I'm going to start here just with a familiar place in Matthew chapter 5 tonight, and I know that these messages here, kind of in the history, the outlining of really the pedigree of our Bible here, don't hearken a lot to back to the scriptures, but I do want to start at least with a biblical and biblical principle here before we get into more of that. I know we're spending some time going into some technical aspects, and maybe this is something that these things about preservation and canonization and translation and things that we've been talking about are something that you've never really thought about or given much thought to, but I think that it is important that we understand how we got our Bible, how we can say with confidence and with faith that, with great faith that the Bible we have in the English language in our hands here tonight, this King James Bible, is the Word of God. And we can trust it, we can build our lives on it, we can build our faith on it, we can organize and operate our church and our ministry by it. And there, of course, have been men involved, human, sinful men involved in every aspect of that process. And so we trust very much so that God has superintended in that process and guided in that process and providentially worked powerfully in that process of putting the right people in the right place. Whether it was the prophets to actually speak the words to originally, or whether it is those who were had the burden and the mandate of faithfully copying the scriptures and the manuscripts going forward, even to those who were involved in the efforts of what we'll talk about here tonight, translation. And I know that anytime man is involved, there's room for error. and some efforts and all of these parts of the process, some of these efforts where there were insincere and unbelieving people involved, there were some errors made, there were some corruption that crept in because of that. And so we look to those places where the most care and the most diligence Most safeguards were put into place to ensure that the Word of God was preserved and carried forward faithfully. And that's one of the reasons why we won't really get to it all tonight because it's still quite a bit. to bring us to that point. It's one of the reasons why we exclusively use the King James Bible is because it is the product of the most diligent and the most careful and the most thoughtful and the most prayerful and the most faith-filled efforts that were made in every step of the process to render us an English Bible. And so we'll talk about the next part of that process here. But I do want to start with something the Lord said in Matthew chapter five, and this is right there in the Sermon on the Mount, verse 17. The Lord said, And verily I say unto you, till heaven and earth pass, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the law till all be fulfilled. Whosoever therefore shall break one of these least commandments and shall teach men so, he shall be called the least in the kingdom of heaven. Whosoever shall do and teach them the same shall be called great in the kingdom of heaven. And God puts a high priority, and Jesus Christ puts a high priority on his word. and on keeping of His Word and on the honoring of His Word. The Book of Psalms says that the Lord had exalted His Word above His very name, and the name of God is very high and exalted. And He exalts His Word above His name and holds His Word up. in esteem, higher than he holds his own name, the name which, you know, we were talking about in Exodus, should never be taken in vain and should not be used, abused, used irreparably in any way. And he holds his word in higher esteem than his own name. The Lord takes his word very, very seriously, and we should too, and honor his word. But we're looking here, recently, excuse me, at the aspects of preservation, and of course, we talked about how the sheer scope of the Word of God coming together and being compiled over all the many, many centuries that it was written, 1,600 years, a span of 1,600 years from when the Bible began to be written to when it was completed, the last book was completed, the book of Revelation, 1,600 years, and in three different original languages and 40 different 40 plus different human prophets and apostles that were involved in the original transmission of scriptures through inspiration. And then the Word of God being written in different places, hundreds of thousands of square miles that were covered by the original writing places of the scriptures, everywhere from the Holy Land well into the East Central Asia and North Africa and up into the European continent. I mean, just an incredible scope that we're talking about. And yet the Lord was able to overcome all of that, time and space and distance and all of those things that would have been impediments to having an entire and a complete Word, scripture, compilation of scripture, volume of scriptures that we have, the Lord was able to overcome that because God is a big God and He's a powerful God. to ensure and through different means and different processes to ensure that the word of God was copied faithfully and reproduced faithfully over the years in their original languages. And then for even as we'll start into tonight, the processes by which the scriptures were translated from the original language to any other language. And that's what translation of course is, is that the word of God being translated rendered