The Reliability of the New Testament

So again, tonight, I wanted to thank you, Pastor Nick and Pastor Anthony, for being here with us. It means a great deal to us. So I'm going to ask you if you would welcome Pastor Anthony. As he comes, can't beat the name.

I mean, he's an awesome name. And he's going to give us some great teaching tonight.

Well, thank you, Pastor Anthony. I appreciate that. For those of you who don't know, tonight is a historic evening because I was installed as a pastor in February of 2020. And this is the first time that Pastor Anthony and Pastor Anthony are together.

So this is actually the first time you can see the before and after picture at the same time in the same place. So thank you, brother, for having us. Let's get started. Somalia, North Korea, Maldives, Morocco, Libya, Uzbekistan.

That's just six out of the 52 countries that either restrict, prohibit in some way, or ban the Bible altogether from being brought into their country. What is it about this book that so many people are afraid of?

What is it?

At the same time, the Guinness Book of World Records tells us that this is the best selling book of all time. In fact, in the Guinness Book of World Records, it says 2 .5 billion copies were printed between 1815 and 1975.

But more recent estimates say that 5 billion copies of the Bible have been printed and sold. What is it about this book that causes fear in the hearts of man? Well, tonight I'm hoping to go through the reliability of the New Testament.

The Bible as God's Word and the New Testament as Historical Documents

We're going to be using a cross stick called 1234, okay? One stands for 10 extra biblical non-Christian sources that corroborate the information in the New Testament. Two stands for 24 ,000 manuscripts.

Three stands for the three E's, early eyewitness and embarrassing testimony. And four stands for 400 ,000 variants. So I wanted to give you a quick and easy acronym, 1234, so that when somebody tells you, is the Bible, is the New Testament reliable?

You can tell them yes, and here's why. So first of all, what is the Bible? The Bible is God's word. In fact, 2 Timothy 3 .16 says it's theopneustos,.

It's breathe out by God.

And it's an accurate and reliable record for history. It's not a science book. It's not a storybook or an almanac. The Bible is the testimony of Jesus Christ and how he rescues people from their sins.

This is his testimony. And it is true. The Bible is the only certain, sufficient and infallible rule of faith for obedience in Christ. The Bible is not wrong. So tonight we're going to go over the reliability of the New Testament.

What's the New Testament? When we speak about the New Testament, we're not talking about one single book per se. We're talking about 27 different documents that were written on 27 different scrolls by different writers over a period of 20 to 50 years.

And these individual writings were collected and compiled together into one collection, one book that we now call the New Testament. So the New Testament is not just one source, but a collection of sources from several writers.

And it's not just theological, although it is, it's also historical. And to date, we don't have any of the original documents. We only have copies of the original writings. And those are called manuscripts.

They're written in Greek, Aramaic, Egyptian, Coptic, Syriac and Latin. Okay, that's a little background for the New Testament. So now, if we can start with the one, go back. We're going to start with the 10 known historical, non-Christian sources that confirm at least 12 facts about Jesus.

These 10 non-Christian stories have facts in them that testify to the events that happened during the life of Christ, all within 150 years of the life of Jesus. So these 10 non-Christian sources have common ground with the New Testament and report the same historical events that the New Testament does.

And I'm going to give you 10 names. You don't have to memorize them, but I just want you to know that these are real. First, we have Josephus. Many people have heard of Josephus. Okay, he was a Jewish historian who wrote during the time of 70 AD when the Romans conquered the Israelite temple.

They knocked it down and proved Jesus' prophecy that not one stone would be left on another. So we have Josephus, who's a Jewish historian. Tacitus, a Roman senator and historian. Pliny the Younger, a Roman politician.

Phlegon, a slave who was freed and penned his journals. Thallus, a first-century historian. Suetonius, a Roman historian. Lucian, a Greek satirist. Celsus, a Roman philosopher. Marabar Seropian, who's a private citizen who wrote letters to his son.

