Chris: When you look at an ancient document or anything preserved for ant from antiquity to recognize the veracity of it or the truthfulness of it, here's what a scholar would ask for. They would want many –this is M.O.R.S.E.H.A.P. –they would want many objective, reliable, sufficiently early eyewitness accounts that have been verified by history and archaeology.
Narrator: Welcome to this episode of the College Ave Podcast recorded right here at College Ave Church in San Diego, California with our pastor, Doctor Chris Hilken. If you've been following along or joining through our livestream, we'd love to invite you to worship with us on a Sunday. This podcast is made possible by the support of our listeners. If you've been encouraged by what you've heard and want to help more people hear episodes like these, you can give online and learn more about who we are at collegeave.church.
Now let's get into today's episode.
Sarah: Hey! This is Sarah Powers.
Chris: This is Chris Hilken. And every week at College Ave in our 11:55am service, we have questions that go along with the sermon. We're picking up on some of those to help give a biblical worldview for everything that we do. Sarah, what are we looking at today?
Sarah: Yeah. Today, we're continuing the conversation from our question of biblical historicity. And so the question itself that we based the whole sermon on, we, you, based the whole sermon on is, is there good reason to trust the reliability of the Bible? Can we trust that it hasn't been corrupted and that the events in the scriptures actually happened? And so our last session, we focused on do we have what they wrote?
And today, we're kind of going more into is what they wrote reliable? And so jumping straight into it, one of the first questions we got that we didn't have time to unpack in our service came from a person who said, there's a famous atheist thought leader that claims the reliability of scripture is compromised in the sense that the disciples couldn't have remembered the literal words of Jesus and then written it down years later. Is this a valid objection?
Chris: No. It there's there's a lot of weaknesses in that argument. The first one is it commits a fallacy of cultural expectations. Right? We are a very –what it says is I wouldn't remember what someone said, so they didn't remember what they said.
It it forgets so many things. It forgets number one, they thought they were following around the god of the universe in human form. So, of course, you've never had to do that ever. You've never walked around someone who you thought was God and taking notes, mental notes. The second thing is, it's an oral culture.
So they would have had to do this all the time, right? In Bet Sefer, Bet Midrash, and Bet Talmud, in Jewish rabbi school, you had to memorize the Old Testament. And someone in modernity would say no one could ever do that, and that would have been an expectation to fulfill rabbinical school. So the idea that we're not good at memorizing, why?
Because if I asked you right now, tell me the 12 disciples, what would you do?
Sarah: Probably remember half of them.
Chris: And then?
Sarah: And then look it up on my phone.
Chris: You'd look it up on your phone. So it's just like this happens all the time. There are different languages. If you think of like the Hawaiian language, they drop certain letters of the English alphabet. And so when you ask them to pronounce words that we have in the English language, they miss them because they their their mouths and brains don't use that part of their speech or that part of their dialectical movement, and so they don't know how to say it anymore.
And that's the same thing. If you don't exercise a part of your body, it goes away. So for generations in scribal transmission and looking things up and having encyclopedias and and almanacs and atlases, we've just said someone else can do my remembering for me. So that would be a massive difference. The third thing to recognize, not just that they were thinking that they were following around God, so you're obviously paying better attention than someone randomly talking.
It's an oral tradition, so so you remember much more. The third thing is Jesus was an itinerant preacher. An itinerant preacher means he had a set of conversations that he was giving surrounding the kingdom of God that he gave over and over and over and over again. You've you've sat under my teaching for the better part of what? How long has it been?
Sarah: Ten years.
Chris: Ten years. Yeah. I'll bet you there's a lot of things that if I started the sentence, you could finish them. There's a lot of stories that I'd begin to tell that you knew exactly where where I was going.
Sarah: Mhmm.
