Episode 20: The Dead Sea Scrolls, Why Pastors Talk about Controversial Bible Issues, Textual Criticism, and Guarana Antarctica Soda Review with Textual Criticism Expert Dr. Anthony Ferguson

0:00 So why should pastors talk about controversial Bible passages and difficult Bible origin questions with church members? Old Testament scholar, Dr. Anthony Ferguson answers. You know, in the book of Proverbs, Solomon takes his son up on the roof and he points out the prostitute. And he says to the person who's pursuing her, that is the pathway to hell. And so what I mean by that is that there is an appropriate form of exposure that we can give to our church members. And I think we should do that. I think we should be the ones who introduce our members to the most difficult topics.

0:44 The north central coast of California and the beautiful Redwoods. The Every Church Flourishing podcast is all about helping churches, leaders, and pastors find health, encouragement, practical advice, soul care, and resources that work together to build up your local fellowship and the broader kingdom of God. Join hosts, Pastor Chris Cole and Dr. Chase Thompson from the Great Commission Association, led by Dr. Mike Stewart, as they explore the frontiers of ministry and aim for the goal of making every church flourish. Hello, everybody, and welcome into episode number 20 of the Every Church Flourishing podcast. We are a ministry of the Great Commission Association of California, and we are always looking for pastors, churches, people, and groups to partner with who value the Word of God and the Great Commission.

1:33 If you are interested in partnering with us, reach out through our website, G-C-A-S-B-C dot org. That is G-C-A-S-B-C dot org. Today on the podcast, we talked to Dr. Anthony Ferguson, an Old Testament textual criticism expert and pastor about some pretty deep Bible nerd stuff, including how can pastors talk about the background of the Bible without turning the church into a seminary? Now, some of this short interview is pretty deep, but if you feel lost, never fear. We're going to process through a little bit of what we discussed at the end of the episode today, right after Cal Baptist ministry student JC and I review Brazil's number one Coke competitor.

2:21 So like me, Dr. Ferguson was taught in seminary not to use Greek or Hebrew in sermons. And also like me, he pretty routinely ignores this advice, which raises a question that the third part of our interview today with Dr. Ferguson brings up, why would we focus a whole episode on some of the more academic points of the Bible, including textual variants, the Dead Sea Scrolls, biblical origins, and that sort of thing? Well, at least one of the answers to that question Dr. Ferguson addressed in our open, and that is, if you don't, somebody else will. And shouldn't a pastor be the one to shepherd the people through those issues rather than somebody else?

3:02 Well, let's nerd out for a second. I know that you are much more than a hobbyist in the field of textual criticism and I think it's pretty fair to say that nearly all church members. Most pastors and leaders are quite ignorant of textual criticism. I guess my question is, should they be? I went to a Christian college in the South in the 90s, and I was exposed to a special kind of attack on the Bible, kind of spearheaded by Spong and John Dominic Cross and the Jesus seminar later on by Bart Ehrman and people like that, that really used sort of academic means to undermine the reliability of the Bible.

3:45 And one of which was just the fact that there were so many. Textual variations out there. Now, I grew up in the church. I grew up in solid churches. Frank Barker, Briarwood Christian, and one of the flagship PCA churches and some really good large Baptist churches in the South. But when I got to college, I was very ignorant of these textual variants and paleography and textual criticism and all of that. And so when I first started hearing German higher criticism, it shook me. I went through quite a bit of doubt to hear these very smart people making fairly sophisticated, and I would say sophisticated for this guy, not genuinely sophisticated, arguments against the reliability of the Bible.

4:30 And to this day, I would say pastors and church members are largely ignorant about textual criticism and the origins of the Bible. And I think scholars like Wesley Huff, who's very popular, are doing things to ameliorate and help that situation. So what do you think, Dr. Ferguson? Is this something that pastors should talk about more from the pulpit? And if so, how do we do that without kind of turning the church into a seminary? That's a really good question. Okay, first question, should they be ignorant? No, I don't think they're able to be ignorant because of the issue that you brought up.

5:11 Now, can they be an expert? Absolutely not. I mean, the amount of time it's taken me like reading manuscript, I'm a bit obsessive. And so doing manuscripts really aligns with my personality because I want to get to the bottom of things. I don't even want to read. Here's my Vulgate. I don't have, whereas my tuogen is somewhere. I think it's down here somewhere, but I don't even want to read a printed edition. Like I want to read a manuscript. So I'm I'm obsessive. I want to get to the bottom of things. So like, yeah, they shouldn't be ignorant, but we can't expect pastors and ministry leaders to be experts in all things. That is really, really difficult. I think the problem with, in particular, the Dead Sea Scrolls is there's many, if any, experts who are evangelicals.

