Origin of the Codex Vaticanus and Codex Sinaiticus Manuscripts

[0:00] We'll open up in a word of prayer here and then we'll let Brother Sorensen get started here this morning. And hopefully you brought your notebook and something to write on. If you need something to write on, there should be some notepad stuff at the back there and an ink pen.

[0:15] I encourage you to take a few notes or write down a question. You know, sometimes when things come up, you begin to question of what and the whys or something didn't make sense.

[0:26] I want to encourage you to write that down. And maybe it will get answered a little clearer later. But if not, that way you can go back. Because if you're like me, if you don't write it down, you'll say, I had a question about that, but now I can't remember the question.

[0:41] And so if you write it down, that will be beneficial for you. And take notes of other things along the way and be able to reference back. But let's go ahead and we'll open in a word of prayer.

[0:51] And then we'll turn the rest of the time here for our Sunday school hour over to Brother Sorensen. And so let's go ahead and go to the Lord in prayer here this morning. Heavenly Father, as we come once again, Lord, we're just thankful for the opportunity.

[1:06] Lord, we're thankful that you loved us enough to send Jesus as our Savior. Lord, to pay the price that we could not pay. But Lord, we're thankful for the word of God that declares the truth that we might know and understand.

[1:20] The living word of God. Lord, we pray just have your hand upon the things that are said and done here this morning. Lord, your people be encouraged. Lord, that we'd understand the importance of this topic.

[1:33] That it's not just a preference. It's not just something that just makes for convenience. But Lord, there's a reason. And it's reason behind in the things that you have preserved for us that we might know not only how to be saved.

[1:48] But Lord, how you want us to live in those things that are to come. The promises of what you've given to us. And Lord, we just give you all the praise in Jesus' name. Amen.

[1:59] All right. Brother Sorensen, we'll go ahead and turn the rest of the hour over to you, brother. All right. Thank you. All right. The controversy today is which is the right Bible. And you can go to the religious bookstore and there'll be a whole wall of shelves of all these various different translations.

[2:15] Over here are the pastors. I didn't bring these on the airplane, but there's seven or eight different translations here, folks. There are scores. I'm not exaggerating. There are scores of modern language translations.

[2:26] The issue is not, well, I like this translation better than that translation. Or this translation is easier to read than that translation. That's not the issue, folks.

[2:39] There are two different Greek texts. And most people don't know that. There is, and we'll get into this here shortly, what's called the modern critical text.

[2:56] And there are a number of flavors and manifestations of it. And there is the traditional received text. The King James Bible is based on the traditional received text.

[3:11] The modern critical text has been around 150 years, 140 years, something like that. And it is different.

[3:21] Now, all these modern Bibles are based on this modern critical text. In the modern critical text, they have deleted almost 8,000 words.

[3:37] There are 16 entire verses that have been deleted out of the modern critical text, and they're deleted in those modern Bibles. There are about 256 verses that have significant portions changed, altered, or omitted.

[3:55] There are differences, folks. And here's the sad thing is, many of these differences pertain to the person of our Lord Jesus Christ. In diminishing the Lordship of Christ, the deity of Christ, the creative work of Christ.

[4:09] We're going to get into these more particularly probably Tuesday night. So there are two different lines of Bibles today. And don't be swayed by this business.

[4:19] Well, this translation is easier to read than that translation. And let me just pause for a second to say the King James Bible is not hard to read. But the marketing people of these publishing companies have led people to believe that.

[4:33] There are about 756,000 words in the King James Bible. About roughly 750 of them are archaic. Do the arithmetic. I mean, just a tiny fraction of the words in the King James Bible are archaic.

[4:46] That means old-fashioned or difficult to read. And we live in a high-tech society, folks. You come across a word that you don't understand, you can go here right now and pop into Google in about five seconds and get a word definition.

[5:01] I mean, we are so lazy in America today. And I mean, you used to use an old-fashioned dictionary. But don't believe the business. That's too hard to understand. We'll get into that more in a later message.

[5:13] But today I want to talk to you about the foundational principles. What we have been told, and I say collectively, we, the Christianity for the last 150 or so years, is that all these Bibles are based on the oldest and best manuscripts.

[5:30] How many have ever heard that? Numbers of you have. The oldest and best manuscripts. And those oldest and best manuscripts are two.

