Defense of the Faith - History: How do we know what we know?

So this is part two. History, how do we know what we know? Randy introduced the first part previously in kind of our science sequence here. This goes into some other aspects and one of the things that is critical to understanding of scripture is the connection between God and history.

In some parts of Christianity, history is divorced from spiritual truth. In other worldviews, history and spiritual truth are divorced and separated. Some of the Greek philosophies, and the apostles combated this, had spiritual matters and human life and history as very separate and disconnected things. What we see instead in scripture is God is involved in history and even through Christ has entered history. So we have there the bullet points. Scripture presents that God is sovereign over history in specific ways. Why does it matter that God is sovereign over history?

Okay, one, he was the one who brought it all about in the beginning, okay? Is history out of control? No. No. And that's one thing, is we look at it and we say, oh, crazy things are going on. I mean, you got all this ISIS and, you know, just nuts stuff going on. Is history out of control?

And the answer is no. That in the end, God's working all things together for good? That's one thing. Yeah. So when you say, Is God sovereign? Yes. What do you mean by that? Yeah, and that's a very good question to ask. Does sovereignty mean that God controls every breath you take and every move you make? It doesn't, although there are some Christians who teach that. The reality is that there are key things that are fixed in place, but that doesn't mean that God is controlling every breath you take and move you make. What are some of the things that are fixed in place that are just absolutely going to happen?

The rapture? Okay, one day the rapture is going to take place. Yeah, that's correct. Yeah. Yeah, there's an order to the solar system and the universe, okay. And you have natural laws that operate with time. On a grand scale, geoscale, astronomical scale, there are things that operate according to certain laws. What else?

Israel will get its land. Israel will get its land. As a matter of fact, what we see since 1948, it's become a nation again. But it's actually going to end up with far more land than that. But yes, that's another key thing. What else? Thousand-year reign. Thousand-year reign is going to happen. Let's ask this. Will you be conformed to the image of his son? Yep, that's predestined. So what happens is, as we stand back, we look at it and we say, these things are crazy! We'll get concerned about the outcome of an election. We'll look at certain things and say, this is out of control. But God's sovereignty does not mean that he sits there and manipulates every tiny little thing. It instead means that certain things are fixed in place as to their outcome.

And all the things that look contrary to God's character and purpose are things that will be swept away. God's ultimate purposes and points in history will not be thwarted. Will not be thwarted. Okay, so let's take a look at this one. When we say sovereignty, we don't mean that God controls every single move, every single breath you take. It means instead that there are ultimate purposes and goals both personally for each one of us as believers as well as things grand scale that will not be thwarted. They will be fulfilled. Absolutely. And that nothing will take place that will thwart those things. So God's sovereignty is not a total mechanical statement over every single little thing. Even with people having the latitude of will, I tend to use the term freedom of will, but the latitude of will to do things very contrary to God's character does not thwart God's ultimate intent and purposes. All things will be summed up in Christ. Let's look at the next one.

Scripture presents that God personally entered history in a specific way. And by the way, when did God determine that He would enter history? Before history began. Isn't that something? So God determined that He would enter history as a human being. And what we have as human beings is this time tunnel. that we're dealing with, right? We've got one moment after the next, and things operate in sequence, and we talk about remembering the past, and we talk about the future, and those are all words of the time tunnel perspective.

God's not stuck in that, but God chose to enter history. Why? Why would God choose to enter history? Okay? It's part of his ultimate plan, right? Yeah. This was not a God wringing his hands, pacing the floor of heaven, thinking, what on earth am I going to do? Or what in heavens am I going to do? Right? God was not just thinking, oh, this is what I'll do.

It's some last minute thing. But before he said, let there be light, he had this in mind. So he entered a history, essentially this time tunnel that he created. And he decided to do that before he said let there be light. Scripture testifies on the basis of specific history claiming to reveal truth progressively throughout history up to the death of the last Apostle. So here is the Lord revealing his word from Genesis to Malachi in the Old Testament, as we call it, and then from Matthew to Revelation in the New Testament. And he's revealing, and those are things revealed sequentially in history. And he did it very intentionally. And then why would it end with the death of the last apostle? Why not the Book of Mormon and the Koran and a few other little books that kicked in there? Because it was sufficient. It was finished.

