NT Reliability: Class 6 Recap

Our finale class consisted of the final quiz, the crowning of the quiz-master, and a Skype call with Jim Warner Wallace!    The final quiz was ten questions on the content from the entire book. Everyone did really well but only the people with the top two scores from all the quizzes received the prizes--Chick Fil A gift card!. So, with no further adieu congratulations to:       1st place: Bill Martino (Browns)       2nd place: Terrence Johnson (Saints) After taking and reviewing the quizzes we got set up for our call with Jim Warner Wallace. We had a few technical difficulties to overcome (HDMI cord wasn't long enough to project, the audio wasn't going through the main speakers, Skype wouldn't let us share screens, and Google Hangouts wasn't immediately available...) but in the end we got it all working! Thanks for Jim and everyone else's patience as we got all that sorted out.

Jim spoke to us about his own investigation into the reliability of the NT. He approached the same way he would approach a cold case; and they are very similar! In both the NT and a cold case you're working off old evidence to make a verdict.    What Jim (as an atheist investigating the NT) wanted to know is: were the NT writings reliable "witnesses". There are four questions to ask about the quality of witnesses. Were they present? Can they be verified? Were they honest? Were they biased? Jim spoke to us about his findings related to the witnesses being Present and Verified. In terms of being Present, Jim wanted to know if the NT writings were early enough to have been there. That doesn't mean they're true, but they do need to at least have been present. Why? Well, a lie is easy to tell when you're farther in time and location from the event you're lying about. But if you're lying about something people around you know, it's much harder to propagate the lie.   So were the NT writings early enough? Jim explained how he determined Luke to have been written no later than AD 53 (only 20 years after the resurrection). His reasons are because Luke does not mention the destruction of the temple and Jerusalem in AD 70, nor does he mention Paul, Peter, or James' deaths from as early as AD 60. Then Jim noticed that Paul, writing in AD 53, cites Luke's writings as scripture (1 Cor 11:24)! This means Luke's writings were at least before AD 53

The next question Jim asked is, were the NT writings accurate? Did they really express a true description of the events they record or were they tampered with along the way? He compared this to using a bullet casing as evidence in a cold case. If it's an old bullet casing, how can he check that it wasn't messed with over time?   The answer is that you follow the "chain of custody"--incremental checks over time. For the bullet casing this would be to find out who first got the bullet years ago. Did they take a photo of it? Did they document it? Who got it next? Was it inventoried? Etc. For the NT documents this would be to find out who the first apostles handed their writings/teachings on to, who they then gave it to, and so on. Jim has researched the NT's "chain of custody" in great detail to find multiple strong chains over different regions all passing on the same "evidence" over time. Therefore the NT writings can be verified.

Jim stopped there to allow for some brief Q&A but offered his full lecture on the NT reliability for those who were there. We had time for three questions.

Question 1: Where did you start your investigation into Christianity?

The first question we asked was about where Jim started his investigation into Christianity, as an atheist. His said he actually started by checking out what Jesus said in the NT and then noticed that the gospel accounts looked like witness testimony. To him, that was something he was familiar with and could assess. So he started investigating the Gospels to see if they proved to be reliable witnesses about Jesus. After determining that he still had naturalistic presuppositions--a rejection of miracles because of his atheism--and so he went on to find out if God exists (which is the topic of his second book, God's Crime Scene).

Question 2: What do you do with personal testimony, changed lives, and immaterial "evidence" like the soul?

Secondly we asked what Jim, as an empirical evidence enthusiast, does with personal testimonies, changed lives, and immaterial "evidence" like the soul. He responded by telling us the most common response he gets from Christians for "why are you a Christian?" (1) Because I was raised in a Christian home, (2) because I see God at work around me, and (3) because God changed my life. All three are good responses but they are not sufficient responses. Jim said he has Mormon family members and Mormons give that sort of responses, they are Mormon because of a "burning in the bosom." But where you were raised and experiences do not necessarily lead to Christianity. The main reason for being a Christian should be: because it is true! And to further explain/show that we need to be ready to have an answer for those who ask (1 Peter 3:15). [As for the soul, he explains in God's Crime Scene what evidence leads him to believe in the existence of the soul.]

Question 3: How do you show the existence of objective morality?

Finally, we asked how he goes about showing the existence of objective morality as evidence for God's existence (a section in his God's Crime Scene book). His strategy is to add "for the fun of it" to the end of an action to identify objective morality. Killing, for some justified reason (like defense of self or others) may of okay. But killing for the fun of it, is always and objectively wrong. The same thing can be said about stealing; it may be okay to steal for some greater good (think of Jack Bauer from 24!) but stealing for the fun of it is wrong. The next question is, how can you ground objective morality. The only real answer is God. Additionally, when you think about moral obligations, those can only be from/to persons. We aren't morally obligated to cars and chairs, only to people. So if there are objective moral obligations they must be grounded in a Person!

