Love this series so far. It's what 2 years in Bible college taught me in 10 minute series. Totally sharing this on Facebook if that's OK. I also like the fact you left the end open as to not prevoke an argument about whether God is real. It keeps it in the middle and allows people sharing it to open more to the gospel. Stay awesome
Perfect timing on this. Our small group is working on teaching on how to teach kids apologetics, and this was a long discussion a few weeks ago. We watched a video from a former Christian turned atheist lecturing on the discrepancies in the Bible (of course it was easy to pick apart his arguments because he never gave specifics of what the discrepancies were and he was obviously speaking out of anger). In your 10 minute video you have demolished an argument he took an hour to build (with a lot of repetitions).
Hi Ticia. Great idea of exposing kids to this. I have a hard time bringing up this topic in our adult Bible study -- the folks just aren't that interested. Be aware that there are opponents (like the atheist you mention) whose academic credentials, quality of arguments, and mode of arguing, are much more respectable than that guy. I'm thinking people like Bart Ehrman here. He teaches at Duke, and has written popular-level books on the topic. But his erudition doesn't make him right.
Bart Ehrman is actually the person I was referring to, I just didn't remember his name when I commented. I watched an hour-long talk he did, and in his talk, he repeated himself several times, he never gave concrete examples, and when he says thousands of errors, he's talking spelling or word order errors. I know academically he's very respected, but the couple of videos I saw I could pick apart his arguments easily.
@@TiciaM Seriously?! You're picking apart an hour long lecture(s) and considering that good enough?! How about you actually read his books, which are far more in depth, and then try to refute his arguments? He's very well respected because he's earned that respect. Typically, they don't let uninformed/uneducated scholars write new testament textbooks for ivy league schools.
@@dabeamer42 Bart Ehrman doesn't teach at Duke; he teaches at UNC Chapel Hill. Mark Goodacre is the new testament professor at Duke. Bart Ehrman has never taught there, only at Rutgers and UNC Chapel Hill. If you're going to try to smear the guy, you might want to at least get his credentials correct. You do realize that you could have googled that information, right? And no, his erudition doesn't necessarily make him right; the validity of his arguments are what matter most. Until you've addressed those, you have no reason to dismiss him. As I stated in my previous comment on this thread, it says quite alot to his knowledge/perspective that he is enlisted to write new testament textbooks for ivy league schools. And as for your "great idea exposing kids to this" comment, I think indoctrination of children is disgusting. If they want to believe when they are psychologically matured and understand logic and critical thinking, then that should be their choice to make. Ingraining them with a belief at an early age, especially a religious faith based belief, is irresponsible to say the least.
Dude I can't tell you how much I love your channel. Thank you for existing, pls keep content coming. Also, the way you always make it an open ended, conversation starter, that's just who you are, you don't have a hidden agenda with it and I love that, it's rarer than you know
Incredible video! Simple yet profound...you have a clear, concise manner of communicating your points and this is exactly what I was looking for to answer my questions. God bless you and your family.
This is a GREAT explanation of an important topic. Matt... you’re a blessed intellectual and relatable communicator. I encourage you to keep producing quality videos. And how cool is it that you know the ‘Smarter Every Day’ dude! 😜
Great video! I love your enthusiastic tone. I love your tangible explanations and teaching methodology. Very easy to listen to. I don't know if previous comments have asked this.... The comparison with the kids copying of the poem is great, but simplistic in that it doesn't consider the aspect of time and generations of copying. Since the majority of New Testament copies have come from one family of earlier texts, isn't it better to lean towards the earlier texts rather than a simply rule of "majority wins"?
Quality of video was really great! Nice explanation. Cool to have a little interview and interaction with others, fun music, and nice Mega Man reference!
Good work, I like the experiment as well. Thank you for adding valuable content that helps people think intelligibly about the most significant issue of their lives. I really appreciate you and Destin and am thankful for having learned about your channel from getting to know you through the "No Dumb Questions" podcast. I think, of late, another blessing to me has been Tim Mackie (Main contributor to "The Bible Project") and if you've not been turned on to him, I urge you to consider looking into his exploration of biblical themes.
