“In Defense of the Bible is a substantive and scholarly work. It provides a clear and comprehensive treatment of the critical issues related to the Holy Scriptures. This book will serve the church well.”

Daniel L. Akin, President, Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary

“The battle for inerrancy is not over! In this book, a bevy of first-rate scholars address the issue of biblical truthfulness from a wide-ranging gamut of philosophical, methodological, textual, historical, ethical, scientific, and theological challenges. Clear, concise, comprehensive; this book should be on everyone’s shelf. I highly recommend it.”

David L. Allen, Dean of the School of Theology, Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary

“Never before our present time have forces throughout our culture so conspired to disregard and discount the Scriptures as having any current value for our society. While the assault on our faith comes from secular sources many of the times, it is sadly prevalent among the ranks of professing Christians. Paul urged Timothy “to command certain people not to teach other doctrine or to pay attention to myths and endless genealogies” or “promote empty speculations rather than God’s plan” (1 Tim 1:3–4). That is more necessary today than ever before. Steven Cowan and Terry Wilder have provided a valuable document for all of us to use in standing confidently on God’s inerrant Word. Every pastor and teacher should have this volume at their fingertips! It is invaluable for use by the serious student of God’s Word.”

Jimmy Draper, President Emeritus, LifeWay Christian Resources

“In Defense of the Bible is an impressive, important, and timely collection of serious essays, providing a faithful apologetic for the truthfulness of Holy Scripture. Steven Cowan and Terry Wilder are to be commended for assembling a fine group of authors who have offered well-informed, readable, and engaging presentations that will be both helpful and hopeful for students and church leaders alike. I trust the book will receive a wide readership.”

David S. Dockery, President, Union University

“Professors Cowan and Wilder have assembled an impressive group of scholars to defend the rationality, truth, and pertinence of the Holy Scriptures. This is needful since ‘the battle for the Bible’ will not end until its Author returns (1 Pet 3:15; John 10:35; 2 Thess 2:8). This timely volume addresses nearly every significant area of dispute on the authority of the Bible, thus repaying its reader with an increase in knowledge concerning ‘the living and active’ Word of the Living God (Heb 4:12).”

Douglas R. Groothuis, Professor of Philosophy, Denver Seminary

“The assault parameters on the veracity of Scripture have changed direction of late, often emphasizing textual corruption and editorial changes. Entering the fray is this excellent volume edited by Steve Cowan and Terry Wilder. Divided into three parts with seventeen chapters, written by major, well-accomplished authors, this text follows an orderly progression through the relevant topics. Further, this book features a wide array of strong arguments, fascinating details, and fresh, valuable insights not often found elsewhere. Altogether, it comprises an assortment of responses for those who wonder how these recent challenges may be addressed. I strongly recommend this volume, especially as a textbook that presents an updated rejoinder to the recent assertions.”

Gary R. Habermas, Distinguished Research Professor & Chair, Department of Philosophy, Liberty University and Theological Seminary

“Cowan and Wilder have amassed a stellar team of contributors who produce a book that is at once deep in coverage and wide in scope. This is an authoritative treatment of biblical inspiration and inerrancy, and I highly recommend it.”

J. P. Moreland, Distinguished Professor of Philosophy, Talbot School of Theology, Biola University

“In Defense of the Bible is much more than an apologetic for the authority of Scripture, as important as such an undertaking always is. This important volume explains, for skeptics and believers alike, why the Bible can and indeed should be accepted as the Word of God on which fallible human beings can rely for information about God and the world, sin and salvation, truth and error, and about how we should live. Readers will learn much about the viability of the historic Christian position that the Bible is the true and inerrant Word of God. And they will be competently introduced into a wide variety of areas, including philosophy, logic, linguistics, exegetical methodology, the history of interpretation, Israel’s conquest of the promised land, Jesus’ miracles, the narratives of Jesus’ resurrection, ethics, slavery, gender relations, science, biblical manuscripts, the canon of the Old and New Testament. Carefully argued, meticulously documented, and lucidly and creatively written, In Defense of the Bible should be read by every pastor and student, believer and skeptic, who is concerned about truth—the truth about God, the truth about the Bible, and the truth about ourselves.”

Eckhard J. Schnabel, Mary F. Rockefeller Distinguished Professor of New Testament Studies, Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary

In Defense of the Bible, Digital Edition

Based on Print Edition

In Defense of the Bible: A Comprehensive Apologetic for the Authority of Scripture

Copyright © 2013 Steven B. Cowan and Terry L. Wilder

Broadman & Holman Publishing Group

Nashville, Tennessee

All rights reserved

ISBN: 978-1-4336-7678-9

Dewey Decimal Classification: 239

Subject Heading: CHRISTIANITY—APOLOGETIC WORKS \ APOLOGETICS \ BIBLE

Unless otherwise noted, Scripture quotations are taken from the Holman Christian Standard Bible ® Copyright © 1999, 2000, 2002, 2003, 2009 by Holman Bible Publishers. Used by permission.

Scripture quotations marked ESV are from The Holy Bible, English Standard Version, copyright ©2001 by Crossway Bibles, a division of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Scripture citations marked NASB are from the New American Standard Bible. ©The Lockman Foundation, 1960, 1962, 1968, 1971, 1973, 1975, 1977, 1995. Used by permission.

Scripture citations marked NIV are from the HOLY BIBLE, NEW INTERNATIONAL VERSION®. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984 by International Bible Society. Used by permission of Zondervan Publishing House. All Rights Reserved.

Scripture citations marked NKJV are from The New King James Version, copyright © 1979, 1980, 1982, Thomas Nelson, Inc., Publishers.

Scripture quotations marked NLT are taken from the Holy Bible, New Living Translation, copyright © 1996. Used by permission of Tyndale House Publishers, Inc., Wheaton, Illinois 60189. All rights reserved.

Scripture citations marked NRSV are from the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible, copyright © 1989 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Scripture citations marked RSV are from the Revised Standard Version of the Bible copyright 1946, 1952, © 1971, 1973 by the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the U.S.A. and used by permission.

Dear friends, although I was eager to write you about our common salvation, I found it necessary to write and exhort you to contend for the faith that was delivered to the saints once for all.(Jude 3)

To Paige Patterson and Paul Pressler,

contenders for the faith.

Untold numbers of Christians are forever in your debt.

Contents

Abbreviations

Contributors

Introduction

Steven B. Cowan and Terry L. Wilder

Part One

Philosophical and

Methodological Challenges

Chapter One

Can and Would God Speak to Us? A Dialogue on Divine Speaking

R. Douglas Geivett

Chapter Two

What Does It Mean to Say that the Bible Is True?

Douglas K. Blount

Chapter Three

Higher Criticism: What Has It Shown?

Charles L. Quarles

Chapter Four

Can We Understand the Bible? 89

Richard R. Melick Jr.

Part Two

Textual and Historical Challenges

Chapter Five

Has the Old Testament Text Been Hopelessly Corrupted?

Paul D. Wegner

Chapter Six

Has the New Testament Text Been Hopelessly Corrupted?

Daniel B. Wallace

Chapter Seven

Does the Bible Contain Forgeries?

Terry L. Wilder

Chapter Eight

Is the Story of Jesus Borrowed from Pagan Myths?

Mary Jo Sharp

Chapter Nine

Is the Old Testament Historically Reliable?

Walter C. Kaiser Jr.

Chapter Ten

Is the New Testament Historically Reliable?

Paul W. Barnett

Chapter Eleven

Are There Contradictions in the Bible?

Douglas S. Huffman

Part Three

Ethical, Scientific, and Theological Challenges

Chapter Twelve

Does the Bible Condone Genocide?

Matthew Flannagan and Paul Copan

Chapter Thirteen

Does the Bible Condone Slavery and Sexism?

James M. Hamilton

Chapter Fourteen

Does the Bible Conflict with Science?

William A. Dembski

Chapter Fifteen

Are There Conflicting Theologies in the Bible?

Craig A. Blaising

Chapter Sixteen

Do We Have the Right Canon?

Paul D. Wegner, Terry L. Wilder, and Darrell L. Bock

Chapter Seventeen

Is the Bible the Word of God?

Steven B. Cowan

Abbreviations

AB Anchor Bible

BASOR Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research

BECNT Baker Exegetical Commentary on the New Testament

CBH Cambridge History of the Bible

EBib Études bibliques

EKKNT Evangelisch-katholischer Kommentar zum Neuen Testament

ET English translations

GBS: OTS Guides to Biblical Scholarship Old Testament Series

IBS Irish Biblical Studies

ICC International Critical Commentary

JBL Journal of Biblical Literature

JETS Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society

JSNTSup Journal for the Study of the New Testament: Supplement Series

JSOTSup Journal for the Study of the Old Testament: Supplement Series

JTS Journal of Theological Studies

LCL Loeb Classical Library

NAC New American Commentary

NICOT New International Commentary on the Old Testament

NIVAC NIV Application Commentary

NovT Novum Testamentum

NSBT New Studies in Biblical Theology

NTS New Testament Studies

SBL Society of Biblical Literature

TOTC Tyndale Old Testament Commentaries

WBC Word Biblical Commentary

WUNT Wissenschaftliche Untersuchungen zum Neuen Testament

Contributors

Paul W. Barnett is associate in ancient history at Macquarie University, Lecturer Emeritus at Moore College, and Teaching Fellow at Regent College. He was formerly Anglican Bishop of North Sydney. He received his M.A. from the University of Sydney, B.D. and Ph.D. from the University of London, and Th.D. from the Australian College of Theology. He is the author of many works on the New Testament including The Birth of Christianity: The First Twenty Years; Paul, Missionary of Jesus; Finding the Historical Christ; The Second Epistle to the Corinthians (New International Greek Testament Commentary); and Is the New Testament Reliable?

Craig A. Blaising is executive vice president, provost, and professor of theology at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary. He earned his B.S. from the University of Texas, Th.M. and Th.D. from Dallas Theological Seminary, and Ph.D. from the University of Aberdeen. He is the author of several theological publications, including co-author (with Darrell Bock) of Progressive Dispensationalism, co-editor (with Darrell Bock) of Dispensationalism, Israel and the Church: The Search for Definition, and (with Carmen S. Hardin) Psalms 1–50 (Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture), and he is also a contributor to Three Views on the Millennium and Beyond and Three Views on the Rapture: Pretribulation, Prewrath, or Posttribulation.

Douglas K. Blount is professor of theological studies at Dallas Theological Seminary. He received his B.A. and M.A. from Baylor University and M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Notre Dame. He has written several works in the area of philosophy and theology. He co-edited (with Joseph Wooddell) The Baptist Faith and Message 2000: Critical Issues in America’s Largest Protestant Denomination, and he contributed articles to a number of books including Faith, Film, and Philosophy: Big Ideas on the Big Screen; The Apologetics Study Bible; The Lord of the Rings and Philosophy: One Book to Rule Them All; and God and Time: Essays on the Divine Nature.

Darrell L. Bock is research professor of New Testament studies and professor of spiritual development and culture at Dallas Theological Seminary. He earned his B.A. from the University of Texas, Th.M. from Dallas Theological Seminary, and Ph.D. from the University of Aberdeen. He is the author of numerous articles and books on the New Testament including A Theology of Luke and Acts: God’s Promised Program, Realized for All Nations (Biblical Theology of the New Testament); commentaries on Luke 1:1–9:50, Luke 9:51–24:53, and Acts (Baker Exegetical Commentary on the New Testament); and Recovering the Real Lost Gospel: Reclaiming the Gospel as Good News.

Paul Copan is professor of philosophy and ethics and Pledger Family Chair at Palm Beach Atlantic University. He received his B.A. from Columbia International University, M.A. and M.Div. from Trinity International University, and Ph.D. from Marquette University. He is the author of several works in the area of philosophy including True for You, But Not for Me; That’s Just Your Interpretation; How Do You Know You’re Not Wrong?; When God Goes to Starbucks: A Guide to Everyday Apologetics; Is God a Moral Monster? Understanding the Old Testament God; and Loving Wisdom: Christian Philosophy of Religion. He has also co-authored (with William Lane Craig) Creation Out of Nothing: A Biblical, Philosophical, and Scientific Exploration and has co-edited three books on the historical Jesus and three other books in the philosophy of religion.

Steven B. Cowan is the Jim Young associate professor of philosophy and religion at Louisiana College. He earned his B.A. from the University of Southern Mississippi, M.Div. from Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, and M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Arkansas. He is the author of numerous scholarly and popular articles in the areas of philosophy and apologetics. He is the editor of Five Views on Apologetics and Who Runs the Church? Four Views on Church Government; and co-author (with James Spiegel) of The Love of Wisdom: A Christian Introduction to Philosophy.

William A. Dembski is Senior Fellow with the Discovery Institute’s Center for Science and Culture, Senior Fellow with the Wilberforce Forum, and executive director of the International Society for Complexity, Information, and Design. He received his B.A., M.S., M.A., and Ph.D. from the University of Illinois at Chicago, S.M. and Ph.D. from the University of Chicago, and M.Div. from Princeton Theological Seminary. He has published numerous articles in mathematics, philosophy, and theology journals and is the author, co-author, or editor of several books including The Design Inference: Eliminating Chance through Small Probabilities; No Free Lunch: Why Specified Complexity Cannot Be Purchased without Intelligence; (with Jonathan Wells) The Design of Life: Discovering Signs of Intelligence in Biological Systems; The Design Revolution: Answering the Toughest Questions about Intelligent Design; and The End of Christianity: Finding a Good God in an Evil World.

Matthew Flannagan is a theologian, philosopher, and ethicist. He currently works as a teaching elder at Takanini Community Church in south Auckland, New Zealand. He earned his B.Soc.Sci. and M.Soc.Sci. from the University of Waika, and Ph.D. from the University of Otago. He is the author of several articles and has contributed to several books like True Reason: Christian Responses to the Challenge of Atheism. He and his wife Madeleine run the MandM blog (www.mandm.org.nz).

R. Douglas Geivett is professor of philosophy in the Talbot School of Theology, Biloa University. He received his B.S. from Multnomah University, M.A. from Gonzaga University, another M.A. from Dallas Theological Seminary, and Ph.D. from the University of Southern California. He is the author of Evil and the Evidence for God and is co-editor of several books, including Contemporary Perspectives on Religious Epistemology and In Defense of Miracles: A Comprehensive Case for God’s Action in History. He has contributed articles and chapters to numerous books, including God Matters: Readings in the Philosophy of Religion; God Under Fire; The Rationality of Theism; and Does God Exist? The Craig-Flew Debate.

James M. Hamilton is associate professor of biblical theology at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. He earned his B.A. from the University of Arkansas, Th.M. from Dallas Theological Seminary, and Ph.D. from The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. He has written several articles and reviews in the area of biblical studies. He is the author of God’s Glory in Salvation through Judgment: A Biblical Theology; God’s Indwelling Presence: The Holy Spirit in the Old and New Testaments (New American Commentary Studies in Bible and Theology); and Revelation: The Spirit Speaks to the Churches (Preaching the Word).

Douglas S. Huffman is professor of biblical and theological studies at Biola University. He received his B.A. from Northwestern College, M.A. from Wheaton College, and M.A. and Ph.D. from Trinity Evangelical Divinity School. He is the author of two books on New Testament Greek and is the editor of How Then Should We Choose? Three Views on God’s Will and Decision Making; and Christian Contours: How a Biblical Worldview Shapes the Mind and Heart. He is also co-editor (with Eric Johnson) of God Under Fire: Modern Scholarship Reinvents God.

Walter C. Kaiser Jr. is president emeritus and Colman M. Mockler distinguished professor emeritus of Old Testament and Old Testament Ethics at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary. He earned his A.B. and B.D. from Wheaton College and M.A. and Ph.D. from Brandeis University. He has authored numerous works including The Old Testament Documents: Are They Reliable and Relevant?; Toward an Old Testament Theology; Ecclesiastes: Total Life; Toward an Exegetical Theology: Biblical Exegesis for Preaching and Teaching; Hard Sayings of the Old Testament; Micah to Malachi (Communicator’s Commentary); Leviticus (The New Interpreter’s Bible); Exodus (Expositor’s Bible Commentary); The Messiah in the Old Testament; A History of Israel; and co-authored An Introduction to Biblical Hermeneutics: The Search for Meaning.

Richard R. Melick Jr. is director of the academic graduate studies program and professor of New Testament Studies at Golden Gate Baptist Theological Seminary. He received his B.A. from Columbia International University, M.Div. from Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, and Ph.D. from Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary. He has written many publications including four books, the latest co-authored with his wife, Shera Melick, Teaching that Transforms: Facilitating Life Change through Adult Bible Teaching. He is a consulting editor for the New American Commentary series and is the author of the series’ first volume, Philippians, Colossians and Philemon. He was also a translator of the Holman Christian Standard Bible.

Charles L. Quarles is professor of New Testament and biblical theology at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary. He earned his B.A. from the University of Mississippi, and M.Div. and Ph.D. at Mid-America Baptist Theological Seminary. He is the editor, author, or co-author of several works on the New Testament, including Buried Hope or Risen Savior: The Search for the Jesus Tomb; Sermon on the Mount: Restoring Christ’s Message to the Modern Church (NAC Studies in Bible and Theology); and (with Andreas Köstenberger and Scott Kellum) The Cradle, the Cross, and the Crown: An Introduction to the New Testament.

Mary Jo Sharp is assistant professor of apologetics at Houston Baptist University. She received her B.M.Ed. from the University of Oklahoma and M.A. from Biola University. She is also Director of Confident Christianity, an apologetics and discernment ministry that equips believers with answers to the difficult questions of the faith and engages people of other faiths or no faith in discussions of life’s most important questions. She has written several articles and contributed a chapter to Come Let Us Reason: New Essays in Christian Apologetics.

Daniel B. Wallace is professor of New Testament studies at Dallas Theological Seminary. He is also the founder of The Center for the Study of New Testament Manuscripts (www.csntm.org), an institute with an initial purpose of preserving Scripture by taking digital photographs of all known Greek New Testament manuscripts. He earned his B.A. from Biola University, and Th.M. and Ph.D. from Dallas Theological Seminary. He is the author of Greek Grammar Beyond the Basics, the senior New Testament editor of the NET Bible, and co-editor of the NET-Novum Testamentum Graece Greek-English diglot.

Paul D. Wegner is professor of Old Testament at Golden Gate Baptist Theological Seminary. He received his B.A. from Moody Bible Institute, M.Div. and Th.M. from Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, and Ph.D. from the University of London. He has written numerous publications including Hebrew Workbooks and Verb Charts Set; Wise Parenting: Wisdom from Proverbs; Using Old Testament Hebrew in Preaching: A Guide for Students and Pastors; A Student’s Guide to Textual Criticism: Its History, Methods, and Results; and The Journey from Texts to Translations: The Origin and Development of the Bible.

Terry L. Wilder is professor and Wesley Harrison Chair of New Testament at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary. He earned his B.A. and M.A. from Dallas Baptist University, M.Div.-BL from Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, and Ph.D. from the University of Aberdeen. He has written numerous scholarly and popular articles on the New Testament. He is the author of Pseudonymity, the New Testament, and Deception; co-author (with J. Daryl Charles and Kendell Easley) of Faithful to the End: An Introduction to Hebrews through Revelation; co-editor (with Andreas Köstenberger) of Entrusted with the Gospel: Paul’s Theology in the Pastoral Epistles; and editor of The Lost Sermons of Scottish Baptist Peter Grant and Perspectives on Our Struggle with Sin: Three Views of Romans 7.

Introduction

Steven B. Cowan and Terry L. Wilder

We have been told that we live in a post-Christian culture.[1] In the Western world, the Christian faith has been and is apparently in decline, especially as regards its cultural influence. Western and American culture are largely secular in orientation today. Even among self-professed Christians, few have a Christian worldview or a basic understanding of key Christian doctrines.[2]

It almost goes without saying that if we live in a post-Christian culture, we also live in a post-Bible culture. Despite the fact that the Bible is still the world’s number one best-seller, biblical illiteracy abounds.[3] Apparently, many people buy the Bible but not so many actually read it. Still fewer give it any serious study. And yet, amidst this dearth of biblical knowledge, there is a wide-spread opinion that the Bible is little more than an ancient relic, an antiquated, irrelevant testimony to the religious beliefs of people from a by-gone era—people who were ignorant, superstitious, ethnocentric, and worse. In other words, the Bible is just a book of ancient myths, fables, and religious propaganda that modern man may safely ignore. Atheist Sam Harris summarizes this contemporary attitude toward the Bible:

The Bible, it seems certain, was the work of sand-strewn men and women who thought the earth was flat and for whom a wheelbarrow would have been a breathtaking example of emerging technology. To rely on such a document as the basis for our worldview—however heroic the efforts of redactors—is to repudiate two thousand years of civilizing insights that the human mind has only just begun to inscribe upon itself through secular politics and scientific culture.[4]

Not only is it the view of Harris and others that the Bible contains scientific and religious falsehoods; many feel that it also contains teachings that are morally repugnant and must therefore be repudiated by more enlightened modern people. Christopher Hitchens, for example, states,

The Bible may, indeed does, contain a warrant for trafficking in humans, for ethnic cleansing, for slavery, for bride-price, and for indiscriminate massacre, but we are not bound by any of it because it was put together by crude, uncultured human mammals.[5]

The view of the Bible that Christians have traditionally held—that it is divinely inspired and therefore infallible and absolutely true in what it asserts—has been under relentless attack for several generations, but that attack has intensified severely in recent years, transgressing even popular media. For example, beginning in the 1990s, the top news magazines began to publish regular features (usually at Christmas and Easter) debunking various aspects of Christian belief and biblical teaching.[6] And numerous television programs have been aired that challenge and revise traditional beliefs about Jesus and the Bible, such as the ABC News special The Search for Jesus;[7] the Discovery Channel’s The Lost Tomb of Jesus, Who Was Jesus? and Biblical Mysteries Explained;[8] and the National Geographic Channel’s Mysteries of the Bible series.[9]

Despite this onslaught of negative opinion about the Bible, it is the conviction of the contributors to this volume that the faith of the Church in the inspiration, authority, and relevancy of the Bible has not been misplaced. In the remainder of this introduction, we will explain the content of this faith in the Bible and will then outline the contents of this book.

What We Believe About the Bible

For two thousand years, Christians have been guided in their faith and practice by the teachings of Holy Scripture. In its pages, we believe that we discover “who God is and what He requires of us.”[10] Or, as the Westminster Confession puts it, Scripture gives us “the whole counsel of God concerning all things necessary for His own glory, man’s salvation, faith and life.”[11] The Bible thus functions as the churches’ and the Christian’s sole authority in matters of religious doctrine and Christian living.[12] Practically this means that whatever the Bible teaches on some topic or another binds the Christian’s conscience. We are obligated to believe what the Bible teaches and to do what the Bible prescribes (with the proviso, of course, that the Bible has been properly interpreted). The Baptist Faith and Message 2000 puts the matter succinctly:

[The Bible] reveals the principles by which God judges us, and therefore is, and will remain to the end of the world, the true center of Christian union, and the supreme standard by which all human conduct, creeds, and religious opinions should be tried.[13]

An earlier Baptist voice, that of James Petigru Boyce, stated his (and others’) firm belief “in the perfect inspiration and absolute authority of the divine revelation [i.e., the Bible], and is convinced that the best proof of any truth is that it is there taught.”[14]

This belief in the Bible’s authority is predicated on certain assumptions concerning other properties that the Bible has. Specifically, the authority of Scripture is predicated on the belief that it is divinely inspired and inerrant.

Divine Inspiration

The reason the Bible has authority is because it is the Word of God. That is to say, we believe that the Bible is divinely inspired; it finds its ultimate source in God. It is not merely a human book even though humans had a role in its composition. The Bible is a written revelation from God. The Bible is authoritative; therefore, when Scripture speaks, God speaks.

That Scripture is divinely inspired is what Scripture teaches about itself. The apostle Peter, for example, wrote that “no prophecy of Scripture comes from one’s own interpretation, because no prophecy ever came by the will of man; instead, men spoke from God as they were moved by the Holy Spirit” (2 Pet 1:20–21). Likewise, Paul asserted that “all Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness” (2 Tim 3:16 NIV). Men wrote the books of the Bible, but they wrote under the direction of the Holy Spirit in such a way that we can say that the Bible is not simply the word of men but is truly the Word of God as well.

Theologians thus speak of verbal, plenary inspiration. By saying that the Bible’s inspiration is verbal, we affirm that the very words of the Bible are inspired by God. God did not simply plant vague ideas in the heads of the human authors which they then sought (fallibly) to write down as best they could. Paul forbids this notion when he said that “all Scripture is God breathed.” The word “Scripture” is the translation of the Greek term graphē (“writings”). The actual written words of the Bible are what are “God-breathed.”

This does not mean that God mechanically dictated the words of the Bible to its human authors (though in some passages this is what happened). Rather, as Peter noted, “men were moved [or ‘carried along’] by the Holy Spirit.” Generally, God inspired the Bible by providentially preparing the human writers through their upbringing, education, and life experiences so that when they wrote, their words were their own words. And yet, they were also God’s words because they wrote what God intended for them to write. Theologians call this concursive inspiration.

To say that inspiration is plenary is to say that all the words (not just some) are inspired by God. We do not divide the Bible up into parts that are inspired by God and parts that are merely human in origin. “All Scripture,” Paul wrote, “is God-breathed.” The entire Bible, from Genesis 1:1 to Revelation 22:21, is the Word of God.[15]

Absolute Truthfulness/Inerrancy

The verbal, plenary nature of the Bible’s inspiration implies that it is inerrant.[16] That is, everything that the Bible teaches or affirms, properly interpreted, is absolutely true. The Bible does not teach anything that is false or erroneous—whether that teaching has to do with God, human nature, ethics, the natural world, history, or whatever.[17] What we learn from the Bible is not just the subjective opinions of some individual or community but the actual truth about the matter at hand.[18] Charles H. Spurgeon, writing on the question of whether or not the human element involved in inspiration somehow led to errors in the Bible, stated it eloquently:

The Holy Spirit has made no mistake, either in history, physics, theology, or anything else. God is a greater Scientist than any of those who assume that title. If the human side had tainted the lesser statements we could not be sure of the greater. A man who cannot be trusted as to pence is hardly to be relied on in matters which involve thousands of pounds. But the human side has communicated no taint whatever to Holy Scripture. Every Word of God is pure and sure, whether viewed as the utterance of man or as the thought of God. Whatever of man there is in the enunciation of the message, there is nothing which can prevent its being implicitly received by us, since the man saith nothing on his own account, but covers his own personality with the sacred authority of, “Thus saith the Lord.”[19]

The teachings of the Holy Scriptures are not and cannot be mistaken. The reason, again, is that God—who cannot err—is the ultimate author of Scripture.

As pointed out earlier, though, this classic understanding of the nature of the Bible is strongly challenged today. We believe that it is incumbent upon Christians, for the sake of the church and for the sake of the world, to meet the Bible’s critics head-on and to respond to all of the major challenges to the inspiration and authority of Scripture. This we intend to do in this book.

The Plan of the Book

Some of the challenges to biblical authority have nothing to do with the actual contents of the Bible. They have to do, rather, with philosophical and hermeneutical matters. So, part 1 addresses “Philosophical and Methodological Challenges.” In chapter 1, Douglas Geivett addresses the question as to whether or not it is logically possible for God to communicate verbally with human beings and, if so, why he might want to do so. It might be thought that God, if he exists, is so different from us that he is ineffable: no human language could accurately describe him or adequately convey his “thoughts” (if he has any) to us. Further, even if God could communicate with us, why would he? What would be the point? Given the pervasiveness of religious pluralism in our culture, it would seem that the majority of people who believe in God (about 90% of Americans) must believe either that God cannot or that he does not communicate verbally with human beings (otherwise, we would have a definitive word from him and only one religion could claim exclusive truth). Creatively adopting the classical dialogue format, Geivett argues that there is no logical or theological reason to think that God is incapable of verbal communication with humans. Further, there are good reasons to expect a verbal revelation from him.

Douglas Blount takes up in chapter 2 the question of what it means to say that the Bible is true. The concept of truth, and especially of biblical truth, has been subject to significant revision in light of postmodern influences. Many scholars and students of the Bible have rejected the correspondence theory of truth (according to which a statement is true if and only if it corresponds to the way things are) in favor of coherence or pragmatic models of truth. These new views of truth have a direct bearing on the traditional Christian claim that the Bible is inerrant (allowing that the statements in the Bible are “true” while being factually inaccurate). Blount defends the correspondence theory of truth and its applicability to the Bible. In particular, he explains the doctrine of the Bible’s inerrancy and defends its rationality.

In chapter 3, Charles Quarles discusses higher biblical criticism, a method of Bible study that is often used to undermine belief in the divine inspiration and historical reliability of the Bible. After tracing the historical development of higher criticism, Quarles explains both its benefits and limits. He argues that properly qualified and with appropriate checks and balances, higher criticism offers useful tools for the study of Scripture.

Richard Melick defends the clarity of Scripture and our ability to arrive at correct interpretations of the Bible in chapter 4. This defense is made in response to the challenges posed by historical skepticism and relativism, the former claiming that knowledge of the past is inaccessible to us given the historical distance between the ancient writer and the modern reader. The latter holds that history and literary interpretation are simply the construct of the modern historian/reader. Melick contends that these challenges can be overcome and that it is possible to know the meaning of the biblical text as intended by its human authors.

Part 2 contains articles responding to textual and historical challenges to the Bible. Muslims, Mormons, and skeptics such as Bart Ehrman contend that the text of the Bible has been corrupted beyond repair in the process of transmission. We cannot, according to them, have any certainty about what the writers of the biblical books actually wrote. Paul Wegner and Daniel Wallace respond to this challenge in chapters 5 and 6, defending the integrity, respectively, of the Old and New Testament texts.

Questions about the authorship of biblical books are addressed by Terry Wilder in chapter 7. Today it is very common to hear that Daniel did not write Daniel, Paul did not write the Pastoral Epistles, nor Peter 2 Peter. Rather, these works were falsely written in their names. Wilder defends, with appropriate qualifications, traditional ascriptions of authorship to these and other biblical books and critiques the notion that the Bible contains pseudonymous forgeries.

Chapter 8, by Mary Jo Sharp, responds to the now popular allegation that the Bible, especially the Gospels, borrowed from pagan myths. The stories of Jesus’ virgin birth, death, and resurrection, for example, are said to be nothing more than Christian versions of virgin-born-dying-and-rising-god myths typical in ancient culture. Sharp shows that the alleged parallels are usually vague or nonexistent and that the Christian story of Jesus is rooted in history, not myth.

Walter Kaiser and Paul Barnett defend the historical reliability of the Old and New Testaments in chapters 9 and 10, respectively. They show that where the Bible can be corroborated through archaeology and historical research, it fits the known facts of history quite well despite the claims of many skeptical scholars. Douglas Huffman rounds out part 2 in chapter 11 by addressing the charge that the Bible contains internal contradictions with regard to its historical accounts. Huffman discusses and applies several hermeneutical principles that prevent simplistic and unwarranted claims of contradictions. He closes his article with a detailed discussion of the accounts of Jesus’ resurrection, showing that they are perfectly consistent.

Part 3 deals with challenges to the authority of Scripture that arise from the areas of ethics, science, and theology. In chapter 12, Matthew Flannagan and Paul Copan address questions related to the infamous “Canaanite Genocide” in the Old Testament, showing that these accounts are consistent with our best ethical reasoning. They argue, specifically, that (1) in the relevant texts, God did not necessarily command the slaughter of innocent men, women, and children; and (2) even if he did, it is not always wrong for such commands to be issued. James Hamilton, in chapter 13, likewise demonstrates the Bible’s moral integrity regarding the topics of slavery and sexism. While slavery is certainly permitted and regulated in the Bible, Hamilton shows that it is a practice rooted in man’s fallen condition and destined to be eradicated in the course of redemptive history. Hamilton also carefully distinguishes the Bible’s teaching concerning the submission of women to male leadership from the sin of sexism. While the former is rooted in creation and is morally acceptable, the latter—which involves the abuse and demeaning of women by men—is neither.

The alleged conflict between the Bible and modern science is addressed by William Dembski in chapter 14. He ably critiques the naturalistic worldview that often lies behind charges of conflict. Naturalism is committed to a denial of miracles and to methodological naturalism (the principle that science may only appeal to natural causes in scientific explanations). Dembski refutes both commitments and lays out principles for harmonizing exegetical and theological conclusions with the findings of science.

In chapter 15, Craig Blaising responds to the charge that the Bible contains conflicting theologies. Not only do the biblical writers have different theological emphases, it is claimed, they actually teach contradictory things about God, man, salvation, and so forth. Blaising argues that this charge is unwarranted and that the multiple theologies in the biblical books are consistent and unified. Chapter 16 is devoted to defending the integrity of the biblical canon. In addition to discussing the process of canonization for both the Old and New Testaments, the article responds to the claims of Elaine Pagels, Bart Ehrman, and others that some biblical books were included in the Christian canon, and others excluded, for purely political reasons by those in the theological community that gained prominence in the patristic church. Paul Wegner, Terry Wilder, and Darrell Bock show that the canon is as it should be given the historical facts and the beliefs of the earliest Christians about the person and work of Christ.

Lastly, in chapter 17, Steve Cowan makes the case that the Bible is not simply historically reliable and internally consistent, but it is in fact the Word of God. He takes a “Christological approach” which bases the case for the inspiration of Scripture on the testimony of Jesus. Utilizing some of the tools of higher criticism, Cowan shows on historical grounds that Jesus, who claimed to be God and rose from the dead, taught that the Old Testament is divinely inspired and promised the inspiration of the New Testament through his apostles.

Before closing, we should point out that the various contributors to this volume would not necessarily agree with every detail of every article or offer solutions to the problems addressed in exactly the same way. Further, everything claimed in the articles may not represent the views of the editors or publisher. But what all editors and authors share is a firm commitment to the inspiration, authority, and inerrancy of Scripture.

Acknowledgments

A book like this would not be possible without the help of others. The editors wish to thank Andreas Köstenberger and Chris Cowan of B&H for the hard work and dedication that they gave to this project to see it through to publication. Appreciation is also due to our many colleagues at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary and Louisiana College who encouraged us along the way and sometimes gave us helpful feedback. Most importantly, we thank our dear wives and children for their encouragement and support. We are truly blessed and humbled to have them.

1 For documentation and discussion of the decline of Christianity’s influence in America and the use of the term “post-Christian,” see Jon Meacham, “The End of Christian America,” Newsweek, April 3, 2009 (accessed online at http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2009/04/03/the-end-of-christian-america.html).

2 According to the most recent statistics of the Barna Group, only 19% of professing “born again” Christians possesses a biblical worldview (see “Barna Survey Examines Changes in Worldview among Christians over the Past 13 Years,” accessed at www.barna.org/transformation-articles/252-barna-survey-examines-changes-in-worldview-among-christians-over-the-past-13-years).

3 Evidence is provided in Barna’s “New Research Explores How Different Generations View and Use the Bible” accessed at www.barna.org/barna-update/article/12-faithspirituality/317-new-research-explores-how-different-generations-view-and-use-the-bible.

4 Sam Harris, The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason (New York: W. W. Norton, 2005), 45.

5 Christopher Hitchens, God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything (New York: Twelve, 2007), 102.

6 Examples include, “Who was Jesus? A New Look at His Words and Deeds,” U. S. News and World Report (December 20, 1993); “In Search of Jesus: Who Was He? New Appraisals of His Life and Meaning” U. S. News and World Report (April 8, 1996); “Rethinking the Resurrection: A New Debate About the Risen Christ,” Newsweek (April 8, 1996); “The Search for Jesus: Some Scholars are Debunking the Gospels . . . What are Christians to Believe?” Time (April 8, 1996); Secrets of the Bible (U. S. News and World Report Collector’s Edition, 2008).

7 Aired June 26, 2000. DVD available at http://www.amazon.com/ABC-News-Presents -Search-Jesus/dp/B0001BFDKK/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1337614823&sr=8–1.

8 See the following links: http://dsc.discovery.com/convergence/tomb/tomb.html; http://store.discovery.com/detail.php?p=98329&v=discovery; http://store.discovery.com/detail.php?p=98330&icid=mybuys&green=6B96B0C5–597B-530B-AAF3-CE0AF28012E1.

9 See http://video.nationalgeographic.com/video/national-geographic-channel/full-episodes/font-family : "Minion Pro", serif;mysteries-of-the-bible-1.

10 Children’s “Prove It” Catechism (Grand Rapids: Truth for Eternity Ministries, 1993), Q.7. The full text of this catechism is available at www.vor.org/rbdisk/html/proveit/fulltext.htm.

11 Chapter 1, paragraph 6.

12 Roman Catholics and others, of course, deny that the Bible is the church’s sole authority, giving equal authority to the Church’s tradition as interpreted by its Magisterium. For a defense of sola Scriptura and a critique of the Roman Catholic view, see James R. White, Scripture Alone: Exploring the Bible’s Accuracy, Authority, and Authenticity (Bloomington, MN: Bethany House, 2004); and Don Kistler, ed., Sola Scriptura: The Protestant Position on the Bible, 2nd ed. (Lake Mary, FL: Reformation Trust, 2009).

13 The Baptist Faith and Message 2000, Article I.

14 J. P. Boyce, Abstract of Systematic Theology (Philadelphia: American Baptist Publication Society, 1887), vii.

15 For a more detailed discussion and defense of the verbal, plenary nature of biblical inspiration, see Paul Feinberg, “The Meaning of Inerrancy” in Inerrancy, ed. Norman L. Geisler (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1980), 277–87; Wayne Grudem, Systematic Theology: An Introduction to Biblical Doctrine (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1994), 73–94; and J. I. Packer, God Has Spoken: Revelation and the Bible (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1994).

16 Not everyone agrees that divine inspiration necessitates inerrancy. Peter van Inwagen, for example, argues that the Church’s belief in the inspiration of Scripture may be justified even if the New Testament is merely “historically reliable” (“Critical Studies of the New Testament and the User of the New Testament,” in God, Knowledge, and Mystery: Essays in Philosophical Theology, ed. Peter van Inwagen [Cornell University, 1995], 163–90). By “historically reliable” he means “that (i) Jesus said and did at least most of the things ascribed to him in those [New Testament] narratives, and (ii) any false statements about what Jesus said and did that the narratives may contain will do no harm to those users of the New Testament who accept them as true because they occur in the New Testament” (p. 172). It seems to us that, all things being equal, van Inwagen is correct. It is certainly not logically impossible (again, all things being equal) that a book could be divinely inspired with the specified qualifications that van Inwagen makes. However, all things are not equal. First, his argument works only if we assume, or have some reason to believe, that God could not insure the inerrant production of a divine revelation. On the opposite assumption—that God could produce an inerrant revelation—we would surely expect that revelation to be inerrant. And there does seem to be reason to think that God could produce an inerrant revelation. On a compatibilist view of human freedom, God could easily orchestrate the lives of the biblical writers to determine that they write inerrantly. And on a libertarian view of freedom, God could insure an inerrant revelation by, perhaps, utilizing middle knowledge to actualize that possible world in which he knows that the biblical writers would (inerrantly) write what he wants them to write. (For the latter possibility, see William Lane Craig, “‘Men Moved by the Holy Spirit’ [2 Peter 1:21]: A Middle Knowledge Perspective on Biblical Inspiration,” Philosophia Christi, Series 2, 1:1 [1999]: 45–82.)

Second, the idea that a divinely inspired book is merely historically reliable, and not inerrant, is inconsistent with the Bible’s own testimony about itself. For example, as already indicated, 2 Tim 3:16 asserts that the very words (graphē) are “breathed out” by God. Given that God is absolutely good (and thus absolutely honest), this seems very difficult at best to square with a Bible that contains false assertions (especially when we understand that God could ensure that the Bible does not contain false assertions). Also, other biblical texts make claims like, “Your [God’s] instruction is true” (Ps 119:142), “Thus says the LORD” (Josh 24:2 NKJV; 1 Sam 15:2; Isa 7:7, passim), “only when the word of the prophet comes true will the prophet be recognized as one the LORD has truly sent” (Jer 28:9), “This is the disciple who testifies to these things and who wrote them down. We know that his testimony is true” (John 21:24), “they [the Israelites] were entrusted with the spoken words of God” (Rom 3:2), “God must be true, even if everyone is a liar” (Rom 3:4), etc. (cf. also 1 Cor 10:11; Rom 9:17; 15:4; Gal 3:8). And, as Steve Cowan shows in his article in this book, “Is the Bible the Word of God?” (p. 429), Jesus himself taught, in texts that are historically authenticated, that the OT Scriptures are the inspired words of God; and he promised the similar inspiration of the NT Scriptures. The consistent and unified testimony of the Bible’s writers (and Jesus) is that what the Bible says, God says, and that what God says is true. So, we conclude that the doctrine of Scripture’s inspiration, when it takes in the whole of the biblical witness and the character of God as revealed therein, does imply the Bible’s absolute truthfulness or inerrancy.

