Is the New Testament Trustworthy?

Biblically Speaking

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Hello, hello, welcome to Biblically Speaking. I'm your host, Cassian Blino. I'm so glad that you're listening in.

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Today, the topic that we're discussing is going to be 13 reasons why the New Testament is reliable.

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And this is going to be based on Dr. Ben Shaw's book, Trustworthy. And I really wanted to discuss this because it feels like having another piece of artillery in our belt of apologetics to really defend our faith, you know, that 1

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Peter 3 .15, to really be able to give a defense. So I'm so excited to talk further on this.

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I can't wait to use this in future conversations for my apologetics. Dr. Ben Shaw, welcome to the show. I'm so glad that you're here.

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Thanks for having me. I'm excited about our conversation today. I know you've had a bunch of other Liberty guys on the show, and so I'm glad to join the ranks there with them.

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Yeah, shout out to Liberty University, really helping Biblically Speaking here have some credibility. So how did you write this book?

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Like, what is your background? What do you usually teach at Liberty University? Yes, it kind of starts with how

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I got to Liberty, which Liberty has been a huge blessing in my life. And that is because they had a hockey team.

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So they had an ice rink on campus, and I was a hockey player. And I found out they had a rink on campus.

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So I was like, well, I want to go there. And that was the whole reason I went to Liberty. And then when I was there, I found out you could ask questions about God.

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I wasn't, I was saved, but not discipled when I went to Liberty. And so I got to ask a bunch of questions

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I had about God while I was at Liberty. And then it turned out, I had a lot of them. And so I originally wanted to go and be going to law enforcement.

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But I had a lot of questions. And I'm like, I can't help people who got really big problems, but God can.

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So I need to learn more about that before I go back into that world. And God just opened the door for me to get a master's degree and a

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PhD at Liberty. And I was able to train with the former hockey coach, who is also the world's leading expert on Jesus's resurrection,

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Gary Habermas, whose book right here on the resurrection, the evidences, it just went in a word book.

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For people listening, you're pointing to two very big books behind you. Yes, yes. A thousand pages on the evidence for Jesus's resurrection.

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And so I was working with him as he's been working on those, it's going to be four volumes total. But I partnered with him and not just because he was the former hockey coach, but the resurrection is a great topic and I loved it.

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And so I was able to get a PhD while studying with him and working for him. So that was really neat. And one day we were at an event and someone had asked him to go speak somewhere and they asked me to come too.

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And I was like, oh, great. That sounds awesome. And then I got home. I'm like, man, what am I going to talk about? Like if he's going, everything

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I know he taught me, what can I do? You don't want to hear you're going somewhere and Jordan's there.

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You want to hear him talk. So I started thinking what's something I could do that would be fruitful, but also beneficial.

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And I thought back to my days when I came to Liberty and the things I wish I had known prior to coming to Liberty or that I started to learn as I came.

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And some of them are really basic, like Paul wrote half the New Testament, things like that. Like, oh, that's helpful to know he's the author of Corinthians.

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And so I started to put together these different arguments for the reliability of the New Testament. And I saw how they all worked on different levels.

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I was like, oh, this is really good. I bet I can do this in one hour. And so I had a cup of coffee and then I did all those 12 arguments in one hour.

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And then I added, the book now has got 13 arguments, which is because if I say I'm wrong on the first 12, well, the 13th is

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Habermas's minimal facts argument. And we still have the gospel and the resurrection, so we're still good. So that's kind of the thinking there in the whole process and how the book came to be.

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But it did start, I should note, it started with a businessman who invested in this event and chose to ask me to come as well.

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He had no idea it was going to turn into a book. But so this is also how God uses different people and different events to do things.

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And hockey. Yeah, and hockey. That's right. Yeah. That's amazing. I love that you wrote this for your past self.

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I love that you entered for hockey and then just kind of like became something so much bigger. I love that you did this in an hour.

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When we were discussing this book prior to this call, you framed it as something that somebody could read in an afternoon, like something that isn't a thousand pages, but the reliability that you can kind of go through in a day.

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And I think that you break it down through really unique perspectives. And then with the supporting arguments as well, and even with Gary Habermas's, but a few things that people don't really think about.

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And we have to kind of be able to give that defense depending on whatever type of apologetics that we're offering.

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Do you feel like it was difficult coming up with these arguments or do you feel like they were like, what helped you guide what you were going to do?

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I really didn't think it was difficult. It was just a matter of, I'd seen them spread out and some people would talk about three or four of them in one book.

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Someone talk about another three or four in a different book. Each chapter could be, and typically is a dissertation or a discipline unto itself.

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So there's plenty of material out there on each of those subjects, but no one's ever really put them together in a short way that non -academics can or want to read.

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So I love Habermas's book on the resurrection. It's a thousand pages. So I know that's not going to be for everybody.

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My book is under 150 pages. It's pretty short, like 10 pages a chapter. That's awesome.

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Yeah. Trying to make it manageable for those guys. You can joke and say, yeah, it's for the hockey players because it's only 10 pages a chapter so they can manage it.

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But that's the point because most people aren't studying to be black belts in these things. They're trying to ground their faith and then go out into their discipline and be able to give reasons for the hope that they have, but also understand the hope that they have as well and live that out in their lives.

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And so these are some of those things, because if we love scripture and we want to understand it better, well, these are some of the things you just ask along the way, whether or not you're trying to be a black belt in these subjects, or you're just trying to be a faithful believer.

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So anyway, that's one of the aspects of the book I wanted to push in the sense of it being, as my editor called it, a

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TikTok of books, nice short engagement there. That's perfect. Do you feel like you were researching and you found arguments online that you kind of just consolidated, simplified, put into one place, but were these also questions that you felt you were facing when you joined and weren't discipled, still had questions that really got looped and harnessed you into this full

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PhD program? Yeah. No, some of them were, not all of them. I didn't really have too many questions on textual criticism, for example, but then when

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I saw the evidence, I was like, oh, wow, that's very strong evidence. Okay, that's good to know. I'm not going to be a textual critic.

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That's not on my radar by any means, but I'm very glad for those guys doing that type of work. But I do love the creeds.

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I like criteria, historical criteria. Those are each chapters in the book. I love the minimal facts, too. Of course, that's a resurrection argument as well.

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So those are some of them. I mean, I had an idea of doing a larger book, and it's based off another very good, nuanced book.

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It's nuanced in a couple ways. There's a That's the title?

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That's the title of the book, published by Oxford, too. So it's not like it's Ben's Backyard Publishing.

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It's Oxford University. Two dozen or so arguments for God's existence. This is 13 arguments for the reliability of the

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New Testament. Habermas's book has about 12 arguments for the resurrection. There's a lot of evidence, a lot of points, a lot of things to consider in favor of Christianity.

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But with that in mind, the New Testament case, I think it could get pretty close to two dozen or so arguments if you start breaking them down in slightly different ways and make some more academic type arguments, which are a lot, probably less fun for the average person.

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But some of the academics might go, oh, yeah, that sounds good. But that's not a project I'd like to do by myself.

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I'd want a partner to assist with that. Definitely. That type of thing. So I don't think it was too hard to find 12, but there could be other ones.

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People ask me, why didn't I include something on miracles in there, a chapter on miracles, for example. But I don't think

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I've got other reasons why I don't think that's necessarily related. Part of that's in my dissertation. So anyway. Yeah.

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I've discussed the resurrection evidence for that with Dr. Michael Lacona. And do you touch on that a little bit more with the resurrection or do you just focus on the whole of the

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New Testament? On the minimal facts chapter, I talk about that. So Lacona, he was actually on my dissertation committee along with Dr.

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Habermas. And I've known Dr. Lacona for a long time. He was very encouraging as I was putting this book together because I ran some of the stuff by him too.

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And I think I actually cite some of his books in there in the last chapters. But yeah,

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I talk about the minimal fact approach itself, whether or not it's a miracle. If you were to read, this is why miracles aren't included.

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If you were to read a book on whether or not Tacitus, one of the best Roman historians, or Josephus, why they are reliable.

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You're not going to find a chapter in there on miracles. And so if we don't do it for them, why are we doing it for Jesus?

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Is it some special pleading or something for... It's just odd. And I think the age of people questioning miracles happening is starting to fade out a little bit too.

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I think a lot more people think that they're possible and that they do happen. So we ought not spend so much time on there instead of, hey, okay, let's look at these reports.

