Reading: Inspiration, Canonization, Transmission, and Translation

(Transcript)

© 2012 Dr. Ted Hildebrandt

A. Introduction and Prayer [0:0-2:24]

This is lecture number two by Dr. Ted Hildebrandt on Old Testament History Literature
and Theology. The lecture today will be on the doctrines of inspiration, canonization,
transmission, and translation.
One thing I should say that somebody did last year that I thought was really cool, I had
a girl who was sitting over here and her father wanted to take her Old Testament class with
her! We’re talking helicopter parent, but anyway, actually, I really enjoyed the guy. I ended up
emailing him. This guy emailed me back and forth and it was really cool. He would go through
the readings, and I got a kick out of that. By the way, was that really neat that he could see
what his daughter was learning? You don’t think that’s neat…okay, I thought it was pretty neat.
Let’s open with a word of prayer, and then we’re going to run through some stuff here
today.
Father, we are so grateful that you have spoken, and that you have spoken to prophets
who were men and women of God, and they recorded Scripture, and you had it preserved for
us for thousands of years through all sorts of ravages of time. You’ve had it preserved for us
and translated for us into English so we can understand it, and we still have it. Many of us even
have multiple copies of it and we thank you for your word that you’ve spoken. We thank you for
your word in nature, and we just, as the passing of this hurricane, realize that the heavens
declare the glory of God. So we look at the heavens and we praise you for your greatness and
for the universe that you’ve made. We thank you most of all for your son Jesus Christ who died
for our sins. We thank you so much for your love and your compassion. I pray that you might
help us today as we go over some things that are rather tricky. We pray that you might give me
the ability to speak them in ways that build up faith rather than tear it down…and that the name
of your son might be honored by this class, in his precious name we pray. Amen.
B. Review: Cosmological and Teleological Arguments for
God’s Existence[2:25-6:26]
Last time we were saying that the Bible (we are going to be studying the Old
Testament), that this book is the word of God. So the first thing that we need to show is that a
belief in God is reasonable. Now, can we prove that there is a God? No. Can we show that it is
reasonable? Can people prove how the Big Bang happened 16 billion years ago or so? Can
people prove that? No. Is that an assumption on their part as well? Okay, so is it only
Christians who have faith in assumptions? Do other people also have assumptions? Yes.
Science has them, every culture has them. So, is there a God?
We talked about the cosmological argument, which was basically following cause-
effect, cause-effect, cause-effect, all the way back to the initial cause; the initial watermelon or
grapefruit, and what caused the universe to come into existence. We as Christians would say
the initial cause that was involved in blowing the watermelon or grapefruit apart was God, and
that God was involved in the creation of the universe. So what cause was the first cause to
cause all of the rest of this stuff to happen? We would say that’s God. The first cause is the
cosmological argument.
 We also used the teleological argument. The teleological argument was an argument
from design. The universe is very, very well structured; very well ordered, okay? One guy has
written a book, the six numbers, and if you change any of these six numbers, the whole
universe changes. For example, the gravitational pull, what happens if the gravitational pull
was different than what it is now? Suppose gravitation was just three-quarters of what it is now.
What would have happened to the universe when it exploded? Instead of gravitation holding
things together, the universe would do what? It would have been blown apart. What happens if
gravitation, on the other hand, was stronger than it is now? The universe would go out, and it is
possible it would be sucked back together. But the way it is, the gravitational pull seems to be
perfect in the way that it allows for us to live. There are other factors too. The size and the
weight of a proton, and what if that was changed? It would change everything. And so, this guy
goes through six numbers and says the universe is incredibly balanced around these six
numbers. Now you could say that’s luck, right? That we just lucked out. But doesn’t it make you
say, “That’s just too many things to be luck?”
So it’s kind of like we used the example of this room with the chairs in this room. You
walk into this room and you look at these chairs, would you assume that it was just luck and
chance that these chairs popped in the way they are now? No, when you look at the chairs in
rows you would conclude: “Somebody did that.” How do you know that those chairs were put
there by somebody? Because there is too much order. You’ve got three rows here, you’ve got
no chairs sitting out in the middle, they kind of angle up, you’ve got ten in a row like that,
they’re all lined up nicely. You say “This couldn’t just be by luck, there must have been a
designer who designed this room and built it like this. So that’s the argument from design, it’s
called the teleological argument.
Then we talked a little bit about intelligent design and actually I think last time I got my
people, William Craig, mixed up with a guy named William Dempski, the mathematician that
had the double PhD was Dempski out of the University of Chicago. Craig is also an apologist,
on the west coast at Talbot Seminary, is anybody familiar with it? Anyway, Craig is out there,
he also argues apologetics, but Dempski is one of the big ones, double Ph.D., Intelligent
Design. Now different people will establish then, how did this happen? Intelligent design says
that there is so much order in the universe that you need someone, you need an intelligence,
to design this because it’s not just luck and chance otherwise, there’d be more chaos.
C. Moral Argument for the existence of God [6:27-9:39]
Now here’s our next argument. This is the Moral Argument. Do animals have morals?
We went out to (I took my son who just got back from Afghanistan) Yellowstone National Park.
What’s one of the problems with taking a walk in Yellowstone? Are there big critters out there?
What happened was there were a fifty-seven-year-old man and his wife who went for a walk. It
turns out that there was a mother grizzly bear. The grizzly bear saw the man and went after
him and killed him. What’s the problem with the grizzly bear? Is a grizzly bear able to take a
human being pretty easily? Just their claws are as long as my finger. The grizzly bear goes like
that once and you’re gutted. These animals are incredibly strong and they can run really fast.
Anyway, this guy was devoured. His wife got away, by the way, do you know how she got
away? This is the truth… she started hollering at the bear and nobody can take a woman
screaming at them so the bear took off…That was a joke (I have to be careful about these
kinds of things now that I’m being taped) but what I am saying is, how did the woman get
away? Do you know what she did? This is the truth, what she did was while her husband was
devoured by the bear, she pretended that she was dead. The bear came up, nosed her, may
have clamped into her (I think she had some minor wounds) but the bear did not devour her
because the bear figured she was dead and left her alone. That’s the truth, she got away by
playing dead. That’s pretty freaky, isn’t it? She totally went limp and pretended like she was
dead and she was spared.
 My point is if an animal devours a human being, is that an immoral animal? Do animals
have morals? No, they eat each other! That’s what I’m saying; they devour things naturally. A
human being that that kills another human being, is there something immoral with that? Okay,
we’ve got laws that call that murder. By the way, are there different levels of murder
too? Some 85-year-old person is in a car, and they don’t know what they’re doing. They
stepped on the gas pedal instead of the break and ended up running a kid down. It ended up
happening down in Boston. Suppose the kid gets killed, is that old person a murderer? Well,
they should not be driving but that is a different question. What we’re saying is there was no
malicious intent or forethought. That person was probably devastated by the fact that they
killed someone.
In other words, human beings have morals. Where did those morals come from? If you
don’t believe that there is a God, then where did morals come from? By the way, can secular
people come up with places that morals come from? Yes, they can, but do they have to work a
lot harder than we do, saying there is a God, who spoke and said “Thou shalt not” what?
“Commit murder. Thou shalt not lie, thou shalt not steal, thou shalt not commit adultery,” that’s
pretty straight up. So, where did morals come from? It’s more of a problem without God than
with God.

D. Pascal’s wager as proof for the existence of God[9:40-13:16]

Pascal’s wager. This is one I like. Does anybody like gambling? I don’t, but let me just say this.
We’re going to roll seven and eleven on a couple of dice. Each die has six sides, so how many
possibilities, can come up with two dice? You guys probably do this in statistics. Six on each
die, so six times six, so thirty-six different combinations. Now seven, you can get in how many
ways? One and six, three and four, etc. So we’re going to roll dice, and here’s the way it's
going to be. Because I care about you guys, we’re going to set this up. If I roll the dice and I
don’t get seven or eleven, in other words, you win and I lose, I give you a dollar. If I get the
seven or eleven, you’re going to pay me ten thousand dollars. Does anybody want to roll?
What’s the problem? I roll them once and I lose, I pay you just a dollar. I roll them twice, I lose,
I pay you a dollar. Three, four, five, ten, I roll them ten times, I paid you guys what? Ten bucks.
I win once, and you pay me what? Ten thousand. Question: will I roll with you all night like
that? Yes. Why? If I lose, I’ve got what to lose? I lose a dollar. I’ve got very little to lose. But
have I got a huge amount to gain when I win? Very little to lose, everything to gain.
Pascal’s wager works like that, it says this: “If there is no God, what have I lost?” Very
little. Suppose there is no God, and you say “Well, you believed all your life and it was a lie and
God doesn’t exist.” What have I gained from that? I’ve gained a wonderful family, a wonderful
wife, I couldn’t ask for more. So I’ve got all that stuff still. If, on the other hand, I believe that
there is no God, and all of a sudden I die and I’m face to face with this God who doesn’t exist
and I’ve blasphemed him all my life and I get fried after that, is there a problem? In other
words, you’ve got nothing to lose and everything to gain. If there is no God, and I believed
there was a God, I didn’t lose almost anything. If it turns out there is a God and I didn’t believe
in him, I lose everything after this life goes down. That is called Pascal’s wager, and he’s
saying if you believe in God and it turns out that you were wrong, you didn’t lose very much of
anything. If you believe that there was no God and it turns out there is, you’ve just lost your
soul and that’s a big deal. Pascal’s wager--don’t roll dice for money.
E. The Jesus Argument: Liar, lunatic, legend or Lord [13:17-20:46]
What do you do with Jesus? You can say, “I don’t believe in God.” Okay, what do you do with
Jesus then? Did Jesus claim to be God? Jesus said, Egw eimi. This means “ I am.” I am
what? When Jesus said “I am,” how did the Jews respond? They wanted to stone him. Why did
they want to stone him? “Because you, a mere man, claim to be” what? “God.” Who is “I am
that I am”? You remember in the Old Testament, “I am that I am.” Is that the name “Jehovah,”
God’s most sacred name? Jesus says “I am” and they try to stone him because they said “you
just made a claim to be God. Therefore we’re going to try to kill you, stone you, for blasphemy.
Because you, a mere man, claim to be God.” In the beginning, John his apostle writes, “In the
beginning was the word. The word was with God and the word was God…. And the word
became flesh and dwelt among us.” So he’s talking about the logos. The divine being
the logos, the word of God, now becomes flesh. Jesus claimed to be God. So C.S. Lewis said
this, Jesus is either a liar, a lunatic, or he is who he said he was, he’s the Lord. Now Jesus
being a liar, what’s the problem with that? When you read the works of Jesus, does he seem
like much of a liar? “I am the way, the truth, and the life.” Okay, Jesus spoke the truth and lying
clashes with his moral character.
If a person in this room claimed that you were God, we’d think you were what? Crazy.
Jesus claimed to be and, by the way, did his own brothers and sisters think he was crazy? In
the passage in Matthew 12, they came to take him away because they thought he was crazy.
Was Jesus a lunatic? Are there lunatics that think they are gods? Especially when they take a
certain amount of substances. Is Jesus a lunatic? Have you read the Sermon on the Mount?
When you read the Sermon on the Mount, “Blessed are the poor, blessed are the merciful for
they shall obtain mercy, blessed are the pure in heart for they shall seek God…” Are those the
statements of a lunatic? If you’ve ever read the Sermon on the Mount, is that the work of a
lunatic? Isn’t that some of the most incredible literature ever written anywhere? I don’t think
you’re going to get to far with this idea of Jesus being a lunatic. The teachings of Jesus are
incredible.
Jesus was Lord, that’s Lewis’ conclusion. Lewis skipped this one, and it bothers me because I
think today, a lot of people still don’t like Jesus as God. Everybody likes Jesus as a souped-up
Mahatma Gandhi. So it is for many “Jesus was a good prophet,” a kind of Martin Luther King
on steroids. But anyway, where everybody has problems with Jesus is his claims to be God.
That’s where they have problems. Jesus was a good prophet, and everybody loves Jesus as a
good prophet, but as soon as Jesus claims to be God, that’s when people freak out.
Now, where did this “God-ness” of Jesus come from? Some of the critics today will say that this
idea that Jesus was God was actually a legend, that actually developed over a period of time.
So this legendary Jesus developed. But I want to ask you about his apostles, who they say
designed these legends about Jesus. What do you know about the apostles? The apostles
were really pretty courageous people. Early on Jesus’ disciples were very “Jesus, you go to the
death, and we will go to death with you. We will stick by your side. We are right there with
you, we believe in you with our whole hearts.” All of a sudden Jesus gets captured in the
garden of Gethsemane and what happens to the disciples? These guys were: “Excuse me,
somebody could get killed around here. They’re going to kill somebody, we need to get out of
here!” So the disciples take off. Now I ask you one question; at the cross of Jesus, where were
all of the disciples? They were hiding in fear. It was the women that are all stuck with him.
But then what happens? Three days later, all of a sudden, they go to the tomb, and
what happens to the disciples then? Is there a transition with the disciples? Will the disciples
who were fearful and ran away now die for Jesus Christ after the resurrection? Tell me what
happens to the 12 disciples (well, one of them kind of did the bucket list thing and didn’t make
it). So Judas is gone, but those eleven disciples, what happened to all of them, except we
wonder about John, what happened to them? Do we have records of what happened to them?
Every one of them died horrible deaths, let’s use Peter as an example, Peter was crucified
upside down. If he just made this up, the legend of Jesus being God, would you die for
something like that? By the way, one or two might die, because they were crazy or something
like that, but would all eleven of them die and never say, “Stop, I just made that up, I was just
kidding, don’t kill me.” No, they all walked to their death and were martyred. Even John, they
started to fry him in oil. What I’m saying is, did they believe this with all of their heart? They
believed it to the point of what? Death. By the way, was this just putting a bullet in their head?
No. Many of them were tortured to death, and that’s how they went to their deaths.
So this idea that the disciples just made up these legends, what’s the other problem with that?
If the disciples just made up these stories, were there other people around them that could
blow the whistle on them and say “that’s not true”? Jesus rose from the dead, the disciples
said, and there were people around who said, “No, that didn’t ever happen, we were there, it
never happened.” What’s the problem with that? Paul says, “Hey, if you don’t believe me about
Jesus resurrecting from the dead, there are five hundred people still alive here, you can go ask
them. Five hundred people all saw Jesus rise from the dead, besides the twelve apostles, and
beside me, Paul, and I saw Jesus on the road to Damascus, alive after he was dead.” So in
other words, they can’t make it up because there were other people who would have
disconfirmed their stories. Paul is saying to go ask the people who were eyewitnesses. So
Jesus is pretty good. Jesus Christ claims to be God, and there is reason for believing that.
Now does this prove it? It doesn’t prove it, but it is reasonable to think some of these things.
F. Personal Testimony argument for the existence of God [20:47-22:21]
Personal testimony. Do you know people who suggest that they have met God? Are there
people in this room who would claim that they have met God, including the professor? I swear I
have seen the handiwork of God, this last year, praise God, I mean, have you ever prayed
something that really, really matters? My son, last year, around this time, was over in
Afghanistan. He was getting shot at every day. He was on the wire for twenty-eight straight
days, getting shot at every day. Did I pray for him? Did some of his buddies not come back?
Other people did not come back. He came back. God spared him. I praise God for that. People
will say he was lucky, it was just the luck of the draw that he didn’t get killed, but I can go over
and over things that show that God answers prayer. Does personal testimony count? Are
there millions of people that believe in Jesus Christ that claim to have a relationship with God?
Yes. Now, do you just dismiss that because they’re all a bunch of whackos? Okay, you need to
think about that. You might say, “Well, yeah, you are, Hildebrandt!
G. Predictive Prophecy as proof of God’s existence [22:22-24:45]
Here are some other things that come from the Bible itself. In this book does God know the
future from the beginning? From the beginning to the end, does God know the future? Now, do
you know the future? Is there anybody in this room or on this campus that knows the future?
Question: what will happen to the stock market tomorrow, up or down? Nobody knows! In other
words, it’s been so erratic that you can’t tell tomorrow what’s going to happen. Now, you’ve got
a God who predicts things 700 years before they happen. By the way, is 700 years a little bit of
a length of a time? 700 years before Christ, Micah the prophet in Micah 5:2 says, “Hey, when
the Messiah comes, he’s not going to just be born anywhere, the Messiah is going to be born
in Bethlehem of Judea.”
You could say, “Yeah, but there were millions of people born in Bethlehem and it was
just his luck of the draw.” Tell me, how big was the town of Bethlehem? The town of Bethlehem
could fit on the quad here. We’re talking three, four, five hundred people max. We’re
Americans, our cities are big: New York City, L.A., and Boston. We do big cities. Over there,
their cities are towns, and actually, you’ll notice, in the DASV, I often translated it “towns”
instead of “cities” because these places are so small. Most of the places and towns that you
read about in Israel would fit on Gordon’s campus, including Jericho. By the way, does anyone
remember how many times they walked around Jericho in one day? Seven times. What does
that tell you? Is this a huge city that they go around seven times or is this a small town that
they go around seven times? Yes, small, Jericho is small. So what I’m saying is, if Jesus
comes from Bethlehem of Judea, was that a small town to be from? It is predicted 700 years
before he’s born. What town is Jesus born in? Bethlehem of Judea! There are prophecies like
that, let me add one prophecy to another prophecy to another prophecy, and you just start
adding this stuff up and you say it can’t be just the luck-of-the-draw. The Bible has got this
down! Who knows the future? God knows the future. You would expect God to be able to say
what the future is and to get it right and he does.
H. Miracle Accounts as proof of the existence of God [24:46-27:26]
Another thing, miracles. You’ve got a record. Moses walks up to the Red Sea and he goes,
“Wham bam!” and guess what happens? The waters part, the Jews go across, the Egyptians
come trucking in after them and the waterfalls and drowns all of the Egyptians! Now you say,
“That was just luck, the miracle, the wind was blowing they had a Noreaster that day and it
blew all of the water back, but it was strong enough to blow 50 feet of water but the people
could still walk through it?” Then they get to the other side and all of a sudden this manna
started coming down from the sky. It doesn’t usually happen that way. Then they are out in
Sinai, a major desert, they haven’t got any water, so this guy goes up with a stick and whacks
a rock and all of a sudden this water comes out of this rock and satisfies all of these people.
You say, “Miracle?” They go up to the Jordan River and the Jordan River parts too and they
march around the city seven times and they go, “Hey, you guys, come out and play!” and the
walls all fall down! Actually, what that was, was that they were jiving, they were walking around
like that, all jiving and the ground was shaking… really? Enough for big walls to fall down? Yes,
that would be miraculous. Jesus saying, “Hey, you’ve got five thousand people here, how much
fish do you have? Let’s feed these people.” Or Elijah, going up on Mount Carmel, and a
lightning bolt coming down at his request, frying that altar while these 400 prophets of Baal are
off screaming to their gods and cutting themselves as slashers. So these are miracles.
If you’re a critic of the Bible and don’t believe in God, what are two things that you’ve
got to get rid of in the Bible? You have to get rid of prophecy and you have to get rid of the
miracles. You say “I don’t believe in miracles, there is no God, so there can’t be any miracles.”
You’ve got to go through miracle by miracle and explain them away throughout the whole
Bible, including this guy being born of a virgin. You’ve got to get rid of that, although I guess we
could do that today! But do you see what I’m saying, Jesus was born of a virgin, but they would
use something like, “Maybe it was a German soldier,” or “maybe it was artificial insemination”
to explain the virgin birth away from Christ. They have to get rid of it because the virgin birth
was a miracle (Isa. 7:14).
I. The Jews as proof of God’s existence [27:27-33:27]
Now, here’s something that came up with King Frederick in Prussia, he said, “Prove to me that
there is a God in one word.” This advisor responded: “the Jews.” Tell me about the Jewish
people; tell me about the Babylonians. Do you remember the Babylonian empire? Babylon was
a magnificent, huge empire. Where are the Babylonian people today? They’re nowhere. What
about the Assyrians? The Assyrians in Nineveh, 1850 acres of land, a huge city, a huge
empire, but where are the Assyrians today? Nowhere. The Moabites, the Ammonites, the
Edomites, all of the –ites and –tites of the Bible, where are all of those groups of people?
They’re gone. Question: If I asked you where the Jews were today, what would you say? New
York City. To be honest, there are as many Jews in New York City as there are in Israel, did
you know that? There are a lot of Jews in Israel and I have a lot of respect for them. I actually
lived in Israel for a year. But things are getting bad there now and you need to pray for the
peace in Jerusalem. All I am trying to say is, over the centuries, have people tried to purposely
destroy the Jews? Has that happened repeatedly, over and over again in history? Yes, the
latest being with Hitler in the Holocaust, 6 million Jews were wiped out. Is that a lot of Jews?
Did the Jews survive that? Is there still a group of Jewish people even after that happened?
Now by the way, are there people today who say the holocaust never happened? Yes. Three
or four days ago, Ahminajab has said that he is committed to totally destroy Israel. This is just
recently. Is he going to make a good shot at it probably? Yes. He is trying to create a nuclear
weapon to do that. So Israel has got some major problems going on.
Question: the holocaust never happened? Ahmadinejad has his own opinion; he says
that the holocaust never happened. You have your opinion, and you say the holocaust
happened. It’s your opinion versus his opinion. How do you know who’s right? Everybody can
have their own opinion. It is just his opinion versus your opinion. In post-modernism, for you
guys, it’s just “Well, you think this and its okay to think this and I think that and it’s okay. We
can peacefully coexist.” Does anybody ever say what really happened? His opinion is that it
never happened, does that matter at all? Did it happen or not? Does it matter whether I
acknowledge it or not? If I don’t acknowledge it, does that mean it didn’t happen? No. It doesn’t
matter what I think. It happened. And by the way, some of the people that went into Auschwitz
and some of those places, did they say it was so horrendous, “No one will ever believe
this.” Eisenhower had his troops document those atrocities because he said, “Nobody would
believe what we just found here.” He purposely had that documented.
Now if you don’t believe that, let me tell you a story about a lady named Sonya Weitz
who stood on this platform. She is what they call “a survivor,” and I’m sorry if you guys go off in
a different direction when I say “survivor,” but when I’m talking about a “survivor,” I mean
someone who is a survivor of the holocaust. She was put on a cattle car, on a train with her
sister, naked with hundreds of other people, like sardines. In her family, everybody was killed
and only she and her sister survived. I don’t know how they survived, she tells the story. She
has been on this platform before. “Well,” you say, “it’s just your opinion” versus… Question:
was she there? And she describes the holocaust. She’s passed on now, by the way, are these
people getting older? I am debating on whether I should put it online or not. It is just an
incredible story, a woman who went through the holocaust and actually went into the
concentration camps. Her family was destroyed, and she stood on this platform and told what
happened to her. Question: is the holocaust legitimate? Yes! How do you know that? Because
there is an eyewitness, this person was there. This isn’t reading it in a history book, she was
there.
So anyway, the Jews. How do you know the Jews are going to last? Are the Jews going to last
until the end? Abraham’s promise, land, seed--that their seed would multiply as what? The
seed would multiply as the stars in the heavens and the sand of the seashore. He was to be a
blessing to all nations. The covenant is land, the land of Palestine, seed, that the seed would
multiply, and that he’d be a blessing to all nations! Are the Jews going to be here when Christ
comes back? Sure enough. So, anybody that tries to destroy them, what usually happens to
them? They end up having problems and so I’m worried about the next time this happens, I
think it’s going to be really serious. So the Jews, are persevered over all of these other people
in the Bible who are gone, yet the Jews still survive. Again, this is the handiwork of God.
J. Where did the Bible come from? Step One: Inspiration [33:28-38:50]
Now, we’re going to switch gears. Where do we get our Bible from? So we’re going to go and
trace through this, and let me move a little more quickly. I’m going to do some of this out of my
head just so we can speed this up a little bit. Does the Bible claim to be from God? Does it
make that claim? Does your calculus textbook claim to be from God? Does your sociology,
psychology, or chemistry textbook claim to be from God? Are there hundreds of thousands of
volumes from our library that don’t claim to be from God? There are how many books in our
library that claim to be from God? Is there probably just a handful? Does the Bible make that
claim? Yes, it does. 2 Timothy 3:16 says, “All Scripture is inspired by God.” And the actual
Greek word there is theopneustos, which means “God-breathed.” “All Scripture is God-
breathed.” When I’m talking up here, if you’re sitting in the front you know this when I talk, do I
talk using breath? Yes, breath is how you speak. “All Scripture is God-breathed,” the word of
God is breathed out into the prophets, and the prophets write it down. Paul says, “All scripture
is God-breathed and profitable for reproof and correction …”
Here’s one that is interesting, over in 2 Peter 1:21, Peter says this, “For prophecy never
had its origin in the will of man.” Is that really important? Prophecy came, but did it come from
man or did it come from God? Peter says that prophecy never came from the will of man. By
the way, were there prophets who went negative, who spoke from their own will, and said,
“Thus saith the Lord, “ when the Lord hadn’t “thus saith-ed”? Were there prophets like that,
“thus saith the Lord,” and God had not talked to them. Those people are called what? False
prophets. Were there a lot of false prophets in the Old Testament? When Elijah, the good
prophet, goes up against them, what’s the ratio of true prophets to false prophets? One to four
hundred. There were a lot of false prophets. The true prophets say, “Thus saith the Lord…”
and they spoke from God. Peter says that “prophecy never had its origin in the will of men. But
men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit.” These men did not speak
from themselves, making this stuff up, they were “carried along by the Holy Spirit,” and so
that’s 2 Peter 1:21, the origin is in God.
Here’s another one. “In times past,” the writer of Hebrews tells us, “God spoke to the prophets
in many different ways and times.” Did God speak to the prophets in different ways?
Sometimes he appeared to them; sometimes he spoke to them, and in all different ways. “But
in these last days,” the writer of Hebrews says, “he has spoken to us in his son.” Jesus Christ
becomes the word of God incarnate. The word of God, the Old Testament word of God, where
God spoke to the people, Jesus Christ now becomes. “In the beginning was the word and the
word was with God, and the word was God… And the word became flesh and dwelt among us
(John 1).” The word of God gets incarnated in Jesus Christ. So the prophets did well, but does
Jesus did better? Yes, Jesus blows everything away. Now you’ve got the expression of God,
not in words in written phonemes and morphemes, you’ve got the word in flesh. Jesus is God
in flesh, Hebrews points that out.
Here’s another one, Jesus does this, what does Jesus say about the Old Testament? Does
Jesus state that the Old Testament is from God? Jesus says, “Not one jot or tittle will pass from
the law until all is fulfilled.” What are a jot and a tittle? A jot is a yodh, it is the smallest Hebrew
letter, it’s like half of a letter. It is the smallest Hebrew letter. What is a tittle? A tittle is, well, do
you know what serif versus sans serif fonts are? Do know how the Times New Roman font has
a little mark on the end of a “d”? It has that little thing that hangs out on the d, that’s called a
serif. Sans serif would be more like Arial where the d is just a straight line and then a circle.
When Jesus says not one jot or tittle, the tittle is a serif. It’s the little hook on the letter. Jesus
says not one jot or tittle will pass from the law until all is what? Until everything is fulfilled. Did
Jesus have a fairly high view of the law? Jesus said, “I did not come to destroy the law, I came
to do” what? “To fulfill it.” Jesus takes the law as the fulfillment of his life. So Jesus has a very
high view of Scripture as coming from God.

