Transcription
You can't trust the Bible. It was written by men.
>> Yeah, kind of.
>> All right, let's see it.
>> What do you mean kind of? Well, God wrote it using humans as pens. So, this is a dogma that is not supported by any data whatsoever. And this content creator is not going to provide any data whatsoever that actually plausibly lead to the conclusion that God wrote the Bible. This content creator is also not going to engage any of the data that complicate that conclusion. And this content creator is just going to be regurgitating some apologetic slogans, all of which require you just presuppose the claims are true. In other words, this is a dogma that is going to be propped up by the assertion of other dogmas, none of which are actually supported by the data. None of which actually plausibly lead to the conclusion that God wrote the Bible. So, this is obviously not an attempt to actually confront the arguments, much less provide any kind of plausible argument for the position being defended by this content creator. This is just as usual with apologetics, the performance of confidence, conviction, and academic competence in the absence of at least the last of the three. Certainly there is confidence and conviction but it is woefully misplaced.
>> That doesn't make any sense. Okay, that's your answer. Okay. Yeah, if it doesn't make sense to you, that doesn't negate reality. So, this is presupposing that it is reality that God wrote the Bible using humans as pens. But of course, again, there are no data that support that and this content creator is obviously not going to provide any. Just saying that it doesn't negate reality to observe that the argument is illegitimate is just rhetorical prophylaxis. It's just the construction of rhetorical scaffolding around the dogma to make it appear as if it is inscrutable, as if it is something that obviously correlates directly with reality. But we're going to see as we examine the scaffolding that it is just more dogmas being stacked upon each other.
>> Well, how do you know that it was written by God? How many people do you think wrote the Bible? A lot. Like more than 12. It was actually over 40. Seriously?
>> Yeah. Actually, it's more like well over a hundred and then a lot more editors and redactors and scribes responsible for the form of the text as it has come down to us. But this apologetic notion that there were somewhere between 40 and 45 authors responsible for the entire Bible is just a dogma. It's a dogma because it's a claim that isn't supported by the data. It is only supported by the presupposition not only of inherency and univocality and historicity, the accuracy of all claims to authorship, but also the attribution of traditional authorship that happened after the Bible had already been written. So for instance, the notion that David wrote the Psalms, that Solomon wrote Proverbs, that Moses wrote the Pentateuch. These are all dogmas, traditional ascriptions of authorship that are not supported by the data and are rejected by the overwhelming majority of scholars. The assertion that there are 40 to 45 authors responsible for the entire Bible just presupposes the historicity of everything, including extra biblical traditions regarding authorship. It's just another dogma being stacked on other dogmas as if they constituted evidence for the main dogma.
See, that proves my point even more. No, it actually refutes your stance when you understand. Uh, well, it would refute it. Not when you understand, when you choose to accept the dogma despite the data. When you put dogma over data, then the dogmas all become clear. That's how this works. There will be no data involved in these claims. There will only be the assertion that you need to accept the dogmas as proof of the main overarching dogma.
Okay, then go ahead and explain it to me. Well, do you know how long it took to write the Bible? Yeah, it was written over a course of like 300 years from the time of Jesus's death up until like Nicaea. No, that's absolutely not correct. Then what was it? Well, you're thinking of the New Testament, which was written fully within 70 years of Jesus's death and resurrection. Uh, this is another dogma that's not supported by the data that presupposes every word of the text is true. The overwhelming majority of scholars agree that there are parts of the New Testament that were not written until the 2nd century CE, which is over 70 years after Jesus's death.
>> Okay. Yeah, that's not very long. Yeah. But when you consider the Old Testament, it's very long. What do you mean? Well, the Old Testament was completed over 400 years before Jesus came. Also entirely false and also presupposing arbitrarily and without argument that every single word of the Bible is true. And also that all of the traditional attributions of authorship and the traditional dates assigned to the composition of these texts are all true. Because there are a number of texts that weren't even started until after 400 B.CE. And there are even more that were not completed until well after 400 B.CE. Cuz most scholars agree the book of Daniel wasn't completed until somewhere around the middle of the 2nd century B.CE. Probably 150 years before Jesus was born or maybe a little less than that. So again, we're just stacking dogma upon dogma upon dogma and saying that's the evidence for the main dogma.
