The Manuscripts

Please turn in your Bibles with me to Romans 15. For the month of September, we're using our adult Sunday school class to take a look at the book that we hold so dear.

We are studying things about the Bible. Why do we have it? Where did we get it? Why are there differences between various translations and versions?

And last time we talked about some of the questions about the canon, the list of books that belongs in the Bible, how that came to be, why we have the books that we do have. Today we're going to focus on manuscripts, and we'll see how far we get into talking about some of the modern versions that come from those manuscripts.

But to begin with, we want to talk about, just very briefly, the languages that the Bible was originally written in. Somebody help me out and tell me what language the Old Testament was written in.

Hebrew. Okay, very good. And just for fun, on your handout there, under number one, original languages, I've got some Hebrew. The Old Testament, and if anybody can tell me what verse that is, you get...

I tell the high schoolers they get bonus points, and they mean absolutely nothing, but... I'll give you super mega bonus points if you can tell me what verse that is. The Hebrew, the Old Testament. We'll come back to you in a second for the New Testament.

Right? Genesis 1. Very good. Super mega bonus points, and I heard it back there too. In Hebrew, you read right to left. So that reads, In the beginning, created, God, the heavens and the earth.

Okay, so the New Testament is written in Hebrew. That's Genesis 1.1. Or the Old Testament is written in Hebrew. What language is the New Testament written in? Greek. Right. And as Dennis has pointed out, that is John 1.1.

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. And so we've got the language written, or the Bible written in these original languages. Today we're going to be focusing on the New Testament and the Greek manuscripts.

It's important because it's in the original manuscript that the actual apostles wrote, or the prophets wrote, the gospel writers wrote, that we believe we have the inspired Word of God.

And I've got a quote there that's helpful from our Confession of Faith. I'm going to read it, and you can follow along. In the Old Testament in Hebrew, and the New Testament in Greek, that is to say, in their original languages, before translation, were inspired by God at first hand.

And ever since, by His particular care and providence, they have been kept pure. They are, therefore, authentic. And for the church, constitute the final court of appeal in all religious controversies.

All God's people have a right to and an interest in the Scripture, and they are commanded in the fear of God to read and search it. But as the Hebrew and Greek are not known to all such readers, Scripture is to be translated into every human language, so that as men thus acquire knowledge of God, they may worship Him in an acceptable manner, and so on.

So, the Bible was originally written in Hebrew for the Old Testament, and Greek for the New Testament. How many people here can read Hebrew and Greek?

Anybody, just a little bit? How about a little bit of Greek? Okay, we've got a few that can do a little bit of Greek, and maybe a little bit of Hebrew. If all we had, if all we still had was the Bible and Hebrew and Greek, that means that most of us couldn't read it.

We couldn't profit from it. We couldn't learn from it. And if God wanted His Word to be read and known to the ends of the earth, it makes sense that He didn't just want it written down one time in one language.

He inspired the original authors to write it down that first time in their original language of Hebrew and Greek. But it didn't stop there. Other churches needed copies of it, and so copies were made.

And of course, they were made by hand. And then, other people in other countries needed it in their language, and so it was translated into other languages. And that is for our good.

Romans 15 and verse 4. We're presuming that at the outset, that God wanted His Word spread throughout the world, not just written down one time. And so we read in Romans 15 and verse 4, For everything that was written in the past was written to teach us, so that through the endurance and the encouragement of the Scriptures, we might have hope.

Now, if I can't read it, then it wasn't written for me. I can't understand it. If I can't read it, then I can't find encouragement from the Scriptures.

And so it's good that they've been translated into various languages. If you read the discussion about tongues in 1 Corinthians, it becomes clear that God wants people to understand His Word in their own language. And so if I were to come in each Sunday, and leading the morning worship, and we come to the Scripture reading, and I were open to Greek New Testament, and only read Greek to you, that would be in violation of a principle that we find there in 1 Corinthians.

It wouldn't be profitable for anybody, because you couldn't understand it. And so, the Word of God then has been copied and translated. And that creates some problems.

Because the people that copied it, and the people that translated it, weren't inspired. They didn't claim to be inspired. The Bible doesn't tell us that they were inspired. And all of the differences that we'll talk about this morning in the manuscript, show us that they weren't inspired.

Only the guys that originally wrote it were inspired by God to do so. Ed. It is the language that Jesus spoke. Only a few portions of the Bible were actually written in Aramaic.

