Apologetics Session 7 - The Bible - Part 3

Prayer and Overview of the Session

All right, I'll open us in prayer. We're God. Thank you for this day. Thank you for these men who've come out to hear more about the Bible. God, I just ask that you would bless this time. I hope us all to learn more and have a good discussion.

Thank you for this church and for the excitement that we have for apologetics. God I pray all these things in Christ's name. Amen. Amen. All right, so this is the hopefully last session for this particular topic.

I think Drew's gonna follow on after this with some archaeological stuff, but We've thus far gotten through manuscript evidence for the Old Testament. And just the the sheer volume of that we've gone through manuscript evidence for the New Testament and the volume of that and.

And also some of the circumstances by which those manuscripts were found. Which I think are pretty pretty interesting you know when people are you know at a Monastery and see a bunch of papers in the trash and they end up rescuing ancient biblical manuscripts.

I think that's pretty interesting. So we went through the formation of the Canon and the timeline. I know we rushed kind of through that towards the end of the last Session, but we see that the 27 books that we have for the New Testament Essentially were settled You know around the late 300s early 400s a .d.

And so that brings us to one topic that we weren't able to get to last week, which is the questions of other books accepted by other traditions. I can't go through all of them. It would take far too much time for us to go through like literally every book.

That that is that is thought to be That wasn't included in the Canon, but people have thought should be included in the Canon. So I wanted to kind of pick one that that we could talk about that's probably Relevant for the area of the country we live in which is the Apocrypha.

The reason I chose the Apocrypha is because the Catholic Church Acknowledges or brings into Canon certain books of the Apocrypha and Since we live in a fairly heavily Catholic area up here in New Jersey I figured it would probably be one that would be interesting to all of you.

But obviously there's a lot of other books that aren't considered inspired or Weren't included in the Canon of Scripture. That you know we could dive forever into into the rabbit hole of that so For those of you who don't know what the Apocrypha is.

It is extra books of the Old Testament. It was written. It was supposedly written in the silent 400 years between Malachi and Jesus. So this would have been after the Old Testament our Old Testament was completed.

And the Roman Catholics have accepted seven Apocryphal books. And it was decided to include those in the Canon at the Council of Trent in between 1545 and 1563 so it's relatively Late obviously right the Old Testament was completed a long time ago, and you know 15 you know so what?

15 So like 1 ,900 years almost 2 ,000 years right they they decided to include some of these books. So the books in the Apocrypha are things like first and second Esdras I think I'm pronouncing that correctly Tobit Judith.

Another book called the rest of Esther. A book called the wisdom of Solomon. A book called Ecclesi Ecclesiasticus. A book called Baruch with the epistle of Jeremiah. A Book called the song of the three children.

A book called the history of Susanna, which was added to Daniel. Another book Bell in the Dragon, which was also added to Daniel. A book called the prayer of Manassas and first and second Maccabees. So the question is why did the Roman Catholic Church decide to include certain books?

Into their canon, I think you know if they're if they're in 15 in the late 1500s mid -1500s. Deciding to include these it's probably important to know why right after all that time. Does anyone know off the top of your head except for Rich Ventura?

You're not allowed to answer questions. You know too many things so you're not a lot of it. Anyone know huh?

Jack do you know? Yes, take a guess to try and back up their wrong theology.

The Catholics did include some of these books as canon. One of the reasons why Is because it justifies some of their doctrines. The Roman Catholics believe in Praying for the dead right. And so they have in second Maccabees 1245 Is is a passage that bolsters prayer for the dead.

This by the way is refuted by Luke 16 25 through 26. Again, this documents going out to everybody so you guys want to dig deeper into into this stuff. You'll certainly have an opportunity to do that. The second is giving alms for the forgiveness of sin.

The Roman Catholic Church had a You know you can essentially pay the church Pay the church off for your sins and that was bolstered in Tobit 12 9 is is where That was. That was sort of underscored for for the Catholic Church.

So why did the early church fathers and why should we now not include these books. I mean how do we know they're not Inspired or scriptural.

Using the keepers of the Old Testament scriptures, and they never considered these books.

Inspired that is that is the that is actually the first reason I have in here. It said the Jews never recognized it as scriptures including when Jesus was alive. Jesus and the Apostles never quoted from them.

