Uncomfortable Can I Trust the Bible? July 8 & 9, 2017 Historically you can trust the Bible. 1000-200 BC - Jewish scriptures written Most scholars have dated the written Jewish scriptures as old as the 10th century BC, with the latest documents written in the 3rd and 2nd centuries BC. This would suggest that all of the events of the Jewish scriptures, which later became known as the Old Testament, happened before the writings. The Jewish scriptures were made up of the Torah (the first 5 books of the Old Testament), the prophets, the wisdom literature as well as songs and poems. What s important for you to know is that all of these scriptures were written down before Jesus was born. It s important because the Jewish scriptures had prophecies about a Messiah. And not just a few. Upwards of 300! Of these estimated 300 prophecies about the Messiah, Jesus fulfilled no less than 29 of them in the last 24 hours of his life! Example: Psalms 22:16, They pierced my hands and my feet. This statement was written 1000 years before it happened and 800 years before the Romans even adopted crucifixion as a form of punishment for criminals. The chance that any human could fulfill just 8 of these predicted events is 1 in 10 to the 17th power or 1 in 100,000,000,000,000,000. 2-3 BC - Jesus born 30 AD - Crucifixion, resurrection, birth of the Church In 30 AD Jesus was crucified. This fact is not disputed among religious and secular historians. Three days later he rose from the dead, and then a few weeks later Peter and the apostles went out into the streets and said (I m paraphrasing here), You crucified him, God raised him, now say you re sorry. (Acts 2:14-40)
Thousands of people embraced the risen savior and believed in Jesus as God s son, and Christianity was born just weeks after Jesus was raised from the dead not 20 or 30 or 50 or 300 years later as some people would suggest just a few weeks later. All in the year 30 AD. 45 AD to 85 AD - Documents that would make up the New Testament written As early as just 15 years after the death and resurrection of Jesus and the birth of the church, the writers of the New Testament started writing down the events that they were witnessing. Scholars believe that the New Testament was written between 45 AD and 85 AD at the latest. Most scholars believe that they were written by 70 AD. 70 AD - Destruction of the temple in Jerusalem In 70 AD, the temple in Jerusalem was destroyed by the Roman legion. 4 years earlier in 66 AD, the Roman legion under command of Vespacian came down from Gallilee and began rolling up village after village and city after city in order to squelch the Jewish revolt. Vespacian funneled all the Jewish revolutionaries toward Jerusalem and surrounded the city. He then went to Rome and eventually became the emperor, and he left his son, Titus, in command. Titus dug a trench around the city and began crucifying Jews outside the city. Over the next 4 years, the Romans executed thousands of Jews. They eventually broke through the walls of Jerusalem on August 6 of 70 AD and destroyed the temple in Jerusalem, enslaved hundreds of thousands of Jews, and exiled all Jews from Jerusalem. It was a dangerous and horrible time to be a Jew or Jewish Christian in Judea as hundreds of thousands of Jews were enslaved and executed during this 4 to 5 year period. It was like an earlier miniholocaust. None of this is recorded in the gospel or New Testament documents. Why? Because the New Testament documents were already written by 70AD. It s important because these documents were written during the time when the eyewitnesses to what Jesus had done were still alive.
Maybe you ve heard or were taught in school that they weren t written until 150 to 200 years later. But there is no evidence for that. The reason many scholars want to push the writings way out here is because of miracles and the resurrection of Jesus. But skeptics maybe even you think that the stories were embellished, and through oral tradition, over the course of 100 years or more, became a myth or a legend. The New Testament was written too early for it to become legend. Did you know that historians and literary scholars agree that it takes at least 70 years or more for a story to become a legend? Example: The legend of King Arthur. Many of us have heard about King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. In fact, there is a movie coming out soon about the story. Maybe you remember it. Arthur grabbed a magical sword out of a stone when no one else could and he eventually became a king. He met a wizard named Merlin and they had lots of adventures. When they got older, a pretty boy named Lancelot joined the team. Well, King Arthur was estimated to live around 500 AD. The first works to chronicle King Arthur were written in 828 AD some 330 years later, give or take. In these writings Arthur wasn t a king at all, just a military leader. The magic wasn t added to the story until Merlin was introduced in 950 AD. Finally, it was recorded and distributed in legend form in 1136 AD, and later in 1180 AD, Sir Lancelot entered the picture. So it took the story 330 years to be written. Then it was written at least 3 more times over the span of the next 300 years with the content changing each time. So it took more than 600 years for the legend of King Arthur to be formed. Gospels and letters of the New Testament were written far too early to be legend because the eyewitness to Jesus life, death, and resurrection were still alive. Luke, in his gospel, explained that he got his account of Jesus life from eyewitnesses who were still alive.
