Defense of the Faith - Aggressive Agnostic: Bart Ehrman
Vern Peterman · May 24, 2015
Defense of the Faith, No. 20
Holly Hills Bible Church
https://hollyhillsbiblechurch.org/teaching/messages/492654426078

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

Now, what we're going to look at here is a specific critic of the New Testament who's rather prolific in his writings, and that's Bart Ehrman. And that's spelled E-H-R-M-A-N. So Bart Ehrman is the particular critic. He's written over 25 books, most of which are critical of the accuracy and historicity of the New Testament. I've got probably, you know, a dozen or so of his books. Just to make sure I'm up on, you know, what he's saying.

And so some of the books, this is just a brief sampling, misquoting Jesus, the story behind who changed the Bible and why. So that sounds pretty suspect, right? Here's Jesus interrupted. revealing the hidden contradictions in the Bible and why we don't know about them. So all these things in the titles have some pretty, you know, shocking and corrupt implications here. How Jesus became God, the exaltation of a Jewish preacher from Galilee.

So at any rate, he's also appeared in a number of debates with Christian scholars such as Daniel Wallace, James White, William Lane Craig, etc. Portions or all of those many debates can be found on YouTube. YouTube's got, you know, you put in Bart Ehrman and, you know, it'll have him sometimes in clips, but also in longer debates. The one, for example, with Dan Wallace, the whole debate is included in a YouTube video there.

Now, what's interesting is while he generally writes against things that represent Christianity, there's another group that he has strongly offended. And that's those who claim that Jesus never existed. Because he has written a book, Did Jesus Exist?, and actually written a book that supports that Jesus actually did exist, and the people who who represent the idea that Jesus never existed, claim to have been libeled and slandered in this book.

So real interesting. So they will be very outspoken critics of Mark Ehrman, curiously. But what we'll do is obviously trying to review more than two dozen books is going to be a little bit beyond what we can do. Nonetheless, we have even what we have, nine pages, which is a bit unusual for what we cover.

And so what I've done here is just pick a couple of examples of things that Bart Ehrman will say, and people who don't know how to investigate it, and don't know how to investigate his, you know, titles and things like that, will think, oh heavens, you know, here this guy has a doctorate degree, you know, he went to Moody Bible Institute in Wheaton College and then it was when he went to Princeton that everything came apart for him, which is why I'm glad that Brad Mastin didn't go to Princeton.

Anyway, so I have here on the bottom of page 1, while this is a generalization, on page 50 of Jesus Interrupted, Dr. Ehrman writes, what did Jesus tell the high priest when questioned at his trial? My sense is that historically this is something we could never know. Jesus was there, and the Jewish leaders were there, but there were no followers of Jesus there taking notes for posterity. Is that true? Let's check that out.

Contrary to Dr. Ehrman's claim, both Peter and probably John were present at the trials before the high priests Annas and Caiaphas. It was John who had gotten them access. Remember how Peter denied Christ? It was John that got Peter in. So let's go through that.

The Apostle John seems to have some unique connections to the Sanhedrin and priestly class. Some have even speculated, by the way, whether or not John was a priest himself, which would explain why he has some unique connections. Only John mentions Nicodemus, one on the Sanhedrin, and also Joseph of Arimathea, also of the Council. And so we have the references there in the Gospel of John, starting with chapter 3 with Nicodemus, and going on into chapter 19 with Jesus' crucifixion and burial. Nicodemus is named when he comes to Jesus by night, when he attempts to defend Jesus before the Sanhedrin, and at Jesus' burial after Christ was crucified.

John also, not naming himself, but calling himself another disciple, or that disciple, or the other disciple, was able to get Peter into the courtyard of the High Priest, and he was known by the High Priest. Peter's presence in the courtyard of the High Priest is recorded in all four Gospels. All four Gospels say that he was there, and Bart Ehrman says nobody was there.

