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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.
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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 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 Rapoport, 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?
Like, you know, if there's 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.
Yeah, 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, well, what interaction have we had that he knows my character?
And it's, you know, that fundamental belief that he created us that's kind of lacking in that equation. But, okay.
Well, if you don't mind, I've got a dozen questions I want to ask you. Sure. 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. Okay. 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, you know, 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.
Oh. 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 20, 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, the Old Testament. 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? Okay. You've got to see what you're 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. 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. The same thing is true with this census problem that people think.
It depends on how you read the Greek. It could mean because there's allegedly a discrepancy that when this census took place didn't line up with what
Luke was saying. The problem is that if you read the
Greek a certain way, Luke could be saying in the first census that Quinarius ordered.
Which would have been about 4 BC not 6 AD. I think that's the discrepancy.
If it's 4 BC that's when Jesus was born. So there's no problem.
It depends on how you read the Greek. It's basically a technical Greek issue. Got it.
That makes a lot more sense. Again, the context just adds so much richness. It makes it much more understandable.
It's not like I read the Bible and I'm like let's go back into the Greek. Let's say for the sake of argument
Luke's wrong. Let's say he got the census wrong. Does that create a problem for biblical inerrancy?
Yeah, he's got a detail wrong. Does it change the fact that Jesus rose from the dead? No. Doesn't change it at all.
By the way, if you evaluate Luke himself, he's right on so many things that you can verify.
We list them all in the book. I don't have enough faith to be an atheist, right? Like for example, Luke chapter 3 verse 1 and 2 says and I'm just doing this from memory because I talk about it a lot so I may get a few details wrong, but it says something like in the 15th year of the reign of Tiberius Caesar, when
Pontius Pilate was governor of Judea, Hedrard, Tetrarch of Galilee, his brother Philip, Tetrarch of Ituria and Tractonicus, and Licinius, Tetrarch of Abilene, during the high priest of Annas and Caiaphas, the word of God came to John, son of Zechariah in the desert.
Now, there are 8 people named in what I just said. All 8 people are known through either written means outside the
Bible or archaeology outside the Bible that they lived at those exact times and were in those positions that Luke says.
In other words, Luke is not doing a once upon a time story. He's not saying once upon a time there was a man like Jesus.
He's telling you the exact year. The 15th year of the reign of Tiberius Caesar was 29
A .D. He's telling you that because that's how you dated people back then.
You know, they didn't have... It's 1974. They didn't have that. They dated their years by the reign of the emperor.
14th year of the reign of Tiberius Caesar. That's 29 A .D., what we know today. And all those people were in place.
So, Luke is telling that he's a historian. He's not writing fables. Right, right.
I think the issue is like if I'm getting inside the early Christian's mind, like early Christian as in like a baby
Christian in today, not like early Christianity. But if like a Sunday school Christian is reading the Bible for the first time and they're seeing like Matthew has these events like saints being raised from the dead after Jesus' crucifixion, but then
I keep reading my Bible because I'm a new Christian and I see that that's not mentioned in other gospels. How do...
Not questioning the resurrection in itself, but how do I not get confused that like this isn't recording everything?
Is it again just a perspective issue of, you know, whoever the author is and what they decided to notate? Look, all writing is selective.
You can't write everything about everything. Now, someone might say, well, that was a pretty big event. You know, why wouldn't they record these bodies coming out of the tomb?
Maybe nobody else witnessed it. Maybe nobody else knew it. I don't know. And it doesn't even say what happened to these bodies.
You know, they resurrected and they walked through the city. Okay. How many were there? We don't know.
They died again, right? What happened? We don't know. It's just mentioned and then it's gone.
What every gospel writes and the reason for every gospel being written is to document the life of Jesus and his death, burial, and resurrection.
In fact, John says he's like the only one who really gives a theological gloss, if you will, on what's being written.
Most of the gospels are just, here's what Jesus said, here's what Jesus did. No commentary. Right? Right.
In fact, N .T. Wright put it this way. If you were to read the gospels, and if you thought that the apostles' goal in writing the gospels was to get you to believe that Jesus rose from the dead, and then by trusting in him, you can not only be forgiven, but given his righteousness, and one day you'll be risen from the dead as well, they did a remarkably bad job of it.
Because they don't really say that. I mean, they do when you piece it together, but it's not really explicit.
Right? Right. You get more of that in the writings of Paul, although Jesus does say, he says, the
Son of Man didn't come to be served, but to serve and to give his life as a ransom for many. And yes, John says, you know, in John 3, 16, that, you know, if you trust in him, he sent his only
Son. If you believe in him, you won't perish, but have eternal life. Okay. There's little snippets of that, but that's it's like almost in passing.
