All language subtitles for Chuck Missler - Learn the Bible in 24 Hours - Session 14

Name him, ha-ha ha-ha.

Okay, good.

Well we're now going to enter our 14 of our Learn the Bible 24 Hours as we begin our

study of the New Testament.

And as we do that we have a whole another perspective to gain here.

The New Testament has architectural features that are very similar to the Old.

The Old Testament opened with the five books of Moses and the New Testament opens with five

historical books, the Gospels and the book of Acts.

And you can look at the book of Acts as volume two of Luke, if you will.

See Luke wrote two books, volume one, and volume two if you will.

So I always treat the four Gospels and the book of Acts as a group.

And so they are followed then by 21 interpretive letters.

Just as the book of Deuteronomy is Moses' interpretation of the law, they're really

three sermons by Moses, in the New Testament we have 21 letters that were gathered and

circulated by the early church as precious items because they were apostolic interpretations

of what went on.

So the Gospels tell you what happened and the letters tell you why it happened and what

the significance of it is.

Now those 21, 14 we believe are written by Paul.

I say we believe because there's one that is deliberately unsigned and there's a strategy

behind doing that.

And we'll talk about when we get to the book of Hebrews.

We're among those, some scholars have different perspectives, but we think we have a good

defendable position by arguing that the book of Hebrews was written by Paul but deliberately

unsigned so it wouldn't be read, so it wouldn't be rise, ire, and so forth.

But in any case we have 14 by Paul and then seven by some of the others, Peter James,

we call him the Hebrew Christian epistles.

So there's 21 epistles.

So we have five historical books, 21 letters that are sort of like the op-ed pieces if

you will.

And then we have, in lieu of the prophets of Old Testament we have The Book of Revelation

by Apostle John.

So we have 39 books in the Old Testament, 27 in the new.

That's 66 books.

The people say, does that sort of strain?

Everybody expects 70 books.

Why 66?

Well technically the book of Psalms is five books by the way.

So if you put that in it's really 70 but let's not confuse people.

Everybody knows it is 66 books.

So the Old Testament was compiled over several thousand years.

That shocks many people because there are books in the Old Testament that are older

than the books of Moses.

The main example being Job.

Because Job was an old book even before Moses.

So they span a period of at least 1500, almost probably 2000 years in compiling the Old Testament.

Pull together as we know it today in the days of Ezra.

In the days of Ezra.

And we're not going to spend a lot of time on the documentation there because Jesus Christ

authenticated it for us.

He quotes from it, quotes from each of the books.

And so we don't have a problem because he felt comfortable enough to quote from it as

God's Word.

That should be enough for us too.

So we're not going to spend a lot of time on that.

But the New Testament is a little different kind of a creature.

It was put together within one lifetime.

Whole different circumstance.

We have four gospels and I say Luke in two volumes.

And I'm treating here the book of Acts as Luke volume two, so to speak.

The Pauline corpus of letters and other epistles.

And these were all circulated along with the Septuagint Old Testament.

Now get the picture here.

The Old Testament which was written originally in Hebrew was translated into Greek three

centuries before the Gospel period because most of the people in the world, commercial

world, spoke Greek.

As the Christian church begins to emerge in that first century, their Old Testament was

a copy of the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Old Testament.

The LX abbreviation is the Greek version of the Old Testament.

Most of the quotes in the New Testament of the Old, in the New Testament when they quote

the Old Testament, they quote most of the time from the Septuagint, the Greek.

And so the gospels, these letters and the Septuagint was a package that was used for

instruction and for worship within the early church.

Something that most people don't factor into the thinking well enough is both Luke and

Paul rely on the fact that the readers were contemporary with these events.

When Paul writes to the Corinthians, many of them in the congregation were up in Galilean

saw the resurrected Lord.

They were eyewitnesses of the resurrection.

That's one reason they don't have to argue hard for it because they experienced it.

And Paul and Luke both rely on contemporary testimony.

There's something else that's always instructive as a student to pay attention to what's missing,

not only what's there.

There are some very conspicuous events in history that are not mentioned in the New

Testament.

Number one, Nero's Persecutions, after 64 AD, Nero, see up till then most of the persecutions

of the Christians came from the Jewish community by Zealous Jews.

In fact, one of the things, one of the points that Luke makes not only in his gospel but

also in the book of Acts, that's why we believe many of us suspect that the Luke, volume one

and volume two were the necessary documentation for an appeal to Caesar.

We know from the Roman law is that if you appeal to Caesar, the facts surrounding your

background had to precede you to Rome.

In those days, that was an expensive project because they did have printing and copying,

it was putting a document together, it was an expensive process.

But you'll notice, if you read Luke carefully, the centurions are always good guys.

And he goes out to some lengths to point out that the uprisings that occurred wherever

Paul went were by the Jewish community, not persecuted by Rome.

That was a development that came with Nero and following, the persecutions by Rome.

Well, it's this thing, that started in 64 AD, no mention of that.

The execution of the leader of the Jerusalem church, James, who led the council in Acts

15, he gets executed in 62 AD, that's well documented.

It's interesting that's not alluded to in any of the New Testament documents.

What does this tell you that the New Testament documents are completed before these things

happened?

This is a way of putting an early dating on the document, especially when some of these

things would have been incorporated in their arguments.