In other words, is the Bible an exhaustive revelation? Does it reveal everything? Does it answer every question you might ask? No, it does not. Is it a sufficient revelation? The answer is yes. It's a sufficient revelation, not an exhaustive revelation. Now, we have one more bullet here. Scripture bases our eternal identities and destinies upon specific events that took place within history. Some of those events are subject to specific points of historical verification.

We will present here the second week of our visit to Israel. And some of the things that we look at there is there is historical verification. Yes, this in fact did take place. And we'll talk about that. Some of them even that have been challenged more recently confirmed. So we have specific points of historical verification. And then we have some of these events are subject to general historical and cultural context confirmation. One of the things that we'll be talking about is, for many centuries, growing olives and pressing out the olives was something that was done in biblical times. And there were particular, among the Jews, particular traditions and laws even about how you had to do that.

And so we'll talk about that. So we get not only specific points of confirmation, but we also get the general context of what's revealed in Scripture. And it's a matter of history. We have the next one. Other events or aspects of those events are specifically claimed to be the subject of revelation by God. Let's pick an example.

You were identified with Christ in His death, burial, resurrection, ascension, and seeding. Do you remember when that happened? Did you experience that at that time? No. Those things are revealed entirely. You would not know it except that it's revealed. You don't go and say, yeah, I remember when that happened. Well, I sure hurt when they drove the nails in, I remember that. Right? No, you don't. So those are entirely by revelation and by faith.

The next one, Scripture views history as both physical and spiritual. See, this is something that a lot of the Greeks got wrong. They ended up divorcing, and this is some of the Gnosticism, they ended up divorcing the spiritual from the physical. Some of them even said it doesn't matter what you do physically because the spiritual is just an entirely different realm. It's just connected. Scripture puts the spiritual and the physical together. Spiritual and physical together. So here's Romans 6, 3-11.

Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus have been baptized into his death at an historical point? Therefore, we have been buried with Him through baptism into death, so that as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, so we too might walk in newness of life.

For if we have become united with Him in the likeness of His death, certainly we shall also be in the likeness of His resurrection, knowing this, that the old self was crucified with Him, in order that our body of sin might be done away with. so that we would no longer be slaves to sin. For he who has died is free from sin. Now, if we have died with Christ, we believe that we shall also live with him, knowing that Christ, having been raised from the dead, is never to die again. Death no longer is master over him. For the death that he died, he died to sin once for all, but the life that he lives, he lives to God. Even so, consider yourselves to be dead to sin, but alive to God in Christ Jesus.

He's making spiritual statements right alongside historical statements. If the physical, historical things did not happen, then the spiritual things didn't happen either. So he's making physical, historical events directly connected to spiritual truth and spiritual events. So both of those have to have happened. Let's take a look at page two.

So people view history in various ways. Some are ultimately skeptical that we know anything at all about history. Some try to make history have the message that they wish it to have. Who are those who are skeptical that we know anything at all about history? The view called postmodernism. It says that all history is human experience. Everybody has a different experience and we express that separately and so that we know with certainty anything is something that the postmodernists would be skeptical of.

Some try to make history have the message that they wish it to have. Certain groups will try to write history in a certain way so that it reflects their particular viewpoint, values, etc. And so we'll kind of rewrite history in order to reflect those values. Scripture makes claims that are rooted in physical history and they ultimately depend upon the objective truth or falsehood of those historically based claims. What does Paul say, for example, if Christ is not raised, what does he say is the outcome? If Christ was not actually, physically resurrected. What's the outcome, he says, from that? You're still on your sins. You're stuck. You're just still on your sins. You're stuck.

So the actual physical event is essential for a spiritual transformation to have taken place at all. It is not sufficient to have just the resurrection as a sort of a nice concept, or a good idea, or an ideal. It's not just an analogy. It actually has to be a physical event that Christ was raised. And if it is not so, then none of this is spiritually true. And we're nowhere, right?

So, we get into classical historiography and the three tests of historical truth. Historians who do not take history as fundamentally subjective, as the postmodern view, and who do not have an agenda in their presentation of history, can be called classical historians. The approach of classical historians is that of systematic evaluation of the evidence regarding an historical document, inscription, etc. So that's classical historiography. Classical historiography is not a field of science in the strictest terms since the events to which evidence refers cannot be repeated for ongoing verification.

One of the points we've made is that the best realm, the optimum realm of science to deal with is in the present, In the present, where I can repeat something and somebody else can also carry that out and verify it. That's the optimum realm of science.