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Are they trustworthy? And I think that's a better, more fruitful discussion. Yeah. Okay. Well, let's get into some of your arguments for that within your text.

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Some of them, and you were mentioning the textual evidence and kind of like, what is accreditation from text?

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Within the New Testament, you say that it's the best textually attested work in the ancient world. Why is this so significant?

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Yeah. That sounds like something, I quoted somebody saying that. That actually sounds like something that Bart Ehrman could say.

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And for those of you guys who aren't familiar with him, he's one of the top two leading New Testament textual critics in the world, and he's an atheist agnostic.

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So he's not a Christian. And he says the New Testament, if I recall correctly, it is cited in the book, something to that effect.

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I thought you were quoting him when you said that, to be honest with you. But he says the New Testament has the most evidence of any book from antiquity.

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And so one of the things we do, there's a number of different ways that Scott, well, first you want to ask, what is textual criticism?

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If I heard this, I'd be like, yeah, I'd be like, what are you guys talking about? Textual criticism, it's just a fancy way of saying, okay, how do we know the words we have in our

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Bible or what was actually written down? Because we don't have the original copies, we only have copies.

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So what would happen is, say Paul's writing his letter to the church in Corinth, well, people would then visit the church in Corinth and copy that letter down and return to their churches so they could read that letter in their churches.

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And this would happen in other writing practices too. It's not just a Christian thing, it's an ancient practice.

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Again, it would apply to Plato, it would apply to guys like Homer and their writings. So it's not just specific to Christians.

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But if we don't have the originals, which we don't, well, how do we know if what we have today is what they really said?

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And so again, not just a question for the New Testament, question for Plato, question for Tacitus, for everybody. And so as you start looking at it, you go, okay, well, what are some things we want?

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Well, we want multiple copies. We want a lot of copies, because then we can see if one is different, if one is different, say you have 100 copies, and one of them is different from the 99, and it's a misspelling, you can be like, okay, that's just a quick typo error.

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See that these 99 show that it should have said the instead of they. It's a quick typo, and then you can move on.

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So that's one thing you want. The more copies you have, typically, the better. And then, so with Plato, for example, there's about 250 copies of Plato that we use to make up when you read an

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English translation of his work today. When it comes to the Greek New Testament, there's about 5 ,000 plus copies.

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So you would think Plato, who we all consider to be one of the greatest philosophers of antiquity, you'd have more than 250 copies or manuscripts that we use.

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And then the New Testament in the Greek, just the Greek, not counting other languages or quotes and other writings, but there's over 5 ,000 copies.

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And so what's really neat is you can look at a lot of these online because the other leading New Testament scholar, who's named a textual critic scholar, he is a

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Christian. His name is Dan Wallace, and they both, Dan Wallace and Ehrman, if I recall correctly, they both studied under Bruce Metzger, who was the leading

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New Testament scholar of a generation before us. So basically, Bruce Metzger, then you get Bart Ehrman and Dan Wallace.

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Dan Wallace goes around taking high resolution photos of these manuscripts. So if something happens to them, we have them digitally preserved.

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So there's a bunch of places you can go online to look at those. So you want a multitude of copies, but you also want copies, you don't want copies that are really late.

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You prefer things that are close. Late as in like, what do you mean by late? So for example,

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John's considered to have written around 95 AD, his gospel. Our earliest fragment we have comes from about 125 to 175

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AD in the second century. So not very long after. That's considered very, very close by ancient historical practices.

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And when we compare just sticking with Plato, for example, by the way, Plato, one scholar calls, he calls the

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New Testament of the pagan world. That's how influential Plato was back then. So we're trying to compare apples to apples here.

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So with Plato, his earliest manuscripts are closer in time to us than they are to him, because they're so late from the time when they were written.

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I see. Just like the gap between like the living and then like the recording. Okay, got it. Yes. I forget the date off the top of my head, but I think it's like 1200 years.

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It's in the book. It's in there. It's cited in there. There's too many hockey hits to the head, I suppose.

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But yes, it's an extensive period of time. So we see if we're going to question the New Testament, all these other writings from antiquity also get questioned.

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But we don't see people questioning, do we have the original text with these ancient writings? So we shouldn't say that with the

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New Testament either. So this gives us good reason to see that what we have written down is actually what was written in the originals.

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Now, all that proves though, is what we have written down is what was actually said. So if anyone says the

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New Testament is unreliable, or it makes false claims or something like that, they are tacitly assuming that what we have written down is accurately preserved, because we have to know what they said in order to say it's either right or wrong.

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Does that make sense? Yeah, that makes sense. So we have to know what they said in order to test it for being accurate or inaccurate.

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And so that's the first layer and level of reliability. We have to know what they said.

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And so because it's the best attested evidence in antiquity, we have the greatest confidence for the

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New Testament. And if you're looking for a source that has a lot of, because there are differences, some differences between the texts, and the overwhelming majority of those differences are spelling mistakes.

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And so that's one thing, and that's to be expected. I didn't think I was going to talk this much on textual criticism.

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So there's a lot of threads here. So feel free to pull me back if there's something I'm saying, and you want to chase it down.

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No, no. Again, you're the smart person. I got to dumb it down. I feel like the things that hold a lot of people back,

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I literally saw a TikTok on it this morning in a really weird way. It has been translated so many times.

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It is such an ancient text. How can we put so much reliability for our heart, soul, mind, and body in something that has been altered in so many ways since it occurred?

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So we know that the base foundation of the text is accurate, but what about the variations that have come out? Aren't we so far from the original copy at this point?

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Yeah. So this is where Bart Ehrman's great because he's an agnostic atheist, and he thinks scholars have successfully preserved the text.

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I want to see if I can get his quote here reasonably accurate. He says they've done so with reasonable success, although not 100 % certainty, but nothing in history is 100 % certain, so that's okay.

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So that again, if we question the New Testament, then we have to question every other writing from antiquity, and we don't do that.

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The second thing is on that TikTok comment, we have the original copies here of these ancient copies, so we can see what they actually said.

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You mean like the Dead Sea Scrolls? In the Greek. The Greek's more for Old Testament texts and some other aspects there, but with the

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New Testament, like the Chester Beatty papyri, for example, there's a number, and that's dated around 180, so that has huge portions of the

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New Testament within it, and that's only dated to 180, I guess that'd be about 150 years or so from the writings themselves.

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So to back that up, we don't have translations of translations of translations.

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We actually have the Greek, and as following Irmin here, it's the best -attested of all sources of antiquity of what we have.

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So it's not translations of translations. We can see the original language, and then the question is, okay, are we translating it?

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Fine, and that's a different question altogether, but we have to know what they said, and we do know what they said, and we know the language in which they said it, which was

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Greek, so we have those writings preserved. And again, with the differences in the text, that was the third point.

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Yes, the majority are spelling mistakes. The second type are, they're called meaningful, but not viable, and what that means is, like, if I have a source, say one, there's an example from Luke that says, uh, blessed for you if you are persecuted, and that's all, and then stops, full stop.

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And the other manuscripts say, blessed are you if you are persecuted for my name's sake, so, you know, anybody could say they're persecuted.

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They're going to be blessed if something bad is happening to them, but if I'm being arrested for a crime I committed, well, I'm not being blessed there.

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Like, that's a punishment. So it's, again, we're being blessed for Jesus's sake.

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Now, that manuscript in Luke, that dates to around the 10th century, so it's a couple hundred years after the fact.

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We have other sources earlier that have the text preserved, so we could see here the scribe probably just assumed for Jesus's sake and kept kept on writing.

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I got it. So, meaningful difference to the text, but it's not viable, and so we know that we can be very confident that the scribe just assumed it.

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Yeah. And then the third one are differences that may make a difference, and so one the two biggest examples are,

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I'll just say the biggest one is in Mark 16, 9 to 15, and you'll see if you're interested, by the way, in a collection of notations where these copies are different, you just look in your

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Bible. Most Bibles have footnotes, so if you're looking for a collection of these differences in the manuscripts where there maybe is some question, you just look to a

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Bible. Most Bibles have footnotes and say early manuscripts do not contain this verse, or it will say something along the lines of some don't, or whatever the case may be, but Mark 16, 9 and following is one of those verses, and there's a lot of debate on the end of Mark as it is, but that's the bigger sections, but all those verses in Mark 16, 9 and following we find elsewhere in the

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New Testament. So both Ehrman, again not a Christian, and Dan Wallace have comments to the effect that there's no major doctrinal change in Christianity because of any of those differences.

