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Host
Andrew
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Tom Kjeldgaard
What is The Bible in 3D?
Join host Andrew, known from Biblical Reflections, on "The Bible in 3D," where we delve into the depths of Scripture through captivating stories and narratives, blending scholarly insights with conversational warmth to illuminate what God's Word truly teaches believers at every stage of their faith journey. Produced by Cogworks Creative Media Company, this non-profit series invites you to discover transformative understanding—explore more at cogworksmedia.org.
Greetings. Welcome to the Bible in three d. This is your host, Andrew. We are in a series entitled hot Topics. And currently, we are looking at a series of episodes that ask the question, answers the question, is the bible reliable?
Speaker 1:Last time, we were finishing up on the internal evidence, alright, of showing that the Bible is reliable. We looked at external evidence, and we looked at internal evidence. We're getting it along and I ended, and so I wanna go back and just add a few things about the internal evidence. So external evidence, we look at things like archaeology and contemporary writings written around or near the same time that the writings that we are asking if it's viable. And again, this is a test that we didn't come up with as Christians.
Speaker 1:We are using the what the secular scholars use to say, is this copy of an ancient document that I am reading,
Speaker 2:is it reliable and is it
Speaker 1:a close or copy of what was actually written many many years ago? Now the internal evidence we said is what does the document say about itself? The Bible claims to be actual history written by eyewitnesses, and certainly in the Old Testament we see that it has prophecies, and we can see later in the New Testament how prophecies about Jesus Christ came true. Yes, he was born in Bethlehem
Speaker 2:and on and on. Let's just look at
Speaker 1:the New Testament. What does it say about itself? Essentially, it's based on eyewitnesses. Matthew was an eyewitness. He was one of the disciples, apostles.
Speaker 1:Mark actually was a teenager. He had seen some of the accounts, some of the things that Jesus did. His mother owned the home where the upper room was used for the Last Supper. John Mark was the young man who was there at the Garden Of Gethsemane and when the guards, the palace police, you know, and the Levites went to seek Jesus, they grabbed ahold of this young boy and he ran off into the night naked. That was John Mark.
Speaker 1:He was a close confidante of the apostle Peter
Speaker 2:and he had been with Paul,
Speaker 1:didn't care for what was happening that first missionary journey. You know, there was you know, they got beat up. They had stones thrown at them and and he went home. He said, I didn't
Speaker 2:sign up for this. But later he's reconciled with Peter. Peter had
Speaker 1:been given great grace as he had often fallen, and he was willing to give grace to Mark. And as Peter was aging out in the early church, wanted to record his testimony, you will, of the life of Jesus, not the life so much as the the public ministry. Mark was chosen because he had heard all of the sermons that Peter had preached, especially when he was in Rome. And so based on what Peter said in these sermons, Mark wrote his gospel. Luke was not an eyewitness.
Speaker 1:He was affiliated with the apostle Paul, and he says in the very beginning of his gospel, he interviewed the witnesses that were still living. So this would have been about twenty years after the resurrection, and whoever was still alive, including mother Mary, he interviewed. So he is giving he's reporting eyewitness testimony. He also was present during much of Paul's journey in in the book of Acts, so he would have been an actual eyewitness during many of the things in the book of Acts, which he writes about. The epistles or the letters of Paul, Paul says right there, I'm writing this, you know, I'm I'm using somebody to copy down what I say, but I'm dictating it.
Speaker 1:So Paul's letters, he says he's writing it. John's letters, he says, I'm writing it. Same with the apostle Peter, and James, the half brother
Speaker 2:of Jesus, and Jude, the half brother of Jesus. And Revelation,
Speaker 1:we are told, is written by the apostle John, and this is all presented as either eyewitness testimony or someone who interviewed the actual eyewitnesses and wrote it down. Of all of the books of the New Testament, the only one that we don't know who the author is is the author of Hebrews. So the internal evidence of the New Testament says, eyewitness testimony. So that that is that is very good. And we compare that to say something like the Iliad and the Odyssey.
Speaker 1:Now these are poems or stories that were written supposedly about the Trojan war between the Mycenaean Greeks and the people of Troy. That's the first book. The Iliad, I believe city was actually called Ilium. We used the word Troy. And then the second book is about fellow Odysseus or Ulysses who then tries to get home and it takes him ten years to get from Turkey back to Greece.
