Is The Bible True? (White vs Price)

Debate Format and Moderator Introduction

First, I would like to introduce our topic, which is, Is the Bible True? And we hope that you are here to hear two of the best minds, I think, on opposing sides of that particular question, and as well, we have probably one of the best-known moderators of any kind of debate format in the country with us this night as well.

Well, let me first introduce a gentleman who has authored such books as The Incredible Shrinking Son of Man, Jesus is Dead, the Pre-Nicene New Testament, and you can find him at his website at robertmprice .mindvendor .com.

Would you please welcome Dr. Robert Price. That's okay. But I think Dr. Price, he could run the whole show if he'd like, but now I'd also like to introduce to you Dr. James White, who is the director of Alpha Omega Ministries, which is a Christian apologetics organization based in Phoenix, Arizona.

He has authored or contributed to more than 20 books, including The King James Only Controversy, The Forgotten Trinity, The Potter's Freedom, Scripture Alone, and The God Who Justifies. He is an accomplished debater, having engaged in more than 75 moderated public debates with leading proponents of Roman Catholicism, Islam, Jehovah's Witnesses, Mormonism, as well as critics such as Bart Ehrman, John Dominic Crossan, Marcus Borg, and John Shelby Spong.

Would you please welcome Dr. James White. And we have a special blessing here this evening. We have a gentleman who serves as the president and chairman of the board of the North Carolina-based Christian Research Institute.

He is the host of The Bible Answer Man, which can be found here in the Tampa Bay area on AM 570 WTBN, 910 AM. Broadcast and heard daily across the United States and Canada, as well as around the world, through the internet equip .org.

Hank is the author of several award-winning, best-selling books, including The Prayer of Jesus, Christianity in Crisis, Counterfeit Revival, The Faith That Demonstrates the Farce of Evolution, and Resurrection.

Would you please welcome Hank Hanegraaff. Hank, let's take it from here.

Thank you very much for that warm welcome. I am delighted to be here tonight to host a debate that hopefully is enlightening to all of you. And as you listen to the debate, be wary of dogmatic assertions and open your ears to defensible arguments.

Solomon was perhaps the wisest man who ever lived. He wrote over 3 ,000 proverbs and 105 songs. And in the book of Proverbs, he talks about wisdom and instruction, to understand the sayings of understanding, to receive instruction in wise behavior, righteousness, justice, and equity, to give prudence to the naive, to the youth, knowledge, and discretion.

A wise man will hear and increase in learning, and a man of understanding will acquire wise counsel, to understand a proverb and a figure, the words of the wise and their riddles. The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge.

Fools despise wisdom and instruction. Tonight, we are going to be instructed by men who have devoted their lives to Erudite scholarship. We ought to listen carefully to what they have to say, and then use the information to make a difference.

If you're an atheist, you have your job description. If you're a Christian here tonight, you likewise have a job description. That job description is to be salt and light, to make a difference while there is yet time.

The format of tonight's debate, Is the Bible True?, begins with two 20-minute opening statements. First off will be Dr. Price, followed by Dr. White. Since the mind can only absorb what the seat can endure, there will be a five-minute break, and then there'll be two 15-minute rebuttals, beginning with Dr. Price, again followed by Dr. White.

Following the rebuttals, 15-minute cross-examinations, again beginning with Dr. Price, cross-examining Dr. White, then Dr. White cross-examining Dr. Price, Price cross-examining Dr. White, and White cross-examining Dr. Price.

Each of those cross-examinations will last 15 minutes. Then there'll be another five-minute break. Michael Fallon at that time will give you instructions so that you can write down questions. Those questions will be gathered and then posed to Dr. White and Dr. Price.

After those questions are gathered, we will resume with 10-minute closing statements, the first by Dr. Price, followed again by Dr. White. Another five-minute break to collect the questions, and then a 30-minute question and answer session which involves all of you.

There'll be a one-minute answer to your question and a 30-second, I should say, rebuttal. With that, we start the debate, first up, with a 20-minute opening statement, Dr. Robert Price.