And the Jewish Talmud. So we have 10 non-Christian sources, and in certain cases, hostile to Christian sources, that report events that happened during the life of Jesus that all corroborate the events that are reported in the New Testament.

Every single one of those 10 writers mentioned Jesus, as well as events that happened during the life of Jesus. Now, by comparison, there were only nine secular sources that mentioned Tiberius Caesar, who was the Roman emperor at the time.

So excluding all the Christian sources, the New Testament, Jesus is actually mentioned by one more source than the Roman emperor. And then, if you include all the Christian sources, the number of authors mentioning Jesus outnumber the authors that mention Tiberius Caesar, 37 to 10.

Do any historians, or does anyone here question the existence of Tiberius Caesar?

No.

Then why would anyone question the existence of Jesus? And the fact of the matter is, no credible scholar does. Jesus is a historical figure who certainly lived and died. And a quick aside, there's an internet atheist claim that Jesus didn't even exist.

It's a bizarre claim. In fact, Bart Ehrman, who's a skeptic and a New Testament scholar who studied under Bruce Metzger, who was one of the foremost New Testament scholars and an incredible Christian man, this is what Bart Ehrman, the skeptic, says, and he's an apostate from the faith.

He says, atheists who don't believe in Jesus, or say Jesus didn't exist, he says, this is not even an issue for scholars of antiquity. The reason for thinking Jesus existed is because he is abundantly attested to in early sources.

If you wanna go where the evidence goes, I think that atheists have done themselves a disservice by jumping on the bandwagon of mythicism. Because frankly, it makes you look foolish to the outside world.

If that's what you're gonna believe, you just look foolish. That's from a hostile Christian source. Bart Ehrman actually wrote the book, Did Jesus Exist?, to counter the claims of atheists that said he didn't.

So I told you that there are 10 non-Christian sources and the New Testament that talk about facts that happened during Jesus' life. So I wanna give you the 12 facts that are common to both the New Testament and non-Christian sources.

First, they all agree that Jesus lived during the time of Tiberius Caesar.

It's a historical fact.

He lived a virtuous life. Jesus, they say, was a miracle worker. Jesus had a brother named James. Jesus was acclaimed to be the Messiah. Number six is important. He was crucified under Pontius Pilate.

All of the sources mention that. He was crucified on the eve of the Jewish Passover. Number eight, darkness and an earthquake occurred when he died. His disciples believed that he rose from the dead. His disciples were willing to die for that belief.

The 11th fact is that Christianity spread rapidly as far as Rome. That's a historical fact. And 12, his disciples denied Roman gods and worshiped Jesus as God. So the non-Christian sources corroborate the information that we find in the New Testament.

John Dominic Croson, who's, again, an atheist and a scholar, says this. That Jesus was crucified is sure as anything historical can ever be since both Josephus and Tacitus agree with the Christian accounts on at least that basic fact.

So that's the one which stands for 10 non-Christian secular sources that record events that took place within the time of Jesus, which validates the New Testament as a historical, reliable record. No one doubts the validity of the non-Christian sources, and neither do scholars invalidate the New Testament as being accurate.

It is an accurate historical source. The New Testament records actual history that is corroborated by 10 other non-Christian sources. So that's the one, okay? 10 non-Christian sources corroborate the information in the New Testament.

Manuscripts and Textual Criticism

Let's move on to the two. The two stands for 24 ,000 manuscripts. And everybody gets, oh my goodness, 24 ,000 manuscripts. And you probably heard that the Bible was copied over and over and over again, over to the point where we can't even know what it says anymore.

But fortunately for us, the New Testament was not transmitted by playing the telephone game. But since it was not told orally from one person to another, the problem of the telephone game doesn't apply.

Numerous people, again, several writers of the New Testament independently witnessed the New Testament events. And nine of those people put their record in writing. That's what the New Testament is. But scholars can know if the New Testament has been changed by comparing the manuscripts that we have using a science called textual criticism.