K. Four Steps from God to us: Inspiration, Canonization, Transmission,

Translation[38:51-50:52]
Now, there are four steps in this process from God to us.
The first step is called “inspiration.” Inspiration is God’s spiration breathing, God breathing his
word into these prophets. The prophets spoke and they wrote it down. Now by the way, if the
prophets didn’t write it down, is it lost to us? Did God ever speak to people who never wrote it
down? He did. For example, look at the book of Huldah. Where is the book of Huldah? Has
anyone read Huldah lately? Huldah was a prophetess, God spoke to her as a prophetess, and
we don’t have any of her books. She either didn’t write it down or maybe she did and it was
lost. But inspiration, the prophets wrote it down God’s word.
Canonization: which books are authoritative?
What is canonization? Once God’s got the content written down, do the people of God have to
collect those books as sacred books? So the prophets write this content down, God comes
down, speaks to the prophets, “Thus saith the Lord…”, and the prophet writes it
down. Canonization is the people of God then collect those books that are considered holy. Do
the people have to decide which books are holy and which books are not? Are there some
books talked about in Scripture that are even mentioned in Scripture that are not holy books?
In the book of Kings, it says, if you want more about King Josiah, go to the annals of the kings
of Israel and Judah. Do we have the annals of the kings of Israel and Judah? No. They were
not considered sacred books, they were considered the annals of the kings of Judah. But did
the writer of Kings use those annals to give us some of his writings? Yes. So, were there other
books in the ancient world floating around that we don’t have that are not canonical? But the
ones we do have, the Jewish people, the people of God, collected them and said, “These are
the ones that are from God.” That collection of books and sanctioning of those books is the
process of canonization.
Transmission: the copying of the text by scribes
Next is transmission, that is, scribal copying. Did the books have to be copied over and over
again for thousands of years? Do scribes make mistakes? When you copy a thousand page
book, do you make mistakes? I will give you a word processor with spell check, even then, can
you type a thousand pages without error even with spell check? Is it possible if you went back
over it a number of times you could probably get it? I think you probably could. I think I’ve done
it myself. What I’m saying is, it is really hard to get it right. These guys are copying by hand.
Question: copying a thousand pages by hand, is this a problem? When copying by hand a
thousand pages you’ve got handwriting problems and all sorts of things.
So scribal errors, I will show you errors, I will show you errors in your Bible as a result
of the scribing process. Now, after you’ve got it copied over and over and over again for 2,000
years or whatever, now you’ve got to do what? The Bible was originally written in Aramaic,
Hebrew, and Greek. The Old Testament was written mostly in Hebrew. After they came back
from the exile to Babylon, they wrote in Aramaic and spoke in Aramaic, and then in Greek after
Alexander the Great came through. So we’ve got it in those languages and we’ve got to get it
translated into what? Hebrew, of course not. We need it in English. So we have to get it
translated. What’s the problem with translation? When you translate between languages do
things get lost in translation? Do languages match up perfectly? No. And so there are some
words, I think of the word hesed, I struggle with how to translate that word. Do I translate it into
“loyal love” or “steadfast love” or just “love” or “mercy”? How do I translate that word, when
there is no single English word that matches hesed it just doesn’t exist in the English language.
Question: Have I got a problem as a translator? No, I just use the NIV and you don’t have to
worry about it [joke]. But do you see the problem of going between languages?
Various Means of Inspiration
So let’s look at the process of inspiration, how did God inspire his word? With Moses, does
God speak face to face? In Numbers 12, God says of Moses, “Moses is not like the run of the
mill prophet, he is not a normal prophet.” He says, “Normally with prophets, I speak to them in
dreams and in visions, with Moses it is not like that. With Moses, I go head to head, face to
face.” By the way, it’s so face-to-face that when Moses comes down from the mountain, what is
his face? Does anyone remember? His face is shining and the people say “Hey, Moses, you’ve
been up talking to God, you just stay over there, I don’t like your shiny face Moses, cover that
up.” So Moses does what? Moses drops a veil over his face! When he goes up to talk to God,
he pulls the veil off, and when he comes down to talk to the people he puts the veil on! So
Moses is a prophet and he has got that kind of interaction with God. Normally God came down
and told the prophet, “Thus saith the Lord…” and the prophet would quote, “Thus saith the
Lord…” Isaiah, Jeremiah, all of the prophets, coh amar Yahweh, and then they quote from the
Lord. So, God speaks to them in words, and they reveal it. God spoke in dreams, in visions.
He even appeared to them in a fiery bush.
Now here’s another way God spoke: God spoke in his son. Jesus, as we said, becomes the
incarnate Word. Jesus is the ultimate revelation of God because what you’ve got is the Word
becoming flesh. The Word, rather than being spoken, is now alive. And the Word now
communicates to us, not just in words but in deeds and in miracles—incredible things--that
Jesus did, but the Word becomes flesh and now God incarnates himself in flesh. Can human
beings go up to Jesus and punch him in the gut? Yes! Does anyone remember the Garden of
Eden? Did people in the Garden of Eden walk with God and talk with God? Yes! What happens
after the fall they are cut off now. But Jesus comes back, in a sense; does Jesus Christ bring
us back to the Garden where God walks among us? But what do the people do? They beat
him! It’s terrible. So Jesus, “In the beginning was the word, the word was with God and the
word was God… and the word became flesh and dwelt among us.” It’s a beautiful passage in
the New Testament (John 1).
Now some writers, however, did research. In other words, it wasn’t God coming down
and dictating something in their ear. In the book of Luke, Luke’s going to write a gospel about
Jesus Christ, but did Luke ever meet Jesus Christ? No. Luke never met Jesus Christ. So, on
what basis does Luke write a gospel about Jesus Christ? Well, Luke tells us where he got his
data from. Where did Luke get his information? “Many have undertaken to draw up an account
of the things that have been fulfilled among us, just as they were handed down to us, by those
who were from the first eyewitnesses [Luke 1:1-4].” Did Luke get his material about Jesus
Christ from eyewitnesses? Does Luke know the difference between eyewitnesses and
secondary sources? Yes. Is he a good historian? He says, “I got this information from
eyewitnesses.” He checks with eyewitnesses and servants of the word because he himself was
not an eyewitness. “For since I myself have carefully investigated…” Where does the book of
Luke come from? It comes from his careful investigations, talking and interviewing people who
were eyewitnesses. “Everything from the beginning, now it seemed good to me also to write an
orderly account.” Now I’m going to order it, he says, “for you most excellent Theophilus…so
that you may know of the certainty of the things you have been taught.” So where did Luke get
his information? Luke got his material largely from eyewitnesses whom he interviewed, and he
tells us that [Luke 1:1-4].
Now, what about this: Solomon, in Proverbs 25:1. Solomon wrote many proverbs, but
who built the book of Proverbs? Was it Solomon? No! Partially yes, but in Proverbs 25:1, it
says, “These are more proverbs of Solomon copied out by the men of Hezekiah.” So Hezekiah
[700 BC], at least 200 years after Solomon [960 BC], from the collection or book of Solomon’s
proverbs, the men of Hezekiah copied these proverbs out from that bigger collection. Do you
see how the Bible gained them? They had a big collection of Solomon’s proverbs, basically
chapters 25 to 29 of Proverbs was copied out of a larger collection. The men of Hezekiah did
that 200 years after Solomon’s time. So do you see how God inspires people in different ways?
That is all I am trying to show you.
Here’s one that Paul does. Paul in Acts 17 when he is on Mars Hill when he is in Athens in
Greece. He is walking around seeing all of these gods and he says, “Hey, you guys are right.
One of your poets has said, ‘In him, we live and move and have our being,’ as some of your
poets have said.” Paul quotes Aretas, a pagan poet, and says what the guys said was right! Is
that in Scripture? “In him, we live and move and have our being, as your poets have said.” Paul
quotes a pagan Greek poet, and that’s in our Bible now. Did God inspire people in all different
ways? Paul had that quote in his head, and he puts it down and says, “No, that was right, what
that guy said.” Now it is under the inspiration of Scripture. God inspired in different ways.
Now, there was external cooperation. Let me just do this quickly. When you pick up the Bible, if
you’ve read other books, is the Bible an incredible book especially the moral quality? What are
the two most important things in the Bible? “Love the Lord your God with all of your heart.” And
what? “Love your neighbor as yourself.” Question: if you had to pick something noble in the
world, are those some of the greatest statements ever? Love God with all of your heart, love
your neighbor as yourself, these are huge things. The Bible reflects this moral quality that is
absolutely incredible. The deepest human values and needs are met and expressed in
Scripture. Is the Bible a deep book? You’d say, “No, Hildebrandt I know the book of
Genesis…” I’m going to tell you that someone in the last class said: “I’m pretty familiar with the
book of Genesis.” And I just want to tell you, I don’t know the book of Genesis and I’ve been
teaching it for however many years. Are there things in Numbers, among others, that I still
wonder about until this day? The book of the Bible is incredibly deep, you could spend your life
studying the depth and the meaning there.
L. Alleged Errors in the Bible: Camels, Hittites, David
and archaeological confirmations[50:53-60:05]
Now here are some things about the Bible. Critics have attacked the Bible and what you get
are things like this--let me just give you the argument about the camel. I love camels. Actually,
the honest truth is, I hate camels. I slept by a camel one night and, if somebody says you have
camel breath, that is not a compliment. Camels have the worst smelling breath, that was the
worst smell I have smelled in my entire life. We slept by a camel and he breathed on our tent
throughout that night. It was terrible. Though I have a great deal of respect for camels.
So what’s the deal with camels? Critics say that the Bible’s got it wrong and that there are
errors in the Bible. The Bible says that Abraham had camels. When is Abraham’s date? 2,000
B.C. The Bible says he has camels. Critics claim that research shows that camels weren’t
domesticated until 1200 B.C., and the Bible says Abraham had camels (ca. 2000 B.C.). It is
obvious that people didn’t know that Abraham couldn’t have camels domesticated because
they weren’t domesticated until 800 years later. The Bible has an error in it. I’m serious this has
been argued. Lo and behold, some archaeologists are digging around and they come to a
place called Ebla. Ebla dates from about 2400 B.C. which puts it about how many years before
Abraham? About 400 years before Abraham. Guess what they had in Ebla? Lo and behold,
domesticated camels in Ebla, 400 years before Abraham lived. Question: the Bible said
Abraham had camels, is that right? That’s right. Did these critics get it wrong? Yes, they got it
wrong.
Now here’s another one, the Hittites. The Bible mentions that Uriah the Hittite was married to
Bathsheba. There are also other Hittites in the Bible. The critics have said, “The Bible’s wrong,
we know all of the peoples in the ancient world, we have all of the archaeology, there is no
group called the ‘Hittites,’ we don’t have any record of these Hittite people, therefore they didn’t
exist. The Bible’s got it wrong, the Hittites did not exist.” Lo and behold, somebody goes up into
the northern part of Turkey, and all of a sudden they start digging around at Boghazkoy, and
guess what? It turns out that this is the capital of the Hittite empire, and they dig up a whole
culture of the Hittites! By the way, can you go to the University of Pennsylvania now and study
the Hittite language? Yes! There is a whole culture with thousands of tablets from the Hittites,
indeed the book of Deuteronomy is built off of a Hittite treaty form. So, question: do we know
now that the Hittites did exist and that the critics were wrong and the Bible was what? Right.
What I am trying to ask is: is the Bible historically reliable? Yes. And what I am saying is that
the critics who critique it, they end up being wrong.
What about David? And this is even only thirty years ago, people were saying David didn’t
really exist. David was King Arthur in the ancient world, they just made up David, this figure of
this great king who was benevolent. It’s just like King Arthur, who never really existed. They
projected all of their ideals back on David and made up this wonderful idealized king. We have
no record in archaeology of David, and therefore he never existed. Lo and behold, I think it was
in the 1980’s, the archaeologist out there with a shovel, he digs up something about this big.
Turns out it was a pomegranate, and the pomegranate dates from about the ninth or tenth
century B.C., which is right around the time of David, and guess what the pomegranate says
on the side. It says “le DVD”. Now let me walk over here for a minute. This was the first record
of the DVD in history! That there were going to be DVD’s and you’ve all been using them, and
historically you can see how the Jews are brilliant and ahead of their time: DVD’s. Well, what’s
the problem with that? The reason I say the le which means “to” or “for”, what is the problem
with ancient Hebrew? They didn’t use what? Vowels. So you’ve got the letters DVD, guess
what you fill in there, you don’t have to be too bright to figure it out. You have two places for
vowels, what are the vowels? It is inscribed on a stone, who inscribes things on a stone? Is
that royalty or is that a poor man? Poor men use potshards [broken pottery pieces]. A rich man
carves into stone. So this is royalty, this is David--“To David.” Guess where half of the psalms
(well not half, but a ton of the psalms), guess how they start? “LeDavid” or, “For David.” So
someone says, “How do we know that DVD means David?” Some critics still will not accept
that and so they say DVD actually stands for some god, “To a DVD/God.” I’m not talking about
your DVDs, no, they said there was a god called (and actually they used DWD) DVD from the
ancient world. But what’s the problem with that argument? In all of our records, is there any
God named DVD, with or without the vowels? No, there’s no record of that. Is that total
conjecture on their part, because they don’t want to accept it. DVD probably means what? If
anybody has ever done anything with Hebrew and you see DVD it means David! So we’ve got
actual records of that now.
Now we’ve also got Jeremiah’s scribe, let me tell you about bullae. These guys, wore stuff on
their rings. It was like a fingerprint. What you did on your bullae, you would stick it in wax or
stick it in mud because they used to write on mud. You would stick it in the mud, and it left your
print (and by the way you knew it was your print because it had your name on it.) This is what
scribes did, this is how they “copyrighted” back then. That was a joke, okay? When they went
bam on the document, that meant it was their document. Now there was this guy named
Jeremiah, he wrote a few books, a big book actually and liked to lament. He had a scribe
named Baruch, Baruch the scribe. Guess what? In 1975 you see it right there, that’s the bullae
of Baruch. In Jeremiah 36, God comes down and says, “Jeremiah, I am going to start talking
to you and you need to start writing it down. You need to get one of Hildebrandt’s Old
Testament scribes to type this up for you because I am going to start talking and you need to
write it down. So go out and find yourself a scribe. Moreover, I’ll tell you the name of the scribe.
I want you to find Baruch, the son of Neriah, the scribe. You find this guy and he’s going to
write it down for you.” Have we got the bullae, the signet ring of this guy? Do we have that? By
the way, its Barakaya the son of Nariah the scribe, does it come from the exact same period?
In 1975 this was found. The guy who wore that ring, did he write Scripture? Did he copy down
Scripture from the mouth of Jeremiah? We’ve got the guy’s bullae. Is that pretty incredible?
You can’t make this stuff up! This is incredible, we’ve actually got that, the actual bullae of the
guy. It says here that this was his bullae, and he actually penned this here in Jeremiah 36.
There is also Jerahmeel, Seriah, Gemariah--these are also guys mentioned in the book of
Jeremiah and they have found artifacts with these guy’s names on them. Is that pretty
incredible? All I am trying to say is: the Bible historically reliable. Do we dig stuff up 2,000
years later that confirms what was going on?
So we’ve got Balaam, does anybody know about Balaam and his talking donkey? Do know that
this guy’s name has actually been found, Balaam the son of Beor. They’ve actually found
something in trans-Jordan with this guy’s name on it--not just in the Bible, outside of it.
On the Mesha Stone from the king of Moab, they found Omri. Omri is famous because
he is the father of King Ahab. Do you remember Ahab and Jezebel? This is Ahab’s father. He
is actually in a record in Assyria, because in Assyria they called Israel “the land of Omri.” So
this guy is confirmed in Assyrian documents in the annals of the Assyrians, Omri is listed there.
Sennacherib, the king of Assyria, is also mentioned in the Bible.
Resurrection witnesses are just some other things too, about historicity. Paul says there were
500 people who saw Jesus rise from the dead at one time.

