Cassian's Recap: 13 Reasons for the Reliability of the New Testament

Hello, hello. Welcome to Biblically Speaking. I am your host, Cassian Bellino, and today is just a recap of this week's episode with Dr. Ben Shaw, Understanding His Book, 13 Reasons for the Reliability of the New Testament.

Trustworthy. Check it out. It's available on Amazon. It's linked. You can go to the show notes. You can buy it. And if you listened to that episode, thank you so much. But if you haven't, today is going to be a quick recap on understanding his arguments for the reliability of the New Testament.

So today, I'm just going to go over a quick review, a quick little TLDR on what are my personal notes of this episode. So if you're just tuning in for these next couple minutes of going over the episode and you love it, I invite you to go back to the full 60-minute episode with Dr. Ben Shaw.

He is phenomenal. He's such a joy to talk to. And at the end of the day, he's doing God's work. He's doing the Lord's work. I mean, he's taking very complex issues of what it means to understand, believe, and prove the reliability of the New Testament.

And he's putting it in these very simplistic, easy to read terms, texts, and books that he wrote in an afternoon. So you can definitely read it within a day. And I had the pleasure of talking to him for about an hour where we go into each one of the points that he made within the book.

So a couple points. I have some notes here just before we jump in, but this is needed to build our defense. When it comes to 1 Peter 3 .15, we need to be ready to give a defense for our faith. And I feel like this book is just like another tool in the tool belt, a piece of artillery having a defense for our faith.

If we're at war here, and I believe we are a spiritual war, we need to be ready with the verses, with the facts, with the beliefs that we base our faith upon. And I think that reading his book is a great place to start.

It's even funny because it's like a lay person's tool. And his editor even said it's like the TikTok of books because it's so short. It's like 150 pages. But it's a really great way to really ground your faith without the full commitment of becoming a theologian.

Because I don't think that's what really God wants us to be. I don't think God wants every single believer to be a theologian. I just think he doesn't want us to be lazy in our understanding and pursuit of him.

And I think this book is a really great way to understand what it says, understands why it says it without taking years to go to seminary, without taking dollars to go study and hours of your day. You can just read it in an afternoon.

Textual Preservation and the Reliability of Ancient Manuscripts

So getting into it, Dr. Schott does a really great job of just pointing out that we do not question the validity of equally, if not older, ancient writings like the writings of Plato, who, if we look at the dates, and I'm glad that he points this one out because again, who's Googling this?

Dr. Ben Shaw. Plato's ancient texts were found closer to our time than his. Okay? When we have dated copies of the Gospels that were found around 125, 175 AD, that means they were found 30, 80 years after the life of Jesus.

Plato's, his writings were found closer to our time than actually the life that Plato lived. So this proves that text was written down. This proves that the text that was actually written down in the Gospels was what was actually said.

It doesn't really say whether or not it's true, but if you say that these writings are unreliable, they are by proxy saying that the events are accurately preserved in order to make the claims about its validity.

So the first layer of reliability is knowing what was said and that what we have in ancient texts today are preserved correctly, accurately, and true. So I hit on with one of the questions that I hear very often.

And one of the questions that you probably might be asking is, isn't the Bible so far from the truth at this point with all of the translations and transcriptions and the rewrites and the edits and the NIV versus the message, haven't we just like entirely lost the plot at this point?

Aren't we so far from the origin that it's essentially an entirely new story? And Dr. Shaw says no. And he quotes Bart Ehrman, who is an agnostic. He states that the biblical texts today have been one of the best preservation of texts by scholars and that these texts, original copies are available.

They're dated 150 years after their occurrence. Texts about Alexander the Great emerge centuries after his death. Jesus's emerged decades later. So the key issues that we do see between these biblical texts, maybe the variations that we might be referencing when we try to make this argument, scholars have studied this and they say that there aren't conceptual losses.

And even Bart Ehrman, the agnostic states, there aren't conceptual losses in the plot, in the storyline, in the overall origin of what we see from the original text to today. It's more so spelling errors.

Okay. They're not missing events. They're not introducing brand new characters or losing them altogether. And if you are still doubtful about this claim, you can look at the footnotes of your Bible where it will actually point out the variations between these texts.

You might say like, oh, in some texts, it says this and some texts that says this. So check it out, which I think makes me feel quite safe about reading my Bible and knowing it's from the origin. So Dr. Shaw then brings up some of his personal work with core apologetics.

Doubt, Genre, and the Greco-Roman Biography of the Gospels

And the aim of core apologetics is to educate those who are doubting, pointing out that there are two types of doubt. There's factual doubts, and then there's the emotional what-ifs. And what-ifs are fine to ask.

It's great to wonder, but it's not okay to live there because there's no basis. There's no claim. There's nowhere we can go. You can ask endless what-if questions. So with the data that we have, we can be confident on what it said, but now we have to ask.

This said what it said, but is it accurate of what happened? This is where he introduces other topics that I have, to be completely honest, never considered when it comes to the reliability of the New Testament or text, which is genre.

