Isn t the Bible Full of Myths and Mistakes?

Transcription

1 Week 3 - Room for Doubt 1 Isn t the Bible Full of Myths and Mistakes? In college as part of my liberal arts degree, I took a class called World Religions day in the class the teacher stood up and said that it was his job to help free our minds from a religion that was handed down by our parents and instructed by a book that with mistakes and inconsistencies and was culturally out of date. Being a college in the midwest, what religion was he referring to Christianity, and what book was he referring to the Bible. Immediately I could feel myself getting defensive, but I didn t really know how to challenge him. I didn t agree with him, but I didn t know why I believed what I believed in terms of the Bible. This is a common occurrence for young believers entering secular college It s the world that we live in. Maybe you ve had an experience like that Or maybe it wasn t in a classroom. Perhaps it was a skeptical friend, an irreligious relative, or someone at work who doesn t believe what you believe and they belittled you because of your trust in the Bible and told you it was a with myths and mistakes. Come on, they taunt, nobody believes that stuff anymore! If you leave those challenges unaddressed, they ll just fester in your mind. Before you know it, waves of doubt will start to affect your entire spiritual life. You won t know what to believe and you probably won t feel like talking to anyone else about it. So you ve got to address them. Thankfully, We have great reasons to believe this book. We ll talk about a few of them today. In order to do so, we re going to examine?ive common challenges about the Bible. And in the interest of time, we ll focus most of our comments on the New Testament. CHALLENGE #1: The New Testament was written too late to be reliable history Have you heard that claim? People will say, Didn t you know that the New Testament wasn t even written until a century or two after the time of Christ? During the period in between all kinds of legends and misinformation crept in so you really can t take what it says very seriously.

2 Week 3 - Room for Doubt 2 If that was true that would bother me. But you need to know that it simply isn t true! This claim has been thoroughly refuted, although that doesn t keep people from repeating it over and over. In fact, the events recorded in the Bible, particularly those in the New Testament, are based primarily on direct, eyewitness testimony. For example, the apostle John, who wrote the Gospel of John, as well as three epistles to the church and the book of Revelation, made it clear that he was simply reporting what he had Here s what he said in 1 John 1:1,3: That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we looked upon and have touched with our hands, concerning the word of life that which we have seen and heard we proclaim also to you Other parts of the New Testament were compiled by writers who got their information directly from the eyewitnesses. These writers include historians like Luke, who wrote the Gospel of Luke and the book of Acts. In Luke chapter 1, he made a point of explaining his research methodology. Read Luke 1:1-4. Isn t that great? He followed things closely so we can be certain. It s clear that these writers were making the claim that they were eyewitnesses to the actual events or, at minimum, had obtained their information from those who were the actual eyewitnesses. Also, their accounts were written down early soon after the events they chronicled and easily within the lifespan of the people who walked with Jesus. In fact, it s now widely accepted, even among skeptical historians, that the four Gospels Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John were all written within century. And we have strong reasons to believe that most of the New Testament was written by about AD 70. New Testament scholar Craig Blomberg explains, for example, that the book of Acts, which was written by Luke, ends apparently un@inished. Paul is a of the book, and he's under house arrest in Rome. With that the book abruptly halts. What happens to Paul? We out from Acts, probably because the book was written before Paul was put to death.

3 Week 3 - Room for Doubt 3 That means, Blomberg continues, Acts cannot be dated any later than AD 62. Having established that, we can then move backward from there. Since Acts is the second of a two-part work, we know part the gospel of Luke must have been written earlier than that. And since Luke incorporates parts of the gospel of Mark, that means Mark is even earlier. If you allow maybe a year for each of those, you end up with the Gospel of Mark being written no later than about AD 60, maybe even the late 50s. So if Jesus was put to death in AD 30 or 33, we're talking about a maximum gap of thirty years or so. And, he adds, The gospels were written after almost all the letters of Paul. Most of his major letters appeared during the 50s. Most of the letters were written years after the death of Jesus. So going back to the big picture, it's clear that the various books in the entire New Testament were written when many people were still alive who were alive at the time of Jesus death and resurrection. And they would have been able to vouch for its accuracy or challenge any stories that weren t accurate. To put this into our own context, most of the New Testament would have been completed within a span of years similar to the time that has elapsed between now and the year 1977 the year when the?irst Star Wars movie came out, Jimmy Carter became president, and Elvis Presley died. Clearly, those events are vividly remembered by many of us here today. Historically speaking, that s just not a long time! And, obviously, if somebody today tried to rewrite history about the details of those events, it would be quickly detected and refuted. But this is important: we have no record of any contemporaries of the New Testament writers who factually challenge what had been written. The New Testament books were written very close to the events they describe, and we can have great con@idence that they are accurate and trustworthy. Before we go on to our second challenge, let me mention one other related topic. A lot of people are curious about the so-called lost gospels.

