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149 | Wrestling with Faith: Can I Trust The Bible?
4.8k Plays3 days ago
This episode explores the question of the Bible's trustworthiness. Phylicia delves into the historical context of the Old and New Testaments, examining the evidence for their authorship and compilation. She address the "JEDP theory" regarding the Torah, highlighting the importance of considering both divine inspiration and historical accuracy.
Phylicia also addresses the issue of unbelief, encouraging viewers to wrestle with their questions and ultimately trust in a loving and unchanging God.
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Transcript
Challenging Historical Bias
00:00:00
Speaker
We need to check our chronological snobbery. That's what one colleague of mine called it and I think it's so appropriate. We have this idea that if it's not new, if it's not you know understandable to me and my scientific Western modern mindset, then everybody else previous to me in the historic timeline was an idiot and they had no idea what they were doing, what they were communicating, what they were writing down.
Introduction to the Final Episode of Beginner Believer
00:00:29
Speaker
Hello, friends, and welcome back to Verity Podcast. My name is Felicia Masonheimer, your host, the founder of Every Woman a Theologian, and the founder of Verity Podcast, which you are listening to or watching right now. I'm so glad you're here. You're jumping into the very end, the last episode of our Beginner Believer series. We have almost 20 episodes in this series, and it has been a delight to walk this road with you no matter where you are at in your journey with God.
Felicia's Personal Faith Journey
00:01:00
Speaker
Today we're going to be talking about the Bible. Why can we trust that the Bible is the Word of God? I want to tell you that this is something I personally wrestled with about four years ago. I was really thinking through what does it mean to believe in Jesus Christ and why do I stake my life
00:01:25
Speaker
and the lives of others through the work that I do on the authenticity of what this man said. I have this Bible that tells me who he was and what he did and tells me that he's the fulfillment of a promise made thousands of years ago, but how can I trust that that is true?
Historical Authenticity of the Bible
00:01:42
Speaker
Those questions led me on a journey to digging deep into the history of the canon of Scripture.
00:01:50
Speaker
The word canon is a word that means measure. And when we use the word canon, C-A-N-O-N, in regard to a group of historical, spiritual books, what we're saying is that those books are the measure of what is true for a specific religious worldview. And in Christianity, the Bible is the canon of Scripture.
00:02:15
Speaker
But four years ago, my question was, how do I know that I know that this really is the Word of God? I know what I've been taught. I know all of the truths about the Bible. I even know the verses that tell me what the Bible says about itself. 2 Timothy 3, 16, all scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness. I know all that.
00:02:40
Speaker
But at the end of the day, how can I trust that the Bible is the Word of God? And so I did a deep dive into this, reading secular sources, reading from archaeologists, reading from historians, trying to understand where did the Bible come from, how was it compiled, and can I really trust this book to tell me everything I know about Jesus and how I should live my life.
00:03:06
Speaker
I came away from that journey of wrestling with these questions more convinced than ever of the uniqueness, the importance, the accuracy, the historic reliability, and the truth of scripture. I'm still doing what I do today because I walked through those questions with God and came out on the other side even more sure that He is who He says He is and that His Word truly can be trusted.
God's Self-Revelation in History
00:03:37
Speaker
Now, in one episode like this, I'm not going to be able to do all that work for you. But I do hope that I can introduce you to some of the concepts and ideas that were part of my own journey. I did do an entire podcast series on this topic, and if you want to listen back to that, it's not on YouTube, but it is on iTunes and Spotify.
00:03:59
Speaker
You can head over to Verity Podcasts. Episodes 11 through 21 are the canon series of Verity Podcasts where I dive deep into this topic. And so I highly recommend doing that after you listen to this episode. But in this one, I'm simply going to touch on some of the big picture questions, the big picture issues, and the reasons why I came away trusting the Bible more than ever after this season of wrestling with doubt.
00:04:29
Speaker
We're going to start by addressing what for me was the most puzzling part of this whole piece. That was, how did God reveal himself in Old Testament times?