Hmm, what's wrong with this? Alright, so further, Dr. Leon Rittmeier, among the world's greatest authorities on the archaeology of the Temple Mount and the vicinity, he, by the way, believes in the Bible as the Word of God, has shown exactly where he believes Peter was standing so as to see and hear the trial. This is the building, this is where Peter was standing, right here. Okay, and it's funny we can follow that link if you if you wish Dr. Rittmeyer has other notes on that page that are worth reading also note Luke's account of the trial So here's Luke 22 54 through 62 having arrested him Christ They led him away and brought him to the house of the high priest. And by the way, where did the arrest take place? I Garden of Gethsemane. Do we know where the Garden of Gethsemane is? Yes. So we can say, right here is the place where he was arrested.

But Peter was following at a distance. After they had kindled a fire in the middle of the courtyard and had sat down together, Peter was sitting among them. And a servant girl, seeing him as he sat in the firelight and looked intensely at him, said, This man was with him too. So not only did you have Peter recorded as being there, but others were there as well.

And by the way, we even not only know just who the high priest was, which is who? Caiaphas, right? We know the name from the Gospel of John of the guy who Peter cut the ear off of. It was Malchus. Okay, so now we have See, he denied it, saying, Woman, I do not know him. And a little later another saw him and said, You are one of them too. But Peter said, Man, I am not. After about an hour had passed, another man began to insist, saying, Certainly this man also was with him, for he is a Galilean too. But Peter said, Man, I do not know what you are talking about.

Immediately while he was still speaking, a rooster crowed. And the Lord looked and turned to Peter. Was an apostle present at the trial? Yes. And very likely John. And Peter remembered in the word of the Lord how he told him before our rooster crows today you will deny me three times and he went out and wept bitterly. In addition to Peter, and likely John, we have these men who would have been able to report to the apostles regarding the events at the house of the high priest.

Matthew 27.57 When it was evening, there came a rich man from Arimathea named Joseph, who himself had also become a disciple of Jesus. Would he have access to the high priest's household there?

A member of the Sanhedrin? Yes. And then Mark 1543, Joseph of Arimathea became a prominent member of the council. If Caiaphas knows and the staff knows who John is, they certainly are going to know who Joseph of Arimathea is and allow him in. As a matter of fact, he would probably be one of those called upon to render a judgment.

So Luke 2351, Joseph, he had not consented to their plan and action, a man from Arimathea, a city of the Jews, who was waiting for the kingdom of God. Here's John 3, 1, 4, and 9. Now there was a man of the Pharisees named Nicodemus, a ruler of the Jews. Nicodemus said to him, how can a man be born when he is old? He cannot enter a second time into his mother's womb and be born, can he? Nicodemus said to him, how can these things be? So how many people would be able to report on what took place there with the trial? How many people would be able to report? Four. You would have Peter, likely John, because he got Peter in, and Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus.

So do we have nobody, as Bart Ehrman claims, do we have nobody able to report on what took place? No, we do not. We do not have nobody, which is double negative, so we have four people. So Bart Ehrman is just factually incorrect. But someone not examining things would just take him at his word and assume all the Bible's all messed up you know this is all invented when in fact you would have four witnesses that we know of possibly more who were present Acts chapter 6 says that a great number of the priests were coming to faith would they also be candidates to be here Yes, and would also be able to testify. So you might possibly have even dozens of people able to tell Dr. Luke and the other gospel authors what took place there at the courtyard. So not just four, but possibly dozens of them. So we're not going to go through all of that. The Acts 6-7 about the great many priests becoming obedient to the faith, that's on page 3 there.

So this is the kind of statement. Yeah, Roy? Just a question. Why did he say that? I mean, was he trying to say that that's any contradiction, that the Bible is not accurate here? Yeah, what is interesting, I'll have a summary statement in a little bit here, but the truth is, just about everything he says is full of distortions and, you know, not well stated information. You have to look at everything that he writes, because it's full of that kind of statement. One of the things that he will bring up in a debate, he will say there are, with all the different New Testament documents that we have, there are 400,000 variants So he'll say, well, you can't know what the original says.

But he'll also turn around and say, this was not in the originals. Well, which one is it? Right? That's self-contradictory. You can't go up and say you have no idea what the originals say and then turn around multiple times in the very same book and say, this was not in the originals.

