Apologetics Conference 2016: Why I Trust the Bible (Andrew Rappaport)

Cornerstone Church

Subscribe

Download

Share

00

00:06

All right. Ladies and gentlemen, please bring it in. Grab a seat.

00:21

All right. We're off to a good start, aren't we? Amen. All right.

00:29

Our second speaker tonight is Andrew Rappaport. His ministry is called strivingforeternity .net,

00:38

and if you want to write that down you can check some of the resources that he has online. Andrew is a gifted teacher.

00:45

I got the chance to go through his website and watch many of his YouTube videos, and he has, Andrew, how many videos?

00:52

Maybe a couple hundred? Just, yeah, and classes that he offers.

00:58

It's almost like a seminary education right there on his website, so please make note of that.

01:03

We are really honored to have this gifted apologist here with us today. So guys, let's give you a hand clap, and we'll welcome

01:10

Andrew Rappaport. Good evening.

01:17

Is this on? Good. Let me drop some things so that I can pick it up. All right. So some things you might have picked up on the way in.

01:25

One is a bookmark, promoting a book that I'll talk about in a second that I had written. Another is what

01:30

Pastor Jeff was just talking about is our Academy. We have an

01:37

Academy that we offer online. It's all on YouTube for free. You can watch all the classes that are currently there.

01:43

And systematic theology, how to interpret the Bible, called harmoneutics, how to disciple, and then the major Western religions and a

01:52

Christian defense of them are all the classes we already have covered. So if you're interested in those.

01:58

I've written a book that we have, if you go out and table and you're interested in different world religions, if you spoke, if you heard from David Wood, you know he has a background on Islam.

02:08

I've studied Islam, Catholicism, Jehovah Witnesses, Mormons, Jewish, which is my background, and then

02:16

Christianity. Go to systematic theology, what's their authority, what's their view of Christ, or God specifically, the

02:22

Trinity, their view of Christ, his deity, man's sinfulness, salvation, and times. And so we systematize all of the religions from their sources.

02:31

The reason it's called What Do They Believe is because one of the things that that I'm very glad of is I had this past week when I spoke to some a whole family of Muslims, and I'm able to say, in everything that I've shared with you, have

02:41

I mischaracterized anything about Islam? And they said, you did not. And then I said, well that's why

02:47

I don't believe in Islam, because you've been mischaracterizing Christianity. And the one nephew actually is supposed to get,

02:55

I gave him my number and hopefully we're gonna get together for dinner. I buy, he talks, and I get to share the gospel.

03:00

So I'm willing to buy dinner to share the gospel, I'm just saying. So let me give you a little background on me.

03:09

I'll do a shorter testimony than David did, but I grew up in a Jewish household, so I was born

03:15

Mitzvahed at the age of 12. I don't have that really radical, I used to think there was something wrong with me because I didn't have that really radical salvation testimony.

03:25

For me it was a three -and -a -half -hour discussion. I basically turned to a guy that shared the gospel with me, and I said, dude,

03:32

I thought it was an emotional argument. I said, I am God's chosen people, I'm in like Flynn.

03:40

I thought that was enough. And I walked away, and he had said, he would have made a great open -air preacher, he said, what if you walk away and your mother died, he knew my mother died when

03:49

I was nine, so if your mother dies and you walk away not listening to this message, your mother might have died just for you to listen to this message, you walk away, your mother would have died in vain.

03:58

I was like, let me listen. I said, you give me a logical reason to believe, I'll believe. Now you have to understand, son, any of you read that passage in scripture that says

04:07

Jesus laughed? No, you didn't. There's no verses that Jesus laughed, fool you. Jesus wept, but you don't see, where do you see, you know, you know, does

04:16

God have a sense of humor? I actually know that he does because, see, he took a guy who was really, really proud of his intellect.

04:24

I have 168 IQ, I've passed the test for Mensa, and the guy that led me to Christ never passed the sixth grade.

04:32

That's humor. So God took a guy that never passed sixth grade to sit there and go through prophecies.

04:38

I took every prophecy he gave me, I put it in one or two categories. Providence, coincidence, or self -fulfillment.

04:46

I could prophesy I'm gonna walk out that door, I can make that happen, but those, I rejected those, I only wanted those that were coincidence.

04:52

I took all the ones he gave me that were coincidence, I started running calculations in my head, I got beyond what 10 to the 48th power, 10 to the 48th power is statistical impossibility,

05:01

I said it is impossible for the New Testament to not have been written by God, and so I believe in the

05:08

New Testament, not Christ. See, being raised Jewish, I believe Jesus Christ was Hitler's God, that's how I was raised. I believe that Jesus Christ represented the

05:15

Holocaust, the Inquisitions, and the Crusades. I wanted nothing to do with Jesus Christ, but I couldn't argue with math, that's my background, and so I said, okay,

05:29

New Testament, I said to Chuck, he said, tell me what the New Testament teaches, he says that Jesus Christ died for sinners like you.

05:35

I had no problem believing I was a sinner. I almost burnt my house down twice because once wasn't enough. First time was a fire extinguisher took care of it, the second time it needed the fire department, okay?

05:45

So I, you know, there wasn't a problem on the sinner part, I just didn't see I needed a Savior, and so what ended up happening was

05:53

I sat there and he's explaining Jesus Christ, and he mentions this resurrection. I'm like, dude, come on, nobody can raise themselves from the dead.

06:02

I never read any of you read Josh McDowell's Evidence Demands a Verdict or Morning of the Carpenter, I never read that at that point, and I had every one of the false views of the of the resurrection, except for one that's still original with me.

06:14

My last argument is maybe the disciples dug a hole underneath the tomb, came up, took the body, and snuck it out, and Chuck goes, in three days they didn't have heavy equipment back then.

06:24

I was like, oh, I could not argue around the resurrection. If Jesus Christ rose from the dead, then

06:30

Jesus Christ was God. I had to deal with that. Jesus Christ is God, I'm accountable to him.

06:37

So on the steps of Dairy Queen in 1984 in San Francisco, I turned from being an enemy of God to a child of God.

06:50

I thought that was everyone's story, and then I started realizing that no, most Christians hear the gospel over and over and over and over, and that's one of the things that you're here this weekend to do, is to learn how to defend the faith, because the reality is many people will hear the gospel many times, and there are gonna be times that some of you are gonna go, oh man,

07:12

I feel like I just shared the gospel and this was a waste of my time, this guy's so unreceptive. Let me explain something to you guys.

07:17

I'm from New Jersey, born and raised, all right, so I go into Union Square in New York, that's my regular fishing hole to go and evangelize.

07:25

I've been going there for ten years. We know four people who used to heckle us, yell at us, be quite mean to us.

07:36

It's the only place I know where I can get guys dancing in tutus while I preach, just saying. You can see anything there, but we have had four people who have given their life to Christ and have contacted me afterwards to apologize for the way they behaved.

07:50

We have a total of seven people who have contacted me that have at least apologized, because they recognized over the years that the way they treated us was bad, and just wanted to ask forgiveness, and that's the thing of going there.

08:04

You think that some of these guys, you think you're not getting through, you're not getting through. The apologetics that you're gonna learn this weekend is to help encourage you, but also strengthen you, so that when you do go out, you have a ready answer.

08:19

And guess what? I can give you one way I can guarantee that you can answer any question.

