#96 Most Asked Bible Questions Answered by Dr. Frank Turek

Today's episode is going to be shaped entirely by the listeners. I have been asking you guys to submit your questions, your confusions, and your objections. Today, we're going to rapid fire and go through the top questions you guys have submitted.

My guest is Dr. Frank Turek. Why are verses missing from the Bible? Has the Bible been corrupted over time? Were books removed? What do you think is like the hardest truth to get over or defend in itself?

The biggest issue is people think that believing in Christianity is all about blind faith. I think that's the biggest misconception people have. You can't write everything about everything. The more evidence we get, the more secure the Bible appears to me.

Ugh, you're breaking my brain, Frank. We trust the Bible that we have. Hello, hello. Welcome to Biblically Speaking. My name is Cassian Bellino, and I'm your host. In this podcast, we talk about the Bible in simple terms with experts, PhDs, and scholarly theologians to make understanding God easier.

These conversations have transformed my relationship with Christ and understanding of religion. Now, I'm sharing these recorded conversations with you. On this podcast, we talk about the facts, the history, and the translations to make the Bible make sense so we can get to know God, our Creator, better.

Hi, it's Cass. I wanted to first start off by saying thank you for listening. I created this because I could not find it anywhere else on the internet. And it takes a very small team and a large upfront investment to make it all possible.

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In exchange for this support, I personally promise to you to always create the highest quality production possible. Thank you so much for listening. Now, let's get to the show. Hello, welcome to Biblically Speaking.

I'm your host, Cassie Lino. Today's episode is going to be shaped entirely by you, the listeners. For the last couple of weeks, I have been asking you guys to submit your questions, your confusions, and your objections.

So, I tried to spend episodes on one of those questions, talking about it for an hour, but today we're going to rapid-fire and go through the top questions you guys have submitted. The top questions meaning, I sought the most.

Questions like, why are verses missing from the Bible? Has the Bible been corrupted over time? Were books removed? Today, we're going to go through all of them very quickly. So, just in case you wanted to jump right into the Bible, bring it over to a friend.

This is the episode to share. Today, my guest is qualified, more than qualified to speak on this. It is Dr. Frank Turek. You are a Christian apologist, a speaker, an author. You spent more than two decades presenting the case for Christianity.

You've come all the way from Stanford, and you have a doctorate in Christian apologetics. You are the author of I Don't Have Enough Faith to Be an Atheist. Frank, welcome to the show.

Hey, Cassie, and great for having me on.

Thank you for coming on. You've spent a lot of your time doing Christian apologetics. What do you think is the hardest truth to get over or defend in itself, after all the questions you've been asked?

Well, I think for Christians, and even non-Christians, maybe the biggest issue is, people think that believing in Christianity is all about blind faith. For example, you don't have any evidence for it.

You just believe it. Maybe even against the evidence. But that's not the case. I think the proper definition of faith is trusting in what you have good evidence to believe is true. Trusting in what you have good evidence to believe is true.

So, for example, when you get on an airplane, you're trusting in the skills of the pilots, the maintenance, ATC, air traffic controllers. You're trusting in all that because you have good evidence to believe that they do their job well because there's so much evidence they do.

And so you're not just believing that it's true, you're also believing in them when you get on the aircraft. And the same thing is true when you trust in Jesus. You have evidence that God exists. You have evidence that Jesus rose from the dead.

You have evidence that the biblical writers are telling the truth. And therefore, when you trust in Jesus, you're doing so because of the evidence, not in spite of any lack of evidence.

Would you say that's like the biggest argument that people come to you with, that they simply don't have the evidence in front of them? They didn't see Jesus with their own eyes, so it's hard for them to just hold that true as evidence?

Well, I think that's the biggest misconception people have. I don't think it's the biggest reason people don't become Christians. I think the biggest reason people don't become Christians is because they don't want moral accountability in their lives.

They don't want to be.

What they perceive to be hemmed in. They don't want to believe that there's some moral authority beyond themselves. That's why I always ask them, if Christianity were true, would you become a Christian?

And a lot of times, they'll say no. It's not a matter of the head. It's a matter of the heart, right? They want to do their own thing. They don't want there to be a God. They want to be God over their own lives.

