Apologetics #5 - The Divine Inspiration of the Bible (Part 4)

Lightly edited for readability while preserving the speaker’s meaning and substantive statements.

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   [Music] foreign [Music] this is apologetics class five the divine inspiration of the Bible part four and today we're going to be talking about the text transmission and the reason we're going to talk about this and we'll talk about which text is because one of the things you face one of the questions you face from critics Skeptics and people who you know are unbelievers or uh doubters or whatever you want to say they'll be like well you know um how do you know you know where the text came from there's so many different Bibles one you know and they might even be smart enough to bring up well this verse and this Bible in the King James version says this verse this way and then this over here in the revised Standard Version says it this way and completely different or when you look at the message or you look at for instance like in the King James version First John 5 7 is there but if you look at the NIV it's not there so uh this is a valid question why is this why does this happen so uh this is something I've had this book right here this little book I bought I remember now I I had to go get it again because I bought it probably in 19 late 1987 or 88 but it's entitled let's weigh the evidence by Barry Burton a good little book to get it's really it really kind of shows you which way it goes it was copyright 1983 Barry D Burton b-u-r-t-o-n um but it's called let's weigh the evidence which Bible is the real word of God and this is more of a comparison it does tell you a little bit of the story that we're going to go through today I went and got it off the bookshelf this morning so I can compare some of the versions and show you some of the scriptures that are different in one Bible versus the other another good book you can get is um by Dr D a weight this is called defending the King James Bible a four-fold superiority he talks about the text the translators the technique the theology God's word kept intact in English um I bought this this is a hardback I bought this online for 11 bucks brand new still wrapped but Dr wait now he's a hardcore Baptist so we don't go to him for theology on like once they've always saved and the gifts of the holy spirit but he was he's a he's a multiple PhD in

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   language okay this guy knows uh he knows language he um he got his ba In classical Greek in Latin from the University of Michigan in 1948 and he got his Masters in theology in New Testament Greek literature from Dallas Theological Seminary in 1952 and he got a masters of arts in speech from Southern Methodist University in 1953 he got a doctor of theology with honors in Bible Exposition from Dallas Theological Seminary in 1955 in a PhD in speech from Purdue University in 1961. this guy knows speech he knows language and he knows Greek and the Hebrew but he also knows the history of the text transmission from the apostles concerning the New Testament and the old two this is almost a technical manual on um it's not like you know sit down and easy reading type thing all right so there's that and I'm going to look at two there's another book by Dr Ken Johnson that I'm going to just look at I didn't require you to get these books because I'm not going to go through the entire book but if you want them this is another book by Dr Ken Johnson called the ancient word of God so we'll we're going to get into that a little bit this morning but again you just need to know um where the Bible comes from now I'm just going to read a little bit of this here in the beginning of this book because he uh he goes through um you know some of the stuff we've already covered about God promised to preserve his word but I found some things interesting in here um irenaeus now we're gonna this is a quote from irenaeus one of the church fathers in ad 178 and this is what he said the doctrine of the Apostles has been guarded as a very complete system of Doctrine and has been preserved without any forging of scriptures uh neither receive addition to nor suffer curtailment from its truths read the word of God without falsification lawfully and diligently explaining the Old Testament in harmony with the rest of the scriptures or the New Testament this was irenaeus against heresies for 0.33 this was 80 78 so in 1878 all right irenaeus if you remember um you had John the Apostle John his disciple polycarp then polycarp discipled irenaeus and irenaeus does recount times that he met the Apostle John as well all right so right before the Apostle John died so irenaeus says here that the doctrine of the Apostles has been guarded a very complete system of Doctrine has been preserved without any forging of the scriptures now when he's talking about the

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   scriptures remember we even talked about it the other day that the 27 books of the New Testament by this time were well had been done for a long time that uh moratorium fragments that we found martinian fragment however it said remember talked about all the books there and uh and then the other ones are mentioned by other Church fathers so what they're saying is is this the scriptures the New Testament the gospels acts the Epistles of Paul the other Epistles of John the Revelation um that it was all intact and it was preserved and there were no forgeries all right that they that we had the word of God now this is A.D 178 when he says this all right so um we'll keep going here let's just keep reading this part see the ancient Church believed the Bible was inspired and perfect they were to carefully guard it from those who would tamper with the text so let's see how it all began so this is A.D 32 to 132 all right acts 11 teaches that Believers in the Messiah the Lord Jesus were first called Christians in Antioch this is important and that the prophets frequented Antioch in the early days now the last book of the Bible Revelation was written about 80 95 by the Apostle John when he had been banished to the island of Patmos for being a Christian in 1896 John was released from his prison returned to the city of Ephesus using it as a headquarters for missionary work John and polycarp continue to plant churches for the next 20 years meanwhile the scribes at Antioch continue to produce copies of the inspired writings of the Apostles they were eventually grouped together to form the New Testament so it was primarily in Antioch where the New Testament the Epistles the Gospels acts and then finally the book of Revelation and John and Peter's last Epistles were being copied and passed around to the church all right so Antioch now Mark and this is just church history I'm giving you here first I know I know remember I told you apologetics and and church history you're going to overlap there's just no way you're gonna have a little church history and apologetics but Mark took his gospel and set up the Christian church in Alexandria Egypt he was martyred there while the essenes of qumran were producing the Dead Sea Scrolls another essene Community developed in Egypt this is very important to remember the Egyptian essenes combined Judaism and paganism from them a rose occult card to therapeutic all right these therapeutic mixed the Pagan practices of the Egyptian essenes with Christianity they also mixed in and what a lot of people don't know and I have this in my book The polluted church is

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   that this group The therapeutic really mixed in as well with Christianity Buddhism because there were Buddhist monks as missionaries in Egypt as early as 300 BC maybe even earlier so the whole idea of having you know monks and celibacy and the rosary beads that come all of that comes from Buddhism the meditation the chanting the repetitive type prayers the visualization all of that stuff came from the Buddhist monks that went into Egypt and then These Guys these Egyptians that joined with them and then some people that would go out into the desert like the uh what they're called the desert fathers and they would go out into the desert to be Hermits basically and they picked up the practices of these things well these all of this is happening you know 250 you know on into you know 250 300 A.D and it was these guys who were thought to buy the people around to be very holy men right but they had they had a mixture they just had aspects of Christianity they mixed in with all this paganism that is what became the Roman Catholic Church from the beginning all right because the Romans and the people in the area all believe that these Egyptian Pagan seen people these therapeutic people that they were holy men and that's why the whole thing is where nuns come from nuns actually nuns come from the whole thing the Oracle of Delphi you might want to write that down you can look that up but the Oracle of Delphi was a well-known place of divination um it was usually one woman that was the Oracle she was the prophetess of the god Apollo and um she would basically go down in this cave and they said there was a gas coming up from the ground and basically she was getting high on some type of gas that was coming up out of the ground but she would prophesy and she was definitely demon possessed but there would be a group of virgins around her that would be dedicated to the oracle that one of them would then they all would train under her and then when she the Oracle passed away there would be another one take um her place and there was a stream there and they talked about the stream if you came and got water from the stream that that was holy water that's where that came from all this stuff that's in the Roman Catholic Church came from paganism and Witchcraft and occultism I can just tell you holy water the nuns they called them nuns actually The Virgins around there the if you remember in Acts 16 remember the woman possessed with a spirit of divination um a lot of people think that that word divination there is python but it's not it's pythian and that and it's talking

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