CA Lecture 17: Why Do We Trust The Bible?

Okay, Lecture 19. We're going to finish up our little series of lectures that talk about the Bible. We've looked at a lot of different topics so far in the course, and as we've turned our attention to the Bible, we've paid attention mostly to questions of, well, why do we think that this book is different in the first place? Now, in this lecture, I am going to do some, I guess what you could call, sort of general housekeeping things regarding our apologetic about the Bible. We're going to look at two big questions. The first one here is what we title the lecture, How Did the Bible Form? But then the next lecture we're going to say something, we will just say a quick word about the preservation of it. I'm not a textual critic. I'd like to stay in my lane, let the New Testament and Old Testament scholars do their work there, but I will at least just kind of hit the highlights of what's at least popular level apologetic material when it comes to the Bible. So we're going to deal with how it was formed, or more specifically, Why were some books excluded from the canon and other books were included in the canon? And then we'll say something about the preservation. Alright, let's talk first about the Old Testament Apocrypha. If you have any friends who are Catholic, or if you came from a Catholic background, or if you've ever seen a Catholic Bible, you will notice that there are additional books in their Bible than in our Protestant Bible. We have 66 books in our Bible. They have a good bit more, and there's a reason for that. The reason is because they include the Apocrypha, the Apocryphal works, in their copy of Scripture. So they have all the books we do, plus they add some more. So what is the Apocrypha, and why is it not in the Bible, or at least the Protestant versions of the Bible? That's a fair question. It's a good question. But I think it's pretty straightforward that it should not be in there. The Apocrypha is a collection of books written approximately between 450 and 100 BC. So roughly during the intertestamental period, when Malachi finishes and before Jesus comes. During that period, roughly, you have these other books that are known as the Apocryphal writings that are written. So you have things like Esdras 1 and 2, Tobit, Judith, Addition to Esther, The Wisdom of Solomon, Ecclesiasticus. Interestingly, just let me pause here on this one. On Ecclesiasticus, if you ever pick up on the bondage of the will by Luther and Erasmus, you'll read this debate between Luther and Erasmus, which is fascinating. Luther, who is, you know, look, we're Protestants. We're glad Luther won the arguments, so to speak, right? Boy, is Luther rough. I mean, Luther would fit modern-day Twitter. He was a smack-talking dude. I mean, rough. rough, rough treatment of Erasmus and the way he interacts with him. Not in the way that I would want us to do at all, but his arguments tended to be a lot more solid than Erasmus's. They're debating the nature of free will. You know, Luther's got this hardcore determinism and Erasmus really just has this jello idea of free will and what it is. Of course, he's advocating for free will, so a lot of more Armenian people really like that part of that, but he really does have a lot of looseness in his concepts of freedom. So anyway, in the midst of them debating back and forth over the nature of free will, they get into the part where you'd expect them to, where they start quoting scripture back and forth to each other. And Erasmus quotes from Ecclesiasticus. And I remember the first time I read on the bondage of the will, I thought he was quoting from Ecclesiastes. And I kept trying to look it up and I was like, well, where is this? But it's not Ecclesiastes, it's Ecclesiasticus. And so it's just a kind of a real interesting historical thing that In the debates, these two sides actually use those types of materials. But anyway, you've got all these different writings here that are included in the Apocrypha. Now, here's what's interesting. I said that if you have a Catholic friend and you pick up their Bible, they're going to have the Apocrypha in it. They have more books of the Bible than you do. But historically speaking, even Roman Catholics did not include this. I mean, look, I'm... I am not one of these guys that tries to bump Catholics over the head. I know some dear Catholics, people that I do believe have faith in Jesus Christ. Of course, I've got questions for them about the church and about the Pope and all kinds of troublesome questions. But I just try to be very, very respectful. What's interesting, I do have to say, though, the inclusion of the Apocrypha in the Bible is a very ad hoc. move because they don't even accept it until about 1546. What's happening then? They are knee deep in their debates with Luther and they're debating the selling of indulgences and purgatory and all of these things. And Luther's answer back and a whole bunch of Catholics answer back to A whole bunch of Protestants answers back to the Catholics in this debate over purgatory and other things like that. It's like, man, it's not in the Bible. It's nowhere in the Bible. So, 1546, the Apocrypha gets included in the canon by the Catholic Church, and now it's in the Scripture. Because some of these books of the Bible, look, think of it this way. These books are like devotional material by Jewish people. It's often been said this way. They're like devotional material for Jewish believers. during the intertestamental period, but they do include some things that are problematic, like prayers for the dead and purgatory and some other things like that. And so when Luther would say, hey, it's not in the Bible, 1546, the Catholics come along and they canonize the Apocrypha, and it's been included in their Bibles