Answering Ehrman Series, Wk 3, “No, the Bible Isn’t Corrupt - Part 2”

  Have you ever had that experience of a person telling you a story that didn’t make sense, but then someone else who was a part of the story was able to fill in the details which helped you understand what the first person was saying? This happened, and still happens with my kids. The younger they were the fewer important details were given and so my wife had to fill in what I need to know to understand what they were saying.

This idea of filling in the blanks is just one thing we’re going to cover as we jump back into our Fall Apologetics series. This year we’re looking at some of Barth Ehrman’s issues with how the orthodox Christian faith looks at the Bible as it’s rule to live by.

We started this series by establishing that Jesus is a historical person. The reason why this is important is because Jesus’ coming in flesh is central to the message of salvation. If Jesus wasn’t real then none of what we’re talking about matters. Christianity stands not only on the words of Jesus, but his historical actions. 

Then last week we took some time and looked at some external evidence for why we can trust the New Testament. We started by looking at the dates of the New Testament writings and their corresponding earliest manuscript dates, comparing them to other historical figures and their earliest manuscript dates. We showed how the New Testament is one of the best, in time, set of established historical documents.  

This brings us to now looking at the internal evidence as to why we can trust the New Testament. Now, remember last week, how I said we were going to get into the weeds, well here we go.

So what is Ehrman’s issue with the internal evidence of the New Testament? Ehrman writes in Jesus, Interrupted, “When students are first introduced to the historical, as opposed to the a devotional, study of the Bible, one of the first things they are forced to grapple with is that the biblical text, whether Old Testament or New Testament, is chock full of discrepancies, many of them irreconcilable. Some of these discrepancies are simple details where one book contradicts what another says about a minor point — the number of soldiers in an army, the year a certain king began his reign, the details of an apostle’s itinerary. In some cases seemingly trivial points of difference can actually have an enormous significance for the interpretation of a book or reconstruction of the history of ancient Israel or the life of the historical Jesus. And then there are instances that involve major issues, where one author has one point of view on an important topic, (How was the world created? Why do the people of God suffer? What is the significance of Jesus’ death?), and another author has another. Sometimes these views are simply different from one another, but at other times they are directly at odds.”

Ehrman’s issue is that he argues that there are discrepancies and outright contradictions within the New Testament text. So, as we saw last week, for Ehrman, it’s not really an issue from the manuscript history point of view where his problem with the New Testament really lies, it’s actually an internal issue. 

Now, we don’t have time to tackle every one of the discrepancies or issues Ehrman presents in several of his books, but we’ll look at a few, which I believe show a pattern of why Ehrman is mistaken.

Let’s first talk about the manuscript discrepancies, because this issue bridges the gap between last week and this week. We know that what we have in the New Testament some of, if not the, closes manuscripts to the historical event in which it describes.

But the question arises, what about changes, additions, and subtractions from these manuscripts? Can we be sure that we have what was originally written?

Daniel B. Wallace is the executive director for the Center for the Study of New Testament Manuscripts. This center’s job is to photograph anything related to the New Testament manuscripts. It is through this center’s work that many unknown manuscripts have been found. 

Wallace, in a 2013 article, stated that the then current estimate of manuscript errors was around 400,000. Today, that estimate is upwards of 450,000. Now that seems like a huge number. However, Wallace explains how scholars have come up with that number. 

See, back in the 1960s a scholar by the name of Neil R. Lightfoot wrote a book entitled, How We Got the Bible. In that book, Lightfoot came up with an estimate of 200,000 manuscript errors.

The way Lightfoot came to this conclusion was by cataloging an error in a manuscript and then counting that same error in every other manuscript that had it. In other words, if the word “John” was spelled J-O-H-N in an old manuscript, any manuscript that spelled it “J-O-N” would be counted wrong. Another example is a phrase like, “Jesus loves Mary.” If that was in the oldest manuscripts, then if in later manuscripts it was phrased as, “Mary is a person Jesus loved,” then that would be considered an error. 

Calculating this way, Wallace revamps Lightfoot’s original estimate to be more than 20 million errors. However, Wallace states that in actually, there are only about 6,577 root errors in the roughly 5,550 New testament documents. If we take those two numbers we get about 1.2 errors per manuscript. When put in the light of how many words are on average in a New Testament book, we get about .02 errors per New Testament book. 

If you’ve read any of my books, then you know there’s more errors in those, than what we find in the manuscripts of the New Testament.

By Ehrman’s own admission he writes in an article entitled, “Aren’t there 400,000 Variants or Errors in the New Testament?,” “In this two-part response, we have covered four categories so far: ‘blunders’, ‘unviable readings’, ‘orthographic variations’, and ‘minor textual variants’. In these four categories, we have covered about 99% of the 400,000 variants. As a textual critic, these are the kinds of things that I try to convince my students are important. Needless to say, I have a hard time persuading them to pay attention to these four types of variants. My students will look at the field and the kind of textual variant, and consider them to be insignificant.”

