Transcription
So, here's five things that we believe make the Bible reliable, historically accurate, and an overall logical thing to believe in.
All right, let's see it.
Reason number one is historical reliability and literary style. Historical reliability, meaning that people, places, archaeological findings, all of these things that are written in the Bible match up perfectly with other texts of the time.
Okay, pause for a second. Um, you said that you were going to give five reasons that the Bible is reliable, historically accurate, and an overall logical thing to believe in. So, those are the conclusions. And then you're going to give five arguments that support that conclusion. But argument number one is just the assertion that the Bible is historically reliable, which is part of the conclusion. So you said, I'm going to give you reasons to arrive at conclusion X. Reason number one, X is true. So that's called begging the question. That's where the truthfulness of the conclusion is presupposed as a part of the argument. And the notion that people, places, archaeological discoveries, all this perfectly lines up with everything in the Bible is demonstrably false. There are numerous places where our archaeological data and numerous other kinds of data up to and including geological data, DNA data, all kinds of data frequently don't align with the Bible. In fact, if we're talking about historical reliability, you have next to none for probably half of the Hebrew Bible up until you get to the Omr dynasty. And after that's where in broad strokes the narrative seemed to align with uh more general geopolitical circumstances and events. Not in all of the details and certainly not in the supernatural claims, but in terms of who was ruling what nation and what nations were fighting with each other and what largescale events took place. The Bible begins to become more accurate around the 9th 8th century BCE. But once you get anywhere earlier than David, the data pretty much preclude the historical accuracy of the biblical texts. And so there is certainly stuff that is historically reliable in the Bible and it is going to be more general largecale and geopolitical events. It's not going to be any supernatural events and earlier than a certain time period. It is overwhelmingly, if not entirely, inaccurate. The notion that the biblical texts all perfectly align with what we've reconstructed of the history of these periods and these peoples and these places is just laughably not true.
And the second part to that is the literary style. The Bible doesn't read once upon a time in Candyland. It reads as a historically reliable text.
Uh so two things to say here. One, there are certainly parts of the Bible that read as historical narrative pros, but certainly not all of the Bible. A lot of the Bible is poetry. A lot of the Bible is prophecy. There's sermonizing. There are letters. There are all kinds of different genres. That's really what we're talking about here. And there are certainly parts of the Bible that do read as something like a fairy tale. So for instance, the style of the book of Job opens in a way that very much sounds like a long time ago in a land far far away, which is more mythology or fairy tale than it is historical narrative pros. But that brings up the second concern because just because it is written in historical narrative pros doesn't remotely make it historical. You can write all kinds of things that are not historical in historical narrative pros. The style of the writing is not itself evidence of its historicity. Again, we've got to compare what's in the text to what we can reconstruct about the history based on a variety of different scientific and other kinds of methodologies and things like that. And again, overwhelmingly, the Bible is not historical when it comes to any of its supernatural claims. when it comes to pretty much all the claims that predate around the time period of King David and even where it does begin to get more historical in its broader and its more geopolitical strokes, there is a lot within it that is considered not historical.
Something else that is so amazing about the Bible is that it is consistent and coherent throughout all 66 books.
So again, it feels like we are using the conclusion as part of the argument because the Bible is not consistent and coherent in a way that makes it particularly reliable as a witness to history. There is certainly consistency and coherence within the Bible, but not in a way that is unexpected or supernatural, just in a way you would expect from the accumulated anthology of a particular people group. But when you look through it, you see expected inconsistency and incoherence as the makeup and the nature and the relationship to other people groups of that people group changes and as their conceptualization of their patron deity changes. uh and then we have a pivot away from concern for the group as a single ethnicity and towards concern for the group as a single ideological identity. In other words, it's no longer about a single ethnic group. It's now about a single group of people who have chosen to follow Jesus. But you can see inconsistency and incoherence throughout. There are numerous places where the same stories are told in contradictory ways or where the expected perspective about God differs wildly. Where in one place God is represented as a youthful warrior. In another place God is uh an old uh patriarchal high deity. In one place God lies. In another place God does not lie. In one place God is violent. In another place God is merciful. In one place, God is ever present and has always been discussed. In another place, God is not mentioned at all, and you're primarily concerned for how individuals are navigating an oppressive larger empire and trying to look out for their own ethnic identity over and against this larger empire. In another place, you have people fantasizing about becoming the larger empire and oppressing others. There are all kinds of inconsistencies. There is all kinds of incoherence. when you look at the Bible as a whole. So saying that it is consistent and coherent throughout is a claim. It's not an argument and it is not a claim that is supported by data. It is a claim that really only functions as an argument to the degree that your audience already presupposes it. In other words, we're still begging the question. We're still saying the Bible is reliable. And our first piece of evidence is that the Bible is reliable. And everybody who already agrees that the Bible is reliable goes, "Huh? Yeah, that's what's going on with this kind of arguments."