M. Fulfilled Prophecy [60:06-62:32]

Now, fulfilled prophecy, I’m going to hit these quickly. Each one of these, to be honest, could
take an hour, two hours, three hours, starting with Tyre. Ezekiel predicted in the Bible that
Tyre, this massively strong city would be destroyed; that it would be flattened like a pancake
and thrown into the ocean. Guess what? Alexander the Great comes 200-300 years later and
guess what he does. He comes up to Tyre and says, “Hey, that city is going into the ocean.”
He throws the whole city into the ocean, and the long story with that is that Ezekiel predicted
the destruction of Tyre, and that is exactly what happened.
 Isaiah tells us about Cyrus, 200 years before Cyrus lives! Isaiah tells us about Cyrus.
Then you’ve got Cyrus the Persian coming and freeing the people. Cyrus is one of the greats if
ever you want to study someone great in the Old Testament. I call Alexander the Great,
“Alexander the Grape,” you know, having fun with him, but Cyrus, I say Mr. Cyrus to him. You
want to study a leader, a real leader, look at Cyrus--that guy has my greatest respect. His
troops respected him so much, that after he died at 75 leading his troops into battle, the Medo-
Persians carried his body a thousand miles to bury it with dignity and respect. Did he have the
respect of his troops? They carried his body a thousand miles to give it a decent burial. Cyrus
is a great warrior king. By the way, Isaiah also has intimations of Cyrus being an anointed one.
An “anointed one” in Hebrew is what?--Messiah. You get this flavor that Cyrus is the anointed
one, kind of a precursor of Jesus.
Then, of course, was Jesus predicted in the Old Testament? Yes, born in Bethlehem. If you
want to read anything about Jesus, read Isaiah 53 and when you’re done it absolutely blows
you away.
Here, in 1 Kings 13, it predicts King Josiah, 300 years before Josiah lived. Josiah is
predicted, and it tells what he would do. The Bible predicts what the guy would do and calls
him by name and tells what he would do 300 years before he lived. So does this book has
some pretty spectacular things in it? Yes.
N. Canonization [62:33-74:36]
Now let’s cruise on here to canonization. Do we have recorded for us in the Bible, everything
that God ever spoke? Well, do we have the book of Huldah? No. God spoke to Huldah, Huldah
addressed the people. She was a prophetess of God, yet we don’t have her book. So there are
some things that God said that he wanted for that day and age but not for forever? Do you say
things that you just want your parents to know but nobody else to know? So he talked, and he
didn’t record everything forever. Solomon, for example, wrote 3,000 proverbs. How many
proverbs do we have in our Bible from Solomon? About 375. That means we’ve only got about
a tenth of what Solomon wrote. You know Solomon wrote 1,000 songs, how many songs of
Solomon do we have? Yea, they put the one Song of Solomon in the Bible and said: “That’s
enough we don’t want any more of that!” So anyway, there are 3,000 proverbs, we’ve got
about 375. Did Solomon write a lot of proverbs that we don’t have? Yes.
Here’s a classic one from Jesus. At the end of John, John says, “You know, I wrote and told
you a lot of things about Jesus, but if I were to tell you everything I know about Jesus, the
books of the world couldn’t hold it!” In other words, there are many things that Jesus did, that
are not written in this book. John says that flat out: “There are many things that Jesus did that I
didn’t put in this book otherwise the book would have been too big!” So John comes out flatly
and tells us that there are a lot of things Jesus did that aren’t recorded.
Now, when things were recorded from God, did the people sanction those things and take
them as authoritative immediately? Or, did legend and tradition have to grow so that they grew
in their authority? Were they instantaneously authoritative? Let’s take Moses, for example, he
walks down from Mount Sinai; he’s got the Ten Commandments, right? He comes down to the
people. Are those Ten Commandments immediately accepted as authoritative from God? After
he busts the first ones he comes out with the second ones. But he comes down and those are
immediately accepted and as a matter of fact, the Ten Commandments are put in what place to
show that they are sanctioned as coming from God? Where were the ten commandments put?
They were put in the Ark of the Covenant. Have you guys seen Indiana Jones? What’s in the
Ark? You open it up and people’s faces meltdown. Anyway, the Ten Commandments were put
in the Ark, does that show these Ten Commandments were immediately accepted as God’s
word and they were sanctioned as such. In 1 Kings 8:9, Solomon says he took the Ark into the
temple, remember Solomon built the temple, he hauls the Ark into the temple and says, “Hey,
the Ark was supposed to have a pot of manna, Aaron’s budding rod, and the Ten
Commandments. I pulled the Ark in here and the Ark only has the Ten Commandments, now
that’s all that’s in there.” The other two things are gone. I always wondered how he found that
out! He must’ve had an x-ray or something.
Then in Nehemiah’s day, what do they do when they come back from the Babylonian exile?
They read the “Book of the law.” By the way, do the Jews to this day at many of their feasts
read the book of the law? Is it accepted as authoritative for that group? Do the people of God
accept the word of God? And so they say, “Okay, these are the books that are good, and that
are in there.” Are there still people hunting for the Ark? What happened to the Ark? I got that
question in the last class. I think the Ark when they went to the exile, remember they went to
Babylon. Remember Daniel, Shadrack, Meshach and Abednego, and Nebuchadnezzar, they
went to Babylon. Basically, Nebuchadnezzar flattened the temple of Solomon. They did what
with the gold? They melted it down and they took all of the bronze and brass and hauled it to
Babylon and it is just gone. Now, do some people think that the Jews hid the Ark in the Judean
desert? There was a guy back just a few years ago that was spending big dollars hunting in all
of the caves in the Judean wilderness trying to find this buried Ark under things. It’s kind of like
Indiana Jones, but there are actually people who do that. I think the Ark is gone, and that
brings up an important point too.
Preservation of God’s Word
The Ark is gone. Do we have the original copy of Isaiah? The original copy of Isaiah that Isaiah
wrote, do we have that? Could God have preserved that? Yes. Did God preserve it? No.
Jeremiah, Isaiah, Daniel, David’s psalms, do we have those? Do we have any of the
Pentateuch, Moses’ writings? No. Did God preserve his word perfectly or did he turn it over to
scribes? Now when scribes copy it, do they make mistakes? Why did God have his word lost,
and not preserve the perfect original? I’m going to make a suggestion--I’m just making this up,
but it seems to me that if God had preserved the Ten Commandments, what would the people
do to that? People would worship it. If you had the actual book of Moses, would people worship
the relic rather than the God of the book? So my guess is that God said, “Hey, I want you to
worship me! Not the relics. So let them go, and you worship me.” That’s why I think those texts
were lost. Now, by the way, did I just make that up? Yes. But does it make a little bit of sense?
If you’ve got a better one, come up and talk to me.
Here’s one, this is Revelation. Are there statements in the Bible that you should not add or
subtract to Scripture? At the end of the book of Revelation, it says, “Whoever adds to this book,
the curses of this book will be added to you. Whoever subtracts from this book, your name will
be subtracted from the tree of life.” Is that a bad thing? That’s a bad thing. By the way,
Deuteronomy 4:2 does the same thing. Moses says don’t add or subtract from this book, this
is from God, this is a canonical work, don’t mess with it.
Peter, Paul, and immediate authority
Now one of the ones that I love is Peter and Paul. You’ve got this statement from Peter. What
was the relationship of Peter to Paul? Did Paul rebuke Peter to his face? Peter and Paul in the
book of Galatians had it out. Peter was saying, “Hey, maybe the Gentiles have to be
circumcised, maybe they have to do all of this Jewish stuff.” Paul says, “No, you are wrong
Peter.” Now, by the way, is Peter the big disciple? Paul is the newcomer. Paul goes to Peter,
puts his finger in his face and says, “Peter, you’re wrong!” And he rebukes him to his face.
What does Peter say about that? In 2 Peter, does Peter get the last word? In 2 Peter, this is
what he says about Paul, “Bear in mind, that our Lord’s patience means salvation, just as our
dear brother Paul has also written you with the wisdom that God gave him.” Does Peter
acknowledge that God gave Paul wisdom and that Paul was writing to them? Yes. Peter
acknowledges that God gave Paul wisdom. Now, what was Peter by trade? A fisherman. What
was Paul by trade? A tentmaker, yes, but was he more of a scholarly person, studying under
Rabbi Gamaliel. So Peter is a fisherman. Here’s what Peter says concerning Paul, he says,
“He writes the same way in all of his letters.” Was Peter aware of all of Paul’s letters? Did
Paul’s letters take years and years before they became authoritative or were they immediately
authoritative? Did Peter recognize the authority of Paul’s letters immediately? He says, “Paul
wrote many letters, God spoke to him from wisdom, speaking in them of these matters,” and I
love this part, “…his letters contain some things that are hard to understand.” Is that the
fisherman speaking? If you’ve read the letters of Paul in the New Testament, Paul does write
some pretty advanced stuff. And Peter acknowledges this, he says, “Paul writes God’s
wisdom, and I’m not sure I understand all of this.” “Which the ignorant and unstable distort as
they do,” the what? They distort Paul’s letters “as they do the other Scripture.” This means he
is putting Paul’s letters on the same level as what? The scriptures, the holy writings! Did Peter
accept Paul’s writings immediately? Yes. And so those are important verses.
They were immediately authoritative and you can actually see this here with Daniel.
Daniel cites Jeremiah, they were contemporaries, they lived at the same time. Daniel says,
“Hey, Jeremiah said we’re going to be in Babylon for 70 years. It’s going to be 70 years.”
Daniel accepts Jeremiah immediately. So the people of God accepted the word of God
immediately.
Criterion for Canonization
Now the question that gets raised here is why were certain books accepted and others
rejected? In other words, they were accepted immediately but then what happened was, you’ve
got a process. If Paul writes to Ephesus, the people at Ephesus get that letter but the people
sitting over in Rome, they know nothing of that letter. Those letters had to be circulated, so you
get the problem of circulation. And then the question is: Okay, we’re sitting in Rome, can we
get the letter to the Ephesians? Did Paul really write that? Was that really the one? So the
early church actually struggled with that for probably 200-300 years. There was a process of
canonization, but what I’m suggesting to you is this, is there evidence in Scripture that things
were accepted immediately. But the problem seems to me more about circulation in the early
church. But with the Jews, you get the same kind of thing.
I want to cap it there, but let’s do some Bible-robics!

Reading: The Transmission of the Bible from God to us

The Transmission of the Bible from God to us
© 2012 Dr. Ted Hildebrandt
A. Quiz Preview [0:0-2:43]
What are we working on for next week? Genesis 26 to 50. You’ll finish the book of
Genesis next week. So that will take care of that and then there’s basically some other things.
There will be an article by a guy named Sailhammer on “Cosmic Maps.” So where will you get
the article? Did anybody listen to it at all? Ok, was it helpful or not? Alright, so you will be
reading Genesis 26 to 50 and the Sailhammer article. Also this week we are going to break
into Our Father Abraham and there are select pages there. We won’t read the whole book, but
there are select pages for Our Father Abraham. So you will work with Our Father Abraham and
then two memory verses. What haven’t we got finished? Bible-robics. We’ll finish the Genesis
Bible-robics today. So basically there’s Genesis reading, Our Father Abraham, the Sailhammer
article, memory verses, and Bible-robics. That should do it, for next week.
There will be ten questions, worth ten points each, and largely what’ll happen is if somebody
misses this, I think there was a soccer game or something like that, they get a week to make it
up, so I can’t turn them back until the following Thursday. What I try to do is turn them back on
Thursday night or Friday morning, so you’ll get them returned probably next Friday. So then
we’ll just do quiz, quiz, quiz every Thursday and about every five quizzes then we do an exam.
(Someone asks a question) No that’s for the exam; you have to get a score above a certain
point on the exam and also on the quizzes to be included in the honors option.
So that’s the assignment coming for next week. The other thing is, don’t forget to turn in your
ten bucks for the course materials, don’t leave that go or it will be double this next week, I think
it’s next Thursday or something so just get that in ASAP.
B. Bible: from God to us [2:44-3:58]
Today is one of the most difficult lectures that I do in this course. Why do I introduce this at the
freshmen level? I want to be honest with you guys and I want you to understand how the Bible
came from Moses, and how the Bible came from Isaiah and got down to us. So rather than
leaving these things unsaid, then what happens is you jump into a university context and the
university professor claims the Bible is full of errors and you have no clue what he’s talking
about. I want to give you these broad categories. The material I’m talking about today, frankly,
there are whole courses on canonization. There are whole courses, I’ve taught whole courses
on textual criticism and so I’m giving you in about 30 minutes what took a whole course. I try to
make things simple but I struggle with expressing these things to you. I really feel committed to
tell you about them just so you know ahead of time what’s going on. Today will actually be a
pretty factual day. Some of the lectures, when we get into Genesis a lot of it will be my opinion
and how I interpret texts in this context. What we’re talking about today is not really my opinion,
these are facts of manuscripts and we’ll try to work with that.
C. Canonization [3:59-5:53]
So, canonization--last time we talked about this and basically we said that in the case, for
example, with Peter and Paul, Peter said that Paul’s writings were on the same level as
Scripture. He said, “they distort Paul’s letters as they do the other Scriptures.” So the letters of
Paul were accepted by Peter automatically as authoritative and Paul accepts that Peter
accepts those letters as authoritative. Now, by the way, did it take quite a while for the church
to collect all of Paul’s letters? Paul wrote letters to the church at Colossae. That church kept
the letter and other people didn’t even know Paul had written that letter. In other words, did
Jesus have a New Testament? No. Did any of the apostles, ever see the whole New
Testament? No. They wrote their books and then it was put out and it would have to be
circulated. Do you realize that circulation—you say, “why didn’t they just email a copy of it to
everyone, that’s what they should have done.” It took a long time actually to spread and to go
from place to place.
So Peter accepts Paul’s books. Did Peter know of all Paul’s writings? There’s no way he did.
Ok, so Paul wrote various things, Peter knew of some of them but he undoubtedly didn’t know
of all of them.
So here’s another example with Daniel. Daniel lived at the same time Jeremiah did. Daniel was
with Nebuchadnezzar in Babylon, Daniel was in the Lion’s Den and all that. Daniel says, “Hey,
Jeremiah said that God told him, we’d be in Babylon for 70 years (Dan. 9:2, 24).” So Daniel
quotes Jeremiah, saying this is what God told Jeremiah and he accepts Jeremiah’s authority
immediately. Daniel accepts it immediately and says we’re going to be here for 70 years. Now
again, did the Jewish books also have to be collected and spread, and things like that? So that
makes time.
D. Criteria for Canonization: Does it claim to be from God? [5:54-7:30]
Now certain books are accepted and certain books are not accepted. How did you tell whether
a book got into the sacred collection and which ones got rejected? There are certain principles
for that and so this moves to criteria. The first main criteria that was used for the canonization
process—the canonization process means: what it takes to get a book accepted into the
canon, the sacred scriptures. The number one question and this is the big question, is: “Is the
book inspired by God?” In other words, “Does the book claim to speak for God?” So, for
example, does it say, “Thus saith the Lord”? Does the book of Isaiah claim to speak for God?
Yes. Does Moses say, “God told me and I wrote it down”? Moses says that. The books claim
that God spoke and the author wrote it down. Jeremiah, “Thus, saith the Lord/The Lord told me
this.” Ezekiel has got all these visions of bones, these are dry bones coming together. Ezekiel
sees the bones and he claims that God showed him this vision.
Now, by the way, think about this criteria. Are these criteria good enough to establish which
books are authoritative and which books are not? Were there some books that claim to speak
for God that probably were not included? Did some prophets say “thus saith the Lord,” and
were not true prophets of God? Yes. Were there a lot of false prophets? Yes. So does this
criterion by itself establish canonicity or do we need other things?
E. Canonization criteria: Was it written by a prophet of God? [7:31-8:28]
One of the other factors you can weigh is: was it written by a prophet? If it’s written by
somebody like Isaiah, do you say, “Isaiah’s a pretty good guy, a prophet of God, a pretty good
man.” Now suppose it was written by a prophet and I say I penned this one. I say, “I am a
prophet of Ahab and Jezebel and I wrote this book.” Would you accept it into your canon? No.
By the way, would it probably be very interesting reading? It would probably be very interesting
reading, but you would not accept it into the canon because it probably was from a guy who
was a Baal prophet. There were 400 Baal prophets. So, in other words, you’ve got to ask: what
about the character of the person who wrote this? Isaiah, Jeremiah, Moses, Samuel, David, in
the Psalms. So you ask, was it written by a prophet of God? Was it written by a man of God or
woman of God? So, was it written by a prophet? What do you know about the person? That is
a check and balance on this.
F. Canonization criteria: Does it agree with the previous revelation? [8:29-9:04]
Does it agree with previous revelation? If you get a book written and in the middle of the book it
says, “You know, Jehovah is ok, but Baal is better.” Is that going to be put in the canon or
thrown out? Thrown out. Why? Because it disagrees with previous revelation, because God
said, “You should worship the Lord your God and him only should you serve.” So if this book
comes in and says Baal’s the one, you’ve got to ask: does this contradict previous revelation?
This becomes a criterion, then, for whether a book is canonical and accepted as sacred
Scripture.