The Reliability of the Gospels and the Problem of Miracle Claims

Here's three things you might not know about me, not that they're strictly relevant. I love the Bible, I go to church, and I'm a Republican. Just think about that if you get bored with the rest of it.

The evening's topic is the accuracy of the Bible, a gigantic topic. To make it manageable, I've decided just to deal with the accuracy of the Gospels, which is where I gather the action is anyway. Let me first affirm that personally, I do not approach the Gospels with the notorious naturalistic presuppositions that miracles cannot happen.

How could a mortal pipsqueak like me ever know such things? But I do ask you to keep in mind that even if miracles are possible, that in no way means that every story of a miracle ever told must be accurate.

And does the possibility of miracles have anything to do with whether particular sayings ascribed to Jesus are really his? Well, George Eldon Ladd, the dean of evangelical New Testament scholars, thought so.

In his book, The New Testament and Criticism, he said he believed that the Holy Spirit providentially kept the transmission of Jesus' sayings and deeds accurate and free from unhistorical accretions. In other words, it boiled down to a belief that the Gospels are divinely inspired and thus accurate.

That I believe is the controlling assumption, the supernaturalist presupposition of evangelical apologetics. But it is not much of an apologetic. If it took divine supervision to keep distortions out, that implies such distortion was ordinarily to be expected, doesn't it?

That it would be probable, not improbable, without a miracle stopping it. Ladd's is a faith statement, not a defense of the faith. Apologists seem to be unable to tell the difference. Apologists argue that the Gospels stem from eyewitnesses and are too close to the events for any false reports or spurious sayings to have crept in.

The disciples would have been vigilant, we're told, to reject and suppress any such false accounts and sayings. We even hear that the high Christologies of Paul, John, and the writer to the Hebrews must reflect the self-understanding of Jesus since they were circulating while disciples of Jesus were still alive and they would have nixed any exaggerations.

Now all these assumptions are gratuitous. Someone's idea of what the apostles would have or might have or should have done is mere speculation. In fact, it is all circular. Now let's see, first we need the Gospels to be trustworthy.

What would have to have happened for that to be the result? Apologists seem to me to reason backwards from their preferred conclusion. But ironically, as I hope to show, it is the Gospels themselves that cast doubt on these arguments.

Again, we're told Jesus' disciples would have spent their time quashing false or exaggerated reports of miracles so that any stories that survived must be legit. The disciples are pictured here as a sort of first century version of Snopes, that internet site where they track down and debunk urban legends.

Well if the apostles didn't have time to spend waiting on tables, I doubt they'd have had time for this either. Besides, had the twelve been on hand to document every single thing Jesus might have done or said?

What's that, Andrew? Someone told you the master did or said what? Well, I don't remember it, but I guess it could have been while we were away on that missionary journey, who knows? To tell such a person, spreading his miracle story, to cut it out, it wasn't authorized, might just be like John telling the lone exorcist to stop casting out demons in Jesus' name because he was working their side of the street.

I doubt if it would have happened. What do you know, Mark tells us in Mark 7 36 that Jesus himself, I wonder if you ever noticed this, Jesus himself did try to hush up certain miracle stories and he couldn't do it.

He would tell those he healed not to tell anyone, presumably because he didn't want to get mobbed all the time. But the more he told them, Mark says, the more they blabbed it. Now, I know what you're thinking.

Mark tells us these stories were true reports, not false rumors. But that's not the salient point. The point is, here we see Jesus himself trying to scotch miracle stories he didn't want circulating for whatever reason, and it was impossible to suppress them.

Would the disciples have had any better luck? Formed critics suggest that certain Jesus sayings originated as prophecies of the risen Lord from heaven, as when he said to Paul, my grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.

Isn't this anticipated when Jesus says, whoever hears you, hears me, and do not worry about what to say, for in that hour, I will give you wisdom they cannot answer. People remembered the sayings, but may not always have bothered to segregate historical Jesus sayings from risen Jesus prophecies.

Apologists seem to hate this idea, but why? If they believe in the resurrection and in prophecy, aren't these sayings just as good, just as authoritative as quotes from the Galilean teacher? Surely the ancient Christians thought so.

