History: How do we know what we know?
Vern Peterman · Oct 30, 2005
Apologetics, No. 05
Holly Hills Bible Church
https://hollyhillsbiblechurch.org/teaching/messages/48262335485420

Transcribed from the recording by SermonAudio, so expect the occasional misheard word.

We want to take a look at what is the basis then. Take a look at this 05 History. How do we know what we know? Page 1 of 3. Some of the bullet points we have here. Scripture presents that God is sovereign over history in specific ways. What are some of those specific ways? What are some things particularly that God has control over in history that we see from Scripture?

Pardon? Nature, okay. And how would you say that? How does God have control over it? Okay, allows things to come about. Okay, good. Anything else? Okay, the nation of Israel. Talking about certain points in Israel's history, including what we have seen here in the last roughly half a century, and that's the basically a rebirth of Israel as a nation. Good. Anything else?

Creation. Okay, we have creation stated. God acted sovereignly over things. He didn't consult me, I'm sure of that. Alright, what else? There's no way he could prophesy what was to happen unless he had control over what was prophesied. Alright, so there's a sense of control and certainly knowledge about what's going to happen.

And that's one of the points as we go through Isaiah, in chapter 40 through 46, several times he says, you know, these wooden and metal idols that you make, do they know the future? God says, I do. I'll tell you the end from the beginning. Several times he reiterates that point.

Okay. Scripture presents that God personally entered history in a specific way. How's that? All right, we have the birth of Christ in a specific way. Certain things happen. It happened at a certain time, in a certain place, with specific individuals. Certain historical events took place. It was in the context of a larger Roman empire and Herod the Great having reign over that portion of the empire. Specific things took place. It happened in Bethlehem, right? there were historical specifics that we can point to.

All right, let's go down the list here. Scripture bases our eternal identities and destinies upon specific events that took place within history. What am I talking about? The cross, okay? And here we read in the New Testament, you have been identified with Christ in his death, burial, resurrection, ascension, and seeding. Certainly the death and the burial and the resurrection are events that were humanly witnessed. Paul writes of the resurrection, 500 people saw Christ resurrected. So you've got some specific historical events and our identification with Christ in those specific events has profound and eternal consequences.

Let's look down the list here. Script Review's history is both physical and spiritual. We just made the point, here is Christ on the cross, but it wasn't just a physical event. By means of the New Testament epistles, we have understanding as to what that means. We have insight into what that means. If we look at the Romans 6, 3 through 11 passage, There are various places where Paul makes spiritual statements based on physical events. Look at it there with me.

Or do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ have been baptized into, what's the historical event? His death. Therefore we have been buried with him. There's another historical event. So history matters. Biblically, history matters. Look at the second page there. People view history in various ways. We've brought this up and Randy made note of it here. Some are ultimately skeptical that we know anything at all about history. And yet you notice the point that I made early on about a cell phone conversation with Thomas Jefferson and Julius Caesar. You know, we instantly start getting chuckles because say, wait a minute, I may not know everything about history, but that's wrong.

Okay. There are certain points where we can say, hey, this just didn't happen. This did not come to pass. The other point, of course, is that it's not practical. Some try to make history have the message they wish it to have. Can you think of somebody who tries to do that? Pardon?

Karl Marx, okay. Karl Marx has a perspective on history that is certainly his own. And he wishes for history to communicate that message. was interesting, the Bolshevik Revolution took place in a way that he didn't expect. It didn't fit his worldview, even though it was a communist revolution. There are those who will make history have the message they wish it to have.

I would put in that category, too, the Book of Mormon. Historically, it's just crazy. I wrote a letter to the Smithsonian because the Smithsonian, of course, keeps track of all sorts of archaeological and historical findings in the Americas. And just kind of in jest, I said, I heard a rumor that you folks have all sorts of backing for the Book of Mormon. Oh, the letter I got back was interesting.

