Can we trust the Bible?

Welcome back to another episode of the Be a Berean podcast on the Bible Thumping Wingnut Network. If you're receiving this episode on the Bible Thumping Wingnut RSS feed, you can subscribe directly to the Be A Berean feed if you want by finding Be A Berean in your favorite podcast app. There's a few Be A Berean podcasts out there. So remember, mine's the one that has the white background with some like a blue border and it says on the BTWN.

I thank you for everybody that subscribes. Everybody gives me any feedback or comments. I do appreciate it. I've been told that if you leave a rating or review, it can be helpful to me. I have also been told that that doesn't make any difference. But if you'd like to do it, I would be happy with that.

Thank you. We have been refuting the friendly atheist for the last several episodes. there is a blog post called 40 problems with christianity that we have been going through and we're on problem number 12 the goal here is not to give comprehensive responses to everything but in some ways it's just to look at what the atheist is writing to determine what type of argument he's even using and then to just give our best even first response to it a lot of times when you're evangelizing or if you're just speaking to a family member at a holiday dinner, things like that. These types of things come up and simply being ready to discuss what's going on is important.

It's okay to say, well, I need to research that. I'll get back to you. But a lot of times when we tell people that, we don't really do it. And so we don't actually give people an answer. And sometimes we're afraid to give the wrong answer. And so I think it's important that we can just sort of practice hearing questions and answers.

So Friendly Atheist's 12th problem with Christianity is delayed documentation. He says the accounts of Jesus's life in the Gospels were written well after the events allegedly occurred. Okay, so that sentence alone is just packed. And I just want us to be able to see these things. So he says we're written well after. By using the phrase well after, instead of we're written X number of years after, the atheist creates in your mind the idea that there's this significant amount of time between when the events happened, when they were written, that should cast doubt on whether or not those gospel accounts could be accurate.

It's a form of argumentation that can be very persuasive. And I just want us to be able to see that because it just sounds bad. Ooh, they were written well after. That sounds bad. Well, what's your definition of well after? if the definition of well after differs from the speaker to the hearer, then the sentence doesn't mean the same thing. And then he says, after the events allegedly occurred, which I'll grant him there's nothing wrong with allegedly in his case, but it casts doubts on whether they occurred.

He says the crucifixion of Jesus is believed to have occurred around 30 A.D. okay, the best estimates date the Gospels as follows. So Mark 80, 68, Matthew 80, 70, Luke 80, 80, and John 80, 90. So that's when he says people think these books were written. I don't know if that's accurate in the first place, but let's say it is accurate or whether it is or it isn't.

His point is we're looking at at least 30 to 60 years after the events before they're written. So here's his problem with it. He says the time lag between the events and the documentation was long enough for exaggeration and myths to contaminate the historical account. It would be similar if a person today wrote a biography of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

Jr. just by talking to people who heard something about him from their now deceased ancestors. Okay, so let's break this down. He says the time lag was long enough for exaggeration and myths to contaminate the historical account. Okay, well, sure, that's a true statement. Had the accounts been written real time, it would have been possible for exaggeration and myths to occur.

I mean, we see this every day. I mean, just read articles in the news. Exaggeration and myths are generated constantly, real time. And some of those stories could be preserved that way. But then he says it would be similar if a person today wrote a biography of Dr. Martin Luther King just by talking to people who heard something about him from now-deceased ancestors.

Well, here's where I take exception, and we'll just take the four books he cited. Mark was written by John Mark, and by all accounts that I've heard, that is considered to be the memoirs of Peter. The idea is that John Mark was really documenting the things Peter told him So this wasn John Mark talking to someone who had heard something about Jesus from somebody else This was John Mark talking to Peter the Apostle, who was on the Mount of Transfiguration with Jesus, who walked with Jesus, who was there the night he was tried and crucified. this is an eyewitness account of the events.

Matthew, Matthew's an apostle. Matthew was one of the 12 who followed along with Jesus. So the implication here is that Matthew wrote a biography of Jesus by talking to other people who didn't know Jesus, but they had known people that knew Jesus, and now those people are gone. But Matthew was written by Matthew, who was with Jesus. Luke was written by the physician Luke, who had followed things closely for some time.

