Equipping University

If you are a distinguishable Christian, you will engage in conversations about Christ and the Bible. What will you say? It is doubtful any of us could remember all the material presented in the previous eight chapters. However, there are four items you can present that will go a long way in disarming the skeptic, atheist, agnostic, Muslim, or any other critic of the Bible.

No matter how much we may desire the opposite, the manuscripts with their variants do exist ��� "in black and white," as it were. It is a childish faith of the highest order to pretend they do not exist. So, what do we do with them? Enemies of the faith make much of them. Those who would love to see the Bible destroyed latch onto one or two variant readings and make sweeping statements about our "corrupt" Bible. A veritable cottage industry has emerged in television networks and publishing houses to discredit the Scriptures. Church leaders must do a better job of training their people. Wallace bemoans that "we've been dumbing down the church for so long [that it] is just a crime and now people are panicking when they hear about this sort of thing." You need not panic ��� you know the facts and how to dig even deeper. In this chapter, we will examine a few of the more famous (infamous?) passages and discover what the evidence has to say.

In "Misquoting Jesus," Bart Ehrman writes of the variants in several familiar passages (none of which is new material) but curiously leaves out much important information. Ehrman does not discuss the manuscripts behind the passages and gives the impression that there is mass confusion over the readings. While quick to count the manuscripts and variants, nowhere does he weigh the manuscripts or give information of their trustworthiness. It would almost appear that Ehrman has an agenda to leave his readers in serious doubt about the authenticity and reliability of the Bible. We will look deeper into Ehrman's book in a later chapter. For now, in this chapter, we will examine the external and internal evidence for each of the passage listed above and a few others. There is nothing to hide and nothing over which the believer should be worried. However, before we do that, we must familiarize ourselves with the tools we have at our disposal for such a study - the fourth edition of the Greek New Testament produced by the United Bible Society and the twenty-seventh edition of the Nestle-Aland Greek New Testament.