Yeah, yeah. When I was speaking with Dr. Andrew Rappaport, he said something very similar, that people want to do it their own way, that they either don't want to submit, they have the pride, or even if there was a God that says, I've given you everlasting life, they're like, no, I can't just get that gift freely.

I have to earn it.

Oh, yeah. They think that they have to somehow make themselves better so God will accept them, but that's not the way our love relationships work, right? Say you have a child. You don't love the child because the child performs.

For you. You love the.

Child already. I mean, that's just what love is. You love the child based on who they are, not what they do. Now, after a while, you might not like the child, but you love the child already based on who they are, and God loves us already based on who we are.

Yeah, I think that's difficult because it's like, what interaction have we had that he knows my character? It's that fundamental belief that he created us that's kind of lacking in that equation. Well, if you don't mind, I've got a dozen questions I want to ask you.

I won't give complete answers because with a dozen questions, we've got like two minutes.

A question, but I'll recommend.

Books and other places to go further. I'll just kind of give a quick answer, if that's alright.

There's a couple sections. This section is going to be called, Can We Trust the Bible That We Have? So kind of, you know, if it's true, can we trust what's in it? And so the first is about missing verses that somebody was asking.

Some listeners noticed that certain verses like Matthew 1721, they're missing from some other Bible translations. So what would you say is happening there? And how does it tell us that this isn't a manipulated text with different variations, with a thousand different versions?

Well, first of all,.

There are about 6 ,000 almost, 5 ,800 or so handwritten Greek manuscripts of the New Testament. Some of them are fragments, some of them are entire.

Books from.

The second century all the way to the time of the printing press. And what.

Critical scholars,.

I should say, textual scholars can do is they can compare all those manuscripts and recreate the original with about 99 .5 accuracy. The 0 .5 we don't know about doesn't affect any doctrine. So even if we don't know whether a particular kind of demon can come out through prayer or prayer and fasting, that's one of the places we're unsure of, that doesn't affect really any significant theological doctrine.

There are two sections in the New Testament that are in question as to whether or not they were in the original. One is the story of the woman caught in adultery, okay, and the other is the end of the Gospel of Mark.

In fact, if you go to the end of the Gospel of Mark, if you have a study Bible, it might say verses 9 through 20 are not in the earliest manuscripts. Now this does not necessarily mean they weren't in the earliest manuscript, they're just highlighted as it's possible they were not and that ending was tagged on later, okay.

Whether or not the ending was tagged on later doesn't affect any doctrine because all the teaching in that segment is taught elsewhere. Except for the handling of snakes, that's why I don't do it,.

Okay.

But, yeah,.

Whether you have the ending of Mark, it doesn't affect any teaching. Although I do think the ending of Mark is legitimate because it's not just the manuscript evidence that helps us discover whether or not that passage should be there, but also the way the text is structured.

And there's something in Greek that Greek writers would use, Roman writers would use, something called a chiasm. And a chiasm, well let me put it this way, in America the way we think, we think linearly and the climax and the main point comes at the end of a story, right?

A lot of times the Hebrews and the Greeks and the Romans did it differently. They would say the center of a story is the essence. That's where everything is pointing to, the center. Well, it turns out there are little sections throughout the Gospels and other writings, even in the Old Testament, that highlight a center.

And so something will build up to a center point and then recede from a center point. Like for example, in the story of Noah, if you read it you'll see that it builds up to a center statement. The center statement is, and God remembered Noah.

And then it'll recede in a mirror-like fashion from that statement. So the same points that were made heading up to that statement are the same points made in reverse order heading away from that statement.

It's called a chiasm. It's after the Greek letter chi. So your listeners, we don't have time to go into this in detail, if they look up chiasm, they'll see what it is. Well, it turns out at the end of Mark there's a chiasm.

And so if you take out those last verses, it breaks the chiasm. And so I think that's evidence they should be in there. The bottom line is this. It doesn't matter whether they're in there or not. The teaching is the same in other places.

So.

We essentially have the same New Testament that was written down 2 ,000 years ago.

Wow.

Okay. I think, yeah, and it's just insane that people put all of their faith into that 5 variance.

0 .5%.

0 .5%.

