The Life Foundations
Nexus
Seminar
On The ‘True Text’ On-line Lessons
Advance To Lesson Seventy-Five
What Is A Heartbeat Engine And How Do You Build One?
SEMINAR ON THE “TRUE
TEXT”
LESSON 58 – THE
PROBABILITY/CERTAINTY MATRIX PRINCIPLE
AKA “WE AIN’T IN KANSAS
ANYMORE, DOROTHY.............AND DOROTHY II”
By Dr. Michael J. Bisconti
We have jumped ahead to lesson 58 because
of criticisms that we have been receiving via email. It is time to silence this particular batch of critics. We call this particular batch of critics “The
Number Crunchers” or “TNCs” for short.
The Probability/Certainty
Matrix Principle states:
There is a causal
relationship between probability and certainty. This relationship is a mechanism built into the human psyche by
the Creator. Experience has taught us
that we can use the psychomechanistic events associated with this mechanism, which
we have named the “psi mechanism,” to extrapolate “future moves”…as in a chess
game. An illustration is in order:
A good chess player,
according to one expert, sees a minimum of ten moves ahead…a great chess player
sees 50 moves ahead…and a master chess player sees 200 moves ahead.
Our point is that your
ability to anticipate future consequences is directly proportional to the
intensity and duration of your involvement in the intellectual processes
associated with the forecasting of those consequences.
Now, what does this have
to do with confirming the ancient, biblical text? Science is not simply a matter of information. It is also a matter of prediction. (Forgive me but I have to interject a note
on a totally unrelated topic and that is that the theory of evolution HAS NEVER
PREDICTED ANYTHING!) Now, prediction
extends the boundary of information. It
extends the boundary of information into the Unknown.
No 100% confirmation of
the biblical text is possible unless you can cross over into the realm of the
Unknown. We have capitalized the word
“Unknown” so that you will understand that we are not talking about the “normal
unknown.” We are talking about the
“scientific unknown.” The scientific
unknown, the Unknown, unlike the normal unknown, has restrictions placed upon
it.
In order to gain the
benefit of the knowledge in the realm of the Unknown, via predictions (more
specifically, predictive science or forecast science, which is totally based in
statistics and the new science of textual calculus established by us) we
must have a big enough “knowledge base.”
Now, this knowledge base is far more than what statisticians call “a
statistically valid sample.” It is a multiply
cross-referenced matrix of data. THIS
DATA IS ALL NUMERICAL. The reason that
it is all numerical is that 100% certainty is only possible in the world of
numbers. Verbal logic can get you
99.9999999999% of the way to the truth.
This, of course, is well beyond the percentile necessary for “reasonable
certainty.” This means that NO ONE
ACTUALLY NEEDS OUR RESEARCH IN ORDER TO BE CERTAIN OF THE TRUTH. MORE SPECIFICALLY, NO ONE NEEDS OUR RESEARCH
IN ORDER TO BE REASONABLY CERTAIN OF THE TRUTH.
The logical question,
then, is why bother to achieve 100% certainty.
100% certainty is necessary for those who either REFUSE OR ARE UNABLE to
believe the truth once they have been provided with reasonable certainty. Those who are unable fall into a special
category. These are people that God has
appointed special tasks in the administration of the world.
Now, we can talk about
numerical logic as opposed to verbal logic.
WE WILL NOW FOR THE FIRST TIME ANYWHERE REVEAL ONE OF THE GREAT
SECRETS OF OUR RESEARCH:
First, we will give you
an example/illustration to ease you into the truth:
Up until about ten years
ago medical science believed that the computer-generated, computer screen
configurations (patterns) representing the beating of defective, human hearts
was totally random. They kept collecting
data on these (seemingly) random configurations and, lo and behold, after
several years, their analytical program DETECTED A PATTERN. Now, don’t miss the following:
The pattern was so
complex that it would have taken two million people working seven million years
to figure it out. However, the analytic
program being used was able to accomplish in one second what it would have
taken one person a year to accomplish.
The end result is that the analytic program was able to perform seven
million years of work by two million people in a week.
Now, what application
does this have to the confirmation of the ancient, biblical texts. Very simply THERE ARE “NONRANDOM PATTERNS”
IN THE ANCIENT, BIBLICAL TEXTS. Now,
this is something totally new. This has
nothing to do with any “Bible Code” discoveries that have been in the news in
the last couple of years or so.
Here for the first time revealed
anywhere are the “Heartbeat Engines” of the ancient, biblical text. The term “Heartbeat Engines” comes, in part,
from the analogy of the human heart study that we referred to above. HERE ARE THE FIRST THREE “HEARTBEAT ENGINES”
OF THE ANCIENT GREEK NEW TESTAMENT MANUSCRIPTS:
There are, in all, 777
Heartbeat Engines. 90% of what we need
to accomplish can be accomplished using the AD, BC, and GL engines above.