And he wrote a lot of things specifically to give an orderly account of them. When Luke starts his gospel, he says, It seems good to me also, having followed all things closely for some time past, to write an orderly account for you. why that you may have certainty concerning the things you have been taught he says that to Theophilus the God lover so Luke writes to God lovers he doesn't write to God haters so it's natural that God haters would would discount what Luke wrote and finally we have the Gospel of John again written by an apostle, a disciple of Christ, who was with them the whole time. And so the atheist is either just being stupid here by not acknowledging the relationship that these writers had with Jesus, or the atheist is also implying what many people have implied and that is that the Apostles didn't really write these things that these things were written by other people that it was not Luke and John who wrote these things and so that's that's an interesting question And if you look at John, let me find where John says it.

Sorry. John says in John 21, 24, this is the disciple who is bearing witness about these things, referring to John that was talked about earlier in John 21. and he says then who has written these things so john says he's written them and we know that his testimony is true so john claims authorship of of the book now obviously the point the atheist would make is that all these things could have been forged and i guess theoretically they could have been forged and and then people would have could have died and and started this like religion that's just gotten huge for a known lie. And I don't buy that.

But the atheist, of course, is presupposing God doesn't exist, or he's presupposing at least that the Bible's God is not the one true God. And so he is going to find anything he can that meets his bias. He's going to find problems that don't exist. Ultimately, I'm not concerned with whether Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John were eyewitnesses of these events, because I trust the Holy Spirit was an eyewitness of the events, and the Holy Spirit is from whom we get the Scripture.

So we don't have the Scripture because Peter saw something. We have the Scripture because the Holy Spirit inspired Peter to tell us the things that he saw. Peter himself in 2 Peter chapter 1 says, We did not follow cleverly devised myths when we made known to you the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ. He adds, But we were eyewitnesses of his majesty.

For when he received honor and glory from God the Father, and the voice was born to him by the majestic glory, this is my beloved Son with whom I am well pleased. Peter's talking about the Mount of Transfiguration he says we ourselves heard this very voice born from heaven for we were with him on the holy mountain so Peter comes out and basically says look I was there I was at the most amazing moment that anyone witnessed in Christ's incarnation and he follows that up in 2 Peter 1.19 by saying and we have the prophetic word more fully confirmed to which you will do well to pay attention as to a lamp shining in a dark place. Continuing in 20, knowing this first of all, that no prophecy of Scripture comes from someone's own interpretation.

So even the eyewitness accounts that we read about in Scripture are inspired by the Holy Spirit, so that it's not tainted by the fallibility of men whose eyewitness accounts will fail at times. One thing I found interesting is, and he's not a presuppositionalist, but J. Warner Wallace has done some really good work explaining eyewitness testimony. So if you look up J.

Warner Wallace, he wrote Cold Case Christianity, and he explains how the process that a detective would go through to evaluate eyewitness testimony for veracity, that he put the Bible eyewitness testimonies through that same process And what he found is that the Bible eyewitness testimonies check out to be true And so I think it's interesting that even these human tests we have will show some of the same things. And he goes through a lot of details that are actually really neat on how a lot of this eyewitness testimony works, and he's very good with logic. so number 12 delayed documentation I don't buy it and even if the documentation was delayed by hundreds of years I first of all I would trust it because God wrote it but what's more what's more strange isn't that we have delayed documentation it's that we have documentation from before events. That is what blows your mind in the Bible.

If men could write the Bible in such a way that it prophesied the future, why would it be such a big deal then to have a Bible that told us something that happened in the past? I'm not impressed with someone being able to write about the past accurately, although I trust they could do it by the spirit of God's power. I'm impressed that the Bible predicts the future.

Number 13 in the friendly atheist list, fact-checking. He says, It is widely understood that the persons who wrote the Gospels were not eyewitnesses to Jesus' ministry and were not historians, as we would define the term today. So we just contradicted that. It is not widely understood. In fact, that is one of those things that even atheists that are rather honest about history kind of acknowledge these things.

So this guy's venturing beyond scholarship. He's venturing into, I just hate God so much, I'm going to repeat everything anyone's ever said that's anti-God. So you have scholars that have done textual criticism and things like that that acknowledge things about the Bible that we can't deny in any meaningful way, even apart from thinking God wrote it.