That discredits all of that? That's just a ridiculous way to see all of it.

Yes.

Okay. Thank you. The next question is, has the Bible been corrupted? One of the most questions we received is, how do we know that the Bible hasn't been corrupted or changed over time? Kind of in alignment with what you just said, that 0 .5%.

How hasn't it just slowly compounded over time with more and more.

Changes? Because we have handwritten manuscripts, and in order for someone to change what the New Testament said, you would have to track down all the manuscripts around the world and change them in the same way to get scholars later when they reconstruct the text to say, oh, this is what it originally said.

It would be impossible to do. Because they're spread all over the ancient world. In fact, the way they know what the original said is they compare the manuscripts. Let's just say we've got five manuscripts.

There's more than this. Let's say there are five. And four of them say the same thing. But the fifth one says something a little bit different. Are we going to know which one has the error in it? Yeah, it's going to be the fifth one that's different.

Right? That's probably the one that has the error in it, not the other way around. So that's how they do this.

Was the protocol then to say, like, oh, this change is in the fifth one. Let's just throw it out altogether?

Well, you do have to make a judgment there. But even skeptical scholars like Bart Ehrman, who's an atheist who until recently taught at UNC Chapel Hill who wrote the book Misquoting Jesus, even he will admit that the essential documents or the essential manuscripts that we have today or, let me put it another way, the New Testament that we have today is essentially the same as it was 2 ,000 years ago.

It hasn't been corrupted. It's not like the telephone game. Okay? We know what the original New Testament writers wrote down. The question is, did they write down the truth? Because you can have an accurate copy of a lie, right?

Okay, so that's.

The next question. But the first question, do we know what they wrote down? Yeah, we know.

We will get to errors or contradictions in the Bible itself, but just kind of like for scope, we have other ancient documents of people that lived even before Jesus, and how is their preservation? Was it in the similar style of the Bible?

All ancient manuscripts are reconstructed from subsequent copies because nothing that old survives on papyrus. It very rarely does it. We don't have Aristotle's writings, we don't have the Iliad, we don't have original manuscripts from Plutarch, or any of these people that lived at the time, or Josephus.

We know what they said based on piecing together the copies.

Okay?

That's how we know what they said. The difference is that in the New Testament we have over 5 ,800 manuscripts. The next closest is the Iliad by Homer, there's about 1 ,800 manuscripts, but most of the ancient world manuscripts survive on a handful of copies.

Like, you know, some of them might just have seven or eight copies, or even one copy. So, it's very, when you look at the New Testament, the New Testament is just filled with corroboration from all of these manuscripts.

When you compare them you can reconstruct the original. It's far more supported than anything else from the ancient.

World. Wow.

Okay. So, many people have heard that books like Enoch were quote, removed from the Bible, and I've spent a couple episodes talking about this, so I understand a little bit about the context, but how did, how would you say in your very short response how early Christians determined which books were going to belong in the final canon or final Bible?

Yeah, the canon was not determined, it was discovered. In other words, the books that are in the Bible were discovered to be inspired. The church or the early believers didn't determine what should be in the Bible, they discovered it.

And the criteria for, say, a New Testament.

Book was.

Was the person either an eyewitness or somebody that was confirmed as an eyewitness? Okay, so Matthew and John were eyewitnesses. Mark knew an eyewitness, Peter, because Peter is thought to be who is behind the Gospel of Mark.

In other words, Mark was interviewing Peter for his Gospel. Luke was confirmed by Paul, and Luke checked out with other sources as he says in several places, and when you look at Luke's writings, you realize he was very meticulous.

There are 84 details in the book of Acts, just from chapter 13 to the end of the book. We say all this in our book, I Don't Have Enough Faith to Be an Atheist, so if people want to go look into it, they can.

We list all those 84 details. The Gospel of John has 59 such details,.

Details that.

Only an eyewitness would know.

So.

The only books that we know that were written by an eyewitness of the Resurrection, an eyewitness of Jesus, or somebody that knew an eyewitness were the 27 books in the New Testament. The only exception is the book of Hebrews, because we don't know who wrote the book of Hebrews, but it's obviously a book written by a Jew.