And he said, it's very important that it's listed as a Greco-Roman biography because it provides a framework for how to understand and interpret the information. Kind of like, I know I'm going to go watch the movie Star Trek.

I know that it's science fiction. I know that because that's a genre it falls into. So I'm not going to take it seriously. I'm not going to treat it like a documentary. This subconsciously or consciously, the same goes for ancient biographical texts.

And this is what blew my mind, because you don't think about this, is this is important because how many Jewish biographies do we have of rabbis? Well, if you look at biographies, they are here to tell us how to emulate someone's life.

And a rabbi is here to tell us how their teachings reflect the law. But to write a biography on any rabbi is basically idolizing them. It's committing idolatry. So if we're supposed to follow Jesus and do what he does, because his life is the living embodiment of the law.

So by choosing this Greco-Roman biography genre, we were ultimately making a statement that Jesus is who he is. That he is the law. That it's not idolatry to follow Jesus. He's the embodiment of the law.

This is not idolizing a human. It's following law, which was following a person. So Jesus is the law. Wild claim. Absolutely wild. Blew my mind. Then we get into authorship. Okay? Which again, I guess I just didn't think about it.

But I guess if you were dissecting the reliability of the New Testament, you'd be like, well, nowhere in the Bible does it say John wrote the book of John. Nowhere does it say... I mean, like aside from like Paul's letters, where there's like introduction, there's no like, oh, Matthew, hi, this is Matthew, and I'm writing a book about Jesus and how I knew him and when I was apostle for him.

And that's just kind of something we take for granted. I mean, we see it even in books today. It's not like every book we read, we get the title page, we get the cover, but then within the actual text of the book, it's not like, hi, I'm Cassian.

I'm still the author of this book now that I'm actually writing the paragraphs within it. So we don't think about these things, but people who are trying to disprove the reliability do apparently. And when we look at this, this is important because it's not obvious that Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John wrote it when you just read the text.

We know it because we believe the Bible and that's the way it's organized. But it was really common back in the day for people to write under a pseudonym, like Enoch, okay? The texts usually don't state their authorship at the beginning of the writings.

So how do we know that Matthew and Mark wrote it? Well, what Dr. Ben Shaw said is that they would put tags on the scrolls or headings like the gospel according to, gospel according to Mark, the gospel according to Matthew, which in the scholastic world, this is considered formally anonymous, but not technically anonymous.

And if you think about it, there wasn't any competition coming out saying like, well, Matthew says he wrote it, but my name's Todd and I actually wrote it. There wasn't anybody else coming out of the woodwork to be like, wrong, he didn't write it.

It's one of those things where it's like, well, it's assumed there was a tag and this is the way that it was written. So even though Matthew didn't say, hey, this is me writing this book about Jesus's life, there's a tag, it's the gospel according to Matthew and no one else is saying I wrote it, Matthew did it.

One of the things that actually I think brings this point home is that if you look at different geological locations, all unlinked, if you've got people reading the book of Matthew in Egypt, people reading the book of Matthew in Greece, people reading the book of Matthew in Asia, which would have been Turkey at the time, they all agree that Matthew wrote the book of Matthew.

They're all reading the same text and are in alignment without knowing each other that yes, Matthew wrote this. There wasn't any disputes in different geological locations, geographical locations, sorry, who do not know each other.

They are all agreeing with each other. So if we look at authorship, there's not really any founding here for room for disproving it or saying that he didn't write it. I hope that makes sense. One of the things that Dr. Shaw says is that this is borderline a miracle and it's a highly tested, trusted authorship.

Oral Tradition, Creedal Confessions, and the Early Church

So now we get into the validity of the word today and how did the original receivers treat it? Well, they didn't have a lot of versions to go off of. It's not like everybody had a Bible. They weren't passing them out at the end of service like they do today.

We truly just take that for granted. So at the end of the day, they wanted to preserve this. They wanted to cherish this as much as they could, much more than we do today. Even let's say, like to put this in perspective, Constantine, the ruler, the leader, he pushed super hard to have Bibles created.

He was like, we got, we got to get Bibles. It's the official religion. We got to get these going. Do you, and so all the man with all the power, all the resources, all the money, he's the leadership, he's in charge of people.

He's like, yep, we got to get some Bibles. Guess how many he got? Initially, 50. All the power and money in the world at the time and only 50 were created. We are absolutely spoiled today with the word and the access that we have.

So people back in the day, they weren't really in a place to change the text simply to understand it and preserve it. They just wanted to read it as is. Why would they change the original? All right, going forward, we get into other things like creedal tradition.

This is something, again, you just never think about it. We take this for granted. And when it comes to the reliability of the word, we got to think of the way that it was passed on. And creedal tradition was a way that text in the back, back in the day was passed on.

It was a tool in an oral society to remember scripture. And it kind of is like a jingle. It's like a song. It can be easily passed on. It can be easily remembered like a hymn. And what it does is it communicates truth or it communicates text used in processes like in baptism.

So these were core truths of the word of God. They were used in sanctifying and like covenant processes. They weren't like, I use the example like Irish jingles where there's embellishments or lies, like they were used in very important moments.

