Transcription
Here is a debate that I want to share with you between two New Testament scholars on the reliability of the New Testament. We have Dr. Bart Ehrman, who says that it's not reliable, and on the other hand, we have Dr. Craig Evans, who says that it is. So, what I want you to do right now is activate your tool of intellect while listening to this debate, so you can clearly see each argument that each side has to present during this debate. So, listen attentively, whether you're a believer or a non-believer in the Christian faith. Here we go.
I'd like to, uh, thank the pastors of First Family Church, uh, for, uh, inviting me, for Craig for debating me, and all of you for coming out to hear this. Uh, I think, uh, since this is going to be the topic for the entire evening, I'd like to see what the lay of the land is. So, I'd like to know how many of you would consider yourselves to be Bible-believing Christians? Right. Good. Okay. How many of you would think that the Gospels are completely reliable? Right. How many of you are here to see me get creamed? Right. Thank you. Thank you for your honesty. Well, I, I have a tall order with this crowd. When I started out in my studies, uh, to be a scholar of the Bible, I thought that the question of the reliability of the Gospels was one of the most important questions, uh, facing Christians. I too thought at that time that the Gospels were, in fact, completely reliable. But when I learned, learned Greek, started reading these Gospels in the original language, started comparing them carefully with one another, grappled with the problems, prayed about the problems, did my level best to deal with the problems, I came to a different conclusion. And all I ask tonight is that you approach this debate with an open mind. I'll be very interested in hearing, uh, what Craig has to say about these topics, uh, including this first one. Uh, Craig and I have known each other for over 20 years, but we've never debated before, and we've never had a discussion about this issue. Uh, I will be interested in knowing whether he thinks there are, in fact, any historical errors in any of the Gospels, and if not, I'll be interested in knowing how he explains that as a historian who knows full well that historical sources always have errors. But if he thinks there are errors, I'll want to know how he decides what an error is, and how we can know if there are a few errors, there aren't a lot of errors in the Gospels. And if there are a lot of errors, I'll wonder how he can say that the Gospels are reliable. But we'll obviously wait for his answer.
Let me tell you my view on these questions. In my view, there is certainly historically reliable information in the Gospels, of course, but there are also pieces of historically unreliable information. This can be seen by the fact that sometimes there are flat-out discrepancies between the Gospels, as you will see yourself if you just read them carefully side by side. Let me give you just a taste out of a thousand examples. The Gospel of Matthew says that the father of Joseph, Jesus' father, was Jacob, his grandfather was Mathan, and his great-grandfather was Eleazar. The Gospel of Luke says that Joseph's father was Heli, his grandfather was Matthat, and his great-grandfather was Levi. Well, which was it? The genealogies differ. One of the key motifs of the Gospel of Mark is that Jesus' disciples don't recognize him as the Messiah until chapter 8. But in the Gospel of John, they call him the Messiah right away, the first time they meet him in chapter 1. Which is it? How could it be both? There are small discrepancies between the Gospels, hundreds of them. Was Jairus' daughter sick but still alive when Jairus came to ask Jesus to heal her, as in Mark? Or did she just die before Jairus came, so that he asked Jesus to raise her from the dead, as in Matthew? Hard to see how it could be both ways. The Gospel of John says explicitly that Jesus died on the day of preparation for Passover, the afternoon before the Passover meal was eaten. The Gospel of Mark says explicitly that Jesus died the morning after the Passover meal was eaten. Don't take my word for it, read John 19 and Mark 15 for yourself. They contradict each other. Or look at the resurrection accounts in the four Gospels sometime and ask yourself: How many women went to the empty tomb? What were their names? Was the stone rolled away before the women arrived or after they got there? What did they see there? One man, two men, or two angels? What were they told to do? To tell the disciples to go to Galilee or not? Did they tell the disciples or not? Did the disciples go to Galilee or not? It depends which Gospel you read, you get a different story every time. We should not say that these are a bunch of details and don't affect the larger picture. The larger picture is made up of nothing but details. The big pictures are vastly different too, as you'll see once you allow yourself to admit that the details are all different up and down the line. In my opinion, now, the accounts of the Gospels cannot be reliable because they differ in hundreds of ways, both big and small, and they contain numerous historical errors.
So, Bart Ehrman's stance was that there is reliable information in there, but there's also, uh, information that's not reliable. So, he provides an example of the different genealogies of Jesus that are contained within the Gospels. He talked about the different times, uh, when the disciples recognized Jesus as the Messiah, and he also talked about the, uh, the period when Jesus died, and a few others that he mentioned as well. Now, let's see what Dr. Evans has, um, as his position on this particular matter.
Dr. Craig Evans, welcome. We welcome you tonight. I now give you the floor with question number one: Are the Gospels reliable?
Yes, I believe they are. But what the Gospels are, and therefore, in what sense they are reliable, is not always understood, either by Christians or by non-Christians. In a recent debate, Professor Bart Ehrman declared, "We must recognize that the Gospels are not what we wish they were." This is very true. It is true for Christian laity, and it's true for scholars, but in different ways. Christian laity wish that the Gospels told us more about Jesus, ranging from Jesus' upbringing and youth to greater insights into his personal life. Scholars would like to know these things too, but usually they focus on more academic questions, such as, "Where was Jesus when he said this or did that?" or "What were his exact words in Aramaic?" or "What were the social and political issues that Jesus and his disciples encountered in Jerusalem that faithful final week?" This is one of the reasons why scholars are so keen to find additional data, either through archaeology or through new manuscript discoveries. This is why writings outside the New Testament are taken so seriously. Writings that date from the 2nd and 3rd Century are carefully studied on the chance they might contain early reliable material that will tell us more about Jesus and his disciples. The vital question is this: Do the Gospels provide us with what we need to know? Are they sufficient in content and accuracy? The Gospels may not tell us everything we would like to know. They may not really be what naive Christians, and non-Christians too, for that matter, think they are or should be. But they do tell us what is necessary. What the Gospels tell us about Jesus, combined with what his earliest followers proclaimed in the aftermath of Jesus' aftermath of Easter, is indeed sufficient for Christian faith. Christian faith is focused on a relatively simple story. We hear it in Paul's summary of the Gospel tradition that he received, a tradition that reaches back to the very beginning of the Christian movement. And Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 15: "I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received, that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures, and that he appeared to Peter, then to the Twelve, then he appeared to more than 500 brothers at one time, most of whom are still living, though some have died. Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles. Last of all, as to one untimely born, he appeared also to me." We hear the story in Peter's Pentecost sermon as well, in Acts 2. And I refer to verses 22 to 24, which I will not read, but in verse 38, Peter sums it up, and he says, "Repent and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins, and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit." The message is a rather simple one. The story is not complicated. Do the Gospels cohere with these simple summaries of the story of Jesus? Indeed, they do. Were the Gospels written early enough to contain authentic and reliable material? Indeed, they were. The Synoptic Gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke, were composed sometime in the 60s through to the early 80s, maybe even earlier, when many eyewitnesses were still living. Moreover, the sources utilized by the Synoptic evangelists were much older than the Gospels themselves. Even the first-century Jewish historian and apologist Josephus corroborates the basic outline of the life and movement of Jesus when he describes him as a teacher and a wonder-worker who drew a large following, was accused by Jewish leaders, and was condemned to the cross by the Roman governor, Pilate. The death of Jesus, however, did not bring his movement to an end, as Josephus notes. He says, "For the tribe of Christians, so named after him, are not extinct to this day." I will say more about what it means to describe the Gospels as reliable in my responses to the questions yet to be asked.