Quite a number of pages of You know, no, there's none of this. There's none of this. There's no correlation between the Book of Mormon and archaeological finds. I mean, it's just fascinating stuff. But the point being, what you see described in the Book of Mormon is somebody's agenda, somebody's message to tell, but it's not connected to history. And then scripture makes claims that are rude in physical history and are ultimately dependent. Now get this, this is key. dependent upon the objective truth or falsehood of those historically based claims. And this is where I think it's important for believers to recognize what we are claiming about Jesus Christ puts Jesus Christ in a unique position.

If I were to say, take Buddhism, most branches of Buddhism, it really doesn't matter whether Buddha ever lived. He came up with this eightfold path of enlightenment, and if you follow the path, that's it. But the historical life and death of Buddha really doesn't matter. If he was an entirely fictional being, or if what was told of him was quite wrong, it really makes no difference. It does matter immensely, as we'll see here in what is revealed in scripture for us. Now, what we have with this postmodern view which is entirely subjective.

They don't have an agenda in their presentation. There are however those that do and they'll typically use a postmodern viewpoint. I think Steve you're the one who mentioned that you'll have like black history for example. You know, a lot of these, you know, black studies, women's studies, things like that, are frequently presented with an agenda. They will point to what's classically been taught as history, and they'll say, well, that's got an agenda, too.

Pardon? Yes, yes. We want to show ourselves as victims, or I've also seen, you know, situations where they bring up, you know, kind of unsung heroes, you know, out of the group. Now, however, if you do not hold that history is entirely subjective, if you say, hey, wait a minute, we want to take an evidence approach to history. Now, by evidence approach, I mean the kind of evidence that you would present in a courtroom, just like the postmodernist would if he were pressed to do so. He would not claim that you guys don't know anything. He would develop his case in practical fact. And that's the kind of evidence we're talking about. And this is called classical historiography. And we have this beginning to be presented. It's a legal or forensic approach. You're going to look at evidence. It is not strictly science.

And why do we make that statement? That's right. I can't say, you know, I really want to make sure that it was Thomas Jefferson that, you know, penned this document. And so I'm going to go back in history and run through that a few times. Right? We can't do that. Yeah, Tom?

Yeah, and now here's the interesting thing is what we do is we say, well, it's not pure science in the sense that I cannot repeat the event and again, monitor it to the point where I, okay, I've been through this 10 times now and I'm certain of what took place. I can't repeat the event, but nonetheless, we apply tools of science to it, don't we?

The popular CSI shows and the various spinoffs along that line are basically that. People are kind of wowed by a lot of the investigative tools that go into it. I know in my own case, I was an investigative engineer before I resigned. And so I would be called in on various cases to basically state what happened. And again, it was drawing evidence. We would collect samples, have chemical assays done, and have, you know, reports and graphs and photographs and things like that.

They can deal with things like, you know, fire, contamination problems, things of that sort. And it is a matter of gathering evidence using scientific tools, even though it is not explicitly science. Now, why does that make sense? Why can we do that? Why can we use scientific tools even though this isn't explicitly science? Yeah, Tom. Yeah, you still have scientific assumptions, don't you? You have scientific assumptions relating to things like, you know, witnesses, chemical substances.

You have things that you say, okay, based on how I, can determine the truth now in a repeated process, extending that back, assuming that the universe has a consistency, taking that back in time. I can show that, you know, the person who committed this murder back in 1993, you know, had this DNA and his DNA was found at the site and on the knife or whatever. And the ability to go back assumes that the science that we have that is repeatable is extendable back into time because of consistency of laws. So, all right, now, basically what we're looking at is a forensic approach, an evidence approach, and even the person who denies the validity of history that says it's entirely subjective will appeal to this if they're in trouble. The practical fact is that's what they'll go to.

Let's look at, the Bible is by its own claims historically and therefore spiritually falsifiable. And I think that's the key. You can present this to people. You can tell them the Bible is falsifiable. It isn't just a matter of a blind leap of faith. It isn't a matter of, you know, you might hear a joking definition of faith, believing something you know isn't true. Okay?