ever since. Now, as I said, that's a very ad hoc move. Like, that should clue us in right there that there's something going on there. So, look, we have no reason to accept these. And so we don't. But in addition to that, here's some other reasons of why we just don't accept the Apocrypha. We stop with the 39 books that are in the Old Testament. We don't include the Apocrypha. Several things, or a lot of things actually. Number one, they were not considered scripture in Jesus'day. So none of the Jews walking with Jesus, the Pharisees, the Sadducees, they didn't look at this as the word of God during their day. They weren't accepted by Jesus himself. He doesn't. talk about them that way. He does talk about a lot of other passages from what we'd say the traditional Old Testament would be. The Jews have never accepted them. So these are Jewish writings, but yet even the Jews don't embrace these as being the Word of God. No apocryphal book is quoted as scripture in the New Testament. Many of the early church fathers clearly rejected the apocrypha. They teach heresy, like for example, salvation by works and prayers for the dead and things like that. And then they're accepted in response to Luther so that they can have scripture on their side. So all that to say, look, these are some of our reasons of why, if you get into a debate with somebody, they may occasionally throw out with you and say, like, you know, you've got your Bible, but there's all these other books that the church didn't accept. Well, yeah, we didn't accept them because there aren't good reasons to accept them. So these books are not included in the canon, and here's some of the basic reasons why. When modern critical scholars want to throw these at us and suggest that we were, you know, sort of out of bounds by limiting them and not including them in, look, here's the rationale why the church never did this, or why the Jews never did this, or why Jesus never did this, or why really any of the church fathers ever did this, and why nobody did this until 1546, until the Catholics needed artillery on their side. And then, okay, yeah, these are scripture. So it's a very ad hoc move. Well, so much for the Old Testament. There's lots of other books, sure. that were like devotional material, but ultimately they've never been counted as the Word of God. That's the Apocrypha, and that's why we don't include it in. All right, well, the same thing for the New Testament. There's other books in the New Testament or other books surrounding the New Testament, at least by modern critical scholars, that they throw at us and say, Oh, well, what about all these other later books that were like New Testament time books? Why didn't the church... include those, like the Gnostic Gospels. Let me just pause here for a second to make sure we are all on the same page about what we mean by Gnostic for just a few moments, okay? Now, in some ways, to really explain this, I need to go all the way back to Plato, right? So you get the Presocratics, they're debating the nature of the world. Is it physical? Is it non-physical? Well, along comes Plato. So you have people like Thales and Anaximenes that basically think reality is fundamentally physical. There's nothing spiritual about it. Then you get people like Pythagoras, on the other hand, that comes along and says, no, spiritual things, ideological things, mental things, like numbers, that's what's most fundamental. So, before Plato, two fundamentally opposite perspectives on reality, one purely physical, one purely non-physical. So which is it? Is reality physical or non-physical? Along comes Plato with his Doctrine of the Forms. He splits reality in half. You've got your realm down here. of physical stuff like tables and dogs and chairs and balls and things like that. And then you've got the metaphysical realm where there's a form of each of those things I just said. So we've got lots of different kinds of tables down here, but all of them can be very, very different, even different color shapes and sizes and all these things. But they all are tables because they share in the form of table. That, in a nutshell, is platonic thought. Splits reality between the physical and the metaphysical. Ah, with that, Plato, when it came to the human person, he said, Same thing with us. Physical body, spiritual soul. The soul is a spiritual thing. And now here it is. Spiritual stuff is good for Plato, and physical stuff is bad. In the Phaedo, Plato makes it really clear that the body, the human body, is like a prison to the soul, and the soul liberates. And so from Plato on... This dualism ultimately splits reality between the physical and the non-physical. And ultimately, even with Plato, you're starting to get this idea that physical stuff is bad and spiritual stuff is good. By the time the first century comes along, this is full-blown into something called Gnosticism. Gnosticism was known for a couple big things. Number one. Splitting physical and non-physical and now really amplifying that idea that physical stuff is bad and that spiritual stuff is good. Now on this note, what that meant was, if they wanted to be Jesus followers, if they really like Jesus, how are you going to do that with that kind of ontology? Well in short, you'd say something like this, well Jesus didn't really have a physical body. He was just a spirit, like a holograph or something. It appeared physical, but it wasn't physical, because physical is bad. If he's the Son of God, he can't have a physical body, because physical bodies are evil, right? So that's a problem for them. This is Gnosticism. The other big thing that Gnosticism was known for was having secret knowledge. God only showed to them and not to others. God only partially revealed himself. Now against that backdrop, read the New Testament, where