The reason why his students consider these errors insignificant is because they are. None of these errors in the 99% change anything about the text theologically. Taking Wallace’s number of 6,577, there are only about 66 errors that are theologically pressing.

And most of these are actually brought up in your Bibles. An example of this is if you open up to the Gospel of Mark and go to chapter 16. When you get to verse 8, you’ll read something like this in most modern translations, “Some of the earliest manuscripts do not include: 16:9-20.” Most modern translations let you know when these discrepancies happen and most modern versions adjust for them, while still footnoting the difference. This happens when a verse which is in older translations is regulated to a footnote in newer translations.

The two big discrepancies that are still being debated in scholarly work are John 4, and Revelation 13:18. John 4 is the story of the woman at the well. It has a lot in common with Luke’s writing style, so scholars debate if it wasn’t originally connected to Luke’s Gospel. However, as we saw last week, John and Luke could have been writing at the same time. Luke might have even interviewed John. So Luke might have written the story down, and John simply used Luke’s rendition of it. But the story is consistent in how John presents Jesus, and fits perfectly in his Gospel, so there’s no issue. 

The other discrepancy is Revelation 13:18, where the mark of the beast is most known at 666, but there are a few old manuscripts that have it as 616. Does that impact theology? A little bit, is it enough to change the course of the Christian faith? Not even close. That’s why these issues, even the theological ones, are insignificant.

Now that we have the errors and discrepancies of the New Testament manuscripts understood, we can turn to what is Ehrman’s real problem. Ehrman concedes that we have what the original writers intended, but is what is there actually from God? Ehrman doesn’t think so, because he believes the Bible is riddled with discrepancies and contradictions. Let’s take a couple of his examples and see if he’s correct.

For our two examples, we’re going to look at the birth and death of Jesus. First his birth. Ehrman writes of Jesus’ birth narrative, “The differences between the accounts are quite striking. Virtually everything said in Matthew is missing from Luke, and all the stories of Luke are missing from Matthew.”

Here’s Ehrman’s problem with the text: The narratives are not identical, for Ehrman, this means that there is a discrepancy and therefore they cannot be truthful. But here’s one of Ehrman’s catch 22 moments. If the narratives were identical, then the argument would be that the writers colluded. This is actually an issue scholars like Ehrman bring up when talking about the Synoptic Gospels. The fact that they’re different lends credibility to there being more to the story than one story teller could tell.

Let’s compare Matthew and Luke’s account and see if we can understand what Ehrman cannot. 

Matthew begins with Joseph’s genealogy, we then get an announcement of the birth to Jospeh, the adopted father. Then we are told that Jesus had been born in Bethlehem, and within an estimated two year span, wise men from the east show up. Jospeh receives a dream to escape because Herod is sending soldiers to kill babies. After Herod’s death, Jesus’ family moves to Nazareth.  

The focus of Matthew’s opening is very Jewish in that the focus is on legacy, connecting Jesus to David and Abraham. Matthew also emphasizes Jesus’ fulfillment of Old Testament prophecies, both in where he is born, and who comes to pay homage or worship to him. We’re told that the current king Herod tries to kill him, because Jesus is the true king of the Jews. Matthew focuses on certain elements from Jesus’ brith that will heighten other events later in his life.

Now Luke. This Gospel begins with John the Baptist’s brith announcement. Luke connects Jesus to the Servant of Isaiah and so shows how this connection begins even before Jesus is announced. In this way Luke is showing how God is preparing the way for the Messiah. Then we get Jesus’ announcement, but this time it’s to Mary. Whereas we follow Jospeh’s story in Matthew, Luke is having us follow Mary’s. Mary then visits Elizabeth and sings her song. Eventually we’re given another genealogy, this time, most likely through Mary. Following this, John and then Jesus are born. For Jesus, Angels announce his arrival that very night to shepherds. Luke focuses in on where Jesus has come from and to whom, the least of these, Jesus has come to. Jesus then fulfills Old Testament practices and returns to Nazareth.

Matthew and Luke present, not conflicting stories but pieces of the whole. Matthew moves us through the birth narrative pretty quickly to focus on Jesus’ kingship. Luke on the other hand focuses in on the moments leading up to, and including, Jesus actual birth. If we had one, we would have enough to understand where Jesus came from and why he has come.  However, with both read together, we have a greater picture of the events surrounding Jesus’ birth. How many times have people said, too bad we didn’t know more of Jesus’ life? Well the reality is, we have a lot more than most.

So there’s no contradictory elements in the two birth narratives, but instead, both give us a fuller picture of the first two years of Jesus’ life.