00:04:45
Speaker
How did we get the Torah? So the first five books of the Bible, this would be Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Deuteronomy, and Numbers. How did we get those five books if historically we've understood them to be written by Moses, but it's recording things that happened way earlier than Moses? And ah how do I know, like, this is actually God's word? Because it says that God would say things to people and tell them to do things and then Moses wrote it down and we just trust that that's what happened. That was a big question that I had. You know what? What's going on here? And like I said earlier, we're not going to be able to address every single angle in one 20 to 30 minute episode, but I hope that I can kind of get you thinking about this and point you in a specific direction. The first thing that I want to point out is that
00:05:39
Speaker
God revealed Himself in history in a way that was approachable and understandable to the humans in the cultures of that time. This shows God's incredible mercy and grace towards humanity. God was interacting with people in a way that they understood, a way they could receive.
00:06:03
Speaker
I often think that if God were to speak with an audible voice today, I believe He can still do that if He wanted to. But if He were to speak to a lot of people with an audible voice today, I really don't think that Western-minded American Christians would receive it.
00:06:20
Speaker
I really don't. We have decided that science explains everything. And because of that mentality, God uses different avenues today to reach His people than He did 4,000 years ago.
00:06:36
Speaker
And I think we need to look at this when we read through the the Torah, we read through the Genesis and Exodus where God is like interacting with humans in a very unique and almost unbelievable way. We need to check our chronological snobbery. That's what one colleague of mine called it and I think it's so appropriate.
00:06:54
Speaker
We have this idea that if it's not new, if it's not, you know, understandable to me and my scientific western modern mindset, then everybody else previous to me in the historic timeline was an idiot and they had no idea what they were doing, what they were communicating, what they were writing down.
00:07:13
Speaker
This chronological snobbery really puts God in a box and says, like, well, God had to reveal himself in history in the exact same way that he does now through my printed Bible that I bought from Lifeway. um He must be just operating exactly that way 4,000 years ago before the printing press, before the Internet, before all of that. And it's simply not true. God's compassion on humanity reveals itself in one of the ways through the fact that he was willing to strive with man in very unique ways in ancient contexts. Now, of course, this all presupposes that Genesis and Exodus and Deuteronomy, that it's all true, okay? So we're presupposing that God actually spoke to people, ah Abraham was a real person, and that God interacted with him and made promises to him that we are now seeing the fulfillment of. We're kind of stepping out with a presupposition, so bear with me there.
00:08:10
Speaker
But what I wanna say is that God, when you look at his character throughout the Old Testament, one of the reasons the Old Testament is so absolutely important to study, is that he reveals himself in unique ways through history. And he does so in something that some scholars call progressive revelation, where he reveals more and more of himself as society is progressing and maturing and developing.
00:08:37
Speaker
and obtaining more technology. God reveals Himself in new ways, yet His character remains exactly the same. He's the same yesterday, today, and forever. Jesus Christ, to the God of the Old Testament, made manifest, the Word made flesh here among us, the same yesterday, today, and forever. And yet we see Him speaking audibly, speaking quietly and silently, revealing himself through prophecy and through visual parables like in Ezekiel and Isaiah. We see him revealing himself through Psalms and songs and David's writings of his experiences with God, his internal spiritual experiences with God. We see him in miracles in the Gospels. We see him
00:09:27
Speaker
Through the correction and the guidance of the apostles and the epistle books of the New Testament, we see him in dreams and visions and Daniel and Revelation. God revealed himself in all of these different ways throughout history in many different cultures from these ancient Semitic um Mesopotamian cultures to in Canaan and Egypt and Israel.
00:09:54
Speaker
and in Greece and Rome and far, far beyond, he revealed himself in specific ways, always remaining the same.
Modern Perceptions vs. Historical Revelations
00:10:05
Speaker
And I want to start there because ah when we come to the Bible expecting God to fit our little modern 2024 box and we get angry when he doesn't, it really reveals our own limitations. Just the limitations of the human mind, the limitations of our worldview. Actually, it really is a challenge to say, hey, you're not as open-minded as you think.