It is, in fact, something that is falsifiable. You can say this is historically false based upon the facts. And if you could demonstrate that something was historically false about the claims of Scripture, then you could say it is also spiritually false, because the spiritual and historical are connected. Paul makes that connection, 1 Corinthians 15, 12 through 19.

Now if Christ has preached that he has been raised from the dead, how do some among you say that there's no resurrection of the dead? But if there's no resurrection of the dead, not even Christ has been raised. And if Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is in vain, our faith, your faith also is vain. Moreover, we are even found to be false witnesses of God, because we testified against God that he raised Christ, whom he did not raise, if in fact the dead are not raised. For if the dead are not raised, not even Christ has been raised. And if Christ has not been raised, your faith is worthless. You are still in your sins. Then those also who have fallen asleep in Christ have perished. If we have hoped in Christ in this life only, we are of all men most to be pitied."

So is Christianity falsifiable? Yeah. It is of such a character that it must be historically true to be spiritually true. That's what he's saying here. If the women who went to the tomb on that early resurrection day morning went there, and the body was still in the clothes, and they went to the disciples, and the disciples came and looked at it and said, yep, still in the clothes. That's it. You're done. The claim is shot. It's been falsified. So it is falsifiable, that is, there is an historic test that can be applied to determine is this true or is it not true. So that our faith is not simply a groundless leap of faith, it is not simply Oh, I believe it because I believe it.

I've sat down with two different sets of Mormon missionaries now and spent several hours with each of them going over the documents and showing them copies of the 1830 edition of the Book of Mormon and all that, and they've had no answers whatsoever.

At the end, all they say is, I've got a burning in my blissom. Okay? And I don't know if they had a burning of their blissom or enchiladas, okay? But the problem is that You know, there's no historical connection. They lost it. It's falsifiable and they didn't win. But they're calling it still true because of the burning in the bosom, the subjective experience. What this is saying is the subjective experience is dependent upon objective historical fact.

Or it's all junk. Let's go do something else, right? That's the claim that Paul's making here. Let's turn to the third page. Now, in classical historiography, historiography is the study of how do we approach documents that are historical, okay? Classical historiography has these three tests. One is what's called a bibliographic text.

It's how did it get to us? How'd this document get to us? And there's three primary things we're going to look at. One is, what's the quantity of the evidence? The next is, what's the quality of the evidence? And the third one is the timeline from the origin to the earliest written record.

If I told you that on March 4th of 4 BC, Herod had a gray hair fall from his head. And you would say, Vern, how do you know that? And you'd be kind of grimacing at me and wincing, right? And you'd say, well, I heard it from somebody. And all of a sudden, you're starting to really grimace and really wonder, what's the problem? Yeah, in other words, what you're looking at is what's the timeline from the original event there to the recording of it is not very good. I heard something and if that's my best connection to what happened 2,000 years ago, that's not so great. So you're looking for a closer timeline to the actual events.

That's going to be part of it. Let's talk about the quantity of evidence. How much evidence does it take to convict somebody of a crime? It needs to be solid evidence. It needs to be substantial enough that it points to the claim. This person committed this crime. There has to be substantial enough evidence in quantity for that to hold up. There also needs to be quality of evidence.

Let's take an instance here with the New Testament documents. We'll see later on because we'll go into it in more detail. including the various translations, about 24,000, and the number's growing, 24,000 handwritten copies of all or part of the New Testament.

And that's by sets. That is, I'm counting one whole set of documents that are associated as one of those numbers. So you're talking 24,000 copies, handwritten. That's including some of the different languages that it's involved in. Many of the ancient documents, in most instances, have less than a dozen. In some cases, you know, I can count them easily on one hand.

You see the order of magnitude difference? Now, so how does that put me as to quantity of evidence? Really good, okay? As a matter of fact, the term is orders of magnitude. If I go from 10 to 100, and from 100 to 1,000, each of those jumps is an order of magnitude. If I have 24,000, how much better is that than 24? You're talking several orders of magnitude. This is like 1,000 times better easily, right? And that's the character of the New Testament documents versus almost any other ancient document.

