Interview with Andreas Kostenberger

Welcome to No Compromise Radio, a ministry coming to you from Bethlehem Bible Church in West Boylston.

No Compromise Radio is a program dedicated to the ongoing proclamation of Jesus Christ, based on the theme in Galatians 2, verse 5, where the apostle

Paul said, "'But we did not yield in subjection to them "'for even an hour, so that the truth of the gospel "'would remain with you.'"

In short, if you like smooth, watered -down words to make you simply feel good, this show isn't for you.

By purpose, we are first biblical, but we can also be controversial. Stay tuned for the next 25 minutes as we're called by the divine trumpet to summon the troops for the honor and glory of her king.

Here's our host, Pastor Mike Abendroth. Welcome to No Compromise Radio ministry. My name is

Mike Abendroth and I'm your host. On Wednesdays, we like to talk to different authors who have written books that help

Christians and help the Christian faith, and today is no different. I read a book a while ago.

I just couldn't put it down and I thought we have to have the author on No Compromise Radio, or to be technical, the co -author.

Online, we have Andreas Kostenberger. Dr. Kostenberger, welcome to No Compromise Radio ministry.

Great to be with you, Mike. The subtitle of your book, The Heresy of Orthodoxy, is How Contemporary Culture's Fascination with Diversity Has Reshaped Our Understanding of Early Christianity.

Dr. Kostenberger, tell us why you wrote the book. We wrote the book because we believe that in the recent media, the very gospel of faith in the

Lord Jesus Christ is in danger of being subverted and being changed to, as Paul would put it, quite a different gospel, which is really no gospel at all.

We feel those recent challenges of Christianity strike at the very heart of what

Christianity is according to scripture, and so we wanted to clarify the nature of the true biblical gospel and to defend it against what we call the recent fascination with diversity in our contemporary culture.

Well, Dr. Kostenberger, doesn't it strike you strange when people say today, well, as Christians, we need to know what, we'll stand up for what we're for, we'll be known what we're for, not what we're against.

What's wrong with that kind of thinking? Well, I think that the difficulty is that in many cases, the representations of this new diverse gospel in the media is so subtle that people in the churches may not even realize that this is the new gospel of diversity that is being preached instead of the old one.

Many might never have heard the name Walter Bauer, who originally proposed this thesis that in the first century, there was no

Christianity, only Christianity in the plural, and there was no understanding of Jesus being the son of God and salvation coming from faith in him alone, but they have been influenced by talking heads in the media who subvert the biblical gospel for the sake of this new gospel of diversity.

Well, this book is entitled The Heresy of Orthodoxy, an excellent book on Crossway by Crossway Publishers.

Dr. Kostenberger, you said, what used to be regarded as heresy is the new orthodoxy of the day, and the only heresy that remains is orthodoxy itself.

How true that is. I'm wondering if you could tell our listeners, in layman's terms, in layperson's terms, who

Bart Ehrman is and why he teaches something that we should run from if we want to have sound hygienic doctrine.

That's right. Well, Bart Ehrman is a professor of New Testament at UNC Chapel Hill here in North Carolina, not far from where I teach in Wake Forest.

And he essentially has revived a thesis that goes back to the

German scholar, Walter Bauer, who claimed that there was no gospel in the sense of orthodox beliefs of who

Jesus was and how salvation is obtained in the first century, that what you and I today would think of as the gospel was only what the church found it politically expedient to set forth as Christianity much later, actually in the fourth century.

Essentially, Ehrman registers three claims that are distinct but related.

The first one is that originally, as I mentioned, there were only multiple Christianities in the plural, and orthodoxy was imposed only by the later church, by ecclesiastical decree.

Secondly, the Christian canon is also late development. There are lost

Christianities and lost scriptures that are more pristine and that we need to seek to recover.

And those are scriptures and Christianities that have been suppressed by those in power. And so our current canon is not a collection of divinely inspired writings, as you and I might have been accustomed to believe, but they're merely what the fourth century church hierarchy wanted

Christians to believe to consolidate its own power base based on the postmodern notion that truth is merely a function of power.

And thirdly, that our current Bibles and the versions you and I read are actually corrupt and that the original text has not been faithfully preserved and that multiple errors have crept in, as is attested to by the various textual variants.