Meaning, the Bible was written all the different books between 1,500 years apart with 40 different authors. And yet, it still tells the story of God perfectly without contradictions, which is amazing.
So all of that is not only presupposing that every word of the Bible is inspired and inherent. It is also presupposing that it is historical and it is also presupposing whatever interpretive lens is needed in order to overcome any of the contradictions because the biblical text according to the overwhelming consensus of scholars out there was not written over a period of 1500 years but over a period of around 1,00 to,100 years and it was not written by 40 authors. It was written by well over a hundred authors and editors and redactors and it does not tell one single story that has no contradictions in it. It tells a number of different stories and they often contradict. You don't accept those contradictions which demonstrates that you're not providing an argument, you're providing a claim and you are counting on your audience already agreeing with that claim. And so you're really just cheerleading for a specific set of beliefs and you're pretending that that cheerleading constitutes an argument for the conclusion you started with. But all you're doing is saying here are reasons to believe in the conclusion. The conclusion it's still just begging the question.
The third thing is the manuscript evidence. We have less than 10 manuscripts about Caesar during that time period.
So, I don't know what it means to say we have less than 10 manuscripts about Caesar during that time period. Which Caesar? Which time period? Manuscripts of what kind precisely? If you're talking about Julius Caesar, you're not talking about manuscripts of any kind that mention or relate to Julius Caesar. You're talking about manuscripts of biographies of Caesar. And which time period specifically are you talking about? because as time goes on, we have uh more manuscripts than just 10. So, what this suggests to me is that this content creator saw something on social media one time and is kind of trying to repeat what they remember without really knowing precisely what the claim was and certainly without actually investigating the claim to figure out one what exactly it is and two if it's actually accurate. And that means that what's going to come after this is also something that this content creator is not going to understand and certainly did not critically investigate.
And we have no problem believing that he was a real person and all the things that he said.
Uh well, we have no problem believing that Julius Caesar was a real person because we have all kinds of different literary and archaeological data that demonstrate he was a real person. When it comes to believing all the things he said, no scholars point to all of the manuscripts as well as the sources of those manuscripts which include eyewitness accounts according to the majority view of scholars and they criticize a lot of portions of those biographies and suggest that this and that was not actually something that happened or was not actually something that Julius Caesar said. So the notion that scholars just unilaterally accept any and all claims related to Julius Caesar because of fewer than 10 manuscripts is just laughably false. That's not how historioggraphy works.
We have over 5800 Greek manuscripts about Jesus during the first century.
Okay. So again, this content creator does not understand the claim that they saw on social media and is trying to repeat it from memory and is not getting it correct. We do not have 5,800 Greek New Testament manuscripts from the first century. We have zero Greek New Testament manuscripts from the first century. We have four fragments of manuscripts of New Testament texts from the 2n century. We have a few more than that from the 3 century. The overwhelming majority of the 5,800, in fact, more than 5,000 of them come from well over 700 years after Jesus's death. So if you chart them, what you see is they start off with minuscule numbers of manuscripts and then right around the 8th 9th century they start to increase exponentially and then they drop off because the 5800 manuscripts refers to any and all texts of the New Testament that were transcribed by hand prior to the invention of the printing press because after that they began and to print them. So, it's talking about all of the manuscripts prior to the printing press. And again, more than 5,000 of them come from the medieval period and later. They do not remotely all date to the first century CE. In fact, we have exactly none that come from the first century CE. On top of that, we have over 25,000 manuscripts across Latin and Greek and the different languages of that time.
