Hearing Lloyd's comments on the GTA this morning.
As a Western Canadian, I can understand your feelings about Toronto, and so I do
understand you have some concerns about the GTA.
But some of us live in the city
because we don't get caught in the traffic, because we're in the middle of
the city and we came up I got here in 15 minutes, and I live downtown.
So you might want to consider moving back with us.
Yeah, that's not working, eh?
I think of this every time.
It happens every year.
As a kind of revolutionary note in this decade in which the tendencies are
to want to move to the edges and to define ourselves more narrowly
as a transdenominational seminary like Tyndale, who in 1894 came together because
of an Anglican, a Baptist, a Methodist, and a Presbyterian
under a banner that said neither Fundamentalist nor Modernist.
This idea, this experiment called Tyndale,
which had a number of names over the years, has become something to me.
That is something that we need to protect and to guard.
We're living in a time in which the edges
are easier to grab hold of, and a transdenominational seminary that comes
together as a big tent evangelical place in which the center pole is Christ.
And the rest of it is about our
conversation and our living together and our learning to live together.
I've begun to take that more and more as a sacred trust.
And your partnership with Tindale in
making that sacred trust possible is critical.
Just think of this.
In two weeks, I'll be signing an agreement with the Mennonite Brethren to begin the
site for graduate studies for Mennonite Brethren here in Ontario and to develop a
degree program called Anabaptist Evangelical Studies.
At the same time, they're looking at the model that you created in the Wesleyan
tradition as the model for what they're wanting to create.
Booth University College and ourselves now
have a partnership together in Salvation Army studies.
The Pentecostals Assemblies
of Canada have master's seminary, which is really Tyndale with a master's label,
the Newfoundland Pentecostals, which is a whole nother group.
If you're from Newfoundland, you'd
understand that the Newfoundland group of Pentecostals
have a partnership within the university which enables them to train entry level
pastors, and that encourages them in their theological studies.
This is a sacred trust, and I want to thank you, as the president of Tyndale for
what you have brought in, modeling some of that.
At the same time, I want to say that
we're, in a time in which this partnership is even more critical,
as we as evangelicals, in the midst of a disorienting kind of
time, don't always want to talk to us, each other.
This place called Tyndale becomes a place where that conversation can take place.
So please understand that we do not take this lightly, this partnership.
We understand it as something that God has breathed us together.
And so thank you.
Welcome to tyndale.
I'm sorry, again, we're still working on renovations.
We've been here two years. I think.
Last time we met, I had just discovered that the gas line.
Is that correct? Yeah.
I had this kind of momentary nightmare last night of remembering the gas line
prevented us from finishing the front work and today enbridge who we are.
The gas line people are coming and beginning work.
So the next few days, there'll be a bit of an upheaval.
But I'm almost
willing to assure you that next year there will be grass out
there and a parking lot and a traffic light.
That will not mean that when you turn
left, lloyd always turn right if you want to get out of the city.
If you turn left, you would be taking your life into your hand.
But with a new traffic light, you'll be safer.
So thank you for being here, and
thank you for James, who is a gift to the faculty here at Tyndale.
Is our great privilege and honor to have Dr.
Ben Witherington here with us today and tomorrow.
He is the Amos Professor of New Testament
for Doctoral Studies at Asbury Seminary, also on the doctoral faculty at St.
Andrews University in Scotland.
He studied at the University of North
Carolina, Gordon Conwell, and did his PhD at Durham in England.
He is a leading New Testament scholar, one
of the top New Testament scholars in the world.
He is in very high demand.
He mentioned this morning he takes about 50 flights a year, so that gives you a
sense of how busy he is and how in demand he is.
He's taught around the world at numerous institutions as well ashland Theological
Seminary, vanderbilt University, duke Divinity School, gordon Commonwealth.
And now you can add Tyndale to your list.
This is the part where the scholars sanctification is tested.
When I say that he's written over 40
books, I don't know, what if you have a more updated number than that?