Hi Matt, just been catching up on all your NDQs over the past fortnight. They are fab, as is this video. You, sir, are an inspiration to me. Keep up the great work!!
Very well done. Your rational and reasoned videos are the best on the web. I have been trying to explain this very thing to people for years. It simply does not compute with others...for some reason. (I, of course, have my suspicions as to why. 😉). Keep up the great work.
Destin Sandlin Hi Destin, just wanted to say thank you so much for your great work on RU-vid. SED is one of my go-to places as a Physics teacher and NDQs has firmly established itself as my podcast of choice to listen to while doing house chores! (They are often so good that I look for extra jobs to do so that I can keep on listening!!)
Monkey Monkey I respect your beliefs, but I'm curious. Why is everything one man (Muhammad) says credible, but many people reading thousands of texts and agreeing on exactly what was written isn't credible? I'm trying to understand why one man's writing must be from God, but many men agreeing on a common writing isn't. It just seems disingenuous, but maybe I misunderstood you.
I’m a Catholic that always loves searching for good information to help me evangelize to other people and I always enjoy all your videos! You are very well spoken! God bless you my brother in Christ
Nicely done! I spent yesterday afternoon monkeying around on the roof putting up lights & listening to your sermon on the Protestant reformation. It was super informative & gave me a better understanding on what sacrifices were made for our benefit
Kyle Reitsma Sermons - Lander Evangelical Free Church Sunday sermons and other lessons from Sunday School classes Via my podcast app Subscribe: feed://lander-efree.squarespace.com/sermons?format=rss www.landerefree.org/sermons/
Search any podcast player for "Lander Evangelical Free Church". My personal recommendation would be to jump in on his Sermon on the Mount Series starting with the Beatitudes at the beginning of Matthew chapter 5. His deep dive into Ephesians is pretty great, too.
Jarrett Hall Thanks for the link! He never mentioned those. What other secrets is this mysterious man hiding? Just when I think I know some guy on the internet, I learn he's living a secret life, posting sermons and not even telling ME, his buddy? Doesn't subscribing to someone's RU-vid channel MEAN anything anymore? Who ARE you Matt? If that's your real name. Anyway, listened to the "sermon on the mount", then bookmarked for later. 45 minutes is long, but if it wasn't 12:30am, I'd listen to another one. I like the relatable analogies that actually make sense and add value to the subject matter. What happened to my life? I'm getting excited to listen to a bunch of sermons?! Don't tell Matt I liked it. He didn't tell me they even existed, so why should I tell him anything? That'll teach him to respect me. If he asks, I'll say I fell asleep after 5 minutes.
Thank you explaining this in such an objective, clear and unbias way! I am a Christian and I also love science. Thank you for bridging the two together!
Hey Matt, really awesome episode. I really liked how you got those kids to copy the poem as a practical experiment. I have gotten into many discussions about the validity of the early manuscripts and so on. It is really eye opening how much evidence points to at least a single working document. That said, why isn't this spoken about more? I feel this should be common knowledge about the considering the fact that scholars have been studying these texts for thousands of years and so many people's lives have been affected by said texts. Thanks for all your hard work. Also Han shot first. Please fix.
to answer your question about why isn't this spoken about more its rather simple, Most pastors and churches don't invest the time and energy required to really lay out why we believe what we believe. instead they give platitudes and bullet points.
But the copy we have now is in English. - Who translated them - how was it copied - how do you make sure it’s authentic - the translators are honest in translating?
One thing the bible isn't lacking is archeological evidence, that's actually one of its strengths. That's not to say everything in it is backed by archeology. Scientific impossibilities are a universe from nothing, we never observe things coming from nothing.
Here's the biblical motto I use on copies "God allows the dust, but doesnt allow the rust". Unlike a copy machine, the biggest scriptural problem is not what's been taken away, but what is added. Nowhere on a copy machine does anything get added, only diminished. Textually, there's next to no evidence anything has been lost, only embellished.