G. Canonization criteria: Does it come with the power of God? [9:05-9:59]

Here’s another one: Does it come with the power of God? Now this one is subjective. Do
certain books come with the power of God? When you read Scripture, does it change your life?
Yes. The books are powerful. Now when you read your math book, question: does that have
the power to change you? Most of you go, I read the math book. You say, first of all, reading a
math book is almost like an oxymoron. Anyway, you know what I’m saying? But it doesn’t get
into your soul. You read I was referencing just before I came here, Eli Wiesel’s book The Night.
Has anybody read that--Eli Wiesel’s book The Night? When you read that book, does that
penetrate your soul? Now I ask you, the books of Scripture do they move you? Is the power of
God there? And the answer is: yes, but that’s a subjective thing.
H. Canonization criteria: Was it accepted by the people of God? [10:00-10:50]
Here’s another criterion: is it received by the people of God? In other words, did the people of
God receive the word of God? In the Old Testament, who were the people of God? The
Jews. So the Jews in the Old Testament, the nation of Israel, the 12 tribes, did they receive
these books as the canon, as coming from the hand of God, or coming from the mouth of God?
Therefore, we as Christians, where do we get our Old Testament from? Do we get it from
Jesus and the apostles? No, the Old Testament canon comes to us from the people of God in
the Old Testament which is the Jewish nation. They give us the Old Testament canon. So the
Old Testament canon comes from the people of God in the Old Testament. Did they sort
through which books should be in and which books should not be in the canon? They sorted
through that stuff and they were the ones that were the experts on that.
I. Antilegomena: Books spoken against [Proverbs, Esther…] [10:51-11:52]
These books are called the Antilegomena. Now, what is “anti”? “Anti” means what?
Against. Anti is against. Lego (are there any of my Greek students in here?) lego means “to
speak.” So these are the books that are “spoken against.” The Antilegomena are the books
that are spoken against. There are five of these books. These five books were spoken against
by the Jewish people. The Jewish people had questions about these and so they were
“spoken against [Anti-legomena].” Now, what’s the problem with these five books? By the way,
do the Jews today accept these five books? Yes, they do. They accept them but they were
questioned at one time. Is that helpful to know that the Jews questioned these books? Were
the Jews careful about which books they accepted into the canon? It wasn’t just “Boom,”
automatically you’re in. They questioned the books and were careful.
J. Antilegomena: Why was Proverbs questioned? [11:53-19:42]
Who’s got a Bible here? Can we do Proverbs chapter 26? If you guys have your Bibles, we’ll
be using them quite a bit today--Proverbs chapter 26 verse 4. Then can I have somebody
that’s a little bit more ornery give me, why don’t you do Proverbs chapter 26 verse 5. Ok, she’s
going to do Proverbs chapter 26 verse 4 and he’s going to do Proverbs chapter 26 verse 5. So
let’s, first of all, let’s focus our attention on Proverbs 26:4. Proverbs 26:4 says, “Do not answer
a fool according to his folly, lest you be like him.” So you meet a fool, should you answer him?
No, it says “Do not answer a fool according to his folly” because if you try to answer you’re
going to be like him. By the way, have you ever seen anyone come up and they’re asking a
stupid question and I’m thinking, by the time you try to answer the question, you end up getting
trapped within their folly? So Proverbs chapter 26 verse 4 says, “Do not answer a fool
according to his folly, lest you be like him.”
Now, what’s Proverbs 26:5 say? “Answer a fool according to his folly, lest he be wise in
his own eyes.” So the question comes up, do those two verses contradict each other? By the
way, you can take this home and you can say to your parents, “Hey, my Bible professor
showed me a contradiction in the Bible.” Here we go, these two, they contradict. One says to
answer not a fool according to his folly and the very next verse says to answer a fool according
to his folly. The Bible’s got a contradiction in it, that’s what we learn at Gordon College. Is there
a contradiction there? Yes, but the word of the Lord is flawless. Now you know where he’s
getting this. If you ever want someplace that tells you about the word of God and says how
flawless it is and says it over and over and over, like a million, well actually 176 times. What
chapter in the Bible has 176 verses? Does anybody know that? It’s the longest chapter in the
Bible. Psalm 119 is all exactly what he said, “The word of the law is flawless” and it goes on,
over and over, 176 times. Psalm 119. Question: Is there a contradiction here? Let’s get out of
quoting Bible verses and look at these verses. These verses contradict each other.
[Student:” “I want to make a quick comment on the contraction. My Bible is in Portuguese and
English and the Portuguese version, it made sense.” Ok, so what’s the Portuguese version
say? (“Ok it says, “Don’t respond to the folly with foolishness just like his.…otherwise you will
equal yourself to him. Respond to him with the foolishness he deserves, or the contrary, he will
think that he’s wise.”)
[Hildebrandt’s response] Alright. Do you see what they did there? Did they try to explain the
verse? Now is that a translation or is that an explanation? It’s an explanation. That’s actually
not what the literal Hebrew says. The literal Hebrew, I’m sorry, says, “do not answer a fool.” So
in other words what I’m saying is, did the Portuguese people realize there was a conflict
here? What they did was they wrote an explanation so that it would, modify it and that kind of
thing. So that’s what they were doing. Now I will say this, so is there a contradiction there, yes.
Is this wisdom literature?
Wisdom literature says: Should you answer a fool or should you not answer a fool? Is there a
time to answer a fool and is there a time not to answer a fool? Have you guys ever been in
those situations? Sometimes is it appropriate to answer a fool according to his folly? Yes,
what’s worse than being a fool? Being wise in your own eyes. So if you see a fool and he’s
sliding down to arrogance, if you don’t answer he’s going to become wise in his own eyes. The
Bible says, “Hey, stop him from becoming worse than a fool, by being wise in his own eyes.”
However, if he’s a fool and he’s just asking dumb questions and you’re going to get caught in
the question, don’t answer a fool according to his folly. So in other words, Proverbs 26:4-5
clash like this, but what does it call from you as the reader? Do you have to be wise and
discerning to know when this applies? So, in other words, is that the very point of wisdom, to
see these conflicts and say, “Hey, I’ve got to be wise enough to know when to answer and
when not to.” That’s part of wisdom.
So the Jews accept the book of Proverbs and I actually think, that’s my area of expertise,
Proverbs is one of the most wonderful books in the world, but I love these little conundrums in
Proverbs. They just kind of annoy people and if they don’t know the Bible, you can really
harass people. “Look up this verse, Mom, read this verse and then that verse. Don’t they
contradict each other?” Then just watch them respond.
What I want you to do, is give up some of the stuff you got on your back. Read the text
of Scripture. No, don’t bring in Psalm 119. Psalm 119 is way over here. Read the verses
themselves. They do conflict. There’s no way you get around that. They do conflict. I mean
read the first part A of 4 and A of 5, they conflict. If you can’t see that, you need to see that. By
the way, did the Jews see that? Yes, they did. That’s why they spoke against these books;
because they saw the conflict. So you have to see the conflict. “Don’t answer a fool,” the next
verse says, “answer a fool.” Those two things are contrary.
Now you can try to resolve the conflict, but you need to see the conflict so that you can resolve
it. If you don’t see the conflict, then there’s nothing to resolve. What I’m saying is you need to
see the conflict. The Jews saw the conflict. Most everybody that reads it sees the conflict, you
need to see the conflict. You need to allow yourself to be jarred a little bit. So that you can work
on resolving it and come to a solution.
Yes, it depends on the fool. It depends on the situation and so I don’t think you want a
one-answer-fits-all with this. It’s trying to say, you’ve got to figure it out on the fly. What its
doing is calling for discernment within you. It says, “Here are two options you have, you need
to have the discernment to figure out when to use this or not.” Let’s go on to the next one.
K. Antilegomena: Why was Ezekiel questioned? [19:43-21:23]
Why did some Jews speak against the book of Ezekiel? Because Ezekiel talks in chapters 40
to 48 about this temple structure that is too big for the temple mount. Now, do you know what
the Temple Mount is? In Jerusalem, there’s this place with a gold dome on top and basically,
this is the temple mount. When Ezekiel describes the Temple Mount, he’s got it way too big.
There’s not enough room on the Temple Mount for what Ezekiel describes. So what the Jews
say is, it doesn’t work. When you go to start putting this miles long temple structure up there on
the Temple Mount, the Temple Mount’s not that big. It won’t hold it. So some of the Jews who
live in Israel, know Jerusalem, they know this is way too big. Does that make sense? So they
questioned it. The solution to this is to ask: Ezekiel is talking about which temple? It is the
future temple.
Is the geography of Palestine going to change? Is the Mount of Olives going to split open? Yes.
So there’s going to be a geographical change and so what he’s describing is in the future. The
future third temple, that’s to come and there’s going to be this massive earth movement. So
apparently the temple’s going to be bigger than it is now. But you have to look into the future. It
won’t fit there now. There’s going to have to be some geographical upheavals. By the way,
does the Bible say there will be geographical upheavals in the end times? Yes. So we’re good.
So they questioned Ezekiel because of the size of the temple. But we’re ok with that because
it’s during the apocalypse in the future.
L. Antilegomena: Why was Esther questioned? [21:24-22:26]
Now, why was the book of Esther questioned? You know they said, “Esther’s a woman, you
know we don’t like woman stuff, so we’re going to get rid of that book” [joke]. Now, why was
the book of Esther questioned? Do the Jews take real pride in God’s name--the name Yahweh
or Jehovah? It’s a big deal for them. The book of Esther never once uses the name of
Jehovah, never once. The Jews went through the book of Esther and they said, “You know,
that book never mentions the name of God.” By the way, when you read the book of Esther, is
God all through the book? Yes. God’s all over the book but his name is never referenced in the
book. So the Jew’s questioned the book of Esther. Did the Jews accept the book of Esther? Do
they even have a feast called Purim to memorialize Esther’s deliverance of the Jews from a
Persian genocide? Purim is a famous feast to this day, we’ll talk about that later. But anyway,
the book of Esther was questioned yet accepted even though it didn’t mention the name of
God.
M. Antilegomena: Why was Ecclesiastes questioned? [22:27- 26:51]
What’s the problem with Ecclesiastes? My mother’s actually given me a lecture about
Ecclesiastes. She says, “You don’t teach Ecclesiastes to those college kids do you?” And I
say, “No, mom, it’s ok, we never get there.” She says, “Oh, I just can’t understand that book. I
don’t know why that’s in the Bible.” And she goes off like that. Why do people have trouble,
with the book of Ecclesiastes? It’s a kill-joy. We’re Christians actually so we’ve got to be happy
all the time. When you read the book of Ecclesiastes, what is the major message? The major
message is vanity, vanity, and all this vanity. In the book of Ecclesiastes he says,
“Meaningless, meaningless, all is meaningless.” Question: do we as Christians like to say life is
meaningless? No, because we’re Christians and everything’s got to fit together. However, have
some of you felt at major points in your life, the meaninglessness of life? Yes. The book of
Ecclesiastes expresses that. That’s why I love the book. My mother hates it.
Now, how do people get out of the book of Ecclesiastes? Don’t do this. But this is how they do
it. They grab the last chapter. In chapter 12 it says, “Fear God, keep his commandments, this is
the whole duty of man.” Have any of you ever heard Ecclesiastes taught as vanity, vanity, all is
vanity but that’s messed up but in the end, he comes around to “fear God and keeps his
commands.” So you’ve got eleven chapters of bad stuff and then in chapter 12 he redeems
himself by saying “Fear God and keep his commands.” Have any of you heard Ecclesiastes
taught like that? Eleven chapters of meaninglessness and then chapter 12 pulls it together.
I want to ask you, is God going to put eleven chapters in his Bible of things that are all
wrong so we can hold onto the good? I want you to think about embracing the first eleven
chapters. Are there going to be times in your life when you need to know that one of the wisest
men that ever lived felt the meaninglessness of life? He felt that life was vapor. That’s when
you look around and notice there’s a lot of life like that. I want you to embrace that rather than
ignoring it because frankly, you’re going to feel that at various points in your life. No, life is not
one big happy time; I love Jesus, everything’s cool. Maybe for you guys at 18, but I’ve got a 22-
year-old at home that’s been through a war. He doesn’t do the happy-Jesus thing because he’s
seen his buddies blown to smithereens. So all I’m saying is be careful about your Christianity.
Ecclesiastes can broaden you in ways you need to understand with some of the bigger
questions of life that jar some people at the core of their being. If you go around “happy Jesus
all the time,” there are people who are going to blow you off as being shallow and trite. They
will blow Jesus off as well because they are going to say that Jesus doesn’t have anything to
say to the real. What I want to tell you is, “Can Jesus speak to the meaninglessness of life?”
Yes, he can. But you need to understand and embrace that and engage that in order to see
Jesus’ redemption engage there and what Jesus speaks to is the deepest part of human
beings. Go back to the Night. Remember Eli Wiesel’s Night.
So, anyway, Ecclesiastes is a wonderful book, don’t throw out the first eleven chapters.
Listen to the Byrds old song. There’s an old music group after the Civil War called the Byrds
and they sang, “There’s a time for everything, there’s a time to be born, there’s a time to die.
There’s a time to…” So then think about it, think about Hildebrandt back in the Civil War with
their muskets, singing the Byrd’s song. But the Byrds did a wonderful song on this called,
“Turn, Turn, Turn,”--“A time to born and a time to die” “there’s a time for peace, there’s a time
for…” What? And for Gordon College, you’ll like this. “There’s a time for peace” Peace, peace,
peace, do we do peace? Ecclesiastes says, “there’s a time for peace” and a time for what? “A
time for war.” “A time to be born, there’s a time to die.” It is very interestingly balanced out like
that. We only like one side of the balance sometimes. But Ecclesiastes is a wonderfully
balanced book.
N. Antilegomena: Why was Song of Songs questioned? [26:52-30:36]
The other one my mom’s given me a lecture on is Song of Solomon. It is called the “Song of
Songs.” “You don’t teach that to college kids, do you?” And the answer is: “No, mom, we never
get there.” So Song of Solomon is Christ’s love for his church, portrayed in physical terms of a
love relationship between a man and his wife. Do you believe that? A lot of the early church
people taught it that way. They maintained the Song of Songs was the love relationship of
Christ to the church. Is Song Songs a love song? Once upon a time, they hired me to do a
revision of the Jamieson, Fausset and Brown commentary. It is a famous old Bible
commentary. They hired me to basically go in the Song of Songs and update the commentary
from the 1800’s up into the 20th century. So I was going through it, I knew it was bad, but I
didn’t know it was that bad. What happens is, there’s a place called Ugarit. If this is Israel, up
above Israel, just north of Israel, they’ve got a place called Ugarit. They found a bunch of
tablets there from about 1200 BC in a language called Ugaritic that I’ve had the unfortunate
privilege to be forced to learn. In Ugaritic, there are all sorts of imagery and guess what that
imagery is very similar to? The imagery in Song of Songs. Do we know what he means when
he’s talking about all these lilies and all these plants, do we know what that means now? Yes,
we do. Is it really, how should I say, is Song of Songs a very sexual book? And the answer is:
yes. By the way, the good part is, a lot of it is based on imagery so you don’t know what it’s
talking about and that’s probably good. But what I’m saying is, yes. You respond, “Hildebrandt
you’re just making this up.” I’m not making this up, this is the truth and we know what those
images are and they are very, very, very explicit. By the way, who made sex? God did. So
what you see here is this beautiful romantic relationship. By the way, does your generation
have a problem with this? I call it the decade of decadence. You guys mature when? About 14,
15. People don’t get married until they are in their 20s, you’ve got ten years. That has created
a huge problem in our culture in terms of this whole sexuality thing? What Song of Songs says
is, “No, it’s beautiful. It’s one of the most beautiful things in all of life.”
The Bible describes it as just trees and flowers and so that’s cool. So by the way, did the Jews
have problems with the Song of Solomon? The Jews knew what it was talking about. These
guys are all wearing their black hats and curly cues. All I’m saying is, did they know what this
thing meant? They knew what it meant and they questioned whether it should be in the Bible.
Now did they include the Song of Songs in the Bible? Yes, they included it but there were
some questions about it, that’s all I’m saying.
So those five are what they call the “Antilegomena.” Now, this is the canon of the Old
Testament, these are the accepted books. Who gave us the canon of the Old Testament? The
people of God in the Old Testament. Now, who were the people of God in the Old Testament?
The Jews. So the Jews give us the canon of the Old Testament. Did the Jews themselves
question five of their own books? Yes, they didn’t just get in automatically. They questioned.
These are the Antilegomena. They questioned Proverbs, they questioned Ecclesiastes, they
questioned Esther, Song of Songs, and they questioned Ezekiel. So those are the
Antilegomena.
O. Apocrypha or Deutero-canonical books [30:37-35:18]
Now the Old Testament Apocrypha, what is the Old Testament Apocrypha? The Old
Testament Apocrypha are books that are accepted by the Catholic Church but not accepted by
Protestants generally. These will be books like Maccabees. Has anyone heard of the book of
Maccabees? Maccabees 1 and 2, Bel and the Dragon, the Wisdom of Ben Sirach, the Wisdom
of Solomon and others. By the way, are the Apocrypha books very important reading? Yes,
they are. The Old Testament was started when Moses starts writing. The big question of the
date of Moses, 1400 or 1200 BC there is a big debate on that. When does the Old Testament
end? I always say I call this guy Malachi, the last of the Italian prophets. Anyway, Malachi ends
it 400 BC. What happens between 400 BC and Jesus? What happens between 400 and 0?
Does the Old Testament tell us anything that happened after 400, when Malachi
prophesied? No. There’s nothing, zero.
The Apocrypha books come from that 400 year period, between the time of Malachi
and the time of Jesus. One of those books that is very interesting and actually when I do New
Testament, we end up reading the book of Maccabees. There’s this guy, Antiochus
Epiphanies, he’s kind of like a pseudo anti-Christ and he goes around killing Jews and doing
some really nasty stuff. The Maccabees boys rise up and they’re the hammers. They go out
and hammer these Syrians. So the Syrians are beating up on the Jews and the Jews go after
them. This is all recorded in the book of Maccabees [ca. 167 BC].
Now, the question: is that part of the word of God or not? It is really interesting history
and it is really important history. By the way, you all know this, the Maccabees fought against
the Syrian Antiochus Epiphanes and they overcame him. They cleansed the temple and they
had a Feast of Lights to celebrate the cleansing of the temple from this anti-Christ figure,
Antiochus. They called it the “Feast of Lights.” You guys all know it, it’s called happy what?
You’re Jewish. Happy what? Happy Hanukah! Where do you think Hanukah comes from?
Hanukah comes from the Maccabees. About 167 BC, the details aren’t important to us in Old
Testament times but what I’m saying is the book of Maccabees is important reading.
Fascinating reading but is it the word of God? These are two different questions? So it’s
important reading. Did the Jews accept the Apocrypha as the Word of God? Is the Apocrypha
a part of the Jewish sacred canon? The answer is: no. Where do we get our Old Testament
canon from? The Jewish people. The Jewish people don’t accept the Apocrypha and so we
don’t accept it either. So the Apocrypha is very interesting reading but it’s not on the level of
the word of God and largely as Protestants, we don’t accept that. There’s some conflicts with
other parts of Scripture and things like that but I do recommend reading it. It’s fascinating.
There is a tradition where those books were put with the Septuagint (ca. 150 BC) and into the
Latin Vulgate (AD 400). And so they did a lot with the Latin Vulgate. They were in there. Now a
lot of people think they were put alongside the canonical books, that they were important
reading but they were kept separate. But they said they were put in separate and all of the
sudden like that and they slid in. Some of the doctrines that the Roman Catholic Church holds
that the Protestants don’t are included in the Apocrypha. By the way, the first church council
that accepted the Apocrypha explicitly was the Council of Trent, 1545. I don’t know the exact
date but it was in the 15 or 16 hundreds AD. Is that a little late? 1500 AD, that’s a little late. So
what I’m saying is that was a reaction against Protestantism. The Jews do not accept it. They
read Ben Sirach. The Jews are experts on the Apocrypha because it tells about their history for
that 400 year period but they do not accept it as Scripture. There are big debates on this.
P. Pseudepigrapha [35:19-38:51]
Pseudepigrapha. “Pseudo” means what? If something is “pseudo”--it’s false. So the
Pseudepigrapha are the “false writings” accepted by no one. These are the writings that
everyone accepts are bogus. They are false. Does anyone remember when you read Genesis
in chapter 5 I think it was? It says, “Enoch walked with God and he was not for God took him.”
Do you know there’s a book called the Book of Enoch? Wouldn’t you like to read about Enoch?
The Book of Enoch. When you’re in the New Testament, the New Testament Pseudepigrapha,
you’ve got a book called the Gospel of Thomas. Wouldn’t it be really cool to read about
Thomas? Remember doubting Thomas? He’s got a gospel--The Gospel of Thomas. Now is
this close to the Word of God or do these things get weirder and weirder? Actually, does
anybody remember, this was about four years ago, critics of the Bible and Atheists pre-Easter
they have what I call “an Easter Surprise.” No, I’m serious, every Easter they come up with
something in an attempt to discredit Christianity. This time they did the Gospel of Judas. Does
anybody remember that? It came out right around Easter, the Gospel of Judas. So I got a copy
and thought I’m going to read this just because I have to argue against it. I was really
disappointed, to be honest with you. After you read the first paragraph, it is obvious that the
Gospel of Judas is a Gnostic text. As soon as I say Gnostic text you’re talking second or third
century AD. It’s way late. In other words, it’s written way after Jesus, it’s a Gnostic text. I was
really disappointed, it wasn’t even a challenge. You want to be able to get a little meat to fight
with. Even in the opening, it was clearly a Gnostic text. So I read the whole thing, but it was just
disappointing. It’s clearly a late Gnostic text. As soon as I say "Gnostic text", is that going to be
Scripture because that’s like a hundred years, two hundred years after the New Testament so
it just doesn’t fit time-wise? I hope they come up with a better one this year.
So that’s the Pseudepigrapha. By the way, have any of you guys ever read stories about
Jesus? Have you ever wondered what Jesus was like between when he was one and when he
was sixteen--no wait before he was thirty? Some of these Pseudepigrapha have stories of
young Jesus when he get’s out there and he fights with kids. He picks up dust and makes it
into a dove and he goes (like that ) and the dove flies away. So all this is really cool stuff. The
Pseudepigrapha will try to reconstruct the early life of Jesus based on the New Testament
Pseudepigrapha. Does anybody accept the Pseudepigrapha as being gospel? No. But, by the
way, will critics attempt to use it to discredit Jesus because they have wild and wacky stories.
They are pretty interesting though. So yes, that’s the kind of stuff they use. But again, for
believers this is the canon, this is the Apocrypha, this is in the ballpark. Nobody accepts the
Pseudepigrapha as sacred Scripture.
Q. Scribal Copying of the Bible: Transmission of the text over
3000 years[38:52-40:36]
Transmission--this is where the going gets tough. Pay attention, this stuff is tricky. Did
God use flawed processes to preserve his word? Did God use flawed people to preserve his
word? How do you get the Bible down from Moses, who say wrote from 1440 or 1200 BC
(there’s a big debate as to whether Moses was 1440 or 1200). How do you get it from 1200
BC down to the 21st century? How did the Bible come down to us? The scribes had to copy it
over and over and over again. But what’s the problem when a book gets copied by hand
without spell check over and over and over again? Do errors come in? Could you copy by
hand, or do you know anyone who could copy a thousand page book without making a
mistake? Now did God speak to the prophets? Yes, so we’ve got a direct God connection
there. Are the scribes regular human beings copying? When did the Dead Sea Scrolls come
up though? For 2000 years have people had the Dead Sea Scrolls? No. That’s something
that’s only happened since 1948. So anyone before that didn’t even know about them. We’ll
come back and hit the Dead Sea Scrolls later.
R. I Samuel 13:1 text variant/copyist error [40:37-46:48]
Let me show you a copyist problem in your scriptures. Let me show you in your Bibles. Who’s
got a King James version? Anybody got a King James Version? Can you look up 1 Samuel
13:1. Has anybody got an ASV or NASV? Can you look up 1 Samuel 13:1? Who’s got an
NIV? Then who has an ESV or NRSV? Remember I told you the ESV was kind of a knock-off
of the RSV. Ok, 1 Samuel 13:1. Now what I want you to do is, if you guys got your Bibles, I
want you to open them to 1 Samuel 13:1, and look and see what your Bible says. This is a
scribal error. Now, by the way, does this mean you can agree with me or disagree with me or is
this fact? This is fact. These are the manuscripts we have. They’re reflected in your Bibles;
listen to the various translations of the Bible.
By the way, the New King James version says basically the same thing as the Old King James.
The King James Version for 1 Samuel 13:1 says, “Saul reigned one year and then he reigned
two years over Israel.” I want you to think about that. Does that verse really make much sense?
Normally, if the guy reigned two years you would say, “He reigned two years.” Does that cover
that he reigned one year? It assumes that he reigned one year. So the King James Version
says, “Saul reigned one year and then he reigned two years over Israel.” Does that strike you
as a little bit odd? I want you to think about it.
The NASV, shall I do the NASV out of my head? This is the NASV from 1977. It says what?
She’s got the new one that they fixed. It’s more current. I’m going back to the original NASV
and the ASV of 1901 and the NASV of 1977. In the original one, it says, “Saul was 40 years