So that's the only wild card. The book of Enoch is a book that is an intertestamential book. It's between the Old Testament and the New Testament, sometimes called the Apocrypha, and that's a question that Catholics and Protestants will debate.

I think the best evidence is those books were never considered to be the Jewish canon. They were never considered to be part of the Old Testament. They were considered to have good historical information in them, but they were never considered to be inspired.

In fact, the great translator of the Bible,.

Jerome,.

Would not translate them because he didn't think they were inspired. Augustine, a contemporary, thought they were inspired, so they kind of had a debate. But I think the weight of the evidence shows that those books were not inspired.

If you're talking about other New Testament books, like so-called New Testament Gospels, like you hear the Gospel of Peter, the Gospel of Judas, the Gospel of Thomas, those books were not written by Peter, Thomas, or Judas.

Those books are a hundred years after those people had died. They're forgeries. They're second-century books that people took the name of an apostle and put that name on those books to get the people of God to think, oh, maybe they are inspired.

Maybe they are authentic. They're not eyewitness accounts. They're in the second century, not the first century. They're forgeries.

Well, I understand the, you know, first-hand accounts, or a confirmed first-hand account, but what about the Old Testament?

Yes. You know, like, like Job,.

Or Genesis. Right.

The Old Testament has manuscript support, but obviously it's older, so not as many manuscripts. And the Dead Sea Scrolls are some of the best evidence for the Old Testament transmittability. What do I mean.

By that? When.

The Old Testament scrolls were discovered in the Dead Sea Scrolls in the 1940s and 50s, one of the most amazing finds is the entire Book of Isaiah. It's called the Great Isaiah Scroll. It's 24 feet long.

It's in the Shrine of the Book Museum in Jerusalem, if you ever get a chance to go there. They created a whole museum around it, actually. And it's completely intact. It comes from about 125 B .C. So this is before Jesus, yet it contains the entire Book of Isaiah, including the famous passage, Isaiah 53, which is predictive of Jesus.

When they compared that manuscript with the next earliest manuscript in existence, it's called the Masoretic Text, which comes from about 1000 A .D. So this is 1100 or so years later. When they compared the Dead Sea Scroll version and the Masoretic Text, they were 95 identical.

The 5 that were different were mostly word order or spelling, that kind of thing. So again, it didn't affect any theology.

What.

Does this show? It shows that the Old Testament scribes over 1100 years accurately copied the manuscripts from one copy to another. So there's very strong support for the Old Testament as well. The reason I believe the Old Testament's true is because I think there's evidence that God exists, and I think there's evidence that Jesus rose from the dead and therefore is God, and I think there's good evidence that Jesus taught the Old Testament was the Word of God.

So on Jesus' authority, I'm going to believe the Old Testament because if he's God, whatever he teaches is true. Right? Look, I just have a personal policy. If somebody predicts and accomplishes his own resurrection from the dead, I'm just going to trust whatever the guy says.

Okay? So that's what Jesus did. So I'm looking at what Jesus said, and I'm looking at the Old Testament with his eyes, and he's saying, he said to the Pharisees, you err not knowing the Scriptures. What are the Scriptures in his day?

The Old Testament? He's thinking that the Old Testament is the inerrant Word of God. Right? He's saying the Scripture can't be broken. He's the one claiming that the Old Testament is the Word of God, so if Jesus thinks it's the Word of God, I'm going to agree.

That's a pretty good personal policy, but you mentioned something great. I mean, you mentioned it a couple times. It's how do they preserve these texts? Because like you said, papyrus only lasts so long.

What was it, like 20 years, and then they have to go to animal skins, which maybe lasts like 50 years. So how were those books of the Old Testament preserved over time until they were written, you know, by the time of Jesus and much more permanently?

Well, animal skins would last longer, and obviously they can last very long if indeed they're in a dry environment like Qumran, a desert. So the animal skin upon which the Great Isaiah Scroll was written is still in good shape, and so that thing's 2 ,100, 2 ,200 years old right now.

And what you see in the Shrine of the Book Museum is actually a facsimile of that. The real one is probably in a vault somewhere in Jerusalem, but who knows how long they land. It really depends on the condition, right?