There's only one verse in John. It's the end of chapter 20.
I think it's verse 31. It says something like this. These things were written down, meaning everything
John has written down, all the signs that Jesus performed, these things were written down, so you may know that Jesus is the
Savior, and by believing in him, you may have life in his name. What's he saying? You got to believe that Jesus is the
Savior, and then trust in him, belief that, belief in, right, to have life in his name.
That's the only place he explicitly says, this is the purpose I'm writing this. Right?
The rest of the Gospels don't say, you know, you got to trust in Jesus to be saved.
Hey, you want to be resurrected someday? They don't say that. That's not their purpose.
Their purpose is to tell you what Jesus said and did. The epistles, the letters, which is how you live as a
Christian and how the early church is growing, all of that talks about, oh, you got to trust in Jesus to be saved and sanctified and all this.
The Gospels are like newspaper reports. Here's what happened. The epistles are like, oh, now that that's happened, here's how you should live.
Well said. Well said. Yeah, that's a much better way to approach the
Gospels. Okay. Okay, let's go on.
Section three, did these events actually happen? A lot of questions from the audience when it comes to, like, did this actually happen, reliability?
There's a lot of distrust. What was something that helped you get a lot of trust in the Bible where you said, if this is true, then the rest is true?
What got you there? Okay, the two most important things in my mind, and there are many, in the chapter in I Don't Have Enough Faith to Be an
Atheist, there's a chapter called the top ten reasons we know the New Testament writers told the truth.
I'll just give you a couple real quick. One is embarrassing testimony. What's embarrassing testimony? Embarrassing testimony would not be made up.
Like, you don't make up embarrassing things that make you look bad. You might make up things that make you look good, right?
Right. But you won't make things that make you look bad, that make you embarrassed. Embarrassing testimony, like when the boys raced and one lost?
Yeah, or one lost, or they all run away for fear of the Jews, why the women are the brave ones that go down to the tomb.
Or Peter says, I'll never deny you. What do they wind up doing? Denying him three times, that's what he does. Or, you know, the disciples are doubtful when they hear of his resurrection.
They're even doubtful after they see him risen. Yeah. In Matthew 28, 17.
Right. The women's testimony was not considered on par with that of a man. You'd never have the women be the first witnesses in that culture.
That's embarrassing. Right? They're not considered to be reliable witnesses in that culture. You would never have
Jesus being called a drunkard, or being called demon -possessed. You would never have him be called a madman.
You would never put two prostitutes in his bloodline. Wow. You know, that's embarrassing.
Right? You would never say that your Messiah was crucified like a criminal on a cross.
Yeah. Right? And his own family didn't believe in him. His brothers didn't believe in him.
It says in Mark 3, his family thought he was out of his mind. Yeah.
You think they're making this? They're not making this. This is too embarrassing. Now you contrast that to Egypt.
We've been to Egypt a couple times. You go to a monument in Egypt, you know what a monument in Egypt is? It's a shrine to how wonderful the
Pharaoh is. They don't report anything negative. No embarrassing stories about the
Pharaoh? Nothing. Yeah. He doesn't have prostitutes in his bloodline. Right? His head would be cut off.
A historian's head would be cut off if you tried to say, hey Pharaoh, I'm going to put a couple of prostitutes in your bloodline.
What do you think? You must die, right? I'm not going to make that up. That's a good point.
Wow. And when all that hit you, you were like, that just simply isn't how history works.
No, that's not how it works. Even today, I don't care who's in the White House, the press secretary is always spinning for the president, right?
That's true. The president never does anything wrong. Everything the president does is right and good, right? Every press secretary does that.
We don't admit embarrassing details. That's a good point. In fact, there's one other aspect to this that I wanted to mention.
What was it? It's just the fact that embarrassment, even for other writings other than the
Bible, historians will go, yeah, if it's embarrassing, it's probably true. No one's going to make it up.
Okay? We hide that kind of stuff. We don't advertise that. We certainly don't make it up.
It was Dennis Prager, who's a conservative Jewish man, not a believer in Jesus, but conservative
Jewish man, he says this about the Old Testament. He says, the main reason I know the
Old Testament is true is because no people group would ever invent such an embarrassing history of themselves.
How many times do the Israelites get dope slapped by God?
Hey, stop going after other gods. Stop sinning. I'm going to have to smite you if you keep doing this, and they keep doing it.