The Jewish revolt against the Romans in 66 AD, no mention.

The destruction of the temple is the most telling one of all in 70 AD, the fact that

that's not mentioned.

So this is strong documentation demonstrating that the documents that make up the New Testament

were drafted and in circulation prior to any of these events.

In other words, they were circulated prior to 62 AD and we'll get to more of that.

Now there is a parchment, I'm not going to spend a lot of time in the Dead Sea stuff

and all that, but there is a parchment.

It was published for a while under the label of the Jesus papyrus, that's just a secular

label for a book that was written about it.

But there was some scraps, a little segment of text of Matthew's gospel and it had been

found in Egypt and it was at the Magdalene school of Oxford.

There are three fragments.

They're written on both sides which tells you that this was a Codex.

The ancient Old Testament was written on scrolls.

That's why I always use the little idiom of scrolls when I talk Old Testament.

I use a little scrap of parchment.

As we go through these slides, I use a different background so you make you conscious of what

came from the Old and New Testament.

A Codex was started to emerge when they discovered it was useful to write on parchment on both

sides and make pages like in a book.

A Codex is what you and I think of as a book in contrast to a scroll which has, you know,

a scroll has two scrolls and a scroll is a scroll.

Codexes are handy because you've got pages, you can quickly get at page 237.

You don't have to wind you through a scroll.

So Codexes became started to emerge in this period about the time of the first church.

It's interesting that this is already the fact that these scraps are written on both sides

indicate they were a Codex, not in a scroll.

There's three fragments written on both sides.

There's about a total of 24 lines.

They appear to be a segment of Matthew chapter 26 verses 23 on one side, 31 on the other.

Something else that will be important as we get a little further, they also conform to

what we understand from Texas Receptus and I'll come to that later in a minute here.

But some advanced technology comes to our rescue and it turns out that a scanning laser

microscope can differentiate between 20 millions of a meter layers of the papyrus.

They can measure the height and depth of the ink as well as the angle of the stylus.

They can tell whether the writer was right or left handed.

See the technology today is astonishing.

Well using these advanced technologies, it turns out that Dr. Karsten Thede using a scanner

laser microscope and comparing with four other manuscripts, and I won't go through

the details of the other four manuscripts, the more important thing, what he's done

from his studies, he's concluded that the Magdalene papyrus is either an original of

Matthew's gospel or an immediate copy.

It was written while Matthew and the other disciples and other eyewitnesses were still

alive.

The point I'm making is you will find in your Bible helps many estimates of when certain

books are dated.

As you'll discover if you do your homework that the current scholarship is substantiating

the dates far earlier than was previously believed.

Many people are in the impression that the New Testament was put together in the second

century AD and so forth.

That's nonsense.

We're discovering that many of these things are contemporaneous.

They were circulated before a 60 AD and some of these are dated in the 50s.

So this is within a decade or two of the events.

Now of the four gospels, this isn't that important but obviously a lot of material that's

in common to all of them.

Matthew is larger than the others because Matthew took shorthand.

I'll come to that in a minute.

But Mark and Matthew are very similar but the common material is shown here.

John has the largest non-common material.

John speaks especially of the Judean ministry rather than the Galilean ministry and we'll

talk about that when we get there.

Now in terms of linguistics, a common language Aramaic but Jesus also spoke great.

We find occasions of both.

He spoke initially Greek to Mary until he addressed her in Aramaic where she recognizes

who he was.

She thought he was the gardener and she's Mary and she recognized Rabona.

He gives him, we'll talk about that when we get to John 20.

Pilate, he impresses me.

Pilate personally could write in Hebrew, Greek and Latin.

Pilate labeled the titlan on the cross and he played a word game against the Jews and

we'll talk about that when we get there.

But part of it was in Hebrew, Greek and Latin and he wrote it himself.

As a top official, he had skilled in all three.

Hebrew because he was ruling the Hebrew territory.

He spoke Greek because that was a common commercial language and Latin was the official language

of the Roman Empire so it gets more prevalent use later of course.

Now there are some syntactic peculiarities in the New Testament.

The set in the structure is really Hebrew more than Aramaic.

Mark quotes Luke in hundreds of places.

That shatters many people's concepts here.

You think of Luke as a journey come lately because so much of what he learned he learned

by doing some research.

But Mark quotes Luke which means Luke's document was in place very early.

Mark is basically the secretary for Peter.

When Mark speaks he's really speaking for Peter.

He did the writing for Peter apparently.

Mark quotes Acts in 150 places.

Staunton realized the book of Acts was that early.

It's also clear from Mark that he knew Thessalonians, Corinthians, Romans, Colossians and James.

These letters of both Paul and also of James.

There are 600 evidences of an early date for Luke.

That shatters a lot.

I mentioned he's not that important except they will contradict some of the traditional

myths that have surrounded the New Testament.

There is a school of belief among scholars, they call it the Jerusalem school for reasons

about one bother you to hear it.

That originally there were Hebrew drafts out of which about 40-45 came a rough Greek version.

And then probably from that some Greek and Aramaic version sometimes called the Q documents.

But in any case out of all of this we have a Greek adaptation by subject which leads

to Luke first.

Mark next.

And then probably Matthew but Matthew drawing directly from the Hebrew for lots of reasons.