Indeed, it seems to me to keep the two categories separate implies a value judgment their faith would not have allowed them to make, namely that a prophecy from Jesus wasn't really from Jesus. You just made it up, didn't you?

I think they've written that off as blaspheming the Holy Spirit. Apologists point to 1 Corinthians 7 as proof that all early Christians were always careful to segregate their own statements from historical Jesus quotes.

And now concerning the unmarried, I have no command of the Lord, but I give my opinion as one who by the Lord's mercy is trustworthy. To the married, I give charge, not I, but the Lord, that the wife should not separate from her husband, etc.

To the rest, I say, not the Lord, that if any brother who has a wife who is not a believer, but she's willing to live with him, etc., etc. Keep in mind that Paul regards his own inspired rulings as commands of the Lord.

First Corinthians 1437, if anyone thinks he is a prophet or a pneumatic, he ought to acknowledge that what I am writing to you is a command of the Lord. In 1 Corinthians 7 .10, Paul fears what he's about to say may not be taken seriously enough, so he makes sure his readers understand that he has God's will on the matter and no tentative opinion that they may take or leave as they see fit.

The Lord says, not me. In verse 12, Paul's back to more slippery issues that do not allow for absolute answers. When things are inherently iffy, one cannot simply lay down the law, but in clearer matters one can and with divine authority.

Now, in all of this, what Jesus of Nazareth may or may not have said is just not in view. Might false reports about Jesus have survived attempts of Christians to stymie them? Presumably, the historical Jesus was neither a drunkard nor a glutton, not a demoniac or a Samaritan, yet we still hear these reports in the Gospels, neither suppressed nor, come to think of it, even denied.

Likewise, Matthew tells us that the report of Jesus' disciples absconding with his body and faking the resurrection had spread unchecked for decades and was still current as he wrote. Now, I'm assuming these reports are false, but it demonstrates that the disciples, even if they tried, couldn't purify the Jesus tradition of false reports.

There may be some, you know, that you don't suspect that they're actually false. It's possible. Did heretical views about the nature of Christ get suppressed as long as his disciples were around to keep an eye out for such things?

Well, Mark 8, 27 through 28 tells us that already during Jesus' ministry, people held all sorts of views of him that we would consider heresy, yet Jesus made no attempt to clamp the lid on them. So what if some imagined him to be the returned Elijah or Jeremiah?

He told the disciples not to try to set anyone straight, but to keep the truth of themselves. And he certainly cannot have been publicly teaching his messiahship or divinity as C .S. Lewis pictured, since that option is the only one no one in the crowd proposes.

Skeptics have suggested that on Easter morning, the disciples did not see Jesus himself, but only chance passers-by whom, in their desperation, they later inferred must have been Jesus alive again, even though it didn't look like him.

Ever notice that? In other words, a false belief of the skeptical theory is a false belief in the resurrection stemmed from cases of mistaken identity abetted by wishful thinking. Now, is this scenario some contrived modern fabrication alien to the gospels?

Maybe not. According to Mark 6, 16 and 8, 28, there are joyful reports among the disciples of the martyred John the Baptist that their master has been raised from the dead and seen by many witnesses. But Mark says it was all a case of mistaken identity.

It was really Jesus these people were seeing. They only thought it was their much-missed master. Keep that in mind when you read the Easter stories where Mary or Peter or the Emmaus disciples first think they're seeing someone else and later realize it must have been Jesus.

Paul's teaching was drastically misrepresented already during his career. Some viewed him as a libertine. Why not do evil that good may come, as some people slanderously charge us with saying their condemnation is just, Romans 3, 8.

Others circulated the distortion that Paul told Jews not to circumcise their children, Acts 21, 21. Others claimed that Paul still preached the need for circumcision, Galatians 5, 11. Or that he had gone to Jerusalem for the approval of the 12 as soon as he was converted, Galatians 1, 15 through 20.

A version of events that he denied vociferously but which Acts repeats. Paul had, it seems, little control over the distortion of his own teaching during his own career. How can you be so sure the 12 had any better luck safeguarding the teacher of their master if they even tried?