So according to Ehrman, there's multiple Christianities, diversity.

The current canon cannot be trusted, and also the current versions of the Bible are corrupt.

Well, I noticed at the bookstore, Dr. Kostenberger, that Bart Ehrman is very, very popular.

And wouldn't you say that his influence has spread rapidly across American evangelicalism?

Well, Bart Ehrman is a brilliant scholar. He is an excellent writer. He is able to present matters that are fairly complex in a way that they are appealing to a popular audience.

His books have sold millions of copies. And quite frankly, for that reason, his theories are all the more dangerous because they are presented in such an appealing, popular way.

Absolutely. On the line we have today on WV &E No Compromise Radio, Dr. Kostenberger, who co -authored

The Heresy of Orthodoxy on Crossway Books with Michael Kruger. Dr.

Kostenberger, my favorite part of the book was on about page 110 to 113, that you talked about the concept, along with your co -author, the concept of covenant.

Walk our listeners through. We have probably pastors listening, but lots of lay people listening as well.

Talk us through the concept of covenant with preamble and the prologue, and why it would be necessary for this covenant to have a document that is the

New Testament. Well, essentially, even many more conservative

Christians have been led to believe that the covenant that we have today with the

Old Testament and the New Testament writings, that that only gradually emerged over the first few centuries of the

Christian era, and that the Church just gradually came to terms with which were or were not worthy of inclusion in the

New Testament. And what we argue is that essentially the whole logic of a covenant, and of the canon, rather, is that the very notion of a covenant then led to covenant documents being written.

So in the Old Testament, God entered into a covenant with Abraham and with Moses, with David, and it was only a matter of course that those covenants, as you mentioned, that had very distinct form, such as a preamble, a historical prologue, that stipulations for keeping or not keeping the covenant, and then sanctions, blessings, or curses, those covenants were naturally then reduced to writing, and they became what we today know as the

Old Testament. And so what we're arguing is that likewise with the New Testament, when

Jesus instituted the new covenant with the 12, the evening before he was crucified, that naturally that new covenant he made was going to be written up in what we today consider the

New Testament. We actually find what you might call canonical consciousness already in the

New Testament writings themselves. So rather than thinking of the canon as a late 4th century development, we show that the very logic of the canon is a natural outgrowth of the covenant that God entered into with his people, both in the

Old and in the New Testament. Well, on page 112, you and your co -author write, that certainly any 1st century

Jew, when confronted with the term covenant in Jeremiah 31, would have understood that term within his own historical and biblical context, a context patterned after the treaty covenants of the

New Testament world. Thus, there would have been clear expectations that this new covenant, like the

Old, would be accompanied by the appropriate written text to testify to the terms of the new arrangement that God was establishing with his people.

And so, in other words, Dr. Kossenberger, you're saying that a Jewish person at that time would have thought, for sure, we have a new covenant, therefore we'll have written documents to tell us what to do and what

God has done for us. That's exactly right. Just like today, you typically don't have just an oral agreement, you have a written document that sets forth the stipulations of a given contract.

And I think the importance of that is that contrary to what Bart Ehrman believes, that the whole idea of the canon is actually gradually emerged and only really came to fruition four centuries after Jesus instituted the new covenant.

The very idea of new covenant documents is as old as Jesus instituting that new covenant with his followers in the first place.

Well, we have Dr. Kossenberger on the line today, the heresy of orthodoxy, and certainly,

Dr., when people want to attack Christianity, they want to attack the Bible first and foremost.

When someone says to you, well, the Bible was only written by men, how do you respond and how can you tell our listeners, if they are approached that same way, what's their best course of action?

Well, there's a couple immediate responses. One is that the Bible, of course, at the very beginning assumes the existence of God.

It doesn't defend it. It doesn't seek to demonstrate it. It just starts out by saying, in the beginning,

God created, doesn't it? And so God is already assumed as the creator and the one who brought everything there is into being.

And so likewise, the scriptures that we have claimed to have been given by God, and so the scriptures themselves establish that claim, you have a prophecy that is a part of the scriptures that is fulfilled demonstrably, especially when it comes to the life and the death and the resurrection of Christ.

That would be the one response, you know, the fact that God exists and that the Bible assumes the existence of God.