the disciples... In their writings, John especially, 1 John, him talking about Christ, we have touched with our hands, we have seen with our eyes, we have heard with our own ears. He has been with us. He's battling Gnosticism. In Colossians chapter 1 and chapter 2, the Apostle Paul is battling Gnosticism. I mean, he is knocking the Hong Kong phooey out of this idea that physical stuff is bad. He says he is the express image of the Godhead. In him, the fullness of the Godhead dwells bodily, right? So he's talking about his physical body, and he's saying that God is in it. So the New Testament condemns Gnosticism. The message of the Gospels, the message of the New Testament writers, is largely not that. It's rejecting that. It's pushing against that. And furthermore, the Gospel writers will make it clear that the Gospel is for all people. This knowledge is for everybody, not just a secret group. Now, a century, two centuries, three centuries... Normally about two centuries after the time of Jesus, there's this collection of writings that come up. They're called Gnostic Gospels because two centuries later, Gnosticism is full-blown. The heresy of Gnosticism is raging, right? And so there's these, they want to have their own version of Jesus. And so they write their own little story about who Jesus is, and then they give the name of their writing to one of the disciples. So the Gospel of Thomas is an example of this. Why call it the Gospel of Thomas? Hey, because if you can get people to think that Thomas wrote it, then ultimately they'll believe it. Remember what I said? There's an apostolic authority. These heretics are trying to borrow from that and write under the names of the apostles. So, it came a group of writings, they claim to be Gospels, but they paint Jesus as some mystical person, as a spirit only, not an actual person, not an actual physical body. And they're called Gnostic Gospels. So why don't we accept those? Well, a couple of reasons here real quick. They weren't written by the apostles or given approval by them. Remember, as I've said, there's an apostolic authority. You could argue, I think very well, that ultimately in the New Testament, there is no New Testament book that was not either A, written by an apostle, or approved by an apostle, right? And so the apostles did not write them, and therefore they are rejected. They teach heresy. I mean, they paint a fundamentally different picture of Jesus Christ, and they're written at least a century after the events. And so, who knows better, the people that actually walked with him or the people that were writing a century later? So, for those reasons, we don't tend to take the Gnostic Gospels all that seriously. If you want to know what was heretical in the 1st and 2nd and 3rd centuries, then sure, you can read those, but we've got good reasons for rejecting them. Alright, here's another question. Well, how about preservation? And here, look, I'm just going to touch lightly on these things. This is outside my lane of traffic, but I will just say a few things about it. What about the preservation of the Old Testament? There's often, you've heard it in kind of the colloquial criticism, sort of like a popular level criticism. People use the telephone game, right? Ooh, this guy whispers in this guy's ear and he whispers in that guy's ear. And by the time it gets around, the message is completely different. The sort of insinuation in this is, as these manuscripts were handed down from one to the next to the next to the next, that ultimately we've lost, even if God did speak in those original texts, right? And that's what we affirm with inerrancy, right? That the original autographs were indeed infallible and inerrant. And so the accusation goes, as those were handed down from centuries ago, ...century to century later that we've lost it, kind of like the telephone game. Well, this completely misunderstands the way the Jews reverenced the text. Scribes had a profound reverence for the scripture. The Jewish tradition gave careful guidelines for copying the text. So, for example, scribes were only allowed to use a certain material to copy the text. So the idea that they just grab a scratch sheet of paper is absurd. They were limited to how many columns and how many lines on each page they could have. They counted them and audited. them all. No text could be written from memory. Keep that in mind. These people probably had the entire thing memorized verbatim, the entire Old Testament. And yet, despite the fact that they had it memorized, they were not allowed to copy it from memory itself. They had look at the text and then copy the text and look at the text and copy the text, right? Furthermore, there was a religious ritual performed each time the name of God was written. I mean, it wasn't, you know, keep in mind, they were terrified of taking the name of God in vain. And so when they would copy the text and they'd write this, there was a ritual they'd perform every single time. If one mistake was found on the new copy, the whole thing had to be destroyed, or sometimes they had ways that they could actually repair or correct it. If it was not repairable or not corrected, then it would have to be destroyed. And then keep in mind, it's not uncommon, as I've already mentioned, for them to have the entire thing memorized. And if they did, it would be very easy for someone coming behind them now to find mistakes in the text. And so, all that to say, this idea of the telephone game is a bad metaphor. Yes, in telephone scenarios, you can't trust the final message. But in the actual copying of the Hebrew text, no, you don't have that kind of problem. Now, here's, I think... You could say kind of the proof of what I'm saying, that indeed you don't have the loss of preservation here as you go