Podcasts about greek nt

Join David and Tyler on this special edition of Faith Unaltered as well as their special guest: author, teacher, and Greek NT scholar Dr. Bill Mounce! Join us as we discuss the importance of laymen and laywomen learning Biblical Greek! We hit on the pro's of that life altering journey, discuss Dr. Mounce's book "The Basics of Biblical Greek" (BBG) and explain to you why, as a follower's of Jesus Christ, we SHOULD learn to read the New Testament in the language it originally was penned in! FOR MORE DR. BILL MOUNCE AND FREE GREEK RESOURCES: billmounce.com BUY DR. MOUNCE'S BOOKS HERE: https://www.amazon.com/stores/William-D.-Mounce/author/B000AQ4QZY?ref=dbs_a_mng_rwt_scns_share&isDramIntegrated=true&shoppingPortalEnabled=true To engage some, to equip some. Faith Unaltered is an apologetics based show that reaches out to believers and unbelievers to discuss and debate the big questions. We exist to engage not only, unbelievers but believers of various faiths and worldviews. We also aim to equip believers with sound arguments that demonstrate the truth of Christianity. At the end of the day, you choose! ***GlossaHouse resources are available at our website! - https://glossahouse.com/ ✏️ ***Sign up for classes with GlossaHouse U - https://glossahouse.com/pages/classes

URBONUS' Donatas Urbonas, Rytis Vysniauskas & Augustas Suliauskas share their predictions about who will make the FIBA World Cup 2023 quarterfinals. They also compared their Greek NT concern barometer, discussed a new Serbia star in the making, and tried to understand the mess with Shane Larkin and Scottie Wilbekin in Turkey. This Urbonus episode is sponsored by Courtside 1891. It is FIBA's premium streaming partner for the World Cup and will allow you to watch action from the FIBA Basketball World Cup 2023 We've got good news - a 10% discount code that will enable you to receive 10% off the Max FIBA World Cup Pass so that you can keep up to date with all the World Cup action live and on-demand on Courtside 1891. Discount code: - BASKET23 (10% discount, multi-use) Redemption instructions: Go to this page. Click the “Watch Live with Max” button Log in/Register for Courtside 1891 You'll then be redirected to the choose-a-package page Select the ‘Max FIBA World Cup Pass' Use the discount code to complete the transaction. Topics: Klay in Manila & Team USA practice (0:00); The level of concern watching Greece vs. New Zealand (5:15); A new star in Serbia (26:20); Reaction to Turkey punishing Larkin & Wilbekin (32:38); Will Italy make the quarterfinals? (43:48); Greece vs. Lithuania debate (48:34); Belief in Slovenia (1:00:40); The group with the least surprises? (1:04:54); Yuta Watanabe's tweet illustrates a confusing FIBA system (1:10:01).

For additional notes and resources check out Douglas' website.Ron Moseley's book, Yeshua: A Guide to the Real Jesus and the Original Church (Clarksville, Maryland: Messianic Jewish Publishers, 1996) is an interesting read. I have met representatives of this movement before, and read a number of their books, especially once I came into direct personal contact with this school of thought on my first trip to Israel. This school of thought is well described by the term Messianic Judaism, a movement within evangelical Christianity that has been in motion for half a century now. This review is not only a critique of Moseley's book, but also a challenge to the Messianic movement as a whole.ExcellentMany things Moseley and his associates emphasize are correct -- even excellent.Jesus and Paul were Jews. Most Bible readers forget this, and this seriously affects their ability to interpret the scriptures. There's great benefit in setting aside time for study, worship, and cultivating an awe of God (p.42). Yet this is no proof that we need to observe the Jewish calendar. Slowing down and stopping normal work one day a week, attending seminars; going on retreats, having daily devotional times, and so on can serve this purpose equally well. The Jewish background of NT teaching is brought to light, often in a captivating way.The Pharisees' teaching was similar to Jesus' (p.91). I might go even further: if we were to compare our own spiritual heritage to the many Jewish sects active in the first century, theirs is unquestionably the group with which we have most in common.Possibly correctA number of his ideas may be on track, but lack support. I think it is fine for Bible teacher to share his ideas, but only with a confidence in proportion to the evidence itself. This attitude Moseley repeatedly fails to exhibit.His comments on the tzitzit may be right (p.21), though it strikes me as a bit of a stretch. Yet I like this view. John hesitates to enter Jesus' tomb because of his association with the high priestly family (pp.24-25). Could be. But then there are other reasons for which he didn't enter (fear, deference to Peter, being out of breath…). Peter chopped off Malchus' ear to disqualify him for the priesthood, or to insult the priesthood of Caiaphas (p.25). This strikes me as speculative, though I did mention the possibility in my (premium) podcast on Malchus. I think it is more likely Peter was trying to kill Malchus than maim him. Matthew 8:21-22 may refer to secondary burial (pp.27-28). I am familiar with the practice of secondary interment, and have shown ossuaries on many of my tours. Yet such an understanding of Jesus' words does not significantly affect the point Jesus is making, that we are to let nothing, even family obligations, come between us and him. He claims that coins falling into the temple collection containers in effect “sounded the trumpet” (p.28). Yet what is the reference? This sounds like pure speculation. There are many such claims in this book. "Leaven” means giving God your second best (p.110). To prove this, he cites only a secondary source; there is no proof for this assertion. The problem with the teaching of the Pharisees was that it could spread so far and affect so many, not that it was second best. RM's interpretation weakens the point Jesus and Paul make when they resort to this metaphor in their teaching.Definitely wrongYet the patent errors in the book are often not minor, but major.Moseley claims that the “new covenant” is not better than the old, but only an extension of it, or a call to observe it (pp.36, 57). That is certainly not how I and Bible scholars read Jeremiah 31! The Hebrew writer does not put down the old covenant – the fault lay with the people (Hebrews 8) – but he definitely says the new is better. Moseley's group believes that the NT was written in Hebrew, yet I am aware of no evidence. Even among early Christians, the only tradition circulating of which I am aware is that Matthew was originally written in Hebrew (the view of Papias). I believe Semitic thought patterns are discernible in most of the documents of the Greek NT, and without doubt Jesus taught primarily in the language of the people of Palestine, but there is not a shred of manuscript evidence for an original Hebrew NT.   Luke 16:16, commenting on the Law being proclaimed until John, is claimed by Moseley not to indicate any fundamental shift vis-à-vis the Torah (p.41). Moseley is correct that we are under grace and still obligated to obey God's laws; Protestant Bible teachers often stumble over that one, falsely pitting Paul against James, for example. Yet there is more than one way that the Law can remain the word of God for us. I would put it this way. For the ancient Jews, the Torah was the word of God and the law of God; for us, the Torah is still the word of God, yet not the law. “Replacement theology” makes its first appearance 160 AD, with Justin Martyr (p.60). What about Matthew 21:43? Here Jesus says the kingdom will be taken away from the Jews.The moral principles of Torah still apply today (p.50). Please listen to hear my series (“Night of Redemption: A Study of Exodus,” October 2011). We are called to go well beyond the moral level of the Jews. There is a trajectory in the Bible, from paganism to Judaism, and from Judaism to Christianity. The law leads us to Christ, after which point we are mature enough no longer to need it (Galatians 3:21-26). One obvious example is how we treat our enemies. While there are parts of the OT where grace is shown to enemies, in other parts the Jews are told to kill them, even to exterminate them without mercy. Jesus raises the bar. No longer are we permitted to kill, take revenge, or even resist the evil person. How to implement Jesus' teaching in Matthew (also Paul's in Romans 12) may be difficult, yet that does not entitle us to ignore it. Since the Torah was an “everlasting covenant”, it still applies today (p.62). This view shows a lack of understanding of Hebrew idiom, which is unfortunate for one who promotes himself as an expert. Here let me share an excerpt from my paper on Terminal Punishment, which I believe is germane. “We have to let the Bible define its terms... [T]here are a number of scriptures where words such as 'forever,' 'eternal,' and 'everlasting' do not entail a sense of infinite duration. For example, the following list is based (only) on the Greek root aion*, which appears in the LXX and the NT numerous times, with the general sense of (world) age, forever, always, eternity, etc. In none of the following cases does the word aion* bear the sense of infinite eternity. [Whether for the Greek aionios, the Hebrew ‘olam, or the Latin aeternalis, the point is that 'forever' isn't always literally forever, at least in Hebrew thought.]Genesis 6:4—'Men of old' (giants/ungodly persons/fallen ones/sons of Cain) did not live infinitely.Jeremiah 25:12—Destruction of Babylon (though not literally destroyed)Genesis 9:12—Perpetual generationsExodus 21:6—The man or woman would become one's servant'“forever' (!)Leviticus 25:34—Perpetual possession of fieldsDeuteronomy 23:3—“Forever” means the tenth generation1 Samuel 2:22—Young Samuel was to serve at the house of the Lord 'forever'1 Chronicles 16:5—'Forever' ~ 1000 generations—also Psalm 105:8Ezra 4:15, 19—Israelites had been 'eternally' resisting political dominationPsalm 24:7—'Ancient' doorsProverbs 22:28—'Ancient' boundary stoneJonah 2:6—The prophet was confined in (the fish) 'forever'" Moseley claims that “fulfill” in Matthew 5:17-19 means to correctly teach (p.64). Yet when prophecies are fulfilled, they are not merely “correctly taught.” Rather, their words come true, or a deeper parallelism becomes manifest. “Out of Egypt I called my Son” (Matthew 2:15, quoting Hosea 11:1) is fulfilled when Jesus' family returns from Egypt. When Jesus fulfills Psalm 22, Psalm 69, Isaiah 53, and so forth, he is not “correctly teaching” them—though he may have—but rather bringing to pass the plan of God, and bringing to light the truth of God, in accordance with what had previously been written. Christians knelt for prayer, so in reaction the Jews stood (p.60). The ancient literary and archaeological evidence refutes this claim. The preferred position of the early Christians was standing. Moreover, the orans (plural orantes) is well known from ancient art. The ethical requirements of the OT are the same as those of the NT (p.70). Not so, as I mentioned above in my comment on warfare. Back when we lived in the DC area, I pursued this notion, and wanted to include it in my part of the DPI book on the Sermon on the Mount. Tom Jones and Gordon Ferguson shot me down—and I'm glad they did. Back then I was trying too hard to find in the old law justification for many current practices. The point: between the covenants there is not only continuity, but also a radical discontinuity.Certain parts of the law were to be kept by Gentiles (all of it by Jews), in effect creating two levels or standards of commitment (p.79). There is no evidence that Gentiles could be saved through part of the covenant! RM's exegesis of Acts 15 is questionable. Then he claims to have found, out of the traditional total 613 laws in the Torah, many of which still apply to Gentiles (33 positive commands and 135 prohibitions). He overreaches. Let me give two examples. We are to show reverence when enter the house of worship (Leviticus 19:30). I'm all for that, but in Christianity there is no church building (originally). He also states that Deuteronomy 24:15 requires employers to pay workers their wages when the job is done. Yet the passage refers to daily wages, not payment for completing a job. In short, Moseley's method smacks of arbitrariness. In connection with the Feast of Tabernacles, rituals involving water and light had been neglected (p.135). Moseley says that this was part of the ceremonial law. There's only one problem: it's nowhere in the OT! Acts 2:38 refers to Gentile baptism (p.143). Proponents of another eccentric view teach that Gentiles were to be saved by faith alone, and Acts 2:38 baptism was only for the first generation of Jewish converts. In Acts 2:39 the phrase “those who are far off” refers to Gentiles (not the distant descendants of the audience), a point illustrated in such passages as Ephesians 2:17. RM's understanding of conversion is lacking. The Messianic movement often claims that the NT was originally written in Hebrew. On this assumption, they rely on a reconstructed Semitic text of the NT, even though no such ancient manuscripts have survived. Claiming that the Greek NT is less accurate than the "lost" [and hypothetical] Semitic original, they dismiss verses that are problematic for their position. Be aware that no evidence exists for an original "Hebrew Testament." This is pure conjecture.OverstatedThere were some points I wasn't sure which category to place in. They contained some truth, but were pushed too far. Maybe these should be listed under a “maybe correct” heading, but I chose to list them separately.Augustine championed Marcion (p.40). Augustine (354-430 AD) would have vigorously protested this allegation! Marcion  (c.140 AD) rejected the OT completely; Augustine relied heavily it as he promoted his relatively novel ideas, such as original sin and Christian military service. Paul did not intend Greek readers to interpret nomos (law) in the normal way (p.59). It is true that we must discern whether the word means law (generally), the Law of Moses (which is both law in the common sense and Torah in the sense of instruction [

Mindaugas Kuzminskas and Errick McCollum join the URBONUS podcast to share their EuroLeague playoff predictions and feelings about Thomas Walkup potentially joining the Greek national team, and Ergin Ataman flirting with Panathinaikos Athens. Topics: Errick's reaction to random Kuzminskas' songs (00:00); Mixed feelings about Thomas Walkup joining Greek NT (3:47); Bad feelings about Ataman flirting with Panathinaikos (14:29); Why Errick isn't a fan of Ataman to Panathinaikos move (20:30); The only chance for Fenerbahce to stop Olympiacos (22:21); Errick & Kuz not optimistic about Partizan chances (31:09); The decisive factors in Maccabi & Monaco series (39:32); Who has a better backcourt: Maccabi or Monaco? (50:10); Errick being ruthless for Zalgiris & Barcelona series (51:13); Errick smashes Donatas' hopes (57:11); Coach of the Year & best defender (1:04:14); Making jokes about the Lithuanian weather (1:07:47).

In this short "Glossa" episode, Dr. T. Michael W. Halcomb reads Mark 6:1-6 slowly in Koine Greek using the Koine Era Pronunciation (KEP). Listen in. | GlossaHouse.com --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/glossahouse/message

For additional notes and resources check out Douglas' website.1 The elder to the beloved Gaius, whom I love in truth.Third John is a personal letter written from one friend (the elder) to another (Gaius).Gaius was a common name in the ancient world.For example, it was the name of the emperor Caligula (37-41 AD).A conflict has arisen between supporters of Demetrius and supporters of Diotrephes.This little letter yields many insights into early Christianity.First, John emphasizes his love for the Christians to whom he is writing.Loving relationships are rooted in truth (v.1).Without truth -- and this includes others' being truthful -- a solid relationship is not a realistic possibility2 Beloved, I pray that all may go well with you and that you may be in good health, just as it is well with your soul. 3 I was overjoyed when some of the friends arrived and testified to your faithfulness to the truth, namely how you walk in the truth. 4 I have no greater joy than this, to hear that my children are walking in the truth.Health is a legitimate concern (v.2). Do we inquire after people's physical condition, or only after their spiritual health?"Friend" (v.3) is a technical term.Truth is something in which we "walk" (live in day to day), not just something to which we give assent (v.3).With regard to verse 4, Paul had similar sentiments in 1 Thess 3:8. The "children" are probably not be John's literal offspring, but rather children in the faith.With regard to verse 3, what do we call fellow believers?There are many acceptable words to describe followers of Jesus Christ: disciples, friends, believers, the church, the assembly, the Way, brothers, and more.Our term of choice reveals how we conceive of our relationship to fellow believers.Note: the term "disciples" seems to have been current in the book of Acts, yet not once does it appear in any of the letters. This would suggest that our options are considerably broader than we may have been led to believe.5 Beloved, you do faithfully whatever you do for the friends,even though they are strangers to you; 6 they have testified to your love before the church. You will do well to send them on in a manner worthy of God; 7 for they began their journey for the sake of Christ,accepting no support from non-believers.8 Therefore we ought to support such people, so that we may become co-workers with the truth.That "friends" may be strangers (v.5) strongly supports the special use of this alternate term for Christians.Financially supporting true disciples, even those they have never met, is commendable (vv.5-6)."Sending them on their way" indicates financial support (Matt 10:10; 1 Cor 9:14; Gal 6:6).Evangelists often (if not usually) were compensated for their work, since they moved from city to city and needed room and board. Elders too seem to have been paid (1 Pet 5; 1 Tim 5).These early missionaries did not accept assistance from non-believers (v.7). The church family takes care of the church family.One way these men were assisted was in room and board (v.8). Hospitality is a high virtue in the Bible.In v.7, "for the name of" has been rendered "for the sake of" (NRSV). If we follow the Greek NT more literally, the phrase the name (v.7) probably refers to the divinity of Christ.See Deut 12:5; Exod 23:20-23; Judg 2:1-5; Deut 4:37; John 17:11.God gave his "name" to Jesus.This is only one of many NT passages supporting the truth that Christ is God.9 I have written something to the church; but Diotrephes, who likes to put himself first, does not acknowledge our authority. 10 So if I come, I will call attention to what he is doing in spreading false charges against us. And not content with those charges, he refuses to welcome the friends, and even prevents those who want to do so and expels them from the church.Diotrephes is unfortunately not so generously minded (v.9).He "loves to be first."Ego is a driving factor in much of church history and church politics.John uses the rare word philoprōteuōn, appearing only here in the NT.In classical Greek it means "strive to be first or in the front rank."In ecclesiastical Greek (well after the 1st century), the word came to mean "love to be the leader."Striving to be first is a negative leadership quality. Modesty more often than not characterizes the men and women of the Bible whom the Lord uses to do great things.Diotrephes' doctrinal persuasion is a matter for speculation (v.10). This letter does not seem to be connected the world of Docetism. It's Diotrephes' world that is the issue -- with Diotrephes as star actor and lead commander. He expels those who disagree with him from the church.These were false instances of church discipline.Click for more on the subject of church discipline.John has no hesitation in dealing publicly with the wicked actions of Diotrephes.This ego-driven leader seems to pervert the good principle of 2 John 10 for his own purposes.Before siding with a teacher, we should examine the fruit of his life (v.11). (See also Matt 7:15-20.) There is a connection.11 Beloved, do not imitate what is evil but imitate what is good. Whoever does good is from God; whoever does evil has not seen God. 12 Everyone has testified favorably about Demetrius, and so has the truth itself. We also testify for him,and you know that our testimony is true.Demetrius, the righteous leader, has a good reputation (v.12).This was a requirement for overseers and ministers (deacons, servants) in 1 Tim 3 and TitusThere are three reasons Gaius and his friends should trust Demetrius:He is highly regarded by the church at large.Demetrius' life is in accord with the truth.John speaks well of him.The friends should weigh this triple testimony: that of John, the church, and the truth itself."Whoever does good is from God" (v.11) refers to Demetrius. Moral character lies at the heart of Christian leadership, not forcefulness, persuasiveness, good looks, or popularity.13 I have much to write to you, but I would rather not write with pen and ink; 14 instead I hope to see you soon, and we will talk together face to face.15 Peace to you. The friends send you their greetings. Greet the friends there, each by name.As he indicated in his previous letter, John prefers to deal with certain matters face to face (vv.13-14)"Pen and ink" here, "paper and ink" in 2 John 12.See also 2 Cor 10:9-11."Friends" (v.14), once more, was an epithet of the early Christians.The friends were to be greeted not generally, but by name (v.14). There is something special about remembering people's names and praying for them by name (2 Tim 1:3).Finally:Though 3 John is quite a short letter, there is much for us today.Every chapter of the Bible -- 1189 in all! -- is inspired and useful (2 Tim 3:16).That means we need 3 John. Without it, our Bibles would not be complete. This letter anticipates many situations facing us today.Thought questions:Do we care about how others are doing physically, emotionally, and spiritually? (See 1 Thess 5:23.) Spiritual interest alone is lopsided. God created the body and its emotional, volitional, and intellectual faculties, not just the spirit.Am I a Demetrius, or a Diotrephes? Do I love to be first, or are am I well spoken of by others for being selfless? Am I a team player?How do we feel about paid staff? Christian workers are worth their wages. It is also right for us to support (at a distance) Christian workers we may never have met.What is our "favorite" term for a follower of Christ? There are many available designations for a Christian. Biblically there is no warrant for limiting ourselves to just one term (like disciple or Christian).

First, I want to simply present a number of the Old Testament passages in which the Christ was promised and described (Christ is the Greek/NT translation of the Hebrew/OT word, Messiah). Second, I mean to revisit and reiterate John's claim that Jesus is the fulfillment of all of those passages. Third, I'll help you to see how John's introduction, our passage for this morning (1:1-18), relates to all of that. Finally, and most briefly, I intend to give you a few glimpses into how the Christ-promises of John 1:1-18 are demonstrated and proven in throughout the rest of the Gospel.

In this episode we learn about another topic that is neglected far too often. This is a simple, rudimentary teaching to the marvelous Greek NT manuscripts. 

In the sixth episode of the Textual Confidence Collective we give you a tour of the history of New Testament Textual Criticism and the faithful men to whom it has been committed. Meet the church fathers who debated textual variants and the editors who produced our early critical texts. Peek in as we evaluate 1881 and the impact of the efforts of Hort and Westcott. Learn about cutting edge advances in textual methods today and important new editions of the Greek NT like the Tyndale House Greek NT (THGNT) and the Editio Critica Maior (ECM). Discover how you can be a part of completing the Textual Criticism that Erasmus titled “a work of piety.”

Another Antetokounmpo is set to join the Milwaukee Bucks organisation, with Alex traded to the Wisconsin Herd. Further to Giannis playing with the Greek NT, assistant coach Josh Oppenheimer will be joining the team. Also, the latest rumours have linked Kevin Durant and Boston. What would that mean for the Bucks? Kane and Justin discuss the latest on today's Locked on Bucks.Support Us By Supporting Our Sponsors!Built BarBuilt Bar is a protein bar that tastes like a candy bar. Go to builtbar.com and use promo code “LOCKED15,” and you'll get 15% off your next order.BetOnlineBetOnline.net has you covered this season with more props, odds and lines than ever before. BetOnline – Where The Game Starts! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Another Antetokounmpo is set to join the Milwaukee Bucks organisation, with Alex traded to the Wisconsin Herd. Further to Giannis playing with the Greek NT, assistant coach Josh Oppenheimer will be joining the team. Also, the latest rumours have linked Kevin Durant and Boston. What would that mean for the Bucks? Kane and Justin discuss the latest on today's Locked on Bucks. Support Us By Supporting Our Sponsors! Built Bar Built Bar is a protein bar that tastes like a candy bar. Go to builtbar.com and use promo code “LOCKED15,” and you'll get 15% off your next order. BetOnline BetOnline.net has you covered this season with more props, odds and lines than ever before. BetOnline – Where The Game Starts! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The crown jewel in the 7-week series we're bringing to a close this Sunday is this final message on the glory of God. How could it not be? Everything has been building to this point. C. S. Lewis wrote in The Problem of Pain that, “Man is not the centre. God does not exist for the sake of man. Man does not exist for his own sake.” It's a lifelong battle to believe and practice that; to embrace the reality that it is not me, not us, but God at the centre of all things. We have spent these past weeks looking at the DNA of our church. We have aspired to be all of these things, declaring, “We are Harvest,” and ultimately it comes down to one thing in this seventh and final message: We glorify God. Perhaps more correctly, we seek to glorify God. Series: We Are Harvest Message: We glorify God Pastor Todd Dugard Harvest Bible Chapel February 27, 2022 We seek to glorify God… Glory: Hebrew (OT) kāḇôḏ; Greek (NT) doxa: weightiness which indicates importance; impressive; substantive (Kittel) …in our believing (2 Corinthians 1:20) Isaiah 43:8a Man is not the centre. God does not exist for the sake of man. Man does not exist for his own sake. C. S. Lewis …in our doing (1 Corinthians 10:31) The glory of God is the manifest beauty of his holiness. It is the going-public of his holiness. It is the way he puts his holiness on display for people to apprehend. So, the glory of God is the holiness of God made manifest. John Piper Mission: To glorify God by making more and better disciples of Jesus who love God and love people. …and in our being (2 Corinthians 3:18) 2 Corinthians 3:16 What Jesus did and suffered in the fulfillment of his mission, is esteemed, reckoned, and ascribed to us with all the fruits and benefits becoming ours as if we had done and suffered the same things ourselves. And this union of Christ with us is an act of his own mind and will, wherein he is inexpressibly glorious. John Owen (paraphrased) When the glory of God is the treasure of our lives, we will not lay up treasures on earth, but spend them for the spread of his glory. We will not covet, but overflow with liberality. We will not crave the praise of men, but forget ourselves in praising God. We will not be mastered by sinful, sensual pleasures, but sever their root by the power of a superior promise. We will not nurse a wounded ego or cherish a grudge or nurture a vengeful spirit, but will hand over our cause to God and bless those who hate us. Every sin flows from the failure to treasure the glory of God above all things. John Piper, Preaching the Cross God is glorified when the foundation of our lives is Jesus Christ. God is glorified when the church preaches without apology, worships without shame, prays without ceasing, and witnesses without fear. God is glorified when every disciple worships, walks with, works and witnesses for Christ. God is glorified when we love him with all of our heart, soul, mind, and strength. God is glorified when we love people from every tribe and language and people and nation regardless of status, gender, or age. God is glorified when we're on mission to make disciples and plant churches, seeing sinners turn to him in faith alone, finding hope in the gospel. And God is glorified when in our believing, and in our doing, and in our being we show that the centre of all things is not us but Christ.

The crown jewel in the 7-week series we're bringing to a close this Sunday is this final message on the glory of God. How could it not be? Everything has been building to this point. C. S. Lewis wrote in The Problem of Pain that, “Man is not the centre. God does not exist for the sake of man. Man does not exist for his own sake.” It's a lifelong battle to believe and practice that; to embrace the reality that it is not me, not us, but God at the centre of all things. We have spent these past weeks looking at the DNA of our church. We have aspired to be all of these things, declaring, “We are Harvest,” and ultimately it comes down to one thing in this seventh and final message: We glorify God. Perhaps more correctly, we seek to glorify God. Series: We Are Harvest Message: We glorify God Pastor Todd Dugard Harvest Bible Chapel February 27, 2022 We seek to glorify God… Glory: Hebrew (OT) kāḇôḏ; Greek (NT) doxa: weightiness which indicates importance; impressive; substantive (Kittel) …in our believing (2 Corinthians 1:20) Isaiah 43:8a Man is not the centre. God does not exist for the sake of man. Man does not exist for his own sake. C. S. Lewis …in our doing (1 Corinthians 10:31) The glory of God is the manifest beauty of his holiness. It is the going-public of his holiness. It is the way he puts his holiness on display for people to apprehend. So, the glory of God is the holiness of God made manifest. John Piper Mission: To glorify God by making more and better disciples of Jesus who love God and love people. …and in our being (2 Corinthians 3:18) 2 Corinthians 3:16 What Jesus did and suffered in the fulfillment of his mission, is esteemed, reckoned, and ascribed to us with all the fruits and benefits becoming ours as if we had done and suffered the same things ourselves. And this union of Christ with us is an act of his own mind and will, wherein he is inexpressibly glorious. John Owen (paraphrased) When the glory of God is the treasure of our lives, we will not lay up treasures on earth, but spend them for the spread of his glory. We will not covet, but overflow with liberality. We will not crave the praise of men, but forget ourselves in praising God. We will not be mastered by sinful, sensual pleasures, but sever their root by the power of a superior promise. We will not nurse a wounded ego or cherish a grudge or nurture a vengeful spirit, but will hand over our cause to God and bless those who hate us. Every sin flows from the failure to treasure the glory of God above all things. John Piper, Preaching the Cross God is glorified when the foundation of our lives is Jesus Christ. God is glorified when the church preaches without apology, worships without shame, prays without ceasing, and witnesses without fear. God is glorified when every disciple worships, walks with, works and witnesses for Christ. God is glorified when we love him with all of our heart, soul, mind, and strength. God is glorified when we love people from every tribe and language and people and nation regardless of status, gender, or age. God is glorified when we're on mission to make disciples and plant churches, seeing sinners turn to him in faith alone, finding hope in the gospel. And God is glorified when in our believing, and in our doing, and in our being we show that the centre of all things is not us but Christ.

Dr. Jon Laansma, the Gerald F. Hawthorne Professor of New Testament Greek and Exegesis at Wheaton College, co-authored with Randall Gauthier, The Handy Guide to Difficult and Irregular Greek Verbs. He discusses how this tool, combined with healthy doses of reading practice, helps students advance more quickly to “putting roots down” in the language of the Greek NT. Once over the hump of initial learning, daily reading is efficient and doable, from which point the student can expand beyond the NT and circle back to figure out why some verbs have the tense stems that they do.

For additional notes and resources check out Douglas' website.Spiritual BeingsCherubim – guardians; winged, composite beings. See Gen 3:24; Exod 25:18; Ezek 9:3 (cp. Ezek 1)Seraphim – worshippers, winged; “burning ones” Only in Isa 6.Angels = messengers (ángelos, Gk; mal'akh, Heb.)Human: 1 Kgs 19:2; Hg 1:13; Mal 2:7, 3:1; Lk 7:24; Acts 12:15 (?); possibly the “messengers” of the 7 churches (Rev 2-3).Supernatural: more common use of the word.Note: We do not become angels when we die (Matt 22).Presented as genderless (or male).Some are named: Gabriel, Michael; also Raphael, Uriel, Jeremiel (OT Apocrypha)Can be good or evil (Matt 22:30, 25:41)Archangels (1 Thess 4:16, Jude 9) = chief angels. 7 in number, though not total agreement.Their mediating work is done, though they will accompany Christ at his returnMere servants (Heb 1:14)!Beware sensationalism.We mustn't worship them (Col 2:18, Rev 19:10).One day we will even judge them (1 Cor 6:3)!Powers, principalities (rulers), celestial beings (dignities, KJV)Eph 6:12 & Col 2:15. Through Christ God is showing his wisdom to the powers (Eph 3:10).Elaborate angelic hierarchies (choirs) in Middle Ages:First sphere:SeraphimCherubimThrones or OphanimSecond sphere:DominionsVirtuesPowers or AuthoritiesThird sphere:Principalities or RulersArchangelAngelsCould they be human beings who are political powers?Perhaps, but then why are they described as being in the heavenly realms (Eph 6:12)?Some reason that they are the interior spirits of earthly human authorities, like Walter Wink. This is a clever though (for me) not entirely convincing explanation.In the final analysis, the Bible does not tell us enough about the "powers" to answer our every question to our satisfaction.Demons (daimónion, 63x; daímon, only in Matt 8)One theory holds that these are fallen angels. That is, they were created as neutrally moral beings, but chose to rebel.Another theory hold that they are the offspring of humans and angels (Gen 6). See Jubilees 4:15-22; 1 Enoch 69:4, 106:13-17; 2 Baruch 56:12; CD 2:18.Some early Christians equated demons with the false gods  of idolatry. (See 1 Cor 10.) LXX sometimes translates “idols” as “demons.”Two are possibly alluded to in the O.T.: Lilith (“night hag,” Isa 34:14), and Azazel (Lev 16).Fall of demons thought to have happened before creation (1 Enoch 69:1-15).In Jubilees 10, Noah prays and God imprisons 9/10 of the demons plaguing mankind, but allows 1/10 to continue their evil work under their leader Satan (or Mastema).If evil powers are referred to in Gal 4 and Col 2, Christians should be totally free from their influence. The more we focus on them, the more we “give them power.” We are sternly warned to keep away from the occult (Gal 5:20, Acts 19:19, Exod 22:18, Rev 21:8).Superstition often ascribed disease to demons (as in the apocryphal book of Tobit). In N.T., only Luke 13:10-17 seems to make this association. Demon possession and disease, e.g. epilepsy, are distinguished (Matt 4:24).“Belief in demons and their effect upon mankind increased in Judaism from A.D. 150 to 450.” (ISBE I: 922).Satan = accuser (Hebrew); diabolos – slanderer, accuser (Greek NT and OT LXX)Concept vague in O.T., develops in Intertestamental times, developed in N.T. times.Satan is portrayed as an over-zealous figure, eager to uphold righteousness but excessive in his accusations. He does not appear especially wicked.In the N.T., however, we learn his true identity. He is the father of lies (John 8:44), and the "ancient serpent" (Rev 12).Most likely a fallen angel. Some earthly rulers' demises allude to fall of Satan (Isa 14, Ezek 28).Satan, as C. S. Lewis points out, is really not the opposite of God, but of the (good) archangel Michael.Mentioned only 3x in the OT (Job, Zechariah, and 1 Chronicles).Miscellaneous questionsSpiritual warfare? (Eph 6)Angelic / demonic territories? (Dan 10). The Bible never instructs us to delve into this realm.Prayer cover? (Idea advanced in Peretti's books.) Not substantiated.Are demons associated with specific sins in the N.T.?Undoubtedly Satan works through his minions, since he is never said to be omnipresent (or omniscient). James 1:13-15 allows the connection of the demonic with sin. However...There is no “demon of laziness," "demon of lust," "demon  of anger," etc.Such personifications are imaginative, and lack solid biblical foundation.This view also minimizes our personal responsibility for sin.Do we meet angels (Heb 13)? If we do, we (probably) wouldn't know we were meeting them, so we should be cautious about accepting claims of angelic encountersFurther studyFor a political interpretation of the “powers,” read Walter Wink's interesting series.Billy Graham's book Angels: God's Secret Agents is quite well done.Hear also the podcast on Demon Possession. Click here.For more detailed articles, check out the International Standard Bible Encyclopedia 

It's that time of year... the Olympiakos season is officially over. With transfer rumors hot as ever, Pedro Martins rumored to leave in the summer, and the Greek NT playing friendlies a couple weeks, there's a lot to discuss. Peter, Ari, and Demo break down these topics among other things. FOLLOW US: @Gate7Intl on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and Reddit HIT SUBSCRIBE!!! LIKE AND COMMENT!! CHECK OUT OUR WEBSITE: www.gate7intl.com --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app