Now let’s look at the death narrative, or what is usually referred to as Jesus’ Passion. Looking at the Passion narratives in Mark and Luke, Ehrman writes, “It is hard to stress strongly enough the differences between these two portrayals.” Ehrman has three key points of difference in these Passion narratives. First, Jesus is quiet throughout Mark’s passion narrative, whereas in Luke he speaks. Second, in Mark, Jesus is suffering and in Luke he’s triumphant. Third, Ehrman questions, when was the curtain torn?

Looking at the first point, we can see that Jesus does speak more in Luke than he does in Mark. In Mark Jesus speaks two times, once to Pilate (v.15:2), and once on the cross (v.34). In Luke, Jesus speaks five times: once to Pilate (v.23:3), once to some women in the crowd on his way to the cross (v.31), and three times on the cross, saying “Forgive them…(v.34)” “…with me in paradise (v.43),” and “Father into your hands …(v.46)

Now Mark does include that Jesus made a loud cry, but doesn’t give any words. This loud cry, as Luke tells it, would be connected to Jesus’ words, “Father, into your hands…” However, Mark doesn’t say that Jesus was completely silent. In keeping with tradition, Mark is writing from Peter’s witness. Because of this there are two interpretations as to why we get a difference of how many times Jesus speaks. First, Peter at this point isn’t very close to the cross, so he might not have heard everything Jesus spoke. So when preaching, Peter shares his testimony of what Jesus said, though he might know of more. Secondly, Peter is preaching these events and not covering every detail. Sermons are not meant to be detailed written account, but rather heard. That means you focus in on what you believe matters fro your current audience.

Either way, what is important is, and something Ehrman doesn’t address, is the fact that what is said isn’t contradictory. In fact, where Mark and Luke share the same words of Jesus, their the exact same. To Pilate Jesus states, “You have said so.” So like the brith narrative, we do not have contradictory elements, but rather a fuller picture.

But what about Jesus’s portray. Ehrman claims the in Mark, Jesus is portrayed as merely suffering, but in Luke he is triumphant in suffering. The reason Ehrman makes this claim is because of what Jesus says in Mark 15:34, “Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachthani?” Like many people in the crowd at the cross, Ehrman interprets this as Jesus crying out to God as if God has forsaken him. Now as Ehrman briefly notes, these words open Psalm 22. However, Ehrman doesn’t go into detail about why Jesus might have quoted Psalm 22. 

See Psalm 22 is a Messianic Psalm. If you read it, you’re going to read something very interesting, it’s a Psalm that poetically describes crucifixion. It’s almost as if Jesus isn’t crying out in agony because God has abandoned him, but rather, pointing his disciples a final time to the Scriptures being fulfilled. In other words, this a triumphant moment, in the middle of Jesus’ pain he is revealing that the scorn of the cross was meant by God to bring about salvation. Instead of ending in agony, Jesus is ending in victory, showing that what he was going through was prophesied hundreds of years before. Again, no contradiction, but a fuller understanding of the events of the cross.

Finally, what about the curtain being torn. Luke has the curtain torn before Jesus dies, but Ehrman states that Mark has it being torn afterward. So which is it? They can’t both be right. Well, let’s read the two passages. Luke 23:44-46 reads, “It was now about the sixth hour, and there was darkness over the whole land until the ninth hour, while the sun's light failed. And the curtain of the temple was torn in two. Then Jesus, calling out with a loud voice, said, ‘Father, into your hands I commit my spirit!’ And having said this he breathed his last.” There it is, Luke states that the curtain was torn before Jesus died. 

Turning to Mark, we read in 15:33-34 & 37-38, “And when the sixth hour had come, there was darkness over the whole land until the ninth hour. And at the ninth hour Jesus cried with a loud voice, ‘Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachthani?’ … And Jesus uttered a loud cry and breathed his last. And the curtain of the temple was torn in two, from top to bottom.” Looks like Ehrman’s right, Mark has the curtain torn after Jesus died. Except there’s a problem. The word ‘And.’ Does it mean “this then that” or does it mean “one event occurred and another event occurred?” The Greek word there is ‘kai’ (kahee) which means “also or both.”

Mark is giving us information about what is also happening when Jesus dies. Both Mark and Luke have the same time frame, “… at the ninth hour ….” It is at this hour that Jesus dies and the curtain is torn. The focus of Mark is Jesus’ death, but he also wants us to know that the curtain was torn at his death too. However, Luke shares how Jesus prophesied the coming destruction of the temple, so Luke links what’s happening at the temple and Jesus’ death. In other words, they both tell us the same thing, but different in sharing the events in such a way to make a point within their specific Gospel.