Speaker 2:I mean, on his face, these are stories.
Speaker 1:Now was there a war between the Mycenaean Greeks and the Trojans? Probably so, a German archaeologist, I believe his name was Schliemann, found the city, the Burnt of course, the city of Troy, discovered archaeologically, there were seven different several different layers. And so, you know, he found some good evidence to say, yes, there really was Troy, there really was
Speaker 2:a war, it really was burnt down. Now, all of
Speaker 1:the things that happened before and after are made up. The story about this these three goddesses and they're trying to figure out who is the most beautiful. And so they asked the father god Zeus, okay, which one of us is most beautiful? And Zeus goes, I'm not getting into this question or this problem. So they pick a human,
Speaker 2:a guy named Paris who's the son of the king of Troy and all of
Speaker 1:the goddesses offer him bribes, he chooses one, carries her off, and supposedly that starts the Trojan War.
Speaker 2:Well, folks, that's just fiction
Speaker 1:and we know that. The Trojan War, the historical event, was part of the great Bronze Age collapse and had had nothing to do with mythological goddesses and who was the most beautiful. So, again, I'm comparing the New Testament, claims to be true by eyewitnesses who were there, and we can verify some of that in archaeology. I didn't talk about it today. And we can compare that to, say, the Iliad and the Odyssey.
Speaker 1:By the way, these were written by a blind poet named Homer. Okay. How can a blind poet write? Well, never mind. Apparently, these were oral traditions handed down.
Speaker 1:And somebody somewhere wrote it down and gave him credit. One of the problems with reading the Iliad and the Odyssey, ancient literature, is that we have many different versions of the Trojan War, Iliad. We've got at least three, four, five different versions. Which one is true? Which one is correct?
Speaker 1:Again, the internal evidence does not support all of the details as being true.
Speaker 2:Let us now go to the third step in determining if a copy of
Speaker 1:an ancient document that we have
Speaker 2:is consistent with how the document was originally written.
Speaker 1:So the test again, external evidence, internal evidence, and today we're gonna look at what is called the bibliographical evidence. If we are willing to evaluate the New Testament like scholars evaluate any other historical document, I'll tell you right up front, there is more evidence to support the reliability of say the New Testament than any other ancient document that we have. If you cannot accept the results of this test, then you cannot accept any ancient document or copy of ancient documents that we might have. And I'll come back to that. Now in this bibliographical step,
Speaker 2:we look at two things. How close
Speaker 1:are the existing documents that we have, our copies, to the time of the subjects or the life of the writer. So how close is the date of our documents to the date when these things actually happened? The second thing we look at is of the oldest existing documents that we have of this particular writing, how many copies do we have of these earliest copies? So no one has the original autograph of any ancient document. They'd long be gone.
Speaker 1:But they've been copied. So if we look at the earliest copies, k, what's the time space between the copy, when it was copied, and when the events happened, and how many copies of these
Speaker 2:earliest documents do we have? Earliest copies.
Speaker 1:Again, there's more proof as to the validity and accuracy of, say, the New Testament than any other document in ancient times. One more time. If we reject the New Testament as valid, then you have to reject all the ancient documents in all ancient history. So with that test in mind, I'm gonna throw out some ancient writers, and I'm gonna tell you when they were written and the earliest copies we have, and I'll give you the time span, and I'll tell you the number of those early copies that we have. Julius Caesar wrote his commentary on the Gallic Wars.
Speaker 1:You know, kind of like everybody running for president writes a book when they're running so that you can get the book, their autobiography, you know, and that helps you decide to vote for them.
Speaker 2:Well, Caesar was a general and he went to Gaul and there was all these wars
Speaker 1:going on there and so he writes about these Gallic Wars, the Romans trying to defeat and conquer all all the Gauls. The Gauls would have been now, we're talking Europe. And he wrote this because he wanted to push himself forward. He wanted everybody to know who he was. So he wrote this book, had many copies made so people who were interested in the Gallic Wars would read it and know that Caesar was the hero.
Speaker 1:When were they written? Well, Caesar was born about January and he was murdered about forty four BC. So, you know, let's say, you know, sixty BC is when he wrote and the title is Caesar's Commentary on the Gallic Wars. So that was okay.