Pardon? The Apocrypha? We also have numerous copies of that as well. There are other reasons why we might take an exception to it in terms of historically, but in terms of the quantity of evidence, there's quite a bit of evidence on that too. Yeah? Well, that's something we'll look at later too.

What's interesting, of course, what you get are copying differences. The vast majority of those copying differences are differences like how we spell theater versus the way that they do it in Britain. ER and RE or something like that. Something of that order or an obvious misspelling like you switch two letters. That's the vast majority of the differences.

We'll go into the details on that, but then we get down to the quality of the evidence. One of the things that you look at is, all right, now I've got plenty of quantity. Is it all just little tiny shreds and pieces? It's like if I came up with, here's a box and it's full of shredded checks. Have I got a lot of checks?

Yeah. How's the quality? Not so good. Okay. And so I might be high on the quantity end, low on the quality end. In the New Testament, we do have things where they're just little fragments and pieces. We also have others where we have a whole document and it's in really good shape. There was a hand that went up over here and I...

Yeah, Art? Well, and that's one thing, the indictments, one thing they'll have to turn around and just like we're talking about here, all right, show me the evidence, because now it's, they may have some indications, some suspicions, now they're going to have to demonstrate it and prove it. And, you know, there's a whole list of federal rules of evidence and it basically lines up with the kind of thing we're looking at here. Let's look at the internal evidence test.

Now I'm not talking about just the documents and how did I get it and what does it look like. Now we're talking about inside it, how able was the author to testify to facts by reason of geographical and time proximity to the people, facts, and events in question. Again, this is where, you know, if I testify to you about something about Herod, and I say it, you know, on March 4th of 4 BC, a gray hair fell from Herod's head.

How's my geographical proximity to the event? Not so good, huh? I'll tell you, I've never been there either, so that also didn't help. The time proximity, what's the problem time-wise? Yeah, it's way past there, okay? Unless I can come up with some record from back then, because that's what you're going to be asking, isn't it? Hey, how about somebody was there or you're close to it, you know? So we have time proximity, time of exposure to the evidence.

You ever had something like that where you saw something quick and didn't quite get enough time to take a look at it? Let's think about this. Here's Mark. Let's take Matthew. Matthew, one of the disciples. First book of the New Testament, right? It was all just sort of a quick flash and they wrote a bunch of stuff down, right? What time exposure did Matthew have to Jesus Christ? Yeah, just right next to him day by day for several years, right? So that the time, the opportunity to take a look at things has the appearance of being He had plenty of opportunity to witness and to confirm the kinds of things that were said. And he even asked somebody else, is that what you heard him say?

Here's another instance. We just went through a study in Acts and a few of you were involved with that. At one point, Luke writes out the letter from the commander, the Roman commander in Jerusalem to the governor over Caesarea and the contents of that letter are recorded in Acts, and he uses the word tupos, which means an exact stamp. He indicates in his language and what he writes that he got a hold of this letter, it's an official document, and recorded what the commander wrote. Did he have exposure to the evidence? Oh yeah. Paul spent two years there in Caesarea Philippi. Luke, who's a doctor, medical doctor, coming and taking a look. He's got time to look through the evidence here. Plenty of time. Tom? Did I say Philippi? Excuse me. Maritama. Did I say Philippi? Excuse me. Yeah. Maritama is on the coast. Thank you. Okay. Now, opportunities and intent to investigate.

Suppose you had somebody that had plenty of time, but their mind's somewhere else. They're thinking of something else. They're distracted. This hasn't got their attention. Does it appear to you when you read through, say, the Gospels and Acts, that the disciples have their attention on what is being said and what's being done? Now, you get that impression that this definitely got their attention.

It's not something where, you know, hey, I just happened to see it and I was doing something else. Peter didn't say, that sounds great, but I'm too busy fishing. He paid attention to this to the point of leaving the fishing and focusing upon Christ. Let's take a look at one more there. Claims and intent of the author. Is it consistent with reliability? If the author writes, you know, I was half drunk and I hadn't slept for six days and I think this is what happened. Is that impressive very much?