Some of the chapters of Daniel are in Aramaic. And I think some of Esther is in Aramaic. And so, it doesn't really come into the discussion when you're talking about the New Testament manuscripts, even though it's the language that Jesus spoke.

They wrote in Greek. But that's a good question. Any other questions before we press on? So, you've got these copyists and translators that are going to spread the Word of God.

Christianity is spreading. The Word needed to spread with it. But they didn't have a printing press to mass-produce copies of the Word. They didn't have copy machines. They obviously didn't have fax machines to spread it out or email or even the postal service like we have today.

And so, if you were going to copy the Scriptures, you had to do it by hand. And that was a slow, painstaking process. They didn't even have fluorescent lights.

And so, unless they were working outside, which usually wasn't the case, to be inside, they'd be working with some sort of candlelight, some sort of artificial light that wasn't very bright. They're not writing on nice paper like we have.

They didn't have nice pens like we have. They're working with parchment. They're working with vellum, which is animal skin. And they're not reading some nice, you know, as you read, if I had written out for you this quote from our Confession of Faith, you probably couldn't have read it.

But I have a typewriter. I don't have a typewriter. I have a computer at home and a printer. And so, I was able to type that and print it and you can read it. They didn't have that.

And so, when they're making the copies, they're working off somebody else's handwriting, which makes it all the more difficult to read and to copy accurately. They didn't even, most of them, write at a desk.

They had a copy sitting in front of them and they would sit down and they'd write it on their knees. And so, there's, and it would take hours upon hours to copy these manuscripts.

And so, as you get further into it, you get fatigued, you get tired, you get your eyes get weary and your eyes start to bug out. You know, if you read even for too long, a nice typed manuscript, your eyes can start to go buggy a little bit.

I'm just going to give you an illustration of something of what it would be like. Some of you know that my wife does some transcribing work and it's for an NFL football scout.

And I don't have time to tell the story how that came to be. She's had that since California days. But what he does now, if he knew how to type, she wouldn't have a job. But he handwrites what he wants written and then he faxes it to us.

And this is his writing. And it's next to illegible. I don't know how Aaron does it. But translating a manuscript would be something like this.

You get this and here's one that's not quite as small. And I'm not going to pass him around because you'll want to know what he says about Indianapolis at Miami, September 21st. I got Monday Night Football right here.

Anyway, so I'm not going to pass it around so you can see it. But Aaron takes this and with a nice bright light and a nice computer, she looks at it and reads it and is able to type it out.

That's really easy compared to what these guys did. But if you're working off a manuscript like this, you're squinting and going, what did he write? What is that letter? And sometimes she'll hand it over to me and go, what is that word? I don't know.

I can't read the man's writing. But I can make some of it out. That's what they're working with. They're copying off something like this. And then they weren't typing it.

They were handwriting it themselves. All of that goes to say that there's going to be some mistakes that are made because they weren't inspired. There will be accidental mistakes.

A copyist replacing a word or letter with a similar looking word or letter. An English example, replacing a lowercase a with a lowercase o because you couldn't see the little stem on the side of the a because it was all run together.

Something like that. One helpful. One helpful. There's a guy I'm going to quote several times today. His name is Bruce Metzger. He's done a lot of work with the manuscripts and textual tradition.

Has a lot of helpful things to say. And he talks about some of these mistakes. If two neighboring lines of a manuscript began or ended with the same group of letters. Or if two similar words stood near each other in the same line.

It was easy for the eye of the copyist to jump from the first group of letters to the second. And so for a portion of the text to be omitted or occasionally repeated perhaps. So think of something like in our language.

Like reduce, reuse, recycle. You've got those three words in a row. And you write reduce. And then your eyes jump. You look back up at the text and you jump to the third RE instead of the second one.

And so you get reduce, recycle. And so everybody that reads that from then on in the early church thinks that you should reduce and recycle. But they don't know about reusing. Because the copyist eyes skipped from one RE to the next.

Those are the kind of mistakes that you make when you get tired. You get fatigued. And your eyes just go to the wrong place. Two lines ended in a similar word. The one line ends in crucifixion.

The next one ends in resurrection. And your eyes go to the ION in resurrection. And then down to the next line you've skipped a whole line. Those are the sorts of mistakes that would be made. Sometimes there were intentional alterations.