Chris: And especially the best of the hits as it were, right? If I'm going to a camp, I'm using some of the same things that have been really effective and have been really helpful in translating information, you're going to be able to know exactly what I'm doing. You'd probably be able to recollect them well enough to teach them yourselves at this point. And and that is in bypass over ten years, and you're talking about an intense discipleship program they went through for three years where Jesus is going from town to town teaching this over and over again about the coming kingdom of God. It also rejects the fact that we have no reason to believe that they weren't writing things down or they weren't taking notes in real time as it were.
So I think it just commits so many different problems and it just says, if Jesus were here today and were hanging out with us and he were talking, I would not be able to remember what he said verbatim. Therefore, that's what they were doing and that's the equivocation. I think it just makes a lot of mistakes. The last thing to recognize is if it's granted. Okay?
So if a famous atheist says this and I grant it all and go, you know what? You're totally right. How could they have remembered what he said? There's an empty tomb. There's a start of Christianity.
There's a martyrdom of disciples. There's a movement in the first century. There's a Nazareth decree. There are frescoes written on the walls of Dura-Europos within the first centuries of Jesus' death and resurrection. There's first Corinthians chapter 15 and the motifs and creeds coming out of the first century church about Jesus Christ being dead, buried, and resurrected.
I'll grant you everything you wanna grant. And let's pretend like every disciple just made what they set up. It was just these Jesus said different things, but they said this is kind of a general idea about it. What we know is that within the first century, people were talking about Jesus. If you throw away everything the disciples read about Jesus and just take into consideration what secularist people who did not appreciate the movement of Jesus or were indifferent third parties, Pliny the younger, Suetonius, you've you've got a lot of people speaking–
Josephus, who's obviously obviously a Jewish scholar– they're telling the same stories. Now they're not claiming to quote Jesus verbatim, but you can construct the whole of Jesus' life just from what his enemies are talking about. So I think it's really a straw man or maybe more of a red herring of going, you know what, first of all, you're wrong because you've neglected all these idiosyncratic nuances between our culture and their culture. The second thing is even if I granted everything to you, what do you do with all of the explanatory scope required for the start of the church, the empty tomb, and the resurrection narrative, right?
Like, that still requires an explanation. So if you're granted all those things, you actually have a bigger list of questions like, what are the disciples doing then if they're all going to their deaths? What what is happening to this first century church and the persecution under Diocletian and the expulsion of the Jews under Claudius? Like, what do you do with all that?
So it, kind of like in, remember The Cat in the Hat?
Sarah: Mhmm.
Chris: Where the kids, they get the stain on the clothes, and they go, or the cat, like, brings the stain in the house. I don't remember exactly how the story goes, but they get it on the drapes. And the little kids are like, oh no, the the stain is on the drapes. So the cat's like, I'll take care of this, brings out thing one and thing two.
And they throw the stain, and now it's all over the carpet. And it's like, well, now now the carpet's all messed up. We should have just kept it on the drapes. That was a lesser thing to fix. Mhmm.
Let's put it on the carpet. And then it's on the carpet and then they throw it all over the house. And that's kind of what happens when you poke holes like that. You make a bigger mess. You have more to explain then.
So I don't think it's a realistic thing to say, they are just like me. It doesn't make sense to me. It didn't make sense to them. And now I'm that's my whole point. I think it's, I just think it doesn't appreciate the difference and the nuance between who we are, who they were, what they thought they were doing, cultural differences,
and if you grant it all, you have more questions than you do have answers.
Sarah: So let's talk about that, the the reliability of scripture. Throughout your sermon, you gave an acronym that's helpful to remember how we know that scripture could be tested and hold up under the scrutiny. And, you give a lot of evidence that shows, okay. We do have kind of a gold standard when it comes to, M.O.R.S.E.H.A.P. It's m o r s e h a p.
Chris: Yep.
Sarah: And leading all the way up to, m o r s e h a, that is kind of how we would apply scrutiny to any sort of historical text. But then you made a specific, separation with P standing for prophecy. Can you talk about how prophecy or prophetic fulfillment of those things is what demands kind of a a calling to say, yeah, this is divine?