No. Okay. But that's not what you get. Here is the day of Pentecost and that claim is coming across. You know, these people, they're just full of wine. And Peter says, you know, no, they're not drunk as you suppose. Okay. But instead, this is what's happening. He clarifies it and he says, no, that's not what's influencing things.

How about the external evidence tests? There's a third one. How well does the testimony claimed in the historical document correspond to other facts from other historical sources? We do a cross check. If I come to you and let's say I have a document And this document says that Vern Peterman had a three-way cell phone conversation with Thomas Jefferson and Julius Caesar. And I've signed it and I've had it notarized. And you see a signature down there for Thomas Jefferson and Julius Caesar. Okay, now you've got a document to work with.

What are you going to do? What are you going to check out? What's that? Yeah, the authenticity. You're going to look at, does this signature match anything that Thomas Jefferson ever did? Okay? Yeah, you're going to look at external evidence like that. You're going to look at, okay, when was the first cell phone invented? Right?

You're going to look at external information, so it's no longer just, you know, do I have a lot of evidence? It wouldn't matter if I had a thousand copies of this thing. It wouldn't matter if the copies were in great shape and delivered to you via certified mail. It would still be a hunk of junk, right? And the reason is it doesn't check out externally.

So you're going to use those three tests. And actually if you have some court case where an historical document is brought in, these tests are exactly what they're going to do. If they want a historian to come in, let's say it's some suit over some documents of high value, a historian will come in and he will make reference to these kinds of tests. And that's what he will testify to in regarding each of these points. And so we can use those same evidence principles as applied to the documents that we have from scripture. And what we'll do over the next several weeks is to take a look at exactly those kinds of things. So we'll begin applying these tests and saying, how well does it check out? And so now, as you look here, Here are some presuppositions that come into it.

One of the questions here, do we disbelieve a document's claims and content unless everything is independently confirmed from the outside? I don't believe it unless I can find every single point in fact confirmed from outside sources. Is that a reasonable approach?

You're saying no. Okay. Yeah, you're probably not going to spend several million dollars determining whether I'm correct on Herod losing a gray hair on March 4th. The email rumors, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, and what happens? There's a way to check it out, isn't there? Yeah. Yeah.

And my general assumption is if I get an email rumor, it's wrong until I prove it right, because so many of them are wrong. This is an assumption that you take to the document. It is not necessarily automatically correct, but people tend to either assume it's wrong until I confirm it, or they assume that it is right unless proven wrong. Doesn't that parallel with our legal system? You are innocent until proven guilty? Yeah. Beyond reasonable doubt, yeah. Right. And what we look at is the person is assumed innocent unless proven guilty beyond reasonable doubt.

That's our standard in the criminal courts. And, you know, like when I would do a fire investigation, we would go in there. I did one case. It was an arson. I said, OK, here is the place. I had to get pictures. Here's the place where they deposited some kind of liquid. material that was combustible, an accelerant.

And then after getting the picture, so I could say here's where it was, and then took a sample out of it, sent it off to the lab and was able to produce a lab report and say that they poured mineral oil, mineral spirits, on this spot right in here and started the fire there and from there it went to the rest of the building. And so it's a matter of documenting, you know, here's where it was, here's the substance they used, et cetera. Then you get the fire report and then you say, okay, here's when the fire was reported, et cetera. So you're able to pinpoint, you know, place, time, how, what substance, et cetera, and nail those facts all down. And then you're able to put together your case.

Same thing here, we're looking at, you want to have a good solid case But do you assume, and the terms that have been used here, and I have them in the quotes there, the minimalist looks at it as suspect until it's confirmed. The maximalist, and this is the last paragraph there on page three, the maximalist will look at it as a reasonable claim, true unless proven false. Now, which one is correct in any case? What's the right approach to take?