down. Essentially, let's compare just for a moment two kinds of texts, the Masoretic texts and the Qumran texts. Now the Masoretic texts are the texts that come roughly, they're about a thousand years old. These are texts that we found and that we used from about the medieval period, right? A thousand years after the time of Christ, yes, the texts have been copied and handed down and copied and handed down and copied and handed down. Up until about the 1900s, about the 1940s, the oldest texts we had were the Masoretic texts, which were about 900 years old at that point. Now, that means from the time of Jesus to those Masoretic texts, there's been a thousand years goes by and we don't have any of those copies up until then. But in the 1940s, a young boy out in Israel, he was walking his sheep, and as he walked out into the wilderness, there's all these caves and canyons, and he sees this hole in the side of a canyon wall, and he throws a rock into it. When he does, he hears clank, clank, clank, clank. He's interested, and so he climbs into it, and what he finds is a bunch of jars. And those jars are these big scrolls. He grabs some of the scrolls. He brings it back to the camp. There's a couple people in the camp that don't think anything of it. They throw the scrolls onto the fire to use as kindling for the fire. And fortunately, there was an archaeologist in the group that saw what they were and freaked out and got them all out of the fire and told nobody else to throw any in the fire and asked, where did these come from? They point to the little boy. The little boy says, I tell the whole thing. And voila, boom. The discovery of the... Dead Sea Scrolls. Probably the most significant archaeological find, some can argue, in history, right? Here's why these are important. These texts, the Qumran, Dead Sea Scroll texts, where remember these go back to about a thousand years, the medieval period, these go back roughly to the time of Jesus. So a thousand year gap between when these were to when these were, and there was a long period of time that these were the only ones we'd have. Now here's what I'd say to you. If indeed, thousand year gap. We have one, we copy it, we hand it down, copy it, hand it down, copy it, hand it down, and then boom, Masoretic text around the medieval period. If the telephone illustration were right, then you should expect to find massive differences between the Masoretic texts and the Qumran texts. But you don't. There are very minor textual differences between these texts. Now, you could do the same thing. With the Septuagint, which is a Greek copy, and the Samaritan Pentateuch, remember the Samaritans had their own copy of the law, basically they thought that it was special to them. Gleason Archer, a famous older, deceased now, Old Testament scholar, said this, basically that of the two copies of the... Isaiah found in the Qumran caves. They proved to be word-for-word identical with the standard Hebrew Bible in more than 95% of the text. 5% variation consisting chiefly of obvious slips of the pen and variations in spelling. So all that to say when you start to compare the Qumran text with these later texts, there's less than 5% variation. Most of those clearly there was just a scribal mistake somewhere. Remember, I described the process that they used to try to prevent the making mistakes. That demonstrates the sacred approach that they took to it. But it doesn't guarantee, even still, that there aren't some mistakes in there. Because they're humans, right? But when you look at huge gaps between different kind of text schools, ultimately what you find is there's little to no concern in the variations there. So, the telephone illustration just doesn't apply. Now, New Testament, the good news, I'd say this. Look, the good news in the Old Testament is that these texts, the variations are so minor, they were so meticulous in how they copied it because it was the Word of God, right? The bad news is we just don't have a lot of copies of them. So, fewer copies, but great, great similarity between the major camps of texts, okay? In the New Testament case, it's the total opposite of that. The good news is we got tons and tons of copies, manuscripts and fragments. The bad news is that they weren't as careful. Now, having said that, here's the good news. There's at least 5,800 documents or fragments today. I remember when early in my career in the late 90s and early 2000s, that was about 5,200, 5,300. We now have about 5,800 documents and fragments. If you were to count the copies from other languages other than Greek, like Latin, for example, and some other languages, You have more like 25,000 copies of the New Testament or fragments. From the vast supply of the ancient sources, scholars have been able to retrace with certainty about 99.5% of the New Testament. And that gives us a tremendous amount of assurance about the preservation of the New Testament. And so Geisler, before he passed, would famously say, there are less than 40 places in the New Testament where we're not really certain which reading is original. but not one of these has any effect on a central doctrine of the faith. And so that's relatively good news. Now look, there's plenty of other folks that could go into much greater detail and do a much better job on this. I'm a philosopher that deals with the existence of God and life after death and all of those types of things. But this idea that the Bible has not been adequately preserved just seems off. This idea that we were biased. in various ways or short-sighted in excluding other books from the canon. No, there's good reason not to include those other things in the canon. So those are some of the highlights as we think about the Bible. In the next lectures, we'll turn to the relationship of theology and science.