History can't go back there. We can't go back, for example, to the signers of the Declaration of Independence and ask them questions. We can ask questions of their various documents and seek answers, but we can't go and you can't repeat the event. Let's have an annual repetition of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. Can we do that? No, we can't. So we can't repeat it.

Nonetheless, the tools of science can be used to assess the evidence regarding a historical document so that we take a legal or forensic approach. We can test it to the historical evidence and arrive at conclusions about historical events on that basis. Now, one thing, as we address historical documents, while the Bible puts history and spiritual things together, we can't with science test spiritual truth. However, we can test the historicity of things. We can test the historicity of things.

And in that sense, what the Bible says is falsifiable. If somebody were to say, well, you know, I'm going to believe the Bible no matter what, then that means the Bible isn't falsifiable. The reality is the Bible makes specific historical claims that if they were proven to be not true would invalidate what it says spiritually, too. That's what the Apostle Paul said. If Christ is not raised, we're still stuck in our sins. So what has taken place spiritually is connected to history. And the Bible is historically falsifiable. And if it's historically falsifiable, then spiritual truth declared in the Bible is also falsifiable on that basis. So here's 1 Corinthians 15, 12-19, bottom of page 2.

Now, if Christ is preached that he has been raised from the dead, how do some among you say that there is no resurrection of the dead? So here, some of the believers in Corinth were slipping backwards. They had initially believed that Christ was raised from the dead, and now they're saying, eh, I'm not so sure.

But if there is no resurrection of the dead, not even Christ has been raised, and if Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is vain and your faith also is vain. even found to be false witnesses of God, because he testified against God that he raised Christ, whom he did not raise, if in fact the dead are not raised. But 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 hope in Christ in this life only, then we are of all men most to be pitied. So what is spiritually claimed in scripture is connected to what is historically claimed. And if what is historically claimed is false, then what is spiritually claimed is also false. So that's the concept of history the scripture conveys.

Now, so let's turn to page three here. So regarding historical documents, classical historiography applies the following three tests to any document to determine its reliability. If we're relying on scripture, scripture came from documents. that we have multiple handwritten copies of. So the tools of science and the methods of logic are applied to documents with, in summary, these tests, questions and points of consideration. So we're going to briefly, we can obviously spend a lot of time on it, apply these tests to the New Testament documents.

So the three tests are the bibliographic test, and we'll get into the next pages, The internal test, how internally consistent is it? And then the external test, how does it fit with information we have from other sources? So those three tests are the tests of classical historiography. So one is the bibliographic text test rather is textual transmission. How did the documents get to us? What is the quality of the evidence? What is the quantity of, excuse me, what is the quantity of evidence, the quality of evidence, and the timeline from the original to the earliest written record?

So we have some bar graphs right below there. And one there shows the number of manuscript copies. If we look towards the time of the New Testament and earlier, because these documents are in some cases earlier, you see the number of manuscript copies. And by the way, I've added the note, this number is for the Greek manuscript copies. And what we find is for several of the ancient documents, the number of copies we have are so small that you can hardly see a bar on the bar graph. We're talking about less than 10 for some of these. And the New Testament, however, has well over 5,000 Greek manuscript documents. Now, I make that differentiation because if I include some of the translations, the Old Latin, the Syriac, etc., the figure is closer to 25,000 handwritten copies.

So lots and lots and lots of evidence. We're talking thousands and thousands, and not just a couple thousand, but many thousands of documents, handwritten copies of the New Testament, versus a number of the ancient documents. The one that comes in second is that of Homer. So that would be in terms of the quantity of evidence, the New Testament has an overwhelmingly greater quantity of evidence to work with than any other ancient document. Yes.

Wasn't the original New Testament written in Hebrew? The original New Testament from the evidence that we have was written in Greek. However, there are places where Hebrew and Aramaic and Latin and I can think of one instance actually the Persian language comes through. So Paul was a Jew, and he wrote the Ephesians? Yes. So was he writing in Hebrew? No, not necessarily.

The common tongue among people in Israel was actually Aramaic. Is that a reading of Hebrew? No, Aramaic is a different language, and you find parts of Daniel and Ezra written actually in Aramaic. Hebrew was the ancient language that the Jews started off with. However, by the time they got exiled into the Assyrian Empire and the Babylonian and the Persian Empire, Aramaic took over as the dominant language. So then someone had to transcribe from Aramaic into Greek?