Speaker 2:Sixty BC. Do we have copies
Speaker 1:of that? Well, don't have the original copy, but we have copies of copies. The oldest copy that we have has been dated to September. That means Caesar's commentary on the Gallic Wars, the time span between when it was written
Speaker 2:and the copy, the earliest copies we have, is a thousand years or pretty close. How many copies that old do we have? 10. Now as a young
Speaker 1:young boy in high school, I first took Latin. And I have never forgotten this. The opening line in Caesar's commentary on the Gallic Wars goes something like this. So Caesar starts out his book, all of Gaul is divided into into three, and then he goes on to name each of the three areas. Nobody doubts that the copy that we have from September, nobody doubts that it's anything other than a copy of what Caesar himself wrote in, say, sixty B.
Speaker 1:C. Plato, he goes back even further. So Plato lived between 04/27 and March, The earliest copy of any of his works. Now Plato was a philosopher. Many many things have been written about what he has done, what his writing, what his philosophy was.
Speaker 1:And if you study philosophy, I mean, this, you know, this is like square one, you know. This is the guy. Very important than his writings. Everybody read them. The Greeks read them.
Speaker 1:The Romans read them. The Arabs read them, medieval church, and everybody up through today has read and studied the works of the philosopher Plato. So it's the earliest copy again is September. The time span between Plato wrote it and copies that we have that were dated to 900, that's twelve hundred years between when it was first written and the oldest copy. Now we can go on.
Speaker 1:Tacitus was a Roman historian. He wrote about a 100 AD. The earliest copy we have of his work is November. So there's another thousand year gap. I'm sorry, Plato's works, the most that we have that's 1,200 years old, the most copies on any one work is twenty, twenty or less.
Speaker 1:Tacitus, we only have seven copies of his work. Pliny the younger, he again was a historian and he goes back to about that same time period and we have earliest copy about 1,100.
Speaker 2:So there's another thousand year gap and there's only seven copies. The Lucids,
Speaker 1:he was a I believe he was a historian, a Greek historian, April to April. The earliest work we have of his is September, so the time span is thirteen hundred years. And we only have eight copies. Suetonius, a historian, and that would have been Roman and earliest copy is September, so there's an eight hundred year gap and there's only eight copies. Herodotus was a Greek historian and he wrote contemporary, actually earlier than, say, Plato.
Speaker 1:So he was April to April. And again, there's about thirteen hundred years between when he wrote and when our earliest copies. And there's only eight of them.
Speaker 2:Alright. Let's go to Aristotle. Aristotle was
Speaker 1:March to March. He, a Greek philosopher, so much of his thought, and I've talked before about logic and his work in logic, and we still study it today. Absolutely no one doubts that the copy of his treatise on logic is anything different than what he wrote. And the time span between when he wrote and our earliest copies in November is fourteen hundred years. And of all his works, we only have one z's, two z's.
Speaker 1:The most copies we have of any of his works is five. And yet nobody in history and in philosophy by the way, I think I said Sophocles was actually a playwright and he wrote Greek tragedy. So whether you're talking about a playwright, philosophy, history, you know, these time spans are a thousand years or more from the copies we have that are dated when they were written. And typically we have maybe seven or eight in the case of Plato, maybe one's two's and at the most five. Let's talk about the New Testament.
Speaker 1:New Testament, again, was written between about fifty A. D. To about ninety A. D. If everything disappeared, we have manuscript evidence, copies of letters, writings by the early church fathers.
Speaker 1:This would be within two hundred years excuse me, two generations rather. Not two hundred years. Two two generations of the resurrection. So between '35 and January, we have copies of writings by the church fathers. In fact, in seminary I had to read a letter that was written by one of these church fathers to one of the early emperors to say, you shouldn't persecute us.
Speaker 1:We're good citizens. And it's a it's a very interesting read. Why am I telling you this? Because the early church fathers quote the New Testament. We can reconstruct the entire New Testament based on the quotes in all of these early church fathers, and that was between '35 and January.
Speaker 1:We we have copies of their stuff. January. We have what's called the John Ryland's manuscript.
Speaker 2:Alright? It was found in Egypt. It is a small portion of the gospel of John. K? The gospel of
Speaker 1:John was written in the nineties AD.