So, Dr. Evans' position is that the Gospels are not what people wish they were, and so his main concern is, "Do the Gospels provide people with what they need to know?" And so, what is only, uh, needed by Christians is an understanding that the resurrection of Jesus happened. And because the Gospels agree on this simple point, he's claiming that they are reliable. Right. So, we can see right here that we have two fundamentally different worlds that are colliding right here.
Question number two: Dr. Ehrman, do the Gospels accurately preserve the teaching of Jesus Christ?
Yes. A very interesting question. I was, I was a bit interested to hear Craig's response to the last question and, and my question about that one. And this one is still going to be: Does he find discrepancies in the Gospels or not? Are there discrepancies? I would, my own view about the sayings of Jesus is that in the New Testament, there are actually things that Jesus said, of course, but there are other things in the Gospels that he did not say. I've always assumed that, uh, Craig feels the same way about this, since one of his best-known scholarly books is called "Authenticating the Sayings of Jesus." It's a book that presupposes that we have to use scholarly historical criteria to, uh, establish what Jesus really said. I wasn't able to reread the book in preparation for the debate, I'm sorry to say, but I did manage to get a blurb on Amazon.com, and I assume it's accurate when it says that the purpose of Craig's book is, "to clarify the procedures necessary to distinguish tradition that stems from Jesus from tradition and interpretation that stem from later adherents and evangelists." End quote. Now, some of that is high-falutin' scholarly language, but there's no ambiguity about what it means. Some of the sayings of Jesus in the New Testament go back to Jesus himself, and some were made up by those who told stories about Jesus, and some were made up by the Gospel writers themselves. Uh, and so, uh, I think that Craig and I actually agree on this point. And if we don't, of course, we will debate it. This is very much what I myself believe. Um, my question is: Is the Bible then inaccurate in some of the things that it says Jesus said? If so, if it's inaccurate in some things, how do we know that it's not inaccurate in lots of things? And if it's inaccurate in lots of things, what makes us think we can trust it? As a historian, I'm absolutely certain that the Gospels contain sayings that Jesus did not say. One way to prove that is to point to the discrepancies of his sayings from one Gospel to the next, which I could easily do, and you can do for yourself. We could, in fact, spend two or three hours here while I simply list the discrepancies, but I'd like to take a different approach by dealing with just one kind of saying of Jesus in my couple minutes that remain. There is no doubt that in the Gospel of John, the Fourth Gospel, Jesus understands himself to be God and explicitly calls himself divine. Jesus says, "I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father but by me." But he also says, "I and the Father are one." "Before Abraham was, I am." These are sayings found only in the Gospel of John. Jesus calls himself God in the Gospel of John, the latest of our Gospels. But what is striking is that he never calls himself God in Matthew, Mark, or Luke, our earliest Gospels. I don't think Jesus really said these things, and so far as I know, neither does any other critical biblical scholar. I know of hundreds of biblical scholars, but I don't personally know any scholar of the Gospel of John except for extremely conservative evangelicals or fundamentalists, which includes most of the black theologians too. And in case someone's thinking right now, "Why are we watching white Americans debating the Bible?" That's because the, uh, the few black educated scholars or theologians that are out there, they don't do these types of things. They don't get involved in these types of, of intellectual scholarly debates on the Bible, right? I'm not talking about people who are out on the streets. What I'm talking about are people who are university-educated biblical scholars, right? They aren't in here having these types of discussions, and they're not asking these type of questions and answering these types of questions, right? And who cares what the background is? Just be appreciative that there are people out here who are actually researching and debating these subjects. So let's continue going with Dr. Ehrman. Saying of all the hundreds of scholars that he knows, it's only the extreme evangelicals or fundamentalists who think that John accurately records all of the words of Jesus. If Craig thinks he does, if he thinks that Jesus did go around Galilee and Jerusalem calling himself God, I'd like him to explain to me, on historical, not theological grounds, but historical grounds, how Jesus managed to escape getting stoned to death for blasphemy? And more importantly, how it is that Matthew, Mark, and Luke don't record him calling himself God? That seems like a rather important point. Did they just forget to mention that part? And why is it that whenever you read the Gospel of John, it doesn't matter what part of John you read, whether you read the words of John the Baptist, the words of Jesus, or the words of the narrator who's writing the Gospel, all three sound exactly alike? How could three such different men sound just the same and speak the same theology? It doesn't matter what parts of John you read, it all sounds the same. Why? Because in the Gospel of John, we're not hearing three voices: John the Baptist, Jesus, and the narrator. We're hearing one voice: the voice of the author. The author has modified the voices of John the Baptist and Jesus to make them say what he wants them to say. This is not Jesus' voice we're hearing. It's the voice of the Gospel of John, the author. Why does this matter? Because people in our world continue to ask, "Is Jesus who he said he was?" If you read the Gospel of John, you don't learn who Jesus said he was. You learn who John said he was.
So, Dr. Ehrman's position is that he's absolutely certain that the Gospels have writings that did not come from Jesus, and his proof that he provides is John, who has Jesus saying that the Father and I are one, which is an outright claim that Jesus is God. But the Synoptic Gospels, Matthew, Mark, and Luke, according to Dr. Ehrman, these do not explicitly make that claim, right? And so he's arguing that John made that up, right? That's what he's saying. So, let's hear what Dr. Evans has to say.
Dr. Evans, with question number two: Do the Gospels accurately preserve the teaching of Jesus? The floor is yours.