So this guy's just off the deep end here. He says, rather, they were educated storytellers who used material from both mostly oral and some written sources, while at the same time adding in some embellishments and myths at their own discretion. He says there was no fact-checking available, that is no contradicting information sources, and no one alive who could testify that any given story was untrue.

So that's true. There was no one alive who could testify that any story was untrue because they were all true. There was plenty of fact-checking available. There were people that could verify if these things happened. There were people who had seen them happen. There were entire sections of the New Testament written to warn people about trying to add things that weren't true.

They were educated storytellers. The apostles weren't educated. They say that themselves. Somewhere in the book of Acts, somebody even says to them, we can see that you're not educated, but you're regular men. So again, this is just one of these kind of made-up things. ironically half the atheists you talk to will say the people who wrote the bible were like morons they were sheep herders the other half are going to tell you they were educated storytellers i don't know why anybody would make up a story like this um i don't know like peter peter made all this up to make himself look like a moron basically then Peter really put his foot in his mouth a lot this doesn't make sense I'm not saying it proves the Bible's true that it says things that are negative about the apostles themselves but come on let's get serious here for a minute so that's just a stupid one there's no problem with Christianity with fact checking Roman bias Let's read number 14.

As mentioned, almost all of the eyewitnesses of Jesus' ministry were dead by the time of the Gospel writings. That's a lie. Either of natural causes or as a result of the Jewish-Roman war that began in 66 AD, the band of Jewish followers of Jesus, led by his brother James, no longer existed. So interestingly enough, he acknowledges Jesus had a brother named James, which we know because the Bible says so.

Like, I don't get where he gets his information from. Why do I even believe there was a brother James? Anyway, he says the only Christians remaining were the Romans and other Gentiles who were followers of Paul's concept of Christianity. So he's going to create this two-concept of Christianity thing, the Old Testament one and then the one Paul kind of writes, and Jesus is somewhere in the middle, evidently.

He says, consequently, the Gospels are told in a manner consistent with Paul's theology and with an anti-Jewish pro-Roman bias. That's just not the case. He says, one of the best examples of this bias is the exoneration of Pontius Pilate and the condemnation of the Jews for Jesus's death. And he cites Matthew 27, 24 here. And so if we look at Matthew 27, 24, it says, so when Pilate saw that he was gaining nothing, but rather that a riot was beginning, he took water and washed his hands before the crowd, saying, I am innocent of this man's blood, see to it yourselves.

There's nothing about that that is an exoneration of Pontius Pilate. That simply that Pontius Pilate didn want to take responsibility for what he was doing It doesn exonerate him whatsoever It says, A fabrication of the first order, and one that has had tragic consequences for Jewish people for the past two millennia. Jewish people are suffering greatly because of the errors of their forefathers.

There's no doubt. Jewish people have been judged by God. They've been punished by men. And, yeah, I don't think any of it's ever been justified. I don't think it's right to commit like a genocide against the Jews because Jews in Jesus' day were bad. But that's what happens.

That's what has happened. Men are wicked. Men are evil. I don't know how the atheist has any concept of what a tragic consequence is. He also says another is the story of the Roman centurion who was allegedly commended by Jesus for having more faith than anyone else in Israel. That's in Matthew 8, 5-13.

So in Matthew 8, Jesus notices a Roman centurion, and he says to him, you know, he hasn't seen such faith in Israel in Matthew 8, verse 10. the fact that that happened doesn't mean that the bible has got some kind of roman bias and anti-jewish bias the fact of the matter is is that jesus christ came to his own and his own people did not receive him and as many as did receive him he gave who believed in his name he gave the right to be called children of god and so the people of the nation of israel who had been given promises and covenants in the Old Testament. They had been told things about the Messiah. Those people didn't believe in the Messiah who came.

And many people outside of Israel had started to believe. And that was God's plan all along, was to work with this one nation, for the most part, for centuries, to bring about his Messiah from the line of Judah, born in Bethlehem and he would go to Egypt and eventually come out of Nazareth and then one day he would die for his people he would raise for their justification and he would ascend into heaven and now in him all nations would be blessed and so now it isn't just the Jews that have the corner of the market on Yahweh God so that's not a Roman slant on things. This is God's plan of salvation working itself out in such a way where now the Jews are in effect being judged.