Every one of Israel's kings were evil. Only a handful of Judah's kings, the southern kingdom, was good.
All the other kings, they're all bad. Why? They're just telling the truth.
You'd never see that in Egyptian history. All the pharaohs were great. This might be a silly question, but do you think there's a lot of humor in the
Bible? Not that the Bible's a joke, but you know, like Elijah being called a baldy. Do you find humor there?
Yeah, that's humor there. When Elijah goes after the prophets of Baal, they say to the prophets of Baal, or he says to the prophets of Baal, how come your
Baal isn't responding? Maybe he's on the toilet. That's basically what he says. There's funny stuff in there all the time.
Yeah. That's what I loved so much about trying to have these interviews, was the
Bible's so serious. There's so much depth. There's so much there, and then we have these moments where it's like God clearly has a sense of humor, and that's why we have some.
Okay, so moving into this new section, did these events actually happen, is several listeners of mine are asking, why don't we see clear references to Exodus in other ancient historical records?
So, how do scholars think about that kind of gap in history from a secular perspective?
Well, two things. We do see evidence for the Exodus in other writings. Although the
Egyptians aren't going to admit it, there is circumstantial data that points out that the
Jews were in Egypt in, say, the 1400s B .C.
And I think the biblical dating for the Exodus is 1446
B .C., which means the conquest of Jericho would occur around 1406
B .C. And I have several YouTube videos on this, but I'll just give you a couple of pieces of evidence.
There is an ancient manuscript. There's only one copy of it. It is in papyrus.
It comes from Egypt. It's called the Epure Papyrus. And it basically describes the plagues, what happened to Egypt.
And when you read it, you go, wow, this is a lot like what the Book of Exodus says, that Egypt experienced all these plagues.
And some scholars are trying to say, oh, no, no, no, that's way too late. No, no, no, that doesn't have anything to do with the Exodus, or blah, blah, blah.
No, it really does appear to be an Egyptian account of the Exodus. So that's one thing.
The other thing is the earliest evidence for Yahweh, the earliest inscription anywhere in the world about Yahweh is found in ancient
Egypt. It comes from about 1400 BC.
It's in what we would call now Sudan, but at the time it was Egypt.
And it's an inscription that talks about the nomads of Yahweh. The nomads of Yahweh?
What? Yeah, nomads. So these people are on the move. Why would there be nomads worshipping
Yahweh in southern Egypt? Oh. And that's from a historical, like secular perspective.
That's an inscription put up by Amenhotep III, who was the grandson of the
Exodus pharaoh Amenhotep II. So Amenhotep III puts this this oh, what do you call it?
Anyway, it's a bunch of inscriptions he puts up, a monument he puts up, and it's the
Soleb, I think it's, if I'm remembering correctly, it's like S -O -L -E -B. It's a site that you can go to, and archaeologist
Titus Kennedy has been to this site in Sudan, and so has archaeologist Joel Kramer, who has some great videos on his
YouTube channel called Expedition Bible. He goes to this site, and he shows this inscription.
It's earlier than anything from Israel. Yahweh is mentioned in Egypt in 1400 B .C.
In fact, there are two inscriptions with Yahweh on it from that era. So you have that.
You also have what in paintings in Egyptian tombs, what looks like Semitic slaves in the
Reckmeyer tomb. I've been in it. I was just in it last year from that period.
You also have Semitic tribes coming to Egypt in paintings called the
Ben Hassani painting that has been found. I think it's in an Egyptian tomb.
There's just a lot of circumstantial evidence that the
Hebrews were in that land in the 1400s B .C.
There's another video we have on our YouTube channel, the YouTube channel of me at the Sphinx, because between the paws of the
Sphinx is a placard that was put up about a thousand years after the
Sphinx was built, around 1400 B .C. And this placard, or stele, they call it, stela, sometimes it's called a stela, has inscriptions on it.
And the basic inscription says that the pharaoh, or that the son of the pharaoh was given the throne of Egypt if he would only clear away the sand from around the
Sphinx. This pharaoh who would become pharaoh was called
Thutmose IV. And Thutmose IV was the second son of Amenhotep II, the
Exodus pharaoh. The first son disappears from history.
We don't know what happened to this guy. Well, in Amenhotep II's tomb, you can go to it today, there's another crypt in the tomb with the body of about a 15 year old boy whose name is
Webensenu, I think that's his name, Webensenu, something like that. Amenhotep's second son dies when he's about 15.
And his body is still in that tomb. Titus Kennedy was in that tomb last year.
And the thought here is, is if the Exodus is true, that boy died as the firstborn of the plague.