from its original language into any other language, and that's something that's not new. To point back to the scripture that we read here, the Lord here in Matthew chapter 5 says, He makes an interesting statement here, one that we're pretty familiar with. He says, And that terminology that he's using there, jot and tittle, was a reference back to the punctuation and diacritical marks that are found in the original Hebrew scriptures. I understand something. At this point, the original, the Hebrew scriptures had been translated into at least two languages at this point and were widely in circulation. There was a There was a translation called the Targum that was into an Aramaic. Aramaic was far more common in Israel. The speaking of Aramaic and the reading and writing of Aramaic was far more common in first century Israel. than even the biblical Hebrew. And there was another one called the Septuagint, and that was the Old Testament scriptures translated into Greek. It's a pretty bad translation. You've probably heard of it before. It was done very, very quickly. There were 70 different translators and they did it over like a two week period. And then they weren't allowed to review or revise their work. They just published it. It was a pretty bad translation. Any serious Hebrew scholar, any serious Old Testament scholar does not have a very high regard for the Septuagint, but those things were available in Jesus' day, and they would have been perhaps even a little bit more accessible than even the original Hebrew scriptures. When Jesus makes a comment here that one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass away, he is referring to the Hebrew scriptures. and placed a priority on the purest and most preserved scriptures that were available to them in that day. Something we understand is the Word of God is always, God has always intended for His Word to be for everyone. To be for everyone. To be in a format in which is accessible and attainable to the common person. You see other places in the scripture where Jesus, who by all accounts, right, we know He's the Son of God, we know that because we get to read about it, but to everyone around Him, He was the carpenter's son. He was an average man in Israel at the time, an average man in Galilee at the time. He was able to go into a synagogue on the Sabbath day. He was able to go and open up the scriptures and read from Isaiah and then preach from Isaiah to the people in the synagogue. I mean, he stands up and he reads from Isaiah 64 and then he preaches to them. This day, these words are fulfilled in your ears. And why? Because he was a Hebrew reading scriptures in Hebrew. And that was in a language that was unknown to the people inside of the synagogue. Anybody who had literacy was allowed to go and read the scriptures there in the synagogue. It was hard to come by a copy of them because writing materials and things like that were expensive. And it wasn't a quick process in order to rapidly produce scripture in a volume, but anybody had access to the scriptures. When the Lord delivered his law in the Old Testament, the first place, the most important place where the law was to be taught was in the home. by moms and dads. It wasn't, God didn't tell the Israelites, go to the temple, go to the tabernacle to learn the word of God. Go to the experts, go to the scholars. You can only hear the word of God and be taught the word of God from Moses or from Aaron or from the high priest at the time or from the Levites. And that was never God's plan. He tells them in Deuteronomy 6 that the words which I commanded this day shall be in thy heart and thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, with all thy soul, with all thy mind, with all thy strength. And thou shalt and you'll talk about the words of this commandment shall not depart out of your mouth. You're going to talk about them when you're in the way and when you lie down and when you rise up, you're going to hang them on your doorposts. You're going to keep the Word of God around you, which means that it had to be accessible In the New Testament, the New Testament scriptures were written in Greek, but they were written in a particular kind of Greek called Koine Greek, K-O-I-N-E, Koine Greek. Koine Greek, Nietzsche, the German philosopher in the 19th century, criticized the Greek in which the New Testament was written because it was a low class form of Greek. Compared to the classical Greek of Plato and Aristotle and all the classical works of Western civilization, the Greek in which the New Testament scriptures were written in were pretty basic and pretty common, but it wasn't written in order to be a work of art. It was written to be truth accessible to the common person all around the world. Koine Greek was a universal language. It was a language that was spoken by everybody in the first century. You go to a new place and you wonder how Paul and Barnabas and Silas and these early missionaries could go to a different part of the world and communicate. Not because they would go into Asia Minor and the people in Asia Minor spoke Hebrew or Aramaic, but because Paul spoke Koine Greek and so did they. They had their native language and they spoke Koine Greek also. You go to Italy and yeah, they probably spoke Latin there and some other rudimentary forms of Italian dialects and things like that, but they also spoke Greek. And they go east into the modern areas of Syria and Iraq and Iran