Well, can we just skip over those few bits of the New Testament that seem to have been added to the original manuscripts? What are we supposed to do with those sections? Do we preach through them on Sundays? And most significantly, don't these sections undermine the reliability of our Bibles?

So great questions today in the inbox from an anonymous listener, a woman who writes this, "Dear Pastor John, I've recently discovered that many theologians do not believe John 7, verse 53 through John 8, verse 11 should be in the Bible because it was added later and is not found in the oldest Greek manuscripts we have.

Even notes within current translations will admit the story was not found in the early manuscripts. This has shaken my confidence in the English Bible. Even one of my Muslim friends says this proves the corruption of the Bible. I don't know how to respond. How does it not undermine our confidence in our English Bibles?" On March 6, 2011, I preached one of the most unusual messages I've ever preached, because I preached it on this passage, John 7, 53 to 8, 11, a story that I agree was probably not part of the original Gospel of John.

And there, in that sermon, which is at Desiring God, I dealt with the problems more fully than I can do it here. So I would encourage folks to go read or listen to that message at Desiring God. It's called "Neither Do I Condemn You." The date is March 6, 2011.

But here, in this brief podcast, let me give three reasons, or clusters of reasons maybe, why we can be confident that the text of our New Testament corresponds to what the original authors wrote and have not been distorted in transmission. Number one, the traditional Muslim claim—and this is a street argument and a university argument, and I've dealt with it at both levels with people—the traditional Muslim claim that the text of the New Testament has been corrupted, and that behind the text of the New Testament there was another text in which Jesus did not die on the cross, and there was no atonement through his death, no covering for sins, no sacrifice, and there was no resurrection three days later.

That claim, that Muslim claim, has zero historical manuscript evidence supporting it. In other words, there are no historical manuscripts of that nature. None. This is simply an Islamic theological claim, not a historical reality. And you can simply ask your Muslim friend to point you to any, any manuscript evidence at all that there was another version of the New Testament that portrayed Jesus differently than we have in the New Testament of our Bibles.

They don't have it. They won't be able to point you to it or offer it up. They only have a claim, and it's amazing how they get away with using this when there is no historical manuscript evidence to make the claim at all. So that's number one. Number two, even though the first printed New Testament appeared in 1516, and therefore up till that time, for 1500 years, the New Testament had been handed down by scribes, being copied by hand, nevertheless, almost all text-critical scholars—these are the scholars who specialize in doing the analysis of the many texts that we have to see if we can discern the original wording—almost all text-critical scholars, both theological conservatives and theological liberals.

I could tell a story about my three years in Germany where I thought I would have to establish the text of the passage I was working on, and they just waved it away and said, "Oh, we've got the reliable text. You don't even worry about that." Virtually all those scholars agree that the enormous abundance of those manuscripts, as we compare them, make it possible to be sure we have a text that corresponds to what the original authors wrote.

And the fact that there are some outliers, like Bart Ehrman, who write books to try to undermine the reliability of the actual text, his writings have not, among mainline scholars, conservative and liberal, found persuasion. And here's what's amazing. The abundance of these manuscripts of the New Testament, or parts of the New Testament, as compared with the number of manuscripts for other ancient works, is staggering.

There are ten existing manuscripts for Julius Caesar's Gallic Wars, composed between 58 and 50 BC, and all of these date from the 10th century or later. There are 20 manuscripts of Libby's Roman history, written roughly during the time when Jesus was alive. Only two manuscripts exist for Tacitus' histories and Annals, which were composed about AD 100, and one of them from the 9th century, the rest from later, the other from later.

There are only eight manuscripts of the history of Thucydides, written between 460 and 400 BC. Now compare those numbers with the manuscripts or partial manuscripts of the New Testament. These numbers are from the Institute of New Testament Textual Research in Münster, Germany. Go online and see all these things for yourself.

Which is the most authoritative collection of such data in the world. There are 322 unsealed, that is capital manuscripts, capitalized, 2,907 minuscule texts, 2,445 lectionary portions, 127 papyri, for a total of 5,801 manuscripts of the New Testament part or whole. These are all handwritten copies of the New Testament or parts of the New Testament, preserved in libraries around the world today, and now captured electronically in digital format so that you can see them for yourself online.

No other ancient book even comes remotely close to this kind of wealth of diverse preservation. Now it's true that the more manuscripts you have, the more variations you find. But on the other hand, and more importantly, the more manuscripts you have, the more control you have for discerning which readings are the original ones.

Here's the way F.F. Bruce from a generation ago said it. "If the great number of manuscripts increases the number of scribal errors, it increases proportionately the means of correcting such errors so that the margin of doubt left in the process of recovering the exact original wording is in truth remarkably small." Now here's my third and final reason for encouragement and confidence.

What is most significant for the reliability and authority of the New Testament is that the variations that textual critics are unsure of are not the kind that would change any Christian doctrine. That's really important. So somebody might say, "Oh, there's hundreds and hundreds of variations." That's true. F.F. Bruce says, "The variant readings about which any doubt remains among textual critics of the New Testament affects no material question of historic fact or of Christian faith and practice." Nothing on this score—and I say this because he wrote that book in 1943, and you might say, "Whoa, that's 70 years ago." Nothing on this score has changed in the last couple of generations since F.F.

Bruce. In 2006, Paul Wegner reaffirmed Bruce's conclusion, and this is the book I would send people to if they want to get a book on this, A Student's Guide to Textual Criticism of the Bible by Paul Wegner. Here's what he says, "It is important to keep in perspective the fact that only a very small part of the text is in question, and of these, most variants make little difference to the meaning of any passage." When he closes his book—and I'm going to close this podcast by quoting Frederick Kenyon from earlier—"It is reassuring at the end to find that the general result of all these discoveries and all this study is to strengthen the proof of the authenticity of the Scriptures and our conviction that we have in our hands in substantial integrity the veritable Word of God." Now, how all this scientific work on the text relates to our spiritual assurance that is ready to die for the truth of sentences in the Bible, how this scientific work relates to that spiritual assurance is what I wrote a book about and published last year called A Peculiar Glory.

And if that's the level at which people are going to struggle, then I offer them that as my effort to establish my own faith and to help other people. Maybe it would help them, too. Yeah, that could be very helpful for listeners. There's so much reassurance just in those ancient manuscript comparison stats as well.

Thank you, Pastor John, for that. And thank you for making the Ask Pastor John podcast a part of your day and for sending in really great challenging questions like this one. You can stay current with our episodes on your phone or device by subscribing through your preferred podcast app.

And you can now even listen through Desiring God's official YouTube channel. And if you'd like to search our past episodes, browse our most popular episodes, or send us a question of your own, you can do those things through our online home at DesiringGod.org/AskPastorJohn. But will profanity and crude talk make us more relatable and more effective in our engagement with this culture?

The question comes up a lot in the inbox, and this time it arrives in an email from a podcast listener, a college student, who faces this question and all sorts of entailments with it on campus. And we are going to work through those questions next time when we return on Friday.

I'm your host, Tony Reinke, and we'll see you then. Page 2 of 9 Page 3 of 9 Page 4 of 9 Page 5 of 9