um how do you account for the errors of the scribes um when the New Testament was handed down person to person yeah excellent question there are errors that we know about why because we can compare the documents we can compare the manuscripts and see where the errors are in fact let me see if I can show you a representation of that because it's better seen uh than it is described here it is let's say you have here's the original which we don't have we don't at least we we we don't think we have any original documents okay so they're all copies okay and let's say you find four different copies and in the first copy you see an error right here and then uh another copy there's another error right there in the third copy there's another error right there and in the fourth copy there's an error right there can you reconstruct the original yes yes and that's what Scholars do the original this happens to be Romans 6 or Romans 3:26 God is just and the justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus now the note here is the New Testament documents have far fewer variations than this example so yes sometimes scribe made mistakes but in virtually all cases we know what the mistake was and we can correct it by comparing it with other documents now you might say why wouldn't God just if this is true why wouldn't he just maintain the original I'm speculating here but I think think one reason well two reasons number one if we had the original we might venerate it we tend to venerate things like that right but number two if I had the original what could I do to it I could alter it right but if you had a copy you would a copy you would a copy you would a copy you would a copy you would a copy and I had a copy and I changed my copy is everyone going to know who changed their copy yeah because when you get all your copies together and compare it to mine you go ter you heretic why'd you do that right so by not preserving the original you actually are able to preserve the original better so what if the error is not that simple like what if it's it's a difference in concept um so if we have these copies and say copy one gets 12 copies copy two gets 24 copies and then you've got copy four that gets 400 copies but copy four is the incorrect copy then how do we justify truth in that as well as how do we justify the truth in Jesus's exact words when didn't hear them ourselves okay there is no significant Doctrine theological doctrine that is affected by any variant in and who admits this Bart ER himself okay so Bart Man the great skeptic admits that the New Testament documents are reliable in fact Let me let me show you a quote from him because this quote is very uh right on the money you know he wrote the book misquoting Jesus I don't know if you've heard of this this book but in 2005 he wrote a book called misquoting Jesus a popular book uh in which he tries to insinuate that we can't trust what the New Testament documents have said yet the very same year 2005 he wrote an academic work he updated an academic work with his mentor Dr Bruce Meer from Princeton University in fact Meer was the top manuscript scholar of the last century and in that book He agrees with meter that the New Testament documents are copied accurately now why is he coming to two different conclusions the same year same evidence the only thing I can speculate is when you say to the academic Community something wrong they'll correct you on it but when you say something wrong to the lay Community they don't know any better in most cases you can sell a lot of books when you say the New Testament documents aren't copied reliably that gets you a review in the New York Times I get you on the coar show The John Stewart show you sell a lot of books right what's at a textbook to be studied we're studying man now you're studying misquoting Jesus um no his textbook um the New Testament okay well that one that he co-wrote with Meer is actually good but this one this one now here's what he says this is in the appendix of the paperback version so this comes out a year or two later from the original misquoting Jesus he's interviewed and in the interview here's what he says check this out this is a quote from the book page 252 he says' Bruce mezer is one of the great Scholars of modern times and I dedicated the book to him because he was both my inspiration for going into textual criticism and the person who trained me in the field I have nothing but respect and admiration for him and even though we may disagree on important religious questions he is a firmly committed Christian and I am not we are in complete agreement on the number of on a number of very important historical and textual questions what are they in agreement on if he and I were put into a room and asked to hammer out a consensus statement on what we think the original of the New Testament probably look like there would be very few points of disagreement maybe one or two dozen places out of many thousands the position I argue for in misquoting Jesus does not actually stand at odds with Professor meter's position that the essential Christian beliefs are not affected by textual variance in the manuscript tradition of the New Testament well why would you write misquoting Jesus then not you but Bart IR right why is I mean the book maybe should be called misquoting man because he doesn't even agree with himself so it seems that even when when push comes to shove admits that we do have an accurate copy of the New Testament documents now your second question is how do we know Verbatim what Jesus said we might not know Verbatim what he said because there are no quote marks in Greek so we're not always sure exactly if it's a quote or if it is a paraphrase because Jesus probably spoke in Aramaic yet the documents are written in Greek but that's okay you can communicate truth in in different languages and you don't have to be exact with what he said you can get the gist of it in fact Jesus said he was an itinerate preacher he probably gave the same talks in several different places right I mean if you followed me around I go around to different campuses I give the same presentations over and over again but I might say things slightly differently in one place and another place so maybe one guy heard it one way another guy heard it another way we have the gist of what Jesus said and that's really all God wanted to tell us also uh you might imagine that at those times people had highly developed memories they could memorize complete books we can't remember our phone number because we have all these devices that remember it all for us so these people were an oral culture and they memorized things quite well thank you very much thank you Grace