And then of course John is a whole other act on the thing about probably about we're

dealing here.

But we're dealing here within just a few decades of the actual events.

And so just to give you a perspective.

Paul's letters the first letter he probably wrote were Thessalonian letters.

And we'll deal with those separately in a special way not because they're first but

because they have some topical issues that we're going to deal with later.

First Corinthian letter was about the spring of 55.

There are actually four letters to the court.

And we only have two of them remaining.

And then the first Timothy first and the first and the other Timothy was about fall of 55,

second Corinthians about 56.

And you get the general feeling most of these were anyway between 50 and 58 as the letters.

And other New Testament books are roughly in the same domain in the 50s to 60s and we

won't quibble with the details here.

Let's talk a little bit about the history of the English Bible.

This is very important to understand.

The Old Testament originals were sometimes referred to as the Forlaga.

And for us the important event was the translation of the Forlaga into Greek three centuries

before the gospel period.

And we don't spend a lot of time on the background of that because Jesus authenticated the New

Testament for us.

I mean the Old Testament for us by his quotes and so forth.

But I want to be conscious of the fact that that was several centuries before the gospel

period.

Okay.

Now the Hebrews, the Jewish leadership, got really upset in the first century because

they discovered the Septuagint, the Greek translation, had been adopted by the Christians as their

Bible.

So they had the Council of Yomna where they had a real problem to solve because Judaism

relies on sacrifices.

There is no remission of sins without sacrifices.

They have no place to sacrifice.

The temple has been destroyed.

So what they effect or faced with doing is redefining Judaism.

That comes out of the Council of Yomna.

But they also, out of that Council, set the groundwork for what later becomes the Masoretic

text.

When you look at a Hebrew Old Testament you are reading probably the Masoretic text and

that is out of, it derived from the Council of Yomna.

Now what also starts to emerge here is a group of documents that are called Texas

Receptus and we are going to talk a little bit about that as we go on here.

Texas Receptus, about the end of the third century, the Lucian of Antioch compiled the

Greek text to become the primary standard throughout the Byzantine world.

Now something you need to understand is that the center of the world was not Rome anymore,

it had been moved.

Constantine moved it to Byzantium.

All these church councils you read out and so forth are not in Latin, they are in Greek

and they are in the east.

Byzantium was the capital of the world.

And the Greek text that was circulated widely throughout the Byzantine world is a text that

is referred to as Texas Receptus.

The received text is what it is intended to connote.

And by the sixth through the 14th century the majority of New Testament texts are produced

in Byzantium in Greek.

So it was the primary publication center of the Christian world.

In 1525, now we are moving way ahead in the 16th century, Erasmus using five or six of

the Byzantine manuscripts compiled the first Greek text produced on a printing press thanks

to Gutenberg.

This was the big event that really led to the Reformation, to make Bibles available.

And his writings are the basis for what it is formally called Texas Receptus.

And it gives you a feeling for the timing here.

And on this we have the old Latin and then the Vulgate, Jerome does the Latin translation

of the Bible which becomes with Tyndale and others translate to make the English Bible.

And that is really what the one we are dealing with.

I won't take you through the evolution from Wycliffe and all the rest from 1382 down through

1611 the King James Version except to make a couple of points here.

As we go through these Erasmus and the Tyndale Bible, Luther's Bible, COVIDales and so forth

and the Geneva Bible rest, you need to understand that the people that did these translations

did it under penalty of death.

It was a capital crime to be trafficking in Bibles by the medieval church.

So these heroes became martyrs.

They did all this out of their commitment to get the Word of God out to the people so

they could understand it rather than have it filtered by a church with its own agenda.

But you finally get down to the King James Version from which all of us are indebted.

King James VI of Scotland became King of England and he called himself James I and in 1607

with more than 50 scholars they met in continual prayer and committees.

The one thing that really distinguishes them, they were committed believers.

They weren't, they were believers first and scholars second in that sense of speaking.

Something else you should understand when they did the King James Version, they had

available to them 5,556 manuscripts.

So they had plenty of ammunition.

The primary reliance of the translation committee was on Texas Receptus that was their yardstick.

What they produced is the King James Version of the Bible and it has been heralded even

by the secular world as one of the most noblest monuments in English prose.

The majesty of the King James has never been really equaled.

And some of us have trouble with the old English but that turns out there's less than a dozen

words that bother you and you can learn those pretty quickly.

As you get comfortable with it, many of us still find the King James the most comfortable

version because of its majesty frankly.

Every translation has its problems, the advantage of the King James, the problems are well known

and well documented and most Bible helps key to that anyway.

Some of the translations have problems too but they are less well known.

So okay, there's something else as you realize the King James Version leans on Tyndale and

the forebears but it leans most heavily on Texas Receptus as they translate into English.

But I want to talk about another set of Codexes or cottices, the Alexandrian.

There's Codex Alexandrinus that was discovered about 1630 and was brought to England.

It's a fifth century manuscript containing almost the entire New Testament.

There's also Codex Sinaiticus.

About 200 years later a German scholar named Constantine Montezendorf discovered Codex Sinaiticus

at St. Caffin's monastery at the traditional Mount Sinai.

This manuscript is apparently dated about 350 AD so it's one of the two oldest manuscripts

of the Greek New Testament.