But then the next lecture we're going to say something, we will just say a quick word about the preservation of it. I'm not a textual critic. I'd like to stay in my lane, let the New Testament and Old Testament scholars do their work there, but I will at least just kind of hit the highlights of what's at least popular level apologetic material when it comes to the Bible. So we're going to deal with how it was formed, or more specifically, Why were some books excluded from the canon and other books were included in the canon? And then we'll say something about the preservation.

Alright, let's talk first about the Old Testament Apocrypha. If you have any friends who are Catholic, or if you came from a Catholic background, or if you've ever seen a Catholic Bible, you will notice that there are additional books in their Bible than in our Protestant Bible. We have 66 books in our Bible.

They have a good bit more, and there's a reason for that. The reason is because they include the Apocrypha, the Apocryphal works, in their copy of Scripture. So they have all the books we do, plus they add some more.

So what is the Apocrypha, and why is it not in the Bible, or at least the Protestant versions of the Bible? That's a fair question. It's a good question.

But I think it's pretty straightforward that it should not be in there. The Apocrypha is a collection of books written approximately between 450 and 100 BC. So roughly during the intertestamental period, when Malachi finishes and before Jesus comes.

During that period, roughly, you have these other books that are known as the Apocryphal writings that are written. So you have things like Esdras 1 and 2, Tobit, Judith, Addition to Esther, The Wisdom of Solomon, Ecclesiasticus. Interestingly, just let me pause here on this one.

On Ecclesiasticus, if you ever pick up on the bondage of the will by Luther and Erasmus, you'll read this debate between Luther and Erasmus, which is fascinating. Luther, who is, you know, look, we're Protestants. We're glad Luther won the arguments, so to speak, right?

Boy, is Luther rough. I mean, Luther would fit modern-day Twitter. He was a smack-talking dude.

I mean, rough. rough, rough treatment of Erasmus and the way he interacts with him. Not in the way that I would want us to do at all, but his arguments tended to be a lot more solid than Erasmus's.

They're debating the nature of free will. You know, Luther's got this hardcore determinism and Erasmus really just has this jello idea of free will and what it is. Of course, he's advocating for free will, so a lot of more Armenian people really like that part of that, but he really does have a lot of looseness in his concepts of freedom.

So anyway, in the midst of them debating back and forth over the nature of free will, they get into the part where you'd expect them to, where they start quoting scripture back and forth to each other. And Erasmus quotes from Ecclesiasticus. And I remember the first time I read on the bondage of the will, I thought he was quoting from Ecclesiastes.

And I kept trying to look it up and I was like, well, where is this? But it's not Ecclesiastes, it's Ecclesiasticus. And so it's just a kind of a real interesting historical thing that In the debates, these two sides actually use those types of materials. But anyway, you've got all these different writings here that are included in the Apocrypha.

Now, here's what's interesting. I said that if you have a Catholic friend and you pick up their Bible, they're going to have the Apocrypha in it. They have more books of the Bible than you do. But historically speaking, even Roman Catholics did not include this. I mean, look, I'm...

I am not one of these guys that tries to bump Catholics over the head. I know some dear Catholics, people that I do believe have faith in Jesus Christ. Of course, I've got questions for them about the church and about the Pope and all kinds of troublesome questions. But I just try to be very, very respectful.

What's interesting, I do have to say, though, the inclusion of the Apocrypha in the Bible is a very ad hoc. move because they don't even accept it until about 1546. What's happening then? They are knee deep in their debates with Luther and they're debating the selling of indulgences and purgatory and all of these things.

And Luther's answer back and a whole bunch of Catholics answer back to A whole bunch of Protestants answers back to the Catholics in this debate over purgatory and other things like that. It's like, man, it's not in the Bible. It's nowhere in the Bible. So, 1546, the Apocrypha gets included in the canon by the Catholic Church, and now it's in the Scripture. Because some of these books of the Bible, look, think of it this way.

These books are like devotional material by Jewish people. It's often been said this way. They're like devotional material for Jewish believers. during the intertestamental period, but they do include some things that are problematic, like prayers for the dead and purgatory and some other things like that. And so when Luther would say, hey, it's not in the Bible, 1546, the Catholics come along and they canonize the Apocrypha, and it's been included in their Bibles ever since.

Now, as I said, that's a very ad hoc move. Like, that should clue us in right there that there's something going on there. So, look, we have no reason to accept these. And so we don't.

But in addition to that, here's some other reasons of why we just don't accept the Apocrypha. We stop with the 39 books that are in the Old Testament. We don't include the Apocrypha.