They may have been the ones adding to it. The idea that no one could have fabricated teachings in Jesus' name and gotten away with it is really absurd once you think of the Gnostic Gospels, like the Pistis Sophia, the Dialogue of the Savior, the Secret Book of James, and the rest.

But you may say they didn't get away with it. We true Christians reject them as forgeries. Well, plenty of other ancient Christians treasured them. Don't you see what's going on here? It's really theological, not historical reasoning.

Oh, we can reject that evidence because it's not in the canon. Did the Gospel writers know what Jesus had and had not said? John, like the Gospel of Thomas, has Jesus warned that if this temple be demolished, he will raise another in three days.

John admits Jesus said it, but he immediately allegorizes it. Jesus must have meant his body, not the Herodian temple. But for Mark and Matthew, Jesus said no such thing, and only false witnesses say he did.

Luke says Stephen said it or was reported to have said it, though he leaves it out of the trial of Jesus altogether. People are quick to misinterpret what they hear, filtering it through their expectations and biases.

What preacher has not been chagrined to learn what his parishioners think he said in a sermon? I've had students complain to their parents at what they thought I was teaching, only to have the parents calm down when I explained what I'd actually said and that junior half-listening had distorted.

Maybe it was just too new to them. Similarly, I found myself frequently misquoted at the newspaper and edited misleadingly on TV, for instance, on the Faith Under Fire program. Remember thinking, am I that stupid?

In an interview on an Australian podcast, I quipped that even if the Gospels had been written 10 minutes after whatever events transpired, the historian could not simply accept what they said because of the typical ease and speed of distortion.

Well, Dr. White, for one, took me to mean, as I heard him say on his own podcast, that this means I have a total skepticism about the past and our ability to reconstruct it. Dr. White means well, and he's smarter than I am.

He's certainly after the truth, but even he seems to have misconstrued what I said, and if he didn't, that just underlines my own point because I'm misconstruing what I said. How much more easy must it have been to misunderstand and misrepresent Jesus' sayings for disciples as stupid as Mark makes the 12?

And in Mark chapter 4, Jesus flatly tells the disciples that the crowds, though they idolize him, understand his teaching not at all. So much for the oral tradition. Many apologists appeal to the theories of Riesenfeld and Gerhardsen who suppose that Jesus must have made his disciples memorize his sayings verbatim and pass them on, just as the rabbi supposedly did.

It was said of Rabbi Yohanan ben Zakkai that he was like a plastered cistern that loseth not a drop. That means, of course, a sealed cistern, not a drunk one. That is, he didn't lose a drop of the teaching committed to him.

But the very fact of spotlighting him in this way implies he was unique in this fidelity, not typical. And Jacob Neusner has made it plain that no one in rabbinic Judaism could keep straight who said what when.

The same saying will be ascribed to three or more rabbis in the Mishnah, generations apart, as if each were the first to say it. Neusner shows how individual sayings cannot be dated with any certainty earlier than the documents in which they appear.

That backdating them to earlier sages was often just a way to win an argument, giving one's opinion a bit of additional clout by associating it with a big name. Now, this is precisely what forum critics think happened in the case of Jesus.

Some believe Christians should never fast because the kingdom had arrived and it would be futile to pour the new wine of the kingdom into the threadbare skins of Jewish practice. So whoever held that view attributed it to Jesus.

But someone else thought it was time to take up fasting again in remembrance of Jesus, the bridegroom now taken away. So now Jesus was made to say that too. Someone else just couldn't imagine Christians not fasting any more than not praying.

So he has Jesus say that Christians fast all right, just not in order to be seen by others, unlike the hypocrites. Well, which is it? Did Jesus say any of these things? If he somehow said them all, he was a first century Robert Gibbs or Janet Napolitano.

You can always try to reread, really rewrite the various sayings in such a way as to split the difference, but don't you see what you're doing? You might as well admit the statements are incompatible and that you only want to jam them together because your real concern is the inerrancy of the Bible, which you hold as a matter of dogma before you ever look at the evidence.