Jim concluded his chat by encouraging us to study and share apologetic material. He said he recently spoke at the Green Bay Packer's chapel and asked if anyone has heard of William Lane Craig, Sean McDowell, or Lee Strobel. Only one person had heard of Lee Strobel. Jim said that Aaron Rodgers he has over a million twitter followers, how is he using that reach? Jim's point: use the platform you have to share the apologetic material that's out there. It's much easier to make Aaron Rodgers as smart as William Lane Craig than it is to make like William Lane Craig as popular as Aaron Rodgers. And in the same way we should strive to become a smart Christian case-maker in our circles of influence.

Well that concludes this class on NT reliability. Thank you, thank you, thank you for all those who attended and supported this. Keep a look out for the next community event and study coming up in February!

NT Reliability: Class 5 Recap

This week was all about external evidence validating the accuracy of the NT record. Last week included a bunch of external evidence when we talked about the importance of Luke’s writings but this week was about more archaeological evidence, evidence of early Jewish writings, and evidence of early Gentile writings—all of which confirm historical details of the NT. Below are a couple highlights from those sources of evidence. Before looking at some archaeological finds a few comments should be made. It would be great to have archaeological evidence for every single event mentioned in the NT but this is not expected for at least two reasons. First, in AD 70 Jerusalem was destroyed by the Romans and so a lot was lost. Second, Jerusalem is currently (and always has been) a very populated, active city and so it can’t be shut down and dug up; there’s probably a lot of amazing evidence that is simply still down there!  “Now there is in Jerusalem near the Sheep Gate a pool, which in Aramaic is called Bethesda and which is surrounded by five covered colonnades” (John 5:2) It was long thought that this pool and the five covered colonnades mentioned by John (John 5:2) was a fabrication meant to symbolize the five books of the Pentateuch. But, after more than a hundred years after its discovery the exact pool along with its five porticos has been confirmed.  The left picture is from the dig site and the right picture is an artist’s rendering of the pool with the five covered porches, four surrounding it and one down the middle.  "Erastus, who is the city’s director of public works, and our brother Quartus send you their greetings.” (Rom 16:23) A first century pavement stone in Corinth was found with the same Erastus mentioned. “Erastus in return for his aedileship laid (the pavement) at his own expense.” [source] In Corinth Paul “reasoned in the synagogue every Sabbath, and tried to persuade Jews and Greeks” (Acts 18: 4). Crispus (18:8) was the synagogue leader and Justus lived next door (18:7). An inscription identifying this synagogue h as been found.  ". . . GOGE EBR . . ." = [SYNA]GOGE EBR[AION] — which can be translated as "Synagogue of the Hebrews [= Jews].“ [source] “Eat whatever is sold in the meat market [Greek: macellum] without raising any question on the ground of conscience.” (1 Cor 10:25). Numerous inscriptions referring to a meat market by this same Greek name have been found. These and many, many other archaeological finds show that the NT accounts are grounded in historical reality.    Not long after the fall of Jerusalem (AD 70) the Jews documented their laws and then also added commentaries. This entire work is called the Talmud. Being a book of law there is not much mention of Christianity and where there is, it is hostile. Nonetheless it agrees with numerous NT claims about Jesus: He was a transgressor in Israel, practiced magic, scorned words of the wise, led the people astray, Jesus said he had no come to destroy the temple but add to it Jesus was hanged on Passover Eve for heresy and mislead the people Jesus’ disciples (five are name) healed the sick in his name Jesus was called Ha-Taluy (The Hanged One), referring to his death Jesus was called Ben-Pantera (Son of Pantera [corruption of Greek word for virgin]), referring to his birth The most distinguished, first century Jewish, historical writer wasJosephus. He was born in AD 37 to a priestly family, joined the Pharasaic party, and then commanded forces in the Jewish Was in AD 66. He and his men were surrounded by Roman forces and vowed the commit suicide instead of getting captured. Josephus ended up not following through with the vow and was captured by the Romans. He became a high-level interpreter for the Romans and ended up living a comfortable life in Rome. He was viewed as a traitor to the Jews and so he attempted to repay them by using his life of leisure to write about the history of the Jews. He wrote many historical works.  Josephus independently confirms NT figures like Herod’s family, Augustus, Tiberius, Claudius, Quirinius, Pilate, Felix, Festus, Caiphas, Ananias, James, and many others. He also writes about Jesus. The passage about Jesus has questionable sections given that it was written by a Jewish man. Below is the section about Jesus with the questionable sections followed by the proposed revisions (per F.F. Bruce) in square brackets. In either case it is fantastic testimony to the historicity of Jesus! “And there arose about this time Jesus, a wise man, if indeed we should call him a man [a source of new troubles]; for he was a doer of marvelous deeds, a teacher of men who receive the truth [strange things] with pleasure. He led away many Jews, and also many of the Greeks. This man was the [so-called] Christ. And when Pilate had condemned him to the cross on his impeachment by the chief men among us, those who had loved him at first did not cease; for he appeared to them [,as they said,] on the third day alive again, the divine prophets having spoken these and thousands of other wonderful things about him: and even now the tribe of Christians, so named after him, has not yet died out.” (Ant 18:3.3) We don’t have any existing first-century writings by Gentile about Christianity but there are two reasons for this. For one, to Rome Christianity was an obscure superstition not worth writings about (remember writing was costly). Secondly, the most likely Gentile writings about Christians are prison reports which has certainly been lost by now. Nonetheless, a few early Gentile writings about Christianity are important to highlight.  Cornelius Tactitus wrote (AD 110) of a fire during Nero’s reign (AD 54-68). Nero was rumored to have started the fire himself. In comment to this Tacitus write: “Therefore, to scotch the rumor, Nero substituted as culprits, and punished with the utmost refinement of cruelty, a class of men, loathes for their vice', whom the crowd styled Christians. Christus, from whom they got their name, had been executed by sentence of the procurator Pontius Pilate when Tiberius was emperor; and the pernicious superstition was checked for a short time, only to break out afresh, not only in Judaea, the home of the plague, but in Rome itself, where all the horrible and shameful things in the world collect and find a home.” Suetonius, a Roman historian writing around AD 120 also writes about the fire and says, “Punishment was inflicted on the Christians, a class of men addicted to a novel and mischievous superstition.” He also writes about events during the reign of Claudius that match up with NT accounts. “As the Jews were making constant disturbance at the instigation of Chrestus, [Claudius] expelled them from Rome.” In Acts we read that Paul “met a Jew named Aquila, a native of Pontus, who had recently come from Italy with his wife Priscilla, because Claudius had ordered all Jews to leave Rome.” (Acts 18:2) Suetonius also says that Claudius’ reign was marked by “constant unfruitful seasons”, reminiscent of this account in Acts: “Agabus, stood up and through the Spirit predicted that a severe famine would spread over the entire Roman world. (This happened during the reign of Claudius.)” (Acts 11:28).