and those places like that. And yeah, they had their native languages that they spoke. They also spoke Koine Greek. And the scripts were written in that language because it was a language that was accessible to the most amount of people possible in the world at the time. God always wanted the Scriptures to be accessible to the common person. One of the real tragedies of the centuries that follow, the Dark Ages centuries, was that the Word of God was withheld from the common person. I mean, if there's a reason why the Dark Ages were the Dark Ages, it's because there was a dearth of the Word of God in the hands of the common person. People were not given access to the Bible. The Bible was kept in Latin and kept in Greek and kept in languages that if you could read in your own language, you couldn't read that one. You couldn't understand it. You had to go to the scholars. You had to go to the trained ones. You had to go to the ones who had an education. You had to go to the ones who had a classical education in ancient dead languages to be told what the Bible was telling you. And that was never God's plan. It was always God's plan that the Word of God would be in a language that anyone could read for themselves so they could go directly to the source and understand what God's will for them was. So as the ancient languages faded, And as people lost the knowledge of the use of these ancient languages, I guess you would say the use of ancient languages faded. The Scriptures became inaccessible to more and more people. Only the people who had a strong classical education, those who were of means and leisure, who had time to go to university and learn a language that nobody spoke anymore, like Latin, like Greek, like Hebrew, like Biblical Hebrew, only those people could understand what the Word of God said. And more and more and more, very few of those were altruistic enough to tell people exactly what the Word of God said, the whole counsel of God. It'd be very easy if you were the only guy who could read, you could just say, well, skip over a verse or two or skip over a line or two if it wasn't in your interest. And unfortunately, that was so much of what was taking place in the churches in the dark ages. the Word of God was being refused to the common people. I understand textual translation is not a new phenomenon and there's, in that always existed the risk of human error and human perversion in this. And thankfully, some translation efforts have been driven by the desire to faithfully translate the Word of God while rendering it into a different language. And thankfully God has guided through that and preserved through that process. Unfortunately, there have been other efforts that have seized on the occasion of translating the scriptures to then change them by addition and change them by omission and change them by alteration using that translation process to alter the scriptures themselves. Many of these efforts were misguided and corrupt. Thankfully, God has prepared and placed true servants, His true servants, in the right places and times to take part in the important task of faithfully rendering God's will. We'll talk about some of those efforts here tonight. This is actually a really complex subject that goes really, really deeply. And if you really want to dive deeply into it, let me just say, come to the Bible Institute class, because we will get into a lot of this more deeply than we are tonight and in the next week or so. But to try and keep it as quick and as simplified as possible here, understand that this process of translation begins with the manuscripts themselves. What copy of the Word of God we are going to translate from. And that's a real heart issue at the core of translation and whether or not we can trust the end result is whether or not we can trust the beginning product here. And so a manuscript is simply this. It is a copy of the text in its original language. And so a manuscript is a copy of an Old Testament book, of a New Testament book in the original language in which it was written. The originals, sometimes called the autographs, Those do not exist anymore. The oldest of them would be some 3,000 plus years old. The things, the products that they were made out of would not exist. hold together that long, right? Even the newest of them would be 1900 years old. Those materials have since completely deteriorated and faded. There are some fairly old scrolls and things that have been preserved, but the oldest of those is from about the 400s, about the 5th century, certainly not from the 1st century AD or even beyond that. And so the original originals, the autographs, if you would, do not exist and they have not for a long time. All we have is copies of copies called manuscripts. Copies and copies and copies and called manuscripts. And understand that not all manuscripts are made equally. Manuscript used for the translation affects the final outcome. And so the first challenge that all translators have to overcome, the first question they have to answer is, what manuscript am I going to translate from? And that becomes kind of the big question here that we'll address tonight. And so the best Old Testament manuscripts are called, the Masoretic Text is from a group that particularly took up the mantle of faithfully preserving and copying the Old Testament scriptures as traditionally believed to be compiled by Ezra the scribe about 400 years before Christ. And there were first