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All the essentials of Christianity remain the same, so those are all good news for us. Dan Wallace puts it this way, there's no churches, there's no schools, no one's making any major changes because of a textual difference.

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There's nothing there that's significant. That's definitely reassuring, Ben. I feel like for me, my mind goes to the nth degree of like, well, you know that those spelling changes add up, and you get to a point where now you're interpreting a verse entirely different, and we're so far from the original verse, but you know, if these scholars and agnostics are saying that there's really no impact on the faith as a whole because of a few spelling differences, then we can kind of feel like, green light go, you can keep going.

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Yes. I'm tempted here. Hang on. Pull it out. Let's see the books. Let's just get it.

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We'll just read the quote. That way we have it, and I'll have to trust on my memory. No viable variant affects any cardinal truth of the

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New Testament. So that's Dan Wallace. He also goes on to say, the text is certain in all essentials, and even in most particulars, we can be relatively sure of what the autograph says.

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So that's great. That's Dan Wallace. Now, Ehrman says, textual scholars have enjoyed reasonable success at establishing to the best of their abilities the original text of the

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New Testament. Indeed, barring extraordinary discoveries or phenomenal alterations in method, it is virtually inconceivable, virtually inconceivable, that the character of our great

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New Testament will ever change significantly. Oh, wow. So that's pretty, you know, that's a strong comment there.

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And I believe he also has another comment somewhere. He does. He makes a comment. It's in one of his books, too, that he makes a comment in agreement with Dan Wallace, but really it's with Metzger, that there's no cardinal truths of Christianity that are changed because of these differences.

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So again, you can be confident there. One of the things I should note with our ministry at CORE Apologetics, the mission of our ministry is to help build disciples and minister to those who are doubting.

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Now, I'm bringing this up for a reason, because when we have doubts or questions, questions and doubts can be the same thing.

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So when I came to Liberty, I had factual questions. Does that mean I was a doubter? I don't know. But the discipleship and apologetic answers, they like blend together.

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And so, you know, if I'm wanting to know if Paul wrote Corinthians, that's a discipleship question and an apologetic question.

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But then dealing with doubts, there's certain types of doubts. So those are like factual doubts, but then you have emotional doubts, which is the most common type.

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And they typically look like what -if questions. They typically will start with a what -if. And so someone could go, but what if there is some secret hidden difference?

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What if, what if, what if? So now when you start asking those types of questions, you're moving away from the evidence and moving into this hypothetical world of what -ifs.

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What if, you know, you can pick it. I'm going to restrain myself on my what -ifs. But you can imagine anytime you say the scenario automatically, like what if I made it to the

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NHL? Like things would be different. But that's not reality. That's just a what -if scenario where all the facts have changed.

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So it's fine to ask those questions, but you can't live there. We have to live with what we have. And so what we do have, like Herman said, barring any crazy discovery, our text probably is not going to change.

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So we don't have to live in those what -ifs. We can go, OK, we're confident that's what it said. But now we've got to start getting to, OK, was it trustworthy what they said?

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Were they accurate? Were those sorts of questions? Yeah. Yeah. Let's get into the genre of it. It says that you fit the

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Gospels within the category of Greco -Roman. What does that mean? What do you mean by that? And why is that even relevant to this?

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Isn't it just like, these are the Gospels of Jesus. Why do we need to put a genre on it? Right. Well, because God, so genre helps us interpret whatever text or media we have before us, whether it's a writing, a movie, whatever.

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So if you go and watch Apollo 13, you understand, OK, this is supposed to be a historical rendition of an actual event of actual people.

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If you go and watch Star Trek, you're interpreting it wildly differently than you are Apollo 13.

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And so that's out of the gate, an important difference. Even if, say, Mike Licona uses this analogy a lot.

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I like it. But in Apollo 13, they take some license there to concisely state what happened over a prolonged period of time, because you're only watching the movie in like two hours, whereas this was a couple of days in which the events happened.

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And they said failure is not an option. That's Gary Sinise's line in the movie. But they never actually say that in the movie or in the engineer's room.

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But that was the ethos of the place. So we can understand, OK, they're taking some license there.

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It's not exactly false, but we know they didn't actually say, OK. But when you go and watch

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Star Trek and hear Beam Me Up, you're like, OK, this is just checking out for a minute and we're going to enjoy this world.

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So it's a totally different appreciation. So one is trying to be faithful to the past. The other is not.

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And we know that in both of those. And it's the same thing with writings of antiquity. There were novels. There were all sorts of romances and tragedies that could be written that would be understood.

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But biographies were different. Biographies were supposed to be aimed at conveying truthful historical events.

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That doesn't mean that the author is not going to have bias or anything like that. But the point is that they're aimed at truth.

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They're aimed at historical events. And more importantly, especially with the Gospels, they were written so close to the actual events themselves that they were even more expected to be historically accurate, because it's a lot different if you're writing historically about someone 300 years ago.

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For example, like Alexander the Great, our earliest biographies of him come centuries after his life. Centuries.

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But with Jesus, we're talking decades, depending on who you ask and what dates. Yeah, it's almost like a written live stream of like what was actually happening.

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It's written so close. But when it comes to these Greco -Roman biographies, how does that differ to like Jewish genres?

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Because I understand that like every book of the Old Testament, like I said, I'm very deep in Old Testament right now. And so you've got like historical narratives and you've got poetry and you've got all of these things.

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How does the Gospels, how do they compare to that? Right. So this isn't anything new for me, by the way.

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Ben Shaw did not invent this. This is built out a lot of... Richard Burrage wrote a book called

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What Are the Gospels? And that's essentially been considered the definitive work on the Gospels are

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Greco -Roman biographies. And that's important because there was some debate in the 70s and 80s on what genre are they?

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And he was going to argue they're not biographies. You guys are all wrong. And then he got convinced, oh, you guys are actually right.

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I think they're biographies too. Now, one of the things why I bring him up is because one of the things he highlights is that in the

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Jewish writings of that time, you start to ask, well, how many Jewish biographies do we have of rabbis, of rabbis?

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Let me specify, of rabbis. Because you write a biography to show why you would emulate someone or why you should follow after them, why they should be your role model.

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So the Gospels do that for Jesus because we're supposed to follow after Jesus. But there's no rabbinic biographies because if you do that, it could be considered a form of idolatry.

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It was only supposed to show how when you talk about the rabbis, their teachings or what they say, how it reflects the law.

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But when it comes to Jesus, when they write the Gospels to follow Jesus because he is the embodiment and the living of the law.

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So this is Richard Burrage's point. And it's very profound. And that's how I felt when I first came across it, too.

26:27

Oh, that's a good point. I had never thought about this argument or this even consideration that by the very nature of the genre they chose, they were saying something about Jesus.

26:38

Oh, my gosh. These aren't even like questions that you'd have to defend in like an atheist Christian argument. Like this is so meta right now.

26:45

Oh, my gosh. Oh, my gosh. But you're right. When you bring up that point, it's like, well, you haven't even thought about this, but this does further support it.

26:52

Yeah, it's another angle to it. And again, it just supports to this understanding of Jesus's deity that again, because if there's no rabbinic biographies, why is there no rabbinic?

27:03

Well, because if you're telling me I got to go follow Gamaliel, are we not idolizing Gamaliel at this point?

27:09

Yeah, we don't want to do that. No, we certainly don't. But why don't we do it for Jesus? It's a little different. So that's another aspect of the genre, too, that's important.

27:19

Yeah. Okay. Wow. Thank you for that. I feel like these are so helpful, because I only have like my surface level questions, like what

27:27

I asked before. I'm like, well, translations can go off the deep end. And you're like, it's so much deeper than that, Kaz.

27:34

Translations are so, yeah, the copies of the copy, like it's very good. We have, I've been using this analogy. I wish if someone's good at blockchain, that'd be very helpful for me, because I just, this is my modern day analogy.

27:44

But if I understand blockchain correctly, you have all these computers agreeing on the transactions.

27:51

Well, we have all these copies of the New Testament that testify to what the original said. So if there's a divergent text, all the others testify against it and pull us back to this copy.

28:03

So I'd be interested to know if that's like a good, seems like a good analogy. I just don't know enough about that technology. Like it would be so painfully obvious that that divergent.

28:11

Right, right. Got it. So we have the copies, we're good there. And then it's just a matter of the translations.