No, typically, because in our culture, a lot of the time, we're just used to English, right? But different parts of our culture, people are commonly bi- or tri-lingual. Different parts of our culture, for example, you'll have whole areas and households who are Spanish. is commonly spoken and read. So we're not accustomed to a multi-lingual culture. But commonly Aramaic would be spoken. Hebrew was something that the Jews were taught, but it wasn't necessarily part of the common culture for everyone.

When Alexander the Great came in, he enforced Greek. Militarily enforced Greek. And by the way, he changed Greek that he enforced. It was classical Greek prior to that, and there were several different dialects. And so he came up with Koine Greek, which is common Greek, and that's what he enforced that people would learn.

The Jews that moved to Alexandria, Egypt were forced by Alexander the Great to learn Koine Greek. Within a generation, many of them had forgotten Hebrew and so they had translations made. That's why we have the Greek Old Testament called the Septuagint. because they couldn't read Hebrew anymore. Paul very likely spoke and wrote Greek, and Hebrew, and Latin, and Aramaic.

So, yeah, it's a multilingual culture. And that's one reason why, because you'll get different aspects of the culture, they would write the manuscripts in Greek and then frequently be translating them into several different languages. So we have well over 5,000 Greek manuscripts of the New Testament and then by the time you include the other languages that it was translated into and hand copied from.

You're looking at around 25,000 hand-copied documents of the New Testament Next one you have there is the time gap in years in other words You want as a as a better witness to the original you want to have a short? Time gap between when the original was written and the earliest copy Having the actual original in papyrus form or in animal skin form is pretty unusual and rare. And usually we only get a part of a document that's in that form. But what we have here is, in the bar graph, centuries of time, sometimes over a thousand years, an example would be Plato, Herodotus, and Demosthenes, over a thousand years between the earliest copy that we have, and the original writing. In the case of the New Testament, we begin to have fragments of the New Testament within decades after it was written. So not only the quantity, but the quality of the evidence that is being closer to the original writing is best in the New Testament documents.

And by the way, the reference that we have here is the Gospel of John has the earliest fragment. Let's see if I got that on here. There. This is the Gospel of John earliest fragment, and I think I put just sort of a photocopy of that on the last page. This is the earliest fragment of the Gospel of John, and I've got the front and back. This is found in Egypt, dates about 125 AD, so it's within decades, less than a century after John wrote. Just now is being investigated a fragment of the Gospel of Mark that was prior to the year 100 AD, and that's still being checked out, so that's sort of early.

So is there more to that fragment, or is that it? That is it. What they found for a fragment of the Gospel of John. So how do they know it's John? I mean, just from the... Just the words that are in there. It's the front and the back of that one page. In what language is that written? Oh, Greek. So it's front and back of the Gospel of John. Just a portion of it.

And this is in the Ryland's library over in England. No, what happened with the Old Testament documents, those were largely done on animal skin vellum. By the New Testament times, a lot of the letters were being done on papyrus, where they would take the papyrus reeds and put them at opposing angles there, and that papyrus document would then be the usual way of passing letters along. And so the pattern was more to have a papyrus document, and you may even have a stack of them if you have a significant amount, but not so much on scrolls. Not so much on scrolls for the New Testament documents. Is that the complete New Testament or any pieces of it?

Complete or parts of it. Complete or parts of it. Yeah. It includes parts of it. Yes. Boy, all over the place. This was found in the sands of Egypt. Here's a little fragment there in the sands of Egypt. Yeah. In other cases, they'll have them in jars. Think about it.

In the early centuries, was it legal to have a copy of scripture? No, and so anything you did had to be something that was hidden away, done in some quiet area, and so there wouldn't be some standard place to have it. They didn't have church buildings early on either, so you might find it just about anywhere.

And some of these, they will discover them, but not necessarily know what they have until somebody has a chance to take a look at it. One of the things that happened, this is roughly a century ago, crocodiles in ancient Egypt, during the early Roman times, and later, crocodiles were revered, and so they would have crocodile mummies. and crocodile graveyards and they needed to stuff the crocodiles with something so they took a bunch of documents from New Testament times and after and stuffed the crocodiles with these papyrus documents and so we have a great many of them from the crocodile graveyards that have gone to places like UC Berkeley and that kind of place most of them have never been looked at And so some of these will be found in various forms with nobody having actually looked at them for decades. Because you have to have somebody knowledgeable, knows what they're looking at, and have the time to look through these documents. So UC Berkeley, for example, has thousands of these documents from New Testament times that have never been looked at.