Slideshow for this message is available We are in John chapter 8 this morning. And today is not your normal sermon and you’ll see why in just a second. Let’s begin in Samuel. When you read through the book of Samuel and Kings you very quickly pick up on a pattern. Here’s the pattern: when the author introduces us to a new king, he uses this formulaic introduction that looks like this: So hopefully you are seeing the idea. This formula is used at least 16 times that I could find. Now, there’s an interesting problem when you get to 1 Samuel 13:1. 1 Samuel 13:1 is another one of these formulas and it’s applied to Saul. But when you read it, you’ll see a problem. I’ll illustrate the problem by showing you three different translations: door 1, door 2, door 3, door 4. Now what’s going on here? The answer is the text is lost. Somewhere along the way, in the process of transmission, these numbers were either: intentionally left out, forgetfully left out or got destroyed so they could not be copied. Here’s the question. How does that make you feel to know there is a fallible human process that is associated with the English Bible you hold in your lap this morning? Does that destroy your confidence? Does that mean that the Bible contains errors? Don’t we teach biblical inerrancy (that the Bible is a book WITHOUT errors)? Yes we do, but it’s important to note that this doctrine applies to the original autographa, that’s a term that refers to the original documents, the actual scroll that the inspired writers wrote on, which of course we no longer have. We must acknowledge that errors have been introduced through the copying and transmission process. It’s called textual corruption. Now, the word corruption is a little unfortunate. It brings to mind corruption in politics. If we say the Bible is corrupt, that’s a pretty negative picture. But it’s a technical word that just means there is some change from the original. Imagine transferring a file from your phone to the computer. If the file makes it 99 percent of the way and just one bit changes then the file has been corrupted even though it still contains 99.999% of the original information. But it’s also the case that if 99.999% of the data is lost and only a fractional portion is preserved, that too is a corrupt file. So the real question is how corrupt is it? It all hinges on the answer to that question. Textual corruption can come in two different flavors. 1 Samuel 13:1 is corrupt in that something was taken away from the original text. But it is also possible to corrupt the text by adding to it. Today we come to John chapter 8:1-11. This is the story of the woman caught in adultery and all the Pharisees want to stone her and Jesus says, ‘he who is without sin cast the first stone.’ He begins writing on the ground and one by one they walk away. And then Jesus turns to the woman and says, “Go and sin no more.” It’s a beloved text. But here’s the problem. This section of the Bible almost certainly was not part of the original text. John chapter 8.1-11 is an example of corruption through addition. This was a story that had circulated around and was likely even true, but was not part of the original text and was added much later. If you’ll notice in most English Bible’s they point this out at varying levels of specificity: have a note at this point: In my NAS you’ve got this tiny little footnote. In my Greek NT it sets it apart like this. The ESV does it like this. Maybe this is the first time you’ve heard something like this. And maybe it’s even disturbing to you. So here’s what I want to do today. The goal is to BOTH convince you that this text is not part of the Bible which means we are not going to preach it as Scripture AND to have you walk away with FULL confidence that this book can be absolutely trusted in all it’s parts even though this transmission error exists. The Transmission Process So I’m actually going to start with the second part of that. Knowing that transmission errors like this exist, how can we trust that any of it is reliable at all? It’s a very good question. It’s the same feeling of uncertainty that you get when you discover someone has lied to you. Well, if you just lied right there, what kind of assurance do I have that everything else you’ve told me isn’t a lie. Is this a fluke or a habit? Many liberal scholars will attempt to attack the Bible in this very same way. Bart Ehrman’s who is one of the world’s foremost scholars in this area in best-selling book, “Misquoting Jesus” focuses on this issue as it pertains to the New Testament text: So his point here is simple: There is no need to examine the content of the New Testament if we don’t even have the New Testament. Now it’s difficult to feel competent to address a conclusion like this from a scholar. So here’s the question, “Can we defend the claim that the actual TEXT of the BIBLE is trustworthy?” From a raw textual transmission point of view, how corrupt is the text we possess today? To answer the question of how reliable the text is, we have to develop some minimum criteria for determining if a document is reliable (this criteria is not be specific to the Bible. This could be any historical document). And there really are only about three tests that matter here. Let’s start with that first point. What we mean by this is how long of a gap exists between the original writing (the autographa) - the actual scroll that was originally penned, and the first extant copy (that is, the oldest copy we have discovered that is still in existence today). As you know the Bible is made up of two halves - the OT written in Hebrew and the NT written in Greek and they represent very different processes of formation and transmission. Just think in rough terms about the differences. If you think about the Hebrew OT it records thousands of years of history and was written over roughly a thousand year period of time. So let’s assume Moses wrote the Pentateuch - the first five books. He’s around 1400BC and the last book of the OT was written maybe around 400BC Compare that to the NT. The NT records roughly about 50 years of history and was written in that same amount of time. So they are quite different documents. So it makes sense to discuss the transmission process of these two portions individually. The OT Witness Let’s start with the OT. When it comes to the OT, by far, the most relevant and interesting discussion is the dead sea scrolls. Here’s why. If you were alive prior to 1947 and someone were to ask you, “What is the oldest complete copy of the OT you possess?” what would your answer be? Well you’d have to answer the Codex Leningrad B19A. Codex is the word for book and B19A is a cataloging identifier. It’s housed in the National Library of Russia in Saint Petersburg. Here’s a picture of the inside of the book. It’s quite beautiful. Now there were other fragments and parts that were older. The other really famous manuscript is the Allepo Codex. It’s mostly complete but isn’t much older. So this is the oldest complete copy of the OT we possess. And when was this written? This was written in 1008AD. That’s a HUGE GAP between when the original author wrote the book and our oldest existing copy! Let’s just draw that gap on the timeline. How many hand copies are represented here? Answer: lots. How much confidence do you have that this book has not changed? It creates a lot of uncertainty. How much does a manuscript change in 1000 years? If a manuscript wears out every 100 years (best case) that means at least 10 copies and probably a lot more than that. There’s just no way to know. Well, in 1947 there was a massive discovery. In fact, it’s hard to argue against the fact that it’s the greatest discovery of the 20th century. It happened by accident. Some bedouines were throwing rocks and scrambling down into caves by the Dead Sea and found 7 scrolls housed in jars. These are tall jars designed to hold scrolls. Those jars were found in this cave which is now known as Cave 1. This is an extreme desert climate so the conditions were absolutely optimal for preservation. At first they had no idea what they were. They were hanging them on the post of their tent, selling them to antiquities dealers. But then they fell into the right hands and the search was on. The area was scoured and hundreds of more scrolls were discovered. There are were 972 manuscripts found and tens of thousands of fragments. 90 percent of the scrolls were found in cave 4 here. I had to laugh at one book I read. "In the fourth cave the fragments were torn into up to 15,000 pieces. These small fragments created somewhat of a problem for scholars." If any of you like putting together impossible puzzles without a picture on a box this might be a job for you. The main guy in charge of this died before it was complete. Even to this day the study of these scrolls continues. About 40 percent of the manuscripts are actually copies of OT books. All the OT is represented except for the book of Esther. There’s one scroll in particular that is especially impressive. It’s called the Great Isaiah Scroll. It’s the complete book of Isaiah in almost perfect readable condition. If you are curious you can go to this Digital Dead Sea Scroll website and interact with the text. Here’s the significance for our purposes. We are asking the question what is the gap between the writing of the original document and the oldest copy we possess today? Prior to 1947 and the discovery of the scrolls it was Codex Leningrad B19A at 1008AD. With the dead sea scrolls we can get to about 100 years BCE. That’s 1100 years earlier. That’s a GIANT leap. And of course the question is how much has the text changed in that 1000 year period? The answer is virtually none. It really is remarkable. Now to be sure, we still have a gap. If Moses wrote Genesis then we are still 1300 years away from the Pentateuch but only 250 years or less away from the last of the prophets. But it does give us tremendous confidence to say if the text didn’t change for 1100 years between dead sea scrolls and the Leningrad codex, it’s reasonable to assume that the text has been faithfully preserved despite the gap. So that’s the gap that exists in the OT. What about the NT? The NT Witness In the NT we have a much smaller gap. Let’s start with this quote. Now I don’t love the way that quote is worded and honestly a lot of the NT apologetic material because it is worded to make it sound like we have complete books. We don’t have complete books at these early stages. Here’s a list of some of the earliest manuscripts we have of just the gospels. These are all fragments but very, very early. So we have a very close gap in terms of fragmentary evidence. But what about larger sections and complete manuscripts? Every book of the NT is different in terms of it’s manuscript evidence. It would take a whole class to understand all this, but since we are in John, let’s just take John as an example. We could ask the question, "How many significant manuscripts of the book of John exist that were written before 300 AD. Circle that date 300 AD in your mind. Do we have 1? Do we have 2? The place to go to discover this is actually this website that is known as the K-List. Why is it called K list? Because it’s mercifully shortening this German phrase. (Short List of Greek Manuscripts of the New Testament) It’s funny that they call it a short list since it catalogs every NT Greek text or fragment ever discovered. You can filter by fragment size, date, location it was discovered and every other imaginable tag. So if you filter by date and the book of John you discover that there are 20 significant, existing manuscripts of the Gospel of John written before A.D. 300 and many manuscripts. One of the most famous is P66. Here’s a leaf. This is a nearly complete copy of the book of John and many date this around 200AD. The gospel of John was written maybe around 90AD so this is about 110 years after the fact. Now that’s not bad. But it’s still a bit of a gap. But here’s a really important question: If you were the scribe copying parchment 66 what would you be using as your master copy? You’d find the oldest possible manuscript available to you because that would be closer to the original. So the Scribe of P66 is writing around 200. How old of a manuscript do you think he could find? Let me show you some pretty interesting quotes from some church fathers who lived right around this time. This is from an early church father named Turtullean who lived AD 175. This is even more fascinating since it references the book of John - the book in question. Now keep in mind this is Peter of Alexandria who wrote this in 311AD. Here he is claiming that the original still existed in 311AD. If that is true, it’s possible that the P66 manuscript which predates this quote by 100 years was hand copied from the original. I told you to circle that year 300 in your mind. It would have been possible for any manuscript of John earlier than 300AD to have been copied from the original. We know that the manuscript existed in 311. But it’s not like it exploded right after that. We don’t know how much longer that survived. So it could have lasted another couple hundred years. We don’t know. So it’s possible that manuscripts much later than even 311 were copied from the original. We could strengthen the case further still by pointing out that in many cases there was not just one autographa. We know Paul used an scribe. And since many of his letter were sent out for circulation, almost certainly from day one there would have been multiple copies increasing the chance for the original to be preserved. Here’s the point: what is certainly, certainly not the case is that there were dozens and dozens and copies upon copies and massive errors crept into the copies we possess today. So we’ve discussed these first two criteria for reliabiliy - both the proximity to the original (the gap) and the number of copies. Now let’s jump forward two hundred years. The number of copies we have of biblical texts that have survived really begins to multiply. So if we go the 5th century which would be the 0-500AD, this is what the manuscript evidence looks like. This fragmentary and whole book evidence. 500 years sounds pretty far removed. So again, ask yourself the question. If you are copying a manuscript from this era, you’d get the oldest possible manuscript. You could probably reach back 200 years. At this point it’s easily conceivable that if someone was really trying to get to the original, this is only the second copy. Now after this point, in history the number of manuscripts just explodes. I think this is a helpful chart. “Many of these are fragmentary, of course, especially the older ones, but the average Greek New Testament manuscript is well over 400 pages long. Altogether, there are more than 2.5 million pages of texts.” So our total number of Greek manuscripts is around 5800 and if you include translations of the Greek manuscripts we are talking north of 23,000. And just to get a visual impression of the total number of manuscripts; it is really overwhelming. “If the average-sized manuscript were two and one half inches thick, all the copies of the works of an average Greek author would stack up four feet high, while the copies of the New Testament would stack up to over a mile high! - Dan Wallace” Again, keep in mind, most of this is later (Medieval). Most of this is fragmentary. Only about 8% of the manuscripts we have are complete. It’s sometimes helpful just to compare this to how well preserved other ancient documents are that have come down to us through the corridors of time. So if you compare the biblical manuscript evidence to some other classical literature you see just how well preserved the Bible is. Just to be clear, these are cherry picked examples in that they are the BEST preserved documents we have. Here’s another way of visualizing the data. Okay you have all these documents but how different are they from each other. That’s our third criteria for reliability. How much variation is there from one verse text to another across manuscripts? If you count literally every single possible type of variants. 62.9 percent of verses show no variants whatsoever. This means that if you examined all 5500 scripts they would be in 100% agreement on 62.9 percent of the verses in the Bible. That’s not that great. Does that mean you can only trust a little more than half. The picture changes drastically when you realize the nature of the variants. 75% of the variants are spelling errors. 19% don’t actually make sense. The scribe came along and a scribe is not supposed to correct. He’s just supposed to copy so he carries forward the mistake. 5% are meaningful but not viable. 1% less than one percent are both viable and meaningful. The two largest discrepancies by far in terms of meaning is John 8 and the end of Mark 16 (called the longer ending). If you exclude these (which is easy to do as you’ll see in a second) after these two, the longest discrepancy is two sentences and then quickly drops off to small phrases and single words. So hopefully this assures you that what we hold in our hands today is a very accurate edition of the NT and very, very closely reflects the original autographa Why is John 8 Suspect? So let’s come all the way back to it. So we have all this manuscript evidence that points to great preservation. Why are we saying with such certainty that John chapter 8 and this story of the woman caught in adultery is NOT part of the original text. What is the evidence for that? Well, I only need to spend 3 minutes on this point. Now that you understand how this process works it won’t be hard to convince you. Five points: These verses are present in most of the medieval Greek miniscule manuscripts, but they are absent from virtually all early Greek manuscripts that have come down to us, representing great diversity of textual traditions. Let me give you one more wrinkle of detail here. Manuscripts can easily be divided up into families. Once a certain error is introduced into the text that error gets copied and recopied and develops into a family. There are about five major families of manuscripts: In every major family of manuscript this is excluded until you get to the medieval era. There is one exception is the Western uncial D, but it is known for its independence in numerous other places. They are also missing from the earliest forms of the Syriac and Coptic Gospels, and from many Old Latin, Old Georgian and Armenian manuscripts. Moreover, a number of (later) manuscripts that include the narrative mark it off with asterisks, indicating hesitation as to its authenticity, while those that do include it display a relatively high frequency of textual variants. All the early church Fathers omit this narrative: in commenting on John, they pass immediately from 7:52 to 8:12. No Eastern Father cites the passage before the tenth century. Now that might not sound all that significant to you. But very few people realize how much material has been preserved from the church fathers. Do you realize that there are over a million NT quotations that have been preserved from the church fathers. If all we had was the church fathers we could piece together well over 95% of the NT. Although most of the manuscripts that include the story place it here (i.e. at 7:53–8:11), some place it instead after Luke 21:38, and other witnesses variously place it after John 7:44, John 7:36 or John 21:25. The fact that it is not consistently placed in the same location is pretty strong evidence that it was added later and not part of the original. Finally, even if someone should decide that the material is authentic, John almost certainly didn’t write it. The style is completely different. There are numerous expressions and constructions that are found nowhere else in John. Now that being said, it does appear to be a piece of oral tradition carried down. It most likely was true. It just doesn’t belong in the Scriptures and can’t be treated with the same sort of unquestioned authority. It would be foolish to make a theological point using this text or to preach it in the same way we preach the rest of the Bible. How Should we Respond? So we could have just skipped this section all together. But we talked about this as elders and decided it best to take this opportunity to demonstrate how we go our Bibles. Now, what I want to do now is just apply what we’ve learned today. There’s a few really important points to make here. Thank the Lord you have a Bible! We definitely take it for granted that we are able to read the Bible literally whenever we want to. It has most certainly not always been this way. The first reason that most of history has not been able to read the Bible in their language was because if you wanted your own volume you had to copy it by hand. Copying the Bible would have been a massive undertaking and took professional scribes close to a year. Contrast that to a modern printing press that can crank out 75 pages per minute. My Bible has 1106 pages for a total print time of 14 minutes. In quantity each page costs less than a penny and I can pick up this nice leather bound version for $18.95. If you want a paper Bible, grab one on the way out. They are free. You can take a whole case of them if you want. Nobody cares. They are so cheap. You can read it online, download an app and get 300 translations in a second. My friends, this has not always been so. Just try to hand copy the Bible. Long copy times means high cost. Gutenberg’s Bible which was the first printed Bible was significantly less expensive than handwritten copies and cost 30 florins in 1452. People were so incredibly excited at how drastically the prices had been slashed with the invention of the printing press. It was a moment of ecstasy. Now you could buy a Bible for 30 Florins. You want to know what that is in today’s dollars. At a very conservative exchange rate is about 100,000 dollars. How many of you could afford to purchase one? Churches might be able to purchase a single copy. And they would chain it to the pulpit. The second reason that many could not read the Bible is that it wasn’t in their language. We are so fortunate. All this careful compiling, comparing, studying the original manuscripts so that we could then have an accurate original to then translate. Our English translations are among the best in the world. We are so thankful. Read it. The claim is that this book is the Word of God. You need this. You need to be shaped by it in every way. What you love. What you do and don’t do. This is your food. It is bread to your soul. This connects you to Jesus Christ, the author of life. READ IT. It’s a treasure. It’s been passed down. Men have given their lives to preserve it. What a tragedy if we don’t read it. The great 18th-century evangelist John Wesley provides a good answer: I want to know one thing, the way to heaven. . . . He hath written it down in a book. Give me that book! At any price give me the Book of God! I have it: here is knowledge enough for me. Let me be homo unius libri [a man of one book]. In the beginning was the WORD. This is the WORD. Application: Read Psalm 119. Make a Bible Reading Plan. Download the Dwell App. Pray for the Spirit of God to use it in your life. Don’t trust in the labor saving deliverance of technology! IT’s not a life hack that is going to give you the next level of breakthrough. Let me make this point by way of 3 P’s. You have the Production of Scripture under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit. We don’t believe this is any old book. We believe this to be the inspired words of God. Then there’s the preservation which we have talked about. But then there’s the perception. How do we perceive the words? How do we understand them? You see we ultimately need the Spirit of God to ascertain and discern spiritual things. Many will look at this book and write it off as foolishness. But ultimately it’s the Spirit of God working in us that is the true test. Ultimate test of authenticity. The holy Spirit. God gives us the Spirit of God which is the WORD in us. Now those are quick points, but do something about it right now. Next week, I want to have reports that Bible reading has increased in your life.

By The Scriptures did not come by human will. Men moved by the holy spirit spoke for God. These original authorized writings, written in Hebrew (OT) and Greek (NT), have been transmitted and translated to us with great fidelity. We can have confidence in the integrity of the Scriptures. 2 Peter 1:20-21 But know this first of all, that no Continue Reading

One of the truly amazing words in the Greek NT is the verb gegraptai. It is perhaps the most powerful proof of the doctrine of the preservation of Scripture and causes our love for it to grow by leaps and bounds. Scriptures for Study: Notice the fourth category of gegraptai in… Continue

One of the truly amazing words in the Greek NT is the verb gegraptai. It is perhaps the most powerful proof of the doctrine of the preservation of Scripture and causes our love for it to grow by leaps and bounds. Scriptures for Study: Gegraptai appears 16 times in Romans. What… Continue

One of the truly amazing words in the Greek NT is the verb gegraptai. It is perhaps the most powerful proof of the doctrine of the preservation of Scripture and causes our love for it to grow by leaps and bounds. Scriptures for Study: What is being preserved in Matthew 4:4,… Continue

What you believe about the Word of God and its value to you, will determine how you often read and study it. If you truly believe that the Bible is inspired by God and given to you that you may live as successfully as possible, then it won't be difficult to make time for studying it! So often I receive questions about how to study the Bible effectively, and what tools are worth investing in. In this episode, join me live from Botkins, Ohio as I share the top 4 tools I recommend using to study the Bible, and I walk you through passages of Scripture using them so you can really see how helpful they are! Dive More Into This Topic at miracleword.com/study Check out MIRACLEWORDU.COM for more in-depth teaching on specific biblical topics to grow in your faith! Links and Resources mentioned in this episode"Olive Tree Bible Study App (I add most resources to my library digitally within this app!) Dake's Annotated Reference Bible  Life Application Study Bible NLT NET Bible with Translators Notes "A Textual Criticism of the Greek NT" by Bruce Metzger Voddie Baucham's Video on "Why I Believe the Bible"Sow a seed and help us change this generation before it's too late: http://bit.ly/2B81pjY Give by PayPal: https://www.paypal.me/miracleword Give by CashApp or Venmo: $MWgive Get exclusive emails and our free magazine here: http://bit.ly/2WlgS6N Get text messages from me: http://bit.ly/2XoOapG I want to highly recommend our online training courses found at https://www.miraclewordu.com/ Each course is designed to equip you with biblical knowledge that will give you the fuel to overcome in every area of life. Our brand new course "Mountain Moving Faith" is now available in Miracle Word University!  For more great content, follow me on Instagram: @tedshuttlesworth and Facebook: @MiracleWordMinistries

Revelation 14:1-5 Series: Just Conquer #39 INTRODUCTION Our study through the Apocalypse, which, you'll remember is a word that means "unveiling," keeps giving us opportunities to be blessed. Those who read and hear and keep the words of the prophecy will be blessed, so says John at both bookends (Revelation 1:3; 22:7). Our pace, approximately a paragraph at a time, is like a brisk walk but not so fast that we're skipping over things. This is pastoral strategery. One principle of Bible reading, study, and preaching, that I don't say out loud much these days is that for every text there is one interpretation with many possible applications. Some of you are blessed to own that principle as if it was a coating over every page of your Bible; you can't read otherwise. Some of you perhaps have never heard it before. The interpretation is what it means. There was an original author, moved by the Divine Author, writing to an original audience. The author intended a meaning for his readers to understand. We can acknowledge that none of us might know the correct meaning; being wrong takes barely any effort. We can also acknowledge that some meanings are debatable, as in, there's evidence for a variety of meanings. Many of those debates can be had in Christian charity. But humility, toward the text and toward one another, does not mean we give up the conviction that the meaning is there, even if we're ignorant about it. A number of the 16th century Reformers gave their lives translating the Bible into the common language so that non-scholars could read the Bible for themselves. I was reminded this past week that even the New Testament was written in the common language, Koine Greek; wherever Paul preached he could be understood. The Greek NT isn't a unique Holy Ghost mountain-top language that waits for academics to climb up to it. Now that we all have our own copies of God's Word, what a privilege, and a privilege we're to steward. I'm moving us through the book of Revelation and asking everyone to consider the meaning. My "rules" are that I wouldn't demean anyone by assuming what I'm trying to prove with a comment like "If you just read your Bible." We're reading it together, asking questions and making observations. My other rule is that I would hardly use the word "literal." It's tiresome, and typically patronizing. And, also, I don't think that means that all the images mean symbols. We just finished reading about the unholy trinity of the dragon, the sea-beast, and the earth-beast in chapters 12-13. This is satan, the embodied antichrist, and his false prophet. We had heard the sixth trumpet blow, but before the seventh trumpet blows and the seven judgment bowls are dumped over, John has seen these visions that portray why the sinfulness and depravity and spiritual conflict is so awful. It's part of a long war, with grudges as petty as they are old. Revelation 13 showed the final grasps for power by the ancient serpent and his successful, albeit temporary, dominion. He is praised for about as long as Trump has been president, three and a half years. The saints are outnumbered and outcast. But the saints still conquer with the Lamb. Chapter 14 reminds us of the commitment of those who stand with the Lamb, who endure, who love not their lives to death (as in 12:11). We see some of them in this chapter, though there is application for all of us. THE SEALED (verse 1) Here is another vision, another "And I saw," and this is much more encouraging than the previous. “Then I looked, and behold, on Mount Zion stood the Lamb, and with him 144,000 who had his name and his Father's name written on their foreheads.” (verse 1) Instead of the dragon standing on the sand (12:18), anticipating those who would take on his mark, here is the Lamb standing on a mountain with those sealed for Him. Mount Zion is the place of God's temple, the place of His presence and rule, typically referring to the city fo Jerusalem. The Lord laughs at those who try to unseat Him, and anoints His Son in this very place. "He who sits in the heavens laughs; the Lord holds them in derision.
 Then he will speak to them in his wrath,
 and terrify them in his fury, saying,
 “As for me, I have set my King
 on Zion, my holy hill.”
( Psalm 2:4-6) Consider this prophetic word from Joel: “And I will show wonders in the heavens and on the earth, blood and fire and columns of smoke. The sun shall be turned to darkness, and the moon to blood, before the great and awesome day of the LORD comes. And it shall come to pass that everyone who calls on the name of the LORD shall be saved. For in Mount Zion and in Jerusalem there shall be those who escape, as the LORD has said, and among the survivors shall be those whom the LORD calls. “For behold, in those days and at that time, when I restore the fortunes of Judah and Jerusalem, I will gather all the nations and bring them down to the Valley of Jehoshaphat. And I will enter into judgment with them there, on behalf of my people and my heritage Israel, because they have scattered them among the nations and have divided up my land, and have cast lots for my people, and have traded a boy for a prostitute, and have sold a girl for wine and have drunk it.” (Joel 2:30–3:3 ESV) Where is this Mount Zion? There are good reasons that some believe it is the heavenly Mount Zion (think Hebrews 12:22), but there are better reasons to understand it as on earth. The earthly Mount Zion contrasts with the earthly work of the beast. The earthly Mount Zion makes sense of why John hears a "voice from heaven" in the next verse. The earthly Mount Zion fits with the temple and the witnesses in Jerusalem in chapter 11. The earthly Mount Zion fits with these 144k. Here is “the end-time city where God dwells with and provides security for the remnant” (Beale). With the Lamb are 144,000 who had his name and his Father's name written on their foreheads. The easiest part to understand about this is the unity of the Father and Son, the Ancient of Days and His Anointed. That's the easiest. We first read about the 144k in Revelation 7. There we saw them as the "sealed," those "from every tribe of the sons of Israel," 12k from 12 tribes, in contrast with the "great multitude that no one could number, from every nation" (verse 9). Another contrast in chapter 7 is that the innumerable group were already standing before the throne and before Lamb, clothed in white robes, while the 144k were sealed on earth. A lot of Bible readers believe that this group of 144k represents all of the redeemed. But that requires ignoring the distinctions in chapter 7, and it requires messing with the language in the rest of this paragraph. What if this is actually a finite group, a select group who are firstfruits, those who have the same sealing on their foreheads who are Israelite believers during the tribulation? What if these are the “rest of [the woman's] offspring” (Revelation 12:17). The name written on their foreheads is for security, not servility as with the mark of the beast. The beast sees his own as expendable, the Lamb sees His own as invaluable, as part of His glory, not a threat to it. THE SONG (verses 2-3) The 144k are key again. They are not the ones singing the song, but they are the ones who learn the song. ”And I heard a voice from heaven like the roar of many waters and like the sound of loud thunder. The voice I heard was like the sound of harpists playing on their harps, (verse 2) With John we've heard a voice before, and this seems to be a collective voice, since verse 3 has a plural singing. The voice is loud, as the roar of the sea and the loud thunder of the sky. The voice is melodic, emphasized by a thrice cognate usage, as the KJV translates, it sounded like "harpists harping on their harps." He sees on Mount Zion, he hears from heaven. ”and they were singing a new song before the throne and before the four living creatures and before the elders. No one could learn that song except the 144,000 who had been redeemed from the earth.” (verse 3) A new song is a frequent description, especially in the Psalms, which seems to be related to fresh deliverances by the Lord. The living creatures and elders sang the new song in 5:8-10. “Oh sing to the LORD a new song,
 for he has done marvelous things!
 His right hand and his holy arm
 have worked salvation for him.
 The LORD has made known his salvation;
 he has revealed his righteousness in the sight of the nations.
 He has remembered his steadfast love and faithfulness
 to the house of Israel.
 All the ends of the earth have seen
 the salvation of our God.”
 (Psalm 98:1–3) The singers here are not the four living creatures and the twenty-four elders any more than they are the throne, nor are the singers the 144k. The singers seem to be those saints already in heaven, those celebrating celestially, as in 7:10. But these 144k are encouraged by the worship service. It is an interesting statement to say that No one was able to learn the song except the 144k, and those 144k are the ones having been redeemed from the earth. Here is another part of the scene that makes less sense if the 144k represent all the saints; what would be the point about limiting who can learn the lyrics? Instead, it fits to say that there is something these chosen ones are able to understand differently than others. This "new song" is God's deliverance of them through His sealing in the midst of the dragon and beast's attack. THE SELECT (verses 4-5) Though the 144k are not written out again, they are described with three parallel phrases, "these...these...these.." ”It is these who have not defiled themselves with women, for they are virgins. It is these who follow the Lamb wherever he goes. These have been redeemed from mankind as firstfruits for God and the Lamb, and in their mouth no lie was found, for they are blameless.” (verses 4-5)
 First, the Select are pure. There is a good deal of debate over the nature of this purity. All those who understand the 144k as symbolic of all the saints must interpret this virginity metaphorically. And there is biblical context for a figurative lack of defilement with idols, sometimes referred to as spiritual adultery and even harlotry. But John's phrasing here is explicit: with women, not with idols, and called virgins. A question I like to ask is, if John had meant to describe physical purity, how could he have done it more clearly than this? Yes, marriage is good, instituted by God, and the marriage bed is blessed when it is undefiled. But there seems to be something unique about this group, who did not even get married, which would be a future application of Paul's instructions in 1 Corinthians 7:26 about a “present distress.” This is not a call for everyone, but for this particular group. Second, the Select are loyal. They are following the Lamb wherever He goes. Jesus' call to His disciples was, "Follow me." Third, the Select are honest. They are the ones having been redeemed from men to be firstfruits to God and to the Lamb. They were chosen and bought, and selected as a special offering. Perhaps the word “firstfruits” (aparche) is better understood as "contribution" rather than emphasizing the first part. Or it could mean that there are still a number of (Jews) to be saved, and the 144k are witnesses to them. It is hard to imagine why the 144k would be both part and all believers. But no lie was found in their mouths, which Zephaniah had prophesied (Zephaniah 3:13, see 3:11-17). During this time, society is a lie. The beast lies about his power, the second beast lies about the glory of the first. Men lie to each other about glory, even if they believe the lies they tell. The select won't abide fake news and false reports. So they are blameless, not as in without sin, but they do the truth. They take their stand with the Lamb, and have no deceit like Him in their suffering (Isaiah 53:9). CONCLUSION In summary, the 144k 1) stand with the Lamb on Mount Zion, 2) have His name on their forehead, 3) learn the new song, 4) are redeemed from earth, 5) are virgins, 6) follow the Lamb, 7) are a special contribution, 8) do not lie, 9) are blameless. And also, while I believe these describe a future generation of select believers who endured the Great Tribulation and see the Lamb on Mount Zion in His millennial kingdom, they provide a pattern for those of us living now in great tribulation. There is application for us. We are select for now, we are called to obey here, to not stand in the way of sinners but to follow Christ and speak the truth. Some of the most highly blessed have been some of the most severely tested. Don't despise the heat God uses to increase your capacity for joy. We are not the 144k, but we are offerings to God, who have been redeemed and sealed by the Spirit and given a song and follow the Lamb with loyalty and must resist the lies of the beast. As Psalm 107:2, let the redeemed of the Lord sing so. ---- Charge: The benediction for today is well-known. These are the final words before the apocalypse, they are fitting, fortifying. We are given over to the One who has selected us and who has strength to keep us on our feet until we see categorical glory with cosmic joy; misery swallowed up in majesty. Stand with the Lamb, follow Him wherever He goes. Benediction: "Now to him who is able to keep you from stumbling and to present you blameless before the presence of his glory with great joy, to the only God, our Savior, through Jesus Christ our Lord, be glory, majesty, dominion, and authority, before all time and now and forever. Amen." (Jude 24–25)

With some UEFA Nations League fixtures on the horizon, Ari, Peter, and Lambros discuss the Greek National football team. We go through the squad selection, highlighting some notable omissions as well as some interesting additions, and give some context to the upcoming matches against Slovenia and Kosovo. This marks the first of hopefully many Greek NT-focused episodes where we take a step back and cover the national team as fans of Greece as a whole.

Understanding the transmission of the Greek text to us today and explaining why we have confidence that it is an accurate representation of the original autographs. Copy and past this link in your browser to receive sessnio notes. https://photos.google.com/photo/AF1QipOK2VbCAGO5qtV7zi2vJU7N9KFQvup0Brhs6QXY

Introduction to and brief history of the Greek New Testament text.Copy this link in your browser to receive notes. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1v5EqBN7L7lc_V6R1ue7D7Oh5PtV3TFlK/view?usp=sharing

A new MP3 sermon from Bible For Today Baptist Church is now available on SermonAudio with the following details: Title: 7 Bible Schools Use Pagan Greek NT Subtitle: Verse By Verse Exposition Speaker: D. A. Waite, Th.D., Ph.D. Broadcaster: Bible For Today Baptist Church Event: Sunday Service Date: 5/24/2020 Bible: Romans 11:19-36 Length: 35 min.