17 Paul Feinberg (“The Meaning of Inerrancy,” in Geisler, Inerrancy, 287–95) defines inerrancy more formally as follows: “When all facts are known, the Scriptures in their original autographs and properly interpreted will be shown to be wholly true in everything that they affirm, whether that has to do with doctrine or morality, or with the social, physical, or life sciences.”

18 For more on the Bible’s truthfulness and what it means, see the article in this volume by Doug Blount, “What Does It Mean to Say that the Bible Is True?” (p. 47).

19 C. H. Spurgeon, “The Human Side of Inspiration,” Sword and Trowel (October 1889): 551.

Part One

Philosophical and

Methodological Challenges

Can and Would God Speak to Us? A Dialogue on Divine Speaking

What Does It Mean to Say that the Bible Is True?

Higher Criticism: What Has It Shown?

Can We Understand the Bible?

Chapter One

Can and Would God Speak to Us? A Dialogue on Divine Speaking

R. Douglas Geivett

Preamble

I have sometimes thought about writing in dialogue form. Done well, fictional dialogues on naturally gripping topics can be engaging without loss of rigor. This chapter is a modest attempt to emulate Plato, who composed the earliest successful dialogues on topics of philosophical interest. Every serious reader, Christian or not, should be familiar with Plato’s dialogues, Augustine’s dialogical essay On the Teacher, George Berkeley’s Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous, and David Hume’s Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion.[1]

Topics in philosophy of religion and in Christian apologetics are especially amenable to dialogical treatment since the issues often are the focus of energetic conversation about the things that matter most. For this chapter I was assigned the topic “Can God Speak to Us? Would God Speak to Us?” Eventually it occurred to me what should have been obvious from the beginning—these are questions that arise very naturally for people thinking about the nature and authority of Scripture. Why not exhibit the kind of dialectic that might take place between two thoughtful people investigating these questions, one who is prepared to argue that God can and would speak to us and one who needs to be convinced? With this experiment I’ve discovered that writing a dialogue for these purposes is an agreeable way to reflect the dialectic of shared inquiry while drawing attention to the virtues of a particular point of view.

Chad and Danielle are my inventions. Perhaps not so coincidentally, “Chad” looks like a possible nickname for old king Nebuchadnezzar, and “Danielle” is a female counterpart to Daniel, the Israelite prophet who addressed Nebuchadnezzar on behalf of Yahweh, the God of Israel. So Chad may be seen as a loose representation of the Babylonian king’s initial suspicion about Daniel’s claim that God was speaking to him. The king eventually acquiesced to this fact, with renewal and unexpected flourishing following his submission to God’s word. Danielle, then, is a symbol of the effort made by the prophet Daniel to convince the king that God could, would, and indeed had, spoken to him. At best, however, Chad and Danielle are modernizations of interactions between the ancient king and prophet in a very loose sense. (The name “Daniel” means “God is my Judge,” a possible allusion to the vindication Daniel would enjoy when his prophetic word to Nebuchadnezzar was fulfilled.)

In the dialogue that follows, Danielle makes a plausible argument both that God could and that God would produce a revelation that speaks to the needs of humanity with divine wisdom and compassion. Chad, though given to suspicion, is moved by Danielle’s argument. As it happens, the proof is in the pudding. Nebuchadnezzar was himself addressed by God in a way that the Babylonian king could not ultimately resist.

Part 1: Can God Speak to Us?

Chad: What’s that you have in your hands, there? I can see that it’s a book. But what kind of book is it?

Danielle: This? It’s a Bible.

Chad: And what’s a “Bible”?

Danielle: The Bible is a book, a very special book.

Chad: You just said, “The Bible is a book.” Do you mean there’s only one Bible? If the Bible is such a special book, and you have the only Bible there is, then you must be pretty special yourself.

Danielle: It is a special privilege, but I’m not the only one who has the Bible. There are many copies of the Bible and even many English translations from the original Hebrew and Greek. All or portions of the Bible have been translated into all of the major languages. I’m surprised you haven’t heard about it until now.[2]

Chad: You keep talking about “the Bible.” If there are so many Bibles, why do you do that, as if there’s only one book that is the Bible?

Danielle: That’s a fair question. And there’s an irony in the answer. The Bible is actually a collection of sixty-six books.

Chad: So first you speak as if the Bible is a book and that there is only one. Now you’re telling me not only that there are many Bibles but that the Bible itself is many books.

Danielle: Exactly!

Chad: Isn’t that peculiar?

Danielle: Not really. Our English word “Bible” comes from the Greek word biblia, a plural noun that means “books.” These books were composed over a period of several centuries.[3] In due course, they came to be collected into a single unit as one book. This process began even before all of the books of the Bible had been written. So the Bible “grew,” as it were, during the course of composition.

Chad: I can see how various writings can be collated into a single volume, like an anthology. But you seem to be saying that the Bible is not an anthology. What do you mean when you say that the Bible is a “unit”?

Danielle: Good question.

Chad: Is there a good answer?

Danielle: That’s the thing about good questions. The best questions often have the most important answers. To answer your question, the Bible has a unity that no anthology has. For example, a typical anthology is made up of works by different authors. The Bible isn’t like that. It’s completely unlike any other book.

Chad: If the Bible was composed over several centuries, then there must have been many different authors for individual books of the Bible.

Danielle: Yes, and no. Depending on how you sort out the human authorship of individual books, there were several dozen authors and compilers of individual books. But each worked under the direction of a single great Author.

Chad: Do you mean one of the goddess muses who were said to have inspired great literature, developments in science, and works of art? This is news to me.

Danielle: I’m not referring to any sort of a muse. The muses were supposed to be finite goddesses. The Bible was inspired by the one and only true God. This is why the Bible is also called “the Word of God.” Because God guided the human authors in their writing of individual books of the Bible. As one author wrote, “For no prophecy was ever produced by the will of man, but men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit.”[4] God is the ultimate source of the whole Bible and is, in that respect, the unique Author. This explains what is so special about the Bible. This book has unique authority as the Word of God himself.

Chad: Why call the Bible “the Word of God”? This makes it sound like God speaks to us. What kind of god does such a thing? Is that even possible? Can this God you speak of actually speak to us? And even if your God could speak, why would God bother to speak to us?

Danielle: You’re asking two questions: “Can God speak to us?” and “Would God speak to us?”

Chad: Correct. It seems we’ve come to a really fundamental issue. Some other time we might discuss your claim that the Bible is inspired in this special way by God—or the “Holy Spirit,” whatever that means—while also being written by numerous human authors. I have a number of other questions about the Bible. But I’d like to start with these two.

Danielle: I agree that these two questions are basic. So let’s limit this conversation to them. Let’s begin with your first question.

Chad: “Can God speak to us?”

Danielle: Right.

Chad: Shouldn’t we begin with your concept of God?

Danielle: Yes, that makes sense.

Chad: You said there is one true God, who is the ultimate author of the Bible, the guarantor of the unique authority of the Bible.

Danielle: That’s a nice concise way of paraphrasing my claim.

Chad: So we need to understand what you mean by this “one true God.” Who or what is God?

Danielle: God is a bodiless person. He is the fundamental, self-subsistent, the eternal, perfectly free and loving, all-wise and omnipotent Creator of the universe, which continues to exist by God’s sustaining power and is the arena of meticulous providence and of special divine action or miracles. This thesis about God is called “theism.”

Chad: And you’re a theist.

Danielle: I am.

Chad: I can see why theism is important to your view of the Bible. But why believe that your God exists?

Danielle: Since we’ve decided to focus on our two fundamental questions—whether God could and whether God would speak to us—maybe we should assume that the theist’s concept of God is coherent and that this God actually exists. While I believe these assumptions are grounded in good evidence, we agreed to restrict our discussion to these fundamental questions. We may find, eventually, that our answers to these fundamental questions have a bearing on questions about the coherence of theism and the existence of God.[5]

Chad: That’s an interesting suggestion. I look forward to that discussion. But I agree, let’s stay on topic. How is it possible that God speaks to us?

Danielle: Are there any good reasons to think that it is not possible for God to speak to us?

Chad: I can think of several reasons.

Danielle: Our time is limited, so let’s consider what you think are the strongest.

Chad: Okay. First, “speaking” is a human act that requires a physical body, and in particular the use of a larynx. But God, according to you, is not physical and doesn’t have a larynx.

Danielle: Is that your strongest argument?

Chad: Maybe not. Let’s see how you respond.

Danielle: Let me ask you a question. Why must speaking require a physical body and a special apparatus for vocalizing? Isn’t there a difference between vocalizing and speaking?

Chad: I see no difference.

Danielle: How do you define “vocalizing”?

Chad: Let’s see. Vocalizing consists in voicing, using the voice to communicate a message.

Danielle: Is every use of the voice an instance of vocalizing?

Chad: I think so.

Danielle: But is every use of the voice a matter of communicating a message? What about humming?

Chad: I guess humming is a form of vocalizing. And I wouldn’t say that it communicates a message. At least, there are times when it doesn’t.

Danielle: So here we seem to have an instance of using the voice without communicating a message. Is that consistent with your original claim about vocalizing and speaking?

Chad: I think it might be. But I can see that I should revise my claim that speaking and vocalizing are the same thing. Do you mind?

Danielle: Not at all.

Chad: All speaking involves vocalization, even if some vocalizing is not speaking. This is compatible with my original claim. Speaking requires a body that is equipped with faculties and organs for vocalization and meaningful communication. There is no speaking without vocalization. No vocalization without the use of a physical apparatus. But God, you said, is a bodiless person.

Danielle: There is a logic to that progression. Let’s see if it holds up to scrutiny. Why must speaking require vocalization?

Chad: Because in every familiar case of speaking there is vocalization.

Danielle: I see two problems with that. First, you just identified a correlation between speaking and vocalization, not a dependence relation. But more important, your claim begs the question. You assume that all familiar cases of speaking involve vocalization. Even if those instances of speech that are most familiar do correlate with or depend on vocalization, this does not establish that all speech involves vocalization. But that is precisely the question. You say that all speech involves vocalization. But why think that? You seem to be avoiding this question.

Chad: But my claim is based on a good induction. If all familiar speech involves vocalization, that makes it likely that in all other cases speech involves vocalization.

Danielle: That may be a reasonable induction.

Chad: Thank you.

Danielle: But only for the restricted class of speakers you’re referring to.

Chad: What do you mean by that?

Danielle: By “familiar cases of speaking” you’re referring only to the class of human speakers. But our question is not whether humans can speak to each other, but whether God can speak to us.

Chad: So just because human speech always involves vocalization, which requires a physical body, it doesn’t follow that God, who has no body, must vocalize in order to speak to us?

Danielle: Do you disagree?

Chad: I suppose you’re right. But it still might be the case that even in nonhuman cases speech requires vocalization.

Danielle: That’s pretty thin evidence for denying that God can speak to us. In fact, it isn’t evidence at all. To say that something is a possibility is not to provide a reasonable basis for believing it. But the more important point is how we are to understand speech. After all, our question is whether God can speak to us. So what does “speaking” mean?

Chad: To speak is to utter something using words.

Danielle: Isn’t “uttering” a form of vocalization?

Chad: I suppose it is.

Danielle: So we’re back to where we left off. Our question is whether we can make sense of speaking without literally uttering words.

Chad: Now you’ve made the mistake I made!

Danielle: How so?

Chad: You’re answering in terms of possibilities, and you just said that possibilities don’t provide reasons to believe something.

Danielle: I did, yes. So?

Chad: So you’re trying to get away with suggesting the possible as a substitute for making a positive claim.

Danielle: That’s because I can get away with it.

Chad: Isn’t that special pleading?[6]

Danielle: Not at all. Remember, our question was whether God can speak to us. That’s a question about what is possible. I haven’t been arguing that God has in fact spoken to us. Actually, I haven’t done much of the arguing at all. You’ve carried out most of the argument . . . not that that’s a bad thing.

Chad: I’m just answering your questions.

Danielle: Precisely.

Chad: I suggest that there are reasons for thinking that God cannot speak to us.

Danielle: Yes, that’s your claim. Your claim is that there are good reasons to think that it is not possible for God to speak to us. But so far you haven’t given any reasons that you find convincing.

Chad: Well, I was about to when you interrupted me.

Danielle: I apologize. Please continue.

Chad: Where were we?

Danielle: You were trying to explain why God cannot speak to us.

Chad: Yes, yes, I know. But where was I before we were sidetracked? Oh, yes, can we make sense of speaking without uttering words?

Danielle: That was my question. And your answer is?

Chad: Don’t you have the burden of proof? You’re the theist who believes the Bible is God’s “Word.”

Danielle: That I am. What do you want me to prove? That we can make sense of speaking without uttering words?

Chad: Absolutely. It would be nice for you to be in the hot seat for awhile.

Danielle: Let’s think this through. Can words be spoken without uttering them?

Chad: I seem to be doing all the thinking here. All you do is ask questions.

Danielle: But asking questions that lead to insight requires thinking. Right?

Chad: I guess so. But I wish I was the one asking the questions.

Danielle: But you are! You’ve asked two very basic questions: “Can God speak to us?” and “Would God speak to us?”

Chad: I forget. Did you come up with those questions, or did I? Never mind. Words certainly can be produced without uttering them. This happens when we write something down.

Danielle: Does this count as speaking?

Chad: Here we go again. No, it doesn’t, not literally.

Danielle: Not literally? Is there some other nonliteral sense in which written words can be regarded as speaking?

Chad: You’re trying to make a point, aren’t you?

Danielle: Let me ask you this. Suppose I write down some sentences and you read them aloud to someone else. Does your act count as speaking?

Chad: Sure. Suppose it does.

Danielle: Would you be speaking on my behalf?

Chad: I’d say so.

Danielle: You would be my surrogate, my deputy. I deputize you to speak and say only those words I’ve written down for you to speak. Would you say that if you speak my words at my request to an audience I’ve selected for you, then I’m speaking through you?

Chad: Yes, that’s a natural way to speak. No pun intended.

Danielle: Good . . . that would be a sadly anemic pun. Now, if I’m speaking through you, am I not speaking?

Chad: Yes, but not directly.

Danielle: Must all speaking be “direct”?

Chad: I suppose not.

Danielle: So in the circumstances we’re considering, I am speaking, albeit through you.

Chad: Yes.

Danielle: Why is that?

Chad: Because they’re your words.

Danielle: And what did I call the Bible that you found so puzzling?

Chad: The Word of God. . . . Huh, I see where you’re going with this.

Danielle: So the Bible could be the Word of God, even if God does not speak his words “directly,” as you say?

Chad: But then it becomes a question of whether God could “write down” the words for someone else to utter.

Danielle: You’re getting the hang of this.

Chad: Getting the hang of what?

Danielle: You’re asking questions that could lead to further insight about our original question.

Chad: And that’s a compliment?

Danielle: See! You’ve done it again. Yes, that’s a compliment. Now then, could God write words down for another to utter them?

Chad: This seems to present us with a form of our earlier problem. God would need a physical body in order to write something down.

Danielle: That was your problem, not mine. Anyway, we’ve now taken a rabbit trail. When I was asking you about a case where I write words for you to utter, we were considering whether a person can speak, if not directly, then at least indirectly, without uttering words. You agreed that this is possible. But there may be other ways that speaking may occur without uttering words.

Chad: Are there?

Danielle: What do you think?

Chad: I think that you think so.

Danielle: So what do you think I would be thinking if I thought so?

Chad: You should have been a philosopher. You would be thinking that there are other ways of speaking without uttering words.

Danielle: Go on. What are these other ways?

Chad: You are clever. I’m not sure what to say.

Danielle: Remember, we’re talking about God here. Are there ways that God could speak without uttering words?

Chad: And yet produce words?

Danielle: Yes.

Chad: What’s a word?

Danielle: That’s a great question. What is a word?

Chad: How about, “I know one when I see one”?

Danielle: We can start with that. Is what you see when you see a word something physical?

Chad: Yes. It might be words on a page in a book.

Danielle: Like the Bible, for example?

Chad: Sure.

Danielle: Do you ever know a word when you hear one?

Chad: Of course.

Danielle: And hearing involves awareness of something physical, like a sound?

Chad: That sounds right.

Danielle: That’s a much better pun, Chad.

Chad: Thank you, Danielle.

Danielle: So you can see and hear words if they appear as physical objects on a page or as sounds uttered by a person?

Chad: Yes.

Danielle: Where do these words come from?

Chad: From other people, I’d say.

Danielle: Would you be okay with saying other persons instead of “people”?

Chad: Sure.

Danielle: So words are generated by persons. What is a person?

Chad: Oh, for goodness sake! Do you have to get all metaphysical on me? Let me ask you a question: What do theists say a person is?

Danielle: That’s a great question, and I’m glad you asked. Most theists would say that a person is, for starters, a self-conscious being that has thoughts and experiences emotions. What is essential to personhood is to be a center of consciousness. As centers of self-awareness, persons also have intentions. They are therefore able to act. If they could not act on their intentions, there would be no point in intending anything, so there would be no intentions. Intentions anticipate the prospect of realization. Human persons are like this. They’re self-aware beings with bodies. They intend to act and do act in the physical world through the movement of their bodies. So what is immaterial engages the material.

Chad: That’s what theists say about persons?

Danielle: Quite a lot of them do. Is there a better conception of personhood than this? Is this not the commonsense view of persons?[7]

Chad: Suppose it is.

Danielle: What we should suppose is that this is the correct view of persons, because it is the commonsense view, until it is shown to be mistaken. We can then ask what it means for God to be a person. If God is a person, must he have a body to act in a physical world, such as producing words as a form of speech?

Chad: You probably want me to say no. But as you just pointed out, human persons have bodies, which they use when acting in the physical world.

Danielle: How do human persons “use” their bodies when acting in the world?

Chad: They use their minds to move their arms and legs.

Danielle: Are their legs physical?

Chad: Yes.

Danielle: Are their minds physical?

Chad: Not if you’re right about what it means to be a person.

Danielle: In the case of humans, can we say that human persons act with their minds, something immaterial, on their bodies, something physical, in order to act in the world?

Chad: It sure seems that way.

Danielle: So let’s go with how things seem from a commonsense point of view. Our natural starting point in any inquiry is from the commonsense perspective, and how things seem counts as evidence for what we should think.[8]

Chad: That seems reasonable.

Danielle: The theist believes that God acts in the physical world in much the same way that human persons do.[9]

Chad: I see where this is going. But I see another problem. Even if God can produce effects in a physical world in a way analogous to our function as agents in a physical world, God is a very different kind of person than we are.

Danielle: That’s true. Why is that significant?

Chad: Humans use words to communicate with each other. They’re members of the same community. They occupy the same space, as it were. They have to in order to speak to each other. But God is not present in our space. So it seems that God cannot speak to us.[10]

Danielle: You think that God must be able to “enter our space,” or be present to us, in much the same way human persons are with one another? Otherwise, God cannot interact in the physical world in a way that is required for communication with us, for speaking to us.

Chad: That’s what I’m thinking.

Danielle: And you think God cannot be present in this way?

Chad: I’m experimenting with that idea, yes.

Danielle: What is it about God that makes it impossible for him to be present in our world so that he cannot speak to us?

Chad: As you said, the theist view of God is that he is utterly transcendent. So he exists at quite a significant remove from us.

Danielle: You don’t mean physically, do you? After all, God has no body and God is omnipresent. So what do you mean?

Chad: There is some sense in which God is just unapproachable.

Danielle: Maybe the problem, then, is that there’s something wrong with us. Is it that we cannot, with our finite minds and physical limitations, be aware of God as present in the way that we can with each other? And this means that God cannot speak to us because if he tried he would fail, and God cannot try to do anything that he would fail at?

Chad: I couldn’t have said it better!

Danielle: So if God is interested in speaking to us, our limitations must not be an obstacle to this, yes?

Chad: Yes.

Danielle: But what counts as an obstacle for God? God is omnipotent.

Chad: Let me rephrase my position in terms consistent with God’s omnipotence. There are certain things it is logically impossible for God to do.

Danielle: Like make a square circle.

Chad: Yeah, that kind of thing.

Danielle: And being present as a person within the community of human persons would be, for God, like squaring a circle?

Chad: That’s the general idea.

Danielle: But human persons are able to enter into community with each other as persons. That’s a logical possibility?

Chad: Of course.

Danielle: So we can do something God cannot do?

Chad: I guess that follows.

Danielle: This doesn’t sound like divine omnipotence anymore, and if it’s something we can do, whether or not God would do it, it’s not clear that it would be logically impossible for God.

Chad: That’s something I’ll have to think about more carefully. Maybe we should allow, for the sake of argument, that God could speak to us. That still leaves the question whether God would speak to us. I have doubts about that as well.

Danielle: Your intellectual honesty is admirable. But are we really moving on “for the sake of argument,” or is it because your views about the possibility of divine speaking have been shifting?

Chad: I honestly can’t say which it is.

Danielle: That’s an honest answer. Sometimes we aren’t sure whether our inquiry is taking us somewhere we’ve never been before.

Chad: So, how about we take up the second basic question?

Danielle: Good idea. How should we approach it?

Chad: We could do it the same way we did with our first question. Start from scratch . . . assuming, of course, that theism is true.

Danielle: Is that the only way?

Chad: I can’t think of a better way. It seemed to work in our examination of the first question.

Danielle: And what did we learn during that discussion?

Chad: That it’s reasonable to believe that God could speak to us.

Danielle: That’s progress. So with that in mind, is there another way to approach the second question? Isn’t there a logical order to the two questions?

Chad: We might build on what we learned from our conversation so far.

Danielle: Which approach do you think will be most productive? Should we start from scratch, or proceed in logical order with . . . ?

Chad: Now that I think of it, I like the second approach better. Thank you for suggesting it.

Danielle: Ah, but I didn’t suggest it. You came up with that yourself. All I did was ask questions. And I agree with your suggestion.

Part 2: Would God Speak to Us?

Chad: I’ve enjoyed our conversation, Danielle. And I’ve learned a lot from our interaction so far.

Danielle: I have, too, Chad. Why has it been so worthwhile, do you think?

Chad: Let me put it this way: if God exists, then it’s exciting to consider the possibility that God speaks to us.

Danielle: What if God does speak, and we don’t like what he has to say? Would you be excited about that?

Chad: It depends on what God says. Some may like it while others would not. Speaking for myself, I wouldn’t know what to expect if God were to speak to me.

Danielle: Let’s start with that. Is there anything you would like for God to say?

Chad: I can think of all sorts of questions he could answer for me. God would know the answer to every question and have a solution for every problem.

Danielle: It’s interesting you should say that. You seem to agree that God would be omniscient, knowing everything there is to know.

Chad: Yes, that’s what it would mean for God to be God, if God exists. You haven’t convinced me yet that God does exist.

Danielle: Is that the same as saying that God is omniscient and therefore knows the answer to all the questions we might ask?

Chad: No, the point is a different one. God might know the answers to all of our questions but not be able to solve our problems. God might not even want to solve our problems.

Danielle: So you think God would be able to solve our problems if he wanted to?

Chad: I sure hope so.

Danielle: We could hope for it all we want. The question is, can we really expect God to solve our problems?

Chad: That depends on what God is like. God must know what our problems are. But he might not care about solving them. Or he might not be able to.

Danielle: If God is omniscient, as we agree he would be if he exists, then you’re right. He would know what our problems are. We should probably come back to that point. But first, you’ve just mentioned two other issues. You think that God might not care about our problems.

Chad: Maybe God has other things to think about. Or maybe we aren’t that important to God. How significant can our problems be? We’re insignificant dust in comparison with the Creator of the whole universe.

Danielle: You know, Chad, there’s a verse in the Bible that raises the same question. Do you mind if I read it to you?

Chad: The Bible is a pretty old book, written by a bunch of people who’ve been dead for a long time—no disrespect intended. What could we possibly have in common with them? I’m asking a question based on developments in the sciences. We know that we occupy an infinitesimally small region of the universe. People used to think that humans are at the center of the universe. But that hubris has been laid to rest by modern science.

Danielle: Get ready to be surprised, Chad. Here’s what it says in the Old Testament book of Psalms: “When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars, which you have set in place, what is man that you are mindful of him?”[11] This ancient author is expressing the same sort of surprise you feel. Modern science is irrelevant. God is so great and we are so small. That’s enough to make us wonder why God would bother with us at all. And do you know what’s interesting about this passage?

Chad: Tell me.

Danielle: This author is talking directly to God. He’s asking God the question. That puts things in a different light. You’re trying to work out the answer on your own. You’re assuming that God would be disinterested, indifferent about our problems. Have you thought of asking God whether he cares about us and why our problems would matter to him? That’s what this author is doing.

Chad: It sounds like he already believes that God exists. I’m not there yet.

Danielle: Does that really matter? You haven’t concluded that God does not exist. So, what if he does? That’s the assumption we’ve been making, and that’s the assumption of your question.

Chad: What question is that? I’m starting to get lost in a tangle of questions.

Danielle: Your question is whether God would be bothered with our problems. This question assumes that God exists. It also assumes that God might not be the sort of personal being that would take an interest in us. The author of this passage in the Psalms does believe that God exists. But he also is puzzled about God’s concern for humanity.

Chad: This writer also seems to assume that God is interested or concerned, and he just wants to understand why that is. But I’m thinking about something different. I’m not prepared to assume that God has this sort of interest in humanity. My question is how that’s even possible. Doesn’t it make more sense to think that God is too remote from us to be bothered with our problems?

Danielle: You’re right. Here we have an author who believes in God. He believes that God exists, and he believes that God is mindful of us. But in the larger context of the passage, the writer leaves clues about his reasons for believing that. In fact, even the small bit of the passage that I read to you holds the key. His question for God is inspired by what he believes about God as the Creator. He’s saying, “When I observe your handiwork and its immense scale, in all of its grandeur, I can’t help wondering why we matter so much to you.” A few lines earlier he says, “O LORD, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth! You have set your glory above the heavens.”[12]

Chad: But the author believes, deep down, that God hears him and cares about him.

Danielle: Exactly. Don’t you see? On the one hand, we are dwarfed by the immensity of the universe. On the other hand, the universe is a magnificent creation, a testament to God’s greatness. And included in that greatness is what it reveals about God’s intentions.

When Paul, that great Christian apostle of the first century, was visiting Athens, he noticed evidence all around him that its citizens were very religious. But they were not in touch with God. Paul notes that their symbols of religious concern showed that they yearned to know God. And all their temples and images did was remind them that God really was not close at hand. Paul then tells them, “The God who made the world and everything in it, being Lord of heaven and earth, does not live in temples made by man, nor is he served by human hands, as though he needed anything . . . .”[13]

Chad: Stop right there! It sounds like those Athenians wanted contact with God. Sure, their efforts to reach out to God didn’t count for much, but at least they tried. They probably gave it their best. But God doesn’t need us.

Danielle: That doesn’t mean we don’t need God. Let me read the rest of the sentence. Paul pointed out that God himself “gives to all mankind life and breath and everything.” God doesn’t need us. But he made us. We have life and breath because of him. He placed us in this world of grandeur. We aren’t aliens in God’s world. This world is a fit habitat for humanity. As scientists have noted, our universe is fine-tuned for human life. That’s unsurprising since God created the universe. He created an environment that is friendly to human existence and provided conditions for human flourishing. I think that’s part of what Paul was getting at when he went on to say, “And [God] made from one man every nation of mankind to live on all the face of the earth, having determined allotted periods and the boundaries of their dwelling place.”[14] Does that sound like a God who is oblivious to the human condition and indifferent about our concerns?[15]

Chad: But the Athenians were listening for God and evidently they never heard from him.

Danielle: Hold on! Maybe it wasn’t an accident that Paul showed up when he did. They were very religious, but they didn’t have the complete picture. Even they realized this because they had erected an altar with the inscription “To an Unknown God.” So what did Paul do? He said, “What therefore you worship as unknown, this I proclaim to you.”[16] First, he reminded them of God’s provision for humanity as their Creator. Then he pointed out the implications—God may not be as remote as they had come to believe. After that, he encouraged them to seek God.

Chad: But they were seeking God.

Danielle: Yes, but they were looking in all the wrong places. Their mistake was thinking that God could be found some place around town or would show up if they built a special place for him. But Paul tells them that God had built a special place for us! And that’s the clue they needed. God is not far from anyone of us. According to Athenian tradition, it was thought that “in him we live and move and have our being.”[17] They couldn’t be more right . . . or more wrong.

Chad: What do you mean, “They couldn’t be more wrong”?

Danielle: Because they had dangerously neglected to act on what they knew. As their Creator, God had already showed up. He had been there all along. All they had to do was seek him in the right way. Building temples was the wrong way. It distracted them from acknowledging that God takes the initiative in speaking to us. He placed us in a world that attests to his presence and interest. The author of Psalm 8 understood this.

Chad: It seems like we’ve lost the thread of our original plan. We were trying to figure out whether God would speak to us.

Danielle: Right. So what have we come up with so far?

Chad: That God made us. That God is present. That God takes the initiative with us.

Danielle: Doesn’t that answer your first worry, that God would be indifferent? Why would God create us in the first place?

Chad: I see the point. But maybe God created the world and us, and we just want to connect with God. We might fool ourselves into thinking that he cares.

Danielle: But we care, and we can’t fool ourselves about that.

Chad: So?

Danielle: So what does it say about God that we care about whether he cares?

Chad: I’m not following.

Danielle: God created us and the world we live in. Like Paul said, he determined the boundaries and conditions of our lives. No other living thing aspires to connect with God as we do.[18] Why is that?

Chad: We’re different than other critters.

Danielle: How are we different? How do the animals relate to God?

Chad: That’s an odd question. I had a dog when I was growing up, and as far as I can tell, he was an atheist.

Danielle: Do you really mean that? Do you think your dog reflected on the evidence for and against the existence of God, then made a decision that God does not exist?

Chad: Of course not. I was just saying that my dog didn’t believe in God.

Danielle: What was your dog’s name?

Chad: Jack.

Danielle: Nice name. Why didn’t Jack believe in God?

Chad: This is getting silly.

Danielle: Well . . . .

Chad: Because he was a dog and dogs don’t contemplate the existence of God.

Danielle: So your dog wasn’t an atheist. Because of the kind of creature he was, Jack was indifferent about God.

Chad: I’d say he wasn’t even indifferent. The question probably never occurred to him.

Danielle: But we aren’t indifferent. We would like to know whether God cares for us. And unlike your dog, we can know that God cared enough to create us. Among God’s creatures, we seem to be constituted—designed, you might say—so that we are naturally interested in the question of God’s existence and his presence in our lives.

Chad: Okay, so domestic animals aren’t much interested in the basics of theology.

Danielle: We’re different because we’re not indifferent.

Chad: Clever.

Danielle: The difference between us and other animals is significant in other ways. Did Jack ever share his dreams and ambitions, or plans for achieving them? Did he struggle to decide what was the morally right thing to do? Did he contemplate his mortality and take pains to determine whether there is a doggy heaven and how to get there? Did he ponder the problem of pain and suffering?

Chad: It was always fascinating to me that Jack seemed like us in so many ways. It was like he had a soul—although my dad used to say he didn’t know Jack.

Danielle: Would you have been so fascinated if Jack had been exactly like us? If he had the kind of consciousness and mental life that we do?

Chad: No. Then he would just seem like a human being in a dog’s body. That would be weird.

Danielle: Well, then. If God created us and we are naturally concerned about whether God is concerned about us, what does this suggest about God?

Chad: You mean God meant for us to want a connection with him?

Danielle: And would God intend that without providing for it?

Chad: Not if God is good.

Danielle: Can a personal being who is not good be God?

Chad: I guess not. When you defined theism you said that God is perfectly loving.

Danielle: So does it make any sense that we would be created with a natural interest in connecting with God, if God was indifferent about connecting with us?

Chad: God might have a reason for creating us that way, but not wish to connect with us.

Danielle: What’s more likely, that God, being our kind Creator who designed us for connection with him, also wants connection with us, or that he would ignore a desire that he placed within us?

Chad: Of course, it’s more likely that God desires connection with us if God gave us that desire.

Danielle: So one reason to think that God would speak to us is that God desires connection with us.

Chad: You make an interesting point. But why should connection involve speaking to us?

Danielle: You ask an interesting question. Can you think of a better way for God to connect with us?

Chad: I can think of other ways.

Danielle: So can I. And I think God does connect with us in various ways. But what would be the best way for God to connect with us? Remember, our desire is for God to address our basic questions about life and human destiny. When you ask a question, do you use words?

Chad: Usually. I guess facial expressions work, too, sometimes.

Danielle: Would God use facial expressions?

Chad: Not likely.

Danielle: And we agreed that God could speak to us.

Chad: Yes, if God exists.

Danielle: And if you ask an important and complex question, do you want a clear answer?

Chad: Yes.

Danielle: If you ask me to explain how to get to the airport from here, would you settle for hand motions?

Chad: That would probably be pretty confusing.

Danielle: What would you expect if you asked me for directions?

Chad: You would tell me, using language. Words, if that’s what you’re trying to get me to say.

Danielle: What if you were lost and needed directions. Would language be useful then?

Chad: That would be convenient, yes.

Danielle: So some messages can be more clearly and helpfully communicated through speech?

Chad: Naturally.

Danielle: Who benefits from the words that are used to communicate, the speaker or the listener?

Chad: The listener.

Danielle: Does the listener benefit if he doesn’t understand the message?

Chad: No.

Danielle: So a speaker must express what he has to say in language that will be understood by the messenger?

Chad: Yes, if he really is interested in communication.

Danielle: If God has a message for us, what language will he use?

Chad: If he’s talking to me, it won’t be Hebrew or Greek. That’s for sure!

Danielle: What language would he use, then?

Chad: English would be nice.

Danielle: So if God wished to communicate with you about an important matter, you would like for him to speak plainly to you in English?

Chad: I’d appreciate it.

Danielle: What if God spoke to someone else in Hebrew and an interpreter translated his message for you?

Chad: Then I’d wonder why God wasn’t fluent in English, especially since it’s the lingua franca of the modern world.

Danielle: But English wasn’t spoken in the ancient world.

Chad: Right. But I don’t live in the ancient world.

Danielle: Are you saying that God’s message to you should be different than it is for others?

Chad: I might have questions that they don’t have.

Danielle: So you think that God would want to answer the kinds of questions that you have that others do not have?

Chad: I don’t mean that the way it sounds.

Danielle: What about the questions that have been asked for centuries, about the things that matter most? If God answered these questions at an earlier time in history for a nation of people who did not speak English, would that make any difference if the same message could be translated into English?

Chad: It would be less personal.

Danielle: That may or may not be true.[19]

Chad: Yes, in translation, the same message could be delivered to any number of people at any time in history.

Danielle: Just to be clear, why should it matter whether it’s God who answers our questions?

Chad: Some questions are too important to risk counting on an unreliable source. If God spoke to us, we would have the most reliable information we need to answer our deepest questions.

Danielle: Could that be another reason why God would speak to us, to spare us the confusion and possible misinformation that might come if we trusted other sources?

Chad: I think it is.

Danielle: So we would be confident about answers to life’s biggest questions if our answers were backed by divine authority?

Chad: I would have more confidence in answers that I thought God had given to my most perplexing questions.

Danielle: So would I. But what if we’re asking the wrong questions?

Chad: Sorry, I don’t know what you mean.

Danielle: Let me ask it another way. What if God has answers to questions we aren’t asking? Should that matter to us?

Chad: It might. I guess if God thought a question we weren’t asking had an answer we needed to hear, he’d want to communicate that, too. It might matter to God even if it didn’t matter to us.

Danielle: So that’s another reason why God might choose to speak to us. He might have things to say that we aren’t asking about. And these things might be especially important. They might also be things that we would never know any other way.

Chad: True.

Danielle: A few minutes ago I asked what would help if you were lost and asked me for directions. You said that it would be most helpful to have clear directions in familiar language, language you could understand.

Chad: I remember that.

Danielle: What if we’re lost and only God can tell us the way to get un-lost? We might be confused about how we should live our lives. We could be misdirected about important problems. People disagree about the correct answers to life’s biggest questions. If we’re lost, who can show the way?[20]

Chad: What if we’re not lost?

Danielle: Is it possible to be lost and not know that you’re lost?

Chad: Yes. It’s also possible to be lost and not admit it.

Danielle: So we may be lost and know it, in which case we may or may not admit it; or we may be lost and not know it. Either way, we’re lost. What if you were lost and didn’t know it? Could you know that you were lost and didn’t know it?

Chad: That’s another one of your trick philosophy questions.

Danielle: Not really.

Chad: Well, if I was lost and didn’t know it at the time, I might find out later that I was lost.

Danielle: Could you go on being lost and never know it unless someone came along and told you that you were lost?

Chad: My wife does that.

Danielle: Do you appreciate it when your wife says you’re lost and it’s time to ask for directions?

Chad: Of course. All the time!

Danielle: You’re kidding, right?

Chad: There have been times when I was glad she insisted that I ask for directions. On two or three occasions we ended up in a pretty scary neighborhood without knowing north from south.

Danielle: What if our lives are on the wrong track? What if the path we’re on leads to destruction? We’d want to know it, right?

Chad: I would.

Danielle: And if we didn’t know we were on a dangerous path?

Chad: I’d still want to know.

Danielle: But if everything seemed normal and you were pretty sure you were on the straight and narrow. What then?

Chad: You mean, if I was convinced that I was on the right path but I was actually on the wrong path?

Danielle: Would you want to know that you were on the wrong path?

Chad: Yes.

Danielle: Would you want to know how to get onto the right path?

Chad: Yes.

Danielle: Would you want to know that you know that you were on the wrong path and how to get onto the right path?

Chad: Yes. But that’s the tricky part. There may be lots of conflicting advice about how to do that.

Danielle: Well, if we’re on a mountain road with lots of tight switchbacks, driving a car that needs maintenance, and looking at the map upside down, does it make sense to keep on going?

Chad: Hardly.

Danielle: Now, what if you pull over to check your map for the nearest rest stop, and you have a dozen maps all suggesting that you’re in different places?

Chad: I can’t be in different places at the same time.

Danielle: It takes a humble man to admit to that, Chad, especially if you mean that religiously.

Chad: Yes, I have the equivalent of a religious conviction that it’s impossible for me to be on two paths at the same time.

Danielle: That’s more commendable than you think, because some people believe that all religions offer basically the same path to life’s proper destination. But each religion is actually a different path.

Chad: Aren’t we getting off the path now? We’re supposed to be talking about reasons God would have for speaking to us in the Bible.

Danielle: True, that is the issue. But we’re on the right path. If the various world religions all make different claims about the nature of reality, the point of human existence, the proper destination for each one of us, and how to reach that destination, then it might be easy for us to get confused and end up lost on the wrong highway. We might think that the path to religious truth is the same for all religions and that there are only insubstantial surface differences between religious philosophies. Or we might see that the differences are real but not know which, if any, are correct. This is the problem of religious pluralism.[21]

Chad: Right. Maybe Christianity isn’t so different from any other religion, when it comes right down it.

Danielle: That depends on what you mean by Christianity. If you’re talking about the Christianity that traces back to Jesus Christ himself, then the differences are very real. Cutting through the confusion calls for a word from God. If the human race is in trouble and a precise solution is needed, would God leave us without a clear prescription for a divine remedy?

Chad: Is God a quack doctor, you mean?

Danielle: That’s one way to put it. A medical analogy may actually be very helpful. Suppose we suffer, as humans, from a dreadful illness. We labor under the symptoms of this illness, some of us aware that there’s a problem, others apparently oblivious. God is our Creator. He knows we’re in trouble. He can assess the seriousness of our plight. His diagnosis is reliable. It may be different than what we think. But he’s the expert. He also knows what must be done to cure our disease. We may prefer a different medicine, something more palatable. He may prescribe major surgery, and we prefer the application of a mild ointment. We may think God’s cure is worse than the disease, or a tad excessive, given the severity of our predicament. But again, God is the expert. And God knows what the prognosis will be if we follow his directions and what it will be if we ignore his directions. We may think we know better, when we haven’t a clue. Our disease may fog our minds and leave us with poor judgment. If God speaks, shouldn’t we listen?

Chad: Maybe we should get a second opinion.

Danielle: That’s cute, Chad. But that’s my point. Without the conviction that God has spoken in a way that very realistically diagnoses the human condition, we may limp along on a path that leads to destruction. A second opinion, something that differs from God’s own solution to the human predicament, will always be mistaken.

Chad: But why think we’re in so much trouble?

Danielle: Because God says so.

Chad: So you say.

Danielle: You don’t have to take my word for it. Someone with far more impressive credentials than me says so.

Chad: Who’s that, Danielle?

Danielle: I’m glad you asked!

