Q&A on Apologetics, Canon, and the History of the Text

Any other questions? Your son? Where's my son? What was the Greek word for apology?

Apologia. I'm going to be kissing you in the car on the way home.

And what's the root of that? Think about it. What's an important Greek word that most of you know? It's in the first chapter, the first.

Verse of the Gospel of John. I'm surprised you didn't hit that. I.

Think you should go down that road. Yeah. I know Lagos. Lagos, right? Lagos is the word. So apologia, the root of that is Lagos. So it's a word forward or a defending word. Yes? I know the answer, but I think they need to hear it.

The Preservation of the Old Testament Text

So you talk about the new Testament. How do you evaluate the old Testament? Do you mind if I answer? No. I don't want to. I don't want to leave Eric out. What am I doing? I'm just getting coffee, brother.

Okay. He's going to play a question that nobody asked.

No, it's fine. That's a very good question, and it's actually a question that is not often asked because the textual history and transmission of the Old Testament is not the same as the New Testament.

The Old Testament was contained within the Jewish community and was contained with a lot more rigorous, meticulous copies than the New Testament. The New Testament has a ton of manuscripts, but it also has a lot of variation because those manuscripts were often written by people who weren't necessarily scholars or scribes by trade.

So we do have to deal with textual variation in the New Testament manuscripts much more than the Old Testament. Plus, the Old Testament manuscripts, the oldest Hebrew manuscripts we have are the Masoretic texts, which is the 9th century texts, which means that they are a thousand years removed from the Old Testament.

But about a hundred years ago in a place called Qumran, which is a place near the Dead Sea, there was a group of clay pots that stand about six foot tall that were found, and in those clay pots they found manuscripts that had been written prior to the time of Jesus, and those were called the Dead Sea Scrolls.

And when they began to compare those scrolls with the Masoretic text, which is the text that we had that was the oldest at the time, it took us back a thousand years and showed that there had been no substantial change even in that thousand years.

So that gave us great confidence in the historicity of the Old Testament text and the preservation of it. Now the other thing I will often say if people say, why do you trust the Old Testament is accurate?

I also appeal to Christ because Christ trusted in the accuracy of the Old Testament. He said to the people, have you not read what God said to you? That's a very important thing. Think of what I just said.

Have you not read what God said to you? Meaning that what they had written was God's Word. And so I think we have various reasons to believe the Old Testament has been preserved as well. We also have something called the Septuagint.

I'll spend another hour. The Septuagint also bears witness to the historicity of the text. So we have several lines of historical evidence for the Old Testament. It's not the same as the New Testament, but it's just as compelling.

How the Early Church Recognized the Canon

Who else? Yes sir, I see a hand. I don't remember off the top of my head, but how did the early church know which writings of the apostles that need to be included in the Bible?

All right. This is, yeah, this is my area.

That is called the question of canonicity. When we talk about the scriptures, there are actually four areas of study that I didn't get to do. Again, this is limited time, right? The first area is inspiration.

The second area is canonization. So inspiration is God wrote it. The second is man recognizing what God had written. That's canonization. The next is transmission. How does it go from the original to the copies?

And then the next is translation. How does it go from a copy in one language to a copy in the next language, right? So that's four steps to get from Moses to me. I taught a course called From Moses to Me.

How did the Bible go from the hand of Moses to my hand, right? And it's that process. It's inspiration, canonization, transmission, translation. So in the second category of canonization, we again have the issue of the Old Testament versus the New Testament.

Under the Old Testament, you have the Old Testament prophets who were writing and God's people, the people of Israel, recognized that this was from God and therefore they collected those scriptures and they had what's called the Tanakh, the Torah, the Nevi 'im, and the Ketuvim, which are the Old Testament scriptures, which they would lay up in the temple.

They had those scriptures and they recognized those are from God. In the New Testament, it's a little bit more difficult because you no longer have a centralized system that's like the Levitical system.

You have the apostles and the apostles do bear witness to what was written, but the apostles weren't the only ones writing. So when we look at the scriptures of the New Testament, we begin to say, okay, who were these men and what were they writing, right?

And so we know Matthew was an apostle. We know Mark was not. But according to one of the early fathers, I forget who it is, Mark is actually writing from Peter. So Mark is writing what Peter has given him.

So Mark is writing from Peter. So we have Peter's authority. Luke, of course, is with the apostle Paul and John, of course, is the beloved disciple. So we begin to look at the historic nature of these books.