28:17

How do we translate them? And that's why people can go, hey, look, let's just go just, you can go learn Greek and then you can, you can translate it yourself.

28:23

That's really how you could do it. Yeah. And I have an episode on that for those who haven't listened anyways, moving on.

28:30

So again, this is another topic where I'm like, I didn't even think about this is like, are these written anonymously?

28:35

Like I thought, and again, like in my Sunday school mind, which is how I like to refer to this is like Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.

28:42

Those are the authors. We got the name right on those, but this is up for debate that they didn't write them simply because they didn't say, hello, it's

28:51

Mark. I'm not going to talk about this. I didn't even realize that you had to do that, that people could use that as a loophole to say, see, anybody could have written about this guy,

29:00

Jesus, and it's not even Mark. So everything you believe is actually false. How did that come about?

29:06

Yeah. So there could be, and just like today, here's my modern day, silly example. I was thinking in my head one day, too much free time on my hands that I was going to write a book on etiquette.

29:15

Yeah. Hockey guy writing a book on etiquette and just modern day etiquette. I would love to hear the slang in that one.

29:22

It would be under the pseudonym written by a guy named Ed D Cut. Hilarious.

29:28

So yeah, that's, people do, they do, I'm going to try to say the name and I've had too much coffee now.

29:36

You can write under a false name or a pen name or something like that. And people would do that in antiquity too. There's a bunch of writings we have where we know it's not by say

29:44

Enoch or something, someone like that. So they can attribute a name to somebody that wasn't actually the author of that name.

29:51

Yes, we just discussed this. This is so tempting. You said the old Testament there. So yeah, there's a number of those. I got the old

29:56

Testament pseudepigrapha right out over there myself. And there's a bunch of those types of writings, but yeah.

30:02

So in Paul's writings, because they're letters, by the way, speaking of genre, there's very few,

30:08

I don't know of any actually off the top of my head, holy books or scriptures that contain in -house letters among their members.

30:14

But we have Paul's letters to the different churches. So that genre there is rather unique. But also in Paul's letters, you do a typical thing, like when we were doing emails to set this up, hey

30:23

Ben, and then you sign your name. And then I respond back, hey, and I sign my name. So back then they just did it at the front.

30:30

Paul writes this letter to you and we see Paul's greeting in a number of letters. Well, the Gospels as biographies, they're a little bit different.

30:37

Now, very similar to my book, my name's on the front, but I don't think my name is in the body anywhere in the book.

30:45

I mean, my name may be in there, but I don't think anywhere in the book, I say, I, Ben Shaw, write this book. So you can know that there's ways to know who the author is without it actually saying,

30:53

I, Ben Shaw, author this book. And there's actually a number, there's Greek sources that do that. So it's not, again, like it's just to the

30:59

Gospels. So in the Gospels, we don't have anywhere it says like, I, Matthew, write this Gospel, like you said.

31:05

But what we do have is within the first a hundred years or so, Simon Gathercole, he's a brilliant scholar.

31:14

He has an article that highlights about 16 references to the authors of the

31:20

Gospels within the first hundred years. I'm sorry, say that again. He has an article in which he lists all the different sources that attribute the authorship to the

31:32

Gospels. So Matthew writing Matthew, Mark writing Mark, so on. And so that's our first, well, let me even back up before that.

31:39

So we have no, they don't say Matthew, Mark in the Gospels. So how do we know it's

31:45

Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John? That's the good question. The same way my book doesn't say it, doesn't say Ben Shaw wrote this book.

31:51

On the front cover, it says Ben Shaw, and you know that that's the author. No one told you that, it doesn't say author on the front cover either.

31:57

But you just know that's how you interpret the book.

32:03

The same thing in antiquity. They would have ways to identify writings, even if the author wasn't named.

32:09

And one of the ways they would do that is have a tag on the outside of the scroll. They could have a heading saying the Gospel according to so -and -so.

32:16

There's a number of other ancient writers. I believe Plutarch has some anonymous biographies. So they're formally anonymous.

32:23

We want to say formally anonymous because he doesn't say I, Plutarch, or I, Lucian is another ancient writer who has an anonymous work.

32:29

So there's other ancient writers who have, again, formally anonymous. But obviously the culture knew who the authors were.

32:38

People knew. And the same thing, Luke is writing a specific Gospel to Theophilus, to somebody.

32:43

I don't think Theophilus got it one day. It was like, oh, I wonder who sent me this weird letter all of a sudden. Took all the time, money, and effort to write this thing.

32:50

So we have ways in which we can identify them. Again, one way would be a label outside of the scroll.

32:57

One would be you could put a heading on there by Matthew. And that's actually what we have all in a lot of our early sources.

33:04

We have references to them. We also have references from someone like Papias on the early end to Irenaeus of Lyon on the other end.

33:13

And they both refer to Mark and Matthew. Irenaeus lists all four.

33:19

So we have early attestation to Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John as being the authors.

33:26

It's widespread. So that's two. Three, there's no competitors. No one comes up and says, hey,

33:31

Ben wrote Mark. There's no competitors. That's three. Four, if we're to run with the fact that, so I use the phrase formally anonymous before, yeah, formally anonymous, but they're not technically anonymous.

33:45

That's what some skeptics will try to say. Well, if we run with the fact, let's go with that for a minute.

33:50

And let's just say, okay, they were technically anonymous and the gospels are spreading out along the Mediterranean. What are the odds that all these different people in all these different places are going to say, hey,

34:00

Mark wrote this gospel and Mark wrote that gospel. So you got someone in Rome, you got someone in Alexandria, you got someone in Antioch, and they're all coming up with Mark.

34:08

They're all coming up with Matthew. I said we weren't going to talk about miracles, but we're getting pretty close to one if this is where we're having to go here.

34:15

So I think that's a good four -way approach.

34:20

You ride the horse of technical anonymity and see if it leads to nowhere. And then we also have all this positive evidence in favor of the four -traditional authorship.

34:31

Yeah, it definitely leans the latter way. It's almost like everybody gets a text apart, like different parts of the country.

34:36

And everybody gets a text and it's like, we all say it's from the same sender, even though it doesn't say, hello, this is from Cass.

34:42

Right. Yes. Yeah. That's a good modern day analogy there you could use. Again, yeah. You can even understand how different, even just our own country, how there's different parts.

34:51

Why in the world, if it was an anonymous text, even that, why would we all come up and go

34:57

Cassie? Or why would we come up and go someone? Everyone's going to pick different people. I think even in terms of football season, because it's college football season now, people are going to, especially in the

35:09

South, college football is really big. But then in other parts of the country, it's not as big. So you have, there's such different, and that's such a small thing, but how much more so now when we're talking about the gospel in different areas and different cultures in the

35:22

Mediterranean, all coming to the same authorship. Yeah, a hundred percent. People in Alexandria and also people in Greece are saying the same exact thing when they live completely different cultures.

35:32

Yeah. I think for me, that kind of seals the deal, but I'm already bought in. So, you know, it must be hard kind of putting yourself into the non -believers mentality, like really sympathizing with their beliefs.

35:43

So you can really build a substantial argument against it. Do you feel that way? Part of it is I grew up in South Florida. And so I was in the, part of my questions and not being discipled,

35:53

I tried to see things from other people's point of view, a lot growing up. So there's 4 million people in our county. So I try to understand, okay, well, what do you think?

36:00

Like I knew the sermon on the Mount and I trusted Christ as Lord when I heard that, but then seeing other people believe different things,

36:05

I was like, well, what do you believe? Is that true? And most of the time they didn't know. I mean, so it's like, okay, well, that's what they think.

36:11

This is what they think. So I don't necessarily have a, it's not like troubling, but it is important to be able to go, okay, because I don't want to bear false witness about them.

36:19

I want to make sure I'm representing them well. So I'm understanding them. So I want to seek to understand them and then I can present them.

36:25

And then why I think, why I disagree. And then, or if I'm, if I could be wrong on something like with that, the

36:31

Jewish genre of biographies, like that was something I was like, oh, wow. I hadn't even thought about this. I need to evaluate these things.

36:37

So then I can, now he's a believer. So it's a little different. I get that. But, but yeah, part of our minimal facts approach is we're just using what skeptics give us as far as data to show the resurrection.

36:46

So that's just kind of something, Habermas is kind of the same way. So it's not really, I don't know. God's just equipped us that way or our minds that way.

