Textual Criticism vs Blind Faith: How Manuscripts Expose Cult Myths

Music Hello and welcome to another episode of the William Branham Historical Research Podcast. I'm your host, John Collins, the author and founder of William Branham Historical Research at William-Branham.org and with me I have my co-host, minister, and friend, Cheno Ross, pastor and the voice of the Understanding Scripture and Truth by Cheno D. Ross, YouTube channel. Cheno, it's good to be back and to step on a bunch of toes today.

We are giving our talking a little bit beforehand of what we were going to be discussing. And it's interesting because this is highly fascinating to me and also to Bob Scott, who does the podcast talking through the Kansas City Fellowship years, thinking a little bit outside of the box, a lot outside of the box of what the cults teach, but even just outside of the box of what normal tradition in some cases has trained us to believe.

As you and I were just discussing before this, there's this worldview that whenever we read a book in the Bible, somebody has set down and pinned that entire thing from start to finish, from one sitting, and it is a book written like it is written in today's world.

But that doesn't at all match the ancient cultures and not just in the Judeo-Christian world. We're talking the ancient cultures of other civilizations. That's not the way that they wrote the books is not the way in which we write and read them today.

So, wanted to talk through, as your idea, but wanted to talk through a bit about the cult leaders and their claim to have this divine knowledge that exceeds and excels far beyond what every other scholar has known.

And I want to add a caveat to that. Most scholars will tell you that they're still learning because there's so much to know. In one lifespan, you can never know it all. But a cult leader will say, I know it all, I know everything.

And I've mentioned this before in the podcast, I've mentioned it to you right before this. The shock for me came whenever William Branham, who oddly, he would say things like, I don't know the book real well, but I know the author, meaning he doesn't know the Bible, but yet he's going to proceed to teach it to claim that he knows the exact meanings behind every statement in between the words and where we should look in between the lines of the Bible to find his secret.

knowledge. He's saying, I don't know the book real well, but I know the author. And one of his sayings was, in reference to himself, God only sends one prophet per age. He's done it all through time, read through the Bible, read through the Old Testament. And the shock for me, I'm leaving the cult, and I'm reading the Bible over and over and over again. And I'm reading one of the prophets, and it says, lo and behold, in the years of King Darius. And then I'm reading another prophet in the years of King Darius. And I have on my website, if you type in Profits, you can see,

I sketched together this timeline of when prophets began prophesying and began, you know, the Bible books, et cetera. We have clear mile time markers in the Bible because of the names and the events that they mentioned. So I started piecing all this together and I created this timeline. Well, there's numerous prophets that overlap each other. And this is being taught, as though that's not the case, incorrect history given. And I'm certain that if Brannum was doing it, and Brannum laid the foundation for all of this mess we see today, that I'm certain, you know, Hobart Freeman was

doing the same. Yeah, good lead in, John. You and I talked all the record a couple of weeks ago after we had finished a podcast about maybe doing one along the line of today's, and I think today is a day to do it. And what we were talking about then is we were just discussing what is the role of higher education and what is the role of professional theological training in Christian ministry? What should we expect? I would say in the broad charismatic part of Evangelicalism, the answer would be very little. What would we expect a very little and very little is what you get

and that's that's not a good thing. You were just talking about the fact that some of the prophets overlap each other and they obviously do and you can and just you know that just by reading your Bible, if you read Jeremiah and Ezekiel and Daniel, you'll realize they all lived at the same period of time when the neo-Babylonian empire was just coming on to the scene in Mesopotamia.

The Assyrian empire had ruled prior to that and then the Babylonian empire under Nebuchadnezzar crushed the Assyrian empire and you've got three different Hebrew prophets, two of which end up in Babylon, Ezekiel and Daniel, and Jeremiah stays with the refugees in southern Palestine.

But I think that when we ask what's the role of higher education, I think so many people in the charismatic part of Evangelicalism and not even just the charismatic part. and say a lot of the independent non-carismatic part of evangelicalism would say, you know, we don't really have any need of higher education or professional theological training.

And I think that these people, they're often very critical of it. It's often talked about in a very discouraging manner and they will find, you know, passages. They'll say, well, Amos the prophet, you know, God called him to be a prophet, but he was just a herdsman in a gatherer of sycamore fruit.

So he didn't really know anything. You know, he just, in other words, just a farmer, a country bumpkin, or they'll look at what the Sanhedrin said of the Apostles Peter and James and John in Acts 4, where after they had healed that man at the gate beautiful, we read in Acts 4, that their opinion of them was that these men are unlearned and ignorant men.

And so how is it they're able to do the things they're doing and say what they're saying? So I think it's very easy to look at maybe the King James translation of those words and not realize exactly what the criticism was.

The criticism wasn't that these men can barely tie a fishing knot and catch a fish. That's what their living was. They were fishermen. That was not the criticism. The criticism was that those particular men didn't have the rabbinical training that the religious leaders did that were on the Sanhedrin council.

When it says they were ignorant and unlearned, read first and second Peter, Peter wrote that. Read James's his address to the church at Jerusalem in Acts 15. These are very well scripted, very intelligent, very well written pieces of work.