What's that? Yeah, that's a part of it. You have to have someone with knowledge and interest to take the time to look at them. Some of them are just your receipts. Some of them are, you know, I do will and bequeath my two slaves to Igor over here. So it's everyday documents. Sometimes they'll encounter ones like this that are of significance.

So now, let's take a look at the top of page 4. The dates of surviving New Testament documents, you have them broken up by century. So when we talk about handwritten copies, this chart at the top of page 2 tells us the distribution. What that tells you is that the greatest number of handwritten copies were done in the 12th century. So we have some copies from the second century, but compared to some of the other later copies, it's relatively small.

And let's ask this question. Why would you have a large number of copies more recently? More interest? Technology changes? All right. What happens to papyrus when it's exposed to You know, the weather. Yeah, it can be just broken up. It's exposed to sunlight. The sunlight will degrade it. Too much moisture and it'll rot. So you have that.

Additionally, in the early centuries, it was illegal for the average person to have a copy of scripture. The Roman Empire, until they made Christianity legal, they would have a soldier You know, would come up to your front door and say, OK, declare for us now what scriptures you have. And when we find those, you'll be OK. But if you don't tell us about them and we find them, you're going to die. So did they keep them when they declared them? Or did they confiscate them? They took them. The soldiers took them. That was how it was done.

So, you know, there was that. issue so get rid of as many as you can would be the Approach of the Roman Empire up until Christianity was declared legal. It was just capital punishment basically to have them and hide them So they'd go around pursuing the destruction of these documents and so that is one reason also just simply by age and also just by accident, you know and We had a great set of New Testament documents, but we had a fire. Yes?

What century was the printing press? It was the middle 1400s in Europe. The Chinese actually had the printing press centuries before. See, we use metal type, typically lead type was how it first started. The Chinese use ceramic type. So then we have the next one is the internal evidence test that is consistent with itself.

How able was the author to testify to facts by reason of geographical and time proximity to the people, facts, and events in question? If I were to tell you something, about the life of George Washington. You might ask, well, Vern, that was a long time ago. What proximity do you have to his life and the events? Oh, I heard something, or I remember reading something. That's not so good.

If, however, I were to say, I'm going to write a biography about my dad, you say, OK, well, now there you've got some time and geographical proximity that that sounds like you could do a good job with it, right? So how close are you in time? How close are you geographically as an author to be able to write? And so you have geographical proximity, time proximity, time of exposure to the evidence.

Did I do a quick run into the museum and then go out? Or is this something where I actually spent years of time with exposure to the evidence, right? Opportunities and intent to investigate. Am I allowed to actually go in and check things out and ask questions and look at documents? Here's an instance.

The Apostle Paul had his life in danger and so the centurion in the book of Acts who was responsible for sending Paul accompanied by several hundred Roman soldiers over to Caesarea, that centurion sent a letter to the governor over in Caesarea. Dr. Luke quoted that letter from the centurion to the governor. Luke investigated carefully and had proximity enough to quote the centurion's letter. He could check it out and get a hold of the original document and quote that right in the middle of the Book of Acts. He was able to say, as we'll soon see, that in chapters 7, 8, and 9 of the Gospel of Luke, that this was like the only son, this was the only daughter, and he would get specific as to that. The Apostle John, when he talked about, here's Peter, cuts off the High Servant's ear. The Apostle John comes and says, that High Servant's name of the High Priest is Malthus.

Specific details. Why? Because there was historical and personal proximity. The next one we have here, claims and intent of the authors consistent with reliability. Does it sound like the author is writing once upon a time? Or is he specifically talking about the things that he saw and heard and witnessed? Or did he investigate things carefully if he was not a first-hand witness?

So Matthew, Mark, John, Paul, and Peter wrote primarily as eyewitnesses. Luke wrote, as an eyewitness in much of Acts 16-28, because he says, us and we. As for the people and events when he was not an eyewitness, Luke wrote about his aim and approach. Here's Luke 1, 1-4 that gives Luke's approach. And he says, "...inasmuch as many have undertaken to compile an account of the things accomplished among us, just as they were handed down to us by those who from the beginning were eyewitnesses and servants of the Lord." So is Luke claiming to be an eyewitness?

