Transcription
What are some approaches or arguments, um, related to apologetics that that you think pastors should avoid because you've seen them be unhelpful or even harmful? Just kind of think common mistakes that hurt rather than help our gospel witness.
Yeah, it's it's a good question. And I think part of the answer to that question is to be careful to make sure that we're answering the questions that people are actually asking. And, uh, you know, Paul says in Colossians 4:5, to walk in wisdom towards outsiders, making the best use of the time and let our speech always be seasoned with salt, so that we may know how to answer answer each person. And it's interesting that he says each person and not necessarily each objection. And realizing that there's a person, there's a questioner behind a lot of the questions that we see being asked.
And I was once given, uh, this advice at a conference that I spoke years and years ago, where one of the organizers simply beforehand, kind of brought all of the speakers together and just encouraged us to picture the most vulnerable person we could think of in the audience and speak to that person directly. And I think, you know, that can go awry in the sense of what I was saying before. You know, we can we can almost pad the truth too much. But I I think there's an aspect of speaking with graciousness and clarity in understanding that, uh, there's going to be a person who might have some baggage that we need to be aware of.
I get this a lot when I do events and speak on the problem of evil. And I just, someone inevitably comes up and starts talking to me afterwards about all of the issues they have with a good God and why certain bad things happen. And it's happened a few times where I've just realized, you know, there's something going on here and kind of tried to take the tone of the conversation down and said, you know, those are great questions. Why would you ask those questions? And find out that this person is, uh, dealing with some sort of personal hurt and realizing that a lot of those kind of big problem of evil questions are less theological and philosophical and sometimes more personal.
And, uh, that's something, um, that's more of a zooming out approach. Um, you know, there's the the more you know, getting into the nitty-gritty into the the weeds of something. Like we need to be careful not to overexaggerate in certain claims apologetically. Uh, my area of specialty is in manuscripts, and there have been some exaggerations in sort of the apologetic endeavors to answer certain questions about manuscripts where the, say, manuscripts of the New Testament are compared to the writings of other ancient, um, uh, texts like Homer and Pliny and Plutarch. And, uh, it's talked about that the the copies of the manuscripts of the New Testament dwarf all of these others. And that's actually true. But when I started to dig into some of the catalogs of those manuscripts, what I found was that classics categorize manuscripts very differently than New Testament studies does. And that classics tends to catalog what they call functional manuscripts where you can actually read from the document. Whereas New Testament studies counts every fragment that has a discernible text that could be linked to a New Testament document as a manuscript. And so this tends to start to compare apples to orchards in that it is true that we just, we do have far more New Testament copies of ancient, uh, manuscripts than we do say for, um, Homer. But, uh, in sort of presenting that data, sometimes it can it can present something where we're not really making an accurate comparison. And the ends to the means actually end up skewing the data in a way that if you actually look into the data, is is somewhat unhelpful.
And so I think in our apologetic endeavors, I think trying to find the best forms of the argument and make sure that we're not overexaggerating for the purpose of getting to the conclusion. Whereas the conclusion might actually be true. Something like a manuscript comparison, the conclusion is still true that if we're going to trust that Thucydides wrote this particular document and we only have a couple dozen copies and they're written hundreds of years after we know the original was written, then we're going to have to apply that same standard to the New Testament where the number of manuscripts, both in quantity and in quality, are far better than Thucydides. So that's a true statement. But in some of the kind of presentation of the data that I've seen in some popular level apologetics endeavors, it tends to present the information in a way that for individuals in my field, kind of cringe at how, you know, it you're playing loose and fast with some of those, um, facts.
Funny anecdote about that. Uh, when you went on the Joe Rogan Experience, I was vaguely familiar with your work because you had written a few articles in the past for The Gospel Coalition. But, uh, and then I noticed you were following me on X and I was like, "Oh, wait. Have we interacted before?" So I searched our two names on X and you debunked me on this very thing a few years ago because I had shared some chart comparing the the number of copies. And you said something, uh, to the effect of, kinder than this is going to sound, I used to share charts like that before I started studying it. So, you know, what I considered a claim to fame that I was debunked by Wes Huff before anyone else on the internet. Thanks for that. That's good. You can put that in your bio. Exactly.