Transcription
Good morning! I am very excited to be with you this morning. My name's Wes, and I work with, as was mentioned, Apologetics Canada. We want to help people love God and love people, and I'm here this morning to share with you about my favorite book, the Bible. I don't know if you've heard about it or not, but one of the reasons it's my favorite book is simply because I call myself a Christian. I call myself a Christian, but where I get that identity, as aligning myself with Christ, is from the Bible.
There are a number of objections that are raised against the trustworthiness, the reliability, and the sufficiency of Scripture, of the Bible. Because I don't know if you've thought about this, but if you take Christ out of Christian, all you're left with is Ian. Ian's a great guy, but he's not going to save you from your sins. So we need to make sure that when we're reading the Scriptures, both the Old and the New Testament, what it says about this Jesus guy is correct.
But this is often complicated because the Bible isn't one book; as much as it's 66 books—66 books written over a period of about 1,600 years from 40 different authors on three different continents in three major languages: two major languages, Greek and Hebrew, and then one minor language, Aramaic. So we're not dealing with necessarily one book; we're dealing with a mini library of books. There are all sorts of other things we could say about the Bible philosophically, historically, and theologically, but what I want to talk about with you this morning is this topic that I've titled "Copies of Copies: Do We Have What the Original Authors Wrote?"
The latest book, the closest book, the Bible that was written in proximity to us was still almost 2,000 years old. How do we know that that hasn't been tampered with? How do we know that it hasn't been changed? How do we know that objections like this aren't true? All the things that are supposed to take place in the future are already—how all the prophecies—how completely antiquated they are. Because, you know, when the Bible was written and then rewritten and then edited and re-edited and then translated from dead languages and then re-retranslated and then re-edited and then re-re-edited and re-translated, and then given to kings for them to take their favorite parts out and then re-edited and re-translated and then re-edited and given to the pope for him to approve and then re-re-translate, then re-rewritten, then re-read, then re-translated, re-edited again—all based on stories that were told orally 30 to 90 years after they happened to people who didn't know how to write.
So, I guess what I'm saying is the Bible is literally the world's oldest game of telephone. I don't know if you've heard that objection before; I do. I hear it quite a bit in my work. In my academic work, I'm doing my PhD at the University of Toronto in the area of the history of the Bible. Don't let that intimidate you; PhD stands for "Permanent Head Damage." You go to school long enough, they give you a piece of paper and say, "This guy needs to just get a life, so let's give him a piece of paper and get him out of here."
You might recognize David Cross of comedian fame, and he raises that objection. It's an objection that's a common one. In fact, it's not just David Cross; it's individuals like Joe Rogan who continually repeat this kind of narrative of the telephone game about the history of the Bible. Even that scholarly piece of work known as "The Da Vinci Code," you might be thinking it's a piece of something I wouldn't say scholarly, but it says the Bible has evolved through countless translations, editions, and revisions. History has never had a definitive version of the book. That's kind of the narrative that's communicated when we talk to people who are skeptical about the Bible. Maybe you even have your own skeptical views of the Bible itself.
So when you talk to people who hold these points of view—and I've talked to dozens and dozens—if you push into this objection that David Cross and others raise, often what they communicate is something like this: they'll grant maybe that a person named Jesus actually existed and that he did have some sort of a message, and maybe that was written in, for argument's sake, say that he spoke in Aramaic, which would be true; that is the language that Jesus spoke most of the time.
So if his immediate followers took what Jesus wrote and he wrote them down, they wrote it down in Greek. This is what we have—the original copies of what we call the New Testament. The Gospels, those biographies of Jesus's life, were written down in Greek. But here's where it goes wrong: they say, "Well, you know, people, as time goes on, they're no longer speaking languages; they're not reading languages like Greek; they're reading languages like Latin." And so they take those Greek copies, they translate them into Latin, and they get rid of the Greek copies; they're old, dusty; nobody's using them anyways.
Then more time goes on, and people aren't speaking Latin anymore; they're speaking languages like Old German. So they take those Latin copies, they translate them into German, and they get rid of the Latin copies. This goes on for a number of different languages until eventually you get to what we have as our modern English translations. So in that sense, what they're thinking of is that you have a translation of a translation of a translation.