If we understand the point of view of each writer we can understand the way in which they present Jesus’ life. Mark is writing from Peter’s sermons. Peter is sharing the point of Jesus’ death, but adds, “and hey this curtain tore at the same time.” However Luke states in his opening that his purposes is to share the events by way of the witnesses. Mark is telling a sermonized short version of Jesus’ life, whereas Luke is trying to tell a more in order historical event. 

Again, it’s not that they are contradictory, but that through multiple accounts of Jesus’ life, we get a better understanding. Just like when a husband and wife tell the same story, you get a fuller picture of what happened. 

What we have just done is what’s called harmonizing the passages. That means we look at the passages and see how they fit together as an overarching story. But what does Ehrman think of such a practice? He writes on the subject, “When readers then throw both Matthew and John into the mix, they get an even more confused and conflated portrayal of Jesus, imagining wrongly that they have constructed the envoys as they really happened … It gives a fifth story, a story that is completely unlike any of the canonical four, a fifth story that in effect rewrites the Gospels, producing a fifth Gospel … The historical approach to the Gospels allows each author’s voice to be heard and refuse to conflate them into some king of mega-Gospel that flattens the emphases of each one.” 

I don’t agree with Ehrman on this point. Instead, I believe there should be a two-fold approach. First, we let each of the writers tell us what they want to say. We understand their theological purposes as to why they compile the work they do. This allows for the many nuances of Jesus’ life to be revealed. Matthew wants us to understand Jesus as the fulfillment of the Old Testament. Mark wants us to answer the question, “Who do we say Jesus is?” Luke wants as tidy a historical record as he can produce. John wants us to know why he calls himself the beloved disciples and so shows us Jesus on a personal level. And we could go on through the whole of Scripture understanding each of the writers purposes for their work.

The second approach is to then take these witnesses and understand the overarching life story of Jesus and the story of God. Connecting the pieces to the fuller story like a detective at a crime scene. No one book can hold every piece of the puzzle, but the more we have the better picture is seen. In fact, John, in his Gospel, touches on this very idea when he writes, “Now Jesus did many other signs in the presence of the disciples, which are not written in this book; but these are written so that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name. (20:30-31)”

In the case of the Gospels, Ehrman believes we shouldn’t be creating a fifth Gospel to figure out things like the life of Jesus. However, you might remember in our first week, I quoted Ehrman as stating, “I talked about why historians have problems using the Gospels as historical sources, in view of their discrepancies and the fact that they were written decades after the life of Jesus … I also talk about how scholars have devised methods for reconstructing what probably happen in the life Jesus …” In other words, Ehrman has himself spent his life creating a fifth Gospel, a Gospel that he believes is truer than what is given in the New Testament. Again, he imposes rules for others that he doesn’t use for himself. There’s just no way to win with him.

Finally, I said last week that we would come to a conclusion on the concept of inerrancy. I want to add to that the idea of infallibility. First, there are two definitions of inerrancy. The first is the popular, and by that I mean the widely held definition, but not scholarly definition. This definition usually looks at the English Bible in your hands, and states, every word is right. However, by this definition, what happens when the number of the beast isn’t actually 666, it’s actually 616? Or what if the longer ending of Mark wasn’t a part of the original manuscripts? For a lot of people that means that the Bible is wrong and isn’t inerrant.

But this isn’t actually the true concept of inerrancy. The definition that theologians uses is, “… the term … refers to the trustworthy and authoritative nature of the Scripture as God’s Word, which informs humankind of the need for and the way to salvation.” The Bible is inerrant in how we are to conduct our lives to it. This is based, not on your translation, but on the original writings. We might have errors in some manuscripts, but scholars can trace those errors through a manuscript’s linage and find out where the error came from. Yes, there are about 66 points in Scripture that scholars debate on, but even those do not change orthodox Christian faith. 

This is where the term infallibility comes in. Again the theological definition is, “The Bible will not fail in its ultimate purpose of revealing God and the way of salvation to humans.” And it hasn’t. If you are a faithful follower Jesus today, it’s because the word of God has not failed in bringing you the message of salvation. The Bible is a sure foundation to how God has spoke and continues to speak to people, bringing them into salvation, and into greater trust of who he is. I hope that these last two weeks have given you a greater trust in the Scriptures and the work that God has performed in preserving, even though finite and sin compromised humans, his message in it.

Answering Ehrman Series, Wk 2, “No, the Bible Isn’t Corrupt - Part 1”

  At the turn of the twentieth century, a young lawyer turned political activist became a well known writer in New York City. His writing focused on reform and turning away from predatory business practices. One of his most famous lines was, “One of the deepest impulses in man is the impulse to record, to scratch a drawing on a tusk or keep a diary… The enduring value of the past is, one might say, the very basis of civilization.”