Okay? And that is where the majority of the authorship comes from. So what do you mean? Well, the Bible contains 66 different books. 39 of those are in the Old Testament. So 39 of those were written before Jesus came and then 27 the New Testament. Those were written after Jesus's resurrection. So this is only if you're talking about the Protestant canon. If you let the authors of the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament determine which texts are authoritative, which texts are inspired, the number increases significantly.
Okay. So then they just added more 400 years later kind of except it's only one completed work. It was not viewed as one completed work until well after all the texts had been written. So during the decades that these texts were being written, they were circulating as different works and they were grouped together into categories like the category of gospels developed fairly soon after they were written and then you had Paul's writings which also developed fairly soon after they were written. But the notion that the entire New Testament was one work is something that took many years after that to develop. And what would be included and what would not be included was a significant debate. And it probably wasn't until the 4th century CE that we begin to have a clear idea of 27 specific books that matches what we understand today as the New Testament. So this is something that was argued about, was debated, and took a long time to settle.
How? Well, the Bible only has one author, which is God. So the initial argument was the Bible is not reliable because it was written by men. And the response is basically, nuh-uh, God did it. And we're not going to get any data whatsoever, any evidence, any actual argument. We're just going to get the assertion of a bunch of dogmas that also are not backed up with any argument or any data whatsoever. But it has over 40 different writers which were men. Yeah, you mentioned that, but it doesn't make any sense on how you can come to that conclusion. Well, see, all 66 different books of the Bible have one singular continuous narrative. Uh, this is another dogma that is just asserted without any support whatsoever. And the overwhelming majority of scholars would tell you there are a variety of different narratives that are brought together within the Bible. There are even different contradictory versions of the same narrative brought together in the Bible. So this is once again just the naked assertion of a dogma without any data that support it.
Okay. So they wrote about the same thing. Yeah. Which is not possible. This is laughably wrong. Um, there is nothing remotely approximating an even implausible degree of continuity of agreement of harmony within the different narratives of the Bible. There are lots of contradictions uh even between different tellings of the same story. The notion that it is a supernatural degree of harmony that's just not possible is just so absolutely asinine.
How isn't that possible? It's just people who conspired to write even more of it. So, this is a pretty common apologetic straw man, and it just absolutely baffles me that anyone takes it seriously because critics are not arguing that the Bible achieves some kind of otherwise impossible degree of unity by the authors conspiring together because there would need to be an implausible degree of unity, of harmony for that to even be necessary. But there's not. There is not only a perfectly plausible degree of unity, there's a perfectly plausible degree of disunity and disharmony and contradiction. We don't have to say they conspired because there's no reason to think they conspired. All that happened is that people are receiving traditions and passing them on and adding to them and adapting them and changing them to serve their own particular rhetorical needs and interests within their own particular social and historical context. That's how anthologies are transmitted. It's perfectly normal. And the fact that there is contradiction, there is alteration, there is change is also perfectly normal. So the biblical texts are perfectly normal from a literary point of view. There is no impossible degree of harmony. So there's no need to come up with some kind of explanation for how they could have gotten it so harmonious. They didn't. So this is a silly straw man that has no basis in reality.