For additional notes and resources check out Douglas' website.Hebrew words:Phinechas – "mouth of brass" or possibly "negro" (in old Egyptian). Appears first in Exodus 6:25, and also in 17 other OT location. Not to be confused with a later Phinehas (son of Eli, 1 Samuel 1:3) and yet another Phinehas in Ezra 8:33. Although his name was imitable, apparently his character was less imitable!Tsamad – join, yoke (Numbers 25:3); tsemed = couple, pairQubbah – large vaulted tent. There exists a similar word in Arabic meaning "camp sanctuary." Appears only here in Bible.Qin’ah – ardor, zeal, jealousy (Hebrew). From qana’ = be jealous.Zelos – jealousy, zeal (Greek NT and LXX). Whereas in English the Greek root evolved into two adjectives (zealous and jealous), it did not evolve to two nouns (zeal and "jeal"). But it could have!Further study:Passages the podcast covered or referred to:Number 25Exodus 32; Leviticus 10; 2 Samuel 6James 4:7-10Romans 12:11 (see also Revelation 3:16); Colossians 1:28-2:1; 3:1ff; 3:16; 4:2-6.Matthew 5:30; 1 Corinthians 5:5,7,13; 6:17; 2 Thessalonians 3:6-15; Hebrews 13:4; Revelation 21:8.In the NT: 2 Peter 2:15, Jude 11, Revelation 2:14Psalm 106:28-31(2 Cor 11:2 -- here Paul is jealous [zēlô] with a zeal [zēlō].)AdvancedPhinehas was chief of the Korahite Levites (1 Chronicles 9:20). Learn more about him in Joshua 22:13ff, 30-32 and Judges 20:28ff.He is lauded in the Apocrypha in 1 Maccabees 2:26, 54 and Sirach (Ecclesiasticus) 45:23-24.He's even mentioned three times in the Dead Sea Scrolls.Some things we learn about God:God's jealousy, which is sinless, is white-hot, holy, and cannot be compromised.He punishes sin.God detests illicit yoking (with unbelievers).He commends those who stand up for his righteousness.For kids:Due to the mature subject matter and shocking nature of the principal text, Numbers 25, this lesson is more appropriate for children who are exposed to significant sexual temptation. (In the United States, this is normally from age of 12.) Be sensitive.For more mature kids, read Numbers 25 and have a discussion. Begin by asking, What character strengths Phinehas has:Strong conviction.Does not follow the flow; understands that there are absolutes.Is unapologetic.Takes the initiative.Demonstrates leadership in a time of moral crisis.His anger is not for his own sake, but because he understands and believes deeply in God's law.True zeal...Ask, in what sorts of situations should a godly person take a stand (e.g. in school, in sports, at church)?In regard to leaving home /going to university, ask, What are you going to do/say when you see people engaged in gross sin?Ask, How does the world oppose and even ridicule such a man?Conclude by reading Joshua 24:15 (begin in v.14 and read as far as you need in order to paint the picture).Key verses:Numbers 25:11Psalm 106:31 

EveryWord004 Welcome to this FOURTH episode of the Every Word Podcast. This is a podcast series for those who enjoy studying details found in God’s Word. In every episode I will read from Dr. Wilbur Pickering’s fresh-sounding translation of the New Testament, which he named, “The Sovereign Creator Has Spoken.” In today’s episode, I will read and comment on Pickering’s translation of Mark chapter 3. The episode notes for this podcast provide the text of everything I’m saying and links to supporting documentation. Dr. Pickering’s translation is based on the Majority Text of the Greek New Testament, which is also called the Byzantine Text. This podcast series shows why the Majority Greek Text is superior to the Eclectic Greek Text, which was used as the basis of most of the NT translations of the last century.  The shift in the Greek text used for English Bible translations began in 1881, with the publication of Wescott and Hort’s Greek New Testament, which was based on an extremely small sampling of manuscripts of the Alexandrian Text Type— that is from Egypt.  [The main two manuscripts they relied on are Codex Sinaiticus (abbreviation א [Aleph] or 01) and Codex Vaticanus (abbreviation B or 03). Those are dated at 330-360 AD and 300-325 respectively.]  At the time Wescott and Hort were working, it was anticipated that research into the most ancient manuscripts newly discovered in Egypt would reveal a coherent textual stream that would point to the authentic initial form of the Greek text. Now, over a century later, those ancient Egyptian manuscripts have been analyzed, but they do not reveal a coherent textual stream that can be followed. Instead they reveal that Egyptian scribes very freely edited the texts they copied. In contrast, the Majority Text of the New Testament was made by copyists who lived in the same places as the original recipients of the apostles’ writings. Individual scribal errors have been weeded out, since this text type is based on the majority reading of thousands of Greek manuscripts. The Majority Text has been stable over the centuries and is the best academically defendable text of the Greek New Testament that we have today. It is my hope that these podcasts will build awareness of the faulty Greek text that underlies almost all of the English Bible translations of the last century, starting with the ASV (1901), and including RSV, NASB, NIV, GNT, NLT, NET, and ESV. Mark 3:  A Sabbath healing—the rejection Another time He went into the synagogue, and there was a man there with a withered hand. ² So they watched Him closely, whether He would heal him on the Sabbath, so that they might accuse Him. ³ Well He says to the man with the withered hand, “Come out in the middle”. ⁴ Then He said to them: “Is it lawful on the Sabbath to do good or to do evil, to save life or to kill?” But they remained silent. ⁵ After looking around at them with anger, being grieved at the hardness of their hearts,  *They had no compassion, no agape; their only concern was to preserve their system, their position and authority.  He says to the man, “Stretch out your hand!” So he stretched [it out], and his hand was restored as healthy as the other!  *Perhaps 5% of the Greek manuscripts omit ‘as healthy as the other’, as in NIV, NASB, LB, TEV, etc. ⁶ Then the Pharisees went straight out, and with the Herodians  *Pharisees and Herodians were political opponents, so this was a strange alliance; evidently they perceived Jesus as a common enemy; such a serious enemy that He needed destroying.  started hatching a plot against Him, how they might destroy Him.   PCF: The variant that Pickering shows us here is just returning three short words to the Greek text. While we already would know that the man’s hand was restored, it is nice to know that Jesus didn’t just give partial healing to this man. The hand wasn’t just better and useful again, but was just as strong as his other hand.   Healings by the sea Jesus withdrew with His disciples to the sea; and a large crowd from Galilee followed Him—also from Judea, ⁸ from Jerusalem, from Idumea and beyond Jordan; even those around Tyre and Sidon. A huge crowd came to Him, having heard the sorts of things He kept doing. ⁹ So He told His disciples that a small boat should be kept ready for Him because of the crowd, lest they should press in on Him. ¹⁰ Because He had healed many, so that as many as had afflictions were pushing toward Him so as to touch Him. ¹¹ And the unclean spirits—whenever one saw Him, he would fall down before Him and cry out, saying, “You are the son of God!” ¹² And He kept giving them strict orders that they should not make Him known.  *I wonder why the demons felt compelled to proclaim who Jesus was, evidently. I would say that He generally has the opposite problem with us!   PCF: I like how Pickering translated two imperfect Greek verbs in this section using ‘kept’. (v. 8 and 12) The imperfect shows a prolonged situation or in this case a repeated action.   The Twelve chosen He went up on the mountain and summoned those whom He wanted, and they came to Him. ¹⁴ He appointed twelve,  *Less than 2% of the Greek manuscripts, of objectively inferior quality, add ‘whom He also named apostles’, presumably imported from Luke 6:13, to be followed by NIV, LB, TEV, etc.  that they might be with Him and that He might send them out to preach ¹⁵ —also to have authority to heal sicknesses and  *Perhaps 1% of the Greek manuscripts, of objectively inferior quality, omit ‘to heal diseases and’, to be followed by NIV, NASB, LB, TEV, etc.  to cast out demons: ¹⁶ namely Peter (a name He gave to Simon); ¹⁷ James son of Zebedee, and John the brother of James (and a name He gave to them was Boanerges, that is, ‘Sons of thunder’); ¹⁸ Andrew, Phillip, Bartholomew, Matthew, Thomas, James son of Alphaeus, Thaddaeus, Simon the Cananite; ¹⁹ and Judas Iscariot, who also betrayed Him. ²⁰ Then they went into a house;  *This may well have been His own house in Capernaum. If He were in someone else’s house, the hosts could have protected Him so He could at least eat.  and again a multitude gathered, so that they were not even able to eat bread. ²¹ Well upon hearing this His family came to apprehend Him, because they were saying, “He is out of his mind!”   PCF: When we find an addition to the Greek NT text, it is often where a copyist added something found in one Gospel and put that into the Gospel he was copying. The words ‘whom he named apostles’ was added to Mark by a copyist who liked those words in Luke’s Gospel. It is quite interesting to me that so many translations of the last century followed that addition, including those Pickering listed plus others like NLT, NET and ESV. The KJV does not contain those words. As a Bible translator, we often are tempted to do the same thing, shoring up the differences between Gospels. But it is better to allow each Gospel to stand on its own. Then in verse 15, we have another thing left out of most translations. The phrase ‘to heal diseases’ is in the ones Pickering mentioned, plus left out of the ESV, NLT, and NET. The KJV contains the words. This omission has the support of only 1% of Greek manuscripts, and the Bible translations of the last century don’t even bother to footnote this variant.  There is a tiny textual variant that Pickering does not footnote. That is in v.18, the spelling of Simon’s designation as ‘the zealot’. The Greek word most often translated as ‘zealot’ is Kananaios (Καναναῖος) in the Eclectic Text, whereas the Majority Text has Kananités (Κανανίτης). 99% of Greek manuscripts have the spelling as in the Majority Text. So, both texts have the same word, but in the ET it is in the nominative form, and it is accusative in the MT. In either form, it can be translated as zealot (meaning a man wanting Israel to rebel against Roman rule) or as Pickering translates, a Cananite, (someone descended from the Cananite people). Either meaning would have been an epithet.   Scribes blaspheme the Holy Spirit Then some scribes who had come down from Jerusalem  *They had come all the way to Galilee, just to combat Jesus.  started saying, “He has Beelzebub”, and “It is by the ruler of the demons that he casts out demons”. ²³ So summoning them He started saying to them in parables: “How can Satan cast out Satan? ²⁴ If a kingdom is divided against itself, that kingdom cannot stand. ²⁵ And if a household is divided against itself, that household cannot stand. ²⁶ And if Satan has risen up against himself and become divided, [his kingdom//he] cannot stand, but is finished. ²⁷ No one can plunder the strong man’s goods,  *Since the definite article occurs with ‘strong man’ the first time the phrase occurs, the entity has already been introduced, so the reference is to Satan. Here is a biblical basis for binding Satan, which is now possible because of Christ’s victory. Hebrews 2:14 informs us that Jehovah the Son took on human form to destroy the devil, while 1 John 3:8 affirms that He was manifested to undo the works of the devil. But in John 20:21 the resurrected Jesus said, “As the Father has sent me, so send I you”, and not long after that He returned to the Father. He defeated Satan alright, but it is up to us to ‘undo the works’.  invading his house, unless he first binds the strong man—then he may plunder the house. ²⁸ “Assuredly I say to you: all the sins of the sons of men can be forgiven, including whatever blasphemies they may utter; ²⁹ but whoever blasphemes against the Holy Spirit never has forgiveness, but is subject to eternal condemnation”  *Perhaps 1% of the Greek manuscripts, of objectively inferior quality, read ‘sin’ instead of ‘condemnation’, to be followed by NIV, NASB, LB, TEV, etc. ³⁰ —because they were saying, “He has an unclean spirit”.  *Those scribes committed the unpardonable sin.   PCF: There are some footnotes from Pickering that I will not read. And there are two places in today’s reading where I have tweaked Pickering’s translation. Those are marked by square brackets in the program notes. If you want to see a nicely formatted PDF of the episode notes, please download that file from dailybiblereading.info. I am somewhat uncomfortable with Pickering’s footnote about binding Satan. Due to his brevity, his note might be interpreted to say that we have been given the right to bind Satan in every circumstance. So let’s be clear: The One with authority to bind Satan is Christ, not us. I agree, however, that Jesus left us with the task of undoing as much as we can of Satan’s works.  I believe that binding Satan works for us in areas where we have clear legal authority in God’s sight. When we were working in Indonesia, a fellow missionary family was having difficulty with their two-year-old daughter screaming at night and uncharacteristically not wanting her mom to hold her. They thought, as I do, that this was some kind of demonic harassment. In a case like this, I believe that the head of the family can speak out and directly forbid the evil spirit from bothering their daughter or even approaching their house. This is done by making it clear that you (as the head of the family) are claiming authority based on your union with Christ. Doing this solved the problem. Note that I as an outsider would have had no authority to bind Satan for my friend’s family. Similarly, for a child that is grown up enough to be out of the authority of your home, and one who has ‘gone off the deep end’, we cannot any longer bind Satan in the same way. In a case like that we ask Jesus to do that and ask for spiritual protection for the grown child. Therefore also, an area where each of us can legally bind Satan and forbid harassing spirits is in our own lives, bodies, or minds. We can consider 2Corinthians 12:7-9 as an example of why this may not work in every case. The variant that Pickering points out in v. 29 is small but significant. ESV follows the Eclectic Text Mark 3:28-29 saying: “Truly, I say to you, all sins will be forgiven the children of man, and whatever blasphemies they utter, but whoever blasphemes against the Holy Spirit never has forgiveness, but is guilty of an eternal sin.” It is a little difficult to understand how a single sin can be eternal? The Majority Text reading makes better sense:  “… but whoever blasphemes against the Holy Spirit never has forgiveness, but is subject to eternal condemnation.”  Being subject to eternal condemnation is scary-er to imagine than guilty of an eternal sin. And since 99% of the manuscripts say that, it is most likely to be the original form of the text.   Jesus goes on the offensive New relationships Then His brothers and His mother came, and standing outside they sent to Him, calling Him. ³² A crowd was sitting around Him; so they said to Him, “Look, your mother and your brothers and your sisters  *The reference to ‘sisters’ makes clear that the ‘brothers’ were indeed Mary’s sons. Some 30% of the Greek manuscripts omit ‘and your sisters’ (as in TR, AV and NKJV).  are outside asking for you”. ³³ He answered them saying, “Who is my mother or my brothers?” ³⁴ And looking around at those seated in a circle around Him He said: “Behold [you who are sitting here are] my mother and my brothers! ³⁵ Because whoever does the will of God, the same is my brother, my sister, my mother.”  *The claims of Christ’s Kingdom are more important than the claims of one’s family.   PCF: The textual variant at v.32 has the support of only 70.9% of the Greek manuscripts. Note that this is one where the Textus Receptus and therefore the KJV do not have the words ‘and your sisters’. As Pickering points out in his Greek NT, this is “not a very difficult case of homoioteleuton.” That Greek term means a variant caused by words in the text starting the same way. The words ‘and your brothers’ and the ‘and your sisters’ are almost identical. Brothers in Greek is adelphoi and sisters is adelphai, so the two four-word phrases (in Greek) are just one letter different. A copyist would be very likely to skip over ‘and your adelphai’, thinking he had already copied that.  Pickering says that “The reference to ‘sisters’ makes clear that the ‘brothers’ were indeed Mary’s sons.” Well actually, in the context of his mother being paired with ‘brothers’, I don’t think very many readers would think that the word ‘brothers’ means ‘Jewish brothers from Nazareth’.   Dr. Pickering named his NT, “The Sovereign Creator Has Spoken.” That title contains three concepts that were not believed by Wescott, Hort, and the succeeding managers of the Eclectic Text. They did not believe that our Creator created humans as described in Genesis. They did not believe in the sovereignty of God. Nor did they believe that God actively inspired and has preserved every word of Scripture for us. Moses and Jesus said, “Man shall not live on bread alone, but by every word of God.” (Deut. 8:3; Mat. 4:4; Luk. 4:4) May the Lord bless you ‘real good’!   Resources: Fields, Philip: Playing Follow the Leader in Bible Translation, 2019, by Phil Fields. See the Resources list in that article for many more helpful articles on the superiority of the Majority Greek Text.   Friberg, Timothy:  On the text of the Greek New Testament that also happens to be the right one for cousin audiences Although the title of this four-page paper refers to translating for Muslims, the principles and summary is widely applicable.  I suggest reading this paper before reading Friberg’s other articles listed below.   Layman’s Guide — A modest explanation for the layman of ideas related to determining the text of the Greek New Testament, 2019.   What is what? — Differences between the Traditional Text and the Bible Society Text of the Greek New Testament. Some data for the reader to weigh, 2019.   Pickering, Wilbur: New Translation of the New Testament: The Sovereign Creator has Spoken Greek Text of the New Testament based on Family 35   All of Pickering’s articles and books are freely available for download at PRUNCH.net. All are released under the Creative Commons license. Additionally, his second edition (2016) NT translation is available for a free download via the Kindle app. It is also freely available as a module in the MyBible program for Android and Apple devices.    Robinson, Maurice: The New Testament in the Original Greek: Byzantine Textform, 1991, 2005, 2018.  This is available in free digital form in the MyBible Bible app, and in other ways.   Article: Full Text of the 105 verses lacking overall Greek Manuscript Support in the NA edition 27

EveryWord004 Welcome to this FOURTH episode of the Every Word Podcast. This is a podcast series for those who enjoy studying details found in God’s Word. In every episode I will read from Dr. Wilbur Pickering’s fresh-sounding translation of the New Testament, which he named, “The Sovereign Creator Has Spoken.” In today’s episode, I will read and comment on Pickering’s translation of Mark chapter 3. The episode notes for this podcast provide the text of everything I’m saying and links to supporting documentation. Dr. Pickering’s translation is based on the Majority Text of the Greek New Testament, which is also called the Byzantine Text. This podcast series shows why the Majority Greek Text is superior to the Eclectic Greek Text, which was used as the basis of most of the NT translations of the last century.  The shift in the Greek text used for English Bible translations began in 1881, with the publication of Wescott and Hort’s Greek New Testament, which was based on an extremely small sampling of manuscripts of the Alexandrian Text Type— that is from Egypt.  [The main two manuscripts they relied on are Codex Sinaiticus (abbreviation א [Aleph] or 01) and Codex Vaticanus (abbreviation B or 03). Those are dated at 330-360 AD and 300-325 respectively.]  At the time Wescott and Hort were working, it was anticipated that research into the most ancient manuscripts newly discovered in Egypt would reveal a coherent textual stream that would point to the authentic initial form of the Greek text. Now, over a century later, those ancient Egyptian manuscripts have been analyzed, but they do not reveal a coherent textual stream that can be followed. Instead they reveal that Egyptian scribes very freely edited the texts they copied. In contrast, the Majority Text of the New Testament was made by copyists who lived in the same places as the original recipients of the apostles’ writings. Individual scribal errors have been weeded out, since this text type is based on the majority reading of thousands of Greek manuscripts. The Majority Text has been stable over the centuries and is the best academically defendable text of the Greek New Testament that we have today. It is my hope that these podcasts will build awareness of the faulty Greek text that underlies almost all of the English Bible translations of the last century, starting with the ASV (1901), and including RSV, NASB, NIV, GNT, NLT, NET, and ESV. Mark 3:  A Sabbath healing—the rejection Another time He went into the synagogue, and there was a man there with a withered hand. ² So they watched Him closely, whether He would heal him on the Sabbath, so that they might accuse Him. ³ Well He says to the man with the withered hand, “Come out in the middle”. ⁴ Then He said to them: “Is it lawful on the Sabbath to do good or to do evil, to save life or to kill?” But they remained silent. ⁵ After looking around at them with anger, being grieved at the hardness of their hearts,  *They had no compassion, no agape; their only concern was to preserve their system, their position and authority.  He says to the man, “Stretch out your hand!” So he stretched [it out], and his hand was restored as healthy as the other!  *Perhaps 5% of the Greek manuscripts omit ‘as healthy as the other’, as in NIV, NASB, LB, TEV, etc. ⁶ Then the Pharisees went straight out, and with the Herodians  *Pharisees and Herodians were political opponents, so this was a strange alliance; evidently they perceived Jesus as a common enemy; such a serious enemy that He needed destroying.  started hatching a plot against Him, how they might destroy Him.   PCF: The variant that Pickering shows us here is just returning three short words to the Greek text. While we already would know that the man’s hand was restored, it is nice to know that Jesus didn’t just give partial healing to this man. The hand wasn’t just better and useful again, but was just as strong as his other hand.   Healings by the sea Jesus withdrew with His disciples to the sea; and a large crowd from Galilee followed Him—also from Judea, ⁸ from Jerusalem, from Idumea and beyond Jordan; even those around Tyre and Sidon. A huge crowd came to Him, having heard the sorts of things He kept doing. ⁹ So He told His disciples that a small boat should be kept ready for Him because of the crowd, lest they should press in on Him. ¹⁰ Because He had healed many, so that as many as had afflictions were pushing toward Him so as to touch Him. ¹¹ And the unclean spirits—whenever one saw Him, he would fall down before Him and cry out, saying, “You are the son of God!” ¹² And He kept giving them strict orders that they should not make Him known.  *I wonder why the demons felt compelled to proclaim who Jesus was, evidently. I would say that He generally has the opposite problem with us!   PCF: I like how Pickering translated two imperfect Greek verbs in this section using ‘kept’. (v. 8 and 12) The imperfect shows a prolonged situation or in this case a repeated action.   The Twelve chosen He went up on the mountain and summoned those whom He wanted, and they came to Him. ¹⁴ He appointed twelve,  *Less than 2% of the Greek manuscripts, of objectively inferior quality, add ‘whom He also named apostles’, presumably imported from Luke 6:13, to be followed by NIV, LB, TEV, etc.  that they might be with Him and that He might send them out to preach ¹⁵ —also to have authority to heal sicknesses and  *Perhaps 1% of the Greek manuscripts, of objectively inferior quality, omit ‘to heal diseases and’, to be followed by NIV, NASB, LB, TEV, etc.  to cast out demons: ¹⁶ namely Peter (a name He gave to Simon); ¹⁷ James son of Zebedee, and John the brother of James (and a name He gave to them was Boanerges, that is, ‘Sons of thunder’); ¹⁸ Andrew, Phillip, Bartholomew, Matthew, Thomas, James son of Alphaeus, Thaddaeus, Simon the Cananite; ¹⁹ and Judas Iscariot, who also betrayed Him. ²⁰ Then they went into a house;  *This may well have been His own house in Capernaum. If He were in someone else’s house, the hosts could have protected Him so He could at least eat.  and again a multitude gathered, so that they were not even able to eat bread. ²¹ Well upon hearing this His family came to apprehend Him, because they were saying, “He is out of his mind!”   PCF: When we find an addition to the Greek NT text, it is often where a copyist added something found in one Gospel and put that into the Gospel he was copying. The words ‘whom he named apostles’ was added to Mark by a copyist who liked those words in Luke’s Gospel. It is quite interesting to me that so many translations of the last century followed that addition, including those Pickering listed plus others like NLT, NET and ESV. The KJV does not contain those words. As a Bible translator, we often are tempted to do the same thing, shoring up the differences between Gospels. But it is better to allow each Gospel to stand on its own. Then in verse 15, we have another thing left out of most translations. The phrase ‘to heal diseases’ is in the ones Pickering mentioned, plus left out of the ESV, NLT, and NET. The KJV contains the words. This omission has the support of only 1% of Greek manuscripts, and the Bible translations of the last century don’t even bother to footnote this variant.  There is a tiny textual variant that Pickering does not footnote. That is in v.18, the spelling of Simon’s designation as ‘the zealot’. The Greek word most often translated as ‘zealot’ is Kananaios (Καναναῖος) in the Eclectic Text, whereas the Majority Text has Kananités (Κανανίτης). 99% of Greek manuscripts have the spelling as in the Majority Text. So, both texts have the same word, but in the ET it is in the nominative form, and it is accusative in the MT. In either form, it can be translated as zealot (meaning a man wanting Israel to rebel against Roman rule) or as Pickering translates, a Cananite, (someone descended from the Cananite people). Either meaning would have been an epithet.   Scribes blaspheme the Holy Spirit Then some scribes who had come down from Jerusalem  *They had come all the way to Galilee, just to combat Jesus.  started saying, “He has Beelzebub”, and “It is by the ruler of the demons that he casts out demons”. ²³ So summoning them He started saying to them in parables: “How can Satan cast out Satan? ²⁴ If a kingdom is divided against itself, that kingdom cannot stand. ²⁵ And if a household is divided against itself, that household cannot stand. ²⁶ And if Satan has risen up against himself and become divided, [his kingdom//he] cannot stand, but is finished. ²⁷ No one can plunder the strong man’s goods,  *Since the definite article occurs with ‘strong man’ the first time the phrase occurs, the entity has already been introduced, so the reference is to Satan. Here is a biblical basis for binding Satan, which is now possible because of Christ’s victory. Hebrews 2:14 informs us that Jehovah the Son took on human form to destroy the devil, while 1 John 3:8 affirms that He was manifested to undo the works of the devil. But in John 20:21 the resurrected Jesus said, “As the Father has sent me, so send I you”, and not long after that He returned to the Father. He defeated Satan alright, but it is up to us to ‘undo the works’.  invading his house, unless he first binds the strong man—then he may plunder the house. ²⁸ “Assuredly I say to you: all the sins of the sons of men can be forgiven, including whatever blasphemies they may utter; ²⁹ but whoever blasphemes against the Holy Spirit never has forgiveness, but is subject to eternal condemnation”  *Perhaps 1% of the Greek manuscripts, of objectively inferior quality, read ‘sin’ instead of ‘condemnation’, to be followed by NIV, NASB, LB, TEV, etc. ³⁰ —because they were saying, “He has an unclean spirit”.  *Those scribes committed the unpardonable sin.   PCF: There are some footnotes from Pickering that I will not read. And there are two places in today’s reading where I have tweaked Pickering’s translation. Those are marked by square brackets in the program notes. If you want to see a nicely formatted PDF of the episode notes, please download that file from dailybiblereading.info. I am somewhat uncomfortable with Pickering’s footnote about binding Satan. Due to his brevity, his note might be interpreted to say that we have been given the right to bind Satan in every circumstance. So let’s be clear: The One with authority to bind Satan is Christ, not us. I agree, however, that Jesus left us with the task of undoing as much as we can of Satan’s works.  I believe that binding Satan works for us in areas where we have clear legal authority in God’s sight. When we were working in Indonesia, a fellow missionary family was having difficulty with their two-year-old daughter screaming at night and uncharacteristically not wanting her mom to hold her. They thought, as I do, that this was some kind of demonic harassment. In a case like this, I believe that the head of the family can speak out and directly forbid the evil spirit from bothering their daughter or even approaching their house. This is done by making it clear that you (as the head of the family) are claiming authority based on your union with Christ. Doing this solved the problem. Note that I as an outsider would have had no authority to bind Satan for my friend’s family. Similarly, for a child that is grown up enough to be out of the authority of your home, and one who has ‘gone off the deep end’, we cannot any longer bind Satan in the same way. In a case like that we ask Jesus to do that and ask for spiritual protection for the grown child. Therefore also, an area where each of us can legally bind Satan and forbid harassing spirits is in our own lives, bodies, or minds. We can consider 2Corinthians 12:7-9 as an example of why this may not work in every case. The variant that Pickering points out in v. 29 is small but significant. ESV follows the Eclectic Text Mark 3:28-29 saying: “Truly, I say to you, all sins will be forgiven the children of man, and whatever blasphemies they utter, but whoever blasphemes against the Holy Spirit never has forgiveness, but is guilty of an eternal sin.” It is a little difficult to understand how a single sin can be eternal? The Majority Text reading makes better sense:  “… but whoever blasphemes against the Holy Spirit never has forgiveness, but is subject to eternal condemnation.”  Being subject to eternal condemnation is scary-er to imagine than guilty of an eternal sin. And since 99% of the manuscripts say that, it is most likely to be the original form of the text.   Jesus goes on the offensive New relationships Then His brothers and His mother came, and standing outside they sent to Him, calling Him. ³² A crowd was sitting around Him; so they said to Him, “Look, your mother and your brothers and your sisters  *The reference to ‘sisters’ makes clear that the ‘brothers’ were indeed Mary’s sons. Some 30% of the Greek manuscripts omit ‘and your sisters’ (as in TR, AV and NKJV).  are outside asking for you”. ³³ He answered them saying, “Who is my mother or my brothers?” ³⁴ And looking around at those seated in a circle around Him He said: “Behold [you who are sitting here are] my mother and my brothers! ³⁵ Because whoever does the will of God, the same is my brother, my sister, my mother.”  *The claims of Christ’s Kingdom are more important than the claims of one’s family.   PCF: The textual variant at v.32 has the support of only 70.9% of the Greek manuscripts. Note that this is one where the Textus Receptus and therefore the KJV do not have the words ‘and your sisters’. As Pickering points out in his Greek NT, this is “not a very difficult case of homoioteleuton.” That Greek term means a variant caused by words in the text starting the same way. The words ‘and your brothers’ and the ‘and your sisters’ are almost identical. Brothers in Greek is adelphoi and sisters is adelphai, so the two four-word phrases (in Greek) are just one letter different. A copyist would be very likely to skip over ‘and your adelphai’, thinking he had already copied that.  Pickering says that “The reference to ‘sisters’ makes clear that the ‘brothers’ were indeed Mary’s sons.” Well actually, in the context of his mother being paired with ‘brothers’, I don’t think very many readers would think that the word ‘brothers’ means ‘Jewish brothers from Nazareth’.   Dr. Pickering named his NT, “The Sovereign Creator Has Spoken.” That title contains three concepts that were not believed by Wescott, Hort, and the succeeding managers of the Eclectic Text. They did not believe that our Creator created humans as described in Genesis. They did not believe in the sovereignty of God. Nor did they believe that God actively inspired and has preserved every word of Scripture for us. Moses and Jesus said, “Man shall not live on bread alone, but by every word of God.” (Deut. 8:3; Mat. 4:4; Luk. 4:4) May the Lord bless you ‘real good’!   Resources: Fields, Philip: Playing Follow the Leader in Bible Translation, 2019, by Phil Fields. See the Resources list in that article for many more helpful articles on the superiority of the Majority Greek Text.   Friberg, Timothy:  On the text of the Greek New Testament that also happens to be the right one for cousin audiences Although the title of this four-page paper refers to translating for Muslims, the principles and summary is widely applicable.  I suggest reading this paper before reading Friberg’s other articles listed below.   Layman’s Guide — A modest explanation for the layman of ideas related to determining the text of the Greek New Testament, 2019.   What is what? — Differences between the Traditional Text and the Bible Society Text of the Greek New Testament. Some data for the reader to weigh, 2019.   Pickering, Wilbur: New Translation of the New Testament: The Sovereign Creator has Spoken Greek Text of the New Testament based on Family 35   All of Pickering’s articles and books are freely available for download at PRUNCH.net. All are released under the Creative Commons license. Additionally, his second edition (2016) NT translation is available for a free download via the Kindle app. It is also freely available as a module in the MyBible program for Android and Apple devices.    Robinson, Maurice: The New Testament in the Original Greek: Byzantine Textform, 1991, 2005, 2018.  This is available in free digital form in the MyBible Bible app, and in other ways.   Article: Full Text of the 105 verses lacking overall Greek Manuscript Support in the NA edition 27