Several things, or a lot of things actually. Number one, they were not considered scripture in Jesus'day. So none of the Jews walking with Jesus, the Pharisees, the Sadducees, they didn't look at this as the word of God during their day.

They weren't accepted by Jesus himself. He doesn't. talk about them that way.

He does talk about a lot of other passages from what we'd say the traditional Old Testament would be. The Jews have never accepted them. So these are Jewish writings, but yet even the Jews don't embrace these as being the Word of God.

No apocryphal book is quoted as scripture in the New Testament. Many of the early church fathers clearly rejected the apocrypha. They teach heresy, like for example, salvation by works and prayers for the dead and things like that. And then they're accepted in response to Luther so that they can have scripture on their side. So all that to say, look, these are some of our reasons of why, if you get into a debate with somebody, they may occasionally throw out with you and say, like, you know, you've got your Bible, but there's all these other books that the church didn't accept.

Well, yeah, we didn't accept them because there aren't good reasons to accept them. So these books are not included in the canon, and here's some of the basic reasons why. When modern critical scholars want to throw these at us and suggest that we were, you know, sort of out of bounds by limiting them and not including them in, look, here's the rationale why the church never did this, or why the Jews never did this, or why Jesus never did this, or why really any of the church fathers ever did this, and why nobody did this until 1546, until the Catholics needed artillery on their side. And then, okay, yeah, these are scripture.

So it's a very ad hoc move. Well, so much for the Old Testament. There's lots of other books, sure. that were like devotional material, but ultimately they've never been counted as the Word of God. That's the Apocrypha, and that's why we don't include it in.

All right, well, the same thing for the New Testament. There's other books in the New Testament or other books surrounding the New Testament, at least by modern critical scholars, that they throw at us and say, Oh, well, what about all these other later books that were like New Testament time books? Why didn't the church... include those, like the Gnostic Gospels. Let me just pause here for a second to make sure we are all on the same page about what we mean by Gnostic for just a few moments, okay?

Now, in some ways, to really explain this, I need to go all the way back to Plato, right? So you get the Presocratics, they're debating the nature of the world. Is it physical?

Is it non-physical? Well, along comes Plato. So you have people like Thales and Anaximenes that basically think reality is fundamentally physical.

There's nothing spiritual about it. Then you get people like Pythagoras, on the other hand, that comes along and says, no, spiritual things, ideological things, mental things, like numbers, that's what's most fundamental. So, before Plato, two fundamentally opposite perspectives on reality, one purely physical, one purely non-physical. So which is it?

Is reality physical or non-physical? Along comes Plato with his Doctrine of the Forms. He splits reality in half.

You've got your realm down here. of physical stuff like tables and dogs and chairs and balls and things like that. And then you've got the metaphysical realm where there's a form of each of those things I just said. So we've got lots of different kinds of tables down here, but all of them can be very, very different, even different color shapes and sizes and all these things.

But they all are tables because they share in the form of table. That, in a nutshell, is platonic thought. Splits reality between the physical and the metaphysical. Ah, with that, Plato, when it came to the human person, he said, Same thing with us. Physical body, spiritual soul.

The soul is a spiritual thing. And now here it is. Spiritual stuff is good for Plato, and physical stuff is bad.

In the Phaedo, Plato makes it really clear that the body, the human body, is like a prison to the soul, and the soul liberates. And so from Plato on... This dualism ultimately splits reality between the physical and the non-physical. And ultimately, even with Plato, you're starting to get this idea that physical stuff is bad and spiritual stuff is good.

By the time the first century comes along, this is full-blown into something called Gnosticism. Gnosticism was known for a couple big things. Number one. Splitting physical and non-physical and now really amplifying that idea that physical stuff is bad and that spiritual stuff is good.

Now on this note, what that meant was, if they wanted to be Jesus followers, if they really like Jesus, how are you going to do that with that kind of ontology? Well in short, you'd say something like this, well Jesus didn't really have a physical body. He was just a spirit, like a holograph or something. It appeared physical, but it wasn't physical, because physical is bad.

If he's the Son of God, he can't have a physical body, because physical bodies are evil, right? So that's a problem for them. This is Gnosticism.

The other big thing that Gnosticism was known for was having secret knowledge. God only showed to them and not to others. God only partially revealed himself.

Now against that backdrop, read the New Testament, where the disciples... In their writings, John especially, 1 John, him talking about Christ, we have touched with our hands, we have seen with our eyes, we have heard with our own ears. He has been with us. He's battling Gnosticism. In Colossians chapter 1 and chapter 2, the Apostle Paul is battling Gnosticism.