Most of us who are scholars just ask, how is that even possible?
There must be three of him.
Well, you do have Ben withering the third,
so there must be a number two and number one somewhere.
Somewhere hidden away working.
He also appears often on television and
documentaries and specials on New Testament issues.
So it's our great pleasure, I want to ask
you, to welcome him now as he comes to give his first talk.
So what's a New Testament scholar doing at a Wesley conference?
Well, I'm here to assure you that my very first master's level job was teaching at
Duke Divinity School, and what I taught was Wesley Studies.
I taught Wesley's history, doctrine, and polity.
John Wesley said, I am a homounous libre.
I'm a man of exactly one book.
Of course, he was a man of many books.
He even did a Reader's Digest edited version of a Christian library
where he recommended excerpts from about 430 Christian classics to his burgeoning
legions of preachers and exhorters of various kinds.
But for Wesley, there was nothing that had
more authority, power or unction to function than the word of God.
And it wasn't one authority amongst many.
Sometimes you will hear Methodists talk about the quadrilateral, the authority of
Scripture, reason, tradition and experience.
For John Wesley, whatever tradition,
reason or experience was, it never trumped Scripture.
I use the word trumped lightly.
In fact, I was at a lecture not long ago
on Christianity in Malta, and I discovered that the means by which the Maltese folk
repelled the Ottoman invasion was with a trump, which is a flame, ancient
flamethrower that had a bellows attached to the back.
It was called a trump.
It was full of hot air and shot flames out in all directions.
And I thought, well, our president is aptly named.
John Wesley was convicted, like most
Protestants raised by Susannah and his father, to treat the Scriptures as the
final authority on three major subjects history, theology and ethics.
History, theology and ethics.
He did not believe it taught cosmology, he
did not believe it taught anthropology, but he was utterly convicted that it
taught history, theology and ethics, and it had the final say on those subjects.
What we're going to do in our first
session is I'm going to talk to you about the nature of the Scriptures.
I like to say a text without a context is
just a pretext for whatever you want it to mean.
And the real problem for preachers is they're constantly sound biting the
Scriptures and in danger of taking it out of context.
John Wesley taught the Greek New Testament at Oxford.
He wanted all of us to study this in its original context.
But we are so far removed now from the original context of the Bible that we've
actually largely forgotten what kind of document it is.
So I'm going to give you a sort of review in our first session about what we're
actually dealing with when we're dealing with the Bible.
We're going to talk about the oral nature
of the biblical text and their rhetorical context, and then we're going to move on
in our further sessions and talk about that messy issue of Biblical Ethics next.
Okay, this has got to work.
Here we go.
So the first thing I want to say to you is this is an ancient text.
Now, what you should notice about this
ancient text is it is written in scriptum continuum.
This is, in fact a biblical text.
It is one piece of papyrus that's part of
a manuscript of the original text of the Greek New Testament.
It is written in a continuous flow of letters.
There is no separation of words.
There is no separation of sentences.
There is no separation of paragraphs.
There are no headings, there are no punctuations and yea verily.
There are no chapters and verses that was
inserted into the text by Archbishop Steven Langton and we'll come to him.
But he was clearly an archbishop who had far too much time on his hands.
He did all the chapters and verses,
sometimes well, sometimes poorly, in the early Middle Ages.
Now, when you look at this text, it should
be immediately apparent that not everybody can read this.
In fact, the literacy rate in the biblical
era, the New Testament era, was somewhere between ten and 20%.
Okay, ten and 20%.
Let's take the next slide.
Okay, it ten to 20%.
The majority of people could not read and
write in the world of Jesus and Paul and James and Peter.
They didn't have little Gideon Bibles on their nightstand, and they could not read.
Now, reading was a more widespread skill than writing.
Writing, in fact, was the most unusual skill in that world.
Maybe five to 8% of all ancients in the world of Jesus could read or write.
Jesus did not say, let those with two good eyes read.
He said what?
Let those with ears hear.