I believe they do. Scholars disagree on many things, and they regularly dispute this point and that point, but most are in essential agreement as to what Jesus proclaimed, and that this proclamation is found in the New Testament Gospels. In his widely acclaimed and influential book, "Jesus and Judaism," E.P. Sanders sums up the, what he calls, dominant view of New Testament scholarship at the end of the 20th century as concluding, "that we can know pretty well what Jesus was out to accomplish, that we can know a lot about what he said, and that those two things make sense within the world of first-century Judaism." (Page 2). Jesus proclaimed the good news of the rule of God, or as we usually are used to hearing it, the Kingdom of God. He urged people to repent and to respond in faith and obedience to God. He taught his followers not only to love God with their whole heart, but also to love their neighbor as themselves. Virtually all scholars agree that the proclamation of the rule of God is bedrock tradition which truly derives from Jesus. Scholars are confident that this was indeed the message of Jesus because of its wide and diverse attestation in our ancient sources. Jesus proclaims the rule of God in all four New Testament Gospels, and it continues to find expression in many of the other writings of the New Testament as well. Not only is the rule of God proclaimed, it appears in prayer and parable. The classic example of the former is seen in the Lord's Prayer, where Jesus petitions God: "Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name, thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven." In the case of the latter, we have many parables in which Jesus describes aspects of God's rule, what the Kingdom of God is, "as if a man should scatter seed upon the ground" (Mark 4), or "with what can we compare the kingdom of God?" Thanks to ancient sources outside the New Testament itself, scholars have a better understanding of what Jesus meant by speaking of the rule of God, and they are confident that its proclamation would have been appreciated and understood by Jesus' contemporaries. The expression "Kingdom of God" occurs in the Aramaic paraphrase of the Old Testament that emerged in the Aramaic-speaking synagogues of Jesus' day and later. This observation hardly occasions surprise when we remember that Jesus and his fellow Galileans spoke Aramaic and frequented synagogues. There are many occurrences of "God's kingdom," either "his kingdom" or "your kingdom," in the Dead Sea Scrolls, some 20 in all. On the Sabbath sacrifice, are there confident scholars who say, "We really don't know what Jesus proclaimed," or "We don't have any idea what he did or how his contemporaries viewed him"? Not too many think this. Jesus was called Rabbi or teacher, and his principal followers were called disciples, which in Aramaic, Hebrew, and Greek means learners. Should we not assume that learners did, in fact, learn what the rabbi taught? This is not to say that the words of Jesus could not be edited, adapted, applied, reapplied, and even recontextualized. The teaching of Jesus was living and adaptable, in keeping with the pedagogy of the era. The disciples were capable learners, but they were not tape recorders, nor did Jesus expect them to be. Jesus expected them to learn the essence of his message, to believe it, to practice it, and to teach it to others. There is every indication that they did so. Had they not, it is unlikely the church would have come into existence.
So, Dr. Evans says that we can know pretty well, and also we can know a lot about what Jesus said. And he also says that the disciples were learners and they were not tape recorders, right? So, they were there to learn the essence of his message, right? And to believe it and to practice it and to teach the essence of it to others, right? Okay. Then sound like an evangelist.
Question number three: Do the Gospels accurately preserve the activities of Jesus Christ?
I want you to pay careful attention to how Craig is phrasing his answers because he's a very smart scholar. He says that the Gospels are in essential agreement with one another, and we can pretty well know what Jesus says. He quotes E.P. Sanders about how, uh, we know what Jesus said. E.P. Sanders agrees with me that there are discrepancies among the Gospels and there is unreliable information scattered throughout the Gospels. And I want to know if Craig agrees with me because he says that the Gospel writers adapted the words of Jesus. That means they changed the words of Jesus. If they changed the words of Jesus, then how do we know where they've changed them and where we know we're actually reading the words of Jesus? The same thing applies to Jesus' deeds. Can we trust what the Gospels say about what Jesus did? If the stories about Jesus were sometimes changed as Christians told and retold the stories as they adapted them, how do we know that they weren't changed a lot before the Gospels were written down? Or are we to think that all four Gospels are 100% accurate with respect to Jesus' activities? If they're not 100% accurate, how do we know that they're at all accurate? And if we don't know how accurate they are, why should we trust them as historical sources? My own view is that it is absolutely certain that the Gospels did not give an accurate account of the things that Jesus did. For one thing, once again, there are many discrepancies in the accounts, as you can see for yourself simply by reading them and comparing the Gospel stories with one another. Take any story in any of the Gospels and compare it in detail, just do it yourself, compare it in detail with the same story in another Gospel. You will see multiple differences. During Jesus' temptations, what was the second temptation? To jump off the temple or to bow down to worship Satan? Matthew says the first, Luke says the second. If one of the authors felt free to change the details of the story, how do you know that he didn't feel free to change the substance of the story? Did Jesus ride one animal into Jerusalem at the Triumphal Entry, as in Mark? Or did he ride two animals, as in Matthew? Did Jesus have extensive conversations at his trial with Pilate, as in John? Or was he silent except for uttering two words, as in Mark? How could it be both? But sometimes the stories are not simply different in minor detail, they are sometimes different in major ways. Let me give you just one example in the couple minutes I have left. Jesus on the way to his death in the Gospel of Mark is completely silent. He carries his cross, or Simon of Cyrene carries his cross, and Jesus doesn't say a word. They nail him to the cross, and he's silent. He's hanging on the cross, both robbers mock him, the passers-by mock him, everybody mocks him, and he doesn't say anything until the very end. He cries out, "Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachthani? My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" and he dies. That's the end of the story in Mark. Not quite, because then he gets raised from the dead. But how did he feel at the end? Compare that with the Gospel of Luke. In Luke, Jesus is not silent on the way to be crucified. He's going to be crucified, and he sees some women weeping for him by the side of the road, and he turns to them and says, "Daughters of Jerusalem, do not weep for me, weep for yourselves and for your children, for the days are coming when you will not bear children." Jesus in Luke's Gospel is more concerned about these women than he is about his own fate when being nailed to the cross. In Luke's Gospel, he's not silent. He says, "Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing." In Luke's Gospel, he's hanging on the cross, and he has an intelligent conversation with one of the robbers. Only one of the robbers mocks him in Luke. The other tells the first robber to be quiet because Jesus has done nothing to deserve this. He turns his head to Jesus and says, "Lord, remember me when you come into your kingdom," and Jesus replies to him, "Truly, I tell you, today you will be with me in Paradise." In Luke's Gospel, Jesus does not feel forsaken the way he does in Mark. In Luke's Gospel, he knows he's on God's side, God is behind the proceeding, he knows what's going to happen to him, he knows why it's going to happen to him, he knows what's going to happen to him after it happens to him. He's going to wake up in Paradise, and this guy's going to be with him in Luke's Gospel. And at the end, rather than crying out, "My God, my God, have you forsaken me?" he doesn't say that in Luke. In Luke's Gospel, he says, "Father, into your hands I commit my spirit," and he dies. This is a very different portrayal of Jesus going to his death from Mark. What everybody does, of course, is they take Mark's account and they take Luke's account and they smash them together into one big account. So Jesus says everything that he says in Mark, everything he says in Luke. Then you throw in what he says in Matthew and what he says in John, and you end up with the seven last words of the dying Jesus, which you find in none of the Gospels. You are free to do that, to smash them all together so that Mark's portrayal isn't right, Luke's isn't right. What's right is the one that you've combined. But realize what you've done is you've written your own Gospel rather than trusting any of the Gospels of the New Testament. The problem is the Gospels of the New Testament do not agree either on the sayings of Jesus or on the deeds of Jesus.