Speaker 2:The John Rylan's manuscript is dated about January. What are
Speaker 1:we talking? Thirty years? We have an actual document. It's not the complete Gospel of John. It's in the latter portion, chapter four in particular.
Speaker 1:And it's dated to January. It's within thirty years of when John wrote it. Where was John when he wrote it? He was in Ephesus, was in Turkey. And here is a copy that we can date, it was done thirty years later and it's all
Speaker 2:the way across the Mediterranean and it's in Egypt. There is no other ancient document that can do this kind of stuff. Alright, now we go to February. We have what's called the Chester Beatty piris. We have the Bodmer piris.
Speaker 2:We have
Speaker 1:p 67 fragment. Now the Chester Beatty piris contains major portions of the New Testament and it is dated to just a little after February. These other two, the bottom of Papyrus is actually a major portion of the Gospel of John, and the p 67 fragment is portions of the Gospel of Matthew. Again, these documents were written between fifty and seventy A. D.
Speaker 1:And the copies that we have that we can put our finger on in the museum were written about two hundred, So maybe a hundred and fifty to a hundred and seventy years after. Alright, now. Now we get into the
Speaker 2:heavy lifting. There is the we have
Speaker 1:a complete and separate translation of the New Testament which is dated about March. It's called the codec Vaticanicus. So here is a document, the complete New Testament that
Speaker 2:is maybe two hundred
Speaker 1:years after all these things were written. A
Speaker 2:complete copy. The next complete copy that we have is called the Codex Sintiaticus and they date that to March. Again, a complete translation of the New Testament. Now let us go and say starting about April.
Speaker 1:Right around April and shortly thereafter, we have a little less than 6,000 complete Greek manuscripts of the New Testament. During that time, we also have 8,000 copies of the New Testament that were translated into the Vulgate Latin. This is the Latin Vulgate translation. It was written by Saint Jerome in the March. The New Testament Greek was during this time
Speaker 2:after April translated into Syriac, Aramaic, Coptic, Armenian, Gothic, Ethiopian.
Speaker 1:And we have over 19,000 copies. Now these are not Greek, but they were translated from the Greek within a few hundred years of when they were originally written. So if we
Speaker 2:say, is the New Testament reliable? Well, by
Speaker 1:the test, the bibliographical test that these secular scholars use, you know, what's the distance between time wise between when it
Speaker 2:was written and the copy that you have? K. And how many copies are there? But if we
Speaker 1:can get down to thirty years for portions and to get a complete section of the New Testament, we're probably talking two hundred two hundred fifty years max. And within three hundred years, we we have almost 7,000. Okay. No other ancient document can claim the reliability that the New Testament does. And from here it only gets more exciting.
Speaker 1:Just to summarize now, the external evidence, the archaeology, the Dead Sea Scrolls, the contemporary writings during the New Testament, the historians that mention Christ and the Christians show the reliability of the Bible. The internal evidence what the New Testament, what the Bible claims for itself. Eyewitness history, prophecy, and we can show the prophecy is actually fulfilled in the New Testament, and it's written, especially the New Testament, by people who tell you who they are, and they
Speaker 2:were real people. We have eyewitness statements. And
Speaker 1:now we use the bibliographical test, and we it's an embarrassment of riches. There is so much evidence to show that copies that we have reliably identify and are the same as the ones that were originally written. I hope this gives you encouragement. I will make sure that I have some written pages out there. And if this is something that's interesting to you and you would like maybe, you know, my full text, you know, where you could sit down with somebody and say, well, let me talk to you about the John Rylan manuscript, you know, or this or that, and you'll blow people away.
Speaker 1:First time I heard it, I just was like, oh my gosh. Alright. With all that in mind, let us go to the Lord in prayer. Father, we thank you for the written word. We thank you for the proof that have kept alive for us to find, to encourage us in our faith.
Speaker 1:We thank you in Jesus name.
Speaker 3:Thank you for tuning in to this episode of the Bible in three d. We're so grateful for listeners like you. Your encouragement helps us create and share more transformative content that strengthens communities worldwide. If this episode inspired you, consider supporting our nonprofit mission with a donation at cogworksmedia.org. Also, be sure to check out our other podcast, biblical reflections, for more faith insights.
Speaker 3:God bless.