Sermon Tone Analysis
Overall tone of the sermon
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Grace
Intro
I love preaching verse by verse through the bible for a couple of reasons.
I’m not smart enough or creative enough to come up with a different sermon series every few weeks.
God’s word dictates what I will preach.
This means that it will steer me away from pet peeves, hobby horses, and soap boxes.
But also when preaching through books of the bible, I am sometimes confronted with difficult topics, texts, and teachings.
I can’t avoid them b/c they are the next few verses.
This is specifically difficult in this next passage.
The story we are going to look at in a few minutes is one beloved by Christians.
We get to see the grace, mercy, and compassion of Jesus.
We get to see that sin can be forgiven.
It’s a beautiful picture of the gospel of Jesus.
Now I will admit that this sermon is going to be a little different than other ones I have preached.
It’s going to be a little more academic.
So put your thinking caps on and bear with me.
This will all make sense in a minute.
Have you ever thought about how your bible got to you?
Not who purchased your bible, but how we got from the Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek Text to the English bible you hold in your hands?
This is something that bigger nerds than I have a field day with.
The Bible that you hold is the result of the hard work of translators and scholars.
They spend years pouring over the original languages to bring us a readable and understandable copy of the bible in English.
It’s a great amount of time, work, and effort that goes into this process.
This process happened not just now, but in the centuries before.
We don’t have any of the original manuscripts.
Meaning that we don’t have any of the writings that John, Paul, Matthew, Luke, etc wrote on.
What we do have are copies of those original manuscripts.
I don’t want you to think that these are haphazard copies.
The scribes who copied these original documents were precise and careful with their copies.
And Scripture was hand copied from its original writing until the invention of the printing press.
For some 1500 years, people trained in copying would pour over the scriptures that had been handed down and copy them.
Now over time, there may be some scribal errors.
Or even Scribal insertions.
And that would be a problem if we only had one manuscript.
But we don’t have only one manuscript.
We have over 5,700 Greek Manuscripts.
If we include manuscripts that are in other languages like Latin, Syrian, Armenian, etc there are more than 25,000 manuscripts.
To put that in perspective lets’ talk about some works that were written around the same time as the NT
I am borrowing this from another Pastor who already had these number compiled.
There are ten existing manuscripts of Julius Caesar’s Gallic Wars (composed between 58 and 50 BC).
And all of these date from the tenth century or later.
There are twenty manuscripts of Livy’s Roman History written roughly during the time when Jesus was alive.
Only two manuscripts exist for Tacitus’s Histories and the Annals, which were composed around AD 100 — one from the ninth and one from the eleventh century.
There are only eight manuscripts of the History of Thucydides who lived 460–400 BC.
These works may mean nothing to you, but the number of manuscripts should.
Just know that the Bible is the most attested to and rigorously copied book that has ever existed.
Okay, so now we have all these manuscripts that all of these scribes copied down.
How can we be sure that they are correct?
If you think about it.
The more manuscripts you have the more opportunity there is for error.
The more danger there is of a rogue scribe going ahead and inserting his own theology or teaching into the text.
The more variations of letters or small words that may change the meaning of the text.
Here’s where we come a study called Textual Criticism.
This is the study of comparing texts to make sure we have the most accurate representation of the bible.
What these Textual Critics do is analyze the text and determine what is the most accurate and authentic word to be used in any given text.
You’ll see this if you have one of the bibles that has footnotes or end notes.
They’ll be a number or letter next to a word or phrase that will lead you to a note that says something like other “manuscripts say xyz”
If the Textual Critics see something that seems off they compare it to other manuscript evidence to see if it is accurate or not.
So if a rogue scribe went off and wanted to write his own thing, then the textual critics would look at different manuscripts to verify if what this rogue wrote was original or authentic.
And these textual critics can do this b/c they have a pool of manuscripts to draw from.
Now where there are legitimate discrepancies in the text it never impacts or changes core theological doctrine.
The bible you hold in your hand can be trusted.
Why am I talking about this?
Because I want to assure you that you can have 100% faith in the bible.
Even though we don’t have the original documents we can be sure that we have an accurate representation of what the original authors wanted us to have.
Now you may be thinking, why is this important to me?
Well, the reality is there are opponents to our faith that use these discrepancies as ammunition to conclude that the bible can’t be trusted.
And they believe in saying that the bible can’t be trusted then it nullifies the truth about God.
And I want you to be ready for that task.
Especially the younger generation.
You will run into these arguments from angry atheists on TikTok, Instagram, and even in college.
They will try to convince you that there is no truth to be found in the Bible by using this type of argument.
They will want you to doubt the authenticity and truth found in the Bible.
But I want you to know that there are answers to each of their questions.
There are people who have devoted their lives to sifting through and making sure that we have the right information.
Any of these variations and discrepancies in the manuscripts do not affect any core or essential doctrine of Christianity.
Now, I do have a more immediate reason for talking about Textual Criticism this morning.
There are some questions about the authenticity of the story we are going to look at this morning.
Many scholars and Textual Critics believe that the account of Jesus with the adulterous woman isn’t original to John where we find it now.
I don’t want you to accuse me of not taking the bible seriously.
If you’ve been around for any length of time you know that I love God’s Word.
I teach God’s Word.
I am convinced that God’s Word is divinely inspired.
And yet all evidence of this text points to it not being originally written by John.
What evidence do we have that it isn’t original?
This is evidence is from a scholar.
The evidence goes something like this:
The story is missing from all the Greek manuscripts of John before the fifth century.
All the earliest church fathers omit this passage in commenting on John and pass directly from John 7:52 to John 8:12.
In fact, the text flows very nicely from 7:52 to 8:12 if you leave out the story and just read the passage as though the story were not there.
No Eastern church father cites the passage before the tenth century when dealing with this Gospel.
When the story starts to appear in manuscript copies of the Gospel of John, it shows up in three different places other than here (after John 7:36; 7:44; 21:25), and in one manuscript of Luke, it shows up after 21:38.
Its style and vocabulary is more unlike the rest of John’s Gospel than any other paragraph in the Gospel.
And this may shock or surprise many of you.
This is a very beloved story that demonstrates Jesus’ mercy, grace, and compassion on a sinner.
How can this not be original to John’s Gospel?
So what am I to do?
There are a few options.
I preach this the same way I would preach the rest of scripture.
I skip over it and leave you all asking why I did that.
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