But something more important is this, is anytime this question is asked, and I say it's not just a question of history, it's also a question of theology. If God wrote a book, he knows what he wrote. And if God's will is that his people know what he wrote, then he will ensure that his people know and have what he wrote.

So it's also a matter of faith. That what we have is what God intended for us to have. For instance, in our Bible, we don't have the book of Enoch. But yet Jude quotes from the book of Enoch. But the New Testament church never recognized the book of Enoch as a scripture.

Neither did the Old Testament saints recognize the book of Enoch as scripture. So even though it's quoted in the New Testament, that doesn't mean that it's part of the Bible any more than when Paul quotes from the poets of Rome or anyone else.

So there are things that are quoted in the Bible that are not the Bible, but ultimately God ensured that we have what we're supposed to have. That's a very short answer to a very complex question.

Dating the Birth of Christ and the Gregorian Calendar

Thank you. Sorry, that was a lot. This is more like not really apologetics, but I was quite curious. You know how like time is measured and stuff like before Christ and after Christ. How do people like know when to start?

Like you said it was at the birth of Christ, and this is super embarrassing, but like what made them decide to start then? You want to answer that or you want me to?

It's all you. I try to make it up. I do mornings, you do nights. Okay.

You're actually asking another question. No, I'm not. Like I'm interpreting English in English. What you're asking is how do we know.

When Jesus was born? No, no, no, no. Well, we may see like it was going backwards. Okay. You know, like counting down.

Okay. From a historic perspective, the Gregorian calendar is what we use now, which was established by Pope Gregory. So that wasn't until the 6th century, I believe. I have to look that up to be certain.

6th or 7th century. But the counting has always been recognizing when Christ came and the church has been counting since Christ came ever since he came. The question, though, becomes did he come? There was no year zero.

So when was Jesus born? And we have to wrestle with the issue of Kyrenius, because in the Gospel of Luke, it says Kyrenius was governor of Syria when Jesus was born. But historically, that actually doesn't line up with the time we think Jesus was born.

So it kind of puts our dating out a little bit and it puts it to the point where Jesus is probably born somewhere 4 to 7 BC. So we would actually be in 2028, not 2022, if we were trying to be super specific.

But we're not. It's all essentially numbers that have been put together later. But the point I was making when I talked about Christ splitting time was I was saying everything we measure now is based on Christ.

But that's what I was, why? And like most of the people.

In the world, everybody in the world, it's 2022 everywhere. The whole world recognizes that. Because the Christians won. No, no, no, no, no. I will tell you this. I'm actually going to a unbelieving pagan comedian made that statement.

I'm just quoting him. I'm not going to tell you who he was. He said, he said, if you don't think the Christians won, what year is it? Everybody goes, 2022. It's because they won. There is a sense in which Christianity has been dominant throughout the world for a reason.

Because it's true. Christianity is the dominant religion in the world. It is. There's no, there's the second closest is Islam, right? After that it's, it's, there's several other different religions that go down the line.

But Christianity has, if you, if you include, which I wouldn't say all these people are saved, but if you include Roman Catholics and others who call themselves Christians, there's over two billion people in the world who identify the Lord Jesus Christ.

It is by far the largest religion. It won the battle. And therefore it is, everybody recognizes in that, in that sense. And there's no shame in that. Oh, well, winners write history. Yeah, they do. I mean, it's true.

But that doesn't mean we got it wrong. Now, were there things that were done in Christian history that were wrong? Yes, there were inquisitions and crusades and things that were done ungodly, things that were done.

I'm not, I'm not, I'm not arguing for that. But overall, the, the victory of Christ has been known. Jesus said the gates of hell will not prevail. What does a gate do? Holds it back. And they haven't held us back.

We have prevailed. And if you're a post-millennialist, you'll keep prevailing. Start a fight with you and your brother.

All right. Until righteousness covers the earth.

Until righteousness covers the earth. That's right. So we won. That's a good question. I hope that was a sensible answer. It was. Somebody asked Eric a question. Try and take a breath. No, I can't. Yes, I see a hand.

How to Respond When People Shout Nonsense

How are we supposed to defend our faith when all they want to do is shout nonsense at us?

All they want to do is what? Shout nonsense. Shout nonsense. So, I mean, the Bible doesn't speak to answering a fool. I think at some point, you got to know when to just say, this is fruitless. And we're not to just argue and try to win.

As I was alluding to this morning, apologetics has as its goal not to be proven right or to win the argument, as its goal is to see people reconciled to God. And, you know, you had this rich young ruler came to Jesus.