The language is excellent. The Senate's structure and composition is excellent. I think that we probably just in the broader Evangelical world have a misunderstanding of who the writers of Scripture were. We know we have people like the Apostle Paul who was a highly trained rabbinical scholar before his conversion.

But all of these other people that wrote the Bible don't discount them as being some kind of country bumpkins, barely able to get their nouns and verbs to agree with one another. And that just somehow the Holy Spirit came on them and actually dictated through them the very words of Scripture.

The biblical understanding of inspiration is that truly the Holy Spirit did come on them and super intend their mind and their words. But at the same time, I mean, it's a mysterious cohesion that happened.

At the same time, he used that person's life, their background, their training, their vocabulary, their ups and downs in life. It is a mysterious way in which the Holy Spirit was able to use all of the authors of the Bible, get God's Word and print for us, and yet it's not just dictated by the Holy Ghost from heaven.

If it was, we would have the exact same metaphors, the exact same style and figures of speech throughout scripture, and we simply don't have that. So I'm thinking that probably it was maybe a couple of hundred years ago that in the Western Church, this anti-education, anti-knowledge idea crept in.

Back during the days of the Reformers, back during the days of the Puritans, and these were highly intelligent and educated men. Martin Luther, who, as we all know, more or less began the Protestant Reformation in the beginning of the 16th century AD, he was a trained Roman Catholic priest.

He had gone through all the classes that your normal Roman Catholic priest would have gone through. His Swiss counterpart, John Calvin, was trained to be an attorney, and so were the leaders that came after them, and so were the Puritans.

I don't think we really saw a shift in this anti-schooling and anti-education idea come into the church until 19th century liberalism. Up until then, I mean, even schools like Princeton Theological Seminary, believe it or not, but in the early 20th century, Princeton Theological Seminary was a bastion for conservativism and fundamentalism.

It wasn't until the inroads of higher German criticism and liberalism from the European continent came across the Atlantic and began to infect schools like Princeton, like Harvard, like Union University, schools in Chicago, schools in New York, that then people began saying, oh, wait a minute, if this is what's going on in all of our institutions of higher learning, where we're actually being talked out of the Bible, where the inspiration of Scripture is being assailed and the deity of Christ is being denied, then we need to stop all of this education.

But I think that's probably an overreaction because, yeah, for sure, there were and there still are really educated people. I mean, highly educated. who don't understand, in my opinion, who don't understand the teaching of the Bible very well.

But it's not like they have a monopoly on the market. We've got people who have no education, no higher formal theological training at all, and they don't know anything about the Bible either. So it's not where you educated or where you not.

It has to do more with, are you gonna be faithful and diligent and really studious in your approach to understanding scripture? And there's a lot to understand. I've learned this. I'm self-taught to this point.

I've actually thought about maybe going and becoming a little bit more than this, but the whole study fascinates me. I have, I keep on my desk next to my cult research. This book called Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien, because Lord of the Rings is a nice fantasy tale as are most of the lures that are told in the cult theologies.

This book, and this is a thick book. You can see it's like three inches thick. It's massive. People who read this book understand that it's actually there are multiple sections to it, and this is not really one book.

It's three different, I think three different writings. Well, when they hold the Bible, interestingly some of those same people see it as one book, and it's not, it's actually a library of books. And the concept that was indoctrinated into me, which it wasn't just solely the random cults that taught this, major fundamentalist groups taught this.

The taught that the Bible was literally penned by God, and somebody sat down, God inspired them, inspired the pen, and that way you have books that by people who weren't really scholars written in a way that everybody can coherently understand them because God is panning the book.

And that's just simply not how it happened, not at all. And it would be like, I'm reading Tolkien, and I know the voice and author style of Tolkien, because I'm reading the book. Well, if I were to pick this other book by Scott Adams of Dilbert, and I'll dress down and know where to go, I can tell you clearly that the voice style in this book does not match Tolkien.

Well, after you read the Bible a few times, you begin to realize the different voices that are in the Bible. This is one thing that hit me like a brick wall. Once you can understand the linguistic styles of each book, this idea that it's penned by one single author, literally penned by God, and it's all one voice, all of that really goes away because there are distinct voices in the Bible.

This is something that, like I said, it hit me like a brick wall. And what it did for me goes against what I was taught that it would do for me. I had heard some of this argument while I was in the cult, and they said people who go that way, they just completely abandoned all of the Bible. Because what is happening is, in essence, they're not abandoning the Bible, they're abandoning the fundamentalist view of the Bible.

And in the fundamentalist view, there are significant problems when you understand the actual history of the Bible canonization. It can't work with the fundamentalist view. And things that you begin to understand, which you and I talk briefly, I won't go too far with this, but there are, what's a better example than we talked about, the Pauline epistles.

