The Human Way God Gave Us the Bible. What About the Apocrypha? - Stephen Russell

The fact that God came to us as a human has made me see that everything God does to get to us, He does through human means. So the Bible is human words. It's not special human words. It's human words, the way we normally talk. And therefore, there are going to be some ambiguities. You know, you and I are talking sometimes, and you didn't understand what I said, so you're going to say, "What do you mean?" Well, let's face it, there are places in the Bible that are the same way that we have to stop and scratch our heads a bit. It's human language, but God is trusting us with human language that portrays a divine message.

He's trusted us to speak it and then to wrestle with it, to understand what it's about.

Well, Mr. Russell, welcome back to the podcast. Thank you. So you spent a lot of time researching and teaching church history. You also teach Old Testament survey. And in this episode, we're going to tackle a big and foundational question. Someone actually just I've heard this multiple times, but just recently, this last weekend, someone came to me and said, "You know, how did we get the Bible?" Like, how is it that I have a Bible and I can read it and say, "This is God's Word? What's that story?" So we want to tackle that question of what is the canon of Scripture.

Big topic. There's, I'm sure, lots of details we won't be able to hit, but at least what are the big pieces that happened in history that we now have, the Bible we have today? So let's start there, especially Old Testament. I was thinking, start at the beginning and just walk us through.

Let's start with the Old Testament. How did we get the Old Testament? Well, first, I'd like to make a general statement. How did we get the Bible? Well, God gave it to us, yes. But He did it the way He does, I think, the way He always interacts with us, which is in human ways, which is incarnational. And so the most important thing is God came to us as the man Jesus. So He comes to us in human ways. And that's how the Bible came to us. He used men and women to give His Word, first of all, to His people in the Old Testament, the Jewish people, and then to the apostles and the early Christians for the whole church.

So broadly speaking, God gave us the Bible, and He did it in a human way. He gave us human words. He gave us gave those words through human beings. So it's not something like the Muslims believe, something that just dropped out of heaven. And it's something that's shaped by the ones who have delivered it, the humans who have delivered it. And just for an example, we think that Mark is the oldest Gospel, and Mark's Greek is not very good.

And we also think that the other two synoptic Gospels used Mark as a sort of an outline, and then they added to it. What is fascinating is that Luke, who probably writes the best Greek in the New Testament, corrects Mark's bad Greek, except when Mark says, "So-and-so said this." So it seems to be a quote. Then he will not. He's being very he's being a good historian.

If Mark wrote in slightly bad Greek, that's okay. Let's correct that. But if he quotes someone, for all I know, that's how the man said it. So I'm not going to correct that. But anyway, so there is a real I just want us to see that God uses us, and the actual words, the actual story, they are from God, but they reflect the people who those stories and writings came from. Now, obviously, God first of all worked with the Jewish people, starting with Abraham. And those stories got recorded.

The Pentateuch claims that, at least in some places, that Moses wrote this. At the very end, it tells us about Moses dying and his being buried by God. So probably Joshua finished it. You know, we don't know all those details. But so as God worked with His people, various of them wrote down the things that God showed them. And some of them wrote the things they heard God say, especially the prophets, "Thus saith the Lord."

But how was that recognized? I think a real question with the canon is, how was that recognized? Well, because that's the thing with the Bible. It's not one book. It's a lot of books, you know, compiled together. And also, I mean, a wide range of authors and genres and styles. And you go from Ecclesiastes to Ezekiel or something. I mean, there are very different styles, very different genres. So how in the world did all these get bound into one book called the Bible? I think that's going to be a big question for people, because then they'll be like, "Well, what if there's something missing? What if there was a book that didn't get included? How do we actually know?"

Et cetera, et cetera. Well, a lot of this depends. Okay, it's God using humans to give something to us that carries the divine message to us, but it's in human words, and the language is not consistent. As I was saying, Mark's is not good Greek. Luke's is very good Greek.

What we have to do is believe that our God is capable of making sure that what He wants passed on gets passed on. And so that means there could be things that were written even in the time of Moses or maybe more likely in the time of that First and Second Samuel and First and Second Kings were written or the various prophets. There may have been many books. In fact, we know there were books. We know that the Samuel books and the Kings books were excerpts from the Chronicles of the Kings of the North and the South Kingdom. We know that. So it says, if you want to know more about Hezekiah's reign, it's in this chronicle.