And again, the overwhelming majority of them come from centuries after the composition of the New Testament.
Manuscript evidence is overwhelming. Not to point that everything it's saying is true. That's a different discussion. But it's overwhelming to say that it's consistent and that we actually know what the first century writers were saying in their texts.
Okay. So, it's great that this content creator understands that the number of manuscripts has absolutely no bearing on the historical accuracy of the text. However, the notion that the number of manuscripts means we know exactly what the authors wrote in the first century is also just not true. We can have a billion manuscripts that come from a hundred years after a text was written and they can all be exactly identical. And that still doesn't mean we know for certain precisely every word that was written 100 years prior to the earliest manuscript that we have because there's still that gap between composition and our earliest manuscript witness. Now, it doesn't mean anything could have happened in that time period, but things can have happened in that time period. And when it comes to the manuscripts of the New Testament, the earlier in time we get, the fewer manuscripts we have, the more fragmentaryary the manuscripts that we do have are. And the greater and the more significant, the variations that occur between the manuscript fragments that we do have. And again, there is going to be that gap between the original composition of any text of the New Testament and our earliest manuscript witness to any portion of that text that we have. And that gap covers the period of time when alteration is going to be most likely and when alteration is going to be least detectable because you have fewer copies in circulation and because you have less concern for and less knowledge of these copies and their integrity. So that gap is always going to mean there is a degree of uncertainty regarding what the authors originally wrote. And there are a number of scholars out there who have pointed out there seems to have been some fiddling with certain texts in certain places where for instance the first two chapters of the gospel of Luke likely were not written by the author of the rest of the gospel of Luke. The Greek is very very different and Luke chapter 3 starts off the way we would expect Luke's gospel to start off and also the content of the first two chapters is never once addressed in the entire rest of the Gospel of Luke or the book of Acts suggesting that well this could be a secondary addition to the text. there's a good argument to make, but we can't know for sure because that change happened in that gap. And there are a number of different texts where that's the concern. And there are a number of different variant readings where we don't have manuscript evidence that is early enough for us to be able to confidently say yes, we know this was the case. So the manuscript evidence gets us only so far. We can be mostly confident that we have something pretty closely approximating what originally came from the pens of the authors of the New Testament text. But there will always be uncertainty and there will always be arguments about how this or that part of this text seems like it doesn't really fit. Might have been added by somebody else. Might have been altered somewhere along the way. And we can't say definitively that these arguments are right or wrong because again they occur in that gap where we have no manuscript evidence.
So another reason why we personally believe and a lot of people believe the Bible to be not just fiction is that there is real transformation when you read the Bible and when you commit your life to it. And Jacob and I could speak for hours about how God has personally transformed our marriage, transformed our lives, transformed our friends lives. We know so many people who have committed their lives to the Lord and their lives have been completely changed. The Lord and the Bible has the ability to transform and change people like no other book in human history.
So you will hear people offering the same testimony for the Quran or for the Book of Mormon even for things like the Bavad Gita. And additionally, it's not the Bible itself. It's the interpretive tradition around the Bible. It's the community that curates and spreads that interpretive tradition. It's all of the other extra biblical things that go along with the Bible as an identity marker. So, there are a lot of different things that are influencing that perception of transformation. And there are a lot of texts that also have accumulated a lot of different things that also influence that perception of transformation. So again, this is not evidence. This is another claim cosplaying as evidence.
Fifth and final point and perhaps one of the most convincing is the eyewitness testimonies that wrote the New Testament and ultimately were put to death for what they stated to believe in.