Pliny the Younger (AD 61-112) was governor in Asia Minor writing a letter to the emperor asking for advice on what to do with the embarrassingly large number of Christians in his area. He writes about them, “they were in the habit of meeting on a certain fixed day before it was light, when they sang an anthem to Christ as God, and bound themselves by a solemn oath (sacramentum) not to commit any wicked deed, but to abstain from all, fraud, theft and adultery, never to break their word, or deny a trust when called upon to honor it; after which it was their custom to separate, and then meet again to partake of food, but food of an ordinary and innocent kind.” These non-Christian sources have no interest in affirming Christianity but yet, as they write about history, they can’t help but to confirm the accuracy of the NT account. We closed the discussion with a reallynicely-done, short video on the external evidence for the NT. Next week we will be meeting to chat with Jim Warner Wallace. This is ashort video about his testimony that we watched. Jim’s a cold case detective who was studied the NT reliability, the historicity of the resurrection, and the existence of God and found that the evidence shows it all to be true. As he says, he’s a Christian “because it’s true!” So please come next week with questions for Jim on anything like the NT reliability, the existence of God, and even general apologetics questions.  Before the conversation with Jim we will be taking the final quiz. Remember there is a prize for the people with the top two cumulative quiz scores. Right now the Saints and Browns are tired for the top spot but they can easily be caught. The final quiz is cumulative and worth 10 points so study up for it! For what it’s worth, on the website I’ve posted an outline and shortened outline of the book that I made for myself to study. As a disclaimer, it hasn’t been thoroughly reviewed so it may contain typos or mistakes but hopefully it can still be of some use.

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.”