08:25

You can answer any single question you ever get, because I tell people all the time, I can answer any question

08:30

I'm ever asked on the street. I can, because I believe I don't know is a perfectly good answer, and it's actually one that gets people to go, oh, you guys don't think you know everything.

08:41

No, I know someone who does, but I'm not him. And so the thing is, is that if you don't have an answer, that's when you start studying.

08:51

David said he didn't have answers to Islam, he started studying. Now many people go to him and look to him for answers.

08:57

So what we're gonna talk about, if you do any kind of evangelism, I was just talking to a gentleman just a couple minutes ago, and I asked him whether he's ever been asked the questions, or challenged with these questions.

09:09

And maybe I want you guys to think, have you ever been challenged with someone coming to you and saying, well, the Bible was written by men?

09:16

And this guy said, the guy gentleman always said, every time I talk to someone that's not a believer. That the

09:21

Bible was edited in the 300s, or sometimes the 600s, or the 1500s. I love the 1500 one.

09:29

That we don't have the original Bible. You see, the Bible has come under attack.

09:36

It is one of the things, and so I have the task now of not only having to follow

09:41

David Wood, which is like kind of hard, but I got to follow David Wood and talk about textual criticism.

09:48

How many of you guys even know what that word means? Okay, some of you. So my job is to take a topic that is usually saved for seminaries, and bring it down to a level that all of us can understand.

10:01

Because the reality is, is that those atheists on the street, those professing atheists, they are being equipped to argue against the

10:08

Bible and its reliability. But many Christians, they're not having the resources to know how to defend that.

10:15

And this is a crucial thing, because there's going to be two presuppositions that as Christians, we're going to hold to.

10:21

God exists, and he has spoken. We don't give up on either one of those two. If we're out on the street, we're going to share with someone, and they're saying, well look,

10:30

I don't want to believe the Bible, so you talk to me without that. Really? Okay, let's talk biology, but please don't quote any science textbook.

10:38

No, you don't give up the very source of truth to discuss truth. You don't do that.

10:44

So what we want to do is, we want to know how to defend the reliability of the

10:50

Scriptures. So that's what we're going to do at this time. Let's start with a word of prayer. Heavenly Father, we are grateful for the many people that are taking time out of their day because they want to be equipped, they want to be encouraged, they want to be edified, because we know that we have the truth, not because of anything within us,

11:12

Lord, but because of who you are. You are the great and holy

11:17

God, and there's nothing, as David had said, we're wretches, and you came into this universe and became one of us to die on a cross to be a pavement of sin for us.

11:34

It is the great transaction, imputation, as we're going to hear talked about tomorrow. Lord, we are grateful that we can be called your children, and we thank you that we can gather, that the fellowship this evening would be sweet, that the conference this whole weekend would be encouraging and edifying, most of all to you.

11:56

We say this in Christ's name, amen. And so I am a little bit jealous of some of you guys that are going to get to be here tomorrow, to hear the speakers tomorrow.

12:10

You know, both Eric and John are going to be talking. I'm jealous because John's got a great topic on imputation, so it is a crucial, crucial topic, so I strongly encourage you to be here.

12:22

I can't be because I'm leaving right from here. I have to drive out to Ohio, so my son has given me a timeline.

12:29

I got to get my car to my son by 8 o 'clock in the morning, so it is one of these things where I had to be in.

12:35

I had to be in Ohio in the afternoon. I thought I'd stay overnight in a hotel. He has other plans, but he's helping me out and taking care of my daughter this week.

12:43

So when we look at this topic, this is a topic that many people are being challenged on, and there are many people who aren't ready to give a defense for the reliability of the

12:58

Bible, specifically the New Testament. We're going to get into why the New Testament comes under more attack in a moment, but one of the most common arguments that non -believers raise is that men wrote the

13:11

Bible. Is that true? Yes. Is it completely true? No.

13:17

You know, what they're trying to do by saying, well, men wrote the Bible, is to say that it's not trustworthy. I love that statement when people make that statement.

13:26

I'm open -air preaching, and you know, people are like, well, men wrote the Bible. I say, really, so you don't believe anything written by men?

13:31

No. Really? Okay. So you know, so if a man writes something, you can't trust it?

13:37

No. I usually will ask them, so do you believe in Charles Darwin's theory of evolution? They almost always say yes, and I used to have my preaching bag, a copy of his book, and I'd pull it out, and I'd look at it, go, huh, that's funny.

13:49

It was written by a man. I thought you don't believe things written by men. Really, the issue is, is it trustworthy?

13:58

That's the real thing. See, the reason it could be trusted is because it was written by an author who cannot lie.

14:07

That's not circular logic. Atheists will always say we have circular logic. We do not have circular logic.

14:13

Circular logic would be that we believe the Bible because the Bible says it can be believed, and that's the argument they try to give us, but that's not what we say.

14:23

I believe the Bible's accurate because its author cannot lie. Therefore, by definition, it must be accurate, and so it's in the nature of God that I'm going to root the reliability of the

14:34

Scriptures, and so the issue that we're going to have is that people think it's not trustworthy, and what they're dealing with is the fact that, and we must be honest, and maybe this is going to surprise some people.

14:47

I hope not, but when we look at the Bible that we have today in the Greek and the Hebrew, we have copies of the

14:54

Bible that do have changes in them. They're called textual variances. Let me read from Daniel Wallace.

15:00

He defines a variant this way, quote, a textual variant is simply any difference from a standard text, printed text, or a popular manuscript, etc.

15:15

that involves spelling, word order, omissions, additions, subtraction, or total rewrite of the text, unquote, and see what you have is we have a

15:25

Bible, we have Greek manuscripts that have had changes in them over time, and so the argument that many people say is because there's changes, we can't know what the original

15:37

Bible said. What did the original text say? We believe that in its original writings that the

15:43

Bible was without flaw, without error. It was completely accurate in its original writings, but we don't know if we have those original writings anymore, and so we don't think we do.

15:57

There's some things we would expect to see if we thought, you know, the original, but the reality is people will say, well, there's 400 ,000 variances in the

16:09

Bible, in just the Greek Bible, the Greek New Testament. That seems like an awful lot, especially considering there's only 138 ,000 words in the

16:20

Greek New Testament. Anyone see a problem there? There's about three times as many variances as there are words.

16:29

Now let me give you some ways that some people define a variant and how we come to them. Now some people have tried to say that a variant, a textual variant, the way they come to this number is some will argue that it's every time that you have a manuscript where there's some word that's misspelled, and if it's misspelled the multiple times in every manuscript that for each manuscript it counts as an additional variant.

16:51

Well, that's not actually true. It's a quote that comes from Lightwood, and it's not the way that we count it.

16:58

The way we count it is actually there's 400 ,000 variant readings. In other words, you may have in some places where it says,

17:05

Jesus Christ is Lord. That's one reading. Another, it says, Christ Jesus is

17:11

Lord. It's a second reading, and the other might say, Lord Jesus Christ. That's a third reading.

17:17

Now what you see there is that there's three different ways of reading that. That's not spelling errors. That's not just the fact that in one case it's spelt one way, in another case it's spelt another way.

17:27

So the point here is to say that there are, and we have to be honest with this, that there are different ways that these were written down and copied.