They would make changes intentionally as they copied. They would correct what they perceived to be grammatical mistakes. Well, there's no way he meant to write that in the present tense. So I'm going to change it to the aorist tense.

Because that's clearly what it should be. Or he left out a word here. And that's obvious to me. He must have just missed it when he copied his. And so I'm going to put it in. Sometimes they made intentional changes like that.

Sometimes they were to remove some offensiveness or some perceived unorthodoxy. They read it and they thought, oh, that can't be right. And so they would tweak it a bit to make it a little bit more acceptable in their own mind.

Sometimes they would replace one word with another that they were familiar with from a parallel passage. It happens a lot with Old Testament quotes. They had that Old Testament quote memorized one way.

It's written down another way. And they start reading it and go, oh, I know that. And they write it the way they remember it. Or they look at it and they go, that's not how I know it. It should be this way.

When I first moved here, the Bible that I had grown up with was the New American Standard Bible. That's all I had ever known. I mean, I knew about the other ones, but that's the one I had grown up with.

And we started reciting the Ten Commandments one Lord's Day morning. Oh, I can do this. And I said, we're reciting in the NIV here, and I'm thinking in the New American Standard.

And you shall not take the name of the Lord your God in vain. That's what I wanted to say, and everybody around me was saying, you shall not misuse the name of the Lord your God. What? And if I had been reading that, I might have been tempted to write down what I knew.

Remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy. That's how I knew it. And the NIV is remember the Sabbath day by keeping it holy. They would make those corrections sometimes without even thinking about it.

James White gives a helpful example of this. And there's an example. It's there on your handout, Ephesians 1-2 and Colossians 1-2.

When Paul wrote to the Ephesians, he said, Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. Ephesians 1-2. This phrase early on had a part in the liturgy of the church.

It was a Christian blessing, a greeting, a blessing of sorts. Many people continue to use it in that way to this very day. But when writing to the Colossians, Paul was not as complete in his wording as when he wrote to the Ephesians.

Instead, he wrote, Grace to you and peace from God our Father. He doesn't add in the Lord Jesus Christ. Now place yourself in the position of a scribe who has memorized Ephesians 1-2. Each Sunday you hear grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ as you leave the worship service.

It is second nature to you. Now you start making a copy of Paul's letter to the Colossians. You start into verse 2 of chapter 1. Grace to you and peace. Ah, I know this one you think.

To yourself. And so you write out the whole phrase as you are accustomed to hearing it. And move on with verse 3. In the process, you have added an extra phrase. And the Lord Jesus Christ.

Without even knowing it. Or perhaps you look back at the original you were copying and notice that it does not say, And the Lord Jesus Christ. That is strange, you might think. It should say that.

Well, the guy who copied this must have just missed it. I'll fix it. And so you put it in. Again, due to your familiarity with the same phrase but in a different context. And so scribes would try to harmonize like that.

I've got the King James and the NIV there. And the King James keeps in the Lord Jesus Christ in Colossians 1-2. It's based on a manuscript that had that in the manuscript.

And so, of course, it's included. NIV, other modern translations based on older manuscripts that don't have that phrase included. And so they've, I think, rightly omitted it in Colossians 1-2.

So those are the kinds of things that copyists would do what would happen. Another set of problems comes not in the copying of manuscripts but in the translation of them.

When the original Greek is translated into another language, you might start with a copy where somebody's already made some changes. And so those changes find their way into your translation of whatever language it was.

Early on, they began translating into Syriac. And Latin was an important one. And Coptic, the language they spoke in Egypt. And one of the most important early translations was Jerome's Latin translation.

It's called the Latin Vulgator, the common Latin translation. That was early in the 5th century. And so they began translating as well as copying. Something that we've emphasized in the previous classes and need to again is to remember that God is sovereign over all of this process.

He allowed the mistakes to be made. And he's allowed the preservation of literally thousands of manuscripts so that we can go back and compare them and find the thing that's closest to the original manuscripts.

We'll talk more about that. So let me ask you a question and see if we're tracking here. Typically, which text would be more reliable? One that's written in Greek or one that's written in Latin?

Greek, okay? Because the Latin one's been translated. And when you translate, I forgot to say, you almost always lose something in translation. It's impossible to convey exactly what it means many different times as you translate.

Now, a lot of it depends on the skill of the translator and the original language and the language that you're translating. I'm really good at Greek, but I'm not so great at Latin. I'm going to have a sort of sloppy Latin translation.