NT Reliability: Class 3 Recap

For our third class we studied the chapter on "The Gospels" to find out who wrote the gospels, when they were written, and what the original sources were. Before we dove into the topic du jour we first took a quiz on last week's topic of "The Canon", reviewed results of the first quiz, and then discussed some lingering questions from our last meeting. We're doing a little competition with our quizzes such that scores will be compiled week-by-week and the two people with the highest cumulative scores will get a prize! To do this anonymously everyone was given a secret name based on an NFL team. After the first quiz the Panthers and Saints hold the top spots with a score of 5/5. Keep studying for the upcoming quizzes, it's still anyone's game! One question from last week was about the differences in the Catholic and Protestant canon and when they diverged. The differences are in the OT, the NT books are identical. The early Christian church used a Greek translation of the OT called the Septuagint. When this was translated, books written after the traditional OT were then translated and added to the Septuagint (these are called deuterocanonical books).  At the time of the Reformation, Protestants decided that these books weren't in the original OT and rejected them, the Catholic Church kept them. A second question was asking why there was such urgency with all the councils or synods leading up to the codification of the NT. I couldn't find any clear answer but it seems that Constantine helped push this along in order to reconcile the disagreements between the Christian church and the Arians (a Christian heresy). Though it's imoprtant to note that at the Council of Nicea the books of the NT weren't even discussed, it was all about the Arian heresy. After this Jim Carr and Bill Martino provided some information on the apocryphal Gospel of Mary and Gospel of Barnabas in order to see how they are different than our NT books. The Gospel of Mary was written no earlier than the late second century and is an obvious forgery. There is debate over who the supposed author is (Mary the mother of Jesus or Mary Magdelene) but in either case it is filled with gnostic claims showing it is certainly an inauthentic forgery. The Gospel of Barnabas is dated no earlier than the 16th century, is written in Spanish and Italian, and is filled with Islamic teachings about Jesus. It is likely an Islamic attempt to fit it's teachings in with the Bible and is certainly an unreliable historical text. The chapter on "The Gospels" is the longest in the book and admittedly a bit dry add to that the fact that we were short on time and we had ourselves a really quick overview of the topic. F.F. Bruce goes into source criticism - the study of the sources of the gospels. Of course it should be stated that we don't have the originals. So the study of them is speculative at best. Nonetheless we it is useful to study the first three gospels together because of their similarity. These are called the Synoptic Gospels. There we see that 95% of Mark's gospel is shared in Luke and/or Matthew's gospels. Luke and Matthew also have other shared content that is called the "Q". It is hypothesized that the Q was actually and earlier source. The unique content in Luke's gospel is denoted by "L" and the unique content in Matthew by "M". Because "Q" is estimated to have been early, a document called "Proto-Luke" is hypothesized as a combination of Q and L before Mark's material was added.  Johns's gospel is treated separately because of the uniqueness of it compared to the Synoptic Gospels. It has four main areas of divergence from them: geography of Jesus' ministry, chronology of Jesus' ministry, diction/style of Jesus, and self-disclosure of Jesus. F.F. Bruce goes through and shows how these divergences can easily be reconciled with the Synoptics. And in any case, John presents the same Jesus as the Synoptics, the miracle-working Messiah and Son of God!

For next time (Thursday October 15th, 7pm in rooms 13, 14, & 15 at Mt. Zion UMC): Read Chapters 5 and 6. Study the content from Chapters 4 for a quiz. P.S. We talked about the information Steve Schrader shared with us when he came to talk about the "The Bible: Fact or Fiction?". His slides are available on the website, here.

NT Reliability: Class 2 Recap

Our second class was another great meeting with lots of good conversation. We started out with a short quiz on the topic of the date and attestation of the NT then discussed  two questions. One question was on clarifying the notion that a historian should not analyze the NT differently than she would any other historical document. The idea is that the historian should go into the analysis the same but will obviously encounter parts of the NT that will draw special attention (e.g. miracles). The second question was about how we know what the original NT said. A short answer is because we have a lot of quotations from early church fathers and also have a lot of manuscripts. (Check this article for more). But as Daniel Wallace says,  "...classical scholars do not ‘know exactly’ what these classical authors wrote. This is what I have said regarding the New Testament, too! We may have a high level of confidence, but it never rises to the point where we know exactly with absolute confidence what the text said. Absolute certainty concerning historical documents is a myth. I’ve not said otherwise. But for [Ehrman] to continue to cast the debate in terms of absolute certainty is neither helpful nor accurate."

Then we hit some highlights on the topic of "The Canon" (chapter 3). Here are a couple. It is not true that there was never any doubt about any NT book. Some of the shorter epistles and books at the end of our NT took longer to be accepted. But books like the four Gospels, Acts, ten of Paul's letters, 1 John, and 1 Peter were unquestionably canon from very early on. The oldest mention of the books of canon is from the Muratorian Fragment from AD 170. Aside from the natural formation of canon, the church was motivated to establish canon for at least three reasons: to counter heresy (like those of Marcion), to choose books to read during services, and to know what books to protect during persecution. It was in AD 397 that canon was officially decided upon at the Synod of Carthage. But it's critical to remember that the church chose the books because she already established them as divinely inspired, not the other way around. (Here is the video of Mike Licona's presentation that we briefly watched) For next time (Thursday October 8, 7pm in rooms 13, 14, & 15 at Mt. Zion UMC): Read Chapter 4. Study the content from Chapters 3 for a quiz. Take up F.F. Bruce's offer to compare NT apocryphal writings to our NT books. Bill: check out the Gospel of Barnabas Debi: check out the Gospel of Mary Look up why/how/when the extra books in the Catholic NT came to be. Research why there were so many councils in such a short time in the 4th century.