Okay, so we know that they were drawing out important issues, that there was some human doing that. But God was superintending that. Okay, we have to believe that. You can't exactly prove it, but we have to believe that. So we don't have those chronicles anymore, but we do have what God wanted us to have to see how He was working with His people. Now, how did those get canonized? Once again, especially for the Old Testament, and I'm thinking now about the Jewish people, we don't have details, but as various scholars have looked at this, it looks like the Jewish leaders God uses human beings. It looks like the Jewish leaders by about 400 BC had clearly said that God was working in the Torah, the first five books of the Bible.

So somewhere, it's already been written a long time ago, but somewhere it was clearly understood. This is what we read to hear what Yahweh has to say to us. Some hundred years later, it was the same thing for the prophets. And when Jesus came along, He talks about the Law, the prophets, and the Psalms. And the Psalms are usually the first book that's in what the Jews today call the writings. And we think that that was canonized. So the Torah was first canonized, clearly stated, "This is God's Word," and it's through human church leaders or synagogue leaders. Then the same thing happened to the prophets, but like 100 or 200 years later. And then we think after Jesus' time that as the temple was destroyed, that the rabbis had to kind of finalize.

So we're not going to change the Torah. We're not going to change the prophets. But they still had these books that we now, the Jews today, call the writings. And Jesus called it Psalms because that was the first book. Okay? Okay, yeah. And so probably as they started to realize they were having a competition with the Jewish Christians, they solidified what the books are that belong in the Hebrew Bible. And so it was the Torah first, next the prophets, and then finally the writings.

And so that was all decided roughly around AD 100, the last ones. We don't have a record where somebody says, "This is when we did it," but by looking at how the books were treated, when there seemed to be a final collecting, let's say, of the prophets, we think we have, generally speaking, the years when the Jewish people clearly said, "This is God's Word to us." So the last one is around AD 100, after the church has already started.

But there's another issue, and that is, how did the church look at this? Yeah, that's kind of what I'm wondering. And that piece that you said happened in AD 100? Sorry, what was that last piece that was you're saying that was canonized or recognized as Scripture for the Old Testament? Is that right? Well, it's called the writings.

And it includes Daniel. It includes Psalms and Proverbs, Ecclesiastes. I think it includes Esther. So it's the books that don't fit directly into the old prophets. Now, notice, Daniel is there. Right. Okay. Okay, yeah. So the older prophets don't fit in. They have their own book, and the Torah has its own book. So this is sort of well, the name, the writings, is saying, "This is the other stuff that we believe is God's Word to us."

It is remarkable. Esther doesn't have the name of God in it. So that is kind of interesting that the rabbis said, "This is God's Word." And Ecclesiastes, whatever else you want to say about it, it looks like someone who is having a lot of questions about God. Okay?

And so those two books, it's kind of amazing. And I'm glad they're in. But it's just kind of amazing that they did make it in because they're not as forceful in their statement that God is with us. But then Peter Crafe says something really interesting about Ecclesiastes. He says that this is the book where the I think if you say that Solomon was a deep believer in God, well, the record after a while is that he had a lot of foreign wives, and he built them temples, and he worshiped in their temples. He worshiped their gods. So this sounds like Solomon, towards the end of his life, he did all these things. But he's saying, "Under the sun," which means all I can perceive as a human being.

It's not looking to revelation. And this is really interesting because Crafe says that it was a bold rabbi that said, "We should put this in," but it gives us the background to what is the world like if you don't know how God's been at work. So if you're just looking at the world under the sun, it's a chasing after the wind. It's vanity of vanities. Maybe you feel good about this and that, but in the end, the same thing happens to everyone. You die. And he sees that as the sort of a silhouette. And then what God does in the rest of the Bible, and especially in Jesus, fills in that silhouette. So you have like a head, but you don't know who it is.

That's what Ecclesiastes says. Look at all these things. Ecclesiastes includes some neat clues. He does talk about work as something that should encourage us. He does talk about loving your wife as something that should encourage us. But he also says but then he'll say, "But everything's vanity."