Postscript

You may think that this dialogue ends abruptly and without closure. That often is how dialogue proceeds. But this dialogue addresses two questions. Could God speak to us? Would God speak to us? Questions about how we know whether God has spoken or how we know when God has spoken come next. So this dialogue explores foundational issues. If the conversation were to continue, Danielle would draw attention to the unique authority of Jesus in a world of religions and demonstrate, from Jesus’ life and teachings, that he believed the Bible to be the Word of God.[22] Chad’s final question leads directly into the many issues addressed in this book. Maybe Danielle will make sure that Chad gets a copy![23]

1 Several advantages of the dialectical method of exposition are stated by Isaac Watts in his book The Improvement of the Mind, first published in 1833 and reprinted by Soli Deo Gloria Publications (Morgan, PA: 1998); see pp. 109–10 of the reprint edition. Interest in fictional dialogue for the examination of perspectives continues unabated. Peter Kreeft is well-known for his many books in this style. And lest one doubt that philosophers of the “analytic” persuasion must regard modern dialogical writing as beneath them, it should be noted that a few philosophers in this tradition have tried their hand at it. Notable examples of dialogical works on topics of religious interest include John Perry, Dialogue on Good, Evil, and the Existence of God, and Charles Taliaferro, Dialogues about God (whose book is part of the New Dialogues in Philosophy Series, edited by Dale Jacquette and published by Rowman & Littlefield).

2 For an extensive account of translations of the Bible, including principles used in translation, English versions of the Bible, and translations in the languages of the world, see the several articles on “Translation,” in The Oxford Guide to the Bible, ed. Bruce M. Metzger and Michael D. Coogan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 749–79.

3 It’s difficult to be very specific about how long ago the first books of the Bible were composed. The Old Testament book of Job, thought by many to be the earliest written, cannot be dated exactly. Proposed dates range between the seventh and the second centuries BC. See Bruce Vawter, “Job,” in Metzger and Coogan, The Oxford Guide to the Bible, 369; J. E. Hartley, “Job,” in The International Standard Bible Encyclopedia, ed. Geoffrey W. Bromiley, vol. 2, rev. ed. (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 1982), 1065–66.

4 2 Peter 1:21 ESV.

5 For evidence and arguments for the existence of God, see especially Richard Swinburne, Is There a God? (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), and Gregory E. Ganssle, Thinking about God: First Steps in Philosophy (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 2004). Atheist philosopher J. J. C. Smart and Christian philosopher J. J. Haldane have entered into dialogue about the question of God’s existence in their excellent book Atheism and Theism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996). For alternative approaches to evidence and argument for and against the existence of God, see the various essays in R. Douglas Geivett and Brendan Sweetman, eds., Contemporary Perspectives on Religious Epistemology (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992). I’ve developed a cumulative case for Christian theism in Evil and the Evidence for God (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1993); “The Kalam Cosmological Argument,” in To Everyone an Answer: A Case for the Christian Worldview, ed. Francis J. Beckwith, William Lane Craig, and J. P. Moreland (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 2004), 61–76; “Two Versions of the Cosmological Argument,” in Passionate Conviction: Contemporary Discourses on Christian Apologetics, ed. Paul Copan and William Lane Craig (Nashville, TN: B&H Academic, 2007), 52–68; and “David Hume and a Cumulative Case Argument,” in In Defense of Natural Theology: A Post-Humean Assessment (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 2005), 297–329. See also my book, co-edited with Gary R. Habermas, In Defense of Miracles: A Comprehensive Case for God’s Action in History (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 1997).

6 Special pleading is a rhetorical ploy that a speaker or writer uses when he exempts himself from the rules he imposes on others. Here, our interlocutor Chad carefully considers the argument made by Danielle and thinks he perceives a contradiction of this sort.

7 Roger Scruton writes, “The most important task for philosophy in the modern world is to resurrect the human person, to rescue it from trivializing science, and to replace the sarcasm which knows that we are merely animals, with the irony which sees that we are not.” See Scruton, An Intelligent Person’s Guide to Philosophy (New York: Penguin, 1996), 59.

8 For the application of this principle to the commonsense view of persons, see the chapter “Strict Naturalism versus a Natural View of Persons,” in Stewart Goetz and Charles Taliaferro, Naturalism (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2008), 25–52.

9 See the fascinating treatment by Roger Scruton in chap. 3 of his book The Face of God (London: Continuum, 2012), 51–72.

10 On this, see ibid.

11 Psalm 8:3–4 ESV.

12 Psalm 8:1 ESV.

13 Acts 17:24–25 ESV.

14 Acts 17:26 ESV.

15 For an overview of the fine-tuning argument for theism, see Robin Collins, “The Teleological Argument,” chap. 8 in The Rationality of Theism, ed. Paul Copan and Paul K. Moser (London: Routledge, 2003). The argument is stated briefly in Ganssle, Thinking about God, 77–80.

16 Acts 17:23 ESV.

17 Acts 17:28 ESV.

18 This nearly universal tendency has led some to think of man as homo religiosus. E. La B. Cherbonner wrote, “As sure as he is free, every man will have a conception of God.” He went on to explain how this connects up with idolatry and sin. See Hardness of Heart: A Contemporary Interpretation of the Doctrine of Sin (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1955), 42.

19 See the incisive discussion of how the Scriptures mediate experience of God in Adam Green and Keith A. Quan, “More Than Inspired Propositions: Shared Attention and the Religious Text,” Faith and Philosophy 29, no. 4 (October 2012): 416–30. The practice of lectio divina is a valuable means of experiencing God through immersion in the Word of God. See Michael Casey, Sacred Reading: The Ancient Art of Lectio Divina (Ligouri, MS: Ligouri/Triumph Press, 1997); and Innocenzo Gargano, Holy Reading: An Introduction to Lectio Divina, trans. Walter Vitale (London: Canterbury Press, 2007).

20 Edward John Carnell wrote: “The fundamental reason why we need special revelation is to answer the question, What must I do to be saved? Happiness is our first interest, but this happiness cannot be ours until we know just how God is going to dispose of us at the end of history” (An Introduction to Christian Apologetics [Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1948], 176).

21 W. Gary Phillips and I have developed a reply to the problem of religious pluralism in our contribution to the book Four Views on Salvation in a Pluralistic World, ed. Dennis L. Okholm and Timothy R. Phillips (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1996), 71–80, 133–40, 192–209, and especially 211–45. See also R. Douglas Geivett, “Religious Diversity and the Futility of Neutrality,” in Can Only One Religion Be True? ed. Robert B. Stewart (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 2013).

22 For a detailed development of this point, see John W. Wenham, Christ and the Bible (London: Tyndale Press, 1972); and the article in this volume, “Is the Bible the Word of God?” by Steve Cowan (p. 429).

23 Many friends and colleagues read the manuscript for this dialogue and made valuable suggestions for improvement. Shortcomings are no doubt due to choices I made over the better judgment of others. I reluctantly accept full responsibility for whatever deficiencies there are and proffer as an admittedly feeble excuse that this is my first stab at writing in dialogue form. My thanks go to Michael Austin, Steve Cowan, Peter Everett, Howard Geivett, Alex Plato, Charlene Ponzio, Doug Wieber, and my daughters, Kaitlyn and Erin Geivett.

Chapter Two

What Does It Mean to Say that the Bible Is True?

Douglas K. Blount

“Sanctify them by the truth; Your word is truth.”—Jesus Christ (John 17:17)

This chapter addresses three questions related to the Bible’s truth. The first section concerns the nature of truth in general; the second concerns the nature of biblical truth; and the third defines the doctrine of inerrancy and explains the Christian’s rationale for believing it. The final section comments briefly on the rationality of that doctrine.

What Is Truth?

Before discussing what it means for the Bible to be true, it seems needful to discuss what it means for any proposition to be true.[1] As this suggests, the primary candidates for the label “true” (or, for that matter, “false”) are what philosophers typically refer to as “propositions.”[2] Of course, we often speak of declarative sentences being true (or false). But such sentences are true (or false) only in a derivative sense, only if “they express a true [or false] proposition or content.”[3] So the sentence “Bono knows a good rhyme” expresses the proposition that Bono knows a good rhyme; and that sentence is true in a derivative sense just in case that proposition is true.[4]

While not identical to declarative sentences, then, propositions are nonetheless closely related to such sentences. In short, those sentences express propositions. But propositions and the sentences that express them cannot be placed in a one-to-one correlation. For consider the English sentence, “I think therefore I am,” and its Latin equivalent, “Cogito ergo sum.” Each constitutes a distinct sentence.[5] But they nonetheless express the same proposition. Or, to put the point differently, though distinct, these two sentences share a common meaning. Propositions, then, amount to something like the meanings of declarative sentences. Moreover, just as two distinct sentences can express one and the same proposition, so also one declarative sentence can express different propositions at different times or in different contexts. To see this last point, consider the sentence, “It is now raining in Dublin.” An utterance of this sentence at 3:33 p.m. on March 28, 2015, expresses a different proposition than an utterance of it at 3:33 a.m. on April 17, 2018.[6]

What does it mean for a proposition to be true? Three basic answers to this question dominate the contemporary philosophical discussion.[7] But it is an ancient philosopher who provides the best-known gloss on the answer that enjoys the most support not only today but also historically. “To say of what is that it is not, or of what is not that it is, is false,” Aristotle states, “while to say of what is that it is, and of what is not that it is not, is true.”[8] This view, known as the correspondence theory of truth, makes the intuitively plausible claim that a proposition’s being true amounts to its accurately describing the way things are; in short, if a proposition p is true, then things are the way p says they are. More formally, this “theory maintains that the truth of a proposition p requires the following two conditions to be met: (1) it is a fact that p, and (2) the proposition corresponds to that fact.”[9] So, as J. P. Moreland states, “the truth relation of correspondence holds between two things—a relevant fact and a proposition—just in case the fact matches, conforms to, corresponds to the proposition.”[10] Truth à la correspondence may thus be defined as follows: For any proposition p, p is true just in case it corresponds to reality.[11]

But as mentioned above, the correspondence view is not the only theory of truth to appear in the contemporary discussion. The coherence theory holds that a proposition is true just in case it coheres with other propositions.[12] This view has the advantage of allowing one to make truth claims even in the face of radical skepticism about one’s perception of the world,[13] but it also has significant disadvantages. First, since there are infinitely many possible sets of propositions with which a particular proposition may or may not cohere, one wonders which set is relevant to that proposition’s truth. In other words, the question arises, with which set must a proposition cohere in order to be true? Now the obvious answer to this question seems to be that the relevant set is the one that most accurately describes the world. But if so, coherence with that set amounts to correspondence with reality; and in that case, the coherentist’s view of truth turns out to be a version of the correspondence theory. On the other hand, if the set that most accurately describes the world is not relevant, what set is?

Now perhaps the coherence theorist will argue that the question of which set of propositions is relevant to the truth of a particular proposition is wrong-headed; perhaps such a theorist will argue that no particular set of propositions enjoys this privilege, that all sets are equally relevant. In that case, since every proposition coheres with some sets and fails to cohere with others, every proposition would be both true and false; and that is clearly untenable, for it flies in the face of the law of noncontradiction,[14] which is itself necessary for rational discourse. So any attempt to avoid the question of which set of propositions is relevant to a given proposition’s truth by claiming that no such set enjoys such privileged status will create more problems for the coherence theorist than it will solve.

Moreover, even if coherence theorists can satisfactorily answer the question posed above, there remains another obvious problem for their view. As Burgess and Burgess ask, “May not a paranoid’s delusions of persecution be frighteningly coherent?”[15] But while the propositions believed by a paranoid might constitute a coherent set, they would nonetheless have little by way of verisimilitude. Surely, then, despite the set’s coherence, its members should not count as paradigmatically true propositions. In short, a particular set’s cohering in no way guarantees that any of its members—let alone all of them—fits reality.

Yet a third view of truth, known as the pragmatic theory, receives its classic expression from William James. On his view, a proposition is true just in case it has “cash-value.”[16] Having such value involves being helpful, profitable, useful. Pragmatism, James states, conceives of truth “as something essentially bound up with the way in which one moment in our experience may lead us towards other moments which it will be worthwhile to have been led to.”[17] So on the pragmatist’s view, believing a true proposition “means this function of a leading that is worthwhile.”[18] Stated more simply, the pragmatic theory holds that a proposition is true just in case “it is useful in practice.”[19]

Like the coherence view of truth, however, the pragmatic theory faces an obvious problem. For, of course, apparently false beliefs may nonetheless be useful. Believing that everyone is out to get me, for instance, might be useful with respect to my goal of not being blind-sided by false friends.[20] In fact, as Friedrich Nietzsche points out, false beliefs—beliefs that lack verisimilitude—might be not only useful but also essential to one’s well-being.[21] So, then, a proposition’s proving pragmatically valuable does not guarantee that it fits reality.

So, then, the coherence and pragmatic theories of truth suffer from serious problems—problems that render their criteria incapable of guaranteeing verisimilitude for the propositions they designate as true. The correspondence theory, however, enjoys significant intuitive plausibility. That does not mean correspondence theorists face no challenges whatsoever. For while their view does not seem obviously wrong in the way its two main competitors do, the issue of what precisely it means for a proposition to correspond to reality has been a contentious one. More specifically, the claim that correspondence amounts to something like mirroring (so that “proposition p corresponds to reality” means something like “proposition p mirrors reality”)—a claim that some early correspondence theorists seemed to make—has been discredited. Still, other conceptions of correspondence remain tenable. So, for instance, one might hold that proposition p corresponds to reality just in case both (1) p asserts that some state of affairs s obtains, and (2) s in fact obtains.[22] On such an account, the proposition that Bono knows a good rhyme corresponds to reality just in case Bono does in fact know a good rhyme. The challenge of explaining what correspondence means can thus be met and correspondence theorists may remain undeterred.

Now the foregoing discussion assumes that truth exists objectively. But that assumption has been subject to attack. Typical of such attacks is Philip Kenneson’s: “Truth cannot be out there—cannot exist independently of the human mind—because sentences cannot so exist, or be out there. The world and God are out there, but descriptions of the world and God are not. Only descriptions of the world and God can be true or false.”[23] Of course, this argument assumes that sentences, not propositions, are the fundamental bearers of truth. Yet Kenneson does nothing to motivate this assumption. Moreover, even if one were to agree that sentences, rather than propositions, are the fundamental truth-bearers, it would not follow that truth depends on human minds (and thus fails to be objective). For, as Christians have long affirmed, truth—whether understood as ultimately propositional or sentential—depends on the divine mind.

What’s more, on Kenneson’s view, “only descriptions of the world and God can be true” and “the world and God are out there.” To be “out there” is to exist independently of human minds. But if God so exists and knows all true descriptions, then those descriptions—those truths—themselves exist within the divine mind. But in that case, all true descriptions exist independently of human minds. Since all truths thus exist independently of human minds, truth itself is (despite Kenneson’s claims) “out there.” So Kenneson’s own commitments undermine his argument against objective truth. In order to avoid this conclusion, Kenneson must claim either that God depends on human minds for his existence (and, hence, is not “out there”) or that God knows no true descriptions. But one can maintain that God owes his existence to something other than himself only by sacrificing divine aseity; and one can maintain that God lacks knowledge of true descriptions only by sacrificing divine omniscience. Since Christians have been committed to both divine aseity and divine omniscience from the earliest days of the church, Kenneson can avoid undermining his argument against the objectivity of truth only by parting company with historic Christian doctrine.

Now Kenneson claims that humans cannot “take up a ‘view from nowhere.’ ” By “view from nowhere” he means a view that does not suffer from a limited perspective. From this claim he then infers that there is no objective truth.[24] While it may be true that humans cannot achieve a “view from nowhere,” this does not undermine the existence of objective truth. Here again Kenneson’s claim to the contrary depends on unwarranted assumptions. He first assumes that objective truth exists only if humans can access it; he then assumes that humans can access such truth only if they can achieve a “view from nowhere.” But neither of these assumptions enjoys much by way of plausibility. In the end, then, arguments against the objectivity of truth such as Kenneson puts forward fail.

What Does It Mean for the Bible to Be True?[25]

Judges 11:30–31 indicates that in attempting to manipulate the Lord into giving him victory over the Ammonites, Jephthah vowed to offer as a burnt offering whatever first emerged from his house when he returned home after the victory. The text later states that having triumphed over the Ammonites, “he kept the vow” (Judg 11:39). So, according to the Bible, Jephthah kept his vow. Given the correspondence theory, this assertion is true just in case the proposition it expresses—to wit, that Jephthah kept his vow—corresponds to reality. Moreover, the proposition that Jephthah kept his vow corresponds to reality just in case Jephthah did in fact keep his vow.

As it goes for the assertion that Jephthah kept his vow, so it goes with all biblical assertions. To accept the truth of such an assertion is not merely to accept its coherence with some set of propositions. That the Bible speaks truly does not mean simply that it speaks coherently. To be sure, having one divine author, the Bible speaks with one voice; it does not contradict itself.[26] So the Bible’s assertions, taken together, compose a coherent set; so also the set of propositions expressed by those assertions is coherent. But the coherence of that set does not constitute the truth of those propositions.

Moreover, as Paul tells Timothy (see 2 Tim 3:16–17), the Bible is profitable for various purposes. But to accept the truth of its assertions is not merely to accept its usefulness. One can, of course, rely on the Lord who speaks through the Bible to use his word to transform his people (Pss 19:7–11; 119:107–117, 159–176; John 17:17; Eph 4:11–16). Even so, the usefulness of propositions expressed by biblical assertions does not their truthfulness make. For even if (contrary to Nietzsche’s claim) truth is necessarily useful, it does not follow that useful propositions are necessarily true. The truth of propositions expressed by the Bible’s many assertions is no more reducible to instrumental value than to mere coherence.

Of course, the Bible includes forms of discourse other than assertions. It is no mere collection of propositions; its assertions, while numerous, do not exhaust its content. In addition to asserting various propositions, the Bible also commands, exhorts, promises, rebukes and warns. Moreover, as Kevin Vanhoozer tells us, these other things that God does through the biblical text are theologically significant.[27] And, as Stephen T. Davis states, “[W]hat surely seems clear is that those Christians who want to express their attitude toward the Bible by the statement ‘the Bible is true’ must mean a great deal more than simply, ‘Its assertions are all true.’”[28] But of what does that “great deal more” consist? Besides affirming that the Bible’s assertions express propositions that correspond to reality, what else might be involved in affirming the Bible’s truthfulness? Well, as Nicholas Wolterstorff points out, we “regularly predicate the word ‘true’ of things other than assertions.”[29] So, for instance, we speak of carpenter’s squares, friends, and even coffee as being “true.” Obviously, however, the sense in which these things are true differs from the sense in which propositions are true.

Still, there seems to be a core notion of “true” that cuts across these various uses of the term. Wolterstorff suggests that this core notion “is that of something’s measuring up—that is, measuring up in being or excellence.”[30] On this understanding, a proposition’s corresponding to reality amounts to a particular kind of “measuring up”; the excellence of propositions, then, is a matter of how well they “measure up” to reality.[31] Since the Bible’s nonassertive discourse does not correspond to reality,[32] its truth must involve some other kind of “measuring up,” some other kind of excellence. I suggest that the excellence of such discourse amounts to something like fittingness to guide God’s people in righteous living.[33] Or, to put the point differently, the nonassertive discourse “measures up” with respect to trustworthiness; in short, its excellence consists of meriting our trust and submission. “If we take the Bible to be true,” Davis writes, “we trust it to guide our lives. We allow our lives to be influenced by it; we intend to listen where it speaks; we consider it normative; we look to it for comfort, encouragement, challenge, warning, guidance, and instruction. In short, we submit to the Bible, and we place ourselves under its theological authority.”[34] And we are right to do so.

The Rationale for Inerrancy

The doctrine of inerrancy states that the Bible is wholly truthful.[35] More precisely, the doctrine may be defined as follows:

“Scripture is inerrant” =df. “for any proposition p, if the Bible asserts that p, then p.”

Here several points deserve mention. First, inerrantists claim that the original biblical manuscripts—often referred to as the autographa—are wholly truthful, but they do not typically extend that claim to copies of those manuscripts (except insofar as those copies accurately reflect the originals).[36] Second, in affirming that the Bible does not err, inerrantists have a specific type of error in mind, namely, factual errors. In other words, they deny that the Bible makes any false assertions. However, they do not claim that the autographa contain no peculiarities of grammar or spelling.[37] Third, affirming inerrancy does not necessitate affirming particular interpretations of specific biblical passages. As this suggests, the questions of inerrancy and interpretation are separate ones. The first concerns whether or not the Bible makes only true assertions; the second concerns what assertions the Bible in fact makes. While affirming inerrancy commits one to a particular answer to the first question (namely, that all the Bible’s assertions are true), it does not commit one to a particular answer to the second one.[38] So, then, two inerrantists may legitimately disagree about the proper interpretation of, say, Genesis 1, without either forfeiting her claim to be an inerrantist.

That the Bible speaks truthfully is certainly not a notion alien to the Bible itself. In fact, the doctrine of inerrancy arises primarily from the Bible’s teaching about itself. As Norman L. Geisler and Lanny Wilson suggest, the basic “argument for biblical inerrancy is simple: (1) The Bible is the Word of God; (2) God cannot err; (3) therefore, the Bible (which is the Word of God) cannot err.”[39] If we articulate this argument not in terms of error in general but specifically in terms of factual error, we arrive at something like this:

1. (1') The Bible is God’s Word.

2. (2') God cannot speak falsely.

3. (3') Therefore, the Bible cannot speak falsely.

Putting the point of (2') positively rather than negatively, we have the following.

1. (1') The Bible is God’s Word.

2. (2") God is wholly truthful.

3. (3") Therefore, the Bible is wholly truthful.

Let us call this last version of the argument, which represents what I take to be the standard argument for inerrancy, SAFI.

When evaluating a deductive argument, such as SAFI, two questions must be addressed. First, are the premises of the argument true? If not, the argument fails; but if so, the second question must be addressed: Do the premises of the argument guarantee its conclusion so that, if they are true, the conclusion must also be true? Now if the argument has no false premise and its premises guarantee its conclusion in the way just mentioned, then the argument succeeds; and, of course, the conclusion of a successful deductive argument is true.

So what about SAFI’s premises? As for (1'), it simply affirms the traditional Christian understanding of biblical inspiration.[40] That understanding arises from the Bible’s own teaching. Perhaps the most important biblical passage on this point is 2 Timothy 3:16; according to this text, “All Scripture is inspired by God and is profitable for teaching, for rebuking, for correcting, for training in righteousness. . . .” Notice that, according to this text, the primary object of inspiration is the Bible itself, not its human authors. In other words, while we may speak of the human authors as inspired, they are inspired only secondarily. Moreover, lest anyone think that the mode of inspiration left room for those human authors to corrupt the Bible’s message, Peter writes, “First of all, you should know this: No prophecy of Scripture comes from one’s own interpretation, because no prophecy ever came by the will of man; instead, men spoke from God as they were moved by the Holy Spirit” (2 Pet 1:20–21).[41]

As for (2"), the Bible repeatedly affirms God’s truthfulness. So, for instance, just prior to his passion, Jesus petitions the Father on behalf of his disciples, saying, “Sanctify them by the truth; Your word is truth” (John 17:17). The psalmist declares, “The entirety of Your word is truth, and all Your righteous judgments endure forever” (Ps 119:160). A few verses later, we find, “I hate and abhor falsehood, but I love Your instruction” (Ps 119:163), the implication being that the Lord’s instruction contains no falsehood. Responding to Balak on the Lord’s behalf, Balaam says, “God is not a man who lies, or a son of man who changes His mind” (Num 23:19). Writing to Timothy, Paul states, “If we are faithless, [Christ Jesus] remains faithful, for He cannot deny Himself” (2 Tim 2:13). Elsewhere, Paul indicates that God “cannot lie” (Titus 1:2). John states that “God is light, and there is absolutely no darkness in Him” (1 John 1:5). So, like (1'), (2") enjoys strong biblical support.

Now an argument for biblical inerrancy with premises drawn from the Bible is unlikely to convince unbelievers to accept its conclusion.[42] Even so, believers—those seeking to follow after Christ Jesus—ought to take such an argument quite seriously. After all, if Christ himself accepts God’s Word as wholly truthful, so also should his disciples accept it as such. Moreover, I doubt that unbelievers come to Christ by way of inerrancy; rather, I suspect things go the other way, that people come to inerrancy by way of Christ. So while attempts to convince unbelievers to accept the Bible as wholly truthful are unlikely to succeed, this should not dissuade us from considering SAFI carefully.

Since Christians have good reason to accept SAFI’s premises, the argument’s success depends on whether its premises guarantee its conclusion, on whether the truth of all its premises together entails the truth of its conclusion. Certainly, that God is wholly truthful provides a powerful reason for affirming that

1. (2*) God’s Word is wholly truthful.

Now if we replace (2") with (2*), we have the following.

1. (1') The Bible is God’s Word.

2. (2*) God’s Word is wholly truthful.

3. (3") Therefore, the Bible is wholly truthful.

Let this revised version of SAFI be SAFI*. SAFI* clearly makes a truth-preserving inference, so that, given the truth of (1') and (2*), (3") cannot fail to be true. Therefore, if (2") entails (2*), then SAFI also makes a truth-preserving inference and thus succeeds in establishing its conclusion (assuming that both its premises are true).

Now it seems inconceivable that one could be wholly truthful but one’s word be in some way untruthful. On the face of it, then, (2*) certainly seems to follow from (2"). Here, however, opponents of inerrancy typically object; they do so not by mustering a straightforward argument against one of SAFI’s premises but rather by showing that an argument parallel to SAFI fails. Such a strategy seeks to show that since the parallel argument fails to establish its conclusion despite having the same form as SAFI, SAFI must also fail to establish its conclusion.[43]

The parallel argument goes something like the following.

1. (A) The universe is God’s creation.

2. (B) God is wholly good.

3. (C) Therefore, the universe is wholly good.

Let us call this parallel argument, which seeks to mimic SAFI, MIME. MIME has true premises, but its conclusion is nonetheless false. Thus, those premises do not guarantee that conclusion. MIME therefore fails. But since SAFI has the same form as MIME, SAFI must likewise fail. Or, at least, so say SAFI’s critics.

Now the problem with MIME is not hard to see. For consider (A). As it stands, (A) is ambiguous. It can be construed as

1. (A*) The universe as it first existed is God’s creation.

But it can also be construed as

1. (A^) The universe as it now exists is God’s creation.

If for clarity’s sake, we replace (A) with (A*), we will need also to replace (C) with

1. (C*) Therefore, the universe as it first existed is wholly good.

We then have the following.

1. (A*) The universe as it first existed is God’s creation.

2. (B) God is wholly good.

3. (C*) Therefore, the universe as it first existed is wholly good.

Let this revised version of MIME be MIME*. Unlike MIME, MIME* seems to make a truth-preserving inference. For, unlike (C), (C*) is true.[44] Thus, if we construe (A) as (A*) and revise (C) accordingly, the argument we then have—namely, MIME*—succeeds.

However, if we construe (A) as (A^), we will need to replace (C) with

1. (C^) The universe as it now exists is God’s creation.

We then have the following.

1. (A^) The universe as it now exists is God’s creation.

2. (B) God is wholly good.

3. (C^) Therefore, the universe as it now exists is wholly good.

Let this revised version of MIME be MIME^. Unlike (C*), (C^) is false. But so also is (A^). For while God created the universe as it first existed, he has allowed his creatures to shape that world. The world that now exists is thus the product not just of divine activity but also of creaturely activity.[45] So the problem with MIME^ lies not with the inference it makes from (A^) and (B) to (C^); rather, the problem with MIME^ is that it has a false premise.

Therefore, if one construes MIME’s first premise in one way (and modifies its conclusion accordingly), the resulting argument succeeds. If, however, one construes MIME’s first premise in another way (and modifies its conclusion accordingly), the resulting argument has a false premise. In neither case does it follow that the argument’s inference fails to be truth-preserving. Consequently, inerrantists have nothing to fear from MIME or its offspring.

Even so, MIME’s failure as an objection to SAFI is instructive. The argument hinges on how one construes its references to the universe. Whether it uses “universe” to mean “the universe as it now exists” or “the universe as it first existed” makes all the difference in whether the argument’s inference is truth-preserving. This explains why inerrantists restrict their claim of inerrancy to the original biblical manuscripts, the autographa. In short, they treat

1. (1') The Bible is God’s Word

implicitly as

1. (1*) The Bible as it was originally written is God’s Word.

When all the discursive dust settles, then, the standard argument for inerrancy goes as follows.

1. (1*) The Bible as it was originally written is God’s Word.

2. (2*) God’s Word is wholly truthful.

3. (3*) Therefore, the Bible as it was originally written is wholly truthful.

This argument, which we may call SAFI**, succeeds. Moreover, as long as we have good reason to believe the biblical text as we know it accurately reflects the autographa, we have good reason to believe the Bible we have is inerrant. We do indeed have good reason so to believe, but that issue must await discussion in other chapters.

The Rationality of Inerrancy

In conclusion, I want to make two brief remarks about the rationality of the doctrine of inerrancy.[46] First, while truth is objective, rationality is not. What strikes one as rational depends on one’s background beliefs. This explains why two reasonable people can look at precisely the same evidence and come to quite different conclusions about it.[47] For this reason, it seems unlikely that by their own lights, unbelievers will see the doctrine of inerrancy as rational. Perhaps they will grant that by believers’ lights, the view has warrant. But seeing the doctrine as warranted given the assumptions of the faith does not mean seeing it as warranted given one’s own assumptions. For their part, unbelievers will judge the doctrine in accordance with the assumptions that undergird their overall views of the world. And the fact that by his Spirit, God has authored the Bible in its entirety will not typically sit well with the assumptions of unbelief. This sad state of affairs arises not from any deficiency in the Christian faith generally or the doctrine of inerrancy specifically. Rather, it arises as an unfortunate consequence of the nature of argumentation and rationality. So, however unfortunate it might be that unbelievers may remain unmoved by arguments for the Bible’s truthfulness, believers should remain resolute in their own commitments.

Second, to the extent to which SAFI** succeeds, one has warrant for believing the Bible to be wholly truthful. Now, as discussed above, that argument’s premises guarantee its conclusion so that if they are true, so also the conclusion must be true. So, then, to the extent to which one has good reason to believe (1*) and (2*), one has good reason to believe (3*) and thus affirm the doctrine of inerrancy. Moreover, Christians have overwhelmingly good reason to believe both these premises. For, of course, the perfection of God—which ensures (2*)—and the inspiration of the Bible—which ensures (1*)—are axioms of the Christian faith. To be sure, the church recognizes them as axioms that find expression within the sacred text itself. Even so, they constitute not conclusions toward which Christians must argue but rather foundations on which Christians build. In short, they comprise the starting points for faith seeking understanding. Not surprisingly, then, faith comes to understand, among other things, that the Bible is wholly truthful.

1 This section concerns what it means for a proposition to be true; it does not concern itself with how one knows a proposition to be true. As important as that latter issue may be, one should not confuse it with the former. Moreover, even if the question of knowledge were unanswerable (and truth were thus inaccessible), it would not follow (despite postmodern protestations) that there is no truth. Still, the question of knowledge can be answered. (In my judgment, Alvin Plantinga has answered it quite successfully. For Plantinga’s account of knowledge, see his Warrant and Proper Function [New York: Oxford University Press, 1993] and Warranted Christian Belief [New York: Oxford University Press, 2000].) Those claiming otherwise tend to believe (à la René Descartes) that knowledge requires certainty; they then infer the inaccessibility of truth from the elusiveness of certainty.

2 Hence, the “thing that is either true or false is not a sentence, statement, or other piece of language, but a proposition” (J. P. Moreland, “Truth, Contemporary Philosophy, and the Postmodern Turn,” in Whatever Happened to Truth? ed. Andreas Köstenberger [Wheaton, Illinois: Crossway, 2005], 76).

3 Ibid., 77.

4 If someone correctly believes that Bono knows a good rhyme, then we may also rightly speak of that person’s belief as being true in a derivative sense. In general, then, “one’s belief in p” is true (in a derivative sense) just in case p itself is true.

5 Notice that sentences are linguistic expressions; they thus exist only in linguistic contexts. Without language, there would be no sentences; there would, however, still be truth.

6 A particular utterance of a sentence can be referred to as a token of that sentence-type. So the claim made above amounts to this: Various tokens of a particular sentence-type may express different propositions. Since taking account of it would unnecessarily complicate our discussion, I shall ignore the token/type distinction in the remainder of this chapter.

7 Alexis G. Burgess and John P. Burgess, Truth (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011), 2–4.

8 Aristotle, Metaphysics, 1011b25. The reference is to W. D. Ross, trans., Metaphysics in The Complete Works of Aristotle, vol. 2, ed. Jonathan Barnes (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984), 1597. While this passage serves as the locus classicus for the view of truth here in view, this view does not originate with Aristotle. Cf. Plato, Sophist, 263b.

9 The Oxford Guide to Philosophy, ed. Ted Honderich (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), s.v. “correspondence theory of truth.”

10 Moreland, “Truth, Contemporary Philosophy, and the Postmodern Turn,” 78.

11 Cf. Burgess and Burgess, Truth, 3.

12 Cf. The Oxford Guide to Philosophy, s.v. “coherence theory of truth.” See also Burgess and Burgess, Truth, 3.

13 Such skepticism, suggested by David Hume and championed by Friedrich Nietzsche, turned out to be the inevitable consequence of what has come to be known as “the Cartesian project.” That project, arising from the work of René Descartes, attempted to bridge the apparent gap between reality and one’s perception of reality. In short, Descartes’s work aimed at explaining how one can know that the world is the way one perceives it to be. Descartes believed that he had successfully accomplished this goal. Unfortunately, for reasons into which we cannot go here, he was mistaken. But while he failed to provide an indubitable ground for knowledge about the world of sense experience, Descartes nonetheless set the agenda for modern philosophy. Sadly, however, the trajectory that his work set for such philosophy led to Hume’s skepticism in the eighteenth century and to Nietzsche’s nihilism in the nineteenth. The latter’s nihilism, moreover, set the stage for the rise of postmodernism in the twentieth century.

14 The law of noncontradiction states that a proposition cannot be both true and false at the same time and in the same sense.

15 Burgess and Burgess, Truth, 3.

16 William James, “Pragmatism’s Conception of Truth” in Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking, and the Meaning of Truth (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978), 97. James does not intend the reference to cash to be taken literally.

17 Ibid., 98.

18 Ibid.

19 Burgess and Burgess, Truth, 3.

20 Notice that what one finds useful depends on one’s goals; and what might be useful with respect to one goal (e.g., not being blind-sided by false friends) might impede the achievement of another (e.g., developing authentic relationships).

21 Cf. Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, § 517.

22 J. P. Moreland makes a similar point in “Truth, Contemporary Philosophy and the Postmodern Turn,” 77.

23 Philip D. Kenneson, “There’s No Such Thing as Objective Truth, and It’s a Good Thing, Too” in Christian Apologetics in the Postmodern World, ed. Timothy R. Phillips and Dennis L. Okholm (Downers Grove, IL: Intervarsity, 1995), 159.

24 Kenneson, “There’s No Such Thing as Objective Truth,” 156.

25 This section concerns what it means for assertions and other forms of biblical discourse to be true; the next section then argues that believing the Bible to assert some proposition warrants believing the proposition itself. In other words, believing the Bible states that p warrants believing that p. This chapter shall not, however, concern itself with how one knows what the Bible in fact asserts.

26 For a defense of the Bible against charges of contradiction, see the article in this volume by Douglas Huffman, “Are There Contradictions in the Bible?” (p. 267).

27 Kevin Vanhoozer, “Lost in Interpretation? Truth, Scripture, and Hermeneutics,” in Köstenberger, Whatever Happened to Truth? 127–28.

28 Stephen T. Davis, “What Do We Mean When We Say, ‘The Bible Is True’?” in But Is It All True? The Bible and the Question of Truth, ed. Alan G. Padgett and Patrick R. Keifert (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2006), 88.

29 Nicholas Wolterstorff, “True Words,” in Padgett and Keifert, But Is It All True? 39.

30 Ibid., 42.

31 Hence, “a true assertion is one whose propositional content fits, or corresponds, to the facts” (ibid, 43).

32 In what way could a command or an exhortation or a warning correspond to reality?

33 The following seems to suggest a similar understanding of the Bible’s nonassertive discourse: “Truth in the context of theological interpretation must never be merely theoretical (a mere correspondence relation) but practical, transformative, and relational (a covenantal relation). We enter into the covenantal relation of truth when our words, thoughts, and deeds conform to the image of the one who is the truth incarnate” (Vanhoozer, “Lost in Interpretation?” 124).

34 Davis, “What Do We Mean,” 90.

35 So, for instance, the Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy affirms “that Scripture in its entirety is inerrant, being free from all falsehood, fraud, or deceit” (Art. XII, emphasis added). The Statement can be found in Inerrancy, ed. Norman L. Geisler (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1980), 493–502. Geisler and Lanny Wilson write, “When one speaks of inerrancy, he is claiming that the Bible is factually and actually correct (true) in what it affirms. The Bible makes no mistakes and affirms no false statements. What the Bible says is true is true; and what the Bible says is false is false” (N. L. Geisler and L. Wilson, “Bible, Inerrancy of” in The Popular Encyclopedia of Apologetics, ed. Ed Hindson and Ergun Caner [Eugene, OR: Harvest House, 2008], 103). Millard Erickson puts it more succinctly, stating, “The inerrancy of Scripture is the doctrine that the Bible is fully truthful in all of its teachings” (M. J. Erickson, Christian Theology, 2nd ed. [Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 1998], 247).

36 Cf. The Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy, Art. X.

37 For, of course, a good writer sometimes transgresses the conventions of grammar and spelling in order to make a point. Cf. The Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy, Art. XIII.

38 Inerrantists typically hold that the doctrine does have certain hermeneutical implications, implications with respect to interpretive method. Cf. The Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy, Art. XVIII.

39 Geisler and Wilson, “Bible, Inerrancy of,” 103.

40 Hence, as Erickson states, “Inerrancy is a corollary to the full inspiration of the Bible,” Christian Theology, 246.

41 The Bible makes clear the fact of its inspiration; it does not, however, explain how that inspiration took place. Even so, Athenagoras of Athens, writing about AD 175, puts forward an interesting metaphor for inspiration; he speaks of the Holy Spirit “making use” of the Bible’s human authors “as a flautist might play upon his flute” (see Athenagoras of Athens, Embassy for the Christians, in Embassy for the Christians, the Resurrection of the Dead, trans. Joseph Hugh Crehan, Ancient Christian Writers, ed. Johannes Quasten and Joseph C. Plumpe, no. 23 [New York: Newman Press], sec. 9, p. 39).

42 But for an apologetic argument for the divine inspiration of the Bible (and, by extension, inerrancy), see the article in this volume, “Is the Bible the Word of God?” by Steven B. Cowan (p. 429).

43 Gaunilo uses the same strategy in responding to Anselm’s ontological argument (cf. Gaunilo, Reply on Behalf of the Fool in Anselm, Proslogion: With the Replies of Gaunilo and Anselm, trans. Thomas Williams [Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 2001], 27–34).

44 Cf. Genesis 1:31.

45 This point plays an important role in almost all Christian responses to the so-called problem of evil.

46 Elsewhere I discuss the rationality of believing the Bible to be wholly truthful at more length than is possible here. For that more detailed discussion, see my “The Authority of Scripture” in Reason for the Hope Within, ed. Michael J. Murray (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1999), 399–422; reprinted with revisions as “For the Bible Tells Me So: The Rationality of Inerrancy,” Areopagus Journal 2, no. 1 (2002): 21–28.

47 Here one need only consider the contemporary debate over, say, the fossil record or abortion to see people coming to radically different conclusions despite looking at exactly the same evidence. In short, evidence on its own never leads to a particular conclusion. When evidence goes to a conclusion, it does so in company with assumptions; and as often as not, it is following, not leading.

Chapter Three

Higher Criticism: What Has It Shown?

Charles L. Quarles

One of the most important methods applied in the field of biblical studies is “higher criticism.” This essay will briefly introduce the method and explain its historical development. It will explore whether or not the method should be utilized by Christian scholars. It will discuss some of the dangers of recent applications of the method and question whether these dangers are endemic to the method itself.

What Is Higher Criticism?

Higher criticism (hereafter, HC) is a synonym for historical criticism. HC stresses the human rather than the divine authorship of the Bible (though it does not necessarily deny divine inspiration) and seeks to discover the message that the original human author intended to communicate through the text to his original readers. Because of the human element in the origin of the Bible, practitioners of the historical critical method believe that it is appropriate to interpret the Bible like any other ancient document. The interpreter must seek to understand the language of the text and its historical background in order to discover its original meaning.[1]

HC is typically differentiated from “lower criticism,” which may be identified with “textual criticism,” the quest to restore the readings of the original texts of the biblical documents. Although “lower criticism” seeks to discover what the original text of the Bible was, “higher criticism” seeks to understand what the text of the Bible originally meant. Lower criticism is a preliminary step in HC.

One should not misunderstand the meaning of the term “criticism” when used to describe approaches to biblical interpretation. The term “criticism” in these contexts merely refers to a rational approach to uncovering the meaning of the text. It refers to “the scientific investigation of literary documents in regard to such matters as origin, text, composition, character, or history.”[2] Although some practitioners of critical methods may offer very negative critiques of the Bible, such criticism is not intrinsic to critical approaches. Those who practice the historical critical method do not necessarily “criticize” the Bible in a pejorative sense.