Happy Shelter in Place Day, Friends! I find myself living in the part of Central California right now that has been essentially shut down for the next 22 days, and our Shelter in Place order just went into effect about an hour ago. These are strange, strange times! So – sometimes people ask me how it’s going doing a daily podcast. I can tell you that each episode takes just a little under 3 hours from start to finish, which includes writing the episode, recording it, editing it in Audacity, and entering all of the pertinent information into a WordPress and Libsyn post. Longer episodes take longer, shorter episodes can be around 2 hours of time. Last night was one of the later nights for the show. One of my daughters wanted to watch a show with me, and I’ll take just about any excuse I can to spend time with them, so we watched a show together, which began after midnight. Then I wrote a fairly long pastoral email to the congregation of the church I pastor about the coronavirus pandemic. When I say fairly long, I mean over 1800 words, so about 6 pages worth. We’re in California, and on a virtual lock-down, so hopefully they had a little extra time to read. One of the problems being in a church that is pastored by somebody who fancies himself as a writer is that you can get very long emails from time to time. If you are a leader at the church I pastor, you got a 2100 word email from me AND an 1800 word email from me within the space of 4 days. I should repent in sackcloth and ashes for that, I suppose, but these are trying times we live in right now, filled with dangers like novel viruses, lack of toilet paper, and novel-length emails from pastors. ANYWAY, the point of what I was trying to say earlier before I rambled was that I didn’t start WRITING the podcast until around 3AM. Fortunately, I had some great material from pastor David Platt to use, so I didn’t have to write a ton of original material myself. It was, however, one of the few times since I began this daily podcast in January that I kind of just wanted to go to bed, and not spend 2 hours or so on a podcast. HOWEVER – when I got to the point of recording it, and I got to the part where I was just reading the Scriptures into the microphone, that’s when I noticed something that happens practically every time I do the podcast: THE WORD OF GOD ENCOURAGED ME. It gave me HOPE. It built me up. It elevated my mood. Almost every time I record this show, I come away encouraged. Not because I like recording and editing a podcast – that can get a little tedious…but because the WORD of God is powerful, and supernatural, and it just builds me up in faith, because faith comes by HEARING THE WORD OF GOD. I just wanted to share that with you as a benefit. You can get that same benefit – without the 2-3 hours of writing, recording and editing by simply READING (or listening!) to the WORD OF GOD! If you haven’t done so yet, allow me to encourage you to listen to the other half of today’s episode – episode #78 – I split today’s show into two parts so it wouldn’t be too long. In today’s reading, we encounter the story of the woman caught in adultery, known to scholars as the Pericope Adulterae. Many scholars, including many evangelical ones, consider this passage to be a later edition to the New Testament, and in most modern Bibles, this part of John is set apart to show doubt about the passage. So – what’s going on here, and was this story original to John’s Gospel, or was it a later edition?             The Pericope Adulterae, found in John 7:53-8:11, is surrounded by more controversy and conjecture than any other New Testament Passage with the possible exception of the ending of Mark. The authorship and placement of this pericope has been hotly debated at least since the fifth century, and there are still scholars lined up on opposite sides of the issues surrounding this passage.             Attempting to extract meaning and application from this passage is almost meaningless without first wrestling with the genuineness of the text and the mass of evidence for and against it. The issue is simple to grasp – if this pericope is a genuine and accurate happening in the life of Jesus, then it carries just as much weight as the rest of the New Testament. Conversely, if the passage is a later edition with no basis in fact (i.e. it never happened) then the passage is notable only for its historical value and the question of how it became inserted into many manuscripts of the New Testament.        Though it will be argued that there is no way to be certain of the historicity of this passage, the preponderance of the evidence points to it being a genuine happening in the life of Jesus, and as such it does have application in the modern church and it can inform how we live and interact with each other. Summary of the Passage             7:53-8:2 The Pericope Adulterae begins with a somewhat awkward[1] transition from the previous narrative. The stage is set here; Jesus has spent the night at the Mount of Olives and dawn finds Him mingling with the crowd near the temple courts. His very presence attracts a crowd and notably (for the fourth Gospel)[2] Jesus sits down to teach them.             8:3-8:6a As Jesus is teaching the people, The scribes and Pharisees bring in a woman and stand her in front of the crowd. They explain to Jesus that the woman was caught in the act of committing adultery, and (on the surface) they present her to Jesus for judgment. The question is, should the woman be stoned in accordance with the law of Moses? The text informs us that this question is a trap for Jesus, a classic catch 22, there is no clear way that Jesus can give a verdict here without opening Himself up to some basis for accusation, either in the eyes of the Roman authorities, or the people.             8:6b-8:9 Perplexingly, Jesus doesn’t answer their questions immediately, indeed, He never gives them the verdict. Instead, He leans over and writes on the ground. The accusers persist in their questioning, and Jesus finally responds with His classic retort, challenging any one of the accusers without sin to be the one that casts the first stone. Though we don’t know how much time passed after Jesus’ challenge, one can almost be assured of an awkward silence, punctuated by occasional stones hitting the soft earth as they fall from the hands of the accusers. Beginning with the eldest among them, the scribes and Pharisees melt away into the crowd.             8:10-8:11 Jesus and the accused woman are left as the center of attention. He initiates dialogue her, asking the obvious questions – where is everybody? Is no one left to condemn? Upon her acknowledgment that they have all left, Jesus also refuses to condemn the woman, but warns her to leave behind her life of sin. Controversy and Canonicity: Contra Johannine             This Pericope is a wonderful piece of literature; very moving and dramatic. Jesus cleverly meets the challenge of the scribes and Pharisees without compromising and without falling into a trap, and the woman caught in sin is given a second chance to repent. It’s a powerful story, but is it genuine? Did it really happen? If it did really happen, why is there so much evidence against it being an original part of the gospel of John? A survey of the evidence for and against genuineness is presented below.             The majority of New Testament scholars are fairly adamant that the Pericope Adulterae is non-Johannine in origin. The ancient manuscript evidence is indeed stacked against this Pericope. Bruce Metzger  points out that all major early Greek manuscripts omit the Pericope, including our oldest and most respected early manuscripts, Codex Sinaiticus, Codex Vaticanus,        p66 and p75.[3] Though some Old Latin manuscripts include the Pericope, many omit it as well, and the early Syriac, and Coptic manuscripts do not contain the passage[4]. Codex Bezae is the only major Greek manuscript prior to the 8th century that this pericope appears in, and Bezae is known for its many interpolations. In fact, Metzger states,                         “No other manuscript has so many and such remarkable variations from     what is usually taken to be the New Testament Text. Codex Bezae’s special            characteristic is the free addition (and occasional omission) of words, sentences      and even incidences.”[5]                         Further manuscript evidence against the Johannine nature of the Pericope is the variety of places it is attached in some of the manuscripts that do contain it. In some manuscripts, it appears after John 7:36, in some after John 7:44, some as an addition at the end of John’s gospel, some after Luke 21:28, and some even after Luke 24:53.[6] Though the number of manuscripts that displace this pericope is not overwhelming, the mere fact of its varied appearance in even a few manuscripts tends to cast doubt on the concreteness of its location after John 7:52.             The final bit of manuscript evidence is the unusually high number of textual variants found in the manuscripts that do contain the pericope. Gary Burge points out that line per line, these twelve verses contain more textual variants across the manuscript tradition than almost any other passage of scripture. [7]             There is also much patristic evidence, especially in the east, stacked against the passage. This pericope is not mentioned by any Greek Father until Euthymius Zigabenus in the 12th century and isn’t found in the writings of the early Fathers in the west either. Thus, it is omitted by Origen, Clement, Cyprian, Irenaeus, Tertullian, Cyril and Chrysostom,[8] even in writings where it would seem to be an appropriate resource for them to use. While Zane Hodges tries to make the case that the absence of the Pericope in these church fathers constitutes an argument from silence, and thus proves nothing[9], the fact of the matter is that this is more empirical evidence stacked against the pericope, and it adds weight to the non-Johannine argument.             While the manuscript evidence would seem to be the greatest evidence against the Pericope, there are also suspicious grammatical and contextual features of the text. Statistical analysis of the text has claimed to show several features which “prove” its non Johannine nature. Vern Poythress has examined the grammatical use of the conjunctions “de”, “oun”, “kai”, and “asyndeton” in the Gospel of John, and developed some general rules that John appears to follow. Upon examination of the adulteress pericope, it would appear that there are enough variations in its use of conjunctions (compared with the rest of John) to allow Poythress to conclude that this Pericope is not written by John.[10]             Further grammatical evidence focuses on the words that are used in the passage. Bryant and Krause point out that approximately nine percent, or 15 of the words used in this pericope do not occur elsewhere in the gospel, the highest percentage for a passage of this size in John[11]. The Mount of Olives, The scribes, and the phrase “early morning” are not found anywhere else in the gospel of John, but all are somewhat common in the synoptic gospels. In addition, only here in John is Jesus addressed as teacher.             While some of these unique words can be explained by the nature of the story, as well as the semi-technical judicial language employed, there are still a high frequency of unique words and constructs here compared with the rest of John.             Finally, there is contextual evidence that seems to indicate this pericope is out of place. Borchert[12] and many others believe that the text disrupts the flow of the Feast of Tabernacles narrative. Many point out its similarity in time and setting to Luke 21:37-38, and (as mentioned above) some manuscripts place the passage right after verse 38 because it seems to be a better fit. It is also true that the flow of the text from 7:52 to 8:12 is smooth and uninterrupted when this passage is removed, but of course, that could be said of many passages! Controversy and Canonicity: Pro Johannine             Most scholars believe the evidence against the Pericope Adulterae is overwhelming, but there is much positive evidence for the ancientness of this event, and even some evidence that would seem to indicate the text is Johannine and not at all out of place.             The strongest evidence for the veracity and Johannine nature of the Pericope comes from the manuscripts and church fathers of the west. Several Old Latin manuscripts do in fact contain the Pericope. Hodges argues valiantly that the absence of the passage in our earliest and most reliable manuscripts (Sinaiticus, Vaticanus, p66 and p75) is due to those manuscripts being of a proto-Alexandrian origin, and thus likely coming from the same (ancient) exemplar, one which had the passage intentionally excised.[13] He posits that the Pericope was removed from some texts very early (before 200), but that the passage was quite possibly in the original autograph.             The Patristic evidence for the Pericope is surprisingly strong in the west. Several church fathers in the fourth and fifth century mention the text, beginning with Pacian of Barcelona, and including Ambrose, Ambrosiaster, Jerome and Augustine. Jerome and Augustine in particular add much to the pro Johannine side of the argument, providing significant ancient evidence and speculation on the passage.             Jerome includes the Pericope Adulterae in his Latin Vulgate translation of the scriptures, thus cementing its future acceptance among the Catholic church. In his Dialogue against the Pelagians, Jerome makes a very intriguing reference to this passage,                         “In the Gospel according to John in many manuscripts, both Greek and Latin, is found the story of the adulterous woman who was accused before the Lord.”[14]             This comment is very significant in considering the Pericope Adulterae, and would seem to stand as the strongest pro-Johannine evidence available. As Hodges points out[15], Jerome was well traveled, and would have had a wide exposure to both Greek and Latin texts, many of which were older than any that has survived to this day. Jerome’s statement should carry much more weight with modern New Testament textual scholars than it appears it does.             Augustine goes even further than Jerome does in his commentary on the passage, acknowledging the already existing controversy over the passage and offering a reason for it’s removal from some manuscripts,                         “Certain persons of little faith, or rather enemies of true faith, fearing, I suppose, lest their wives should be given impunity  in sinning, removed from their manuscripts the Lord’s act of forgiveness toward the adulteress, as if He who said  ‘sin no more’ had granted permission to sin.” [16]             While Augustine’s hermeneutical approach to the passage contains a common mistake (Jesus did not specifically forgive the adulterous woman), his observation is very relevant and offers an intriguing possible explanation for the manuscript problems (and textual variances) associated with this passage. Hodges further quotes Ambrose who makes a similar suggestion to Augustine’s – that the passage is a stumbling block.             The contextual argument against this pericope is perhaps the easiest to answer. While many commentators have pointed out the “disruption” of the Feast of Tabernacles narrative that this pericope seems to effect, Allison Trites convincingly argues the opposite; the entire passage fits into the overall theme of controversy in John 1-12.[17] Other contextual clues could be seen to indicate the proper placement of this passage. For one, it would seem that the story is a great illustration of John 3:17, “For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him.” (John 3:17, NIV)             The Pericope can also be seen in a literary sense as a response to the question posed in John 7:26, “Here he is, speaking publicly, and they are not saying a word to him. Have the authorities really concluded that he is the Christ?” (John 7:26, NIV)             While much has been made of the grammatical analysis of this pericope, specifically focusing on what is considered non Johannine grammar, there has been some grammatical work on the passage that offers different conclusions. Alan Johnson has used some of the existent grammatical statistical methods on other, non disputed passages of John, and concluded that some of those would be considered non Johannine based on the very same methodology used on the Pericope Adulterae. In addition, he also points out several grammatical features in this passage that are consistent with the rest of John, including the use of “de”, “touto” and “legein” [18]             My own grammatical analysis of the passage has produced some interesting results, further casting doubt on the ability of statistical grammatical analysis to effectively determine canonicity and authorship questions. The phrase “meketi amartane” (no longer sin, or stop sinning) only occurs here in the pericope and in John 5:14, where Jesus likewise instructs the paralytic to stop sinning. “ina ecosin” (that they might) is a phrase found only in verse six, and John 17:13. “Kai palin” (and again) in verse 8 is found six other times in John but only once in Luke. Finally, the phrase “eis ten gen” (in the earth) from verse 6 is found 23 times in the New Testament, 5 are in John, and 12 are in Revelation – so of the 23 times that phrase is used, 17 times it is Johannine. That analysis might be used to impress upon some a level of certainty that John did write this passage, but in fact, in the final analysis it doesn’t add much to the argument one way or the other – except to possibly refute those who use statistical grammatical analysis to “prove” that this Pericope is non-Johannine.             A thorough survey of the evidence reveals one thing quite clearly: the authorship and position of the Pericope Adulterae is not an easy issue to decide. It is perplexing and frustrating to see the certainty that is exhibited by many scholars on both sides of this issue. Bruce Metzger, Phillip Comfort, Kurt Aland, Raymond Brown, George Beasley-Murray, Leon Morris and many others all make absolute statements on the Pericope and point to overwhelming evidence that it is either non-canonical or non Johannine. Beasley-Murray goes so far as to write, “It is universally agreed by textual critics of the Greek NT that this passage was not part of the Fourth Gospel in its original form.”[19] What an outrageous and misleading statement! On the other hand, there are a few scholars (Elmer Towns, some scholars in the King James only camp, and several Dallas Theological Seminary professors) who are equally adamant that this passage is certainly genuine, and right where it belongs in the New Testament. The fact is that the best and most irrefutable evidence against the Johannine nature of the Pericope Adulterae is its lack of attestation in many of our earliest and best surviving manuscripts. When this manuscript evidence is considered in light of Jerome’s quote above on all of the Greek and Old Latin manuscripts he saw that contained the Pericope (and likely were older than most that we have now) we have a clear conundrum, one that cannot be fairly answered without new evidence coming to light.             Thankfully, one thing is agreed upon by most N.T. scholars – this pericope is very old[20] and very likely to be an accurate event in the life of Jesus. Thus Metzger writes that John 7:53-8:11, “has all the earmarks of historical veracity”[21], and Raymond Brown writes, “There is nothing in the story itself, or its language that would forbid us to think of it as an early story concerning Jesus.”[22]             If this Pericope is in fact a genuine event in the ministry of Jesus – how is it that it is absent in so many early Biblical texts? To put the issue another way, Phillip W. Comfort offers a list of suspect passages in the Textus Receptus, including the Pericope Adulterae. He challenges those who would argue for the inclusion of these questionable passages to, “come up with good arguments as to why scribes (in the early centuries) would have purposely excised these passages.”[23] Gary Burge proposes an interesting, though improvable suggestion that answers both questions: the Pericope Adulterae text was excised from some early manuscripts for theological reasons. Burge points to the unbiblical Doctrine of Penance, as articulated by early church fathers like Tertullian, Clement and Cyprian. Sexual sins in the eyes of many of the early church fathers were very grave, and in some cases unforgivable.[24]  In light of that, it is conceivable that this passage was removed, under the impression that it was or too light on a sin, or in fear (As Augustine suggests above) that it would give others license to sin without fear of reprisal. It is also a possibility that the text is a real happening in the life of Jesus that never was put into the gospels because of the fear listed above (or for another reason – as John says, if everything Jesus did was written down, the world couldn’t contain the books!) A Deeper Look at the Text We now turn our attention back to the text itself, and from the perspective that it is a genuine happening, and is placed in the appropriate place in the text. Examining this passage in its literary context, we see that Jesus’ ministry, previously marked by amazing miracles and healings at the time of the adulterous pericope had become quite controversial. Jesus’ teachings were very challenging, and He even lost some disciples because of them.             In the events leading up to the encounter, Jesus brothers urge Him to go the Feast of Tabernacles, and he temporarily declined, only to come later and begin to interact with the people. As He teaches, many people believe in Him, and many don’t – causing arguments and strife. The temple guards are sent to arrest Jesus, but they themselves become arrested by His words and fail to complete their job. The Pharisees and other religious leaders meet in anger, considering what to do and finding no solution. It is directly after this that the incident with the adulterous woman happens.             The Old Testament, in Deuteronomy 22 states, “If a man is found sleeping with another man’s wife, both the man who slept with her and the woman must die.” (Deuteronomy 22:24, NIV) Leviticus 20 states similarly, “If a man commits adultery with another man’s wife—with the wife of his neighbor—both the adulterer and the adulteress must be put to death.” (Leviticus 20:10, NIV) These were the laws of Moses referred to in vs. 5 of this passage. Curiously, there is no mention of the man that was with the woman – this has led many to conclude that the situation was a set up from the beginning, (i.e. the woman was also “trapped”) The scribes and Pharisees, therefore, were wanting Jesus to rule on a case that was flawed from the beginning – they were asking Him to incompletely apply the law of Moses to this situation.             This was merely another attempt by the religious leaders to put Jesus in a position where there is no good way out. A similar incident occurs in Matthew 22 (and the other Synoptics): Jesus is asked whether it is right to pay taxes to Caesar, if He answers yes, then the crowds would get angry with Him, if He answers no, then He risks making enemies of the Roman leaders. Also, Jesus uses the same technique against the religious leaders in Matthew 21 when asked who gave Him his authority, His return question, was John’s Baptism from heaven or not, could not be answered in such a way as to not cause the leaders problems.  In this particular instance, if Jesus were to “rule” that the woman should be stoned, He would run afoul of Roman laws against mob violence[25] and if He let the woman off the hook, then He would be countermanding the Law of Moses.             The response of Jesus to this dilemma, certainly knowing the religious leader’s hearts and motives, is very interesting: He merely stoops down and writes on the ground. Much ink has been wasted trying to determine what exactly it was that Jesus wrote in the ground. Beasley-Murray offers a good list of past suggestions: Was He writing out His decision in the case before verbally announcing it? Was he writing out a passage from Exodus that warns against supporting a wicked man as a malicious witness? Was He writing in the dust to remind the scribes of Jeremiah’s words, “Those who turn away from you will be written in the dust, because they have forsaken the Lord, the spring of living water.” (Jeremiah 17:13, NIV).[26] I prefer Raymond Brown’s proposal; that Jesus was merely doodling[27], possibly to consider how to handle the situation wisely, possibly in prayer. The fact is that what Jesus wrote has not been recorded, so it clearly was only an important issue for the exact time the incident took place, if even then.             By suggesting that the one who is without sin cast the first stone, Jesus brilliantly defuses the situation. It’s very possible He could be referring to Deuteronomy 17, which prescribes that nobody should be put to death on the testimony of just one witness, and that the witnesses should be the first one to cast the stone. Is Jesus pointing to the possibility of the corruption of the witnesses here – understanding that the woman, though guilty, was caught in an elaborate set up, and thus invalidating the “prosecution’s” case against her, or is He articulating a more basic principle – if you are sinless you can participate in her stoning? This is a difficult question to answer; Stephen James argues somewhat convincingly that what Jesus means by “without sin” in this context is that their case must be presented without evil motives, and in accordance with the law of Moses (how many witnesses to the act were there, more than one? What of the man?) The religious leaders knew their motives weren’t correct, and therefore left the scene.[28]             It is also important to point out here that in defusing the scene the way He did, Jesus did not abrogate the Law of Moses, nor did He completely uphold it – He chose a third, an option that leaves open the question of whether those laws were still applicable in His mind.             The incident ends with Jesus challenging the woman to go and leave her life of sin. Modern and ancient preachers and commentators alike have written or preached that Jesus actually forgave the woman – this is not the case – Jesus did not explicitly forgive her as recorded in the text, He simply chose not to condemn her, and exhorted her to also stop sinning. Application             If we accept the hypothesis that this Pericope is an accurate and genuine happening, then how does it apply today? Did it abolish the death penalty, as many have argued? Did it usher in an age of more leniency on sin? What sort of standard is Jesus setting for those who would be in a position to judge or pronounce punishment over another? While it is very important to not draw doctrine out of a narrative that doesn’t explicitly indicate doctrinal things, this text can still go beyond being a beautiful story of the mercy and wisdom of Jesus and find application in our modern setting.             The first application to consider is what this story says about the death penalty, if anything. As Stephen James points out, many (including John Howard Yoder, Dwight Erricson, Lewis Smedes, G.H. Clark, Charles H. Milligan etc) have used this passage to argue for the abolishment of the death penalty.[29] A careful reading of the text will clearly show that Jesus does not abolish the death penalty, indeed, He doesn’t even address the issue. Thus, both opponents and proponents of capital punishment will need to look in other places to justify their beliefs.             I believe the real modern application of this passage is found in Jesus’ challenge to the religious leaders, “If any one of you is without sin, let him be the first to throw a stone at her.” (John 8:7 NIV) There seems to be a profound connection to this principle and the plank-eye principle that Jesus articulates in Luke 6 – in order to help remove the speck from your brother’s eye, you must first remove the plank from your own. The principle is this, that we should judge and purify ourselves, worrying less about the bad things we see in other people – until our own issues are dealt with – then we will see clearly to help others out. The principle is not advocating merely minding your own business – it is advocating personal holiness that can lead to corporate holiness when we help and challenge each other in right heart and attitude. The Pharisees and scribes were not at all interested in the principle behind the Mosaic laws they were urging Jesus to rule on (i.e. purge the evil from among you), they were just interested in accomplishing their own agendas. The church today cries out for those who would walk in holiness and near the heart of God to the point where we can see clearly enough to help our brothers out with the specks in their eyes, and we can pass judgments rightly. Conclusion                         An objective look at the Pericope Adulterae, its context, its grammar and its manuscript history leads one to the conclusion that this passage has been rightly seen as controversial through the ages. There is not the kind of overwhelming evidence that is needed for dogmatic statements regarding the authorship and canonicity of John 7:53-8:11 either for or against. There is substantial evidence, however, to demonstrate that this text represents a genuine and accurate event in the life of Jesus, and as such it can inform the modern believer about the nature of Jesus and the importance of holiness in the realm of judgment.                 [1] Somewhat awkward, but not completely out of place – see below.             [2] Some scholars point out that Jesus sitting and teaching is a common feature of the Synoptic Gospels, and cite it as further proof of the Non-Johannine authorship of the Pericope – see John 6:3, however for another instance of Jesus sitting down among the people. Borchert, Gerald The New American Commentary Volume 25A: John 1-11. (electronic edition) Logos LibrarySystem (Nashville: Broadman Press, 1996)                 [3] For a full list of the major Greek manuscripts that omit this pericope, see: Metzger, Bruce M. A Textual Commentary on the Greek New Testament, Second Ed. (New York: Oxford, 1992.), 219-220                 [4] Brown, Raymond E.  John 1-11. Anchor Bible 29.  Garden City:   Doubleday, 1982, 335                 [5] Metzger, Bruce M. The Text of the New Testament – Its Transmission, Corruption           and Restoration, Third Ed. (New York: Oxford, 1992.), 50                 [6] The Text of the New Testament – Its Transmission, Corruption and Restoration p. xxix                 [7] Burge, Gary M. “A Specific Problem In The New Testament Text And Canon: The Woman Caught In Adultery (John 7:53-8:11)” (Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society 27 no.2), 144                 [8] “A Specific Problem In The New Testament Text And Canon: The Woman Caught In Adultery (John 7:53-8:11)” 142             [9] Hodges, Zane C. “Problem Passages in the Gospel of John Part 8: The Woman Taken in Adultery (John 7:53-8:11)” (Bibliotheca Sacra 136 no. 544 (October, 1979), 329                 [10] Poythress, Vern S. “Testing for Johannine Authorship by Examining the Use of Conjunctions” (Westminster Theological Journal 46, no. 2 Fall 1984), 362             [11] Bryant, Beauford H. and Krause, Mark S. John. The College Press NIV Commentary. (Joplin: College Press, 1998)             [12] Borchert, Gerald – John 1-11 The New American Commentary. (Nashville: Broadman Press, 1996)                 [13] “Problem Passages in the Gospel of John Part 8: The Woman Taken in Adultery (John 7:53-8:11)” 323                 [14] As quoted in “Problem Passages in the Gospel of John Part 8: The Woman Taken in Adultery (John 7:53-8:11)” 330                 [15] “Problem Passages in the Gospel of John Part 8: The Woman Taken in Adultery (John 7:53-8:11)” 330                 [16] As quoted in  “Problem Passages in the Gospel of John Part 8: The Woman Taken in Adultery (John 7:53-8:11)” 331                 [17] Trites, Allison A. “The Woman Taken in Adultery” (Bibliotheca Sacra 131 no. 522 April, 1974) 138-144             [18] Johnson, Alan F. “A Stylistic Trait of the Fourth Gospel in the Pericope Adulterae” Bulletin of the Evangelical Theological Society (IX Spring, 1966) 91-96                 [19] Beasley-Murray, George R. The Gospel according to John The Word Biblical                 Commentary.  (Dallas: Word Incorporated, 1999.)                 [20] Raymond Brown quotes Eusebius, who in turn quotes Papias writing near the time of the Apostles about a woman who was brought before Jesus accused of many sins. Brown also mentions the 3rd century Syrian Didascalia Apostolorum, which gives clear reference to the events of the Pericope Adulterae which indicates that 2nd century Syria knew of the narrative. John 1-11, p. 335                 [21] Textual Commentary on the Greek New Testament, p. 220                 [22] John 1-11, p. 335                 [23] Comfort, Phillip W. Encountering the Manuscripts  (Nashville: Broadman and Holman, 2005) p.99                 [24] “A Specific Problem In The New Testament Text And Canon: The Woman Caught In Adultery (John 7:53-8:11)” pages 146-148                 [25] John 1-11 The New American Commentary                 [26] The Gospel according to John The Word Biblical Commentary                  [27] John 1-11. Anchor Bible 29 p. 334             [28] James, Stephen A. “The Adulteress And The Death Penalty.” (Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society 22 no. 1 March, 1979) pages 49-50. [29] “The Adulteress And The Death Penalty.” Pages 45-46

Happy Shelter in Place Day, Friends! I find myself living in the part of Central California right now that has been essentially shut down for the next 22 days, and our Shelter in Place order just went into effect about an hour ago. These are strange, strange times! So – sometimes people ask me how it’s going doing a daily podcast. I can tell you that each episode takes just a little under 3 hours from start to finish, which includes writing the episode, recording it, editing it in Audacity, and entering all of the pertinent information into a WordPress and Libsyn post. Longer episodes take longer, shorter episodes can be around 2 hours of time. Last night was one of the later nights for the show. One of my daughters wanted to watch a show with me, and I’ll take just about any excuse I can to spend time with them, so we watched a show together, which began after midnight. Then I wrote a fairly long pastoral email to the congregation of the church I pastor about the coronavirus pandemic. When I say fairly long, I mean over 1800 words, so about 6 pages worth. We’re in California, and on a virtual lock-down, so hopefully they had a little extra time to read. One of the problems being in a church that is pastored by somebody who fancies himself as a writer is that you can get very long emails from time to time. If you are a leader at the church I pastor, you got a 2100 word email from me AND an 1800 word email from me within the space of 4 days. I should repent in sackcloth and ashes for that, I suppose, but these are trying times we live in right now, filled with dangers like novel viruses, lack of toilet paper, and novel-length emails from pastors. ANYWAY, the point of what I was trying to say earlier before I rambled was that I didn’t start WRITING the podcast until around 3AM. Fortunately, I had some great material from pastor David Platt to use, so I didn’t have to write a ton of original material myself. It was, however, one of the few times since I began this daily podcast in January that I kind of just wanted to go to bed, and not spend 2 hours or so on a podcast. HOWEVER – when I got to the point of recording it, and I got to the part where I was just reading the Scriptures into the microphone, that’s when I noticed something that happens practically every time I do the podcast: THE WORD OF GOD ENCOURAGED ME. It gave me HOPE. It built me up. It elevated my mood. Almost every time I record this show, I come away encouraged. Not because I like recording and editing a podcast – that can get a little tedious…but because the WORD of God is powerful, and supernatural, and it just builds me up in faith, because faith comes by HEARING THE WORD OF GOD. I just wanted to share that with you as a benefit. You can get that same benefit – without the 2-3 hours of writing, recording and editing by simply READING (or listening!) to the WORD OF GOD! If you haven’t done so yet, allow me to encourage you to listen to the other half of today’s episode – episode #78 – I split today’s show into two parts so it wouldn’t be too long. In today’s reading, we encounter the story of the woman caught in adultery, known to scholars as the Pericope Adulterae. Many scholars, including many evangelical ones, consider this passage to be a later edition to the New Testament, and in most modern Bibles, this part of John is set apart to show doubt about the passage. So – what’s going on here, and was this story original to John’s Gospel, or was it a later edition?             The Pericope Adulterae, found in John 7:53-8:11, is surrounded by more controversy and conjecture than any other New Testament Passage with the possible exception of the ending of Mark. The authorship and placement of this pericope has been hotly debated at least since the fifth century, and there are still scholars lined up on opposite sides of the issues surrounding this passage.             Attempting to extract meaning and application from this passage is almost meaningless without first wrestling with the genuineness of the text and the mass of evidence for and against it. The issue is simple to grasp – if this pericope is a genuine and accurate happening in the life of Jesus, then it carries just as much weight as the rest of the New Testament. Conversely, if the passage is a later edition with no basis in fact (i.e. it never happened) then the passage is notable only for its historical value and the question of how it became inserted into many manuscripts of the New Testament.        Though it will be argued that there is no way to be certain of the historicity of this passage, the preponderance of the evidence points to it being a genuine happening in the life of Jesus, and as such it does have application in the modern church and it can inform how we live and interact with each other. Summary of the Passage             7:53-8:2 The Pericope Adulterae begins with a somewhat awkward[1] transition from the previous narrative. The stage is set here; Jesus has spent the night at the Mount of Olives and dawn finds Him mingling with the crowd near the temple courts. His very presence attracts a crowd and notably (for the fourth Gospel)[2] Jesus sits down to teach them.             8:3-8:6a As Jesus is teaching the people, The scribes and Pharisees bring in a woman and stand her in front of the crowd. They explain to Jesus that the woman was caught in the act of committing adultery, and (on the surface) they present her to Jesus for judgment. The question is, should the woman be stoned in accordance with the law of Moses? The text informs us that this question is a trap for Jesus, a classic catch 22, there is no clear way that Jesus can give a verdict here without opening Himself up to some basis for accusation, either in the eyes of the Roman authorities, or the people.             8:6b-8:9 Perplexingly, Jesus doesn’t answer their questions immediately, indeed, He never gives them the verdict. Instead, He leans over and writes on the ground. The accusers persist in their questioning, and Jesus finally responds with His classic retort, challenging any one of the accusers without sin to be the one that casts the first stone. Though we don’t know how much time passed after Jesus’ challenge, one can almost be assured of an awkward silence, punctuated by occasional stones hitting the soft earth as they fall from the hands of the accusers. Beginning with the eldest among them, the scribes and Pharisees melt away into the crowd.             8:10-8:11 Jesus and the accused woman are left as the center of attention. He initiates dialogue her, asking the obvious questions – where is everybody? Is no one left to condemn? Upon her acknowledgment that they have all left, Jesus also refuses to condemn the woman, but warns her to leave behind her life of sin. Controversy and Canonicity: Contra Johannine             This Pericope is a wonderful piece of literature; very moving and dramatic. Jesus cleverly meets the challenge of the scribes and Pharisees without compromising and without falling into a trap, and the woman caught in sin is given a second chance to repent. It’s a powerful story, but is it genuine? Did it really happen? If it did really happen, why is there so much evidence against it being an original part of the gospel of John? A survey of the evidence for and against genuineness is presented below.             The majority of New Testament scholars are fairly adamant that the Pericope Adulterae is non-Johannine in origin. The ancient manuscript evidence is indeed stacked against this Pericope. Bruce Metzger  points out that all major early Greek manuscripts omit the Pericope, including our oldest and most respected early manuscripts, Codex Sinaiticus, Codex Vaticanus,        p66 and p75.[3] Though some Old Latin manuscripts include the Pericope, many omit it as well, and the early Syriac, and Coptic manuscripts do not contain the passage[4]. Codex Bezae is the only major Greek manuscript prior to the 8th century that this pericope appears in, and Bezae is known for its many interpolations. In fact, Metzger states,                         “No other manuscript has so many and such remarkable variations from     what is usually taken to be the New Testament Text. Codex Bezae’s special            characteristic is the free addition (and occasional omission) of words, sentences      and even incidences.”[5]                         Further manuscript evidence against the Johannine nature of the Pericope is the variety of places it is attached in some of the manuscripts that do contain it. In some manuscripts, it appears after John 7:36, in some after John 7:44, some as an addition at the end of John’s gospel, some after Luke 21:28, and some even after Luke 24:53.[6] Though the number of manuscripts that displace this pericope is not overwhelming, the mere fact of its varied appearance in even a few manuscripts tends to cast doubt on the concreteness of its location after John 7:52.             The final bit of manuscript evidence is the unusually high number of textual variants found in the manuscripts that do contain the pericope. Gary Burge points out that line per line, these twelve verses contain more textual variants across the manuscript tradition than almost any other passage of scripture. [7]             There is also much patristic evidence, especially in the east, stacked against the passage. This pericope is not mentioned by any Greek Father until Euthymius Zigabenus in the 12th century and isn’t found in the writings of the early Fathers in the west either. Thus, it is omitted by Origen, Clement, Cyprian, Irenaeus, Tertullian, Cyril and Chrysostom,[8] even in writings where it would seem to be an appropriate resource for them to use. While Zane Hodges tries to make the case that the absence of the Pericope in these church fathers constitutes an argument from silence, and thus proves nothing[9], the fact of the matter is that this is more empirical evidence stacked against the pericope, and it adds weight to the non-Johannine argument.             While the manuscript evidence would seem to be the greatest evidence against the Pericope, there are also suspicious grammatical and contextual features of the text. Statistical analysis of the text has claimed to show several features which “prove” its non Johannine nature. Vern Poythress has examined the grammatical use of the conjunctions “de”, “oun”, “kai”, and “asyndeton” in the Gospel of John, and developed some general rules that John appears to follow. Upon examination of the adulteress pericope, it would appear that there are enough variations in its use of conjunctions (compared with the rest of John) to allow Poythress to conclude that this Pericope is not written by John.[10]             Further grammatical evidence focuses on the words that are used in the passage. Bryant and Krause point out that approximately nine percent, or 15 of the words used in this pericope do not occur elsewhere in the gospel, the highest percentage for a passage of this size in John[11]. The Mount of Olives, The scribes, and the phrase “early morning” are not found anywhere else in the gospel of John, but all are somewhat common in the synoptic gospels. In addition, only here in John is Jesus addressed as teacher.             While some of these unique words can be explained by the nature of the story, as well as the semi-technical judicial language employed, there are still a high frequency of unique words and constructs here compared with the rest of John.             Finally, there is contextual evidence that seems to indicate this pericope is out of place. Borchert[12] and many others believe that the text disrupts the flow of the Feast of Tabernacles narrative. Many point out its similarity in time and setting to Luke 21:37-38, and (as mentioned above) some manuscripts place the passage right after verse 38 because it seems to be a better fit. It is also true that the flow of the text from 7:52 to 8:12 is smooth and uninterrupted when this passage is removed, but of course, that could be said of many passages! Controversy and Canonicity: Pro Johannine             Most scholars believe the evidence against the Pericope Adulterae is overwhelming, but there is much positive evidence for the ancientness of this event, and even some evidence that would seem to indicate the text is Johannine and not at all out of place.             The strongest evidence for the veracity and Johannine nature of the Pericope comes from the manuscripts and church fathers of the west. Several Old Latin manuscripts do in fact contain the Pericope. Hodges argues valiantly that the absence of the passage in our earliest and most reliable manuscripts (Sinaiticus, Vaticanus, p66 and p75) is due to those manuscripts being of a proto-Alexandrian origin, and thus likely coming from the same (ancient) exemplar, one which had the passage intentionally excised.[13] He posits that the Pericope was removed from some texts very early (before 200), but that the passage was quite possibly in the original autograph.             The Patristic evidence for the Pericope is surprisingly strong in the west. Several church fathers in the fourth and fifth century mention the text, beginning with Pacian of Barcelona, and including Ambrose, Ambrosiaster, Jerome and Augustine. Jerome and Augustine in particular add much to the pro Johannine side of the argument, providing significant ancient evidence and speculation on the passage.             Jerome includes the Pericope Adulterae in his Latin Vulgate translation of the scriptures, thus cementing its future acceptance among the Catholic church. In his Dialogue against the Pelagians, Jerome makes a very intriguing reference to this passage,                         “In the Gospel according to John in many manuscripts, both Greek and Latin, is found the story of the adulterous woman who was accused before the Lord.”[14]             This comment is very significant in considering the Pericope Adulterae, and would seem to stand as the strongest pro-Johannine evidence available. As Hodges points out[15], Jerome was well traveled, and would have had a wide exposure to both Greek and Latin texts, many of which were older than any that has survived to this day. Jerome’s statement should carry much more weight with modern New Testament textual scholars than it appears it does.             Augustine goes even further than Jerome does in his commentary on the passage, acknowledging the already existing controversy over the passage and offering a reason for it’s removal from some manuscripts,                         “Certain persons of little faith, or rather enemies of true faith, fearing, I suppose, lest their wives should be given impunity  in sinning, removed from their manuscripts the Lord’s act of forgiveness toward the adulteress, as if He who said  ‘sin no more’ had granted permission to sin.” [16]             While Augustine’s hermeneutical approach to the passage contains a common mistake (Jesus did not specifically forgive the adulterous woman), his observation is very relevant and offers an intriguing possible explanation for the manuscript problems (and textual variances) associated with this passage. Hodges further quotes Ambrose who makes a similar suggestion to Augustine’s – that the passage is a stumbling block.             The contextual argument against this pericope is perhaps the easiest to answer. While many commentators have pointed out the “disruption” of the Feast of Tabernacles narrative that this pericope seems to effect, Allison Trites convincingly argues the opposite; the entire passage fits into the overall theme of controversy in John 1-12.[17] Other contextual clues could be seen to indicate the proper placement of this passage. For one, it would seem that the story is a great illustration of John 3:17, “For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him.” (John 3:17, NIV)             The Pericope can also be seen in a literary sense as a response to the question posed in John 7:26, “Here he is, speaking publicly, and they are not saying a word to him. Have the authorities really concluded that he is the Christ?” (John 7:26, NIV)             While much has been made of the grammatical analysis of this pericope, specifically focusing on what is considered non Johannine grammar, there has been some grammatical work on the passage that offers different conclusions. Alan Johnson has used some of the existent grammatical statistical methods on other, non disputed passages of John, and concluded that some of those would be considered non Johannine based on the very same methodology used on the Pericope Adulterae. In addition, he also points out several grammatical features in this passage that are consistent with the rest of John, including the use of “de”, “touto” and “legein” [18]             My own grammatical analysis of the passage has produced some interesting results, further casting doubt on the ability of statistical grammatical analysis to effectively determine canonicity and authorship questions. The phrase “meketi amartane” (no longer sin, or stop sinning) only occurs here in the pericope and in John 5:14, where Jesus likewise instructs the paralytic to stop sinning. “ina ecosin” (that they might) is a phrase found only in verse six, and John 17:13. “Kai palin” (and again) in verse 8 is found six other times in John but only once in Luke. Finally, the phrase “eis ten gen” (in the earth) from verse 6 is found 23 times in the New Testament, 5 are in John, and 12 are in Revelation – so of the 23 times that phrase is used, 17 times it is Johannine. That analysis might be used to impress upon some a level of certainty that John did write this passage, but in fact, in the final analysis it doesn’t add much to the argument one way or the other – except to possibly refute those who use statistical grammatical analysis to “prove” that this Pericope is non-Johannine.             A thorough survey of the evidence reveals one thing quite clearly: the authorship and position of the Pericope Adulterae is not an easy issue to decide. It is perplexing and frustrating to see the certainty that is exhibited by many scholars on both sides of this issue. Bruce Metzger, Phillip Comfort, Kurt Aland, Raymond Brown, George Beasley-Murray, Leon Morris and many others all make absolute statements on the Pericope and point to overwhelming evidence that it is either non-canonical or non Johannine. Beasley-Murray goes so far as to write, “It is universally agreed by textual critics of the Greek NT that this passage was not part of the Fourth Gospel in its original form.”[19] What an outrageous and misleading statement! On the other hand, there are a few scholars (Elmer Towns, some scholars in the King James only camp, and several Dallas Theological Seminary professors) who are equally adamant that this passage is certainly genuine, and right where it belongs in the New Testament. The fact is that the best and most irrefutable evidence against the Johannine nature of the Pericope Adulterae is its lack of attestation in many of our earliest and best surviving manuscripts. When this manuscript evidence is considered in light of Jerome’s quote above on all of the Greek and Old Latin manuscripts he saw that contained the Pericope (and likely were older than most that we have now) we have a clear conundrum, one that cannot be fairly answered without new evidence coming to light.             Thankfully, one thing is agreed upon by most N.T. scholars – this pericope is very old[20] and very likely to be an accurate event in the life of Jesus. Thus Metzger writes that John 7:53-8:11, “has all the earmarks of historical veracity”[21], and Raymond Brown writes, “There is nothing in the story itself, or its language that would forbid us to think of it as an early story concerning Jesus.”[22]             If this Pericope is in fact a genuine event in the ministry of Jesus – how is it that it is absent in so many early Biblical texts? To put the issue another way, Phillip W. Comfort offers a list of suspect passages in the Textus Receptus, including the Pericope Adulterae. He challenges those who would argue for the inclusion of these questionable passages to, “come up with good arguments as to why scribes (in the early centuries) would have purposely excised these passages.”[23] Gary Burge proposes an interesting, though improvable suggestion that answers both questions: the Pericope Adulterae text was excised from some early manuscripts for theological reasons. Burge points to the unbiblical Doctrine of Penance, as articulated by early church fathers like Tertullian, Clement and Cyprian. Sexual sins in the eyes of many of the early church fathers were very grave, and in some cases unforgivable.[24]  In light of that, it is conceivable that this passage was removed, under the impression that it was or too light on a sin, or in fear (As Augustine suggests above) that it would give others license to sin without fear of reprisal. It is also a possibility that the text is a real happening in the life of Jesus that never was put into the gospels because of the fear listed above (or for another reason – as John says, if everything Jesus did was written down, the world couldn’t contain the books!) A Deeper Look at the Text We now turn our attention back to the text itself, and from the perspective that it is a genuine happening, and is placed in the appropriate place in the text. Examining this passage in its literary context, we see that Jesus’ ministry, previously marked by amazing miracles and healings at the time of the adulterous pericope had become quite controversial. Jesus’ teachings were very challenging, and He even lost some disciples because of them.             In the events leading up to the encounter, Jesus brothers urge Him to go the Feast of Tabernacles, and he temporarily declined, only to come later and begin to interact with the people. As He teaches, many people believe in Him, and many don’t – causing arguments and strife. The temple guards are sent to arrest Jesus, but they themselves become arrested by His words and fail to complete their job. The Pharisees and other religious leaders meet in anger, considering what to do and finding no solution. It is directly after this that the incident with the adulterous woman happens.             The Old Testament, in Deuteronomy 22 states, “If a man is found sleeping with another man’s wife, both the man who slept with her and the woman must die.” (Deuteronomy 22:24, NIV) Leviticus 20 states similarly, “If a man commits adultery with another man’s wife—with the wife of his neighbor—both the adulterer and the adulteress must be put to death.” (Leviticus 20:10, NIV) These were the laws of Moses referred to in vs. 5 of this passage. Curiously, there is no mention of the man that was with the woman – this has led many to conclude that the situation was a set up from the beginning, (i.e. the woman was also “trapped”) The scribes and Pharisees, therefore, were wanting Jesus to rule on a case that was flawed from the beginning – they were asking Him to incompletely apply the law of Moses to this situation.             This was merely another attempt by the religious leaders to put Jesus in a position where there is no good way out. A similar incident occurs in Matthew 22 (and the other Synoptics): Jesus is asked whether it is right to pay taxes to Caesar, if He answers yes, then the crowds would get angry with Him, if He answers no, then He risks making enemies of the Roman leaders. Also, Jesus uses the same technique against the religious leaders in Matthew 21 when asked who gave Him his authority, His return question, was John’s Baptism from heaven or not, could not be answered in such a way as to not cause the leaders problems.  In this particular instance, if Jesus were to “rule” that the woman should be stoned, He would run afoul of Roman laws against mob violence[25] and if He let the woman off the hook, then He would be countermanding the Law of Moses.             The response of Jesus to this dilemma, certainly knowing the religious leader’s hearts and motives, is very interesting: He merely stoops down and writes on the ground. Much ink has been wasted trying to determine what exactly it was that Jesus wrote in the ground. Beasley-Murray offers a good list of past suggestions: Was He writing out His decision in the case before verbally announcing it? Was he writing out a passage from Exodus that warns against supporting a wicked man as a malicious witness? Was He writing in the dust to remind the scribes of Jeremiah’s words, “Those who turn away from you will be written in the dust, because they have forsaken the Lord, the spring of living water.” (Jeremiah 17:13, NIV).[26] I prefer Raymond Brown’s proposal; that Jesus was merely doodling[27], possibly to consider how to handle the situation wisely, possibly in prayer. The fact is that what Jesus wrote has not been recorded, so it clearly was only an important issue for the exact time the incident took place, if even then.             By suggesting that the one who is without sin cast the first stone, Jesus brilliantly defuses the situation. It’s very possible He could be referring to Deuteronomy 17, which prescribes that nobody should be put to death on the testimony of just one witness, and that the witnesses should be the first one to cast the stone. Is Jesus pointing to the possibility of the corruption of the witnesses here – understanding that the woman, though guilty, was caught in an elaborate set up, and thus invalidating the “prosecution’s” case against her, or is He articulating a more basic principle – if you are sinless you can participate in her stoning? This is a difficult question to answer; Stephen James argues somewhat convincingly that what Jesus means by “without sin” in this context is that their case must be presented without evil motives, and in accordance with the law of Moses (how many witnesses to the act were there, more than one? What of the man?) The religious leaders knew their motives weren’t correct, and therefore left the scene.[28]             It is also important to point out here that in defusing the scene the way He did, Jesus did not abrogate the Law of Moses, nor did He completely uphold it – He chose a third, an option that leaves open the question of whether those laws were still applicable in His mind.             The incident ends with Jesus challenging the woman to go and leave her life of sin. Modern and ancient preachers and commentators alike have written or preached that Jesus actually forgave the woman – this is not the case – Jesus did not explicitly forgive her as recorded in the text, He simply chose not to condemn her, and exhorted her to also stop sinning. Application             If we accept the hypothesis that this Pericope is an accurate and genuine happening, then how does it apply today? Did it abolish the death penalty, as many have argued? Did it usher in an age of more leniency on sin? What sort of standard is Jesus setting for those who would be in a position to judge or pronounce punishment over another? While it is very important to not draw doctrine out of a narrative that doesn’t explicitly indicate doctrinal things, this text can still go beyond being a beautiful story of the mercy and wisdom of Jesus and find application in our modern setting.             The first application to consider is what this story says about the death penalty, if anything. As Stephen James points out, many (including John Howard Yoder, Dwight Erricson, Lewis Smedes, G.H. Clark, Charles H. Milligan etc) have used this passage to argue for the abolishment of the death penalty.[29] A careful reading of the text will clearly show that Jesus does not abolish the death penalty, indeed, He doesn’t even address the issue. Thus, both opponents and proponents of capital punishment will need to look in other places to justify their beliefs.             I believe the real modern application of this passage is found in Jesus’ challenge to the religious leaders, “If any one of you is without sin, let him be the first to throw a stone at her.” (John 8:7 NIV) There seems to be a profound connection to this principle and the plank-eye principle that Jesus articulates in Luke 6 – in order to help remove the speck from your brother’s eye, you must first remove the plank from your own. The principle is this, that we should judge and purify ourselves, worrying less about the bad things we see in other people – until our own issues are dealt with – then we will see clearly to help others out. The principle is not advocating merely minding your own business – it is advocating personal holiness that can lead to corporate holiness when we help and challenge each other in right heart and attitude. The Pharisees and scribes were not at all interested in the principle behind the Mosaic laws they were urging Jesus to rule on (i.e. purge the evil from among you), they were just interested in accomplishing their own agendas. The church today cries out for those who would walk in holiness and near the heart of God to the point where we can see clearly enough to help our brothers out with the specks in their eyes, and we can pass judgments rightly. Conclusion                         An objective look at the Pericope Adulterae, its context, its grammar and its manuscript history leads one to the conclusion that this passage has been rightly seen as controversial through the ages. There is not the kind of overwhelming evidence that is needed for dogmatic statements regarding the authorship and canonicity of John 7:53-8:11 either for or against. There is substantial evidence, however, to demonstrate that this text represents a genuine and accurate event in the life of Jesus, and as such it can inform the modern believer about the nature of Jesus and the importance of holiness in the realm of judgment.                 [1] Somewhat awkward, but not completely out of place – see below.             [2] Some scholars point out that Jesus sitting and teaching is a common feature of the Synoptic Gospels, and cite it as further proof of the Non-Johannine authorship of the Pericope – see John 6:3, however for another instance of Jesus sitting down among the people. Borchert, Gerald The New American Commentary Volume 25A: John 1-11. (electronic edition) Logos LibrarySystem (Nashville: Broadman Press, 1996)                 [3] For a full list of the major Greek manuscripts that omit this pericope, see: Metzger, Bruce M. A Textual Commentary on the Greek New Testament, Second Ed. (New York: Oxford, 1992.), 219-220                 [4] Brown, Raymond E.  John 1-11. Anchor Bible 29.  Garden City:   Doubleday, 1982, 335                 [5] Metzger, Bruce M. The Text of the New Testament – Its Transmission, Corruption           and Restoration, Third Ed. (New York: Oxford, 1992.), 50                 [6] The Text of the New Testament – Its Transmission, Corruption and Restoration p. xxix                 [7] Burge, Gary M. “A Specific Problem In The New Testament Text And Canon: The Woman Caught In Adultery (John 7:53-8:11)” (Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society 27 no.2), 144                 [8] “A Specific Problem In The New Testament Text And Canon: The Woman Caught In Adultery (John 7:53-8:11)” 142             [9] Hodges, Zane C. “Problem Passages in the Gospel of John Part 8: The Woman Taken in Adultery (John 7:53-8:11)” (Bibliotheca Sacra 136 no. 544 (October, 1979), 329                 [10] Poythress, Vern S. “Testing for Johannine Authorship by Examining the Use of Conjunctions” (Westminster Theological Journal 46, no. 2 Fall 1984), 362             [11] Bryant, Beauford H. and Krause, Mark S. John. The College Press NIV Commentary. (Joplin: College Press, 1998)             [12] Borchert, Gerald – John 1-11 The New American Commentary. (Nashville: Broadman Press, 1996)                 [13] “Problem Passages in the Gospel of John Part 8: The Woman Taken in Adultery (John 7:53-8:11)” 323                 [14] As quoted in “Problem Passages in the Gospel of John Part 8: The Woman Taken in Adultery (John 7:53-8:11)” 330                 [15] “Problem Passages in the Gospel of John Part 8: The Woman Taken in Adultery (John 7:53-8:11)” 330                 [16] As quoted in  “Problem Passages in the Gospel of John Part 8: The Woman Taken in Adultery (John 7:53-8:11)” 331                 [17] Trites, Allison A. “The Woman Taken in Adultery” (Bibliotheca Sacra 131 no. 522 April, 1974) 138-144             [18] Johnson, Alan F. “A Stylistic Trait of the Fourth Gospel in the Pericope Adulterae” Bulletin of the Evangelical Theological Society (IX Spring, 1966) 91-96                 [19] Beasley-Murray, George R. The Gospel according to John The Word Biblical                 Commentary.  (Dallas: Word Incorporated, 1999.)                 [20] Raymond Brown quotes Eusebius, who in turn quotes Papias writing near the time of the Apostles about a woman who was brought before Jesus accused of many sins. Brown also mentions the 3rd century Syrian Didascalia Apostolorum, which gives clear reference to the events of the Pericope Adulterae which indicates that 2nd century Syria knew of the narrative. John 1-11, p. 335                 [21] Textual Commentary on the Greek New Testament, p. 220                 [22] John 1-11, p. 335                 [23] Comfort, Phillip W. Encountering the Manuscripts  (Nashville: Broadman and Holman, 2005) p.99                 [24] “A Specific Problem In The New Testament Text And Canon: The Woman Caught In Adultery (John 7:53-8:11)” pages 146-148                 [25] John 1-11 The New American Commentary                 [26] The Gospel according to John The Word Biblical Commentary                  [27] John 1-11. Anchor Bible 29 p. 334             [28] James, Stephen A. “The Adulteress And The Death Penalty.” (Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society 22 no. 1 March, 1979) pages 49-50. [29] “The Adulteress And The Death Penalty.” Pages 45-46