So there are clues that even this guy who has, I think, turned away from God that's what I think about Solomon at this point. I don't know if he turned back or not. But this guy that turned away from God, he is saying, "Even so, just looking at the world, there's still some things that are interesting clues."

And I really think that it was Crafe that made me aware of this, and I think it's a wonderful way to look at the book. It can help people born in the church recognize sometimes they don't understand. But it also helps us if we are really committed, it still helps us see how the world looks at life. It's vain.

That's why a lot of people think, "Well, if I don't like my life anymore, I can kill myself." So it's really helpful for our own deepening of our understanding of what God's been at work doing. But it also helps us understand those who don't know the Scripture. But that's kind of a long okay, so those books were put in kind of the extras were put in the writings. Yeah. And like I said, we think it was around AD 100 when they finally solidified that. And you see, the thing is, the Jews had lost the temple. And so they started trying to solidify, "What do we have to hold on to?" So this is like probably an exile era, right?

Well, it's not the Babylonian exile. It's the destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans. Oh, right. Okay. So if you that is a big question then, because is this coming out of essentially the synagogues then saying, "These are the things we're going to hold to?" And I can see what you're saying. If the temple's been destroyed, which is AD 70, right, by the Romans, right, or the Second Temple destroyed. Second Temple. And it's like, "What do we have?" So this is probably a lot of scholars in the Jewish synagogues, et cetera, doing this work. It's probably no, we have to.

We are looking at evidence and hints and clues. So it's not like we can point to a writing where a rabbi said, "By the way, a bunch of us got together, and we did this." But now, with what you just said, the First Temple was destroyed in 586 BC, and then it was reconstructed in finished in the reconstruction in 516. And it's a little bit after that that they seem to have said clearly that the Torah is God's Word to us.

And historically, they say that they kept a copy of that in the temple, in the Second Temple. So that makes sense there. So the Torah is much earlier. Yes. And when we say Torah, First Five Books of the Bible or the Books of Moses or whatever. So that's much earlier. But what you're describing here is not a group of guys got together and decided, "This is what the Bible is." Like, you're talking about something that happened over a long period of time. Is that right? Because you're talking all the way up to AD 100 then, 600 years later. Yes. You know, this is it feels I don't know what the word is. Describe to this a bit more.

I want to make sure it's human. It's human. For me, the fact that God came to us as a human has made me see that everything God does is to get to us, He does through human means. So the Bible is human words. It's not special human words. It's human words, the way we normally talk. And therefore, there are going to be some ambiguities. You know, you and I are talking sometimes, and you didn't understand what I said. You're going to say, "What do you mean?" Well, let's face it. There are places in the Bible that are the same way that we have to stop and scratch our heads a bit. It's human language. But God is trusting us with human language that portrays a divine message.

He's trusted us to speak it and then to wrestle with it, to understand what it's about. It also takes time for a group of people to say clearly, "This is God's Word for us." And for the Jews, it was basically somewhere I'm not saying nobody believed that Moses' writing was Scripture before 400 BC, but it seems that around that time, around the time they built the Second Temple, they said clearly, "These books are God's books." And then a little bit later, they said the books that we call the prophets, which is not quite just the books we call the prophets, those are also God's Word. And then I think partially because of the challenge that was raised by the Jewish Christians, they had to kind of solidify, "So what is God's Word?"

And then finally, it was the writings or the extras. But in every case, some people think there was a council around AD 100. Others say, "No. That's unclear." But whether there was a council or not, the Jewish leaders came to a consensus. This is God's Word, and it's closed. This is it.

Okay. And so at some point then I'm guessing it had to have been soon after that time is when the Christians would have adopted it as Scripture as well? Well, the Christian story is more complicated. But like, at what point did the early church say, "Yep, we agree. This is Scripture?" Like, what the Jewish leaders have outlined as what we now call the Old Testament, that's the Scriptures. Well, all of the things that were canonized by the Jews were written in Hebrew.