Okay?

And there's also Codex Van Canis.

It had been in the Vatican Library since at least 1481 but was not made available to

scholars until the middle of the 19th century.

It was dated slightly earlier like about 325 AD than Codex Sinaiticus in regard to

many of the most reliable copies of the Greek New Testament.

Now what's going to happen here, look ahead a little bit, Codex Sinaiticus, Codex Vaticanus

have been overly revered by scholars to our detriment.

I'll explain what happened here but you need to, because they are very old manuscripts,

they tended in the minds of some of the modern translators to have extra weight because they're

older.

And that turns out to be a trap and I'll come into that.

These, the Alexandrian codices have become very controversial in recent years for a number

of reasons.

So these occurred about the third or fourth century and they become the primary reliance

of the newest, most modern translations, the NIV and any of the other new translations

tend to lean very heavily on these Alexandrian codices.

So the primacy of Texas Receptus has been dethroned.

In about the 1730s, a guy by the name of Ben Gal produced a text that deviated from Texas

Receptus and he relied on some of these earlier manuscripts and Carl Lockman did a similar

kind of thing and another guy did, not that critical.

The real important guys are two characters known as Westcott and Hort.

Brookfoss, Westcott and Fett and John Anthony Hort were Anglican churchmen who had contempt

for Texas Receptus.

And they leaned especially heavy on these Alexandrian codices.

They began a work in 1853 that resulted after 28 years with a Greek New Testament based on

Vaticanus and Cenanticus.

The problem is we've now discovered that those texts, even though they're older, are corrupted.

And these people have really promoted it and we should talk a little bit about them.

Both of these guys were very influenced by Origen and others who denied the deity of

Jesus Christ.

And they embraced the prevalent Gnostic heresies of the period from the headquarters of the

Gnostics which is Alexandria.

The Codexes we're talking about came from Alexandria.

Alexandria was the fountainhead of the Gnostics which were really in effect anti-Christian

groups.

Much of the New Testament letters are written in repudiation of the Gnostic beliefs.

So we discover upon more careful examination that these codices that they're relying on

while they're excellent Greek scholars are corrupted texts.

And so this is one of the reasons you'll notice if you've been following Bible things in the

last few decades, there's been a reaction against the modern translations by some who

begin to realize that they're victims in a sense of corrupted foundations here.

There are over 3,000 contradictions in the four gospels alone between the manuscripts.

And they change the traditional Greek text in over 8,000 places.

And now by the way, West Cotton Heart, although they're very, very obviously outstanding Greek

scholars, you wouldn't trust them to run your, you wouldn't trust them to teach your

study school class.

They did not believe in the deity of Jesus Christ.

So you got to be unlearned just because the guy has a lot of degrees and a lot of prominence

in the scholastic community does not make him a modified expert in before the Lord.

And so in the case we now have a question mark on Alexandre and cortices, which means

that puts a cloud on some of the modern translations.

They're useful because they're readable, but be careful if you're doing a detailed study

because they've been corrupted.

Now what were the Gnostic heresies?

Okay.

I think it's Satan's strategy, the same one he had in Genesis 3.

He put doubt and then additions and amendments.

Did God really say that?

Well, this is maybe what he really meant.

That's the kind, that's where he started going down one of these alleyways that he

gets you into trouble.

In about 55 AD, the twisting of the scripture begins.

That's what 2 Peter chapter 2 deals with.

That's what 1 John 1 deals with.

They're dealing with the Gnostic heresies.

And so the Gnostics disparage the existing writings.

They mixed in Greek philosophy and concepts along with the revelation of God.

In other words, if you look with the Gnostics, add to it some pantheism and all these other

things.

So that's why they deal if you're really in the know, you don't take those things seriously.

Let us let you know what it really like.

Is that kind of deception that's going on?

So what the Gnostics did, they expregated the scriptures.

The Gnostics were known for mutilating the scriptures.

They would throw out the verses that weren't comfortable.

And in 156, Irenaeus said of the Gnostics, wherefore they and their followers have be

taken themselves to mutilating the scriptures which they themselves have shortened.

So we have evidence that that was one of the things, one of the tactics they used.

The headquarter for the Gnostics of course was Alexandria, which is the primary library

center of the world at the time.

Now let me, we could spend a lot of time wading through scholastic arguments about

the texts.

I'm going to show you a shortcut.

I'm going to show you a shortcut.

There are, in the scripture, there are authentication codes.

There's an automatic security monitor watching over every single letter of the text that

doesn't rust or wear out and it's been running continually for several thousand years.

And most people don't know about it.

There is a fingerprint, what I call a fingerprint signature of the author in the scripture.

And we'll show you that.

And furthermore, this authentication code is of a non-compromizable design.

Now if you're an engineer, your mouth is a watering boy.

Where is this thing?

I want to see this thing.

Let me back up a little bit now and give you some background.

How many of you have noticed there are sevens in the Bible?

Somebody without their hand up hasn't read their Bible, right?

Over 600 passages have it very explicitly so.

Some of these are very overt.

It's very obvious.

Seven of this and seven of that or whatever.

Some of them are structural.

Some of the list a few things you'll always notice.

There's always seven of them.

You find those.

They're subtle.

Some are not any subtle.

Some are actually hidden.

And yet you can find them if you know how to look.