The problem is that is not how you got your Bible. If you are holding a modern English translation of the Bible, it is not a translation of previous languages all the way up—a translation of a translation of a translation. When you hold a Bible, it's translated from those original languages that I referred to before. It's translated directly from the Hebrew and the Greek.
Actually, translation committees—these groups of scholars and academics who get together to translate the Bible and make it understandable in your language and my language—they actually take into consideration how previous translations rendered certain things, but they're not translating from those previous languages; they're translating from the original languages and seeing how throughout history different individuals and groups have rendered those words in previous or different languages.
This is a confusion of translation versus transmission. Translation is going through one language into another; transmission is the long history of how we go from texts written in ancient languages 2,000 years ago to today. They're confusing that; they're confusing categories. Not only that, but what David Cross and others communicate with the telephone game is a single line of transmission.
If you've never played the telephone game, it starts with me having a particular message. I whisper that into the person over there’s ear, and they whisper into the next person's ear, and this goes down the line through all the pews until we get to the very back. Then we get that person at the very back to relay the message that they were whispered to, and of course, it's broken. I mean, this is why it's called broken telephone; it's messed up because of the rules of the game. It's a single person whispering into a single person's ear. You have to whisper; you can't say it twice. There are rules like this.
But is that really what we have with the Bible? David Cross and Joe Rogan would say so, but if you look at the history of the Bible, what you find is that there were multiple authors writing it multiple times in multiple locations to multiple audiences who themselves were in multiple different locations. So it's not a single line of transmission; it's multiple lines of transmission injected with steroids.
Why? Because not only do you have the original authors writing at different times to different places to different people in different locations, but then you have scribes who are likewise copying in different locations, writing to different audiences at different times who are themselves in different locations. If we look at the history of this between the first century, when the New Testament was written, and the fourth century, you have copies of both the Old and the New Testaments being copied and spread around all over the ancient world.
So that by the time you get to the fourth century, you have hundreds, if not a few thousand copies of what we would call the books of the Bible. They were independent at that time; they eventually got stuck into one volume like we think of a Bible today, but copies of the Gospels, the Acts, the Psalms, and the Prophets were floating around the ancient world. So that within a few decades and centuries, you have copies up into Europe, into Asia, and into North Africa, which means that no one person or no one group could have controlled the text at any one point in time.
Why? Because if what David Cross said was correct, if you had popes and you had kings, you had scribes who wanted to insert things into the Bible, and there in Turkey, what are they going to do with all the copies that are in North Africa? What are they going to do with all the copies that are in Central Europe? Well, they'd have to track them down and also alter them, but that would have been impossible.
So because of the history of the Bible, what's called the transmission, no one group or one person could have controlled the text at any one point in time. The objection for the translation of the translation of the translation doesn't work when we actually look at how we got the Bible. Likewise, the objection that people inserted things in the Bible that they wanted to do or took things out also doesn't pan out when we look at how we got the history of the Bible.
They were two years removed from the most recent books or even a few thousand years more removed from, say, some of the books in the Old Testament. So as time goes on, we're obviously getting farther away from the text, right? In one sense, of course, but in another sense, as time goes on, we're not necessarily getting farther from the original text; we're actually getting closer.
What do I mean by that? Well, let me pick on the King James Bible for a second. The beloved King James Bible was translated between the years of 1604 and 1611. It was translated not from manuscripts—those handwritten copies—but from printed editions of the Hebrew Old and Greek New Testaments. The main printed editions that the King James translators used were based themselves on about 31 manuscripts. I'm talking about the New Testament here.
Of the New Testament, the King James translators had seven printed editions of the Greek New Testament, and those were based on approximately 31 manuscripts. Now we have today 27 of those 31 manuscripts in our possession; we can go and we can look at them. But we also have 5,000-plus more manuscripts. If you skip ahead to 2023 from 1611, when the King James translation was published, we have a greater body of evidence that leads us back to the New Testament text and the Old Testament text.
Because the earliest manuscript of those 31 that the King James translators had is their kind of underlying base text, the oldest of which was from the 11th century. Today, we have copies that go back to the second century. So as time goes on, as we stick shovels in the ground and we discover manuscripts and we uncover archaeological evidence, we get closer to the timeframe to a picture of what the Bible actually said.
Now, that doesn't mean that the King James translation is not accurate in that sense. If anything, what we found when we unearthed all those manuscripts is a confirmation that even though the King James translators were using a base text that came from a later period, it was remarkably similar, remarkably accurate. This is not a kind of a dig on the King James Bible by no means, but what we have when we have modern translations is we're able to get a greater picture of what the original looked like.