[5:42] They don't tell you there's just two, but there's two of them. One is called Codex. That word Codex means, it's a Latin word, which means volume, a book that's bound on the left side. That's what we commonly think of a book today.

[5:52] But prior to that, in ancient times, books were scrolls, particularly in the Old Testament era. But anyway, Codex Sinaiticus. It was a book found at the Mount Sinai.

[6:03] We're going to get into that here this morning. And the other is called Codex Vaticanus. I'll just call them Sinaiticus and Vaticanus. Those are big, highfalutin words. One just means the Book of the Sinai. The other means the Book of the Vatican. That ought to put a red flag up.

[6:17] The Book of the Vatican. And those two manuscripts, almost time for more medicine. Those two manuscripts comprise about 98% of the modern critical text.

[6:32] And so where we're going to go this morning is that those two manuscripts really aren't old. We were told, and we have been told, I say that collectively and editorially, we have been told for 140, 150 years that they go back to the 4th century.

[6:52] That would be about 330 A.D. to 350 A.D. And that they're the oldest, largely complete manuscripts of the New Testament.

[7:02] And the theory is that the oldest manuscripts are closer to the original, it's called the autographs, which no longer exist. And I think God in his wisdoms have seen to it that they do not, because people would worship them as religious relics and religious artifacts, icons.

[7:20] And so those that presumably, allegedly, are closer to the date-wise to the originals must be the closest representation of the New Testament. And we're touching here on another issue, and that is preservation.

[7:33] I believe God has preserved his word. Jesus said, heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words, plural, shall not pass away. These people do not believe that God has preserved his word, or his words particularly.

[7:48] Well, anyway, this idea of the oldest and best, it's been part of fundamentalism, and still is in some segments of fundamentalism today. The fundamentalist institutions over the past century bought into this notion, Bob Jones University, still does to this day, by the way.

[8:04] Tennessee Temple University, my alma mater, the old Pillsbury Baptist Bible College, the GERB schools, there's Faith Baptist College there in Ankeny, Iowa. Central Baptist Seminary, men such as John R. Rice, Richard V. Clearwaters, Northland University, Calvary Seminary, Detroit Seminary.

[8:19] These are all fundamental Baptist institutions. And the prevailing wisdom up until about 50 years ago was, we have to go to the oldest and best manuscripts.

[8:33] But folks, little by little, by the mid-20th century, going back, let's see, it's what, 2024, we go back about 75 years ago.

[8:43] By the middle of the 20th century, serious Bible students are starting to examine this critical text stuff, and we're going to do that, and saying, something's rotten in Denmark.

[8:56] Can Shakespeare say that? Something's not right. Something doesn't add up here. And back in the middle of the 20th century, and even earlier, back into the end of the 19th century, a man by the name of Dean John Bergon wrote several massive works saying that this critical text stuff is not right.

[9:14] And a great proponent of the traditional received text. And by the way, the common term is received text.

[9:27] We'll explain more about this in a later message. I prefer the term traditional text, because the text of the New Testament existed before the term received text ever came to pass.

[9:37] But the traditional text, received text, textus receptus, which is Latin for received text, and then they abbreviate that to TR. They all refer to the same thing, the traditional text of the New Testament, from which the King James Bible is based.

[9:53] But men started studying this issue. Middle of the 20th century, a man by the name of Edward Hills, graduate of Harvard University. David Otis Fuller, Duke Fuller out of Grand Rapids, Michigan.

[10:05] He wrote a book entitled Which Bible, which I read back in the early 1980s. Folks, it changed my life. I mean, I had gone to Central Baptist Theological Seminary in Minneapolis, and though in many ways was a good school, they were wrong on the text issue.

[10:22] And they basically had the philosophy, you know, pick and choose whichever Bible you like. It's kind of like going to the old-fashioned smorgasbord or buffet-type restaurants, you know, pick and choose whatever you want. And the Bible du jour then, the Bible of the day that they were pushing with the New American Standard.

[10:37] And I even used that a little bit early in my ministry. But I read a book by David Otis Fuller back in about 18...1983. And which Bible? We're going to get into the essence of that book on Tuesday night.