What must I do, you know, inherit eternal life? Jesus said, you know, what the command say to you? And he told him, he said, you know, I've kept these since I was a youth. Jesus told him, you know, one thing you lack, you know, sell all that you have.

Give to the poor, follow me. And the Bible says he went away sad because he was a wealthy man. And one thing that a lot of churches miss and preaches and everybody else is that Jesus didn't go chasing after him after that.

Amen. He let him go. You know, it may seem like you're taking a loss, but you're not. Sometimes you just got to say, OK, you don't want to know. I have, you know, through college and early years of ministry, I thought I had to be not just had to be right, but had to be seen as being right.

And when the argument I want a lot of arguments, but didn't produce any fruit from those conversations, I've learned to trust the word of God and realize that I'm just a messenger. I'm the mailman delivering the mail and then trust God with his word.

And when they want to reject that, I don't I don't need to go chase after. I say, but you don't understand. Jesus left a lot of people just walk away. And there's a point where you just realize, you know what?

My concern is not winning this argument. My concern is this man's soul. And the man is dead in his trespasses and sins as hard as hearted. It really doesn't matter what I'm going to say. First Corinthians two, you read this.

I think it's verse 14 that the things of God are spiritually discerned and it's foolishness to natural man. And so until the spirits working on somebody that that's his job, not to be a faithful ambassador, but it's the Holy Spirit's job to do the convicting and the convincing.

And so when they start shouting all that stuff, that's the point you just got to say, OK, you're just being ignorant or whatever. You know, if you want to have a conversation, we can have a conversation.

I'll tell you a story of what happened to me. So a guy comes in my office, he's having some marriage issues. And there's always two sides to the story, but I'm getting one side. This happens a lot. He's telling me everything that's wrong with his wife and he's wanting me to side with him, which I'm not going to do.

Because first of all, his wife is not there for me to see whether this is true or not or whatever. But he's gone through the whole spiel and everything else. And normally I would either just spoke and said stuff and argued or whatever.

But I just let him talk. And I just said, you know what? God actually has something to say about that in his Word. And I didn't comment. I just read the passage. Well, you know how when you talk to some people and, you know, they're looking at you and you know, the voice, the sound waves are going, you know, through their earlobes, but they're not really listening to what you're saying.

That's what happened the first time. So it's kind of like he was just waiting for me to finish. And then he started up again saying stuff. I said, hold on. You know what's interesting? The Bible has something to say about that, too.

So I turned to another passage and just read. Now I made him uncomfortable. He's shifting in the seat, you know, and he's waiting again for me to be through again. And then he then he start, you know, when I'm done, he starts again.

You know what? The Bible has something to say about that as well. And without thinking, he blurted it out. I don't care what the Bible has to say. Now, when he said it, he realized what he said. At which point I closed my Bible.

I said, then why did you come ask me? I said, you can go to a thousand churches and find a pastor who will agree with you and tell you everything you want to hear. But I have an obligation to preach God's word.

And I feel firmly convicted by that. I can give you my opinion. My opinion may even be in agreement with what you're saying. And we both could be wrong. It doesn't matter what I have to say. It only matters what God has to say.

And so we have to just trust God's word. And when people want to rebel against that and reject it, you got to be willing to walk away. And so at that point, I just closed the Bible. I said, hey, can I pray for you?

And he agreed for me to pray. I never saw him again. But hey, you know, it wasn't on me to convince the man. It was me to properly represent. And so we got to know when to hold him. You got to know when to fold him.

You got to know when to walk away. I want to say this also. Who do you belong to? Yeah. Who does this world belong to? Who's one? So what happens is, is these people come to you and try to get you in an argument.

And then they say something like this. Well, you got to prove the existence of God. Now, do you remember day two? You're denying God. You're here breathing. You look out here. Look, hey, you're made up of material, made up of atoms that's made up of mostly empty space that's held together by something we don't understand.

And you're telling me I have to have a faith in nothing. I can tell you why those atoms aren't splitting apart and causing division. Because Jesus spoke and they held together. And they'd be like, well, you got to prove Jesus exists.

You're breathing. Okay. You've already won the battle of here in Christ. Don't think you have to prove God exists. To try to prove God exists is to make less of God than what he is. God exists. And so don't you think that you have to fight with their rules?

Technically, they have to fight with God's rules because it's God who set the world in motion and made two plus two equals four. So they have to follow by God's rules. You don't have to try to prove the existence of God.

Don't ever fall for that. You have God. They deny him and sin. And they know he exists. In Romans one says they are left without excuses. Amen.