There are other books. We tend to call them the Apocrypha. Okay. So I have to just for visuals here, right? Okay. So I was hoping you would go there, right? So I have what you'd say is like a typical Protestant Bible, whatever. You know, this would be, let's see, the Christian Standard Bible, right? Okay, decent, new translation, whatever. And it's this. And I look at it, and 66 books in this one. This is or 66 books, yeah, compiling the Bible. Yes, Old and New Testaments. But then this is I picked up a copy of the Catholic Study Bible. So this is the New American Bible. This is the revised edition.

Decent translation, et cetera. But I open it up, and the table of contents is quite different than this one. It has this thing called the Apocrypha in it. No. Okay. They don't call it. They don't. And my brain says, "Oh, it's Apocrypha." And they don't separate it. So you can find Protestant Bibles that have the Old Testament, and in the middle, they have the Apocrypha, and at the end, they have the New Testament. Whereas this has they're all mixed together in the Old Testament. Oh, I see what you're saying. Yeah. I'm looking at it right here. Yep. Yep. You're so right. Because right in here, the Wisdom Books, it has Job and Psalms, but then you have Sirach.

Yep. And also Wisdom of Solomon. And Wisdom. Yep. Yep. Right here, Wisdom of Solomon. Yep. Those two, by the way, Mennon really liked. Mennon Simons, right? Mennon accepted those. Oh, my. Oh, my. Okay. And you'd have the same yeah. Oh, yeah. This is yep. You're right. It's just mixed only. It's all mixed. Regardless, so we say Apocrypha. Okay. They call it something different. Orthodox Church would also have it'd be similar, but not identical. Let's see, the Ethiop I think it's the Ethiopian Church, the Coptic Church. They'd have the Ethiopians, not the Coptics, but the Ethiopians have the biggest canon.

They have the same canon. I believe they have the same canon that we have for the New Testament. I think all Christian churches agree on the New Testament. I'd have to look into the Ethiopians to be sure. But it's the Old Testament where Catholics and Orthodox and then the Oriental Orthodox, which would be the Copts and the Ethiopians, have a little bit of a difference among themselves. But like, isn't this a huge problem? Because here we have us saying, "This is the Bible that I read," right? And then the Catholics are like, "You're missing a lot of the Bible here." You know, so I guess let's start historically. Where did the difference come from? Okay.

Essentially, like, the critics will say, "Why are there two Bibles?" You know? And this is a huge problem, and therefore, Christianity is not true. I've heard that one, right? Which I don't agree with, obviously. But yeah, explain this to us. Okay. There's two things to look at historically, at least two things that I think of right away. One of them is that in the 330s and 320s, Alexander the Great conquered the Persian Empire, huge empire, probably the biggest empire at the time. So he conquered it. And one of the things that came out of this was that Greek became the lingua franca or the language that you learned if you wanted to talk to somebody from another ethnic group.

Okay. It's English today. All the worldwide, if you want to talk to foreigners, you're probably going to learn English. It's the most well-known second language. Well, back then, it became Greek. And so the upper classes in the all throughout the Persian Empire well, what had been the Persian Empire, it was broken into four parts. Alexander died with a baby son, and his baby son disappeared. But before he disappeared, four of his generals said, "We'll run this show until Junior grows up." Junior never grew up. He disappeared. So these four generals controlled the empire that Alexander had formed, and they broke it in four parts. The two parts that are important to us or to Christians are the Seleucid Empire, which is basically the Middle East and Persia, and then the Ptolemaic Empire, which is Egypt.

The rulers of the Ptolemaic Empire, they were scholarly. They started a huge library. And so they wanted as much stuff translated from the wisdom of the ancient world into Greek and put into their library. And so it looks like there's a claim that a particular Ptolemy asked for the Jewish Scriptures to be translated into Greek.

This might be a legend, but whether it's a legend or whether it's the way it happened, the Old Testament got translated into Greek. Okay. So is this a Septuagint? This is a Septuagint. But there's two aspects to that.

All of the books or whoever was doing the translating translated books that were in Hebrew but that never got canonized. And they translated it. Well, remember, this is a long process, and it takes a while till everybody is agreed. And so some books got translated into Greek that no longer exist in Hebrew. Now, we have discovered most of the Septuagint was not available in Hebrew, but we have discovered some fragments anyway. I don't know that we have a whole scroll, but we have some fragments of some of the Septuagint in Hebrew from the Dead Sea Scrolls. So what we're looking at okay, again, I would just call it, for lack of a better term, the Protestant Bible or this Bible here.