00:10:29
Speaker
You want to say you're open-minded, but you're not open to the idea that God could, if he wanted, reveal himself in scripture, written down scripture, in in people's lives that they wrote down all throughout history in many different ways because he loved them that much.
00:10:50
Speaker
So if you're listening to this, you're watching this and you um consider yourself open-minded, hang with me because if you truly are open-minded, you will sit with that discomfort and you will wrestle with it instead of simply responding with an angry comment.
00:11:09
Speaker
So let's talk about the Torah specifically. So the Torah, those first five books, this was a big sticking point for me. I, i going back to what I said at the beginning, I really felt like I needed something more than just Genesis and Exodus to say that God is just, you know, creating a garden and putting people in it and then, you know, giving them this choice and they choose poorly and sin comes into the world. And then all of a sudden he's talking to this other dude, Abraham, and it's just like, okay, let me step back from this and view this as somebody who didn't grow up in the church, who has never heard that the Bible could actually be history. How do I interact with this? Is it a little bit wild? Yeah, it is. So what makes this trustworthy and reliable and the Book of Mormon not?
00:12:05
Speaker
We know that the Book of Mormon was written by one man who claimed to receive the revelation from an angel with no accountability, no cross-referencing, no golden plates to you know actually be checked or confirmed against the book that he wrote. So what separates the Hebrew Bible, which is the basis for the Christian ah revelation in the New Testament, ah from something like the Book of Mormon? How do we trust this?
00:12:34
Speaker
Great questions.
Authorship and Compilation of the Torah
00:12:36
Speaker
So I'm going to share with you some of the research, a short summary of some of the research that I did on the angles of textual criticism and and the ways that people have looked at the canon of the Torah um in scholarly history. And this is just a short summary that I put together from the canon series of the podcast.
00:12:57
Speaker
The Torah, Genesis through Deuteronomy, a set of five books called the Pentateuch in Greek, is a vital piece of scripture not just to the Jews, but also for Christians. As we look at how the canon of scripture was compiled, we need to consider where these first five books originated, who authored them, and what may have been their consolidation process.
00:13:18
Speaker
There are a few theories on this, so I'm going to share the first two. The first is the JEDP theory, founded by Julius Wellhausen. JEDP is held by many scholars and university theologians who tend to a slightly more liberal interpretation of scripture and its authority.
00:13:36
Speaker
JEDP is an abbreviation for four supposed texts which, when compiled over time, eventually became the Torah. These texts had all different origins and were compiled by Ezra the prophet as canon after the Babylonian exile.
00:13:53
Speaker
J-E-D-P stands for Jawic or Yawic, Elohic, Deuteronomic, and Priestly. Four different texts with these four different names. Each of these texts is progressively more recent, so the Yawic text would have been the oldest, the Priestly would have been the newest.
00:14:14
Speaker
Scholars believe the Torah was compiled from four different authors and four different texts because the language and use of God's name, Yahweh versus Elohim, indicates different authorship and maybe even a different date of writing. These source texts are completely hypothetical, so we don't have these four source texts this is it's a it's a hypothesis and much of the conversation around their existence is used to support a more non-literal approach to Torah teaching.
00:14:42
Speaker
A few notes about this view. God has many names in scripture, and authors may use specific names to reflect the character of God as expressed in the situation that's recorded. One example of this would be Genesis 16, where Hagar calls God El-Roy, you are the God who sees me. This is a specific name for God based on the situation in which he is interacting.
00:15:07
Speaker
Conservative scholars would argue that different name usage does not necessarily mean a different time period or author, but simply the author's effort to depict God's character. The priestly source length would be linked to Ezra and the final canonization of the Torah as authoritative. So this means that Ezra's time would have been when the entire canon of scripture in the JEDP theory was finalized and this would be around 444 BC. We know that Ezra read the Torah, the law to the people
00:15:43
Speaker
when they were gathered, they were regathered after the exile together. And so he read it aloud to them and they wept over the beauty of this law that was given to them. But what is being put forth here is the idea that that is actually when the Torah came to be, like it didn't exist prior to that in any kind of consolidated form. So why does this matter?