Right. So Josephus said we have not therefore a multitude of books disagreeing and conflicting with one another which the Greeks Did but we have only 22 which contain Contain the record of all time and are justly held to be divine.

So Josephus who is a Jewish historian Basically said that you know we don't have All these books that are disagreeing and conflicting with one another so in this quote He was talking about the Jews only having 22 books.

Again remember the Old Testament was broken down differently for The Jews than our than our Christian Old Testament is based on the way that they combined certain books so our 39 books are Are actually included in all of this and so Josephus then also broke down The sections so he said you know we don't have all these books disagreeing with each other.

We have only 22, and then he said he said He broke it down in a later statement saying five books of law written by Moses 13 books covering the time from Moses to King Artaxerxes and four books containing hymns and precepts for the conduct of a human life.

So again remember that that they broke down the Old Testament differently, but even Josephus Doesn't reference the 24 books that we talked about in the very very beginning of this session. He left two of them out, and there's some speculation as to why he did that.

Some say he may be excluding Esther's or Ecclesiastes. That may not have been considered canon at the time of Josephus. Some speculate that Josephus combined the books together than other Jewish Historians or rabbis did but in either case it doesn't include any of the books of the Apocrypha.

The second reason that we shouldn't consider the Apocrypha scripture is Because Jesus didn't consider the Apocrypha scripture so since the Apocrypha would have been written in the 400 years between you know Malachi the silent 400 years between Malachi and the New Testament Jesus would have surely known about the Apocrypha but in Luke 24 44 Jesus said then he said to them.

These are my words that I spoke to you while I was still with you. That everything written about me in the law of Moses and the prophets and the Psalms must be fulfilled. So Jesus here actually made a point to actually call out the sections of the Old Testament, right?

He called out the if you remember all the way back to the two weeks ago I guess we talked about the Tanakh we talked about the Torah which is the first five books the Nevi 'im and the Ketuvim which were the the writings and the The prophets right so we had.

We had those those three sections called out here by Jesus as well and also in Matthew 23 35 Jesus said so that you may come all the righteous. So that you may come all the righteous blood shed on earth from the blood of the righteous Abel to the blood of Zechariah the son Of Barakaya whom he murdered between the sanctuary and the altar again.

He's talking about events that happened right, so in this statement Jesus is Talking to the Pharisees and it covers the time from Abel Genesis right through the time of Zechariah and Chronicles who lived in the time of Malachi.

So so Jesus in those two statements seems to be very clearly talking about the sections of the Old Testament. Which did not include any of the apocryphal books and also the time period right from from all the way in the beginning right the the son of Adam and Eve all the way to the time of Malachi and then the third reason is because the New Testament nowhere validates Anything from the Apocrypha.

So never is it quoted in the New Testament, right? And the Old Testament actually is Quoted from the New Testament. No books from the Apocrypha were ever quoted. The New Testament contains 263 quotations and 370 allusions being a reference to but no mention of the Apocrypha and.

Then finally the final reason why we shouldn't consider the Apocrypha Inspired scripture is because the Apocrypha itself shows itself to be uninspired in the prologue to Ecclesiasticus. Ecclesiasticus.

It's a hard time a hard time pronouncing that. It actually says. In the prologue it says pardon any errors within this book so The prologue to the book itself says that it is not inerrant, right? It says please pardon any errors.

So right there, it's it's showing itself not to be if you remember we talked about the way R .C. Sproul Talked about inspiration. You know, he said that that is inspired. Therefore it is infallible. Therefore it is inerrant.

It's inspired. It's breathed out by God. It is therefore it has no fault. Therefore it can have no error. And so if you have a book that says please pardon any errors by definition, it can't be inspired.

The Apocrypha is actually filled with historical geographical and chronological mistakes. It's filled with a number of moral errors. So it just doesn't have the same quality as the rest of the Old Testament.

Jewish canon one such example is in Tobit 1 4 and 1 10 where Tobit claimed to live in the time of David and Claimed to be carried away in captivity to Assyria. These two events are separated by more than 200 years.