old when he began to reign and he reigned 32 years over Israel.” That’s what the original
NASV Bible said not the new one, they’ve corrected it. But the 1977 one says, “Saul was 40
years old when he began to reign and he reigned 32 years over Israel.” How old was Saul
when he died? 72.
Now many of you have the NIV. Look at the NIV. It says, “Saul was 30 years old when he
began to reign and he reigned 42 years over Israel.” How old was Saul when he died? 72. Is
that different? One says that he was 40 years old and he reigned for 32 years and the same
verse translated in the NIV says he was 30 years old and reigned for 42 years.
Now the ESV (and RSV) says, “Saul was…years old when he began to reign and he
reigned…and 2 years over Israel.” Now honestly which one’s giving us exactly what the text
says? What did the Hebrew text say? Are the ESV and RSV right? The number is gone. By
the way, did many of your translations in the footnotes tell you that the number is gone? Yes. Is
that why you use the footnotes from your Bible? Are they important? So basically they put in
the footnote: the numbers are gone. Now a question: does it matter to you? Well, you say, I
don’t believe it’s gone. Does it matter what you believe? To be honest, it doesn’t matter what
you believe, it’s gone. That’s the honest truth. It’s gone. It doesn’t matter whether you, your
mother, your father, your pastor, your missionary… doesn’t matter what they believe. The
number’s gone. The RSV tells it like that. Where did the NIV get the 30 and the 42? Actually,
they went over to the book of Acts and Acts 13:21 gives some indication and they read the
number back from Acts. They made up a number and put it in there. Yes, so the Hebrew text
does not have 40. If you go over to Acts chapter 13, it has some of the numbers that help us.
The Septuagint would also fill in the numbers. So what happened there? This is a scribal error.
S. Mark 16 textual problem [46:59-49:50]
By the way, do your modern Bibles tell you when there’s a scribal problem? Are they honest
with you, telling you there’s a scribal problem? Turn in your Bibles to Mark 16, see how your
Bible handles Mark 16. Mark 16 is a major scribal problem: it is very difficult to solve. Look at
Mark chapter 16, the last chapter of the book of Mark. What does your Bible say after verse
8? What does your NIV do in Mark 16:8-9? Between those, what’s it got? “They went out and
said nothing to anyone because they were afraid.” What comes right after that in the NIV?
There’s a line. Then what does it say? Does it say anything on the line or does it just give you a
line? (person talks) Yes, so “Mark 16:9-20, some of the best manuscripts we have do not have
those verses” and they indicate that with the line. By the way, are they being honest with you?
They’re just telling you, “Hey, be careful with this.” Do they put it in there? They put it in there
but they give you that warning. Some people say there are changes in diction and therefore it
was added later. So there’s a big debate on this. By the way, was it fair for the Bible to put it in
but put that line there and explain some of this? Yes.
 Does the King James version put in a line? Did the King James Version, when it says, “early
witnesses,” have any of the early witnesses we have today? The answer is: “No.” The King
James Version was done in 1611. In 1611 AD, did they have all or any of these manuscripts?
No, they didn’t have them. Does that mean the King James Version is totally flawed forever?
Did they do the best they could at 1611? Do we know more now than they did in 1611? Do we
have thousands of more manuscripts than they had in 1611? Yes. By the way, do we know
about manuscripts all over the world now? They were in England doing this in 1611, they
couldn’t email somebody in Budapest and say, “Hey, give me your manuscript.” They were in
England, it was 1611, and they were stuck. Don’t fault the King James translation for that.
T. 1 John 5:7 textual problem: Compare KJV and NIV/NRSV [49:51-52:18]
Another place that King James has a real problem is 1 John 5:7 and that verse was added
later. All of your modern translations will drop this verse. By the way, have you got 1 John 5:7?
Ok, let me just tell you about the early church. The early church in the first couple to three
hundred years of the church, did they argue over the doctrine of the Trinity? Did it take them a
while to establish that doctrine? So they argued back and forth about it. When the church
fathers argued back and forth, did they quote Scripture back and forth to prove their points?
Yes, they did. We’ve got records of the argumentation. Did they argue using Scripture? It’s
what you’d expect Church fathers to do, back in 200, 300, 400 AD, that kind of age. Here’s
what the King James Version says, in 1 John 5:7. I want you to think about the doctrine of the
Trinity here. “So there are three that bear witness in heaven: the Father, the Word,” who’s the
word?—Jesus, the logos, “and the Holy Spirit. These three are one.” That verse teaches very,
very clearly what doctrine? “The Father, the Word, and the Holy Spirit. These three are one.” Is
that the clearest presentation of the Trinity you can find anywhere in the Bible? There is no
verse that’s even close to that. Did you know that that verse was never once quoted by the
early Church fathers? When they were debating the Trinity, they never quoted that verse. Does
that tell you anything? That verse wasn’t there. As a matter of fact, the first time that verse
pops up is basically in the 16th century AD. Is that a little late? Actually, most people believe,
there’s a guy named, I call him Erasmus the Rascal. Erasmus the Rascal wrote that into the
Bible, some people think, on a wager. Somebody bet him he couldn’t so he translated it from
Latin, back into Greek. And then what happened? The King James version used the Erasmus
Greek text but Erasmus had written this verse in and so they put it in their KJV translations. So
there’s no note in there, it just says that verse. You’ll notice all modern translations drop it
because it is not found before the 16th century. Do you understand early manuscripts? Do we
have it in the papyrus manuscripts? No.
U. General discussion of the accuracy of the text of Scripture [52:19-57:00]
I need to say this at this point. I worry about going over this stuff. Even last class one of the
students said this is like, all of the sudden you say, “Holy cow, there’s all these errors, the
whole Bible’s going up in flames. Who knows? Adam and Eve, maybe they didn’t live. I mean
maybe, you know, Cain and Able maybe that was a scribal error. The whole thing goes up.”
Now, do you understand the Bible? Let me just use the New Testament for example.
We have 5,000 manuscripts of the New Testament. Ok, can we compare those 5,000? Do we
have means and mechanisms? There’s a guy down at Princeton, that’s all he’s done for his life
for 67 years is study these manuscripts and their variances. Bruce Metzger is his name. This
guy’s incredible. He studied these manuscripts all over the world and put them together. 5,000
manuscripts. We know about them, they’re codified and all this kind of stuff. Tell me, have you
ever heard of a guy named Plato? I forget this last name. Plato also wrote back then, how
many manuscripts do we have of Plato? We’ve got 5,000 of the New Testament, how many
manuscripts have you got of Plato? You probably have what, 7-13 manuscripts of Plato. Oh,
you say what about Aristotle? Has anybody ever seen the Aristotelian text? Ok, it’s about this
thick? Aristotle, he’s got logic, rhetoric, ethics, that kind of stuff. You know it’s really important
philosophy, Nicomachean Ethics. Just worked through that a little bit ago myself. It’s a
wonderful text, Aristotle was quite a guy. You know how many manuscripts we have of
Aristotle? 120 or less. How many do we have in the New Testament? 5,000. How many do we
have of Aristotle? 120 or less. Do you see the comparison? Is the New Testament, better
established than any book on the face of this planet? There is no close second. Do you realize
not only do we have early manuscripts that the King James Version translators in 1611 didn’t
have. We’ve now got papyrus. We’ve got a papyrus called P52, papyrus 52. It has part of the
book of John on it and guess when this papyrus dates from? First of all, when did the apostle
John die? Did he live in the 90s AD? We’ve got a piece of the book of John from within 30
years of when John lived. Within 30 years of when the man lived. We’ve got a piece of papyri.
That’s pretty incredible. Tell me what other book has that kind of documentation from back two
or three thousand years ago. No, it’s unique.
There’s a guy named Dan Wallace, I taught with him when I was at Grace College. Wallace is
a Greek geek. You know you have geeks of technology. He’s a geek of Greek. He’s got all
bushy black, dark hair he’s growing this beard now. He’s got this big old beard, bushy beard,
and he looks like he’s really Greek. And he’s even got Greek black robes and he’s got this
beard now. You know what he’s doing? Dan Wallace has found that there’s a manuscript over
in Istanbul, where Constantinople was. He’s going like he’s Greek. Is he going over there so
he can find this manuscript? He knows it’s there. Does the rest of the world know about this
manuscript? No, nobody’s seen this manuscript. He’s going over there trying to pry it out of
their hands. So he’s getting all Greeked up and he’s going over there, all Greek to fit into this
monastery. He’s going after that manuscript. That’s the truth. You’d have to know this guy. I
hope he doesn’t pack any heat on him. I swear he’ll get pictures of it or something but he’s
going after it. I mean he has thought about this a long time and he’s worked at it and I think
he’s been over there and talked to them. He’s trying to develop friendships with them. By the
way, why does he have to do that? Because the manuscript Sinaiticus was found at what
place? Sinaiticus was found at Mount Sinai, at St. Catherine’s Monastery. Do you realize what
the guy did in the 1800s? He went out and stole the manuscripts from the monks. Are the
monks still mad about that to this day? You guys laugh, I’m serious. I’ve been in St. Catherine’s
monastery. They remember that forever that the manuscript was stolen. Now, by the way, on
my part, am I glad that they stole it? Yes, actually because it was sitting in this monastery, do
you realize what they were doing with some of these manuscripts? The monks were burning
the pages of the manuscripts to stay warm. Is that a problem? Do you realize that these
manuscripts are like some of the best in the world? They were burning the manuscripts to stay
warm! I’m glad the guy stole them. Ok, I’m sorry.
V. Why did God preserve his word imperfectly?—a suggestion [57:01-59:23]
We’ve got all these manuscripts, how do you correct for all the differences in the manuscripts?
Now, by the way, can you guys do that? You don’t read Greek and Hebrew so you can’t do
that. Does somebody else who’s an expert like a Bruce Metzger do that evaluating of
manuscripts? Now what happens is they edit together a Greek text or Hebrew text and then
that’s published and then guys like me read it. In the footnotes, they tell you the various
readings? Yes, they do, it’s very handy. In the footnotes, you can see all the different
manuscript readings.
Now how do we correct for all this stuff and why didn’t God preserve it perfectly? The
answer is we don’t know why God does what he does. I’m going to make up something here.
So for this, I’m going to walk over here because this is me making this up. Several other people
have suggested this, a lot of people hold this. Why didn’t God preserve his Word perfectly?
Could he have preserved it perfectly? Is there any manuscript that’s perfect? We don’t know
because all we’ve got are manuscripts that come from a hundred years after and we’ve got to
compare manuscript to manuscript, we wouldn’t even know if we had it.
Do the manuscripts have errors? Yes, they do. Do you realize some of the scribes in the
margins things like he says, “it is so cold in here that my ink is freezing up on me.” I have a
question: do you write well when you are freezing like that? No. So these scribes had really
hard conditions. I don’t fault the scribes. They did the best they could. They didn’t have spell
check and Word and that kind of support. Why didn’t God preserve it? The suggestion is: if
God had preserved his perfect Word like the ten commandments and left it in a box, what
would people do to the box? They’d end up worshiping the relic. Do human beings make relics
out of that kind of stuff? They would worship the relic rather than the God who gives the ten
commandments. So I think that he purposely had his Word lost. I want you worshiping me
instead of some text. So, therefore, the text is lost and we’ve got no relic, we’ve got thousands
of manuscripts.
W. Evaluating Scribal Errors [59:24-60:38]
Let’s talk about scribal errors. Do we know the types of errors scribes make? Yes, we do.
Here’s one: Genesis chapter 10 verse 4. What’s the difference between the letter ‫ ד‬and the
letter ‫ ?ר‬First of all, can you see that there’s a difference? What’s the difference? Does
anybody see the little bump on the end of that one? That’s a tittle. Does anybody remember a
jot and tittle? That’s a tittle. This is a D (‫)ד‬. This is an R (‫)ר‬. Do you think the scribes ever
confused D (‫ )ד‬and R (‫ ?)ר‬Do you see how close those are? Let me give you an example. This
guy’s name is Dodanin if you’ve got them all memorized from Genesis 10. This guy’s name is
Dodanin. But if you look at some of your Bibles, it won’t say “Dodanin,” it will say “Rodanin.” Do
you see that the R and D have been confused? So was his name Dodo or was his name
Rodo? The problem is the letter looks so similar that they confuse letters like that on occasion.
So the D and the R get confused. Now we know that’s a problem so can we correct for that?
Yes, we can. Comparing manuscripts you would expect that.
X. Orality and Manuscript transmission [60:39-62:53]
Here’s another one. Let me just do this to you in English. Sometimes they spoke
manuscripts. What’s the advantage of doing an oral manuscript? I would be up here reading,
“In the beginning was the Word” or “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth”
copy this down. What’s the advantage? From one manuscript in this class, I could produce how
many? 100. Do you see the advantage of doing it orally? But what’s the problem with its being
oral? Here’s the problem orally: write down the word for me the word “there/their/they’re”.
What’s the problem? You got “there”, “their”, and “they’re” all sounding the same.
Now, let me just do Psalm 100 as an example of that. In the King James version of
Psalm 100, it will say, “make a joyful noise to the Lord! Come into his presence with singing.
Know ye, that the Lord, he is God. It is he who hath made us and (lo’ anaknu) not we
ourselves.” Does anybody remember hearing this? That’s the King James Version. If you look
in your NIV and most modern translations, you’ll see it’s like this, “make a joyful noise to the
Lord! Come into his presence with singing. Know ye, that the Lord, He is God. It is he who hath
made us and we (l’o anaknu) are his.” That is very different from “not we ourselves”--and “we
are his.” You know how those are pronounced? “and not we ourselves”: lo’ anaknu. You know
how “and we are his” is pronounced? L’o anaknu. What’s the sound difference between, l’o
anaknu and lo’ anaknu? Tell me which one’s which. You can’t. It’s pronounced the same
way. It’s l’o anaknu. But it can be taken as “not we ourselves,” that’s the way the King James
Version translates it, “and we are his” is the way most modern translations because we
understand more about the poetry now.
Y. Metathesis [62:54-63:28]
Metathesis—have you ever typed this: “thier”? Are your fingers used to doing “ie”? What’s the
benefit of MS Word? MS Word flips them. Have you ever had that happen? It flips them, so
that’s beneficial. So I recommend Microsoft Word. This is called “Metathesis,” when you switch
the order of the letters. When you switch letters, that’s called metathesis. If you ever read that
in a manuscript, you’d know what that should be. It doesn’t fake anybody out.
 Z. Fission and Fusion [63:29-64:02]
So here’s one. In the early Greek manuscripts, they were all written in capital letters with no
spaces between the words. Do you like having spaces between the words? Tell me what this
says. You guys read English. (people trying to read CHRISTISNOWHERE). Yes, you guys are
a bunch of pagans. This is beautiful, this is liturgical, “Christ is now here.” [Students
read: Christ is no where]. Do you see what the problem is when you don’t have spaces
between words?
AA. Homeoteleuton: same endings [64:03-65:08]
Here’s another one. This is called “homeoteleuton.” I just like it because it’s kind of a cool word.
“Homo” means what? Same. “Homeoteleuton” means “same-ending.” You guys all know this:
same ending problem. Have you ever read across the page and you come across a word here
and it’s repeated down about three lines here and your eye skips down the page because you
come across and then jump down? Let me take you to Jesus doing the parable of the Good
Samaritan. The guy was beaten up. There was a priest and he comes up to him and “he
passes by on the other side.” And then there’s a Levite, he comes up to this poor guy who’s
beaten up and “he passes by on the other side.” What’s the problem?—“Pass by on the other
side,” and “pass by on the other side” is repeated. In certain manuscripts, what would the
scribe do? Did his eye jump down the page? He skipped one of the guys because his eye
jumped down the page. Now have you ever read like that and you jump down the page? That’s
called “homeoteleuton,” same ending, you jump down the page skipping some of the material.
AB. Dittography and Haplography [65:09-65:45]
Now here’s another way to make an error, “Dittography.” “Dittography” means, have you ever
typed something and you type it twice when it should have only been written once? Then you
realize you did the same thing twice. Then I get really mad at myself, “Oh, I can’t believe I just
typed that.” So then you erase it. That’s “Dittography.” It means it was written twice but it
should’ve been written once. Haplography means it should’ve been written twice but they only
wrote it once. So dittography and haplography are the opposites. Dittography means it was
written twice but it should’ve been written once. Haplography means it was written once and it
should’ve been written twice. You know you have made these kinds of errors.
AC. Harmonizing Corruptions [65:46-67:18]
Here’s another one: harmonizing corruptions. This comes from the book of Job chapter 3. In
Job chapter 3 it goes like this. What’s happening to Job? Job gets the tar beat out of him. So
Job’s getting the tar beat out of him and his wife comes up in chapter 3, her kids are dead,
everything’s been blown up. She comes to her suffering husband. Now I’m going to quote you
literally the Hebrew, tell me what’s wrong. In the Hebrew, it says literally: “Job’s wife comes up
and says, {Job’s got all these boils] ‘Job, bless God and die.’” This is quoted directly from the
Hebrew, “baruk,” it means “bless”--“Bless God and die.” Now when you read that coming from
Job’s wife, is it really clear what she really said. Did she say, “Bless God and die”? Yes, she
was a very pious woman. No. when she comes to Job and all this tragedy and she’s says
what? “Curse God and die.” What was one of the problems? Did the scribes not want to write
“cruse God”? Scribes did not like to write that. They put “bless God” there instead. Now, by the
way, anybody reading that text, do you know that it should be “curse God and die”? Let me say
that again: anybody reading that text, do you know that it should be “curse God and die”?
Anybody reading that knows that. So what happens is the readers flip that. The scribes didn’t
like to write that, so they put “bless God and die” instead. So that’s called “harmonizing
corruptions.” They didn’t like writing “curse God and die” so they harmonized it into something
they were more comfortable with.
 AD. Conflation [67:19-68:15]
Now here’s conflation. Conflation is an interesting one. Some manuscripts, this comes from the
book of Revelation I believe or Acts. It says, So you’ve got fifty manuscripts that say “Church of
God”, “Church of God”, “Church of God”, and “Church of God”. Then you’ve got fifty other
manuscripts that say, “Church of the Lord”, and “Church of the Lord”. Now you’re a later scribe,
you’ve got fifty manuscripts that say “Church of God”, and you’ve got fifty manuscripts that say
“Church of the Lord”, which one are you going to copy? Yes, so what did you do? By the way,
let me ask, what would you do? If you have one manuscript that says “Church of the Lord”, and
one that says “Church of God”, what would you do? They combine it and they say, “Church of
the Lord God”. So later manuscripts have this “Church of the Lord God.” Now the point with
conflation is, the text has a tendency to grow, because of this conflation tendency. So with
conflation, the text has a tendency to grow because of this conflation problem.
AE. Principles of weighing the manuscript evidence
Older & Shorter are preferred [68:16-68:56]
Now, here are some principles for deciding which manuscript readings are to be accepted into
the Bible. Older manuscripts: if you have a manuscript dated from the 16th century and you
have one dated from the 3rd century, which one do you put more weight on? 3rd century. Why?
Because it’s earlier. The older the manuscript, the more status it has--the older the manuscript,
the better.
The shorter reading is preferred. Why do they prefer the shorter reading? You’ve got
two sets of manuscripts going, why do they prefer the shorter one? Did the text have a
tendency to grow over time? So the shorter one is probably the older and better one. So the
shorter reading is to be preferred. “Church of the Lord” or “Church of God” but not “Church of
the Lord God.”
AF. Geographically spread out [68:57-69:51]
Now, let me just do this. Suppose we have one hundred manuscripts from Wenham in
Massachusetts. We’ve got, on the other hand, a set of five manuscripts that disagree with the
Wenham manuscript. One of those manuscripts is from Washington, DC, one is from
Philadelphia, we don’t do New York City in Boston here, Boston is the other one, and L.A. is
the other one, and Miami is the other one. Only got five, but we’ve got the same reading from
Washington, Philadelphia, Boston, LA, and Miami and you have got a different reading from
one hundred manuscripts from Wenham. Which reading would you accept? The five or one
hundred. The five, why? Because they’re spread all over the place. Would the ones in
Wenham all be copied from each other? Would they all have the same mistakes? But the
greater the geographical spread, the more valuable the reading.
AG. Manuscript families [69:52-70:31]
Now let’s discuss the numbers and type of the manuscripts. What’s a manuscript family? A
manuscript family is when you have a parent, the parent is copied, that’s called “the child.” So
you have the parent, the child, the child gets copied and do you see that they all go back to the
same parent? So one gets copied let’s say five times. They all go back to the same parent. Are
certain families better set of manuscripts and other families worse set of manuscripts? So what
happens is you can evaluate these families of manuscripts. You have the Western family, the
Alexandrian family, and then you can weigh the manuscripts and you can try to pick the best
family of manuscripts.
AH. New Testament and Old Testament Scribes [70:32-72:07]
Let me hit one more thing here, as far as the New Testament. I want to contrast for you the
New Testament and the Old Testament. Were the New Testament scribes that copied the New
Testament, were they good scribes? The early Christians, were they educated or uneducated?
The early Christians were uneducated. Were the early Christians: rich or poor? Poor, mostly.
Were the early Christians sitting in their house, air-conditioned house, or fleeing from
persecution? Fleeing persecution. When you’re fleeing persecution, poor and uneducated, do
you make a good scribe? No. Are the early Christian manuscripts difficult because they weren’t
professional scribes? Did the early Christians do the professional scribe training? Not much,
later on, they did.
Now tell me about the Jewish people. Were the Jewish people good scribes or bad
scribes? Good. Professional--give their whole life to copying Scripture? Our best Hebrew
manuscripts come from about 1000 AD – 800 AD, they’re called Masoretic Texts. These
Masoretic Texts they copied sometimes they would say, this page has to have 25 “a”’s. And
they would count up on the page 25 “a’”s. If one of the “a”’s was missing, they would destroy
your manuscript? Question: were those people very careful? The Jewish manuscripts were
very accurate. However, what’s the problem? Our best Jewish Masoretic manuscripts are from
800-1000 AD. What’s the problem? Is 1000 AD late when Moses was 1400 BC? Yes.
AI. Dead Sea Scrolls [72:08-73:38]
Then, all of a sudden, in 1948, some Arab kid was out for a walk along the Dead Sea, he threw
a stone into a cave. He heard a clink instead of a clunk and he said, something’s in there. He
went in and found a big old canister. He opens the canister and inside there’s all this paper. He
says, “Whoa, what’s this? You can burn fires with this all night.” He pulls it out, turns out I think
they sold the first one at 50 bucks. How much is it worth now? Millions. Actually, do you know
what they did with the Dead Sea Scrolls? Some of the guys, when they took it up to
Bethlehem, they wanted to make more money so you know what they did? They tore it up so
they could sell 10 pieces instead of one. You say they didn’t do that. Yes, they did. But
anyway, we got these Dead Sea Scrolls in 1948. What’s the benefit? Why do you say so much
with respect the name of Marty Abegg, a good friend of mine who worked on the Dead Sea
Scrolls and blew it open? I think it was cave 13 or cave 11, he blew it open with a Mac
computer actually. Why do I have so much respect for Marty? The Dead Sea Scrolls are our
best Hebrew manuscripts. The Dead Sea Scrolls, in 1948 jumped us back 1000 years to
before the time of Christ. That’s 1000 year jump. Can we now check how good those late
Masoretic texts manuscripts are? Yes, we’ve got 1000 year jump now. Guess what they found?
Are the Hebrew texts accurate? The Hebrew texts are accurate. The Dead Sea Scrolls confirm
this generally.
AJ. Gabi Barkai and Numbers 6 [73:39- 76:19]
Now, by the way, let me just tell you a story about a guy named Gabi Barkai, I studied
under him in the 1970s, after the Civil War. Gabi Barkai has studied tombs in Jerusalem all his
life and I’m talking all his life, some 40 or 50 years. Gabi can walk into a tomb in Jerusalem and
as he knows every tomb in Jerusalem. He’s a really bright guy. He walks up to the wall, put his
hand on the wall and he’ll say, that chisel mark was made in 300 BC. This guy is good. He’s
the best in the world. He has spent his whole life doing that.
Now, what’s the problem with tombs? Usually, they bury the people with all their riches.
Usually, what happens to a tomb? The grave robbers get there and rip all the stuff off so you’re
left a few pieces of barley and fragments. Can you do some carbon-14 dating on it? But you’re
often left with nothing or mere scraps. Lo and behold, this is in the 1980s, they’re digging to
make a new hotel and they got the steam shovel out, they’re digging up and all of the sudden
they hit something. They said, “Holy cow, this a tomb.” You’ve got a tomb in Jerusalem, who
are you going to call? Gabi Barkay. “Gabi, get over here, we hit a tomb.” What happened was,
there was an earthquake and the earthquake collapsed the roof of the tomb onto the tomb.
Question: is that good? Yes, all the stuff is still in situ. They opened this tomb and this tomb
dates from 700 BC. This is from the time of Hezekiah, king of Judah. The tomb roof was
collapsed, there’s a woman in there, you can tell from the bones. She has got around her neck,
a little amulet made out of silver. It took them 3 years to roll this silver amulet from 700 BC. It
said something like this, and this is a good way to end the class, “The Lord bless you and keep
you. The Lord be gracious unto you and make his face shine upon you and give you shalom.”
Have you ever hear that? Did your pastor ever say, “The Lord bless you and keep you and
make his face shine upon you”? This is the priestly blessing from Numbers chapter 6:24ff. Gabi
Barkai found the earliest piece of Scripture ever found--700 BC. Does it say the same thing
that your Bible says? The same thing. So we can have confidence in Scripture.