00:16:07
Speaker
if, like Orin Tal in a paper on the canonization of the Pentateuch argues, if Torah was not authoritative until the resettlement of Palestine after the Babylonian captivity.
00:16:21
Speaker
Let me pause there if you're like, what did you just say? After Israel was in Babylon, they were regathered to Israel. Ezra and Nehemiah worked together to bring both physical and spiritual restoration to the nation of Israel. When this happened, this is what JEDP theory is arguing that this is when the Torah became authoritative and not before.
00:16:45
Speaker
If this is true, the spiritual implications and the authority of the Torah are only a cultural figment from the 5th century BC. Torah compilation for spiritual, particularly messianic purposes, can be written off as the ignorance of ancient minds.
00:17:07
Speaker
This is the biggest issue that conservative, one of the biggest issues that conservative scholars would have with JEDP theory, that very often the approach that it takes is more of an approach for, of the compilation of these texts for geopolitical purposes. And many of those who hold to it, not all, but many would argue for a less literal, less messianic, less spiritual implication to the Old Testament books, but particularly the Torah.
00:17:38
Speaker
Now. there is a weakness among the conservative scholars too. Sometimes when you ask them, well, where did the Torah come from? How can I trust this this book that is referenced through all the prophets, through all the Psalms and writings, and then into the New Testament? How can I trust these first five that started it all? There's just this kind of dismissive answer that while Moses wrote it, he's the author of the Torah, and he simply received all the information from God, and he wrote it down, which does sound a little bit like the Joseph Smith saga.
00:18:09
Speaker
And we know that that cannot be that cannot be what God intended. A lack of accountability or a lack of eyewitnesses when we know how many eyewitnesses were available in the New Testament, which we'll get to in a minute.
00:18:24
Speaker
So for me, as I was wrestling with this, I was going, if God went to such pains to make sure that Jesus is just like so accountable to history and to society and to technology in the revelation of himself as the God-man in the New Testament,
00:18:44
Speaker
I have to expect that he was doing the same in the Old Testament, or at least I'm going to look for that evidence. If the evidence isn't there, then I will walk away from this, you know, canon of the Old Testament. But if the evidence is there, then I will be convinced that I can trust it.
00:19:04
Speaker
the third option so instead of this dismissiveness by some conservative scholars instead of this dismissiveness by some more liberal scholars The third option would be to take into account both the divine inspiration of the Torah and its historicity.
00:19:21
Speaker
The Torah portrays an incredibly detailed knowledge of Egyptian culture, history, landscape. And this is befitting to Moses' background, given his education, given who we know him to be. This book These books are also laced with genealogical records, intentional records, which give us a map for the authority of the account. So often we're dismissive about these genealogies. They seem so boring. And yet this is a way not only to track the lands of the people,
00:19:58
Speaker
of Israel so that they could keep track of what lands were theirs in regard to tribal inheritance. They also show us just how seriously the authors took the history of where they came from and where they were going.
00:20:17
Speaker
Since eyewitnesses are so important to deciding whether something is canon, it should intrigue us that these family lines show Seth, the son of Adam, alive at the same time as Noah,
00:20:30
Speaker
Shem, the son of Noah, alive at the same time as Abram. If Noah possessed family records, preserved them, and Abraham gave everything he had to Isaac, Genesis 25.5, which may have included records of his own, we would have records being passed down, not just orally, which we know is huge in ancient cultures, the oral transmission,
00:20:52
Speaker
of of the stories of the people that came before, but also physical records. In fact, the word for statutes in Genesis 26.5 used in reference to Abraham's obedience is a word for clay tablets written in stone, indicating that Abraham could have been recording God's directives for his posterity in some kind of physical way. Now,
00:21:17
Speaker
and Understanding all this, you might be saying, yes, well, I still have a lot of questions about how long people lived. Like, why were people living for 500 and 600 years? And I think there are some really great resources that address those concepts um from different angles. I won't get into it here.