And that is about 40 years longer than he said. He supposedly lives so he supposedly lived to be about 162 or something. But these two events that he said he lived during. Were separated by 200 years.

So that's that is a chronological error as well.

Yeah, go for it. Question about the other multiple copies of that that were found or I didn't dig into the manuscript evidence for the Apocrypha.

You know, you could go down a rabbit hole on any of this on any of this stuff, but You know, I didn't really go into like the textual evidence for the Apocrypha. I think that that both the Chronological errors the You know claim of having errors in it are enough to disqualify it regardless of how many copies I mean we have.

You know, what is it 643 copies of Homer? That doesn't mean it's inspired or scriptural. There could there could very well be a lot of copies a lot of manuscript copies. I just don't know.

Go for it. Yeah. So since the Apocrypha was used to back up doctrine one of the reasons I guess probably the main reason why they use it to Doctrine is there a part of the Apocrypha that backs up Purgatory and.

Elevation of Mary there is I took again. I'm Earlier, this is like a frosting. We could we could probably spend an entire week or multiple weeks just digging into the Apocrypha. I think purgatory's of Maccabees.

Yeah, I think purgatory's of Maccabees as well. But but yeah, there's there there is Mary would've been after that. Yeah, but they elevate they certainly. So by no means were the examples that I gave Comprehensive right there.

There's certainly additional examples that you can probably pull out for why these books because again The Roman Catholic Church pulls in seven books. I only referenced two. I referenced Tobit and I referenced I think it's second Maccabees so, you know out of there's a reason why they brought all seven of those in and it was primarily to To under underpin some of their their other doctrines.

And there's certainly more doctrines that that are supported by the Apocrypha for the Roman Catholic Church. But what I was really going after was well, okay great. We know why they did it, but why shouldn't we right, right?

You look at. And and these are some of the reasons why right the fact that they actually Contradict one another they have errors in them. They have chronological and moral Failures. Yeah, I don't know, you know, I mean the the you know, there's like Tobit wrote Tobit supposedly.

But like I like that don't have this was in the 400 silent years. So we don't have anything in the Bible that would reference it because it was theoretically after the Bible if we were to have anything In the Bible to reference back to the writers of the Apocrypha.

It would have been the New Testament. But like I said, there's no references to it in the New Testament. So.

The book of Enoch is that considered part of the Apocrypha as well or is that kind of outside?

I don't think that's but that is another extra biblical book that has a little. Is it Peter 1st or 2nd Peter?

That makes some sort of reference to you. They're.

There is Jude and there is a reference to it and the book of Enoch is a really interesting book because it adds a lot of sort of Supernatural context to like the Tower of Babel and Like I watched a whole video on on the book of Enoch.

Maybe a couple of videos on the book of Enoch. It's it's pretty interesting. But yeah, it's it's not considered You know canonical for for our Bible the Jews didn't consider it canonical.

Do you mean Jews considered valid history that do some of the Jews consider it to be some valid history?

Potentially yeah, the thing is is there's also questions about whether Enoch wrote it or how long after Enoch was taken up. There's three books of you. Yeah, there's actually three. That's the other thing.

That's the yeah, there's the original and then there's two others that came in there. The span of time between them is like, yeah.

They mean the first one, but yeah, Ivan's right. There's actually multiple. All right, so that kind of sums up The canon that sums up the manuscript evidence so now that we we've seen that we have just an overwhelming amount of evidence for the The accuracy of the Bible we need to talk a bit about textual criticism.

Before I get off is anyone? Looked at what textual criticism is and have a definition. I have one for you know, so it's fine. Anybody know so textual criticism is actually a branch of textual scholarship.

It has nothing to do with the Bible, right? It's basically how historians Will evaluate any historical text the Bible just happens to be one of the historical texts that they're going to to do this with.

So it's a textual. It's a it's a branch of textual scholarship. Philology, it's a big word. And literary criticism that is concerned with the identification of textual variants. Different or different versions of either manuscripts or printed books.

Philology for those of you who don't know because I didn't when I first saw that Is a branch of knowledge that deals with the structure historical development relationship of language or languages. So basically is looking at translations it's looking at ancient texts and it is You know trying to determine What is the what is closest to the original source?