some teachers and some scribes, and then some called them the Masoretes that took up this challenge themselves to copy the scriptures out for themselves. The best manuscript It's the best manuscript because of the safeguards that these scribes and copyists were required to abide by. Now, this is a particularly pertaining to the Old Testament scriptures here, but these safeguards they put in place, there were eight rules that they had to follow and understand something. If you had to write a term paper based on these eight rules, you'd never get it done. I certainly wouldn't, right? Handwriting these things when they didn't, they were handwriting these texts out. And they had to follow these rules in order to faithfully reproduce a manuscript along the way. And I'm gonna give them to you quickly. First, the parchment had to be made from the skin of a clean animal and tied together with strings cut from the skin of a clean animal. Had to be, follow kind of what we would consider to be the, kosher rules of clean animals and the way that they're handled and processed and all this, first had to be that. Secondly, they had to write it in the text in columns of 48 to 60 lines per page. They had to line the paper first before they began to copy any of the words to it, but they had to line the paper out 40 to 60 lines, no less than 48, no more than 60 lines. If there was less than 48 lines or more than 60 lines on a paper, the whole scroll was destroyed. They had to use black ink only that was repaired by a specific recipe. If they use any other color ink, the whole scroll was destroyed. They were not allowed to write any word of scripture from memory. They had to have an authentic copy in front of them while they transcribed the text. They had to pronounce each word out loud before they wrote it. They had to reverently wipe their pen. before writing the word for God, Elohim. Anytime they were going to write the word Elohim, they had to wipe the pen clean. Anytime they were going to write the word Jehovah, which in our King James Bible is the word LORD in all caps. Anytime they had to write the word Jehovah in the scriptures, They had to clean their entire body. They go take a bath and then come back and write the word of the name of Jehovah. And there are some passages where God's name shows up several times. You can imagine, right? You take like five, six baths in a day in that process. There are strict rules concerning the forms of letters, the spacing of them, the use of the pen, the color of the parchment, any of these things that were not within regulation would invalidate the whole copy. The whole thing would be destroyed. If there was a revision to a role and a role would be all of the pages of a particular book of the Bible. If there was a revision that needed to be made, it had to be made within 30 days of completing it. And if there was an error found on a single page of the roll, the entire page was condemned. The entire page had to be rewritten. If they didn't make those revisions within 30 days, the whole roll was destroyed. If a mistake was found, any mistake was found on the page, the page was condemned and destroyed. If there were three mistakes found on one page, the whole book was destroyed. I mean, I can't write a thank you note without making three mistakes. Every word and every letter was counted. Any added letters, any added words, any missing letters, any missing words, any letters that were touching through bad penmanship, and the entire roll would be destroyed. I mean, they went through great pains to ensure that the Word of God was copied carefully and faithfully. They weren't taking this job lightly. They were serious about this work. And that is, that is from where we get our, our, our Hebrew text for, um, uh, the, the, the best Hebrew texts for our, our, uh, translation efforts. There was no official group like the Masoretes that, that, that took up the mantle. of translating or preserving and copying the New Testament in the same way, the best manuscripts for the Greek New Testament come from a body of over 5,000, it's almost 5,300 extant text of the New Testament books, of which a large majority of those 5,200 plus that are in in an extraordinary agreement with each other. 98 to 99% identical to each other over these 5,200 extant manuscripts. And from these, traditionally called the traditional text, formerly were called the majority text. That term was used because the majority of them were in agreement, 5,200 that were in 98, 99% agreement called the majority text. Not called that anymore because somebody actually published a majority text in like 1982 and kind of stole the name, because the name was kind of an informal name at that point. And so they actually, produced something else called a majority text, also called the Antiochian text, hearkening to the church at Antioch, the church which was the first missions church, out of which Paul and Barnabas were sent as missionaries. The Byzantine text, coming out of the Byzantium Empire, where most of the early missions work was done. Byzantium Empire was centered around modern-day Turkey and the the Balkan Peninsula, Greece and Macedonia, those places where most of the early missions work really was thriving and going forward and where a lot of strong New Testament churches were founded and going forward. And from this was produced what's called the Textus Receptus, the received text. And that's refers to the complete Greek