All of those manuscripts, the oldest copies—ones that come from the second, the third, the fourth centuries—have been discovered within the last 200 years. This is one of the things that my colleague and I, Andy, went over to Egypt and are going to be producing that "Can I Trust the Bible?" video series. We talked about—we went to some of the places that those manuscripts were found. We went to places like Oxyrhynchus, Egypt, where the manuscript that's on the screen most likely came from.
The manuscript that's on the screen is called P66. Now, scholars are very imaginative, so they said, "What's it made out of? Papyrus? P? And how many do we have before this? 65? P66. Write it down in Latin because that sounds better." And now they have P66. Now, this is a very important manuscript because if you think about a book, Christians didn't invent the book, but they popularized it. The ancient world loved scrolls, but Christians loved codexes—books. Remember I said about Latin and academics? Codex means book in Latin. So an academic is going to call the book a codex.
If you think about a book, the most vulnerable areas of the book are the front and the back. We have a lot of the middle of the books. So if we're talking about, say, the Gospel of John, we lose a lot of the beginning and we lose a lot of the end. P66 is an almost entirely complete copy of the Gospel of John, and it comes from the late second to early third century.
If you read along with me on the screen, you can see—anybody going to start? No? I'll make it easy for you. If you read along with me on the screen, it says—at what we would consider John chapter one—"In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things were made through him, and without him was not anything made that was made." Does that sound familiar? Hmm, I wonder why. It's because that's exactly what it says in your copy of the Gospel of John.
Christians in the late second, early third centuries were reading exactly what you're reading, and we know that because we can go back in time, we can look at manuscripts like P66, and we can translate them and see what they were reading almost 2,000 years ago—1,800 years ago is what you're reading today. That's an incredible fact. Despite all of the accusations of translations of translations of translations, we can just go to the original languages; we can see what the early Christians were reading.
So for that reason, a description of the text of the Bible is not the telephone game. If anything, I want to pose to you that it's more like a hundred thousand-piece puzzle. If I were to give you a box of a hundred thousand-piece puzzle and I were to say, "Okay, I want you to put this puzzle together," and you open it up and you find that even though the box says it's a hundred thousand pieces, you open it up—would it be more annoying if you found that it had 99,900 pieces or that it had 100,100 pieces? Well, it's both annoying; you're going to be mad at me either way. I apologize, but it's actually less annoying to have more.
Why would that be? Well, as you put the pieces together, as you find the ones that actually fit, you realize because of the picture that's being made that there are pieces that just don't belong, or there are duplicate pieces, or there are pieces from other puzzles. As the picture comes together and the image comes into view, you realize where some pieces just do not fit and that has been added in, either intentionally or unintentionally.
If you're curious about those, open up your English translation of the Bible and look at the bottom of the page and find the textual notes. They'll tell you; we're transparent with this; we're not trying to hide anything. So the Bible isn't the telephone game; it's a hundred thousand-piece puzzle with a hundred thousand one hundred pieces. Because of the history of the Bible, we're able to pinpoint where those extra hundred pieces are, and we're able to render the text to exactly what the original authors wrote.
So based on that, we can say with confidence that what we have now is what the original authors wrote back then. It's a fact. Now, some people might argue whether certain things are true or not, but it's a lot harder to argue that we don't have what the original authors wrote based on the history of the Bible.
As a side note, in one sense, I would say that your English Bible has been changed, but it's not been changed for the sake of corruption; it's been changed for the sake of clarity. Let me give you an example: when was the last time you opened up to Psalm 23 and read it like this? Sometimes you just read Scripture, and it touches your heart, right? Well, that's what Psalm 23 read in the 9th century. Now, that's English—sort of. It's Old English. But the English language has been updated, hasn't it?
So your Bible has been changed, but not for the sake of corruption; it's been changed for the sake of clarity. Because the English language changes, and that's why you have updates to your Bible. This is why you have revisions—because we want the Bible to be as clear and concise as possible so you're able to read it and apply it to your lives. That's great, right?
I hope I've given you at least a snippet of confidence that what you have now is what the original authors wrote. But let me pose an objection: what if it's just lies? What if we have the most accurately transmitted document of ancient antiquity in the New Testament—which is what we have—but they just made it up? We'd have a problem, wouldn't we? We'd be back to the Ian issue. Ian can't save me from my sins. How do I go back to Christ?