I mean, he is knocking the Hong Kong phooey out of this idea that physical stuff is bad. He says he is the express image of the Godhead. In him, the fullness of the Godhead dwells bodily, right? So he's talking about his physical body, and he's saying that God is in it.

So the New Testament condemns Gnosticism. The message of the Gospels, the message of the New Testament writers, is largely not that. It's rejecting that. It's pushing against that. And furthermore, the Gospel writers will make it clear that the Gospel is for all people.

This knowledge is for everybody, not just a secret group. Now, a century, two centuries, three centuries... Normally about two centuries after the time of Jesus, there's this collection of writings that come up.

They're called Gnostic Gospels because two centuries later, Gnosticism is full-blown. The heresy of Gnosticism is raging, right? And so there's these, they want to have their own version of Jesus.

And so they write their own little story about who Jesus is, and then they give the name of their writing to one of the disciples. So the Gospel of Thomas is an example of this. Why call it the Gospel of Thomas?

Hey, because if you can get people to think that Thomas wrote it, then ultimately they'll believe it. Remember what I said? There's an apostolic authority.

These heretics are trying to borrow from that and write under the names of the apostles. So, it came a group of writings, they claim to be Gospels, but they paint Jesus as some mystical person, as a spirit only, not an actual person, not an actual physical body. And they're called Gnostic Gospels.

So why don't we accept those? Well, a couple of reasons here real quick. They weren't written by the apostles or given approval by them. Remember, as I've said, there's an apostolic authority.

You could argue, I think very well, that ultimately in the New Testament, there is no New Testament book that was not either A, written by an apostle, or approved by an apostle, right? And so the apostles did not write them, and therefore they are rejected. They teach heresy.

I mean, they paint a fundamentally different picture of Jesus Christ, and they're written at least a century after the events. And so, who knows better, the people that actually walked with him or the people that were writing a century later? So, for those reasons, we don't tend to take the Gnostic Gospels all that seriously. If you want to know what was heretical in the 1st and 2nd and 3rd centuries, then sure, you can read those, but we've got good reasons for rejecting them.

Alright, here's another question. Well, how about preservation? And here, look, I'm just going to touch lightly on these things. This is outside my lane of traffic, but I will just say a few things about it. What about the preservation of the Old Testament?

There's often, you've heard it in kind of the colloquial criticism, sort of like a popular level criticism. People use the telephone game, right? Ooh, this guy whispers in this guy's ear and he whispers in that guy's ear.

And by the time it gets around, the message is completely different. The sort of insinuation in this is, as these manuscripts were handed down from one to the next to the next to the next, that ultimately we've lost, even if God did speak in those original texts, right? And that's what we affirm with inerrancy, right?

That the original autographs were indeed infallible and inerrant. And so the accusation goes, as those were handed down from centuries ago, ...century to century later that we've lost it, kind of like the telephone game. Well, this completely misunderstands the way the Jews reverenced the text.

Scribes had a profound reverence for the scripture. The Jewish tradition gave careful guidelines for copying the text. So, for example, scribes were only allowed to use a certain material to copy the text.

So the idea that they just grab a scratch sheet of paper is absurd. They were limited to how many columns and how many lines on each page they could have. They counted them and audited. them all.

No text could be written from memory. Keep that in mind. These people probably had the entire thing memorized verbatim, the entire Old Testament.

And yet, despite the fact that they had it memorized, they were not allowed to copy it from memory itself. They had look at the text and then copy the text and look at the text and copy the text, right? Furthermore, there was a religious ritual performed each time the name of God was written. I mean, it wasn't, you know, keep in mind, they were terrified of taking the name of God in vain.

And so when they would copy the text and they'd write this, there was a ritual they'd perform every single time. If one mistake was found on the new copy, the whole thing had to be destroyed, or sometimes they had ways that they could actually repair or correct it. If it was not repairable or not corrected, then it would have to be destroyed.

And then keep in mind, it's not uncommon, as I've already mentioned, for them to have the entire thing memorized. And if they did, it would be very easy for someone coming behind them now to find mistakes in the text. And so, all that to say, this idea of the telephone game is a bad metaphor.

Yes, in telephone scenarios, you can't trust the final message. But in the actual copying of the Hebrew text, no, you don't have that kind of problem. Now, here's, I think...

You could say kind of the proof of what I'm saying, that indeed you don't have the loss of preservation here as you go down. Essentially, let's compare just for a moment two kinds of texts, the Masoretic texts and the Qumran texts. Now the Masoretic texts are the texts that come roughly, they're about a thousand years old.