00:21:33
Speaker
but i think let's say that the genetic line at that point was extremely pure and for some reason people did live extremely long lives that eventually were shortened later on due to genetic mutations and you know the way the world had changed let's say that It's true. You would have people who were eyewitness to these events alive and able to confirm what they saw to for many generations. And so you have right there one of the things that, yes, is it a little bit wild? Indeed it is. But it's one of the things that tells me
00:22:10
Speaker
we have eyewitnesses to these events. And even if they lived a normal lifespan, 95 years, let's say, normal lifespan, you're still passing down these truths through oral tradition, through the transmission of these stories, these accounts from person to person to person, so that they can, by hundreds of years later, reach someone like Moses. And what's the question that we should be asking?
00:22:39
Speaker
Has God changed in all of this? Has God changed?
God's Consistent Love and Jesus' Teachings
00:22:44
Speaker
Because when you look at those first five books, the basis for everything, when you look at those first five books, you see a God who consistently proclaims his love for his people.
00:22:54
Speaker
When you set aside your modern American, if you're American and watching this, ideas of what is good and what is bad, picked up from culture, our humanistic mindset that says that the only explanation can be science. When we set that aside to be truly open-minded for a moment, we see a God who loved his people and who fought for them and wanted to defend them from evil, even when they chose evil instead of him.
00:23:24
Speaker
and that is a pattern that you will see continue all the way through the rest of the Bible. Okay, I spent a lot of time on the canonization of the Torah. I won't go through the canonization of the rest of the Bible because you have the canon series to listen to. But the reason I wanted to spend so much time on those first five books is because they are the basis for everything else. When you get into the prophetic books and the history books, Kings and and Samuel, Joshua, when you get into um Isaiah and Ezekiel and Micah and Amos, they're all referring back to the law. And when they say the law, they're referring to the Torah, the first five books. So when David is talking about how God's law brings him delight and when
00:24:12
Speaker
Samuel is talking about the law to Saul or to David. He's talking about those first five books. And when you finally get to the New Testament and you're looking at the Gospels, what does Jesus do? He claims to be the fulfillment of the law. He claims to be the I am that I am.
00:24:31
Speaker
quoting directly from the Torah, not just there, but many other times. So when Jesus is quoting from this, he is appealing to the authority of the Torah as the basis for his own authority as the God-Man, and his claim to deity is what got him crucified.
00:24:51
Speaker
Jesus' claim to deity is what got him crucified. He wasn't just crucified because he was upsetting to the Roman government. The Roman government really wanted to let him off. But the Jews wanted him dead. The Jewish leaders at that time wanted him dead. And it all really started when Jesus said, before Abraham was, I am. An appeal to the Torah.
00:25:17
Speaker
So that's why I start there. So let's go on to the trustworthiness of the manuscript. So one of the things you look for when you are trying to confirm a historical event are the surviving manuscripts that record that event, right? The New Testament specifically,
00:25:37
Speaker
has 6,000 surviving manuscripts and excerpts versus only 600 for Homer's Iliad. Did you hear that? There are 600 surviving manuscripts for Homer's Iliad, which all of us don't even question. 6,000 surviving New Testament manuscripts and excerpts.
00:25:59
Speaker
And you might be wondering, like, what's the accuracy then of these manuscripts? Well, the New Testament is actually much easier to prove because you have just so many that you can cross-reference. And the differences between them are so minute. So you might have a copy a copy editing difference, you know, punctuation, maybe a word here or there, but nothing that affects the theology of the New Testament or what Jesus said.
00:26:25
Speaker
You will have some manuscripts that maybe have a little bit added. So, for instance, the Lord's Prayer in the original manuscripts didn't have um yours as the kingdom and the power and the glory forever. Amen. At the end, that was added on later in church history. But that doesn't change the prayer. The rest of the prayer remains the same.