There are books that every scholar certainly agrees was written by Paul. There are others that are debated. And I'm not saying either side like the book of Hebrews. Like the book of Hebrews. I'm not saying either side is right or wrong, but it is debated. There are enough questions as to whether Paul wrote it that scholars disagree. And for a fundamentalist, this is a problem because if it's all pinned by the same author, you can't have this sort of debate. And so they see the whole debate as an issue. I see the debate is healthy because you begin to learn more about

the books than you would have ever known had you stuck in this fundamentalist view of the past. Yeah, I totally agree, John, that the sheer depth and breadth of the Bible precludes anyone ever knowing it all. And that's, you know, that's kind of sad news because we really, I love God's word. I love to read it. And I wish I could know everything in it.

But I often tell people around me what makes me sad is I don't have enough time in my lifetime to learn it all, to know it all or to certainly to be an authority on it all.

So it's very interesting when anyone comes along. And of course, our podcasts that you and I do together are more focused on Dr. Hobart Freeman. And he was one who came along who said so many times that he knew and taught the whole Council of God. We preach the whole Council of God.

We don't leave anything out. You know, we believe it all. We preach it all, which presupposes that you know it all. But as you just intimated with what you said, John, I do believe there is one divine author and that is God behind it all. But God, the Holy Spirit did not pin the Bible himself, nor did he get a hold of the risks of prophets and apostles and force them to write his words. It is what I said earlier. It's a very mysterious confluence between God, the Holy Spirit, and the authors of Scripture, the human authors, to have given us just this incredible, incredible

book. It is a book to us today. I mean here's my Bible today and it's small print and you know these micro-thin pages, the Bible is on, and just in my Bible, there are 1300 pages.

There are 66 individual books, 39 in the old 27 in the new, that make up this Bible. There are 1300 pages in my Bible written by approximately 40 different authors over a period of approximately 1500 years and it contains approximately in the Hebrew and Greek 2 million words. That is the breadth and depth of Scripture. And so as you and I have talked about all the air and I've just talked about it all the time, the need we have for scholarship and for scholars. You know I know this might be, I hope it's not talking over the head of anybody in the audience and I hope I really hope

that it's not offending anybody in the audience. But we just have this, we have a partial view that anybody can just pick up the Bible and know what it's saying. And I think there is some truth in that and there's some air. I think that the Bible, God's Word is written in such a way that those things that we do need to know for our salvation and for our life as a follower of Jesus, I mean if you are 10 years old and above, you can read that, you can read the Bible and you can figure out what you

need to know. So part of that statement, any of us, any person can pick the Bible up and read it and understand it. You don't need formal training, you don't need a professional degree. Part of that is true. The elements in Scripture that we need to know for our salvation are clear enough that any of us without any formal training can definitely, if we will be sincere, it does require things. It requires sincerity, it requires honesty, it requires humility in order to approach the Scriptures and read it and understand it the way God wants us to. But no, it does not take any

advanced professional training. But that's only to understand parts of the Bible. The Bible is, as I said, it's so deep and so broad and so wide and so full of the wisdom of God and it touches on so many historical and cultural and geographical issues that if you don't know them, then you don't know them. There's no way the Holy Spirit is going to tell you all this stuff. He might help you understand the simple things of how you walk with Jesus.

But no, the Holy Spirit doesn't give you a class in geography and archaeology as you're reading the Bible. That's something you have to do on your own. So just to give you one example, or maybe a couple of examples, this summer and this fall, I had just, in my personal study, I really devoted myself to studying the prophet is equal.

So I've got, I've got 48 chapters and I have read it and read it again and then read it again and then read it again. And you have to do that to, as you said earlier, John, to kind of pick up, who is this author?

What is his psyche? What is his background? What is he all about? What are his experiences? What's a general outline of what he's trying to say? So that's where you begin by reading and reading and reading.

But if you don't know Hebrew, which I'm not a Hebrew expert, then you're dependent on an English translation and for better or for worse, you are dependent on an English translation. That's not the end of the day, however, because God knew that when the scriptures were written in Hebrew and Greek and He knew that people down through the centuries wouldn't be able to read those languages.

So I believe that He also has super-intended the translation process well enough. It's not perfect, but well enough, where you can pick up Ezekiel and apart from a few disputed passages, I think you, as an English reader, can understand what Ezekiel has said.

However, after I spent all this time reading it, then I go to someone like Dr. Block, who I don't remember what year he wrote it, but he wrote his magnum opus. He wrote a massive commentary on the book of Ezekiel.

It's actually in two volumes. Volume one covers the first half of Ezekiel, chapter 1 to 24. These are all prophecies of judgment against the city of Jerusalem and the remaining people in Judah. And then the second volume is covering chapters 25 through 48 and it's giving us the glorious promises of Israel's future.

My point in saying this is Dr. Block spent 13 years of his life before he wrote these two commentary volumes. That's a big section of your life. He knows more about Ezekiel than I know.

He knows more about Ezekiel's book than you know. He knows more about the book of Ezekiel than most any person out there. His life because he's become an expert on it and how did he do that by devoting 13 years of his life?