It sounds like he's one of Satan's among us people. If he's a believer, I don't know if he's a believer. But if he is, he's bought into the lie of Satan, right? Well, and that's the thing. A lot of what he says, just like what we saw here with, was there anybody able to testify? A lot of what he says is deceptive. You have to go through everything that he says. I was talking with a fellow fairly recently who had read several of this guy's books and had various questions and I went through just like we did here with a number of different things and finally I said Bart Ehrman is not a reliable representative of what is true about history.

And so here's a guy who's prolific, he's got a doctorate degree, he's got this distinguished professor title and such and such a chair, and it sounds like this guy really knows what he's talking about. But then when you start examining things, everything is twisted. As I've gone through it, and I'd say I've got probably a dozen of his books, as I've gone through it, just about every page you can find something that's twisted.

But people not having the ability to go and examine what he says, and they take it at face value, and they end up having no confidence in the Bible whatsoever. Not realizing that what he is saying is twisted and a misstatement of the facts. Well isn't that just like in science where people have an opinion of something and so they design the scientific studies to prove that their own personal agenda is approved through the study. I mean you see it all the time.

You can't count on 90% of these studies anymore because they've got some agenda behind them. that he tried to prove, which is Christianity is not valid. Right. It's like we did with Richard Dawkins, where he will talk on and on and on and on about the evolution of bats, about the evolution of giraffes, in multiple books, multiple pages, just go chapters and chapters and chapters, but never tell, never tell, that there are zero fossils between rodents and bats. Never tell that between the okapi-like creature and the giraffe there are zero fossils. Never tell you that. Why? Because it will reveal the faith of an atheist.

In this case, this guy claims to have been a Christian but now claims to be an agnostic. Did it ever say what it was that, why he stopped being a Christian? Because I'm looking at the fact that he went to seminaries at one point. He was serious about it on some level. Yeah. It was when he went to Princeton.

Princeton is an old line Presbyterian seminary. But it started drifting, I mean, like a century ago. They used to have some fairly decent professors there, but a century ago it started drifting, and that's one of the reasons you started having break-offs from the Presbyterian Church. The Bible Presbyterian Church, the Evangelical Presbyterian Church, those kinds of things were break-offs because they saw things going liberal. And now at this point in time, Princeton is just a good place to go to lose your faith. That's about what it amounts to.

So by the time you're done, you'll have no confidence at all in scripture because you're going to have people who talk like this guy. They'll have you read his books, right? Well, he's read the same words that we just read. So why does he think that he just made up that John and Peter and Nicodemus and that they weren't there? Here's how he goes about it.

He believes that these New Testament books were written about two generations later by people other than the apostles, etc. And so that's how he gets around it. Well, if you make that assumption and start off with that, then you discount, well, there must not have been a Peter or a John or a Nicodemus or any of those guys present. And he thinks that Dr. Luke, rather than actually being able to talk to the apostles, who was a guy a couple generations later, And so that's how he gets around it. The problem is that that viewpoint is becoming less and less tenable.

And over time, one of the statements we've made here, over time the direction of findings of New Testament documents and the direction of archaeology has been to press the minimalist, those who do not put confidence in scripture, to press them closer and closer in time. to the maximalists, which we would be, those who place confidence in scripture.

One of the events that's just happened in the last decade is finding that the claim that there were no synagogues during Jesus' time is now wrong. And the fine man Magdala proved that. So, and that was one of the things that they said, well, there were no synagogues in Jesus' time. All the synagogues were later. So somebody writing later assumed that there are synagogues and wrote that back into the gospel accounts.

Well, now we know that's not true. So that just fell. The findings of additional and earlier documents, the findings of archaeology have pressed things in the direction of an understanding of scripture as being an actual historical document and not something made up later. However, Bart Ehrman's books, you can tell from the titles, go with that. So anyway, that's how he would get around it.