5:53 I don't know, would you call me an expert? I have a contract to publish my dissertation with TNT Clark. Maybe once I publish that, then you can call me an expert. I mean, I do have a PhD in the field. I have academically published things in JBL and other journals. There's another expert, Drew Longacre, who is a good friend, but there's just not many. So what you have in the field of Dead Sea Scrolls is you have a lot of non-Christian who interpret the data from a non-Christian perspective, and they come up with maybe coherent arguments. And I would say, Chase, they might be very sophisticated arguments. They don't believe the Bible. They might even have an ax to grind against the Bible. So they're reading everything in terms of that worldview.

6:37 So who would a pastor turn to, right? I would recommend any listeners to look at Texting Canon Institute. Texting Canon Institute is a very helpful resource. The Evangelical Textual Criticism blog spot, where I blog with several others, is very, very helpful. The issue with both of those is that most of the scholars there are New Testament textual critics. There are very, very few Evangelical Old Testament textual critics. Now, Peter Gentry is an amazing evangelical, but he was a Septuagint scholar. So he produced people like John Mead, who is another great scholar, but he again is Septuagint. He's getting more and more involved in the Dead Sea Scrolls because of the influence of Wes Huff. And he's very, very competent.

7:20 He does a great, great job. But there's just not a lot of experts who can synthesize the data and then articulate the data in a way that's both trustworthy, like they're actually Interpreting the data properly, but then also faithful. And that's what I've tried to do is that, so just for example, if you look at a lot of apologetic sources, they'll say things like, the great Isaiah scroll proves that the book of Isaiah has been preserved letter by letter. I mean, even Wes Huff mistakenly said that on the Joe Rogan show. And I know Wes Huff, We've talked multiple times, and Wes Huff is great. Wes Huff is doing a great, great job. Wes Huff has already admitted that was a mistake. He didn't mean to say that. He was thinking of 1Q, Isaiah, B.

8:04 But that just illustrates the fact that it's so easy to misrepresent the Dead Sea Scrolls. And if you pull up any apologetic book off your shelf from an apologist who isn't an expert on the Dead Sea Scrolls, they're going to tell you the Dead Sea Scrolls prove their liability of the Bible. Well, the real thing about the Dead Sea Scrolls is, yes— They do prove the reliability of the Bible, but it's much more complicated than that. And so one of the problems that we have is we tell our students, oh, the Bible has been preserved with accuracy. Or we say they counted letter by letter to make sure no letters were missing. They make these arguments, and then somebody like yourself then goes to a state university, and Abart Ehrman, or Eugene Ulrich, or an Emmanuel Tov, rightly says, look at all the variants.

8:48 What do they do? So this makes me think about the book of Proverbs. You know, in the book of Proverbs, Solomon takes his son up on the roof and he points out the prostitute. And he says to the person who's pursuing her, that is the pathway to hell. And so what I mean by that is that there is an appropriate form of exposure that we can give to our church members. And I think we should do that. I think we should be the ones who introduce our members to the most difficult topics, issues of justice and injustice, textual variety, textual plurality, fluidity, all of the difficult things in this world, the problem of evil. I don't want the people on 11th Street to be learning the problem of evil from a non-Christian. I don't want them to be learning epistemology from David Hume, right? I don't want that.

9:32 I want them to be learning it from a biblical perspective. So, yes, pastors should not be ignorant to textual criticism. Yet, textual criticism is very complex, And the Dead Sea Scrolls in particular has a dearth of experts who are both evangelical and experts, right? So there's not a lot of information. So although ignorance is no excuse, I'm very sympathetic. Now, what do I do? I don't, I was told in seminary, you should never talk about Greek and Hebrew from the pulpit. I do it often. And I don't do it in a way that's condescending and I don't do it in a way that's prideful. I try not to. So, for example, onomatopoeia, the word in English is the same word in Hebrew, sh.

10:15 So that would be an example where I might say, like, the Hebrew here is onomatopoeia, where the word is the same as it sounds. And, well, I do that often. Or if there's a textual variant and I think it's significant, I'll tell the church, listen, the ESV says this, but I think the ESV is wrong, and here are the reasons why. And I have no—I'm exposing the people at 11th Street often to these types of topics. And I try to do it in a way that's not arrogant, but also exposes them. Sometimes if the issue is minor, I won't mention it. There are some times I think the ESV is wrong, but I don't know exactly how the way to communicate it, so I'll still preach the ESV. And that, my friend, is a very interesting question that we can save for another time or an academic publication in the future.