[10:51] You don't want to miss that. Men like Theodore Letus, Del Johnson, myself began writing books on this issue. Incidentally, on the table back there, I'm looking... Folks will say, well, I'll come back Tuesday night and buy books.

[11:05] Folks, they may be gone by Tuesday night. I say that just from experience because we're in churches all the time and have about the same amount of books put out. But there's four books back there on the table. I'll say more about each of them.

[11:17] But on this basic issue of the Bible issue, and we're going to talk of one particularly in this hour here today, the neither oldest nor best. But there were winds developing within our fundamentalist movement back at the end of the 20th century.

[11:33] And there were fundamental Baptist Bible colleges and fundamental colleges that adhered to the critical text, folks. They are fading away. Now, that's not true out in the broad evangelical world, but I'm talking within the fundamentalism.

[11:45] Hillsborough Baptist Bible College, my alma mater, is no longer. Clearwater Christian College, which, though not Baptist, was a fundamentalist institution, they're no longer. Calvary Seminary out in Pennsylvania, no longer.

[11:55] Tennessee Temple, no longer. Northland University, no longer. Folks, God does not bless this critical text. And we're going to see why in the next several sessions.

[12:07] And schools that have stood on the received text in the King James Bible continue to be strong and flourish, whether it's West Coast Baptist College or Pensacola Christian College or Fairhaven College or Ambassador College, Dayspring College in northern Illinois.

[12:25] They're flourishing. God blesses a school that upholds His Word. Well, anyway, to get back to what we want to talk about today, neither oldest nor best. Again, the theory behind all these Bibles is that they're based on a text that is based on the oldest manuscripts, Sinaiticus, Vaticanus.

[12:44] So let me tell you the story here of what's going on here just recently. Back in the 1840s, 50s, 60s, things happened that were largely swept under the rug, but high-definition digital photography on the Internet today, which has been available for only about 10 years, as that Vaticanus and Sinaiticus, you can look at it yourself.

[13:11] You don't have to know Greek. You can see there are problems. And so I wrote a book about eight years ago entitled Neither Oldest Nor Best, and the book documents that Sinaiticus is not old, produced in about 1840.

[13:29] Folks, that's not old as far as Bible history is concerned. Another book or manuscript, Vaticanus, was probably produced in about 1435. That's not old by Bible standards.

[13:41] And the whole theory, the whole idea that all these modern Bibles are based on the oldest and best manuscripts, it's a false theory.

[13:54] And this book documents neither oldest nor best. We cannot keep this book in print. And by the way, I only brought one of these along because I only have two left. But the good news is the shipment's coming in probably on Friday this week.

[14:08] And we'll have lots more. And so you'll want to order this. You can see Pam, she'll have you fill out a yellow slip back there. And we'll get these in the mail first thing next week. But this book documents the whole story.

[14:21] We're just going to briefly go through it. And it gets a little complicated at times. But why those primary manuscripts are not old. And it's a fascinating story. Well, and so again, the basic theory of the critical text is these manuscripts are allegedly the oldest and therefore closest to the originals.

[14:46] But let's follow the story today. Here is the conventional wisdom. Here is what I was taught in seminary 60 years ago, 55 years ago. And that is back in about 1843, a man by the name of Tischendorf.

[15:04] Now on Tuesday night, we're going to get into the matter of German rationalism. That is just a fancy name for liberalism. Theological liberalism. Theological liberalism does not believe in the deity of Christ.

[15:17] It does not believe in the verbal inspiration of the Bible. It does not believe in a literal hell. It does not believe in the miracles of the Bible. If anything is not rational, they reject it. And that's largely the liberal line to this day.

[15:33] The National Council of Churches in America is liberal. I mean, they deny or doubt or dispute anything miraculous. Well, anyway, so in 1843, a man by the name of Tischendorf, who was a German rationalist, a liberal, liberal Lutheran, began with the premise that the basic documents of the New Testament have been lost to antiquity.

[16:01] That is, we don't have them anymore, and that's true. And so he did not believe that God had preserved his very words. So he set out on a mission, on a quest, to find the oldest manuscripts of the New Testament, and maybe then we could find out what the Bible really says.

[16:21] Folks, I don't need to find an old manuscript, because it's right here. Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words, plural, shall not pass away.