This is from the Hebrew stream of the Old Testament, what we call the Old Testament. The Catholic Bible I'm looking at here is including the Greek books. Yes. Yes. The Septuagint well, like, the books listed in the Septuagint as well. So these are actually going back to two different root languages, essentially. Yes. The Greek, though, the Septuagint was amorphous.

The actual boundaries were not certain. That's why the Catholics have fewer books, and different Orthodox groups have slightly they have more than the Catholics, but slightly different ones among themselves. Oh, this is confusing. Okay. Okay. But you know, the real issue is or at least I would see it this way, the real issue is getting the message across. And so I think that reading the Apocrypha is important because it tells us most of it was written after Malachi, who was the last prophet of the Old Testament that wrote John the Baptist is the last Old Testament prophet. But if you go from the last writer, Malachi, to the last preacher, John the Baptist, during that time period is when probably all of the Septuagint of what we call the Apocrypha, the extra books of the Septuagint, were written.

Some of them were written in Hebrew. Sirach has a I don't know if it's called a preface or an introduction, but I think the translators I haven't read it for a while, but I think he says, "My grandfather wrote this in Hebrew." And I am going to translate it for the Jews in Egypt into Greek because that was what the Egyptian Jews spoke. They spoke Greek.

And it's also the people that spread the Gospel, the apostles, whether that was whether they naturally used the Septuagint or not, they used it. You know, at home, when they went out, they used it because it was a way to reach the pagans who spoke Greek.

Okay? Okay. So they didn't go around when you read they didn't go around using the Hebrew Bible. They went around using the Septuagint. Most of the time, when there is a difference between the Septuagint and the Hebrew at a particular place, if it's quoted in the New Testament, I think I'm accurate on this, most of the time, it's quoted from the Septuagint. Okay. So is that the apostles, the early church, just saying, "This is the trade language of the day, so we're going to go with that so that people understand and we can reach people better"? Is that the essential? Well, nobody ever said anything like that, but they wanted to reach the people, and that was the language that people understood.

So that makes sense. But I think there's more to it. I think there's more to it. In the Hebrew, it says that an Alma will give birth to someone who will be Immanuel. Well, Alma in Greek means young girl, and most young girls are virgins. But when it was translated into the Septuagint, it was translated Parthenos, and that is a virgin.

Okay. So there are places okay, this I've got to tell you, this is what I think, and there are a lot of people that will disagree with this, but I think God wanted Isaiah was, first of all, directed to the people of his time. And so for Isaiah, the Alma was going to be Isaiah's wife, and she's going to have children. And right after that, it talks about the children that were born to him. Yeah. The immediate context right after. The immediate context. And you see, prophecy can have two, one, two, or more fulfillments. Yeah. And so I think the first fulfillment was the thing that happened in Isaiah's day. Yeah. But okay. And so this is so this isn't God with them in the sense of an incarnation, but it is God with them showing Isaiah says, "This is a sign that God is at work here."

And so it is God with us. God is with us. But in the New Testament, it gets quoted with the Parthenos. A virgin is going to give birth, and I think that's the second now, Alma could mean a virgin, but it's ambiguous.

But Parthenos is not ambiguous. So I think God was at work even with the this is my belief. I think that God was at work. I can already see the comments coming in on this, you know, where people will probably disagree. But I see the point you're making where God is working through these different languages. And there is something there about that that is pretty unique to Christianity because you have other religions like I don't know, you know, Mormonism. They believe it's literally like direct from heaven, you know, to Joseph Smith, like this exact thing, or the Quran. It has to be in this specific form of Arabic. No other option is considered valid scripture.

But we would say, well, there's lots of different languages involved. There's lots of different people involved. There's different well, I mean, we read it in English. You know, we don't read it in Hebrew and Greek. Yeah. And I think that that's noted, and that's special and important to this story. Yes. Yes, it is. You're kind of making a point with that. It is. The Quran is only the Quran in Arabic. I have one at home. I think I gave it to the library at school. Yeah. And it's a it's a they clearly say, "This is a commentary," although they have translated.