Whoa. Okay. So his brother, his younger brother, who did not have a right to the throne, had to come up with some sort of justification for taking the throne from his father.
So he says he had a dream that Ra gave him. If he took the sand away from the
Sphinx, he would have the throne. So he puts that stele up right between the paws of the
Sphinx. Whoa. And you read it, and that's what it says. That he's now the pharaoh.
So we go from Amenhotep II, who, by the way, himself was not the firstborn.
If he was, he would have died. He was the secondborn. So he didn't die in the plague. But his firstborn son did die.
So his secondborn son says, in order for me to take the throne, I've got to tell the people that Ra told me I get to take the throne.
And so that's between the paws of the Sphinx. And it happens right about the time the
Jews are leaving, the Hebrews are leaving Egypt for the
Holy Land with Moses. Whoa. Right. We think we know where Moses' supposed tomb was too.
Of course, it was never occupied because Moses left Egypt. But it's below the amazing monument there to Hatshepsut, which she was the woman pharaoh.
And the idea here is that this character who builds a tomb underneath her tomb was really
Moses. Wow. And Senenmut was his name, which means mother's brother.
I know it's an odd thing, but we have video of that too. These are all, I mean, are we absolutely certain of this?
No. No, it might not be the true Moses, but there's actually an article on the
Armstrong website, Armstrong Institute website about, it's called, Is This Moses? And you read that and you go, wow.
This really could be the Moses from the Bible who built,
Hatshepsut's big palace there, big really funerary palace, and he had his own tomb underneath, which was never used because he left
Egypt. So there's a lot of circumstantial evidence, I'm just giving you some of it, that the
Exodus really did occur. Of course, the Egyptians are never going to say, yeah, this goat herder from Canaan, he is the guy that basically kicked
Ra's butt and took all his people out of here. Oh, by the way, another thing is
Amenhotep III, no, sorry, Amenhotep II, the Exodus pharaoh, then bragged shortly after the
Exodus that he went to Canaan and captured 101 ,000 slaves and brought them back.
Now, why would he need to go capture slaves? Well, he just lost a whole bunch of slaves. So now he's saying,
I got to go find more slaves. And most scholars think that's exaggerated because the biggest slave raid up to that point was about 5 ,000 slaves.
He's saying he took 101 ,000 slaves. He's just bragging. And Amenhotep II was a big bragger, just like you see in the movies.
I know in the movies, you know, Ramses II is the guy, but it was probably Amenhotep II. He's a big bragger.
Yeah, he's like, you know, I'll take you on. He's very athletic, you know, do all sorts of stuff with bows and you know.
I'm like picturing the guy from The Mummy. Yeah, yeah. Are you already looking up The Mummy? You can see The Mummy.
We have his mummy. By the way, his mummy has scars on it. I'm at the movie, but I will look at The Mummy.
No, we have Amenhotep II's mummy. We've got it. We've got
Thutmose III's mummy too. Oh my gosh. It's in the mummy museum in Cairo.
You can see it. And he's got what look like boil scars on his neck, unlike all the other mummies.
Oh, like from The Plagues. Yeah, bingo. Whoa. Unfortunately, I have so many more questions, but I feel like this has just been like verbal gold.
Like this is going to be the most shared podcast for me because it's just it's so good for apologetics. And I don't want to take up too much of your time, but I do have a final question here is, you know, after you've been asked a million questions, you've studied this for years, but what do you think is the most important objection that people are raising for the
Bible today that you think is worth answering? The Bible today.
You know, the more evidence we get, the more secure the Bible appears to me. But most people aren't asking is the
Bible true? They're asking is the Bible good? Oh. Right.
Like, is it good according to my definition of good? And my definition of good is
I get to sleep with whomever I want. Basically. See, if it has restrictions on sexuality, well, so much for the
Bible. That's really the issue, I think, in many cases. That's why I ask people, if Christianity were true, would you become a
Christian? No! No. Now, is this the case always?
No, of course not. But I find it a lot. I find it, it's not a matter of the evidence for the existence of God.
It's more a matter for the evidence of their resistance to God. Oh. They want to suppress the truth and unrighteousness.
This is what Paul says in Romans 1, right? People intuitively understand there has to be a creator from the creation.
And they also understand this creator has to be moral because the moral law is written on their hearts.
But they don't want that, because they want to do their own thing. And so they'll suppress the truth about the creator, so they get to do what they want.
And then they get real vocal about it to the point that not only are they doing evil, as he says at the end of Romans chapter 1, but they're cheering on other people who are doing evil.