Actually, no. That's what is so incredibly impressive and impossible about scripture. How? Well, you know how you mentioned the time frame that it took for the Bible to be written? Yeah. What if I told you that the entire Bible took between 1,500 and 2,000 years to write all 66 books? That would be inaccurate. The 66 books of the Protestant canon came together over the course of probably around 1,000 years with some slightly fuzzy edges to that spectrum. The oldest parts of the Hebrew Bible are probably some fragments of poetry that are incorporated into larger poetic compositions that may have some fragments dating back to maybe 1,000 B.CE. Certainly no earlier than about 1100 B.CE. And then the latest texts of the New Testament were written probably between 120 and 150 CE. So uh no 1,500 to 2,000 is again just presupposing. Every word of it is true. Every word of it is historical. It's all univocal. It is all inspired. It's begging the question. You're presupposing the conclusion in the case you're trying to build for the conclusion.
See that's an insane amount of time. And like why why is it dating between 1500 and 2,000? Why why is that so so broad for 500 years? Well, because various Bible scholars, they will date the book of Job to be around 2,000 BC, but then there's some people who traditionally date the book to be around 1500, 1300, something that's less old. Uh, that's absolutely asinine. I don't know who this content creator has in mind, but they're not Bible scholars. The majority of Bible scholars think that the book of Job was probably written in the Persian period. Now, it might preserve some earlier narratives from maybe a couple of centuries earlier, but there are no Bible scholars who think it was written prior to the existence of the Hebrew and the Aramaic language. Some apologists think, oh, it's more Aramaic than Hebrew, so it can be older than Hebrew, but uh Hebrew and Aramaic pop up around the same time period. So, no, it was definitely not written anywhere between 1300 and 2,000 B.CE. That's laughably wrong. It's probably a thousand years younger than that. So that's why there's that distinction between the two. Even though like the Mesopotamian documents that we have as like an extra biblical documentation regarding Job, those are from around 2,000 BC. There are no Mesopotamian documents that are considered to be any kind of extra biblical anything related to Job.
>> Okay. That's that's pretty crazy. Mhm. Then the Torah was written around 1,400, 1,500 BC within that century. Also laughably wrong because that would place the composition of the Torah well before the existence of the Hebrew language. So no, that's not the case at all. The narratives of the Torah were probably formulating in the maybe 9th, 8th centuries BCE with some of it being committed to text. A lot of it was probably written down between the seventh and the fifth centuries BCE and then probably collated and organized between the fifth and fourth or maybe 3rd centuries BCE and then again there are some poetic fragments like maybe the blessings in Genesis 49, the song of Moses in Deuteronomy 32, maybe the song of the sea in Exodus 15. Some of the parts of those poems may go back to around 1,000 B.CE. Maybe a little earlier, but no earlier than 1100 BCE. So, uh, no part of the Torah was written anywhere in the time period that this content creator is suggesting. This is apologetic nonsense. And the rest of it, well, the rest of the Old Testament was written in the next thousand years up until 400 BC. Uh, again, this is just apologetic nonsense. It's based on the presupposition that every word of it is true and every traditional ascription of authorship and dating is true and this content creator doesn't know the scholarship in any sense whatsoever.
Okay, but still they could have just been conspiring to create it over a very long period of time. Except the problem with that is that those 40 different authors were from three different continents. So
>> So you know how we have airplanes today?
>> Yeah.
>> They didn't have those. It was not common for people to travel, let alone traveling extremely long distances. Uh, so this is not accurate. The notion that it was written across three different continents presupposes that Moses wrote the Pentateuch and so Exodus was written in Egypt or something like that. Uh, you could say maybe it was three different continents if you imagine that one of these pseudapographical letters from the New Testament was written in Alexandria, Egypt. But that would be the only reason that that was the case. But also, it's not three different continents like North America, Africa, and Asia. It is three different continents that make up the central and eastern Mediterranean. So, it's still all around the Mediterranean Sea. And while individuals didn't commonly travel over such long distances, the texts did. The texts were circulating. And by the time we get to the New Testament, they all had all of the Hebrew Bible as we know it, as well as other texts that they believed to be inspired scripture that would not ultimately make it into the Hebrew Bible. So again, the argument is just entirely off base and is based on the presupposition that is asserted without any argument whatsoever that every word of the text is true. And again, that every tradition that popped up after the Bible was completed regarding when these texts were written and who wrote them is also true.