4 Week 3 - Room for Doubt 4 What about those other biblical writings, they ll ask. Books like the Gospel of Thomas, or the Gospel of Mary or the one that s been in the news in recent years, the Gospel of Judas. Why did the early church exclude them? The answer is that the early church did not exclude them, because those writings didn t even exist when the church was still early! Most of them were written about AD 175 or later by members of a heretical religious group known as the Gnostics. This means that none of these so-called lost gospels were authored by the biblical characters whose names they bear including Thomas, Mary, Judas, and others. The DaVinci Code hangs it s claims on these Gnostic gospels. These lost gospels are late forgeries that only claimed to be gospels books pretending to be something they re not. Therefore, they are not something we need to worry about. CHALLENGE #2: The Bible is full of myths and stories of miracles that can no longer be believed by thinking people You know, someone may tell you, The Bible is full of claims about ancient prophecies, virgin births, divine miracles, people walking on water and rising from the dead. We now live in the age of science and we can t accept such superstitious stuff anymore. But you might ask that person: So, have you really investigated the evidence for or against these things and concluded that they didn t happen? Usually the answer you ll get will be something like, Well, I don t need to do all of that, because these kinds of events simply don t happen. But do you see what they re doing? In most cases the person has predetermined what they want to conclude, often without any investigation at all. That s not only bad history and science, it s bad philosophy too! In fact, this is called circular reasoning! This also re@lects an anti-god bias, it s just old-fashioned prejudice against Christian truth claims. These people have prejudged the situation without really looking into it! We need to challenge them to be more open-minded; to pay attention to the testimonies of the eyewitnesses who were actually there; to look at the

5 Week 3 - Room for Doubt 5 evidence; and to have the courage to follow the evidence wherever it leads Last week we looked at the evidence for a cause behind the universe that is spiritual, eternal, and unimaginably powerful and wise. If you missed the message, I urge you to go back and listen to it. I think you that there are great reasons to believe in a supernatural Being who is responsible for all these things the One the Bible refers to as God! But beyond that, there is a lot of other powerful evidence in the Bible. For example, there are amazing prophecies that were ful@illed in detail hundreds of years later: Isaiah 53, for example, predicts the coming of a suffering servant who would be punished in our place, and it even says he would be pierced for our iniquities. This was written by the prophet Isaiah some 700 years before the time of Christ, and it even made this prediction that he would be pierced centuries before cruci8ixion had been invented! Psalm 22, written about 1000 years before the time of Christ, describes his suffering in detail when it says a pack of villains encircles me; they pierce my hands and my feet. All my bones are on display; people stare and gloat over me. They divide my clothes among them and cast lots for my garment. These are amazing descriptions of what was to come on the day of Jesus cruci@ixion. And Micah 5:2 predicts again, hundreds of years ahead of time that the Messiah would be born in the tiny town of Bethlehem, just as it would later happen. And, yes, Jesus really did heal people, cast out demons, walk on water, and turn water into wine. And do you know what s interesting? None of his enemies denied that he did these things the evidence was too overwhelming! So, instead, they would just try to catch him on a technicality. They d say, Sure you healed the guy s withered hand, Jesus, but you did it on the Sabbath day and you should know that this is a big no-no! But by blaming him for doing it on the Sabbath day, they were admitting that he d done a miracle! (see Matthew 12:9-14) And think about this: if a God like the one we gave evidence for last week really exists, then it would be nothing for a God like that to foretell the future,