17:35

Now the thing is is that when we go through and actually look, and I've done this work, but if you look at all of the

17:43

Greek manuscripts and you look at the different textual tools that we have today, you can actually count how many either phrases or words have a textual issue, and we come up with about 6 ,577 is the number.

18:04

So about 6 ,500. So when we look at what it, we're going to have two ways of looking at textual variances, and what, if we want to make it sound like you can't possibly in any way get back to the original meaning, you're going to use this definition that gives you 400 ,000 because it's a larger number, and what are you going to do?

18:22

You're going to have to count every different reading, but you see in the phrase that I gave you, you're dealing with one text that has three different readings, and we want to get back to the original reading if we can.

18:36

So we're going to count that once, not three times. Gives you a very different number.

18:41

Now from 400 ,000 we get to 6 ,500. 6 ,600 if you want to round up.

18:48

So very different numbers. We're going to come back to why that becomes important in a bit, but I want you to keep that number in your head because here's what ends up happening.

18:59

What you end up seeing is that many of the scholars will try to argue that we cannot get back to the original meaning of the scriptures.

19:10

Very interesting. Since David Wood quoted from Bart Ehrman, I guess I should too, right? So Bart Ehrman, how many folks do not know who

19:18

Bart Ehrman is? Just out of curiosity. Okay, Bart, okay, well then let me give you some background on him. Bart Ehrman is someone who grew up in a

19:26

Christian home, went to seminary. He kept going to more and more liberal seminaries, and somewhere along there he says he lost his faith.

19:36

I would look to 1st John chapter 2 verse 19 and say he never had faith to lose.

19:43

He went out from among us because he was never of us. Now Bart Ehrman has done some some great work in this area, but the reality is one thing he tries to do is say that we have lost the meaning and we can't possibly get back to the original meaning of the

20:00

Bible. In his book, Misquoting Jesus, he lays out an argument for this. Now one of the things

20:05

I learned with Bart Ehrman, anytime he gives support for his claims, he's usually pretty right on.

20:12

It's the times he doesn't. See, what he does is he gives support for something that's true and then supplants it with something that's not true, and for most people they can't see that because they haven't done the study, and when you do the study you realize what he's doing, but for most laymen, especially the atheists that are reading his book, they don't see that.

20:28

They don't understand what's happening, and so here's an argument. Now if you're gonna write a New York Times bestseller, don't you think you're gonna put your best argument first?

20:35

I mean, wouldn't you? All right, so here's his best argument. He has a chapter where he says we cannot get back to the original meaning of the

20:41

Bible. We can't know what it said. We can't understand the meaning, and here's his proof. There are some manuscripts.

20:48

You ready for this? Some manuscripts teach that Jesus Christ was a carpenter, and others teach he was just a son.

20:55

He was a son of a carpenter. I mean, doesn't that just shock you? I mean, you know all those

21:02

Bible doctrines we have built on the fact that Jesus was a carpenter, right? Oh wait, no, none.

21:09

I mean, there's not a single doctrine that's based on Jesus being a carpenter or the son of a carpenter.

21:15

In fact, both could be true, couldn't they? Especially in a day and age where Jesus was, where most people took the trade of their father.

21:25

It wouldn't be unusual for both to be true, but even if only one of them was true, does that change the meaning of the

21:33

Bible in any way of real significance to doctrines that we hold to?

21:39

No. So my argument would be, Bart Ehrman, if that's the best you got, you got nothing.

21:46

Like, we're afraid of this? I had a gentleman who talked about Q.

21:52

Any of you familiar, anyone, any of you heard of Q, the document Q? A couple of you, all right.

21:59

There's another New York Times bestseller book written by a guy who came out of Islam, and he claims he wanted to be a

22:07

Christian, and he came to America and take the religion of America, which was Christianity. Now he rejects that.

22:12

He wrote a book called Zealot, The Life and Times of Jesus and Nazareth. This is Reza Al -Azhar.

22:18

And what he argues is, he basically tries to argue the same argument that Bart Ehrman argues. He's trying to say, hey, we can't get back to the original

22:26

Bible, and that's why he gave up on the Bible. He gave up on the Bible because we can't know what it actually said.

22:31

And so he bases everything in his book on this document called Q. Q stands for Quellum.

22:38

It's Greek, sorry, it's German for source. This is the idea that they have. The liberal scholars believe that there was this document called

22:47

Q, and Q was the first gospel. Q was then used by Mark to write a later gospel, and then the other gospel writers,

22:59

Luke and Matthew, used Mark, and they may used a little bit of Q, and from that they built their documents, and they kind of wrote a little bit more of making

23:09

Jesus less of, you know, less of a man and more of a God, and by the time he got to John, he just totally forgets

23:15

Q, and he writes that Jesus is God. And this is the progression they try to argue is how these things happen.

23:23

I actually believe Matthew is the first gospel written, which would make more sense since that's the gospel written to Jewish people, and that was an issue earlier in Christian life and not later in Christian life.

23:33

So here's the thing though. You write a New York Times bestseller book, and I'm amazed that people don't pick up that in the introduction of the book, the introduction, the author undermines his entire book, because this whole book is based on this document called

23:53

Q. Let me quote from him. Aslan says this, quote, although we no longer have any physical copies of this document, we can infer its context by compiling those verses in Matthew and Luke that share in common and do not appear in Mark, unquote.

24:15

Now if you're gonna write a based on something you have no historical evidence, where's the historical evidence that Q ever existed?

24:28

It only appears in the text of liberal scholars in their textbooks.

24:35

It's kind of like the the transitional forms of evolution. They only exist in textbooks. They don't exist in real fossil record, right?

24:44

So what do we have? We have someone that's building a whole argument on a book that doesn't exist, but we can infer it.

24:51

That's called begging the question. It's a logical fallacy. You're starting with your conclusion.

24:57

I had a gentleman once, I was at this, you guys go to the Jersey Shore, right? All right. So when they were doing that TV show,

25:04

I used to do some open -air preaching down there. It was a lot of fun. I loved it when they'd come video me. I would never give them permission to use any of the footage, but they would give me a crowd for like an hour and a half because there's big cameras there, and we had all the crew from Jersey Shore sitting there, and they needed the gospel.

25:19

Trust me. But I was there once, and this guy was arguing for Q, and he said, well look, there had to be an original document.

25:28

This is the argument these guys make. There had to be one document that everyone else got their information from.

25:33

I said, really? Why? Why couldn't it be firsthand eyewitnesses? He said, no, it has to be an original document.

25:39

I said, really? I said, let me ask you a question. This was a couple years back. This was right after Obama was running for his reelection.

25:45

He was speaking at the Democrat National Committee. That was like the Thursday night, and this is now Friday night, and I said, you know,

25:50

Obama spoke last night. Did the New York Times report it? He said, yeah. I said, did the

25:56

Washington Post report it? He said, yeah. I said, what about the Boston Times? They reported? Yeah. I said, what about the

26:01

AP? They reported? Yeah. I said, what was the original document they all got that from?

26:08

He went, well, they were all there. They were all there? I thought you said eyewitnesses don't count.

26:15

What do you mean they were all there? You mean they could all sit there and observe the same thing? Did they all write exactly the same account?

26:22

No, they didn't. They all took a little bit of a different angle on the accounts, didn't they? You mean just like we have in the

26:28

Gospels? In fact, that's a better argument for the Gospels. If we only had one account, that would be a problem.