Welcome to this SECOND podcast in a series that I am calling the Every Word Podcast. This is a podcast series for those who enjoy studying details found in God’s Word. In every episode I will read from Dr. Wilbur Pickering’s fresh-sounding translation of the  New Testament. The NT was named, “The Sovereign God Has Spoken,” and I will read from the 2016 2nd edition. In today’s episode, I will read and comment on Pickering’s translation of Mark 1:29-45. This is the kind of podcast where it might be better to look at the episode notes while listening. If you are flying down the freeway right now, just bear it in mind that you may want to check this out later. With a few exceptions that I will discuss today, Dr. Pickering’s translation is based on the Majority Text of the Greek New Testament, which is also called the Byzantine Text. I consider the Majority Text to be superior to the Eclectic Greek Text which was used as the basis of most of the NT translations of the last century. The shift in the Greek text used for our Bible translations began around 1881, with the publication of Wescott and Hort’s Greek New Testament, which was based on an extremely small sampling of manuscripts of the Alexandrian Text Type*— that is from Egypt.  *Footnote: The two are Codex Sinaiticus and Codex Vaticanus. These are dated at 330-360 AD and 300-325 respectively. At the time Wescott and Hort were working, it was anticipated that research into newly discovered ancient New manuscripts from Egypt would reveal a coherent textual stream that would point to the authentic initial form of the Greek text. Now, over a century later, those ancient Egyptian papyrus manuscripts have been analyzed, but they do not reveal a coherent textual stream that can be followed. Instead the papyri manuscripts reveal that Egyptian scribes very freely edited the texts they copied. In contrast, the Majority Text of the New Testament was made by copyists who lived in the same places as the original recipients of the apostles’ writings. Individual scribal errors have been weeded out, since this text type is based on the majority reading of thousands of Greek manuscripts. The Majority Text has been stable over the centuries and is the best academically defendable text of the Greek New Testament that we have today. In this podcast, I am trying in a small way to undo the damage caused by Wescott and Hort’s Greek New Testament, which passed a legacy of mistakes down to all succeeding editions of the Eclectic/Critical Greek Text.** The damage I speak of can be found in almost all of the English Bible translations of the last century, starting with the ASV (1901), and including RSV, NASB, NIV, GNT, NLT, NET, and ESV. **Footnote: The Eclectic Text is also called the Critical Text, the Nestle-Aland text, and the United Bible Societies (UBS) Text. The succeeding editions of the Eclectic Text have primarily followed Wescott and Hort, while the apparatus (or footnotes) dealing with textual variations has grown significantly to show details about textual variants found among Alexandrian manuscripts. You may ask, “How can I find the damage that you speak of in my Bible?” The quick answer is to examine the footnotes found in the New Testament. Then check out what Pickering has to say in his NT translation.    Mar 1:29-45: Pickering’s footnotes are indented and italicized. Peter’s mother-in-law  29 Immediately upon exiting the synagogue they went into the house of Simon and Andrew, with James and John.  30 Simon’s mother-in-law was lying down with a fever, so without delay they told Him about her.  *WP footnote: The parallel passage in Luke 4:37 specifies that it was a high fever—she was burning. 31 So He went and grasping her hand lifted her up; immediately the fever left her and she began to serve them.  *WP footnote: A high fever usually leaves a person weak, even after it passes, so we really have a double miracle here: Jesus dismissed the fever, but also reversed its effect.  Many healings  32 That evening, when the sun had set, they started bringing to Him all who were sick and the demonized. 33 So much so that the whole town was gathered at the door, 34 and He healed many who were sick with various diseases and cast out many demons; and He did not allow the demons to speak, because they knew He was Messiah.  *WP footnote: I here follow some 40% of the Greek manuscripts, including the best line of transmission; most versions omit “He was Messiah”.  Alone to pray  35 Now very early, still night, He got up, slipped out, and went off to a solitary place, where He was praying. 36 Simon and those with him hunted for Him, 37 and upon finding Him they said to Him, “Everyone is looking for you”. 38 But He said to them: “Let us go to the neighboring towns, so I can preach there also; that is why I have come.”  *WP footnote: I here follow some 40% of the Greek manuscripts, including the best line of transmission; most versions have ‘come forth’, presumably referring to why He had slipped out of town. 39 He was constantly preaching in their synagogues throughout all Galilee, and also casting out demons.  The hinge—proof, evaluation, rejection, blasphemy A leper—the proof  40 A leper came to Him, imploring Him, kneeling before Him and saying to Him, “If you want to, you are able to cleanse me”. 41 So being moved with compassion, Jesus stretched out His hand and touched him,  *WP footnote: Wow! In those days, no one would touch a leper, because of contamination. Notice that Jesus agreed with the leper: “I want to; be cleansed!” Beautiful!  and said to him: “I want to; be cleansed!” 42 And when He said this, immediately the leprosy left him, and he was cleansed. 43 And He sent him away at once, sternly warning him, 44 by saying: “See that you say nothing to anyone; but go, show yourself to the priest and offer for your cleansing the things that Moses commanded, as a testimony to them.”  *WP footnote: This would be the first case the priest had ever had of evaluating a cleansed leper, because only the Messiah could cure leprosy. By instructing the cleansed leper in this way, Jesus was serving notice to the priests that the Messiah had come. 45 However he [the leper] went out and began to proclaim it freely, spreading the news,  But he did go to the priest, which resulted in the following evaluation—Luke makes this point clearly in his parallel account. That said, however, I can sympathize with that leper—he had good reason to sound off! But it did increase the pressure on Jesus. so that He [Jesus] was no longer able to enter a town openly, but remained outside in deserted places; yet [people//they] kept coming to Him from all over.  *WP footnote: There were an awful lot of sick people who all of a sudden had hope.   My comments: Before commenting on two textual variants footnoted by Pickering in the portion I just read, I would like to go back to the first episode to verse 1, and the variant that I pointed out at the end of the verse: 1 A beginning of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, Son of God! Pickering has a footnote that says, “There is no definite article with ‘Son’, which in this case emphasizes the inherent quality of the noun.” So Pickering makes this comment about his translation, not about a textual variant. He says that in Greek, ‘Son of God’ has no article before it. In other words, Greek doesn’t say, ‘the Son of God’. His comment may be right that in Greek, the absence of an article gives emphasis. Unfortunately, English doesn’t work that way, and not using the article ‘the’ before ‘Son of God’ makes the sentence sound odd to me, and an odd-sounding sentence doesn’t give me a feeling of emphasis. Pickering also leaves out a ‘the’ in a similar place is verse 34, and to me his translation sounds odd there too. (“and He did not allow the demons to speak, because they knew He was Messiah.”) So here’s a little translational principle for free from me: Forcing an English translation to follow the Greek in tiny little grammatical things often doesn’t work very well. It just makes the translation sound odd, and perhaps alert the reader to look at the footnote. To add emphasis in English, we may need to add a word or two, or switch around the order of the words. But I mentioned in the last episode that there is a variant that Pickering didn’t mention. To be complete I should have said that Wescott & Hort’s Greek text include ‘Son of God’ in brackets. The brackets indicate that they had some doubts that the words were in the original text, but decided to keep not erase the words in the text. Most of the time W&H were bolder in their choice of variants, and the mention of them was relegated to the footnotes.  W&H started a giant game of follow-the-leader in such things. Succeeding editions of the Eclectic Greek NT followed W&H in similarly casting doubt about the authenticity of those three Greek words in Mark 1:1 by putting them in brackets. And now finally the popular SBL Greek Text* totally deletes the words. As I said in the last episode, 98.4% of ancient Greek manuscripts have those words. *Footnote: The Society of Biblical Literature (SBL) is jointly published in partnership with Logos Bible Software. Thankfully, the translators of nearly all of the Bible versions of the last century decided to include the bracketed words, ‘the Son of God’ in Mark 1:1. That is probably why Pickering didn’t mention that variant. So why am I even bringing all this up? Because I want to point out a rather interesting thing about Bible translation in the last century. Since W&H and the ASV of 1901, modern Bible translators have inherited the extra responsibility to choose whether or not to include words in brackets in the Greek text in their translation. You might think that diligent translators would carefully research each variant when brackets appeared in the text. But I have shown in my article entitled, “Playing follow-the-leader in Bible translation” that most Bible translators simply followed the choices that were made by the ASV of 1901. (See the link to that article in the episode notes.) Indeed, whether a variant is in brackets or in the footnotes, Bible translators of the last century rather often switched between the Greek text they used, and often did not mention in a translation’s footnotes. So when you read in the preface of the NET, NIV, or the ESV that the translators followed the Eclectic Text (which might be called the Critical Text, Nestle-Aland Text, or the UBS Text), do not take that to mean that they followed that text 100% of the time. I give data in my follow-the-leader article which shows that for 44 significant variants in the Greek text, the translators of the last century followed their Eclectic Text an average of 71% of the time. 29% of the time they were following the Majority Text (or probably, whatever the KJV had). The reason for the giant game of follow-the-leader is that the 1901 ASV and the RSV NT of 1946 bore the brunt of negative reactions from readers to the things that they missed in their KJV Bibles. So the safe thing for all succeeding Bible translators has been to just make the same decisions as the previous versions. Meanwhile they continue the appearance of scholarship by imitating the misleading footnotes that say, “Some ancient manuscripts say x y z.”  Let me say it again in a different way: The Bible translators for the major Bible versions of the last century didn’t follow ANY Greek text faithfully. They played follow-the-leader with decisions that were made in 1901 based on following W&H. This method of switching back and forth between different Greek source texts is not academically or objectively supportable. It is time that we insist that our New Testament translations be made following just one Greek text in a consistent manner. Now, everything that I have just said about how Bible translators have used published Greek texts is a backdrop for the two textual variants that Pickering footnotes in the portion of his translation I read. These are located at verses 34 and 38. 32 That evening, when the sun had set, they started bringing to Him all who were sick and the demonized. 33 So much so that the whole town was gathered at the door, 34 and He healed many who were sick with various diseases and cast out many demons; and He did not allow the demons to speak, because they knew He was Messiah.  *WP footnote: I here follow some 40% of the Greek manuscripts, including the best line of transmission; most versions omit “He was Messiah”.  ESV: … And he would not permit the demons to speak, because they knew him. PCF: Pickering translates Greek kriston here as ‘Messiah’. Messiah is a word we transliterate from Hebrew and it means ‘the anointed one’, and kriston (Christ) is the Greek word meaning ‘the anointed one’. I like how this variant completes the text by saying WHAT INFORMATION the demons knew about Jesus. The ESV translation might be misunderstood to say that the demons knew Jesus in a friendly relationship. 36 Simon and those with him hunted for Him, 37 and upon finding Him they said to Him, “Everyone is looking for you”. 38 But He said to them: “Let us go to the neighboring towns, so I can preach there also; that is why I have come.”  *WP footnote: I here follow some 40% of the Greek manuscripts, including the best line of transmission; most versions have ‘come forth’, presumably referring to why He had slipped out of town. ESV: … that is why I came out. PCF: I respect Pickering’s control of Greek as being WAY better than mine. However, if we follow the Eclectic Text and translate ‘come forth’, it is still not clear whether Jesus was meaning coming forth from heaven to earth, or from Peter’s town. I believe that either of the two Greek words here (ἐξῆλθον or ἐξελήλυθα) could be taken either way. I think it likely that this is one of several places which have a double meaning. The disciples might have understood, ‘why I came out of town,’ while Jesus may have been thinking, ‘why I came forth from heaven to earth’. But now I want to discuss what Pickering said in both of the two footnotes that I just read to you. He said, “I here follow some 40% of the Greek manuscripts, including the best line of transmission …” Hey, 40% is not a majority of the Greek texts! So whenever Pickering says something like this, he is actually departing from the Majority or Byzantine text and following a subset of Byzantine texts which is called the f35 family of texts. Wow! The plot thickens here! Googling F35, I see that this is the name of a line of Lockheed-Martin fighter jets. That’s not what we mean. From my very limited reading I am concluding that Pickering has constructed a somewhat more restrictive version of the Majority Text.  Here is Pickerings explanation, which can be found as the last footnote in each book of his Greek NT: The citation of f 35 is based on thirty-five MSS*—18, 35, 141, 204, 510, 547, 586, 645, 689, 789, 824, 928, 1023, 1072, 1075, 1133, 1145, 1147, 1199, 1251, 1339, 1435, 1503, 1572, 1628, 1637, 1667, 1705, 2253, 2323, 2382, 2466, 2503, 2554 and 2765—all of which I collated myself. None of them is a ‘perfect’ representative of f 35 in Mark, as it stands [an unreasonable expectation, presumably, for a book this size, besides being a Gospel]. But 586 is only off by one letter, and its exemplar, and that of 35 and 2382, probably were perfect! And several other exemplars come close—that of 1628 was off by one variant, those of 510 and 2253 were off by two variants, those of 824, 1435, 1503 and 1637 were off by three, several by four, and so on. [This refers to the MSS I have collated—there may be even better ones out there! In fact, since I have collated scarcely 10% of the family representatives for this book, there probably are better ones out there.] The uniformity is impressive. Since these MSS come from all over the Mediterranean world (Sinai, Jerusalem, Cyprus, Patmos, Constantinople, Aegean, Tirana, Mt. Athos [six different monasteries], Corinth? , Athens, Grottaferrata, Vatican, etc.) they are certainly representative of the family, giving us the precise family profile—it is reflected in the Text without exception.  *Footnote: In the preface to the F35 Greek NT Pickering states, “I call that segment [of Greek manuscripts that formed the basis for his NT] Family 35, because cursive [manuscript] 35 is the complete New Testament, faithful to the family archetype, with the smallest number.” So Pickering compiled his Greek NT from the 35 manuscripts listed above, but he named the family based on just one of them, number 35, which is the earliest manuscript that contains a complete NT and was faithful to the family archetype. For much more about this, see Pickering’s book, The Identity of the New Testament Text IV, or the other articles in the section of Prunch.net entitled Objective Authority of the Biblical Text. Pickering has taken the time to compile his Greek text of the NT with two different sets of footnotes. One gives footnotes that show textual variants with all known manuscripts, then a second one shows variants found just within the f35 family, which represents 40% of the Greek manuscripts. Can you imagine the time it took for Pickering to painstakingly compare every letter of 35 Greek manuscripts?! Here is my tentative conclusion about the f35 family of manuscripts: It is impressive that such a consistent family of manuscripts can be grouped together. But this designation has something I don’t like: It doesn’t seem right to me to depart from the historically unvarying Majority Greek Text to adopt a subset defined in the last century by Pickering. Let me explain this from my perspective of translating for the majority Islamic nation of Indonesia. There are Muslim scholars who love to point out that Christian Bibles have been fiddled with. They claim that our Greek texts have been corrupted. All they have to do to prove their assertion about textual instability is to point out the footnotes in the Bible translations of the last century. But if we translate the historical Majority Text, we don’t need any such footnotes, because it has remained stable since the third century. So although I am attracted to the two variants Pickering translated in verses 34 and 38, I believe I would still choose the Majority Text to translate for my audience.  Please don’t take my words as a harsh criticism of Pickering. I think we will see that he doesn’t often choose the minority 40% in his translation. It just so happens that two times happened in our reading for today. Quite a few other footnotes in today’s reading had to do with Pickering pointing out cool details. He loves to comment on Jesus’ miracles. I particularly like what he said about verse 45: 45 However he [the cured leper] went out and began to proclaim it freely, spreading the news,  *WP footnote: But he did go to the priest, which resulted in the following evaluation—Luke makes this point clearly in his parallel account. That said, however, I can sympathize with that leper—he had good reason to sound off! But it did increase the pressure on Jesus. so that He [Jesus] was no longer able to enter a town openly, but remained outside in deserted places; yet they kept coming to Him from all over.  *WP footnote: There were an awful lot of sick people who all of a sudden had hope. PCF: By the words ‘which resulted in the following evaluation …”, Pickering is talking about what happened next in the story. His next section heading at Mark 2:1 is A paralytic—the evaluation. In other words, Pickering considers the juxtaposition of the story of the healing of the leper and the arrival of Pharisees and teachers of the law from Jerusalem in the next story to show that the leper not only told everyone in his town about his healing, but he followed Jesus’ instructions and went to the temple in Jerusalem to tell his story to the priests. We can’t prove that, but it is a neat little insight to consider. The episode notes for all of the Every Word podcasts will include a Resources section which gives links to articles that will give further documentation about all of my claims about the Majority Text, the Eclectic Text, and about different Bible translations. All of Dr. Wilbur Pickering’s works are released according to the Creative Commons License and are available at PRUNCH.net. Additionally, his second edition (2016) NT translation is available for a free download via the Kindle app. It is also freely available as a module in the MyBible program for Android and Apple devices.  Dr. Pickering named his NT, “The Sovereign Creator Has Spoken.” That title contains three concepts that were not believed by Wescott and Hort. In their age Darwinism had invaded the church. W&H  did not believe that our Creator created humans as described in Genesis. They did not believe in the sovereignty of God. Nor did they believe that God has actively inspired every word of Scripture and has made sure that every word has been preserved. Moses and Jesus said, “Man shall not live on bread alone, but by Every Word of God.” (Deut. 8:3; Luk. 4:4) Let’s pray: Lord Jesus, we want to know You better. Like the leper in today’s story, we come to You in our sin and sickness and say, “If You want to, You are able to cleanse me.” Yes, Lord, we DO believe in You. In faith we see you reaching out and touching us, saying “I want to.” Thank You, Lord, for your power and love revealed to us today in Mark 1. Resources: Fields, Philip: Playing Follow the Leader in Bible Translation, 2019, by Phil Fields. See the Resources list in that article for many more helpful articles on the superiority of the Majority Greek Text. Friberg, Timothy:  On the text of the Greek New Testament that also happens to be the right one for cousin audiences Although the title of this four-page paper refers to translating for Muslims, the principles and summary is widely applicable.  I suggest reading this paper before reading Friberg’s other articles listed below. Layman’s Guide — A modest explanation for the layman of ideas related to determining the text of the Greek New Testament, 2019. What is what? — Differences between the Traditional Text and the Bible Society Text of the Greek New Testament. Some data for the reader to weigh, 2019. Pickering, Wilbur: New Translation of the New Testament: The Sovereign Creator has Spoken Greek Text of the New Testament based on Family 35 Articles and other major works: See PRUNCH.net. Robinson, Maurice: The New Testament in the Original Greek: Byzantine Textform, 1991, 2005, 2018.  This is available in free digital form in the MyBible Bible app, and in other ways. Article: Full Text of the 105 verses lacking overall Greek Manuscript Support in the NA edition 27