So they're communicating the very essence, the very core of the Bible. And this is mostly found in the New Testament, commonly in Greek. And since we don't use creedal traditions, we don't understand the structure.

We don't typically recognize that it's a creedal tradition. But one example would be first Corinthians 15. And this is important because this is a confession. These are cardinal truths of Jesus dying on the cross for our sins.

And if you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord, that you're saying that this is truth, you can't embellish that. That is a truth. You are stating a confession that you believe that about Jesus dying for our sins.

Okay? Would you die for a lie? These people were claiming this with their heart. If it was false, why would they die for it? It's not like anybody had a luxurious life after proclaiming this. They had a pretty rough life.

So this is just stating that these creedal truths that were used in an oral tradition were truth because they're not going to pass on something and die for it if it wasn't. These were binding statement beliefs.

These weren't like sing song praises. These weren't propaganda. So we have to understand the way that oral tradition was passed on and validity behind what was being said. Moving on, we get into archaeology, which is, to be honest, some of my favorite stuff.

Archaeological Evidence for Jesus, the Shroud of Turin, and Spiritual Transformation

And a few things have popped up in proving the reliability of the New Testament based on recent or past archaeological finds. And this is something I just saw recently, but it was a mosaic found stating that Jesus is God.

And this was found. It's dated because they do the carbon dating for it. This was built 220 years before Constantine's decree that Christianity was the official religion. This was an investment into art, into stone, into labor to create a mosaic.

You wouldn't do that about something you didn't truly believe. You're not going to spend thousands of dollars getting a tattoo on your entire back unless you truly love that tattoo and what it stands for.

You're not going to say Jesus is God. Oh, that thing we just threw it up there. This was an investment. This echoed their beliefs. This was something they wanted to last. Okay? And this was before Constantine's decree.

This is people proclaiming that Jesus is God. Another piece of archaeological evidence, pretty popular, is the Shroud of Turin. And I understood it as basically a piece of cloth with, allegedly, Jesus's face in it.

And that's all I knew. But I think that Dr. Shah does a really good job of essentially saying that this is a phenomenon because the Shroud of Turin is not just showing like an imprint of blood because Jesus died.

He was bloody. The Shroud of Turin was laid on his face. And what you get is like when you put your face in snow and you get the face and it's like, oh, yeah, well, that's the imprint. That's the stain of the blood.

No, it's not blood. It's not dirt that you get because you put your face on it. When you look at it, the Shroud of Turin, he says that it's not blood. It's trace imprints. There's probably like 200 fibrils on the cloth of the atheists that studied it.

And this imprint shows up on like five of the 200 fibrils of the cloth. Okay? The atheists that study this say, what is this? It's not dirt. Dirt and blood that would seep through the entire cloth. It's 200 fibrils.

This is on like five of them. Okay? This is a 3D imprint of somebody that transcended. And if you look at the dating methods used, it places it right at 30 AD, which is Jesus's life. That's his death.

So just like a phenomenon how did something make that type of imprint impact last on that type of cloth at that time? Dated right during the time of Jesus's death. So again, pretty reliable stuff. And last, we end with spiritual transformation.

How does the impact of the New Testament prove its reliability and trustworthiness? Listen, I've read a lot of good books. I'm not going to lie. Twilight changed my life. Okay? I was like 12 and I didn't know what love was until I saw Bella and Edward.

That doesn't mean it's true. That's essentially what we're saying here. We're not saying because the New Testament is such a good book, it must be true, right? Because what? Twilight was a good book. That doesn't mean it's true.

What it's saying here is that the Bible makes claims on Jesus, who he is and what he can do. And then people who read about this are changed fundamentally. Not just I read a good book and I started picking up some new habits.

They are fundamentally changed. They are transformed. So this isn't to confer the reliability of the New Testament, but to prove consistency with the claims of it being reliable based on the impact it has on people who read it, live it, absorb it.

Practical Apologetics Resources and Closing Thanks

So where do those who want to build their first Peter 315 artillery begin? Where do we go when people challenge us? Ben Shaw says, listen to my podcast. I'm just kidding. He says, go to Core Apologetics.

He also says to listen to my podcast. But if you want to learn more of these insights from Dr. Ben Shaw, Dr. Gary Habermas, other professors at Liberty University, and you I'm a huge fan of Liberty University.

Shout out to them. You should go to coreapologetics .com. You can jump on calls with these scholars. You can have one-on-one questions with them as they lead courses on the reliability of the New Testament and other topics.

So it's very easy to understand. You get an option, you get that ability to ask questions, and you can go face to face with a scholar. That is like one level deeper than what I can provide because you are meeting with the scholars head on.

So if you are interested in growing in that way, head over to coreapologetics .com. But please don't leave me because we've got way more content coming your way in season two of Biblically Speaking. I cannot put into words how grateful I am to have access to this type of insights, to have people come on the show and share a depth that I don't even know how to Google this.

I didn't even consider these things, and yet here we have an easy explanation for it. So if you tuned in, thank you so much for listening. I really enjoyed this episode with Dr. Ben Shaw. I'm really excited for what's coming up next.

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