Now Jews are experiencing a partial hardening, right? And that's all part of God's plan. And it doesn't mean that it was made up. This is just the way God did it. So what you see here, he says it's Roman bias. What you have is atheistic bias. he's pre-decided that there is a problem with the god of the bible so then he looks at something the god of the bible does and then he finds what he thinks would be wrong with it and he picks roman by i mean this is you know if you don't like the god of the bible then the flood was bad the flood was mean if you don't like the god of the bible hell's bad i mean literally like you just, it's all presuppositional.

There's no amount of Roman bias in the Bible, and to the extent that non-Jews and or Romans themselves are given any preference at this time, it's just the way God has worked things out. It's not written in there. If we look at the book of Romans real briefly at the beginning, Paul says, I am under obligation both to Greeks and to barbarians, both to the wise and to the foolish.

He says, so I'm eager to preach the gospel to you also who are in Rome. But right before that, in verse 13, he says, I do not want you to be unaware, brothers, that I have often intended to come to you, but thus far have been prevented, in order that I may reach some harvest among you as well as among the rest of the Gentiles. So he's calling the Romans Gentiles.

He says he's under obligation to Greeks and barbarians, wise and foolish. And then he says, for I'm not ashamed of the gospel in 16, for it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes, not just Romans and not just Jews. And then he adds to the Jew first and also to the Greek. So Paul tells them, the gospel was given to the Jews. they had in some ways an exclusive access to it for centuries.

And it was their responsibility to guard what was entrusted to them, like Paul told Timothy to do. And in many ways, and they ultimately failed by not recognizing their Messiah. And God has now seen fit that he's going to pull his elect from all nations. Every tribe, tongue, people, and language. And so it's not that he never did that before. I mean, we have examples in the Old Testament of Gentiles coming to faith, which are very good pictures of the future revival we'd see in Gentile nations.

But the fact of the matter is, is God hasn't turned his back on the Jews either. And to say that the Bible is somehow pro-Roman, anti-Jew, misunderstands Romans 11, misunderstands what the point of all this was. In number 15, the atheist's objection. So that makes us what, 40% finished? Is that right? 15 out of 40?

3 eighths? Okay, yeah, 30, 37 and a half percent. We're getting there, people. We're getting there. Number 15 is called Growing Fish. This will be the last one for this episode, so bear with me.

The atheist says, the stories told in the Gospels became more impressive as each new Gospel was written. So here he's presupposing no continuity in the Gospels. He's presupposing that they don't align with one another and that somehow they were written in different orders and that the first one was written and then somebody wrote the next one and they made stories grander. because the whole idea here is that everything's gotten grander in the Bible from what it really was.

That Jesus was basically this guy who hung out, he did some stupid things, said a couple things, and then he died and nobody cared, and then all these other people just kept embellishing it. So the atheist continues. He says, In Mark there's no account of a virgin birth or of a resurrected Jesus interacting with the disciples, other than the ending verses that were added later.

He says, With Luke the virgin birth is added. with John the raising of Lazarus is first presented and Jesus is for the first time equated with God the Father okay so first of all Mark not choosing to include all the same details as Luke doesn't mean anything was added or embellished John including information about the raising of Lazarus that wasn't somewhere else is doesn't mean it's an embellishment That's him supposing it's an embellishment and then just finding things that make it an embellishment. I mean, notice he doesn't give a list of all the things that actually match up from just even a cursory reading. There's lots of those.

We know ultimately they'll all match up. But he just picks a few things that are different. And not even different. It's not like in one story Lazarus stays dead and in another story Lazarus is alive. right it's not like that it's like this account didn't talk about Lazarus and this one does so therefore it was it was embellished he says Jesus is for the first time equated with God the father though in John I do take exception with that the entire Bible equates Jesus with his father he is one with the Father because he always has been one with the Father when when we get to passages of the Bible where Jesus has a chance to be called only a man or not a man he does things that only God would do it's almost like this is what the whole Bible is about it's hard to pick a verse here but Jesus always proclaimed himself to be the one who could forgive sins Jesus proclaimed himself to be the fulfillment of the Old Testament scriptures he's the one that the Holy Ghost came upon and that the Father said you're my beloved son he's one with the Father throughout the New Testament and so it's kind of a it's kind of a weird way of saying it, that Jesus is for the first time equated with God the Father.