That's where the 24 ,000 manuscripts come in handy. So in order to reconstruct the original, to know what the New Testament actually said, you need a large number of manuscripts that are written shortly after the original.

The more manuscripts you have, the better off you are at getting to what the original actually says. So having many manuscripts is a good problem rather than a bad problem. Now, on Long Island, you know, everybody's mother makes the best meatballs.

My mother makes the best meatballs. You say, your mother makes the best meatballs. We can go on and on. Now, if my mother, if you ate my mother's meatballs and wanted that recipe, well, let's say everybody ate the meatballs and wanted the recipe, it'd be like 60 or 70 recipes I'd have to fax out, right?

So I send you all the recipes, and five years down the road, I lose my recipe. Well, could I reconstruct my mother's recipe for meatballs if I had you all send me back copies of your recipe?

Of course.

And then if there were differences along the way, like if the first recipe said, you know, a pound of veal, a pound of pork, a pound of chopped meat, a pound of veal, a pound of pork, a pound of chopped meat, a pound of chicken, ground chicken, that's wrong.

We know that ground chicken doesn't go on meatballs.

That's a sin.

That's wrong. So if I got 50 recipes back and they all said a pound of veal, a pound of pork, a pound of chopped meat, and one said a pound of ground chicken, I could say they altered that. We can safely reconstruct the original recipe because there's so many recipes out there.

The same is true of the New Testament. Here's what I mean. We have about 5 ,700 Greek manuscripts of 350 pages each, and over 19 ,000 copies of the New Testament in Syriac, Latin, Coptic, and Aramaic.

That's over 24 ,000 copies, more than any other book of antiquity by 23 ,000. The next closest is Homer's Iliad with 643 copies, although recent evidence says it could be closer to 1 ,000 or 1 ,100. But still, as far as the New Testament goes, we have thousands more manuscripts that corroborate the original than any other book of antiquity.

There are only between two and 20 copies of most other historians' writings, like Plato, Suetonius, Euripides, and guess what? Nobody doubts their reliability, and they only have between two and 20 copies.

We have 24 ,000 copies of the New Testament. Here's the bottom line. If we can't trust the 24 ,000 copies of the New Testament to reconstruct the original, we wouldn't be able to trust any other documents of antiquity, and then all history would be a matter of speculation.

However, we can be confident of what the original document said because we have 24 ,000 manuscripts. So number one means 10 non-Christian sources that corroborate the New Testament. Two stands for 24 ,000 manuscripts that help us recreate the original.

Early Eyewitness Testimony and the Criteria of Embarrassment

All right, now let's talk about the three Es. Early eyewitness and embarrassing testimony, right? Eyewitness testimony is admissible in a court of law. This is a really important piece of information now, right?

You ready? We're going into the deep end of the pool. If the apostles wrote the letters in the New Testament, they did it before they died. You didn't get that. You need to be alive in order to write a letter, okay?

If the apostles wrote the New Testament, they did it before they died. They were alive when they wrote the letter. So now historically, we know that Peter and Paul died somewhere between 65 and 70 AD in the persecution by Nero, which means their letters, Romans, Corinthians, Galatians, Ephesians, Philippians, first and second Peter, were all written before 65 to 70 AD.

That's between 20 and 40 years after the life and death of Jesus. That's a very short time for writing done during that period. Remember, they didn't have blogs. They didn't have the internet. They didn't have Walmart where they can go and buy paper.

Paper was very, very expensive, okay? So these writings were very close between 20 and 40 years of the actual life of Jesus. And lucky for us, all of the New Testament writings are done within the first century, one generation, and all probably before 70 AD with the exception of maybe Revelation.

Some people say it's 90. Some people argue for a 70 AD date. Now, if you read the book of Acts, which is written by Luke, he abruptly stops before the destruction of the temple, which was prophesied by Jesus.

Now, if Luke was trying to record an accurate accounting of what happened, he certainly would have added the fact that the temple was destroyed because this would have fulfilled one of Jesus' prophecies.