The most important discovery
made through the application of these first three engines is that it is
99.9999999999% probable that the Alexandrian manuscripts have been edited from
their original form. Of course, are
goal was 100% probability; so we didn’t stop there. Applying most of over one hundred other HX (HX = Heartbeat
Engine) engines we were able to establish the 100% probability that the
Alexandrian manuscripts were edited from their original form. Note that “100% probability” is “textual
calculus” language for “documented certainty.”
Documented certainty is “more certainty than you need to be
certain.” It is “more certainty than
‘reasonable certainty.’”
We have provided enough
information on this web page to refute all of the arguments and so-called
proofs presented by the TNCs referred to above. For a detailed discussion of Heartbeat Engines read What Is A Heartbeat Engine
And How Do You Build One?
Conventions
Following are the conventions
used in the Greek text we are using in our seminar. See Lesson Six
for a sample of the use of the variant tags.
We are
using a compilation of the Greek New Testament that has variants
identified and tagged for reference to source of transmission and schools of
emphasis.
Verse
Numbers
For ease
of reference, the verse numbering scheme has been made to conform closely to
that found in most standard English versions of the New Testament, following
the Authorized (King James) Version of 1611.
Where considerate verse numbering differences occur, they are added to
the text in brackets.
Breathings,
Accents, And Diacritical Markings
All
breathings, accents, capitalization, punctuation, and diacritical markings have
been omitted. These are primarily a
product of modern editorship and are lacking in ancient manuscripts.
Book
Titles And Colophons
Book
titles do not appear. The Greek closing
colophons to the epistles that appear in the English of the Authorized Version
have been placed in brackets [] wherever they occur in the Stephens 1550
edition (only).
Variant
Tagging Method
The
following tags have been applied to those words peculiar to one stream of
transmission or scholarly group that emphasizes a particular variant word. Those words with no tag do not differ in the
various printings of the Greek.
T = Stephens 1550 Textus Receptus.
The text
used is George Ricker Berry's edition of "The Interlinear Literal Translation
of the Greek New Testament." This
text is virtually identical to Erasmus 1516, Beza 1598, and the actual Textus Receptus: Elzevir 1633. Berry states, "In the main they are one
and the same; and [any] of them may be referred to as the Textus Receptus."
(Berry, p. ii)
These
early printed Greek New Testaments closely parallel the text of the English
King James Authorized Version of 1611, since that version was based closely
upon Beza 1598, which differed little from its "Textus Receptus"
predecessors. These Textus Receptus
editions follow the Byzantine Majority manuscripts, which was predominant
during the period of manual copying of Greek New Testament manuscripts.
S = Scrivener 1894 Textus Receptus
The text
used is "h Kainh Diaqhkh:
The New Testament. The Greek Text
underlying the English Authorized Version of 1611" (London: Trinitarian
Bible Society, 1977). This is an
unchanged reprint of Scrivener's "The New Testament in the Original Greek
according to the Text followed in the Authorized Version" (Cambridge:
University Press, 1894, 1902).
Scrivener attempted to reconstruct the
Greek text underlying the English 1611 KJV for comparison to the 1881 English
Revised Version. In those places where
the KJV followed the Latin Vulgate (John 10:16), Scrivener inserted the Greek
reading, as opposed to back-translating the Latin to Greek--which would have
produced a Greek word with no Greek manuscript evidence. Scrivener's work follows the Byzantine
Majority texts, and in many places matches the modern Alexandrian-based
editions.
B = Byzantine Majority
The text is that identified by Freiherr Von
Soden, "Die Schriften des Neuen Testaments in ihrer altesten erreichbaren
Textgestalt" (Gottingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1911) and Herman C.
Hoskier, "Concerning the Text of the Apocalypse" (London: Bernard
Quaritch, 1929). This technique of
Byzantine identification and weighting was utilized by Hodges and Farsted in
"The Greek New Testament according to the Majority Text" (Nashville:
Thomas Nelson, 1982; 1985). It was
subsequently utilized by Robinson and Pierpont, resulting in 99.75 percent
agreement between the two texts.
The Byzantine Majority text is closely
identified with the Textus Receptus editions, and well it should with greater
than 98% agreement. As Maurice Robinson
pointed out in his edition of the Byzantine Majority: "George Ricker Berry
correctly noted that 'in the main they are one and the same; and [any] of them
may be referred to as the Textus Receptus' (George Ricker Berry, ed., The
Interlinear Literal Translation of the Greek New Testament [New York: Hinds
& Noble, 1897], p. ii).
A = Alexandrian
(Some of the comments
that follow will be confusing to anyone learned in the “Alexandrian
dispute.” We will clear up this
confusion at a later stage in the “text building” process.) The differences are those identified by the
United Bible Society, 3rd edition, and utilized by modern translations such as
the NIV and the NASB. While these
variants come from manuscripts with less textual evidence than the Byzantine
Majority, many of the differences are exactly the same as those identified by
the Byzantine Majority and Scrivener.
The percentage of variants is quite small and occurs mainly in word placement
and spelling. Many of the variations
identified are omitted or bracketed words, which is not surprising due to a
significantly smaller base of text from this stream of transmission.