[16:32] We'll get into that particularly on Wednesday night. And so Tischendorf went to two places in the Mediterranean world that were reputed to have ancient manuscripts. One was a Greek Orthodox, some call it a convent, some a monastery, but it was at the foot of Mount Sinai in Egypt.

[16:50] And indeed, it was quite a repository. We'd call it a library of ancient manuscripts. And so Tischendorf went there. Now here's the conventional story. Here's the conventional wisdom that I was taught.

[17:01] Tischendorf went there, and there in the monastery, he saw in a wastebasket an old manuscript that was laying there and being used as kindling, because in the winter it gets cold in the desert in Egypt, and they had a little wood stove there, and they were using the leaves of this manuscript to kindle the fire to keep the place warm.

[17:21] And he and his nobility rescued this ancient manuscript and took a part of it back. It went first to Germany and then several other places in Europe.

[17:35] And he came back about ten years later and asked if he could get the rest of the manuscript. Well, the fact is he stole it the first time, and the officials there at that monastery would not give him the rest of it.

[17:52] And so in 1859 he came back again and went over their heads and had gone to the higher authorities in Cairo, Egypt, and said, I'd like to borrow the rest of that manuscript and I'll bring it back someday.

[18:03] He never did. But he went over their heads, and so he quote-unquote borrowed it. And that part he took in 1843 and the part he took in 1859, put them together, and made a crude, they call it facsimile, it's a crude copy.

[18:19] And it ever since has been called Codex Sinaticus. That word Sinaticus, the Book of the Sinai. And that copy, not the actual documents, but the copy, made its way to London, England, and there were two well-known British scholars there.

[18:38] One of the names starts with a W, one of the stars with an H, and some of you are nodding your head, you know what I'm talking about. Two British scholars, one by the name of Dr. Westcott, and another by the name of Dr. Hort. Hort. Bruce, or Bruce Fenton Westcott, and Fenton Anthony, John Fenton Anthony Hort.

[18:53] They had several middle names. Just Westcott and Hort. And that Sinaticus copy, or the copy of Sinaticus, made its way to London, England, to Dr. Westcott and Hort. Now remember that name, because it's going to come up here many times here as we move along.

[19:08] Meanwhile, again back in 1843, Tischendorf went to the other major repository of documents, in the Mediterranean world, and that was the Vatican.

[19:22] Now, this was a time in history, and I'm old enough to remember this, when there was hostility between the Catholics and the Protestants. There was no ecumenical spirit. There was no cooperative spirit.

[19:35] Today, Rome is trying to entice the Protestants to come back to Rome by being nice to them. Back then, there was no niceness. There was persecution and hostility and animosity. But anyway, Tischendorf, curiously, the Vatican cooperated with him.

[19:51] And they took him into the Vatican library and showed him a place called shelf 1209, an old manuscript, or a seemingly old manuscript. And Tischendorf was allowed over some negotiation to copy the New Testament.

[20:04] And he called the original thing Vaticanus, the Book of the Vatican. And that copy there from the Vatican made its way to London, England, to Dr. Westcott and Hort.

[20:20] And again, this is the conventional wisdom, and much of it is true, but some of the details were altered, and they collated those two together into what became, and this is an old copy of Westcott and Hort's Greek text here.

[20:35] The book is falling apart. They collated that into a new Greek text, which became the granddaddy of all these. And in this new Greek text, like I say, in fact, the last 16 verses of John, or Mark, are not there, plus 16 other verses have been deleted.

[20:54] 8,000 words have been deleted compared to the traditional text. 256 verses have had major changes, and it's morphed and developed over the last 150 years into this, from which all these modern Bibles come from.

[21:12] And again, the theory is Vaticanus and Sinaiticus are the oldest. Now, let me tell you what really happened. I'm out for some medicine.

[21:23] And by the way, if you go home and look on the label on this root beer, there will be an ingredient in here, if I can read it with these glasses. It's called... Anyway, it's on there.

[21:34] I can't read it. And so I had a nurse, I was preaching in Alaska last summer, and the nurse went home and looked this stuff up, and it said, this thing here is a root extract, which has medicinal properties for throat issues.

[21:46] And all the doctors couldn't figure that out, so pardon me. Here's what really happened. Back in the year 1830, 1838, by the way, this is Sunday school, so we're going to give you a test on all these names and dates.