Just context specific, because if you walk into a Barnes & Noble, you're going to look at a category of document. Sometimes you set off, your presupposition indicates the categorization you've made. If I handed you a book called The Da Vinci Code, you're going to say, okay, this was written as a piece of fiction, but then people are trying to find truth in the fiction. We actually, in our culture, people fairly quickly learn how to make such categorizations.

When you are presented a newspaper, do you read the comic section the same as the front page? Maybe the headlines make you just laugh hilariously, but typically what we do is we learn what is the character of the writing. We look at the front page and we expect that this is supposed to be telling us the facts. We look at the opinion page and we recognize that as opinion. We look at the classified ads and maybe those might be funny too, They're not intended to be comics. And then we look at the comic section and that's something else. And all around this stuff will be advertisements and we learn to categorize those too, don't we?

We approach the front page with the idea that it is at least presented as if it were true. We look at the comic page and we don't start with the assumption that it's true, right? It's that set of assumptions, however, that is important because frequently here's what happens.

People prove what they assume. If they assume, you know, I've got these Bible documents here and this is just a bunch of rank, you know, mythology. And then they go through and study it and their assumptions are carried through their study and they get all done. What do they conclude? This is a bunch of rank mythology, right? And that's what they'll get and write in their books, and that's what they'll write and speak on the TV and on various shows and whatnot. And that's the opinion they'll express.

It's not necessarily what the facts call for, but it's the assumption that's the starting point. The maximalist, the person that assumes that it's innocent until proven guilty, that it claims to be the truth, therefore I'll start there until I confirm it otherwise, comes from the other standpoint, and he looks at it and says, I see a lot of things confirming it. Is he able to confirm it at every single point? No. But where he does have confirmation, he interpolates between, he fills in the blanks and said, based on the truth that I've seen confirmed, I believe that the rest of the document is also reliable. So there's the difference. Let's take a look at another one.

Does a claim to miracles in a document categorically exclude its truth claims? Does a claim to miracles in a document, this is the last line on the page there, Does a claim to miracles in a document categorically exclude its truth claims? If it describes a miracle, it is most certainly not true. Is that the case? Let's ask this question, how verifiable is that assumption?

Yeah, it is not. So really what happens is you will have people that they'll look in there and here's the book of Exodus, Moses part of the Red Sea. Well, they just throw it over their shoulder at that point, you know, let the papers fly. Well, this is a bunch of, you know, junk. Why? Because they prove that the sea didn't split. Right? No. The assumption. So here we see a couple instances where the assumption that you start with, leads to the conclusion, not the facts, not the facts themselves.

I want to run out of time here. I want to run through some things here. How come we've lost it here? Oh, it was off. Okay. It won't do any good for me to turn this around to you, you can't see that. What I'd like to do, because we're going to be proceeding here over the next several weeks, you know, on parts of this topic, but just to take an initial look at it.

One thing on the assumptions and the miraculous and whatnot is that I listened to a debate between Gordon Stein, who was agnostic, and Gordon Stein said, if God miraculously floated this chair because it was on the stage, I would believe in miracles. And Greg Monson countered and said, no you wouldn't. You come up with a scientific explanation for us of why that took place. Why did the phenomenon happen? And Stein had to do a pretty gaggy cover for it. Yeah. All right.

During the New Testament era, particularly about 10 AD to about 60 AD, so here's a fairly tight time window, right? They developed this cultural pattern. There's no basis in the Old Testament. It was only in the area around Jerusalem and only within that time frame. So it's right in the middle of the New Testament era. During that time frame, What they would do is the Jewish family would do as they did with Jesus, wrap the body and put them like on a shelf in a tomb. They would let the flesh rot away and a year later, after the burial, they would take the bones and place them in a carved out stone box called an ossuary box. That was just a unique period of time. After that time, the practice died off so you got a real tight time window.

Now so here's the here's the pattern on the Mount of Olives some of these burial sites here include places and this is an example of an ossuary box there that's down in the lower left corner. Here are some and there's one of the James ossuary some of you may have been hearing quite a bit of controversy about that and I make note of that.