However, he didn't, which means Luke probably died before the temple was destroyed. So we see the apostles writing to the Galatians, Corinthians, Philippians, Romans, Timothy, all before they died, all between 20 and 40 years of their life.

We have early eyewitness testimony. And each one of them includes names, places, events, and early creeds that could all have been falsified. We're gonna read that in a little while. I'll tell you in a minute.

Okay, so in addition to early testimony, we have another reading, eyewitness testimony. Let's read the opening paragraph of Luke.

If you have your Bibles,.

We're gonna read out of Luke 1. I'm gonna start. It says, in as much as we have undertaken to compile a narrative of the things that have been accomplished among us, just as those who from the beginning were eyewitnesses and ministers of the word have delivered them to us, it seemed good to me also, having followed all things closely for some time past, to write an orderly account for you, most excellent Theophilus, that you may have certainty concerning the things that we have been taught.

Now, reading that, it sounds to me like Luke is putting together a factual account of history for a specific person. And in his book, he goes on to mention 13 kings and other people of influence throughout his gospel.

This sounds very different than once upon a time. This doesn't sound like a story he's making up. He's including specific facts for them. In fact, in verse five, he writes this. In the days of Herod, king of Judea, there was a priest named Zechariah of the division of Abijah, and he had a wife from the daughters of Aaron, and her name was Elizabeth.

So in the very next line, after Luke's introduction, he includes six facts that places account during a specific period of time in a particular place with real people, which can all be verified by the reader.

In other words, it's falsifiable. All you had to do is show that Tiberius wasn't the king, or Zechariah didn't have a wife from the line of Aaron. See, now, legends like Star Wars don't shoot the messenger.

Start off a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, and you can't verify a story like that, people, places, and that. I know some people do, right, right, try. See, not with Dr. Luke. He gives us verifiable facts.

This is not the way a fable or a myth would be started. In other words, we have the gospel of Luke, not Luke Skywalker, all right? We have a historical record of what he wrote down. Furthermore, the apostle Peter confirms his letter as an eyewitness in 2 Peter 1 .16.

He says this,.

"'For we did not follow cleverly devised myths, "'only we known to you the power "'and coming of our Lord Jesus, "'but we were eyewitnesses of his majesty.'". Peter addresses the myth story right out of the box and claims that there were eyewitnesses.

He would also die later for this so-called myth, which makes me tend to believe that he believed what he saw. Have you ever heard of Blaise Pascal? Have you heard of Pascal's Wager? Okay, no one. Blaise Pascal says this.

He says, "'Liars make poor martyrs.'". You're not gonna lie for something that you know that that's a lie. You lie for something that you believe is true, and that's what Peter did. All right, so we had early testimony, eyewitness testimony, now embarrassing testimony.

So did you ever have something embarrassing, I mean, like really embarrassing happen to you, right? How many people do you usually wanna share that with? Not many. But if you did, the person who told you probably wouldn't think that you made the story up, right?

Because it's embarrassing. Why would you make this up and make yourself look foolish? So I'm gonna let you in on a little something. Couple years ago, many years ago, I used to work out. I know some of you saying, what changed?

I was working out, right, in a gym, and I won't tell you what gym it is. So I go in, and I'm done with my workout, and I go to my locker, and I'm opening the lock, and I'm trying, and I forgot my locker combination.

I must have tried this thing 40 times. So I realized that the guy behind the counter in the front, he's got these big bolt cutters. So I have to make my way to the front. I'm like, oh gosh, I hope nobody sees me.

I tell the guy what happened. He's like, oh, I'll be back in a minute. So I'm waiting, waiting, waiting. He comes back with the bolt cutters. Thankfully, nobody was around. He cuts the lock, so I'm like, oh, beautiful.