You've got to be good at both, and not all the translators always were. Okay, so Greek is going to be more reliable than Latin. Another question. Which is going to be more reliable?

A manuscript, typically, that's older or one that is more recent? Older. Older. Because there's been less changes, less omissions, less smoothing out of the text like the things that we've talked about.

Okay, so we've got lots of copies being made. And as those copies are made, we've got lots of variants, is what we call those changes in the text.

Lots of variants that are taking place. Do you have any questions so far? Stop and take a breath for a minute. We're not going to get all the way through this handout today. But do you have any questions?

Jim? Yeah, they write it from right to left. Yeah. It's just a different way of working. No other languages. Arabic is similar, written right to left, I believe.

There are other languages that are written that way. And what you would consider to be the back of the book is the front of the book. It goes, you turn the pages this way as you read, right to left.

Yeah. Good question. Anybody else? Ed? That can influence it. We'll talk in a second about manuscript families that came from different regions back in the day. There's so many different questions interwoven there.

What manuscripts were the guys at Harvard using and which ones were the guys at Cedarville using? What is their theological bent? And so most translations will try to have a broad range of denominations represented on their translation board so that it wasn't translated at all by Baptist, so it's going to be colored by that.

Most translations try to avoid that by having as broad a range as possible on their translation boards. But yes, the area in which it was translated can have an effect on, or copied or translated can have an effect on the final product.

Yes. No. No. Oh, I skipped that. It's right here in my notes. Thank you. That's a good question. All of these copying errors, mistakes, and so on led to literally thousands of different variants.

And that's not terribly surprising because there's over 5,000 New Testament manuscripts. Now, all of them don't have all of the New Testament. Some might just have a little bit of this gospel or a little bit of this letter.

But there's over 5,000 manuscripts that we have available to look at that have the New Testament written on them. And so there's thousands of variants in them. Relatively few of them create any sort of problem, even fewer any problem of significance.

And James White summarizes, and I believe that he's right. He says, The reality is that the amount of variation between the two most extremely different manuscripts of the New Testament would not fundamentally alter the message of the Scriptures.

You don't lose anything if you adopt one of those variants. You might lose something in a particular text, but it's taught somewhere else in the Bible. And so you don't lose any foundational biblical doctrine.

It doesn't fundamentally alter the message of the Scriptures. That's an excellent question. And the answer is no. Roger. The Dead Sea Scrolls were helpful in some respects in understanding how things were written and understanding some of that.

But just generally speaking, yes, the discoveries of older texts have helped clarify, older manuscripts have helped clarify what was better and what was more original.

Yes, and we'll talk more about that as we go. Good. Roger. I would, I'd have to go back and read more. I didn't do a ton of reading on what the copyist did, just a little bit to give you a flavor of the difficulty of the work.

I'd have to go back and look at that more. I would think they would be motivated by the fact that it was the Word of God. And typically there were people in the church that were doing this copying. I don't, I think some of them were professional copiers.

I'm not, I'm not certain on that. I can't fully answer that without doing a little more research. Abby. Yeah, the society at Qumran did a lot of, a lot of writing and you can learn some by, by studying that.

Yes, that's true. Believe it or not, this is not all intended to make you doubt your scriptures. Remember the things that we've studied in the first two lessons in this class.

Don't scrap all of that when you come to this one and we're talking about mistakes that were made and so on. Remember the sovereignty of God over the, the entire process. All right, let's talk a bit about manuscript families then.

And you've got a quote there from Bruce Metzger that I'll read and you can follow along. During the early centuries of the expansion of the Christian church, what are called local texts of the New Testament gradually developed.

Newly established congregations in and near a large city such as Alexandria, Antioch, Constantinople, Carthage, or Rome were provided with copies of the scripture and the form that was current in that area.

As additional copies were made, the number of special readings and renderings would be both conserved so that eventually a type of text grew up that was more or less peculiar to that locality.

Okay, so the church at Carthage gets a copy of the scriptures. It's been copied several times probably. So they've got one that has some mistakes in it, some errors, some copying problems.

As they make more copies for themselves and other churches in their area, those errors are reproduced. They're copying what they believe are the manuscript that's been given to them and so those are reproduced and then they add a few of their own as they go along because they make mistakes too.