So the level of functional literacy in the world of Jesus and Paul was extremely low.
And the people who were literate, as you
might expect, were the people who were educated.
And the people who were educated were
mostly the social elites of the Greco Roman world.
And unfortunately, ladies, that means 90% were men,
and only 2% of women were really literate in that world.
When I say literacy, then, I'm mainly talking about the ability to read, because
the ability to write was a specialty skill.
It involved scribes.
Almost all ancient documents were written
by professional scribes, including most of the New Testament documents.
For example, in Romans 16, you may have
noticed that odd greeting towards the very end of the book.
In that long greeting card of Romans 16, I Tertias greet you in the Lord.
Well, bless his heart.
He had written 16 chapters of Paul's long oral discourse.
His hand was falling off, and he figured
he had a right to be in holy Scripture, too.
And he put in this greeting.
He was the manuensis or scribe.
He's the one who wrote down that
particular wonderful letter we call Romans.
Now, next slide.
Okay, let's take a little test.
Let's take a little test.
Look under that very bottom line there.
What does that at the very end of the bottom there say?
Somebody just said, Jesus is now here.
That's a good orthodox statement.
What else could it say?
Jesus is nowhere.
Or if, like me, you're from eastern North Carolina, it could be Jeez us is nowhere.
Now, here's my point.
In an ancient biblical text with a continuous flow of letters, even how you
divide up the letters affects the meaning of the text.
It took a professional reader to do that.
There were professional writers of texts,
and there were professional readers of text.
Next slide.
This is closer to the Middle Ages, but
what you should notice is we're still doing what?
Continuous flow of letters. Right?
Now, you may notice that one new invention is a line over some of the Greek letters.
For example, in the third line down at the
end of the line, there's a theta and anew with a line over it.
That's because Christian scribes got smart.
They abbreviated the name of God, the nomad of Sakura.
The sacred names started to be abbreviated.
Theta new is, of course, God, right?
Or you might have the chi knew, which would be Christon.
So what they did to leave room and have enough space, because document writing was
very expensive in antiquity, is they would abbreviate only the sacred names.
Only the sacred names were abbreviated.
Next slide.
Now, I could go through a Zillion documents and prove to you that these were
documents for professional reading written by professional scribes.
But I'm hoping you'll just simply take my word for it.
But even when you had public inscriptions next slide.
Like this one.
This is a very famous inscription that
existed on the entranceway into the holy area in the temple in Jerusalem.
And what it said was, if you are a Gentile
and you go past this door, we have a right to stone you on the spot.
Now, you'd have to be able to read
to know that you could be oblivious, to say the least.
This is actually in the Istanbul Museum.
The Ottomans took it, along with a lot of other things, including the inscription in
the Hezekiah Tunnel back to Istanbul when they left Jerusalem.
And this is so still today in the Istanbul Museum, even public inscriptions would be
impenetrable to people that were not truly literate.
This is my point.
Even public inscriptions would be
impenetrable to people who were not more than functionally literate.
Okay, next slide.
Now, this is an important invention.
It's called pages.
Before this point in time, which began towards the late first century Ad, all
documents were written on papyrus rolls and rolled up.
For example, the Gospel of Luke would be a
roll that would roll all the way down this aisle to the door.
It's the longest by word count of all the four gospels.
It would be more than 30ft long, from Luke eleven to the end of Luke 24.
And yay verily.
That's hard to carry around.
I mean, can you imagine carrying around 66 books like that at once?
Well, this invention, which is called the codex, really changed
the way the Bible was handled and read and put together.
What it looks like, of course, is pages to us.
And this was actually the beginning of the modern book.
But remember, all of these documents are handwritten.
Until when?
Remember Gutenberg?
Remember the printing press?
What was the first book off his printing press in the 15th century?
That would be Martin Luther's bible.
Protestants were the ones who got into printing.
This is why pastors still have so many
books in their library who are protestants.
This is the beginning of a different way of dealing with this.
Next slide.