I don't have 13 years of my life to devote to one book and I'm so grateful for the scholarship that exists out there. there, because there's not enough time in all of our lives to devote the amount of time we would need to come up with this and it wouldn't even be exhaustive, but close to, or semi, or I wished it was, exhaustive knowledge of this book.

And I could give so many other examples, a professor that taught at the seminary that I attended Gordon Conwell, seminary outside Boston, Doug Stewart. He was a professor there at Gordon Conwell, theological seminary for 40 years.

And listen to this, he's an expert in three different languages, Hebrew, Assyrian, and Babylonian. He's an expert in those three languages. I mean, how would you like to be able to write a birthday card to your wife in Assyrian, or in Babylonian?

And then you'd have to translate that for her. You say, well, what difference does that make? Here's the difference things like that make. There is a trickle down effect to all normal lay people out there in the world.

There is a trickle down effect. So here's an example. People who've read the Old Testament remember that there were people in the Old Testament referred to as Hittites, the Hittites. For centuries, there was no proof that any people called the Hittites ever existed.

We knew the Egyptians existed. We knew the Romans did and the Greeks and the Assyrians and the Babylonians, why? Because we have inscriptions. We have archaeological records that let us know those civilizations existed.

But there was no proof the Hittite nation existed until archaeological discoveries were made. It was confirmed that the Bible was true after all. There really was an ancient people called Hittite. If you don't have people like Dr. Stewart who can read Assyrian and Babylonian and all these other languages, so what if you have an archaeological find?

It simply does you know good. So I'll give you even a more practical way of understanding how helpful this is. We know that in the Old Testament, they didn't measure things in yards. They measured things in cubits.

Well, how long is a cubit? Well, actually, there's a shorter and a longer cubit in the Old Testament, but still, how long is a cubit? We don't measure cubits today. We have rulers like this.

We have yardsticks. We have tape measures. So how long is a cubit? And how can we be certain of how long is a cubit? Here's how that works. And Hezekiah's tunnel was discovered, and this wasn't that long ago either.

Hezekiah's tunnel is a place that Hezekiah in his day and age, King Hezekiah, actually had tunneled out of sheer... rock, to bring water from the Gaihan spring into the city of Jerusalem. And at the end of the tunnel, they have written on there how long the tunnel was in Cubots as they tunneled their way through.

Well, that's wonderful. Now that we have this archaeological find of Hezekiah's tunnel, and we know that it's X number of Cubots, now all you got to do is stretch a tape measure on that.

And then you convert that to Cubots in Presto, you have the answer. This, John, and many other things are things about the Bible you will never know. Just by reading the Bible, we need professional scholarship and higher education.

Have you ever wondered how the Pentecostal movement started, or how the progression of modern Pentecostalism transitioned through the latter reign, charismatic and other fringe movements into the new Apostolic Reformation? You can learn this and more on William Brannum Historical Research's website, William-Brannum.org. On the book's page of the website, you can find the compiled research of John Collins, Charles Paisley, Stephen Montgomery, John McKinnon, and others, with links to the paper, audio, and digital versions of each book. You can also find resources and documentation on various people and topics related to those movements. If you want to contribute

to the cause, you can support the podcast by clicking the contribute button at the top. And as always, be sure to like and subscribe to the audio or video version that you're listening to or watching. On behalf of William Brannum Historical Research, we want to thank you for your support. You know, you mentioned that you wished you had more time to learn it. I'm convinced, just based off of my past 13 years of experience trying to learn it, that a person who devoted their life fully to learning the Bible through the entire course of their life could never learn,

fully learn the Bible. It is impossible. One of the reasons I say this is because the language barrier, and I know I'll offend a lot of people, especially the KJV-only crowds, but the language is a funny thing to me. I grew up in a world where we were KJV-only, and we condemned everybody who had these different beliefs of what passage is meant, because their new language of their new version was different. And they would say, that's of the devil. You can see the devil is clearly seeding the new versions with something that's polar opposite of what it says. And then I began to work with other cultures and other

languages, and I was really given shell shock, because the things that I commonly say that are English, some of which came from slang that I have learned, doesn't translate in other countries, and so I'm having to explain myself very carefully at the same time.

I'm in those other countries, they've learned English, the ones interacting with me. And their culture has new things of slang and new terms that they're using freely, not knowing that I don't know it.

So we have this language barrier that kind of crosses over. So in a person's lifespan, you start to see the language itself take different meanings. And if you go a few lifespans, it can develop into an all-new language altogether.

If you don't believe me of this, go down in Louisiana and try to have a conversation with somebody. I've done it. And some of the things they say, I'm like, can you repeat that please?

And it's just the way things are. It's the way that the cultures kind of interact with each other. And some great event in one part of the world will sway the language in a direction that the other part of the world didn't get swayed.

Where I'm headed with this is the funniest example of this that I can mention. And there's thousands of examples in the Bible. But the very funniest thing is I grew up singing this song about Adam's rib and how the females came from Adam's rib and all of this stuff.

And I, Branham had this weird notion that he had a divine revelation that men had one less rib than a woman because Adam had had it ripped out, which isn't true at all. Once I went to college and I'm learning anatomy, I'm like, wait a minute.