Okay, that actually makes sense. Further than that, the Bible was written in three different languages. Three, Greek, Hebrew, and Aramaic. Interesting, especially when you consider that in the Old Testament, which was predominantly written in Hebrew, occasionally they would have phrases or different names in Aramaic, but they're being written by people who did not speak Aramaic. By the time you're having the inclusion of passages or entire chapters written in Aramaic, they're being written by people who know Aramaic. But none of this at all complicates the overwhelming scholarly consensus that this is the long-term accumulation of and addition to an anthology of literature that is being passed down uh within a particular ethnic group and then is being added to by later Greek speakers who are actually engaging the text in Greek rather than in Hebrew or Aramaic. So an actual competent grasp of the history of the development of the Bible doesn't present any challenges to the observation that this is a perfectly natural, perfectly human, perfectly explainable process that doesn't advance anything supernatural or anything impossible whatsoever.
Very interesting. But what's most amazing about the Bible is the prophecies. Prophecies. The Bible contains over 2500 verifiably fulfilled prophecies. That's a lot. There is no single thing anywhere in the Bible that could be plausibly described as a verifiably fulfilled prophecy, much less 2500 of them. But there are a lot of different ways that apologists convince themselves that this is an accurate statement. One, they look at prophecies that are written in the Hebrew Bible and then are verifiably fulfilled by things that New Testament authors have written precisely to represent the prophecy as having been fulfilled. It would be like a prophecy in Harry Potter being fulfilled in a later volume of Harry Potter. That's not a verifiably fulfilled prophecy. Another very common thing to do is to squint at a prophecy until the details get so blurry that you can say, "Look, there's some overlap with a squinted at event that actually took place in history." Or we have a lot of ex eventu prophecy where people are writing after the ostensible fulfillment but pretending to be articulating the prophecy before the actual fulfillment of the prophecy. These are all far and away the most likely explanations for absolutely every single thing that anyone could ever describe as a verifiably fulfilled prophecy in the Bible. The reality is that there is not one thing in the entire Bible that could be plausibly described as an actual verifiably fulfilled prophecy. Again, we're begging the question. We're presupposing every single word of it is true and we're not providing a single argument for why we should presuppose that.
Yes. But what that means is that the Bible accurately predicted the future which is not possible let alone it is not possible to do that 2500 times which is why it happened a grand total of zero times. There is absolutely nothing anywhere in the Bible for which you can make anything remotely approximating a plausible case that it is a verifiably fulfilled prophecy unless you mean well it's written in the narrative in the New Testament that it was fulfilled. Therefore verifiably fulfilled prophecy even though we cannot verify that the thing that was written actually happened. So, that's the case where we have an author who's saying, "I'm going to tell the story in a way that fulfills the prophecy." Boom. Prophecy fulfilled, even though we can't verify that the story actually happened. Or we're dealing with ex eventu prophecy. Or we're dealing with prophecies that are being squinted at until the details blur and start to bleed into the blurry edges of some squinted at historical events. Or the other thing that can happen is that we can have someone who can see the writing on the wall of events and say it's likely that this thing is going to happen in the very near future. So for instance, the destruction of the Jerusalem temple in 70 CE. Somebody writing between 66 or 68 and 70 CE probably very easily could have seen that coming. After all, the destruction of the Jerusalem temple after the city was besieged by a larger, more powerful foreign empire was one of the most important events from the Hebrew Bible. Now, we have a larger, more powerful foreign empire besieging Jerusalem. Obviously, the possibility that the temple would be destroyed again was something that was on people's minds. So the fact that someone could have written in '66 or '68 or '69 or '70 