I want to suggest to you the possibility that these heptatic structures are a signature

of the Creator Himself.

And let's take a look at some examples.

I want you to imagine, you don't have to actually do this, but I want you to imagine

yourself seriously taking this on an assignment.

Imagine yourself taking on a scratch pad, blank piece of paper, and I want you to design

a family tree, a genealogy.

And by the way, for this assignment, you can do this from fiction.

You can make it up as you go.

How many could do that?

Obviously you could.

Okay.

That's no problem.

You know, fathers and sons make up a family tree.

Okay.

Except I got a couple of rules I want you to follow.

When you finished your assignment, you turn it in, I want the number of words that you

used to be an exact multiple of seven.

In other words, if I take the total number of words that is in your work product, if I

divide it by seven, I don't have any remainder.

So it's either seven words, 14, 21, 28, in other words, whatever number words you use,

it's an exact multiple of seven.

How many could do that?

You could fudge it around to a multiple of seven.

Good.

Yeah, sure you could.

Of course you could.

I got another rule I want to add.

I want the number of letters that you use to also be an exact multiple of seven.

I can sense that some of you dropped out and you say that you begin to realize that's

a little tricky.

And incidentally, I'm talking about an English here, aren't I?

Unless you can fudge it around sometimes.

Poets always do that.

You can throw an asterisk in or something.

Okay.

I want the number of vowels and the number of consonants to be divisible by seven exactly.

If I go through all your words, I count the vowels.

It's an exact multiple.

You got a problem with that?

Of course you do.

You realize that to make it a multiple of seven, if it's a random result, you've got

six chances of losing only one of winning.

I haven't come out right.

You have me?

So every time I add a rule, it makes it tougher.

I'm going to say I want the number of words that begin with a vowel to be divisible by

seven.

Well, that's kind of a chicken.

And obviously if that's in the number of words to begin with a consonant, it must be

divisible by seven.

The number of words that occur more than once to be divisible by seven.

Anybody still playing?

You get the feeling that this would be hard to do, right?

Those that occur in more than one form divisible by seven.

Those that occur in only one form divisible by seven.

The number of nouns shall be divisible by seven.

The number only seven words shall not be nouns.

That's easy, probably, maybe not.

The number of names shall be divisible by seven.

Only seven other kinds of nouns shall be permitted beside names.

The number of male names shall be divisible by seven, and the number of generations shall

be divisible by seven.

You've probably guessed where I'm headed here.

Because this is a description of the genealogy of Jesus Christ in the first 18 verses of

the book of Matthew.

And incidentally, we're talking about the Greek, not the Hebrew, or English.

In English, it's soft.

You can fudge around.

Greek is incredibly precise.

Every verb has to be five conditions and so forth.

It's a tight, precise language.

What I'm sharing with you here, of course, is the discoveries of Dr. Ivan Pennen.

He's a very interesting guy born in Russian in 1855.

He was exiled in early age.

He got tangled up in a plot against the Tsar.

He eventually immigrated to Germany and then finally to the United States.

He graduated from Harvard in 1882 with a PhD in mathematics.

But then he discovered Jesus Christ.

Now, by the way, every one of us in this room that has discovered Jesus Christ,

whether you know or not, is a result of a miracle.

Brought by someone's prayer.

For some of you, the stories are really quite dramatic.

For many of us, it's quite routine.

But every one of us that except Christ are a result of a miracle.

But if you're a PhD from Harvard, that's a miracle indeed.

OK, so.

But shortly after becoming a Christian, he discovered these haptatic structures,

these sevenfold structures that underlie the biblical text.

He discovered that about 1890.

He committed the rest of his life more than 50 years, generating over 43,000 pages,

writing incidentally in very small letters.

He's got a very tight hand of discoveries.

He went to his lord in October 30th of 1942 and left behind all kinds of discoveries.

Candidly, it's very tedious to go through because it's laborious stuff.

And yet, what comes out of this are some treasures.

And I'll show you a few highlights.

That was the one that I showed you, the genealogy of Jesus Christ fits all those conditions.

And even if you try to simulate that, you'll discover it's almost impossible

to get something to fit all those conditions.

But let's talk about a specific practical example.

If you look at your Bible, at the last 12 verses of the Gospel of Mark,

you will probably find a footnote in it.

Something to the effect that these verses are in dispute

and were probably added later by some copyist.

That's the typical kind of remark you see,

annotating the last 12 verses of the Gospel of Mark.

And the question is, were they added later?

Or, you know, Westcott and Hort,

regards the last part of Mark, that's verses 9 through 20 of chapter 16,

as a later edition, that this wasn't in the original, it was added by some well-intended

copyist down the road a bit.

Well, that's easily shredded because Irenaeus, in 150 AD,

quotes it in his commentary.

The Alexandrian codices were fourth century.

But in the first and second century, we have quotes from these so-called

verses that were added later.

No, they weren't added later.

They were expregated from the Alexandrian codices, is my contention.

So Irenaeus either had a copy of the original or he must have been clairvoyant.

I don't think he was going to be clairvoyant.

Hippolytus, also in the second century, quotes from these 12 verses.

And these are several hundred years before the Alexandrian codices.

So if these verses are not the Alexandrian codices, they were expregated.