So we talked earlier about manuscripts being copies of Autographs which are the original documents or copies of other manuscripts. Well, obviously you can end up with variants or where a particular text may have been copied incorrectly.

Or some changes were made to it. And textual criticism is a is a branch of scholarship that tries to get back to the original and they use a series of tests for that. So it's used by biblical scholars to determine the best reading of the Old Testament and New Testament to show the accuracy to the original documents.

And they're also concerned with whether or not. So textual criticism gets us back to the original text and then what scholars will do is they'll apply other tests to determine Whether the authors were being truthful in what they wrote.

So they they apply a series of tests to To determine whether or not the authors of the text were concerned with truth. So what they'll what they'll do is they'll look for. You know for ways in which Contents that people are putting in the document and ways in which they're writing things that that would lead them to believe in the cultural Context of the day that it was written whether or not they believe that thing to be true.

So when I ask somebody to look up Luke 1 1 through 4.

Been accomplished among us just as those who From the beginning were. I wouldn't. Eyewitnesses and ministers of the word have delivered them to us. It seemed good to me also having followed all things closely for some time past To write an orderly account for you most excellent theophilus that you may have certainty concerning the things you have been taught.

So in here Luke is saying outright right that he is concerned with making sure that He is writing an orderly account that he has taken. You know he has expended effort to ensure that he has You know got all the information right ready closely followed for some time past.

Right to to go and and determine what actually happened right. Because Luke is sort of I guess some think of him as like the first you know historian right church historian going back in like Interviewing and finding out what actually happened.

Somebody read 2nd Peter 1 16 for me for we did not follow cleverly devised myths.

When we were made known to you the power and the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, but we were eyewitnesses of his majesty.

Right so here Peter is Making a point right. He's saying we actually saw right. We were eyewitnesses to this power. We're not Making this stuff up right the cleverly devised myths. We're not making this stuff up.

We actually saw the power and majesty of Jesus Christ. Somebody read John 1 1 1 rather.

Which was from the beginning which we have heard which we have seen with our eyes Which we looked upon and have touched with our hands concerning the word of life.

How many senses are referenced here? I've seen her. Right so they're going out of their way to say This really happened. Okay. We saw it. We heard it. We touched with our hands, right? Concerning the word of life, right?

So these in these passages the biblical writers are saying we're not making this stuff up. This is not a fictional account, right? This is really what happened. We were eyewitnesses. We saw it. We made we made sure that we recorded it and created an orderly account, right?

This is real. This is real and. So they go out of their way also to provide details that can be verified. Somebody read Luke 3 1.

15th year of the reign of Tiberius Caesar Pontius Pilate became governor of Judea Inherit being Tetrarch of Galilee and his brother Philip the Tetrarch of the region of Iteria and Trachonitis and Lysanias Tetrarch of Abilene.

So what is Luke doing in this passage? Marking time. Marking time, right? He's telling you the exact point you think I like Google Maps you type in an address that puts a little pin. Right where where your destination is he's putting a pin in where you know.

The account that's to follow is right in time. He goes through telling you who was ruling the Empire. Who was the governor of Judea? Who was the Tetrarch of Galilee? Right? What was his brother doing?

Right? There was. There was a lot of specificity there that is that is to make sure that you know. This is when that happened and these things can be validated. People who are reading this could go back and say well what year was that?

Right, so it was it was a way to essentially mark the the the you know Temporal loop locale of where they were in in time for this so. Another way that you can also determine whether or not somebody's telling the truth.

So we've talked about people talking about this is really what happened. This is not fictional. They're going out of their way to make sure that they're saying that this is real. But another way that you can infer that this is real is if they included Things like embarrassing material right in the documents.

Because when people make things up, they generally make things up to make themselves look better. They don't make things up. To essentially make themselves look bad. So can somebody read Mark 14 69 through 72.

14 69 through 72.

And the servant girl saw him and began again to say to the bystanders. This man is one of them. But again, he denied it and after a little while the bystanders again said to Peter certainly you were one of them for your Galilean.

But he began to invoke a curse on himself and to swear I do not know this man of whom you speak and Immediately the rooster crowed a second time and Peter remembered how Jesus had said to him before the rooster crows twice You will deny me three times and he broke down and wept This is Peter.