manuscript completed by a scholar by the name of Erasmus from the body of over 5,200 extant manuscripts that were in overwhelming agreement He went through great pains, took over 12 years to produce this and edit and revise it, 12 years in working on this received text, actually even went into the writings of the early church fathers from the second, third, fourth centuries, those who were quoting scripture. Sometimes it was from transcripts of the trials where they were being tried for their faith and being condemned to death for things. And they were quoting scriptures and the scriptures they were quoting agreed with the 5200 majority text transcripts from the traditional text. It was really, it's an impressive thing. And a man who spent a great deal of time and great deal of effort to put together the Textus Receptus from which was a a Greek manuscript used to produce then modern languages from that. There is a body of manuscripts, it's far smaller, it's less than 50, actually it's about 45 of these extant scriptures from the original 5300, about 45 of these were used to produce what's called the critical text of the Greek New Testament. they referred to as the minority text or the eclectic text or the Egyptian or the Alexandrian text and referred in that way because they came from different, disparate different places, that's what eclectic means, and found, one of them in particular found in Egypt, we'll talk about it in a minute, but the revision committee didn't go in necessarily to produce, they were not mandated to produce a new translation, but Tumen in particular decided that's exactly what they wanted to do. And so they produced a new critical text of the New Testament using some suspect manuscripts to say the very, very least. Their final product disagrees with the received texts seven to 10% of the time. which is a significant amount of differences between one text and the other. Seven to 10% of the time, it's not really the same text as the received text was. And this was done in the 1880s. This was not all that long ago. They produced this critical text and they produced a text that has seven to 10% of it disagrees with the traditional text that had been used since the 1400s. This committee ostensibly took the approach that the oldest manuscripts were best. But that's not really true, is it, right? Just because something is older doesn't mean it's better. Because the fact is, I mean, whether it's older or newer or whatever, the best is the best. It doesn't matter if it's the oldest or not. And they also couldn't categorically prove that the texts that they were using were the oldest texts. They made that assumption based on the formatting of the text. The text was written in all capital letters, which was something that was kind of an older style of writing. And so they said, oh, well, this is older than what we've been using. And so it's got to be older than what they have. And so it must be better. It must be closer to the source. And that was the reasoning that they used. The older manuscripts allegedly that they were using, one of them was pulled out of a burn pile in a Greek Orthodox monastery in the Sinai Peninsula. A Greek manuscript that the Greek Orthodox priest didn't think had enough value to keep. They were going to burn it. And it had many, many errors in it. There were things that any real scribe, like we talked about, any real scribe would reject outright. Corrections being made right on the page and misspellings and letters touching and all kinds of errors that a faithful scribe would have rejected and would have thrown. It was probably a reason why it was being burned, I guess I should say. The other texts that they used to make revisions was locked up under lock and key and under supervision. And the men that went in to review it were not allowed to study it for more than three hours at a time. They were never allowed to write anything down, copy anything. They had to go in, study it, and then leave out of there. And then from their memory, try to reproduce the things that they saw. And they were only given access to this text for a total of 42 hours. And they went out from there and reproduced an entire Greek New Testament manuscript from 42 hours from their memory. It's a pretty good memory, I guess. 42 hours isn't a whole lot of time to read the New Testament. You'd get through it. Would you remember everything you read? And from this, they created an entire new Greek manuscript from which many modern versions come out from. There's other consideration, another consideration is some of those other earlier translations of scriptures translated from the originals into other, you know, dead-ish languages, I suppose. You'd say languages that were spoken around the first century BC, first century AD, even to say some that existed in the time of Christ and then shortly thereafter. And to what degree that these were used and referenced and used as reference points in the translations into other languages. Again, there was one in Aramaic called Targum. Another one of the Old Testament, Hebrew Old Testament translated into Greek called the Septuagint. Both of these are pretty full of errors. There was one translated into Syriac, Syriac Aramaic. Aramaic and they're called the Peshitta. And the Peshitta still exists today. And it's for being an early translation, it's not a bad one, but it's also not a good one. It's one that hasn't gone through a lot of review and revision