Many have undertaken to draw up an account of the things that have been fulfilled among us, just as they were handed down to us by those who from the first were eyewitnesses and servants of the word. With this in mind, since I myself have carefully investigated everything from the beginning, I too decided to write an orderly account for you, most excellent Theophilus, so that you may know the certainty of the things you have been taught. (Luke 1:1-4) Mark points out specific eyewitnesses in his gospel account as well. A certain man from Cyrene, Simon, the father of Alexander and Rufus, was passing by on his way in from the country, and they forced him to carry the cross. (Mark 15:21) If any reader wanted to find out the truth, even if Simon of Cyrene was dead, he could go to Cyrene and find Alexander or Rufus and ask them what they saw! Why would Mark name names if these people could easily be questioned? He would only do this if it was true. Paul in 1 Corinthians 15:3-6 writes this just 25 years after the resurrection of Jesus: For what I received I passed on to you as of first importance: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures, and that he appeared to Cephas, and then to the Twelve. After that, he appeared to more than five hundred of the brothers and sisters at the same time, most of whom are still living, though some have died. The fact is, if you wanted to call bull on Paul, all you had to do was find one of the living eyewitness he readily gave you! You can trust the Bible. It was written far too early to be legend. There is too much detail in the New Testament documents for them to be legends or fiction novels.
The Gospel writers wrote as if they were writing history, not fiction. C.S. Lewis, former skeptic turned believer and world-class literary scholar, said this about the gospels: I have been reading poems, romances, vision literature, legends and myths all my life. I know what they are like. I know none of them are like this. Of this (gospel) text there are only two possible views. Either this is reportage...or else, some unknown, ancient writer...without known predecessors or successors, suddenly anticipated the whole technique of modern novelistic, realistic narrative -C.S. Lewis Example: Luke 3:1-2 - In the fifteenth year of the reign of Tiberius Caesar when Pontius Pilate was governor of Judea, Herod tetrarch of Galilee, his brother Philip tetrarch of Iturea and Traconitis, and Lysanias tetrarch of Abilene during the high-priesthood of Annas and Caiaphas... Luke was so meticulous in his detail, that a man by the name of William Ramsay, an oxford scholar, set out in 1881-1882 on a journey to the middle east to investigate Luke s writing in the book of Acts. William Ramsay was convinced that because of the detail in Luke s writing in the book of Acts, he could prove that Luke was making it all up. But here s what happened. William Ramsay goes on his journey around the middle east and the Mediterranean to all these places that Luke wrote about and investigates every detail in the book of Acts. You know what he found? Nothing! Nothing to discredit Luke s writings. In fact, this is what he said, I set out to look for truth on the borderland where Greece and Asia meet, and found it there [in Acts]. You may press the words of Luke in a degree beyond any other historian's and they stand the keenest scrutiny and the hardest treatment -William Ramsay Perhaps these writers weren t writing about what they believed, but rather they were reliably reporting what they saw and heard!
The New Testament documents had too many embarrassing details to be false. We find the New Testament documents full of embarrassing details. Like when Peter, the guy that starts the church, gets rebuked by Jesus saying Get behind me Satan! Or when Peter denies Jesus and the rest of the disciples run away and hide after Jesus dies. One thing that would definitely not happen in a made-up story: While the disciples were holed up in a room like defeated cowards, two women were the first to discover the empty tomb. How about when Jesus was buried in the tomb of Joseph of Arimathea one of the Jewish men who sentenced Jesus to die? And by the way, this would have been easy to refute if it wasn t true! The only explanation of the level of detail and the level of embarrassing detail is that it was true! And thousands of people believed it was true. So what about these apparent contradictions in the Bible? Just because there are omissions, doesn t mean they contradict one another. What you have is multiple writers giving their part of the story. They can t write about what they didn t see or hear, but what is remarkable is how their individual writings make up these elaborate puzzles. Only when you put them together do you see the whole picture. Cambridge Professor J.J. Blunt identified over sixty of these instances where one writer inadvertently filled in the gaps for another. For example: Judgement for Bethsaida: Matthew records Jesus pronouncing the following judgement: Woe to you, Chorazin! Woe to you, Bethsaida! For if the mighty works done in you had been done in Tyre and Sidon, they would have repented long ago in sackcloth and ashes. Puzzle: What mighty works have been done in Bethsaida? Matthew doesn t record Jesus doing any. In order to get an answer, we need to first solve a puzzle in John s account of the feeding of the 5000.