So you can attack this scholarship from the point of view of the historical records,

but I'm going to show you something even more surprising.

If we studied the last 12 verses of Mark, we discover that verses 9 to 11

are an appearance to Mary and discusses the disciples' initial disbelief.

From verse 11 to 18, our subsequent appearance is then the conclusion of the chapter

is verses 19 to 20.

So from 9 to 20, what we're talking about.

Another way to organize those 12 verses is from verses 9 to 14, a simple narrative.

Verses 15 to 18 is a discourse by Jesus Christ, and the last two verses are a conclusion

of the whole gospel.

And by the way, if you take these 12 verses away, you leave the gospels with the people

confused and in disarray and in disbelief.

You have no resurrection.

So you can see why the Gnostics would love to drop those verses off.

But anyway, these are the verses that are there.

Let me share some things with you that Pan and Discover about these verses.

The number of words in these 12 verses are 175.

That's a multiple of seven exactly.

Oh, really?

The vocabulary involved is 98 different words.

That's a multiple of seven exactly.

The number of letters in the 12 verses are 553.

That's a multiple of seven exactly.

The vowels are a multiple of seven exactly.

The consonants obviously would be a multiple of seven exactly.

The total vocabulary I said was 98 words.

84 of those are found earlier in the book of Mark.

That's a multiple of seven exactly.

14 of these words are found only here.

It's a multiple of seven exactly.

42 of those words are used in the Lord's address.

56 are not part of his vocabulary that are in these 12 verses.

All multiple of them exactly.

If I take just two rules, if I have one rule, you've got six chances of losing one of winning.

To meet two rules, it's seven squared.

In other words, I have 48 chances of losing and only one of having both rules of seven.

Follow me if it goes by the square, right?

Two rules is the square.

For three rules, it's the cube of that.

I have 343 chances of losing for everyone of winning.

So it goes.

For four rules, it's 2401.

I've given you so far nine rules.

You have one chance.

If this is a random process, you have one chance in 40 million.

You have one chance of coming out okay.

The more rules you add, the more restrictive it becomes.

Would you like to try this, by the way?

Now assume you worked eight hours a day, 40 hours a week for 50 weeks a year.

That means you've got about 2,000 productive hours per year, and put those in minutes.

That's 120,000 minutes per year.

You've got seven to nine chances to try this randomly.

40 million attempts.

Let's assume it takes you 10 minutes to do a draft.

If it doesn't work, you take another 10 minutes to draw another draft.

Well in that case, it would take you about 3,362 years to come up with that design.

By the way, it gets worse.

I said there were 175 words.

There's 56 in the dress of the Lord, 119 in the rest of the passage.

In the introductory verses, it was 35.

Each one of these are multiple of seven exactly.

In other words, in the various groupings of the natural divisions of the passage, you'll

find it's always a multiple of seven exactly.

It goes on and on.

I won't badger this more than you need to hear.

There's something else you need to know about both Hebrew and Greek.

We're distinctive in that each letter has a numerical value and it is relevant that

way.

Here's a list of the Greek words.

The alpha is worth one, the beta, two, gamma three and so forth.

Right on through to the end.

The use of numerical values of letters is called gametria.

There's a gametrical value.

Every word thus has a numerical value.

The numerical or gametrical value of this, the total gametrical value of the passage happens

to be 106,663, which is a multiple of seven exactly.

Try doing that by accident.

If you take each one of these natural groupings, you'll discover each one has a gametrical

value of a multiple of seven exactly.

The first word, the middle word, the last word and so forth.

It goes on and on, as you can imagine here.

That said, we had a vocabulary of 98 words, 14 not before in Mark, found later in the

New Testament.

35 occurrences.

The numerical value of them, again, is a multiple of seven exactly.

The verse 20 of vocabulary is 14.

It goes on and on in terms of words found here previously, words not found.

Everything's a multiple of seven exactly.

The total forms, 133, the value of those are 89, 663, which is a multiple of seven exactly.

Those that occur once is 112, which is a multiple of seven.

Curring more than once is 21 and a multiple of seven.

Curring 63 times, which itself is a multiple of seven, and we could go on and on like

this.

There's a word here, that's an unusual word, because it occurs nowhere else in the New

Testament.

It has a numerical value of 581, which is a multiple of seven exactly.

It's preceded by 42 vocabulary words in the passage of 126.

All these are multiples of seven exactly.

Now, I've gone.

I've added a lot on here.

We started out with just nine rules.

I've just given you 34 of them.

That's the chance of these rules having happened by just random chance.

Well let's take a look at that.

That's a 7 to 34th power, which is roughly 5 times 10 to the 28th tries would be needed.

You already had enough experience with the powers of 10 to realize these are big numbers.

Let's assume you'd like to try to simulate this, and I'll let you have a computer to

help you.

There are about three times 10 to the 7th seconds per year.

I'm going to give you a computer that can do 400 million tries per second.

That's a pretty good machine.

That means it would take about four times 10 to the 8th tries per second.

It would take about 4.3 million computer years.

That's pretty another way.

I would need one million supercomputers working 4.3 million years to obtain this result by

randomness.

By randomness.

So this is again, and by the way, I've just used 34 conditions here.

Panin identified 75 of them.

So you can say some of those are not independent of each other.

That's true.