26:36

The fact that we have four different accounts of the same events is what strengthens the argument that these were eyewitness accounts.

26:45

In fact, there is a cold -case detective who had been an atheist, a professing atheist, and he came out to try to debunk

26:53

Christianity and the Christians he worked with. And he wrote a book called Cold Case Christianity. And he basically argues, he took 20 years experience as a detective to argue, okay, there's certain things you'd expect in eyewitness testimony.

27:10

He deals with eyewitness testimony for 20 years ago, 30 years ago, like people who've been dead for a long time.

27:17

And he ends up arguing that when he looked at the New Testament, well, guess what?

27:23

That is good, solid, first -hand eyewitness accounts. There are certain things he laid out had to be there.

27:32

So J. Warner Wallace, you know, laid out a case. It's a good book to get on this.

27:38

It really deals with it in a good way. But the thing that you end up seeing is the reality is there is no physical evidence for this document called

27:49

Q. Now, I don't know about you, but I keep hearing in the news and on atheist blogs.

27:55

Yes, I get on atheist blogs. It's always good to get on atheist blogs. I get to find out who's got a hit on me. We actually have had,

28:01

I've had on atheist blogs, they put my address, a picture of my house. They put a picture of my family. They put my preaching schedule when

28:08

I was out of town and say, hey, let's go rape his wife and daughter and kill and rob the house. I responded on the atheist blog.

28:14

I hope you don't mind, but my house is actually regularly patrolled by the police. So just saying, we got lots of cameras.

28:26

But, you know, when you look at this, we end up seeing on the atheist blogs that they make these arguments.

28:35

And what you see is that it's based on nothing. Now, they keep telling us that we believe in fairy tales.

28:42

Have you ever heard that? We believe in a sky daddy, an invisible sky daddy.

28:48

Really? I'm not the one that's basing my argument on nothing. That's what

28:55

I would call a fairy tale. Saying that we can't trust the Bible because of a document that never existed.

29:02

That's a fairy tale. Actually, I kind of believe frogs becoming men and princes is a fairy tale.

29:07

Just saying. It's just, add millions of years and we call it science, you know. We supposedly believe in a magic god, right?

29:20

In a magical being. I believe nothing, having a magical bang and exploding into everything is, that's magic.

29:29

Someone creating something, we see that a lot. Just nothing and then boom, everything? Yeah, I don't think we're the ones that have magic on our side, sorry.

29:40

But when we talk about these things, let's categorize these variances because I want you to see something.

29:45

We're going to see how this is going to work. There we go. So, what we see here in this pie chart, okay, you see the blue.

29:55

75 % of most of these variances that we deal with are spelling errors. This is the largest number.

30:01

Now, I find it always interesting when Barnum and others say that the largest majority of them, of the textual variances that we find, are spelling errors and punctuation.

30:12

You know I find that so interesting? Do you know that there was no punctuation in the Greek until 800

30:17

AD? Now, there was also no spacing in some of the manuscripts.

30:28

Now, that can make a difference. So, here's what I want you to do. You're all taking notes, I know. So, on your paper, you can write these letters down.

30:34

I should put it up here one day on the slide, but G -O -D -I -S -N -O -W -H -E -R -E.

30:45

Now, what did I spell? Yeah, some people are having trouble.

30:51

Is G -O -D -I -S -N -O -W -H -E -R -E or G -O -D -I -S -N -O -W -H -E -R -E? You put a space in the wrong place and it makes a big difference, doesn't it?

31:00

Could that explain some variances that we have? How are we going to know which one of those two

31:05

I mean? You're going to look at the rest of the context of what I'm saying, right? Yeah, we're going to say, well, if I'm an atheist and I'm saying and I'm saying this,

31:15

I'm probably saying God is nowhere, but if I'm writing to defend Christ and if I'm talking about God and I'm talking about his omnipresence,

31:24

I may be saying God is now here, right? The context is going to explain that, but that one space, when they start adding spaces, and some people put spaces in the wrong places, that fits in the 75%.

31:38

Now, the issue with that is when you start comparing to the different manuscripts, what we can do is see where those spelling errors are, where those spacing errors are, because we have many manuscripts to compare to.

31:51

As you compare to the other manuscripts, you can take a look at them and say, okay, this spelling mistake, okay, this guy had, you know, early onset of, you know, dyslexia, you know, okay, he just mixed up a couple letters.

32:05

Sometimes what people would do is because they were copying, they'd skip whole lines, and so we have those sort of things.

32:12

We can explain those sort of things, but those don't affect the meaning and we can easily get back to the original meaning of the text.

32:19

That's 75 % of these variances don't affect the meaning of the text and we can get back to the original, okay?

32:29

So the second largest one there is this not meaningful 19%.

32:36

19 % of these variances are ones in which there's no, the meaning of the text hasn't changed, but we can't get back to the, we can't get back to its original.

32:52

So it would be a thing like Jesus is a carpenter or Jesus is the son of a carpenter.

32:58

The meaning is actually changed and we can't get back to the original. A big deal, okay?

33:06

And that's going to be one that people are going to argue for. Now the question is when we get to some, we're going to not be able to get back to the original meaning, or sorry, the original, what it originally said, but the meaning hasn't changed any.

33:20

There's going to be things where we can say, okay, could have said this, could have said that. For example, in the

33:26

Hebrew you have, in Kings and Chronicles, you have a case where in one case it talks about so many,

33:33

I think it's like 12 ,000 chariots and 8 ,000 horsemen. And the other texts, those numbers are reversed.

33:41

Which one's right? Don't know, but the meaning of the text hasn't changed any. So if we want to get back, our goal is to get to the meaning of the text, right?

33:52

So that 19 % put that in the category with the 75 and this whole pie so far we could toss.

33:59

Okay, so what about that 5 %? These are ones that are meaningful, but not viable.

34:06

In other words, the meaning of the text actually changes, but viable means that we can get, can we get back to the original?

34:15

By comparing it to other manuscripts, can we get back to the original? And the answer is, with that 5%, yes we can.

34:22

So in other words, here, spelling errors, punctuation, things like that, not a big deal.

34:29

The ones that are not meaningful, we don't really, we're not so concerned about because it's not changing the meaning of the text. Here, well the meaning of the text changed, but guess what?

34:37

We can get back to what it originally said. That leaves us with, ready? A whopping 1%. 1 % of these textural variances are ones where we can't get back to the original meaning and the meaning has changed.

34:55

So these are the ones we are concerned about, right? Where we can't figure out what did it originally say?

35:00

We can't get back to the original and the meaning actually changed, so this could be a problem. This is where Bart Ehrman uses his one, because here you have more than a, that he's a carpenter or the son of a carpenter.

35:11

Which was it in the original? We don't know. Is the meaning changed? Yes it is, but you see the dilemma that he has is there's no doctrine built on that.

35:21

When we look at this and we look at these textural variances and we look at this 1%, there is not a single

35:29

Christian doctrine that's in that 1%. Not one.

35:37

People say, whoa, well in 1st John you have that part that talks about the Trinity, the three in one, so that wasn't in the original.

35:45

Big deal. When I have Jehovah's Witnesses come to my door, oh wait, they never come to my door. They avoid my door.

