Data Over Dogma Podcast

Currently Playing: We've Never Found the Original Bible Manuscripts

Everybody does textual criticism — including the people who insist it's the devil's work. This episode we dig into how scholars actually reconstruct the earliest recoverable form of the biblical text: why there's no original manuscript of any biblical book, what a credit-card-sized scrap of John can and can't tell us, and how a single letter in John 1:18 turns a unique Son into a unique God. Plus, Erasmus back-translating Revelation out of Latin, the verses your Bible quietly dropped, and the paragraph of Samuel that the Dead Sea Scrolls handed back to us. _______________________________________________ Get your Data Over Dogma merch at our online store: https://data-over-dogma-shop.fourthwall.com/ _______________________________________________ Support Data Over Dogma and get every episode early and ad-free, plus exclusive bonus content — become a patron: https://www.patreon.com/DataOverDogma _______________________________________________ Listen to the podcast on every app: https://pod.link/1681418502 _______________________________________________ Follow us: Instagram — https://www.instagram.com/dataoverdogmapod TikTok — https://www.tiktok.com/@data.over.dogma.pod Threads — https://www.threads.com/@dataoverdogmapod X — https://x.com/data_over_dogma Facebook — https://www.facebook.com/DataOverDogmaPod _______________________________________________ Get Dan McClellan's New York Times bestselling book, The Bible Says So: https://static.macmillan.com/static/smp/bible-says-so-9781250347466/ _______________________________________________ Chapters: 0:00 Cold open 0:45 This week: textual criticism 1:59 KJV onlyism pushes back 3:11 Truth versus certainty 4:08 The KJV's own textual criticism 5:01 It started with Homer 6:00 The earliest recoverable text 7:17 No originals survive 8:33 The Hebrew Bible gap 10:17 Qumran and Origen's Hexapla 11:50 Erasmus and seven manuscripts 14:03 When it became a science 14:27 The harder reading wins 15:49 John 1:18: Son or God 20:00 The shorter reading rule 21:12 Griesbach, Lachmann, and after 23:40 The 1881 Revised Version 25:33 Verses added later 26:38 Diplomatic versus eclectic 28:48 Haplography and dittography 31:43 A lost paragraph in Samuel 32:52 Conjectural emendations 33:53 Wrap-up and thanks _______________________________________________ #DataOverDogma #BibleScholarship #TextualCriticism #BibleManuscripts #KingJamesVersion