And it’s the need to write down history that brings us back to our fall apologetics series, we’re walking through some of Bart Ehrman’s issues with the orthodox Christian faith. Last week we looked at the historicity of the person of Jesus, because it is central to the faith. Jesus is a historical person, which is important because God coming in the flesh is central to the message of salvation. Barth Ehrman agrees with Jesus being a real historical person, but stops at believing he’s anything but that.

This leads us into our actual first issue from Ehrman, that of the Bible’s corruption. Ehrman states, “It is hard for me to pinpoint the exact moment that I stopped being a fundamentalist who believed in the absolute inerrancy and verbal inspiration of the Bible. As I point out in Misquoting Jesus, the key issue for me early on was the historical fact that we don’t have the original writings of any of the books of the Bible, but only copies made—in most instances, centuries later.”

There are two issues that Bart Ehrman brings up in this quote: The inerrancy of the Bible, and the original writings. We’ll look at inerrancy next week, but today, we’re going to tackle Ehrman’s issue that we cannot know what we have today is the same as the Apostle’s or whoever wrote the New Testament books, wrote. To address this issue, we’re going to separate it into two categories: This week, we’ll look at the external evidence of the Bible, and then next week look at the internal evidence. Form these two parts, we’ll come to a conclusion on inerrancy at the end.

Let’s begin within the external. Ehrman is correct that we do not have any of the original manuscripts. However, we need to put that into the perspective of the historical record. Let’s look at a timeline of history. We’ll begin with the time frame of the New Testament. The numbers I’m about to give you are not exactly what I would date the books of the New Testament, but rather are averaged out between scholars, both conservative and liberal. 

Jesus is crucified in roughly 33AD. The first book of the the New Testament, written most likely by James, is written somewhere between 40-50AD. Roughly a decade after the crucifixion. Paul begins his writings around the middle part of the 40s. Paul’s writings end with his death around the mid 60s. The Synoptic Gospels are written somewhere between 60-90AD, with there most likely being a Hebrew sayings version of Matthew dating earlier. Peter’s letters have to be written before his death in the mid-60s, most likely around the early part. John’s writings seem to begin after the destruction of the temple in 70AD and end with him around 100AD. The other books, such as Acts, Hebrews and Jude would be written somewhere in between 40 and 100AD. Our earliest fragment of any New Testament document is called P52, which is a portion of the Gospel of John, in 125AD. 

The oldest complete New Testament is Codex Sinaiticus which was finalized somewhere between 325-360AD. So we know that the current Bible that we have today, at the very latest, is early to mid 300s. 

However, one of the more interesting historical documents is what is referred to as the Muratorian Canon. In the 1800s a French man named Muratori found a fragment of an early Bible list. This fragment included: All four Gospels, Acts, All of Paul’s writings, Jude, two letters of John, but no specific on which ones, and John’s Revelation. It also includes, the Revelation of Peter, Wisdom of Solomon, which is an intertestamental book which predates the New Testament, and the Shepherd of Hermas. We’ll tackle why these books were not include in the Bible in our fourth week, but for now, it is important that, out of the 27 New Testament books, we have at least 22 being acknowledged within around one-hundred and fifty years of Christ’s crucifixion. I saw at least, because, what was found was another fragment. 

What we need to realize, is that we have a lot of manuscripts and fragments between 125AD and the mid 300s.

Now it might seem odd that we have such a large range away from the dates of the actual writing to the completed work. In fact we could say that between the writings themselves, and the time we have a complete copy to the New Testament, there is about 260 years. That’s from when the last writing was composed to when we have the entire New Testament. 

On it’s own, it seems like a huge amount of time. But let’s put it into historical perspective. One of the oldest written works of ancient Greece is Homer’s Iliad. It was written in around 900BC, the oldest surviving manuscript of the Iliad is from 500 years later in 400BC. Around 400BC you have Plato, Thucydides, and Aristotle lived and wrote. Their surviving works come between 900-1,100AD, which is around 1,400 years later. Julis Caesar lived between 100-44BC, with his surviving works coming a little under 1,000 years later. The historian Livy, lived between the first century BC and the first century AD, with his earliest manuscripts surviving from the 300sAD. Josephus and Tacitus both lived in the first century AD, with their earliest surviving copies, again, are in the 900sAD. 

Out of all these surviving copies, the New Testament at its very latest is still about 2 decades closer to the events they write about, than these other ancient surviving manuscripts. And yet, these other documents are not held to the same standard as the New Testament. Those who purport to have written the other historical documents, are not scrutinized as closely as the New Testament writers have been.

But this is just scratching there surface. Let’s take a moment and look at how many surviving copies of these manuscripts we have. Starting from the least to the greatest, Plato’s manuscripts are about 7, Thucydides about 8, Caesar is about 10, Livy is about 20, as is Tacitus’. Aristotle is about 49, while Josephus jumps to a wapping 120. But Homer’s Iliad trounces all of them with 643 surviving manuscripts. When we compare these to the New Testament, we have roughly 5,500 Greek manuscripts and fragments starting in 125AD and going up. To put that into perspective, stacked on top of each other, it would be almost four Empire State buildings high.