CE, oh the temple's going to be destroyed is not supernatural. It's just someone who can see the writing on the wall. I mean, we can look at the Doctrine and Covenants, one of the standard works of Mormonism, and we can see a prophecy about the Civil War beginning and an accurate prediction about how the Civil War would begin decades before it actually happened. That doesn't mean it's a verifiably fulfilled prophecy. It just means somebody could prognosticate that given the circumstances today, this is likely to happen soon in the near future. Now, people have looked at the circumstances that gave rise to Joseph Smith's prophecy about the start of the Civil War and have said, "Yeah, a lot of people were thinking that was going to be the case because the circumstances made that an easy guess." And that's what Joseph Smith did. It doesn't make it a verifiably fulfilled prophecy. And there's nothing in the Bible for which you can make anything remotely approximating a plausible case as a verifiably fulfilled prophecy. There are just things that you choose to believe are verifiably fulfilled prophecies and then you just go out and assert that they're verifiably fulfilled prophecies and the only defense you have is well you refuse to accept the possibility of prophecy. No, I don't. I just expect an argument for it. If you're going to deny that Joseph Smith uttered an accurate and verifiably fulfilled prophecy in the 1830s about the start of the Civil War, if you're going to impose historical critical methods on that, then you have to accept that historical critical methods are going to be imposed upon your verifiably fulfilled prophecies. So you have to pick and choose when you want to uh deny and when you want to assert the validity of naturalism and of historical criticism and that kind of stuff. But no, it's not that people refuse to allow for the possibility. I allow for the possibility. You just can't make an argument that it is anything other than not impossible. And what I'm concerned with is what is most likely or even probable or even plausible. But you can't even make a case that it's plausible. All you can do is retreat to home base of, well, it's not impossible.
Okay, but how many times did it get a prophecy wrong? Zero. Zero. Come on. The Bible has a 100% prophetic accuracy rate. Uh, no, it doesn't. It has a very high renegotiating what the prophecy was and renegotiating what events might have fulfilled it rates.
>> It literally has zero false prophecies. And what were those prophecies about? Well, they range to a lot of different subjects, but there were over 300 just about Jesus. But weren't those written after Jesus? No. So, once again, the Old Testament was completed by 400 BC. And so, all of these prophecies about Jesus, they date between 400 BC and going all the way back to potentially 2,000 BC where it's going all the way back to the very root of the Bible being written. So throughout all that time frame was when all those prophecies were written about Jesus and then they were fulfilled by Jesus. So there are zero prophecies about a person named Jesus anywhere in the Hebrew Bible. And we cannot verify that anything was ever actually fulfilled by Jesus. What we have are texts written by people where they're telling stories about how this guy fulfilled these prophecies. Of course, when you look at the fulfillment, what you see is how these prophecies were understood in the late 1st or very early 2nd century CE frequently doesn't actually line up with what those prophecies were actually written to prognosticate. It lines up with a later renegotiated understanding of the prophecy. And we can even see the authors altering the stories about Jesus precisely and explicitly. So the new narrative can have Jesus fulfill a prophecy. So again, zero verifiably fulfilled prophecies. What you have are texts where somebody says, "And then Jesus fulfilled the prophecy." And this content creator is just presupposing that that author was telling the truth and was accurately narrating a historical event that actually happened in reality. We can't verify any of that. So there's no such thing as a verifiably fulfilled prophecy. There is just wishful thinking and there is just dogmatism and there are just apologists who assert it because they need to make themselves feel better and they want to make their audience feel better.
>> Wait, so you're telling me that one man fulfilled over 300 prophecies? Yes. And it's mathematically impossible for a single man to fulfill even eight of those prophecies.