[21:59] Not really. But back in 1838, in Greece, there is a place south of Thessalonica, some Americans call it Thessalonica, but the Greeks call it Thessalonica, called Mount Athos.

[22:13] It's a little peninsula sticking out in the Aegean Sea, and on that peninsula were many Greek Orthodox monasteries, and numbers of them had scriptoriums. A scriptorium is a place where they copied manuscripts.

[22:25] Now today we think of printing, but prior to 1440, when the printing press was invented, every copy of the scripture was hand copied, manually scripted, manuscript. And anyway, so on this place called Mount Athos was a particular monastery, and there was a, the leader of the monastery wanted to produce a copy of the Old Testament, of the New Testament, in the old style of Greek writing that the New Testament largely was written in, called Uncial Letters.

[22:58] That's neither here nor there. And his motive in producing this old, this new old copy of the New Testament was to bind it up nicely and send it to the Tsar of Russia, or the Greek Orthodox and the Russian Orthodox have close connections, send it to the Tsar of Russia with the hope that the Tsar of Russia would send money back to their little monastery so they could buy a printing press.

[23:25] And so that's the idea that we're going to make a copy of the New Testament in the old-fashioned style of writing. And his nephew, and here's another name to remember, Simonides.

[23:38] This book talks about Simonides. His nephew, who had grown up as a Greek in the monastery, I mean Greek with his life, he knew ancient Greek, he knew modern Greek.

[23:49] He was a skilled paleographer, that means studying the old letter forms and word forms. And he was a skilled calligrapher, that means being able to copy and write you know fancy.

[24:02] And so this, this head of the monastery, a guy by the name of Benedict, asked his nephew, Simonides, to do this project, to make a copy of the New Testament on a blank manuscript and we're going to then bind it up nicely and send it to the Tsar of Russia and hope he'll send us some money.

[24:19] Simonides was 18 years old and though he was competent to the task, his heart was not in it. But to satisfy his uncle, he did it. He copied, in fact, not just the New Testament, the whole Bible.

[24:30] But in his haste, he made many mistakes. And after it was all done, his uncle, who of course knew Greek, went back and looked at his work and found a lot of mistakes.

[24:44] He did it in haste. And so they knew they couldn't send it to the Tsar and meanwhile the uncle scratched out all the mistakes and another scribe or two there at the monastery and scratched out the mistakes and overrode it.

[24:57] And they deemed it was not worthy to send to Russia so what they did is packaged it up and sent it to the monastery at Mount Sinai. Let's say Mount Sinai.

[25:08] St. Catherine's, I'm trying to say, at Mount Sinai. That's the real story. And we're going to see here the controversy.

[25:19] Well, three years later, Tischendorf showed up and found it and he claimed that it was being used for kindling. But folks, here's the problem. It was produced on parchment.

[25:30] Parchment is a type of very thin leather. And many ancient manuscripts were in fact, I mean, paper as we know it did not exist in biblical times.

[25:41] And so to make this thing realistic for the Tsar, they did it on old-fashioned parchment. Parchment does not readily burn. You can light a match to it and it'll just smolder. It's not something you use to kindle a fire with.

[25:56] Now, if you get a hot, roaring fire going, it'll burn. But this whole idea that he used, that Tischendorf found these leaves of the manuscript being used to kindle a fire is just false. I mean, you don't start a fire with parchment.

[26:10] Well, anyway, so about 20 years passed and by now, Simonides, the guy, the calligrapher, the paleographer, had become a businessman and he collected manuscripts across the Mediterranean world and he'd travel across Europe and sell these manuscripts.

[26:32] He'd go to museums, to libraries, and universities and he was reputed a very knowledgeable man on this subject. and he went to England and in 1860, somebody showed him this copy of Sinaiticus that had got to Westcott and Hork and it was being proclaimed in the religious press and the religious world as the oldest copy of the Bible in the world.

[26:57] Simonides said, hold the phone, stop the press. That's in the Greek, by the way. He said, hey, wait a minute, I did that 20 years ago. That is not an old manuscript.

[27:09] I did it. Well, it turned into a big controversy. The British media, they didn't call it media, then they just called it the press. The British press got wind of this and it became front page news in major British newspapers and certainly in the religious newspapers there in England.