Welcome to this SECOND podcast in a series that I am calling the Every Word Podcast. This is a podcast series for those who enjoy studying details found in God’s Word. In every episode I will read from Dr. Wilbur Pickering’s fresh-sounding translation of the  New Testament. The NT was named, “The Sovereign God Has Spoken,” and I will read from the 2016 2nd edition. In today’s episode, I will read and comment on Pickering’s translation of Mark 1:29-45. This is the kind of podcast where it might be better to look at the episode notes while listening. If you are flying down the freeway right now, just bear it in mind that you may want to check this out later. With a few exceptions that I will discuss today, Dr. Pickering’s translation is based on the Majority Text of the Greek New Testament, which is also called the Byzantine Text. I consider the Majority Text to be superior to the Eclectic Greek Text which was used as the basis of most of the NT translations of the last century. The shift in the Greek text used for our Bible translations began around 1881, with the publication of Wescott and Hort’s Greek New Testament, which was based on an extremely small sampling of manuscripts of the Alexandrian Text Type*— that is from Egypt.  *Footnote: The two are Codex Sinaiticus and Codex Vaticanus. These are dated at 330-360 AD and 300-325 respectively. At the time Wescott and Hort were working, it was anticipated that research into newly discovered ancient New manuscripts from Egypt would reveal a coherent textual stream that would point to the authentic initial form of the Greek text. Now, over a century later, those ancient Egyptian papyrus manuscripts have been analyzed, but they do not reveal a coherent textual stream that can be followed. Instead the papyri manuscripts reveal that Egyptian scribes very freely edited the texts they copied. In contrast, the Majority Text of the New Testament was made by copyists who lived in the same places as the original recipients of the apostles’ writings. Individual scribal errors have been weeded out, since this text type is based on the majority reading of thousands of Greek manuscripts. The Majority Text has been stable over the centuries and is the best academically defendable text of the Greek New Testament that we have today. In this podcast, I am trying in a small way to undo the damage caused by Wescott and Hort’s Greek New Testament, which passed a legacy of mistakes down to all succeeding editions of the Eclectic/Critical Greek Text.** The damage I speak of can be found in almost all of the English Bible translations of the last century, starting with the ASV (1901), and including RSV, NASB, NIV, GNT, NLT, NET, and ESV. **Footnote: The Eclectic Text is also called the Critical Text, the Nestle-Aland text, and the United Bible Societies (UBS) Text. The succeeding editions of the Eclectic Text have primarily followed Wescott and Hort, while the apparatus (or footnotes) dealing with textual variations has grown significantly to show details about textual variants found among Alexandrian manuscripts. You may ask, “How can I find the damage that you speak of in my Bible?” The quick answer is to examine the footnotes found in the New Testament. Then check out what Pickering has to say in his NT translation.    Mar 1:29-45: Pickering’s footnotes are indented and italicized. Peter’s mother-in-law  29 Immediately upon exiting the synagogue they went into the house of Simon and Andrew, with James and John.  30 Simon’s mother-in-law was lying down with a fever, so without delay they told Him about her.  *WP footnote: The parallel passage in Luke 4:37 specifies that it was a high fever—she was burning. 31 So He went and grasping her hand lifted her up; immediately the fever left her and she began to serve them.  *WP footnote: A high fever usually leaves a person weak, even after it passes, so we really have a double miracle here: Jesus dismissed the fever, but also reversed its effect.  Many healings  32 That evening, when the sun had set, they started bringing to Him all who were sick and the demonized. 33 So much so that the whole town was gathered at the door, 34 and He healed many who were sick with various diseases and cast out many demons; and He did not allow the demons to speak, because they knew He was Messiah.  *WP footnote: I here follow some 40% of the Greek manuscripts, including the best line of transmission; most versions omit “He was Messiah”.  Alone to pray  35 Now very early, still night, He got up, slipped out, and went off to a solitary place, where He was praying. 36 Simon and those with him hunted for Him, 37 and upon finding Him they said to Him, “Everyone is looking for you”. 38 But He said to them: “Let us go to the neighboring towns, so I can preach there also; that is why I have come.”  *WP footnote: I here follow some 40% of the Greek manuscripts, including the best line of transmission; most versions have ‘come forth’, presumably referring to why He had slipped out of town. 39 He was constantly preaching in their synagogues throughout all Galilee, and also casting out demons.  The hinge—proof, evaluation, rejection, blasphemy A leper—the proof  40 A leper came to Him, imploring Him, kneeling before Him and saying to Him, “If you want to, you are able to cleanse me”. 41 So being moved with compassion, Jesus stretched out His hand and touched him,  *WP footnote: Wow! In those days, no one would touch a leper, because of contamination. Notice that Jesus agreed with the leper: “I want to; be cleansed!” Beautiful!  and said to him: “I want to; be cleansed!” 42 And when He said this, immediately the leprosy left him, and he was cleansed. 43 And He sent him away at once, sternly warning him, 44 by saying: “See that you say nothing to anyone; but go, show yourself to the priest and offer for your cleansing the things that Moses commanded, as a testimony to them.”  *WP footnote: This would be the first case the priest had ever had of evaluating a cleansed leper, because only the Messiah could cure leprosy. By instructing the cleansed leper in this way, Jesus was serving notice to the priests that the Messiah had come. 45 However he [the leper] went out and began to proclaim it freely, spreading the news,  But he did go to the priest, which resulted in the following evaluation—Luke makes this point clearly in his parallel account. That said, however, I can sympathize with that leper—he had good reason to sound off! But it did increase the pressure on Jesus. so that He [Jesus] was no longer able to enter a town openly, but remained outside in deserted places; yet [people//they] kept coming to Him from all over.  *WP footnote: There were an awful lot of sick people who all of a sudden had hope.   My comments: Before commenting on two textual variants footnoted by Pickering in the portion I just read, I would like to go back to the first episode to verse 1, and the variant that I pointed out at the end of the verse: 1 A beginning of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, Son of God! Pickering has a footnote that says, “There is no definite article with ‘Son’, which in this case emphasizes the inherent quality of the noun.” So Pickering makes this comment about his translation, not about a textual variant. He says that in Greek, ‘Son of God’ has no article before it. In other words, Greek doesn’t say, ‘the Son of God’. His comment may be right that in Greek, the absence of an article gives emphasis. Unfortunately, English doesn’t work that way, and not using the article ‘the’ before ‘Son of God’ makes the sentence sound odd to me, and an odd-sounding sentence doesn’t give me a feeling of emphasis. Pickering also leaves out a ‘the’ in a similar place is verse 34, and to me his translation sounds odd there too. (“and He did not allow the demons to speak, because they knew He was Messiah.”) So here’s a little translational principle for free from me: Forcing an English translation to follow the Greek in tiny little grammatical things often doesn’t work very well. It just makes the translation sound odd, and perhaps alert the reader to look at the footnote. To add emphasis in English, we may need to add a word or two, or switch around the order of the words. But I mentioned in the last episode that there is a variant that Pickering didn’t mention. To be complete I should have said that Wescott & Hort’s Greek text include ‘Son of God’ in brackets. The brackets indicate that they had some doubts that the words were in the original text, but decided to keep not erase the words in the text. Most of the time W&H were bolder in their choice of variants, and the mention of them was relegated to the footnotes.  W&H started a giant game of follow-the-leader in such things. Succeeding editions of the Eclectic Greek NT followed W&H in similarly casting doubt about the authenticity of those three Greek words in Mark 1:1 by putting them in brackets. And now finally the popular SBL Greek Text* totally deletes the words. As I said in the last episode, 98.4% of ancient Greek manuscripts have those words. *Footnote: The Society of Biblical Literature (SBL) is jointly published in partnership with Logos Bible Software. Thankfully, the translators of nearly all of the Bible versions of the last century decided to include the bracketed words, ‘the Son of God’ in Mark 1:1. That is probably why Pickering didn’t mention that variant. So why am I even bringing all this up? Because I want to point out a rather interesting thing about Bible translation in the last century. Since W&H and the ASV of 1901, modern Bible translators have inherited the extra responsibility to choose whether or not to include words in brackets in the Greek text in their translation. You might think that diligent translators would carefully research each variant when brackets appeared in the text. But I have shown in my article entitled, “Playing follow-the-leader in Bible translation” that most Bible translators simply followed the choices that were made by the ASV of 1901. (See the link to that article in the episode notes.) Indeed, whether a variant is in brackets or in the footnotes, Bible translators of the last century rather often switched between the Greek text they used, and often did not mention in a translation’s footnotes. So when you read in the preface of the NET, NIV, or the ESV that the translators followed the Eclectic Text (which might be called the Critical Text, Nestle-Aland Text, or the UBS Text), do not take that to mean that they followed that text 100% of the time. I give data in my follow-the-leader article which shows that for 44 significant variants in the Greek text, the translators of the last century followed their Eclectic Text an average of 71% of the time. 29% of the time they were following the Majority Text (or probably, whatever the KJV had). The reason for the giant game of follow-the-leader is that the 1901 ASV and the RSV NT of 1946 bore the brunt of negative reactions from readers to the things that they missed in their KJV Bibles. So the safe thing for all succeeding Bible translators has been to just make the same decisions as the previous versions. Meanwhile they continue the appearance of scholarship by imitating the misleading footnotes that say, “Some ancient manuscripts say x y z.”  Let me say it again in a different way: The Bible translators for the major Bible versions of the last century didn’t follow ANY Greek text faithfully. They played follow-the-leader with decisions that were made in 1901 based on following W&H. This method of switching back and forth between different Greek source texts is not academically or objectively supportable. It is time that we insist that our New Testament translations be made following just one Greek text in a consistent manner. Now, everything that I have just said about how Bible translators have used published Greek texts is a backdrop for the two textual variants that Pickering footnotes in the portion of his translation I read. These are located at verses 34 and 38. 32 That evening, when the sun had set, they started bringing to Him all who were sick and the demonized. 33 So much so that the whole town was gathered at the door, 34 and He healed many who were sick with various diseases and cast out many demons; and He did not allow the demons to speak, because they knew He was Messiah.  *WP footnote: I here follow some 40% of the Greek manuscripts, including the best line of transmission; most versions omit “He was Messiah”.  ESV: … And he would not permit the demons to speak, because they knew him. PCF: Pickering translates Greek kriston here as ‘Messiah’. Messiah is a word we transliterate from Hebrew and it means ‘the anointed one’, and kriston (Christ) is the Greek word meaning ‘the anointed one’. I like how this variant completes the text by saying WHAT INFORMATION the demons knew about Jesus. The ESV translation might be misunderstood to say that the demons knew Jesus in a friendly relationship. 36 Simon and those with him hunted for Him, 37 and upon finding Him they said to Him, “Everyone is looking for you”. 38 But He said to them: “Let us go to the neighboring towns, so I can preach there also; that is why I have come.”  *WP footnote: I here follow some 40% of the Greek manuscripts, including the best line of transmission; most versions have ‘come forth’, presumably referring to why He had slipped out of town. ESV: … that is why I came out. PCF: I respect Pickering’s control of Greek as being WAY better than mine. However, if we follow the Eclectic Text and translate ‘come forth’, it is still not clear whether Jesus was meaning coming forth from heaven to earth, or from Peter’s town. I believe that either of the two Greek words here (ἐξῆλθον or ἐξελήλυθα) could be taken either way. I think it likely that this is one of several places which have a double meaning. The disciples might have understood, ‘why I came out of town,’ while Jesus may have been thinking, ‘why I came forth from heaven to earth’. But now I want to discuss what Pickering said in both of the two footnotes that I just read to you. He said, “I here follow some 40% of the Greek manuscripts, including the best line of transmission …” Hey, 40% is not a majority of the Greek texts! So whenever Pickering says something like this, he is actually departing from the Majority or Byzantine text and following a subset of Byzantine texts which is called the f35 family of texts. Wow! The plot thickens here! Googling F35, I see that this is the name of a line of Lockheed-Martin fighter jets. That’s not what we mean. From my very limited reading I am concluding that Pickering has constructed a somewhat more restrictive version of the Majority Text.  Here is Pickerings explanation, which can be found as the last footnote in each book of his Greek NT: The citation of f 35 is based on thirty-five MSS*—18, 35, 141, 204, 510, 547, 586, 645, 689, 789, 824, 928, 1023, 1072, 1075, 1133, 1145, 1147, 1199, 1251, 1339, 1435, 1503, 1572, 1628, 1637, 1667, 1705, 2253, 2323, 2382, 2466, 2503, 2554 and 2765—all of which I collated myself. None of them is a ‘perfect’ representative of f 35 in Mark, as it stands [an unreasonable expectation, presumably, for a book this size, besides being a Gospel]. But 586 is only off by one letter, and its exemplar, and that of 35 and 2382, probably were perfect! And several other exemplars come close—that of 1628 was off by one variant, those of 510 and 2253 were off by two variants, those of 824, 1435, 1503 and 1637 were off by three, several by four, and so on. [This refers to the MSS I have collated—there may be even better ones out there! In fact, since I have collated scarcely 10% of the family representatives for this book, there probably are better ones out there.] The uniformity is impressive. Since these MSS come from all over the Mediterranean world (Sinai, Jerusalem, Cyprus, Patmos, Constantinople, Aegean, Tirana, Mt. Athos [six different monasteries], Corinth? , Athens, Grottaferrata, Vatican, etc.) they are certainly representative of the family, giving us the precise family profile—it is reflected in the Text without exception.  *Footnote: In the preface to the F35 Greek NT Pickering states, “I call that segment [of Greek manuscripts that formed the basis for his NT] Family 35, because cursive [manuscript] 35 is the complete New Testament, faithful to the family archetype, with the smallest number.” So Pickering compiled his Greek NT from the 35 manuscripts listed above, but he named the family based on just one of them, number 35, which is the earliest manuscript that contains a complete NT and was faithful to the family archetype. For much more about this, see Pickering’s book, The Identity of the New Testament Text IV, or the other articles in the section of Prunch.net entitled Objective Authority of the Biblical Text. Pickering has taken the time to compile his Greek text of the NT with two different sets of footnotes. One gives footnotes that show textual variants with all known manuscripts, then a second one shows variants found just within the f35 family, which represents 40% of the Greek manuscripts. Can you imagine the time it took for Pickering to painstakingly compare every letter of 35 Greek manuscripts?! Here is my tentative conclusion about the f35 family of manuscripts: It is impressive that such a consistent family of manuscripts can be grouped together. But this designation has something I don’t like: It doesn’t seem right to me to depart from the historically unvarying Majority Greek Text to adopt a subset defined in the last century by Pickering. Let me explain this from my perspective of translating for the majority Islamic nation of Indonesia. There are Muslim scholars who love to point out that Christian Bibles have been fiddled with. They claim that our Greek texts have been corrupted. All they have to do to prove their assertion about textual instability is to point out the footnotes in the Bible translations of the last century. But if we translate the historical Majority Text, we don’t need any such footnotes, because it has remained stable since the third century. So although I am attracted to the two variants Pickering translated in verses 34 and 38, I believe I would still choose the Majority Text to translate for my audience.  Please don’t take my words as a harsh criticism of Pickering. I think we will see that he doesn’t often choose the minority 40% in his translation. It just so happens that two times happened in our reading for today. Quite a few other footnotes in today’s reading had to do with Pickering pointing out cool details. He loves to comment on Jesus’ miracles. I particularly like what he said about verse 45: 45 However he [the cured leper] went out and began to proclaim it freely, spreading the news,  *WP footnote: But he did go to the priest, which resulted in the following evaluation—Luke makes this point clearly in his parallel account. That said, however, I can sympathize with that leper—he had good reason to sound off! But it did increase the pressure on Jesus. so that He [Jesus] was no longer able to enter a town openly, but remained outside in deserted places; yet they kept coming to Him from all over.  *WP footnote: There were an awful lot of sick people who all of a sudden had hope. PCF: By the words ‘which resulted in the following evaluation …”, Pickering is talking about what happened next in the story. His next section heading at Mark 2:1 is A paralytic—the evaluation. In other words, Pickering considers the juxtaposition of the story of the healing of the leper and the arrival of Pharisees and teachers of the law from Jerusalem in the next story to show that the leper not only told everyone in his town about his healing, but he followed Jesus’ instructions and went to the temple in Jerusalem to tell his story to the priests. We can’t prove that, but it is a neat little insight to consider. The episode notes for all of the Every Word podcasts will include a Resources section which gives links to articles that will give further documentation about all of my claims about the Majority Text, the Eclectic Text, and about different Bible translations. All of Dr. Wilbur Pickering’s works are released according to the Creative Commons License and are available at PRUNCH.net. Additionally, his second edition (2016) NT translation is available for a free download via the Kindle app. It is also freely available as a module in the MyBible program for Android and Apple devices.  Dr. Pickering named his NT, “The Sovereign Creator Has Spoken.” That title contains three concepts that were not believed by Wescott and Hort. In their age Darwinism had invaded the church. W&H  did not believe that our Creator created humans as described in Genesis. They did not believe in the sovereignty of God. Nor did they believe that God has actively inspired every word of Scripture and has made sure that every word has been preserved. Moses and Jesus said, “Man shall not live on bread alone, but by Every Word of God.” (Deut. 8:3; Luk. 4:4) Let’s pray: Lord Jesus, we want to know You better. Like the leper in today’s story, we come to You in our sin and sickness and say, “If You want to, You are able to cleanse me.” Yes, Lord, we DO believe in You. In faith we see you reaching out and touching us, saying “I want to.” Thank You, Lord, for your power and love revealed to us today in Mark 1. Resources: Fields, Philip: Playing Follow the Leader in Bible Translation, 2019, by Phil Fields. See the Resources list in that article for many more helpful articles on the superiority of the Majority Greek Text. Friberg, Timothy:  On the text of the Greek New Testament that also happens to be the right one for cousin audiences Although the title of this four-page paper refers to translating for Muslims, the principles and summary is widely applicable.  I suggest reading this paper before reading Friberg’s other articles listed below. Layman’s Guide — A modest explanation for the layman of ideas related to determining the text of the Greek New Testament, 2019. What is what? — Differences between the Traditional Text and the Bible Society Text of the Greek New Testament. Some data for the reader to weigh, 2019. Pickering, Wilbur: New Translation of the New Testament: The Sovereign Creator has Spoken Greek Text of the New Testament based on Family 35 Articles and other major works: See PRUNCH.net. Robinson, Maurice: The New Testament in the Original Greek: Byzantine Textform, 1991, 2005, 2018.  This is available in free digital form in the MyBible Bible app, and in other ways. Article: Full Text of the 105 verses lacking overall Greek Manuscript Support in the NA edition 27

Welcome to this first podcast in a series that I am calling the Every Word Podcast. This is a podcast series for those who enjoy studying details found in God’s Word. In every episode I will read from Dr. Wilbur Pickering’s fresh-sounding translation of the  New Testament. The 2016 2nd edition of this NT was published with the name, “The Sovereign God Has Spoken.” It is available for a free download for the Kindle bool reading app. In today’s episode, I will read and comment on Pickering’s translation of Mark 1:1-28.   This is the kind of podcast where it might be better to look at the episode notes while listening. If you are flying down the freeway right now, just bear it in mind that you may want to check this out later. The full text that I will read is attached, but the attachment can only be found at dailybiblereading.info, not in podcast apps. (Click on the PDF download icon to get the attachment. For Android users, if you use our dedicated Daily Bible Reading app, you can get the PDF by clicking the gift icon.) The prettiest way to read Pickering’s NT is via the Kindle app using a tablet, and it is a free download.   Dr. Pickering’s translation is based on the Majority Text of the Greek New Testament, which is also called the Byzantine Text. I consider the Majority Text to be superior to the Eclectic Greek Text which was used as the basis of most of the translations of the last century. The shift in the Greek text used for our Bible translations began around 1881, with the publication of Wescott and Hort’s Greek New Testament, which was based on an extremely small sampling of manuscripts of the Alexandrian Text Type*— that is from Egypt.  *Footnote: The two are Codex Sinaiticus and Codex Vaticanus. These are dated at 330-360 AD and 300-325 respectively. At the time Wescott and Hort were working, it was anticipated that research into newly discovered ancient New manuscripts from Egypt would reveal a coherent textual stream that would point to the authentic initial form of the Greek text. Now, over a century later, those ancient Egyptian papyrus manuscripts have been analyzed, but they do not reveal a coherent textual stream that can be followed. Instead the papyri manuscripts reveal that Egyptian scribes very freely edited the texts they copied. In contrast, the Majority Text of the New Testament was made by copyists who lived in the same places as the original recipients of the apostles’ writings. Individual scribal errors have been weeded out, since this text type is based on the majority reading of thousands of Greek manuscripts.   The Majority Text has been stable over the centuries and is the best academically defendable text of the Greek New Testament that we have today. In this podcast, I am trying in a small way to undo the damage caused by Wescott and Hort’s Greek New Testament, which passed a legacy of mistakes down to all succeeding editions of the Eclectic/Critical Greek Text.** The damage I speak of can be found in almost all of the English Bible translations of the last century, starting with the ASV (1901), and including RSV, NASB, NIV, GNT, NLT, NET, and ESV. **Footnote: The Eclectic Text is also called the Critical Text, the Nestle-Aland text, and the United Bible Societies (UBS) Text. The succeeding editions of the Eclectic Text have primarily followed Wescott and Hort, but the apparatus (or footnotes) dealing with textual variations has detailed the other variants found among Alexandrian manuscripts.   I realize that all this stuff I have just tried to explain may ‘sound like Greek to you’. But I promise that the examples I give will be interesting, and you won’t need to know any Greek to understand them. It will be helpful to your understanding if as you listen you are able to see Pickering’s translation beside your own Bible translation while listening to this podcast.    See the attached PDF for all the readings.       1 A beginning of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, Son of God! Pickering makes a footnote for many of the textual variants. The Eclectic Text does not include ‘Son of God’, and the Lexham Bible (published by Logos) doesn’t translate ‘Son of God’. But most of the last century’s translations follow the 1901 ASV, including those words with a footnote saying, “Some manuscripts do not include the Son of God.” Actually, it is only one Alexandrian manuscript that doesn’t have the three words. 98.4% of manuscripts have it. Another 0.4 percent have it slightly shortened. Only Codex Sinaiticus doesn’t have it, but it was one of Wescott and Hort’s favorites. So that one manuscript dropping the words has caused a footnote in many of today’s translations. Such footnotes have the unintended effect of causing people to question the accuracy of God’s Word.*** ***Footnote:  I take all percentage information from Pickering’s footnotes in his Greek NT.   What might have guided Wescott and Hort to have left out ‘Son of God’?  Here I quote from Pickering’s article entitled The Root Cause of the continuous defection from Biblical Infallibility: F.J.A. Hort, a quintessential 'son of the disobedience'. Hort did not believe in the divine inspiration of the Bible, nor in the divinity of Jesus Christ. Since he embraced the Darwinian theory as soon as it appeared, he presumably did not believe in God.2 His theory of NT textual criticism, published in 1881,3 was based squarely on the presuppositions that the NT was not inspired, that no special care was afforded it in the early decades, and that in consequence the original wording was lost—lost beyond recovery, at least by objective means. His theory swept the academic world and continues to dominate the discipline to this day.1   Footnote 2: For documentation of all this, and a good deal more besides, in Hort's own words, please see the biography written by his son. A.F. Hort, Life and Letters of Fenton John Anthony Hort (2 vols.; London: Macmillan and Co. Ltd., 1896). The son made heavy use of the father's plentiful correspondence, whom he admired. (In those days a two-volume 'Life', as opposed to a one-volume 'Biography', was a posthumous status symbol, albeit of little consequence to the departed.) Many of my readers were taught, as was I, that one must not question/judge someone else's motives. But wait just a minute; where did such an idea come from? It certainly did not come from God, who expects the spiritual person to evaluate everything (1 Corinthians 2:15). Since there are only two spiritual kingdoms in this world (Matthew 6:24, 12:30; Luke 11:23, 16:13), then the idea comes from the other side. By eliminating motive, one also eliminates presupposition, which is something that God would never do, since presupposition governs interpretation (Matthew 22:29, Mark 12:24). Which is why we should always expect a true scholar to state his presuppositions. I have repeatedly stated mine, but here they are again: 1) The Sovereign Creator of the universe exists; 2) He delivered a written revelation to the human race; 3) He has preserved that revelation intact to this day.   2  As it is written in the prophets4— 4 Around 3.3% of the Greek manuscripts have ‘Isaiah the prophet’ instead of ‘the prophets’ (to be followed by NIV, NASB, LB, TEV, etc.). The 96.7% are correct.  ESV ‘As it is written in Isaiah the prophet,’   Here the Majority Text is right with plural ‘prophets’, because two quotes that follow are by two different prophets, Malachi and Isaiah. (Mal. 3:1; Is. 40:3) There are a number of inaccuracies like this that have been introduced in our Bibles because of following the Eclectic Text, and this is a good example of one of them.        10 And immediately upon coming up from11 the water He saw the heavens being torn open and the Spirit, like a dove, descending upon Him.  11 Perhaps 3% of the Greek manuscripts have ‘out of’ instead of ‘from’ (to be followed by NIV, NASB, LB, TEV, etc.).    This is my own comment, not Pickering’s: The difference here amounts to a difference of two prepositions. The Majority Text has ‘apo’ and the Eclectic Text has ‘ek’. Someone is going to try to use the difference here to show the method of baptism used by John the Baptist. Don’t base any doctrine on Greek prepositions. They have a very wide range of meaning. Neither preposition can be used to prove the depth of the water where Jesus was baptized.       13 And He was there in the wilderness forty days being tested1 by Satan, 1 Our ‘test’ and ‘tempt’ are translations of a single Greek word, the context determining the choice. To tempt is to test in the area of morals. In this context I consider that ‘tempt’ is too limited, but it is included in the wider meaning of 'test'. Note that the Spirit impelled Him, which means that this was a necessary part of the Plan. The three specific tests recorded by Matthew and Luke presumably happened near the end of the forty days.    Pickering here gives an interesting translational note. This is not about a textual difference. I think it interesting and probably right that Satan was doing more than merely tempting Jesus. He was testing Who he was up against.       1:14 Now after John was put in prison,4 Jesus went into Galilee proclaiming the Gospel of the Kingdom5 of God, 5 Some 2% of the Greek manuscripts, of objectively inferior quality, omit ‘of the Kingdom’ (to be followed by NIV, NASB, LB, TEV, etc.).    ESV ‘gospel of God’   My comment: In the very next verse, Jesus said, “The time has been fulfilled and the Kingdom of God has approached. Repent and believe in the Gospel.” The phrase ‘gospel of God’ (meaning that God owns or sponsors the Gospel) does occur in the Pauline epistles and in 1st Peter, but not in any of the Gospels or Acts. To me, especially because of verse 15, it seems much more fitting for Jesus to specify, ‘Gospel of (or about) the Kingdom of God’.       16 Then, as He was walking beside the Sea of Galilee, He saw Simon and Andrew his brother, [the son of] of Simon,7 casting a circular net onto the water,8 for they were fishermen.  7 Some 90% of the Greek manuscripts have ‘his brother, of Simon’—presumably a reference to their father. If Peter was the eldest son, he would have been named for his father.    PCF: I think this is an interesting textual variant. If Simon’s father was also named Simon, this part of the story would match the next part where we hear of Zebedee, the father of James and John. If you are looking at the episode notes, you will note that I made a slight alteration to Pickering’s translation. I added the words ‘the son’ before ‘of Simon’, so that the listener will be able to catch the meaning Pickering intends.   When I make alterations like this, I will mark them with brackets. I think the Greek can be understood in the sense ‘his brother— that is Simon’s’. That seems to be the way the World English Bible takes it. (The WEB is another translation of the Majority Text, and it is freely available in many Bible apps.)     23 Now there was a man in their synagogue with an unclean spirit; and he cried out, 24 saying: “Hey, what do you want with us, Jesus Natsarene?!13 13 The name of the town in Hebrew is based on the consonants נצר) resh, tsadde, nun), but since Hebrew is read from right to left, for us the order is reversed = n, ts, r. This word root means ‘branch’. Greek has the equivalent for ‘ps’ and ‘ks’, but not for ‘ts’, so the transliteration used a z (zeta) ‘dz’, which is the voiced counterpart of ‘ts’. But when the Greek was transliterated into English it came out as ‘z’! But Hebrew has a ‘z’, ז) zayin), so in transliterating back into Hebrew people assumed the consonants נזר ,replacing the correct tsadde with zayin. Neither ‘Nazareth’ nor ‘Nazarene’, spelled with a zayin, is to be found in the Old Testament, but there is a prophetic reference to Messiah as the Branch, netser—Isaiah 11:1—and several to the related word, tsemach—Isaiah 4:2, Jeremiah 23:5, 33:15; Zechariah 3:8, 6:12. So Matthew (2:23) is quite right—the prophets (plural, being at least three) referred to Christ as the Branch. Since Jesus was a man, He would be the ‘Branch-man’, from ‘Branch-town’. Which brings us to the word ‘natsorean’. The familiar ‘Nazarene’ (Nazarhnoj) [Natsarene] occurs in Mark 1:24, 14:67, 16:6 and Luke 4:34, but in Matthew 2:23 and in fourteen other places, including Acts 22:8 where the glorified Jesus calls Himself that, the word is ‘Natsorean’ (Nazwraioj), which is quite different. I have been given to understand that the Natsareth of Jesus’ day had been founded some 100 years before by a Branch family, who called it Branch town; they were very much aware of the prophecies about the Branch and fully expected the Messiah to be born from among them—they called themselves Branch-people (Natsoreans). Of course everyone else thought it was a big joke and tended to look down on them. “Can anything good . . . ?”   PCF: This time Pickering’s note points to a treasure he wants us to understand, not a textual variant. You may have picked up in my pronunciation that Jesus was called the ‘Natsarene’. Pickering’s footnote is long, and I think it would be hard to understand for podcast listeners— who may be going down the freeway at 70 miles an hour. The full footnote, complete with Scripture references, is found in the episode notes. But I will summarize what Pickering is pointing out. In Mark 1:23, the demon called Jesus a ‘Natsarene’, following the spelling in Wilbur Pickering's translation. We all know that Nazarene is normally spelled with a z, but Pickering spells it with ts.    Recall that Matthew (2:23) states, “So the family went and lived in a town called Nazareth. This fulfilled what the prophets had said: He (Jesus) will be called a Nazarene.” But the name Nazarene or Nazareth appears nowhere in the Old Testament, so how could this fulfill what plural prophets wrote? Unlike what is often assumed, the name Nazareth has nothing to do with the Old Testament nazarite vow. But in Hebrew, the word meaning ‘branch’ is netser.    Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Zechariah (plural prophets) refer to the Messiah as the Branch or Shoot (which is netser or a related word). Isaiah 11:1 is one of those places: Out of the stump of David’s family will grow a shoot — yes, a new Branch bearing fruit from the old root. (NLT Isaiah 11:1)   So we might call the original name for Jesus’ hometown as ‘Netser-place’, or Natsereth. But when Natsereth was translated into Greek, the ts became a z, Nazareth. So the cool thing about this is that before Christ came, someone founded a settlement called Branchville. I don't think this happened by accident. At the very least, they named the town with the intent to remind people that God’s promised a Messiah who was given the title, ‘the Righteous Branch’. So it is significant, and a fulfillment of prophecy, that Jesus is called ‘the man from Branchville’.   27 And all were astounded, so that they questioned among themselves, saying: “What is this? What can this new [teaching//doctrine] be?3  Because with authority he commands even the unclean spirits, and they obey him!” 3 Instead of ‘what can this new [teaching//doctrine] be’, perhaps 0.5% of the Greek manuscripts, of objectively inferior quality, have ‘a new doctrine’ (as in NIV, NASB, LB, etc.).    ESV And they were all amazed, so that they questioned among themselves, saying, “What is this? A new teaching with authority! He commands even the unclean spirits, and they obey him.”   The word ‘Because’ is also part of the textual variant. The ESV follows the Eclectic Text, and connects the rather disjointed text so that it makes sense. ESV has an incomplete sentence, ‘A new teaching with authority!’ But the Majority Text includes the verb ‘be’, and a logical connector, ‘for/because’ which renders a much smoother text with complete sentences and good logical flow.       The episode notes for all of the Every Word podcasts will include references to articles that will give further documentation about all of my claims about the Majority Text, the Eclectic Text, and about different Bible translations.   All of Dr. Wilbur Pickering’s works are available at PRUNCH.net. Additionally, his second edition (2016) NT translation is available for a free download via the Kindle app. It is also freely available as a module in the MyBible program for Android and Apple devices. Dr. Pickering named his NT, “The Sovereign Creator Has Spoken.” I have not found where Pickering has explained why he gave his NT translation that title. From the forward, I think that it relates to his opinion that God sovereignly protected the original wording of the New Testament through the best line of Greek manuscripts.* *Footnote: As will be explained in further podcasts, Pickering has chosen a more narrow line of transmission, as found in the F35 family of manuscripts. This is slightly different from the Majority/Byzantine Text Type as published by Robinson and Peerpoint, 2018.   I note further that the title, “The Sovereign Creator Has Spoken,” contains three concepts that were not believed by Wescott and Hort. In their age Darwinism had invaded the church. They did not believe that our Creator created humans as described in Genesis. They did not believe in the sovereignty of God, and nor did they believe that God had actively inspired every word of Scripture and was making sure that every word would be preserved.   One of my favorite verses is in Jeremiah 1:11-12: The word of the Lord came to me: “What do you see, Jeremiah?” “I see the branch of an almond tree,” I replied. 12 The Lord said to me, “You have seen correctly, for I am watching* to see that my word is fulfilled.” *The footnote says, “The Hebrew for watching sounds like the Hebrew for almond tree.”   God will carry out his threats and his promises.    If God is watching his word to fulfill it like that, it is logical to believe that He also was careful to preserve his Word for us. For the New Testament, God blessed the Majority line of Greek texts so that they predominate and the text has remained unchanged through the centuries. I think it is a good goal to hope for better translations in this century which will preserve every word that should be in the Greek text, and that every word should be translated in a way that fits the English language. As Moses and Jesus said, “Man shall not live on bread alone, but by Every Word of God.” (Deut. 8:3; Luk. 4:4)   Let’s pray: Lord, my listener and I want to know You better through your Word, that we may be transformed to obey you from the heart. We thank You for sending the Righteous Branch, Jesus, to be our King, just like the prophets foretold.   Resources: Fields, Philip: Playing Follow the Leader in Bible Translation, 2019, by Phil Fields. See the Resources list in that article for many more helpful articles on the superiority of the Majority Greek Text.   Friberg, Timothy:  On the text of the Greek New Testament that also happens to be the right one for cousin audiences Although the title of this four-page paper refers to translating for Muslims, the principles and summary is widely applicable.  I suggest reading this paper before reading Friberg’s other articles listed below.   Layman’s Guide — A modest explanation for the layman of ideas related to determining the text of the Greek New Testament, 2019.   What is what? — Differences between the Traditional Text and the Bible Society Text of the Greek New Testament. Some data for the reader to weigh, 2019.   Pickering, Wilbur: New Translation of the New Testament: The Sovereign Creator has Spoken Greek Text of the New Testament based on Family 35   Articles and other major works: See PRUNCH.net. Robinson, Maurice: The New Testament in the Original Greek: Byzantine Textform, 1991, 2005, 2018.  This is available in free digital form in the MyBible Bible app, and in other ways.   Article: Full Text of the 105 verses lacking overall Greek Manuscript Support in the NA edition 27