I open the stuff, I get my stuff out. I open the door, and I'm in my locker. And I look, I open it, click, oh. So now what do I gotta do? I gotta take all my stuff out. Okay, I gotta take my lock, put it on this guy's lock, because I just snapped his lock in half, write the combination out on a Post-it, go to the front desk, have him, and have him stick it on there and tell the guy I'm sorry.

Now, I haven't been back to that gym. Okay, but now, think about this. If I was starting a movement called Christianity, and I wanted everyone to follow me, do you think I'd start out with that story?

Probably not. But if I did, you'd say, this guy's being honest. He wouldn't make that up, right? You don't tend to make up things that make you look bad, especially if you're starting a new religion and trying to get people to follow you.

That's what's called the criteria of embarrassment. If an account contains embarrassing details, they're probably true. And the disciples make themselves look bad in the New Testament. In fact, they're often categorized as dim-witted, right?

Many times, they don't even understand what Jesus is saying. Jesus, haven't I been with you so long, and still, you're so dull of hearing, right? And Pastor Anthony taught me this is a technical Greek term.

That's why they're called the disciples. Thank you. Also, the disciples are uncaring. They fall asleep on Jesus twice when he asked them to pray when he's in the Garden of Gethsemane. So these are the guys who believe Jesus is God, yet they admit that they fell asleep on him at the hour of his greatest need, and now they want you to follow him?

Follow them because they follow Jesus?

Difficult.

Then, lots of times, they're rebuked. Think of what happened to Peter. Jesus says, get behind me, Satan. That's in Mark 8 .33. You'd think Peter would've pulled him aside and said, listen, I know you're trying to write everything that you saw.

Could you leave that part out?

Satan?

Get behind me, Satan? And then, Paul writes when he came to Antioch, speaking about Peter, he says, I opposed him to his face because he was clearly in the wrong. Now, here's Peter, one of the pillars of the early church, and here's Paul, including in the scriptures, that he was wrong about a theological issue.

That's embarrassing. Then, the disciples are depicted as cowards. All of the disciples but one hide when Jesus goes to the cross. Peter even denies him three times after promising, I will never disown you.

This poor Peter, everything about this guy is wrong. Embarrassing. Meanwhile, as the men are hiding for fear of the Jews, the brave women are the ones who go to the empty tomb and discover Jesus is gone, right?

So, again, if I was writing a story and I wanted people to follow me, it would be the brave men that went to the tomb, risked their lives, and found out that Jesus wasn't there, and now bringing this great news to everyone.

They were hiding. So, now, think about this. If you were a New Testament writer, would you include these embarrassing details if you were making up a story and encouraging people to follow Jesus?

No.

This is what we call the criteria of embarrassment. We have embarrassing evidence that points to the truthfulness of what these guys wrote. So, that's the three Es. Early eyewitness and embarrassing testimony.

We went through the one, which stands for what? 10 extra biblical sources that confirm the facts of the New Testament. Two is 24 ,000 manuscripts, excellent. Three is early eyewitness and embarrassing testimony.

Variants, Textual Criticism, and Confidence in the Original Text

Okay, finally, the last one, the four. 400 ,000 variants. This is a tough one to overcome, right? In fact, scholar Bart Ehrman, in his book, Misquoting Jesus, says that we can't know what the original said because of all the variants.

He says that there's over 400 ,000 textual variants, and he's right. Now, think about this. There's 400 ,000 variants and only 138 ,000 words in the New Testament. That's three variants per word. I don't know how I'm gonna get through this.

The Bible suffers from variantitis. So, what's a variant? Is it a deliberate changing of the text to alter what it says?

No.

The chief concern Bart Ehrman raises during the biblical text is the massive number of variants, but what he doesn't realize, this turns out to be a good problem. If you had only one copy of the Bible, how many variants could you have?

None. You only have one copy. You have nothing to compare it to, right? You couldn't compare it to anything else. So, the more copies you have, the better chance you have at getting the original right.

Scholars usually consider this a really good problem, not a bad one. If you have a lot of manuscripts, like if I gave out a lot of recipes for my mother's meatballs, you'll have a lot of variants, but you'll also have more manuscripts to use for comparison.