They call this a commentary. I got to get mine. Hold on. Hold on. Hold on. Because I think mine says the same thing. Let me know what the comments are. Okay. Well, this is going to be great. Okay. So sorry. I just ducked out to get a copy of the Quran, right? Because so you're making this point, and I haven't looked at this. So it says translation.

It doesn't say either way. Okay. Who's the translator? So this is John Rodwell. Okay. He's a Westerner. If a Muslim translates the copy I have at home was done by a Muslim for Muslims who don't speak Arabic, so they would say if and if he would be a Muslim, he could be a Muslim, but if he would be, he should think that this really can't be the translation. This is more of a commentary. Yeah. But if he's a Muslim, for sure I mean, if a Muslim does it, that's what he's going to say. This is actually a commentary on the Quran, which is God's word in Arabic. Because it can only exist in Arabic. Yes.

No, you're totally right. And because this is a Western. I've never thought about that. The Christians from the get-go were different. As soon as the Christians made if I could say it this way, an adequate number of converts in a different language group, they translated. If there was somebody who was skilled, then that guy would right away sometimes they actually invented an alphabet, the New Christian, and then translated the Bible into that language. So that happened with Armenian, with Georgian.

There was already a Coptic alphabet, so they didn't start that. But as soon as the church reached Egypt, they started translating it into the Coptic language. And as soon as it got to the Western part of the Roman Empire, translated into Latin. See, so this explains one of the reasons then that we have the Septuagint to begin with, really. Like, again, this is the trade language. This is before New Testament. This is before the church, right? And they're making this translation, and that's where we're getting these two different Old Testament texts, essentially. Yes. It's the message for the Christians that mattered, the message, not the language. In fact, it was good to translate the message into the language of the new people that were turning to Christ.

Now, there is an interesting little story. I don't know if you you can always cut this out. All Protestant Bibles until about 1820 had the Apocrypha in the middle: Old Testament, Apocrypha, New Testament. The reason is the Apocrypha is important. It tells us what happened. It tells us what happened from the end of the yes, well, I'll get there. From the end of the written prophets, Malachi, till the last of the Old Testament prophets, John the Baptist, what happened there and what was written? Oh, Maccabees is terribly important to tell us about the history. So all Protestant Bibles had the Apocrypha in the middle as something very informative.

We, efficient Americans, established the American Bible Society, and we decided we could print more Bibles for the same amount of money if we take out the Apocrypha. That's where it happened. Isn't that interesting? That's where it happened. Let's take this out. It's not scripture. And I'm not saying it is scripture, but I'm just saying we don't have to probably we could print a third more Bibles for the same money. So the ultimate question that I'm sure people are going to have is, like, should this bother us? Because back to the critics saying, "Well, Christianity is false because there's two Bibles," like, how is this how does this work? You know, should this bother us?

Well, if I'm right that it's the message that matters, then there can be multiple translations of the Bible in English, and they can all get the message across. Okay?

The books that Protestants and now Anabaptists don't accept as canonical still should be respected as instruments of conveying what happened historically. Okay? So they're still important. But even whether you see them as canonical or not, they still help us understand how God was working with his people. And that, I think, is what's so important there.

Should it worry us? If I'm right and what God is doing is getting a message across, then just like the Hebrews were or the Jewish people were willing to translate their Hebrew into Greek, no, it shouldn't bother us. But I also think we should recognize it seems to me you can many people will probably disagree with me, but it seems to me that the places that the apostles quoted the Septuagint instead of the Hebrew, it seems and there's a difference, let's say, about whether it's an Alma or a Parthenos, whether it's a young girl or a virgin who gives birth to the Messiah. I think God was using what the people were doing. See, God superintends.

I don't believe he superintends to make sure that the message gets across. I don't think he makes it that it has to be this word or that word.