This is you know The rock on which Christ will build his church, right this is this doesn't make him look very good, right? You know, he obviously he was scared. Right and you can get but like he could have just you know, we could have just excluded this part, right?

Like just leave that part out, right? But no, you know the one of the the marks that That they care about truth is that they record it regardless of how it makes them look, right? And in this case, it makes Peter look very bad, right?

Another example is when Jesus rebuked Peter and called him Satan in Matthew 16 23. Which says. But he turned and said to Peter get behind me. Satan your hindrance to me. So you're not setting your mind on the things of God or on the things of man.

And this was not a joke right this Jesus calling Peter Satan was not you know him messing around. This was a rebuke. This was a harsh rebuke. Right from from Jesus Christ. And others in Matthew 26 36 through 46 when the disciples fell asleep in Gethsemane.

Or when they didn't understand the parable of the sower and mark 4 1 through 12. One final examples in John 20 when the tomb was discovered by women. Right, why wouldn't why wouldn't they write it the disciples discovered the tomb?

Okay. So these are all examples. They don't prove necessarily anything. But they do infer that the writers actually cared about the truth because they were willing to not only write good things about themselves.

But also write things as they happened even if it made them look bad. So these examples make it clear that they cared more about truth than they cared about how they looked. And another reason to believe that the disciples Actually believed that Christ was the Son of God and that this was not you know a made-up story was What it cost them to believe that so I was actually think I kind of knew some of these things but To see them in a list actually shocked me because almost all of them were killed in horrible ways.

And and when you think about it, you're like, yeah, almost all of them were killed in horrible ways. But listen to this list. Peter was crucified. Andrew was crucified. Philip was crucified. Bartholomew was flayed to death.

James the greater was beheaded. Matthew was killed by the sword. Matthias was stoned to death. Thomas was stabbed with spears. John died after exile. Luke was hanged. James was thrown and beaten. Mark was dragged to death by a horse.

Paul was beheaded and Paul was beheaded. I Refusing to recant. Refusing to stop preaching they were thrown in prison many times. Some of Paul's best writings were in prison. They were willing to actually put their lives on the line for what they believe.

They believe that Jesus rose from the dead. They believed it so much that they were willing to die in these horrible ways to be tortured to death in these horrible ways to To you know to stay stand on their beliefs.

So that's another again doesn't prove anything. But it but it does infer that people that they really believe this it pretty much proves though that they weren't lying. It proves that they believed it.

Yes. Yes.

They it doesn't mean that they couldn't have a little delusion or whatever, but it it does prove that they weren't lying because you know when in Situations where there's multiple culprits to a crime and there's a lie and they try to cover a weak link.

So there's always a weak link. Yes, and with that many links in the chain, there would have been one that failed.

Yeah, and Jesus appeared to 500 after after he rose. Right, and some people say well must have been a mass delusion, right but like. The thing is is this they really believe this, right?

The other thing to to also juice point. All the apostles that were martyred were not in the same place. Yeah, they were as far as India Upper Asia. Yes, I mean all over. And as you look back in history, you see where the gospel had reached those areas.

You know and from actually in some of the manuscript evidence we talked about Egypt a lot of manuscripts are found in Egypt. Yeah, some were found, you know in Near the Dead Sea right there. They're found in different places and when I talked about I forget which reference I did.

But there was one Where they were looking in the ancient version of a landfill, right? That was the reason they were digging there was because Christianity had spread to that area and it had a lot of early churches.

And so there was a reasonable belief that there would be early manuscripts because of that. So yeah, they were going out Evangelizing right remember earlier on I said that you know, the the Masorette's they were very meticulous Scott, you know scribes to that they were trying to preserve this text for generations, whereas the The New Testament writers the New Testament scribes were really concerned with evangelism.

They wanted to spread they made lots of copies not just to preserve it But also to spread it around the world. And so that was another reason why You know why you would find these these all over the place and yeah, they were all killed in horrible ways in different places so that was that was what we call the We call that the Composition test right was this composed with truth in mind.

Manuscript Evidence and the Composition Test

Next we get into something called the companion test. So this test is concerned with whether the documents reached us accurately. This is a part of textual criticism where you'll ask. You know some people say well, how can a book written 2 ,000 years ago, you know be accurate.