Oh. So what do you think is the most important thing people need to hear today to kind of combat that need to be their own version of God?
Well, everybody has to deal with guilt. And the reason we feel guilt is because we're guilty. We don't even live up to our own standards, much less
God's standards, right? Even atheists don't live up to their own standards. Nobody lives up to their own standards perfectly.
So we're all fallen, which means we all need a savior. And so Jesus came to save, right?
He didn't come to judge the world, but to save it. So how do you get your sins forgiven?
You trust in Jesus, and then not only are you forgiven, but you're given
His righteousness. Because if He's infinitely just, and He is, He can't allow unjust people like you and me and those watching to go unpunished, otherwise
He wouldn't be infinitely just. So what does He do? He punishes an innocent substitute in His place. Where can
He find an innocent substitute? Not in any one of us. He's the one that has to add humanity to His deity and come to earth and allow the creatures that rebelled against Him to torture and kill
Him so He can not only forgive us, He can give us His righteousness.
Because, look, at the end of the day, there's only two things you can get. You can either get justice, or you can get grace.
Does anybody listening to us right now want justice from an infinitely just God? I don't.
I want grace. The only way you can get grace is if God remains just because He's infinitely just.
So He has to punish us, but He doesn't want to, so He punishes an innocent substitute in our place. So He remains just, and He justifies those who have faith in Jesus.
That's what Romans 3 .26 says. That's why Jesus is the only way. It's not an arbitrary claim. He doesn't say,
I'm the only way because I said so. No, there's no other way to there's no other way to reconcile infinite justice and infinite love unless justice is satisfied.
And how can justice be satisfied? Not by us, but only by Him because He's already just. He's sinless.
So He doesn't have to pay for His own sins. He wants to pay for our sins. Yeah. I can imagine that what you just said, if somebody's listening and they're like one foot in, one foot out of Christianity, it seems very in the clouds.
It seems just like I don't want to say fairytale, but it's just what you said is not common language. It's not a common thought.
It's not an idea that just feels modern in any sense. So how do you, a well -educated man in the modern world, reconnect with your
Lord and Savior in that way when it's so supernatural to our reality? Well, the most obvious thing is justice.
Everybody believes in justice. Even atheists somehow believe in justice. They're marching in the streets. We want justice!
You might just get it one day. Right? Everybody believes there are certain things that are right and other things that are wrong.
And they also, if they're honest, they'll acknowledge they haven't always been right. So if true justice does exist, we're all going to get it someday unless someone intervenes to take the punishment upon Himself for us.
And that's what Christianity offers. So I think it's very relevant and very obvious if you just point out, hey, you don't think these things going on in the world are wrong?
Oh, yeah, they certainly are wrong. If they're wrong, there must be a standard of right. What's that standard of right?
Have you always lived up to that standard of right? No, you haven't? Oh, you want justice? You might just get it. You probably won't like it when it happens.
Would you rather have somebody else pay for that other than yourself? Oh, yeah. Well, that's what Jesus does. Wow. Gospel in 30 seconds.
Frank, I wish I could take so much more of your time, but I am just so grateful for the time that we got.
And what do you have coming up that people can continue learning from you, purchasing your book, which is linked below, but also any speaking events that people can go to?
How do people stay connected with what you do? Yeah, our schedule is on the website crossexamined .org,
crossexamined with a D on the end of it. And we do two podcasts a week. The I Don't Have Enough Faith to Be an Atheist podcast. So we cover issues like this and other issues that people can see.
And we've got a TV show where our YouTube channel has,
I don't know, 3 ,500 videos on it, many of them from the college campus. Many of them are Q &A videos.
So you could type in a subject. You'll probably find a video on it. The question's already been asked. So they can see all that on our
YouTube channel, Instagram, wherever they go. TikTok, we're on there as well. So I'll be on social media.
What are you looking forward to next? Well, we have a book coming out in September called
The War on Reality. And then the updated I Don't Have Enough Faith to Be an Atheist comes out in October.
Wow. So that's coming up. And we're on a lot of college campuses. We haven't been out to Hawaii since last
May, but we're going to do Hawaii Cruise next year. Oh, wow. That's amazing.
That's going to be so fun. Me and Jack Gibbs. It's going to be fun. Yeah. Okay. Hopefully we stay connected.
We can meet up. But thank you. This is liquid gold. This is amazing. So thank you so much for your time today.
Thank you for having me on. So sad it took so long, but it finally happened.
I fear this might be a two -hour podcast if I don't end it here. So I appreciate you. Thank you so much.