My Dad once told me a story about a teacher in his junior high. The teacher taught history and the class received brand new text books. As the year went on the teacher became more and more upset with the new books. Finally one day, the teacher said to the class, “I have a degree that specializes in American history, and in all my years of study, I have never heard half the stuff that this text book wants us to learn.” My Dad told me later that the text books were found to contain a lot of errors, where certain historical events were attributed to made up figures instead of the actual person. These books were eventually thrown out of the public school system for all the problems they had. And you wonder how did the publisher think they could change history and no one would notice.
In the last few years I was doing a lot of study on early American history, specifically on how the Christian faith effected the founding of the U.S. In one of the lectures I was listening to, they were talking about a biography about George Washington. There was a text book that was used for somewhere around 60-80 years that had a forward in it by people who knew Washington personally. In that forward, people spoke about Washington’s faith and how it guided him in his life, setting the framework for the rest of the book. Yet in the early part of the 1900s, that book was reprinted without that forward. And by taking away that forward, the publisher took away a key aspect of understanding Washington’s life. And you wonder how the publisher could think they would get away with it.
And then there’s today, where there is so much misinformation out there, that if you watch anyone news organization you’ll come away with a very specific view on what’s going on in this world. In fact, just watching the Kyle Rittenhouse case these last two weeks, has been an eye opening experience. To watch people lie and then have that lie called out during witness examination, is just mind-blowing and you wonder, how could they think they will get away with it.
Well they don’t. People find out that they’re being lied to and manipulated, and they get mad. In fact, there’s a new phrase that has come out in the last few years, it’s called being black pilled. Meaning a person has become disillusioned with what they have been told and then begin to reject everything because they feel like they can’t trust anything.
This brings us back to our fall apologetics series, where we’re going to talk about how we don’t have to be disillusioned with what the Bible tells us, because unlike any other document out there, the Bible has been put through the ringer and yet stands against all misinformation about it.
Last week we began our annual apologetics series by stating we were going to cover three big questions that every Christian should be prepared to answer. In that first week we covered the question is Jesus historical? We looked at how a group of people called mythicists, put forth the idea that Jesus wasn’t really a historical person, but rather an amalgamation of different ancient religions.
In response, we answered the first three main arguments of the mythicist. We answered the argument, that Jesus’ story takes from other ancient “resurrection” stories, by actually taking the time and comparing one of these stories to the biblical account, showing how it was not even close.
Then we responded to the argument that Jesus’ wasn’t mentioned by Roman sources. To which we showed that indeed Jesus was mentioned by several Roman sources, which was amazing due to Jesus being a no one in Roman society.
Finally, we answered the argument that there’s no archeological evidence for Jesus. Agreeing that there is no stone that Jesus inscribed, here is Jesus, but rather everything about Jesus fits perfectly into the world of a 1st century Jewish man. From which the archeological account agrees.
Today we are going to cover the fourth argument of the mythicist, because it needs a little more time to respond to. This final argument encompasses more than a ten minute answer. It is the argument or, as we will refer to it today, the question of, is the Bible reliable?
This is probably the most asked question, or position I get. I’ve heard it from a teen girl when she was thirteen, I’ve heard from an adult man when he was around seventy, and I’ve heard it from people in between.
A comedian named David Cross, who I know from the live action Chimpmuck movie as the evil record produce, has said this, "Back when the Bible was written, then edited, then rewritten, then rewritten, then re-edited, then translated from dead languages, then re-translated, then edited, then rewritten, then given to kings for them to take their favorite parts, then rewritten, then re-rewritten, then translated again, then given to the pope for him to approve, then rewritten, then edited again, the re-re-re-re-rewritten again...all based on stories that were told orally 30 to 90 years AFTER they happened.. to people who didn't know how to write... so...(https://www.reddit.com/r/JoeRogan/comments/1le2is/back_when_the_bible_was_written/)."
And in the most popular podcast on the internet, Joe Rogan has said, “The New Testament was written by Constantine who was a F******* Roman Emperor who wasn’t even Christian. He didn’t even believe it. He became a Christian on his death bed. That’s when he became a Christian. The New Testament is utter horse s***. It’s created by a bishop and a f***** Emperor, that’s a fact. It’s established religious fact. Everyone knows where it came from. And not only that, it was written hundreds of years after the death of Jesus (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y5nyyupLskI).”
For people in our society this is where they are getting their information from, and it’s bad information. The people who say such things have never actually taken the time and read the scholarly work on the Bible.