One of the problems there, if that would be true, whenever you copy by hand, there are always some kind of a thing left out or a thing added in or a thing misspelled. And that isn't that's not that important. It's important to try to correct it, but that's just that's another place that God uses humans. Humans he trusts humans to transmit the text as clearly as possible. When they do make mistakes, he trusts them to figure out how to figure out what the original text was. This is just a reality. It's a reality. You have to accept it that when you copy things by hand, there are going to be differences among the manuscripts, but the message is still the same.

But I also think that the Septuagint sort of fine-tuned for the Christian people certain secondary meanings of some of the prophets. So a virgin is going to give birth a virgin is going to give birth to the Messiah rather than just a young girl.

And there are other passages like that. So it's the message that's important. That's why the Christians immediately, upon having enough converts translated, they didn't wrestle with this as, "Oh, should we keep it in Greek?" They didn't do that. They translated it into the local language. It's the message they wanted to get across.

And as far as the Apocrypha, I would just say that it informs us on many important issues. So it doesn't matter so much if you think it's canonical or not. It's still helpful. It's still helpful. I think this is really important to think about because, again, this is like this is what the critics of Christianity will bring to the table. It's like, "Well, there's two Bibles. There's one that includes what you call the Apocrypha and the one that doesn't. Only one can be right." You know, therefore, it's not God's word. Or another one that's very, very frequently touted, it'd be, "Oh, well, there's variation in the manuscripts." You know, "Oh, well, this one's a little different here, and oh, they missed some punctuation there," and all this stuff.

And then, therefore, it cannot be inspired. That's the argument that's made. That can carry some weight, and that can bother us. But if you remember, early on, I said that God works with us incarnationally. He works with us in human ways.

So one of the human ways he works with us is with our language. You know, in another podcast, we talked about ceremony and how important it is for humans. The Old Testament is full of ceremony. God is saying humans need certain actions, certain ways to approach the holy, and he gives them directions on that. We need that. And so that's a human thing, ceremony and being willing to submit to God. Now, in the church, there's a different kind of ceremony. Okay? But still, there should be there should be an approach to God that recognizes our humanity. That's what's in the Old Testament. I think it's in the New.

So early on, I said that God works with us in human ways. Well, that includes okay, so this issue of isn't that scary? This has the Apocrypha and says it's God's word. This one doesn't. Well, here's how I see it. God used human beings who spoke human words to get the message across, God's divine message.

And there could be two different translations that get the same message across. So I don't it's the message that matters. And then, because their means of transmitting it was writing it. And let's think about this. If I am copying the Old Testament let's say I'm a Jewish scholar, and I'm copying the Old Testament. There are two ways they did it. Sometimes someone sat up front and read real slow, and there were a whole bunch of copyists. Okay? Sometimes a monk might have done it by himself or a Jewish rabbi done it by himself. Let's face it. This can become mind-numbing.

And so I might skip I might skip a line and not know it. These are found all over the manuscripts. Or if right here on this first line, there's the word "to the sun," and then three lines down, there's another "to the sun." I'm a little bit tired. I copy up till "to the sun," and I look away from a manuscript over here, and I see the second one, and I leave a gap. I don't leave the gap, but I skip. Okay? So we have this all over the place where a little piece is skipped, and it's obvious why, or a piece is repeated, and it's also obvious why. So there are really good ways come up by human beings to evaluate manuscripts, handwritten manuscripts, and decide relatively certainly what the original words were.

One of the ways so what I just mentioned is a big thing. If I'm a monk and I'm reading this manuscript, and I come to this, and I know the scripture really well, and I say something is missing, I go and find another Bible. I see what I see what's missing.

And in the side margin, I add in and put little marks to show that this was left out, and it should be put back in. If you are a monk copying the Bible unfortunately, monks also wrote notes as they're reading that, "Oh, this is really interesting." And so they wrote their own notes. Sometimes the next monk who's copying the manuscript seems to have thought that that was left out by mistake and puts it in. We think that the Johannan comma, which is where it says there are three witnesses on Earth and there are three witnesses in heaven ah, 1 John, right? 1 John and 1 John. Thank you. Yes. And if we the oldest manuscripts do not have the three witnesses in heaven.

So we think that a monk was reading this and put a little note to himself. Well, there's also wow, this is neat. There are also three witnesses in heaven. He wrote that, and then somebody inserted as somebody was writing, you know, actually copying. But you see, the thing is, there are ways to help decide what is the original, how old it is, how well written it is. The better written, the fewer mistakes. But if I write with a quick hand, then that probably means maybe I'm under persecution.