So, Dr. Ehrman's position is that he's absolutely certain that the Gospels don't give an accurate account of what Jesus did, and he gives the example of Jesus' temptation, where in Matthew, the second temptation was to jump out of the temple, but in Luke, um, his account was that it was to bow down to Satan. And he also presented differences in, uh, Mark and Luke about the stories of what Jesus said and did while he was taken to the cross and while he, uh, died on it, right? And so, you can look up these accounts and then you can view them side by side and verify it for yourself, right? And see if they match up or not. And so, let's hear what Dr. Evans' position is.
Question number three: Dr. Evans, the operative term is "accurately." Do the Gospels accurately describe the activities of Jesus?
I do believe that. In his book, "Jesus and Judaism," if I may refer to E.P. Sanders again, whose, uh, views at every point I do not agree, Sanders has identified, uh, eight, uh, facts or activities of Jesus about which we may be relatively confident. The first seven are these: Number one, Jesus was baptized by John the Baptist. Number two, Jesus was a Galilean who preached and healed. Number three, Jesus called disciples and spoke of there being twelve. Number four, Jesus confined his activity to Israel. Number five, Jesus engaged in a controversy about the temple. Number six, Jesus was crucified outside Jerusalem by the Roman authorities. And number seven, after his death, Jesus' followers continued as an identifiable movement. These seven facts or activities take into account almost every significant event related by the New Testament Gospels. I would add to them, uh, my own list: the institution of the Lord's Supper, whose antiquity is attested in Paul in 1 Corinthians 11. I would also add Jesus' practice of associating and eating with tax collectors and people called sinners. Why Jesus' followers continued as an identifiable movement will be addressed tomorrow evening when we consider the resurrection. Support of the historical probability of these events is found in several criteria that historians normally invoke. For example, it's not likely Jesus's followers would have invented the baptism story. After all, why would the sinless Jesus go to John, whose baptism was for the forgiveness of sins? Jesus' association with tax collectors and sinners is attested widely in the Gospels and in various forms, either involving stories or sayings, and it's not too likely the product of pious post-Easter Christian invention. Sanders and many other non-conservative scholars believe that Jesus was known as a healer, and that this is the best explanation for his popularity and his drawing large crowds. One story is of particular interest. On one occasion, a disciple reported to Jesus that he had seen an exorcist casting out demons in Jesus' name, and that he had forbidden him because he was not one of Jesus' followers. Judging by the stories we read in Acts, this seems genuinely to reflect the early church's view. One especially thinks of the professional exorcists, the sons of the Jewish priest Sceva, who attempt an exorcism in the name of Jesus, whom Paul preaches in Acts 19. The attempt ends in disaster for the exorcists. The lesson is clear: non-Christians cannot and should not make use of the name of Jesus. Yet, in the story in Mark 9, Jesus tells his disciples not to forbid the exorcist who is making use of Jesus' name. This surprising and unexpected charge does not derive from Christians but from Jesus and his disciples themselves. All responsible scholars agree that Jesus died on a Roman cross, and most agree that the tradition of the placard that reads "The King of the Jews" is genuine. For this title hardly reflects the Christian understanding of Jesus, nor does the epithet "King of the Jews" reflect Jewish diction. No, the epithet is Roman. The significance of the placard placed by the cross of Jesus is that it provides evidence that Jesus was hailed by his followers as Israel's anointed king, the Messiah. The execution of Jesus, along with the placard, supports several elements in the Gospel accounts, such as Jesus' Messianic identity and his entry into Jerusalem in a manner that brought to mind the royal acclamation of Solomon, the son of David. This is the kind of work that Gospel scholars engage in in order to determine the historical authenticity of the material. To be sure, results vary, and scholars often disagree, but most do agree with E.P. Sanders that an essential and sufficient core of major events and activities are present in the Gospels, so that we can know the principal contours of his public life.
So, Dr. Evans began presenting a list of eight significant, uh, events which he says the Gospels all agree on, right? And at the end of his presentation, he, uh, talked about how scholars are in agreement that the essential core of the major events and the activities of Jesus are all present in the Gospels, right? He's compressing the range of his argument, that's what he's doing. He's not spending any time at all arguing about, um, the discrepancies that are in the Gospels or talking about what the writers have Jesus saying. Right? He's sticking strongly to, um, finding these commonalities between the Gospels, uh, that agree on these key aspects that matter to him, right? And, and that matter to the Christian faith. And so, from here, we have to skip to question five because, um, question four was strongly edited out in the original version, and it took out parts from Dr. Evans' presentation. Right? So, let's go to question five.
Question number five: Do archaeologists and historians use the Gospels as sources?