So eventually you get these different families of texts that are particular to different areas. And there's four important ones that are listed there. And I'll tell you a few things about each of them because it'll be important later.

There's the Alexandrian family. Its characteristics are that it's relatively brief and abrupt. Metzger says it's generally shorter than the text of other forms and it does not exhibit the degree of grammatical and stylistic polishing that's characteristic of other texts.

It's usually considered to be the best text and the most faithful in preserving the original. We've got copies of this kind of manuscript that date to the end of the second century which is just remarkably close to when they were originally written in the first century.

It's the oldest type of manuscript that we have and again, the most accurate. It's more abrupt. It hasn't been smoothed over. Some of those things that copyists tended to do to smooth things out hadn't been done to it yet.

And so copies from this family are particularly helpful. There's the Western family. We can trace it to the second century, only have copies of it from the third century and later.

These manuscripts show a lot of paraphrasing, a lot of smoothing over of the text. They read something, it didn't seem quite right, they would smooth it out a bit. There's the Caesarean manuscript, which is a bit of a mixture between the first two, between Alexandria and the Western.

And then the fourth is the most common type of manuscript. It's the Byzantine or Syrian family. It's clear, it's complete. They sought to smooth away any harshness of language, to combine two or more divergent readings into one expanded reading, and to harmonize divergent parallel passages.

This is dated to the fourth century. It's the latest of the families of manuscripts, but we have the most of them. They'd had time to, again, smooth out some of those differences between manuscripts.

And if they had, this is just an example, if they had one manuscript here that read Jesus, and one over here that read Christ, instead of trying to decide which was original and which was correct, they just put them together and have Jesus Christ.

And so you get a fuller manuscript, one that's got more possibilities in it. And again, it's one of the later types. So there's these four types of families.

All right, we've still got a little time. Let's turn over and we'll talk a little bit about what's known as the received text or the textus receptus. All of this time we're talking about no printing press, no technology for copying.

In 1454, really somewhere between 1450 and 1456, a man named Johann Gutenberg invented the printing press with movable type, and so you could start mass producing books.

All the same, no hand copying, no mistakes made in copying, because you had this printing press with movable type. And you can imagine that this radically changes everything.

Books are immediately more available. You imagine the implications of it for Christianity. Bibles are going to be available now. Much more common, easier to obtain, easier to read than a handwritten manuscript would be.

And so books begin multiplying after this. First book off Gutenberg's press, anybody? The Bible. It was Jerome's Latin Vulgate. The first thing that came off his printing press.

A translation of the Bible in Latin. And that was in 1456. During that time, Renaissance is beginning, going on, and there's a man named Erasmus.

And one of the cries of some of the scholars in the Renaissance was, to the sources, back to the sources. Instead of just being content with a Latin translation of the Bible, let's get back to the original language.

Incidentally, this wasn't really popular. People liked their Latin Bible. They didn't want to have to think about the Greek. And so, Erasmus wasn't really a very popular guy for publishing a Greek New Testament, but he thought it was important and did it anyway.

He used primarily two manuscripts dating from the 12th century, both of them from that Byzantine family of manuscripts.

Compared them with a few others and made a few corrections, but primarily was working off those two 12th century Byzantine manuscripts. He only had one manuscript that had the book of Revelation in it.

And that one was missing the last six verses. He didn't have the last six verses of Greek anywhere. And he was in a hurry to be the first to publish the Greek New Testament.

Somebody was down in Spain trying to do the same thing, and he and some of his supporters wanted him to be the first guy to publish. And so, he wasn't able to find a Greek manuscript with those last six verses of Revelation.

So, does anybody know what he did to get the last six verses of Revelation in Greek? He took Jerome's Latin Vulgate and translated it back into Greek.

He didn't get it from a manuscript. He just translated it back into Greek. And so, what you get in his Greek New Testament are things in those last six verses that don't have support anywhere in the Greek manuscript tradition.

You can't find it in the manuscripts anywhere because he translated it. Now, a lot of what he translated was good. It was excellent. He knew his Greek very well. But it wasn't the original Greek.

It was his translation from Latin, those last six verses. Erasmus' Greek New Testament that was published, as you see there, in 1516, became essentially the accepted Greek New Testament.

It's what everybody began to use that wanted to study the Greek or make a translation from Greek into a particular modern language. It went through several editions from Erasmus' second edition of the Greek New Testament.