So here is another claim cosplaying as evidence. The notion that the Bible is all eyewitness accounts is not supported by the data and is rejected by the majority of scholars. None of the gospels are accepted by a majority of scholars as actual eyewitness accounts. The consensus view is that these were people writing decades later who were not eyewitnesses. Some of them may have had access to third or fourthhand accounts of things that actually happened, but we have no eyewitness testimony in the Gospels. Now, some of the letters of Paul are agreed by the overwhelming majority of scholars to have actually been written by Paul. And so, to the degree Paul is talking about what he has witnessed in these letters, that constitutes eyewitness testimony. But that's a pretty tiny little portion of the historical narratives and the events that are represented in the New Testament. But again, we're not presenting evidence. We're presenting a claim as if it were evidence and we are not allowing that claim to be interrogated. We are presupposing the truth of that claim because we are confident that the majority of our audience also presupposes it's true and so is already going to be predisposed to agree with the claim. This is somebody just saying here are the reasons we think the Bible is trustworthy. The Bible is trustworthy. The Bible is trustworthy. the Bible is trustworthy. Those are the reasons that we believe the Bible is trustworthy. These are claims. These are not arguments. These claims do not stand up to any scrutiny and they have not been scrutinized by these content creators because this is not saying we looked into it and we have concluded rationally that it is true and reliable and historical. It is saying we believe it is true and reliable and historical and here are the things that we saw on social media that we want to now present as evidence for what ultimately we chose to believe as a dogma.
12 disciples that walked with Jesus that ultimately when he was crucified scattered away running and hiding and scared for their lives. Then something happened that these 12 scared men turned around and became bold as lions pushing forth this message of Jesus. And not just the message of Jesus, but the message that they saw him risen from the dead.
So again, we're taking a dogmatic claim and we're cosplaying it as evidence as an argument. And it is not evidence or an argument. And you can see my video number Mlen 3118 for a review of where the traditions about the ministries and the martyrdoms of Jesus's disciples actually came from. The majority of them come from apocryphal narratives written centuries after their deaths and include fantastical and magical events and details that the overwhelming majority of Christians just flatly reject even as they pick and choose the aspects of the narratives that they're going to assert as actual historical fact without any historical investigation or interrogation. Again, these content creators have not investigated these things. They have started from a dogmatic position and then they have gone out to find dogmatic claims that support those dogmatic positions and then they assert those dogmatic claims as if they were evidence without ever actually competently or seriously considering the merits of those claims.
Jesus is the way, the truth, and the life. Not just because of fairy tale mythical faith and belief, but because faith is believing in something in light of evidence, not in spite of evidence.
Uh, no, that is not how the word faith has historically been used. And even the Bible says that's not what faith is. Because if you go to Hebrews 11:1, what you get is faith is the confidence in things hoped for, conviction in things not seen. So faith is very much belief in things for which you do not have direct evidence. Which is why what you've offered here is not actually evidence. It is your confidence in the things not seen that you are cosplaying as an argument as evidence. If you're looking to learn more or challenge the ideas that I just stated, we're going to put some books and resources in the comments section below that personally helped us on our journey. So, there were three apologetic texts mentioned in the description of the video by Frank Turk, by Josh McDow, and by Curtis Grant Parker. And none of them in any way whatsoever facilitate challenging what these content creators shared because these are the sources for the claims that these content creators shared. even though they didn't actually remember them entirely accurately in every instance. Those books are not interrogating any of this. Those books are providing dogmatic claims and then providing rather facious presuppositional rationalizations for why you should accept those claims and why you don't need to go interrogate those claims or challenge them as this content creator suggested. And this presents one of the big problems with apologetics is that it tries to cosplay as critical interrogation. It tries to pretend that it's actually thinking critically about these things and looking at the evidence and it is doing absolutely no such thing whatsoever. It is looking at claims and then it is going out in search of the evidence and the rationalizations that make those claims feel truthy because they know that we are not fundamentally logical and rational creatures. We are fundamentally emotional creatures who act on intuitions and identity politics. And if they can strike the tuning fork in the loins of our identity politics, it doesn't matter what the data say because we will be happy with that resonance. And then we will turn around and we will perpetuate the dogmatic and the facious claims, which is precisely what these content creators have done. And the fit for this video is the Black Parade.