Ehrman is correct, we do not have the original hand written books of the New Testament. But put into persecutive, unless something was written on stone, we have very few ancient documents. And the ones that give us the writings of such influential people as Plato, Aristotle, and Caesar are roughly a thousand plus years after those people lived. Whereas the New Testament, at it’s latest, is within two centuries. 

But let’s just say, that we did not have one copy of the New Testament, or we only had a handful of copies like we have of Plato, did you know that we could still reconstruct the New Testament? From early church writings, there are enough quotes from the New Testament to reconstruct it. Something that Bart Ehrman agrees to. In his coauthored book, The Text of the New Testament: Its Transmission, Corruption, and Restoration, Metzger and Ehrman put forth that these early church citations, “would be sufficient alone for the reconstruction of the entire New Testament.”

What we have when it comes to the New Testament is a treasure trove. Not only do we have documents extremely close to the events of history, we have an abundance of them. In that abundance we can actually tell and trace linages of manuscripts. Scholars can see how the manuscripts were preserved and corrupted. 

If we only had a handful we couldn’t tell if there were changes, because there wouldn’t be enough to let us know. However, we can see scribeable errors, variation of words and sentence structures. Because of this we can get closer to the originals than any other ancient document. Scholars Köstenberger, Bock, and Chatraw in their book Truth in a Culture of Doubt: Engaging Skeptical Challenges to the Bible write, “It is more likely that we have the changes and the original in our manuscript tradition since we have so many other copies. In other words, we have too much of the text, not to little. We could well say that it is more likely that our problem is that we have 105 percent of the text, not that we have lost some of it.”

In other words, scholars have to reduce the amount of information they have, not expand it. And with so many manuscripts, the consistency of the Scriptures is revealed. Something that we will dive a little deeper into next week, when we look at the internal correctness of the Scriptures. 

For now, we’ll end with this challenge, Ehrman states that if God wanted us to know his words, why didn’t he persevere the originals. Well, God did something greater. If we just had a few, the challenge would be, “we don’t have enough.” Now that we have an overwhelming amount, the accusation is, “why don’t we have the originals.” For skeptics like Ehrman, its a catch 22, there’s no way of winning. Yet God gave us more than any other historical document to show us his truth. To work through human sin, and incompetency. Because of this we can trust God to preserve our salvation. If God says he will bring about eternal life in all those who trust in him, he will do it. It might not be the way we want it, but his way will bring about a greater life. 

So this week, take your doubts at how God works out this plans to him. Seek him to bring the peace that passes understaffing into you life as you struggle with doubt. Whether that doubt is with his word, or the situation you find yourself in. If God can work through roughly two-thousand years to persevere his word, we can trust him to work through our lives to bring us into full salvation. 

Let us be a people of unwavering trust in the Lord. Amen.

Answering Bart Ehrman Series, Wk 1, “Yes, Jesus is Historical”

  Every fall we take time and focus on being prepared to give an answer to why we hold to faith in Jesus (1 Pet. 3:15). As a pastor, one of my responsibilities to this congregation is to equip the saints for the work of ministry (Eph. 4:12). One of the most needed areas of ministry is to be able to articulate well researched and thought through reasons as to why the Christian faith is true and a person should seek the Lord.

This year we’re going to focus our attention on one of the most referenced New Testament scholars that opponents to Christianity use to argue their points. Atheists and Muslims alike use Bart Ehrman’s work as proof that scholars, in the know, have debunked Christianity and those that still hold to the orthodox tenets of the faith, do so from an imaginary, rather than a historical basis.

For the next five weeks, we’re going to cover, and argue against, five main issues that Ehrman presents in his book, Jesus, Interrupted, as to why the orthodox faith of Christianity is wrong.

To give you a little background on Bart Ehrman, he was a fundamentalist Christian when he attended and graduated from Wheaton College. He went on to receive a Masters of Divinity and PH.D from Princeton Theological Seminary. While working through seminary, Ehrman rejected his fundamentalist views, and eventually became an atheist. He has been a professor at the University of North Carolina since 1988, and currently is the Chair of the Department of Religious Studies at Chapel Hill. He has written over thirty books, both scholarly and at the popular level. He is an expert in the New Testament and has debated issues pertaining to the historical Jesus and Christianity’s origins on numerous occasions. Yet, for all his credentials, we will see that Ehrman falls into the same trappings that all of us do. We become so focused on an issue that we cannot see how blind we are to it.