They use the whisper down the lane analogies all the time about how you know. If you're in a room and you whisper down 12 people and you'll get a different answer. But what what textual critics do is they ignore the passage of time between when the book was written and Today because that is actually an irrelevant a matter of time the the real concern is The time from when the document was thought to be originally written and the earliest copy that we have right the how early that copy is dated and I think early on we have a Text fragment of John that's within less than a generation within like 40 years of the autograph so The fact that it's 2 ,000 years ago.

From when that's from from when that book was written is irrelevant if it's 40 years between our earliest copy. So textual critics will ignore that. And only be concerned with the gap gap between the manuscript copy we have.

That still means that there could be errors that are injected in fact, there are errors that are injected we'll talk about some in a bit. And they could be intentional errors that could be unintentional errors, but we'll talk about that in a minute.

So what they'll do is they'll actually take. And when you have the number of copies. This is a lot easier to do if you have a lot of copies a lot of ancient manuscripts. To actually compare against right so you have.

Because what they'll do with the companion test is they take companion copies. And they'll actually compare them against one another to determine Are they the same are they different if so how many you know how many of the older ones have this?

Reading versus that reading and so forth and so on.

You Use the term fragment. Is there any gauge as to how large how much? Text are you talking about in a fragment. Could it be as little as like a teeny tiny piece or it can be as little.

As a few verses we also have some like full scrolls like the Dead Sea Scrolls. We have like the entire book of Isaiah In in one scroll right so we'll have different fragments. But if you actually look at like even if we got rid of all the fragments.

We have I said this earlier if you look at like the early church writers the early church fathers. You can't reconstruct the entire New Testament just from their quotations of it, but yeah, we have a lot of them.

But yeah, I mean it could be I think one of the scraps that I showed. Here this one this one front and back. It's got John 18 31 through 33 and John 18 37 through 38. So it's just a few verses not a lot of text and this one is is the one that's really really close to the to the to the Original.

Yeah, so yeah, so yeah, but then you've got things like the Sinaiticus where it's it's an entire New Testament right. So you've got lots of Ancient documents that are complete, and you've got even older ancient documents that are incomplete.

So then we get into something called the corroboration test. And this test is concerned with the question of whether other historical books or materials confirm or deny the testimony provided by the document itself itself for example the Book of Mormon has No corroborating evidence to support it zero.

But there's three examples from archaeology that supports the Bible's narrative. I hope I'm not believing too much into your stuff, but there's the Caesarea Meritama, which is a tablet containing the pilot inscription.

Which proves the Pontius Pilate existed during the reign of Tiberius Caesar? And that he was governor. I skipped over that you skipped over that one. Perfect.

But I was gonna talk about the Book of Mormon a little bit. Oh perfect. I don't talk anymore about the Book of Mormon.

John 5 to the account of the city of Beth. Beth Seda Bethesda. Sorry the city of Bethesda the pool of Siloam where the angel was said to come down. This is where the paralytic was angel said to come down.

To heal people and people would rush into the pool to try and you know be touched by the angel and healed. This is where Jesus healed the paralytic it was said to have five porticos but scholars concluded that was inaccurate because.

And John must have written that later because they didn't build those with five porticos. But then they discovered the pool of Siloam and sure enough had five porticos. So that's another corroboration of the Bible and then the last one I have here is Historians disputed Jesus having his feet pierced with nails saying there's a little evidence that crucifixion was done that way.

They would have used rope to tie his his feet. But this was until they found Yohanan in 1967 with a 7-inch nail through his hands and feet so they found evidence of another Human being crucified in the same way that it was described that Jesus was crucified.

So those are just three examples where you have extra biblical things that aren't in the Bible. Or that are in the Bible, but but things you know the actual archaeological evidence is obviously outside the Bible of that actually corroborate accounts within the Bible and there are and I'm sure Drew's gonna go through a bunch of them, but there are just a huge number of you didn't even hit.

Yeah, yeah, that's that's the thing there's so many of them that like I could probably rattle off a few more and still not hit the ones that that Drew is gonna gonna go over so I think I said this last time, but I actually have it written down here.