6 Week 3 - Room for Doubt 6 bring about a virgin birth, or do miraculous healings, or even raise someone from the dead. In addition, many of the Biblical stories have been con?irmed by secular history. For example, many of the New Testament claims were later reinforced by early outside reports, such as those by Thallus, Roman historians Tacitus and Suetonius, the Jewish historian Josephus, and others. In fact, according to historian Gary Habermas, author of the book The Historical Jesus, there are at least 39 ancient sources outside of the Bible that provide over 100 facts about Jesus life, teachings, death, and resurrection! And we simply don t have time to go into the rich subject of archaeology and describe how time and again it has con@irmed Biblical details, including the discovery of Old Testament people like the Hittites and cities like Sodom and like Jericho with its collapsed wall that once surrounded the city. Other discoveries have con@irmed the existence and the dates of Pilate who put Jesus under trial as well as the existence of many of the cities and places referred to in the Gospels. Friends, the Bible is not a book of myths. Rather, it with veri@iable facts that you can examine, con@irm, and stake your life upon! CHALLENGE #3: The Bible can t be trusted because it s full of contradictions I still can t trust the Bible, people will say, because it s chock full of mistakes and contradictions! One simple thing you can say in reply is, Really? Chock full of mistakes and contradictions? Show me a few of the ones that bother you the most! Generally, people won t be able to point to anything. That s because they haven t really studied it for themselves; they re just repeating things they ve heard others say. That said, some people will have speci@ic passages they point to. Many of those purported con@licts are not that hard to answer. For example, they ll point out that one of the Gospels indicates that there was an angel at Jesus tomb, while another Gospel says that there were two angels. Or they ll show that in one

7 Week 3 - Room for Doubt 7 account Jesus seems to have ridden on one donkey in his triumphal entry into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday, while another account mentions two donkeys. I mean, how can you trust a book if it was written by people who couldn t even count angels or donkeys, right? But here s a helpful Rule of Math: Wherever there are two, there is also one! You see, the fact that one eyewitness only mentions a single angel, or a single donkey, does not mean that there couldn t have been more than one. That writer is not commenting on how many there were; rather, he s just indicating that there were some. But then the other Gospel writer goes into greater detail, saying how many were actually there. This really isn t a problem. It would be like me leaving church today and telling my wife there was a guy in the congregation wearing a red shirt. Now, if my wife had noticed three guys that were wearing red shirts, would she then accuse me of lying because I had only mentioned one? Of course not! I would still be correct in saying that there was a guy with a red sweater. But she would also be correct in giving more speci@ic details by saying she saw three. The only way it would be a contradiction would be if I said there was one and only one guy with a red shirt here this morning, and then my wife said that there were in fact three. But that s not the case with this shirt example or with the angels or donkeys, either! Other things that are sometimes called contradictions in the Bible are, for example, when the writers present general descriptions, give brief summaries, round numbers, of speech, and so forth. In other words, they tend to talk much like we do today! Yet critics of the Bible often try to force a scienti@ic or mathematical standard of precision on these ancient writers that we don t even live up to now! One question that came in this week was on the genealogy of Jesus Why does Luke's gospel say that Joseph came from Nathan's line, and Matthew's gospel say that Joseph came from Solomon's line? Nathan and Solomon both being sons of King David, and Joseph being the husband of Mary. Which one is correct? They can't both be right can they? Doesn't this undermine the assumption that all of the bible is true? Without going into too much detail by looking at the original greek you can see that Matthew is describing Joseph s lineage, and Luke is describing Mary s lineage. That s why they are different. Look it up good stuff!

8 Week 3 - Room for Doubt 8 Much more could be said on this subject of alleged contradictions in the Bible, and let me acknowledge that not every challenge is easy to answer. But I would also remind you that the Bible has been af@irmed over and over again, and I think it has shown us in ample ways that it is a reliable source of revelation from God one that warrants our attention and our con@idence. CHALLENGE #4: The Bible has been corrupted over time This one is an oft-repeated objection: You can't trust the Bible. It's been translated and retranslated so many times that you can no longer rely on anything it says. It s sometimes compared to the children s game of Telephone, where one kid whispers a message into another kid s ear, then that child whispers it into another one s ear, who does the same, and it goes all the way around the circle until you guessed it a really messed up version of the comes back around. It s a fun game for kids, but it s a bad illustration for how we got our Bible! You see, our Bible is not the end of some long chain of translations from one language to the next say, from Greek to Latin, then Latin to German, then German to English, and so on. Rather, it is a direct translation from the ancient manuscripts in the original languages Hebrew for the Old Testament and Greek for the New Testament. Every good translation goes back to the earliest and best documents and, based on many years of linguistic and cultural studies, puts what was written there into accurate language people today will understand. The result is that we can easily read and comprehend what was originally written by the biblical authors. Now, as is the case with all ancient writings, we don't have the original handwritten documents themselves because those disintegrated long ago, but we do have a number of reliable copies. What makes the New Testament really stand out is that we have so many more copies than we have for any other ancient work, and they are so much earlier. In other words, they date so much closer to the time of the original writings than do the earliest manuscript of other works of antiquity.