The first step in the critical study of the Bible is to establish the text of the biblical document. Until the invention of the printing press, copies of the Bible were produced by hand by scribes of varied skill levels. As these manuscripts (hand-copied documents) were produced, changes were introduced into the biblical text, sometimes accidentally and sometimes intentionally. Thus when one compares ancient copies of the Bible, he finds differences between these ancient manuscripts. Textual criticism evaluates these variant readings and seeks to determine which reading represents that of the original text. Serious biblical interpretation simply cannot proceed until one first determines the most likely reading of the original text.[3]

The application of HC continues by the interpreter seeking to answer a number of introductory questions. These questions focus on issues such as the authenticity, unity, date, provenance, genre, form, structure, occasion, purpose, and background of the document. The issue of authenticity relates to the question of whether the ascribed author of the document is the actual author. While studying issues of authenticity, the interpreter may pose such questions as “Did Paul actually write the letter to the Ephesians?” or “Did Moses write the five books ascribed to him?”[4]

The issue of unity or integrity relates to the question of whether or not the document has come down to us in its original form—i.e., whether changes have been made. For example, although most scholars recognize that Paul wrote 2 Corinthians, some believe that the current form of the letter patches together two or more separate pieces of correspondence. The conclusions one reaches regarding unity may affect conclusions regarding the occasion and interpretation of particular sections.

The issues of date and provenance relate to the questions of when the document was written and where. Issues of genre and form are very significant since poetry and proverbs are obviously to be interpreted in a manner quite different from biblical laws and historical narrative is to be interpreted quite differently from a parable. The issue of structure relates to the logical development of the author’s thought and how various sections of the document are related to what precedes and follows.

The quest to understand the occasion and purpose of the document prompts the questions, “What circumstances in the lives of God’s people did a particular biblical author seek to address?” and “What did the author seek to accomplish by writing this document?” The background of the document relates to various historical, cultural, or religious factors that exerted influence on the author during the composition of the document. For example, tracing the development of the interpretation of Daniel 7 in ancient Judaism may shed enormous light on Jesus’ use of the title “Son of Man” to describe himself in the four Gospels.

Although these introductory questions are preliminary, it can be difficult to arrive at clear answers to them. Answers to these questions should be deemed only tentative until one has carefully worked through the document and examined every detail. Sometimes bits of information that surface in the process of careful exegesis require revision of commonly-held views regarding introductory issues. Thus, answers to introductory questions guide exegesis, but ultimately they should be by-products of good exegesis as well.

These preliminary steps must be followed by philological study. Such study seeks to determine the meaning of the text by studying vocabulary, morphology, and syntax. An understanding of the original language in which the document was written is an essential key to unlocking the meaning of the text. Ultimately, the goal of historical criticism is to understand the sense that the text had for its author and first audience. In the past, this sense was identified with the Latin phrase sensus literalis sive historicus.

Some readers, no doubt, will object to the discussion of higher criticism because they have heard the term used with very negative connotations by conservative scholars. However, this is the standard way of defining the discipline. A scholar of another generation wrote:

The Higher Criticism, on the contrary, was employed to designate the study of the historic origins, the dates, and authorship of the various books of the Bible, and that great branch of study which in the technical language of modern theology is known as Introduction. It is a very valuable branch of Biblical science, and is of the highest importance as an auxiliary in the interpretation of the Word of God. By its researches floods of light may be thrown on the Scriptures. . . . Now this in itself is most laudable. It is indispensable. It is just such work as every minister or Sunday School teacher does when he takes up his Peloubet’s Notes, or his Stalker’s St. Paul, or Geilie’s Hours with the Bible, to find out all he can with regard to the portion of the Bible he is studying; the author, the date, the circumstances, and purpose of writing.

Those who are accustomed to using the term “Higher Criticism” to refer to skeptical approaches to biblical study will likely be surprised to discover that the preceding definition is from the pen of Dyson Hague in his essay “The History of the Higher Criticism” in R. A. Torrey’s The Fundamentals, a series of essays that deeply influenced the fundamentalist movement in the twentieth century.[5]

In current practice, the procedure described above is supplemented with several other critical approaches such as literary criticism, source criticism, form criticism, redaction criticism, and tradition criticism.

Literary criticism, in its most basic sense, is the “study and evaluation of literature as an artistic production.”[6] Literary criticism investigates the ways in which literary devices such as figures of speech, catchwords, framing, or plot guide the reader in properly understanding the text. Such study was the focus of literary critics in antiquity.[7]

Source criticism seeks to identify and isolate the sources used by the author of the ancient document.[8] The critic attempts to identify these sources by noting differences in theology, shifts in language or style, or breaks in the flow of a narrative. Based on such analysis, most New Testament scholars today are convinced that Mark was the first Gospel and that Matthew and Luke used Mark along with another source (commonly identified as Q) in their Gospels. Source criticism is a necessary preliminary step in redaction criticism (discussed below). Although some conservatives today object to source criticism, its practice can be consistent with a high view of Scripture. Even the fathers of modern Fundamentalism affirmed the legitimacy of the approach: “all schools of criticism and all doctrines of inspiration are equally hospitable to the supposition that the biblical writers may have consulted documents, and may have quoted them.”[9]

Form criticism attempts to identify and classify the form of units of material that circulated orally before the biblical documents were written. It seeks to identify the sociological setting of the community that produced or preserved the material. It explores ways in which that sociological setting may have prompted the community to modify the tradition.[10]

Redaction criticism examines the ways in which the final author modified the material from his sources. It seeks to identify the personal contributions of the author to the work and to specify the theological interests revealed by his editorial activity.[11]

Tradition criticism, perhaps the most subjective of the approaches summarized here, is the study of the development of traditions, particularly those about Jesus, up until they were firmly established in their final written form. Tradition criticism seeks to determine which (1) traditions can be traced to the historical Jesus; (2) at what point in the period of oral tradition (which lasted three to six decades), other traditions arose; and (3) the historical circumstances in the Christian community that prompted creation of the tradition.

Tradition criticism overlaps to a certain extent with form criticism and redaction criticism. When form criticism proceeds from a classification of forms to historical analysis of the tradition, it has moved into the realm of tradition criticism. When redaction criticism examines how various Gospel writers adapted oral sources or how communities shaped oral traditions, it too engages in the exercise now known as tradition criticism.

How Did Higher Criticism Develop?

Most scholars today trace the origins of higher criticism to the Renaissance and Reformation or to the skepticism of English Deists.[12] However, Fitzmyer is probably correct that the true origin was much earlier. He argued that historical critical method developed from the approach to literature taken by Classical philologists like Zenodotus of Ephesus.[13] Zenodotus was one of the best representatives of the Scholiasts. These scholars collated ancient manuscripts to discover the oldest readings, compiled glossaries that defined difficult words which had fallen into disuse or whose meaning had changed, and wrote explanatory comments in the margins of the Greek epic and lyric poetical works in the library of Alexandria in the last few centuries BC.

The Scholiasts’ efforts to restore the original text and interpret the original sense of ancient works likely influenced the exegetical work of some of the early church fathers. Origen invested enormous energy in the critical study of the Hebrew and Greek texts of the OT. His efforts produced the Hexapla, a work so massive that it was likely never copied.[14] Origen also investigated introductory issues. For example, he raised questions about Paul’s authorship of Hebrews based on his analysis of the style of the book.[15]

Leaders in the Antiochan school of biblical interpretation like Theodore of Mopseustia and John Chrysostom practiced and encouraged a scientific approach to exegesis that pursued understanding of the literal sense of the text and gave attention to historical backgrounds. Later Augustine, Jerome, and others used critical methods in writing homilies and commentaries. As the early church debated the limits of the canon, church leaders used critical tools to examine the claims of authorship for particular books to ensure their apostolic origin. All of these endeavors were forerunners of the modern historical critical method.

Admittedly, the commitment of the Antiochan school to seek the literal sense of Scripture was largely abandoned in favor of the view that Scripture had four senses. For centuries, the allegorical method of biblical interpretation reigned. In the late medieval period, some scholars like Thomas Aquinas urged biblical interpreters to seek to understand and explain the literal sense of Scripture and equated the literal sense with the meaning intended by the author.[16] Scholars such as Robert Grant have suggested that “the beginning of the modern scientific study of the Scriptures” is to be traced to this period.[17]

During the Renaissance, some scholars began to stress getting back to the sources (recursus ad fontes). This sparked renewed interest in studying the Bible in the original languages and recovering the original sense of the biblical text. Influenced by John Colet, Desiderius Erasmus stressed the priority of the literal sense of Scripture, though he never completely abandoned the search for the spiritual sense that was modeled by his hero, Origen. Erasmus’s later work was a precursor to historico-grammatical exegesis.[18]

The Protestant Reformers, Luther, Calvin, and Zwingli, emphasized the authority of Scripture over church tradition (sola Scriptura) and generally modeled an approach to biblical interpretation that largely abandoned allegorical methods and focused on the literal sense of the original texts with special attention given to the examination of the literary and historical context. Calvin in particular excelled as an exegete of the Scriptures and wrote commentaries on every New Testament book except 2 and 3 John and Revelation.[19] In 1567, Matthias Flacius Illyricus wrote Clavis Scripturae Sacrae, regarded by many as the first formal hermeneutics text. Flacius urged interpreters to seek to discover the sense that the text communicated to the original readers.[20]

New developments occurred in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that would reshape historical criticism into an approach guided by skepticism and which would prove to be disastrous for the church. In his 1637 book Discours de la Méthode, Rene Descartes argued that philosophers, scientists, and historians should lay aside all presuppositions and doubt everything except what is self-evident. He argued that human reason was the sole test of truth. Soon this methodological doubt began to be applied to biblical studies. Cartesian principles prompted biblical scholars to assume that objective evaluation and interpretation of the Scriptures required the interpreter to lay aside his faith and approach the Bible as a complete skeptic. Ultimately, biblical affirmations were rejected unless they could be established by pure human reason. When human reason was guided by strictly antisupernaturalist presuppositions, the results were catastrophic.

The primary impetus toward antisupernaturalism came with the publication of Baruch Spinoza’s Tractatus Theologico-Politicus in 1670. Spinoza devoted the seventh chapter of his book to the topic of the interpretation of Scripture. He argued for the scientific interpretation of the Bible, i.e., the same principles that guided the scientist in his investigation of nature should guide the biblical interpreter in his quest to understand the Scriptures. Spinoza argued that the correct understanding of Scripture did not require some special illumination from the Spirit. Rather, correct interpretation resulted from examining the text in “the natural light of reason.” He argued that “by a process of logical deduction that which is hidden is inferred and concluded from what is known.”[21] Spinoza summarized the necessary steps for such scientific study:

1. Scholars must seek to understand the original languages of the Scripture.

2. Scholars must classify the affirmations of the various biblical books according to subject. This would enable the interpreter to identify agreements and contradictions between the various books.

3. The interpreter should proceed by seeking to understand the background of each biblical book including the identity, life and character of the author, the date, place, and purpose of composition, its literary character, and the history of the book’s reception. The understanding of the author would aid in the interpretation of the book. The understanding of the occasion of the document would aid the interpreter in distinguishing between what was of temporal and eternal significance.

4. The interpreter should identify the “universal truths” of the Scripture that are taught everywhere in the Bible and recognize these as the doctrines of the Holy Spirit. Spinoza suggested that such universal truths included the existence of one omnipotent God, who alone is worthy of worship, who loves all people but especially those who worship him and who love their neighbors.[22]

In the chapters that followed, Spinoza used rational arguments to dispute traditional views like the Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch (though he admitted that the book of Moses was one of the sources utilized by the author) and Joshua’s authorship of the book that bears his name.[23] He argued that the chronologies set forth in the OT narratives were untenable, that the histories in Chronicles and Kings were contradictory, that other OT books were completed much later than was normally thought, and that the OT text was poorly preserved. He argued that since the writings of the apostles were penned merely under the influence of human reason, their statements were subject to the evaluation of human reason as well. He also argued that the apostles contradicted one another as when, for example, Paul insisted that justification was by faith but James taught that justification was by works.

In chapter 4 of his book, Spinoza argued that miracles, at least in the sense of suspensions of natural law, do not occur. Alleged miracles were either to be understood as mere metaphors or assigned to natural causes, perhaps not yet understood. Spinoza appealed to biblical statements about the immutability of God and the eternality of God’s decrees (Ps 148:6) to argue that natural law cannot be suspended.

Spinoza’s work paved the way for biblical interpretation during the Enlightenment. During the eighteenth century, English Deists made reason the final arbiter in decisions about the truthfulness of Scripture. Like Spinoza, the Deists dismissed supernatural elements of the Scripture, denying divine revelation and the very possibility of miracles. William Baird aptly described the new approach to biblical scholarship sparked by the Enlightenment:

It encompasses the era of the modern world—the era in which the scientific method of inquiry has been applied to all fields of learning. Intoxicated by the new intellectual spirit, biblical scholars took up the same tools that linguists and historians were using in the study of other ancient documents. This was a time of the secularizing of Scripture, a time when no ground was recognized as holy and when biblical critics, approaching the New Testament, did not stop to take off their shoes.[24]

The lingering influence of Spinoza is evident in the work of David Hume who dismissed the possibility of miracles in his Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748), in the work of “the father of liberal theology,” Friedrich Schleiermacher, and ultimately in that of New Testament scholar Rudolph Bultmann. Bultmann and his peers led a movement in twentieth century biblical scholarship that rejected the supernatural element of Scripture. He famously declared that “man’s knowledge and mastery of the world have advanced to such an extent through science and technology that it is no longer possible for anyone seriously to hold the New Testament view of the world.”[25] Bultmann sought to “demythologize” Scripture by stripping supernatural elements from it in a manner similar to the practice of some English Deists. Unfortunately, when he finished his demythologization, precious little remained. Bultmann ultimately concluded, “I do indeed think that we can now know almost nothing concerning the life and personality of Jesus.”[26]

The sordid late history of historical criticism demonstrates that it can be destructive, but the early history of the approach shows that this is not necessarily so. As seen in the early history of the church and in the Protestant Reformation, many practiced what is rightfully deemed “historical criticism” for the benefit of the church and the glory of Christ. Their application of the method resulted in deeper reverence for the authority of Scripture. The devastation to the Western church wrought by historical criticism since the Enlightenment is not intrinsic to the method. Instead, philosophical presuppositions perverted the application of the methodology and prevented many scholars from properly following the evidence.

Should Higher Criticism Be Applied to the Bible?

Ultimately, one’s evaluation of the legitimacy of higher criticism is grounded in one’s personal view of the nature of the process(es) and occasion of the divine inspiration of the Scriptures. If one accepts a mechanical dictation theory of inspiration, then the human authors of Scripture did not necessarily understand what they were writing and divine intent may be legitimately distinguished for the human authorial intent. Consequently, one need not pursue an understanding of the meaning that the human author intended to communicate to his original audience. Instead, he can seek to understand what a passage means in its final form and position in the canon of Scripture and treat all of the Bible simply as a single book by a single divine author.

Although some portions of Scripture state that they were dictated by God (e.g., Isa 38:4–6; Rev 2:1), this is not the exclusive means by which God gave his word to his people. Hebrews 1:1 (RSV) insists that God spoke through the prophets “in many and various ways” and this implies that means other than direct dictation were also used.

Most evangelical biblical scholars today recognize that the most common mode of inspiration was a special form of divine providence in which God utilized many different circumstances to shape the mind and thought of the human authors of Scripture so that they wrote exactly what they intended to communicate to their audience and this was exactly what God intended to communicate as well.

Despite the variety of means and processes used in inspiration, Hebrews 1:1 insists that the original historical context of the writings remains important since God “spoke of old to our fathers through the prophets” (RSV). The Old Testament Scriptures were directly addressed to a particular human audience in the past. The historical nature of this communication requires historical study of the Scripture. The message of the Bible to people today must be derived from the meaning intended for the original audience. Wayne Grudem wrote:

In cases where the ordinary human personality and writing style of the author were prominently involved, as seems the case with the major part of Scripture, all that we are able to say is that God’s providential oversight and direction of the life of each author was such that their personalities, their backgrounds and training, their abilities to evaluate events in the world around them, their access to historical data, their judgment with regard to the accuracy of information, and their individual circumstances when they wrote, were all exactly what God wanted them to be, so that when they actually came to the point of putting pen to paper, the words were fully their own words but also fully the words that God wanted them to write, words that God would also claim as his own.[27]

Recent Baptist theologians have emphasized the “divine-human authorship of inspired Scripture.” David Nelson and David Dockery wrote:

Scripture cannot rightly be understood unless we take into consideration that it has dual-sided authorship. . . . What must be affirmed is that the Bible is entirely and completely the Word of God and the words of the human authors (Acts 4:25). It is the Word of God written in the words of men.[28]

Nelson and Dockery later described biblical inspiration as both “verbal-plenary” and “concursive.” They explained concursive inspiration thusly:

[It] attempts to take seriously the human factors in the composition of the Bible. Theologians have described the activity of the Spirit within the activities of the human writers through which the Bible was written as a concursive work. While this perspective of inspiration is consistent with a plenary view of inspiration, it avoids any hint that God mechanically dictated the words of Scripture to the human authors so that they had no real part in the Scripture’s composition.[29]

They later describe concursive inspiration as primarily a function of divine providence:

These men of God [the biblical writers] had known God, learned from him, and walked with him in their spiritual pilgrimage for many years. God had prepared them through their familial, social, educational, and spiritual backgrounds for the task of inscripturating his word. The experiences of Moses, David, Jeremiah, Paul, Luke, John, and Peter differ; yet throughout their lives God was working to prepare and shape them, even their own vocabulary, to pen the Scriptures. Beyond this we dare not say much regarding the how of inspiration except to affirm God’s providential oversight in the entire process of inspiration.[30]

Similarly, Article II of the “Short Statement” of the Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy affirms both the human and divine roles in the production of Scripture:

Holy Scripture, being God’s own Word, written by men prepared and superintended by His Spirit, is of infallible divine authority in all matters upon which it touches: it is to be believed, as God’s instruction, in all that it affirms, obeyed, as God’s command, in all that it requires; embraced, as God’s pledge, in all that it promises.

Article VIII of the statement affirmed that God “utilized the distinctive personalities and literary styles of the writers who He had chosen and prepared” and denied that God “overrode their personalities” when he caused these writers to use the very words that “He chose.” Based on this understanding of inspiration, Article XVIII of the statement specifically affirmed the “text of Scripture is to be interpreted by grammatico-historical exegesis.”

Given this understanding of the nature of inspiration, the search for the literal meaning of the Scripture originally intended by the human author is both a legitimate and necessary exercise. Recently, several scholars have called for the abandonment of historical criticism.[31] In contrast to historical critical study, Plantinga favored “traditional Christian biblical commentary” that (1) takes Scripture to be “a wholly authoritative and trustworthy guide to faith and morals;” that (2) affirms that God is the principal author of the Bible; and that (3) recognizes that one cannot always determine the meaning of a given passage by discovering what the human author had in mind. Plantinga supported his last point by arguing that the intent of the divine and human authors of Scripture should, at least sometimes, be distinguished. He wrote:

There is no reason to suppose the human authors of Exodus, Numbers, Psalms, Isaiah, Jeremiah, or Habakkuk had in mind Jesus’ triumphal entry, or his incarnation, or other events of Jesus’ life and death, or indeed anything else explicitly about Jesus. But the fact that it is God who is the principal author here makes it quite possible that what we are to learn from the text in question is something rather different from what the human author proposed to teach.[32]

Although, on the surface, some features of Plantinga’s solution are appealing, the practice of what he labels as traditional biblical commentary to the exclusion of historical criticism may create more problems than it solves. First, this attempt to shield the Bible from historical evaluation guarantees that its historical nature will be devalued. The gospel grounds its claims in actual historical events such as the incarnation of Jesus, his teachings, deeds, atoning death, and bodily resurrection. To argue that the testimonies to these events are not subject to historical evaluation will likely ensure that the Christian faith is relegated to the category of fiction. As long as Christians insist that our faith is grounded in history, the historical claims of Scripture can legitimately be examined and the evidence for those claims weighed. Admittedly, the historical evaluation of the claims of Scripture has often been either destructive or produced such a minimal number of established facts as to be relatively unhelpful. However, this is the result of historical evaluation guided by strong biases against the theological claims of Scripture or a poor methodology, rather than a lack of evidence or problems innate to historical research.

Second, to discourage Christian scholars from engaging in historical evaluation of the Bible will likely result in Christians being very poorly equipped to respond to the assaults on the Christian faith by skeptics who seek to employ critical methods to dismiss Christian claims. Plantinga argued that historical criticism has no real value for Christianity since one cannot reason his way to faith based on an evaluation of the historical evidence for Christianity. Nevertheless, a careful evaluation of the historical evidence for Christianity may demonstrate that Christian faith is reasonable. To fail to engage in this task would seem to encourage a dichotomy between faith and reason that would be unhealthy for Christianity—especially in the modern world.

Plantinga is correct to express concern about Christian Scripture scholarship that “brackets or prescinds from what is known by faith and aims to proceed ‘scientifically,’ strictly on the basis of reason.”[33] However, many conservative Christian scholars have found that they may engage in historical criticism of a biblical text in a manner that does not lead to “relativizing, dehistoricizing, or discounting its teaching, or rejecting its claims to authorship.”[34] Admittedly, many skeptics will dismiss conservative investigations that amass evidence supporting the historical accuracy of Scripture or claims of authorship as engaging in apologetics rather than true historical criticism. The respected biblical scholar, J. B. Lightfoot expressed an appropriate response to such a dismissal:

If by an “apologist” is meant one who knows that he owes everything which is best and truest in himself to the teaching of Christianity—not the Christless Christianity which alone our author would spare, the works with the mainspring broken, but the Christianity of the Apostles and Evangelists—who believes that its doctrines, its sanctions, and its hopes, are truths of the highest moment to the wellbeing of mankind, and who, knowing and believing all this, is ready to use in its defense such abilities as he has, then a man may be proud to take even the lowest place among the ranks of “apologists,” and to brave any insinuations of dishonesty which an anonymous critic may fling at him.[35]

Third, proper Christian biblical interpretation recognizes both the divine and human origins of the Bible, disregarding neither. To distinguish the human intent from the divine intent is to misunderstand the nature of biblical revelation. Although the findings of secular historical criticism have been impoverished by the failure to recognize the meaning intended by the human author as the Word of God, Christian exegesis will be impoverished by driving a wedge between the meaning and intention of the human and divine authors.

A brief study of the history of biblical interpretation will quickly reveal the potentially devastating results of such a sharp distinction between the human meaning and the divine meaning of Scripture. The approach to interpretation proposed by Plantinga seems to be a step back toward the faulty hermeneutical approach of the medieval church. That approach ultimately undermined the authority of the Bible and supplanted it with the authority of ecclesiastical tradition.

A far better course is the one proposed by the International Council on Biblical Inerrancy. On November 10–13, 1982, the Council (whose meetings in 1978 resulted in the Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy) met to discuss how believers should approach the task of biblical interpretation. Their discussions led to yet another important document, which was titled the Chicago Statement on Biblical Hermeneutics. The Statement specifically addresses the topic of higher criticism in several of its articles. Article VII discouraged attempts to distinguish between the intent of the divine and human authors of Scripture by affirming that “the meaning expressed in each biblical text is single, definite and fixed.” Article XV affirmed the necessity of interpreting the Bible according to “the grammatical-historical sense, that is, the meaning which the writer expressed.” The choice of the word “writer” as opposed to “author” was clearly intended to demonstrate that the human author was in view. In particular, Article XVIII stated:

We affirm that the Bible’s own interpretation of itself is always correct, never deviating from, but rather elucidating, the single meaning of the inspired text. The single meaning of a prophet’s words includes, but is not restricted to, the understanding of those words by the prophet and necessarily involves the intention of God evidenced in the fulfillment of those words.

The statement insists that the text of the Bible has a single meaning, a divine-human meaning. Although the divine author may intend to communicate more through the text than the human author intended, the divine author did not intend to communicate something other than what the human author intended. Since a biblical text has a single meaning and this meaning is inextricably tied to the intended meaning of the human author, exegesis which seeks to understand the message which the human author intended to communicate to his original audience in his original historical setting remains necessary.

Where Has Higher Criticism Gone Wrong?

The defense of historical critical method above should not be taken as approval of all of the so-called findings of the methodology. In the wrong hands and driven by the wrong presuppositions, historical criticism has done much harm to the church. The sad state of the church in many countries of Western Europe is arguably the result of a misapplication of the historical critical method driven by an antisupernaturalist bias and undue skepticism.

Antisupernaturalism

Due primarily to the lingering influence of David Hume, many scholars practice historical criticism with a very strong bias against supernatural events. Important biblical claims like revelation, incarnation, miracles, and the resurrection of Jesus are automatically regarded as unhistorical because of the ruling assumption that such things simply cannot happen. The work of the Jesus Seminar is an example. The Fellows of the seminar tacitly admitted that their investigation of Jesus’ deeds and sayings proceeded on antisupernaturalist assumptions:

The Christ of creed and dogma, who have been firmly in place in the Middle Ages, can no longer command the assent of those who have seen the heavens through Galileo’s telescope. The old deities and demons were swept from the skies by that remarkable glass. Copernicus, Kepler, and Galileo have dismantled the mythological abodes of the gods and Satan, and bequeathed us secular heavens.[36]

These words seem to echo the sentiments of Rudolph Bultmann who claimed, “It is impossible to use electric light and the wireless and to avail ourselves of modern medical discoveries, and at the same time to believe in the New Testament world of demons and spirits.”[37] Bultmann’s statement is simply false. Even after decades of indoctrination in naturalism in the public education system, most Americans still believe in the supernatural (and they do not generally sit in the dark or refuse to take their medicine). According to recent surveys, 84 percent of American adults believe in miracles. Lest someone appeal to the ignorance of the masses to explain such belief, 72 percent of Americans with postgraduate degrees believe in miracles.[38] Nevertheless, some higher critics still parrot the arguments of Hume and Bultmann without seriously examining them.

Antisupernaturalism, sometimes called methodological naturalism, is grounded in one of three worldviews: atheism (denial of the existence of God), Deism (denial of God’s intervention in the world), or monism (belief that equates the divine nature and natural law). However, most Americans are theists. According to a 2006 Barna poll, 71 percent of adult Americans believe in “the all-powerful, all-knowing, perfect creator of the universe who rules the world today.”[39] If this Deity was capable of creating the universe, if he is “all powerful,” and if he “rules the world today,” it is reasonable to affirm the actual occurrence of miracles.

If a researcher is willing to remain open to the possibility of miracles and to weigh the historical evidence, he will discover that the case for Jesus’ miraculous ministry is very strong. Craig Evans recently observed, “Today, scholars are more open to talking about the miracles of Jesus because they rightly recognize that the task of the historian is to describe what people reported and recorded. It isn’t the historian’s task to engage in science and metaphysics. In other words, it is enough that historians acknowledge that Jesus’ contemporaries observed what they believed were miracles; historians should not try to explain exactly what Jesus did or how he did it.”[40] Evans points to the work of E. P. Sanders as an example of this trend. Sanders suggests that Jesus initially attracted a large following because of his reputation as a powerful healer rather than because he was an engaging teacher.[41]

Several of the criteria of authenticity support the early witnesses to Jesus’ miracles. The most helpful criterion at this point is the criterion of independent multiple attestation.[42] Q, widely believed to be our earliest Gospel source, twice mentions Jesus’ miracles. First, Q 7:1–10 (Matt 8:5–13//Luke 7:1–10) records the miracle of the healing of the centurion’s son in Capernaum. Second, Q records that when John the Baptist was in prison he sent a message to Jesus asking, “Are you the one to come, or are we to expect someone else?” Jesus replied, “Go and report to John what you hear and see: the blind regain their sight and the lame walk around, the skin diseased are cleansed and the deaf hear, and the dead are raised, and the poor are evangelized.”[43] Although Q is regarded by some modern scholars primarily as a collection of sayings comparable to the Gospel of Thomas, it is in fact an important witness to Jesus’ deeds. The healing miracles affirmed by Q, purportedly the earliest Gospel source, are independently attested in Mark and John as well as the sources M and L. Mark, which by most accounts was written in the late sixties, affirms that Jesus healed the blind (Mark 8:22–26; 10:46–52), paralyzed (Mark 2:1–12), deaf (Mark 7:31–37), skin-diseased (Mark 1:40–45), and raised the dead (Mark 5:21–23). John affirms that Jesus healed the blind (John 9:1–7) and lame (John 5:1–18) and raised the dead (John 11:1–57). M records that Jesus healed the blind and lame in the temple (Matt 21:14–17). L records that Jesus healed the disabled (Luke 13:10–17), cleansed lepers (Luke 17:11–19), and raised the dead (Luke 7:11–17).[44]

Evidence for Jesus’ ministry as a miracle-worker also appears in extrabiblical texts. A likely authentic line from Josephus’s well-known Testimonium Flavianum (Jos. Ant. 18:63–64) describes Jesus as a “doer of wonderful works.” The adjective translated “wonderful” was used elsewhere by Josephus to describe the miracles of Moses and Elijah and most likely refers to Jesus as one who performed miracles similar to those of these well-known Old Testament figures. Jewish opponents of Christianity in the Babylonian Talmud responded to Christian claims regarding Jesus’ miracles not by denying them but by ascribing them to evil powers. They were probably forced to employ such a strategy because the evidence that Jesus actually performed miracles and exorcisms was undeniable.

In the face of this compelling evidence, scholars are increasingly acknowledging that Jesus performed what his early followers regarded as miracles. The historical evidence is undermining views of reality to which many have tenaciously held since the Enlightenment. Keener does not exaggerate when he claims, “Most scholars today working on the subject thus accept the claim that Jesus was a healer and exorcist.”[45]

Burden of Proof

As noted earlier, Descartes urged historians to lay aside all presuppositions and to doubt everything except what can be established as certain by human reason. In his words, “Since reason already convinces me that I should abstain from the belief in things which are not entirely certain and indubitable . . . it will be enough to make me reject them all if I can find in each some ground for doubt.”[46] Descartes argued that the quest for knowledge must be approached with methodological doubt that rejects claims that cannot be proven against the skeptic. Thus all claims of knowledge, including religious claims, face an enormous burden of proof.

When Cartesian principles of methodological doubt were applied to the study of the Scriptures, the authority and reliability of the Bible were seriously undermined. In sharp contrast to the evidential standards of modern Western jurisprudence in which a person is presumed innocent until proven guilty, the witnesses bearing testimony about Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection, were assumed to be guilty until proven innocent. An example of the modern application of Cartesian principles to the study of the Bible is the work of the well-known Jesus Seminar. The Fellows of the seminar wrote:

The seventh and final pillar that supports the edifice of contemporary gospel scholarship is the reversal that has taken place regarding who bears the burden of proof. It was once assumed that scholars had to prove that details in the synoptic gospels were not historical. D. F. Strauss undertook proof of this nature in his controversial work. As a consequence, his work was viewed as negative and destructive. The current assumption is more nearly the opposite and indicates how far scholarship has come since Strauss: the gospels are now assumed to be narratives in which the memory of Jesus is embellished by mythic elements that express the church’s faith in him, and by plausible fictions that enhance the telling of the gospel story for first-century listeners who knew about divine men and miracle workers firsthand. Supposedly historical elements in these narratives must therefore be demonstrated to be so.[47]

Some modern skeptics hold such a relentless commitment to methodological doubt that they have recently admitted that no evidence short of personal time travel would convince them of events such as Jesus’ resurrection. This unreasonable approach to seeking knowledge is often grounded in important presuppositions which have not been critically evaluated with the same degree of skepticism used to measure religious claims.

Those less skeptical are willing to entertain the possible historicity of biblical accounts if they pass the scrutiny of certain criteria. In modern Gospel studies, these criteria are called the criteria of authenticity. One recent study catalogued some twenty five such criteria in recent Gospel research. The four most-recognized of these are the criteria of multiple independent attestation, Palestinian environment or language, dissimilarity, and coherence. In discussing these criteria, we will see that, absent an antisupernatural bias, their use can actually corroborate the supernatural elements of Jesus’ ministry.

The criterion of multiple independent attestation stresses that material about Jesus is likely historical if it appears in two or more ancient sources that did not depend on each other. This is a reasonable criterion, and it even has some biblical precedent in an Old Testament principle: “A fact must be established by the testimony of two or three witnesses” (Deut 19:15). However, searching for multiple independent attestation is not just a matter of seeking to see which of the four Gospels mention a particular saying or event. As noted in our earlier discussion of source criticism, most Gospels scholars believe that the Synoptic tradition was informed by four sources: Mark, Q, M, and L. So, one must examine these independent Gospel sources, along with John, other New Testament documents, and extrabiblical sources.

The application of this criterion supports the authenticity of a number of Jesus’ sayings and deeds. For example, Jesus’ teaching on divorce is attested by three very early and independent sources: Mark 10:2–12 (Matt 19:3–12); Q (Matt 5:32//Luke 16:18); and Paul (1 Cor 7:10–11). This is very strong evidence that this teaching should be traced back to the historical Jesus. Likewise, all four Gospels record the feeding of the 5,000. The miracle appears in Mark 6:32–44 (Matt 14:13–21//Luke 9:10–17). There are a few agreements of Matthew and Luke against Mark that make one wonder if Q also recorded the incident, although the evidence is insufficient to demonstrate this conclusively.[48] John 6:1–5 independently records the same event. Although there are differences between the Markan and Johannine accounts which establish the literary independence of the two Gospel accounts, there are no clear disagreements. The similarity in detail is actually quite remarkable. The accounts agree that Jesus performed the miracle in the region of Galilee, that approximately 5,000 men not counting women and children witnessed the miracle, that the disciples calculated that over 200 denarii worth of bread would be necessary to feed such a large crowd, that the miracle was performed using five loaves and two small fish, that Jesus prayed as he distributed the food, and that twelve baskets of leftovers were collected after everyone had eaten his fill. The miracle is thus substantiated by two independent accounts that closely corroborate each other. Unless one excludes the possibility that Jesus performed nature miracles, the criterion of multiple independent attestation supports the event as an authentic deed of Jesus. At the very least, the criterion of multiple independent attestation supports the claim that witnesses observed what they believed to be a miraculous feeding.

The criterion of Palestinian language establishes the authenticity of material if it appears to be a fairly literal translation of a Semitic original (Aramaic or Hebrew) into Greek. Since Greek quickly became the predominant language of the early church, material with Semitic characteristics is not likely a creation of the church. These Semitic characteristics show that the material is very early and probably authentic.

Matthew 5:13 probably contains an example of the influence of Palestinian language. Although modern translations refer to salt “losing its taste,” the Greek text literally says that the salt “becomes foolish.” This likely resulted from a Semitic saying that used the root tpl which may mean either “be foolish” (Job 1:22; 24:12; Jer 23:13) or “be saltless, dull, insipid” (Job 6:6). Although Matthew 5:13 does not have a parallel in another Gospel and thus lacks multiple independent attestation, the evidence of an Aramaic original suggests that the statement is authentic.[49]

The criterion of Palestinian environment suggests that material is early and authentic if it refers to customs, geographical features, or beliefs characteristic of first-century Palestine. For example, John 5:2 offers a specific description of the five colonnades of the pool of Bethesda near the Sheep Gate. The location and layout of this pool has now been confirmed through archaeological excavations.[50] The detailed and accurate description of the site strongly suggests that the author of the Fourth Gospel was personally familiar with the city of Jerusalem before its destruction in AD 70 and supports the author’s claim that he was an eyewitness of the events that he records (John 21:24).

The criterion of double dissimilarity suggests that material is authentic if it is dissimilar from what one would have expected contemporary Jews or members of the early church to have invented. This criterion is the most problematic of the four. A rigid application of the criterion could result in a portrait of Jesus that is completely divorced from his Jewish background and whose teachings in no way influenced the church that he founded. Thus, many scholars now call either for a radical revision of this criterion or its abandonment. Nevertheless, a reasonable application of the criterion can be helpful. For example, Jesus’ use of the title “Son of Man” to express his Messianic identity satisfies the criterion of double dissimilarity. No evidence suggests that Jesus’ contemporaries used the title (especially with appeals to Daniel 7) as a self-description. The early church did not adopt use of the title, for apart from the use by Stephen in Acts 7:56, only Jesus used the title in the New Testament. Thus the criterion of double dissimilarity establishes Jesus’ use of the Son of Man title, a title which, properly understood, expresses Jesus’ identity as a king of heavenly origin who reigns over a universal and eternal kingdom and is worthy of worship.

The criterion of coherence suggests that material is early and authentic if it coheres or is consistent with material established as authentic on other grounds. For example, if one establishes that Jesus claimed to be the Messiah and that large numbers of people affirmed this identity, the criterion of coherence suggests the authenticity of the claim that Jesus performed what many perceived as miracles. In Q 7:18–23 (Matt 11:2–6; Luke 7:18–23) Jesus assured John the Baptist of his identity as Messiah by appealing to his miraculous works: “The blind receive their sight and the lame walk, lepers are cleansed and the deaf hear, and the dead are raised up” (Matt 11:5 HCSB). Jesus’ reply contains clear allusions to Isaiah 26:19; 35:5–6; and 61:1. Isaiah 61 is a prophecy about the Messiah or anointed one. A text from the Dead Sea Scrolls (4Q521) confirms that first-century Jews saw these texts as Messianic and thus expected the Messiah to perform a variety of miracles. Jesus’ widely accepted Messianic claims thus cohere with his miraculous ministry.

A fair application of the criteria of authenticity establishes many of the key features of Jesus’ life and teachings as authentic. Nevertheless, these criteria are plagued by several weaknesses. First, historical criticism claims to be a scientific method that approaches the biblical documents like other ancient texts. However, the “criteria of authenticity” utilized by historical Jesus scholars differ significantly from the criteria used by historians outside of the guild of biblical studies. Such historians depend on criteria like “explanatory scope,” “explanatory power,” “plausibility,” “less ad hoc,” and “illumination” to guide them in evaluating data from the past.[51] Biblical scholars should utilize these standard criteria from the field of historical studies alongside the now traditional criteria of authenticity.

Second, some apply the criteria negatively rather than positively, i.e., they assume that material that cannot be established by these criteria is inauthentic. This is unduly skeptical. To apply the criterion of multiple independent attestation in such a way that one dismisses all events for which we have only one testimony would greatly reduce our understanding of ancient history. It is rather amazing that even a single testimony about events that occurred 2,000 years ago has been preserved. To demand multiple testimonies to confirm each event is unreasonable. Modern historians do not demand that multiple witnesses (perhaps Josephus, Tacitus, and Seutonius) affirm some saying of Nero to deem one testimony credible. Nor should one automatically dismiss sayings ascribed to Jesus that lack testimony from multiple sources. A far better approach weighs historical claims in light of the preponderance of the evidence. Few historians treat other ancient texts with the degree of skepticism with which many modern scholars treat the Bible. Most historians accept the testimony of ancient historians, for example, unless there are compelling reasons for doing otherwise—even though those historians wrote centuries after the events occurred and their testimony is preserved by only a handful of late manuscripts. The fact that the New Testament writers were decent, moral men who penned their testimonies of Jesus only a few decades after the events to which they refer and the fact that abundant manuscript evidence has enabled modern scholars to restore the original text of these documents with a very high degree of accuracy, should demand that historians at least treat these documents with the level of credibility granted these other sources.

Conclusion

Over a century ago, Lightfoot bemoaned the undue skepticism that plagued some applications of the historical critical method. He aptly noted that if this “suspicious temper” that approached biblical documents in a way that was “painfully skeptical” were tolerated elsewhere, it “would render life intolerable and history impossible.”[52] The same could be said for some approaches to higher criticism today.

If scholarship is to advance in its understanding of the Bible, a more reasonable and consistent application of the historical critical method is necessary. Scholars must not assume that texts disagree when the tensions between them may be reasonably resolved. They must not flippantly disregard the internal claims of authorship for the biblical documents as if traditional positions are necessarily unscholarly. They must not impose a burden of proof on the biblical documents that is not imposed on other ancient texts nor should they presume that biblical statements are false until they are proven accurate. They must not dismiss serious research as substandard simply because it leads to conclusions that do not well suit the claims of naturalism or because its findings support the claims of historic Christianity.

The most recent trends in higher criticism are generally positive and encouraging. Scholars are more favorable to the authorship of certain Pauline letters. They confidently affirm some of Jesus’ most important Christological claims and even his miraculous ministry. They often agree, across denominational lines, on the meaning of important and previously divisive texts. All of this is a result of a better application of the historical critical method. Although Christian scholars should continue to call for important refinements of the method, now is not the time to abandon it. True biblical scholarship under the lordship of Jesus Christ is both possible and necessary. Guided by the proper philosophical presuppositions, higher criticism may result in a higher view of the Bible and a more exalted view of Christ.

1 Eichorn is often credited with coining the term “higher criticism” in the second edition of his Einleitung ins Alte Testament in 1787. Based on the comments in his preface, however, it appears that he borrowed the term from the Classical scholar C. G. Heyne. See John van Seters, The Edited Bible: The Curious History of the “Editor” in Biblical Criticism (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2006), 191.