Chris: Yeah. So M.O.R.S.E.H.A.P. , if you're listening and aren't familiar with that, it is the concept of when you look at an ancient document or anything preserved for ant from antiquity to recognize the veracity of it or the truthfulness of it, here's what a scholar would ask for. They would want many this is m o r s e h a p. They would want many objective, reliable, sufficiently early eyewitness accounts that have been verified by history and archaeology. That is how you would test the veracity of a document.
Why do you want many? Because if you have a room of a thousand people and something goes wrong, let's say at church on the weekend, something caught fire and there was some sort of lawsuit between what actually happened. And 999 people are saying there was a lady who walked in with a lighter and dropped it and it caught fire. And 958 of them go, she had a blue shirt, and 20 of them say she had a red shirt, and then 12 of them said it was a man. Right?
Like, you you use the many to help understand what is the most likely instance that actually occurred here. So, you find out that 20 of the people who said it was a red shirt are color blind. You find out that the other 12 people were in the restroom. They're just making it up because they wanted to be famous. So you have a lot of them.
Now if the only person who gave an account was one of the color blind people or one of the people who wasn't in the room, you would go, well, this isn't very credible. So the more accounts you have of something, the better it is. You want objective accounts, meaning were they did they did they stand to gain something from telling this? You want objective witnesses. Right?
So if the the the woman wearing red who drops the lighter and sets the church on fire, her husband is in the crowd and she's getting sued for it, what's he gonna say happened? Well, he's gonna say it wasn't her, right? So you want objective witnesses. So you want third parties. You want people who were, some who are sympathetic, some who are hostile, and some who are unsympathetic, who don't care, third parties, that are all telling the same story.
This is what we have with Jesus. We have people who are against him, for him, and neutral to him all saying, yeah yeah, this is the the miracle worker from Nazareth. Like, what do– the Pharisees never accuse Jesus of not doing anything supernatural?
They accuse him of doing something supernatural under the guise of Beelzebub. They they question under whose power he can perform miracles, but they're not going, that guy doesn't do miracles. Mhmm. They challenge him for blasphemy because he did what on the Sabbath? He healed on the Sabbath.
So whether it be, well, he shouldn't have healed on the Sabbath, we don't care if he healed on the Sabbath, or we know he healed on the Sabbath, but he's the lord of the Sabbath. Those are three different groups of people. We don't care. We saw this guy get healed.
We do care. He shouldn't have done it. And we're glad he did because he's Lord of the Sabbath. Those are three different people looking at the same story.
Sarah: Mhmm.
Chris: The only conclusion you wouldn't come to is that no one was healed. They're all in agreement on those things. So that's an objectivity of witnesses. You have this with the New Testament. You'd want reliable witnesses, meaning we have a reason for them to be credible.
The martyrdoms of the disciples are helpful for this. Reliability can also be established in things like embarrassing detail. So who found the empty tomb first?
Sarah: Women.
Chris: Women. Right? Yeah. Why is that embarrassing detail? To a patriarchal culture where men ruled and governed and the witness of a woman in court wasn't even understood and heard, the Bible has to embarrassingly say the women were the ones who are brave enough to go to the tomb. The men were hiding and huddled up in a room.
And then you get a very human way of dictating these things. And John, when he writes his own gospel, calls himself the disciple who Jesus loved. Mark, which is likely written to the perspective of Peter, says that Peter was the first man to reach the tomb in the foot race between him and John. Right? Like so it's full of this stuff.
Yeah. Where if it was just an objective hoax, you would go, two witnesses from the Sanhedrin came and found the tomb empty. They were verified. They wrote it down on this slip of paper. This is kind of what you would find.
What? you don't have that. You have embarrassing detail. Disciples arguing over who's first and who's last. Peter in Mark's gospel, which is likely his point of view, records that after in Mark chapter eight, Jesus says, I'm gonna go die. What does Peter say?