And we have the same number of ribs. That's not right. Why did he do this? Well, and then take it a step further. I started studying the language and I'm reading a new version and it doesn't use the word rib.

It uses the word side. And I can't remember what version that is. So this troubled me. I went to look it up and sure enough in the ancient, you know, ancient, as the wrong word, in the old Queen's English, the word rib was commonly used to mean side.

And it literally meant the side of Adam. And what's funny is that same word as I was looking it up, that word is used like 40 places throughout the Bible, not to mean a physical rib, but to mean a side of something.

I think one of the examples was the side of the ark. It used the same word that was used for rib. So whenever you're thinking of Adam and Eve and there's this being that is both male and female, the side of this being was taken apart and then there was Adam and then there was Eve.

If you understand kind of what the language is saying, but it's all based off of the word rib, which in modern language has very little usage as the word side. So people literally thought that a rib was ripped out of Adam.

I don't know what you believe on this or not, but as I'm going down this study, this is just one of probably a thousand different things that I found where the language itself created a barrier for me to truly understand what it meant.

Yes. Definitely true, John. Because the Bible is foundational for all of my beliefs, for all of our... beliefs, when I first got in the ministry within a couple of years of me being a pastor and teacher, so we're talking about 40 years ago, I began a series, believe it or not, that I call biblical and extrabiblical literature.

Here I am like a 22 or 23 year old at that time, self-taught. I went to seminary after that individual, but I just wasn't happy. Just like what you're saying, you experienced John, I was not happy with the way I was hearing Dr. Freeman explain things.

There were too many inconsistencies. I knew there were gaps in his reasoning, there were holes in his arguments, and I knew that everything goes back to the Bible, so now that goes back to the original languages, and then you've got to start studying, which we did for five years.

I ended up with more than 240 or 50 messages, where we literally covered everything. I began with, what were the methods and materials of writing? They didn't have computers, typewriters, ink pens, paper. What were the methods and materials?

How were those manuscripts preserved? How were they transcribed? I just took our group of people through an exhaustive study of all that, and it gives you such an incredible foundation of confidence as you read the Bible, because when you see a new translation and it has something different than the King James Version, you're totally okay with that, as long as you understand something about the family of manuscripts.

We don't have any of the autographs. The actual letter that Paul wrote to First Corinthians when he wrote it on a piece of papyrus, or on a piece of parchment, it's called the autograph.

We don't have that. We don't have any of the autographs. We have copies of copies of copies. That's what we have. For us today, we have translations into English of copies of Greek, of copies of Greek, of an original Greek manuscript, or Hebrew manuscript.

I talked to someone on the phone the other day. Someone who was a died in the wool Freeman follower, and he is no longer following Freeman, but then he went further and began to share with me how he has now thrown out some of the most important and cardinal doctrines of the Christian faith.

I told him, I said, he said, now, will you still talk with, I said, of course, I said, I'll talk with any about it. I don't judge anybody based on anything. I think you're wrong, I'm 100%, I think you're wrong, but I love you the same, and I'm happy to talk to you, and I'm happy to discuss and dialogue and debate.

I'm happy to do that. What had caused the problem for him, John, it goes back to manuscripts and the tradition of the translation of manuscripts and what we call textual variants. It's a whole study in itself, but if people could simply think of it like this.

When Paul wrote Corinthians, he wrote it in Greek. And so probably a couple of copies of that were made and they were scattered around. And then maybe later a couple of more copies were made.

And then pretty soon that autograph, the original manuscript, it no longer existed. And for good reason, people would be worshipping the original manuscripts if we had them. But that original manuscript is no longer in existence.

And so what someone had to do is they had to make their own copy of a copy. So now you've gone from an autograph to a primary manuscript, now to a secondary manuscript. And over time, those wear out.

And so then now that one, before it wears out, we're going to make another copy. Now that's called a tertiary copy. And what happens is there are scribal errors that enter into the picture, their minor.

Their very minor is not like a new doctrine has been introduced because the people who were doing the transcribing, loved the Bible, loved the manuscript. And we're doing to the best of their ability to copy it accurately and faithfully.

But I've given students this opportunity. I said, I'll just give you Matthew. And I want you to sit down and just read Matthew and just write it. I can 100% guarantee you'll misspell a word.

What happens often is when the scribe is writing. He writes the word, you know, he sees the word, he writes it, then he looks back. And you know what he does? He writes the same line again because his eyes went up to what he had just written.

It's called the photography. So you actually have a duplication of that. Those kinds of errors are relatively easy to spot, because we do them all the time ourselves. We know why that word was written twice.

It wasn't in the original manuscript. And it wasn't in the primary copy and it might not have been in the secondary copy. It's in that third or tertiary copy. And then anybody who's copying that manuscript, this is how you end up with a family of manuscripts.

Anybody who's copying that one says, wow, it says the word mouth twice. It said he opened his mouth mouth. So that's what I have to write. And so that's how that ended up in that family of manuscripts.