And I borrowed Paul's letters, and I'm writing them as fast as I can so I can get them back to whoever I borrowed it from. And when I do that, I'm more likely to make a mistake. So there are all kinds of rules that the ancients had to decide what the original was.

And I think those rules are accurate. They're not a you know, it's not just a slam dunk. This is definitely the case. But there are really good reasons for the passages or the variants that are chosen over the others. Now, some people complain that the oldest copies are from Egypt and that they reflect a heretical strain of Christianity. I personally don't think that holds water.

The ones that form the manuscript family that King James was translated from are all considered those that were put together under the direction of the emperors who had become Christian. And so there's an issue there, too. You know, you could say anyway that they favored things that or passages that seem to be in the favor of the emperor. But I think you really should go for the oldest and for the clearest writing. And also, one other thing they did that was kind of interesting, they would also go for the variant. Typically not always, but typically that was the strangest. Because what are you likely to do if you are aware that mistakes are made and you come across a passage that, "Well, what does that mean?"

Well, I think the word this other word is close to the spelling of this word, and I think it makes more sense. So I'll add that in. So there are reasons for the rules that the scribes used to and the monks used to figure out which manuscript is more accurate.

Now, shouldn't those variations be a concern, though? Because then you could say, "Well, then maybe this isn't actually God's word." Again, I'm taking the side of the critics, right? You go to college or whatever, and they're like, "Oh, you're a Christian. Okay, that's fine." But you do know there's a lot of variation in the manuscript, so therefore, the Bible's not true. Okay. I will inform you, first of all, that the text that the Greek text that the King James and the Luther Bible come from had their origin both with Erasmus and a Catholic compilation of the Old and New Testament in the original languages. The Catholic was actually they had more scholars, and they had more manuscripts.

So once that came out, it came out after Erasmus published his Greek New Testament. After the Catholic version came out, he got it, and he used it to correct his own because he could see that there were what you do is with a critical text, you put what you think is the original text here, and in the bottom, you have what's called an apparatus. And so it tells where there are differences, and you can look up how old was this manuscript. So it not only tells you what the group of scholars came up with as probably the manuscript, it also has it also have this line here will have like two letters, one at the beginning, one at the end.

And down here, you look for those, and it will tell you at least the modern critical apparatus says it gives a rating, like we're sure or we're a little bit uncertain or rather uncertain, but we still think this is it. So it gives you that kind of a rating, and then it tells you where the it gives you the variants, and it says which manuscripts have those. So now, what I'm getting at is Erasmus did that. Erasmus had 12 manuscripts at first. None of them agreed with each other. So if you're going to get too hooked up or too bothered by we've got to have exactly the right word and exactly the right letter. There's no such thing as any two we have manuscripts that we can tell were written by the same hand.

There's still differences, you know? So what the King James was based on was exactly what we're doing today, but we have more manuscripts than we had in his day. He had 12. The Catholics in Spain did the big compilation. And when he could get his hands on that, he used that because he didn't have those manuscripts in front of him, but he had the information. And he changed his next edition changed some places because he had a better record. Instead of just 12 manuscripts, he had I don't know how many the Spanish Bible had, but and he was only doing the New Testament. So I don't know how many Greek oh, and they sometimes used this is important, too.

They sometimes used some of the translations, and there's a reason. If there is an ambiguity either in the Greek word itself or if there's a manuscript that says this in Greek and a manuscript that says this in Greek, therefore well, now there's an ambiguity. They would often go to a very early translation and see what they did with the word. And so if they translated it this way, then that's going to mean that I'm probably going to favor that over this other way. You hear what I'm saying? Oh, yeah. So there's it's an art, but it's also a science. And once again, it's God entrusting humans to use language to explain to tell the truth and to interpret it and to transmit it and to correct the mistakes in the transmission.

And all these things have to happen. But this is a marvel. God says, "You're in my image, and yes, you're broken, but I am still going to use you." Moses, let's say. I'm going to use Moses to get across the truth, the truthful message.