So two or three of those actually derive one from the other.

Okay, throw those out.

I got 75 to pick for them.

The New Testament, let me show you some other things that Panin discovered.

The New Testament consists of 27 books, right?

That means there's an opening and closing word to each of the 27 books.

It begins and ends with a word, right?

So two times 27, that means there's 54 words, right?

Among those 54 words, there's a total vocabulary of 28 words that are multiple of seven exactly.

In the gospels alone, there's multiple of seven exactly.

The total geometrical value of those words is also a multiple of seven exactly.

The value of the shortest word, which is one letter, is 70 and it's multiple of seven obviously.

The value of the longest word is multiple of seven, and this one's particularly interesting

that the longest word happens to be apocalypsis.

And it happens to be seven times six times six times six.

That's kind of interesting, I think.

There's this is the one I love.

I realize a lot of these things may be overkill here, but I want to show you the one that blows

me away completely.

We've discovered the vocabulary in the Greek that's unique to Matthew.

Now, I understand what I'm talking about.

The vocabulary of these are words that only Matthew uses.

If you go through the whole Bible and take all the words, there's a vocabulary that's

unique to Matthew.

It occurs only 42 times, a multiple of seven exactly, and those have 126 letters, a multiple

of seven exactly.

Now what makes this particularly peculiar is let's assume for discussion that Matthew

tried to do this on purpose.

How would you do that?

If you're a Matthew and you decided you would like to have this characteristic in your gospel,

how would you go about making sure that the words that you alone use is a multiple

of seven exactly?

Well, you can only do it two ways.

You've got to sit down with all the other writers in the New Testament, assuming you can

figure out who they're going to be, and get them to agree not to use your little list

of words.

How many think that happened?

Not very likely.

Or you could argue that this feature is an argument that Matthew wrote last, because in

theory at least he could lay down everybody else's writings and make sure that it fit.

So you could use this as an argument that Matthew wrote his gospel last.

He either had prior agreement, that doesn't make sense, or his gospel was written last.

So the gospel of Matthew has a vocabulary unique to itself that's a multiple of seven

exactly, but that sort of mark.

Well, I thought Matthew wrote last.

I thought Mark wrote last, because Mark also has a vocabulary unique to him that's a multiple

of seven exactly, but so does Luke.

And so does John.

They each were written last, and obviously I'm a meek for sesus.

And so did James, Peter, Jude, and Paul.

Each one was written last.

In other words, each one has a vocabulary that nobody else uses that happens to be an exact

multiple of seven.

There's only one explanation for this that I can tolerate mathematically, and that is

that the Holy Spirit was an overseer of every word, every letter in the New Testament.

I think that's exciting.

By the way, this even bridges the Old New Testaments.

You know, I often joke that I'm going to have a conference and have an average conference.

We're going to tear out the page of the Bible tonight that's unnecessary.

That'll smoke out all the fundamentalists, right?

And they were very ceremoniously open the Bible and tear out the page between the Old New

Testaments, because it's unnecessary.

There are words that have this heptatic feature if and only if you put the Old New Testament

together.

The word hallelujah occurs 24 times in the Old Testament, four times in the New.

Four plus 24 is 28, a multiple seven exactly.

Hosanna, shepherd, Jehovah's Abioth.

And I go through a list of these words that are not multiple of seven in either Old New

Testament, but they are a multiple seven when you put the Old New Testament together.

I think that's kind of fun.

All this of course is detailed in our briefing page called How We Got Our Bible.

But the main point is these specifications that we talked about have been fulfilled.

The specifications in the Bible says that he would be born of a virgin and he was.

That he'd be born in Bethlehem and he was.

That he'd be taken into Egypt and he was.

That he would heal the sick and make people whole and he did.

In each one of these is documented.

You can look up the verses.

He would be crucified and he was.

And he would die for our sins and he did.

That he would be raised from the dead and he was.

And so why do we accept the Bible?

Because these little numbers from Canaan, no, no, that's not the reason.

We do this because it's the authentication of Jesus Christ.

The Septuagint has over 300 detailed specifications.

He's fulfilled his lifetimes.

The seven weeks prophecy that we studied in Daniel chapter 9 is undeniable.

So we have the authentication of who Christ is, first of all.

The scripture authenticates who Christ was.

Then we can lean on the authentication by Christ of the Torah of Daniel, in fact of

the whole Old Testament.

It's an integrated design.

That's our apologetic.

That's the one that's bulletproof.

That this, these 66 books penned by over 40 different guys were, virtually 2,000 years,

is an integrated package and that it transcends the dimensionality of time itself.

No other book on the planet earth does that.

These six separate books by penned by 40 different guys who didn't even know each other.

Over several thousand years, their design anticipates in detail events before they happen.

So the, obviously, the source of this message is from outside our physical universe, outside

our time domain.

There are all kinds of hidden authentication codes in the scripture.

We've talked about some of the micro codes, these little numbers and so forth.

There are also macro codes.

We went through Genesis chapter 5 and the fact that we have the summary of the Christian

gospel tucked away in the genealogy in the Torah of all places.

We have the macro codes.

We looked at those in Genesis 5, Genesis 22, the Akita, the Book of Ruth, the whole book

of Joshua and of course the transcendent numerical design that we've touched on here,

just as we go along the way.