>> So now we're appealing to more shallow apologetics. This time, Peter Stoner's 1952 book, Science Speaks, where he talks about these calculations that he did to estimate the probability of eight specific prophecies being fulfilled by Jesus and how he asked his undergraduate students to guess what the probability of any given prophecy being fulfilled was. And then he just averaged the spitball guesses that his students gave him and put them all together and said, "Okay, this is the probability of these eight prophecies being fulfilled." Of course, he listed things that were never prophecies to begin with. He listed things that are only fulfilled if you accept mistranslations. He listed things that were not about Jesus at all that later authors decided to renegotiate as prophecies about Jesus. So these are things that we can't even say were fulfilled to begin with. In some cases, we can't even say we're prophecies to begin with. In all the cases, we can't say were prophecies about Jesus to begin with. So again, the claim is being built on top of a foundation of other claims. You never actually get to an actual argument. It's just here's a dogma. Okay, demonstrate it. Well, here are a bunch of other dogmas. Can you demonstrate any of them? Well, can I interest you in some more dogmas? It's just stacking dogmas on top of dogmas on top of dogmas. And you never actually get anything remotely approximating any actual valid evidence or any kind of competent engagement with the data. And I've got a bunch of videos directly addressing the prophecies that Peter Stoner was talking about in his book if you want to check them out.
But couldn't those prophecies have been like self-fulfilled? like he read the prophecies and then he intentionally did things to make them come true.
>> So now the critic is being represented as presupposing that if the New Testament said Jesus did it, then Jesus did it. So this is a ridiculous caricature of what a competent critical thinker would say in response to these claims. This is an apologist who's performing both sides of this puppet show and is not doing a good job with either side. That could be a valid argument except many of those prophecies were things that were done to him against his will by people who had never read the prophecies. Like what? Like in Psalm 22 written over a thousand years before Jesus came. No, Psalm 22 was probably written maybe 500 years before Jesus showed up. This predicted that during the crucifixion that the guards there are going to be gambling over his clothing. But it was the Torah reading Jews who did that. No, it was the Roman guards who had never read the Old Testament. Again, that is presupposing that the narrative actually happened as described in the Gospel and we don't have any way of verifying that. So, you can't call that a verifiably fulfilled prophecy. You are begging the question. You are presupposing the conclusion in the argument here. The conclusion being that the texts are true and that they are reliable. Remember that's what started off the whole video. The texts of the Bible are not reliable because they were written by humans. And the argument is well as long as we presuppose the texts are reliable then it means prophecy was fulfilled which is not possible for a human to do. So the texts are reliable. You see how you have to already presuppose the conclusion for the argument to work because if the critic then says well wait a minute how do we know that actually happened? Now you're up a creek. don't have any way to respond to that with anything other than you just got to believe that it actually happened. Maybe you say, "Well, we can be confident that the uh gospels are reliable because they talk about places that actually existed or because it was historically accurate over here, pilot actually existed." That means when it says this supernatural thing happened, we can just leverage that reliability from the thing we can verify happened to the thing that very clearly didn't happen. That's just laughable. It's just again begging the question. It's trying to construct this argument on an edifice of dogmatism.
Okay, that's interesting. The Bible predicts a crazy amount of stuff. I see that. So, what makes the Bible impossible and evidence that God is the one who wrote it is that it was written over a course of 2,000 years by over 40 different authors from a multitude of different countries, three different continents in three different languages. When it all came together, it all said the same thing and it contained over 2500 verifiably fulfilled prophecies. That is not possible because it's not true. These are all just assertions of dogmas that are not supported by any data. The most true thing about that was that it was written in three different languages, Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek. Everything else is a dogma based on the presupposition that it's all true. If you don't already presuppose it's all true, you cannot arrive at the conclusion. The argument falls to pieces. The entire argument is constructed on the foundation of presupposing it's all true. If you cannot do that, you cannot get to the conclusion. This is so laughably not not even sophomoric. This is like middle school level logic and factious tendentiousness.
>> Okay. So, yeah, there might actually be something to this.
>> Yeah. No, there's just dogmatism here. read it and you'll become a Christian.
>> This is some of the cringiest cringe that has ever cringed, but I do think people should read the Bible. I think they should read it and they should think critically about it and then they will come to these arguments and they will understand just how pathetic these arguments actually are. And the fit for this video is the last Ronin.