Luther used that to translate the New Testament into German. William Tyndale used Erasmus' New Testament to translate it into English. And so, this became a very useful piece of material for people that were making new translations.

It would go through several changes. Some different guys had their fingers in updating it and adding to it, but it essentially stayed the same. Some of the guys that were involved in working on that Greek New Testament were Stephanas.

And there's an interesting legend. There's probably a little bit of truth and not some about Stephanas. Stephanas, he was the first to insert verses, verse divisions, so that you could find your place in the manuscript.

Those didn't exist before the 16th century. But it's often been stated, this is Metzgergen, it's often been stated that Stephanas marked the verse divisions while journeying on horseback.

And that some of the infelicitous divisions arose from the jogging of the horse that bumped his pen into the wrong places. If you've ever read your Bible, you've gone, why did they divide the verse there?

Well, it was because Stephanas was on his horse. Boom. That's, you know, that's legend. It's likely that he did it while he was traveling, but more likely that he did it when he stopped at an inn at the night when he was working on that.

But so the legend comes, and so comes an explanation for some unhappy verse divisions. So that's Stephanas. Another guy that had his fingers in this Greek New Testament after Erasmus was Theodore Beza.

Anybody know who Beza was? Beza was Calvin's successor at Geneva. He's a solid, reformed guy. Okay? This Beza. And he made some translation, or a few changes to the manuscript, but very few.

As older manuscripts were discovered, they weren't widely used because they were so different from what Erasmus had published and what had become accepted. Beza had access to an excellent Western family manuscript, but he made sort of scant use of it because it was different from that accepted text.

A few editions began to publish with an apparatus at the bottom that showed where there were variations. Here's the text as we have it, as it's familiar to us, but down here, here's where some other manuscripts differ.

Some editions started doing that. In 1633, a second edition of one of Beza's Greek New Testaments was published, and it contained something like a blurb.

I've quoted a couple times from James White today, and he writes on the King James-only controversy. It's not my purpose in this class to get into this controversy, but this book has helpful material on the manuscript, tradition, and so forth.

But when you write a book these days, you send it to some of your buddies and some scholars, and you have them read it before it's published, and then they write something nice about it. And then they write the something nice about it on the back of the book.

So I pick up this book and go, well, I don't know James White. Let's see who wrote about it. Oh, J.I. Packer wrote a blurb on this book, and John MacArthur wrote a blurb on this book.

And so I know these guys, so I'm going to see what they say. John MacArthur says, James White has given us a valuable resource that is understandable and dependable. Best of all, the book is spiritually edifying, and so on.

They write blurbs. You know what? They did that all the way back in the 17th century. So in 1633, a New Testament is published, one of Beza's, and it's got a blurb.

And it reads in Latin something like this. I'll read it to you in English. The reader has the text, which is now received by all. Text and received are the two key words in there, and it became known as the received text, or in Latin, the textus receptus.

It is from that Greek New Testament, an earlier version of it, but from that Greek New Testament that we know as the textus receptus, that the authorized version of the Bible, or the King James Version of the Bible, was translated and published first in 1611.

And the manuscript they used, the edition they used, was one of Beza's, or several of Beza's, as they were translating that Greek New Testament into English. The authorized version is an excellent English translation that, in my opinion, has yet to be matched for its literary beauty and style and flow.

But it's my opinion and that of others that the New Testament portion is based on a Greek manuscript tradition that is inferior.

It comes from that Byzantine family of text essentially based on a couple of 12th century manuscripts, and it doesn't incorporate later, or excuse me, earlier manuscripts that were discovered at a later date.

I think we're going to stop there. You can draw a line after 4D on your handout, and we'll come back next week.

Please bring this with you next week. I'm not going to make a whole bunch more copies of this. We may have a new one with some additional material. Please bring this back with you next week. Any questions about what we've covered up to this point?

Any comments? Any thoughts? Dale? Yes, there are, and we'll talk about that next week at the bottom of the handout. I trace out some of the more modern English translations, and so which families they've come from.

This is oversimplified, but it's to give you a picture. Yes, there are modern English translations that come from older manuscripts than just the Byzantine family, and we'll talk about that some next week.

Any other questions? All right. Thank you for your diligence and working with something unfamiliar. We'll try to wrap it up next week and maybe also talk some about translation philosophy a bit and cover the rest of the material.

Word dismissed. Thank you. Thank you.