So this individual I was talking to found some contradictions with numbers back in kings and chronicles. And so he said, so I can't believe God's word, because in one case it said in one As you said, 3,000 another it said 30,000 and they can't both be right.

And I said, you know what makes me sad is Hobart Freeman should have spent time dealing with textual variants and less time on divine healing and all of his crazy anti-medical stuff and you would not be having the problems you're having and believing God's word today.

One of the funniest text variances that exists in the Brannum cult, I'm sure is the Freeman cult and many of the charismatic Pentecostal world, if you cannot be given the number 666. And in fact, if you go to a hotel, you go to the 6th floor, you'll find there is never a room 666 because the reason is it's the number of the devil except for some manuscripts had 606, which makes it really funny because if you don't know the number of the devil is the number really that important. That's one of the questions I had.

But the study of, I'm glad you went to text criticism. The study of text criticism is not, for me, it's one of the most fascinating studies of all that we're talking about, but I see it as one of the most important if you came out of one of these cults. Simply put, there are more variants of text in the New Testament than there are words in the New Testament across all of the families. And this is something that, because of that mindset that I came out of, this was the most troubling thing for me. I was like this guy, I got

to throw the whole thing out. This can't be because we were taught the pinned by God method. If you taught the pinned by God method, this doesn't work yet. How can there be more variants than there are words if it was pinned by God? Well, complicate what you said, further complicate it with this fact, which I don't know if you know this one or not. In the ancient world, there, you do know that there were many people that could not read or write. And so statements like, forsake yourself not together, gather together for the reading of scripture. I can't remember the exact words, but people had to do this

because most of the people couldn't read. And most of the people didn't have the Bible for themselves. So they had to, they had to come together. But what I did not know until I went through the study of text criticism, there are actually people who were in the ancient world who could write, but could not read. And I thought, how can this be? And I'm listening to different ideas of why this was the one that made the most sense to me. If you look at the Greek language, they're all a bunch of symbols and they're very easy to duplicate.

Some of them are like squares with ticks. And you get one of those ticks in the wrong place. It means an entirely different thing than if you had the tick in the right place. And so there were people that could literally look at a tick and a square and assemble whatever it was and replicate the symbol. And so they were doing this. So you had families of scrolls where I can't think of an example off the top of my...

head, but a very reputable Christian scholar was explaining this tick since this variant down a path where this meaning is not even the same thing. And again, there's more variants than there are words in the New Testament.

If you're in the fundamentalist mindset where it's pinned by God, well, how do you carry it a step further than this? If it's pinned by God originally, well, what about the translations? Don't they have to also be pinned by God?

Well, what about the King James version? Doesn't it have to be pinned by God? Well, what about the variants and language as the language change? And you can go on and on to infinity with these types of questions.

And it comes out about the same way as this. There was this unique problem that existed in Islam. The very first time that Islamic people started to leave the earth and go into orbit to the space station because you're supposed to pray towards Mecca.

Well, if the world's spinning and it's round, which direction do you pray? And it's kind of like this, which direction do you go with the text criticism? If you're taught this thing that is totally and fully incompatible with reality.

Yeah, John, I think this is our 60th interview we've done together. And I don't think I've ever advertised myself yet. But I'm going to do it for the first and maybe the only time here.

This is a fascinating study. And on my YouTube channel, understanding scripture and truth by Chenot D. Rawls, I do have some exhaustive teachings about the doctrine of the canon of scripture, about the early manuscripts.

I mean, so exhaustive, if you just look, just go down the title. You have to go to the playlist entitled biblical and extrabiblical literature. We exhaustively studied the apocrypha, which are the books you'll find in the Roman Catholic Bible, but not in the Protestant Bible.

We looked at the pseudopigrapha, which is another group of books that made it in neither books like The Gospel of Thomas and things like that. And then, but we primarily looked at the early manuscripts and the family of manuscripts.

And as you and I have just indicated how where a scribal mistake happens in, let's say, a certain geographical region, then what you find through history is that the manuscripts that come from that area oftentimes include that same scribal mistake.

And that's how we come up with the different families of manuscripts. So, for instance, I am a lover of the King James Bible because I was brought up on it. All my scriptures are memorized out of it.

However, I am not a KJV-only guy. That is the most insane argument that anyone could possibly argue. The KJV-only guy, people literally think that the King James Bible, which is in Elizabethan English, is inspired by God.

And it is not inspired by God. It is a translation that comes from a family, a textual family called the Byzantine family of manuscripts that I don't even think is the most reliable family of manuscripts.

I don't, but I'm able to go because I'm pretty knowledgeable about all of this stuff. I am able to go through my King James Bible, which I have done, and make the corrections and make the notations myself.

West Cut and Hort, I probably better not go down that path. That is the textual, critic path that's probably going to lead you to the best manuscripts because they go back to some of the earliest manuscripts.

But again, the tape series, the messages that I have in the past are exhaustive, dealing with coptic manuscripts, which means they came from Egypt, dealing with Syriac, like the Paschetta, like Tessons, Dio Tesseron.