So I don't buy it. And in fact, I would say I'd just ask him to give, he'd have to go through all the verses in Matthew, Mark, and Luke and tell me how none of them do that. And I would rather put the burden on him and say it's just not true. Let me continue. He says, another example is that the temptation of Jesus by the devil grows in significance and details from Mark to Luke to Matthew These examples reflect a classic illustration of myth Such events are embellished over time to make for a more persuasive story Well, it makes no sense, because he's telling us right now it's not more persuasive.

What would be more persuasive, Mr. Atheist Man, is if the stories matched exactly, apparently, according to your standard. it's not more persuasive to make something change over time if that's going to cause doubt do you see the point here? let's take a look we've got to find the passage here the temptation of Jesus in Mark The spirit drove him out to the wilderness. He was in the wilderness 40 days being tempted by Satan, and he was with the wild animals, and the angels were ministering to him.

Okay, that's the Mark passage. And he says to Luke, it changes. Well, the Mark passage is obviously nothing but highlights. I mean, there's like no details there. So let's face it, there's no details. That was highlights of a situation.

There was a headline. Okay, so then we get to Luke, and we get all the way to Luke. We've got a genealogy. We get to Luke 4. There's so much more details before we get there. Luke, who's trying to give an orderly account, says, Jesus returned from the Jordan and was led by the Spirit into the wilderness for 40 days, being tempted by the devil.

And he ate nothing for those days. So basically, it's just the same thing that Mark said. There's no difference here from Luke to Mark. Mark just had what I'll call highlights. The devil said, if you're the son of God, command this stone to become bread. Jesus said, it's written, man shall not live by bread alone.

And the devil took him up and showed him all the kingdoms of the world in a moment of time. And he said to him, to you I'll give authority. And he goes on and on. and the devil quotes scripture, Psalm 91, he will command his angels concerning you to guard you. And Jesus says, you're not going to put the Lord God to the test. And then the devil had ended every temptation and he departed from him, it says.

And so there's a little more detail in Luke than in Mark, but there's nothing contradictory. There's nothing that is added or embellished. There's just more details than the first story. And then if you look at Matthew, you have the same thing. that's the account I know the best you have a lot more detail but even at the end it says it says that Jesus says you shall not put your God to the test and when the devil says he will command his angels concerning you and Jesus says look I'm not going to I'm not going to take an Old Testament scripture even though I know it's about me I mean Jesus knew the scripture he knew Psalm 91 was about him and I'm not going to take the scripture that says he will command his angels concerning you and I'm not going to force it to happen in some way that God didn't mean for it to happen I'm not going to test God that way I'm not going to put him to the test and then after he resists the devil the thing that Matthew includes that the other two didn't is the devil left him in Matthew 4 11 and behold angels came and were ministering to him so the scripture that the devil quoted is fulfilled but not the way the devil tried to make Jesus fulfill it.

And so what we have, if you want to study those three, I'm not going to go through them now, is you just have stories with more or less detail than others. Nothing contradictory. And frankly, nothing really embellishing sounding. I mean, none of it sounded all that crazy to me. If I was writing about a guy who claimed to be God and God's big enemy was this being and creature called the devil, I would probably have them face off in some way.

And honestly had I written the story it would have seemed far more like there would have been fire and like a battle and maybe that arm wrestling picture that we all seen with the guy that looks like Kenny Loggins and the guy that looks like Satan You know, it would have been, you know, smash mouth, like the devil would have been killed right then and there. But, so actually the story would have been way more embellished if humans had written it. The fact that it's so simple, and the fact that Jesus basically lets the devil get away, it's more evidence that this is from God, because it doesn't go by the way we think of things.