Wait, somone got Smarter Everyday in my Ten Minute Bible Hour. :) I like the fact that you actually tested the hypothesis of statistical analysis on defragmenting documents. ;) With kids no less. :)
remember kids, always make backups of your school work. or if that doesn't work, try to get your best friends to write down 5000 copies, and hire a whole bunch of ancient scholars to reconstruct the original when needed.
Great video! Loved the experiment you did. It would have been a better analogy though if you had asked some of the kids to DELIBERATELY add to the poem, which we know scribes did to the gospels (e.g. the gospel of John's story of Jesus and the woman taken in adultery is not found in our oldest and best manuscripts. Same with the last twelve verses of Mark)
Thank you for also pointing out the difference in arguments about whether the Bible is a verifiable historical document and whether what it says actually happened. Plenty of Christians themselves would still argue that the Olympian gods in Homer's writings didn't actually exist either, so it isn't unreasonable for people to question/argue/discuss the supernatural stuff in the Bible either. Plenty of historians argue over how much of Julius Caesar's writings actually happened as well (#fakenews), but we are still talking about some of the most well documented ancient texts, so we know with a good degree of certainty that these are the same words that ancient people had in front of them to read also AND that quite a lot of these words were written down within the lifetimes of those people who were being written about...
THANK YOU! I love this series and have recently made some family really mad because I worded something wrong. Ok so I said that saying the KJV was the only viable translation was ignorant. People don't like being called ignorant... And I was wrong to not clarify my point further. God bless and may the Peace of Christ be with you!
For anyone that doubts it still,.. see Dr. Daniel Wallace and his research on this in depth. He is the founder of- the Center for the Study of New Testament Manuscripts.He is actually the guy who is personally digitizing every NT greek manuscript in the entire world.
The 'Word' of course does not refer to the bible. If you refer to 'In the beginning was the Word...' then a knowledge of the 'Logos is necessary. There is no reference in scripture which confirms the bible is the word of God. That which does not pass away is the primordial Aum (Om) the creative sound vibration which creates the universe, the breath of God. "The wind blows where it wills, you know not from where it comes or where it goes, so are they born of the Spirit (literally wind)" "
I've been loving the series. Just a quick question. There are verses or excerpts that are footnoted with *not in earlier manuscripts. How do those passages come about?
Ah, Textual Crit. My favorite class in seminary. Really. I enjoy digging in to the apparatus (that's the term for the footnotes Matt pointed to, where the scholars give reasons for and against a given reading). I was a teeny bit disappointed that Matt made it all the way thru without mentioning the phrase "Textual Criticism". That would have made my day.
one quibble: what about potential early errors in a text that got widely copied? it seems semi-likely that quite a few 'chains of copies' could flow through the same text, so an error in that text could become fairly widespread. other than that, great video!
That's absolutely correct. That is why scholars don't just count the number of manuscripts that say one thing and then say the one with the most is the best. There are a number of techniques that help root out early errors. The easiest is that most errors don't make sense when you read it, so we know that those are an error. Another technique is that manuscripts are sorted into "textual families". These are usually text traditions that grew up in different areas. For much of the reception history of the NT, different areas were separated geographically, politically or even theologically and there was not as much "cross-pollination" of textual traditions. Some of these divisions happened very early and, once they did, even early errors made subsequently didn't cross over into the other tradition. An extension of this is translation. The NT letters and books were translated very early into other languages (like Coptic) and while we generally don't re-translate these back into Greek and use them for translation, they are helpful for settling textual disagreements of competing early text traditions. There are more techniques as well, but the final thing to consider is that most of these variants make no difference. About 1% of all variants are realistic (i.e. they could be the correct copy) AND significant (meaning that the difference would even show up in a translation to English).
Great video, I went to a Christian college and this is teaching that took a whole semester to examine and you broke it down in a clear and understandable video🔥
I love your channel, Matt. In regards to your statement, "Interestingly, the fragment that dates so close was written by John." at 3:16 is not attested in any source I can find for the John Rhylands fragment. Where is there a fragment we can say is written by an apostle of Jesus?