Reading: Transcript Reading: Translations and OT text, Genesis 1

Dr. Ted Hildebrandt, OT History, Lit., and Theology
© 2012, Dr. Ted Hildebrandt
This is Dr. Ted Hildebrandt teaching Old Testament History, Literature and Theology lecture
number 4 on translation and the opening part of Genesis chapter 1.
The last time we were talking in the course, and let me just summarize the whole
course. We started out initially trying to show that there are reasons why people believe in the
existence of God. So we went through various proofs for the existence of God. Not that they
prove things 100%, but that there are reasons to believe in the existence of God. Now, once
we have God, then God has spoken. The process of God speaking is the process called, what
word is used for when God speaks? Inspiration. God inspires the prophets. So God speaks to
the prophets and we call it inspiration.
Now after God has inspired the prophets and spoken to the prophets who wrote it
down. Then what happens with the people of God? The people of God collect the books. Now
the collection of books takes over a thousand years. Moses wrote it 1400 BC, Malachi is
writing in 400 BC. There’s a thousand year gap there, so the Jewish people are collecting the
word of God over a long period of time. They collect it and put it in various sacred places. Do
other people come in and try to destroy the word of God? Babylonians come in; they torch
everything, that kind of destruction. So the Jews are working with that, the books get collected.
That process of collecting and sanctioning authoritative books is called canonization. So you
have the process of canonization which is the collecting of the authoritative books.
After the books get collected what do they need to do? What needs to happen next?
They’ve got to be copied over and over again. That’s called the process of
transmission. Transmission is getting the books copied from one generation to the next. In
the process of copying do scribes make mistakes? When you were scribes on the Vannoy,
Putnam, or Mathewson materials did you make mistakes? Yes, that’s why you have an editor.
So, yes, scribes make mistakes. Do they make mistakes because they are evil? No, they make
mistakes because they are human. They tried to do the best they could.