At least that's what I used to do. No one who lacked that controlling agenda would treat the text the way apologists do. Did Jesus want to restrict the preaching of his gospel to Jews alone, skipping Samaritans and Gentiles as in Matthew 10?

Or did he throw open the gates to the whole world as in Matthew 28? Peter and the Jerusalem elders debate this issue in Acts 11 and 15 with no one mentioning that Jesus ever said anything on the subject.

And if he had, these debates would never have happened. It seems natural then to suggest that Matthew 10, 5 through 6 was produced by someone who was against the Gentile mission, while the great commission of Matthew 28 was the product of a supporter of the Gentile mission.

Each sought to add dominical clout to his position, pulling rank by imaginatively citing opinions of Jesus no one had ever heard before. It's the most natural thing in the world. In the more recent case of Islam, we know that many holy men fabricated so-called traditions of the Prophet Muhammad to claim his sanction for their favorite teachings or practices.

Many even later admitted that they made them up and no one blamed them since it was all for the sake of piety. Okay, they admitted they made them up since it was all for the sake of piety. That sounds exactly like what form critics picture happening in the Jesus tradition.

Now, just because it might have happened this way doesn't mean it did. Any more than the mere possibility that the disciples suppressed any invented sayings or stories means they did that. You have to weigh each case, which the Jesus seminar, for instance, spent 11 years doing.

That's hard work. And we can't wish it away because we prefer the simplicities of Sunday school.

Thank you, Dr. Price. Now for his 20-minute opening statement respecting, is the Bible true? Please welcome Dr. James White.

Presuppositions, the Principle of Analogy, and the Reliability of the New Testament

Good evening and welcome. It is exciting to see all of you here this evening. I'm especially excited to see Dr. Price here this evening. I have been studying for this debate for a number of months now.

I have come to know like he's an uncle or something like that. So I'm going to miss listening to you after this evening. He is truly a man with an encyclopedic knowledge. He's called the Bible geek for a good reason.

And yet we need to also recognize, I think, that he is a radical skeptic. I'm not sure if a lot of you are familiar with his books and his materials. But hopefully this evening, some of those points will come out.

Dr. Price has often said that he doesn't care about majority opinions. He doesn't care about what the majority of scholars say. And he has often asked that people would respond to his arguments rather than simply using the argument from authority.

I'm going to do my best this evening to respond to his position and not to engage in the argument from authority. Now this evening, we present a beginning, not an ending. When you leave this evening, your task will not be completed.

I believe that you will need to do more research, do more reading to think about what has been said. You must see it as beginning, not an end. I would encourage a serious student to follow this debate up with a comparison of Dr. Price's work, especially his books.

And I have them up on the screen right now. Deconstructing Jesus and the Incredible Shrinking Son of Man. And I hope you will compare those works with such works as the Jesus Legend that came out not all that long ago by Boyd and Eddy.

Reinventing Jesus by Wallace et al. And Craig Keener's newly published massive tome, The Historical Jesus of the Gospels. Tonight, we can only open the topic, discuss the issues, and invite you to join into the discussion.

Now, I'm going to present three points, but no poems this evening. Three points because I believe that there is so much information that we could engage in this evening that we would really sort of get lost in all the details.

We're going to have enough time for cross-examination, hopefully, to flesh these things out. Point number one, we need to discuss the presuppositions that we bring to the study of history and to our understanding of even answering the question, is the Bible true?

My position is that it's difficult to debate whether the Bible is true when it seems to me that Dr. Price rejects a priori any evidence upon which a positive answer could be given. Now, we're going to need to dig into this because he began by saying, well, I don't have naturalistic presuppositions, but I believe that the principle of analogy, which he did not mention directly, but which he has mentioned many times in his published works, is based upon a naturalistic presupposition that precludes any evidence that could give a positive answer to the question, is the Bible true?

Now, immediately when someone says, oh, you're one of those people that says you have to allow for the supernatural. Well, that's true. And they say, well, if that's the case, then you have to allow for any claim.

Any claim to supernaturalism must be accepted. That is not the case. I suggest to you that you and the audience this evening must examine each one of us for a very important term, consistency. You must examine our presentations and how we interact with one another and how we deal with historical information for consistency.