10:58 So, I mean, so in all of these ways, I'm exposing the church in either very explicit or implicit ways to textual criticism. And I'm not afraid. The people at Texting Canon Institute, John Mead, Peter Gurrie, say we shouldn't be afraid of truth. And I think that's exactly right. Let's give God's people the truth about the Bible manuscripts, and let's also give them a faithful way to interpret the data. That's what I want to do. And you're not very familiar with the world of textual criticism. Dr. Ferguson is not saying the Bible is wrong. He is saying the translators of the ESV are not infallible in some of the translation calls they make. And you know, a really good book, and Pastor Christopher is about to close us out with the last question, but a really good book that I think is good for pastors.

11:42 Might be a little high level for some, not all church members, but you've mentioned Peter Gurry a couple of times. Elijah Hickson and Peter Gurry came out with a very short and helpful book, Myths in New Testament Textual Criticism, that I think helps inoculate pastors from sharing, I don't know, apologetics myths, like you were mentioning earlier. Some of the things that people smooth over a little bit that Emmanuel Tove, Herb Bart Ehrman, would not smooth over so much. And I think it's very helpful, as you say, for church members, pastors, leaders to know truth and to promote truth. Okay, over to you, Pastor Christopher. Anthony, we're so glad that you've been on the show with us.

12:22 You've got such a broad range of expertise, and we can't wait to have you back. I want to have you back just for an episode to talk about how pastors can apply the Old Testament when they're preaching it to people in current contexts, and love to hear you unpack that. So hopefully we get you to come back on our show and do that with us. Just, you've got your average church members listening to this podcast, sort of people who say, I'm not an expert. Other people who say, yeah, I'm a church leader or I'm a biblical scholar. Other people, pastors, maybe others that are listening. So real quick, maybe you could do it this way.

13:03 Top three or four recent takeaways that the average church member would just be so blessed or encouraged by from recent Dead Sea Scrolls scholarship that you would just say, hey, here's some really cool things. They're just fun to know, or they might be life transformative. So Wes Huff said 1QISA is word for word identical to the Masoretic text. So that was a mistake. But I would say there are some Dead Sea Scrolls that are letter by letter identical to the empty text. So I think that can be an encouragement. The second thing I would say is the best way to interpret the data is to see that some scribes approached copying with a more dynamic approach and the ability to make adjustments to the text.

13:46 But alongside that approach, there is a very conservative approach to copying. So really the goal, my goal in textual criticism is to identify the conservative approach to copying. And often what happens is the evangelicals only think about the conservative approach. And then the mainline news articles only focus on the dynamic approach. Nobody, some people, but the goal is to bring those things together, right? So I would say amid the diversity of readings in the Old Testament, there is a unity that is very, very close to the Masoretic text. And that's what my book is attempting to show and what my dissertation showed as well. So there are letter for letter. When you put it all together, there is, we see God's sovereignty in it all.

14:29 I would say also to the average person who's watching this, maybe who's somebody who's like in Chase's situation, what if God in his sovereignty and providence only preserved the diversity? Ask the question, what if in God's sovereignty, he only preserved manuscripts in the Dead Seas that are wild and non-aligned? And there was no evidence of a conservative approach to copy. He could have done that, but he didn't. So in my mind, I am very grateful to God and I rejoice in God that he allowed us to see a conservative approach all the way back. I would finally say that Dead Sea Scroll scholarship, I think one of the problems is there's an absence of practitioners who are also Dead Sea Scroll experts, and that's kind of hard, right?

15:12 Drew Longacre, he's a pastor as well, and I would highly recommend him. The people at Qumran loved the Bible. They believed that if you disobeyed the Bible, you would be kicked out of their community. They even thought if you disobeyed it in the smallest of details, you'd get kicked out. So they thought they could obey the Bible. And yet, when you look at their copies of the Bible, they had different versions of Isaiah. And what I mean is that there's differences in their Isaiahs. And yet, they believed they could obey Isaiah completely. So what I would say to the listener is that I think the people in Qumran are doing to the Bible the same thing we're doing. Use my Bible. I sing my Bible. I adapt my Bible to be a Jesus storybook Bible Bible. I adapt my Bible to be a new mother's Bible Bible, right?