36:54

Yeah. It's what I'm doing. I'm coming with so many questions and I'm like, well, what about this? And my poor scholars and, you know, people that come on are like, oh, well, with that question, here's the solution.

37:03

I'm like, okay, thank you. You guys could never predict, but moving forward, just with the audience expectations, I think

37:08

I love this topic is putting ourselves in the shoes of the original, you know, receivers of the word.

37:16

And what are the expectations there? Like how did they receive and view the new Testament writings? All we know is our 2024 mind.

37:23

So what are the expectations like that they received it? And was it with like, oh, look at this new like article in the newspaper, like entertainment wise, or is it like, oh my gosh, this is like the living word.

37:33

Like, how did they receive it? Yeah. Well, writings back then weren't easy to come by. So that's part of the challenge.

37:39

Constantine famously had had Bibles made and sent out. So Constantine, big ruler, you know, to put it mildly, conqueror of the known land, so to speak.

37:50

And he made a whole total of 50 Bibles. So with all the money and luxury they had, it took everything to get 50

37:58

Bibles made. So getting these things written was not always an easy process. It could be expensive, it could be difficult.

38:05

So when we have those writings, we want to keep them, they want to preserve them. They would often have people read them as well. And so you'd go somewhere, you could hear someone reading one of the letters.

38:14

Polycarp and Ignatius, there's some discussions in there where the letters were being expected to be read and passed on to different groups.

38:22

Yeah, they would get those things. It's not like we are in a luxury of media, as far as, you know, we can watch movies on demand.

38:30

Growing up, it wasn't like that. You know, what's on TV, that's what we get. The weird story is my wife and I got, she's gonna,

38:39

I don't know what she's gonna think of this, but she started watching the 80 biographies of old wrestlers, and she got kind of hooked on them.

38:45

She goes, oh, you know, we should, we should check out some of these old wrestling, you know, the Hulk Hogan era wrestling and things like that.

38:51

So we started watching some of those, because I used to watch that growing up. And it was just funny, because I was telling her, I'm like, look, you had to wait a whole week before you could find out what was going to happen to this guy.

39:01

And so, yeah, you know, that's just such a cheesy and, you know, hockey player of an analogy, how the angel world might have expected a letter from someone.

39:10

But yeah, it's just with computers and electricity and AC for a lot of us, we take a lot of this stuff for granted.

39:17

And we ought to be thankful that we have these opportunities. So for them, just to kind of simplify it, they would have received these writings as like, a real privilege.

39:26

It wouldn't have been like commonplace, everyone knew the Gospels, it was like, if you got your hands on the Gospels, like that was a pretty big deal.

39:33

Yeah, I mean, well, I think too, most of the culture too, couldn't read. I want to say they could read, but they weren't fully literate too.

39:40

So that would be a challenge for many of them. I think they're probably more literate than they get credit for, but they're still largely illiterate.

39:46

So it's an oral culture. And so having one is important. So even Papias, he mentioned, he valued a living voice.

39:54

So if he got to go hear one of them, or someone who talked to the disciples, he was thrilled to do that rather than someone's written report.

40:00

So you actually have some balances, but that's very, very early, like very, very early on. But then as it spreads, people are going to want to see the writings, want to see what

40:07

Paul wrote and said and things like that. So when it comes to the reliability of the New Testament, people had no incentive to change it.

40:14

They wanted to preserve it as is. Yes, that doesn't mean that they're not going to have scribal errors.

40:21

I worked on Habermas's volume three, which was a lot of transcription. I've got a comfortable seat,

40:27

AC, lighting, keyboard, and I had typos left and right in doing it.

40:33

So you're going to have those issues. People typically wouldn't do that. Later on, there's some issues where some people may do those sorts of things, but I'll leave that more to the textual guys to unpack those sorts of issues.

40:43

There's a great book called Myths and Mistakes of Textual Criticism, and they unpack a lot of those things. It's really good.

40:49

I don't think it's too terribly long, maybe around 200 plus pages or so, but they do a good job in that book.

40:56

Okay. Well, moving forward with evidence beyond the text, there are these things that you mentioned called creedal traditions.

41:03

Do you mind giving us a quick little overview on what those are? Yes. I just alluded to them because I mentioned a lot of the culture at that time would have been oral.

41:10

Just like if you're trying to share information with people, you want to make sure they actually have it and know it well, these creedal traditions are what were used.

41:22

When we hear creeds, we're thinking, oh, like the Nicene Creed or something like that, but that's not at all what we're talking about.

41:28

So take that idea and just get it out of your head. That's not what we're talking about. Okay. Yeah. Totally got it. Okay. So when we're talking about New Testament creeds, we are talking about rhythmic or structured statements that could be easily passed on to a group of believers that they could then receive and understand and then pass on to others.

41:46

Like a jingle? Like a jingle. It's very similar. Habermas uses the example, row, row, row your boat, and you already know the rest.

41:54

Everyone's singing the rest of it now because we have these cadences and these little jingles in our heads, because when you have them in rhythmic form, it's easier to memorize them.

42:03

Or when they're structured, it's easier to memorize them. Same thing in the oral culture, kind of like us before we had cell phones and we had to memorize everyone's phone number.

42:10

We try to find ways to memorize someone's phone number and maybe put it to a beat or something. Now we're just like Googling everything.

42:17

So anyway, very important back then to be able to pass those on. And so what we have in the

42:22

New Testament though are preserved oral traditions and they are preserved in writing in the

42:28

New Testament for us. But we don't always catch them because, well, most of us aren't reading

42:33

Greek. Also, they're written. So wouldn't we just take them as - Yes. So since they're written, we pass over the fact that it's formulated, it's structured.

42:44

And so I'll give you some examples here. I'll give you the best one in a minute, but there'd be a number of reasons why they would create these creeds. I already mentioned one, just the teaching part of it.

42:51

You might use it at a baptismal. So creeds go by a number of different names. Kind of like a hymn. They go by hymns.

42:57

Hymns are another, because they'd be something you might sing before baptism or out of service, but they're also communicating theological truths.

43:04

You could give a baptismal confession. They go by the name confession. Kerygma, the kernel of the gospel or the core of the gospel.

43:12

A lot of these creedal statements are the very core and center and essence of the gospel.

43:19

And so, okay, now enough with the names. We're just using creed as a catch -all name because it's just very easy to do that.

43:25

And we understand that they're formulated to be easily memorized. So if they're in the

43:30

Testament, where are they? And how do we identify them? Well, if you can read Greek, you can usually identify the structures. But in the

43:36

New Testament, one of the most studied of all the creeds is in 1 Corinthians 15. And it's very evident that Paul is giving an oral tradition there because he says so.

43:47

He says, I deliver to you that which I also received. So that right away is a cue that he's about to tell us oral tradition.

43:56

Those words delivered and received or passed on and received, those are technical rabbinical words that the rabbis would use when they passed off oral tradition from one person to another.

44:07

Keep in mind, Paul was a Pharisee. So he has this training and this baggage with him. And it's not just using the typical language back then.

44:16

So he's giving us this language that he's about to give us something. And then we read 1 Corinthians 15, starting on verse three.

44:22

Well, let me even back up. 1 Corinthians 1, Paul says that he's reminding the church in Corinth of the gospel that he gave to them.

44:30

So it's the gospel. It has the power to save if they believed in it. And then he goes,

44:35

I deliver to you that which I also received as of first importance. So gospel, power to save, first importance.

44:43

Kerygma, right? That's what we're talking about. He goes on to say that Jesus died for our sins according to the scripture and that he was buried and that he was raised on the third day according to the scriptures and that he appeared to Peter.

44:55

And then he goes on to list a number of people, three groups and three individuals actually. And so we see there it's structured and a lot of New Testaments now, they're starting to break out these creedal statements.

45:07

So if you look into 1 Corinthians in some Bibles, I think the HCSB for one of them, they will bracket it out. And so it can identify it as a creed for you.

45:15

So then we see here that Paul's giving us this. And what's he giving us? Jesus' death for the forgiveness of our sins and that he was raised again.

45:22

Pretty important. And then he goes on a few verses later to say if Jesus didn't rise from the dead, we're still in our sins and our faith is in vain.

45:28

So he gives us here this creed. Now people go, okay, this isn't like an evangelical argument.