I mean, I know all these things off the top of my head because that was a field I studied and studied and studied. And I did it for one reason. I think similar to the journey you've been on, John.

I did it for one reason to give me confidence in this book that I call the Bible, the Word of God, when I pick it up. I wasn't foolish enough to think that just because I believe that Moses wrote the Pentateuch, I was a foolish to think that he wrote the last three verses of the Pentateuch, which record his death.

So when you say, I believe Moses wrote the five books of Moses, yeah, I do believe he wrote the five books of Moses, but there are some exceptions. An editor after him had to have added that as a post script about Moses' death.

Now, if you are one of the super weird people out there, I guess you could believe God told Moses how he was going to die, so Moses wrote it all in there, and then he died afterwards.

There are probably people out there in the cults that believe that happened. That is nonsense. I'll give you one other example, and then I know you're just dying to talk, John. When you go back into Genesis 14, it's talking about Abraham, battling some kings, and it said he chased them, I think, up as far as Dan, D-A-N.

Well, wait a minute, Dan is one of the 12 sons and 12 tribes of Jacob. He's not even born. He's not even on the scene yet, so there can't be a Dan. Dan doesn't come for many years after that.

So, most scholars understand that that's an editorial redaction in Genesis 14 that a later editor post the time of Jacob. given his twelve sons, wrote the word Dan in there so that the readers post that time would understand where in the world is he talking about.

He might have called it some other name that no one would know because that place has now been renamed Dan, the earlier place no longer exists. That is no negative reflection on the Bible being the Word of God or it being the inspired word of God.

It's just there are a lot more mechanics that go into that than people realize. This whole podcast was your idea, but I was built into a climax that you beat me too. I mentioned that the text criticism is one of the things that I strongly recommend most.

There's a reason why this is. This is a funny story, side story, but when I began to find all of the fallacies with the legends behind William Branham, one of the guys who was in the call, he came up with he apparently had been going through some of the same exercise while in the call and apparently was greatly troubled by many of the things that he thought were contradictions in the Bible.

They published this newsletter which they've now taken off of their website, but the newsletter was literally five to seven pages of where the Bible contradicts itself and how the summary of this publication was, you can't trust the Bible, so therefore if you can't trust the Bible, then you also can't trust William Branham's statements to align in the same way and therefore brothers and sisters, we must believe it anyway.

That was literally the summary which if you're not brainwashed, you look at that and you think, well, what in the world was that for? But the funny part about it was, at that point in time, I had gone through the stages of my journey in way past the contradictions into the text criticism and the irony is the things that they were mentioning as contradictions in the Bible, I had been doing apologetics for like two years and I understood the reasons why these statements were not actually in conflict.

There are many things in the Bible that are, they seem to be in conflict, but if you really understand the history, why it was written, how it was written, it's not actually so much a conflict.

There are other things that are unexplainable and those are the ones that as I'm talking with the apologists, they just simply say, well, we don't know, we don't understand it. But these other things you're mentioning, they're not conflicts.

So as I was saying, the text criticism is very critical for this one reason which you just mentioned and I'm going to build on what you said. If you understand the Bible as a thing that is pinned by God, word for word accurate and then you suddenly come in contact with something.

that a different family has a different word or some thing that defies what you believe, the whole religion falls apart. You're building it on, it's basically a false religion. If you build your religion on this false idea, you have a false religion because your foundation is incorrect.

When you read the Bible and you understand it for the meanings of what is being said, not individual words and phrases that might have problematic areas between the copies, it turns into a different book because you're understanding the message that was to be relayed.

And if you think pinned by God in your way of saying it, your words are different from mine of how you say that. But I think we're saying the same thing. If the entire idea is coming across and the idea is coming across from God and you understand the concept that is being given you, this is a much greater thing than trying to invent rules by little verses and phrases and trying to piece together the mystery of these things, which is ridiculous.

And another example of this, which I don't think you gave in what you just said, I'd have to go back and listen to it. But one of the things that hit me that was kind of funny, you mentioned the redaction.

So along with redaction, there are sometimes scribal notes. Somebody's reading, they take a note because it's their copy. What happened happened, that happened a lot. What happened was the guy who copied it, sometimes who can't read, well, he's copying the scribal notes.

And suddenly now the text has a new thing in it that wasn't in the original. If you're believing in this archaic way of trying to say that it was pinned by God, well, what do you do with the scribal notes that are in your King James Bible?

It doesn't work, it doesn't work. And so there are the idea of text criticism, people get hung up on the word, they think that that's critical thinking, critical against the Bible. It's actually a way to further proof what was original.

By comparing and criticizing the two words of two different families, you can suddenly realize and recognize which is what's more true to the original. Because it's not like today's world where you go, you take your book to a printing press and then it stamped book by book by book, every page is exactly the same.

And within each one of these families has all these variances. The only way to go back to understand what was original is to critically examine the words and phrases used in both. And that process teaches you that it reminds me a lot of like the old philosophers, if you read a philosopher, the guy who's trying to tell you something isn't where you learn it.