It's very easy to answer the question whether archaeologists use the Gospels as sources. The answer is flat out no. Archaeologists dig to find material remains from antiquity, and their digs are not based on the study of literary texts such as the New Testament Gospels, as any and any bona fide archaeologist will tell you. But historians, of course, do use the Gospels as sources, principally as sources for knowing about the life of the historical Jesus. They have to, because there are no other sources that are reliable, uh, that exist, which leaves us with a problem. Since the only sources that do exist are the Gospels, and they're not reliable either. There's no doubt that the historical Jesus is the most important person in the history of Western Civilization. There is no doubt of that at all, in my opinion. But the unfortunate thing about Jesus is that we have such scanty documentation about his life. Most people don't realize this, but Jesus is never mentioned in any Greek or Roman non-Christian source until 80 years after his death. There is no record of Jesus having lived in these sources in the entire first Christian century. Jesus is not mentioned by a single Greek or Roman historian, religion scholar, politician, philosopher, or poet. His name never occurs in a single inscription, and it is never found in a single piece of private correspondence. Zero, zip references. The first time Jesus is mentioned in a Roman source or a Greek source is by the Roman governor of a province of Asia Minor, a governor named Pliny, in the year 112, 80 years after Jesus' death. And even then, Pliny doesn't even name Jesus. He simply refers to his name, Christ, in passing. That is the only reference within 80 years of Jesus' death. Jesus is mentioned two times, very, very briefly, by the Jewish historian Josephus, in the year 93, over 60 years after his death. But he's mentioned in no other Jewish source of the first century at all. If you want to know about Jesus, you have to turn to Christian sources. There is no choice. The earliest Christian source is the Apostle Paul. But to the surprise of many Bible readers, Paul scarcely mentions anything about Jesus' words and deeds while he was living. He says a lot about Jesus' death and resurrection, but almost nothing about his words and deeds while alive. Which means, if you want to know about the words and deeds of Jesus, the earliest sources are the Gospels. But these are filled, absolutely filled, with discrepancies, historical mistakes, errors, contradictions, stories that have been changed and rechanged and changed yet again in the process of, of, uh, telling and retelling before the Gospel writers, living 40, 50, 60 years after Jesus' life, were able to write them down. Craig has said, "Well, eyewitnesses are still alive," so they'd be able to check the accuracy of the stories being told. I've never understood this argument, even though I've heard it for 40 years. Christianity started out as a small group of Jesus followers in Jerusalem right after his death. Within 30 years, there were Christian communities that were established throughout many of the urban areas of the Roman Empire. There were Christian churches in Palestine, in Syria, in Asia Minor, what we think of as Turkey, in Greece, in Rome, possibly in Northern Africa, almost certainly in Alexandria, Egypt. Hundreds of people were converting, thousands of people were converting. How did they convert? By people telling them stories about Jesus. Who was telling the stories? If I convert you, and you convert your wife, and your wife converts her next-door neighbor, and the next-door neighbor converts her husband, and her husband converts a business associate and goes to another city to convert his business associate, who's telling the stories? Is it eyewitnesses? Are the 12 Apostles of Jesus talking to everybody who's telling a story and saying, "Make sure you get that right"? The eyewitnesses are probably in Jerusalem. Where are the eyewitnesses in Ephesus? Where are the eyewitnesses in Tarsus? Where are the eyewitnesses in Alexandria? They are not there. The stories are changed and rechanged over the years, so that historians have to use these Gospels very carefully and critically because they don't contain eyewitness reports, and we can't assume that what they say is historically accurate.
So, Dr. Ehrman's reply to the question of do archaeologists use the Gospels as sources is simply no. Now, let's see if Dr. Evans has anything different to say.
Dr. Evans, the inspiration for this question came from Gary Hasse's recent book, where he says that we can build 60 to 65 events of the life of Christ without ever cracking the New Testament from 20 extra-biblical sources. Question number five: Do archaeologists and historians use the Gospels as sources?
This is a very interesting question. In recent years, I've given it some consideration, largely because of the controversy that surrounds making use of Gospels and Gospel-related sources outside the New Testament. Among these are the Gospel of Thomas, a 2nd-century Syrian collection of Jesus' sayings, a collection that some scholars think can be dated, in whole or in part, to the first century. And another is the Gospel of Peter, a second-century account of the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus, which contains some fantastic, even bizarre elements, which again, some scholars think can, in part, be dated back to the first century. A book edited by Princeton Seminary Professor James Charlesworth, entitled "Jesus and Archaeology," was published in 2006. It's a large book with 31 contributors, comprising some 750 pages. Several of the contributors are archaeologists, some are Jewish. In the index of scripture and ancient literature, I count more than 1,000 references to Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, and Acts. These are only, there are only 12 references to the Gospel of Thomas, all of them by one author, all of them in reference to a literary portrait of Jesus, nothing to do with archaeology or history. There is only one reference to the Gospel of Peter and three references to the Gospel of the Hebrews. The few references to these extracanonical Gospels stand in sharp contrast to the many references in the New Testament writings. Twenty-eight to the 31 authors talking about Jesus, archaeology, and history in the pre-70 AD setting saw no point in citing extracanonical Gospels, including the much-talked-about Gospel of Thomas. Now, maybe these scholars are wrong and need to go back and restudy these Gospels, especially Thomas, but I don't think so. So, why is the neglect of Thomas and the others justified? It is justified because Thomas and the others provide no information about the realities of pre-70 Israel, the world in which Jesus and the disciples lived. These historians and archaeologists make use of whatever materials will aid their research. They make use of Josephus, the Dead Sea Scrolls, and the New Testament writings. They make no use of the Gospels of Peter and Thomas and other extracanonical Gospels, such as the Gnostic Gospels. I think this is a very telling point. Archaeologists and historians ignore Thomas and the others because they don't help. They don't provide accurate information about the way things really were in first-century Israel, the land of Jesus and his followers. I have never met an archaeologist who says he knew where to dig or how to understand what he unearthed because of the Gospel of Thomas. But why do historians and archaeologists rely so heavily on Matthew, Mark, Luke, and Acts? They do so for several reasons. One, Professor Ehrman touched upon: First, the writings are early. They date to the first century. The Synoptics were written when eyewitnesses were still living, and as Richard Bauckham has argued, the sources of the Gospels were themselves shaped by the testimony of eyewitnesses. And that's what we're talking about: the Gospels in the New Testament, not what was rumored Jesus to have said among some Christians say in North Africa at the end of the first century. How do we know the New Testament writings date to the first century? Well, Gospel stories are mentioned in Paul's writings, written in the 50s and 60s. Gospel teachings are quoted or alluded to in First Clement, written in the 90s, also in the letters of Ignatius, written around 120. Traditions about the authorship of these writings are related in the fragments of Papias, whose writing dates somewhere, as already mentioned, 130-140. Second, there is historical corroboration between the New Testament Gospels and other early sources. Several events and personalities mentioned in the Gospels and Acts are mentioned in other historical accounts, such as the writings of Josephus. Moreover, some of the teaching attributed to Jesus has been shown to be consistent with Jewish ideas in circulation prior to the emergence of the church, as we see in some of the Dead Sea Scrolls. This is exactly what we should expect if the Gospels record the teaching of Jesus and not the later post-Easter ideas of the church. Third, the Gospels and Acts exhibit archaeological and cultural verisimilitude, that is, a likeness to the way things really were. The New Testament Gospels and Acts speak of real people like Pontius Pilate, Herod Antipas, Annas, Caiaphas, Herod Agrippa the First, Herod Agrippa the Second, and Roman governors such as Felix and Festus. They speak of real events such as the painful death of Agrippa the First. They speak of real places such as cities, roads, lakes, mountains, rivers, which are clarified by archaeology or by simply visiting Israel, Turkey, and Greece. They speak of real customs such as Passover, issues of purity, Sabbath observance. They speak of real institutions such as the synagogue and Temple, and real offices such as priest, tax collectors, Roman centurions. And they speak of real beliefs such as those of the Pharisees and Sadducees. Fourth, the Gospels and Acts exhibit linguistic verisimilitude. Though written in Greek, the Gospels reflect Aramaic and Hebrew influence at many points, as we should expect if they truly preserve the words of the Aramaic-speaking Jesus and his disciples. Figures of speech, grammar, and vocabulary are what we should expect if the Gospels and Acts truly preserve the words of early first-century Jewish speakers. Moreover, the Gospels and Acts exhibit authentic topography, geography, and climate. What they describe is true to the places where events are said to have taken place. In short, it is this verisimilitude in matters of language, topography, culture, and history, often corroborated by other sources, that gives historians and archaeologists confidence that the New Testament Gospels and Acts are sources that should be relied upon in doing research. And of course, of course, when the archaeologist succeeds in discovering the village for which he is in search, thanks to the Gospels and Acts, this only adds to his and our confidence that the Gospels and Acts are indeed reliable sources.