That is the only way to determine what is true and what is false, that which is consistent. And so I encourage you this evening to look at it in that way. I really believe that a naturalistic or historical critical perspective that rejects any possibility of God's having anything to do with this world as a presupposition is based upon a truncated worldview, a truncated view of reality that naturalism is seen in the principle of analogy.

The second point that I want to raise, Dr. Price's view of the authorship of the text, I believe is incapable of demonstration or defense. It's theoretical, but it is a theory that flies against the consistent interpretation of the information.

And thirdly, the third point, and I'll go over each one of these now. The third is Dr. Price's view of the transmission of the text is contradicted, I believe, by all the extant data. So let's look at those three points.

Hopefully that'll provide us with a good basis for our discussion this evening. In defense of point number one, I mentioned the principle of analogy. What is the principle of analogy? Well, it is the statement that our understanding of the past must always be analogically rooted in our experience of the present.

For Dr. Price, this seems to mean that since there is no experience of supernatural events in the present, then it is outside the bounds of critical historiography to ever appeal to the supernatural. Anything that is said about that must be mythical.

Or as Bultmann put it, quote, the historical method includes the presupposition that history is a unity in the sense of a closed continuum of effects. This closeness means that the continuum of historical happenings cannot be rent by the interference of supernatural transcendent powers, and that therefore there is no miracle in this sense of the word.

Now, clearly, as Ernst Troeltsch realized, that imports a whole worldview. He said, quote, a whole worldview lies behind the historical critical method. And is that historical critical method that is really at the heart of Dr. Price's radical skepticism about the existence of Jesus?

About whether Paul wrote anything that is attributed to him? All of the things that come up in his voluminous writings is really based upon this embracing of the principle of analogy. But the question is, does Dr. Price's position allow us to have any knowledge of history at all that can be called certain?

Or any knowledge that is true? For example, he just brought up, and I thought it was fascinating, a statement that he made. I want to quote exactly what he said in an Australian interview just a few years ago.

He said, so it wouldn't matter if the Gospels had been written 10 minutes after the events. You wouldn't know what to think. Legends grow up in no time, end quote. And most of his presentation was on the idea of how quickly legend can build up, even during the lifetimes of eyewitnesses.

And so one of the questions that I'm going to be asking, and you can start thinking about it now during the cross-examination, is what kind of evidence would suffice to answer positively the thesis that we have this evening?

If you can't give an answer to that, then really, what are we debating? What kind of evidence would be necessary to answer the question, is the Bible true? Are the New Testament documents reliable? What kind of evidence would a historical position have to present to substantiate and answer that question?

A historical methodology that results in this kind of hyper-skepticism is not only self-defeating, but since it precludes any meaningful statements about history at all, it leaves its proponents either silent with just pure agnosticism, well, we just don't know.

We can't really know what happened in history at all. Or if they do speak to historical issues, completely inconsistent. That is, I would ask you to listen this evening when Dr. Price says, well, we can be certain of this or certain of that.

Upon what basis does he make that statement? That is very, very important. Now he, for example, in a debate with William Lane Craig said, the first is what strikes me as a kind of double truth model. The second is the old red herring attempts to evade the principle of historical analogy.

By means of the claim that critics reject miracle stories only because they espouse philosophical naturalism. The second follows from the first and both commit the fallacy of ad hominem argumentation even while projecting it onto the opponent.

Well, I do not believe that that is the case. The presuppositions of that methodology that he utilizes must be examined and examined very, very carefully. Now, in defense of point number two, in Dr. Price's contribution to the five views of the historical Jesus book, he focused upon the idea that Old Testament stories have simply been rewritten.

They are the background to create the New Testament narratives about a mythical Jesus. Yet, and this has always fascinated me, he has also lent support to Dennis R. McDonald, who is a fellow Jesus seminar participant, in saying that he has shown very effectively how many puzzling elements in Mark's gospel may be elucidated by the hypothesis that he was following the Iliad and the Odyssey as models.