2 Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, 11th ed., s.v. “criticism.”

3 The standard introduction to textual criticism is Bruce Metzger, The Text of the New Testament: Its Transmission, Corruption, and Restoration (New York: Oxford University Press, 1968). An outstanding introduction that is more comprehensive, more recent, and possibly superior to Metzger’s is Philip Comfort, Encountering the Manuscripts: An Introduction to New Testament Paleography and Textual Criticism (Nashville: B&H Academic, 2005). For a useful introduction to Old Testament textual criticism, see Ellis Brotzman, Old Testament Textual Criticism: A Practical Introduction (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1994).

4 For a treatment of introductory issues, see Andreas Köstenberger, Scott Kellum, and Charles Quarles, The Cradle, the Cross, and the Crown: An Introduction to the New Testament (Nashville: B&H Academic, 2009); and Eugene Merrill, Mark Rooker, and Michael Grisanti, The World and the Word: An Introduction to the Old Testament (Nashville: B&H Academic, 2011).

5 Dyson Hague, “The History of the Higher Criticism,” in The Fundamentals, ed. R. A. Torrey (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1993), 1:10.

6 Edgar Krentz, The Historical Critical Method (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 1975), 49. For introductions to literary criticism, see Norman C. Habel, Literary Criticism of the Old Testament (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1971); Mark Allan Powell, What Is Narrative Criticism? (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1991).

7 B. F. C. Atkinson, Literary Criticism in Antiquity (Cambridge: University Press, 1934).

8 See E. P. Sanders and Margaret Davies, Studying the Synoptic Gospels (Philadelphia: Trinity Press, 1989). For a discussion of Old Testament source criticism, see Walter C. Kaiser Jr., The Old Testament Documents: Are They Reliable and Relevant? (Downers Grove: IVP Academic, 2001), 136–43; and Kenneth Kitchen, On the Reliability of the Old Testament (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003), 492–97.

9 Franklin Johnson, “Fallacies of the Higher Criticism,” in Torrey, The Fundamentals, 1:56.

10 See Edgar V. McKnight, What Is Form Criticism? (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1969).

11 Robert Stein, Gospels and Tradition: Studies on Redaction Criticism of the Synoptic Gospels (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1991); Norman Perrin, What Is Redaction Criticism? (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1969).

12 See, for example, Krentz, Historical Critical Method, 7; Gerhard Maier, The End of the Historical Critical Method (St. Louis: Concordia, 1977), 13.

13 Joseph Fitzmyer, The Interpretation of Scripture: In Defense of Historical Criticism (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist, 2008), 61.

14 Karen Jobes and Moisés Silva noted, “It is estimated that the Hexapla would have required about six thousand pages bound in fifteen volumes. Such a massive work would probably never have been copied in its entirety. The only copy we know of was deposited in the library in Caesarea, Palestine, under the care of Pamphilus, the Christian martyr (ca. 250–310). It was presumably destroyed with the library by Muslim Saracens in the seventh century, if not earlier” (Invitation to the Septuagint [Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2000], 51).

15 Eusebius, Historia ecclesiastica, 6.25.

16 See William Baird, From Deism to Tübingen, vol. 1 of History of New Testament Research (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1992), xv–xvi; Krentz, The Historical Critical Method, 7; Dockery, “New Testament Interpretation: A Historical Survey,” in Interpreting the New Testament: Essays on Methods and Issues, ed. D. A. Black and D. S. Dockery (Nashville: B&H Academic, 2001), 25–26.

17 Robert Grant, The Bible in the Church: A Short History of Interpretation (New York: Macmillan, 1960), 105–8.

18 See Dockery, “New Testament Interpretation: A Historical Survey,” 26.

19 See ibid., 27.

20 Krentz, The Historical Critical Method, 10.

21 Spinoza, Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, trans. Samuel Shirley (Leiden: Brill, 1991), 154.

22 On the other hand, he argued that the biblical writers disagreed about the nature of this Deity and how he related to human beings. Thus, such teachings must be regarded as human rather than divine. Related to moral teachings of the Scripture, the interpreter must distinguish between universal moral teachings and those that only applied to specific situations. Spinoza also urged interpreters to be very cautious about using the statements of one biblical writer to interpret those of another. Since biblical writers often disagreed with each other, interpretation by cross-reference could distort the original author’s meaning.

23 Spinoza, Tractatus, 161–72.

24 Baird, From Deism to Tübingen, xiii.

25 Rudolph Bultmann, “New Testament and Mythology,” in Kerygma and Myth, ed. H. W. Barsch (London: SPCK, 1953), 4.

26 Rudolph Bultmann, Jesus and the Word (New York: Charles Scribners Sons, 1958), 8.

27 Wayne Grudem, Systematic Theology: An Introduction to Biblical Doctrine (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1994), 81.

28 David S. Dockery and David P. Nelson, “Special Revelation,” in A Theology for the Church, ed. Daniel Akin (Nashville: B&H Academic, 2007), 129.

29 Ibid., 142.

30 Ibid., 142–43.

31 Eta Linnemann, Historical Criticism of the Bible: Methodology or Ideology? Reflections of a Bultmannian Turned Evangelical, trans. Robert Yarbrough (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1990); Gerhard Maier, The End of the Historical-Critical Method, trans. E. W. Leverenz and R. F. Norden (St. Louis: Concordia, 1977).

32 Alvin Plantinga, Warranted Christian Belief (Oxford University, 2000), 374–421, esp. 385. This quote stands at the conclusion of the discussion of a number of instances in which NT writers quote and apply the Old Testament in a manner that Plantinga regards as foreign to the intention of the Old Testament authors. This alleged tension is apparently the result of a misunderstanding of the intent of the OT writer, the NT writer, or both.

33 Ibid., 375.

34 Article XVIII of the Chicago Statement on Biblical Hermeneutics.

35 J. B. Lightfoot, Essays on the Work Entitled Supernatural Religion (London: Macmillan, 1889), 22.

36 Robert Funk, Roy W. Hoover, and the Jesus Seminar, The Five Gospels: The Search for the Authentic Words of Jesus (New York: Macmillan, 1993), 2.

37 Rudolph Bultmann, “New Testament and Mythology,” 4.

38 H. Taylor, “The Religious and Other Beliefs of Americans,” 2003, n.p. (cited May 8, 2007); accessed at http://www.harrisinteractive.com/harris_poll/index.asp?PID=359.

39 G. Barna, “Beliefs: General Religious,” n.p. (cited May 1, 2007); accessed http//www.barna.org;FlexPage,aspx?Page=Topic&TopicID=2.

40 Craig A. Evans, Fabricating Jesus: How Modern Scholars Distort the Gospels (Downers Grove: Intervarsity, 2006), 139.

41 E. P. Sanders, Jesus and Judaism (London: SCM, 1985), 157–73.

42 For an introduction to this criterion, see the next section of this essay. Keener notes that “many appeal to multiple attestation to support the picture of Jesus as a miracle worker.” He explicitly mentions Sabourin, Boobyer, Rowland, and Sanday. See Craig Keener, Miracles: The Credibility of the New Testament Accounts (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011), 1:22.

43 See James M Robinson et al., The Critical Edition of Q, Hermeneia (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2000), 188–225.

44 One might add that the healing of the severed ear of the servant of the high priest in Luke 22:50–51 roughly corresponds to Jesus’ healing of the deaf in other sources.

45 Keener, Miracles, 1:23.

46 Rene Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy (1641).

47 Funk, Hoover, and the Jesus Seminar, The Five Gospels, 4–5.

48 Compare Matt 14:13, Luke 9:11, and John 6:2 in which both Matthew and Luke abbreviate Mark’s lengthier description of the gathering of the crowds with the words hoi ochloi ēkolouthēsan autō (“when the crowds heard this”).

49 See Quarles, The Sermon on the Mount: Restoring Christ’s Message to the Modern Church (Nashville: B&H Academic, 2011), 81.

50 See U. C. von Wahlde, “Archaeology and John’s Gospel,” in Jesus and Archaeology, ed. J. H. Charlesworth (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2006), 560–66; R. Brown, The Gospel According to John I–XII, AB 29 (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1966), 206–7; and Andreas Köstenberger, John, BECNT (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2004), 178.

51 For an outstanding introduction to these criteria, see “Important Considerations on Historical Inquiry Pertaining to the Truth in Ancient Texts,” in Michael Licona, The Resurrection of Jesus: A New Historiographical Approach (Downers Grove: IVP Academic, 2010), 29–130.

52 Lightfoot, Supernatural Religion, 22.

Chapter Four

Can We Understand the Bible?

Richard R. Melick Jr.

J. F. Smith loved the Bible. He read the Bible daily and throughout his life sought to live what he read. He died confessing the message of the Bible as his hope for death and beyond. By many today, he would be considered a simple man. Raised during hard times, he dropped out of school in the eighth grade, seeking work to help support his family. Hardly aware of the finer points of science, philosophy, and technology, much less literary hermeneutics, he simply accepted what he read. Somewhat successful in life, he owned several businesses, fed and clothed a family of nine during The Great Depression, and left a legacy of honesty and hard work that generations after him still follow. J. F. Smith was my grandfather.

Papaw, as we called him, read the Bible because he found strength and, at times, comfort from it. We know, as did he, that the power of Scripture was actually the power of God through Jesus Christ to whom the Bible bears witness. Nevertheless, it was the Bible that shaped his life. While he had questions about the Bible, I never heard him question the Bible. He sometimes queried the meaning of a passage of the Bible, but I never heard him give up; he never excluded the passage from the Bible. Sometimes he sought guidance about how to live in accord with the Bible, but he never discarded a verse because he did not think it relevant to his life. He loved the Bible.

His somewhat simple but genuine approach to Scripture typifies that of countless millions who have read the Bible for answers to life. Knowing him, it seems strange that people question his faith in the Lord through the Scriptures. But today many do. In the early centuries, most people heard the Bible as it was read to them because they were illiterate. They accepted the Bible’s message because it rang true in their hearts and minds. While some in their erudite ivory towers wondered whether the Bible could be trusted, they simply lived it—and died for it. In their own uncomplicated way, they understood the Bible.[1]

The question of this chapter is “Can We Understand the Bible?” The answer requires thinking beyond the obvious. It calls for deciding what the Bible is. It requires study about the functions and adequacy of language, the contributions of culture and worldview, and the relevance of ancient literature to modern problems. Yet, the obvious answer is the correct one: “Yes, we can understand the Bible.” Christians have consistently affirmed its perspicuity.[2] The Bible has within it a self-correcting mechanism so that the reader is protected from erroneous conclusions both about the Bible and its message.[3] Like my grandfather, millions of readers witness to this fact by the way they live. Their lives embody the truth of Scripture, and they live well.

As noted above, multiple issues enter the discussion about understanding the Bible. Questions seem to spawn more questions. In modern times multiple academic disciplines lend their methodologies and conclusions to help shape biblical interpretation. Hermeneutics resembles a hydra-headed monster whose body may be discernable, but whose multiple faces defy a simple definition of its form. Multiple volumes contribute to the field, each with at least a nuanced personality as to how to navigate the maze of literature.

In keeping with the subject of this book, I will propose a thesis regarding understanding the Bible and discuss several key questions that may seem to mitigate against it. I hope that at least some of the critical questions will be addressed.

The chapter is about hermeneutics. In its simplest form, hermeneutics is “the science and art of interpretation.” As a necessary further delimitation, for biblical hermeneutics the discussion concerns written texts. Hermeneutics has at least two components and an ultimate goal. The goal is proper interpretation that allows the reader to understand the written text accurately and adequately. This raises questions about meaning, to which we will turn later.

The two components are “science” and “art.” Science follows principles tested by multiple experiments so that they become normative. As applied to language, science means that the reader must understand the norms of communication. Without these norms, no effective communication occurs. Art takes science into new dimensions. While it is possible to speak of the principles of art, art often employs a free flow of expression, sometimes mixing and interchanging “the rules” to form new creations. In reading texts, the artistic element basically means the effective application of the principles (science) so that the reader “hears” and “understands” what the writer expects. It means following the patterns of the text to their desired end. In light of these two components, the reader must know the basic rules of communication and be able to recognize their application in a given text.

Foundational Principles

At the outset, two foundational principles should be laid. They provide the foundation for the chapter and reveal my basic orientation.

First, the Bible is the inerrant Word of God. My personal simple definition is this:

God so orchestrated the circumstances of the writing of Holy Scripture that every word participates in its context to communicate exactly and accurately what God intended to say. Since every word comes from God, and is inspired, the Bible is inerrant. It is correct in what it teaches and accurate in what it records.[4]

Several key ideas come together in this definition: God orchestrated the circumstances, every word participates in its context, the Bible is correct in what it teaches and accurate in what it records.[5] Other important implications of the Bible’s inerrancy include: these words demand contexts; God uses and does not violate various personalities; inspiration and inerrancy only apply to the original manuscripts; and the Bible’s authority is limited to faith and practice.[6]

Biblical inerrancy defines those who affirm it. It clearly indicates their confidence in God’s Word as the authority for their lives. Inerrancy also relates to hermeneutics. Those who affirm inerrancy find it functions hermeneutically in a proper way. Inerrantists keep looking for legitimate answers to problematic texts in Scripture. Noninerrantists often prematurely assume there is an error and fail to search further for answers to problems. Interpreters can twist the Bible to mean what they want or may accept “easy” answers to difficult problems, but the serious Bible student begins with a predisposition that the Bible’s difficulties can be resolved.

Second, there are two sets of laws for biblical interpretation: laws of human communication and laws of the Holy Spirit. These laws correspond to the dual authorship of Scripture. The Bible is the perfect product of human writers and the Holy Spirit who inspired them. It is imperative, therefore, that interpreters acknowledge both sets of laws. The laws of the Spirit require the reader to follow the leadership of the Holy Spirit to find the ultimate interpretation. They include conversion and growing Christian maturity because of obedience to Jesus. The laws of human communication require the reader to understand the dynamics of person-to-person communication through texts. The laws of human communication continue to be refined. They require that the reader stay abreast of the best of language and communication theory.

Referring to the laws of the Spirit may surprise some. Some dismiss them as irrelevant because they appear to be subjective. Their logic is that discussing the role of the Holy Spirit has little to do with reading the texts, even if he influences them. Others may prefer not to include the laws of the Holy Spirit because they prefer to discuss the Bible as literature quite apart from its truth claims. In this people may take an apologetic approach, wanting to argue the biblical points on “neutral” turf. Admittedly, both objections have merit. Many who misinterpret a passage defend it by referring to a “spiritual” interpretation revealed to them. Others prefer to engage in discussion about the Bible objectively because that is the proper arena for discussion’s sake. The Bible has entered the world of literature and begs to be considered within that realm. Nevertheless, no one can adequately explain the continuing popularity and relevance of the Bible apart from the role of the Spirit. Conservative Bible scholars have consistently affirmed that principle as a guiding factor in their work.

The Bible and Historical Skepticism

This chapter focuses on two major concerns related to understanding the Bible. The second is the question of how literature functions. The first is more to the core of the problem with the Bible: skepticism regarding what the Bible says.

Usually the issue is categorized as “historical skepticism.” That is, how can modern readers understand texts from centuries ago? In this, the focus is clearly on the Bible. No one really questions whether we understand Suetonius’s Lives of the Caesars. With any ancient document in a classical language there are the standard questions of grammar, syntax, lexicography, and author’s style. They are essential for reading, much more for understanding a text. Without Suetonius, however, a major portion of history lies unexposed. With it, we can fill in the gaps, more or less, of Roman history. In other words, it is standard fare for understanding the Roman world.

The Bible functions in some ways like Suetonius’s Lives of the Caesars. Most of the Bible is history. The Old Testament is the story of a people, its leaders, its culture, and its religion. Similarly, much of the New Testament reports the history of early Christianity.[7] Most scholars would affirm that Suetonius’s work is history, though perhaps with a strong political element influencing it. Many scholars today, however, have difficulty accepting the Bible as history. At best they may see some historical elements behind it.

That leads to the crux of the matter. The truth claims in the Bible are often disregarded because of the Bible’s worldview. Stated differently, many people question the Bible’s accuracy and authority simply because it differs from how they view reality. To be more precise, the modern mind has difficulty with miracles. To be most precise, the modern mind has difficulty with a God becoming flesh through a virgin conception and birth before reentering heaven through a resurrection from the dead and ascension.

The critical issue is the content of the Bible. With the rise of the Enlightenment and modern science, questions were raised about the perspective of the Bible. Since the Bible is, strictly speaking, a library of books, not every book suffers the attack of incredulity that others do. The Gospels are the ultimate battleground because of the writers’ descriptions of the miraculous in Jesus’ life.

If the history of the Bible is at question, the Bible’s interpretation of the history is more so. It is a major step to affirm “Christ died and rose again.” It is another major step to affirm that he died and rose again “to pay for our sins.” Finally, the ultimate problem for many is to affirm that he died and rose again to pay for our sins and that “his death and resurrection are the only way to find God’s favor.”

The content of the Bible produced a fork in the road among those who refused to accept the interpretations found in it. On the one hand, some classified the Bible as myth literature. As such, they view it as a genre that accepts stories of divine intervention into life, God relating to humans intimately, and supernatural explanations of natural events. They perceive it to be similar to the mythology of the Greeks, Romans, and Egyptians. On the other hand, some questioned the adequacy of the writers’ worldview. Without doubt, biblical writers wrote believingly about miracles and the uniqueness of Jesus. Their writings, however, were viewed as simply outdated worldview explanations of events that we can no longer accept.

Each generation of skeptical scholars seeks to silence the message of the Bible, without success. The basic question that confronts them continually? “Why can the message of the Bible be so powerful when its foundations are completely false?” Developing from this, some questioning scholars have tried to keep the “meaning” of the Bible by reinterpreting its events in more modern ways, a subject to approach later.

Given this historical development, it is common to hear people say that “back then” they accepted miracles, virgin births, resurrections, and the like. These fit their worldview. Given the skeptical modern understanding, however, events like these cannot happen, so critical scholars are driven to find meaning out of texts that are to them inherently wrong. It has been a fruitless endeavor.

The assumption that “our generation knows better” is filled with problems. Advances in technology, science, social sciences, medicine, and others are used to support that idea, but many within these scientific fields continue to have faith in the literal message of the Bible. We should raise some concerns about a simplistic assumption that moderns know better.

Years ago E. D. Hirsch Jr. spoke to the issue warning of “three relativistic fallacies.”[8] The three still apply to thinking about the writers of the past. The first is “the fallacy of the inscrutable past.”[9] He basically warned about assuming only a few people can actually sympathize with the past and, therefore, really know it. Accepting this fallacy undermines all historical investigation and few actually want to go there. The second is “the fallacy of the homogeneous past.”[10] This assumes that all who lived in a certain age shared a common perspective imposed by culture and worldview. Accepting this confines all writers to their ages so that they cannot think, speak, or write differently from their age as it is perceived by the interpreter. This is fraught with difficulties. Using Paul as an example, a syllogism can point out the difficulties with this:

1. First-century people were idolatrous.

2. The apostle Paul was a first-century person. . . . The apostle Paul was idolatrous.

Obviously this is incorrect. The apostle Paul, pre-Christian or Christian, was never idolatrous. The reverse is also incorrect:

1. First-century people were not idolatrous.

2. Demetrius the silversmith was a first-century man. . . . Demetrius was not idolatrous.

Yet Acts 19:24 states that he made silver shrines for the god Artemis. It is very likely that he too was idolatrous.

These examples seem clear enough. The problem comes with the Bible’s descriptions of miracles and Jesus’ life. Naively, some people today think “everybody back then could believe in a resurrection.” That hardly fits even the Bible’s description of reactions to it. Jewish people thought it was blasphemy, and Gentiles thought it was ridiculous.[11]

It should be noted that the Bible is not “filled with miracles.” Miracles in the Bible occur rarely and only at special transitional periods of time. Their purpose is to verify that God accomplishes his purposes in history. In other words, the message finds support from divine intervention into the affairs of earth. The times of miracles are creation, the Exodus from Egypt (including conquering the land), the battle for religious purity in the divided kingdom (Elijah and Elisha, for example), the life of Jesus, and the birth of the church. There will also be “lying miracles” at the great tribulation.

Further, miracles occur in historical passages. From the perspective of the writer, they are indispensable for understanding history. The Bible perfectly and naturally blends God’s eternal plan and its historical outworking. The Bible should not be viewed as a book of miracles with some history to validate them; rather, it is a history that includes miracles on occasion. This is consistent with the “biblical” worldview.

It would also be a mistake to assume that the world of the biblical writers naively accepted miracles like the virgin birth and resurrection. Even the Bible records objections to them, particularly the resurrection. The unusual nature of the claim that Jesus rose again was the cutting edge of Christianity in the first century[12] and is essential to the gospel.[13] Similarly, the concept of a virgin conception and birth was as foreign to first-century people as it is today. Though unique events, they were included because the story of Jesus could not be told without them. The majority of people rejected Jesus, but many did accept him. In fact, there would be no early church, and certainly no Christian church today, if thousands of both Jews and Gentiles had not accepted the truth of these events. When the logic of Christianity was explained it made sense. If Jesus were truly the God-man and his life were a divine incarnation, one would expect that God would continue to enter history in a supernatural way. The sinless, divine Jesus could not have entered the world sinful, as all other human beings except Adam and Eve have.

Luke was the primary writer of the history found in the New Testament. Perhaps he understood this concern acutely. He was a Gentile and was probably raised in a world retaining at least the vestiges of pagan mythology. When he wrote of the virgin conception (and birth) of Jesus, he avoided any sexual terminology. Unlike the mythologies, Luke never stated that Jesus was the product of sexual intercourse between God and a human woman. He noted the angel’s answer to Mary’s question of how the conception could happen. “The power of the Most High will overshadow you.”[14] His explanation involves a special creation, not a normal conception. The language emphasizes that this was a unique event.[15]

Hirsch’s third fallacy is equally powerful: “the fallacy of the homogeneous present-day perspective.”[16] Today there are a wide variety of perspectives within any culture and across cultures. The millions of devout Christians indicate that not all modern people have difficulty accepting the historical descriptions of the past. Furthermore, the numbers of Christian persons involved in politics, academics, and scientific research bear witness to the fact that rejecting the Bible’s account is not a matter of intellect or academic training.

Three more points should be made. First, the Bible’s message has continual relevance. If the Bible were a textbook of science, there would likely be some obvious differences in descriptions of nature and other scientific elements. In fact, there are relatively few statements of “science” in Scripture; and where they occur, they are correct. Obviously allowances must be made for phenomenological language just as is necessary today.[17] The point is that even when the writers spoke about science and nature, they were guarded in what they said and usually they spoke from an observational perspective. We would likely hear the same observational language today, even to descriptions like “heaven above” and “beneath the earth” as descriptors. To say that phenomenological language reflects a simple view of nature or science requires far more support than that it occurs in the Bible and “everybody” thought that way back then.[18]

Though the Bible is correct when it describes nature and science, it is primarily about transforming human behavior. It presents the problem of personal evil, describes it as an offense to God and humanity, and prescribes the solution to it by God’s grace displayed in Jesus Christ. Human behavior has always been the same. People are selfish, prone to rebellion against God, and set on constructing their worlds in their own images. Everyone who has written historically has described the same kinds of problems (because of evil) and sought the cure. The Bible offers the cure. It is a divinely initiated cure involving God’s own Son. It is natural, therefore, to write about God’s interest in the world he created, as well as his intervention in its affairs. God cares.

The second point concerns historical investigation. Our contemporary world places the highest value on empirical verification. That is, we want things to be scientifically proved. This is largely because of the impact of science and technology and the better life situations that have resulted from them. The pertinent question for this chapter, however, is how are events of the past empirically verified? Before the days of video, everything depended on personal testimony. Events were considered true because people witnessed them and reliable persons wrote about them. In other words, personal accounts are considered adequate for the establishment of a historical record of the past.

The Bible records personal testimony. People lived the history and saw the events contained in it. They gave their witness, even to unusual things like miracles. The question for modern readers seeking to reconstruct the past is, “Can we trust those who witness to the events of the Bible?”

The New Testament addresses this often. In one place, Paul spoke of the resurrection of Jesus, claiming that Jesus appeared to the apostles and to more than 500 people still alive at the time of his writing. Can we trust these people? From the records we possess, it is clear that even the secular society spoke of how good Christians are. They lived exemplary lives, seeking to speak and live truthfully, honestly, and lovingly. These are the people who wrote about what they saw. They recalled changed lives because of seeing Jesus. The point is that the writers of Scripture lived exemplary lives and their witness to history cannot be easily discarded. Theirs is an empirical verification.

Empirical verification is not the only way the biblical writers chose to demonstrate their points. For example, Paul in 1 Corinthians 15 states two sets of theological truths in parallel:

Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, and he was buried.

Christ arose on the third day, according to the Scriptures, and he was seen.

This represents several types of verification.

Christ died . . . Christ arose—the simple events described

According to the Scriptures—a logical verification (it “fit” the Old Testament expectations)

He was buried . . . he was seen—empirical verification of the events.

Thus personal witness is critical. The character of the witnesses predisposes us to accept their testimonies.

The third and final point summarizes the chapter thus far. People do understand the message of the Bible. It is precisely because they do understand it that they try to find its meaning outside of the Bible. The message is unique and offensive to many. The core issue is the redemptive intervention of God into human life through his Son, Jesus Christ, the God-Man. This is evidenced by Jesus’ resurrection and the other miracles logically fit into this paradigm. Because the Bible has had the most significant influence of any book, and they differ with it, skeptical scholars try to reinterpret its meaning away from its clear, straightforward message. The worldview of the Bible is clearly understood. It may not be accepted. But to answer the question “Can we understand the Bible?” the first answer is “yes.” In fact, people have always understood it.[19]

The Bible and Literature

The second issue of the chapter is how to understand literature. More precisely, it is how to understand the Bible since it is literature. In modern times, the Bible has been subjected to the same types of analysis that other forms of literature have. The first scholars to approach it that way feared for their lives because they were considered heretics. With growing secularism, however, more scholars boldly expressed their opinions that the Bible has to be subjected to the same criteria as other books. They looked for parallels in other cultures to explain how seemingly unique concepts found their way into the Bible.[20] Further study has revealed that virtually all of the “parallels” were not really parallel. The Bible has its own uniqueness.[21]

The more lasting contributions came from scholars who examined the literary aspects of the Bible. All communication involves three elements: a sender (author), a text (the Bible), and recipients (readers). The history of hermeneutics involves issues with each of these three. Space prohibits detailed analysis of every issue related to them. Our approach will be largely to summarize and focus on primary movements. The theme of the chapter is “Can We Understand the Bible?” After discussing the central questions related to it, I will offer some suggestions to answer that question positively.

The Text

At first glance, issues of understanding seem to be related to the texts themselves. Questions concerning how they were written, what language, what cultural references, and the like initially come to mind. Much of hermeneutical study considers these questions. They occasioned the refining of the historical-critical method of hermeneutics. Conservative scholars have been less prone to accept the “critical” side of the methodology but have affirmed the historical, linguistic, grammatical aspects of interpretation. Using the historical, grammatical, and linguistic aspects of literature did not come from the urging of more liberal scholars. Conservative scholars argued through the centuries the necessity of these tools for understanding ancient literature.

It is necessary to distinguish methods and movements. In many respects, all who approach ancient literature must have expertise in using proper methods. These include language, syntax, philology, and provenance of the writings. The methods are both necessary and essential. Movements use methods but tend to claim them as distinctively their own. This is what happened with the historical-critical movement. All scholars acknowledged the historical and grammatical methodologies. Historical-critical scholars, however, added the critical element to their toolbox. It was a fork in the road. Conservative scholars often denied the critical methodology, though not all did so. Nevertheless, skeptical scholars trumpeted their method that included grammatical and historical as though those were all theirs. The movement stole the methodology.

It is necessary to separate the two again. Movements are tied to specific philosophies. In the history of biblical scholarship, the method (historical-grammatical) joined the skeptical philosophy. A host of scholars objected and used the methods without joining the movement to deny the divine inspiration of the Bible.[22]

For approximately 1,800 years of Christian history, understanding focused on the text. The first methodological conflict was between the literal and allegorical approaches to Scripture. Allegorical interpretation had its origin in neoplatonic thought centered mainly in Alexandria, Egypt. The allegorical scholars believed that words pointed beyond themselves to another world of reality, the world of the logos. It was a rational world of the mind, understood by its own self-vindication.[23] Allegorical biblical scholars claimed that the words of the Bible contained deeper meanings. They pointed to the theological world of rationality. There were at least two dimensions to language, but sometimes three.[24] Their point was that language was only the tip of the iceberg to its greater meaning, which was found beyond the actual words of a text. Thus these interpreters did not deny a literal meaning of the text, but they sought the spiritual meaning to which the words pointed. Practically, meaning depended on theology, which protected the words from meaning “anything” a reader might think.

The literalists countered the allegorists. They understood that the text adequately communicated. Language by itself contained the capability of accurate communication. For them, the primary focus for interpretation was grammatical. The text meant what it said! Theology was the product of the text not the safeguard of the text’s meaning.[25]

These interpreters were text-centered. They believed that the text communicated meaning and the reader had responsibility to gain understanding through the text. The text was always objectively understood. That corresponded to their understanding of Divine inspiration. God had revealed himself uniquely in the Bible. It was adequate and clear. The reader had to read with ears to hear, but any reader could understand the Bible. This view held the majority opinion for over one and a half millennia.[26]

The Author

With the rise of historical criticism and a more sophisticated understanding of how language functions, the text became a battleground instead of an objective message from God. The “functional text” will be discussed more fully later. At this point, it is sufficient to understand that the search for meaning shifted away from the text.

Many conservative scholars sought to protect the objective meaning of the text by pointing to the author’s intent. The question for them was “What did the author mean when he wrote?” The text had no independent life of its own. It could only be understood correctly if one understood the author. The author’s intent refers to deriving the point the author wished to make through his communication with the words of a text.

The Biblical Theology movement, primarily in the 1800s, reinforced the idea that each author had a distinct way of communication and a distinct understanding of the gospel message. The systematic theologians sought to find the unity of the Bible with more than thirty-nine authors spanning at least 1,500 years, by most conservative estimates. Biblical theologians looked to the way the individual writers expressed themselves. The primary emphasis became how they differed from each other. Thus, Paul should not be considered Peter. Matthew should not be considered the same as Luke, and so on.

Admittedly, a few focused entirely on the individual authors and used their methodology to attempt to destroy the unity of the Bible. Employing tools of the behavioral sciences, primarily psychology and sociology, some tried to develop a profile of the writers. Sometimes for them, authorial intent meant the author’s attempt to put his message into words. That is, some exegeted the author rather than the text and reached impossible conclusions. Some even suggested their analysis of the author enabled them to express what the author meant better than the author himself did![27] There was a tendency in some circles for authorial intent to take away from what the author actually wrote (he did not really intend what he wrote) or to suggest imperfections in the text because of imperfections in the profile they developed of the author.

In reality, this is a misunderstanding of authorial intent, and there are numerous problems associated with it. First, all we know of the authors we find in the text itself. That makes the task of developing personality profiles difficult if not impossible.[28] Second, it assumes modern readers know more about the text than ancient readers. Third, it disregards the issues developed carefully in the early church’s task of recognizing the canon.[29] In the early centuries, Christian and so-called Christian writers produced at least dozens of books that we know about today. Many had names of the apostles attached to them. The early church had the task of sorting through them with the intent of recognizing which books were actually inspired uniquely by God and which were not. One of the critical standards for evaluation was the regula fide. This “rule of faith” measured each of the books by its contribution to Christian theology handed down from Jesus to Paul (primarily) and to the apostolic fathers. Their work is founded on the principle of unity in recognizing the canon God inspired.[30] Fourth, this approach is inevitably linked with the assumption that the modern era has provided the proper tools for analyzing everything. Thus we know better today with the skills gained through psychology and sociology, for example. They act as if these tools enable a proper understanding of ancient literature even with very limited evidence to support the various theories of the authors’ profiles. It is the height of arrogance to assume that 2,000 years after the books were written, we can know better than those who first examined them and collated them into a canon.

Authorial intent is a positive contribution to understanding the meaning of the text. Any of us who has been misquoted in print or public address feels violated. We reply, “But that is not what I meant!” Unfortunately, the writers of Scripture cannot object when their words have been abused by later generations. The readers must decide for them. Disregarding their intention, however, surely violates one of the basic laws of communication. The message sent has some objective controls. One of them is what the author intended to say.

The quest to know the author’s intent focused largely on “rules” and scientific methods of discovery. Thus, it became primarily philological. Grammar, syntax, and historical setting enabled one to understand the meaning of the text. In that sense, the task is objective. It is, of course, indispensable. The author chose a language, words, and specific conventions of writing to convey his message. Without understanding these, the text is lost.

At the turn of the nineteenth century the question was asked: even with the scientific rules approach to the text, do we really understand it adequately? That began a quest to understand the meaning and significance of the text. Previously, understanding had been objective; now scholars realized the need for subjectivity as well. Does one really know the author’s intent without feeling the impact of the author’s writing?

Since 1800 scores of writers have contributed to the discussion. Some defend the traditional and objective approach. Others break new ground positing sometimes radically subjective approaches. It is impossible even to survey these. Rather, this section will focus on pivotal thinkers and the issues they spawned by their writings. The most significant are Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768–1834) and Hans-Georg Gadamer (1900–2002). Most contemporary scholars agree with Thistelton that “Schleiermacher provides a great turning point in hermeneutics, comparable only with Gadamer’s second great turning point in the second half of the twentieth century.”[31]

In some senses Schleiermacher is transitional.[32] He held to the necessity of authorial intent, found largely by the scientific methodology. He also felt the need to understand the psychology, the author’s way of thinking. Schleiermacher insisted “that the interpreter must also pay close attention to the effects of the text, to what they set going, as well as ‘how a way of speaking originated.’”[33]

Here, the search for the author’s intent broadens. There is a hermeneutical circle in understanding every text. First, the grammatical parts of a text are only understood when we know the whole of which they are a part. Thus the “circle” is an interchange between the whole and its specific parts. The second aspect of the circle relates to understanding the author and his text. The new element is “every understanding is based on a provisional and preliminary understanding of what the text is about.”[34] Thus, every reader of a text reads the text in light of pre-understanding. Hermeneutics becomes a dialogue between the reader (with a pre-understanding) and the text (revealing that pre-understanding). The idea of pre-understanding dominated hermeneutics for decades and remains a major concern. Simply put, we all approach the text with some preformed idea about it. This may be a simple understanding of spiritual expectations about the Bible, or it may be as complicated as a worldview. It is sometimes epistemological, touching on how we gain knowledge and how we know what we know. It may also be deeply psychological, reflecting a personal relationship with the author of a text. Clearly, this is a lasting major contribution of Schleiermacher. Everyone comes to everything out of a personal context. It also raises the question of whose context is superior: the text’s or the reader’s.[35]

While pre-understanding is a matter of the reader’s stance as the text is read, it may still focus on what the author meant. The dialogue with the text extends to a dialogue with the author. Sometimes one dialogue eclipses the other.

The Text and Reader

A major voice related to the text was German scholar Rudolph Bultmann (1884–1976). Bultmann believed that truth existed in thought before it was objectified. Therefore, objects were only expressions of truth. The term he used to de-objectify was demyth. For him, first-century people expressed the ultimate truth (in the world of thought) through objects and actions in the language of myth.[36] Thus, the biblical authors objectified truth through myth. The task of the modern reader is to go behind (and through) their mythology to the truth they objectified. In his existentialist philosophical framework, Bultmann realized that people would find meaning in the text when their personal life situations paralleled that of Scripture. The “connection” between the de-objectified world of the first century and the twenty-first-century reader was the kerygma, or preaching their faith. Ultimately the goal was for the modern reader to identify personally with the faith of the biblical writers.

The objectified ideas for Bultmann were basically the cross, the resurrection, and the doctrine of Christ, Christology. These, of course, were the basic myths of the New Testament because they called for a clearly supernatural intervention into the world. Incarnation was of necessity expressed in mythical terms as the truths were objectified.[37]

Many have criticized Bultmann’s work and his followers have divided. For one, the New Testament does not only describe the faith of its characters. They participate in the story, themselves becoming right with God by grace and not works. Second, his view of history is flawed compared to the Bible’s approach. Faith is not separated from history in a mythical sense, but faith is accomplished through history; moreover, Jesus Christ’s death and resurrection do not have the character of myth as found in other first-century religions. Third, his approach is profoundly existential regarding persons. He is extreme in his desire that the person “meet” God beyond the facts of history and totally in personal experience. In reality, he makes the death and resurrection of Jesus only the embodiment of ideas (truth), not historical events. Yet both the New Testament and extra-biblical history treat these events as shaping history itself, not just forming the faith of those who believe. Bultmann is included here because of his literary approach to the text of the New Testament in particular. In de-objectifying the events of the New Testament he disregards any plain sense reading.

Hans-Georg Gadamer represents the second major turning point in modern hermeneutics. He is considered under the heading of text because of the way he understood texts to function. Before Gadamer turned his thoughts to literature, he formed much of his understanding from art.[38] When an artist paints he may have a definite scene in mind. When the painting is on display, however, the viewers may see elements in the picture that the artist did not intend to build. The reason for this is that the viewer views the painting from his own personal perspective. In that sense, the picture exegetes the viewer and establishes an ongoing dialogue. “All encounters with the languages of art is an encounter with an unfinished event, and is itself part of this event.”[39] The individual therefore participates in the ongoing meaning that the picture reveals. It is the ongoing participation that keeps the viewer from total subjectivity. The picture has a history that it “brings” to the encounter and the viewer participates in that history in a contemporary way.

Gadamer then turned to texts. Gadamer spoke of two horizons: the horizon of the text and the horizon of the interpreter. When one reads the text, the two horizons may fuse so that the two horizons merge into one: meaning for the reader.[40] Understanding the text requires communication between the text and the reader. This is called conversation and occurs through language. Therefore, he accepts the need for language study but also understands the ultimate purpose is not for recovering the past as much as enriching the present. Conversation is necessary because everyone interprets everything. Interpretation may shape understanding permanently if no conversation occurs.

Initially the pre-understanding dominates. It is formed by tradition and personal experiences. Pre-understandings are essential in opening up the conversation with the texts, leading to understanding. One of the contributions of Gadamer is the priority of interpretation. Everyone begins with an interpretation that can be shaped in dialogue with the text.[41]

Gadamer opened the door to thinking about the text unrestrained by the author’s intent. Texts develop a life of their own. They continue to have value because they are ever contemporary, bringing meaning to the present. In Gadamer’s wake, many completely forgot the original author and focused on the power of the text.

Another emphasis Gadamer brought was the necessity of doing in order to understand. Hermeneutics was a practice, not just an intellectual exercise. In fact, application “is the central problem of hermeneutics.”[42] Without doing there is no understanding.

Later interpreters seemed to pick up the idea of the “interpretive community.” Whether there is a direct connection or not may be debated, but in many circles attention shifted to the reading community and its needs. These may be considered the things that shaped the pre-understanding. Even so, pre-understanding became a way of viewing the Bible. For some, it was a legitimate way of interpretation. Thus rather than seek to refine and shape the pre-understanding to a biblical way of “seeing,” the pre-understanding became a legitimate way of interpretation. The Bible then became a tool of power for other causes and interpretation became largely a matter of whose pre-understanding should prevail.

In some ways the liberationists fall into this category. It would be a mistake to put all in one category, but the emphases are often found in the extremes of the movements. Thus liberation theology, feminist theology, womanist theology, and perhaps others saw in the Bible a way to “prove” their causes. These movements often began with the social and political status of the readers who then saw parallels between the Bible and their situations. Following that, the themes with which they began (pre-understanding) became the lens through which they interpreted, and ultimately the Bible became the motivator for change. Regarding liberationist Juan Luis Segundo of Uruguay, Thiselton reports that “he insists that the liberation theologian must allow his pre-understanding to be shaped both by sociology and by an active involvement in society.”[43] This often caused an affinity between theology and the works of Karl Marx.[44] Thus the pre-understanding becomes an asset to seeing the Bible differently.

This section focused on the text. The primary point to be made is that there was a subtle shift from the text understood by authorial intent to the text functioning independently of historical constraints. By the end of the twentieth century many, if not most, interpreters cared little for what the text meant. They cared greatly about what the text means. The meaning of the text is found in how it speaks to individuals and groups in their own social and political situations. The shift overlooks the primary message of Scripture, allowing secondary themes and biblical history to become primary.

The Reader

Finally, it is necessary to speak briefly about the primacy of the reader. The previous section, the text, has paved the way for this. Generally the emphasis on the reader comes through those who espouse a Reader-Response Hermeneutic. The earlier and more text-centered theorists made a more formal connection between the reader and the text.[45] Later, however, the response of the reader is the meaning.[46] As Fish explained, “I ‘saw’ what my interpretive principles permitted or directed me to see, and then I turned round and attributed what I had ‘seen’ to the text.”[47]

Thus, in its most developed form, Reader-Response theory takes the reader’s understanding as normative in interpretation. The reader’s understanding is found in the active response the reader makes to the text. It is in “doing” that understanding occurs.