15:54 I take verses about greed and I put it into a different form of the Bible, excerpted Bible, so I don't have all the passages about greed together, right? Why am I doing this? Why do we like Chosen? For those of you who like Chosen, I know that's a bit, you know, everybody likes that. But what are they doing? They're reworking the Bible. Why? Because they love the Bible. Here's my final example. Shane and Shane, if you don't know who Shane and Shane is, they have a song called Psalm 23. But when you listen to Psalm 23, it's not Psalm 23. Redone Psalm 23. They've added words and reworked words and done all these things. But why have they done that? Is it because they don't believe in the authority of the Bible? Is it because there's not an authoritative, canonical Psalm 23?

16:34 No, it's because they love the Bible. And I would say, I think what's the best way to interpret the evidence from the Dead Sea Scrolls and Qumran is just that. You have people who love the Bible and are using the Bible and believe you can obey the Bible. and that they're doing the same thing that we're doing today. So I think amid a diversity, the best argument is that when we talk to the people Who made the changes in the second, first century BC, they were people who believed that the Bible was stable, steadfast, and that you could obey it. They knew what it was. So I think that's an encouragement. Well, that is a great ending point. Dr. Ferguson, we have soaked up almost 90 minutes of your time and I have enjoyed every second of it. Thank you for your time. Thank you for your insights.

17:21 Thank you for pastoring and being a scholar. We don't have enough of those. And God bless you and your family. You guys have been great to us on the podcast and we really appreciate you. Absolutely. See you guys. Okay, that was short, but pretty deep. Some of you might have some fried brains right now, so let's hit a refreshing South American beverage really quick to perk us up, and then we're going to talk about the deep academic world of the Bible and why it's important for regular church members to know these sorts of things. So today, we are reviewing an interesting soda from Brazil, Guarana, Antarctica Zero.

18:02 The diet version of Brazil's national soft drink. Have you ever tried this before, JC? I have not. It looks good. I like the colors. Solid green right there. Yeah, it's really pretty. That's a Guadagnac fruit on the front of it, which reminds me of some Guadagnac trivia. Number one, it is made from the Amazonian Guadagnac plant, which is called the eyeball fruit, because the cherries-looking things, The fruits of the Guadagnac plant look exactly like creepy bloodshot eyeballs when you cut them open. Number two, the Guadagnac berry has twice the jolt of caffeine, maybe as much as four times because Guadagnac berries and coffee berries both have caffeine, but Guadagnac has two to four times more caffeine than coffee berries.

18:55 And finally, as I mentioned earlier, this is Brazil's Coca-Cola killer. In fact, it was so popular in Brazil that Coca-Cola had to make a competitor called Kuat just to try to get into the Guadagnar market. So what do you think this is going to taste like, JC? Honestly, this is the first time I've ever heard about this drink, but it has been a long day at work and hearing about caffeine, that's exciting. I'm looking forward to this. I have no idea what that fruit tastes like, but that's, that's going to be cool. Okay. Let's open her up and give it a shot. Let's do it. It's a nice, crisp open. I like that. It's definitely got more of a smell than our soda from last week, the liquid death billionaire drink.

19:42 Yeah, I like that smell. That's appealing. Okay, let's give her a drink. Wow. Wow. That is a really interesting, different flavor. What is that? That's insane. That's good. That is really good. It is good, but I don't even know what to compare it to. Yeah, I don't even know how to describe that. I don't either. It's a really interesting taste that's very uncommon for an American. It's almost like a citrus grape.

20:23 If a grape had a little bit of that lemon taste, almost, something close to that. Yeah. I'm getting a little bit of maybe cherry. I don't know. It's sort of like a cherry ginger ale but even there it's not it's just different there there's nothing in america that i'm aware of and i've drank a lot of soft drinks that's like this one this is good it's a good it's a zero it's a guadalas zero which means no calories which does mean artificial sweeteners but it doesn't have any aftertaste it's really good hmm what do you think what are you going to give it jc honestly this one's going to be really high i i drink a coke zero probably almost every single day thanks to your wonderful supply of them and this might be a competitor with my beloved coke zero i'm gonna have to give that a four point i i like that that's good i'm going to dial it back just a bit but still very high for me as well 4.5 so bravo brazil for your wonderful job good job guadalanta antarctica zero yeah i think i'm gonna finish this whole thing this is this is good, Okay, well, we'll see you next week for more Soda Reviews.