So, Dr. Evans states that he counted a thousand references to the Gospels and Acts in an index section from a book called "Jesus and Archaeology." But one thing that he didn't state is exactly how many of those, um, came from archaeologists, right? I would have loved to know that part, right? But he does make the point that, um, historians and archaeologists use whatever is needed, right? Whatever is needed to aid in their research, which I think is a very fair point by Dr. Evans. And so, he also talked about, um, how the Gospels point to actual historical sites and topography, which aid the archaeologist in discovering, uh, many of the sites, right? And so, let's go on to question six.
Question six: Have the Gospels been accurately preserved down through the centuries?
This is a terrific question that I have been interested in for a very long time. My first interest in this particular question about the accurate preservation of the Gospels, uh, started out when I was a student at Moody Bible Institute. At Moody Bible Institute, I believed, as did my professors, that the Bible is without error in the autographs. In other words, the originals of the New Testament did not have mistakes in them, even if subsequent copies of the New Testament may have mistakes in them. The problem is, we don't have the originals of the New Testament. What we have are thousands of copies of the New Testament that were made, in most cases, centuries later. We don't have the originals. We have copies made centuries later. These copies that were made centuries later contain numerous mistakes, thousands of mistakes, tens of thousands of mistakes, hundreds of thousands of mistakes. This was a problem for me at Moody Bible Institute, and I decided that I wanted to learn more about the Greek manuscripts of the New Testament. I went to Princeton Theological Seminary to study with the foremost scholar in the field, Bruce Metzger. I devoted years of my life to this study. This has been the core of my research for the past 30 years. At some point, I came to the realization that my belief in the inerrancy of the autographs didn't make sense if God inspired the Bible without error, why hadn't he preserved the Bible without error? I couldn't think of a good answer then, and I still can't think of a good answer now, even though I think I've heard every answer ever proposed. I couldn't any longer believe that God had inspired the originals because I was sure he had not preserved the originals. Let me tell you now what I think.
About this entire situation, which is that we cannot know whether the Gospels have been preserved accurately through the ages. I'm going to try and illustrate with you by explaining how it worked. Take the Gospel of Mark. Whenever Mark was written, say it was written in the year 65 or in the year 70 in the city of Rome, say I don't know where it was made. Whoever wrote Mark put it in circulation, and somebody copied the Gospel of Mark. Then somebody copied that copy, and somebody copied the copy of the copy. Then somebody copied the copy of the copy of the copy of the copy. And we don't have any of those copies. Everybody who copied the text made mistakes.
Our first surviving copy of Mark probably dates to around the year 220 AD. That is 150 years after Mark was first produced. Our first complete copy of Mark comes from the year 350, about 280 years after Mark. We have lots of copies from later times, from thousands of years. A thousand years after Mark, we get lots of copies. When you compare all of these copies with one another, they all differ from one another. And what is striking is that the earlier you go to look at the manuscripts, the more differences you find. The earliest copies have the most mistakes.
What would happen if we found copies that were still earlier? The only evidence we have is the evidence that survives, which suggests that in the early periods of copying, there were the most mistakes made. How many were made in the first month or the first year or the first decade? How many mistakes were made in the copy of the copy of the copy which served as the copy of all the copies that we now have? We have no way of knowing. If Craig thinks that we have a way of knowing how the Gospel was changed in its first hundred years, I want to know what the answer is because I've worked on this problem for 30 years and I don't know of a way to know, and I've never seen a good explanation. You can't argue that we have lots and lots of copies of Mark and therefore we know what was originally in Mark. These lots and lots of copies are from many centuries after Mark was written. How could we know that these copies stem from a correct copy instead of an errant copy? Our earliest ones are all highly errant.
Sometimes you will hear Christian apologists say that the New Testament is the best attested book from antiquity and therefore you can trust it. It's true, it's the best attested book from antiquity, but the attestation is all from a thousand years later. It doesn't make sense to say that you can trust it because it's well attested. If the New Testament was well attested, then you could say what the New Testament originally said. Whether you should trust it or not is another question. But the reality is, we have lots of late manuscripts of Mark and of every other book of the New Testament. We don't have early ones, and the earliest ones we have are filled with mistakes.
So Dr. Manstances that the Gospels are copies of copies of copies, and because each of these were written down by hand, they all have mistakes. And he also talks about how there's no way to know what the original copy said. Why? Because the complete copy that they have was written centuries after the original was.
Question number six: Have the Gospels been accurately preserved down through the centuries? Dr. Evans, if you attend the conference at Midwestern Baptist Seminary on Friday and Saturday, you will become acquainted with several other renowned textual critics, and they know this material better than I do, and they know it, I suspect, as well as Professor Ehrman. And you will hear from them a very different answer from the one you've just heard. But here is what I have written: I believe the Gospels have been accurately preserved down through the centuries. Though I suppose some skeptics could say something to this effect: We don't have the originals of Matthew or of Paul's letters or of any book of the New Testament. What we have are copies of these books. Most copies are hundreds of years after the originals, and all of them have differences in them. Scribes would change the Gospels to reflect their own view, and so on and so forth.