Welcome to this first podcast in a series that I am calling the Every Word Podcast. This is a podcast series for those who enjoy studying details found in God’s Word. In every episode I will read from Dr. Wilbur Pickering’s fresh-sounding translation of the  New Testament. The 2016 2nd edition of this NT was published with the name, “The Sovereign God Has Spoken.” It is available for a free download for the Kindle bool reading app. In today’s episode, I will read and comment on Pickering’s translation of Mark 1:1-28.   This is the kind of podcast where it might be better to look at the episode notes while listening. If you are flying down the freeway right now, just bear it in mind that you may want to check this out later. The full text that I will read is attached, but the attachment can only be found at dailybiblereading.info, not in podcast apps. (Click on the PDF download icon to get the attachment. For Android users, if you use our dedicated Daily Bible Reading app, you can get the PDF by clicking the gift icon.) The prettiest way to read Pickering’s NT is via the Kindle app using a tablet, and it is a free download.   Dr. Pickering’s translation is based on the Majority Text of the Greek New Testament, which is also called the Byzantine Text. I consider the Majority Text to be superior to the Eclectic Greek Text which was used as the basis of most of the translations of the last century. The shift in the Greek text used for our Bible translations began around 1881, with the publication of Wescott and Hort’s Greek New Testament, which was based on an extremely small sampling of manuscripts of the Alexandrian Text Type*— that is from Egypt.  *Footnote: The two are Codex Sinaiticus and Codex Vaticanus. These are dated at 330-360 AD and 300-325 respectively. At the time Wescott and Hort were working, it was anticipated that research into newly discovered ancient New manuscripts from Egypt would reveal a coherent textual stream that would point to the authentic initial form of the Greek text. Now, over a century later, those ancient Egyptian papyrus manuscripts have been analyzed, but they do not reveal a coherent textual stream that can be followed. Instead the papyri manuscripts reveal that Egyptian scribes very freely edited the texts they copied. In contrast, the Majority Text of the New Testament was made by copyists who lived in the same places as the original recipients of the apostles’ writings. Individual scribal errors have been weeded out, since this text type is based on the majority reading of thousands of Greek manuscripts.   The Majority Text has been stable over the centuries and is the best academically defendable text of the Greek New Testament that we have today. In this podcast, I am trying in a small way to undo the damage caused by Wescott and Hort’s Greek New Testament, which passed a legacy of mistakes down to all succeeding editions of the Eclectic/Critical Greek Text.** The damage I speak of can be found in almost all of the English Bible translations of the last century, starting with the ASV (1901), and including RSV, NASB, NIV, GNT, NLT, NET, and ESV. **Footnote: The Eclectic Text is also called the Critical Text, the Nestle-Aland text, and the United Bible Societies (UBS) Text. The succeeding editions of the Eclectic Text have primarily followed Wescott and Hort, but the apparatus (or footnotes) dealing with textual variations has detailed the other variants found among Alexandrian manuscripts.   I realize that all this stuff I have just tried to explain may ‘sound like Greek to you’. But I promise that the examples I give will be interesting, and you won’t need to know any Greek to understand them. It will be helpful to your understanding if as you listen you are able to see Pickering’s translation beside your own Bible translation while listening to this podcast.    See the attached PDF for all the readings.       1 A beginning of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, Son of God! Pickering makes a footnote for many of the textual variants. The Eclectic Text does not include ‘Son of God’, and the Lexham Bible (published by Logos) doesn’t translate ‘Son of God’. But most of the last century’s translations follow the 1901 ASV, including those words with a footnote saying, “Some manuscripts do not include the Son of God.” Actually, it is only one Alexandrian manuscript that doesn’t have the three words. 98.4% of manuscripts have it. Another 0.4 percent have it slightly shortened. Only Codex Sinaiticus doesn’t have it, but it was one of Wescott and Hort’s favorites. So that one manuscript dropping the words has caused a footnote in many of today’s translations. Such footnotes have the unintended effect of causing people to question the accuracy of God’s Word.*** ***Footnote:  I take all percentage information from Pickering’s footnotes in his Greek NT.   What might have guided Wescott and Hort to have left out ‘Son of God’?  Here I quote from Pickering’s article entitled The Root Cause of the continuous defection from Biblical Infallibility: F.J.A. Hort, a quintessential 'son of the disobedience'. Hort did not believe in the divine inspiration of the Bible, nor in the divinity of Jesus Christ. Since he embraced the Darwinian theory as soon as it appeared, he presumably did not believe in God.2 His theory of NT textual criticism, published in 1881,3 was based squarely on the presuppositions that the NT was not inspired, that no special care was afforded it in the early decades, and that in consequence the original wording was lost—lost beyond recovery, at least by objective means. His theory swept the academic world and continues to dominate the discipline to this day.1   Footnote 2: For documentation of all this, and a good deal more besides, in Hort's own words, please see the biography written by his son. A.F. Hort, Life and Letters of Fenton John Anthony Hort (2 vols.; London: Macmillan and Co. Ltd., 1896). The son made heavy use of the father's plentiful correspondence, whom he admired. (In those days a two-volume 'Life', as opposed to a one-volume 'Biography', was a posthumous status symbol, albeit of little consequence to the departed.) Many of my readers were taught, as was I, that one must not question/judge someone else's motives. But wait just a minute; where did such an idea come from? It certainly did not come from God, who expects the spiritual person to evaluate everything (1 Corinthians 2:15). Since there are only two spiritual kingdoms in this world (Matthew 6:24, 12:30; Luke 11:23, 16:13), then the idea comes from the other side. By eliminating motive, one also eliminates presupposition, which is something that God would never do, since presupposition governs interpretation (Matthew 22:29, Mark 12:24). Which is why we should always expect a true scholar to state his presuppositions. I have repeatedly stated mine, but here they are again: 1) The Sovereign Creator of the universe exists; 2) He delivered a written revelation to the human race; 3) He has preserved that revelation intact to this day.   2  As it is written in the prophets4— 4 Around 3.3% of the Greek manuscripts have ‘Isaiah the prophet’ instead of ‘the prophets’ (to be followed by NIV, NASB, LB, TEV, etc.). The 96.7% are correct.  ESV ‘As it is written in Isaiah the prophet,’   Here the Majority Text is right with plural ‘prophets’, because two quotes that follow are by two different prophets, Malachi and Isaiah. (Mal. 3:1; Is. 40:3) There are a number of inaccuracies like this that have been introduced in our Bibles because of following the Eclectic Text, and this is a good example of one of them.        10 And immediately upon coming up from11 the water He saw the heavens being torn open and the Spirit, like a dove, descending upon Him.  11 Perhaps 3% of the Greek manuscripts have ‘out of’ instead of ‘from’ (to be followed by NIV, NASB, LB, TEV, etc.).    This is my own comment, not Pickering’s: The difference here amounts to a difference of two prepositions. The Majority Text has ‘apo’ and the Eclectic Text has ‘ek’. Someone is going to try to use the difference here to show the method of baptism used by John the Baptist. Don’t base any doctrine on Greek prepositions. They have a very wide range of meaning. Neither preposition can be used to prove the depth of the water where Jesus was baptized.       13 And He was there in the wilderness forty days being tested1 by Satan, 1 Our ‘test’ and ‘tempt’ are translations of a single Greek word, the context determining the choice. To tempt is to test in the area of morals. In this context I consider that ‘tempt’ is too limited, but it is included in the wider meaning of 'test'. Note that the Spirit impelled Him, which means that this was a necessary part of the Plan. The three specific tests recorded by Matthew and Luke presumably happened near the end of the forty days.    Pickering here gives an interesting translational note. This is not about a textual difference. I think it interesting and probably right that Satan was doing more than merely tempting Jesus. He was testing Who he was up against.       1:14 Now after John was put in prison,4 Jesus went into Galilee proclaiming the Gospel of the Kingdom5 of God, 5 Some 2% of the Greek manuscripts, of objectively inferior quality, omit ‘of the Kingdom’ (to be followed by NIV, NASB, LB, TEV, etc.).    ESV ‘gospel of God’   My comment: In the very next verse, Jesus said, “The time has been fulfilled and the Kingdom of God has approached. Repent and believe in the Gospel.” The phrase ‘gospel of God’ (meaning that God owns or sponsors the Gospel) does occur in the Pauline epistles and in 1st Peter, but not in any of the Gospels or Acts. To me, especially because of verse 15, it seems much more fitting for Jesus to specify, ‘Gospel of (or about) the Kingdom of God’.       16 Then, as He was walking beside the Sea of Galilee, He saw Simon and Andrew his brother, [the son of] of Simon,7 casting a circular net onto the water,8 for they were fishermen.  7 Some 90% of the Greek manuscripts have ‘his brother, of Simon’—presumably a reference to their father. If Peter was the eldest son, he would have been named for his father.    PCF: I think this is an interesting textual variant. If Simon’s father was also named Simon, this part of the story would match the next part where we hear of Zebedee, the father of James and John. If you are looking at the episode notes, you will note that I made a slight alteration to Pickering’s translation. I added the words ‘the son’ before ‘of Simon’, so that the listener will be able to catch the meaning Pickering intends.   When I make alterations like this, I will mark them with brackets. I think the Greek can be understood in the sense ‘his brother— that is Simon’s’. That seems to be the way the World English Bible takes it. (The WEB is another translation of the Majority Text, and it is freely available in many Bible apps.)     23 Now there was a man in their synagogue with an unclean spirit; and he cried out, 24 saying: “Hey, what do you want with us, Jesus Natsarene?!13 13 The name of the town in Hebrew is based on the consonants נצר) resh, tsadde, nun), but since Hebrew is read from right to left, for us the order is reversed = n, ts, r. This word root means ‘branch’. Greek has the equivalent for ‘ps’ and ‘ks’, but not for ‘ts’, so the transliteration used a z (zeta) ‘dz’, which is the voiced counterpart of ‘ts’. But when the Greek was transliterated into English it came out as ‘z’! But Hebrew has a ‘z’, ז) zayin), so in transliterating back into Hebrew people assumed the consonants נזר ,replacing the correct tsadde with zayin. Neither ‘Nazareth’ nor ‘Nazarene’, spelled with a zayin, is to be found in the Old Testament, but there is a prophetic reference to Messiah as the Branch, netser—Isaiah 11:1—and several to the related word, tsemach—Isaiah 4:2, Jeremiah 23:5, 33:15; Zechariah 3:8, 6:12. So Matthew (2:23) is quite right—the prophets (plural, being at least three) referred to Christ as the Branch. Since Jesus was a man, He would be the ‘Branch-man’, from ‘Branch-town’. Which brings us to the word ‘natsorean’. The familiar ‘Nazarene’ (Nazarhnoj) [Natsarene] occurs in Mark 1:24, 14:67, 16:6 and Luke 4:34, but in Matthew 2:23 and in fourteen other places, including Acts 22:8 where the glorified Jesus calls Himself that, the word is ‘Natsorean’ (Nazwraioj), which is quite different. I have been given to understand that the Natsareth of Jesus’ day had been founded some 100 years before by a Branch family, who called it Branch town; they were very much aware of the prophecies about the Branch and fully expected the Messiah to be born from among them—they called themselves Branch-people (Natsoreans). Of course everyone else thought it was a big joke and tended to look down on them. “Can anything good . . . ?”   PCF: This time Pickering’s note points to a treasure he wants us to understand, not a textual variant. You may have picked up in my pronunciation that Jesus was called the ‘Natsarene’. Pickering’s footnote is long, and I think it would be hard to understand for podcast listeners— who may be going down the freeway at 70 miles an hour. The full footnote, complete with Scripture references, is found in the episode notes. But I will summarize what Pickering is pointing out. In Mark 1:23, the demon called Jesus a ‘Natsarene’, following the spelling in Wilbur Pickering's translation. We all know that Nazarene is normally spelled with a z, but Pickering spells it with ts.    Recall that Matthew (2:23) states, “So the family went and lived in a town called Nazareth. This fulfilled what the prophets had said: He (Jesus) will be called a Nazarene.” But the name Nazarene or Nazareth appears nowhere in the Old Testament, so how could this fulfill what plural prophets wrote? Unlike what is often assumed, the name Nazareth has nothing to do with the Old Testament nazarite vow. But in Hebrew, the word meaning ‘branch’ is netser.    Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Zechariah (plural prophets) refer to the Messiah as the Branch or Shoot (which is netser or a related word). Isaiah 11:1 is one of those places: Out of the stump of David’s family will grow a shoot — yes, a new Branch bearing fruit from the old root. (NLT Isaiah 11:1)   So we might call the original name for Jesus’ hometown as ‘Netser-place’, or Natsereth. But when Natsereth was translated into Greek, the ts became a z, Nazareth. So the cool thing about this is that before Christ came, someone founded a settlement called Branchville. I don't think this happened by accident. At the very least, they named the town with the intent to remind people that God’s promised a Messiah who was given the title, ‘the Righteous Branch’. So it is significant, and a fulfillment of prophecy, that Jesus is called ‘the man from Branchville’.   27 And all were astounded, so that they questioned among themselves, saying: “What is this? What can this new [teaching//doctrine] be?3  Because with authority he commands even the unclean spirits, and they obey him!” 3 Instead of ‘what can this new [teaching//doctrine] be’, perhaps 0.5% of the Greek manuscripts, of objectively inferior quality, have ‘a new doctrine’ (as in NIV, NASB, LB, etc.).    ESV And they were all amazed, so that they questioned among themselves, saying, “What is this? A new teaching with authority! He commands even the unclean spirits, and they obey him.”   The word ‘Because’ is also part of the textual variant. The ESV follows the Eclectic Text, and connects the rather disjointed text so that it makes sense. ESV has an incomplete sentence, ‘A new teaching with authority!’ But the Majority Text includes the verb ‘be’, and a logical connector, ‘for/because’ which renders a much smoother text with complete sentences and good logical flow.       The episode notes for all of the Every Word podcasts will include references to articles that will give further documentation about all of my claims about the Majority Text, the Eclectic Text, and about different Bible translations.   All of Dr. Wilbur Pickering’s works are available at PRUNCH.net. Additionally, his second edition (2016) NT translation is available for a free download via the Kindle app. It is also freely available as a module in the MyBible program for Android and Apple devices. Dr. Pickering named his NT, “The Sovereign Creator Has Spoken.” I have not found where Pickering has explained why he gave his NT translation that title. From the forward, I think that it relates to his opinion that God sovereignly protected the original wording of the New Testament through the best line of Greek manuscripts.* *Footnote: As will be explained in further podcasts, Pickering has chosen a more narrow line of transmission, as found in the F35 family of manuscripts. This is slightly different from the Majority/Byzantine Text Type as published by Robinson and Peerpoint, 2018.   I note further that the title, “The Sovereign Creator Has Spoken,” contains three concepts that were not believed by Wescott and Hort. In their age Darwinism had invaded the church. They did not believe that our Creator created humans as described in Genesis. They did not believe in the sovereignty of God, and nor did they believe that God had actively inspired every word of Scripture and was making sure that every word would be preserved.   One of my favorite verses is in Jeremiah 1:11-12: The word of the Lord came to me: “What do you see, Jeremiah?” “I see the branch of an almond tree,” I replied. 12 The Lord said to me, “You have seen correctly, for I am watching* to see that my word is fulfilled.” *The footnote says, “The Hebrew for watching sounds like the Hebrew for almond tree.”   God will carry out his threats and his promises.    If God is watching his word to fulfill it like that, it is logical to believe that He also was careful to preserve his Word for us. For the New Testament, God blessed the Majority line of Greek texts so that they predominate and the text has remained unchanged through the centuries. I think it is a good goal to hope for better translations in this century which will preserve every word that should be in the Greek text, and that every word should be translated in a way that fits the English language. As Moses and Jesus said, “Man shall not live on bread alone, but by Every Word of God.” (Deut. 8:3; Luk. 4:4)   Let’s pray: Lord, my listener and I want to know You better through your Word, that we may be transformed to obey you from the heart. We thank You for sending the Righteous Branch, Jesus, to be our King, just like the prophets foretold.   Resources: Fields, Philip: Playing Follow the Leader in Bible Translation, 2019, by Phil Fields. See the Resources list in that article for many more helpful articles on the superiority of the Majority Greek Text.   Friberg, Timothy:  On the text of the Greek New Testament that also happens to be the right one for cousin audiences Although the title of this four-page paper refers to translating for Muslims, the principles and summary is widely applicable.  I suggest reading this paper before reading Friberg’s other articles listed below.   Layman’s Guide — A modest explanation for the layman of ideas related to determining the text of the Greek New Testament, 2019.   What is what? — Differences between the Traditional Text and the Bible Society Text of the Greek New Testament. Some data for the reader to weigh, 2019.   Pickering, Wilbur: New Translation of the New Testament: The Sovereign Creator has Spoken Greek Text of the New Testament based on Family 35   Articles and other major works: See PRUNCH.net. Robinson, Maurice: The New Testament in the Original Greek: Byzantine Textform, 1991, 2005, 2018.  This is available in free digital form in the MyBible Bible app, and in other ways.   Article: Full Text of the 105 verses lacking overall Greek Manuscript Support in the NA edition 27

#BibleStudy #ExpositoryPreaching #GrahamKing Titus Overview This epistle is named for its recipient, Titus, who is mentioned by name 13 times in the NT (1:4; Gal. 2:1,3; 2 Tim 4:10; for the 9 times in 2 Cor., see Background and Setting). The title in the Greek NT literally reads “To Titus.” Along with 1, 2 Timothy, these letters to Paul’s sons in the faith are traditionally called “The Pastoral Epistles.” Although Luke did not mention Titus by name in the book of Acts, it seems probable that Titus, a Gentile (Gal. 2:3), met and may have been led to faith in Christ by Paul (1:4) before or during the apostle’s first missionary journey. Later, Titus ministered for a period of time with Paul on the Island of Crete and was left behind to continue and strengthen the work (1:5). After Artemas or Tychicus (3:12) arrived to direct the ministry there, Paul wanted Titus to join him in the city of Nicopolis, in the province of Achaia in Greece, and stay through the winter (3:12). Because of his involvement with the church at Corinth during Paul’s third missionary journey, Titus is mentioned 9 times in 2 Corinthians (2:13; 7:6,13,14; 8:6,16,23; 12:18), where Paul refers to him as “my brother” (2:13) and “my partner and fellow worker” (8:23). The young elder was already familiar with Judaizers, false teachers in the church, who among other things insisted that all Christians, Gentile as well as Jew, were bound by the Mosaic law. Titus had accompanied Paul and Barnabas years earlier to the Council of Jerusalem where that heresy was the subject (Acts 15; Gal. 2:1–5). Crete, one of the largest islands in the Mediterranean Sea, measuring 160 miles long by 35 miles at its widest, lying south of the Aegean Sea, had been briefly visited by Paul on his voyage to Rome (Acts 27:7–9,12,13,21). He returned there for ministry and later left Titus to continue the work, much as he left Timothy at Ephesus (1 Tim. 1:3), while he went on to Macedonia. He most likely wrote to Titus in response to a letter from Titus or a report from Crete. About your Teacher - Graham King Graham, Marina and their 3 young children moved back to the UK, after 18 years of overseas ministry and church planting, in July 2017. Graham became the new pastor of PEFC and has brought a great blessing to the fellowship. He has been involved in missions and church planting since graduating from Bible college in 1993 and has been a pastor for over 20 years. Graham has been involved in 4 church plants through the years and has had extensive experience in all the different aspects of missions and church life. During his years in church ministry in Hungary he also was a full time Secondary School teacher and chaplain in an international Christian School in Budapest. With a deep love for The Word, the work and people of God, Graham now looks forward to many fruitful years, teaching the Bible, building up the church, ministering to people and watching lives changed through God’s amazing grace. 100s more resources available at https://exposittheword.com/ Audio used with permission from Graham King

#BibleStudy #ExpositoryPreaching #GrahamKing Titus Overview This epistle is named for its recipient, Titus, who is mentioned by name 13 times in the NT (1:4; Gal. 2:1,3; 2 Tim 4:10; for the 9 times in 2 Cor., see Background and Setting). The title in the Greek NT literally reads “To Titus.” Along with 1, 2 Timothy, these letters to Paul’s sons in the faith are traditionally called “The Pastoral Epistles.” Although Luke did not mention Titus by name in the book of Acts, it seems probable that Titus, a Gentile (Gal. 2:3), met and may have been led to faith in Christ by Paul (1:4) before or during the apostle’s first missionary journey. Later, Titus ministered for a period of time with Paul on the Island of Crete and was left behind to continue and strengthen the work (1:5). After Artemas or Tychicus (3:12) arrived to direct the ministry there, Paul wanted Titus to join him in the city of Nicopolis, in the province of Achaia in Greece, and stay through the winter (3:12). Because of his involvement with the church at Corinth during Paul’s third missionary journey, Titus is mentioned 9 times in 2 Corinthians (2:13; 7:6,13,14; 8:6,16,23; 12:18), where Paul refers to him as “my brother” (2:13) and “my partner and fellow worker” (8:23). The young elder was already familiar with Judaizers, false teachers in the church, who among other things insisted that all Christians, Gentile as well as Jew, were bound by the Mosaic law. Titus had accompanied Paul and Barnabas years earlier to the Council of Jerusalem where that heresy was the subject (Acts 15; Gal. 2:1–5). Crete, one of the largest islands in the Mediterranean Sea, measuring 160 miles long by 35 miles at its widest, lying south of the Aegean Sea, had been briefly visited by Paul on his voyage to Rome (Acts 27:7–9,12,13,21). He returned there for ministry and later left Titus to continue the work, much as he left Timothy at Ephesus (1 Tim. 1:3), while he went on to Macedonia. He most likely wrote to Titus in response to a letter from Titus or a report from Crete. About your Teacher - Graham King Graham, Marina and their 3 young children moved back to the UK, after 18 years of overseas ministry and church planting, in July 2017. Graham became the new pastor of PEFC and has brought a great blessing to the fellowship. He has been involved in missions and church planting since graduating from Bible college in 1993 and has been a pastor for over 20 years. Graham has been involved in 4 church plants through the years and has had extensive experience in all the different aspects of missions and church life. During his years in church ministry in Hungary he also was a full time Secondary School teacher and chaplain in an international Christian School in Budapest. With a deep love for The Word, the work and people of God, Graham now looks forward to many fruitful years, teaching the Bible, building up the church, ministering to people and watching lives changed through God’s amazing grace. 100s more resources available at https://exposittheword.com/ Audio used with permission from Graham King    

#BibleStudy #ExpositoryPreaching #GrahamKing Titus Overview This epistle is named for its recipient, Titus, who is mentioned by name 13 times in the NT (1:4; Gal. 2:1,3; 2 Tim 4:10; for the 9 times in 2 Cor., see Background and Setting). The title in the Greek NT literally reads “To Titus.” Along with 1, 2 Timothy, these letters to Paul’s sons in the faith are traditionally called “The Pastoral Epistles.” Although Luke did not mention Titus by name in the book of Acts, it seems probable that Titus, a Gentile (Gal. 2:3), met and may have been led to faith in Christ by Paul (1:4) before or during the apostle’s first missionary journey. Later, Titus ministered for a period of time with Paul on the Island of Crete and was left behind to continue and strengthen the work (1:5). After Artemas or Tychicus (3:12) arrived to direct the ministry there, Paul wanted Titus to join him in the city of Nicopolis, in the province of Achaia in Greece, and stay through the winter (3:12). Because of his involvement with the church at Corinth during Paul’s third missionary journey, Titus is mentioned 9 times in 2 Corinthians (2:13; 7:6,13,14; 8:6,16,23; 12:18), where Paul refers to him as “my brother” (2:13) and “my partner and fellow worker” (8:23). The young elder was already familiar with Judaizers, false teachers in the church, who among other things insisted that all Christians, Gentile as well as Jew, were bound by the Mosaic law. Titus had accompanied Paul and Barnabas years earlier to the Council of Jerusalem where that heresy was the subject (Acts 15; Gal. 2:1–5). Crete, one of the largest islands in the Mediterranean Sea, measuring 160 miles long by 35 miles at its widest, lying south of the Aegean Sea, had been briefly visited by Paul on his voyage to Rome (Acts 27:7–9,12,13,21). He returned there for ministry and later left Titus to continue the work, much as he left Timothy at Ephesus (1 Tim. 1:3), while he went on to Macedonia. He most likely wrote to Titus in response to a letter from Titus or a report from Crete. About your Teacher - Graham King Graham, Marina and their 3 young children moved back to the UK, after 18 years of overseas ministry and church planting, in July 2017. Graham became the new pastor of PEFC and has brought a great blessing to the fellowship. He has been involved in missions and church planting since graduating from Bible college in 1993 and has been a pastor for over 20 years. Graham has been involved in 4 church plants through the years and has had extensive experience in all the different aspects of missions and church life. During his years in church ministry in Hungary he also was a full time Secondary School teacher and chaplain in an international Christian School in Budapest. With a deep love for The Word, the work and people of God, Graham now looks forward to many fruitful years, teaching the Bible, building up the church, ministering to people and watching lives changed through God’s amazing grace. 100s more resources available at https://exposittheword.com/ Audio used with permission from Graham King

#BibleStudy #ExpositoryPreaching #GrahamKing Titus Overview This epistle is named for its recipient, Titus, who is mentioned by name 13 times in the NT (1:4; Gal. 2:1,3; 2 Tim 4:10; for the 9 times in 2 Cor., see Background and Setting). The title in the Greek NT literally reads “To Titus.” Along with 1, 2 Timothy, these letters to Paul’s sons in the faith are traditionally called “The Pastoral Epistles.” Although Luke did not mention Titus by name in the book of Acts, it seems probable that Titus, a Gentile (Gal. 2:3), met and may have been led to faith in Christ by Paul (1:4) before or during the apostle’s first missionary journey. Later, Titus ministered for a period of time with Paul on the Island of Crete and was left behind to continue and strengthen the work (1:5). After Artemas or Tychicus (3:12) arrived to direct the ministry there, Paul wanted Titus to join him in the city of Nicopolis, in the province of Achaia in Greece, and stay through the winter (3:12). Because of his involvement with the church at Corinth during Paul’s third missionary journey, Titus is mentioned 9 times in 2 Corinthians (2:13; 7:6,13,14; 8:6,16,23; 12:18), where Paul refers to him as “my brother” (2:13) and “my partner and fellow worker” (8:23). The young elder was already familiar with Judaizers, false teachers in the church, who among other things insisted that all Christians, Gentile as well as Jew, were bound by the Mosaic law. Titus had accompanied Paul and Barnabas years earlier to the Council of Jerusalem where that heresy was the subject (Acts 15; Gal. 2:1–5). Crete, one of the largest islands in the Mediterranean Sea, measuring 160 miles long by 35 miles at its widest, lying south of the Aegean Sea, had been briefly visited by Paul on his voyage to Rome (Acts 27:7–9,12,13,21). He returned there for ministry and later left Titus to continue the work, much as he left Timothy at Ephesus (1 Tim. 1:3), while he went on to Macedonia. He most likely wrote to Titus in response to a letter from Titus or a report from Crete. About your Teacher - Graham King Graham, Marina and their 3 young children moved back to the UK, after 18 years of overseas ministry and church planting, in July 2017. Graham became the new pastor of PEFC and has brought a great blessing to the fellowship. He has been involved in missions and church planting since graduating from Bible college in 1993 and has been a pastor for over 20 years. Graham has been involved in 4 church plants through the years and has had extensive experience in all the different aspects of missions and church life. During his years in church ministry in Hungary he also was a full time Secondary School teacher and chaplain in an international Christian School in Budapest. With a deep love for The Word, the work and people of God, Graham now looks forward to many fruitful years, teaching the Bible, building up the church, ministering to people and watching lives changed through God’s amazing grace. 100s more resources available at https://exposittheword.com/ Audio used with permission from Graham King

This episode provides you with the facts to defend your faith in the preservation and accuracy of the scriptures. You probably have been confronted by non-believers with statements like "the New Testament is full of 400,000 errors" or "your copy of Exodus is nothing like what Moses wrote over 3,000 years ago." Listen in as I give you an introductory knowledge to be able to give an answer for your faith in the reliability of God's Word.SHOW NOTESOLD TESTAMENT PRESERVATIONAncient Near East Scribal practicesRabbinic tradition for copying the Torah as described in the Talmud: Takes about 2,000 hours to write a TorahThe scribe must be an adult, male Jew who has undergone special training and certification.The parchment must be prepared from specified animal hides. No metal can be used in the making of a Torah because metal was used in warfare.The scribe may not write even one letter into a Torah Scroll by heart. Rather, he must have a second, kosher scroll opened before him at all times.The scribe must pronounce every word out loud before copying it from the correct text.A Torah Scroll is non-kosher if even a single letter is added or deleted.there isn’t sufficient white space surrounding a lettera single letter was so marred that it isn’t legible to a childthere isn’t enough space between two words or if one word can be mistaken for twoA Torah Scroll in which any mistake has been found, cannot be used, and must be fixed within 30 days, or buried so that it cannot be referenced.A Torah scroll that has deteriorated must be buried so that the damaged scroll cannot be used to create a new scroll and thus have the possibility of an error being transmitted.Dead sea scrollsIncludes portions of every single OT book except EstherInclude a complete text of Isaiah Dated to at approx 125 years before Christ95% in agreement to the next oldest version of Isaiah (1000 year difference) with most of the variations spelling or grammatical correctionsSome secular scholars state that the Dead Sea scrolls demonstrate that the OT was fluid until the time of Christ. I’m not a Hebrew scholar, but the conservative scholars demonstrate that the OT followed the Masoretic tradition and was not fluid. See the thesis link in the resources.NEW TESTAMENT PRESERVATIONThe earliest manuscripts Fragments of at least 11 manuscripts date to the second century.More complete manuscripts of entire books of the NT are available starting in the second and third centuries.The earliest copies of a book containing both the OT and NT are from about 450 AD.The abundance of manuscriptsThe are 25,000+ early manuscripts of various languages. About 5,600 of these are in Greek and about 10,000 are in Latin.Aristotle’s Poetics has only 5 manuscripts copied 1,400 years after the original.Homer’s poetry is the closest to the NT with less than 2,400 copies in various languages with the oldest manuscript over 400 years after he first wrote.Early church fathers quoted the NT extensively: more than a million quotes with an estimate of being able to recreate 95% of the NT from the quotes.The accuracy of manuscripts400,000 variants by the modern count.Most of the variants are simple grammar or spelling changes. There are only about 400-600 variants that can affect translation into another language.One scholar estimates that only 50 of these 400-600 are significant for consideration. There are over 138,000 words in the Greek NT, so those 50 variants make up less than 1% of our NT.Bibliography:“Accuracy

The purpose of this podcast is to announce my short paper telling why I support the Byzantine Greek Text (BT) as the most accurate representation of what the apostles wrote. This has been a major decision for me, because it means that my translation team and I will revise our published Indonesian New Testament by they year 2022. Here’s the link. You will not be able to see the footnotes in this text, so I have attached a PDF file as Bonus Content for this podcast. In order to see it, you will probably need to visit dailybiblereading.info and find this episode. I was not interested, and not even open, to considering the Byzantine Greek text over the ET (Eclectic Text//United Bible Societies Text/Nestle-Aland Text) until I went to meet Dr. Timothy Friberg, who also has worked in Indonesia for as long as I have. Dr. Friberg is the genius who compiled the Analytical Greek New Testament (AGNT), first published in 1985. The AGNT provides more helpful and accurate grammatical parsing of the NT Greek text because it is based on careful linguistic analysis, rather than the traditional Latin-derived parsing. It is therefore used by a majority of trained Bible translators and many others. When Friberg talks about anything having to do with Greek grammar, then people really should listen. He is the one who convinced me about the Byzantine Greek text being the best one, and the best one for us to translate for all audiences. But especially for someone working in Indonesia, it is so much better to use the Byzantine Text. Here’s why: Muslims believe that their Al-Koran has been unchanged through the centuries, and that the Christian Bible (particularly the New Testament) has been fiddled with.  Their belief in the immutability of the Al-Koran is actually incorrect, but they have ample proof that the NT has been fiddled with, because they can point to words taken out of our Bibles in the last 120 years. In contrast, the BT has been stable through the centuries. It includes most of the words that readers familiar with the KJV miss in modern translations, and it can be translated without the need of any footnotes talking about textual variants. I have written a short article (linked here in the episode notes) that outlines how the shift happened to translating the ET rather than a better Greek text. I hope that some of my listeners will be interested in that story. Here are a few teaser facts: About 120 years ago, Christians were told that earlier manuscripts penned on papyrus and preserved in the dry climate of Egypt (especially around the library center in Alexandria) more likely revealed the authentic form of the words penned by the apostles. Subsequent manuscript finds and analysis over the next century did NOT support the claims that manuscripts of the Alexandrian type form a stream that consistently points to the most authentic text of the NT. What research showed is that Alexandrian manuscripts show sloppy and wild variations because Egyptian copyists freely redacted the texts they copied. Wescott and Hort published their Greek NT in 1881. It was based on only two Alexandrian texts, Vaticanus and Sinaiticus. Successive editions were published by Eberhard Nestle (beginning in 1898), who was followed by his son, then Kurt Aland (in the 1950s). All these editions prioritized Alexandrian manuscripts. These editions are known by various names, and I will refer to them as the Eclectic Text. Even though many textual discoveries were documented in successive editions, those discoveries were largely relegated to abstruce footnotes, and the main text still very much followed what Wescott and Hort published. The Christian public was not made aware about the wild variations discovered in Alexandrian manuscripts. It has been conclusively shown that Alexandrian copyists shortened the texts they copied. They did the same thing with Homer’s poems. Sometimes more than one variant are found in one or two verses of the Greek text. I was further convinced about the flawed nature of the ET when I found out that it displays 105 verses where the combinations of variants chosen are not represented in any extant manuscript. Or if we widen that to two consecutive verses in the ET, we find a further 210 two-verse combinations that are not found in any extant manuscript. An example in a single verse occurs in John 5:2 where no manuscript has been found anywhere that contains the name spelled ‘Bethzatha’ and the exact form of the Greek translated as ‘at the sheep gate’. To me, the presence of three hundred and fifteen unsupported combinations represents a fatal flaw in the principles used in compiling the ET. By contrast, the Byzantine Text has stayed stable throughout the centuries. Byzantine manuscripts predominately were found in the wide area which received the original letters written by the apostles, places like Antioch, Rome, Corinth, Ephesus, etc. 95% of the manuscripts containing NT books or fragments or them are of the BT type. This is why the BT is also called the Majority Text. It seems that a majority of ancient copyists believed that this was the text to pass on to following generations, and Alexandrian renderings died out. Some of you will have heard about the Textus Receptus, which is the 1516 Greek text compiled by Erasmus that became the basis of the KJV NT. In my article I show briefly why the BT is far superior to the Textus Receptus. Just as succeeding editions of the ET basically played ‘follow the leader’ since Wescott and Hort’s 1881 publication, so modern translations have played ‘follow the leader’ since the American Standard Version (ASV) of 1901. Translations that followed ASV’s lead include RSV, NASB, GNT, NIV, CEV, NLT, NET, and ESV. The prefaces of all these translations claim that the translators were following the ET, but in reality all of these only followed it around 72% of the time. In doing this, it is clear that the translators took the lazy and safe path, rather than themselves examining the textual evidence. There is no evidence that the ASV translators were super-scholars who made consistently excellent decisions about the Greek text. They (or some of them) played it safe and went with KJV-like readings in some places, but then seemingly by whim they (or others of them) went with poorly-supported textual variants in other places that were sure to anger readers— like leaving out words from the Lord’s Prayer. One after another, succeeding generations of translators of newer translations have simply following the lead of the previous popular translations, all the while keeping up an appearance of scholarship by including misleading footnotes that say, “Some manuscripts add the words …” By not following the their declared Greek text consistently, all the translators of the above listed Bibles have shown that they really did not respect the ET to be faithfully showing the content of the original autographs. If Bible translators don’t follow the ET faithfully, then what justification can be found to claim that it is the best available representation of what the apostles wrote? What Greek text will we, the Christian public, choose to follow? It doesn’t make sense to create a new edition of the Greek text based on what translators have actually translated since 1901! The assertions above are supported by hard evidence in my January 2019 article: Playing ‘Follow the Leader’ in Bible Translation. The Eclectic Text is basically dead. One might compare it to the theory of evolution. Experts from multiple scientific disciplines have repeatedly announced that evolution can no longer be maintained as a viable theory. (And many of the scientists are scratching their heads as to how to replace it, because they absolutely will not entertain returning to believing in the creation of the world.) In a similar way, seminary professors who have long taught the superiority of earlier Alexandrian manuscripts are not even open to looking at articles that might change their view. Someone has observed that just when a popular theory or philosophy has lost logical credibility, that is just when people become more bone headed about it. I hate to say it, but support for the BT will need to come from ordinary conservative Christians who care about God’s Word and His reputation, and who are willing to look at the evidence. In my article, I discuss English translations of the BT. The most available literal translation of the BT is the World English Bible, and I prefer the British Edition. Unfortunately, I find that there is no translation of the BT done in a more meaning-based manner. There is no BT-based version like the NIV or the NLT. My firm belief is that every believer should have access to at least one good literal translation and one good meaning-based translation. When a literal translation leaves the reader wondering if their understanding of a verse is correct, they need to be able to open a meaning-based translation to find their answer. ALL the false cults that have ever sprung up from the year 1600 to the present based their teaching on literal translations where the meaning of their favorite passages was hard to understand and open to multiple interpretations. My particular desire is to allow for meaningful audio recordings of a New Testament translated from the BT. Literal translations from ancient Greek cannot ever express things in a natural and easy-to-understand way in modern English. The two languages are too different. As someone who has made two complete recordings of the whole Bible, I refuse to record a verse in a translation where I know that the listener who is not following the written text will misunderstand it. That’s why my podcast notes give little tweaks I have made to even the GNT and NLT. If there is a group out there currently trying to make a good readable, meaning-based translation of the BT, I want to join them. If no group or organization has started to do this, then I will start and I call on interested parties to join me. So starting next year, I want to make a series of podcasts reading the results. I hope that this modest beginning will lead to more faithful Bible translations for the Christian public in the future. Please pray for this effort.