Feeding of the 5000: John records Jesus asking Philip, Where are we to buy bread, so that these people may eat? (John 6:5). Puzzle: Why is Jesus asking Philip, a minor character, about where to get money and food, instead of asking a leader such as Peter or John? Puzzle piece 1: Luke, and only Luke, mentions that Bethsaida was the location of the feeding of the 5000 (Luke 9:10). Puzzle Piece 2: In other contexts, John records that Philip was from Bethsaida in Galilee (John 1:44). Putting the Pieces Together: One piece in John and one piece in Luke interlock to help us solve the puzzle: Jesus is asking Philip because Philip is from Bethsaida. He would know where to get money and food because he s in his hometown! We wouldn t know that from John alone. John tells us the who while Luke tells us the where. What about errors over time from making all the copies? The copywriters of the New Testament were meticulous. If we use the science of textual criticism to compare these documents that would eventually make up the New Testament, with other writings that we would consider reliable historical books, many of which we find in our universities, we see overwhelming evidence that the New Testament writings stand up to the test. These accurate copies aren t just something that the New Testament writers did. It happened in the Old Testament too. In 1947 in the Qumran caves in the middle east, the Dead Sea Scrolls were found. This was one of the most important archeological digs in history. What did they find? Pieces and parts of every Old Testament scripture dated to 2nd and 1st century BC. Before that, our oldest copy was from 980 AD. When they compared the 166 words in Isaiah 53, they found that only 17 letters were different and none of those letters affected the meaning of the text. These copies were accurate.
For the 285 years after the church was born, belief in the resurrected Jesus boomed and the copies of these eyewitness accounts were spread all over the Roman empire, Asia, and into Egypt as people became what we now call Christians. Here s what s remarkable. Christianity had replaced the pantheon of Roman, Barbarian, and most Egyptian gods before it was an official religion. 312 AD - Constantine makes Christianity the official religion of Rome Now some people think that this is when Christianity started, but we ve clearly seen today that Christianity started much earlier. Constantine made Christianity the official religion of Rome not because he was interested in becoming a Christian, but because he wanted to unify the empire. And what was the one thing that most people in the empire had in common? They believed that what was written was true and Jesus was, indeed, God. Even Constantine s mother was a Christian. Point: Christianity isn t a religion. The Bible isn t about a religion. It wasn t even called the Bible until about 388 AD. The Bible is about Jesus. It s not a book meant to persuade you to believe. It s a book meant to introduce you to Jesus to what he said and what he did. How could the miracles, namely the resurrection, happen? I ll remind you that there was an empty tomb. They never found Jesus dead body. No one has ever been able to prove Jesus wasn t raised from the dead. At first look, it seems unbelievable because it breaks the laws of nature. But so does believing that the universe exploded into existence from nothing. As blogger Roddy Bullock proclaimed, Everyone believes in something Unbelievable. If the New Testament was actually historically reliable on what we can prove, why would we think it wasn t reliable on what we can t prove?
Thoughts to ponder: What other motivation would the apostles, all who were killed for their faith in Jesus, have other than they believed it to be true? Why would hundreds of thousands of Christians die for a lie? Why would James, the brother of Jesus, who wasn t a disciple, (in fact, he thought Jesus was crazy) suddenly become a follower? He believed because he saw Jesus alive after he saw him dead on the cross! Why would Paul the most feared Christian-hater; the guy who wanted to put the early church out of business; a prominent Jewish leader in line for power and money give it all up, risk life and limb, get shipwrecked twice, and then eventually be killed for his faith in a lie? Could it be that the writers were writing the truth and they were willing to die because they actually saw their friend Jesus the son of God raised from the dead, and they believe in what he did and said?