00:26:43
Speaker
What about the Old Testament? So there are a couple different texts we have of the Old Testament. One I want to tell you about is what's called the Septuagint. This is sometimes abbreviated with the Roman numerals LXX for the 70. Septuagint means the 70.
00:26:59
Speaker
And this was a Greek translation of the Hebrew scriptures. And it was put together right around 200 to 150 BC. The oldest existing manuscript of the Septuagint is dated to the fourth century AD. So we have something from the fourth century, but it was originally written 200 or so years before Christ.
00:27:25
Speaker
So we have this up to again, and then we have completely compiled something called the Masoretic Text. What's the Masoretic Text? It is this Old Testament text completed probably in the 10th century AD, published in 1524. And the Masoretic Text gives us a picture of the Old Testament that people in the Middle Ages would have had.
00:27:51
Speaker
So the question is, is the Old Testament that was being used in the Middle Ages, is this consistent with what Jesus would have had or that the Jews would have had before Jesus? Because if it's being changed or adapted, then we know that the Old Testament really can't be trusted.
00:28:09
Speaker
When the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered in 1947, an amazing thing was found.
Dead Sea Scrolls and Biblical Accuracy
00:28:14
Speaker
It was discovered that these manuscripts, which were centuries older than the Masoretic texts, like these are manuscripts from right around the time of Christ or before the time of Christ, and they were Old Testament manuscripts, they matched almost to the letter.
00:28:30
Speaker
The Masoretic Text from a thousand years later, which means that the copying and translating of these texts over the centuries was that accurate. And it was that important to the copyists to preserve the truth of what they were transmitting.
00:28:50
Speaker
A thousand years with no significant changes? Just slight little copy changes that didn't affect the theology of it at all? This is incredible. Why did it matter so much that they preserve this? Why did it matter so much that these texts not be changed?
00:29:08
Speaker
Well, I would say, based on what I learned from studying this, I'd say it's because they believed they had incredible spiritual significance and that for Christians, they realized the port importance of the scriptures Old Testament scriptures as they were the basis for the New.
00:29:28
Speaker
So you have, of course, the multitude of manuscripts, the 6000 New Testament manuscripts, their accuracy, then all the Old Testament manuscripts as well. And then you have early eyewitness accounts. So this is extremely important for historians. This is what you're looking for. And I want to read to you, this little book that I'm going to be reading from you is called History and Christianity by John Warwick Montgomery. I can't recommend this book enough. It's a little bit hard to find. It's a little bit older. Montgomery was actually a colleague or peer of C.S. Lewis, and so I would highly recommend if you can find this book, um History and Christianity by John Warwick Montgomery. If you have more questions, if you're wondering why can I trust the Bible from a historical perspective, this is a great book. This was one of the the resources that really helped me to process through this.
00:30:18
Speaker
So on page 78 of this book, he was talking about how the legitimacy of Jesus' resurrection, but also of the scriptures and the fact that the New Testament eyewitnesses were so important. Here's what he says, quote, note that when the disciples of Jesus proclaimed the resurrection,
00:30:39
Speaker
They did so as eyewitnesses, and they did so while people were still alive, who had had contact with the events they spoke of. In AD 56, Paul wrote that over 500 people had seen the risen Jesus and that most of them were still alive. 1 Corinthians 15.1 It passes the bounds of credibility that the early Christians could have manufactured such a tale and then preached it among those who might easily have refuted it simply by producing the body of Jesus. The conclusion? Jesus did rise from the dead and thereby validated his claim to divinity. He was neither charlatan nor lunatic, and his followers were not fable mongers. They were witnesses to the incarnation of God, and Jesus was the God to whom they witnessed." and
00:31:25
Speaker
He goes on to give a historian's appeal
Agnosticism in Academia
00:31:28
Speaker
for Christianity and understanding why agnosticism has become so popular and so accepted in academic circles. He calls it immensely fashionable to be agnostic or atheistic um and in academic circles. And that's true, that's true even today. But he also goes into, in this book,
00:31:50
Speaker
just the trustworthiness of the New Testament texts based on the eyewitness accounts, but also based on the time between the events that happened and when they were written down. Here he quotes Sir Frederick G. Kenyon, formerly director and principal librarian of the British Museum, who summarized the textual advantage of the New Testament documents over all ancient manuscripts This is what he said, quote, in no other case is the interval of time between the composition of the book and the date of the earliest extant manuscripts so short as in that of the New Testament. So what he's saying here is the interval of time between when the book was written and the date of the earliest manuscripts it's based on.