Summary

In summary, this lengthy section intended to illustrate the situation of modern biblical hermeneutics. Taking the three normal elements of interpretive focus, it surveyed some of the major issues in each. Thus there are concerns about the author, the text, and the reader. Often these interrelate. While the survey has been far from adequate from a historical perspective, I hope it has provided insights into some of the primary thinkers and how their thinking related to others.

By and large, the current hermeneutical theories are subjective. They have little concern for the objective nature of the text or of any intended meaning. Meaning relates to personal experience, and experience both begins the textual inquiry and ends it.

The question of the chapter is “Can We Understand the Bible?” That assumes there may be a normative meaning that all should be able to find. The question relates to understanding the Bible, not understanding ourselves or bringing our own interpretations in such a way that we misunderstand the Bible in favor of an interpretation that strikes “my” fancy. So far, we have suggested multiple issues involved in understanding. In the next section we will make some suggestions as to (1) the fact that the Bible has a normative message that all should understand and (2) the ways we can approach it to arrive at that understanding.

Can We Understand the Bible?

God inspired the Bible for our understanding. If what the Bible claims about itself, that it is divinely inspired, and what we believe is true, then obviously its message is unique. That is to say, the proper understanding of the Bible is critical. From the Bible’s perspective, proper understanding is essential for one to have a relationship with God. From God’s perspective, as best we can understand him, the Bible matters. Surely God inspired his authors to write in such a way that we not only can but do understand.

The thesis of this essay is that “the Bible has a self-correcting mechanism so that readers can understand its message accurately and adequately.” This has been the uniform testimony of countless readers as they approached the Bible. Not all have had the same pre-understanding that tends toward acceptance. Some were skeptical. Some were opposed to the Bible. Even so, in reading it they came to understand and accept its words as true. Several elements suggest the nature of the self-correcting mechanism.

We should begin by agreeing with much of what scholars have said about the nature of interpreting literature. The three components of written communication—author, text, and reader—each have a part to play in understanding. It will be helpful, therefore, to provide insights related to all three.

The Text

1. The Bible’s message has never been broadly accepted. It is too naïve to assume that some generations could easily understand the message and others not. The biblical characters’ constant complaint reveals that truth. From Cain, who misunderstood God in his sacrifice, to the churches of Revelation, who went their ways rather than God’s—even in ancient times—most did not accept the message. In other words, God’s word through the Bible was always counter to the cultures in which it was given. While the language, broader culture, and history may have been similar, the unique message of the Bible always seemed to escape some people. Virtually every prophet complained that his hearers did not understand. Even Jesus died with the prayer on his lips “Father forgive them . . . they know not what they do” (Luke 23:34 ESV). No generation has been better able to accept the message of the Bible than any other. If, therefore, the concern is that our generation (or time) seems to be the one that cannot identify with the message, then that is obviously false. Of course, understanding and accepting are two different issues. If, however, the reader response thinkers have an element of truth, and they do, then the deepest understanding will not be possible until one accepts the message. The world as a whole has always seemed to miss God’s voice. However, we should not equate rejection of the message with the lack of understanding, at least at the most basic level. Throughout the Bible there is a tension between culpability and responsibility. Regarding understanding the Bible, people are responsible to understand, implying that it is possible. They are also legitimately at fault if they do not understand. They are culpable.

2. The Bible creates its own literary world. This point speaks directly to the text. No one would doubt that there are levels of understanding. Prolonged contact and commitment to any book or ideology brings better understanding.

Reading any literature involves some basic elements. First, there must be a shared language. This is accomplished adequately by a text’s availability in the original languages and by translations. Second, there must be a reason to read it. Generally that involves an interest in the book’s content. Third, there should be a basic believability about the book. That is, we assume the writer speaks the truth and/or illustrates the truth through the pen. If we find out differently, we can decide what to do with the book’s message. Fourth, the book’s value relates to its ability to touch life. We identify with the content of the book at some level or discard it as worthless.

Most people acknowledge the moral value of the Bible. It touches life in a way that they readily identify with it. Who would choose to live in a world where there is disregard for life, where people violate each other, where sexual promiscuity and unbridled lust prevail, and where everyone does what pleases him or her? The morality of the Bible cannot be disputed. Following the teachings of Jesus leads to a better life for the individual and the world. Everyone understands these portions of the text and most people applaud his teachings.[48]

The Bible draws the reader into its perspective. Like Gadamer’s illustration of the painting, the reader is drawn into the story of the Bible. Its history, morality, compassion, and constant theme of grace touch life in ways all can understand. Even most of the characters of biblical history have both good and bad conduct, and all people can identify with them in that. The Bible’s realistic presentation disarms and encourages readers.

The problematic aspects of the Bible were identified in the first section. Records of miracles and the interpretation of history as God’s working out his plan cause some people to balk. Even so, the Bible consistently displays its own worldview. From Genesis to Revelation God intervenes in human history and human society. Furthermore, there is a unity of purpose in the Bible. From the garden of Eden to Revelation, God’s plan to redeem holds the narrative together. When this is understood in light of the multiple authors (at least 39) and centuries of writing (c. 1500), this is all the more impressive. From Genesis to Revelation the Bible creates its own narrative. It describes “this age” as we know it in a way that places it in the context of “all ages.” Its explanations of life and existence consistently reiterate God’s plan.

Even the parts that pose difficulty to many make sense in the “world of the Bible.” From the beginning it explains the need of a redeemer to cleanse the sins of the world. The profile of the redeemer is shaped throughout the Old Testament and is found in Jesus in the New Testament.

In saying the Bible creates its own world, we mean that throughout history its message has been unique. Multitudes of readers testify to the fact that once they understood the central theme, they were drawn into the world of the Bible and its worldview made sense. It has a logical consistency. No other literature is like the Bible.

We are not suggesting that the Bible creates reality. The Bible records what God does. It also records what God says. God’s words correlate with what he does in history. Thus, the Bible is not meta-history or supra-history.[49] It is God acting in time and space. Yet there is a narrative that draws the reader into it and, once there, the reader understands.

3. The message of the Bible is clarified by clear statement and repetition. Several times we have stated that the Bible not only can be understood but that it is. This understanding is at the most basic level. Reaction against the Bible comes primarily because readers do not want to accept the message. Yet they know enough to accept or reject. Acceptance is the beginning of knowledge.

The message of the Bible is clearly stated. For example, the words of the prophets and the words of Jesus brought reactions because they were understood. The reactions of people throughout the centuries have been the same as that of the day they were spoken and written. Some sections of the Bible demand more serious study, and perhaps they are a main reason for advanced hermeneutical principles. The central message, however, involves God, sin and alienation from God and self, redemption through the love of God and the sacrifice of Jesus, and acceptance and reunion with God through conversion and the purity developed by the Holy Spirit.

The central message recurs often throughout the Bible. In various times, ways, and through various situations the message remains. It is repeated frequently enough that it is impossible to miss. Generation after generation understood what God was doing in history. Its message was clear.

4. The Bible corrects the hermeneutical circle. As noted before, the hermeneutical circle describes the reader in relation to the Bible. The reader brings pre-understanding to the text, and the text reinforces that pre-understanding. The cycle is the circle.

The strong point of the circle is that there is communication. Gadamer’s word conversation well describes the dialogue between reader and text. Thiselton prefers to use the word horizon rather than circle. There are two horizons: that of the text and that of the reader. Thiselton defines horizon as “a technical term in hermeneutical theory. Even in popular parlance horizon is used metaphorically to denote the limits of thought dictated by a given viewpoint or perspective.”[50] The horizons are in place regardless of distance between them. Obviously, difficulties increase with the distance of time, from the first century to the twenty-first. Nevertheless, the two horizons can fuse (as per Gadamer) through language. Thus the text is capable of bridging the gaps in understanding.[51]

The hermeneutical circle may leave the reader in hopelessness. It is better to think in terms of a “hermeneutical spiral,” as Grant Osborne suggests. In the hermeneutical spiral, the reader “asks questions” of the text which the text “answers.” The text will, of course, answer the question it is asked. The answer provided by the text, however, corrects the question. The reader then asks a more refined and accurate question of the text, one that was enlightened by the text’s answer. The text answers that question with another refinement. The dialogue continues but in an upward spiral. Progressively, through the “conversation,” the reader enters the world of the Bible through its text. Thus the Bible provides both understanding and meaning.

The Author

1. Retaining the author’s intent. The previous discussion about authorial intent revealed that those who hold to it can posit a variety of definitions and approaches to it. They range from strict “text-based” understanding to understanding the text better than the author.

That said, authorial intent historically has been interpreted as “that which is controlled by what the author intended in his writing.” The fact is, the only way we know ancient authors of the Bible is by what they wrote. Therefore, the text speaks only what the author wanted it to say. His intent can be found only by the text he wrote. Thus, “authorial intent” is a product of the text itself.[52] Advocating authorial intent is logical and puts controls on the meaning one derives from the text.

2. Understanding God’s intent as author. Because the Bible claims to be divine communication, it is also necessary to look beyond the human author to the divine. Looking for God’s purposes enables one to see a bigger picture than is provided by simply one portion of the Bible. Understanding God’s intent requires the guidance of the Holy Spirit who opens blind eyes and reveals the ultimate purpose and meaning of a text. It is a mistake, however, to think of God’s intent being different from that of the human author. As Peter reminds us, holy men of old were led by the Holy Spirit to write.[53] There is a combination of both human and divine communication in the words of the Bible.

The Reader

1. The reader’s response does affect understanding. Scripture is filled with evidences of this truth. It also corresponds to educational learning theory and psychology. At the most basic level, being converted to Christ brings a new life and a new way of knowing.[54] Jesus said to his disciples that if they would do God’s will they would know.[55] In a sense, therefore, the response of the reader does affect the ability to understand the text.

2. The reader must make a proper response to the text. One of the problems of the more extreme Reader-Response advocates is their disregard for correct action. The response of the reader validated itself regardless of the character of the action. In fact, the action became the vehicle for interpretation.

That is far from the Bible’s expectation of the response of readers. All of us know that readers can be wrong in their response. Not every action is a proper action. The question then becomes “what constitutes a valid response?” The answer is that the response corresponds to that expected of the text. In that sense, it conforms to the text and to the author’s intent. The Bible expects a change in behavior, but it is a change of behavior in accord with its expectations. It begins with conversion, continues in growth toward holiness, and ends with being like Jesus. All valid responses must be within the expectation of the Bible. Biblical expectations occur throughout the entirety of the Bible. They are seen in direct commands, biographical texts, and theological motifs. The Bible is clear enough. The reader must make the proper response.

Conclusion

Often I think of my grandfather. Though not formally educated, his biblical questions at family reunions stumped even the seminary students present. Yet he knew the answers! He understood what the Bible said, and he understood the author of the Bible. He spoke of Paul, Peter, John, and the like, but he always understood they spoke for God. He knew God. He knew God through the Bible. He understood the Bible. In some ways he is a paradigm for us all. We too can understand the Bible, if we will.

1 Without doubt some misunderstood. But the annals of history record the biggest mistakes related to the Bible came from those in political or economic advantage.

2 A simple definition of the perspicuity of Scripture is that the Bible read in its entirety can be clearly understood by the devout reader.

3 This will be discussed further. The self-correcting mechanism involves the unity of Scripture, the consistency of its message, and the Holy Spirit who guides devout readers to the truth.

4 Rick and Shera Melick, Teaching that Transforms: Facilitating Life Change Through Adult Bible Teaching (Nashville: B&H Academic, 2010), 20. It should be noted that there was a misprint in this text which I corrected here.

5 The hermeneutical aspects of this definition are significant. It is intended to indicate a dynamic aspect to inspiration using circumstances, including individual personalities, to impact various cultures.

6 Ibid. The implications of the definition follow on ibid., 20–30.

7 The one pure history book of the New Testament is The Acts of the Apostles. The Gospels are certainly historical, if not history. Taken together they compose the majority of the New Testament.

8 E. D. Hirsch Jr., The Aims of Interpretation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976), 38.

9 Ibid., 39.

10 Ibid., 40.

11 Miracles by definition are unusual. Those who accept the possibility of miracles simply have a different worldview.

12 Perhaps this is most evidenced in the reactions to Paul on Mars Hill. Few accepted the resurrection of Jesus at face value; some were willing to investigate more; apparently many scoffed it as out of hand and impossible. See Acts 17:32–34.

13 See Rom 10:9–10, for example.

14 Luke 1:35 ESV.

15 Many people today stumble at this point. They assume Jesus’ conception was done through intercourse. Further, they assume it is like the mythological descriptions of the gods having sex with humans. Luke avoids both of these points in his description.

16 Ibid., 41.

17 For example, to describe the sun as “rising” is phenomenological. It does not prove they thought the earth was flat. Almost every day in modern times weather forecasters say, “Sunrise tomorrow is at . . .” Are they, too, wrong?

18 One example of this is the common fallacy that ancient peoples thought the earth was flat. In fact, as early as Aristotle (330 BC) many thinkers believed the world was spherical. See G. E. R. Loyd, Aristotle: The Growth and Structure of His Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968), 162–64. Eratosthenes of Egypt (240 BC) determined the circumference of the earth. Jeffrey B. Russell, “The Myth of the Flat Earth,” American Scientific Affiliation. In 1945 the “flat earth” was listed as the second of 20 errors in history by the British Historical Association. Members of the Historical Association, Common Errors in History, General Series, G.1 (London: P. S. King & Staples for the Historical Association, 1945), 4–5.

19 I am not arguing that everyone understands the entire Bible. There are sections that scholars still have not resolved. The point here is that we cannot discard the Bible as irrelevant because we cannot understand its central message.

20 The epitome of this is the Religionsgeschichte movement that consciously sought to explain away the uniqueness of the Bible’s message by showing cultural parallels. The scholars of this movement seemed to accept the “fact” that nothing could be unique. All thoughts and literature should have parallels with other cultures. One of the primary scholars who accepted this approach was Rudolph Bultmann, also known for his hermeneutic of demythologizing.

21 An example of this is the connection often made between Christian baptism and initiation into the mystery cults. Scholars have demonstrated that the parallels are not as clear as once thought. Furthermore, skeptical scholars always seem to assume Christianity borrowed from other sources. They seldom seem to posit the fact that other groups may have copied from Christianity.

22 A classic example of this is the three outstanding British scholars whom some think by themselves retarded the spread of the critical movement in Britain. They were Bishop J. B. Lightfoot, B. F. Westcott, and F. J. A. Hort. To these names could be added a host of others on the continent and in the US. Some of these include Keil and Delitzsch, Hengstenberg, J. A. Alexander, Edward Pusey, H. A. W. Meyer, John Peter Lange, Theodore Zahn, Conybeare and Howson, Henry Alford, and A. T. Robertson. The list of primarily 19th-century biblical scholars laid the groundwork for many conservatives of the 20th and 21st century who built on their work.

23 Neo-platonists posited a difference between the phenomenological world of matter and the pneumenal world of thought, rationality. For them, the higher, and therefore “real” world, was the pneumenal, not the phenomenological.

24 For example, Origen believed that the Bible had three levels of meaning, corresponding to anthropology. First, there was the literal, corresponding to the human body. Second, there was the moral, corresponding to the human soul. Finally, there was the highest dimension, the spiritual, corresponding to the human spirit. Origen was the primary Christian proponent of allegorical interpretation.

25 John Chrysostom was the primary “literal” interpreter. The issues are, of course, more complex and interrelate with issues of canon, apostolic authority, the “rule of faith” (regula fide), and other factors. The point here is that the focus was on the text.

26 Anthony Thiselton reaffirms this when speaking of the impact of Friedrich D. E. Schleiermacher (1768–1834): “It may be difficult for us to realize that hermeneutics before Schleiermacher was so largely or even exclusively philological.” Anthony C. Thiselton, Hermeneutics: An Introduction (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2009), 154.

27 Grant R. Osborne, The Hermeneutical Spiral: A Comprehensive Introduction to Biblical Interpretation (Downer’s Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 1991), 369, states of Wilhelm Dilthey (1833–1911) that he posited “the possibility that readers are in a position to understand the meanings of texts better than the authors themselves. Since readers intersect authors’ minds from outside and bring to bear many techniques, they can recreate meanings that go deeper than the authors themselves realized.”

28 It should be noted that there are a few references to the biblical writers in the church Fathers, but none make a serious contribution to understanding their writings better.

29 Often modern discussion would prefer the term that the early church “determined” the canon. Their deliberations, however, clearly indicate that they sought to discover which of the available books were “God-inspired.” Thus their task was to recognize not determine.

30 Most people realize there were books that were rejected and that some books were disputed. The essential core of the dispute was theological, reflecting a concern for the unity of divine revelation.

31 Thiselton, Hermeneutics, 149.

32 His hermeneutical theory is, perhaps, best found in Friedrich D. E. Schleiermacher Hermeneutics: The Handwritten Manuscripts, ed. Heinz Kimmerle, trans. James Duke and Jack Forstman (Missoula: Scholars Press, 1977).

33 Ibid., 154.

34 Ibid., 155. The circle involved two parts.

35 It should be noted that Schleiermacher was probably more concerned with a person knowing the entire context of the author of a given text. That is, one could so well know the author that the reader can know the text better than the author himself. Even so, this introduces the subjective side of hermeneutics.

36 This is worked out systematically in the 1921 volume Rudolph Bultmann, History of the Synoptic Tradition, trans. John Marsh (Oxford: Blackwell, 1963).

37 See, for example, Rudolph Bultmann, “New Testament and Mythology” in Kerygma and Myth: A Theological Debate, ed. Hans Werner Bartsch, 2 vols. (London: SCM, 1953).

38 The basic work of Gadamer is Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method (London: Sheed and Ward, 1975).

39 Gadamer, Truth and Method, 99 (his italics).

40 This is further explained and evaluated by Anthony C. Thiselton, The Two Horizons: New Testament Hermeneutics and Philosophical Descriptions (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1980), 327–56.

41 There are multiple discussions and criticisms of Gadamer, which testifies to his prominence as a philosopher and hermeneutician. Two recent discussions that relate to the subject of this chapter are Eduardo J. Echeverria, “Gadamer’s Hermeneutics and the Question of Relativism,” and Christina Bieber Lake, “The Knowledge That One Does Not Know: Gadamer, Levertov, and the Hermeneutics of the Question.” Both essays are found in Kevin H. Vanhoozer, James K. A. Smith, and Bruce Ellis Benson, eds., Hermeneutics at the Crossroads (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2006).

42 Gadamer, Truth and Method, 315.

43 Thiselton, Introduction, 268.

44 Liberation theologians generally are (1) selective in their employment of biblical texts (the Exodus being primary); (2) make redemption and justice apply to the group rather than the individual; and (3) see the prevailing cultures as the oppressors who need change.

45 See, for example: Wolfgang Iser, The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978).

46 See for example: Stanley Fish, Is There a Text in This Class? The Authority of Interpretive Communities (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1980), 3.

47 Ibid., 12.

48 They often claim he is a good teacher rather than a unique Savior. It is difficult to understand how they can call him good and reject his teaching about sin and his death as the atonement for it. His vicarious death is a major part of his teaching.

49 I am not suggesting the Bible should be viewed in a Barthian way. Instead, the Bible creates a narrative in and through actual history so that both become the vehicle of divine communication.

50 Anthony C. Thiselton, The Two Horizons: New Testament Hermeneutics and Philosophical Description (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1984), xiv.

51 Though we omitted him from the previous discussion, Ludwig Wittgenstein spoke of “language games” much the same as the horizons. For example, see Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. by G. E. M. Anscombe (Oxford: Blackwell, 1967).

52 Philosopher Nicolas Wolterstorff advocates that the “goal is to get at what the authorizer said” rather than the “authorizer’s intention.” These are different. His suggestion is that we ultimately want to know the author. It also seems that “the author” may be God. See Nicholas Wolterstorff, “Resuscitating the Author” in Vanhoozer, Smith, and Benson, Hermeneutics at the Crossroads, 37. Also see his Divine Discourse: Philosophical Reflections on the Claim That God Speaks (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).

53 2 Peter 1:21. Multiple texts speak to the process of inspiration.

54 See, for example, 1 Cor 2:14 and Rom 12:1–2.

55 John 7:17.

Part Two

Textual and Historical Challenges

Has the Old Testament Text Been Hopelessly Corrupted?

Has the New Testament Text Been Hopelessly Corrupted?

Does the Bible Contain Forgeries?

Is the Story of Jesus Borrowed from Pagan Myths?

Is the Old Testament Historically Reliable?

Is the New Testament Historically Reliable?

Are There Contradictions in the Bible?

Chapter Five

Has the Old Testament Text Been Hopelessly Corrupted?

Paul D. Wegner

The simple answer to this question is definitely not, for if the Old Testament (hereafter OT) had been hopelessly corrupted, then God could not hold us responsible for following his commands. In one sense God would have failed since the purpose for Holy Scripture is to provide divine revelation. That is, God gave his revelation to man (and through man) in order for us to know what he expects from us. A hopelessly corrupt Scripture would not allow us to know his expectations. However, for those who believe in the authority of the Bible, we want to know more than that it is not extensively corrupted. We want to know just how accurate it is if we are going to live our lives by its guidelines. The Scriptures differ from other literature in that they claim to be “God-breathed” (theopneustos, 2 Tim 3:16);[1] the authors were said to be moved along by the Spirit of God (2 Pet 1:20–21). So how do we know if the OT is accurate?

Evaluating the Accuracy of the Old Testament

Historiography is commonly defined as “a written account of the past based on source inquiry,”[2] and the OT is largely a history about God’s dealings with the nation of Israel. A number of modern scholars have become skeptical of any source that expounds miracles or supernatural events, and thus the OT is sometimes dismissed out of hand. Iain Provan presents a more balanced and mediating approach:

Our knowledge of the past is dependent on testimony. This being the case, and biblical testimony being the major testimony about Israel’s past that we possess, it must be folly to marginalize biblical testimony in any modern attempt to recount the history of Israel. It can be considered perfectly rational to consider that testimony along with other testimonies. It should be considered irrational, however, to give epistemological privilege to these other testimonies, even to the extent of ignoring biblical testimony altogether. . . . We should make our judgments on a case-by-case basis, however, rather than prejudging the matter by utilizing faulty methodological criteria that allegedly lead us to “firm ground” for historiography within or outside of biblical testimony.[3]

According to Provan, then, the primary records of Israel’s past are found in the Scriptures. A careful and rigorous examination of the OT is therefore crucial to the evaluation of Israel’s history, and the place to start is the OT sources themselves. This is why OT textual criticism is so important to our evaluation of the Scriptures, for we must determine the actual reading of those OT texts to make sure we have a firm foundation upon which to begin our process. Kenton Sparks states, “Modern historians normally sift through their sources to determine which are most beneficial, mainly because their objective is to present an account of the past that is as accurate as possible.”[4] This too is our goal in OT textual criticism.

The Nature of OT Textual Criticism

The Definition of OT Textual Criticism

OT textual criticism is the science and art that seeks to determine the most reliable reading of the Hebrew text.[5] It is a science because specific rules govern the evaluation of various types of copyist errors and readings, but it is also an art because these rules cannot be rigidly applied in every situation. Intuition and common sense must guide the process of determining the most plausible reading. Informed judgments about a text depend upon one’s familiarity with copyist errors, manuscripts, versions, and their authors. No original manuscripts (or autographa) exist from the authors of Scripture, but this is to be expected since they were written on perishable materials (i.e., papyrus, leather; cp. Jeremiah 36) that in time began to wear out and needed to be recopied.[6] The ancient Jews did not appear to have the same view of the autographa as modern scholarship; thus copies fit their needs equally well and were treated with the same respect and honor as the earlier manuscripts. However, when an older manuscript became so worn as to no longer be used for reading or study, it was ritually buried in a geniza (“hidden place”). It was still treated with honor since it contained the name of God, Yahweh. The most well-known geniza is the Cairo Geniza, found in an old synagogue in Cairo in the late nineteenth century.

Why is textual criticism necessary? In the age of photocopying, laser printing, and e-books, it is sometimes hard to imagine that parts of the OT were hand-copied for thousands of years until the development of the printing press or, more specifically, “moveable print,” in the fifteenth century AD.[7] Centuries of hand copying allowed for the possibility of mistakes creeping into a text. Even when scribes were vigilant and highly trained, mistakes were occasionally incorporated into the new copies. The following are just a few of the reasons mistakes were made: (1) poor quality vorlages (i.e., manuscripts being copied from—some contained worm holes or became very dark from deterioration); (2) scribes often had to copy manuscripts under poor conditions (e.g., low-lighting conditions or cold rooms); (3) some scribes were not well-trained or sufficiently careful; and (4) scribes sometimes modified their copies both intentionally or unintentionally. Copying manuscripts is a long and tedious process—mistakes can sneak into the text even when meticulous rules are followed, as anyone who has published a book can attest to. OT textual criticism then, is the comparison of various Hebrew manuscripts, ancient translations, and even Jewish Targums to determine where those mistakes entered the text and what is, to the best of our ability, the most plausible original reading of the text.

The Goal of OT Textual Criticism

There has been significant debate as to the goal of OT textual criticism since the OT text is a literary document that was collected and copied over an extended period of time.[8] A biblical book may have gone through some modification on the way to its final, authoritative form, and there are times when we can identify these changes (e.g., “Dan” in Gen 14:14; Isa 7:8). The goal of the OT text critic is to determine the final, authoritative form, which then was maintained by the scribes and was later recorded in the canon. This position assumes Adam van der Woude’s contention that there has always been a relative “uniformity” of the textual tradition in the religious circles around the temple, even amidst the “plurality” that developed before the turn of the century.[9] The final form of the text that later became canonical may not be obtainable in every case; nevertheless, it is a plausible goal in the vast majority of the cases, especially given the number of materials discovered in the twentieth century (e.g., Qumran mss, Naḥal Ḥever mss, Cairo Genizah mss).

The starting point of OT textual criticism, commonly considered a “uniform text,” differs significantly from NT textual criticism, commonly considered a “non-uniform text.” James Barr, who before his death in 2006 held OT professorships at Oxford and Vanderbilt Universities, summarized the differences well:

With a non-uniform text [e.g., the NT] we may find variant readings, and textual discussion begins from the variant readings, even if all of them “make sense.” With a text of high uniformity [e.g., the OT], however, textual discussion will more frequently begin from the feeling that there is a “difficulty”; the procedure will be more independent of the existence of variant readings.[10]

This makes the task of OT text critics more subjective than that of their NT counterparts. P. Kyle McCarter notes the additional difficulty that a text may be corrupt even though it remains clear and easy to understand:

A copyist who inadvertently strays from his text is much more likely to write something familiar to himself—something he frequently writes—than something unfamiliar. It is the nature of scribal error that it tends to produce the ordinary, commonplace, or “easy” reading. Corrupt texts, therefore, very often read quite smoothly.[11]

It is important to keep in mind that there is very little question about the reliability of most of the Hebrew text—textual criticism really only deals with a small portion of the overall text. However, it is crucial for the OT textual critic to have a good understanding of the history of the OT text in order to understand how the process of its preservation affects OT textual criticism.

History of the Hebrew Text

Shortly after the third millennium in both Egypt [Hieroglyphics] and Mesopotamia [Sumerian], people began to write historical works describing wars, famines, and conquering of empires. If someone wanted another copy, or if the original copy began to show signs of wear, a scribe would have to hand-copy the original text. However, not all scribes were careful and not all original documents were clear and understandable, allowing for mistakes to be made in the process of copying. Scriptures that were handed down as revelation from God were treated much more carefully and reverently in the copying process than most other literary documents.[12] In fact, the Scriptures were so important to the nation of Israel that an entire class of scholars called sopherim (“scribes”) developed from about 500 BC to AD 100. Their primary job was to preserve Israel’s sacred traditions, the foundation of the nation. While the scribes’ primary job was to preserve the text [commonly called “repetition”], they also sometimes slightly modified or updated the texts in order to ensure that the Israelites understood them [commonly called “resignification”];[13] for example, following the return from the Babylonian exile, the Jewish people were more familiar with Aramaic than Hebrew, and thus the scribes not only recorded the OT Scriptures in Aramaic script (sometimes called “square script”) but also continued adding matres lectionis (i.e., Hebrew consonants that represented vowels to assist pronouncing and understanding the text). The use of matres lectionis did not affect the meaning of the text but helped to clarify which forms of the word the author intended. However, sometime during the first century AD, the Hebrew text became much more unified and thus much easier for the scribes to maintain. There has been significant debate concerning why or how this happened,[14] but there is a significant difference between the varied textual traditions found at Qumran dating between the third and first centuries BC and the minimal deviations in the Hebrew texts from Masada (prior to AD 73), the caves at Naḥal Ḥever (late first century AD), and Wadi Murabbaʻat (written before the Bar Kochba revolt of AD 132–135). This difference in the Hebrew texts is most likely the result of a Judaism that was much more variegated before the destruction of the temple, thus allowing for more “resignification” of the Hebrew text among the various Jewish groups. Following the destruction of the temple, Judaism was dominated by the Pharisees who tended toward “repetition” of the Scriptures instead. Thus, scribes were no longer willing to allow even slight modifications of the text; they were meticulous to ensure that the Hebrew text did not become corrupted.

Shortly after the beginning of the Christian era (c. AD 70–200), a second group of scribes arose called the Tannaim (tānnāîm “repeaters,” i.e., teachers) who began copying their traditions. The Mishnah (a collection of Jewish oral traditions expounding the OT laws), some of which may have originated in the early first century BC, also began to take shape under the Tannaim. During this period or shortly thereafter, Talmudic evidence suggests that the temple hired professional “correctors” or “revisers” (maggihim) who conducted some type of textual criticism on the temple scrolls.[15] Thus, even though the tendency in copying scrolls favored the “repetition” of the Hebrew text, the copying process at times incorporated mistakes or errors that needed to be removed. A third group of scribes called the Amoraim (amôrāîm “expositors”) arose about AD 200–500 and preserved the Hebrew text. During this period the Talmud (a record of the rabbinic discussions concerning the interpretation of Jewish law, customs, etc.) began to be formed. The Amoraim were centered in both Babylonia and Palestine giving rise to two Talmuds, the Babylonian and Palestinian. Sometime during this period meticulous rules were developed to preserve the OT text in the synagogue scrolls. For example:

1. Only parchments from clean animals were allowed; these were to be joined together with thread from clean animals.

2. Each written column of the scroll was to have no fewer than forty-eight lines and no more than sixty lines whose breadth must consist of thirty letters.

3. The page was first to be lined, from which the letters were to be suspended.

4. No word or letter was to be written from memory.

5. The scribe must wash himself entirely and be in full Jewish dress before beginning to copy the scroll.

6. He could not write the name Yahweh with a newly dipped brush, nor take notice of anyone, even a king, while writing this sacred name.[16]

Later an entire tractate was devoted to the proper procedures for preparing a sacred scroll, and many more requirements were added.[17]

Finally, about AD 500–1000, a fourth group of scribes called the Masoretes inherited the scribal traditions and preserved them. Their diligent labors helped to preserve the Hebrew text we have today, called the Masoretic Text. These scribes were extremely careful and treated the text with great reverence. They made meticulous notes regarding the text, from recording the number of letters used in a book to indicating the middle letter of a book. As H. Wheeler Robinson, former professor of Oxford University, observes, “Everything countable seems to be counted.”[18] They also made careful notations along the sides of the Hebrew text and in multiple other volumes concerning the reading and pointing of the texts. There were two major venues of Jewish scholarship, one in Babylon and one in Palestine. Following the Islamic conquest of Palestine in 638, Tiberias once again revived and became the chief center for Jewish textual studies.[19] From about 500 to 1000, the Masoretes added vowel points, accents, and the Masorahs (to help safeguard the text from error), as well as scribal corrections. In the early half of the tenth century, two notable Masoretic families flourished in Tiberias: the Ben Asher and Ben Naphtali families. It was once thought that these textual traditions were significantly different, but now they are considered one textual tradition with only minor variations.[20] Eventually the Ben Naphtali textual tradition began to die out and Ben Asher took the predominant position.

The Process of OT Textual Criticism

Despite the careful and meticulous process scribes observed in preserving the Hebrew text, errors still came into the text through the copying process. But a general knowledge of OT textual criticism will provide a basis for understanding just how accurate the OT Hebrew text is, will provide guidelines to determine the most reliable reading of a text, and will help to avoid dogmatism in passages where a definitive reading cannot be determined. There were many issues that complicated the copying process, but scribes tend to make the same types of errors. An awareness of the types of mistakes common to the transmission of texts thus provides a good foundation to understanding the textual critical process.

Types of Errors

The following are the more frequent types of corruptions that may be encountered in manuscripts.

Unintentional Changes

These changes occur accidentally in the copying process and are often easy to spot.

Confusion of Similar Letters. In Hebrew square script, several letters that look very similar can be easily mistaken (e.g.,ד [d, dālet] and ר [r, rêš]; ם [final m, mêm] andס [s, sāmek]). Example: Genesis 10:4 refers to a clan of people known as the “Dodanim” (דֹּדָנִים, dōdānîm), but 1 Chronicles 1:7 calls them “Rodanim” (רֹדָנִים, rōdānîm). The name “Rodanim” is generally preferred as a reference to the Rhodians of the Asia Minor coastline.[21]

Homophony. The substitution of similar sounding letters or words (e.g., in English “it’s” is often mistakenly written for “its,” or “there” for “their”). Several Hebrew letters (e.g., א [ʼalep] and ע [ʽayin], ת (tāw) and ט [ṭêt], ס [sāmek] and שׂ [śīn]) and words (e.g., כֹּל [kōl] “all” and קוֹל [qôl] “voice”) are hard to distinguish by sound alone, so that errors of homophony could easily have been incorporated into the text during periods of oral transmission. Example: In Isaiah 9:2 (ET 3) the word לֹא (lōʼ, “not”; “You have multiplied the nation, [and] not increased the joy” [KJV]) was apparently incorrectly substituted for the word לוֹ (lô, “to him” or “to it”; “You shall multiply the nation, You shall increase their gladness [lit. ‘gladness to it’]” [NASB]).

Haplography. The omission of a letter or word. For example, “occurence” is a common misspelling of “occurrence.” Omissions also tended to occur when the copyists accidentally skipped ahead to the same letter or word further along in the text. Psalm 18:27 reads “with the one who is pure, you show yourself pure (תִּתְבָּרָר, titbārār [Hithpaʽel form]),” but 2 Samuel 22:27 quotes this psalm simply as, “you were pure (תִּתָּבַר, tittābar [Niphʽal form]),” which suggests that a rêš fell off due to haplography.

Dittography. A letter or word that has been written twice rather than once. For example, in English latter might mistakenly be written for later. This mistake was more easily made when copying letters that were very similar. In Jeremiah 51:3 the word יִדְרֹךְ (yidrōk, “he drew [a bow]”) appears twice consecutively. The Masoretes, recognizing the mistake, left the secondידרך (ydrk) unpointed. The text of Jeremiah 51:3 is translated as “Let not the archer bend bend his bow” and the second “bend” should be left out.

Metathesis. A reversal in the order of two letters or words. This is a common typographical error. For example, “urn” written for “run,” “dog” for “god,” or “nay” for “any.” In 2 Samuel 22:46 the word וְיַחְגְּרוּ , weyaḥgerû “they come girded (from their strong fortresses)” (see also Targum and several Hebrew manuscripts) should probably be written as וְיַחְרְגוּ , weyaḥregû “they come trembling (from their strong fortresses)” as found in Psalm 18:46 (see also Septuagint [LXX] and Syriac Peshitta).

Fusion. Incorrect word division that results in two words being joined as one. An illustration in English would be, “the man held his handout” (rather than hand out). Fusion probably appears in the MT of Leviticus 16:8: “And Aaron shall cast lots for the two goats, one for the LORD and the other for Azazel (לַעֲזָאזֵל, laʽăzāʼzēl)” (see also vv. 10, 26). Medieval rabbis identified Azazel as a hairy desert demon,[22] but why would Aaron give one of the goats to a demon? It makes more sense to divide the name in two, לָעַז אֹזֵל (lāʽaz ʼōzēl “for the goat of departure [or ‘going away’],” referring to the goat that is led off into the desert. This reading is supported by the LXX and Vulgate.

Fission. One word that has incorrectly been separated into two. For example, “Jennifer is a grand child” can be a mistake of fission that should read “Jennifer is a grandchild.” The textual note from BHS for Psalm 102:4 (ET 3)b-b states that the reading כְּמוֹ־קֵד (kemô qēd [uncertain meaning]) in the Codex Leningradensis is incorrect and that multiple Hebrew manuscripts read instead,כְּמוֹקֵד (kemôqēd “like a burning mass” (BDB, 428d) or “like a furnace/hearth” (KB^3, 559d).

These are some of the most common mistakes that copyists made. A general knowledge of these types of copying mistakes can help the OT textual critic better understand possible corruptions arising in the Hebrew text.

Intentional Changes

These changes, which are often an attempt to improve or clarify a text, can be difficult to spot. Bruce M. Metzger pointedly remarks that “scribes who thought were more dangerous than those who wished merely to be faithful in copying what lay before them.”[23]

Changes in Spelling or Grammar. Over time, scribes apparently tended to update archaic language so that the text could be better understood. For example, the MT of Psalm 11:1d reads נוּדוּ (נוּדִי) הַרְכֶם צִפּוֹר , nûdû harkem ṣippôr (lit. “flee to your mountain a bird”). But the LXX (Psalm 10) reads μεταναστεύου ἐπì τὰ ὄρη ὡς στουθίον (“flee to the mountain like a bird”). The latter appears to follow an original Hebrew wording נוּדוּ (נוּדִי) הַר כְּמוֹ צִפּוֹר , nûdû har kemô ṣippôr, that includes an archaic Hebrew form (kemô) “like, as.” It is quite plausible that the scribe was confused by the archaic form.[24]

Clearing Up Other Difficulties. Copyists appear to have modified unclear phrases, rare words, or even words used in an unusual way so that they could be more easily understood (for example, often a qerê reading provides a more common form for the text (Ps 10:5, kethîb דְּרָכָו [derākāw, “his ways”], qerê דְּרָכָיו [derākāyw, “his ways”]; Ps 18:51, kethîb מַגְדִּל [magdil “to cause to make great”], qerê מַגְדִּיל [magdîl “to cause to make great”]).

Euphemistic Changes. A euphemism is the substitution of a milder term for a more unpleasant or offensive one, but sometimes changes were made simply to smooth out the grammar or to help the text sound better. Most MT manuscripts contain anywhere from eleven to eighteen tiqqunê sopherîm “corrections by the scribes” depending on the manuscript. A good example in the poetic books is Psalm 106:20, “So they exchanged their glory (כְּבוֹדָם , kebôdām) for the image of a bull that eats grass.” The tiqqunê sopherîm listed in the textual notes of BHS says that the scribes changed the phrase “His [God’s] glory” (כְּבוֹדׇם, kebôdô) to “their glory” (כְּבוֹדָם, kebôdām). Another interesting example is Genesis 18:22, which originally read “and God remained standing before Abraham.” However, the phrase “to stand before someone” later came to denote subservience to that person. Scribes, therefore, rearranged the sentence order out of reverence for God.

Textual Critical Methodology

The job of the text critic requires the perceptivity of a private detective in piecing together what steps led up to the present-day text. No single witness perfectly reproduces the original Hebrew text (sometimes called Urtext) of the entire Old Testament; therefore, it is important to carefully examine every piece of evidence before drawing a final conclusion. Since there are no original autographs of any of the Old Testament books, all extant manuscripts are copies of copies. It is the job of the text critic to try to work backward to the reading that is as close as possible to the final, authoritative reading of the text.

The best way to identify possible errors in the Old Testament text is to look for problems in translation, an apparent textual corruption, or textual variations. To be effective, textual criticism should include the following steps: (1) collect evidence from various sources, including the MT tradition, recensions and ancient versions; (2) evaluate both internal and external evidence; (3) determine the most plausible reading; and (4) suggest a conjectural reading only when the attested readings do not make sense.

Collect Evidence from Various Sources

The MT is a good place to begin since it derives from the oldest and, to date, most reliable tradition overall. Most modern critical editions of the MT (e.g., BHS [Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia], BHQ [Biblia Hebraica Quinta], Hebrew University Bible Project) have already compared the MT traditions and provide a summary of the pertinent information in their textual apparatuses (cf., variant readings from the medieval texts are collated in Johann H. Michaelis, Biblia Hebraica ex aliquot manuscriptis et compluribus . . . [Halle, 1720]; Benjamin Kennicott, Vetus Testamentum Hebraicum [Oxford, 1776–80]; Giovanni B. de Rossi, Variae Lectiones Veteris Testamenti . . . [Parmae, 1784–88]; Christian D. Ginsburg, The Old Testament . . . [London, 1908ff.; new ed. 1926]). Most modern critical editions are diplomatic editions (i.e., reproductions of one known codex of the MT—often the Codex Leningradensis dated to AD 1008) that reproduce the text exactly, even when it is known to be wrong (e.g., see textual notes for Psalm 20:9a where a daghesh is added for no apparent reason [קַּמְנוּ instead of קַמְנוּ ]). The textual apparatus indicates any corrections or variations from this standard text, as well as evidence from the ancient versions or recensions. In general, most significant variations in manuscripts arose before the first century AD when the Pharisees preferred “repetition” of the text, or from traditions other than the MT (e.g., LXX, Qumran texts, SP [Samaritan Pentateuch], Vulgate, Peshitta).