The purpose of this podcast is to announce my short paper telling why I support the Byzantine Greek Text (BT) as the most accurate representation of what the apostles wrote. This has been a major decision for me, because it means that my translation team and I will revise our published Indonesian New Testament by they year 2022. Here’s the link. The episode notes viewable here do not contain the footnotes and other special formatting. I have attached PDF file with this episode. If your podcast player does not show you the PDF, please look for this episode at dailygntbiblereading.info. I was not interested, and not even open, to considering the Byzantine Greek text over the ET (Eclectic Text//United Bible Societies Text/Nestle-Aland Text) until I went to meet Dr. Timothy Friberg, who also has worked in Indonesia for as long as I have. Dr. Friberg is the genius who compiled the Analytical Greek New Testament (AGNT), first published in 1985. The AGNT provides more helpful and accurate grammatical parsing of the NT Greek text because it is based on careful linguistic analysis, rather than the traditional Latin-derived parsing. It is therefore used by a majority of trained Bible translators and many others. When Friberg talks about anything having to do with Greek grammar, then people really should listen. He is the one who convinced me about the Byzantine Greek text being the best one, and the best one for us to translate for all audiences. But especially for someone working in Indonesia, it is so much better to use the Byzantine Text. Here’s why: Muslims believe that their Al-Koran has been unchanged through the centuries, and that the Christian Bible (particularly the New Testament) has been fiddled with.  Their belief in the immutability of the Al-Koran is actually incorrect, but they have ample proof that the NT has been fiddled with, because they can point to words taken out of our Bibles in the last 120 years. In contrast, the BT has been stable through the centuries. It includes most of the words that readers familiar with the KJV miss in modern translations, and it can be translated without the need of any footnotes talking about textual variants. I have written a short article (linked here in the episode notes) that outlines how the shift happened to translating the ET rather than a better Greek text. I hope that some of my listeners will be interested in that story. Here are a few teaser facts: About 120 years ago, Christians were told that earlier manuscripts penned on papyrus and preserved in the dry climate of Egypt (especially around the library center in Alexandria) more likely revealed the authentic form of the words penned by the apostles. Subsequent manuscript finds and analysis over the next century did NOT support the claims that manuscripts of the Alexandrian type form a stream that consistently points to the most authentic text of the NT. What research showed is that Alexandrian manuscripts show sloppy and wild variations because Egyptian copyists freely redacted the texts they copied. Wescott and Hort published their Greek NT in 1881. It was based on only two Alexandrian texts, Vaticanus and Sinaiticus. Successive editions were published by Eberhard Nestle (beginning in 1898), who was followed by his son, then Kurt Aland (in the 1950s). All these editions prioritized Alexandrian manuscripts. These editions are known by various names, and I will refer to them as the Eclectic Text. Even though many textual discoveries were documented in successive editions, those discoveries were largely relegated to abstruce footnotes, and the main text still very much followed what Wescott and Hort published. The Christian public was not made aware about the wild variations discovered in Alexandrian manuscripts. It has been conclusively shown that Alexandrian copyists shortened the texts they copied. They did the same thing with Homer’s poems. Sometimes more than one variant are found in one or two verses of the Greek text. I was further convinced about the flawed nature of the ET when I found out that it displays 105 verses where the combinations of variants chosen are not represented in any extant manuscript. Or if we widen that to two consecutive verses in the ET, we find a further 210 two-verse combinations that are not found in any extant manuscript. An example in a single verse occurs in John 5:2 where no manuscript has been found anywhere that contains the name spelled ‘Bethzatha’ and the exact form of the Greek translated as ‘at the sheep gate’. To me, the presence of three hundred and fifteen unsupported combinations represents a fatal flaw in the principles used in compiling the ET. By contrast, the Byzantine Text has stayed stable throughout the centuries. Byzantine manuscripts predominately were found in the wide area which received the original letters written by the apostles, places like Antioch, Rome, Corinth, Ephesus, etc. 95% of the manuscripts containing NT books or fragments or them are of the BT type. This is why the BT is also called the Majority Text. It seems that a majority of ancient copyists believed that this was the text to pass on to following generations, and Alexandrian renderings died out. Some of you will have heard about the Textus Receptus, which is the 1516 Greek text compiled by Erasmus that became the basis of the KJV NT. In my article I show briefly why the BT is far superior to the Textus Receptus. Just as succeeding editions of the ET basically played ‘follow the leader’ since Wescott and Hort’s 1881 publication, so modern translations have played ‘follow the leader’ since the American Standard Version (ASV) of 1901. Translations that followed ASV’s lead include RSV, NASB, GNT, NIV, CEV, NLT, NET, and ESV. The prefaces of all these translations claim that the translators were following the ET, but in reality all of these only followed it around 72% of the time. In doing this, it is clear that the translators took the lazy and safe path, rather than themselves examining the textual evidence. There is no evidence that the ASV translators were super-scholars who made consistently excellent decisions about the Greek text. They (or some of them) played it safe and went with KJV-like readings in some places, but then seemingly by whim they (or others of them) went with poorly-supported textual variants in other places that were sure to anger readers— like leaving out words from the Lord’s Prayer. One after another, succeeding generations of translators of newer translations have simply following the lead of the previous popular translations, all the while keeping up an appearance of scholarship by including misleading footnotes that say, “Some manuscripts add the words …” By not following the their declared Greek text consistently, all the translators of the above listed Bibles have shown that they really did not respect the ET to be faithfully showing the content of the original autographs. If Bible translators don’t follow the ET faithfully, then what justification can be found to claim that it is the best available representation of what the apostles wrote? What Greek text will we, the Christian public, choose to follow? It doesn’t make sense to create a new edition of the Greek text based on what translators have actually translated since 1901! The assertions above are supported by hard evidence in my January 2019 article: Playing ‘Follow the Leader’ in Bible Translation. The Eclectic Text is basically dead. One might compare it to the theory of evolution. Experts from multiple scientific disciplines have repeatedly announced that evolution can no longer be maintained as a viable theory. (And many of the scientists are scratching their heads as to how to replace it, because they absolutely will not entertain returning to believing in the creation of the world.) In a similar way, seminary professors who have long taught the superiority of earlier Alexandrian manuscripts are not even open to looking at articles that might change their view. Someone has observed that just when a popular theory or philosophy has lost logical credibility, that is just when people become more bone headed about it. I hate to say it, but support for the BT will need to come from ordinary conservative Christians who care about God’s Word and His reputation, and who are willing to look at the evidence. In my article, I discuss English translations of the BT. The most available literal translation of the BT is the World English Bible, and I prefer the British Edition. Unfortunately, I find that there is no translation of the BT done in a more meaning-based manner. There is no BT-based version like the NIV or the NLT. My firm belief is that every believer should have access to at least one good literal translation and one good meaning-based translation. When a literal translation leaves the reader wondering if their understanding of a verse is correct, they need to be able to open a meaning-based translation to find their answer. ALL the false cults that have ever sprung up from the year 1600 to the present based their teaching on literal translations where the meaning of their favorite passages was hard to understand and open to multiple interpretations. My particular desire is to allow for meaningful audio recordings of a New Testament translated from the BT. Literal translations from ancient Greek cannot ever express things in a natural and easy-to-understand way in modern English. The two languages are too different. As someone who has made two complete recordings of the whole Bible, I refuse to record a verse in a translation where I know that the listener who is not following the written text will misunderstand it. That’s why my podcast notes give little tweaks I have made to even the GNT and NLT. If there is a group out there currently trying to make a good readable, meaning-based translation of the BT, I want to join them. If no group or organization has started to do this, then I will start and I call on interested parties to join me. So starting next year, I want to make a series of podcasts reading the results. I hope that this modest beginning will lead to more faithful Bible translations for the Christian public in the future. Please pray for this effort.

Romans 5:1-2 ‘Therefore, having been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom also we have access by faith into this grace in which we stand, and rejoice in hope of the glory of God.’ I awoke last Monday with this extraordinary truth from Romans 5 going around and around in my mind—‘We have access by faith into this grace in which we stand.’ The emphasis was ‘in which we stand.’ It was a word in season—and, being who I am, I felt like preaching it! Well, what do you know? Now, when we see a ‘therefore’ in scripture we must ask, “what is the ‘therefore’ there for?” Here, Paul has just concluding a long argument about Abraham being put in right standing with God, not by Law, but because he believed what God told him. His concluding word before this ‘therefore’, is about Jesus, ‘…who was delivered up for our offences and was raised for our justification’ (Rom. 4:25. Our justification took place when the Father showed his acceptance of Jesus’ death by raising him up). So Paul writes, ‘THEREFORE, having been justified.’ What Paul is leading to is our qualifications in Jesus. In him, you qualify for Peace: you qualify to be established and you qualify to hold your head high—even to boast! I want to unpack these. My question is: Are you standing in all the benefit for which he has already qualified you? Advancing in this temporal world’s terms is usually about qualifications. Do you have the HSC? Have you a University degree or Diploma? Do you have a Master’s or a PhD? Where did you do your training? How much experience have you had? What qualifies you for this job? All of these qualifications require effort on your part. They are qualifications based on your works. But what about the satisfaction of a qualification that comes, not by your work but by that of someone else? It would be counted ridiculous if someone applied for a job requiring an MBA and the applicant said, “Look, I don’t have one, but my older brother said I could use his.” That’s how it is for us! Just as earthly, earned qualifications open doors, so do these ‘graced’ qualifications. An earned qualification carries certain rights and benefits—not to mention authority to carry out its requirements within a discipline or task. The employer puts at the disposal of the qualified person, all that is necessary to perform the brief, and certain privileges also apply. In our case, we have been qualified by grace, and some, not understanding that, continue to act as though unworthy and so try to earn what they’ve been given! This passage could read like this, “having been already honoured with your qualification of right standing with God, you are free to go ahead by faith and enjoy his peace of integration (as distinct from disintegration) and to access your entitlements to stand erect and be established in all that accrues as a result of your new position, including head-held-high confidence in it!” (This is the meaning of the Greek words used by Paul). The verb ‘justified’ is Aorist, Passive, meaning it happened at a moment in time—and you weren’t active in its occurrence, it happened to you. You were passive! Because it happened at the Resurrection 2000 years ago! I was put into right standing with God 2000 years ago with (and in) the resurrection of Jesus! I was there! You were there! In him! I’m suggesting that (without forcing scripture), the text of Romans 5:1 be read this way with the comma after ‘justified’ thus— “…having been justified,…. by faith (let us) have peace with God…” Note this: the weight of manuscript evidence actually says, ‘let us have peace with God.’ (Young’s Literal Translation allows this). YOU’VE BEEN QUALIFIED FOR PEACE: Listen again ‘… by faith we have peace with God…” Peace here is eirene, the Greek NT equivalent of Hebrew shalom—satisfaction, completion, fullness. I’ve shared before that biblically, ‘peace’ means fullness or satisfaction in the sense of completing something (shalom=completeness, wholeness, as in the satisfaction of a debt—bringing it to peace). The completion, by effort, of a course of study or training, brings satisfaction and ‘peace’ and people say, “well done… having completed your degree, you now qualify for this job, or this pay level, or this responsibility.” But in our case, we’ve been made qualified by Another! Peace with God has been secured. It is now ours to enjoy….by faith! Let me ask this: are you there today…now? Or is there a foment of anxiety and stress and thoughts of ‘what if this’ or ‘what if that’? or ‘why not that?’ He is saying today— “By faith we have peace”: “by faith we have peace”: “by faith we have peace”. We’ve been qualified for it. He has already secured it for us and we must enter it—or throw back at him all that he did on the cross and in the resurrection (See John 14:1 and 27 etc). YOU’VE BEEN QUALIFIED TO STAND—ERECT: (Rom. 5:2) ‘Through whom also we have access by faith into this grace in which we stand.’ Stand here is HISTEMI, to take a stand, to be established! Listen—we once were fallen, but now we stand! Now we are, by faith, being established…in Grace! (Remember Ezekiel’s vision of the valley of dry bones that were, at the word of the Lord, given flesh and sinews and breath—and stood as a great army!?) We are very different people with vastly different personalities, natures, thought processes, cultures (macro and micro) as well as widely differing gifts and callings. However, the thing we share in common as believers, is that we have been qualified to STAND, by faith in our full personhood in him. That’s why I can be me and you can be you—in Christ. We need not ever say, ‘why can’t I be like her?’—unless in a matter of sanctification or likeness to Jesus. He did not make you to be like her or him: he made you to be the sanctified, fully-operative ‘you’! Unique…and that’s the journey of this life, the journey he has you taking, into the fullness of you in Him. (His desire is ‘to present you, faultless’! Jude 1:24). My task today is to encourage you in that journey into ‘you-hood’ in Christ! The YOU, you may have been waiting to meet. The ever-emerging You, being transformed day-to-day by the activity of Christ in you (the hope of glory). Accessing by faith the grace in which you have been qualified to stand! YOU’VE BEEN QUALIFIED TO HOLD YOUR HEAD HIGH & EXULT: Yes, that’s right! “…we have access by faith into this grace in which we stand AND confidently exult in hope of the glory of God.’ Unashamedly rejoice. This is also by faith—Paul is just continuing the sentence! This is another ‘by faith’ blessing for which we’ve been qualified! Some translations have ‘boast’; some have ‘exult.’ The Greek verb (kauchaomai) means to have our ‘head held high’ and even ‘to boast’, to live with God-given confidence! Remember how Paul said, ‘most gladly will I boast in my infirmities.’ That’s the same word. Not only have we been qualified to stand, but to do so with head held high, unabashed confidence (not diffidence or apology), glorifying Jesus—unashamedly rejoicing in him. Jesus, 2000 years ago qualified you to have PEACE; to BE ESTABLSHED; TO HOLD YOUR HEAD HIGH, UNABASHED! BY FAITH! Ian Heard, 13/01/19 www.until-we-see.com

A rambling discussion on the gnostic gospels, Greek NT manuscripts, Masoretic vs Septuagint OT and more...

Rimon Armaly is a professor & Christian leader known for his preaching and teaching ministry in churches, conferences, and the college classroom. He has been active in Christian ministry since 1992 and has served as an associate pastor, conference speaker, Bible college professor, and also an evangelist. He earned a Diploma from Elim Bible Institute in 1996, a Bachelors of Arts from Nyack College in 2011 in “Biblical and Theological Studies: majoring in Greek NT, and a Masters of Arts in “Biblical and Ancient Near Eastern Languages & Archaeology” in 2014 from Trinity International University, Deerfield IL. If you are […]

This is Part 2 of my discussion with Dr. Charles Lee Irons on the issue of Theonomy.  Enjoy the show! You can find more of Dr. Irons' work on his blog: http://www.upper-register.com/ In this episode, he will specifically mention these two papers: http://www.upper-register.com/papers/1788_theonomy.pdf http://www.upper-register.com/papers/1788_revision.pdf Here is a link to his latest book that I HIGHLY recommend to any student of the Greek NT: https://www.amazon.com/Syntax-Guide-Readers-Greek-Testament/dp/0825443822/

This is Part 1 of my discussion with Dr. Charles Lee Irons on the issue of Theonomy.  Enjoy the show! You can find more of Dr. Irons' work on his blog: http://www.upper-register.com/ In Part 2 he will specifically mention these two papers: http://www.upper-register.com/papers/1788_theonomy.pdf http://www.upper-register.com/papers/1788_revision.pdf Here is a link to his latest book that I HIGHLY recommend to any student of the Greek NT: https://www.amazon.com/Syntax-Guide-Readers-Greek-Testament/dp/0825443822/

How did we get the New Testament? This episode is in response to listener requests. Mike and Trey interview Rick Brannan, the information specialist for Greek New Testament products and databases at Logos Bible Software, about how we got the New Testament, the KJV-only idea, and conspiratorial views about the history and transmission of the […]

[Basic: Accordance 10] The latest free update of Accordance 10, Accordance 10.2, offers users a number of exciting new features. The podcast covers two of them: 1) Combined Text allows users to combine two texts, like a Hebrew OT and a Greek NT, in a single parallel pane; and 2) The MT-LXX Interlinear displays the LXX under any tagged Hebrew Bible—and the Masoretic text under any Greek LXX. Join Dr. J as he explains these two new features.

The History of the NT Greek Canon. Papyrus was mostly used for more ancient books. It survived in warm, dry climates such as the Middle East, but became frail after repeated use. Parchment or vellum, which became more used in the 4th century, was made from the skins of cattle, sheep, goats, antelopes, and was much more durable than papyrus, but more expensive. At the close of the first century A.D. the codex or leaf form of book, came into use in the Church. This is the form of book that we have today. Majuscules or Uncials were all capitol letters without spaces or punctuation. This was beautifully done in very old manuscripts and eliminated errors due to handwriting styles. Minuscule was a script type of writing using lower case letters. Since the minuscule handwriting made books cheaper, they were more available to people with limited means. Greek manuscripts fall into these two major groups (majuscule or minuscule), having subgroups of being written on either papyri or parchment. Either material was used interchangeably depending on cost. In English for example it would read: GODISNOWHERE. In the 4th century, when Rome received Christianity, scriptoria were established to produce copies of the NT. Therefore, just because a manuscript is older, that does not mean that it's necessarily more accurate. God chose to preserve the NT by the very number of man's mistakes. In other words, the mistakes preserve the original text. There are over 5700 manuscripts catalogued of parts of the NT alone. Each having small differences, then the number of variants becomes high, however, by comparison of them all, the variants become quite clear and a wonderful rendering of the original text is possible. Wescott and Hort indicated that about one eighth of the variants had any weight, the rest being trivial. Philip Schaff estimated that there were only 400 variants that affected the sense of the passage, and only 50 of these were important. Dr. A.T. Robertson, the greatest of Greek scholars, indicated that of real concern regarding textual variants amounted to but “a thousandth part of the entire text.” Four categories: Papyri………….116 Majuscules …….310 Minuscules……..2877 Lectionary………2432 5735 Codex Sinaiticus At the age of nineteen, young Count Koinstantin von Tischendorf amazed his professors with his fluent knowledge of the classical languages and his knowledge of history. This is how Tischendorf dis­covered the 129 pages of what is today known as the Codex sinaiticus, or the Codex Aleph. Codex Sinaiticus is still one of the finest and most accurate texts available to us today, and it became the basis of many revisions and corrections of earlier editions of the Bible. Actually, Codex Vaticanus, also known as Codex B was known to be some fifteen years older than Codex Sinaiticus (Codex Aleph). Vaticanus dated back to 325 or 350 A.D., and had probably been brought from the East by Pope Nicholas in 1448. In 1809, when Napoleon exiled the Pope, it took about fifty wagons to transport the Pope's library. Tregelles, another great scholar and friend of Tischendorf's, decided to investigate the Codex Vaticanus in the Vatican library. A third very interesting manuscript, which very few people knew about, is the Codex Alexandrinus. This Greek language manuscript had been written about 450 A.D. in Alexandria, Egypt. In 1621, when Cyril Lucar became the Patriarch of the Greek Orthodox Church, he transferred the manuscript to Constantinople. The beautiful document, Codex Alexandrinus, was presented at court in 1627, just fifteen years after the King James Version of the Bible had been completed. The first thing that was printed was Jerome's Latin Vulgate as it was the most popular Bible translation at the time, although by then Bibles had been printed in several languages of Europe. No Greek NT had been “printed” until 1514 and was called the Complutensian Polygot. It was a magnificent edition of Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek and Latin texts. 600 were printed, of which 97 are preserved today. However, the first Greek NT to be published (put on the market) was an edition prepared by the famous Dutch scholar Desiderius Erasmus in 1516. Erasmus could not find a Greek manuscript that contained the entire NT. He used about a half dozen different, incomplete copies of the Greek NT. For most of the text he relied on two rather inferior manuscripts from a monastic library at Basle, one of the Gospels and one of Acts and the Epistles, both dating from the 12th century. Said of this first edition, owing to the haste in production, the volume contains hundreds of typographical errors. Said of this first edition: “It is in that respect the most faulty book I know.” (Scrivener) Erasmus made a second edition which became the basis for Luther's German translation. Corrections were made but the text was still only based on a half-dozen Greek manuscripts. Further editions were made for a total of five editions in all by 1535. The text of Erasmus' Greek NT rests upon a half-dozen miniscule Greek manuscripts. The oldest and best of these (codex 1, a miniscule of the 10th century) he used the least because he was afraid of its supposedly erratic text. It is Erasmus' text (Textus Receptus: Received Text) that is the basis of the 1611 King James Version. This is not to say that the KJV is a terrible translation, but it is flawed as any other translation and it is not as good as RSV, NIV, or NASB etc. ROM 8:1 There is therefore now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus, who walk not after the flesh, but after the Spirit. KJV ROM 8:4 That the righteousness of the law might be fulfilled in us, who walk not after the flesh, but after the Spirit. KJV After Erasmus thousands of manuscripts of the Greek NT have been discovered as well as other ancient Greek texts that have aided in our understanding of the Koine Greek. In fact the 26th edition of the Nestle-Aland Greek NT was published separately from the United Bible Societies' Greek NT. Without communicating and by using different critical methods the two editions are identical. 5735 Greek manuscripts discovered and criticized over hundreds of years have reproduced God's original Word to the writers of Scripture within 99.999% accuracy. Grace Bible Church Basic Training in Doctrine April 8, 2008 Canonicity Definition, Origin, and the OT. Definiton: Canonicity is derived from the Greek word “kanon” which originally meant a rod or a ruler – hence a measuring stick or a norm. The canon of Scripture is the divine absolute standard of God's revelation to mankind. Argument: We don't have any of the originals and the originals have been copied over and over so there are bound to be mistakes. Answer: True Argument: The Bible was written by men and not God. Answer: True. But over 40 different writers who wrote over a period of 1,500 years are in exact agreement about types, antitypes, prophecies, fulfillment of prophecies, timelines, stories, and history, and all without a single glitch. God the Holy Spirit so directed the writers of Scripture that without changing their personality, their vocabulary, their frame of reference, God's complete message to mankind was recorded in their own language and vernacular. This is the doctrine of inspiration. The Bible is not human viewpoint, but it is the Holy Spirit's use of human agencies to record God's complete revelation to mankind through mankind. The Origin of the Scriptures: The Bible was inspired by God and it is now complete. REV 22:18 I testify to everyone who hears the words of the prophecy of this book : if anyone adds to them, God shall add to him the plagues which are written in this book; 1 Cor 2:10 For to us God revealed them through the Spirit; for the Spirit searches all things, even the depths of God 1 Cor 2:16 For who has known the mind of the Lord, that he should instruct Him? But we have the mind of Christ. When we turn to the decree of Artaxerxes, made in his twentieth year, NEH 2:1-8, for the first time is permission granted to rebuild the city of Jerusalem. This prophecy fulfills the conditions of DAN 9:25 Therefore, 69 weeks of prophetic years of 360 days (69 x 7 x 360 = 173,880 days) = 173,880 days. After this many days, from March 14th B.C. 445, one would arrive at the 6th of April, A.D. 32. Luke 19:42 “If you, even you, had only known on this day what would bring you peace-but now it is hidden from your eyes. (NIV) The Old Testament For instance the original Greek of John 1:1 is as follows: Now look at an OT verse in the Hebrew: à áÌÀøÅàùÑÄéú, áÌÈøÈà àÁìÉäÄéí, àÅú äÇùÌÑÈîÇéÄí, åÀàÅú äÈàÈøÆõ. In 280 B.C. 72 Alexandrian scholars got together and produced an amazingly accurate translation. This was called the Septuagint or “the Seventy” in honor of the translators. : The Bible was originally written in Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek, although only a handful of chapters were written in Aramaic Unlike the NT, the OT scriptures were kept among one people, the Jews, for centuries. Outside of the Septuagint it remained in Hebrew, was kept among people who spoke the same language, and the Jews were well trained copyists and preservers of the OT Originally the OT was divided into 3 parts: The Torah, the Prophets, and the Writings The Torah or the Pentateuch consists of Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy The second group, the Nabhim or Prophets which are split into two categories; the Former Prophets (before the Babylonian captivity) and the Latter prophets (after the Babylonian captivity). There are four books in each category. The three Major Prophets are Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel The Minor Prophets, which we divide into 12 separate books, are all one in the Hebrew Bible, called the Twelve. Apart from Daniel “The Twelve” includes everything from Hosea to Malachi The third section of the Hebrew OT is called the Kethubim or “The Writings.” This was divided into 3 sections, The Poetical Books, The Five Rolls (also called the Megilloth), and The Historical Books. Lastly there are the three Historical Books at the end of the Hebrew Canon: Daniel, Ezra and Nehemiah (one book), and Chronicles. Therefore, the Hebrew OT contains 24 books compared to our 39 This endorsement of Scripture takes us from GEN 4:10 (the first book) to 2CH 24:20-21 (the last book in the OT Canon) The Apocrypha are books written after the close of the OT Canon in 425 B.C. The word Apocrypha means hidden or secret. Their addition was an attempt by the devil to infiltrate God's Truth. The Apocrypha teaches: Prayers and offerings for the dead (2 Macc 12:41-46). Suicide is justified (2 Macc 14:41-46). Salvation by giving money (Tobit 4:11). Cruelty to slaves (Ecclesiasticus 33:25-29). The soul is produced by parents (Wisdom 8:19-20).

This episode of CS is titled Erasmus.As we begin, I once again want to do a brief, and I promise it will be brief, summary of the threads that conspired to weave the tapestry of the Reformation. Others might refer to them less as threads that weaved a tapestry as those that frayed in the unravelling of the Church caused by a pack of trouble-makers. The reason I'm compelled to do all this summarizing is because of the massive sea-change coming in our study and the need to understand it wasn't just some malcontents who woke up one day and decided to bail on a healthy church. Things had been bad for a long time and the call for reform had been heard for a couple hundred years.The Western European Church of the 14th and 15th C's experienced a major crisis of authority. This crisis came from challenges both within and without. They combined to plant seeds of doubt in the minds of many about the credibility and legitimacy of Church leaders. Let's review some of the things they'd done, and that happened to the Church, to create the crisis.Due to the politics of late medieval Europe, Pope Clement V moved the papal seat to Avignon, France, in 1309 in what's called the “Babylonian Captivity of the Church” because the Pope came under the influence of the French throne. When another Pope was elected in Rome, the Church was faced with 2 men who claimed the title of “Vicar of Christ.” This Papal Schism confused the people of Europe and stirred strong feelings that the office of Pope was more a political fixture than a spiritual office. At the insistence of the Holy Roman Emperor, the Council of Constance ended the schism. But the solution raised serious questions about the authority of the papacy, further dividing church leaders and distressing the people of Europe.In addition to these political shenanigans, the Church was marked by widespread corruption and fraud. Simony, the buying and selling of ecclesiastical offices, was common. Immorality among monks, priests, bishops and cardinals was at some times and places, not even hidden. The Church spent a fortune acquiring thousands of relics for its cathedrals and paying for them with the selling of indulgences, which we'll talk about soon.The Inquisition had terrorized whole regions of Europe, especially in Spain and while the Church justified its actions saying it was rooting our dangerous heresy, many knew some victims of the Inquisition were innocent. The Church simply wanted their property and wealth and had used the Inquisition as a means of enriching itself.With the birth of the Renaissance and a new open-mindedness about thinking outside the realm of official authority, the Church became an object of ridicule and satire in pamphlets and books that were readily available with the invention of the printing press.Let me be clear. Some of the harshest criticism of the Church came, not from outsiders, but from faithful priests and monks disgusted with the corruption and error they saw among their peers.As a reaction to the stultifying academic pursuits of Scholasticism, there was a popular movement all across Europe known as Mysticism, in which people simply wanted to “feel” their faith and sought make contact with the divine through meditation and a more personal link to God than going through the official priesthood.Most significant was the movement known as The Brethren of Common Life. Their most famous spokesman was Thomas à Kempis whose little book On the Imitation of Christ continues to be a widely read devotional classic. The Brethren stood in opposition to the monastic orders which for the most part had become centers of corruption. The Brethren breathed new spiritual life into the church. They stressed personal devotion to Jesus through meditative study, confession of sin, and imitating Christ. They emphasized holiness and simplicity in lifestyle. In many ways, the Brethren prefigured the Reformers of the 16th C.With the Bible being translated into the common tongue, no longer did people have to rely on a priest telling them what it said.The 16th C world was one of astonishing change. Medieval civilization, dominated by an institutional Church was disappearing. Modern nation-states challenged the Church for political and economic supremacy, and the voyages of discovery made the world seem smaller at the same time new worlds were opening. The Renaissance of Northern Italy saw many turn from a hide-bound and superstitious Catholicism to the romanticized glories of ancient Greece and Rome.Into this changing world stepped one à Desiderius Erasmus.Taking the pulse of the times, Erasmus ridiculed the Catholic church with biting satire. His works were wildly popular. In his most famous, Praise of Folly written in 1509, Erasmus took jabs at the church's immorality, corruption, and decadence. He ridiculed such superstitions as fanatical devotion to relics, stories of bleeding Communion bread, and the cult of the saints. In another work, he depicted Saint Peter railing against Pope Julius II for his luxurious and opulent lifestyle and military conquests.But it was in 1516 that Erasmus published his most important and influential work—a Greek edition of the NT. He examined and compared the available NT manuscripts and citations from the Church Fathers. The result was an accurate NT Greek text that became the NT of the Reformation.One epigram regarding the Reformation states, “Erasmus laid the egg that Luther hatched.”The illegitimate son of a Dutch priest, Erasmus lived in search of knowledge, in pursuit of piety, in love with books, and oppressed by the fear of poverty. Along the way, his writings and scholarship started a theological earthquake that didn't stop until European Christendom was torn in two.Born in Rotterdam and orphaned by the plague, Erasmus was sent from the school of St. Lebuin's—which taught classical learning and the humanities—to a school run by the Brethren of the Common Life. There he learned an emphasis on a personal relationship with God but detested the strict rules of monastic life and intolerant theologians. They intended to teach humility, he later recalled, by breaking the students' spirits.Being poor with no prospects, Erasmus joined the Augustinians. He wanted to travel, gain some academic elbow room, and leave behind the, as he called them, “barbarians” who discouraged him from classical studies. As soon as he was ordained a priest in 1492, he became secretary to the bishop of Cambrai, who sent him to Paris to study theology.He hated it there too. The dorms stank of urine, the food was atrocious, studies mechanical, and the discipline brutal. He began a career in writing and traveling that took him to most of the countries of Europe. Though his health was often poor, Erasmus was driven by a desire to seek out the best theologians of his day. On a trip to England in 1499, he complained of bad beer, the uncouth nature of the English, and terrible weather, but >> he met Thomas More, who became a friend for life.On that same trip he heard John Colet teach from the Scriptures, not just quote from the commentaries he'd studied in Paris. Colet, who later became dean of St. Paul's, encouraged Erasmus to become a “primitive theologian”- that is, someone who studied Scripture like the church Fathers, not like the argumentative scholastics who'd dominated theology for the last hundred years.So, Erasmus devoted himself to learning the Koine or Common Greek in which the NT was written. The result was his most significant work: an edition of the NT in original Greek, published in 1516. Accompanying it were study notes as well as his own Latin translation, correcting over 600 errors in Jerome's Vulgate.Two of the most noteworthy praises of Erasmus's work came from Pope Leo X and from a German monk named Martin Luther—who, a year later, launched the Reformation.Before that turning point however, which would eventually consume Erasmus, he became famous for his other writings. There were plenty of them to be famous for. By the 1530s, some 15% of all the books sold were written by Erasmus.Historians refer to Erasmus as a humanist, but that label has a very different meaning than it does in today. A humanist in the 15th C referred to someone who studied the humanities, that is, the social sciences of language, history, art and other subjects concerned with culture and society. But Erasmus was too brilliant a mind to simply study the humanities; he felt an obligation to better society.  So he wrote to confront and correct the errors he felt had crept into the Church, an institution he knew had by the far the biggest influence in shaping culture. He found he had great skill in the use of satire to make his point and people enjoyed reading his books and tracts.Those books brought him fame, as did his Greek NT. This and his attacks on the church caught Martin Luther's attention, who wrote asking for support.The two never met, but their fates were entwined. Erasmus's enemies accused him of inspiring Luther who was accused of breaking up God's Church. Erasmus found much he liked in Luther's writings, describing him to Pope Leo X as “a mighty trumpet of Gospel truth.” At the same time, he privately told his printer to stop printing Luther's writings because he didn't want his own efforts to be identified with Luther's.For 4 years, Erasmus pleaded for moderation on both sides of the divide Luther's work caused. When pressed, he sided with the Pope. Still, he hated the bickering and intolerance on both sides; saying, “I detest dissension because it goes both against the teachings of Christ and against a secret inclination of nature. I doubt that either side in the dispute can be suppressed without grave loss. It is clear that many of the reforms for which Luther calls are urgently needed.”His mediating position satisfied neither side. He said, “My only wish is that now that I am old, I be allowed to enjoy the results of my efforts. But both sides reproach me and seek to coerce me. Some claim that since I do not attack Luther I agree with him, while the Lutherans declare that I am a coward who has forsaken the Gospel.”Indeed, Luther attacked him as a Moses who would die in the wilderness without entering the Promised Land. And the Roman Church banned his writings.