No no no no, you're not gonna die, to which Jesus responds
Sarah: Get behind me, Satan.
Chris: Get behind me, Satan. So if Peter's writing that and he's trying– if it's a hoax, what would Peter likely scribe out of that? Forget that part. He didn't call me Satan.
You didn't call me Satan. He called me Steven. Right? Like, Simon is his other name. It wasn't Satan.
So you have this embarrassing detail which creates reliability. You would want a sufficient sufficiently early documents so that it's not written a thousand years after the events. Again, in 1 Corinthians 15 and other places, you have creeds coming out within months, if not years, of Jesus' death, burial, and resurrection that start the early church. You have thousands of copies spread out all over the ancient Near East within a hundred years of of Jesus' death and resurrection. So you would also want as many objective, reliable, sufficiently early eyewitnesses.
You want people who said they saw it. This is what Paul says. I I didn't hear about these things secondhand. I went and investigated them. I saw Jesus face to face in the road to Damascus.
Paul points readers who are skeptical to go over into Jerusalem because Jesus once appeared to 500 people at once. The Bible keeps pointing us towards right? Like, I think it's– what does the book of Acts say? It talks about Simon of Cyrene, the one who carried the cross of Christ. Why is it giving us these specificities?
Because you can go find them. The the book of Acts, it it tells what street people live on. Right? Mhmm. Go and go ask them.
You can go ask them yourself. You would never do this if you're making a hoax. You would keep it ambiguous and vague, and you would ask people, no offense, you would ask people to believe without evidence or to read it and ask God if it's true. Well, it's this is what our LDS friends are doing.
Well, we want you to read the book of Mormon and then ask God if it's true. Well, when you read his quote unquote other testament being the New Testament, does the New Testament say read this and ask God if it's true? No. It says go find Simon. Go find the cobbler living in Corinth.
Go find the– you go talk to them, and they'll tell you go find the 500 at once. So Jesus says this in John chapter 12, if you don't believe me, look at the miracles that I performed. He doesn't say you just have to take it on blind faith.
Sarah: Mhmm.
Chris: We actually get a different gospel in that case. And then we wanna make sure that all those things, all the documents are verified. That's the second part of M.O.R.S.E.H.A.P., H.A.P., verified by history. So the historical records show this, that when people are writing about what the events that took place, they're they're recounting these things. So you get like the the Merneptah Stele or the Dan Stele. These ancient, basically, codexes that are inscribed into stone and inscribed into a material that talk about Israel, talk about David, talk about the fall of the house of David, talk about these different things, the destruction of Judah.
So we have that in history. And then archaeology. When you put spade and shovel to dirt, do you dig up the civilizations in the times and places and events as they occurred? And yes, Nelson Glick, the father of modern archaeology says after 25,000 archaeological digs, not a single one has controverted the testimony of the Christian scriptures.
So the last thing we have then is prophecy. You can say that everything was right, but how does that point to Jesus being our messiah? How does that point to Jesus being the fulfillment of all these things? So I'll point you just to one place, which is the book of Psalm chapter 22, which, again, you'll be familiar with because this is one of my favorite places to turn in the Old Testament to talk about prophetic fulfillment. And in Psalm chapter 22, what we find is a Psalm of David, and there's a really interesting device that is used, a literary device used throughout the scripture called typology.
Typology is a big fancy theological word that means in the Old Testament in particular, there were whole lives lived and whole stories told that on one sense were about the person they were telling them about, but they were also about something bigger than them. So we find the story of Moses. The story of Moses actually happened. Right? It's the Exodus story.
It's the prince of Egypt. It's is Moses is a Hebrew. He's gonna be killed because Pharaoh made an edict to kill all Hebrew children. He's put adrift in a basket, and then he's drawn out of the water. That's what the word Moses means.