45:34

This is a widely accepted creedal statement. And so you go, okay, well, if it's a creedal statement, when did

45:40

Paul get it? Because he says he received it. So when did Paul get it? Well, in Galatians 1,

45:46

Paul says three years after his conversion, he went to Jerusalem and he wanted to meet with the apostles.

45:53

And he met with Peter and only James, Jesus' brother, was there. So he met with Peter and James.

45:59

So three years after Paul's conversion, a lot of scholars, if you think Jesus died at 30 or 33

46:06

AD, we'll just take 30 for easy math. If he died at 30 AD, Paul's conversion is usually dated to a year or two after that.

46:14

So just say two years. Three years after his conversion, according to Paul in Galatians 1 .18,

46:20

he went to Jerusalem and met with Peter and James. So that's just five years after the cross. That is the location where a strong majority of scholars think

46:29

Paul received, not just this creed, but probably all the creeds he gives us in the New Testament.

46:35

And he could have received them earlier, maybe in Damascus, possibly, but even if he did, he would have confirmed them again in Galatians 1 .18,

46:44

because he's there for a fortnight with, as one person says, Paul was there for a fortnight and we can presume they did more than talk about the weather.

46:53

But the important part is in Galatians 1, he's saying he's there because they're talking about the gospel. First Corinthians 15 is about the gospel.

47:01

I mentioned that there were three individuals mentioned in that first Corinthians 15 who saw

47:06

Jesus. Do you happen to remember off the top of your head who those three individuals were?

47:12

You mean like his mother and Mary Magdalene? No, that's from the gospels. No, I'm not going to be able to tell you.

47:22

Peter, James, and Paul. And those are those game three we find in Galatians 1 .18.

47:29

So a lot of scholars think this is where Paul received those traditions that he then later passes off that we see in his writings.

47:36

So some other creeds are, we've mentioned first Corinthians 15. A couple verses earlier,

47:42

Paul talks about communion and receiving those traditions. I believe chapter 11.

47:48

Romans 1 .3 -4, widely considered to be a creed. Romans 10 .9, if you confess with your mouth that Jesus is

47:55

Lord. And again, these early creeds are also called confessions because these would be things that they would repeat.

48:00

So if you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord. And then Philippians 2 .5 -11 is another one. They consider it a hymn to Jesus.

48:07

Don't have this attitude in yourselves, which was also in Christ Jesus, who although he existed in the form of God did not regard equality with God a thing to be grasped.

48:15

You can sing it. It's okay. Come on. We want people to watch this. So that's another.

48:23

And scholars debate the number of creeds we have in the New Testament because some of them are just more easily identifiable than others.

48:31

But those are all big statements. In each of those, Jesus' resurrection and deity are at the forefront in those discussions.

48:39

And so the creeds again, but now how does that relate to reliability? Okay. Paul's writing is already pretty early.

48:48

His writing to the letter of the church in Corinth was about 55

48:53

AD. So again, Jesus died in 30 AD. So it's about 25 years after Jesus' death.

48:59

But we said Paul got that information five years later, right? Because he converted and then three years later, he went to Peter and James and got this information.

49:09

By the way, in Galatians 2, Paul says he goes to Jerusalem again a few years later.

49:15

And this time, John is there too. And he calls these guys the pillars of the church. And everything again, is real.

49:20

They give him the right hand of fellowship. Paul's preaching the same message that these guys are preaching. And in 1

49:26

Corinthians 11, he also says, whether it is I or they, so we preach and so you believe.

49:32

So again, this uniformity of belief. So now we have this creed information, 1

49:37

Corinthians 15 connected to two big eyewitnesses, Peter and James, Paul as well.

49:44

But if Paul's getting it here, well, Peter and James would have had to have had this information even sooner.

49:50

So scholars date this information we find in 1 Corinthians 15 to the very early 30s.

49:55

Some say within months of the crucifixion, some say within a year, and then some say just broadly early 50s

50:01

AD. And so now you have something early connected with eyewitnesses.

50:07

That's good historical evidence. That's the type of stuff you want. No one goes, oh, I want something later and with less eyewitnesses.

50:13

Just sounds ridiculous. So we don't want to ask for those things. And then when we look at those three, this is just a side note.

50:21

One of the minimal facts is that the disciples were willing to suffer and die for their beliefs. We have first century evidence that Peter, James, and Paul were all willing to suffer and die for their beliefs.

50:32

So that again adds yet another layer of reliability to their accounts.

50:40

Yeah. And it also excuses any reason for them to embellish or just like come up with something.

50:46

Because when I think of like jingles that people sing, it's almost these like Irish pub jingles where it's like so like such a hyperbole and it kind of goes off the rails of like what really happened.

50:56

And so how did these like hymns, if we're going to call them that, hymns and jingles and creedal traditions, how did that avoid kind of going off of like,

51:03

Jesus was the largest in the land and the best of all, you know, like, do you know what I mean? Like, how did it stay pure?

51:09

Yeah, so those wouldn't have been a couple of things because they're not all they're not all hymns. So some of them would have been hymns like the

51:14

Philippians 2 is considered to be a hymn. But some of them were confessional statements, the type of thing you would have said before being baptized.

51:20

So you're affirming that you actually understand what it is you're believing, what it is you're doing, and we want to make sure you have it.

51:26

And then Paul's also talking about a formal tradition of passing on and handing off so that you can then do the same.

51:32

So it's not something that that is going to go left unchecked, controls on it.

51:38

And there's some different discussions on that as well. But they're going to have controls on it. And again, when Paul comes back 14 years later, it's the same.

51:45

It's the same message. And there was one other element here, but my mind is quickly running.

51:52

Stand by for a good jingle. Just an old hockey puck to the head. I know,

51:57

I know. You mentioned, oh, how do we make sure? Oh, well, they were also with us. Yeah, sorry. Got it. It's back. We're here.

52:03

All right. So in the first off, they were willing to suffer and die. If they were embellishing, they quickly, quickly correct the embellishment in order to avoid dying.

52:11

There's no evidence that any of the disciples recanted their views. That's one. Two, it depends on which element you're talking about.

52:17

Like what would they have embellished? Because you can't just... So this is part of the what if doubting. What if they embellished?

52:23

What's the evidence to suggest that they actually did before I start worrying about that? I need to have some sort of positive evidence. We actually have evidence that they probably didn't because they were willing to suffer and die, like we just said.

52:31

But as I'm glad Andrew Loke, he's a scholar, he's recently been helping to highlight the fact that it wasn't just their physical bodies that they were risking here, but they were risking lying about God.

52:43

And so they wanted to make sure that they were bearing true testimony about God. And Paul even says that in 1

52:49

Corinthians 15, because he says, if the dead aren't raised, we're making God out to be a liar because we're saying

52:54

God raises the dead and Jesus isn't raised. And so they're risking their eternal souls here in a way as well.

53:01

So we don't want to just neglect that. So there's a bunch of... I envy them. That must have been so much pressure.

53:06

And they were being beaten. I mean, Paul's beaten like right out of the gate, but he was also part of that.

53:12

So he could understand because he was part of the persecuting church too. So what's going to cause him to go from,

53:17

Hey, these guys need to go in jail. Like, Oh, wait a minute. They're totally right. No, I was wrong. So those are going to be all different.

53:23

Those are all different threads. And as we see, they start coming together and they can be woven together in a very trustworthy fashion.

53:32

Yeah, definitely gives us strong evidence. Okay. Let's get into some fun stuff, like archeological evidence.

53:38

This is to me fun stuff because I feel like it's what's easy to grasp, you know, where like, if I can see the physical proof of it, then case closed, you know what

53:47

I mean? So what do you think is some of the most archeological finds that are the most convincing for the proof and reliability of the

53:54

New Testament? Yeah. Well, I'll say two things.

54:00

I'll give two, well three. The first is, I think there's a, this isn't a reliability one.

54:05

This is just a funny one, I think for our culture, but there's the temple warning, which is an arch, which has been discovered.

54:12

There's two of them. And on it, it says, and it confirms what scripture says as far as like, um, people not being allowed in a certain portion of the temple.

54:20

But the warning says, if you come across this line, you will have yourself to blame for your ensuing death.

54:25

So I just love the personal responsibility placed on the individual to read the sign. And if you don't, we'll blame yourself because you're going to die.

54:32

So that's not really a trustworthy one, I guess. I mean, it is, but it's not like super weighty or anything like that.

54:37

I just like it. I like the responsibility. But there's some other good ones like the porticos. A lot of scholars thought, you know, those, it was just, there was an age of skepticism where they thought it was just metaphorical, that John was just using metaphorical language.