Well, sometimes we can look at details within the scriptural text that give us an indication that these are from people who were there, who viewed what they saw, and then wrote it down. Let me give you just two examples of how we can do this. The first one I'm calling "Location, Location, Location."
If you open up to the Gospel of Luke, chapter one, we have Luke's purpose statement. Now, the different Gospel authors had different reasons for why they were writing their biographies of Jesus. Luke makes it very clear right off the bat: John chapter one, verse 1—"Many have undertaken to draw an account of the things that have been fulfilled among us, just as they were handed down to us by those who from the first were eyewitnesses and servants of the word. With this in mind, since I myself have carefully investigated everything from the beginning, I too decided to write down an orderly account for you, most excellent Theophilus, so that you may know the certainty of the things you have been taught."
Luke uses an interesting word there that we translate as "account," or your Bible might say "narrative." It's a Greek word that other ancient Greco-Roman writers also use, and in using that word, they do so to describe how to write good history. In fact, there was a guy named Lucian who literally wrote a document called "How to Write History," and he uses this word in saying this is how you do it properly.
What Luke says he's doing is that he's writing not just an orderly account, but he's writing an account that communicates truthful history, and he's going to lengths to do so. If you skip ahead in his biographical material to what we call chapter three, we have a number of details where Luke, in prefacing the ministry of John the Baptist, goes crazy in order to validate its historical reliability.
What do I mean by that? Well, he says that this happened in the reign of Tiberius Caesar. Not only that, but he says that it also happened when Pontius Pilate was governor. It's interesting that he describes Pontius Pilate as governor of Judea. Why? Well, because where Luke describes Pontius Pilate as governor, other ancient historians—very prominent ancient historians—describe Pontius Pilate incorrectly.
There was a guy named Tacitus. Tacitus basically wrote down the majority of what we know about the Roman Empire and emperors. If you have read about Roman emperors, a good deal of that is being pulled from Tacitus. When he talks about Pontius Pilate, he uses the wrong official title. He says he's the procurator. Pontius Pilate was not the procurator; he was the governor. We know that because we have archaeological evidence in terms of actual inscriptions that describe Pontius Pilate as being governor.
Where else do we have Pontius Pilate being described as governor? The Gospel of Luke. Where other ancient writers get it wrong, the Gospel authors often get it right. So we go back to our text: you have Pontius Pilate, you have Tiberius Caesar, you have Herod; he's being counted in there. You have Philip, the tetrarch in the region of Iturea, and then you have an interesting one because Lysanias, tetrarch of Abilene, for a long time—really up until about 20 years ago—scholars would say this is an example of where Luke gets it wrong.
Now, others would say, "Maybe it's just like Tacitus; maybe he just doesn't understand what's going on." And so he uses an individual who wasn't really there because Josephus, who I mentioned before, describes this guy Lysanias, tetrarch of Abilene, as living before the time of Jesus. So you can't have him ruling during the time of Jesus, during the time of John the Baptist, if he's no longer alive because he was living beforehand—until about 20 years ago when they found an inscription stone that came from the time of Jesus, was prefaced as being at the time of Tiberius Caesar, and it says, "Lysanias, tetrarch, established this street," and other things.
So they had to completely rewrite all of the objections and say, "Oh, actually, there was another guy named Lysanias; he was also the tetrarch of Abilene, and he does come from the time of Jesus." And then, of course, you have the religious officials, Annas and Caiaphas. What does this mean? Well, all this evidence is pinpointing Luke pinpointing the ministry of John the Baptist and Jesus within a particular time, at a particular place, for a particular reason.
Luke isn't just writing a theological document; Luke is writing a historical document, and he wants you to know with an incredible level of accuracy because he doesn't have to go through all these names. He wants you to know that what you're reading is true—location, location, location. We can pinpoint these stories on a map and on a historical timeline with incredible accuracy.
Let me just give you another one: what are called "undesigned coincidences." What is an undesigned coincidence? Well, an undesigned coincidence is an instance when you have one or more independent historical accounts that interlock in such a way that would be unexpected if the story was simply fabricated wholesale.