[27:30] This Greek guy, Simonides, said that Sinaiticus isn't old, that he did it and Tischendorf, the German rationalist, said, no, no, no, no, no. It really is old and it became a major controversy.

[27:41] Front page news and the liberal press, and by the way, there were liberals back then, folks, said, Simonides is making this all up. He forged it.

[27:53] He is a hoaxer. If you go and Google Simonides this afternoon pretty soon, you'll find the word hoaxer and his character has been assassinated ever since.

[28:03] But the fact is Simonides was telling the truth. He did produce it and I want to give you three powerful reasons of evidence that I think will stand in a court of law.

[28:16] First of all, what time am I supposed to be done? Three o'clock this afternoon? Three strong evidences that prove Simonides was telling the truth, that he in fact had done this.

[28:27] First of all, there were several witnesses to the project. The Bible says, in the mouth of two or three witnesses shall every word be established.

[28:38] He said that he did it. His uncle, Benedict, put him up to doing it. Another Greek scholar back then, a guy by the name of Kalinikos, witnessed it and he even wrote to the newspapers in London and said, look, Simonides is telling the truth.

[28:53] He actually did this project. And so, folks, that in itself, in a court of law, you get two or three eyewitnesses. That's powerful testimony. And yet the other side has tried to say, no, Simonides is just a con man.

[29:10] He's just trying to make money off this. And Tischendorf was the guy who was making the money. He became the famous guy in Europe who found these oldest Bibles. And he toured Europe and lecture circuits and he was given in German the title of von, which would be like sir in English.

[29:27] It was a title of nobility, an honorary title. He was called now von Tischendorf. He became well-known and frankly wealthy from producing these oldest Bibles. Tischendorf or Simonides, the Greek, had nothing to gain by it.

[29:40] His character and his reputation was assassinated. But there were three that witnessed it. And there is, the book goes into all the details and we're just hitting the high points.

[29:53] The book tells you the story of the witnesses. And even in the newspapers in the Greek, Turkish world, that validated what Simonides said.

[30:05] All right, the second thing is the, I call it the forensic evidence or the physical evidence. When Tischendorf took the first portion away from Mount Sinai and he said that he rescued it.

[30:21] The fact is that the librarian there was sick and in bed and so he stole it. And when he came back later and promised he would borrow it and bring it back, he never did. In fact, there was documentation proving he never intended to.

[30:33] But anyway, that first batch of 43 leaves was sent to the University of Leipzig in Germany, which was Tischendorf's alma mater.

[30:45] It's there to this day. And particularly these first 43 leaves have been shown, I will take you to a page in the book here.

[30:59] If you like books with pictures, you'll like this book. You probably can't see it out there very well. But there are pictures of old manuscripts here. There's a picture here called Codex Bizet.

[31:11] There's no dispute. It's dated to the 5th century AD. That's about 100 years after allegedly Sinaiticus was done. And if you can tell out there, it's kind of bronzed and tan.

[31:21] You see an ancient document, something that's 1,500 years old, folks. It looks tan. It looks bronzed. It's been oxidized by time. Another, Codex Alex Andrinus, 5th century AD.

[31:34] It's bronze. It's tan. And there's others here in the bottom of the page of their old documents. There's no question about their antiquity. But here in the middle is Sinaiticus.

[31:47] These pictures are digital representations. They have not been altered. They've not been photoshopped. This is a digital photograph of Sinaiticus. If you can see it, it's basically white.

[31:58] A document that is 1,500 years old is not white. In fact, it's a little dirty white now because 150 years have passed. In fact, it's getting closer to 180 years. But something of that age will age a little.

[32:14] Here, it's white. And there were several scholars who were aware of all this controversy. One was a Scottish scholar. One was a German scholar.

[32:24] One was a Russian scholar. They went to the University of Leipzig and looked at it and their report was that this ancient document is snow white.

[32:35] I mean, that's verifiable history. Something that's 1,500 years or older is not snow white, folks. And so there is the evidence of the copy itself.

[32:48] Simonides, when he did the project, put little, what they call anagrams, or basically little marks, almost like initials in several places in the manuscript which identified him as the author.

[33:01] And so in the 1860s, he challenged Tischendorf to debate. He said, you bring the document and I'll show you my marks that I put in there that prove that I did it. Well, A, Tischendorf refused to debate him and bring the document.