Now you might be wondering why we’re doing this instead of just teaching out of the Bible. In Jesus, Interrupted, Ehrman issues a challenge to those in the pulpit. He writes, “Thousands of scholars just in North America alone continue to do serious research in the field, and the results of their study are regularly and routinely taught, both to graduate students in universities and to prospective pastors attending seminaries in preparation for the ministry. Yet such views of the Bible are virtually unknown among the population at large. In no small measure this is because those of us who spend our professional lives studying the Bible have not done a good job communicating this knowledge to the general public and because many pastors who learned this material in seminary have, for a variety of reasons, not shared it with their parishioners once they take up positions in the church. (Churches, of course, are the most obvious place where the Bible is—or, rather, ought to be—taught and discussed.) As a result, not only are most Americans (increasingly) ignorant of the contents of the Bible, but they are also almost completely in the dark about what scholars have been saying about the Bible for the past two centuries.”

There is a subtle attack within this quote of Ehrman’s, and a slight disdain for those who attend seminary, supposedly learning that the Bible is unreliable and yet, sweep those discoveries under the rug to hide them from their congregations. However, I have had undergraduate work in exploration of the Bible, and I am currently two classes away from a Masters of Religion. Over the course of my formal education and my personal research, I have come to a firmer trust in the reliability of the Bible, not less. However, I want you to be prepared for those who utilize scholars like Ehrman to chip away at your firm foundation. So, for the next four weeks, I’m going to present to you the scholarly case for the credibility of orthodox Christian faith as we seek to refute Ehrman’s claims.

So let’s get into the first of Bart Ehrman’s issues with the credibility of the Christian faith. In Jesus Interrupted, Ehrman writes, “In my lectures (given as part of a preaching series on ‘the historical Jesus”) I talked about why historians have problems using the Gospels as historical sources, in view of their discrepancies and the fact that they were written decades after the life of Jesus … I also talk about how scholars have devised methods for reconstructing what probably happen in the life Jesus …”

The historical Jesus is a key factor in the credibility of the Christian faith. Paul writes in First Corinthians 15:14, “And if Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is in vain and your faith is in vain.” Everything hinges on the physical resurrection of Jesus for our faith. But in order to have a physical resurrection, there needs to be a real historical figure.

There is a group who are referred to as mythicists, that believe that Jesus is a combination of several religious beliefs amalgamated into the person presented in the New Testament. The thought is, Jesus is a large helping of Judaism, a cup of Egyptian deity stories, a dose of Babylonia gods, and sprinkling of Roman cultic practices. This belief has permeated, what is called the zeitgeist, or the collected cultural mindset of our society for decades. Its roots are in the late 1800s German theological schools, whose purpose was to separate the Jewishness from Jesus. It’s no wonder then that it would be the Germans who who would later seek to kill millions of Jewish people. 

In his paper, “An Atheist Historian Examines the Evidence for Jesus (Part 1 of 2),” historian Tim O’Neill, addresses three attacks that are logged by mythicists at the historical Jesus. The first accusation is that, “There are no contemporary accounts or mentions of Jesus. There should be, so clearly no Jesus existed.”

For one, this discounts the Gospels as not being contemporary accounts, even though the tradition of who wrote the Bible goes back to at the latest the disciple of John the Apostle named Papias. As John Warwick Montgomery points out, Papias confirms the writings of the Gospels by Matthew and John as the Apostles who were with Jesus.  Papias also confirms that Mark was the secretary of Peter the Apostle, and Luke the researcher who accompanied of Paul. The way people go about rejecting the Gospels is to say they were written by Jesus’ followers and so cannot be trusted. Or mythicists, and some naturalists historians, will reject the Gospels because they contain the supernatural. However, if we follow that line of thinking, we better be prepared to get ride of a lot of history written by people who believed in the causes they wrote about. Say good by to anything about Confucius, or Alexander the Great, or a whole host of other historical documents. Though the Gospels were written by Jesus’ followers, they are still historical documents that attest to his life, and should at least be seen in that light. Further on in our series, we’ll dive into why we should not just see the Gospels as historical documents with turret, but how they are truthful.

The fact that we have the Gospels and that they are dated within three decades of Jesus’ life by three eyewitness, and one researcher, is actually rather astonishing in the ancient world. As O’Neill points out, “For example, few people in the ancient world were as prominent, influential, significant and famous as the Carthaginian general Hannibal. He came close to crushing the Roman Republic, was one of the greatest generals of all time and was famed throughout the ancient world for centuries after his death down to today. Yet how many contemporary mentions of Hannibal do we have? Zero. We have none. So if someone as famous and significant as Hannibal has no surviving contemporary references to him in our sources, does it really make sense to base an argument about the existence or non-existence of a Galilean peasant preacher on the lack of contemporary references to him? Clearly it does not.”