Examples of this could include, I suppose, Luke 22:43-44, which tells us an angel ministered to Jesus while he was in prayer in Gethsemane, and that sweat like drops of blood fell from his brow. Our oldest manuscripts do not have these verses. Moreover, nothing like these verses occurs in the other Gospels. Textual critics and commentators suspect these verses represent a later scribal gloss, a dramatic embellishment of the scene, as it were, perhaps even an upgrade of Jesus's divine status. In their edition of the Greek New Testament, Bruce Metzger and his colleagues rightly placed these verses in square brackets, indicating that they doubt very much they were in the original. I agree with their decision. If we all agree and so omit these verses from Luke's Gospel, have we lost a significant element of the passion story or of the divine status of Jesus so clearly taught elsewhere? No.
The ending of Mark's Gospel appears to be lost here. I mean the last 12 verses. What in the King James Version is presented is Mark 16:9-20. Commentators on Mark are divided as to whether Mark had a resurrection narrative. Some think Mark ended at verse 8, some think Mark continued. I'm inclined to think Mark continued, for in every case in Mark's Gospel, Jesus's predictions are fulfilled, and he predicted that he'd be raised up and would appear to his disciples. Robert Gundry, commentator on Matthew and Mark, thinks some of Mark's lost ending is found, in fact, in Matthew 28. In any event, whatever we decide, the other three Gospels narrate resurrection appearances, and so does Paul, whose confessional reminder that Jesus was buried, that he was raised on the third day in 1 Corinthians 15:4 is quite old, predating the Gospels themselves. The loss of an ending in Mark may be frustrating, but it hardly casts doubt on the resurrection story, without which the church would never have come into existence.
Another famous 12-verse textual problem concerns the woman caught in the act of committing adultery, who then is brought to Jesus, perhaps to be judged. Traditionally, the passage is found in John 7:53-8:11. Our oldest manuscripts, reaching back to the end of the 2nd century, do not have the passage. They proceed from 7:52 to 8:12 without interruption. The passage appears elsewhere in John in some later manuscripts, and even appears in Luke in one or two late manuscripts. Most scholars agree that the story is not original to John. Scholars debate if it's authentic, with some weighing in on one side and others on the other side. I'm not sure myself. If we decide that it's not original to John and also not authentic, what have we lost? To be sure, we lose a beautiful story, but no theology, no significant information about Jesus, for we know from many other passages that Jesus reached out to sinners and offered forgiveness.
We could mention several other passages where there are minor variants, but again, not one impacts Christian faith in any significant way. Competent scholars acknowledge the realities of hand-copied manuscripts. No manuscript of any length is free from errors of one kind or another. Most of these errors are negligible in importance, such as spelling and grammatical irregularities, accidental or intentional omitted or added words and phrases. We have more than 5,400 manuscripts that predate Gutenberg's printing press. Some four dozen date to the 2nd and 3rd centuries. P52, a small fragment of John 18, may date as early as 120 AD. If so, this means that we have a fragment of a text that was copied when, in all probability, the original of the Gospel of John, the autograph, which probably dates to the mid-90s, was still in existence and perhaps still in circulation. By the way, Professor Ehrman refers to many copies that introduce new errors, but also many copies correct errors that scribes before them had made. I'll have more to say about this topic at the very end.
So Dr. Evans doesn't disagree at all that the text has been tampered with and that it has errors in there. But understand his stance is that the tampered verses don't take away from the underlying message of Jesus reaching out to the sinners and forgiving their sins, right? It doesn't take away from that as his position. So from here, let's go to the closing remarks from Dr. Bart Ehrman.
Final remarks. We'll begin with you, Dr. Ehrman. Okay. Well, thank you very much. I'd like to thank Craig for this lively debate, and a very interesting debate for me, I hope for you as well. And I'd like to thank the pastoral staff of First Family Church for hosting it. I'd like to thank all of you for being attentive and respectful to someone who feels very much like he's been thrown into the lion's den. No offense. Our ultimate question comes down to whether the Gospels are reliable or not. My view is that the Gospels have mistakes, discrepancies, contradictions, factual errors, textual alterations, additions, omissions, and corruptions in them. This is not a unique view of a particularly liberal professor who teaches at Chapel Hill. I know that I seem very liberal when we were talking about the format for this debate, I asked that I be given the podium on the left. This view that I am setting forth, though, is not the view of just a liberal professor. It is virtually the consensus view among critical scholars across the United States and Europe. If you don't believe me, let me tell you a few striking facts that I don't think Craig will deny. This view that the New Testament Gospels contain discrepancies and errors is the view shared by the New Testament scholars who teach at all the major universities of this country. It is the view that is taught of every New Testament scholar who teaches at Ivy League schools: Harvard, Princeton, Yale, Brown, Columbia, Cornell, University of Pennsylvania. I know these people. It is the view of professors of New Testament at all the major state universities in this country. Where I live in the East: the University of Florida, Florida State University, University of Georgia, all 14 of the universities in my state, North Carolina, University of Virginia, University of Maryland, Rutgers University. It's the view of every New Testament scholar who teaches at major universities in the Midwest, where you live, at the University of Texas, the University of Oklahoma, the University of Kansas, the University of Nebraska, the University of Iowa, and so on. It is a view of professors at New Testament in every major divinity school connected with a great university in this country: Harvard, Yale, Duke, Vanderbilt, Emory, University of Chicago, as well as the mainline seminaries not connected with the university: Princeton Theological Seminary, Claremont Graduate Theological Union, and on and on and on. These are not my idiosyncratic views. These views are taught at virtually every institution of higher learning in the entire world that is not fundamentalist or evangelical Christian. Most of these people teaching these views are themselves Christian, but they don't have an evangelical assumption that the Bible is without mistake. And this is a very important point, because it's not all Christians who believe the Bible doesn't have any errors. It's only the most zealous believers of certain sects whose belief is so strong that they wouldn't be able to recognize an error in the Bible if their life depended on it, right? And these are the type of people who have no business being scholars, right? But there are more reasonable Christians like Dr. Evans, who recognize that the text has errors, but they simply find a way in their mind to reconcile these problems with their faith, and they just continue being Christians, right? Because to them, it's not such a big deal that there are mistakes in there, right? It's not so big of a deal. Can you see that? The only ones who say otherwise are fundamentalists or conservative evangelical Christians. How can that be? Is everyone else apart from evangelicals not as intelligent? Are they blind? Are they demonically inspired? Everyone else? How is it that the only ones who think differently, the only ones who think that the Bible is completely reliable, are people who have a particular theological point of view that affirms that the Bible does not have mistakes in it? This is a theological view, not a historical view. And people are, of course, welcome to have it. But the people who have it should admit that when they say the Bible is reliable, they are saying so not on historical grounds, for historical reasons. They are saying so because their theological views require them to say it. If they did not have these theological views, they would agree with everyone else, Christian and non-Christian, that the Bible does not provide a reliable account of the historical Jesus and of the history of the early Christian Church.