in the meantime. There's one called the Hexapla, it was a Greek translation of the Old Testament, pretty full of errors, Latin Vulgate, written by an unbelieving, translated by an unbelieving scholar named Jerome. Really, when you start to really figure out who Jerome was, he did not believe in basic Christian doctrine. to the point where it's questionable whether he was even genuinely a Christian or not. He was a very smart guy, but he approached the scriptures not from the place of a believer and not from the place of a sincere desire to faithfully reproduce God's Word because he believed it was God's Word, but because he was just taking on an academic project. That's a different philosophy altogether. And so to some translation efforts have really relied very heavily on some of these faulty translations from Hebrew into Greek, from Hebrew into Latin, from Greek into Latin. And they've relied on those two heavily. And because of that, many errors have come forward and those translation efforts are then very, very flawed. Many of these early translations were incomplete and deeply flawed. Several of them were performed and executed by critical and unbelieving scholars. And the consideration as it relates to our topic tonight is to what degree a modern translation is based on that and is influenced by those. And if they are deeply influenced by these faulty early translations, then the end product, again, can't be better than its original form. modern translations. And we'll really get into here next week. The modern translations began in the 1400s, really in the, the, the, the, the early, the, the early sentiments of, of what became the Protestant Reformation. efforts made to begin bringing the scriptures into the common tongues and the common languages of the European languages, German and French, Spanish, and then ultimately English. These efforts were at first very much condemned by the Roman church, even outlawed by governments, those who were found to be in possession of a copy of scripture were often condemned to death. The scriptures were burned. Those who were actually making efforts to translate and reproduce scriptures in languages for the common person were pursued and persecuted and put to death, even if they could be. Many of these efforts, were left incomplete, even some filled with error, but it began to open the door for scriptures to be desired by the common people and actually be in the possession of the common person where they could have the Word of God for themselves and read and understand the Word of God for themselves. And that was an important step in the process. A man named John Wycliffe, made, probably made some of the first, most earnest efforts to attempt to translate the scriptures into English, finished the New Testament, got most of the way done with the Old Testament. But he's called for those efforts, mainly he's called the Morning Star of the Reformation. What came out of the Reformation was not all good. And it was not all altruistically and biblically driven in all of the things that took place. But one of the good things that came out of it, if you could say nothing else about it, one of the good things that did come out of it was an emphasis on getting the Word of God into the hands of every person. and the renewed efforts of that to put the Word of God in the language of the common person and in the hands of the common person so they could have a relationship with God without the intervention and interference of someone else, without being held hostage to some other person's knowledge of a dead language and their their willingness to be honest and forthright about what they were reading out of the scriptures and to read and give the whole counsel of God and not just the parts that they wanted to share and wanted to emphasize. And so as we go forward in this, we'll go in more depth into the pedigree and this process of our English translators, really get to the brass tacks here of why we hold the King James Bible, why it's the only Bible we're going to use here in this church. And we'll get more into that pedigree there. But I know a lot of this is kind of a lot of information, a lot of technical things in the processes here. But it's important that we understand that it's It's with purpose and it's with conviction that we use the Bible that we use. It's not a matter of just preference or certainly not convenience. It's really a matter of conviction and faith that we have in the Word of God that we have in our hands here in English. And so we'll get into that in the next message here in this series. But let's go ahead and close here with a word of prayer. Thank you for your... your attention here tonight. Um, let's, let's, uh, let's, uh, let's go to a time here of prayer. If you join with your heads bowed, we do want to give a few moments here. If any God's been dealing with your heart about anything, I know from this, it wasn't much of a call for response here, but if nothing else, a call for, for openness and open-heartedness about our faith in the Word of God, approaching this subject and approaching this topic with a desire to really put our faith more firmly and more deeply in the Word of God, if that's something that you just need to confirm in your heart here tonight. or anything else the Lord may be dealing with you about. Let's take just a few moments while the piano plays. We'll have time here just for prayer before we go to our closing events here.