Moshe he was drawn out of the water, Moses, into the house of Pharaoh and then kills an Egyptian guard later on in his life, flees to the land of Midian to take care of his father-in-law, Jethro's sheep. A burning bush tells him to go back and rescue his people. So we have someone who fled Egypt and then is brought up in a foreign household that wasn't his own and then comes back as a deliverer, announces that he's gonna free people from captivity. He brings them out. There's a blood of the lamb that saves the people from the angel of death.
He brings them– Moses brings him through the waters of the Red Sea and into the promised land of Canaan. That's a great story. The Moses story stands on its own. But what is Moses? He's what we call a type of Christ, a foreshadowing of Christ. His whole story tells the story of what Jesus is going to do. Jesus, fleeing oppression, he was going to get killed by Herod, and so he flees again to Egypt. And in doing so, he is brought up in a place that is it is not his home. And then he is accused of something and he's brought under that sort of scrutiny. He comes as a deliverer through the blood of the lamb the people are saved.
He brings them through the waters of baptism into the promised land of heaven forever. Moses is telling the story of Jesus. Joshua does the same thing. Wrongfully accused, 30 shekels is the price on Joseph to be sold into slavery.
He's taken into Egypt where he then forgives people who have greatly wronged him and has become their salvation to which Genesis chapter 50, I think it is, what you intended for evil, God intended for good. So Joseph is a foreshadowing or a type of Christ. David does the same thing. So in Psalm 22, David writes this, my God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Why are you so far from saving me?
This is a Jewish device called remez, which means when Jesus is on the cross, this is where you might be familiar with that phrase. Right? Matthew 27:46. When Jesus is on the cross, Jesus says, my God, my God, why have forsaken me? And if you didn't know, he's actually quoting the Old Testament book of Psalm chapter 22 where David cries this out and he says, my God, my God, why have you forsaken me?
Well, when Jesus is on the cross, he's actually pointing everyone's mind towards Psalm 22. So that's how you would name Psalms back then. This was not called Psalm 22 in Jesus' day. It was called, Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani. It was called, my God, my God, why have you forsaken me?
So when he says, I want you guys to think about Psalm 22 when he's on the cross, why is that so significant? Well, because Jesus is saying, Psalm 22, for hundreds of years, you Pharisees and religious leaders and teachers of the law don't know what to do with this. Because David wrote this, but it doesn't sound like David. Right?
Sarah: Right.
Chris: Why are you so far from saving me? Here's what it says in Psalm 22. I cry to you by day, you do not answer, but by night, but I find no rest. You are enthroned as the Holy One, the one Israel praises, verse 6, but I am a worm and not a man, scorned by everyone despised by the people. All who see me mock me, they hurl insults at me shaking their heads.
He trusts in the Lord, they said. Let the Lord rescue him. Let him deliver him since he delights in him, which is fulfilled in Luke chapter 23. And as you carry on, you go, wow. While it sounds like David is crying out, what he's explaining sounds exactly like what Jesus went through, and it finds its completion here.
Verse 12 of Psalm 22, many bulls surround me, a very a vernacular term for the Roman soldiers who are big and bronze. Strong bulls of Bashan encircle me. They open their mouths wide against me. I am poured out like water. All my bones are out of joint.
Right? You would tear the shoulder out of joint to crucify him, but his bones are not broken, which is the prophecy of Isaiah. My heart has turned to wax within me. It has melted within my chest. My mouth is dried up like a potsherd.
On the cross, Jesus says, I am thirsty. The tongue sticks to the roof of my mouth. You lay me in the dust of death. Dogs surround me. On Jesus' left and right are thieves.
A pack of villains encircles me. And here's the crescendo. They pierce my hands and my feet. You can look at the whole life of David and never once does he have his hand and his feet pierced.
Sarah: Mhmm.
Chris: So what is he talking about? This is hundreds of years before the Persians invent crucifixion or the Romans perfect it. David is writing out in the outback of probably some hillside being chased by Saul. He says, villains encircle me. They pierce my hands and my feet.
