Can I Trust My Bible? From What Was Written to What I'm Reading

Let's continue discussing the New Testament papyri, specifically the history of their recent discovery and addition into the critical apparatuses of the Greek New Testament as well as how they have impacted modern English translations.

We've already given an overview of the main categories of New Testament manuscripts. Now let's take a look at the first of those categories, the New Testament papyri. Interestingly, the first copies written, but the most recent to impact the Greek New Testament and English translations. Let's get familiar with the basic in's and out's of the NT papyri and come to understand why they are so important.

To know the trustworthiness of a reading, you need to know the trustworthiness of the manuscripts that support that reading. In this episode we go over the six categories of New Testament manuscripts: the papyri, uncials, minuscules, lectionaries, early quotations, and ancient translations. We'll get an idea of what each of these categories and discuss their strengths and weaknesses. Just understanding a manuscript's category can already tell us a great deal about that manuscript. In future episodes we'll look at each manuscript more carefully.

In this episode we discuss the basic guidelines textual critics employ when evaluating the quality of variant readings by comparing it to how a jury examines eyewitness testimony.  We'll see that this process is not as complicated as it might seem.

In this episode, we'll shift our discussion to how these two ancient texts have impacted the New Testament text and first century Christianity.

After being introduced to these two Old Testament documents, let's sit down with Dr. John Weaver as he helps us better understand their similarities, differences, and impacts on our modern translations.

We know that manuscripts in the original languages are essential when it comes to determining the original text, but what about ancient translations?  Let's take a look at the most well known ancient translation of the Old Testament Text: the Septuagint.  How valuable is it?  And how does it compare to the original Hebrew text?

Have you ever heard that the Bible can't be trusted because it's been translated too many times?  Is there any truth to this claim?  In this episode we begin talking about the original languages of the Biblical text.  What they are, what we know about their history, and how this impacts our English Bibles that we read today.

** There was overlapping audio clips between 17:30 and 18:15, but an updated audio file has now been uploaded **