But there is something else.

How can you personally?

Say, check, I don't, I'm not a mathematician.

I don't want to get into all that stuff.

But how can I know?

How can you know?

And Jesus answers that for you in John 7 verse 17.

If any man will do his will, he shall know of the doctrine, whether it be of God or whether

I speak of myself.

That's Christ's challenge to you.

Try him and see for yourself.

One integrated design.

The New Testament is in the Old Testament concealed.

The Old Testament is in the New Testament revealed.

And once you begin to discover that.

Once you begin to discover the integrity of the package, it will change your whole

perspective on everything that it says.

And when you know you can rely on it.

So we're going to now enter, in the next session, we'll actually enter the New Testament.

We'll talk about the, obviously we'll enter the historical books, the Gospels, and the

interpretive letters will come separately in Revelation.

Along the way we'll do some summaries.

We'll have a whole eschatological summary of where end time prophecy is headed and so

forth.

We can't diversify different good scholars.

They have different views of some of these things.

But in the New Testament we have the five historical books.

And next time we'll focus on Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.

And we're going to take a little different approach.

With a limited opportunity we have, we're not going to go through each book individually.

We'll go, we'll talk about its distinctives first.

But then we'll go through a integration of all of them geographically.

Here's where he went.

There's what he did.

And we'll put it all together for you geographically.

When we do that.

And one of the things that you'll learn that's kind of fun is that Matthew, Mark, Luke, and

John all have a different agenda.

Matthew's a Jew.

He presents Jesus Christ as the lion of the tribe of Judah.

He's the Messiah, the promised Messiah.

He's Jewish.

Very Jewish.

Mark is really writing for Peter.

But his emphasis is to present Jesus Christ as the suffering servant, the obedient to

the Father.

He's a different kind of guy altogether.

Luke's a doctor.

He's interested in presenting in Jesus Christ as the Son of Man.

The fact that God became man is what blew him away.

And John takes the flip side of that, that he's the Son of God.

Each one of these has a distinctive mission as he writes his gospel and you'll discover

something interesting.

Everything in their respective gospels supports that particular emphasis.

The genealogy.

Matthew, being a Jew, starts as genealogs from Abraham and takes it through the legal line,

through Joseph, the legal father of Jesus Christ.

Mark is a servant, not interested in pedigree.

He's the only one without a genealogy.

Luke, because he is the Son of Man, he obviously starts with Adam.

And from Adam to Abraham, when he gets to Abraham to David, they're both the same,

Matthew and Luke.

But when you get to David, Luke takes a left turn.

He doesn't go through the first surviving Son of Bathsheba, as Matthew does.

He goes through the second surviving Son down through a line that ends up with Mary.

And so he has the bloodline and there's a whole thing we'll get into when we get there.

There's some fascinating mysteries behind all that.

And John has a genealogy, but most people wouldn't recognize it.

The first few verses is the genealogy of the pre-existent one.

And you can take a look at that and see what he says there.

So Matthew emphasized what Jesus said.

Mark what Jesus did.

Luke what Jesus felt.

He's the humanist of the bunch.

And John, who he was, that's his emphasis.

So Matthew writes to the Jew, Mark to the Roman, Luke to the Greek, John to the church.

The first miracle, Matthew the first number would be a leper cleanse.

That's a very Jewish emphasis.

Leprese was a symbol of sin.

Mark and Luke both being Gentile oriented, demons expelled.

John's the mystic.

Water turned to wine is his first miracle in each one.

Matthew ends with a resurrection as any Jew would.

Mark with the ascension.

Luke with the promise of the Spirit setting up his sequel, which is Acts of the Holy Spirit.

And then John of course, the promise of his return for the church of course.

And John finishes that, sets himself up for revelation, if you will.

And so it's interesting when we study the camps and numbers, the East, West, South, and

North had symbols.

The ensign for Judah was the lion, right?

And lion of the tribe of Judah.

Mark was the west, the next one was the Ephraim, the ox, if you will.

And Luke the man, the Reuben was a symbol of was a man and Dan the eagle.

So we have the face of the lion, the ox, the man, the eagle that the camp represented,

the same as the face of the seraphim and the cherubim around the throne of God, fits the

four gospels.

You begin to realize there is a mystical overseer on how these things are designed.

And so that's kind of, I think, kind of fun.

And there's also different styles in terms of groupings and snapshots and so forth.

We'll talk about all that next time.

So that's what we're about.

And let's stand for a closing word of prayer.

Fun time coming.

We'll be going through a overview of the life of Christ where we'll put that all together.

Up to the final week, we'll save a whole session for the final week because there's

much, there's an awful lot of there that Mel Gibson didn't tell you or couldn't tell

you.

We'll talk about that.

And I believe he did us a wonderful favor with this marvelous piece of work because

he's given us the opportunity to open a conversation with anybody.

But there are some things that he wasn't in the position to be able to communicate that

we will extract from the text as we go forward.

Let's bow our hearts.

Father, we thank you for who you are.

We pray, Father, that you would take these seeds that are planted in their lives.

We pray, Father, that you'd nurse them to fruition.

We pray, Father, that you'd illuminate that path before us, that we each might know what

you would have of us as we go forward, as we just commit ourselves without any reservation

into your hands in the name of Yeshua, our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ, amen.