He isn't, but what he's saying is we had contact with the eyewitnesses and we check things out. Yeah? So when he says eyewitnesses instead of specifically stating names, is that because there were so many eyewitnesses that he didn't want to go through the whole list? I mean, he was talking to Mary, and Peter, and John, and James, and all these other things. So he just blankets it by saying eyewitnesses. He says eyewitnesses here and just uses that.

But does he give names as he continues to write? He'll talk about how Jesus did this, and John was there, and Peter was there, and Peter said this, and so he generalizes here with eyewitnesses, but he actually starts giving the names of the ones who were eyewitnesses to these things.

It seemed fitting to me as well, having investigated everything carefully from the beginning, to write it out for you in consecutive order, most excellent Theophilus, so that you may know the exact truth about the things that you've been taught." Does this sound like a fairy tale? Not at all. No. So he's giving his approach there in those first four verses, and then he begins laying out this happened, and this happened, and this happened.

And Luke, by the way, one of the reasons we're going through it is because Luke has a lot of original material. The account of Jesus' physical birth isn't paralleled anywhere else. He reveals information that's different from Matthew. He talks about Zacharias and Elizabeth and the birth of John the Baptist and how that happened. And he uniquely does it. But he gives his approach.

Okay, let's take a look at page 5. John wrote this about the character of what he witnessed to in his writing so 1st John 1 1 through 4 Revelation 1 1 through 8 would be in parallel. So here's how he starts off 1st John. What was from the beginning what we have heard what we have seen with our eyes what we have looked at in touch with our hands concerning the word of life and the life was manifested and we have seen and testify and proclaim to you the eternal life and which was with the Father and was manifested to us what we have seen and heard we proclaim to you also so that you too may have fellowship with us and indeed our fellowship is with the Father and with the Son Jesus Christ. These things we write so that our joy may be made complete."

So is John writing about things he's seen and heard? Yes, you definitely get that impression. So this is not somebody who's, you know, I heard something from some other guy's second cousin twice removed. There isn't any of that. We've seen it, we've heard it, we've had direct testimony to what we're talking about here. Alright, the last one is the external evidence test.

How well does the testimony claimed in the historical document correspond to other facts from other historical sources? You've got the quantity of evidence to consider, similar to the previous one, and then the quality of the evidence. So the above tests are explicitly stated for historical documents. How well does it check out with archaeology? How well does it check out with other historical documents that we have? So that's the kind of thing that this external evidence test works with. So, for instance, after Jesus fed the 4,000, which was on the east side of the Sea of Galilee. They went in a boat. Jesus and the disciples went in a boat over to Magdala.

And so then, as we've been showing, and we'll show here again, it was previously claimed that there were no synagogues in Jesus' time. No physical synagogues. And therefore, the authors of Luke and whatnot were writing based on the experience of their time and projecting back in history. And so the archaeological investigation found, nope, there was a synagogue in Magdala and the coins in the floor date from Jesus' life.

So Luke's not lying. He's not making it up. So there is an external evidence test. Do we have exhaustive external evidence to testify? No, we don't. So what we have is checkpoints. Checkpoints. We'll see in the service here, it talks about a physical synagogue in Capernaum that was funded by one of the Roman soldiers. And so we're going to see the remains of the foundation of the synagogue that Jesus was in, that was funded by one of the Roman soldiers. As recorded in Luke chapter 7. So that's an external evidence test.

One of the things we did on the trip to Israel is we went to various places that were present as fortresses during the time of David and Solomon. And from the north end of Israel to the south end. Various fortresses. So there is external confirmation of the reign of David and Solomon.

So we have the issues there of the quantity of evidence. Do we find lots of confirmation? And then the quality of the evidence. Is this something that we can really rely upon? So, as an example of the reliability of the New Testament documents, the names and titles of all of the prominent public figures named in the New Testament have been independently confirmed.

Caiaphas. Was there really such a guy as Caiaphas? Yes, there was. We have his bone box. And the bone box had the bones in it. which look to be of a 65-year-old man, approximately. The bone box has Caiaphas inscribed on the side. And Caiaphas, being a more well-to-do fellow, has all kinds of decorations on the side of the box, right? And so everything fits. It fits the time. Believe it or not, we also have Caiaphas' granddaughter's bone box. So we have other independent confirmations of this guy.