35:51

When I go to them, I could tell you ways to get off there, to get your house avoided.

35:58

I actually have my whole block avoided. My neighborhood, I moved to Jackson and when

36:04

I moved in, we had the Jehovah's Witnesses. I didn't know one of my neighbors, his sister's a Jehovah's Witness, and so what would happen is 10 o 'clock every

36:11

Saturday morning for five years before I moved in, Jehovah's Witnesses would come down our street and they would knock on every door.

36:17

I didn't know that, I just moved in. So I move in, they came to my door and I was like, oh Jehovah's Witnesses. I know you guys are probably like,

36:24

I pretend like I'm not home. I love when I pull my New World Translation off the shelf and I get all ready and my wife is like, oh no.

36:32

So I sit there and I sat and talked with them for a couple of hours.

36:39

So the next week, you know what they did? They went to my one neighbor's house, they skipped right past my house. I felt rejected.

36:45

You know what I did? I grabbed my New World Translation, I ran out of the house. I ran to my neighbor's house and they rang the doorbell and I run on behind them and my next -door neighbor answers the door.

36:56

I'm like, hey Peter, how you doing? Remember, I'm your neighbor next door. These guys are gonna lie to you about what the Bible says. I'm just gonna correct everything they say, so go ahead guys.

37:06

And they just looked at me like, what are you doing? So they left his house. He's still at the door and they went to the next house.

37:13

I went, see you Peter, I'm gonna go next door. And they looked at me and said, what are you doing?

37:18

I said, I'm gonna follow you to every one of my neighbors. You know what happened the next week? They skipped the entire block. One of my neighbors thanked me until I started saying, so do you know

37:26

Jesus Christ? So here's the thing.

37:36

When we look at that 1%, now remember that number I gave you, that 5 ,577.

37:46

So let's say 6 ,600 passages that we have to deal with where we have words that have issues.

37:54

Now let's do some math now. So let's take that and say, well there's only 1 % we have to deal with.

38:01

That's about 66 words out of 138 ,000 words.

38:08

In case you're not good in the math, that's 0 .0476%.

38:14

And we think we have something to worry about. I mean they make that number sound really big, 400 ,000.

38:23

When we actually look at the words that we have to deal with, we're talking about 66 words. We can't get back to their original meaning and the meaning has changed that we have to worry about 66 words out of 138 ,000 words.

38:39

Okay, so all right, the Bible's only 99 .974, you know, like come on.

38:48

Really, we're gonna worry about this. So let me dispel a myth, okay.

38:55

This is a myth. Most people, if you've talked with anybody, they think this is how we got the Bible, the telephone game.

39:02

You guys remember playing that game as a kid, right? One person gets this really long sentence, tells it to the next person who, because it's too long, he doesn't remember exactly everything, tells it to the next person, who eventually tells it to someone like me, who purposely mixes up the words just for fun, and then sees what it comes out at the end, and I'm convinced there were more people like me in line, because it never comes out anything like it started, right?

39:29

And they think that's how we got the Bible. That's not how we got the Bible. Now let me explain.

39:34

There's two different ways that we do the copying, okay. There's a difference in the Old Testament scribes in the

39:39

New Testament. Now there's a reason we have more issues in the New Testament, which is why I deal with that. In the

39:44

Old Testament, man, those guys, you got to give them credit, because this is a job I don't know that I would want.

39:50

This is how you would deal with the copying of the Bible. What the scholars would do is they'd have a scroll in front of them.

39:57

They had a chart on the wall or by them, and if they're gonna write the word letter, that's the word we're gonna work with.

40:05

They're gonna write L. We're gonna go to their chart and find a letter L. Put a tick mark next to it.

40:11

E. Where's the E? Tick mark. T. Tick mark.

40:17

T. Tick mark. E. Tick mark. R. Tick mark.

40:22

Word. Letter. They go find letter on their chart. Tick mark. When they get done copying it, they know from the numbers, they can look at the numbers and they start comparing.

40:33

Do we have all the right letters for this, for this, for this? Do we have all the right words? They can count them.

40:39

They look at their counting and they look and say, oh, this copy had some mistakes. We're missing something. If you had more than three variances, that scribe or that text could not be used in a synagogue, okay?

40:56

And they were that detailed. There's a difference that happened with the New Testament. You know what happened with the New Testament?

41:01

People could hear about the forgiveness of sins. The guys that were doing copying were not as concerned about how they copied it, how detailed they were.

41:12

They wanted to get this out to the world. They wanted everybody to see this and read this in every language, so they were copying as quick as they could.

41:23

And it's a false notion to think that it's one person who copied it to another person who copied it to another person who copied it to another person.

41:31

What they actually did was they would copy it and they would make several copies and give it to, maybe

41:36

I'd make 10 copies, and give it to 10 different people. And then those people would make 10 copies, giving it to 10 people, and then they'd make another 10 copies, give it to another 10 people.

41:45

Now, in doing that, what you end up seeing is that you can see where changes occurred because, you know, if someone goes down to Egypt and you have a misspelling or you have something that changes just in that area, you kind of know regionally, okay, that must be wrong because it's only in that one area.

42:00

And everywhere else it says this. So you're gonna say in that area, that's probably wrong.

42:07

That's probably where there was a copy problem. And so what we end up seeing is,

42:12

I'm gonna use a chart. How many of you have been to the website CARM, C -A -R -M dot org?

42:18

Okay, I'm gonna argue because Eric is here from Mormon Research Ministry, I'm gonna argue that Matt Slick actually stole this from me just because he's stolen things from, you know, but Matt actually has one picture that he lifted off of MRM and put it on his website, so they've been, you know, busting on him ever since.

42:35

But this is from CARM. This is a link you can get there that Matt Slick put together. I like this because it gives a good picture of what we have.

42:42

So you'd have one person who would be the original writer. They'd make several copies. It's not just one copy, it's many copies.

42:50

So this would be a second generation of that document. You'd make more copies, and in here, like in this example he has, this is a third century document, and if you notice this one that he's gotten read, it's missing the word only, the only

43:04

Son of God, but here it says the Son of God. So when you look at this, you can quickly, if you have all of these manuscripts, you can quickly see what happened, can't you?

43:15

You see, it's not the telephone game. I'm gonna compare this one with all of these and go, oh, a word was dropped.

43:23

You've done that in school, haven't you? When you had to, okay, maybe you never had to write those 200 -word essays because you guys were all good in school, but I used to have to write these 200 -word essays where I had to copy something.

43:33

I'd always like forget words, sometimes on purpose. It's always good to have the excuse if you see the word the and the, you can just skip the whole line and think the teacher is gonna believe you that you just did that on accident.

43:46

Well, some of the Bible copy errors did that by accident, but you see, in the second generation, everyone who now copies this one has that same issue, don't they?

43:57

If they're gonna copy it word for word because maybe they're not looking at this one when they're copying, they're just copying the one text that they have.

44:05

And so we can compare all of these and we go back to its family and this is how what would define a manuscript family because of either where it is found or the changes that we see, the variances that we see in it, okay?

44:21

And so based on the geographic location of it, based on how, you know, how close it is to the original writing, these are factors that we're gonna look at.

44:31

There's gonna be three factors we want to look at. How close is it to that original?

44:37

You see, it takes time for those copying errors to occur. So the closer you get to an original, the better.