Evaluating the Internal and External Evidence

Once corruptions or significant variants have been identified, the next step is to evaluate both internal evidence and external evidence to assist in determining the most plausible reading.

Internal Evidence. Internal evidence is gathered from the immediate and broader context (e.g., repeated sentence structures; word usages; or literary structures, such as ellipsis, alphabetic acrostic, chiasm [i.e., inverted sequence or crossover of parallel words or phrases—a b b´ a´ pattern]). The following questions may be useful in unraveling a difficult reading: (1) Is there any evidence of transmissional corruption (e.g., metathesis, haplography, fusion)? Corruptions of this type are fairly easy to spot. (2) Is it plausible that a scribe purposely or inadvertently changed the text (e.g., omission, changes for euphemistic reasons, archaic usage)? (3) Do any linguistic forms or literary structures of the passage help determine the original meaning of the text? For example, the editors of BHS suggest including the following nûn-strophe in Psalm 145:14 [ET 13], which reads נאמן יהוה בכל־דבריו וחסיד בכל־משיו , “The LORD is faithful in all His words and kind in all His deeds” (as found in one Hebrew manuscript, the LXX, and the Syriac Peshitta). This psalm is an alphabetic acrostic missing the nûn verse; it can be reconstructed, however, from these sources.

External Evidence. Next, the text critic must evaluate the external evidence (i.e., manuscripts and versions outside the MT). One note of caution: translators of ancient versions may have misunderstood the original text or used a variety of translation techniques (e.g., literal, paraphrastic, or a mixture of both; cf. Barr, Comparative Philology, 2). Because evidence for the OT text comes from many different sources and languages, the manuscripts must be carefully evaluated according to several factors: language, date, reliability, provenance (origin/source), purpose, and interdependence of the witnesses.

Determining the Most Reliable Reading of the Text

The most important question in OT textual criticism is how to work back to the most reliable reading of a text once evidence has been collected and evaluated. Inherent in the process is one of the most important principles in textual criticism: “Which reading would most likely give rise to the others?” The following steps are helpful in weighing the evidence: (1) Is there simply a problem with the pointing of a word or phrase (e.g., the wordלשׁדי [lšdy] in Ps 32:4 can be pointed as לְשַׁדִּי [lešaddî] “my juice [has dried up]” as in the MT, or as לְשֻׁדִּי [lešuddî] “my mother’s breast [has dried up]” as suggested in the editors’ notes). (2) When unintentional (e.g., dittography, haplography, metathesis) or intentional (e.g., scribal omissions, changes for euphemistic reasons, updating archaic language, harmonizing parallel passages) corruptions of the text are identified, attempt to determine which reading would most likely give rise to the others. The authenticity of an original reading can sometimes be confirmed if there is a logical reason as to how the secondary reading arose from it. (3) Is there any other internal evidence that may provide a plausible resolution of a difficult reading (e.g., repeated sentence structures, word usages, literary structures)? (4) Does any external source (e.g., Qumran manuscripts, LXX, Latin versions) provide a plausible resolution? The text critic should also ask questions such as: Are there any grammatical reasons to prefer a specific reading? Would different word divisions result in a better reading? Are there certain characteristics of the author of a specific source (e.g., harmonizing or paraphrasing tendencies) that would lessen the plausibility of its reading?

Attempting an Emendation

Emendations should remain tentative and be the text critic’s last resort. An emendation is “an attempt to reconstruct an original reading that has not survived among extant manuscripts”[25] and is a matter of intuition and logic. The most popular modern diplomatic editions (e.g., BHS, Hebrew University Bible Project, and BHQ) propose far fewer emendations, giving preference instead to known textual readings.

Conclusion

Bruce K. Waltke notes that in the Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia (the most recent critical edition of the Hebrew Bible) approximately one textual note appears for every ten words; thus 90 percent of the text is without significant variation.[26] According to Shemaryahu Talmon, J. L. Magnes Professor, Emeritus, of the Department of Bible Studies at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, even the errors and textual variations that exist “affect the intrinsic message only in relatively few instances.”[27] Our own count of variants in the book of Genesis shows that only about 7 percent of the words in this book are affected.[28] If this is true, we have an amazing heritage preserved in the Hebrew text of the OT.

We can better appreciate this heritage when we compare the OT to other religious books such as the Qur’an and The Book of Mormon. First, let me give a brief summary concerning general contrasts between these works. The Bible (both Old and New Testaments) was written by approximately forty different authors over a period of over 1,000 years, and yet there is a consistent and clear message throughout the book; neither the Qur’an nor The Book of Mormon has such a pedigree. There is extensive manuscript evidence for the Bible, including at least 300 Hebrew manuscripts and 5,800 Greek manuscripts, as well as more than 20,000 ancient manuscripts of the Old and New Testaments written in various languages, and more than 30,000 scriptural quotations in the early church fathers which help confirm the accuracy of Scriptures. Neither the Qur’an nor The Book of Mormon can make this claim. The OT contains specific prophecies that claim to be fulfilled in the NT (e.g., Isa 53:3–4 = Matt 8:17; Isa 53:7–8 = Acts 8:32–35; Isa 53:12 = Luke 22:37; Mic 5:2 = Matt 2:6; Joel 2:28–32 = Acts 2:16–21); neither the Qur’an nor The Book of Mormon contain anything like this. It is interesting that both the Qur’an and The Book of Mormon claim to be a continuation of divine revelation from the Bible through their specific prophets, and yet both works contain significant contradictions with the theology of the Bible. The book of Hebrews (1:1–2) claims that Jesus is the final revelation, implying there will be no further divine revelation. Now, let’s look more closely at the text critical issues of the Qur’an and The Book of Mormon.

Qur’an

The Qur’an was written in the seventh century AD and thus has a much shorter transmissional history than the OT Hebrew text, and yet the accuracy of the text is much more questionable. Muslims today frequently contend that there was one original Qur’an produced by Muhammad[29] and that it was produced without errors, omissions, or additions.[30] This, however, is questionable on several fronts. First, the history of the Qur’an, even from their own sources, claims that there were at least four to seven different editions (Sahih Bukhari, vol. 6, book 61, hadith 514). There were apparently so many variations that Caliph Uthman, one of Mohammed’s successors, assigned a committee of three people to produce a standard edition of the Qur’an after which all other divergent versions of the Qur’an were destroyed (Sahih Bukhari, vol. 6, book 61, hadith 510). Second, there have been many alleged errors found in the Qur’an, but just a few of them are: (1) Abraham was supposedly a Muslim (suwar 2:127–133; 3:67); (2) No one was called John before John the Baptist (sura 19:7); (3) the Jews believed that Ezra was the son of God (sura 5:7); (4) Miriam, the sister of Aaron, was also Mary, the mother of Jesus (suwar 19:16–34 [esp. 28]; 20:25–30; 66:10–12), though the two, Mary and Miriam, lived over a thousand years apart; (5) the Qur’an claims that a Samaritan [article on Sāmirī] influenced the Israelites to worship the golden calf in the wilderness (a term that did not occur until much later) (sura 20:85–88, 95); and (6) the Qur’an claims that Muhammad went to the “furthest Mosque” during his journey by night (the Mi’raj), which Muslims explain as the Dome of the Rock mosque in Jerusalem, but this mosque was built by Amir ‘Abd al Malik in AD 690, which is 58 years after Muhammad’s death (sura 17:1).[31] Third, most of the so-called prophecies in the Qur’an are indeed questionable. For example: sura 41:21 “Their skins will bear witness against them as to what they have been doing” (prophecy of fingerprints); sura 30:42 “Corruption has spread on land and sea because of what men’s hands have wrought” (prophecy of pollution); sura 17.104 “And after him We said to the Children of Israel, ‘Dwell Ye in the promised land; and when the time of the promise of the Latter Days comes, We shall bring you together out of various people” (establishment of Israel).[32] Each one of these passages is translated somewhat differently in the standard edition of the Qur’an, and certainly most of the Middle East is against this last so-called prophecy.

Most Muslims are offended by scholars who suggest that the Qur’an was edited or somehow modified from the original pronouncements of Allah through Mohammed. However, a recent book by Keith E. Small, who attempts to conduct textual criticism on a small portion of the Qur’an (namely Q. 14:35–41 which describes how Abraham settled his son, presumably Ishmael, in Mecca), finds this exact situation.[33] He examines twenty-two manuscripts and determines that an early consonantal text can be recovered, but the text appears to be fluid until the end of the seventh century when the Umayyad caliphs standardized the text and destroyed most (if not all) of the earlier manuscripts, making it impossible to recover the original reading of the text.[34]

The Book of Mormon

In about 1830, Joseph Smith claimed to have found on a hillside in western New York golden plates inscribed in “reformed Egyptian” from which The Book of Mormon was translated.[35] It is difficult to compare textual criticism of the Bible with The Book of Mormon, for most of the Mormon documents are printed by machine[36] and the work is not yet 200 years old. However, even with such a short transmissional history one of the major authorities on The Book of Mormon, Royal Skousen, claims that there are more than 2,000 errors in the 1830 edition.[37] There are also significant questions regarding the “so-called sources” (i.e., the golden tablets, the Anthon Transcript),[38] including: their supposed connection between Native American languages and ancient Near Eastern languages; the lack of DNA evidence linking Native American groups to the ancient Near East; and whether the so-called “Reformed Egyptian” existed. Several other facts in The Book of Mormon have also been questioned ranging from the locations of the places mentioned in the book (e.g., Bountiful, River Laman); animals it mentions (e.g., horses, asses, elephants); and technologies (e.g., steel, plows, scimitars, chariots) that were presumed to have been present in Mesoamerica (supposedly pre-Columbian) at that time.[39] Even more troubling are the apparent contradictions and anachronisms: (1) 2 Nephi 5:15 claims that when the Nephi landed in the New World they saw an abundance of gold, silver, and precious gems, but in the next verse it claims that they built a temple like Solomon’s except for the precious thing “because they were not to be found upon the land” (v. 16); (2) 1 Nephi 4:9 which is supposed to be dated to 600 BC mentions a sword made of “the most precious steel” (steel was hardly ever used before the seventeenth century); and (3) 1 Nephi 22:15 supposedly quotes from Malachi 4:1, which would be about 150 years before this book was written; (4) Alma 46:15, which is supposedly written about 73 BC, calls believers “Christians” before Christ was even born (cp. Acts 11:26); (5) Alma 37:38 says the people used a compass, but a dry compass was not invented until 1300 in Europe; (6) The Book of Mormon uses the abbreviation “&c” (“and so forth”) about six times (subtitle of 2 Nephi; Jacob 1:11; Mosiah 8:8; 23:5; Alma 3:5) and this abbreviation was often used in the nineteenth century, but not in ancient documents; (7) the modern French word adieu occurs in Jacob 7:27, but it is unlikely that it is older than the ninth century AD; and (8) the word “Bible” is used in 2 Nephi 29:3 supposedly dated to about 550 BC, but the word “Bible” comes from the Greek word and the Christians did not use it for the sacred Scriptures until the second century AD.

By comparison to the shorter transmission histories of the Qur’an and The Book of Mormon, the Bible and especially the OT, has been marvelously preserved and holds up well under careful scrutiny. Even though many scholars have questioned parts of the OT, it is amazing that the more we learn about ancient Near Eastern culture and history, the more we see just how accurate the OT is. A classic example is the accuracy of the book of Daniel. Scholars questioned the mention of Belshazzar as king of Babylon at the time that the Persians conquered it; however, we now know that he actually was ruling in Babylon in place of his father, Nabonidus, who resided in Tema [Tayma] almost 400 miles away.

1 At the time when 2 Timothy was written, the Scriptures consisted primarily of the OT.

2 Kenton L. Sparks, Ancient Texts for the Study of the Hebrew Bible: A Guide to Background Literature (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 2005), 361.

3 Iain Provan, “Knowing and Believing: Faith in the Past,” “Behind” the Text: History and Biblical Interpretation, ed. Craig Bartholomew, C. Stephen Evans, Mary Healy, and Murray Rae, Scripture and Hermeneutic Series, vol. 4 (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2003), 262–63.

4 Sparks, Ancient Texts, 361.

5 See P. K. McCarter, Textual Criticism: Recovering the Text of the Hebrew Bible, Guides to Biblical Scholarship: Old Testament Series (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1986), 18; E. Tov, Textual Criticism of the Hebrew Bible (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1992), 1.

6 One notable exception is the Silver Amulets containing the Aaronic Blessing in Numbers 6:22–27 from the mid-seventh century BC. See Paul D. Wegner, A Student’s Guide to Textual Criticism of the Bible: Its History, Methods and Results (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 2006), 140–42.

7 A form of the printing press had actually been used for hundreds of years before the fifteenth century, but prior to moveable press each page had to be meticulously carved out by hand on a piece of hard wood. A “woodcut” could only make about 500 copies before it became saturated with ink and the fine lines began to wear out. “Brass-cuts” were the next innovation and lasted significantly longer, but once again a new plate needed to be created for each new page—a time consuming and expensive process. Movable print was the innovation that made printing both time- and cost-effective. Movable print meant that each of the individual letters or signs could be arranged in whatever order necessary to make the printed page; when finished printing that page, the letters or signs could be rearranged to produce the next page. Thus, numerous pages could be set and printed with the same letters, thus reducing cost and time in production. For a discussion on the printing press, see Paul D. Wegner, The Journey from Texts to Translations (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1999), 263–65.

8 For a brief summary, see Wegner, Student’s Guide, 29–37.

9 Adam S. van der Woude, “Pluriformity and Uniformity: Reflections on the Transmission of the Text of the Old Testament,” in Sacred History and Sacred Texts in Early Judaism: A Symposium in Honor of Adam S. van der Woude, ed. Jan N. Bremmer and Florentino Garcia Martínez (Pampen: Kok Pharos, 1992), 151–69.

10 James Barr, Comparative Philology and the Text of the Old Testament: With Additions and Corrections (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 1987), 4.

11 McCarter, Textual Criticism, 14.

12 William F. Albright points out, “The prolonged and intimate study of the many scores of thousands of pertinent documents from the ancient Near East proves that sacred and profane documents were copied with great care than is true of scribal copying in Graeco-Roman times” (From the Stone Age to Christianity, 2nd ed. [Baltimore: John Hopkins Press, 1957], 79). See also Wegner, Student’s Guide, 65.

13 James Sanders, Eugene Ulrich, and others recognize these two tendencies and classify the earliest witnesses into two groups of manuscripts: (1) the “repetition factor”—those manuscripts that reproduce an accurate, straightforward copying of the text; and (2) the “resignification factor”—those manuscripts that revise and update the text to make it more relevant to current circumstances (J. A. Sanders, Torah and Canon [Philadelphia: Fortress, 1972], 22; Eugene Ulrich, The Dead Sea Scrolls and the Origins of the Bible [Leiden: Brill, 1999], 11; Peter J. Gentry, “The Text of the Old Testament,” JETS 52.1 [March 2009]: 44–45). Albright also noted this phenomenon: “A principle which must never be lost sight of in dealing with documents of the ancient Near East is that instead of leaving obvious archaisms in spelling and grammar, as later became the fashion in Greece and Rome, the scribes generally revised ancient literary and other documents periodically. This practice was followed with particular regularity by cuneiform scribes” (Albright, Stone Age, 79).

14 See Wegner, Student’s Guide, 63–70.

15 Tov provides the following evidence: “Three scrolls of the Law were found in the temple court. These were the maʽon (‘dwelling’) scroll, the zaʽaṭuṭê (‘little ones’) scroll, and the hyʼ scroll. In one of the scrolls they found written, ‘The eternal God is (your) dwelling place (מען, maʽon)’ (Deut 33:27). And in two of the scrolls it was written, ‘The eternal God is (your) dwelling place (meʽonah מענה).’ They adopted the reading found in the two and discarded the other. In one of them they found written, ‘He sent the little ones (zaʽaṭuṭê) of the sons of Israel’ (Exod 24:5). And in two it was written, ‘He sent young men (naʽarê) of the sons of Israel.’ They adopted the reading of the two and discarded the other. In one of them they found written חוא, hwʼ, nine times, and in two, they found it written חיא, hyʼ, eleven times. They adopted the two and discarded the other (y. Taʽan. 4.68a)” (Tov, Textual Criticism, 32–33. For a detailed analysis, see S. Talmon, “The Three Scrolls of the Law That Were Found in the Temple Court,” Textus 2 [1962]: 1–27).

16 F. G. Kenyon, Our Bible and the Ancient Manuscripts, rev. A. W. Adams (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1958), 78–79; S. Davidson, Introduction to the Old Testament (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1856), 89.

17 See T. B. Masseketoth Sopherim (mid-eighth century tractate of the Talmud), which gives detailed instructions for copying biblical manuscripts (A. Cohen, ed., The Minor Tractates of the Talmud, 2 vols. [London: Soncino, 1965], 1:211–324).

18 H. W. Robinson, “The Hebrew Bible,” in The Bible in Its Ancient and English Versions, 2nd ed. (London: Oxford University Press, 1954), 29.

19 S. Grayzel, History of the Jews, rev. ed. (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1968), 248–49; M. L. Margolis and A. Marx, A History of the Jewish People (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1934), 266.

20 M. H. Goshen-Gottstein, “The Rise of the Tiberian Bible Text,” in Biblical and Other Studies, ed. A. Altmann (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1963), 112; E. Würthwein, Text of the Old Testament, trans. by Erroll F. Rhodes, 2nd ed. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1995), 25.

21 Victor P. Hamilton, The Book of Genesis: Chapters 1–17, NICOT (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1990), 334; Derek Kidner, Genesis: An Introduction and Commentary, TOTC (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 1967), 106; Nahum M. Sarna, Genesis בראשׁית, JPS Torah Commentary (New York: Jewish Publication Society, 1989), 71.

22 For a good discussion of this passage see Gordon J. Wenham, The Book of Leviticus, NICOT (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1979), 233–34.

23 B. M. Metzger, The Text of the New Testament: Its Transmission, Corruption, and Restoration, 3rd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 195.

24 For other examples see McCarter, Textual Criticism, 51–57.

25 McCarter, Textual Criticism, 76.

26 “Old Testament Textual Criticism,” in Foundations for Biblical Interpretation, ed. David S. Dockery, Kenneth A. Mathews, and Robert B. Sloan (Nashville: Broadman & Holman, 1994), 157.

27 S. Talmon, “Old Testament Text,” CHB 1.161.

28 There are about 1,357 words that are affected out of about 19,671 words, which is about 6.8 percent of the text.

29 Once again this claim does not appear to be true based upon their own sources: “Abu Bakr As-Siddiq sent for me when the people! of Yamama had been killed (i.e., a number of the Prophet’s Companions who fought against Musailama). (I went to him) and found ‘Umar bin Al-Khattab sitting with him. Abu Bakr then said (to me), ‘Umar has come to me and said: Casualties were heavy among the Qurra’ of the! Qur’an (i.e., those who knew the Quran by heart) on the day of the Battle of Yalmama, and I am afraid that more heavy casualties may take place among the Qurra’ on other battlefields, whereby a large part of the Qur’an may be lost. Therefore I suggest, you (Abu Bakr) order that the Qur’an be collected.’ I said to ‘Umar, ‘How can you do something which Allah’s Apostle did not do?’ ‘Umar said, ‘By Allah, that is a good project.’ ‘Umar kept on urging me to accept his proposal till Allah opened my chest for it and I began to realize the good in the idea which ‘Umar had realized. Then Abu Bakr said (to me). ‘You are a wise young man and we do not have any suspicion about you, and you used to write the Divine Inspiration for Allah’s Apostle. So you should search for (the fragmentary scripts of) the Qur’an and collect it (in one book).’ By Allah, if they had ordered me to shift one of the mountains, it would not have been heavier for me than this ordering me to collect the Qur’an. Then I said to Abu Bakr, ‘How will you do something which Allah’s Apostle did not do?’ Abu Bakr replied, ‘By Allah, it is a good project.’ Abu Bakr kept on urging me to accept his idea until Allah opened my chest for what He had opened the chests of Abu Bakr and ‘Umar.” (Sahih Bukhari, vol. 6, book 61, hadith 509 [Sahih Bukhari, n.p. November 4, 2011, online: http://www.sahih-bukhari.com/Pages/Bukhari_6_61.php].

30 Muhammad Zafrulla Khan, Islam: Its Meaning for Modern Man (London: Routledge & Keagan Paul, 1980), 83; Ahmad Von Denffer, Ulum Al-Qur’an: An Introduction to the Sciences of the Qur’an (Leicester: The Islamic Foundation, 1989), 44; Mohammad Khalifa, The Sublime Qur’an and Orientalism (London: Longman, 1983), 15, 48. Except for some Shiite groups [Helmut Gatje, The Qur’an and Its Exegesis: Selected Texts with Classical and Modern Muslim Interpretations (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), 39]. Some scholars have gone further and claimed: “The text of the Qur’an is entirely reliable. It has been as it is, unaltered, unedited, not tampered with in any way, since the time of its revelation” (M. Fethullah Gulen, Questions This Modern Age Puts to Islam [London: Truestar, 1993], 58).

31 For more contradictions see: The Qur’an, n.p. November 10, 2011, online: http://debate.org.uk/topics/history/quran.htm#I.

32 Ansar Raza, “Fulfilled Prophecies of the Holy Quran,” n.p. November 9, 2011; online: http://www.alislam.org/library/articles/prophecies.html.

33 Textual Criticism and the Qur’an Manuscripts (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2011).

34 Ibid., 179.

35 David Whitmer, one of the so-called “three witnesses,” described the translation process as follows: “Joseph Smith would put the seer stone into a hat, and put his face in the hat, drawing it closely around his face to exclude the light; and in the darkness the spiritual light would shine. A piece of something resembling a parchment would appear, and on that appeared the writing. One character at a time would appear and under it was the interpretation in English. Brother Joseph would read off the English to Oliver Cowdery, who was his principal scribe, and when it was written down and repeated to brother Joseph to see if it was correct, then it would disappear, and another character with the interpretation would appear” (Address to All Believers in Christ [Richmond, Missouri, 1887], 12).

36 There are two early handwritten sources. One is commonly called the “original manuscript,” written 1828–29 and containing only about 28 percent of The Book of Mormon. It claimed to have been written by Oliver Cowdery and other scribes at the dictation of Joseph Smith. The second is often called the “printer’s manuscript,” written between August 1829 to March 1830, which is a hand copy of the original manuscript with grammatical emendations made later by Joseph Smith when preparing the 1837 edition (Royal Skousen, The Book of Mormon: the Earliest Text [Cambridge, MA: Yale University Press, 2009], 739).

37 Some have argued for significantly more (see Jerald and Sandra Tanner, 3913 Changes in the Book of Mormon [Salt Lake City, UT: Modern Microfilm Comp., n.d.]).

38 “Dear Sir—I received this morning your favor of the 9th instant, and lose no time in making a reply. The whole story about my having pronouncd (sic) the Mormonite inscription to be ‘reformed Egyptian hieroglyphics’ is perfectly false. Some years ago, a plain, and apparently simple-hearted farmer, called upon me with a note from Dr. Mitchell of our city, now deceased, requesting me to decipher, if possible, a paper, which the farmer would hand me, and which Dr. M. confessed he had been unable to understand. Upon examining the paper in question, I soon came to the conclusion that it was all a trick, perhaps a hoax. When I asked the person, who brought it, how he obtained the writing, he gave me, as far as I can now recollect, the following account: A ‘gold book,’ consisting of a number of plates of gold, fastened together in the shape of a book by wires of the same metal, had been dug up in the northern part of the state of New York, and along with the book an enormous pair of ‘gold spectacles’! These spectacles were so large, that, if a person attempted to look through them, his two eyes would have to be turned towards one of the glasses merely, the spectacles in questions being altogether too large for the breadth of the human face. Whoever examined the plates through the spectacles, was enabled not only to read them, but fully to understand their meaning. All this knowledge, however, was confined at that time to a young man, who had the trunk containing the book and the spectacles in his sole possession. This young man was placed behind a curtain, in Eber” (E. D. Howe, Mormonism Unvailed [Painesville, OH: Telegraph Press, 1834], 270–72).

39 The Smithsonian Institute claims that “none of the principal food plants and domestic animals of the Old World (except the dog) were present in the New World before Columbus” (“Smithsonian Institution Statement on the Book of Mormon,” n.p. [cited November 8, 2011]. Online: http://www.irr.org/mit/smithsonian.html). See more contradictions in Jon Gary Williams, The Book of Mormon: A Book of Mistakes, Error, and Fraud (Montgomery, AL: Apologetic, n.d.), n.p. cited November 11, 2011, online: www.apologeticspress.org/rr/reprints/Book-of-Mormon.pdf.; see also “What Is Mormonism?” n.p. (cited November 11, 2011). Online: http://www.whatismormonism.com.

Chapter Six

Has the New Testament Text Been Hopelessly Corrupted?

Daniel B. Wallace

Throughout the English-speaking world, any group of Christians, from home Bible studies to megachurches, can read the Scriptures not only in their own language but with the text of each person’s Bible identical to everyone else’s. Gutenberg’s invention in the mid-fifteenth century has made this possible, yet this very innovation has bred a false sense of certainty about the wording of the Bible.

Before the era of the movable-type printing press, all copies of Scripture were transcribed by hand, one letter at a time. The painstaking process of copying the whole New Testament would require months of labor for a well-trained scribe. Yet of the thousands of handwritten New Testament manuscripts that still exist, no two are exactly alike. This disagreement is that with which the church had to contend for fifteen centuries. And we can no longer consult the original documents (or autographs) since they turned to dust long ago, most likely before the end of the second century. Because of these two facts—disagreements among the manuscripts and the disappearance of the autographs—the need arises for examining the manuscripts and making decisions as to what the original text most likely said.

In this respect, the New Testament faces the same challenges that the rest of Greco-Roman literature faces. Textual criticism—the science of determining the wording of a document whose original is lost—has to be applied to all of ancient literature, even to much literature that was produced since the printing press was invented (such as Shakespeare’s plays or Lincoln’s Gettysburg address). How difficult is the process of ascertaining the wording of the autographs? The postures on this question widely vary, from extreme uncertainty to dogmatic confidence, and everywhere in between.

Recently a provocative book appeared by the atheist apologist, C. J. Werleman, titled Jesus Lied. He wrote, “We do not have any of the original manuscripts of the Bible. The originals are lost. We don’t know when and we don’t know by whom. What we have are copies of copies. In some instances, the copies we have are twentieth generation copies.”[1]

It is not just atheists who have made such claims. Muslims, too, have joined the chorus.[2] On the website “Answering Christianity,” we are told that Christians “have to rely on lies and deception, along with awkward logic to prove their corrupt script, to answer away any contradiction or historical error that a Muslim might present to them.”[3]

A very popular book among British Muslims makes this claim:

The Orthodox Church, being the sect which eventually established supremacy over all the others, stood in fervent opposition to various ideas ([a.k.a.] “heresies”) which were in circulation. These included Adoptionism (the notion that Jesus was not God, but a man); Docetism (the opposite view, that he was God and not man); and Separationism (that the divine and human elements of Jesus Christ were two separate beings). In each case this sect, the one that would rise to become the Orthodox Church, deliberately corrupted the Scriptures so as to reflect its own theological visions of Christ, while demolishing that of all rival sects.[4]

Among those who display this sort of skepticism about the trustworthiness of the New Testament text are a few biblical scholars. In The Five Gospels, Robert Funk, the head of the Jesus Seminar, claimed:

Even careful copyists make mistakes, as every proofreader knows. So we will never be able to claim certain knowledge of exactly what the original text of any biblical writing was.[5]

The temporal gap that separates Jesus from the first surviving copies of the gospels—about one hundred and seventy-five years—corresponds to the lapse in time from 1776—the writing of the Declaration of Independence—to 1950. What if the oldest copies of the founding document dated only from 1950?[6]

The leading proponent of extreme skepticism over the wording of the original text is unquestionably Bart Ehrman, a bona fide New Testament textual critic. In his New York Times bestseller, Misquoting Jesus, he made the following statements:

Not only do we not have the originals, we don’t have the first copies of the originals. We don’t even have copies of the copies of the originals, or copies of the copies of the copies of the originals. What we have are copies made later—much later. . . . And these copies all differ from one another, in many thousands of places. . . . These copies differ from one another in so many places that we don’t even know how many differences there are.[7]

We could go on nearly forever talking about specific places in which the texts of the New Testament came to be changed, either accidentally or intentionally. . . . The examples are not just in the hundreds but in the thousands.[8]

On the other side are those who claim that every jot and tittle of the autographs is known today, since the Textus Receptus (the Greek New Testament, collated from essentially seven late manuscripts whose credentials were less than stellar, that stands behind the King James Bible) represents exactly what the apostles and their associates wrote so long ago.[9] For the King James Only crowd, having certainty about the text is a sine qua non of the Christian faith. One writer from this camp, Jasper James Ray, has been highly influential. He argued that no modern version may properly be called the Bible,[10] that salvation and spiritual growth can only come through versions based on the Textus Receptus (TR),[11] and that Satan is the prime mover behind all modern translations based on the more ancient manuscripts.[12] If this author’s views are correct, then Christians who use modern translations based primarily on the few ancient manuscripts are, at best, dupes of the Devil and, at worst, in danger of forfeiting their immortal souls.[13]

Both attitudes—radical skepticism and absolute certainty—are unworthy of the historical evidence. They are the offspring of postmodernism and modernism respectively. Both betray an arrogance about what one certainly knows, but in the case of radical skepticism the only certainty is uncertainty itself. These two attitudes are like driving on the mountain roads in Greece. Drive too far to the left and you will have a head-on collision with a tourist bus. Drive too far to the right and you will end up flying over the cliff where the guardrail should have been.

In the middle are moderating views embraced by the great majority of biblical scholars. The din of alarmists notwithstanding, most biblical scholars—whether they are evangelical or liberal, Protestant or Catholic—believe that what we have today in all essential respects (though not necessarily in all particulars) is what the New Testament authors penned nearly two millennia ago.

What are the evidence and arguments that have convinced so many scholars? And what is really at stake? Our objective in this chapter is to focus on three things: (1) the number of textual variants, (2) the nature of textual variants, and (3) theological issues raised by textual variants. This third issue must be addressed last because the evidence concerning it needs first to be discussed. For the believer, this final issue is the most important. It is also that which has been most distorted by the apologists of skepticism.

The Number of Variants

We should begin with the definition of “textual variant”: A textual variant is any place among the manuscripts in which there is variation in the wording, including word order, omission or addition of words, even spelling differences. The most trivial differences count, as well as, of course, the most serious. In the past century, the estimated number of textual differences has risen steadily, largely for two reasons: the number of manuscripts known to exist has significantly increased, and the painstaking analysis of individual New Testament books has been published, displaying more variants than were previously known.[14] The best estimate today is that there are as many as 400,000 textual variants among the manuscripts. Yet the New Testament has less than 140,000 words in it. This means that for every word in the New Testament there are, on average, almost three variations.

Some evangelicals have argued that variants should be counted in terms of manuscripts that have these readings. Thus, if 500 manuscripts have “Jesus” in one place and another 500 have “Christ,” there must be 500 variants. This view goes back to a book published in 1963, and it has made its way, in a steady stream of misinformation, into more than one apologist’s writings.[15] But it is completely false.

Textual critics do not count variants by the number of manuscripts supporting them, but by the differences in wording regardless of how many manuscripts support these differences.[16] Thus, if a single manuscript deviates from all other manuscripts in a given place, its reading counts as a single textual variant, and if a thousand manuscripts agree with each other but deviate from all others in one place, this wording too counts as a single textual variant. If variants were counted in terms of the witnesses behind them, the number would be in the tens of millions.

Nevertheless, 400,000 is still a high figure. Why is it that there are so many textual differences for the New Testament? The reason is quite simple: There are thousands of variants because there are thousands of manuscripts. No classical Greek or Latin text has nearly as many textual deviations because no classical text has nearly as many manuscripts. If there were only one copy of the New Testament in existence, it would have zero variants. Yet for several ancient authors there is only one copy extant today, and sometimes that lone copy comes more than a millennium after the original composition. But a lone, late manuscript would hardly build confidence that the single manuscript duplicated the wording of the original in every respect. In reality, the more manuscripts we have, the better able we are to recover the wording of the autographs.

In 1707, a lifelong project saw the light of day when John Mill published his two-volume New Testament just a fortnight before his death. Mill had collated one hundred Greek manuscripts as well as several versions and patristic writers’ comments on the text. His Novum Testamentum listed 30,000 textual differences. This Greek New Testament was the first with any significant amount of variants listed. And it triggered quite a storm. Conservative Protestants condemned Mill’s work as creating doubts about the text of Holy Writ. Remarkably, some even railed against Mill as though he had invented the variants instead of merely discovering them. And Roman Catholics pointed to Mill’s work as evidence that the sola Scriptura of the Reformation was seriously flawed, that Protestants had a “paper pope” which had dissenting opinions on every page.

Not all condemned Mill’s work, however. Six years after his Novum Testamentum appeared, a brilliant textual scholar, Richard Bentley, commended Mill’s magnum opus as that which would better enable scholars to recover the autographic wording:

If there had been but one manuscript of the Greek Testament at the restoration of learning about two centuries ago, then we [would have] had no various readings at all. . . . And would the text be in a better condition then, than now [that] we have 30,000 [variant readings]?

It is good, therefore . . . to have more anchors than one; and another MS. to join the first would give more authority, as well as security.[17]

Bentley’s essential point was that the more manuscripts we have the more we can compare their readings and trace their relationships, ultimately enabling us to have greater confidence about the wording of the original. If one hundred manuscripts are significantly better than a single manuscript in this regard, then having many times that amount should multiply that confidence.

Today, in Greek alone, more than 5,600 handwritten New Testament documents are known to exist. Many of these are fragmentary of course, especially the older ones, but the average Greek New Testament manuscript is more than 450 pages long. Altogether, there are more than 2.6 million pages of text, leaving hundreds of witnesses for every book of the New Testament. As more and more manuscripts come to light, we are getting closer and closer to the wording of the autographs.

It is not just Greek manuscripts that help in this endeavor. Beginning in the second century, the New Testament was translated into a variety of languages—Latin, Coptic, Syriac, Georgian, Gothic, Ethiopic, Armenian, and a host of others. There are about 10,000 Latin manuscripts of the New Testament alone. No one really knows the total number of all these ancient versions, but the best estimates are between 5,000 and 10,000—besides the 10,000 in Latin. Altogether we have at least 20,000 handwritten manuscripts of the New Testament in various languages.

Even if none of these documents existed, we would not be left without a witness. (Collectively, manuscripts, versions [or translations], and quotations of the New Testament by the church fathers are known as witnesses or external evidence.) That is because church fathers wrote homilies and commentaries on the New Testament. To date, more than 1 million quotations of the New Testament by the Fathers have been recorded. “[I]f all other sources for our knowledge of the text of the New Testament were destroyed, [the patristic quotations] would be sufficient alone for the reconstruction of practically the entire New Testament.”[18]

How do skeptics respond to such data? They argue that the number of manuscripts is irrelevant, especially since the vast majority of them are more than a millennium removed from the originals.

[T]he fact that we have thousands of New Testament manuscripts does not in itself mean that we can rest assured that we know what the original text said. If we have very few early copies—in fact, scarcely any—how can we know that the text was not changed significantly before the New Testament began to be reproduced in such large quantities?[19]

The spearhead of the argument tacitly switches from actual numbers to relative amounts, often stated in terms of percentages. It is certainly true that the vast bulk of Greek New Testament manuscripts come from after AD 1000. In fact, more than 85 percent do. From the first millennium, however, the numbers are still impressive: at least 838 manuscripts.[20] To argue that New Testament manuscripts from the early centuries are not very plentiful is only true in relation to later New Testament manuscripts—not to anything else in the ancient world.

Even from the earliest centuries, the numbers are impressive. How many manuscripts from the first century after the completion of the New Testament still exist? How many from the second? The third? We have today as many as a dozen manuscripts from the second century, sixty-four from the third, and forty-eight from the fourth. That’s a total of 124 manuscripts within 300 years of the composition of the New Testament. Most of these manuscripts are fragmentary, but, collectively, the whole New Testament text is found in them multiple times. And even within 125 years of the completion of the New Testament, the extant manuscripts include 49 percent of all verses.[21]

It may be helpful to put these numbers into perspective. If we are comparing the same time period—300 years after composition—the average classical author has no literary remains at all. But if we compare all the manuscripts of a particular classical author, regardless of when they were written, the total would still average less than twenty, and usually less than a dozen—and they would all be coming much more than three centuries later. There are, in fact, three times as many manuscripts of the New Testament within two hundred years of its composition as there are of the average classical author’s work within two thousand years of its composition. Thus, to claim that we have “scarcely any” early copies of the New Testament is hardly an accurate representation of the facts.

Another standard argument of the radical skeptics is that regardless of the number of New Testament manuscripts, the vast majority are worthless for reconstructing the text of the New Testament because they are so late. The implication they draw from the late date of most New Testament manuscripts is that none of them are trustworthy, that the New Testament is in no better shape than other ancient literature.

What the skeptics do not mention is that these later manuscripts add less than 2 percent of material to the text.[22] If we can envision the New Testament as a snowball rolling down a hill, picking up alien elements through the centuries, it is remarkable that it only picks up 2 percent more material over fourteen hundred years. That is an extraordinarily stable transmissional history. Although the New Testament text has grown over time, it has grown very little. Since the earliest texts that we have agree substantially with the later ones, the changes from the autographs to the earliest copies would be miniscule if we were to project backward to the original.[23]

See Chart

How does the New Testament’s preservation compare to that of the works of specific ancient writers, especially historians and biographers—the group that comes closest to the genres we find in the New Testament? For many important authors we only have partial works. Livy and Tacitus were two of the most important Roman historians of the first century AD. We base a lot of our understanding of ancient Rome on these two writers. Livy wrote 142 volumes on the history of Rome. Only 25 percent of them survive today. Only one-third of Tacitus’s writings are still with us. Two hundred copies of Pliny the Elder’s writings remain, but the oldest come seven hundred years after Pliny wrote. Plutarch’s Lives are found in manuscripts no earlier than eight hundred years after he penned these volumes. Josephus’s Antiquities of the Jews is found today in more than twenty copies, none earlier than the ninth century. The earliest copy of Polybius was written twelve hundred years after he lived. There are massive gaps in copies of Pausanias’s Description of Greece—all of these manuscripts coming more than fourteen hundred years later. Herodotus’s Histories has twenty-six copies, the earliest coming half a millennium later, and the first substantial copy does not appear for another millennium after that. The first substantial copies of Xenophon’s Hellenica come eighteen centuries after he penned his tome. If this were the case with the New Testament, the first substantial copies in existence today would not have been written until after the Wright brothers invented the airplane!

For some of the better-preserved writings, there are gaps galore even within the books that have been preserved. One scholar complained that the surviving copies of some of these writings are “[filled with gaps], corrupt, dislocated and interpolated. . . .”[24] He then proceeded to lay out principles to fill in the lacunae with nothing but his own reason because he could not find the original wording in any manuscript. Another scholar noted that for the manuscripts of his author, “The chief blemishes are gaps in the text, where the manuscript tradition fails us entirely.”[25] The task of filling the gaps without manuscript testimony is absolutely necessary for most of Greco-Roman literature, and almost entirely unknown for the New Testament.

In terms of extant manuscripts, the New Testament textual critic is confronted with an embarrassment of riches. If we have doubts about what the autographic New Testament said, those doubts would have to be multiplied at least a hundred-fold[26] for the average classical author.[27] And when we compare the New Testament manuscripts to the very best that the classical world has to offer,[28] it still stands head and shoulders above the rest. The New Testament is far and away the best-attested work of Greek or Latin literature from the ancient world. Precisely because we have hundreds of thousands of variants and hundreds of early manuscripts, we are in an excellent position for recovering the wording of the original.[29] Further, if the radical skeptics applied their principles to the rest of Greco-Roman literature, they would thrust us right back into the Dark Ages, where ignorance was anything but bliss. Their arguments only sound impressive in a vacuum.