This stuff is all made up later. So now, we have, in Jesus Interrupted, Bart Ehrman wrote, in Luke, there is an empire-wide census that requires everyone to return to their hometown. This would totally disrupt human life in the region, but it is not recorded anywhere else. Now, one of the things that I like to do is to go back to the original documents, and these days with PDF files and things of that sort, and certainly something that's 2,000 years old is in the public domain, but you can gather all of the relevant historical documents, all of them, online for free basically, and get the source documents that he's working from so that you're not relying on a statement by someone who's making a summary here. So let's go through it. That there were censuses ordered by Caesar Augustus in the Roman Empire before the birth of Christ and afterwards is recorded in a transcript and translation of Caesar Augustus' funerary inscription can be viewed here.

Here it is. As a matter of fact, I've got a part of it here on page four. And so that entire funerary inscription, we have it. As a matter of fact, we've got several different copies of it. By the way, we don't have the original. But several copies of it have been made and were placed around different places within the Roman Empire. And this one here is in very good condition. There is not one letter that is hard to read or damaged or anything of that sort. So it's in very good condition. He had what is on that inscription written out and prepared before he died. So here's all the things I've accomplished, and one of the things that he accomplished was, and brags about, is his census that he put into place. On the bottom of page four you'll see a black and white copy of a census document.

We also have available a number of individual census documents from the Roman Empire and not just those who were Roman citizens. As for the claim Dr. Ehrman makes about the census, there is ample evidence that the Romans required a periodic census, and the way that they did it was to rotate the locations and spread the requirement over time so that the disruption was not universal and simultaneous. So what they would do is, Caesar Augustus would say we need to have everybody take a census, but we're not going to have it done all at the same time. And we're going to allow that to be varied locally as to how it's implemented. Instead of going and saying, everybody's got to have a census and we've all got to go to the hometown, right? Instead of having that, they would spread it out. over time, so you're not having everybody have a census at once, they would give the local governor the option of how it was to be conducted to adapt it to the local customs and patterns.

So, there's a book, Archaeology of the New Testament, by Blake Locke. I also have a number of other scans of census documents from this era. So I've tried to gather up as many, again, original documents as I could. To the left is an example dated May 10, 91 A.D. by our calendar system, which starts as follows. from Peturus, son of Horus, a resident of the village of Bacchaeus. There belongs to me in the village three quarters of a house in which I dwell, etc. Additionally, there are many census and other papyri documents from Roman times in the possession of several universities in the U.S. in the tens of thousands And elsewhere, a great many of them have never been translated.

They've been sitting there for a century. How this happened was, over time, there was a certain evolution, if you will, of the Egyptian culture, and some portion of the Egyptian culture actually revered crocodiles. And so they had crocodile mummies and they wanted to stuff the crocodile mummies with something. And so what they did is they took various documents that were antiquated and stuffed the crocodiles full of these documents from about the first and second and third century. The story varies as to how it was ultimately discovered, but one of the workers, however this came about, actually in frustration, they were trying to find some things and all they kept finding was these stupid crocodiles. And he went and put a pick into one of these crocodiles and discovered that they're just full of these New Testament and shortly thereafter era documents of various kinds. Sometimes they were census documents. Sometimes they were receipts. Sometimes they were, you know, here's my last will and testament. Sometimes it was a letter.

So they had these papyrus documents, they stuffed the crocodiles, and those, being in the sands of Egypt, were well preserved. So they distributed those around different universities around the country, and Berkeley is one of them that we find has a number of them, thousands of them, most of which have never been translated. Because imagine, you've got to get somebody who knows New Testament Greek, and is interested in pouring through these things. And so, yeah, a lot of them have never been translated. They may even have New Testament documents in them, who knows, but just never been looked at.

So now, then we get on to more on the census of Luke. This is on the top of page 5, on page 32 and 33 of Jesus Interrupted. The historical problems with Luke are even more pronounced. Oh boy! For one thing, we have relatively good records of the reign of Caesar Augustus. Yes, we do.