44:44

Second thing you want to know is how many copies do you have because the more copies you have, the more you can compare.

44:51

And third thing is where is it located? So those are three factors you want to pay attention to, alright?

44:57

And so here's the thing that I want you to look at. When we look at this, there's some really cool technology going on nowadays.

45:05

We are finding more and more manuscripts. You know where we're finding some great manuscripts? The very same place you would look if you wanted to find if the

45:13

Bible was edited, in the trash. Because that's where people are gonna throw things away.

45:19

I had a gentleman, I was at Montclair State University, and I had a gentleman who argued that the

45:24

Bible was changed in the 1500s. The Bible we have today is not what it originally said.

45:31

The Bible was changed by the Roman Catholic Church in the 1500s. The 1500s?

45:37

Yeah, I said, how did they do that? Now this is a thing maybe, you know, it comes natural to me playing dumb.

45:43

You guys probably can't pull it off, but I like doing it. And so what I do is I play dumb and ask questions.

45:49

And I make them have to answer. You heard David say that when he was challenged to have to defend what he believed, he had problems.

45:57

This is what you're often gonna find. You have so many people, they think they're gonna get you on the defensive. I tell people, someone makes a claim, make them have to answer for their claim.

46:05

Ask a question. And so I asked lots of questions. And so I had this gentleman, I said, how would they have done that?

46:11

He says, well, here's what they did. The Catholic Church took all the copies of the Bible, and he took them from people, and they put new copies in their place.

46:20

I said, really? I mean, and no one noticed? No. I said, um,

46:28

I said, okay, maybe I'm not that smart of an individual. Let me, let me take some basic. I said, here's the school newspaper.

46:34

When does this come out? He said, it came out today at 11 o 'clock. He turns out he was a photographer for the paper.

46:40

I said, how many, you know, how many copies of paper come out? He goes, about 1 ,500. I said, okay, 1 ,500 copies of this newspaper came out today at 11 o 'clock.

46:48

If I, right now, at four o 'clock, want to do what you just said, I want to change all of the copies,

46:54

I want to supplant them with an edited copy, how would I do that? I mean, first off, where would

46:59

I find them? He goes, well, you'd find them right there in that pile. I said, where else? He goes, well, I guess you'd find them in the, in the student lounge.

47:07

I said, where else? He goes, uh, student dorm rooms. Where else? He goes, I guess people's houses. Where else? Uh, people's cars.

47:12

Where else? He goes, I don't know, they're trash. I said, okay. I said, now, I would have to go and collect them all, wouldn't

47:18

I? And, and, and replace them. How can I get into people's dorm rooms without them knowing? He goes, well,

47:24

I guess you really can't do that. I said, well, this is the problem I have, because we're dealing with thousands and thousands of manuscripts, and especially if you're gonna say it was edited, you're dealing with different languages now.

47:36

And we're gonna deal with this all across the world. I know people think the Catholic Church is pretty powerful, but how'd they get into everyone's house?

47:44

How did they change this? I mean, couldn't someone go in the trash? I mean, we are finding manuscripts in mummies' tombs, where it was used to mummify people, where they, because this papyrus was so valuable, that what they would do is take the

47:59

Bible and whitewash it, and then write over it. And with the technology we have today, we can now do ultra scanning to scan underneath the text, and see that text that was underneath, and see

48:09

Scripture. I said, how could they have done this, and we wouldn't find this in the places like the trash?

48:16

He goes, I don't know. This isn't making much sense to me. I said, it wasn't making sense to me either, but I'm glad we're now on the same page.

48:24

You see, they never had to think through these arguments. I hear all the time that we never had a

48:30

Bible until 300s. Really? We, the oldest fragment of the

48:35

Scriptures that we have, has just been recently discovered in 95 AD. That's a miracle!

48:43

The fact that we can find something a hundred, well, two hundred and five years before it was written.

48:50

That's amazing! I mean, in fact, we have over a hundred and twenty -five

49:02

Greek manuscripts that are before the third century, before 300 AD. I mean, that must be a miracle, how we got those manuscripts before they were written.

49:12

And, you know, you see these early manuscripts, sometimes we can look at early church fathers and see how they help us. You know, in fact, very early on there was a textual variant in the book of Revelation.

49:23

In some of the early copies, and Arrhenius kind of corrects us and lets us know that this, what is the better variant, and he was one of the early church fathers, but some of the early manuscripts said that the number of the beast was 666, and some others say 616.

49:40

That makes you guys nervous, right? I mean, the only thing that maybe affects is a whole left -behind series, right?

49:49

I mean, all right, I don't know what doctrine is really based on that number, but Arrhenius, very early on, said no, 666 is the better rendering.

49:58

He gave some arguments on why that is, but you see, when we look at these things, we can look at what the early church fathers say when they see some of these changes.

50:06

We can look at some of the things where we look at these early manuscripts that we find. What do we find? We are finding that we have very early copies within 30 years of their writing, so that's a close period of time.

50:21

As David said just a moment ago, you don't have enough time for the changes to occur, so you don't have that time.

50:29

We have over 5 ,700 categorized

50:34

Greek manuscripts. We have more, we just haven't categorized them all, but here's the thing, you know, we don't only have

50:42

Greek because it was translated in other languages. We have over 10 ,000

50:48

Latin manuscripts alone. That doesn't include all the Egyptian and Ethiopian and all the other languages that we have.

50:56

We have 20 ,000 copies of the New Testament in other languages. Here's a neat thing, do you realize that if we didn't even look at the

51:05

Bible, take the Bible, put it on the shelf, not when you're arguing with an atheist just for this discussion, but if you wanted to recreate the

51:12

Bible with nothing more than the quotes from the early church fathers, you can recreate the entire

51:19

Bible for all but 17 verses just from quotations.

51:25

So now what do we have to have? For the Bible to have been changed, not only do we have to have all the Greek manuscripts, but the meaning has to, you know, we get the meaning in those translations, and then we have all those quotations.

51:35

I mean, all that has to change. You're talking like somewhere, some people argue in the 60 to 70 ,000 documents that would have to change.

51:46

That's kind of a lot. That's a lot for us to use to compare and see what the meaning was.

51:53

There's well over 1 million quotations from the early church fathers, and so when we look at this and we look at the fact that we have the

52:02

Greek, we have the Latin, we have the Coptic, we have all these other translations, we start comparing this, we end up seeing that not only do we have very early manuscripts, but we have a lot of manuscripts.

52:15

Now let me give you this. How many of you believe that Julius Caesar was the Caesar, that Julius was Caesar? I hope all of you.

52:24

How many of you don't? How many of you are still sleeping? No. We don't challenge

52:31

Julius Caesar, but you know what? Let's take a look at something. Here's the

52:37

New Testament at 57 ,000 manuscripts, some within 25 years of its writing.

52:44

Homer? No one ever challenges Homer, do they? Homer is the closest with 643 manuscripts, and those are 500 years after.

52:55

You want to go to Caesar, the closest we have to Caesar, we have 10 manuscripts a thousand years after Caesar.

53:01

Why don't we challenge? I mean, if we can't trust the reliability of the New Testament, we definitely can't trust that Julius was

53:08

Caesar. There is way more evidence for the

53:13

New Testament than there ever is for Caesar. In fact, here's an interesting thing you hear a lot if you do some study on the

53:19

Gnostic Gospels. There's a lot of debate on the Gnostic Gospels. Any one of you heard of Da Vinci Code?