That is a simple one those in upper economic classes tended to have more complex ones like this is the ossuary of Caiaphas down the lower part. So you know if you had the money you'd pay for all this decoration on the box basically. They can take the bones, a physical anthropologist can then take the bones and say this is a male or female and the approximate age. So they can do that. So now given that, Here's another place where there's ossuary boxes. This is some of the burial spots in the Mount of Olives, and this is one that's been kind of cleaned up for the sake of demonstration. But you see the usual pattern, usually a sort of an arch top or a triangular top, and most of them are simple.

You would have to be kind of higher economic status in order to be able to afford something that's carved out. Now, This is one that contains the bones of a male, about 60 years old, found near Jerusalem. On the edge of the box, it has Caiaphas' name. A six-year-old male, the right time period, right name, high economic status, fits the decorated box. So everything seems to have been in place.

Does this absolutely prove, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that this is the Caiaphas that's described in the New Testament? No. Is there reason, based on what I presented, to doubt that this is Caiaphas? No. Even if it were not Caiaphas, it would show, for example, that that name was in use during that time. Basically, even those who are skeptical of scripture believe that this is Caiaphas, that this is actually him.

New Testament documents. We have 5,309 surviving hand-copied Greek documents that contain all our Greek documents. So that's different from the figure I gave you before of 24,000, because that includes other languages that are hand-copied. More than 19,000 ancient New Testament manuscripts are in Latin, Syriac, Armenian, and in other languages. So that's the reason for the difference there. Most of the New Testament documents that are hand copied are in other languages.

We'll go over this. And some of the earliest ones are in this Latin and Syriac. We have a number of them that are from the second century, the century right after the New Testament era. So you've got a great number of documents to work with. When you start looking at these tests, the bibliographic tests, do I have lots of evidence to work with?

Oh yeah. It would be like, you know, give me a DNA sample. How's the whole body? You know, you got plenty to work with. So there's lots and lots of material to work with. Some of them, that are on this list are just small fragments that are highly deteriorated. Some of them are whole documents that are in great condition, and more are being discovered all the time. That's why I put the number up here. Even by this morning, it may be different because they keep finding more and more in different places, sometimes in large numbers.

The oldest copies of the New Testament known to exist are in Syriac and the old Latin versions. And this is the reference to the 24,000 copies. Lots of evidence to work with. No other ancient document has anywhere near that much evidence to work with. So just by that figure alone, you've got a lot better stance for anything historical. Steve? The earliest portion that is not contested of any of the New Testament dates from about 125 AD, a portion of the Gospel of John.

And it's a portion on one side and a portion on the other. And that's in a museum over in the University of Manchester, the Rylands Library. So that's the earliest fragment, but then These copies I'm talking about here are more substantial documents. Yeah, more substantial documents than that.

We'll look at this again and you'll get a copy of it, but just a quick comparison. Look at the differences here, number of copies for other ancient documents compared to the New Testament. Look also at the difference in years between the original event and the earliest copy. The New Testament, that Gospel of John, was basically within a few decades, was found in Egypt, that fragment, a few decades of the original writing. Compared to these other documents, it is a huge, huge leap in quality in terms of the time frame. Some have even said it is embarrassing, the quantity and quality of evidence that we have.

So there's plenty to work with for people to just make blank, you know, broad statements of the Bible. We just, you know, that's just a bunch of stories somebody put together. And without taking a look at the mass of evidence, because those other documents that you see there, that's what we use to write our history books. Okay. And, and they count on those when the timeframe from the writing to the earliest copy is nowhere near what the New Testament is. And the number that they have to work with is nowhere near what we have in the New Testament. Huge, huge difference. We'll go into this in more detail. We are out of time.

So let's pray. Thank you, Lord, for your faithfulness in preserving your word that you would bring the truth for us so that it is clear we have your message before us. We have the message you've revealed. We thank you that you indeed acted in a way that is falsifiable, but then the flip side of that is we can know that it is true. And we thank you for that. And we praise you for that. What marvelous things you've done. In Jesus' name, Amen.