21:46 Thanks for your time, JC. Hope you can sleep tonight. And we've already discussed one reason why we had a discussion with Dr. Ferguson today on textual criticism. Bible variants, all the Bible nerd stuff, the origin of the Bible. Let me give you one more reason that I alluded to earlier. This is very personal. I grew up going to two great churches in my youth, Hilldale Baptist Church in Centerpoint, Alabama, and Briarwood Presbyterian in the Altadena-Cahaba Heights area of Birmingham. Both those churches had pastors who taught me in no uncertain terms to value the Word of God, obey it, and live by it. They honored the Word with their teaching and they taught it well, and I am so grateful for that.

22:32 However, and this is not a complaint at all about either of those two churches, I may have simply missed what I'm about to talk about because young Chase was an ADHD rascal that would rather read a book in church than listen to the pastor. So it is that I might have just flat missed any discussions on the origins of the Bible, on manuscript transmission, on paleography, textual criticism. Textual variance, all that sort of thing. And when I finally began to learn about those things in college and grad school, they kind of blew me away. I was initially overwhelmed by the origins of the Bible. We don't have Paul's original letters or the original gospels.

23:14 Some of the handwritten Bible manuscripts have variants. The story of the woman caught in adultery and the longer ending of Mark isn't in the earliest and most reliable Bible manuscripts. What about for thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever. Amen. That also isn't in the earliest and most reliable Bible manuscripts, but I grew up saying that every week in church. So finding these things out in rapid succession shook my faith, and it led me to a time of deep, dark doubt that I shared with no pastor or friend, because I reasoned if my pastors growing up never mentioned this stuff.

23:55 Maybe they didn't know about it. So I was alone and eaten up with doubt, and it was really a deep dive academic study, actually, of the resurrection of Jesus and all of the many evidences that point towards that event happening in historical reality that God used to bring me out of that doubting period and largely made me who I am today, a pastor who cares deeply about the Word of God and the origins of the Word of God too, and a guy who wants to equip church members to not go through the same experience I had. So let's talk briefly about the science and academics of biblical study, Starting with a basic question, what is textual criticism and why does it not mean criticizing the Bible?

24:42 Well, Dr. Michael Kruger is a New Testament textual criticism expert. He's written a great beginner's article on the topic, which is on the gospelcoalition.org website, but I also have it linked on our website, everychurchflourishing.com, under the episode notes for this episode, episode 20. And I want to use his definition of textual criticism here and his explanation of it. Dr. Kruger writes, Outside of archaeology, the only way we can know what might have happened during a period of human history is because someone somewhere wrote about it. While people wrote on a wide range of materials from stone to pottery to wood, the most common were papyrus or parchment, which are essentially ancient versions of paper.

25:30 If a person wrote a historical or literary document and wanted to see that document distributed, then copies would have to be made. Copies were done by hand, usually by trained scribes, although sometimes by amateurs. As documents wore out over time, and they do wear out because they're made of paper and animal skin and papyrus, more copies would have to be made so that the text could be preserved for future generations. During the copying process of any ancient document, scribes occasionally made mistakes. Most were just ordinary slips of the pen or spelling differences or word order changes, accidental omissions or doubling of letters or whatever, but now and then scribal changes would be more significant.

26:23 This means that when we compare copies of any historical document, there are likely to be points where the text is different. Unlike books published by a printing press where all copies are usually exactly the same, hand-copied manuscripts have inevitable textual variations and Pretty much every copy of the Bible, every copy of every book of the Bible was hand-copied up until almost 1500. So essentially nearly 1500 years of church history, our scriptures were copied by hand. Here we come to the core purpose of the discipline of textual criticism, which is to restore as much as possible the original wording of any historical document in this case. the Bible.

27:13 Other aspects of the discipline are important, but there are debates about how accessible the original text is and whether we can ever really reach it after hundreds, over a thousand years of manual copying. Regardless, neither of these things changes the main goal of the discipline of textual criticism, which again is working towards. Reconstructing the original text that came off of the pen of Paul, Matthew, Mark, Luke, John. The core purpose of the discipline of textual criticism is to restore, as much as possible, the original wording of any historical document.

27:57 Now, that reveals that this discipline doesn't just pertain to the study of the New Testament or the Old Testament. Every ancient text is in the same boat. It's a good reminder that the presence of textual variance is not anything scandalous or shocking or unusual. On the contrary, it's natural and ordinary. It's an inevitable part of studying any historical text. Now, that's not to suggest, says Dr. Kruger, that all ancient documents are transmitted with equal degrees of fidelity. Some are preserved better than others. And a number of scholars have argued that the New Testament has been transmitted with an impressive degree of faithfulness. And I wholeheartedly agree with Dr. Kruger there.