Now, here again is the issue of consistency. Who were these writers? Who were they trying to communicate to? Who were the gospel writers? What is the milieu out of which they come? Who are they trying to communicate to?

And therefore, if they were creating a mythical Jesus, were they trying to impress Jewish people with the existence of this mythical Jesus? Well, that would at least explain using Old Testament stories, but it wouldn't explain trying to follow Homer in the Iliad.

So, if they're trying to impress Greek-speaking people, then why the Old Testament utilization? There needs to be a consistency. It seems to me that Dr. Price views the New Testament writers as drawing from this huge, vast array of extremely contradictory sources to create this mythological view of Jesus.

I would submit to you that we should at least give to the New Testament writers some level of recognition and understanding that they put together a decent story and they were trying to convince somebody of something.

And therefore, there has to be some consistent use in their sources. All of the materials about borrowing from Osiris and Mithras and Dionysus and all the rest of this type of mythology, which Dr. Price has presented in a film called The God Who Wasn't There.

I think you were the longest interviewed guy there. You had like 13 minutes. You must have had something on the guys that were putting that together or something, but about 13 minutes worth and presenting all of these alleged parallels to the Jesus story.

Is that a consistent approach to take to the historical material? Now, defensive point number three, I want to present up on the screen a discussion. Dr. Price did not mention this. He focused primarily upon the Gospels.

But one of the things that really struck me was Dr. Price's theory, first of all, that basically Paul didn't write what was attributed to him, that this comes much, much later. The Gospels are in the second century.

Paul's in the second century. But even after that, the theory that he has presented at a scholarly paper, the 1 Corinthians chapter 15, verses three through 11, is a later interpolation. Now, most of us know 1 Corinthians 15.

We know that that particular section where Paul delivers the tradition which he himself recognized was part and parcel of the Christian faith, that Jesus died for our sins, according to the scriptures, and he was buried, and he rose the third day, according to the scriptures, and who saw him in the order in which he was seen, et cetera, et cetera, that most scholars identify as one of the most primitive elements of the Christian tradition, Dr. Price believes, is actually an interpolation.

It was put into 1 Corinthians. Whoever wrote 1 Corinthians, we don't know, but 1 Corinthians is written, and then 1 Corinthians 15, three through 11, is inserted at a later point in time. Now, that kind of assertion that the text of the Bible could undergo this kind of radical emendation means that we wouldn't really have any idea of what the original authors ever wrote or who the original authors ever were, but I want to challenge this based upon the factual information that we have today.

On the screen, you will notice I have the first writing of 1 Corinthians, and as time goes by, and there's supposed to be a green arrow along the bottom there, but it's disappeared. As time goes by, a copy is made of this 1 Corinthians, and then another copy is made as time goes by, and more copies.

This is the copying process that takes place over time. We can see this in the history of the transmission of the text of the New Testament. Then, at this point right here, we have the copy of 1 Corinthians that now inserts that text into chapter 15, verses 3 through 11, and so it's different than the others, and so then as time goes by, and here now we have the first time that we have the earliest manuscripts when the New Testament writings emerge into history, what would we have?

We would have two different kinds of 1 Corinthians. We would have multiple streams. One of the things that I mentioned earlier in a presentation I made is that the New Testament manuscript tradition gives us multiple streams of transmission, and so as the text, the Gospels, John, Paul, etc., as we begin to see the earliest evidence of them in the beginning of the second century, for example, John, or at the end of the second century, for P46, for the epistles of Paul, already we detect that there are multiple streams of tradition, multiple streams of manuscripts that we see in the earliest manuscripts that we possess.

They are not just simply copies of one copy of a copy, etc., etc., and so what would happen historically is we would have evidence of such a major disruption of the text. As Kurt Auland has put it, the New Testament text is tenacious.

That is, once there is a reading in it, it stays in it, and when you have a major disruption of the text, it gives evidence of that. As Dr. Price has admitted, there is no New Testament manuscript evidence whatsoever that substantiates his assertion that 1 Corinthians 15, 3 through 11 is a later insertion into the text, but he says, but our earliest manuscripts are too late to actually answer that question.