C. Process of Translation [7:52-9:38]

Now after the scribes have copied the word of God for 2000 years it has to be
translated from what languages? It has to be translated from Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek
into English so that we can read it. That process is called the process of translation. I want to
look at the process of translation today. Can something get lost in translation? Sorry if we are
using a movie title, but can something get lost in translation? Let me just illustrate: a guy says
something to a girl, a girl says something to a guy, question, lost in translation? So you all
know what I’m talking about. Now you put that in Hebrew. So what we’ve got is something like
this and we’re going to look at this. We’re going to focus on translation today—the going
between different languages. Do different versions and per-versions translate things
differently? Do they have different theories of how they do translation? So what I would like to
do today is to go over different theories of translation. I want to show you some different
translations and then I want to jump into actually doing the book of Genesis chapter 1 today, or
at least get started on that.
So here's where we were last time. Here are the processes of inspiration, canonization,
transmission, and translation. This is the process basically of going from God to us. I think we
talked about that last time. Now what I want to do this time is to work a bit on translation.
D. Translation theory: mistakes in translation Prov. 26:23 [KJV] [9:39-16:39]
Are there different ways to translate? Which one is best? So there’s going to be
different theories. Which one is best? Why do we buy into which approach? Do translators
ever make mistakes? Let’s just put it up front. Do translators ever make mistakes? Who uses
King James Version here? Is there a King James person? Here's a mistake in your King James
Version. Now you say, “Hildebrandt, you’re coming off really strong.” This is a mistake, ok, it’s
wrong. Now, by the way, do I have a great deal of respect for the King James Version? Yes,
but the question is: Is it perfect? And the answer is: No. Here's an example in Proverbs chapter
26 verse 23 it says in the King James Version [KJV], “Burning lips and a wicked heart are like a
potsherd.” Do you know what a potsherd is? In Israel, they made these pots out of clay, clay
pots, and what happens to clay pots after a period of time? Yes, clay pots get busted. So
you’ve got these shards of pots that are busted pieces of pottery.
So “burning lips and a wicked heart are like a potsherd [a piece of pottery] covered with
silver dross.” “Silver dross,” what is silver dross? We don't do that. When you want to purify a
metal what do you do with it, gold or silver? Do you put it in a fire and then kind of bubble it and
melt it down and then the crud rises to the top. What you do with the stuff that comes to the
top? You skim off all the crud that’s on the top. Does that purify your metal? You have to do the
process many times and keep scraping off the bad stuff, or dross. So that’s silver dross. It’s
the impurities. So you skim it off and you put it on the pot. You put silver dross on a pot, that
sounds a bit odd.
The King James translators, first of all, when did they translate? 1611. What was going
on in the world in1611? About 1620, what was happening in America? There was a guy named
William Bradford. Does anyone remember William Bradford coming over and founding the
Plymouth plantation? In June 1620, so we’re talking nine years after the King James Version
was translated. By the way, the Plymouth plantation, is that a long time ago?
So this is old and were the King James translators all experts in Hebrew? Yes, many of
the translators were actually experts in Hebrew. However, did they know everything about
Hebrew? No. The King James translators tell us in the introduction, explicitly, they freely
admitted they didn't know some of the Hebrew words. This word “silver dross” is only used one
time in the Bible. What's the problem with that? Meaning is determined by what? What
determines meaning? I’ve said it about fifty times at least. What determines the meaning of a
word? Context. What's the problem when the word is only used one time? Do you have trouble
establishing the context? This word is only used one time, so the King James translators went
to some Jewish people. They said what does this word mean? Some of the Jewish people said
this and they went to other Jewish people. What does that mean? They told them something
totally different. They ended up with all these different meanings. What was their answer for
what this word meant? The Jewish people didn’t know either. That’s the honest truth. The King
James translators pointed out “we did the best we could. We looked in our best dictionaries, we
checked our best people, and nobody knew really what some of these words were. These
Hebrew words are rare words.”
Now you say, “Hildebrandt, how do you know that's wrong?” Well, once upon a time
just north of Israel about 56-70 miles, there’s a place called Ugarit. It's up in Lebanon/Syria--
Ugarit. They found this place called Ugarit. There’s a language called Ugaritic. Okay, so I've
had the unfortunate privilege of having to learn Ugaritic. They found 20,000 of these tablets at
Ugarit. They date from about 1200 BC. Ugaritic is a sister language to Hebrew. Is that very
helpful? If you know Spanish can you fake some Portuguese? I took a whole year of Ugaritic
and some of the times having this on tape really bothers me because my professor will
probably get on my case, but I took a year’s worth of Ugaritic. The honest truth is I faked the
year. I read Ugaritic just like it was Hebrew. In other words, I knew Hebrew, so what I did was I
took the Ugaritic and when I read the Ugaritic I just read it like was Hebrew. I read the whole
year that way. At the end of the year, I went up to my professor just as kind of a joke because I
got a good grade in the class, and I told him, I just read it like it was Hebrew. And he said,
“Yes because they’re sister languages, so many of the words are very similar.” So I was able to
get away with the year like that.
Now, let me go back here. Guess what word pops up in the Ugaritic text? This very
word, this “silver dross” word that we don't know in Hebrew occurs in Ugaritic. What it means
is, and I’m not sure whether I’ve got the translation down here, no I don't. What it means is,
what do you put on a pot? Normally on a pot, you put a glaze on it. The word that we found
from Ugaritic that is used here means that the potsherd has a glazing on it. It’s glazed, that’s all
it is “a glaze.” Now, by the way, does that make sense in this context that it’s glazed? Yes, that
is what you put on pots. What he’s saying is: “you’ve got fervent words with an evil heart it’s
like glaze on a mud pot.” Do you see that? The glaze is all pretty, but it’s on a mud pot. Fervent
words with an evil heart, are like glaze, pretty nice glaze, on a mud pot—like putting lipstick on
a pig. So that’s this word, we now know what it means.
You say, “Well, the King James Version translators, they should've known better.” Why
couldn't they have known better? Ugarit was only found in 1948, and it was frankly into the
1950’s and 60’s before anybody could even translate these texts very well. So what I’m
suggesting is when the King James folks translated, there was no way they could have known
what that word meant, it was only found in the last 70 years. So were the King James
translators evil? No. They did the best they could in 1611. The things were very different back
then and to be very honest with you, we know much better now. So that's one reason for the
movement away from the King James Version, as we know better now what some of these
words mean because we have some of these cognate languages that help us to understand
how to translate.
E. Archaic Language Problem [16:40-18:07]
So now here's another one. Has the English language changed in the last 400 years? Here's 2
Corinthians 8:1 where it says this, “We do you to wit of the grace of God.” Now, I ask you, have
you done anybody to wit lately? Have you said, “Man, I got done do wit …. Have you done
anybody to wit? Okay, do we talk like this? “I do you to wit.” When was the last time you said, “I
do you to wit”? Now, then you ask the next question: what in the world is this talking about? “I
do you to wit.” What in the world does that mean? How about if I translate it like this: “I want
you to think about the grace of God.” Does that make good sense? “I want you to think.” Is
anybody witty in here? Somebody’s shaking their head. I like witty people; you can give me
grief with it because I enjoy arguing. “I do to wit” was “I want you to think about the grace of
God.” Now, by the way, we should probably translate this differently today than it was
translated 400 years ago because we don't do many people to wit anymore. But we do want
people to think and so we do it as ‘I want to think about.’ So the English language has
changed. “I do you to wit” is archaic English no longer used today.
F. Theories of Translation [18:08-26:47]
Now here are three or four theories of translation. Here’s the first translation theory. You’ve got
a word in this language and you’ve got a word in this language. So you to take the word in this
source language, and you translate it for the word in this receptor language; a word-for-word,
literaltranslation. One word in this language, one word in that language, one word there, one
word here, and that’s how you translate. Now I want you to think about that. Do any languages
matchup word-for-word? This word always means this in this language. If in our own language,
even if I said to you in Bostonian English, “our ca”, “we went to our ca.” Okay, what’s “our ca”
mean in Boston? Okay, “ca” means for most of us, “car.” “CAR” with an “r” on the end. Now,
what’s the problem? When you say “ca,” now you’ve got me saying it. When I say “car,” do
you know whether I’m talking about a railroad car? Is a railroad car different than a car, car?
Qarqar. Does anybody know about the battle of Qarqar? Anyways, you’ve got a “car,” and then
you’ve got a “train car” like the one I drove in, and then you’ve got a “car.” My grandkid was
over and he was playing with a toy car. Is a toy car different from a real automobile car,
different than the train car? In other words, can you take one word in one language and always
translate it another way, does that work? Do languages lineup like that one-for-one? No, they
don’t line up that way. So is this word-for-word literal is a flawed theory because languages
don't work like that.
Now, by the way, do you like word-for-word literal though? It is pretty nice if you can get
them one-for-one, that is really easy and you know you want to do that. So I guess what I’m
saying is, go for word-for-word as much as you can, but is that going to break down
eventually?
Yes, it’s different, and the problem she’s raising is she’s translating from Portuguese to
English for a song. Now, what’s the problem with a song? Is song more poetic? Is poetry going
to be much more difficult than just running narrative? When you’ve got poetry, the poetic words
just don't come along. Believe me, I've tried this I don't want to tell you how many hours I've
spent literally hundreds of hours trying to translate Hebrew poetry into English. It is beautiful in
Hebrew but it comes over in English and I can't turn it into poetry in English. That is really
disappointing to me. I've tried, I've spent hours, I've spent at least 10 hours on one verse
trying to do it and I couldn't get it right. That really has been annoying to me. So does poetry
add a whole other dimension between languages? So word-for-word literal, do we like this? Is
this a good method if you can get away with it? This is good if you can do it, but it doesn’t
always work like that.
So then they have what's called a modified literal. A modified literal is to take it as
literally as you can, word-for-word, but at some points that will break down. So you do a
modified literal meaning go word-for-word but then when that doesn't work you’ve got to bail.
Now, here is a whole different theory. It’s called dynamic equivalence. Now what
dynamic equivalence does is it does not translate word-for-word. What dynamic equivalence
does is it translates what? Meaning-for-meaning. Is that very different than word-for-word? So,
for example, I think of the word hesed in Hebrew. What does hesed mean? You say,
“Hildebrandt, what does that mean? You’ve translated it how many different ways in your life?”
When I was younger I translated hesed as “love” or “kindness.” So I translated it “love.” You
say, “Oh, that’s nice, ‘love.’” But then after you do that for a while you realize that’s not
what hesed means exactly. Hesed means more like, you say, why don’t we just use the NIV?
The NIV translates it “steadfast love.” Now “steadfast love” is that a little different than “love”?
“Steadfast love,” and then you say I don't like the word “steadfast.” Sounds like I don’t know, so
then I translated the word “loyal love.” If you look in the DASV I did “loyal love” there. Now, by
the way, is “loyal love” different than “steadfast love”? Is there a little bit of similarity between
“steadfast love” and “loyal love”? Does loyal love have the idea of maybe a covenant or
contract that you’re loyal to someone? And so I like loyal love better. Then you say,
“remember when you were back at Grace College and you used to translate it “stubborn love.”
Now is “stubborn love” different yet again, but do you see what I’m saying? Does it have
something of that in loyal love? I like the phrase “stubborn love,” and I did that for a while, but
then what was the problem? I started realizing, for most people, is “stubborn” a positive or
negative? Negative. And so then I thought, I know what I mean by “stubborn love” and but it
doesn’t work as it’s negative for most people. So I dropped “stubbornness” and that’s when I
went to “loyal love.” Do you see what I’m saying? So what does hesed mean? And the answer
is: I don’t know. It could be love, covenant love, loyal love, steadfast love, stubborn love, or
kindness. Do you know what I’m saying? It has all these ideas, and so the word is a
multiplexed word. When I go to translate it into English, it’s just more complicated than I can
get it into one or two English words. Dynamic equivalence is when you go meaning-for-
meaning. You try to take the meaning for this in the source language and you try to put the
meaning over there in the receptor language.
Then lastly, is what I call “politically corrected views” of translation. Now, what’s a
politically corrected view? The TNIV by the way, Today’s New International Version, they
published that, I think it was in England. Generally, what gets politically corrected? Gender is
one of the big things that they’ll try to politically correct? I was in a meeting when they
introduced the NRSV, the New Revised Standard Version. Bruce Metzger was up there, he’s
an old, godly gentleman from Princeton, probably in his nineties now. Anyway, it’s been a long
while since I’ve seen him, I hope he’s alright. Metzger was introducing the NRSV and one of
the women translators got up and she was railing on the NRSV because in the NRSV they still
translate God as “he.” She was just so disgusted that a Bible would translate God as “he,”
because that's gender exclusive. It excludes women and so it’s terrible they call God “he,” you
know? She was going off and off on all this stuff. Metzger was just sitting there, and I
remember, he’s got his elbows on this table, and this woman’s going off on the “she God,” and
Metzger’s got his head like this and he’s just sitting there shaking his head. He’s got a
thousand scholars out there; Metzger’s just going like this. Did she have an ax to grind? Have
you guys ever seen a vegan reading of the book of Job? I’m not kidding you, I’m dead serious.
There’s a vegan reading of the book of Job. So anyway, what I’m saying is do different people
have different political agendas today? Can they read their political agendas into how they
translate? Yes.
Now, question, do you like that or not like that? Well, I don't like it because I’m an old
man I guess, but you guys probably don’t even notice the difference. Because how can I say,
you guys have been steeped in this PC stuff since the time you went to kindergarten, believe it
or not. So what I’m saying is, be careful about the politically correct translations. They bother
me. When somebody's got an agenda that they’re trying to read into Scripture, I have a
problem with that. I don't try to read into Scripture. Rather I try to listen to Scriptures.
No, Elohim is a masculine ending. Okay, it’s a he. Okay, so you know now, I don’t want to get
into the philosophical discussion, you know with the gender of God. That’s for another time.
What I’m trying to say is when you’re working with a translation; you have to work with what the
original writers meant and what they wrote. So we’ve got to work with that. There’s a big
debate between the author’s original intent and recent reader response hermeneutics.
G. Proverbs 10:5 Translations [26:48-28:30]
Let's take an example, by looking at Proverbs chapter 10 verse 5. What I want to do is
walk through different translations and try to play around with this and have fun. So the most
beautiful of beautiful translations and this is the best that I highly recommended it is this one
right here. Okay, do you see how beautiful that is? Now listen to it. Listen to it.
‘oger baqqayitz ben maskil, nirdam baqqatzir ben mebish. [Hebrew] Do you see how
beautiful that sounds? That’s Hebrew. By the way, can you see the baqqa here? Do you see
the baqqa there? Do you see how he’s playing with sounds? baqqa, baqqa--do you see how
that goes? Do you see this one here? ben. Is anyone here named Benjamin here? Ben here’s
your name. You see, by the way, you get in here twice, Ben and Ben. Do you see how it’s
repeated? By the way, do you see how this one both starts with the mem with the “m” sound?
The “m,” and do you see this is a “sh,” okay? “sh, (‫“ ”)ש‬s (‫ ”)ש‬do you see how these two letters
are the same? Is he playing with sound? So he’s playing with sounds. Question, can you take
the sounds then over into the English and play with sounds? It doesn’t work in English. I’ve
tried it, believe me. This is beautiful, by the way, you notice the Hebrews, they always read this
way, right to left. You guys always read backward. Right?
H. KJV: King James Version (1611) [28:31- 30:27]
Now try this one, this is an English translation done by the King James translation in
1611, updated in the late 1880s and now you’ve got a New King James that was done a few
years ago. But the King James version was updated in the 1880s, and the normal KJV is not
exactly the 1611 version. It’s the 1880’s version. But anyway, this is King James 1611, “He that
gathereth in the summer is a wise son.” Do any of you “gathereth”? Now as soon as you see
this, is this in archaic form? By the way, do you understand that? Yes, you understand that but
it’s just got an “eth” on the end. Now you don’t usually see this, we are more used to an “et”
than an “eth.” “But he that sleepeth,” sleepeth, do any of thou “sleepeth” in my class, better
not. So no sleepeth thou. “But he that sleepeth.” We don’t say “sleepeth.” We say what?
Sleep. Yes, we just put an “s” on the end. “He that sleepeth in the harvest is a son that
causeth shame.” Is it clear? Is that how you would translate that? You wouldn’t do that, right?
Can you understand it? Yes, you can understand it. The King James Version has a certain
beauty to it. To be honest, I love the KJV, but the language is somewhat archaic now. You
have to take that into account. KJV was one of the best most incredible translations ever done
and that's why it lasted for three/four hundred years and that's why people still use it today
because it’s so incredible.
I. NASV: New American Standard Version [30:28-31:30]
Now, I’ll show you some other translations. This is the KJV and let’s go on. Here’s the
NASV. The New American Standard was an attempt to go word-for-word literal--word in
Hebrew, word in English, etc. This is how they try to do it here, “He who gathers in the
summer.” Now, by the way, do we like the word “gathers” better than “gathereth”? Yes, okay,
so that’s better, that’s an improvement. “He who gathers in the summer is a son who acts
wisely.” Now, by the way, is “son who acts wisely,” is that pretty long? “But he who sleeps,”
now this is an improvement also, “He who sleeps in harvest is a son who acts shamefully.” Is
this obvious and clear about what it means? First of all, yes, we understand it. It makes it
perfectly clear. So this is good. Have they made some improvements here with the “gathers,”
and the “sleeps”? Have they made some improvements? Have they lengthened “the son who
acts shamelessly”? Have they kind of drawn that out? Is poetry short and concise or long and
wordy?
J. NIV: New International Version [31:31-35:05]
Now I want to put the NIV up there so you can see the difference. The NIV says, “He
who gathers crops.” Now by the way where does “crops” come from? The NIV translators, do
you realize those NIV translators added that word in there? The word “crops” is not in the
Hebrew. They added to Scripture. Is that bad news? They added to Scripture. Do you see
that? Now, who did the NIV? You say, “Hildebrandt, didn’t you say that Dr. Wilson did it?” He
worked on Isaiah not in Proverbs, and by the way I’ve told you about Dr. Wilson right? You
have “thus saith the Lord,” that’s like, good, gold okay. Dr. Wilson says and it’s good to go. I
mean you know what I’m saying. Now, why did they put the word “crops” in there? Seriously
they added the word “crops,” “He who gathers crops.” Why did they put that word “crops” in
there? [Student response] That was really good. Yes. In today’s English when we gather, “He
who gathers,” we ask: gathers what? What is our next question? “He who gathers in the
summer,” we’d wonder--gathers what? Are you going to gather marbles? Are you going to
gather sand? What are you going to gather? When it says “crops” is that what it originally
meant? Is that what the word, “qatzir” means? To “gather crops” But actually in an agricultural
society, you’d say “gathers” and you’d pair it up with a harvest is that it obviously what it
means. But in our day is “gathers” obvious? No, so they make it explicit by saying “gathers
crops.” Is that helpful? Is that helpful to us because we don't live in an agrarian society? So the
“crops” is helpful.
Now, by the way, is that what it originally meant? That's what it originally meant. Is the
word “crops” there in Hebrew? No, it's not, but it's embedded in the word “he who gathers,” of
course, you gather crops. So do you see what’s going on there a little bit? “He who gathers
crops in the summer is a wise son, He who sleeps during harvest is a disgraceful son.” Do you
see this “wise son”? Is “wise son” [NIV] different than a “son who acts wisely” [NASV]? Is the
NASV really long and drawn-out? Now, I ask you in a Proverb, should a Proverb be long and
drawn-out, or should a Proverb be pithy and punchy? “A stitch in time saves nine.” Or should a
Proverb be a long sentence? Is a Proverb supposed to be short, crisp, pithy, and to the point?
Is this “a son who acts wisely” drawn-out? Or is a “wise son” short and to the point? So does
this fit Proverbs and the idea of the proverbial genre? Does this make it a bit more punchy? “A
disgraceful son,” rather than “a son who acts shamefully.” Do you see what I’m saying? So a
question: do I like this NIV translation better than this NASV? I personally like it. This one has
some punch to it. It is short like proverbs although it adds the “crops” here to help with the
agrarian background and then “disgraceful son” again punching, opposing the “wise son” and
the “disgraceful son sleeps during harvest.” By the way, is this talking about college? Yes.
K. NLT: New Living Translation [35:06-39:55]
Now let’s go to a different one. This one’s called the New Living Translation and in the
book of Proverbs, in the New Living Translation, there are all sorts of problems. So let’s look at
some of them. “A wise youth,” now as soon as you see that has something changed? “A wise
youth.” All the other ones said a what? A wise “son.” Does everybody see that? Have they
neutered the gender and put “youth” instead of “son” so that it would not be an exclusive
gender with “son.” Was it done for that reason? The answer is: Yes, it was done for exactly that
reason. Did somebody right pages telling them that was not the right way to do it? Yes. Were
that individual’s suggestions ignored? Yes. When you lose, what do you do? You complain and
that's what I’m doing. So anyway, it really still bothers me. “Listen, my son, to your father's
instruction.” Doesn’t that sound very different than “listen, my child, to your father's
instruction”? Yes. How old is the son? This guy’s trying to get his son not to, how do you guys
say, shack up or hook up with this woman, and is he a child? Now I don’t know what you guys
call it. What I’m saying, is this a father warning his son telling him not to have whatever. Is this
kid a child? No, obviously he's a young adult. So what I'm saying is to use the word “child,”
why did they use the word “child” instead of “son”? “Listen, my son, to your father,” “Listen, my
child,” do you see the difference in meaning there? I think anybody can see the difference
there. Question: when the editor over you does something, do you have to bite your tongue
and say “that’s it.” You’ve got to chill out sometimes? I’m still mad about it. I think it's wrong
but anyway, do I have respect for the people I translated with? The editor over me, I won’t even
tell you the names, but do I respect the guy? Yes, immensely, I enjoy the person and he made
me to wit. He gets me to think and I just appreciate him so much, but I disagreed with him on
this point.
So, “A youth who sleeps away the hour of opportunity.” Wait, let’s finish this, “a wise
youth works hard all summer.” Where’s the “harvest crops”? The “harvest crops” is gone. Why
did they take away the “harvest crops”? It says “works hard.” Is that the real point of the
Proverb? Do you guys need to gather crops, or do you guys need to work hard? Is this telling
you the meaning, without the image of the harvest of crops? Yes. Is that good or bad? What
happened to the metaphor the crops and harvest? Is that metaphor of the harvest and the
crops beautiful? Yes, it is, I like that. I don’t like when they take my metaphors away. The
metaphors are rich. But does this help you understand the point of the Proverb? The answer’s,
yes. This puts it right out in your face, but I like the subtleties, I like the richness of metaphors.
So this bothers me a little bit too. But I can see the point. You don't put the metaphors in, you
put the meaning of the metaphor in. By the way, is that more helpful for people who read the
Bible? Are they sure to get the right point then? Now “a youth who sleeps away the hour of
opportunity.” What’s the hour of opportunity? Was it that you need to harvest when the fruit is
ripe? If you harvest two months after the fruit is ripe, that’s no good. So is this again giving us
the point of the Proverb without using the harvest imagery? So this is telling us the meaning,
it’s a more meaning-to-meaning dynamic equivalent translation. So why is he working hard all
summer that raises a whole other set of questions? But, by the way, do you college students,
do most of your work at college in the winter? You work in the summer, right? Do you guys do
summer jobs? Yes, so that’s maybe why it still fits as people work in the summer. But notice
“brings shame” about the son. Is the meaning of the Proverb really clear in this one without the
metaphor?
L. The Message by Eugene Peterson [39:56-43:23]
Once upon a time, there was a guy named Eugene Peterson. He teaches in Canada,
and you know how the Canadians are. So, he is, how should I say it? He is a godly, godly man
that I would look up to. I don't know him personally, but I look up to him from the work he has
done and I've read some of his work. He is a godly, godly man. Is he extremely creative? Now,
what’s the problem with creativity? I'll tell you because I tend to be very creative myself at
points. It's hard when you're creative, there's a fine line between creativity, now I’m not talking
about him, Eugene Peterson, there’s a fine line between creativity and weirdness. I've never
been able to find the line. But anyway, he, on the other hand, is a good scholar, top-flight
scholar, and a creative individual, and he comes up with stuff that when you read it you say, I
wish I had translated it like that. This guy is a genius. What I’m saying is Eugene Peterson,
he’s up at Regent University in Vancouver, Canada. He captures something of the prophetic,
and the proverbial moment that I have not been able to capture. So I look up with admiration.
Now, it’s going to be different, but this guy has captured it. Check this out, this is the
translation of the same verse: “Make hay while the sun shines.” Now, is that it? Has he got it?
Do we say, “Make hay while the sun shines”? He's got that idea of work hard during the
summer. He’s got it, “Make hay while the sun shines, that’s smart. Going fishing during the
harvest, that’s stupid.” Now, if I had to change a word it would probably be this one: “stupid” is
a little bit too strong. Now is the Proverb real strong? Yeah, but I think I would tone this word
down just a shade. But is there genius here? Does this capture the proverb? Do you see this?
“Make hay while the sun shines, that’s smart, go fishing during the harvest, that’s stupid.” This
is The Message Bible. It’s done by Eugene Peterson.
Now, while I respect Peterson, he’s a genius, the problem with one person translating is
that it can be flat, flat, flat, genius, flat, flat, flat, genius. Do you know what I’m saying? Can a
person be genius in every verse? Does he do this with every verse? No, I picked this out, but
what I’m saying is he will have these verses that you just sit there and it just makes you smile.
You just say, “Man, he’s got it.” Now, by the way, is this word-for-word? No. Is this dynamic
equivalence, meaning-for-meaning? Has he got the meaning-for-meaning thing?
Now, by the way, which one of these translations are you going to use? Is it possible
when I’m wanting to smile that I use The Message to make me think about this text in a
different way than I have ever thought about it before? So I use this? Is it possible that I use
the NLT or NIV? Yes. Is it possible to use a different translation when you’re in different moods
and when you're doing different things? If you're a pastor trying to prepare for a sermon, are
you going to use something wild and wacky like that or are you going to use a more word-for-
word literal to begin with? Actually, if you’re a pastor who is doing a sermon, would you
probably do both? Yes, get this one, would the people in your church find resonance with this
one? Yes, so you know, it depends on what you're trying to do. Of course, what you really
should do is read the original Hebrew. So here are some conclusions, kind of in the big picture.
M. Review of whole process [43:24- 46:32]
Well, let’s kind of run through the whole process. Do we have better manuscript
evidence today than they have had for 2,000 years? Yes. Better manuscript evidence than
they’ve ever had. Is any major doctrine affected by all the scribal errors and things, is any
major doctrine really affected? The answer is: “No.” No major doctrine is really affected. You
say, “Oh, Hildebrandt, we’ve wasted all this time and no doctrine is really affected. But what I’m
trying to say is, knowing that scribes copied it and that there are scribal errors helps you
understand how we got our Bible. That's what I'm interested in so that no one will ever pop