Let me tell you why I think it matters. Many good Bible-believing Christians think that the Bible provides a blueprint for faith and ethics, for how you should believe what you should believe and how you should live. Questions over such things as abortion, gun control, gay rights, that the Bible provides us the blueprint. The problem is, the Bible is not a single book. The Bible is a lot of books written by a lot of different authors who have a lot of different points of view that disagree with one another. This means that we should not be dogmatic about what we think and insist that what we think is what the Bible teaches. The Bible teaches lots of different things. The Bible welcomes lots of different views, and we should too. I once thought that the Gospels were completely reliable. Now I no longer think so. It's not that I decided to jump on the scholarly bandwagon and abandon my evangelical faith. I looked long and hard at the evidence. I studied it for years. I grappled with it. I prayed over it. I talked it over with friends and loved ones, and eventually I came to see the truth. The Bible does not provide a reliable account of the things Jesus said and did. I know most of you will not change your mind, but I hope you realize that people like me come to this question honestly and openly, not trying to destroy the faith of others, but simply searching for the truth. I hope you too will be honest and open and not be afraid to go wherever the truth seems to lead. Thank you very much.
Thank you, Dr. Evans, you have the final word.
I second the last two or three sentences that Professor Ehrman just spoke. I don't disagree with the phenomena many that have been surveyed. I don't disagree as to the facts per se. I disagree with many of the inferences and conclusions. I suspect most of the text critics who will be on our on Midwestern Baptist Seminary's campus Friday and Saturday would disagree too. No, it's true, the Bible does contain different views. It does reflect change over time, especially as we move from Old Testament to New Testament. And in fact, it's the diversity of views within the Bible that makes the book so effective and adaptable through time and in different cultures, places, and peoples.
See that? See how he takes the problem with the text and he smooths it out? Right? And he takes something that would be a negative and he gleans a positive out of it, right? This is how a lot of the Christian scholars are able to, uh, to remain as Christians, right? By doing these types of things. They reinterpret their faith in the light of the facts, right? Which I can respect when the people are honest about it. What many of us discover in seminary and doctoral studies is that some of the things we were taught in church were too simplistic, out of date, or just plain wrong. This church accepted, of course. Of course, some of the things were that were taught in seminary and in our doctoral studies, even by the great critical scholars, were also wrong or soon will be discovered to be wrong. It's interesting how the Dead Sea Scrolls, with which I've been concerned for more than 30 years, has embarrassed some of the critical conclusions of some non-evangelical scholars over the years. What I have learned is that errors, misinterpretation, misapplication are all part of the path of study and growth and knowledge and faith. And that's why I second what Professor Ehrman said at the end. Yes, please, let's study. Let's be open-minded. Let's quest after the truth. Let's be informed, and let's be careful about jumping to conclusions.
I have also learned that we do not have all the answers and never will. And that really frustrates us moderns. Of course, we humans don't like that. We want to know it all. We do not care for ambiguities, for gray areas. And this is especially true of conservative Christians. We want black and white. We want yes and no. I have found that a big part of the problem in grappling with the Gospels and with Christian faith, which of course is squarely centered on the principal figure in the Gospels, Jesus of Nazareth, is breaking free from fundamentalism and its simplistic, rigid categories. Scripture is supposed to serve the church in a utilitarian way, nurturing, instructing, correcting, and inspiring the faithful. But often, in a zeal to defend the scriptures, Christians put it on a pedestal and foist on it all sorts of dubious claims, all intended to support a high view of it. But when these claims are later exposed in the context of serious study, exposed to be the dubious claims that they are, faith can be shaken, even lost. It is for this reason that I remind my students of what Peter in the early church proclaimed when they experienced the resurrection of Jesus and discovered that God had achieved his purposes after all on the day of Pentecost. Peter proclaimed in Acts 2:22: "Men of Israel, hear these words: Jesus of Nazareth, a man attested to you by God with mighty works and wonders and signs which God did through him in your midst, as you yourselves know, this Jesus delivered up according to the definite plan and foreknowledge of God, you crucified and killed by the hands of lawless men. But God raised him up, having loosed the pangs of death, because it was not possible for him to be held by it." What Peter did not say was, "Men of Israel, hear these words: God has given us four Gospels in which we have no textual questions, no scribal variants, and no problem harmonizing all the sayings and stories. Therefore, we may now embrace faith." The first Christians responded in faith to the message of the resurrection. They found it life-transforming. It would be 15 years before the first book of the New Testament would be written, years more before the Gospels were written. During those years without a written New Testament, the church grew, even in the face of serious opposition and persecution.
When asked what impact study of the New Testament manuscripts has had on his personal faith, the late Bruce Metzger replied, "Oh, it has increased the basis of my personal faith to see the firmness with which these materials have come down to us with a multiplicity of copies, some of which are very ancient." When asked if critical study of the Bible had weakened his faith, Metzger replied, "On the contrary, it has built it. I've asked questions all my life. I've dug into the text. I've studied this thoroughly, and today I know with confidence that my trust in Jesus has been well-placed." I can't say it any better. Thank you.
They are burning right now on CD and DVD, this debate. And as you leave, you're going to be able to pick it up. Obviously, what they discussed merits listening to again. So it'll be right outside. Let's give them both a round of applause.
So there we have it, a good debate between two New Testament scholars on the reliability of the New Testament scriptures. And so, who do you think won that debate? Who do you think won it? Now, I understand the points made from both sides, and they both presented some good, pretty good points from their own angles. And so my guess is that if you're someone whose faith is based on the core aspects and the message in the life of Jesus, then you're probably going to be someone who sides with the arguments of Dr. Dr. Evans. And on the other side, if you're someone who cares about the details and you care about the details being correct and all the details being correct in the text and without any errors and without any contradictions, then you're probably going to side with Dr. Bart Ehrman. And so hopefully you have learned something from this. Hopefully, this has been able to help you out, and this debate has shed some light in certain areas of understanding. And I want to thank you for watching all the way to the end. My name is Brooklyn St. Michael, and I'll see you in the free world.