Thanks for the question. I think you might have misunderstood my remark. The oldest fragment of the New Testament is a fragment from the Gospel of John, who was the last of the twelve to die, which puts the earliest copy we have within living memory of the lifetime of the apostles who wrote the original. I do not believe, nor does anyone I’ve heard of, that we are in possession of anything written by John himself with his own hand using his own ink.
@@MattWhitmanTMBH Hey! Thanks so much for your prompt reply! So happy to hear from you. I wanted to believe we had a first-hand copy of a gospel, but thank you for clarifying!
Extract from Wikipedia on the "Rylands Library Papyrus P52: "The original editor proposed a date range of 100-150 CE;[5] while a recent exercise by Pasquale Orsini and Willy Clarysse, aiming to generate consistent revised date estimates for all New Testament papyri written before the mid-fourth century, has proposed a date for 52 of 125-175 CE.[1] But a few scholars say that considering the difficulty of fixing the date of a fragment based solely on paleographic evidence allows the possibility of dates outside these range estimates, such that "any serious consideration of the window of possible dates for P52 must include dates in the later second and early third centuries."
I couldn't tell exactly which one Matt was using but I think it was a Nestle -Aland edition. It could the United Bible Societies edition but they do have the same text base. The Nestle-Aland text is the standard for academic work in New Testament studies and you can find them rather cheaply on eBay and Amazon. I found a Nestle-Aland 25th edition at a thrift store for $2.99.
the telephone game is often used as evidence to show that the bible cant be accurate, after all a group of people couldn't even get one simple message right, right? I think the telephone game is a game designed to achieve a specific result.I would encourage you guys to try another experiment I think is rather enlightening. there is a flaw with the telephone game, each person can only (usually) say the phrase one time to the next person. There is usually no incentive to be accurate.So I say allow the participants to ask the person telling them the phrase to repeat as many time as they wish to talk and ask question as much as they like. Secondly incentivize the participants with prizes if the results are 100% correct at the end.In my experience the results have been perfect every time.
Interesting yea; the critical difference with the telephone game is that the message is only ever carried by a single source to a single destination at a time, even ignoring to favor towards mutation that's a perfect environment to destroy information. I bet if you started with a single message and a hundred lines of kids, you could do this same thing to bash the results together and get a reputable approximation of the starting conditions. With 25,000 lines of kids, I bet you'd be within a percentage point of correct. (internet could totally do this, that'd be fun)
exactly. when the participants have the opportunity to seek more information and verify that the information is correct they will do so as long as they are incentivized to do so. in fact I bet the group as a whole would become faster more accurate and more efficient the more times they participated.
If the Good Lord is able to keep this entire universe afloat, He is certainly able to preserve and maintain His Word throughout the ages. Great video 👌
Respectfully I thought there were a big problem with dating the gospels. From what I have been able to dig up it's a bit of a guess work for most. Christian scholars seem to date them closer to the death of Jesus, while non Christians are more careful. What are your sources for the years in your video if you don't mind me asking? Also when you claim that the fragment was "written by John" do we now know who he was? The jury has been out on that one for a while I thought, or am I wrong?
Solid video. If I remember correctly, scribes took so much care in copying scripture that the exact placement of characters is usually identical across biblical manuscripts. I believe even small shreds of the Dead Sea Scrolls (admittedly Hebrew scriptures not New Testament) can be identified almost like puzzle pieces because all the characters line up in the same locations on the page as other known manuscripts.
I would love to see you address this with Religion for Breakfast, as he's also great, though he studies religion from a non-devotional perspective. Plus, I would guess your audiences have similar interests but perhaps don't overlap much.
Do you think that your dating of the Ryland as 'within 30 years of John' is misleading considering the inaccuracy of dating these papyri codexes. Also is it problematic that there are only 100 manuscripts, many of which are fragmentary, from the first 400 years. I've been trying to find out hard what the oldest full book was but still kind of confused... OR do you trust that if there is a part then most of the rest would be the same?
The problem is We don't know if someone added or taken away from the original from the beginning. Also these are 1000s of words where each word can have multiple meanings coming from a language that we can barely translate into English to get the true Translation. So in other words its copies of copies but also language to language and different interpretations