And you're kinda asking yourself, why are they– why is he saying this? I'll go on just for this final point. My bones are on display. They divide my clothes among them and cast lots from my garment. This is Mark 15:24.
So when Jesus is quoting Psalm 22 from the cross, he's saying, hey, guess what, David was talking about himself in one sense, but talking about me in a bigger sense. We call that foreshortening or typology. So again, Jesus there's a lot of things that Jesus could have fulfilled in prophecy that he had control over. Right?
Let's say Zechariah chapter 9 verse 9. The your messiah comes to you riding on a donkey, the colt a foal of a donkey. Jesus could have manufactured it so that he got a donkey and rode into Jerusalem through the beautiful gate, through the East Gate. He could have manufactured that himself. But there's some things that were inflicted upon Jesus or were done to Jesus.
The book of Micah tells us that his birthplace is gonna be Bethlehem. You don't get to vote on where you're born, but we know from the lineage of Jesus, Mary, Joseph that they're from the lineage of Jesse. Jesse's from Bethlehem. He couldn't have voted on how he's gonna be killed, and yet they pierce his hands and his feet, which would have been a Roman crucifixion. So those give us good reason to believe that if God wrote a book and is sovereign over all history, he can foretell the events that are gonna take place.
So you have many objective, reliable, sufficiently early eyewitness accounts that are verified by history, archaeology, and prophecy. And there are hundreds and hundreds of prophecies about Jesus that are foretold in the Old Testament and fulfilled in the New Testament. So you might be saying, well, couldn't they have changed it over time? Couldn't people have changed it to make maybe after Jesus lived, died, and was buried and resurrected, or not, whatever, people went back and changed the prophecies. Why is that problematic?
Because the Jewish scriptures are already solidified before the time of Christ, and we actually have copies of the Jewish scriptures like the Dead Sea Scrolls that predate Jesus' life here on Earth. So you can't change them. They were already set in the jars of Qumran long before Jesus ever shows up. This gives us good reason to believe not just that the Bible is accurate, but that Jesus is the Messiah we've been waiting for and is worthy of our praise and worship. So that's kind of a summary of the M.O.R.S.E.H.A.P. test and why as Christians, we can trust the truthfulness of the scriptures.
Sarah: Yeah. No that's so good. And just in wrapping up, I think culturally, our tendency is just to go, let me put everything else on trial in my life because I can't possibly be the one that's wrong. But when we're presented with all of this evidence, at what point does it move from head to heart?
What does that process look like?
Chris: It can't. And here's what I mean by that. One thing that I think is profoundly true is that you can't convince someone against their will of anything. Right? If I don't want to think good about someone, right, maybe if someone in your life that you've gotten in a fight with or an argument with and you just really don't like them.
Then that person someone else goes, hey. You know what? The other day, was sitting with Britney, some girl you really don't like. I was sitting with Britney, and Britney actually gave me the jacket off of her back. And what do you think to yourself?
Well, she probably did that because she's just trying to get attention or she's– so you become cynical towards something. And when you want something to turn out a certain way, you don't really do an objective investigation of it. So what I would say is that for a lot of people, it begins with the heart in the first place. They use the head as an argument, but in reality, the head isn't the problem. They might be angry at God.
They might be disappointed that God hasn't come through with something in their life. They might grow up in a family where their father was absent, and so they can't recognize or rectify a loving God with an absent human father. You might have been dealt a bad hand. Those are all real things to be experiencing and feeling, but it doesn't make God or the scriptures or the veracity of them any less true. So the difficult work that we have to do is trying to find the truth behind what our heart says, and I can totally understand where people are coming from.
But very rarely do you find someone going on a strictly intellectual cogent investigation of the scriptures. I think when you do, you can arrive at this test and be pretty convinced that we have the same book that they wrote and that the events inside of them actually took place and that Jesus, through prophecy, is the Messiah we've been waiting for.