NT Reliability: Class 4 Recap

This week we got some good news and some bad news. The bad news is that we're condensing the final six chapters into two weeks instead of three. But, this is because of the good news! On our final class we'll be doing a Skype call with atheist-cold-case-detective-turned-Christian-apologist, J. Warner Wallace! (I'll talk a bit about who he is and what we'll be doing at the bottom, after the class recap.) So this week we covered chapters 5, 6, and 7: "The Gospel Miracles", "The Importance of Paul's Evidence", and "The Writings of Luke." Before that though we took the third quiz, reviewed the second quiz, and checked out the quiz-points leader board. Right now the Panthers and Saints are still tied for the lead but the Raiders, Bengals, and Browns are only back by one point! Keep up the studying and competition!   We’ve said that a historian should treat the NT with the same standards as any other historical work, but what do you do with the miracle accounts in the Gospels? F.F. Bruce says that our first concern should not be to defend the miracles as much as understand them. The Gospel miracles are all about Jesus and so our estimate of Christ makes all the difference to our approach to miracles. We defined a miracle as some event that cannot occur naturally—a super natural event. David Hume (the great skeptic, Scottish philosopher, 1711-1776) provides the most popular objection concerning establishing miracles as a historical event. He said that “in principle” the weight of evidence from past experience for the non-miraculous always significantly outweighs evidence for the miraculous, no matter the sort of evidence for the non-miraculous. There are at least four problems with this objection to miracles. It is question-begging to say “a miracle has never occurred and so that is evidence that a miracle has never occurred.” It’s important to distinguish between science and history. Science can identify events as natural or not but independently history reports whether an event (natural or not) occurred. It is bad historical methodology to deny well attested events; “extraordinary events require extraordinary evidence” is patently false. If God’s existence is possible then miracles are possible and thus we have a question of evidence not principle. Check out this article for more. We skimmed right through the short chapter on “The Importance of Paul’s Evidence”. The most important piece of information from that chapter (to me) was that ten of Paul’s epistles are dated from AD 48 to 60 which is earlier than the Gospels. We also reviewed the person of Paul before and after his conversion; what an amazing testimony of God’s unfailing love! The chapter on “The Writings of Luke” focused on the accuracy of the Gospel of Luke and Acts. Luke opened himself to a lot of potential errors but yet time and time again has been proven historically accurate. He references a number of historical figures and is in fact the only Gospel writer to even mention an emperor by name. The table shows a few of the many persons that Luke mentions who have been historically confirmed. Not only does he get the names right but he also gets their titles correct which was not an easy task given the titling systems and names (e.g. praetors, proconsuls, tetrarch, imperial legate, etc.)! Other interesting archaeological confirmations of Luke’s writings are the inscription of Ephesus as “Neokoros”, an inscription of the title “politarchs”, and many others shown here.  What’s really interesting is that there are three “we sections” in Acts where Luke switches from third person to first person plural to indicate that he was present during those events. In one “we section”, Luke, as a physician, describes the ship wreck on Malta in such a medical coloring. In so many ways Luke’s accuracy can be confirmed, it has been confirmed! Nonetheless there are many who accuse Luke of historical error. The most infamous supposed mistake is in reference to the census of Luke 2:2. It took place in 4 BC while Quirinius was “governing” but the problem is that Quirinius wasn’t governor until AD 6. This supposed error is explained and refuted in this short video. Basically, there are two proposed solutions: One, the census could have been started in 4 BC but the completed, officially used by Rome, and credited to Quirinius in AD 6. The other option is that Luke could be referring to a time when Quirinius was governing in a role other than “governor” in 4 BC. In either case there are intelligible solutions and we should give Luke the benefit of the doubt given his stellar, historically accurate, track record.

Ok so big news. Jim Warner Wallace will be doing a Skype call with us on Oct 29 for an hour! Jim runs an apologetics ministry called ColdCaseChristianity that features a lot of his works and thoughts on investigating the truth of Christianity. Please come on Oct 29 with some good questions for Jim! You can read a lot about Jim here but his areas of expertise come from his books. His feature book, Cold Case Christianity, is an exercise of his cold case detective skills applied to the claims of Christianity. He explains how to build a good “case”, traces the sources and evidence establishing the historical reliability of the NT, and then examines the evidence and claims for the resurrection. It is a great, easy-to-read book that is highly recommended. He was recently published God’s Crime Scene where he applies his detective skills to examine eight critical pieces of evidence in the “crime scene” of the universe to determine if they point to a Divine “intruder.”