And there is no mention anywhere of any of them of an empire-wide census for which everyone had to register by returning to their ancestral home. And how could such a thing even be imagined? Joseph returns to Bethlehem because his ancestor David was born there, but David lived a thousand years before Joseph. Are we to imagine that everyone in the Roman Empire was required to return to the homes of their ancestors from a thousand years earlier? There is not a single reference to any such census in any ancient source apart from Luke. Yes. Why did they determine the ancestral place you were supposed to go to? The most important ancestor? Is that what you did? Well, for one thing, we aren't told the specifics of what criteria they used.

It was recorded in the Old Testament that that's where David was from. So we did have that record. The Jews did have, starting with the time of Moses, they did have a census. You know, we've got so many of this tribe and so many of this tribe. And so they actually did have a custom within Judaism of having a census. Did David get in trouble once for for taking a census? Yes, yes he did. But even from the time of Moses, they did have a census.

And so part of the question is, did you do it right? And one of the things, because local governors were given the latitude to determine how the census was done, you could have a local governor that could say, OK, how could we do this census right? and not have people all upset and in arms. Right? Yes. I'm wondering if it wasn't by tribes. Yeah, and so the thing is that by tribe was certainly one way it was done previously. In this case, they went to David So they had some other criteria that they used.

And there doesn't appear to be riots, revolts or anything related to this particular census. There was one later under Quirinius. Was it only the men that were counted? Oftentimes only the men that were counted and largely because that was looking at what military forces do we have. There would be an account like that. For example, Jesus fed 5,000 men.

Now, let's take a look and see if Bart Ehrman's claim is true, that everyone in the whole Roman Empire was required to go to their hometown. Let's read Luke 2, 1-5. Now in those days a decree went out from Caesar Augustus that all the inhabited earth, and by the way, the Greek word was commonly used to mean the Roman Empire. So all the inhabited earth doesn't mean everything, but that's the way the Romans referred to their empire. is all the inhabited earth. It's the only one that counts.

That everyone should be enrolled. This was the first enrollment taken while Quirinius was governor governing Syria and everyone in Israel and perhaps in some other Roman districts was on his way to register for the enrollment. Does it say that everyone in the whole Roman Empire is required to go to their hometown.

It does not. And in general, it was not the case. So anyway, Joseph also went up from Galilee, being a city of Nazareth, to Judea, to the city of David, which is called Bethlehem, because he was of the house and family of David, in order to register along with Mary, who was engaged to him and was with child.

So the huge problem that Dr. Ehrman describes is that Luke said that Caesar Augustus sent out an empire-wide decree that everyone must return to their ancestral home for the census to be enrolled. That's not what Luke wrote. He says that the decree went out that everyone should be enrolled and that's true. We know that that's true. Luke wrote that Caesar Augustus sent out a decree that the Roman Empire should be enrolled after referring to the local governing official Quirinius. Luke then refers to returning to one's own ancestral city with a specific impact on Joseph and Mary. So his claim is not true.

The following pages will show that Caesar Augustus did in fact order multiple empire-wide enrollments, or censuses, during his reign, which ended in 14 AD, the year of his death. Census orders and results are rarely preserved in most of the Roman Empire. If those census documents were preserved, we would have hundreds of thousands of census documents to work with. But mostly they were not preserved. Alright, so let's take a look, we're on to page 6 here.

The implementation of those enrollments or censuses was delegated to regional officials and was carried out with some local variation that included, in some cases, requiring a return to one's homeland. That the Jews had laws and traditions that made enrollments and censuses by genealogical record a long-standing tradition, such that going to the home city of an ancestor from a thousand years back was no challenge at all, because they kept the records.

So here's Caesar Augustus, empire-wide in Romans and censuses. In Romans in the age of Augustus, and by the way, this Romans in the age of Augustus, this guy is not a Christian, so he's got no Christian axe to grind, right? Augustus conducted three formal censuses himself, 28 B.C., 8 B.C., and 14 A.D., and a further one was concluded by elected censors in 22 B.C. However, we also see evidence of provision for continuous registration and assessment. So did Augustus Caesar require a census of the empire? Yes, multiple. So that's really not a question.