These are texts that we found and that we used from about the medieval period, right? A thousand years after the time of Christ, yes, the texts have been copied and handed down and copied and handed down and copied and handed down. Up until about the 1900s, about the 1940s, the oldest texts we had were the Masoretic texts, which were about 900 years old at that point. Now, that means from the time of Jesus to those Masoretic texts, there's been a thousand years goes by and we don't have any of those copies up until then. But in the 1940s, a young boy out in Israel, he was walking his sheep, and as he walked out into the wilderness, there's all these caves and canyons, and he sees this hole in the side of a canyon wall, and he throws a rock into it.

When he does, he hears clank, clank, clank, clank. He's interested, and so he climbs into it, and what he finds is a bunch of jars. And those jars are these big scrolls. He grabs some of the scrolls. He brings it back to the camp.

There's a couple people in the camp that don't think anything of it. They throw the scrolls onto the fire to use as kindling for the fire. And fortunately, there was an archaeologist in the group that saw what they were and freaked out and got them all out of the fire and told nobody else to throw any in the fire and asked, where did these come from?

They point to the little boy. The little boy says, I tell the whole thing. And voila, boom. The discovery of the... Dead Sea Scrolls.

Probably the most significant archaeological find, some can argue, in history, right? Here's why these are important. These texts, the Qumran, Dead Sea Scroll texts, where remember these go back to about a thousand years, the medieval period, these go back roughly to the time of Jesus. So a thousand year gap between when these were to when these were, and there was a long period of time that these were the only ones we'd have.

Now here's what I'd say to you. If indeed, thousand year gap. We have one, we copy it, we hand it down, copy it, hand it down, copy it, hand it down, and then boom, Masoretic text around the medieval period.

If the telephone illustration were right, then you should expect to find massive differences between the Masoretic texts and the Qumran texts. But you don't. There are very minor textual differences between these texts. Now, you could do the same thing. With the Septuagint, which is a Greek copy, and the Samaritan Pentateuch, remember the Samaritans had their own copy of the law, basically they thought that it was special to them.

Gleason Archer, a famous older, deceased now, Old Testament scholar, said this, basically that of the two copies of the... Isaiah found in the Qumran caves. They proved to be word-for-word identical with the standard Hebrew Bible in more than 95% of the text. 5% variation consisting chiefly of obvious slips of the pen and variations in spelling.

So all that to say when you start to compare the Qumran text with these later texts, there's less than 5% variation. Most of those clearly there was just a scribal mistake somewhere. Remember, I described the process that they used to try to prevent the making mistakes.

That demonstrates the sacred approach that they took to it. But it doesn't guarantee, even still, that there aren't some mistakes in there. Because they're humans, right?

But when you look at huge gaps between different kind of text schools, ultimately what you find is there's little to no concern in the variations there. So, the telephone illustration just doesn't apply. Now, New Testament, the good news, I'd say this. Look, the good news in the Old Testament is that these texts, the variations are so minor, they were so meticulous in how they copied it because it was the Word of God, right?

The bad news is we just don't have a lot of copies of them. So, fewer copies, but great, great similarity between the major camps of texts, okay? In the New Testament case, it's the total opposite of that. The good news is we got tons and tons of copies, manuscripts and fragments. The bad news is that they weren't as careful.

Now, having said that, here's the good news. There's at least 5,800 documents or fragments today. I remember when early in my career in the late 90s and early 2000s, that was about 5,200, 5,300.

We now have about 5,800 documents and fragments. If you were to count the copies from other languages other than Greek, like Latin, for example, and some other languages, You have more like 25,000 copies of the New Testament or fragments. From the vast supply of the ancient sources, scholars have been able to retrace with certainty about 99.5% of the New Testament. And that gives us a tremendous amount of assurance about the preservation of the New Testament. And so Geisler, before he passed, would famously say, there are less than 40 places in the New Testament where we're not really certain which reading is original.

but not one of these has any effect on a central doctrine of the faith. And so that's relatively good news. Now look, there's plenty of other folks that could go into much greater detail and do a much better job on this. I'm a philosopher that deals with the existence of God and life after death and all of those types of things.

But this idea that the Bible has not been adequately preserved just seems off. This idea that we were biased. in various ways or short-sighted in excluding other books from the canon.

No, there's good reason not to include those other things in the canon. So those are some of the highlights as we think about the Bible. In the next lectures, we'll turn to the relationship of theology and science.

Transcript for:CA Lecture 17: Why Do We Trust The Bible?

Transcript for:
CA Lecture 17: Why Do We Trust The Bible?