00:32:37
Speaker
The books of the New Testament were written in the latter part of the first century. The earliest extant manuscripts, trifling scraps accepted, are of the fourth century, say from 250 to 300 years later. This may sound a considerable interval, but it is nothing to that which parts most of the great classical authors from their earliest manuscripts. So he's saying that the distance of time between say Homer himself, his writings, and the actual copies of the Iliad we have, the amount of time between Homer's life,
00:33:08
Speaker
and the copies when the copies we have were written is more then the time between jesus's life and when his son ah the new testament gospels were written We believe that we have in all essentials an accurate text of the seven extant plays of Sophocles, yet the earliest substantial manuscript upon which it is based was written more than 1,400 years after the poet's death.
00:33:36
Speaker
So that means that the plays of Sophocles that I have on my shelf, the ones that we have, are based on a manuscript that was found 1,400 years, written 1,400 years after the poet died. Isocles, Aristophanes, Thucydides are of the same state.
00:33:53
Speaker
All while with Euripides, the interval is increased to 1600 years. For Plato, it may be put at 1300 years, and for Demosthenes, as low as 1200 years. For confirmation of these intervals between date of composition and date of earliest text, together with numerous examples, see F. W. Hall's list.
00:34:16
Speaker
So I read this to you and butchered those Greek names so that you could see just how significant it is that the documents we have, the manuscripts we have about Jesus' life are only 250 years away from Jesus.
00:34:32
Speaker
when we have plays and poetry and epics that we attribute to these Greek authors, but the only manuscripts that we have or the earliest manuscripts we have are from 1200 years after that author died. Do you see the difference?
00:34:50
Speaker
The same goes for Alexander the Great. We have more evidence of Jesus' life and what he did than we have evidence for Alexander the Great and what he did. But nobody doubts Alexander the Great's life or what he accomplished based on the texts we have. But many people doubt Jesus' life and what he accomplished based on the texts that we have in the Bible. And that is why This book by Montgomery is so significant to me because it's a historian saying, we cannot.
00:35:22
Speaker
live this double-minded, close-minded reality. If we're going to say that we're okay with this massive span of time between the existence of this person and their works and the manuscript we have available, we have to acknowledge our idiosyncrasies, our hypocrisies when it comes to the Bible and acknowledge that really it's not about the history, it's not about the manuscripts, it's not even about the evidence, it's about my own unbelief.
00:35:53
Speaker
And that, my friends, is what was convicting for me when I was studying this four years
Evidence for Jesus' Resurrection
00:35:58
Speaker
ago. The last thing I want to leave with you is from Dr. Gary Habermas. He's the leading scholar on the resurrection. He was a teacher at my alma mater, Liberty University. He's an amazing man and I absolutely love his work.
00:36:12
Speaker
He has so many articles, so many books, YouTube videos you can watch to learn more about what he does. But I want to read from a journal article that he shared on the topic of the New Testament manuscripts, especially as they attest to the resurrection of Jesus and the authority of the Scriptures.
00:36:33
Speaker
So he says here what I already shared with you that the recent indications are that the new Testament is supported by more than 5,500 copies and partial copies in Greek and other languages. Most ancient classical Greek enrollment texts have fewer than 10 copies each. Did you hear that? Most classical Greek enrollment texts that we have no doubt in attributing to Plutarch and to Plato only have 10 copies.
00:37:01
Speaker
And yet the New Testament is supported by between 5,500 and 6,000 copies. Incredible. While this extraordinary quantity and quality of the available text does not tell us if the New Testament writings are historically reliable, most scholars think that the far more manuscripts and portions do indicate that we essentially have what the authors originally wrote. And this is a crucial point to begin.