What does that mean? Well, I didn't know; I wasn't really listening either, but I do have an example in my notes, so I'll share it with you. Okay, the Gospels tell similar stories, right? You might have noticed that, and there are some stories that are told in all four Gospels. One of those being the story of the feeding of the five thousand.
In the story of the feeding of the five thousand, in John's Gospel, he says, "Lifting his eyes up, then, and seeing that a large crowd was coming towards him, Jesus said to Philip, 'Where are we to buy bread so that these may eat?'" Now, I'm going to answer a question that's been keeping you all up at night for a very long time: why did Jesus ask Philip? Fear not; fear no more; I'm going to tell you.
If we go to Luke's Gospel, we find some other interesting facts. Now, why is this actually a relevant question? Well, if you think about it, Philip is a very minor character. In fact, Judas is said to have held the money bag in the Gospel, so he would have known the finances of the group, and Matthew is described as a tax collector. He would have been actually a more likely individual to know where to buy bread and how much it would have cost. So why does Jesus ask Philip?
Well, in Luke's Gospel, he says, "On the return, the apostles told him all they had done, and they took them and withdrew apart to a town called Bethsaida." Now, Luke doesn't give us the who, but he does tell us the where. He tells us that this event, the feeding of the five thousand, happened in Bethsaida.
Okay, what do we do with that? Well, now if we skip back—if we go back to John's Gospel, later in John's Gospel, we have in chapter 12, it says, "So these came to Philip, who is from Bethsaida in Galilee, and asked him, 'Sir, we wish to see Jesus.'" Why did Jesus ask Philip? Because Philip was a local. But how do you get this information? Because this is not all given to you in one Gospel; it's given to you across Gospels. It's given to you when you read the Gospels in parallels, and you find out actually these details make sense because the Gospels are filling out coincidentally in a way that is undesigned in that they didn't purposefully manipulate the text—the details of what's going on.
So we put it all together: both John and Luke tell the same story. Luke doesn't mention Philip in the context at all, but Luke does tell us the location of the event. John doesn't mention Bethsaida as the setting of the miracle but does tell us that is where Philip is from. So why did Jesus turn to Philip? He was the local. But it's only by putting these pieces together that we can understand why Jesus speaks to Philip in John chapter 6.
Now, these details are incredibly accurate when you look across the broad spectrum of things like undesigned coincidences. So why—this might be inconsequential. You're going, "Okay, Wes, this sounds great, but so what if the Gospel authors are going to lengths to get the details right, the small details? Is it that far of a stretch to say they then get the big details right?" I don't think so. I think you can jump from getting the minor details right to saying the most eventful and impactful event that happened to them—that is, their Rabbi predicting his own death and resurrection—and then pulling it off.
Think about this: people who rise from the dead have more credibility and authority than people who don't rise from the dead, and so they probably got that right. So let's put this all together: why can we trust the Bible? Well, we can trust the Bible because of the evidence that we have that communicates that what we have now is what the original authors wrote. Not only that, but those original writings communicate accurate eyewitness testimony. This leaves us with incredible confidence regarding the text of Scripture.
Now, as I wrap up, what I want to say is this: my biggest regret would be—and I would fail if this was the case—if you walked out of here thinking, "Okay, the New Testament and the Bible more broadly is accurate eyewitness testimony." Why would that be my biggest regret? Well, because the Bible is no less than that, but the Bible is so much more than that. Why? Because the Bible comes down to the question that Jesus asks his disciples, right smack dab in the middle of Mark's Gospel: "Who do you say that I am?"
The Bible is not just a nice collection of ancient stories like Tacitus or like Josephus. The Bible comes down to Jesus actually doing what he claimed to do, being who he claimed to be. So, as C.S. Lewis says, "Christianity, if false, is of no importance, and if true, is of infinite importance. The only thing it cannot be is moderately important."
The reliability of Scripture, the trustworthiness of what we have being what the original authors wrote, and it being actually true sits under all the other arguments, all the other facts, all the other issues that we believe if we claim to be Christians. And if you're here and you don't claim to be a Christian, what I want to encourage you with, what I want to challenge you with, is the fact that these things are verifiable. Not only are they factually verifiable, but they will impact your life; they will change your life completely.
The God who created the world stepped out of eternity and into humanity in the second person of the Trinity, who was named Jesus, took on the punishment that you deserve, and because of that, you are made right in relationship with God and can live with him forever. That's a big, big deal!