[33:16] And two, later, when it became available, the pages that Tischendorf said he put his, or Simonides said he put his little marks on, guess what? They're gone.

[33:28] Part of the page has been cut out. It's been mutilated. And you can go to the British Library website this afternoon and look up Codex Sinaiticus and they, with high definition digital photography, have taken a picture of every page in Sinaiticus, both the Leipzig part and the other part wound up going to Russia.

[33:51] And you'll notice some pages have been mutilated. A few cases, it looks like someone took a straight edge and cut off a bottom of a page or took a straight edge and cut off a side of a page. Well, surprise, surprise, those are the places that Simonides said he put his identifying marks.

[34:08] It's amazing. There are wormholes. Now, there is such a thing as bookworms. And they like parchment because it was animal skin.

[34:19] They've been, of course, cleaned and tanned and prepared, but nevertheless. But there are wormholes in Sinaiticus, but they don't go through the text. The text goes around the wormholes.

[34:30] Think about that. It says simply that somebody wrote this thing in relatively recent times around the wormholes. And the wormholes don't go through the text.

[34:43] I know one scholar and he said, that settles it for me. Not only that, the portion of 43 leaves went to Leipzig. The greater quantity eventually wound up going to St. Petersburg, Russia.

[34:55] And that portion has been doctored. It appears that someone took maybe a coffee and a sponge and sponged it across the pages to make them look tan, make them look older in that other section.

[35:13] The Jesuits were skilled at doing that and producing fake documents, but that's another story. The book gets into that quite a bit on how to fake a document. Back when I was working on this book, I contacted the British Library and said, I have interest in Sinaiticus.

[35:32] I have a doctor's degree. I would like to come and look at it. And I got sent all these forms. I got to jump through all these hopes. I'd have a couple other PhDs sign off and refer me and recommend me and all this sort of stuff.

[35:45] And I sent it all over to the British Library. And they wrote back and said, oh, I'm sorry. This document is so old and so fragile we just don't let people look at it anymore. Well, in the year 2011, which was the 400th anniversary of the King James Bible, the British Broadcasting Corporation, the BBC, went to the British Library and it just shows that they really didn't know what they talked about.

[36:08] They thought that Sinaiticus had something to do with the King James Bible, which of course it doesn't. But anyway, there with the cameras running of a news reporter, a librarian or a docent as they sometimes call them, there at the British Museum took out Sinaiticus and was flipping the pages like you'd flip through an old-fashioned telephone book.

[36:28] I mean, you can see it on YouTube. I mean, if this thing truly is 1,500, 1,700 years old, you're not flipping through the pages like you go through an old telephone book.

[36:41] The thing was fairly supple and flexible, which all goes to say it's not old. And so, number one, there is the evidence of the witnesses.

[36:54] There were three guys who said, we saw this happen with our eyes, eyewitnesses. Number two is the physical evidence, the coloration of the pages that have been doctored, the wormholes that the text goes around the wormholes, the suppleness of the pages.

[37:08] It all says that this thing is not old. Here is the third area of evidence. After Simonides had died and toward the end of the 19th century, there was a scholar in England by the name of Sir James Donaldson.

[37:25] He was entitled or given the title Sir, which was a title of nobility in England. It was an honorary degree by the King of England because he was thought to be the greatest literary expert in the British Empire.

[37:41] And so, long after the controversy had died down, about 30 years later, this scholar, Dr. Sir James Donaldson, examined Sinaiticus.

[37:54] He knew Greek very, very well. And here is what he came up with. He said in the overall manuscript, that was New Testament, Old Testament, and some of the apocryphal books were all combined.

[38:08] In this document, there were modern Greek words. words that were unknown back in, say, 300, 400 A.D.

[38:21] Let me give you an illustration. Let's say that someone gives you a copy of Shakespeare and you find the word telephone in the book. Or internet.

[38:31] Those are modern words that Shakespeare knew nothing about. and Donaldson found words in Sinaiticus that were modern Greek words that are not found, that were unknown in the era that it's alleged to have come from.

[38:48] And so, the evidence here collectively says Sinaiticus is not old. And the whole theory, the critical text from which all these Bibles come from is they're built on the oldest manuscripts.