00:37:26
Speaker
so as a historian Habermas is saying this is an important place to begin you need to have you know the more of the merrier when it comes to manuscripts and portions. Then he once again notes that the earlier the better the closer to the original writings the better and the New Testament writings are closer to the original than classical texts are. Most of the New Testament is available quote from copies that are only 100 to 150 years after the New Testament's completion, while a copy of the entire New Testament dates from about another 100 years after that. So we're again looking at that 250 year timeline. In contrast, the classical counterparts generally date from 700 to 1400 years after their original
00:38:10
Speaker
compositions. And again, this is taken from Gary Habermas, Recent Perspectives on the Reliability of the Gospels, Christian Research Journal 2005. So we're looking at information that's been consistent across multiple my multiple sources, his multiple sources, secular and religious, saying that you've got more manuscripts, more recent manuscripts, more eyewitnesses than for most classical history. So why don't we believe it?
00:38:39
Speaker
Why don't we believe it? It's not about the evidence. It's about unbelief. It's about a personal wrestling. There was one apologist who said that there's three types of unbelief. You have rational unbelief, which is I don't have enough evidence, which I would say here we're looking at the evidence and it's giving us a compelling case for the trustworthiness of the gospel accounts and even for the Old Testament accounts.
00:39:04
Speaker
So there's rational unbelief, but then there's emotional unbelief, which is less about the facts and more about the feelings. Like I, I lost someone dear to me and I have a hard time believing that God could be good or loving or that Jesus could die in a cross for me. Like I don't feel like I can believe it. And then there's volitional unbelief.
00:39:25
Speaker
And that's what Montgomery was talking about here when he said that you've basically given yourself over to an unbelief that is the current trend. It's about pride. It's about believing what I want to believe because it's uncomfortable for me to be accountable to my creator. It's uncomfortable for me to acknowledge that the word of God could be authoritative and that means that I answer to it.
Encouragement to Explore Beliefs
00:39:51
Speaker
But see, when you understand that the word of God, the words of God come from a God whose heart is love towards you, who made you with intention and purpose, who loves you, then suddenly the authority of the word of God isn't something to be afraid of. It's something that draws you to affection.
00:40:16
Speaker
It means that without a shadow of a doubt, you can trust that the words of God that are written down, the character of God that's been preserved across thousands of years by thousands of people, believed and held to by many more, is evidence of God's love for you. And the fact that it's authoritative means that it doesn't change, which means that his love can't be taken away from you.
00:40:44
Speaker
His heart can't be removed from you and his relationship will always be offered to you. That's what it means when we say we trust the authority of scripture. See, you can't have a loving God if your God is constantly changing. You can't trust his love. So if you want a loving God who truly cares for you, you must have A God whose word doesn't change. Because if his word changes, his love isn't reliable. When you believe in the authority of Scripture, you have a loving God who will not leave you. But when you want to remove the authority of God's word, you can't have a loving God too. They go hand in hand.
00:41:34
Speaker
There's a lot more evidence here that Gary Habermas provided that I could read to you, but I just encourage you to go check out his resources and also to check out Montgomery and so many of the others who've done the good work, Timothy Paul Jones, on the history of the Bible, where it comes from, why you can trust it. God's not afraid of your questions. He wasn't afraid of mine.
00:41:54
Speaker
and When you are wrestling with these and asking these questions and and breaking them apart and exposing them to the light, it can be very difficult, really hard, especially if you grew up in the church and maybe you were told that ah a questioning believer is a questionable believer. But God doesn't think that. He can handle it. And you can come out on the other side more convinced than ever, not just of the authority of scripture, but of the consistency of his love.
00:42:21
Speaker
Thank you so much for listening and watching Verity podcast and for following along for the Beginner Believer series. If this was encouraging to you, we would love it if you would subscribe, comment, and share the show with others so that we can continue to help people understand just how much God loves them and how much His word comes to life when you understand it.