53:25

Da Vinci Code is based off of the Gospel of Mary of Magdalene. Very interesting.

53:30

If you actually do the reading of it, I had gone through the book that talks about the original finding of it and things like that.

53:38

Do you know actually there's more missing from that book than we actually have? You know how many copies we have?

53:45

One. We have one copy, it's in French. Some of you are laughing and you get the point.

53:57

French wasn't a language for several hundred years after Christ. We have one copy, it's in French.

54:06

And this is what they built a whole thing where they try to say, you guys got it wrong. You're trusting one copy where there's more of that book that's missing than we actually have because it had page numbers and it just deteriorated because this is what ends up happening with these things.

54:23

So we really don't know. You know, I loved the guy that made the case for it. He argued this. He is, this is just great.

54:29

This is the, this is the stuff when you actually dig into this stuff and read it, you can't help but to laugh because, well, it's kind of one of those laughs where you're kind of sad because people actually believe this, but you laugh because people are actually gullible enough to believe this.

54:40

But here's the thing, this guy, he was looking because there's supposedly this document that Mary Magdalene had of a

54:48

Mary Magdalene having a deed with her husband Jesus who was assumed to have been crucified.

54:56

Okay, and this is out in the area of France. The problem is that the deed, the guy who's writing this book, he had seen the deed, he actually saw it with his own eyes, but he didn't know the language, the

55:10

Greek language that it was written in. The guy wouldn't let him bring a translator and wouldn't let him take a picture, but he knows it's authentic.

55:19

Yeah, and Joseph Smith has these golden plates. I'm just saying, you'll hear about that tomorrow because if you're gonna believe

55:31

Joseph Smith, you might as well believe that that document was authentic as well, all right? So what you end up seeing when we look at this, and let me give you another visualization, this one is kind of good.

55:43

Here, this visualization takes a little bit of explaining. I got this from Mark Barry out on the website, and what you see here is this large circle represents the the size of the

55:56

New Testament documents, right? We have the number of existing copies, and he's taking into it, you know, all of these different copies, not just the the

56:04

Greek, and so what you see here is he's saying 24 ,000, and he looks at something the next closest, right?

56:11

We have Homer at 643, and what he's showing here is this dot is how close it is to the original writings.

56:18

So you see, the further something goes out, the further it is from its writings. The bigger the dot is, the more manuscripts we have.

56:29

Something tells me that the New Testament kind of eclipses every other document of ancient history, every single one.

56:42

The New Testament is the most attested to, most reliable document that we have in ancient history, and we're worried about 66 words out of 138 ,000.

56:58

No, there's no need to worry. There's no need to worry.

57:05

There is not a single doctrine that is affected by any of these textual variances, and you know how we know that?

57:16

Because we have so many copies. Because we have so many copies, thousands and thousands of copies, we can compare them.

57:27

With the technology we have today, there's people that are taking images of these things and putting them up on the internet so that more and more scholars can examine it, and the more we find, this is how

57:39

I like to put it, you take a look at history and archaeology and the Greek New Testament, things like this, and we had a line chart, and everywhere we got a piece of data, we put a line, and everywhere where something was proven false, we'd erase a line.

57:53

You know what we find? We find that that line's filling in and nothing's been erased. The fact is, the more study we do, the more reliable the

58:01

New Testament is. The more study we do, the more it supports everything that's stated in the

58:06

New Testament. So with all of this, we can rest on the fact that very little of the

58:12

New Testament is in question, and even less in the Old Testament. And due to the very large number of manuscripts, it helps us to identify every possible variant location that there would be in the

58:23

Bible, so that we know that not one major doctrine of Christianity is affected by any of these variances.

58:31

Knowing this, we can trust in the reliability of the Bible, and that we can trust that the meaning of the

58:40

Bible has not changed. There's a different study that I encourage you to do, and it's after we trust in the

58:47

Bible, what you should do is a study on hermeneutics. That's how to interpret the Bible. I'll give a little plug, we have a 20 lessons that you can learn, 20 lessons on how to interpret the

58:57

Bible, that you can actually watch for free on YouTube. If you want, you can go out to the table and buy the syllabus, but that the reality is, folks, we have nothing to fear from Bart Ehrman or any of these others that are trying to say that we cannot trust the

59:13

Bible. The Bible is being attested to more than any other document.

59:21

The reality is, we know that there's people that are being given misinformation. What I hope that you now have is,

59:28

I hope that I brought this at a level that every one of you can understand. Every one of you could take this and say, you know what, when someone challenges me and says, well, the

59:35

Bible was written by men, the Bible was edited, I have enough information that I can sit there and say, you know what, you don't know what you're talking about.

59:43

Let me give you some facts. Let me sit down with you and explain to you how we got the Bible. Why it is that we say the meaning of the

59:51

Bible hasn't changed. Because the major thing is, and this is different than Islam.

59:57

See, Islam, they try to argue there's one text. You know what the problem is with that? We don't know where the variances are, because we know the third caliph,

01:00:05

Uthman, had actually had several copies of the Quran and burned them, okay, burned and kept one.

01:00:12

How do you know he burnt the right one? Well, you don't know, because you don't have any other variances. Actually, we do.

01:00:18

David Wood's done some work on that, but the thing is this, when we look at the

01:00:23

New Testament, we have so many copies, we can know where those changes are and know that no doctrine was affected.

01:00:32

In fact, one of the biggest arguments, and Bart Ehrman has a new book out trying to say that Jesus became God, how

01:00:37

Jesus became. He was in the early manuscripts, he was supposedly a man, and later they made him into God.

01:00:43

I'm working on a new book called Jesus Christ Claims of Deity. I went through the entire

01:00:49

New Testament, looking at every claim, direct and incorrect, of Jesus Christ. Being an engineer,

01:00:55

I like math. What did I do? I added up the everything. Do you know that 48 % of the

01:01:00

Gospels refer to Jesus Christ as God directly or indirectly? What do I mean by indirectly?

01:01:06

Every time Jesus read someone's mind, can any of you guys do that? Just saying that's something only

01:01:12

God can do. Any of you raised the dead? Any of you raised yourself from the dead?

01:01:18

I mean, every one of these things that Jesus did, he showed, he put his deity on display. 48%.

01:01:27

It seems like Jesus maybe, just maybe, trying to say there's a really important message in the

01:01:34

New Testament, that God came to earth to die on a cross as a payment of sin that we could be set free.

01:01:47

Brothers and sisters, that's the message that we go out to the world that hates us with, and we tell them the truth because God's Word can be trusted.

01:01:59

God exists, and he has spoken. Let's pray. Heavenly Father, it is an amazing thing that we would see people who would say that we can't trust the

01:02:13

Bible. Lord, we look at these things, and we know that you have spoken.

01:02:21

You have not left us in this world without an absolute authority. Not only have you given, have you indwelt us in the personal

01:02:30

Holy Spirit to illuminate your understanding, but you have given us your

01:02:35

Word so that while we walk this earth and we live in a culture that tries to say everything's relative, we have a solid rock to stand upon, and we can rightly proclaim, thus says the

01:02:48

Lord, because you have spoken. Enable us now,

01:02:53

Lord, that we would strive to make today an eternal day for your glory. Amen.