9 Week 3 - Room for Doubt 9 According to New Testament scholar Daniel B. Wallace, we have an embarrassment of riches compared to the data the classical Greek and Latin scholars have. The average classical author's literary remains number no more than 20 copies. By comparison, for the New Testament we have more than 5,800 copies of early Greek manuscripts and about 20,000 more in other languages. Dr. Wallace goes on to explain that we have more than 1,000 times the manuscript data for the New Testament than we do for the average Greco-Roman author. Not only this, but the manuscripts of the average classical author are no earlier than 500 years after the time of the original author. For the New Testament, we are waiting mere decades for surviving copies. Now, these other historical works are still considered reliable. That being the case, when you consider the thousands of New Testament manuscripts and a time gap between the original writings and the earliest copies that is so amazingly small, there really is no question that the New Testament we have today accurately represents what was originally written. Similar evidence shows the integrity and reliability of the Old Testament text, including more recent discoveries of much earlier copies, such as those of Isaiah found among the Dead Sea Scrolls. These show that the text has been preserved with remarkable accuracy. The bottom line is that the modern translations of the Bible available to us today are accurate and trustworthy renditions of the original biblical texts, and we can read them with great con@idence that they say what they originally said. Challenge #5: The Bible can t be trusted culturally. There are plenty of topics that will cause you to choke a little because of the wording or even meaning in the Bible text. Maybe it s commands to kill whole cities and cultures in the OT, commentary on slavery, gender roles, and alternative lifestyles. Many people will run from the entire Bible once such a passage. When we come to a passage like that, we need to slow down and read the verses that surround it and look for contextual clues, we need to read a few commentaries. Some of the controversial verses can be cleared up with an

10 Week 3 - Room for Doubt 10 understanding of the historical context. For instance Ephesians 6:5 - Slaves obey your masters - when we hear those terms we think of the African slave trade of the 18th and 19th centuries, or of human traf@icking, and we immediately think the Bible is ok that type of slavery. The slavery in the 1st century Roman empire, slaves didn t look too much different from the average free person. They lived and looked like everyone else. Slaves made the same wages as free laborers very few slaves were slaves for life, many would purchase their own freedom or be freed in years. African and New World slavery in contrast was and is brutal, people were and are forced to do the will of the owner at the expense of being killed, and it was for life. - Kidnapping, rape and murder are not condoned in the Bible. Paul did not go on a campaign to abolish 1 century Roman slavery, but later christians would when faced with new world slavery. Another scenario But maybe after looking at the context and reading commentaries you have come to understand the meaning and now you really feel that the Bible is culturally regressive in a certain area. You might say, How can I trust the Bible if it I believe it is outdated on this certain topic? It s like jumping into the shallow end of the pool and getting beat up by nonessential controversies. People will throw out the core claims of Christianity, (the deity of Jesus, his death and resurrection). Instead we need to jump into the deep end of the and wrestle with those core claims and then we have more freedom to wrestle with some of the less central and more controversial claims. Conclusion If you don t trust the Bible enough to let it challenge and correct your thinking, how could you ever have a personal relationship with God? Personal relationships are relationships in which we can contradict each other. If we are not allowed to contradict or refute one another then we will not have an intimate relationship. Do you remember the Stepford Wives? Husbands of Stepford Connecticut decided to have their wives turned into robots who never cross their husbands, the robotic wives are wonderfully compliant and beautiful but that type of marriage is not intimate or personal. What happens if we eliminate everything in the Bible that offends us or crosses our will if we just pick and choose what we believe and reject the rest. If we no longer have a God who contradicts us we have created a Stepford God. Only a God who can say things that outrage us and force us to struggle (as in a real friendship marriage) will we know we have gotten hold

11 Week 3 - Room for Doubt 11 of a real God and not something of our imagination. The Bible must be authoritative if we are to have a personal relationship with the creator of the universe. But you won t bene@it from it by osmosis! You can t put it on your nightstand or under your pillow and think it s going to somehow mystically in@luence your life! Pollster George Gallup Jr. once said that Americans revere the Bible, but, by and large, they don t read it. So let me end with this challenge: This week, pick up a Bible and read it for yourself. As the Bible itself tells us, you ve got to taste and see! And if you ve been struggling with some doubts, remember what Romans 10:17 says: Faith comes from hearing, and hearing through the word of Christ. Small Groups Room For Doubt Q&A night.