Secondly, scripture, of course, is divinely inspired, but has a human element, both in the writing of it, of course, you have the human office of scripture and then also in the transmission and preservation of scripture.

Again, you have scribes, copiers that preserved the original text.

And of course, that is where the other bone of contention comes in with people like Bart Ehrman, who claim that the transmission was corrupt and that as a result, because of that human element of scripture, we have no longer reasonable confidence that the

Bible that we have today is a faithful representation of the text the way the original authors actually wrote the

Bible. Well, in the book, Dr. Kostenberger, you have tampering with the text as a chapter title, chapter eight, subtitled,

Was the New Testament Text Changed Along the Way? And Ehrman would like to say that it has changed.

Tell us a little bit about the manuscripts that we have and how the lay people, even listening today, can be assured that what they're reading is in fact the words of the living

God. Well, one thing that we've observed as a pattern in Ehrman is that, you know, you can't win.

Ehrman wins either way, the way he frames the issue. We have over 5 ,600

New Testament manuscripts that are available for us today, which is an incredible amount of evidence.

And so as a result, there are places where the existing manuscripts differ in the vast majority of cases in very minor, insignificant ways.

And so Ehrman, rather than acknowledging the wealth of evidence we have for the original manuscripts, actually turns that into liability by focusing on the number of very minor variations in the existing manuscripts.

And so what we see in the book is, just imagine for a moment, we didn't have 5 ,000 manuscripts, but we only had, say, five.

Almost certainly, Ehrman would point to the lack of evidence because we would only have such a very small number of manuscripts.

So you see, whether few manuscripts or many, you can't win. Either Ehrman is arguing that there's too many variants or that there's too little evidence.

And we continue to show that the vast majority of the types of variants, meaning different minor variations in the wording of the biblical manuscripts, are highly insignificant.

We are talking about things such as minor spelling errors that don't affect the actual meaning of the words.

We're talking about readings that are transparently nonsensical because of just human error in the transmission creeping in in just one or just a handful of those 5 ,000 manuscripts.

We're clearly able to establish the original reading. There's other meaningless word order changes where the word order is reversed, but we know what the meaning of the text is.

Or in some cases, a definite article is missing, again, without any loss of understanding of what the message of the original text was.

Well, I noticed on page 205, you give these four theses, and they are, we have good reasons to think the original text is preserved in the overall textual tradition.

The vast majority of scribal changes are minor and insignificant. Of the small portion of variations that are significant, our text -critical methodology can determine which is the original text.

And lastly, the remaining number of truly unresolved variants is very few and not material to the story of the

New Testament. And I think that can be very helpful for laypeople to read so they can have confidence that the

Word of God is, in fact, God -breathed. And that is exactly why we wrote the book, to instill confidence among people who, in some cases, might not have the formal training to understand some of the more technical arguments made by people like Bart Ehrman to boost their confidence in the reliability of Scripture, because, in fact, we have every reason to believe that we have the original reading.

Even Bart Ehrman himself is very critique, as we point out in the book, of the fact that our current manuscript is corrupt, and it logically presupposes that at least he can determine what the original reading was, or how else would you measure any corruption away from the original reading?

And so we show that he is even logically inconsistent in that very argument.

In addition, I should also point out that Ehrman himself is very strongly motivated by his own agnosticism and his antipathy, against the

Bible, and even the God of the Bible, in his argument, even though he often presents himself as an objective, neutral scholar who is just looking at the historical evidence.

But, in fact, I think he's very strongly driven by an anti -faith and anti -God bias in his critical scholarship.

Andres, isn't it interesting that people who have that bias can sell millions of books about the

Bible? Well, yes, and that is sometimes a frustration that more conservative biblical scholars have a hard time getting a hearing in the popular media, you know, the mainstream media, the cable networks, and so on, because, and that's part of our thesis in the book, there's a reason why

Bart Ehrman's thesis of diversity is so popular in our culture today, because it just so happens to be the very same value that's also held by our culture, which is that you can't tell anybody what to believe, and there's, in fact, many truths, the whole idea about relativism, pluralism, postmodernism, and so, lo and behold,

Bart Ehrman's gospel of diversity fits right in with contemporary culture, and that is also why, you know, the biblical form of Christianity is rubbing against the nature and going against the grain of our contemporary culture.