The oldest fragment of the New Testament we have comes from about 100 to 150 A .D. It's a small section of the Gospel of John, John 18. It's called the John Rylands fragment. It's only about this big, okay?

Just a little piece of it. So papyrus made out of papyrus reed, it could survive a long time in a dry condition, but generally it breaks down much I don't know how long it takes, but it breaks down. It's not going to last 2 ,000 years under most conditions.

For sure. Yeah.

But how was most of the Old Testament preserved? I mean, we have the Great Isaiah, or Great Scroll of Isaiah written on animal skin. What about everything else? Everything else that was copied thousands of times, was it found and preserved in a vault?

What were they doing back then.

To keep it intact? Every book of the Old Testament was found in the Dead Sea Scrolls, with the exception of Esther. Not complete manuscripts, many of them are just fragments, but the same way that they did up to the time of the printing press.

They would just copy them to a new parchment, a new scroll, whatever, and then that would become the standard, and they'd keep doing that. Now, sometimes copyist errors would creep in, right?

But, the.

Essence of the text stayed the same, and a lot of times the copyist errors could be identified by comparing it to other manuscripts, like we do in the New Testament, or realizing, yeah, no, I think that punctuation's wrong.

Right? Got it. Well, you said that everything but Esther was found. How did we get Esther, then?

Oh, well, Esther had other traditions other than the Dead Sea Scrolls. There are other, like the Septuagint. The Septuagint is the Greek translation of the Hebrew Old Testament. It was translated into Greek at about 250 BC.

A lot of times when the Apostle Paul is quoting the Old Testament, he's quoting from the Septuagint. He's quoting from the Greek translation of the Old Testament. And so, there are other manuscript traditions other than the Dead Sea Scrolls that.

People, that these.

Documents had been preserved in.

Over the years. Okay.

Well, that concludes our first section. So, thank you so much for providing so much, you know, straightforward evidence for this apologetic. The second session's going to be are there errors or contradictions?

Somebody that might be reading and say, the Bible contradicts itself. You know, turn the other cheek and then it says the opposite in the Old Testament. So, I'm just using that example, but the first question is, when people do encounter those differences or apparent contradictions, just from reading through, how should you approach those?

Well, first of all, when someone says there's a contradiction, you need to look at it on a case-by-case basis, right? You just... Okay. You got to see what, what are you talking about? Now, my co-author, Dr. Norman Geisler, wrote this book many years ago.

It's got a new name now, but I'll show you the old name. It's called When Critics Ask. This is the name of the book. Now it's called The Big Book of Bible Difficulties. There's over 800 of these alleged difficulties or contradictions that he goes through, and he points out, no, you thought it was a contradiction, but here's why it isn't, that kind of thing.

Not every difference is a contradiction.

Like, I'll.

Give you an example. Some people have said, well, one gospel says there was one angel at the tomb, another says there were two. This is at the resurrection, right? Is that a contradiction? Well, depends.

If one gospel were to say there's only one angel at the tomb, and another say there were two, that would be a contradiction. But the first one doesn't say there was only one angel at the tomb. It just mentions one.

If you look at, say, two newspaper reports of a given event, you might see one reporter reporting that so-and-so was at a meeting with the president, right? And another will say so-and-so plus someone else was at the meeting with the president.

Are those two accounts complementary or contradictory?

I see. Yeah, that's a solid argument. It's this weird perception that I think Christians have when it comes to, like, the Bible has to be on the same story across, you know, they don't understand that there's different perspectives being told.

Yes, eyewitnesses always agree on the essentials. They disagree on the details. In fact, if you have eyewitnesses that agree word for word on everything that happened, say, in a courtroom, say you had two eyewitnesses, and the judge said, tell me what you saw.

And one guy says X, Y, and Z, and the next guy says exactly the same thing. What's the judge going to say? Oh, man, these guys are colluding. They got together to get their story straight, right?

That's a solid point.

Yeah. No, they'll see, oh, yeah, I saw the guy shoot him. What color jacket was he wearing? It was red. No, it was orange.

I see.

All right. Yeah, you could see how they could get that confused. By the way, like an example of this is the Titanic. You know, when the Titanic sank, that eyewitnesses disagreed over how it sank. Some said it went down whole.