anything new on you. We’ve been through it now. You see how things come to us.
I want you to have a realistic view of transmission, scribes copying, and translation. I
just want you to be aware of the processes of the different translations and different scribal
copying. There should be confidence in God’s word. The benefit is you guys can pick up 10 or
15 different translations in English if you feel like it. So we live in a very rich environment
informationally today.
Does anybody use the Net Bible? Has anybody ever heard of the Net Bible? Okay,
there’s a Bible on the net. It’s hosted by some really good people, Dan Wallace and a bunch of
these guys. I know some of them and they are excellent. It's called the Net Bible. I really enjoy
the footnotes, the study guide from that Bible is very helpful. It’s all on the Internet. I think you
can actually order a copy now; you can actually get it printed. So plurality, focus I think the
point is not to focus on the jots and tittles, but focus on the meaning of Scripture, and I guess
that's my point. Don't focus on the jots and tittles so much, the little points, focus on the
meaning of Scripture and what it means for your life. Focus on how God is speaking to you and
communicating his word to you in terms of the meaning of Scripture, rather than just focusing
on the jots and tittles which just get us upset. If God has spoken to us and told us many things
this book should be one of the most important guides in your life. Do I enjoy reading Plato? The
Republic, I love reading Plato. If you’ve never read Plato, Plato’s wonderful. Aristotle is more
work. Aristotle is a very mathematical logical mind. I enjoy reading Aristotle, Nicomachean
Ethics, and other things. When you read Plato, Aristotle, all the great people, what's this?
[Reference to Bible] This is the Word of God. Question: is it different than Plato? Plato is
interesting, Charles Dickens is fascinating, but this is the word of God. So there’s a huge
difference then. How can I say this? This is one of the reasons why I invested my life into
studying this book because God has spoken. God has actually spoken and I want to hear what
he has to say. So this is one of the most important guides for life then.
N. Scribes make mistakes [46:33-49:46]
Now, did God use flawed process in preserving his word? Yes, he did. Now, by the
way, is this a matter of my opinion. He did use flawed processes. I can show you the flaws and
I have shown you the flaws. Did the scribes make errors? Yes, they did. Can we correct for a
lot of those errors? Yes, we can. Did God use flawed processes? Did he use human beings to
communicate his word? Did God use translational processes? Are there errors in some of the
translations? Actually, to be honest with you are there errors in every one of our translations?
Undoubtedly. Now, by the way, are the translations today much more accurate than they have
been? Were there errors in the King James translation? Yes, you’ve got to say it. I mean Mark
16, 1 John 5:7. Yes, you don’t have a choice. First of all, I want to ask you, did God use scribes
who made mistakes? Now then, if God oversaw that, did those guys make mistakes? No, it’s
not my opinion we have the manuscripts. We can compare the manuscripts. Did the scribes
make mistakes? No, you weren’t there some might say, but if you had 10 minutes to do
research in the library, could you find the manuscripts and actually compare the manuscripts if
you could actually read Greek and Hebrew? Could you do that within 10 minutes? You tell me,
what kind of mistakes? You’re telling me what you believe but I'm not asking what you believe.
I’m saying what do the manuscripts indicate? We have the manuscripts, you can compare this
manuscript it has Mark 16, this one does not have Mark 16. What do you do with that? One
has it, one doesn’t. 1 John 5:7 it's not in any of our ancient manuscripts. It’s in the King James
Version. What do you do with that? See, all I’m trying to get you to say is, did the scribes make
mistakes? Yes or no? I've shown you, do you guys realize I’ve shown you mistakes that
they’ve made? I've shown you flat out in-your-face you don't have an option there, it’s a fact.
Now notice, I’m standing right here next to the Bible. When I don't know something is
factual, I walk over there. I'm telling you this is a fact. It’s not whether you agree with me or
disagree with me. I can give you a Greek Bible and it will list the problems down at the bottom
in the footnotes. All the Greek New Testaments do that. The Hebrew Bible does the same
thing. The variant readings demonstrate the scribes made mistakes. Every scribe who copies a
thousand pages makes mistakes.
O. Translators make mistakes [49:47-55:20]
Secondly, do translators make mistakes? Did I show you some differences in the
translations today? Translators make mistakes. We don't have a choice there. So what we’re
saying that the word of God is flawless, but the word of God has flaws. What’s
missing? What's he talking about? This is the reason why I'm harping on this because this is a
really important point. In other words, there’s a really, really big and important point and it’s
what I've been talking about for three days, and I’m trying to get you to see the point. When
God spoke to the prophet do we call that the process of inspiration? Is inspiration a hundred
percent? Is inspiration when God talks to the prophet, and the prophet wrote it down. Is that a
hundred percent what God wanted to be written down? Yes. God spoke to the prophet, God
said exactly what he meant and the prophet wrote it down.
So when he's quoting, I think what I'm hearing from you is Psalm 119. When he’s
quoting Psalm 119, which goes on for a hundred verses saying the Law of Lord is perfect. Is
that talking about the inspirational process of God speaking to his people? Yes. Is that talking
about the scribal process of copying? No, it’s talking about the process of inspiration and
you’ve got to separate those processes. That is actually what I’m trying to point out. Can a
translator make mistakes? Can a guy like Erasmus add a verse to the Bible in the 16th
century? Not, can he do it, he did it--1 John 5:7. Look in your King James Version.
So, what I’m saying you have to separate the process of inspiration which is flawless,
which is 100%, which is the word of God, but when you give it to the hands of scribes, scribes
make errors, and so do translators. By the way, how does he know that translators make
mistakes? He’s in this class. I'm sorry to be really gross, but does anybody have an NLT
here? Okay, if you look in the NLT you’ll find somebody who translated that. Question, do you
know that I make mistakes? Yes, I’ve already made 100 mistakes in this class. So what I’m
saying is I was one of the translators on the NLT. Do I make mistakes? Yes. Does God use
flawed processes? Yes. Did he use my process? Yes, he used me. So, yes. [Student question]
Okay, okay, but I think you’re missing the point and that’s what I’m trying to say. What you’re
talking about is the process of inspiration. God to the prophet who writes it down.
Okay, do the rest of you guys understand what I’m trying to distinguish here? Come up
after class and we can talk about it, but actually, you’re missing the exact point that I’m trying to
make here. What I’m trying to do is to get you to see that, and that’s probably the most
important point. It’s probably the most important point I’ve talked about so far.
P. Illumination of the Holy Spirit [53:10-55:21]
Now, she used the word inspiration. I want to use a different word. I'm not inspired,
okay? I’m not inspired. I asked for illumination. In other words, illumination is different than
inspiration. Illumination and she said a good point too, do we ask the Spirit to help us
understand the word? That's called “illumination.” Now, by the way, can that be flawed? Have
you ever had one pastor tell you one thing and the other tells you something else? You get two
different messages. So what I’m saying is you’ve got to be careful with illumination because it
comes through a human being. Does everybody hear what she said? That’s exactly what I’m
trying to say.
The process of inspiration is flawless, perfect and the process of God speaking to the
prophet and the prophet writing it down that’s perfect. But then what happens is that book gets
copied over 1000 or 2000 years. Every manuscript we have there's differences between the
manuscripts. We’ve got to sort that out. God used processes that had problems with them,
and then, by the way, there’s translation and you get another set of problems translating
between the languages. Now, can we use multiple translations to try to get it better than we've
ever had it? But is it flawless in the sense of inspiration? It's not on the same level with that
initial process that they’re talking about. The process of inspiration is perfect and so we've got
to distinguish that. If you don't distinguish that, you're dead meat. When you go out and you try
to say every word in this book there are no problems here, a good scholar will rip you to
shreds. What this is, is it a problem of God's word or is it a problem with the translators of the
NIV? It’s a problem with the translators of the NIV. Somebody doesn't like the NLT, they’ll rip it
up and say this Bible’s the word of God, and then they’ll open up the NLT and show you a
problem. It’s possible that Hildebrandt could’ve written that thing in there and he got it wrong.
So I want to say I’m flawed, and so I do work and the NLT was part of that.
Q. God uses flawed process and flawed people for his purposes [55:22-58:33]
So let’s run through this. God used flawed processes. His initial process inspiration
there's no problem with. Providence did not preserve it perfect. With these manuscripts they’re
different, so God chose not to preserve it. What I’m suggesting to you why is that? Because
God did not want us worshiping a book, God wanted us worshiping himself. So he purposely
had the originals lost, we don't have any of the originals. We don’t have what Moses wrote. If
God used flawed processes to accomplish his purposes, then can God use me, a flawed
person, to accomplish his purposes too. Yes, and this opens up then that God uses flawed
people to accomplish his purposes and that we can engage in that. I find that rich. So he calls
us to study and figure things out and we need to focus on the meaning. We need to focus on
the meaning and the impact it has on our life because this is God's word. Are we in the best
position we’ve been in for 2,000 years? Do we have better translation theories? Do we have
better manuscripts than they’ve had in 2,000 years? We’re in the best position of anybody in 2,
yeah, 3,000 years.
But what's kind of ironic about that? We have the best translations done of the best
manuscripts that have ever been done. Does your generation reverence this book or not
reverence this book? Do you see the irony here? In other words, the thing is getting more and
more accurate. We now know that it’s not “silver dross,” that it’s “glaze”. You say we know it’s
much more accurate than what we have ever understood, but yet to this generation, the Bible’s
out the window.
Yes, that’s part of faith, so he’s going back to Hebrews chapter 11 verse 1 and
following, and that basically says we have to have faith. So what I don't want to give up, and
what his comments are so right about, is I don’t want to give up that when God spoke to the
prophets they wrote it down, that’s a hundred percent. If you lose that, if you lose what he is
suggesting, his foundation, you are on a skateboard going downhill at 60 miles an hour. You
know some of you guys can get hurt. Okay, so if you cut that off you’re in big trouble. However,
if you don't know about the scribal stuff and the translation problems can you get in trouble on
the other way? Because a critic can level you onto the floor, because they can show stuff up in
your face, and, well, they’ve got you.
But they don't have us because God has preserved his word and it is accurate. So
you’ve got to work with that. We’re in the best position in 2,000 years and that's comforting.
R. 4 Processes from God to us [58:34-59:27]
Here are the processes and let me just kind of layout these four processes. Inspiration,
is this 100%? Inspiration, 100%, God’s word is flawless. Canonization they gather the
authoritative books together. Have we got the books? Pretty much we accept that from the
Jews as God’s people. The canonization is the collection of books and we’re good on
that. Transmission is this where some of the problems in copying over and over again come
in? We’ve got hundreds and thousands of manuscripts that all disagree with each other and
this is where that happens. You’ll have different theories of translation and have different
translators and some of them will be good, some of them will be bad. Some will be good
sometimes bad at other times. Can we check the different translations by looking at multiple
translations? So this is the processes used from God to us. Again you know what I’m saying, I
mean this is the way it is. This is actual historical fact at this point now.
S. Introduction to the Old Testament: brief historical overview [59:27-59:57]
Let me jump over and we’re going to jump over to here. What I would like to do is
actually look into Genesis now. To do this, before we jump into Genesis 1, we are now actually
going to jump into the text of Genesis. Genesis is a book of beginnings, and you guys have
read it. What I want to do today is cover the first and second verse; we’re going to make great
progress. First and second verse, okay? Genesis 1:1.
T. 9 turning points through the Old Testament [59:58-76:08]
Before we do that, I want to cover the whole Old Testament in nine points. I want to do
a survey of the whole Old Testament and then we’ll jump into Genesis in the first two verses.
So there are nine steps to the whole big picture. First of all, you have what they call primeval
history. Now, what's primeval history? Primeval history is Genesis 1 to 11. It’s the time before
Abraham. So that would include what? Adam and Eve, Noah and the flood, the tower of Babel,
those basically are the big things. Adam and Eve, Noah, the Flood, and the Tower of Babel, all
that in the first eleven chapters of Genesis. They call it primeval history before Abraham.
Abraham’s date is what? 2000 B.C. In this class, I'm not a big date person, but there
are about five or six dates I want you to know for this class. It's really hard, Abraham’s 2000
B.C. Are you okay with that? Abraham’s 2000 B.C. I want you to know that date. Okay, after
Primeval History then what happens?
You have the period of the Patriarchs: Abraham. Abraham, here at Gordon we call
him “Our Father,” just to give a little advertisement to Our Father Abraham, okay? Isaac was
his son. Has anybody ever heard about “Yitzhak Rabin”? Yitzhak (Isaac) Rabin. In Israel today
there’s a guy named Yitzhak Rabin. Yitzhak means “laughter” and you guys pronounce it
Isaac, but it’s really Yitzhak. It means “laughter.” So Abraham has a son named Isaac. Isaac to
be honest with you is a pretty minor character. Jacob is big because Jacob's name gets
switched to what? Israel. Then he produces what? 12 tribes. Okay so you have Abraham,
Isaac, and Jacob is that where the 12 tribes of Israel come from: Judah, Levi, Simeon,
Ephraim, Manasseh, etc. and down to Joseph. So those are the patriarchs.
After the patriarchs, they go to Egypt and the Exodus. Remember while Joseph was
in Egypt, the brothers and their father, Jacob come down to Egypt. They sojourn in Egypt for
about 400 years. I don’t want you to know the date. Then who brings them out of Egypt? God
brings them out of Egypt. Yes, he does some plagues and splits the Red Sea. He brings them
out by the hand of Moses. On Moses’ date, there’s a big debate between 1400 and 1200 B.C. I
don't want you to learn this at this point because we will argue this when we get to the book of
Exodus. There’s a big debate about the date whether it’s 1400 or 1200 BC when they came
out. Don’t worry about it now. Exodus is the great redemptive act of the Old Testament. In the
New Testament, what is the great redemptive act? It's Jesus dying on the cross for our sins. In
the Old Testament, the great redemptive act is Moses leading the people out of the bondage of
slavery of Egypt and in freedom going to Mount Sinai to receive God's law. So Moses is the
deliverer in the Old Testament. Not in the same way Jesus was. You know Jesus was Jesus.
But Moses was the guy that led redemption. Now after they get out of Egypt they wander in the
wilderness for 40 years.
Settlement of Canaan [Joshua/Judges]. They capture and settle of Canaan in Joshua
and Judges. They take over Jericho. They go up to Ai, Hazor, Gibeon, and other sites in
Joshua and the book of Judges. Judges is going to be chaos. They try to settle the land, it
works sometimes, other times it doesn't work. At times the Judges rise up and they beat up on
the Midianites, and the Ammonites come back and whip them. So it’s sort of a back-and-forth
with Judges with some problems there. But anyways they take and settle in the land of
Canaan.
Then they settle for a while, and they say, “you know what we need? We don't have a
leader. We need a king.” So the next period is what they call the period of the united
monarchy. The united monarchy means what? Israel is together, all 12 tribes, 13 tribes
together. Who's the first king of Israel? Saul. He’s a real big man on campus. He’s really
big. Saul is the first king. Saul has some problems and so David takes over. David is the man
after God’s own heart. David then is another date that I want you to know. This is very, very
difficult, David’s 1000 B.C. Okay? Abraham is what? 2000 B.C. David is what? 1000
B.C. Now David has a son named Shelomo. I mean Solomon. His real name is Shelomo, but
you guys call him Solomon unfortunately. But what I’m saying is when I say his name Shelomo,
you guys know Hebrew, do you hear the word? Shelo-mo. Shelo-mo. Yes, shalom. Okay,
does Solomon’s name mean shalom? It means what? Solomon was a man of what? Peace.
He was even named Shelomo. His name was “peace.” What happens with David and
Solomon they write psalms and Proverbs. David does Psalms, Solomon does
Proverbs. Solomon does a couple of Psalms as well. Saul, David, and Solomon are what?
Those are the three big kings of the united monarchy of Israel. They ruled over the whole
nation, that's why it's called the united monarchy.
As soon as I say united monarchy guess what’s going to come next? Divided
Monarchy. Okay, and so next we get the divided monarchy. What happens after Saul, David,
and Solomon? Solomon messes up at the end of his life with all of those women and goes
down. Basically, God rips the kingdom apart north and south. The north is Israel, the south is
Judah. The ten tribes in the north, couple tribes in the south, plus or minus. Ten tribes in the
north called Israel and Judah in the south. Then you have what? In the north a series of kings,
they’re all going to be bad, every one of them. Who’s the most outstanding one you
know? Ahab and Jezebel. Okay, all the kings of the North are all bad. The kings in the south
are going to have some good ones like Hezekiah, mostly bad, but there were some good
ones.
So now the problem is we have got a number of kings in the North and a number of
kings in the South. Who keeps the kings in line? You’re going to say God keeps kings in
line. But how does God keep the kings in line? God uses what people to keep the kings in
line? The prophets. Now I’m going to teach you the books of prophets. Okay, so here's a
summary of the books of the prophets. I’m going to do it in one word. This is the message of
the prophets in one word: “Repent.” The prophet’s job was to go to the king and do what? Tell
him to repent. The prophet went up and he stuck his figure up the nose of the king and he told
him to repent. Then what does the king do? Who wins the prophet or the king? You guys are
familiar with the New Testament, and so let’s do one of the last prophets. He went up to the
king and his name was John. What was his name? John the Baptist and he goes up to the king
and he says, “king you’ve got this wife” and he says, “repent.” What does the king say? “Well, I
don’t like that and my wife doesn’t like that, so your head is gone.” And so John the Baptist
loses. By the way, did Jeremiah do the same thing? When you guys read the book of
Jeremiah, we are just going to do highlights of Jeremiah. Jeremiah comes to God and says,
“Thus saith the Lord.” Jeremiah goes out to the king, “thus saith the Lord, repent, or you’re
going to exile to Babylon.” Jeremiah goes back and God says, “thus saith the Lord.” But every
time Jeremiah says, “repent,” what does the king do to him? He gets beat up. So after a while
he says, “God, the last time I said, thus saith the Lord, I got put into a septic tank for three days
and I almost drowned in the stuff, and after three days it wasn't just everybody else’s stuff, but
some was my own stuff. I was in the septic tank.” What I’m saying is this is the real thing. It’s
what happened in the Bible. What I'm saying is this: Jeremiah almost died in that septic
tank. He comes back to God and says, “O God, I just love the septic tank let’s do it
again.” No, he comes back to God and says, “Hey, maybe we can do a little bit of
waterboarding or something that would be better than a septic tank?” I’m sorry, let me just
straighten up. Now, okay, he comes back to God and says, “God every time I speak in your
name I get beat up.” He comes back to God and he says this directly to God. He says, “this is
bad, every time I go out there and say the word of the Lord I get beat up.” He complained, “I’m
just tired of this.” Did the prophets get beat up? Yes.
Did you hear what happened to Isaiah? Isaiah was fleeing from the King Manasseh.
Rumor has it he went in and hid inside the hollow of a tree. Right. They found the prophet
hiding in a tree. Do you know what they did? They got out a saw and said, watch this, and they
sawed him and the tree in half. Okay, that’s the prophet, Isaiah. You say the great prophet
Isaiah, who saw the Lord and everything. Yes, sawed in two in the tree that he was hiding in
from the evil king. Now that’s not cool. I just want to tell you, did the prophets have a rough
life? Do I have respect for the prophets, and should we have respect for these guys? Yes, they
put their lives on the line.
So the prophets do battle with the king and who wins? I tried to show you, the King
wins. Who wins in the end, however? Yes, the prophet turns to the king in the end and says,
“Hey, you mess with me you’re dead in two years.” And guess what happens? “Oh, yeah that’s
right when you go out for battle, the Lord bless you, good for you, go out for battle, yes go do it.
God says in the battle you’re dead.” Guess what happens? Ahab. Boom, arrow, you’re done.
Okay, so let me get off that.
In the Northern tribes, what happens? We’ve got the northern kingdom of Israel, the
southern kingdom of Judah. Kind of like the Americas; north and south. The northern kingdom
has ten tribes. Those ten tribes get carried off to Assyria. Where is Assyria? What’s the capital
of Assyria? Nineveh. As soon as I say Nineveh who comes to mind? Jonah and the whale.
This is the story behind Jonah and the whale. So they go to Assyria in 722 B.C., the northern
kingdom, ten tribes in the north are hauled off to Nineveh and scattered all over the world. How
long have those ten tribes been scattered? Are they scattered to this day? Tell me where do
most Jews in this world live? New York City. That is the honest truth. So where do the other
half of them live? In Israel. By the way, are there big problems right on the horizon with living in
Israel? Are you going to see, and I’m not a big prophet like that, I’m going to walk over here. I
just want to tell you, is Israel going to have trouble in the next four years here? Are there
people developing weapons right now? Actually did they just open that nuclear power plant in
Iran, 60 watts of power, and are they upping that nuclear power plant to 1,000 megawatts
shortly. It’s already producing now. Just what was it, 2 days ago, that they just announced it?
Iran is producing nuclear material. Question, have they already said that they are after the
complete annihilation of Israel [their words]? I fear that you are going to see this in your time at
Gordon here. You’re going to see something like that happen. By the way, I’m not just making
this up. How should I say it, I’m really into studying these things, and it’s really, really bad. I
don’t know, my guess is you’re going to see God do stuff that’s incredible. Will God let his
people be totally destroyed? No. So there may be something spectacular. I don’t know, my
guess is, let me get off, that was all conjecture. That was all conjecture, do you understand
that? But, the northern tribes are they scattered to this day?
Did the Bible say that the northern tribes would be gathered back together? After 3,000
years almost, have the Jewish tribes been gathered back again? The Bible predicted they’d be
gathered back and sure enough, that's what happened in 1948. You had to wait a couple of
thousand years for this to happen. Is God's word flawless? Will what God has said happen
even though it had to wait 2,000 years? By the way, can you tell me about another country that
was scattered for 2,000 years and came back to be a country again? Tell me another one,
please? How many countries have done that? Israel. Have any revived a dead language as
well? Not one except Israel.
So what happens next, now the northern kingdom has been taken away to Assyria, 722
B.C. Now, what's the deal with the southern kingdom of Judah? Its capital is in Jerusalem, and
in 586 B.C. the Babylonians come in and they destroy the first temple in 586 B.C. Who built
this temple? Solomon. Solomon builds the temple just after 1000 B.C. In 586 B.C. the
Babylonians come in. Do they totally, absolutely level the temple? They totally, absolutely level
the temple. They hall the ark out. This sea, this big humongous bronze sea, they cut it up into
pieces, and the whole thing is absolutely leveled. They go to exile in Babylon. By the way, who
goes to Babylon? A guy named, what was his name that liked the lions and dens? Daniel,
Shadrach, Ezekiel, and all that takes place in Babylon.
Now, by the way, did Jeremiah the prophet tell them they were going to Babylon? Did
Jeremiah also tell them that they were going to be there for 70 years? And so guess what
happens? After 70 years in Babylon, they come back, the return. Ezra, Nehemiah, and Esther
and you’ve got the stories of the great coming back. The Jews are freed from Babylon and they
returned to the land. Nehemiah builds the walls and some of these guys build the second
temple. Why is the second temple important? The first temple gets destroyed, the second
temple gets built. Why is the second temple so important? Who comes into the second temple?
Jesus. This is the temple, these guys are involved in the building of the second temple. Jesus
will come into that, destroy this temple, and in how many days? Three days, he’ll raise it up.
That’s Jesus. Finally, Malachi down in 400 B.C. ends the Old Testament.
Now, what happens between 400 B.C. and zero with Jesus? Yes, that’s when the
Apocrypha was written. So if you want to find out what happened in those 400 years you’d
read something like 1 and 2 Maccabees. They tell the history of that period. But the Old
Testament ends with Malachi 400 B.C.
You ask, “Hildebrandt, for this course what do we need to know?” It's really hard; what
you to know three dates so far. Three dates: Abraham 2000 B.C., David 1000 B.C., Malachi
400 B.C. Is that hard? 2000, 1000, 400 B.C., and that gives you kind of a framework there for
the Old Testament.
U. Creation [76:09-79:30]
Now let me just set up this other thing about creation. Creation, so what? Does it make
a difference whether the world was created or whether the whole thing just is a process of
evolution? Does it make a difference whether the world was created or just evolved? Does it
make a difference? The answer is yes. This is a big thing.
Could God have used evolutionary processes to accomplish his purposes? Yes, he
could have. Is there a big debate? Have you got some people who are creationists and say
that God created wham-bam, and everything was created just the way it was? Do other people
suggest more evolutionary processes like I look at some of you people, some have blue eyes,
some have brown eyes, some of you have different colors. Question: did that develop over
time, the different colors of eyes for example? How much evolution do you allow for? Are there
some Christians who believe God created but used evolution as the process in a big way? Yes,
some people go that way. Other people are more, you know, God created, created, created,
and that was it. It was a done kind-of-thing. So you get this big debate within the Christian
church actually. Even, by the way, do we even have a debate here at Gordon College in terms
of how much and how you scale the evolutionary processes into or out of some these
discussions.
How does that affect your weltanschauung? How does that affect your worldview? I like
this word weltanschauung. Okay, it’s a German word that means “worldview.” If you view
yourself as created in the image of God, is that very different than “I just evolved out of
monkeys.” It affects your worldview. Why couldn't the Bible talk about evolutionary processes?
When were those things even talked about? Was it in the 19th century, right? With what’s that
guy’s name? Yes, Charles Darwin. So in other words, what I’m saying is, there's no
evolutionary process in the Bible because they had no clue of this stuff. Those ideas were
developed in the 19th and 20th century. Yes, it's possible that God told them more things than
what we know now. All we’ve got is the Bible, God could've showed Moses much more. I need
to walk, over here. God’s dealing with Moses. Did God deal with Moses face-to-face? God’s
telling Moses, “Okay, day one I did this.” I am wondering if he played a 3-D video, and God’s
saying, “Okay, watch this Moses, this is what I did. We captured it on a screen.” Now you
understand I just made all of that up, but what I’m saying is the point that he’s making is a
really good one. Is it possible that Moses knew more because of what God showed him? More
than what he wrote down? I would bet my house on that, yes. But now I don’t know what he
showed him, and how he did that, but that’s a really good point.
V. Age of the Earth [79:30-80:25]
How old does the Bible say the earth is? This is a really important question. You guys
have read Genesis 1 to 11 now. How old did the Bible say the earth is? Does anybody have a
verse on that? Please give me one verse. Excuse me, this is a quiz, did you read Genesis 1 to
11? How old did the Bible say the earth is? Seven days she says, that was a good
answer. Does the Bible tell you how old the earth is? Is there any verse in all of the Bible that
tells you that? Zero, it doesn't occur. Do we know on the basis of the Bible how old the earth
is? We don’t know that. The Bible doesn’t say. Now, by the way, is that a very important
admission? There is no verse in all the Bible that says how old the earth is. So that’s a very
important point to get down.
W. Genesis 1:1 and 1:2 [80:26-81:38]
Now, what I’d like to do next time is to go over and look at the relationship of Genesis
1:1 to Genesis 1:2. “In the beginning, God created the” what?—“heavens and the earth.” “And
the earth was” what? “formless and empty and darkness was over the face of the deep.” What
is the relationship of Genesis 1:1 with Genesis 1:2? We’ll look at three different ways of
handling that and then the implications for dinosaurs, Satan, and Big Foot.
Now, Biblerobics. Everybody up. We’ve got to finish this Biblerobics for you guys, so
we are going to go over it several times here.