[38:59] Now, briefly, and I know our time is running because the pastor told me I can actually go to 2 o'clock. But briefly, what about Vaticanus, the other twin, it's not actually a twin, it has far greater significance than Sinaiticus, but it's the other major pillar of the critical text.

[39:19] And again, Tischendorf was allowed to go and copy it there at the Vatican Library. But here are the problems. And again, thanks to high definition digital photography, you can go home this afternoon and look up Codex Vaticanus and the Vatican has it online, you can look at it page by page by page.

[39:37] And at the beginning of each Biblical book, first letter of each Biblical book is a, what's called a drop cap. How many know what a drop cap is?

[39:48] Nobody. Okay. Well, in my Bible here, and it's not as fancy as you think, I just opened up randomly here to Ezekiel 32, the first letter of the first chapter of Ezekiel 32, the first word is and, the first letter is about three times the size of the other letters.

[40:11] It's just a big letter. It's just text art. Now this is a Schofield Bible, and it may not be in your Bible. In my book, we did this in various pages. It's just called text art at the beginning of a chapter.

[40:23] The first letter would be larger than the rest. It's just routinely done in books, just to make it a little more decorative. And those drop caps, or it's sometimes called text art, in Vaticanus are not only in ink, they are full color, blue and green and red.

[40:42] And you look at medieval text art, and you'll often, or text work, text manuscripts, you'll often see this text art, drop caps. But here's the issue. This whole business of drop caps was not invented until the Middle Ages.

[40:56] I mean, that's a smoking gun, folks. It says Vaticanus is not old. And a scholar by the name of Erasmus, we'll get into him more later this week, said that in fact, Vaticanus was produced in 1435.

[41:11] There is no record of it in the Vatican Library until 1475. Nobody even referenced it until sometime shortly after, when Erasmus wanted to investigate it.

[41:24] The evidence is powerful, simply by the drop caps, which you can see if you go online and look at it, that it's not. Drop caps weren't invented.

[41:34] And I had a master's degree in art history tell me categorically those are medieval. That is not ancient. Text work, text art.

[41:46] There are other problems that are quite visible in Vaticanus. There are clear modifications over writing of the text where it's been scratched out and written over. Well, that's not something that is a pristine manuscript.

[41:58] The last 12 verses of Mark are gone in Vaticanus and Sinaiticus. And, by the way, what are the last 12 verses of Mark about? The resurrection.

[42:09] And they're the only two manuscripts out there that have the last 12 verses gone. And the book goes into detail. I won't take the time to get into all here. But the only one who had the ability to do that to Vaticanus was the Catholics.

[42:22] They wouldn't hardly let anybody look at it or touch it. And other scholars said, in fact, that the same scholar that did Vaticanus did Sinaiticus, at least changed that portion in Mark, which also the Vatican has its fingerprints all over this.

[42:39] And so, the bottom line is this. Vaticanus, Sinaiticus, the basic pillars of the modern critical text that started with Westcott and Hort.

[42:52] They put it together into one collated manuscript, which has evolved somewhat. We'll get into this on Tuesday night. Into this, the modern critical text.

[43:03] It's all based on Vaticanus and Sinaiticus, largely. Now, today, they've added a few things more, and we'll get into that Tuesday night. But the whole idea of it being based on the oldest and best manuscript is false.

[43:16] I mean, you ever hear of fake news? Well, the fake news is that the oldest and best manuscripts are here. It's just not true. And it's the foundation on which all these Bibles are based.

[43:28] And there are problems. We're going to get into these particularly on tomorrow night and Tuesday night. And the simple conclusion of the matter is, folks, we just stay with the traditional received text which has given us the King James Bible.

[43:44] And we're going to get into the history of that on Wednesday night. And a fascinating story. There's a whole book back there about it. So anyway, I only have one copy and somebody's already spoken for this one.

[43:55] But you can order it and probably by next week we'll be able to ship them out. And I believe the evidence in this book will stand in a court of law.

[44:07] And it's readable. I mean, I realize this is technical, historical stuff. But I think probably anybody with a high school education can wade through this and understand it. When I write a book, I try to put it on a shelf where everybody can reach it.

[44:21] And I think you'll find it a fascinating reading. All right, brother, let's close. Father, thank you for the opportunity to explain some of the