It's the other ones who are asking questions and it turns into a dialogue and the dialogue, the combination of all of it gives you the meaning. Well, if you read the Bible as a dialogue, as a way to understand the concepts that are being relayed.

It's much like the ancient philosophers. I didn't know we were going to end up with a whole podcast on textual criticism, but that's Basically where we ended up we got some more we'll do a we'll do another one on another topic Uh, and I hope everyone on this is probably new terminology I would think John to people textual criticism and when they hear the word criticism They think oh something evil or bad you just explain no All textual criticism is is a is a comparison of the different manuscripts You can pick any book of the Bible whether it's um Jeremiah or

First John we have different manuscripts of In the in the original languages of those books he drew for the Old Testament Greek for the New we have different manuscripts Those manuscripts don't look exactly the same We didn't have Johann Gutenberg in 1453 in the printing press once the printing press that that was the the marvel of the printing press That you can have an exact copy assuming the type is set correctly You can have an identical copying have thousands of them But you are definitely right in the other note you just mentioned John that sometimes the scribes old and New Testament scribes would

Write a note or a notation in the margin or you know between two lines There were no chapter divisions in the autographs or no verse divisions none of that existed All of that is artificial and it's okay because it helps us find things in the Bible I've had some of my students We've given them this test when Jesus his first Sermon he stood up and he was going to read something from the prophet Isaiah Well, they don't have a book Called Isaiah that you can turn to page 37. It is this long scroll that you have to open

And there are no chapter divisions and there are no verse divisions How in the world are you going to find the passage you're looking for He found the passage that he was looking for and and he read it and handed the scroll back to the minister And he said today this scripture is fulfilled in your ears and he sat back down And I said I challenge in a view I can give you a book of the Bible And if it doesn't have chapter and verse divisions you'll never find that little phrase that you're looking for

So it's good for us to have those so our encouragement To everyone my encouragement personally John if anyone is further wants to further study this go and listen to some of the earlier messages I did They are really really good and I say they even though they're mine because they're not doctrinal They're not my opinion her opinion their opinion They're just a formal study on textual criticism and on manuscript And even understanding, what's an untold?

What's a codicee? What are these things? All of that is explained. And, you know, I know I came away from all of my years of studying that just on a firm, happy, joyful footing as I read the Bible.

And as I said earlier, even though I quote from and carry the KJV, you know, I'm very familiar with all the arguments foreign against it. I'm totally up to date on that. And the KJV only debate, as I said, it's just a silly, silly debate.

The King James translation of the Bible is a beautiful translation will probably never be surpassed just because of the poetry of the language. But that doesn't mean it's accurate. It just means that it's beautiful.

And where it is inaccurate, you will need the help of some other manuscripts. And so after we talked about the textual variants, we went through early translations into other languages like Syriac and like Coptic.

And then we finally worked our way through the Latin, like Jerome's Volgate. Then we finally worked our way all the way up to Coverdale and Tendale and the early English translations and the Bishops Bible and the Geneva Bible.

And then finally, you get to 1611 and you get to the men of the Hampton Court who translated the KJV. And then you have this plethora of translations that happened during the 1900s and they're still happening today.

People always be translating the Bible. So hey, let me end with a little cute quote. I don't even remember where I heard this and I don't know if it was in high school or college, but I use it all the time in my teachings and it's called, I had six faithful friends.

I don't know if you've ever heard this before or not, John, but I just, you know, it goes down the path of encouraging people to be inquisitive. Don't believe something because some human being told you.

After all, he's just a human being. He could be a scholar, he could be a layman. He could be right if he's a scholar. He could be wrong if he's a scholar. He could be right if he's a layman.

Do your own research and it goes like this. I had six faithful friends, they taught me all I knew. Their names are how and what and why, when and where and who. I had six faithful friends, they taught me all I knew.

Their names are how and what and why, when and where and who. That's funny. You know, I'm sorry, I hijacked your podcast, I know it did, but this is something, like I said, this is one of the most important topics in my opinion for people who've left the cults.

And it's a journey that I'm still, I wouldn't even consider myself 1% into this is something for the rest. my life, I will be going through this pathway and I welcome anybody else who has left the cults, try it. And you'll, you'll find even if you don't end up in the same place as Chino or myself, I think we're probably in slightly different places in some, some cases.

Even if you don't, you'll end up in a place where you're more solid in your footing because you'll understand more about what it is. You're claiming that you believe and I'll end with this, after going through just 10% of diving into text criticism and understanding what it meant, many of the pastors that I was listening to, especially the pastors in the cult, but even some of the new ones in the modern churches I've attended, I don't really think that they understand what it is they're preaching because they don't understand what the book actually means in certain cases. But if you go through this exercise, you

do, and it puts you on a ground where your footing is more solid than even the minister who's behind the pulpit. So thank you for doing this. Yeah, we'll do another part next go around. Awesome. Well, if you've enjoyed our show and you want more information, you can check us out on the web. You can find us at William-Branum.org.

For more about the dark side of the New Apostolic Reformation, you can read Weaponized Religion from Christian identity to the NAR, available on Amazon, Kindle, and Audible.