Now, what's a variant? A variant can include a difference between a manuscript based on spelling, word order, an omission of a word, an addition or a substitution of a word, or a total rewrite of the text.

Any difference, no matter how slight, is added to the total number of variants. There's one called didiography, which means that maybe the writer, the scribe who was copying it, wrote the same word twice.

That would be considered a variant. So, how do we deal with all these variants? Well, if you take into account spelling errors, you could eliminate 200 ,000 variants right off the top. So, we go from 400 ,000 variants to 200 ,000 variants just because the apostles spelt letters wrong.

They didn't have Microsoft Word spell check, right? So, we're cut in half already. So, when you add up the variants of word order, which is called metethesis, metathesis, sorry, which would be, let's say a scribe wrote Jesus Christ, and somebody copying it wrote Christ Jesus.

That's a variant. Does it change the meaning of the text?

No.

Or leaving out a line of the text. So, as the scribes were copying lines, he would copy line one, line two, line three. Maybe he forgot line four. Then you see line five. When the textual criticism, criticists are going through it, they recognize, oh, he skipped the whole line.

Does that change any theological truth that we hold? No, it's an error. So, when you eliminate the metathesis, or leaving out a line of copy, copying errors, or scribes using synonyms, which is called homophony, you can eliminate another 196 ,000 variants.

That leaves us with 4 ,000 variants, less than 1 of the original 400 ,000. The actual variant count is only 2 .9 of the whole New Testament text. That's only one legitimate variant for every three pages.

In other words, more than 396 ,000 of the 400 ,000 variants have no bearing on our ability to reconstruct the manuscript of the original. Most of the variants are a result of simple scribal mistakes. A slip of the pen, accidental omission, inadvertent addition, or misspelled words.

They're easily identifiable. Now, the remaining 4 ,000 variants now need to be tested against the 24 ,000 manuscripts. And what do we find? Not a one of them alter any theological truth or a core belief.

In fact, most of the variants in the Bible are noted in the text. So, when you read the long end of your mark, you'll probably see a little asterisk, or a note there that says, this doesn't appear in early manuscripts.

Far from trying to hide those things, the new study Bibles point them out to you. Or in John 7, going from John 7 to 8, the woman caught in adultery. A lot of early manuscripts don't have that. So, rather than hide that, they highlight it and say, listen, if you're gonna build a doctrine, don't build it on this.

We're not so sure, okay? The modern translations don't cover them up. Rather, they point them out to us. So, now here's the irony for Bart Ehrman. At the end of his big book, he lists the top 10 variants of the New Testament.

To strike fear in the heart of Christians.

But what do you need to know in order to spot a variant? The original. You need to know what the variant varies from. You need to know what the original actually says. So, his whole thesis is undermined.

Far from proving the New Testament inaccurate, he proves the absolute opposite. We can know what the New Testament says with confidence, and pointing out the top 10 variants proves that fact. His conclusion proves his entire thesis.

So, the culmination of this evidence tells me that we have accurate copies. They speak the truth. It's corroborated by 10 non-Christian sources. It lines up with what other non-Christian writings say about that period.

And in other words, we can trust it. Did you ever hear of Dr. Simon Greenleaf? Simon Greenleaf University? Okay, he was the Royal Professor of Legal Evidences at Harvard University. And he wrote the standard study on what constitutes legal evidence.

And he credited his own conversion to Christianity as coming from his careful examination of the gospel witnesses. He concluded this, of the four gospels. They would have been received in evidence in any court of justice without the slightest hesitation.

And last on top of that, we have the witness of experience and endurance. No other book has lasted so long, been scrutinized so much, and changed more lives for the better than the Bible has. Five billion copies since 1815, restricted, prohibited, and even banned in 52 countries.

The New Testament is a reliable historical document that we can rely on. Simple as one, two, three, four.

I think that's what the last slide says.

Okay, with that, we're gonna.