How about Pontius Pilate? At one point in time, we didn't have external evidence of Pontius Pilate. This was many decades ago. So people were saying there is no such guy as Pontius Pilate. The New Testament authors made that up. Well, it turns out, no. We do in fact have independent evidence of Pontius Pilate. In 1961, some Italian excavators were excavating over at Caesarea, which is along the coast. They were excavating the amphitheater. And as they were digging things up and cleaning up the amphitheater, they turned stone over and it had engraved on there Pontius Pilatus So and there have been other independent confirmations you can go through you know all the major players and one of them for whom we have lots of evidence is Herod and Herod Antipas Descended from from Herod and so we have independent confirmation of all of the major players Told about in the Gospels and in the book of Acts So one of the key things we're about to run out of time here one of the key things shown on the bottom of page 5 is presuppositions We've talked about presuppositions, that is, what do you assume before you begin the investigation?

And the approach to investigation ends up kind of falling under these extremes. Do we disbelieve a document's claims and content unless independently confirmed? That's called minimalism. We give minimal confidence to the document. Or do we believe it unless clearly proven wrong? Maximalism. So do I disbelieve the Bible unless I have an independent confirmation at various points? Do I disbelieve the Bible or do I assume that it is correct until I am shown otherwise?

And here has been the tendency Over the decades, the tendency has been for archaeological and historical discoveries to move the minimalist, the skeptical person, closer and closer to the one who believes that the document is valid and reliable. Here is a for instance.

Until the discovery of this, it was believed by skeptical folks that the Gospel of John was written about 170 to 180 AD. So way, way after the time of Christ, and obviously it wasn't by John the Apostle. It was somebody else claiming to be John the Apostle, and that's where it came from. When this fragment here, even though it's only a small section, was found in Egypt which wouldn't have been where the gospel was written, right? When this fragment was found, then that forced those who disbelieved in scripture to move the writing of the gospel of John much earlier.

Essentially, about a century earlier. About a century earlier. That's the tendency of archaeological and historical discoveries, is to move those who are skeptical closer and closer to the position of those who believe. Yeah, Gary? Because first of all, the assumption was, I don't trust it to be written by John. So therefore, can I find historical connections that are connected to things later rather than immediately. There's something else, too, and that is if you're going to say that the New Testament is based on myth, it takes time to develop myth. You can't just make a myth be believable within a short period of time. If I told you, let's take it for instance, if I told you that when I was a kid I used to talk to George Washington on a cell phone every day.

You're going to say, Vern, why? And it's because there are people around who know the facts, and you're going to say, Vern, that just doesn't fly. I'm never going to believe you. In order to develop myth, it takes time and separation, and you can't have people around. You can't have people around who remember that. Yes. Like the Holocaust. Yeah. Yeah? Okay, tell me about that. Well, it's not a myth, because there's still people that went through the Holocaust, and there's also pictures. Right. So, you can prove it. Right.

It's within some people's lifetime still that they recall those events, and so it becomes difficult to develop mythology within a short period of time. So that's one thing that forces the later date by those who are skeptical. They want the later date because then you have time to develop the mythology. But I can't sell you on the idea that I used to talk to George Washington on a cell phone when I was a kid because you'd just say, wait a minute. That's not going to fly. Because all within the lifetime, you're going to say none of that clicks. Right? Yeah.

Ah, there is a field of study called paleography, and they have historical methods for dating it that relate to the content of the ink, the lettering style, the papyrus, can I get a carbon 14 date on it, things like that. So it's the science of paleography, which involves knowledge, some scientific methods, and also some judgment. It's one reason why I give you approximately 125 different teams, gave it different dates, and typically what they'll do is give a band, you know, it's about this, you know, plus or minus some decades. And it's based on a knowledge of, okay, I have this document here and I know what its date is, and they use this kind of ink and this kind of lettering style.

The New Testament documents, for example, there was a period of time when everything went into caps and no spaces. So that gives it a band right there. If I find a document, it's all caps and no spaces, then I've got a particular band of time when that would have been written. So it's from a study of paleography, which is something that most of us don't deal with. But essentially it's looking at various things that fit a specific time. And they can get sometimes even within a decade on those at times.

Okay, we've run out of time, so let's pray. Lord, we do thank you. We see that your word is reliable. We have abundant evidence testifying to that fact and confirming it. And so we do just give you thanks for the confirmation that we have abundantly here. And we give you praise. We pray in Jesus' name. Amen.