01:04:42

If you wait for just a minute, they'll be with us in just a minute. Do you have a question for Andrew first? So the question is, how can you give facts like we gave without offending someone?

01:05:01

Come on up. Well, a lot of that's going to be how you carry yourself and how you present it.

01:05:08

I found, for me, I like to ask questions. By asking questions, it, you know, as I said with the guy from Montclair State, that whole time all

01:05:18

I was doing was asking questions. It got me out of the hot seat, got him having to think. A question, what a question does is make someone think about an answer, and so it seems less offensive because you put yourself in a position of, hey,

01:05:31

I'm just learning here. I'm just trying to understand. You're the teacher, and so they feel it shows a little bit more respect.

01:05:37

You know, it's sort of like, you know, David said earlier with his testimony, he was challenged to actually, he was asked a lot of questions.

01:05:44

People don't get offended by that. Usually, they see that as a sign of respect, so that's one way of doing it. That's how I typically try to.

01:06:57

So the idea was other ideologies. Well, there's much towards those kinds of ideologies because apologetics in the

01:07:13

West has historically been geared towards skeptics and atheists and agnostics because those were the people that people over here were dealing with, and then eventually with cults because we had, you know, they come up and knock on your door.

01:07:25

So that's what apologetics in the West has been geared towards. That's one of the reasons I focused on Islam is

01:07:31

I realized there's very few people who are dealing with Islam, even though you're talking about a fifth of the world's population who are

01:07:36

Muslim, but apologetics just wasn't kind of prepared for it because it's been focused on dealing with atheism and agnosticism, and that's very different from, in other words, when a

01:07:49

Muslim says Jesus didn't rise from the dead, it's a completely different reason from when an atheist says that Jesus didn't rise from the dead.

01:07:54

The Muslim has no objection to God or to miracles or anything else. It's the Qur 'an says that he didn't die, therefore he didn't rise from the dead.

01:08:01

That's his reason. An atheist says it for a completely different reason, similar with the text of the

01:08:07

New Testament. The reason that an atheist objects to it is completely different from the reason a Muslim would object to the text of the

01:08:14

New Testament, so it requires a different kind of apologetics. But you're right in that certain other ideologies that I don't think they're ever going to be sort of hot topics in Christian apologetics because they're not as aggressive, right?

01:08:31

When a cult knocks at your door, you have to start thinking about what they teach and how I would respond to what they teach.

01:08:37

I've never had a Buddhist challenge me at all, I mean really, right? You need to believe in Buddhism and Christianity is stupid, right?

01:08:45

I mean, I'm sure they exist and so it's basically people who are interested in it.

01:08:51

I mean, and there are writings on there. I mean, you know, Ravi Zacharias and so on, they go through the teachings of these other religions.

01:08:59

But for most Christians, even Christians in apologetics, I doubt they're going to be major issues because by nature they're not as confrontational as atheism or Islam.

01:09:11

And so it would then fall on the people who are interested in that, right? So if you're interested in that and you're interested in responding,

01:09:19

I would encourage you to go find anyone who's spoken on it and spoken on this, written on it, and find the good responses and start sharing those.

01:09:30

And where you don't find good responses or things that there should be a better response, you could do that, right?

01:09:38

So that's my response. It's the same with Islam, right?

01:09:44

I start going on, hey, where can I find good criticisms on this or this issue and stuff? And hey, I can't find it. Oh, maybe I should just do it, right?

01:09:51

And so that's what I would say. If you feel like that is important and you're noticing an area in apologetics where apologetics is lacking, perfect opportunity to say, cool, this is an area

01:10:04

I need to address and I'm gonna fill that. Again, there are people out there who've addressed it. It's not the most prominent stuff because it's not what the most people are dealing with.

01:10:13

But you can find that and expand upon it. Oh, and I mean, just so everyone knows,

01:10:45

China is where, I mean, it's exploding there. The church is exploding there. And that's why it could be sort of cutting -edge apologetics.

01:10:54

And that's something most of us don't have to deal with. But you would have to deal with that because that's where the church is going to be exploding.

01:11:02

So guess what? The people who are worried about the church growing rapidly there are going to be attacking it with whatever is normal to them, with whatever worldview they hold.

01:11:12

So if you know the worldviews that they hold, they're going to be coming at them with. Even if every

01:11:17

Christian in America, every Christian apologist in America or Europe thinks that's not a major issue, that's going to be the front lines right there.

01:11:24

That's going to be the front lines in those areas. And so that could be something that you and others just dedicate your lives to.

01:11:31

An interesting thing. I pastored at a Chinese church, and so I deal a lot with the Chinese community.

01:11:37

Dealing with someone that was in China, a missionary in China, Chinese, and I had said to him, you know, it's a pity that they don't open the doors to the gospel.

01:11:49

He said that would be the last thing I'd ever want to see. And it puzzled me, like wouldn't you want the gospel to go free?

01:11:55

He said, the last thing I'd want is an open door to the gospel like you have in America. Because you get everything.

01:12:02

He says the gospel is going free right now, but it's all underground, it's person to person. And you know, the statistics out of China are just amazing.

01:12:14

One of the most amazing YouTube videos I've ever seen was, you might have seen it, where a

01:12:22

Chinese church opened up a suitcase full of Bibles, and they just, it was, they pounced on them.

01:12:27

And they were all holding the Bibles and stuff, because it's not as easy as walking down the street and going to Barnes &

01:12:33

Noble and getting a copy there. Just the love they have for scripture. I have a friend

01:12:38

I know, and she goes with some people that they go to China, they literally put a stack of Bibles on the ground, preach the gospel in Chinese, and run.

01:12:48

Because they know the police are going to be called, because they preach the gospel, they can't be caught with the Bibles. So they preach the gospel and say there's

01:12:55

Bibles here if you want to know God's Word, and they take off, and those Bibles are gone. They see people run up, grab a

01:13:00

Bible, and run off. I would like to do that, that'd be awesome. Hey, here you go.

01:13:09

So anyway, that's the gospel. Oh, what's this? Someone left a pile of books there.

01:13:14

What's that? Bible? What's that? I don't know, I'll just walk away here. Oh, I actually shared that a couple times with people who were asking questions in back.

01:13:49

In 2010, there was a guy in Florida, Terry Jones, who was having a burn the

01:13:57

Quran day. And I debated him on it. I was like, you really want to be burning, I mean, read it and expose it, right?

01:14:04

I'm gonna burn a book, right? So I had a debate with him on TV on whether, you know, he should be burning the books and so on.

01:14:11

But at the same time, I was thinking, why are Muslims getting upset over one guy burning one

01:14:16

Quran when their third caliph burned all the Qurans? He burned every Quran there was, right? Because there were so many differences in it, people started complaining.

01:14:23

He said, everyone send me all your Qurans. They all sent them in and he burned them all, right? And then issued an authoritative

01:14:28

Quran. The Quran we have today is a descendant of the Uthmanic version that was put out. And so I was wondering about that.

01:14:35

And so I told Nabil, I was like, hey, let's record a video. We'll call it the original burn the Quran day.

01:14:41

It's about Uthman burning all the Qurans, right? And the video starts off with, I'm rubbing a stick together like I'm starting a fire on this pile, on this pile of books.