Others said it broke in two and went down. But what did they agree on, Cassian? That it sank. That it sank. Boom. Right? Same thing is true in the New Testament documents. They all agree Jesus rose from the dead.

What did they seem to disagree on? Well, who got to the tomb first? Right? How many people were there? Okay. Fine.

That's.

What eyewitnesses will tell you. They'll emphasize different things. Now, in the Titanic situation, you can understand how people would have different perspectives. First of all, they were in shock. Secondly, it was dark.

Thirdly, depends on where you were. If you were a beam of the ship, you might see it break in two. If you were stern or bow, you couldn't see it. You'd just see the whole thing go down, right? You could see how people would think different things.

But what did they all agree on? The Titanic sank. You wouldn't say because one guy said it broke in two and another guy said it went down whole. We can't believe anything they say. Right? They all agree it sank.

The same thing is true in the resurrection. They all agree there was a resurrection. They're disagreeing not necessarily in a contradictory way, but just in the details they report. Who got there first?

How many angels were there? That's what you'd expect.

Yeah. When you put it that way,.

That doesn't make sense. If all four Gospels said exactly the same thing in exactly the same way, we'd go, they're just copying from one another.

I.

Completely agree with you, Frank. I think there is that so-and-so, there was a difference, and there's just a slippery slope of slowly things start. You almost see them as holes in the story. There's just too many holes rather than just differing in perspectives.

Here's the problem.

In evangelical Christianity, many of us have been taught that the Bible's a house of cards. What do we mean by that? We mean that if you find one inconsistency or one contradiction, the whole thing is false.

That's not the way this works.

Okay?

Even if there are contradictions, even if you can show there's a contradiction, it doesn't mean the essential story is false.

Okay. Yeah. I can see both sides. I can also see why people think it is a house of cards, but why don't you see it like a house of cards?

Because regardless of our view on what's called inerrancy, 2 ,000 years ago, either Jesus rose from the dead or he didn't. I see the evidence for that as very strong that he did. Even if somebody were to record something inaccurate about it in, say, a detail, that would not invalidate the truth that he rose from the dead,.

Would it? I see.

Yeah. It doesn't matter if it was on a Tuesday or Wednesday it happened.

Yeah. And not only that, but do you realize there was no... Let me put it another way. I'll put it this way. Christianity is not true because a series of documents we put under one binding we call the Bible says it's true.

In fact, Christianity would be true if the Bible never.

Existed.

You say, well, how can that be?

Do you realize there were thousands of Christians before a line of the New Testament was ever written?

I don't think about that, but you're right.

Well, no, think about it. Did John believe in the resurrection before he wrote it down? Yeah. Yeah. In other words, the New Testament writers did not create the resurrection. The resurrection created the New Testament writers.

Wow. You would not have these documents written down by Jews in the first century claiming a man claimed to be God and rose from the dead unless a man really did claim to be God and really did rise from the dead because they had no motive to invent this.

They got beaten, tortured, and killed for saying this was true. Okay? So we get it backwards. Maybe you look at it another way.

Did the...

What came first? The Titanic sinking or the reports of the Titanic sinking?

Yeah, the Titanic sinking.

Yeah, of course. What came first? The resurrection or the reports of the resurrection?

The resurrection.

Okay, so there you go. Why would you even have these documents if there wasn't a resurrection?

Yeah, I mean... Ah! You're breaking my brain, Frank! This is good stuff. Okay, I love that. That was so succinct. Moving on to the next question because I want to get as many as I can while we have time.

Is some listeners pointed to things like Roman census or timeline differences in the Gospels and asked, are these historical errors? Kind of like what we were just saying. Does it really matter that some people could just wrote it down differently?

Their experience was different than the other person. It seemed like the same event.

Alright, well, let's take the Roman census which is something from Luke chapter 2 about Cornerius. I think that's how you pronounce his name. Ordering a census or something. Suppose I were to say to you the World Trade Center attack.

What date would you think of?

9 -11. 9 -11, of course.

But if I were to say the first World Trade Center attack.

If you.

Think enough, you'll realize there was one in 1993. They tried to blow up the World Trade Center. In 1993, a Muslim guy. Tried to drive a bomb underneath it. Obviously it didn't.

Work.