Now because people like David Cross and Joe Rogan focus on the New Testament, that is where we are going to camp for today. So the question is, is the New Testament reliable? And here we need to put the ancient world into perspective. See, here’s the first problem that is rooted in a greater problem of modern people. We have a tendency to think that the way things are today, is how they have always been. What I mean by that is the way information is transmitted, is the way it has always been.
Last week when we talked about the Roman sources and the archeological evidence, there is a hint of modern error, because people do not understand that the history we do have is only a fraction of what was produced. And I want to give you some examples.
Do you know who Plato is? Well his work entitled, “Tetralogies” (tet-tra-lo-geezs) was written sometime in the late 400s or early 300s BC. Only 7 manuscripts of that work remain and the the earliest manuscript is dated to 900 AD. That’s about 1,400 years between when it was supposed to have been written and what we use to know what Plato said.
Or do you know Aristotle? His writing “Ode to Poetics” was written in the 300s BC. Scholars have 49 manuscripts with the earliest dating to 1,100 AD. There again you have about 1,400 years between when Aristotle wrote the original and what we have today to know that he did.
Or here’s one, a Greek historian named Thucydides who also lived in the 400s BC, and who the Encyclopedia Britannica calls “the greatest of ancient Greek historians (https://www.britannica.com/biography/Thucydides-Greek-historian),” So you would think we would have a lot. But of his writing there are 8 surviving copies. The earliest of these 8 is again from the 900s AD. Again, 1400 years after the fact.
Do we need to continue? No, but we will.
Livy, a Roman historian, who wrote in the 1st century BC, is said to have written 142 books on Roman history. Guess how many remain? 35 books have survived, and they’re contained within 20 manuscripts. The earliest of these manuscript is from the 300s AD. That’s about 300 to 400 year after the fact.
What about Julius Caesar, the first Caesar of Rome, and who a lot of people should know about, I mean he does have a Casino named after him after all. He was said to have written a work entitled the “Gallic Wars” in the 1st century BC. 10 manuscripts have survived, the earliest dates to around, you guessed it, the 900s AD. That’s about a 1,000 years after the fact. (https://books.google.com/books?id=LWVy0WKHsK0C&pg=PA193&lpg=PA193&dq=aristotle+ode+to+poetics+earliest+manuscript&source=bl&ots=WqX7ABTgcj&sig=ACfU3U0Xgf0LLjI8tui2ZkEi_ux_3av-4A&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiRn7T9x470AhXXIjQIHWpiAPwQ6AF6BAgnEAM#v=onepage&q=aristotle%20ode%20to%20poetics%20earliest%20manuscript&f=false)
Yet, these men and the things they recorded are taken has historical not only by scholars, but by the average person on the street.
Now, let’s put this into perspective with the New Testament.
As I quoted earlier, David Cross and Joe Rogan both have this idea that the New Testament has been been rewritten a lot of times, with Rogan going so far as to say that it was Emperor Constantine who compiled the writings into what we now have today. Him and Cross would be at odds, because Cross says it was done by popes and kings, so I guess Cross doesn’t know the historical fact that Rogan says is clearly there. Except both are completely wrong.
You know how we know? Because of manuscripts.
First off, we need to put history into perspective. Jesus is said to be crucified in one of three years: AD 29, 30, or 33. I hold to a 33 AD because of internal and external evidence and so that’s the date we’ll use. Constantine held the council of Nicaea in May 325 AD. So if we have a New Testament before May 325 AD, the majority of the popular belief that the New Testament has been changed over time goes out the window. So, do we?
In the 1700s an Italian scholar by the name of Lodovico Antonio Muratori (lewd-o-v-co, an-tone-i-o, more-a-tore-i) discovers a fragment of a 2nd Century, corresponding to 100s AD, manuscript that contained a basic list of what was considered cannon in the west churches of the Roman world. This is now referred to as the Muratorian Canon, named after the man who discovered it.
Guess which books are there? All but 3, Hebrews, James, and maybe 2 Peter. Now why not these three? Well it might have contained 2 Peter, because it simple states the revelation of Peter and in other areas does not distinguish between separate letters an apostle might have written. Hebrews might also be included, because it was included in Paul’s writings that were circulating at that time. And there are two reasons why James might not be included: First, we don’t have the full text of the Muratorian Canon, and second, James is a very Jewish book, and might not have been circulated among the Gentile churches.