54:50

And then the discovery was found like, oh, he's being serious about that. Sir William Ramsey, he's really known for that because he went to disprove the

54:57

New Testament. He bought into that skeptical line of thinking, went to all the sites, saw them and goes, oh wow, they were actually right.

55:02

I've got to correct myself here. So the archeological discoveries have been really helpful there. Most recently,

55:07

I think it was 2021 or so, early 2020s, there was a discovery made, and this has been going around recently,

55:15

YouTube and different channels as well. But there's a discovery of a mosaic that says Jesus is God on it.

55:21

So that's, that's very powerful, which I was talking to someone about the other day and I didn't realize though, it does help to show too that a lot of money, time was put into that.

55:32

And so it wasn't this thing that accidentally fell together to spell out Jesus is God. And so those beliefs must have been there and they're in force to have that.

55:41

So I thought that was kind of a neat little extra component to that. And that's dated to about 220

55:46

AD. So about a hundred or so years before Constantine, we see Jesus being worshiped as God there.

55:53

We also have, we've got, yeah, there's a whole bunch of other evidences that keep backing that up. So that's one.

55:59

And then the Shroud of Turin is always an interesting and fun one. I don't think I talk about that in the book. The Shroud of Turin, which many believe to be the burial cloth of Jesus.

56:09

And so that's a very interesting topic. I try to stick with subjects or discoveries that you don't need to see in the book because it's all text, but that's one that's a good visual.

56:20

There's a bunch of great photos online of it. There's really no natural explanations for it at present. And do you feel like that's what most of the debates are about is how it happened?

56:29

Yeah. Yeah. Rather than the reliability of it. It's more so, it's not like, oh, was this the cloth? It's more like how the heck did his face get imprinted?

56:36

Yeah. Well, they're interrelated discussions. There's a scholar, Tristan Casabianca. He came to Liberty and spoke here, but he's done a number of different articles on the

56:45

Shroud. And he's interesting because he got convinced after, he wasn't a believer. And then as he started studying the

56:51

Shroud, he became a believer along the way, which is pretty interesting. But he's also part of the reason why the old 1988 carbon dating has been rejected or dismissed.

57:00

Because there were some flaws in the dating and it gets pretty technical, but the medieval dating there now is being questioned.

57:06

And then they're doing some new dating methods that have, I think it's still getting, what's the word?

57:12

It's still getting vetted. But according to this new dating method that looks at the linen, it dates it to the 30s

57:19

AD. So it puts it right there in Jesus' time. It's not the only burial cloth we have. We've different periods of time, but this one has an image on it, which is very unique because the image, each thread, for example, has like 200 fibrils in it.

57:34

The image is only on about three to five of those 200. So it doesn't bleed all the way through like an ink drop would or a paint stroke would.

57:43

It's only on the surface. And it's a 3D image. And there's a whole bunch of super fascinating aspects on it.

57:52

I'm not as well read, but can't, like if I were to just respond in this second, not knowing anything, wouldn't, couldn't it just be like stained blood?

58:00

No, it can't be stained because it's only, there's, there's blood on it. So there's blood all over the cloth. Right. And you can see that and it bleeds right through.

58:08

It's right through the cloth. So, so the cloth is a linen, but each linen is made up of threads.

58:15

And then each thread has 200 fibrils. The image is only on the surface layer of those fibrils.

58:22

Oh my gosh. Yes. It's really an interesting thing. Dr. Habermas has written a couple of books on it.

58:28

And he's done a couple of debates on it too. And he's funny because he'll say, you know, people ask him if he thinks it's authentic or not.

58:35

And he'll go, you know, depends on what kind of day you ask me. If I'm feeling kind of good, I'll say it's like 80 to 90%.

58:42

If I'm feeling kind of crabby at 70 to 80%. So he's, he's pretty strong on it. Obviously if it's not the burial cloth, that doesn't change anything about Christian.

58:49

But if it is, we're looking at a picture of the resurrection. Yeah. So yeah.

58:55

And Jesus's face. Wow. Okay. Well, I don't want to take up too much time. Like this hour flew by.

59:02

Oh my gosh, this was such a good discussion. I've learned so much, but I do have leftover questions if you want to stay for like 10 more minutes.

59:09

Okay, cool. Well, we talked about archeology. There is this concept of undesigned coincidences, but there's also the spiritual life and transformation of like the impact that this had on the communities that were interacting with trustworthiness, that they actually were transformed by this living word.

59:24

Which one would you prefer to talk about? Let's do, let's do, you said undesigned coincidences or spiritual transformation?

59:32

Yeah. Spiritual transformation. All right. Let's talk about that. So the impact of the new Testament on individuals, communities, it is consistent with trustworthiness because they transformed by it.

59:43

Do you mind going in a little bit further on that? Yeah. We want to make nuances too, because there's a lot of books that change people, right?

59:50

And so, okay. So that doesn't alone necessarily make it true or something like that. A lot of books have changed people for the bad.

59:56

So we're not, and that's not the argument we're trying to make. What we are saying though, is if what the new

01:00:02

Testament says is in fact true, and Jesus is who he said he was, and the Holy Spirit is working through the church and through believers, then we should see effects in the world because of it.

01:00:14

If there were no effects and no people were changed, then that would be an argument against the new

01:00:20

Testament. But we don't see that. We see all sorts of spiritual transformation throughout generations.

01:00:27

But even in our own day, this is where I tried to kind of have more of the focus. But you have guys like Peter Hitchens, who's

01:00:33

Christopher Hitchens' brother. If you guys aren't familiar with him, Christopher Hitchens was one of the four horsemen new atheists.

01:00:40

He had passed away, but he was a very dogmatic, very outspoken atheist. But his brother Peter is a

01:00:46

Christian, but he too was very skeptical. And then one day he said he became a Christian and the fear of God just overwhelmed him.

01:00:53

And so this spiritual transformation is evident in his life. So he has this direct,

01:00:58

I call it direct evidence of the Holy Spirit working in someone's life. Now, non -believers might go, well, yeah, okay.

01:01:06

I can't testify. How do I verify that? But you can verify it in the fruits, in his fruits of his life after the fact.

01:01:13

Was his life transformed? And it was. It was dramatic. He's a different person.

01:01:19

And that gets multiplied over. Funny, talking about those WFAD biographies, there's a couple guys in there where that same thing happens to them, where they mentioned that they get saved.

01:01:29

And some of the guys who, I don't know if they're believers or not, they're like, yeah, some people says he found Jesus. And yeah, all

01:01:36

I can tell you is who he was after he found Jesus was not who he was before. So that's an indirect testimony to the changed life.

01:01:44

So we have this direct testimony that people experience. Augustine may be a historical example.

01:01:50

Many of the listeners can testify to their own. But then we also have those who are non -believers who look and say, wow, yeah, there is a difference there.

01:01:58

Tom Holland is an example I use. He wrote the book Dominion, and he talks about how he kind of grew up in the church, but faded away.

01:02:05

Are we talking about Tom Holland, the actor? Not Spider -Man, the historian. Oh, I was about to say, whoa! Good distinction.

01:02:12

I usually say that too. So he writes a book and he's studying the ancient

01:02:19

Romans and Greeks. And he's like, oh, yeah, those guys are great. That's where I get a lot of my beliefs from. And then he starts studying them and he goes, these guys are horrific.

01:02:27

They have no problem enslaving and murdering people by the millions. When I look at Jesus and I look at Paul's teachings, that's a lot more at home for me.

01:02:36

So he has this indirect recognition for him where he's like seeing these lives changed and how not just our community, like he sees now the fruits of their writings in our society today.

01:02:50

But in his book Dominion, he impacts how it occurs throughout Western history. So those are additional examples.

01:02:57

Well, just to play devil's advocate, like can't you say that's just really good writing? Like I read the

01:03:03

Twilight books and I was forever changed after that. Right. And that's why I nuanced it at the beginning. It's not conferring reliability on the

01:03:10

New Testament, but it's consistent with it. So it doesn't make it reliable, but it's consistent with it being reliable.

01:03:17

Got it. Okay. That was a good distinction. Okay. Because we're not questioning the vampires. And that was the point at the beginning.

01:03:23

A lot of books have changed people, not always for the good. A lot of movies have changed people, not always for the good.

01:03:28

And so those are things we want to take into account. We don't want to neglect that. I mean, it's just a fact of life.