28:44 Now, from what he said, I'd like to share with you pastors and teachers four ways to shepherd your flock through these issues, all of which come from a great article by Justin Dillehay, who is a pastor and a scholar, that is also linked on our site and that offers these four tips. Number one, pastor or leader, know your flock. How well you can shepherd them through these academic discussions of the Bible will vary depending on the size of your church. But as much as possible, know what kind of people sit in your congregation. What are their backgrounds? What Bible translations are they using? He says that in his context, some of my older hearers use the King James Version.

29:28 Others come from a fundamentalist King James only background or have friends in those circles. Be aware that some people have been trained to believe that it is a satanic conspiracy when modern translations remove passages and phrases in the King James Version because they don't appear to represent the original text of the Bible. You may have found this argument easy to laugh about with your seminary buddies back in the day, but you'll feel differently when you're dealing with a troubled or angry parishioner who actually believes it. When you assume everyone listening to you shares all your assumptions. It's easy to speak about the idiots out there who believe stupid things.

30:12 You need to be aware that some of those people are probably sitting in your audience and they're not idiots. They're sheep in the flock of Jesus and they deserve to be taught and shepherded, not belittled. Number two, textual criticism may sound bad. Who wants a pastor who criticizes the text of scripture, right? But it's actually not. Textual criticism, strange name I know, is the unavoidable process of evaluating different manuscript readings in order to determine what the authors originally wrote. Maybe you've heard that there are thousands of ancient Greek manuscripts of the New Testament. Well, what do we do with those manuscripts, especially when there are different things written on them?

30:57 And there are sometimes extra spaces, extra letters, extra mistakes, whatever, because these things were hand copied. And I know, Pastor, you're not an expert in textual criticism and you shouldn't pretend to be, but that doesn't mean you can't learn from the experts. And today we have more resources than we ever have before. For instance, evangelical textual critic Daniel Wallace, I'm a big fan of his, has entire courses available for free online. There is a new book we mentioned earlier in the interview by Peter Gurry and Elijah Hickson, Myths and Mistakes in New Testament Textual Criticism that Can Help Pastors Out, and James R.

31:44 White has done a great job of teaching why a Christian should not be King James Only in his book, The King James Only Controversy. These kinds of teachings don't have to be boring. Christians want to know why their Bibles differ from each other, and you can teach them the basics. Number three, assure them these issues are not new. Christians who worry about the omissions in new translations are usually the kind of people who have a respect for the old and reservations about the new. That's why it can be helpful to assure them that though these issues might be new to them, they are not new to the church.

32:25 For example, while recently studying the missing ending of the Lord's Prayer, I discovered that William Tyndale didn't include it in his first English translation of the Bible all the way back in 1526. Knowing that Tyndale is someone who my congregation reveres as a godly martyr as well as a good Bible translator, I made sure to share that fact with them. And I've also found it useful to point out that the original King James Version included textual variants in the margin, and the translators defended this practice against the same objections that some people still have. If it was good enough for the King James translators, it'll likely be good enough for them.

33:08 These things are not new to the church. They have been discussed on paper since at least the 300s, probably much earlier. Finally, number four, pastor, leader. Bible teacher, model faithfulness to the word of God. Your congregation doesn't just need to trust God's word. They need to be able to trust you. You can say all the right things, but it won't matter if they're not convinced that you trust the Bible and would never dream of tampering with it. Hopefully, they'll charitably grant you their trust at the beginning, but over time, you need to earn it. You need to model both theological integrity and also intellectual virtue. I can't promise that everyone will like you, and you won't convince everyone, but over time, your example, and hopefully your integrity, will exert influence, and people will see that the presence of textual variance in the Bible doesn't need to shake anyone's faith.

34:06 And perhaps when young people in your church get to college and they read Bart Ehrman, they'll be able to say, hey, this is nothing new. I learned about this sort of thing in youth group or Sunday school or even on Sunday morning. Well, amen to all that. I hope this will equip you pastor and leader in the church to better shepherd and lead the people you have been entrusted with. And I hope that our non-pastor listeners have learned a bit more about the Bible as we have discussed it. The deeper I go into an academic study of the Bible, the more convinced I am that the Bible accurately and powerfully preserves the Word of God, and it contains everything we need for life and godliness.

34:48 That's all for now. Next week, Pastor Christopher and I sit down with Dr. Kathy Smith for a wide-ranging conversation that centers on helping women in the church flourish. Stay tuned. Good day to you, and God bless you.