Now, I want you to look really closely,
because this is the oldest New Testament document we have.
The oldest piece of papyri we have is a
little excerpt from the Gospel of John, and it is just a tiny fragment of John
Eight, and it goes back to the second century Ad.
What is happening is that as time has gone on, of course, what New Testament scholars
have been about is exactly what John Wesley was hoping they would be about,
finding earlier and better manuscripts of the Greek New Testament
and coming closer and closer to the original text of the Greek New Testament.
Very important.
Next slide.
Now we're really getting somewhere.
Now we have columns, but even in the early
Middle Ages, which is what this is, or next slide.
Even in the later Middle Ages or even next slide.
What we have is Scriptum Continuum.
Again, even into the modern era of the church, the Bible was a pulpit Bible.
It was not a personal Bible, and it was not for general reading.
It was for professional reading from the
lectern by somebody who could actually read scriptum Continuum.
Now, I show you this slide, because
this is another important invention along the way to getting your Martin Bible.
Sewing.
But you can't sew papyrus.
So we changed the material.
We started writing on animal skin.
It's called parchment, an English word that comes from the name
of the Greek city, Pergamum, because the first place they scraped off animal skin
and wrote on it was in Pergamum in modern Turkey.
This is parchment sewn together in the middle.
This is actually a Syriac copy of the Gospel of Mark.
Next slide.
Okay, how did it begin in the biblical era?
Now, here is something that you may not know.
The only religion in antiquity that involved the people of the book that had a
sacred text was the Judeochristian tradition.
No Greek or Roman religions had a sacred book.
No ancient Near Eastern religions had a sacred book.
Even the Egyptians, who were the most
literate culture, they had the Book of the Dead, but it was not like a Bible at all.
So no religions before Judaism and then Christianity were people of a sacred book.
We are people of a sacred book.
So important was this to us that whole monasteries would spend all of their
resources copying again and again with great laboriousness, these documents down.
But it began in the River Nile with papyrus.
Next slide.
That's the plant.
The only thing that's used was the stalk.
Next slide.
So what did you do?
Well, the stalk, interestingly enough, was in this shape.
What else in Egypt is in this shape?
Pyramids.
It's in triangular shape.
They believed, get this, that the triangle was the shape of God.
Maybe that may ring some bells with you.
So they started peeling off that green outer skin.
And they would, with a very sharp paring knife, put down layer upon layer of things
to make what we would call paper, what they called papyrus.
Next slide.
So here they are.
Layering it horizontally.
Layering it vertically.
Next slide.
And here's the interesting thing.
There was enough SAP in the stem that if you made the papyrus quickly, all you had
to do in the hot, arid climate of Egypt is hang it out with a clothes bin to dry.
And the inherent SAP in the document would
keep the pieces glued together and it would simply dry.
No glue, no gorilla glue required.
This is how they made the documents on which we had our scriptures written.
Next slide.
Now, this is the ancient version of a laptop.
This is a pygmy who worked for a pharaoh.
And quite literally, he's a scribe,
very literate, and sat on the lap of the pharaoh.
And the pharaoh would whisper his words,
and the Pygmy would write down the words on a scribe scroll.
He's a scribe.
This is a statue in the Museum of Egyptology in Cairo.
This is as close to an ancient laptop as you got.
Even the pharaoh was not good enough to write down documents he needed to scribe,
even though the pharaoh himself was literate.
Next slide. All right.
Now this is interesting, very interesting.
This is from a tomb in the Valley of the Kings.
Look at the bottom left of this slide.
Women scribes.
We now have visual evidence that though the scribe profession, all the way back to
the time of Moses was overwhelmingly a male profession, that there began to be
female scribes writing down sacred or important documents in Egypt.
And there is the picture of them working away in the bottom left hand corner.
And we know from a side comment by a bishop in modern day Turkey that there
were female Christian scribes copying documents as well.
They were exceptions to the rule, but they existed.
And there's this comment from the bishop.
He said, we use a female scribe to copy the Gospel of St.