Well, I commend to everyone the heresy of orthodoxy by Kostenberger and Kruger. Dr. Kostenberger, on the same subject,

I think it's somewhat related. When I look at John 7 -53 -8 -11, the adulterous woman passage, how are we to look at that?

You are a student of the Johannine writings and have written many books, the theology of John's gospel and letter, et cetera.

How do we look at that? Number one, is it in the canon? And number two, if it's not in the canon, does that make us fall prey to some of Ehrman's thinking?

Well, I think Ehrman is, you know, fairly deceptive here, whether intentionally or not.

You know, I don't know the answer to this, but I've listened to him on several, you know, talk shows and radio shows,

Dianne Rehm's show and so on. And his typical way of presenting the matter is that he says that this passage that you just mentioned,

Jesus and the adulterous woman in John 7 -53 -8 -11, that this is some sort of a typical example of, you know, hundreds if not thousands of cases where the

Bible has been corrupted. When in fact, this is one of only two places in the entire

New Testament where it appears that a passage was added by a later scribe without any deceptive intent, but simply because of trying to supplement the gospel tradition.

I do happen to believe that that story is probably a true story, but one that was not originally part of John's gospel.

But again, nobody is necessarily deceived by that because when you look at virtually all our major English Bible translations, you will find a footnote that clearly indicates that most of the early manuscripts do not contain this passage.

There's usually square brackets or smaller font size used. And so long before Ehrman registered his claim that our

Bibles are corrupt, Bibles have traditionally indicated that this is one of two places, the other being the longer ending of Mark in Mark 16 -9 -20, that most likely were not written by the original authors of the gospels of Mark and John respectively.

Well, thank you for that answer. We have about two minutes left. Andreas, while we have those two minutes, would you give our listeners some motivation to read

John's gospel along with his writings and revelation? In other words, I hear from people all the time, well, you know,

John's gospel, if you're an unbeliever, why don't you read that? Give us some motivation as Christians to read the gospel of Jesus Christ according to John.

Well, the early church called John the spiritual gospel. And by that, they didn't mean that the other gospels were unspiritual, but that John gives us a very carefully reflected theological understanding of who

Jesus was. John focuses single -mindedly on the identity of Jesus, that he was the

Messiah and the Son of God, and that by believing in him, we can have eternal life.

And so in the end, John is very appropriately black and white.

There's only two choices for us to make. If we do not believe in Jesus, as John says,

God's wrath remains on us and we remain in spiritual darkness. And so even unbelievers are not at liberty to remain neutral or to be dispassionate observers.

They have to place their trust in Jesus or they will remain in eternal death.

And that is, in the end, all that really matters. So John is spiritual.

It is also crystallizing and compelling the decision that each of us is called upon to make, whether or not

Jesus is the Messiah and the Son of God. Well, we've had on the program today, Andreas Kostenberger, an author of many books, including co -authoring with Michael Kruger, The Heresy of Orthodoxy, Crossway Books.

You can go to crossway .org for more information. They are also the publisher of the

English Standard Version as well. Dr. Kostenberger, we have 30 seconds left. Are you working on a new book right now?

Yes, I'm working on two new books, one on hermeneutics. It's called

Invitation to Biblical Interpretation. It's forthcoming with Kregel next summer.

And also a book simply called Excellence, which will come out with Crossway next fall on Cultivating Personal Virtues, a book that is more autobiographical in nature and that talks about the pursuit of Christian virtue along the lines of 2

Peter 1, 3 through 11. Excellent. Thank you for being our guest today on No Compromise Radio.

You're welcome. Great to be with you, Mike. No Compromise Radio with Pastor Mike Abendroth is a production of Bethlehem Bible Church in West Boylston.

Bethlehem Bible Church is a Bible -teaching church firmly committed to unleashing the life -transforming power of God's Word through verse -by -verse exposition of the sacred text.

Please come and join us. Our service times are Sunday morning at 1015 and in the evening at six. We're right on Route 110 in West Boylston.

You can check us out online at bbchurch .org or by phone at 508 -835 -3400.

The thoughts and opinions expressed on No Compromise Radio do not necessarily reflect those of WVNE, its staff, or management.