01:03:35

Wow. That was a lot. I'm sure you're just like the best at birthday parties when people are like, in the

01:03:41

Bible, you're like, are you ready? Do you have 30 minutes? I do magic tricks at birthday parties.

01:03:48

Exactly. Well, for someone that is kind of starting off, this was super in depth. This went to a level that I wouldn't even think to question if I was doubting the

01:03:56

New Testament. So for someone who's trying to build up a set of arguments to use within their artillery of first Peter 3 .15,

01:04:04

if they have a friend that's like, I think it's unreliable. I think it's not true.

01:04:09

Where could someone at my level, at the beginning, where could they start? Obviously with your book, obviously, but anywhere else?

01:04:17

Yeah, no, that's a good question. So yeah, there's a two angled response, a two pronged response to that, because if I'm looking to understand the

01:04:25

Bible more deeply, these are questions like, oh, I didn't realize this connection or this connection. I've got these blind spots.

01:04:31

And so we can help unpack them for one another. So that's a good thing. But then also, then how do we apply that to when people are asking us questions or maybe challenging us?

01:04:40

So there's kind of two different approaches there and that the context is going to change. One of the things we've done is with Core Apologetics is we have online classes where we do this live in a classroom.

01:04:53

So I teach online. I know what discussion boards are. I'm sure many of your listeners are like, oh, I love discussion boards because they're super easy.

01:05:00

They're cheaper, all that, you know, it's very, but the discussion boards themselves are very awkward and uncomfortable for everybody.

01:05:06

It's like, oh, hey, great job. So we have classes where we do it live through our ministry. The classes are very affordable.

01:05:13

And what we do is, for example, with this book, we go through this book in six weeks. So we do two arguments a week for six weeks and we do it live.

01:05:20

So instead of us doing six or so that we did today in an hour, we do about a half hour on each one and over the course of six weeks.

01:05:26

So you're getting practice, kind of repetitive practice going through these discussions. You're understanding the

01:05:33

Bible better than how to apply it because it's going to look different to different communities. How do we engage those around us as well as our personal makeup, our psychological makeup, all those sorts of things, because the

01:05:43

Ben Shaw 20 years ago dialogued a little different than the Ben Shaw does now. And it just depends on who

01:05:48

I'm talking to as well. Those are different elements, but those are some of the things we do with core apologetics because we want to help equip everyday believers so they don't have to go to master's degree.

01:05:58

They don't have to go get a PhD like I had to do. But hey, here are some of the, we don't want you to feel like you're drowning, but we want you to feel like you're at a buffet.

01:06:06

You have a ton of options here that you can go and take. And then whoever you meet and talk to, now you've maybe you've gone through these 12 arguments and you have this as a resource and you've already had a chance to unpack it.

01:06:17

We have another class where we talk about Jesus's resurrection. We do the minimal facts approach going through that. And we don't do 2000 pages or that's about 2000 pages right there between his two volumes.

01:06:28

But we do that again in six weeks. It's live and we're talking about it, but we're trying to equip believers so that they can be more grounded in their faith, but then also that they can help share their faith.

01:06:38

You have to know the hope that you have within before you can share that hope with others. So otherwise, if you don't understand it, you're going to be kind of confusing to others.

01:06:46

So as we grow in that understanding, we can share it. I'm not saying that sounded like I was, it might've sounded like I was saying, oh, you've got to do reading and all that before you can go and share.

01:06:55

No, you can go and share your faith right away. I'm not saying don't do that, but I am just saying we want to understand that we don't want to have zeal without knowledge.

01:07:02

That's what I'm getting at. So that's what we're looking to do. And again, you shouldn't have to go get a graduate degree or a master's degree to go to do that.

01:07:10

And so that's what we're seeking to do. We're trying to get that stuff out to help equip churches, organizations, and individuals go through these things.

01:07:18

These are core subjects, reliability of the New Testament's very important. There's so many stats out there about if you read your

01:07:23

Bible, even just four times a week, the dramatic change that can have in your life. And that was huge for me. I didn't know how to read my

01:07:29

Bible when I came to Liberty. Didn't know how to do it. And one guy was like, oh, just read three chapters of the New Testament a day.

01:07:34

You'll read it four times in a year. And if you read Proverbs once a day, one chapter a day, you'll read that 12 times in a year.

01:07:40

I was like, oh, I probably look a lot different in a year from then from now. Yeah. Wow. So those are all sorts of things that we can use and we need to be doing.

01:07:51

That's all part of discipleship too, is having our minds transformed so that we can know what's good, acceptable, and perfect and pleasing to the

01:07:58

Lord. But in order to do that, we got to know, we have to read Scripture. We work on doing encouraging, again, knowing that the resurrection is something that happened.

01:08:08

It's not just some distant event, but it has effect and significance now. It gives us meaning and purpose in what we're doing today, which is very encouraging for myself.

01:08:17

I'm sure for other people who struggle with, oh, what's the meaning? What's the point of this? I used to struggle with that. I was very much

01:08:23

Ecclesiastes. And then we have other classes on dealing with doubt because a lot of people struggle with emotional doubt.

01:08:29

How do you beat this thing? Because it's different because a lot of times facts, they're doing what -ifs, so they're outside of the facts range.

01:08:36

So how do you address those what -if questions? And Philippians 4, 6 -9 gives us some really good advice there. Peter says, cast all your anxieties upon God because he cares for you.

01:08:45

So we talk about those sorts of things. And then we have a discipleship class too. So we just have these core four classes and we go through them.

01:08:52

Yeah. If anyone is interested in that, coreapologetics .com is the place to go. I was just about to say, they're chopping up a bit.

01:08:57

Tell them where to find it. Okay. Is it just that website? Are you guys anywhere else like podcasts and social media?

01:09:05

Where else? We want to start a podcast. We haven't done that yet. I'm on LinkedIn. That's just because my old job,

01:09:12

I had that. So I just kept going there, but we have a Facebook page. We've got an inactive or not very much used

01:09:19

Twitter and Instagram, but we're hoping that'll change. Our focus is really just trying to help equip everyone right now.

01:09:26

And so maybe you could take one of our classes and then do a review for everyone and let them know what you think.

01:09:31

I already have. You were kind enough to share with me one of your classes, which was talking literally about what we discussed today.

01:09:38

So it was so nice to kind of get that reaffirmed and you do it so simply. People are engaged. You have visuals to really match it up.

01:09:44

It's very simple and it's obviously led by people who know what they're talking about. So I wouldn't say that it was too high level.

01:09:51

And that's something that I've personally struggled with and what led me to this podcast. But I feel like had I found

01:09:56

Core Apologetics two years ago, it would have been way more helpful because again, you're being led by people that have

01:10:03

PhDs in this topic and then they're breaking down very easily. So I can already give you a review. It's great. Well, we'll get you the rest of the five other ones on top of that.

01:10:13

That's what we want people to understand. It's very laid back because a lot of times people hear the word apologetics.

01:10:20

They're like, oh, it's academic -y or it's a weird word. And I'm just like, I just want to know. I don't care what I look like.

01:10:25

I don't care what it is. So that's how our goal is. Some of the things that really burden Ron and myself are a lot of Christians don't know what a disciple is.

01:10:34

There's a lot of scary stats on the number of youth pastors with biblical worldviews. But here's another one.

01:10:39

Pastors will, on average, speak to about 8 .8 million non -believers and nominal Christians throughout a year.

01:10:46

Business owners will speak to about 118 million non -believers and nominal

01:10:51

Christians. So who needs to get some extra equipping with these topics? That's a great stat.

01:10:57

And so that's what we're trying to do. And so we're trying to have these classes in a way that is feasible for them to do, because we know people are busy with family, serving at their church, and they have a job.

01:11:09

Who can fit a master's program in there, a PhD? God's calling some people to do that, but not everybody.

01:11:15

A hundred percent. We want to help equip other believers so that they can be faithful and be discipled in their discipline, be disciples in their disciplines, and then at home with their finances, all different aspects of life.

01:11:27

Truly. Yeah, you're doing God's work. It's so great to see what you're doing. And I am hopeful that we collaborate more in the future,

01:11:33

Ben. But for now, for today, thank you so much for giving me so much information, for overviewing your book in 60 minutes.

01:11:40

But like you said, I could probably read it in like two hours. So thank you for making it simple for me and my listeners. I really appreciate you coming on the show.