Yet, here we have an almost complete list of the New Testament roughly 200 years before Constantine called the Council of Nicaea where he allegedly compiled the book. Joe Rogan doesn’t know the history of the New Testament and he is leading others to the same false conclusions.
But what about the rewritings that have occurred, like Cross has said? Well, remember how many of those other ancient documents we have? If we included all the manuscripts that we talked about, they would total 94 manuscripts. For five ancient historical figures, we have 94 manuscripts of their writings. Let’s compare that to the NewTestament.
In the first 1,000 years after Christ, the time frame that most of these other ancient manuscripts are written in, there are around 5,000 Greek manuscripts, to which the New Testament was originally written, and roughly another 20,000 manuscripts in other languages. Within a 1,000 years of the events there are roughly 25,000 New Testament manuscripts compared to the same span of time of other ancient documents with only 94. And there’s more discovered all the time. In fact a group called the Center for the Study of New Testament Manuscripts, headed by Daniel Wallace, seeks to take digital copies of all the manuscripts for the public, and has found several manuscripts that were unknown before (https://www.csntm.org).
And whereas the earliest we have of these other ancient documents is 1,000 years after the fact, with the New Testament we have manuscripts that date back to the 100s AD. Which means that within 60 years of the authors’ original work.
But that’s not all. There are roughly 32,000 quotes from early church fathers and second generation believers, who heard directly from the apostles themselves, written down in places like 1st Clement. Meaning, that even if we didn’t have those 25,000 manuscripts, we would still have a New Testament.
Okay, but is the New Testament reliable? Well, scholars say that 94% of all the manuscripts are identical in structure and information. Of the 6% that is left, 3% deals with textual anomalies, such as “Jesus loved Mary,” as compared to “Mary was loved by Jesus.” The two are the same, but ordered differently, which is easy to do in the Greek. The final 3% does deal in areas that are contradictory. One such area is the use of the mark of the Beast. A lot of manuscripts contain the 666, but there are others that have that number as 616. Now does that change the theology? It does change the interpretation of who might be the beast, but it doesn’t change the theology of what the mark is, and that’s the key here. Even this 3% doesn’t change theology. In fact. Out of those 25,000 manuscripts Kenneth Boa writes, “The New Testament can be regarded as 99.5 percent pure, and the correct readings for the remaining 0.5 percent can often be ascertained with a fair degree of probability by the practice of textual criticism.”
In other words, because we have such an overwhelming amount of manuscripts, we can be assured that what was originally written by those apostles, are what we have in our hands today. In fact, there is more evidence for the reliability of the New Testament, than any other ancient document. Which shouldn’t surprise us as believers.
Isaiah 40:6ff states about the word of God, “A voice says, “Cry out.” And I said, “What shall I cry?”All people are like grass, and all their faithfulness is like the flowers of the field. 7 The grass withers and the flowers fall, because the breath of the Lord blows on them. Surely the people are grass. 8 The grass withers and the flowers fall, but the word of our God endures forever.”
Paul states in 2 Timothy 3:16-17 that, “16 All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness, 17 so that the servant of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work.”
And as Jesus himself said in Matthew 7:24ff, “24 Therefore everyone who hears these words of mine and puts them into practice is like a wise man who built his house on the rock. 25 The rain came down, the streams rose, and the winds blew and beat against that house; yet it did not fall, because it had its foundation on the rock. 26 But everyone who hears these words of mine and does not put them into practice is like a foolish man who built his house on sand. 27 The rain came down, the streams rose, and the winds blew and beat against that house, and it fell with a great crash.”
God’s Word endures through the centuries, showing that he is true to it and reliable in its execution. Christians can be assured that the New Testament is what the Apostles witnessed and recorded. So let us be confident in God’s enduring word, that even as those who would rail against its authenticity, fail to land a blow when history balks at their attacks.
My challenge for you this week then, is to become familiar with the information I have shared with you today. With a reminder that all of my sermons and references are given online every week. But also to come before God in worship this week. Praising and thanking him for his word that we can dive ever deeper into, and yet always have new things challenge us to ponder. So with becoming familiar with the information, and worship God for his word, I want to challenge you to have a prayer of “Lord, help me be wise and build my life upon your word.” Because information without action isn’t very useful within the kingdom of God.
Let us be a people who are firm upon the foundation of God’s enduring word. That in the storms and assaults of this life, we can weather anything because God’s true to what he has said, and we can trust him in it. Amen.
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