The fact that we have such writings as the Gospels, so close to Jesus’ life, for this itinerant Jewish man from the first century, when we have no such writings of great generals like Hannibal, shows us that Jesus’ story has more credibility than people think. 

Tim O’Neill’s second accusations from mythicists is, “The ancient writer ‘X’ should have mentioned this Jesus, yet he doesn't do so. This silence shows that no Jesus existed.” This attack states that because a certain ancient historian does not mention a person, then that person’s historicity comes into question.

This is what is called an “argument from silence.” An argument like this, to be correct, would have to go along the lines of a descendant claiming that their ancestor met a famous person, yet, in all their ancestor’s letters there was never once a mention of that meeting. We might make a claim, but there is no evidence from the source and so his science makes the claim invalid. However this isn’t the case with Jesus.

In the case of Jesus, people have come up with lists of ancient historians who should have mentioned Jesus but did not. One historian that O’Neill mentions is Lucanus. However, as O’Neill points out, Lucanus, wrote one poem and a history of a civil war between Julius Caesar and Pompey. The question arises, “Why would such a historian write about Jesus, when his concern was about Caesar?” It would be like a historian who, in the twentieth century, was writing about the American Revolution, jamming in something about a man named Billy Graham. The two are not connected and therefore the historian wouldn’t mention one in the other.

These types of historian connections makes up the bulk of mythicist lists as to who should have mentioned Jesus. Whereas those like Philo Judeaus would be a better candidate, since he wrote on Pilate and Judean events. But since he did not mention any Jewish preachers, prophets or Messianic figures, it figures that he would not have mentioned Jesus either. 

So it is not strange, however, that Jesus is not mentioned in many contemporary sources due to his irrelevance to Roman society in the first century. What is strange is that he is mentioned at all. In fact, Darrell L. Brock, in his book, Studying the Historical Jesus, finds nine non-Christian Roman and Jewish historical documents that do mention Jesus: Suetonius, Tacitus, Pliny the Younger, Thallus, Lucian of Samosata, Mara Bar Sarapion, Josephus, Sanhedrin 43a, and Sanhedrin 107b. So, rather than there being no contemporary mentions of Jesus, the fact that there are any, and at least nine, shows that Jesus was known well enough to be mentioned. 

The final accusation from those who deny the historical Jesus is, "The earliest Christian traditions make no mention of a historical Jesus and clearly worshipped a purely heavenly, mythic-style being. There are no references to an earthly Jesus in any of the earliest New Testament texts, the letters of Paul." 

To refute this obvious incorrect claim, O’Neill gives several passages of Scripture from Paul to dispute this accusation. I think three will suffice here. Galatians 4:4, “But when the fullness of time had come, God sent forth his Son, born of woman, born under the law ….” Romans 1:3, “concerning his Son, who was descended from David according to the flesh …” 1 Corinthians 2:8, “None of the rulers of this age understood this, for if they had, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory.” Jesus birth, life, and death are all seen through Paul’s letters. Jesus wasn’t a mythical figure, but a flesh and bone person who walked the earth, taught his disciples, and was crucified. 

The writings of the New Testament clearly speak of Jesus walking as a human. He ate food (Matt. 26:26-30), felt tired (Jn. 4:6), wept (Lk. 19:41), and experienced pain (Matt. 26:37). A person might not believe his deity, but what one cannot reject is his humanity. 

The historicity of Jesus is an important foundational aspect to our faith, because as Second John states, “I say this because many deceivers, who do not acknowledge Jesus Christ as coming in the flesh, have gone out into the world. Any such person is the deceiver and the antichrist (v.1:7).” To deny that Jesus was a historical, flesh and blood person is to deny him in his ministry work, and the facts of history. 

In fact, Barth Ehrman countering the mythicists, states, “I can assure you, as a historian, that whatever else you might want to say about Jesus, he certainly existed.” So though, Ehrman may reject that Jesus is who the New Testament says he is, what Ehrman cannot and will not deny, is that Jesus was a historical person, who walked the dusty roads of Judea in the first century.

With Jesus’ historicity established, next week, we’ll dive into the Bible itself, taking two of our five weeks to look at how we can trust the Scriptures we read.

But my challenge for you today, is to ask this question, “Do I trust that Jesus came in the flesh?” Not only does it have historical significance, but the Scriptures state, that Jesus was God who took on our flesh that he may die for us. The flesh of Jesus shows the love of God, that he would go to almost any length to bring us back to himself. This week, understand the reality of God’s deep love for you, because the King of Heaven took on the flesh of earth, so that he may die for those in rebellion against him, that anyone who would put their trust into Jesus would receive his eternal life.

Let us be a people who not just follow a mythical figure, but the true God who walked the earth, died for sinners, resurrected to open his eternall life to us, and who calls us to that life today. Amen.