So what Roman census data has survived and where? So here we have, this is quoting from families in the Greek and Roman worlds. These researchers were looking at census documents to try to make demographic studies and information from the census documents, because often in the census documents it would be something like, you know, I so-and-so, a married man, have a wife, and I've got a son and two daughters, and you know, those kinds of statements. They could develop family demographic statistics for the Roman Empire. So, here is what they describe as the character of the census data that we have. So would there be any record, based on the census data that we have, would there be any record of the census in Judea at the time Joseph and Mary went to Bethlehem? So, let's look at this.

Unfortunately, census data did not survive for most parts of the ancient world, even though regular census surveys were conducted throughout the Hellenistic and Roman imperial periods. Only for the villages and towns of Middle and Upper Egypt has extraordinary documentation in the forms of tax lists and census returns survived by the dry desert sands. So, if There was a census in Israel, and Luke claims that there was. We don't have records because they haven't survived, not because, you know, we have records, but it denies that there's some census on the part of those in Israel.

So in Roman Egypt, the entire population was liable for filing declarations, and the household was normally the registration unit. Every 14 years, the head of each household, normally the eldest male, had to file such a census return and had to declare his property, his house, and the persons who lived in it. Name, status, profession, age, physical descriptions, and relationships to the other members of the household are given in the most detailed returns. Meanwhile, we have nearly 400 existing census returns recording almost 1,500 individuals. These documents make detailed studies on household composition possible, allowing for a more complex analysis of the structure of the household than for any other region of the Greco-Roman world.

So out of what ought to be hundreds of thousands of census records over the time of the Roman Empire, how many documents do we have? We've got about 400, mostly in Middle and Upper Egypt, covering about 1,500 people. Most of the rest of those documents are just lost to us. Now, let's take a look, however, on page 7. Some of those documents that we have require people to return to their homeland.

And here's an example. We have a picture of one from the prefect of Egypt, Gaius Bibius Maximus. So here is the record of a census taken in the year 104 A.D. with similar wording to that in the Gospel of Luke. From the Prefect of Egypt, Gaius Vivius Maximus, being that the time has come for the house-to-house census, it is mandatory that all men who are living outside of their districts return to their own homelands in order that the census may be carried out. Very interesting. So the governor is given the latitude to implement the census however he wishes, and this is an example of one where you've got to go back to your homeland. Here's another one. Another census from 48 AD, so this is closer to the time that Dr. Luke records for Christ's birth, which also records the return of the people to their native land for the census.

It reads as follows. I, Thermotherium, along with Apollonius, my guardian, pledge an oath to Tiberius Claudius Caesar that the preceding document gives an accurate account of those returning who live in my household, and that there is no one else living with me, neither a foreigner, nor an Alexandrian, nor a freedman, nor a Roman citizen, nor an Egyptian. If I am telling the truth, may it be well with me if falsely the reverse. In the ninth year of the reign of Tiberius Claudius Augustus Germanicus Emperor, Wow. So, and then we say under that further, unlike most other peoples of the Roman Empire, the Jews had laws and traditions which required them to keep genealogical records.

And we give there in several different bullet points some of the reasons why they had to keep genealogical records, and so going back to your ancestral homeland, whether it's tribal or some other measure, was something that was doable, and they had records of everyone in order to keep everything straight. Now, here is a document you can look up yourself, because I gave the source for it. A summary assessment.

Dr. Thomas Howe, who is head of the PhD program at Southern Evangelical Seminary, wrote a 66-page review of Dr. Ehrman's misquoting Jesus. And again, you can download this yourself and read it for yourself. In the first paragraph, he says, to the individual with even rudimentary training in textual criticism, church history, philosophy, logic, the multitude of problems with Dr. Ehrman's book, and this is particularly misquoting Jesus, are easily identifiable. Rather, this book is difficult because virtually every assertion and every claim is so fully laden with exaggeration, misrepresentation, selective reporting, and outright falsehoods that almost every line requires a recasting in an accurate light and involves a lengthy response to a series of misrepresentations and half-truths. I would say that his assessment is pretty good. Each built upon the conclusions of the previous, Ehrman has woven a tight web of exaggeration, partial truths, falsehood, and misrepresentation that would take many more pages to unravel in order to set the record straight. And people actually believe this stuff. You can look that up. I have the link there and it's available at several different websites I found. Dr. Thomas Howe has written a 66 page review of misquoting Jesus. Here is another critique by James Reed.