The Atheist continues, another example of the evolution of Christian writings is as follows. Matthew 27, 46 and 50, he quotes, About three in the afternoon, Jesus cried out in a loud voice, Eli Eli lema sabachthani which means my God my God why have you forsaken me and when Jesus had cried out in a loud voice he gave up his spirit in Luke 23 it says Jesus called out with a loud voice Father into your hands I commit my spirit when he had said this he breathed his last in John 19 30 when he had received the drink Jesus said it is finished with that he bowed his head and gave up his spirit in Matthew So now the atheist, I think, is seeing contradictions here. So again, you have three accounts, varying levels of details, all of which can be read in such a way that shows that it's really just three different perspectives telling one story, some with different emphases.

The atheist writes, though, in Matthew, Jesus is expressing displeasure with God for allowing the crucifixion. But in the later Gospels, Luke and John, there are no longer any hints of dissatisfaction. That is a bald-faced lie or a bold-faced lie. I don't know which of those phrases is correct. In Psalm 22, David writes, My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?

Why are you so far from saving me from the words of my groaning? Jesus is referring people to the psalm written hundreds of years before now that describes his persecution. he's referring people so that they can understand substitutionary atonement because it's because Jesus Christ became sin for his people that he was forsaken by God it's because we deserve to be forsaken and in fact because God won't forsake us that Jesus had to be forsaken Jesus is not expressing dissatisfaction with God Jesus is expressing the salvation of God as expounded upon in Psalm 22 because Psalm 22 ends with all the prosperous of the earth eat and worship before him shall bow all who go down to the dust even the one who could not keep himself alive posterity shall serve him and shall be told of the Lord to the coming generation they shall come and proclaim his righteousness to a people yet unborn and he has done it he says in verse 25 from you comes my praise in the great congregation my vows I will perform before those who fear him Jesus is referring people not to his dissatisfaction but to the glory of God that in Psalm 22, through the prophet David, God predicted the crucifixion with great accuracy. The atheist says, it suggests that the writers of the Gospels made revisions to improve the image of Jesus and to make it appear that he viewed his crucifixion as an expected and necessary part of his earthly mission.

No, revisions would not improve the image of Jesus if they didn't also revise the first gospel It makes no sense to say that people revise the Bible to make Jesus look better if they were going to leave all this here for some guy in the year 2015 or 2014 when this is written to expose That would be moronic You would want to write the story in such a way that people couldn't find these obvious things. and so Jesus did know his mission it was expected he predicted it so many times he predicted it in the book of Matthew where it says here he didn't in Matthew 16 we're just going to go there Jesus is so important it's important that we know these things Matthew 16, 21 from that time Jesus began to show his disciples that he must go to Jerusalem and suffer many things from the elders and chief priests and scribes and be killed and on the third day be raised so if people went in and revised things to improve the image of Jesus why did they overlook this apparent Matthew 27 verse that destroys it? If they were so clever and such educated storytellers, how did they overlook this thing that friendly atheists figured out so quickly? This is just another example of people presupposing what they want to be true.

The atheist is grasping at straws. so don't be afraid of some of these these arguments um we didn't even open up all these passages that he brought up we didn't look into canonicity and and how the bible was made in textual criticism i mean all the there's answers for all these things i've considered in the past that maybe all i want to do is i mean let me put it this way if you went through the friendly atheist's problems here. And all you did was a Google search of the things he said, like a question, and just maybe search for 10 minutes. I think you'd find answers to all of these things.

There's wonderful sites like gotquestions.org, karm.org, that these questions have already been answered. And so don't be lazy like the friendly atheist. Thanks for listening. I hope you take care of yourself during this strange time with the coronavirus. And I hope that you will pray for your church, pray for other Christians around the world that were all affected by this differently.

There's people that are getting foster children during the midst of this. There's people who are seeing people in their family get saved probably. So everybody's got a story. I have stories of how the coronavirus and the quarantine render now is actually causing situations that are the answers to a couple of my prayers. So I never would have predicted them to be answered this way.

But for some people, this is very distressing. for some people. It is something that is turning out really good in the meantime. For all of us who love God, it will be worked for our good, but that doesn't mean there won't be some bad things that happen to people. So have compassion for people that are experiencing difficulty as a result. Thanks for listening.

Have a great day. Until next time. Thank you for listening to Be a Berean with your host, Michael Coughlin. I am a writer at thingsabove.us, and I also have a personal website, michaelcoughlin.net. You can contact me by emailing me, michael at thingsabove.us. I hope that you have been encouraged to search the scriptures.