John because they have a fairer hand.
Guys, are you listening?
How's your handwriting?
You know what?
These ancient documents were hand copied.
And even then there were some women's
scribes who produced what is called a fair hand copy of an original document.
Next slide.
This is the ancient STILO, or stylus, by
which they wrote, it was made out of bronze that had a tip.
Next slide.
This is a wax tablet.
What would often happen when a scribe was taking dictation is that he would take
down the message of the letter or the document in wax on his wax tablet first.
Then he would produce a fair hand copy.
So this is the copying document, but then it would be written, because when you
write it in ink on papyrus, it's permanent.
You don't get do overs.
And so they would often do this first use a wax tablet.
This is a to blendum a learning tablet.
Next slide again.
Next slide. That's the ink.
Well, the ink was simply soot from a fire in water.
Black soot and water made the ink that produced the documents of the Bible.
Next slide.
Another inkwell.
And again.
Now, this is one of my favorite slides of all.
This is little publius at his lessons.
This is a Roman learning scene.
The man in the center is a Greek teacher.
Almost all of the great teachers in antiquity were Greeks.
This is one of the reasons Romans conquered the world so they could conquer
people who were smarter than they and then put them to work.
And the Greeks were used for education all over the Roman Empire.
So you have a Greek teacher in the center, and his assistant is on the left.
And then there is a guy behind Little Publius.
You may notice that Little Publius is not real happy about learning, okay?
The man behind him is not holding the lunchbox.
That is the Pythagogos, not the teacher.
A Pythagoras is a slave that walks Little Publius to school.
In fact, carrying his inkwell, his stylus, his papyrus.
That's what was in that little lunchbox, okay?
And when he got home, the Pythagos would do what?
He would rehearse the alphabetas with Little Publius for his next lesson.
So he was semi literate.
He could help him with the alphabet and whatnot.
When Paul says that the Mosaic Law is like a Pythagogos until the time had fully come
and Christ came, he is not saying that the Mosaic Law was a teacher for God's people.
No, he's saying that the Mosaic Law was a childminder, a nanny.
He had kept God's people in line until the time had fully come and Christ came forth
to liberate those under the law out from under the law.
That's the Pythagos.
He is a domestic slave who helps with education.
Next slide.
Now, this is what ancient libraries looked
like which required professional librarians.
And by the way, there were no lending libraries.
There were rich people that had their own libraries.
And there were major public libraries in Alexandria, in Pergamum, in Rome.
And the only people that handled these
documents on the shelf would, in fact be librarians.
And how could they tell one scroll from another?
Well, at the end of the scroll, there would be what is called a syllabus, from
which we get the word wait for it syllabus.
A syllabus is a toe tag that identifies what's in the document.
It would say things like katalukon, according to Luke and as it used to be
true with us and Vh tapes, we wouldn't rewind them when we returned the movie.
Well, they didn't rewind the documents either.
So the tag was at the end of the document to tell you what was in the document.
Because when you got the document and you
read it in the library, couldn't check it out.
You had to do this for 30ft to get to the
beginning of the document and then read it.
This is the original kind of thing that
the Word of God went through to get communicated to us.
Next slide.
So this is a drawing of what the library
in Alexandria, the most famous library in antiquity, would have looked like.
And it would indeed have looked like this.
You would have unrolled a scroll on a table and read it right where it was
because you were so not taking that out of the library.
Next slide.
Look at this.
You notice how papyrus is see through?
Could you write on both sides of the document?
No, because the dark black ink would bleed through.
So documents that even when we went to
codex form and pages couldn't be written on both sides.
Next slide.
More papyrus.
Next slide.
And again.
All right, now, here's where the rubber
meets the road, because I want you to understand the impact of all of this.
These are oral texts.
They were never meant to be read silently.
They were always meant to be read out loud.
And in the earliest phases of
Christianity, they were read out loud by professional readers.
Look at what Revelation one three says.