How God became Jesus is a refutation of how Jesus became God, that it was written by Ehrman. William Lane Craig and Bart Ehrman debate the question, is there historical evidence for the resurrection of Jesus? Guess what Bart Ehrman says? No. Because, why?

He says, these people are not eyewitnesses, they're people from a couple generations later who are writing something about the past that they never saw. William Lane Craig comes along and says, no, these are eyewitnesses and here are some details that only an eyewitness would have. Things like, what's the name of the servant of the high priest that had his ear cut off and then restored? Little details like that you wouldn't know. Who keeps track of a servant? Here's another debate. It's also online on YouTube. Is the original New Testament lost? Daniel Wallace versus Bart Ehrman. They've debated twice, by the way.

So, at any rate, you can look those up. There are other things available out there. But, you know, it's interesting. I mean, people actually go through the book and take everything seriously. But when you start questioning things and looking behind it at original documents or even the claim, you know, there were none of the apostles and nobody there to report what actually took place. Well, wait a minute. It looks like Peter and John and Joseph Veramathia and Nicodemus would all have been there, and based on Acts 6-7, as many of the priests came to believe, well, they very likely would have been there. You may have several dozen witnesses who would have been able to say, yes, there was somebody there.

The point here, we cannot go through every single word and line and all that. We could spend all year and not get it done. But you have a good sampling, and if you want to pursue it further, you certainly can. But there are a great many people who have just lost their confidence in scripture because of this guy's writing. And in fact, every page, when you go and check it out, it doesn't check out. When you go back to the original documents and say, is this actually true? A great many misrepresentations. I talk to people who are on the edge of losing their faith over what this guy says. I say, wait a minute. Let's check this out and see if it's actually true.

So I'll get all of the documents about Augustus Caesar. Here's everything we have on Augustus Caesar. Here all this. The document from the funerary work or writing about Augustus Caesar's records, that's a public domain English translation. I was able to look it up on my phone while you talked about it in section 8. Yeah, that's right. It's in section 8 of that funerary document. Funerary inscription is in good condition. There's no difficulty having to interpolate or read anything. We have multiple copies of it, and they check out real well. And yeah, it's in Section 8 that he is bragging about his census accomplishments.

And it's probably not so much the book or the actual volumes that he's written, but it's the sound bites that people take from his documents and then add them into other articles that the normal people would be reading. It's like with Dawkins and Darwin. and all these other people, you don't read their whole, you know, many volumes that they've written, but you take small quotes out of that and then you put it into something that you want to justify. And so that's what happens with documents like this.

I mean, you can disprove that whole book, but they're still going to use quotes from it. Yeah, I mean, yeah, I like to, for example, I'll go on, like Amazon, and read the reviews. These people who are agnostic or atheists get in there and praise this thing, and wait a minute, none of it checks out. But they just take it at face value.

Oh, the Bible is just full of all kinds of mistakes and errors and historical contradictions. And it's because everything is represented in a distorted fashion he gets away with it, and people don't know how to check it out. But if you set aside what he's written and say, let's look at the historical documents that we have, and we have a lot, and let's look at what Luke says, or whatever other author he's talking about, let's actually check it out, look at it, his claims again and again and again don't square up. And I went through and wrote I'm selecting this because I wrote probably about 40-50 pages summarizing some of the different errors. And then the quote from Dr. Howe here. And I would say, yeah, his assessment is not too harsh.

Lord, we thank you that we can, in fact, count upon your word. We can, in fact, verify a great many points within it, and furthermore, it is not simply an historical document, but it is truth that you want us to know and to understand and to grow in. And we thank you for that, because it says that you love us and you care for us. We pray in Jesus' name, Amen.