It says, Blessed is the one who reads
these words out loud, and blessed are those who hear it.
You see the distinction?
There is one person who is the reader which is not you.
This is the professional lecturer.
Blessed is the one who reads this
document, the Book of Revelation, out loud.
And blessed are those who hear it and obey it.
The Bible is an oral text.
It was meant to be heard in its original languages and in the original languages,
it had alliteration affonates, rhythm, rhyme, anamatapia.
A third of its rhetorical force is lost in translation.
Let me say that again.
A third of the rhetorical force of the
Word of God, as we call it, was lost in translation.
Originally, the Document of Revelation would be taken through these seven
churches by somebody who could read it professionally and separate the words, the
sentences, the paragraphs with dramatic pauses at the right place because he
already knew what was in the document and read it out loud.
The Bible was meant to be heard and received.
And here's another revelation.
Next slide.
Here's our guy who separated things into chapters and verses.
You may blame him for the chapter and verse divisions which are not inspired by
the way they had no part of these documents before the Middle Ages.
Here's the other part of this that you need to understand.
In the New Testament, when you hear the
phrase Word of God logos to the, it
never, ever refers to a book, not once.
It refers to the oral preaching of the inspired text.
So, for example, the Word of God is powerful, sharper than
a two edged sword that pierces between bone and marrow.
He's not talking about a written text,
he's talking about the oral preaching and the effect it has on people or in Paul.
In One, thessalonians 213, he said,
you received the word of God when you heard it from me, as it actually is the
Word of God and not merely the words of human beings.
Everywhere.
The phrase word of God occurs in the New Testament.
It refers to the oral proclamation of the truth.
Not once does it refer to a text.
Twice it refers to Jesus himself.
He is the Word of God in John One, he's also the Word of God in another place, in
the Book of Revelation, but everywhere else, in Acts, in Paul, in Hebrews, when
we have the phrase Word of God, it refers to an oral proclamation of a truth.
Orality was primary, texts were secondary.
And this is one of the things that made the earliest Christians such a peculiar
people, because they actually believed that texts could have a final authority.
Whenever they wanted to talk about a
sacred text, they didn't use the phrase Word of God, they used the phrase hey.
Graphe the Scriptures, the writings is what it literally means.
So, for example, Two Timothy 316,
all writings, Scripture, are what God breathed.
They're God breathed and profitable for
teaching, suitable for training in righteousness.
Mainly what is mentioned there in Two
Timothy 316 is the ethical thrust of the text.
It's training in righteousness that the author is most concerned about.
And what he is prepared to say is that God
has breathed his very life into these writings.
Now, ancient peoples had to be convinced
about that because they believed that prophecy was an oral thing.
You went to the oracle at Delphi in Greece
and it needed to be heard, it needed to be audible to make sense and to inspire you.
It's a new thing to have a people of a sacred book in a strongly oral culture.
We think texts are the final authority.
They thought the living voice is the final
authority in the world in which Paul proclaimed the good news of Jesus Christ,
the Greco Roman world believed, I need to hear it before I believe it.
We say, I need to see it before I believe it.
That's a very different culture.
So our culture is very different.
We give primacy to written texts as final authorities.
They gave primacy to the living voice as
the final authority, and texts would be secondary authorities.
A very different thing.
So what's happening in the Bible is that
we are beginning to have a culture of texts, of sacred texts, of authoritative
texts, and it was Jews and Christians that first set that whole thing in motion.
Very important for us to understand this.
Even when you get to the second century and you have a church father like Papius,
he says this I was not so persuaded by the things I have read, but.
I longed to hear the living voice of John
the Elder or Aristian or some of the original eyewitnesses.
For after all, it is the living witness that is the final authority.
Texts are secondary.
How do we in the 21st century who are text driven textbound people,
come to grips with the fact that texts were seen in antiquity as secondary
authorities to the living preaching of the word?
We need to think about these things, especially when it comes to ethics, and
that's what we're going to do in our subsequent sessions.
Thank you very much.