The Nature of Textual Variants

The high number of variants may give a false impression as to their nature. How many differences are trivial, affecting nothing? How many of them change the meaning of the text? And how many of these meaningful readings are “viable”—that is, they are found in manuscripts with a sufficient pedigree that they have a good possibility of duplicating the original wording? The variants can be broken down into the following categories:

- Neither viable nor meaningful

- Viable but not meaningful

- Meaningful but not viable

- Both meaningful and viable

Neither Viable nor Meaningful; Viable but Not Meaningful

The first and second groups of variants can be treated together. Of the hundreds of thousands of textual alterations, the majority are spelling differences that have no impact on the meaning of the text. The ancient scribes did not have standardized spelling but often followed regional usage or their own whim on many words. Yet spelling differences account for about 70 percent of all textual variants. Thousands of these are neither viable nor meaningful, while thousands of others are viable but not meaningful.

The name for John is spelled in Greek two different ways, either Iōannēs or Iōanēs. The same person is in view either way; the only difference is whether the name has two n’s or one. The single most common textual variant involves what is called a movable nu. The Greek letter nu (n) can occur at the end of certain words when they precede a word that starts with a vowel. This is similar to the two forms of the indefinite article in English: a and an. But whether the nu appears in these words or not, there is absolutely no difference in meaning.

A good number of the spelling differences are nonsense readings. These come about when a scribe is fatigued, inattentive, or perhaps does not know Greek very well. Nonsense readings are the easiest to weed out—both for the modern textual critic and for the scribe who copied the errant exemplar. Further, nonsense readings tell scholars a great deal about how a scribe went about his work. The scribe of the medieval manuscript, codex Neapolitanus (or Gregory-Aland 109), inattentively wrote out Luke’s version of Jesus’ genealogy, which had been set forth in two columns in his exemplar. Without noticing the two columns in the manuscript he was transcribing, this scribe copied across the columns as though they were a single block of text. The result was a uniquely bizarre family tree, with mistakes everywhere. God, in fact, is said to be the son of Aram in this manuscript! In 1 Thessalonians 2:7 an interesting textual problem appears. Most manuscripts read “we became gentle among you” while a few early and important manuscripts have “we became little children among you.” The difference between “gentle” and “little children” is a single letter: either nēpioi or ēpioi. This is a classic textual problem that is not particularly easy to solve. The HCSB, RSV, ESV, NASB, REB, TEV, NIV, and most other translations have “gentle,” while the NET, TNIV, and NIV 2011 read “little children.” One late medieval manuscript instead has “horses” (hippoi)! It is a nonsense reading here, but no doubt due to the scribe’s misreading of one of the other variants in the manuscript he was copying. These nonsense readings are easy to detect and usually point to another word that is well represented among the manuscripts. It is not insignificant that a very large amount of the textual variants in New Testament manuscripts are of this sort.

Sometimes such nonsense readings occur in early and important manuscripts. An early third-century manuscript of Luke and John, known as P^75, has a few nonsense readings. Each reading involves one or two letters, suggesting that the scribe copied the text one or two letters at a time.[30] Indeed, this scribe was overall very careful, though overly concerned with writing exactly what his exemplar read without also wrestling with the sense. The eighth-century manuscript, codex Regius (a.k.a. codex L), an important witness to the New Testament text, has a number of blunders in it, the most amusing being in John 1:30. The original text here is undisputed: John the Baptist says, “After me comes a man . . .” (opisō mou erchetai anēr). John was referring to Jesus when he spoke of this “man” (anēr). But the scribe of codex L forgot the nu in the word anēr, thereby producing the word aēr—air. In codex Regius, then, John the Baptist says, “After me comes air”![31]

Other examples of viable but not particularly meaningful variants involve the use of the definite article with proper names and transpositions (in which the arrangement of the words varies). Proper names sometimes use the definite article, sometimes not. But in translation the article is left off. In Luke 2:16 we read, “They hurried off and found both Mary and Joseph, and the baby who was lying in the feeding trough.” But in the Greek text, the couple is called “the Mary and the Joseph.” Greek is a highly inflected language, and word order is generally more a matter of emphasis than meaning. Thus, one can write in Greek “Jesus loves John,” and the words can stand in any order without affecting the basic meaning. When these two groups of variants—transpositions and definite articles with proper names—occur in a simple sentence such as “Jesus loves John,” there are at least sixteen different ways to write it in Greek, without even involving different spellings for “John.” And when spelling variations, synonyms, and particles that are frequently untranslated are taken into account, the Greek clauses that would all be rendered “Jesus loves John” numbers in the hundreds. In light of these possibilities, 400,000 variants for the New Testament manuscripts are seen to be almost tiny in comparison with the potential pool of insignificant wording differences.

Meaningful but Not Viable

A rather large group of variants are those that make sense and are appropriate to the context but are supported only by insignificant or late manuscripts. For example, in 1 Thessalonians 2:9, one medieval manuscript has “the gospel of Christ” instead of “the gospel of God,” the reading found in all other copies. This variation is meaningful, but it has no credibility: there is little chance that a lone late manuscript could have the autographic wording when all the rest of the witnesses uniformly support a different text.

In a tenth-eleventh century copy of Luke’s Gospel, the scribe has an interesting reading at Luke 6:22. The verse, as found in almost all manuscripts, is translated in the HCSB as “You are blessed when people hate you, when they exclude you, insult you, and slander your name as evil because of the Son of Man.” But codex 2882 lacks “because of the Son of Man.” The manuscript thus makes a general pronouncement of blessing for the persecuted, regardless of whether they are Christ-followers or not—perfectly suited for our postmodern world. There is no obvious reason why the scribe would have deleted the words, but this surely must have happened. No other manuscript lacks “because of the Son of Man,” and this codex generally follows the text-form current in his day. For a scribe a millennium removed from Luke’s autograph, whose text otherwise is in line with a generally later and less accurate form of Luke, is hardly likely, by himself, to have the original wording here.

Harmonizations in the Synoptic Gospels (Matthew, Mark, and Luke) occur in manuscripts on a massive scale. Scribes had a strong tendency to harmonize the wording in the Gospels, especially changing Mark’s text to conform to the wording found in Matthew in parallel passages. Two groups of manuscripts—the Western and Byzantine text-forms—were especially prone to harmonization. Since it is a known scribal practice to harmonize the wording between two Gospels,[32] the reading that does not harmonize is typically considered to be authentic. When harmonizations are found in later manuscripts and nonharmonizations in earlier manuscripts, scholars naturally prefer the nonharmonized reading. The reason is simple enough: ancient scribes, like modern-day Christians, tended to harmonize parallel passages, even when the differences were trivial. What scribes would intentionally de-harmonize the parallel passages? If every Gospel manuscript of substantial length harmonizes, the scribes were clearly not malicious when it came to this issue. Further, by the second century, scribes viewed the Gospels as Scripture. But they also recognized that the exemplar they were copying had mistakes in it. And they often thought they detected such mistakes in parallel passages in which the accounts did not say the same thing. Examples of harmonization in the Gospel manuscripts can be found on any page in the apparatus of the standard critical text of the New Testament.

These first three categories of alterations—neither meaningful nor viable, viable but not meaningful, and meaningful but not viable—constitute the overwhelming majority of textual variants found in New Testament manuscripts. They give the proper context for Ehrman’s provocative-sounding remark, “We could go on nearly forever talking about specific places in which the texts of the New Testament came to be changed, either accidentally or intentionally. . . . the examples are not just in the hundreds but in the thousands.”[33]

Meaningful and Viable Variants

The last category of variants is those that are both meaningful and viable. This group of textual differences shows up as marginal readings in Bible translations. They are by far the smallest category, consisting of less than 1 percent of all textual variations.[34] How meaningful are these readings? They change the meaning of the text to some degree, but not necessarily a lot. If the wording affects our understanding of the passage then it is considered meaningful, and if it is found in sufficiently significant and reliable witnesses, it is viable. Many skeptics have argued for sweeping agnosticism about the wording of the original, when the reality is that our uncertainty about the autographs is over a tiny fraction of the whole. To apply their skepticism to the entire New Testament text is irresponsible and sloppy scholarship.

As an illustration of my last point, consider a debate I had with Bart Ehrman, held at Southern Methodist University on October 1, 2011. The two-hour event boasted the largest attendance ever of any debate over the text of the New Testament—more than 1,400 people! During the Q&A, a local pastor, Justin Bass, asked Ehrman what it would take for him to be convinced that the wording of Mark’s Gospel was certain. Ehrman responded that it would require ten manuscripts, all copied from the original of Mark’s Gospel within one week of its composition, and having no more than 0.001 percent deviation from each other.[35] One would think that such a radical skeptic as Ehrman would have thought about this question for some time and that his response would reflect his well-thought-out reasoning. The reality is that he spoke off the cuff: not only have his criteria never been met for any ancient writing (thus making them an impossible standard to achieve, historically speaking) but it would mean that there would be no more than one half of one letter difference among all these manuscripts![36] Ehrman later admitted on the Internet’s TC List that he was exaggerating when answering Dr. Bass’s question, in spite of the fact that Bass was asking for the minimum amount of evidence required to convince Ehrman.[37] This sort of skepticism, although increasingly common today among non-Christian biblical scholars, creates Chicken Littles by preying on the fear of the unknown of those who have not had the privilege of studying the New Testament in Greek. And it reveals the real agenda of such scholars: no amount of evidence will ever convince them that their wholesale cynicism is even remotely improbable. When more evidence is produced, they simply move the station a little farther down the railroad track.

As we have seen, the vast bulk of textual variants are inconsequential. Whether John’s name was spelled in the Greek New Testament with one nu or two may remain a mystery. But John’s name is never spelled M-a-r-y. The issues that textual scholars have to deal with are so insignificant to most other New Testament scholars that the latter often assume that there is nothing left to do in the discipline. But textual criticism has historically been the backbone of exegesis, since one cannot tell what the text means until he or she knows what it says. Although at the beginning of the twenty-first century most of the text of the New Testament is not in dispute, some passages still are.

A meaningful and viable textual variant is found in Romans 5:1. Does Paul say, “We have peace” (echomen) or “let us have peace” (echōmen)? The difference between the indicative and subjunctive mood is a single letter—either a long o or a short o. The similar sounding omicron (ο) and omega (ω) were most likely both pronounced as ō in Hellenistic Greek (as they are in later Greek), making the decision even more difficult. Indeed, scholars are on both sides of this textual problem, although most translations go with the indicative. But neither variant is a contradiction of the teaching of Scripture. If Paul is saying that Christians have peace (indicative mood), he is speaking about their positional status with God. If the apostle is exhorting believers to have peace with God (subjunctive mood), he is urging them to appropriate the “indicatives of the faith”—the foundational truths on which Christianity is based—by living them out in their daily lives.

Textual critics consider a combination of factors when they try to ascertain the wording of the autographs. The evidence is broken down into two categories, broadly speaking: external evidence—that is, what the manuscripts, ancient versions, and patristic quotations of the New Testament read; and internal evidence—what scribes were likely to have done (such as harmonize passages) and what the author was likely to have done. External evidence and internal evidence are usually on the same side—that is, both of them normally point to the same reading as authentic. When this is the case, the decision is easy. The agreement of these two categories of evidence becomes a twofold cord, one that is not easily broken.

Yet there are plenty of examples in which the internal evidence is at odds with the external. For example, Philippians 1:14 says, “Most of the brothers in the Lord have gained confidence from my imprisonment and dare even more to speak the message fearlessly.” The question naturally arises, What “message” (in Greek: logos [word])? Paul does not tell us. Scribes predictably added “of God,” clarifying what word was in view. Some even added “of the Lord.” Surprisingly, many of the early, better manuscripts are the ones that add “of God,” while the majority of later manuscripts do not have these words. This is a classic illustration of the clash between internal and external evidence. The fundamental principle that textual critics follow is to choose the reading that seems to give rise to the other(s). In this case, most scholars consider the shorter reading to be authentic since scribes were prone to add clarifying notes to ambiguous phrases. This textual problem involves meaningful and viable variants. But no theological issues are at stake.

In Matthew 27:16–17 we read, “At that time they had a notorious prisoner called Barabbas. So when they had gathered together, Pilate said to them, ‘Who is it you want me to release for you—Barabbas, or Jesus who is called Messiah?’ ” This is substantially the text found in most of the manuscripts, including the earliest and best. However, one group of manuscripts has “Jesus” before “Barabbas” in both verses. One can easily see why scribes would be prone to omit the name “Jesus” before “Barabbas” since Barabbas was an infamous criminal who certainly did not deserve the same name as the Son of God. One patristic writer, in fact, arguing against the addition, said that no sinner was ever called “Jesus” in Scripture, so the word must be expunged before Barabbas’s name.[38] Pious scribes who thought along the same lines would naturally delete the name. What is not so easy to explain is why some scribes would add the name “Jesus” before “Barabbas.” The internal evidence, in this case, seems to better explain the rise of the omission than the other way around. Consequently, the NET, TNIV, NIV 2011, TEV, REB, and NRSV have “Jesus Barabbas” in each verse. But again, no theological issue is at stake. In fact, it may be that Matthew is preserving a historical tidbit that involves a bit of irony: One Jesus died in the place of another Jesus, the second one being unworthy of the name.

The two longest textual variants among the manuscripts involve a dozen verses each—Mark 16:9–20 and John 7:53–8:11. No other variants come close. Not surprisingly, some skeptics are hardly even-handed in dealing with these problems. As one scholar complained,

[Ehrman’s] first extended examples of textual problems in the New Testament are the woman caught in adultery and the longer ending of Mark. After demonstrating how neither of these is likely to be part of the originals of either Gospel, Ehrman concedes that “most of the changes are not of this magnitude” (p. 69). But this sounds as if there are at least a few others that are of similar size, when in fact there are no other textual variants anywhere that are even one-fourth as long as these thirteen [sic]- and twelve-verse additions.[39]

In Mark 16, the earliest and best manuscripts end the book at verse 8: “So they went out and started running from the tomb, because trembling and astonishment overwhelmed them. And they said nothing to anyone, since they were afraid.” Such an abrupt end to the Gospel has caused no end of debate among scholars. Did Mark intend to end his Gospel this way? Was the real ending lost? Or were verses 9–20, found in the great majority of manuscripts, the real ending to this Gospel?[40]

A similar situation occurs in John 7:53–8:11, the story of the woman caught in adultery. New Testament scholars by a wide margin regard this text in the same way they regard Mark 16:9–20: these verses are not authentic. Most Christians, if forced to make a choice, would rather have the story of the woman caught in adultery than the long ending to Mark in their Bibles.[41] Yet the evidence is significantly weaker for John 7:53–8:11 than for Mark 16:9–20. In spite of its appeal as an important story about Jesus’ tenderness and forgiveness toward a sinner, it most likely was not penned by the author of the Fourth Gospel.

For our purposes, we need to point out that whether either of these passages is authentic or not, no fundamental truth is gained or lost by them. To be sure, the textual decision will affect how one views these Gospels as a whole, but it does not affect any cardinal doctrine.

Although the textual variants among the New Testament manuscripts number in the hundreds of thousands, the nature of these variants is on a different scale. Those that are both meaningful and viable are less than 1 percent of the whole; the numbers are in the hundreds, not the hundreds of thousands. Remarkably, many skeptics write as though the excision of such texts could shake up orthodox convictions.[42] Such is not the case. I am aware of no confessional statements at seminaries, Christian colleges, or major denominations that were retooled in the slightest because of the excision of any of the meaningful and viable variants.

Theological Issues Raised by Textual Variants

In this section, I wish to highlight two points. First, even though scholars have argued from time to time that serious theological discrepancies are found in viable variants, the evidence simply cannot be twisted in that direction. Second, we will discuss whether inerrancy is affected by viable variants.

As we have noted throughout this chapter, Bart Ehrman is the primary protagonist for major theological tampering of the New Testament by early orthodox scribes. Yet even Ehrman had to stop short of claiming that any cardinal doctrine is in jeopardy because of textual uncertainty. And the fact that he has done so reveals that the Muslim and atheist apologists who depend on his scholarship have misread his books and have blown the evidence way out of proportion.

In the appendix to the paperback version of Misquoting Jesus there is a Q&A section. The most telling question asked of Ehrman is this: “Why do you believe these core tenets of Christian orthodoxy to be in jeopardy based on the scribal errors you discovered in the biblical manuscripts?”

Ehrman’s response: “Essential Christian beliefs are not affected by textual variants in the manuscript tradition of the New Testament.”[43] The question unmasked the prevailing attitude by readers of Misquoting Jesus: they believed that Ehrman had indeed demonstrated early orthodox scribes to have twisted Scripture beyond recognition. This is also how many followers, especially atheist and Muslim apologists, had read his book. Yet Ehrman’s answer showed that he never demonstrated this. Suffice it to say that viable textual variants that disturb essential Christian beliefs have not been found in New Testament manuscripts. Although as we have seen that scribes did indeed change the Scripture to conform to what they believed it meant, their tampering with the text has been severely overstated.[44] And the very fact that scholars have been able to detect these changes shows that the autographic wording is knowable.[45] It is unfortunate that so many have abandoned the Christian faith on a feeling that the Scriptures are unreliable, or on bloated claims of corruption. After all the dust is settled, the manuscripts of the New Testament are, in all essentials, reliable witnesses to the apostolic faith.

Regarding inerrancy, we should first of all note that evangelical theologians have insisted that the autographs are inerrant and that the copies are inerrant only insofar as they faithfully duplicate the original wording.[46] Those outside the evangelical community routinely assume that the fact of thousands of textual variants necessarily proves inerrancy to be a false doctrine.[47] But the fact of variants is irrelevant to the doctrine since inerrancy is about the wording of the original text. Second, we should note that the doctrine of inerrancy does not mean that differences in spelling, grammar, or idioms are relevant. For example, John uses the Greek word for “he opened,” spelling it three different ways in eight verses![48] Inerrancy has to do with the message of the Bible, not necessarily the packaging of that message. From Calvin to Kantzer, those who embrace inerrancy have no problem allowing for non-substantive errors in the text.[49] Third, we should also note what the impact of viable variants is on the doctrine. After all, if there are some variants that may well be authentic and yet seem to contradict inerrancy, then the doctrine may be in jeopardy. Although several potential textual problem passages have been produced, not one has compelled evangelical scholars to abandon this doctrine.[50]

Conclusion

Has the New Testament text been hopelessly corrupted? Even bona fide textual critics who happen to be skeptics have not been able to demonstrate this to be so. Instead, the text is certain in all essentials, and even in most particulars we can be relatively sure what the autographs said. Further, in the passages in which the text is in doubt, no cardinal doctrine is at stake. Most importantly, the death and resurrection of the God-man, Jesus Christ—the core of the Christian faith—has not been tampered with throughout fourteen hundred years of textual transmission.[51]

1 C. J. Werleman, Jesus Lied—He Was Only Human: Debunking the New Testament (Great Yarmouth, Norfolk, England: Dangerous Little Books, 2010), 41.

2 Some Mormon scholars also despair of recovering the New Testament autographic text. See Barry Robert Bickmore, Restoring the Ancient Church: Joseph Smith and Early Christianity (Ben Lomond, CA: Foundation for Apologetic Information & Research, 1999), 61–62; John Gee, “The Corruption of Scripture in Early Christianity,” in Early Christians in Disarray: Contemporary LDS Perspectives on the Christian Apostasy, ed. Noel B. Reynolds (Provo, UT: Brigham Young University Press, 2005), 163–88; Robert J. Matthews, “What the Book of Mormon Tells Us about the Bible,” in Doctrines of the Book of Mormon: The 1991 Sperry Symposium, ed. Bruce A. Van Orden and Brent L. Top (Salt Lake City: Deseret, 1992), 93–107.

Not all Mormon scholars share this skepticism, however. For example, Richard Lloyd Anderson, “Manuscript Discoveries of the New Testament in Perspective,” in Papers of the Fourteenth Annual Symposium on the Archeology of the Scriptures, ed. Forrest R. Hauch (Salt Lake City: Brigham Young University Press, 1963), 58–59 (whole article, 52–59) summarizes his findings: “For a book [the New Testament] to undergo progressive uncovering of its manuscript history and come out with so little debatable in its text is a great tribute to its essential authenticity . . . no new manuscript discovery has produced serious differences in the essential story”; “The textual history of the New Testament gives every reason to assume a fairly stable transmission of the documents we possess”).

3 Quote from the website www.answering-christianity.com; accessed July 8, 2012.

4 M. M. Al-Azami, The History of the Qur’anic Text from Revelation to Compilation: A Comparative Study with the Old and New Testaments (Sherwood Park, Alberta, Canada: Al-Qalam, 2003), 277.

5 Robert W. Funk, Roy W. Hoover, and the Jesus Seminar, The Five Gospels: The Search for the Authentic Words of Jesus (New York: Macmillan, 1993), 6 (italics added).

6 Ibid.

7 Bart D. Ehrman, Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why (New York: HarperCollins, 2005), 10.

8 Ibid., 98.

9 For a critique of the King James Only view, see D. A. Carson, The King James Version Debate: A Plea for Realism (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1979).

10 Jasper James Ray, God Wrote Only One Bible (Junction City, OR: Eye Opener Publishers, 1955), 1.

11 Consider the following statements: “The TEXTUS RECEPTUS . . . is God’s sure foundation on which to rest our eternal salvation” (ibid., 32); “It is impossible to be saved without ‘FAITH,’ and perfect-saving-faith can only be produced by the ‘ONE’ Bible God wrote, and that we find only in translations which agree with the Greek Textus Receptus” (122); “Put poison anywhere in the blood stream and the whole becomes poisoned. Just so with the Word of God. When words are added or subtracted, Bible inspiration is destroyed, and the spiritual blood stream is poisoned. In this respect the revised Bibles in our day seem to have become spiritual guinea pigs, with multiple hypodermic shots-in-the-arm by so called Doctors of Divinity, who have used the serum of scholasticism well mixed with modern free-thinking textual criticism. When the Bible words are tampered with, and substitution is made, the Bible becomes a dead thing with neither power to give or sustain life. Of course, even under these conditions, it is possible to build up church membership, and report many professions. But what about regeneration? Are they born again? No person can be born again without the Holy Spirit, and it is evident the Holy Spirit is not going to use a poisoned blood stream to produce healthy Christians. Therefore, beware, beware, lest your faith become marred through the reading of corrupted Revised Versions of the Bible” (ibid., 9). Apparently Ray was not aware that virtually every manuscript adds and omits words.

12 Ibid., ii, 101.

13 Even in later works that are dressed in more scholarly garb, the witch-hunting invectives are still present. David Otis Fuller, for example, in Counterfeit or Genuine Mark 16? John 8? 2nd ed. (Grand Rapids: Grand Rapids International Publications, 1978), speaks of “bastard Bibles” (10). He adds further, as did Ray, that Satan is the mastermind behind this defection from the King James and TR: “born-again Christians in this twentieth century are facing the most malicious and vicious attack upon God’s inspired Holy Word since the Garden of Eden. And this attack began in its modern form in the publication of the Revised Version of the Scriptures in 1881 in England” (9). Donald A. Waite, a Dallas Seminary graduate with both a ThM and ThD from that institution, argued in his The Theological Heresies of Westcott and Hort (Collingswood, NJ: Bible for Today, 1979), that the two Cambridge scholars were unregenerate, unsaved, apostate, and heretical (39–42). David D. Shields in his dissertation on “Recent Attempts to Defend the Byzantine Text of the Greek New Testament” (Ph.D. dissertation, Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, Fort Worth, TX; December, 1985) points out that “the evidence on which [Waite] bases these conclusions often would indict most evangelical Christians. Even in the author’s perspective, Westcott and Hort have theological problems, but the extreme severity of Waite’s approach would declare anyone apostate and heretical who does not hold to his line” (55). Theodore P. Letis, editor of The Majority Text: Essays and Reviews in the Continuing Debate (Fort Wayne, IN: Institute for Biblical Textual Studies, 1987), used vitriolic language seemingly against everybody, for he was in something of a theological no man’s land: his arrows were aimed not only at modern textual criticism, but even against inerrantists. He spoke, for example, of “the idolatrous affair that evangelicals are having with the red herring of inerrancy” (22); those who advocate using modern-language Bibles (including the translators of the New King James Version) are “in pragmatic league with the goddess of modernity—Her Majesty, Vicissitude” (81); virtually all modern translations imbibe in Arianism (203). Ad hominem arguments are found everywhere in his book.

14 In 1883, Philip Schaff spoke of 150,000 textual variants as the estimate (Philip Schaff, Companion to the Greek Testament and the English Version [New York: Harper, 1883], 177). With the publication of Herman C. Hoskier’s Concerning the Text of the Apocalypse, 2 vols. (London: Quaritch, 1929), in which every variant of every known manuscript of Revelation was tabulated, the estimates were revised upwards. And with other publications such as the two-volume text of Luke by the International Greek New Testament Committee, the Editio Critica Maior series by the Institut für neutestamentliche Textforschung, and Tommy Wasserman’s The Epistle of Jude (Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell, 2006)—a work, like Hoskier’s, that documented every variant among the continuous text manuscripts of Jude—the estimates have risen to as high as 400,000.

15 See Neil R. Lightfoot, How We Got the Bible (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1963), 53–54; Lee Strobel, The Case for Christ: A Journalist’s Personal Investigation of the Evidence for Jesus (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1998), 64–65; Norman L. Geisler and William E. Nix, A General Introduction to the Bible, rev. ed. (Chicago: Moody, 1986), 468: “If one single word is misspelled in 3,000 different manuscripts, it is counted as 3,000 variants or readings. Once this counting procedure is understood, and the mechanical (orthographic) variants have been eliminated, the remaining significant variants are surprisingly few in number.” This statement duplicates verbatim the wording found on p. 361 in the first edition of this book, published in 1968. See also Norman L. Geisler, Baker Encyclopedia of Christian Apologetics (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1998), 532.

16 At minimum, there must be one manuscript in support of a reading; otherwise it is only conjecture.

17 Richard Bentley, Remarks upon a Discourse of Free Thinking (London: J. Morphew and E. Curll, 1713); The eighth edition, which is quoted here, was published a year after Bentley’s death with additions from his manuscript (London: Knaptons, Manby, and Beecroft, 1743), 349.

18 Bruce M. Metzger and Bart D. Ehrman, The Text of the New Testament: Its Transmission, Corruption, and Restoration, 4th ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 126. It should be noted that in the fourth edition of Metzger’s introductory textbook on New Testament textual criticism, Ehrman joined his mentor in the revision. As skeptical as Ehrman has been in his own writings, what he co-authored with his Doktorvater has been a far more moderating and mainstream viewpoint.

19 Bart Ehrman, Lost Christianities: The Battles for Scripture and the Faiths We Never Knew (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 219. Cf. also Bart D. Ehrman, The New Testament: An Historical Introduction To The Early Christian Writings, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 449; Eldon J. Epp, “Are Early New Testament Manuscripts Truly Abundant?” in Israel’s God and Rebecca’s Children: Christology and Community in Early Judaism and Christianity. Essays in Honor of Larry W. Hurtado and Alan F. Segal, ed. by David B. Capes, April D. DeConick, Helen K. Bond, and Troy A. Miller (Waco: Baylor University Press, 2007), 77–107. It is remarkable that in an article intended to show how sparse are the early data for the New Testament (e.g., “If the early manuscripts are most valuable, what value and how much abundance do we have in the mere eleven manuscripts that have survived from the period up to and around 200 C.E.? At that point, Christianity had been in existence for two hundred years!” [88]), Epp makes no comparison with other ancient Greco-Roman literature. Without such a comparison, there is no way to tell how relatively abundant the early New Testament manuscripts are. Further, nowhere does he discuss how much text of the New Testament was found in these early manuscripts.

20 A few manuscripts are dated on the cusp of the millennial change (i.e., AD 1000) or cannot be pinpointed more accurately than tenth to eleventh century; these bring the numbers to 860. See codex 2882, posted at www.csntm.org/Manuscript/View/GA_2882, as an illustration of a recently-discovered manuscript that has been dated to the tenth/eleventh century.

21 Thanks are due to Brett Williams who catalogued all the verses found in the papyri through the early third century. The 3880 verses out of 7917 (the total found in the Nestle-Aland Novum Testamentum Graece, sans Mark 16:9–20 and John 7:53–8:11) is 49.01 percent. Quite a few of the verses are found in more than one papyrus.

22 The total number of differences between the earliest form of the text and the latest is closer to 4 percent. The additions alone are about 1.5%, but the latest form of the text does not merely add material; it also omits, transposes, and substitutes words. The majority of these changes are so trivial as to be untranslatable.

23 Although skeptics such as Bart Ehrman have suggested that the earliest manuscripts we have today display significant differences and betray a wild copying tendency, largely because the scribes who produced them were not professionally trained, the evidence speaks otherwise. I offer three pieces of data: (1) Barbara Aland, “Der textkritische und textgeschichtliche Nutzen früher Papyri, demonstriert am Johannesevangelium,” in Recent Developments in Textual Criticism: New Testament, Other Early Christian and Jewish Literature, ed. Wim Weren and Dietrich Alex-Koch (Assen, The Netherlands: Royal Van Gorcum, 2003), 19–38, argues that the early papyri of John’s Gospel only display a few notable variants and present, apart from sloppiness in copying, a reasonably reliable text; (2) Zachary Cole, “Scribal Hands of Early New Testament Manuscripts” (ThM thesis, Dallas Theological Seminary, 2012), takes head-on the skeptics’ assertion that nonprofessional scribes were necessarily careless. By comparing the handwriting of early manuscripts, Cole demonstrates that there is no correlation between a professionally-trained scribe and careful copying or between an untrained scribe and careless copying; (3) Below is a chart of early papyri that have a “strict text” or “normal text” according to Kurt and Barbara Aland, The Text of the New Testament, 2nd ed. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1989). By “strict text” the Alands mean manuscripts that “transmit the text of an exemplar with meticulous care” (64); by “normal text” they mean “a relatively faithful tradition which departs from its exemplar only occasionally” (ibid.). The Alands also speak of five categories of manuscripts in terms of textual character, with Category I being the closest to the autographs (ibid., 335). The chart is my own, culled from the descriptions in this volume.

Of these, some have dated 𝔓^23, 𝔓^32, 𝔓^64 + 𝔓^67, and 𝔓^77 to the late second century. There are thus as many as seventeen manuscripts that are earlier than, coeval with, or almost coeval with 𝔓^75 that have a strict text or nearly so. Altogether, they have almost 500 verses.

24 Miroslav Marcovich, Patristic Textual Criticism, Part 1 (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1994), ix.

25 W. H. S. Jones, translator, Pausanias: Description of Greece (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1969), xxvii.

26 Technically, our doubts should be a thousand-fold if there are 20,000 New Testament manuscripts (in Greek and the ancient versions) and less than 20 manuscripts for the average classical author. However, if one were only to look at the more ancient copies of such documents, the ratios could be closer. A hundred-fold is an amount that is hard to argue with.

27 Note that I did not say that we have no doubts about the autographs of these other ancient writers. But far greater skepticism toward the New Testament is shown than its manuscript testimony would warrant. Further, it is a curious thing that Ehrman in Misquoting Jesus can sound so skeptical of the wording of the original New Testament when a part of his basis for such skepticism is certainty about what some ancient writers said! In other words, part of his argument against the reliability of New Testament manuscripts is his assumption of accuracy of what certain ancient writers’ texts read, even though we have to do textual criticism on their extant manuscripts to try to reconstruct what they wrote. In Misquoting Jesus, he enlists Seneca (46), Martial (47), Hermas (48), Irenaeus (53), Dionysius (53), and Rufinus (54). And most significantly, he discusses Origen’s quotations of Celsus, an antagonist to the Christian faith who wrote about seventy years before Origen did, with the tacit assumption that the copies of Origen that we have accurately reflect what Origen wrote and that Origen accurately recorded what Celsus wrote, even though seventy years separated the two men. If we had the original text of Origen, we would still be dealing with a seventy-year gap after Celsus. But when a similar time-gap occurs for the New Testament manuscripts, Ehrman says, “We don’t even have copies of the copies of the originals, or copies of the copies of the copies of the originals. What we have are copies made later—much later” (Misquoting Jesus, 10), and “If we have very few early copies—in fact, scarcely any—how can we know that the text was not changed significantly before the New Testament began to be reproduced in such large quantities?” (Lost Christianities, 219).

28 Homer’s Iliad has just over 2,200 extant manuscripts, while his Odyssey has 141 (so Martin L. West, Homeri Ilias, volumen prius: Rhapsodias I-XII Continens, Bibliotheca Scriptorum Graecorum et Romanorum Teubneriana [Stutgardiae et Lipsiae: In Aedibus B. G. Tevbneri, 1998], XXXVIII–LIV; Victor Berard, L’Odyssee: Poesie Homerique, Tome I: Chants I–VII, Collection des Universites de France [Paris: Societe D’Edition Les Belles Lettres, 1924], XXXVI–XXXIX. The data on the Odyssey, however, need to be updated). Nothing in the ancient Greco-Roman world comes close to this—except, of course, for the New Testament and some patristic writers such as Chrysostom. Not counting patristic citations of the New Testament, there are still almost ten times as many copies of the New Testament as there are Homeric manuscripts extant today.

29 In my debate with Bart Ehrman at UNC Chapel Hill (February 1, 2012; available on www.youtube.com), when I declared that the more variants we have the better off we are for reconstructing the autographic wording of the New Testament because it implied that we had more manuscripts, Ehrman was incredulous. He said that instead what would help the reconstruction would be thousands of manuscripts that were identical to each other. This response is typical of how radical skeptics address the textual problems of the New Testament: they create completely unrealistic expectations for the transmission of the New Testament—expectations that could not possibly be met for any documents that were copied by hand—and then declare that the New Testament text is unreliable because it does not live up to such standards. Applying the same criteria to any other ancient literature would result in almost total rejection of our knowledge of human history until the printing press had been invented.

30 E. C. Colwell, “Method in Evaluating Scribal Habits: A Study of P45, P66, P75,” in Studies in Methodology in Textual Criticism of the New Testament, New Testament Tools and Studies 9, ed. Bruce M. Metzger (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1969), 115–16.

31 See Matthew P. Morgan, “The Legacy of a Letter: Sabellianism or Scribal Blunder in John 1.1c?” in Revisiting the Corruption of the New Testament: Manuscript, Patristic, and Apocryphal Evidence, ed. Daniel B. Wallace (Grand Rapids: Kregel, 2011), 91–126, for this and several other examples of blunders in codex L.

32 Gordon D. Fee, “Modern Textual Criticism and the Synoptic Problem: On the Problem of Harmonization in the Gospels,” in Studies in the Theory and Method of New Testament Textual Criticism, by Eldon J. Epp and Gordon D. Fee (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1993), 174–82. Even some advocates of what is known as the “majority text” recognize that harmonizations are plentiful in their preferred text-form. See Willem Franciscus Wisselink, Assimilation as a Criterion for the Establishment of the Text: A Comparative Study on the Basis of Passages from Matthew, Mark, and Luke (Kampen: Uitgeversmaatschappij J. H. Kok, 1989), 87–90.

33 Ehrman, Misquoting Jesus, 98.

34 Ehrman’s Misquoting Jesus is notorious for camping on this final category of variants, but usually by leaving the reader completely unaware that they constitute a tiny fraction of all textual differences. As Craig Blomberg, Distinguished Professor of New Testament at Denver Seminary, notes, “What most distinguishes the work are the spins Ehrman puts on some of the data at numerous junctures and his propensity for focusing on the most drastic of all the changes in the history of the text, leaving the uninitiated likely to think there are numerous additional examples of various phenomena he discusses when there are not” (Denver Journal 9 [2006]; accessed Jan. 31, 2013, http://www.denverseminary.edu/article/misquoting-jesus-the-story-behind-who-changed-the-bible-and-why.

35 The DVD of the debate is available at www.csntm.org.

36 Mark’s Gospel in Greek has less than 57,000 letters; 0.001% deviation is one out of 100,000 or one half of one letter.

37 Several exchanges between Bart Ehrman and Dan Wallace on the TC-List, December 10–14, 2011, are accessible online at http://rosetta.reltech.org/TC/tc-list.html.

38 See Bruce M. Metzger, A Textual Commentary on the Greek New Testament, 2nd ed. (Stuttgart: Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft, 1994), 56.

39 Blomberg, Denver Journal 9.

40 For a debate over the text of Mark 16:9–20, see Perspectives on the Ending of Mark: Four Views, ed. D. A. Black (Nashville: B&H Academic, 2008).

41 In scores of lectures I have given on the text of the New Testament in churches, colleges, apologetics conferences, and the like, I have found that overwhelmingly the Johannine text is preferred over the Markan.

42 See, for example, the sources cited at the beginning of this chapter.

43 Ehrman, Misquoting Jesus, appendix.

44 For an extended critique of Ehrman’s Orthodox Corruption of the Scripture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), on which his Misquoting Jesus was based, see Revisiting the Corruption of the New Testament: Manuscript, Patristic, and Apocryphal Evidence, ed. Daniel B. Wallace (Grand Rapids: Kregel, 2011).

45 Moisés Silva gave an insightful critique of those scholars who wanted to jettison the quest of determining the wording of the original text (“Response,” in Rethinking New Testament Textual Criticism, ed. David Alan Black [Grand Rapids: Baker, 2002], 149):

For us to retreat from the traditional task of textual criticism is equivalent to shooting ourselves in the foot. And my exhibit A is Bart Ehrman’s brilliant monograph The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture. . . . Although this book is appealed to in support of blurring the notion of an original text, there is hardly a page in that book that does not in fact mention such a text or assume its accessibility. . . . Indeed, Ehrman’s book is unimaginable unless he can identify an initial form of the text that can be differentiated from a later alteration.

46 For example, the doctrinal statement of the Evangelical Theological Society, the largest society of evangelical scholars in the world, says “The Bible alone, and the Bible in its entirety, is the Word of God written and is therefore inerrant in the autographs.”

47 E.g., Roger Bolton, “The Rival to the Bible,” in the BBC News Magazine, October 6, 2008 (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/7651105.stm), in discussing the digitization of Codex Sinaiticus by the British Library, claimed, “For those who believe the Bible is the inerrant, unaltered word of God, there will be some very uncomfortable questions to answer. [Codex Sinaiticus] shows there have been thousands of alterations to today’s bible.”

48 In John 9:14, 17, and 21 the third person singular aorist active indicative of ἀνοίγω is spelled successively as ἀνέῳξεν, ἠνέῳξέν, and ἤνοιξεν.

49 John Calvin sometimes noted the infelicities in the language of the biblical writers, such as in Rom 5:15: “Although he [Paul] frequently mentions the difference between Adam and Christ, all his repeated statements . . . are elliptical. Those, it is true, are faults in his language, but in no way do they detract from the majesty of the heavenly wisdom which is delivered to us by the apostle” (The Epistles of Paul the Apostle to the Romans and Thessalonians, trans. David and Thomas Torrance [Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1960], 114). J. I. Packer appropriately comments on Calvin’s view of these grammatical and stylistic impoverishments: “Calvin would fault an apostle for poor style and bad grammar but not for substantive inaccuracy” (“John Calvin and the Inerrancy of Holy Scripture,” in Inerrancy and the Church, ed. John D. Hannah [Chicago: Moody, 1984], 178–79). Kenneth Kantzer notes, in his essay on “Inerrancy and the Humanity and Divinity of the Bible,” that “Inerrancy teaches us that God kept the Biblical writers from bearing false witness as they wrote the Bible. However inglorious human language may be, and therefore, however imperfect the human language of the Bible may be, it still always tells the truth” (in The Proceedings of the Conference on Biblical Inerrancy 1987 [Nashville: Broadman, 1987], 156 [italics added]).

50 See Daniel B. Wallace, “Inerrancy and the Text of the New Testament: Assessing the Logic of the Agnostic View,” in Evidence for God: 50 Arguments for Faith from the Bible, History, Philosophy, and Science, ed. William A. Dembski and Michael L. Licona (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2010).

51 Thanks are due to my two Dallas Seminary academic interns for the 2011–12 school year, Greg Rhodea and Jason Stein, for their indefatigable industry in hunting down many of the references used in this chapter.

Chapter Seven

Does the Bible Contain Forgeries?

Terry L. Wilder

Books in antiquity unquestionably contained forgeries, writings that were purportedly authored by someone who did not actually write them.[1] Critical scholars today argue that not only are many ancient works forged, but so also were some books found in both the Old and the New Testaments.[2] Terms like “pseudepigrapha,” “pseudepigraphy,” or “pseudonymity” are often used to refer to such writings. Technically, a forged or pseudonymous text is not authored by the person whose name it bears and there must be the intention to deceive, from whatever motive.[3] Such deceptive works are written after the purported author’s death by another person or during his life by someone who is not commissioned to do so. Plenty of these writings existed in ancient times, having been created by Greek, Roman, Jewish, and even Christian writers.[4]

Forgeries or deceptive pseudonymous writings are not the same as anonymous texts. The former works make definite bogus claims to authorship; the latter do not. Several anonymous works exist within both the Old and New Testaments. For example, the book of Judges, the Gospels, Acts, and Hebrews do not make definite claims to authorship. That is to say, the authors of these works did not specifically identify themselves, though they were surely known to their recipients.

Strictly speaking, those biblical works most often classified by scholars as forged, inauthentic, or pseudonymous are the OT books of Daniel and Isaiah,[5] and certain Pauline and Petrine letters and those of James and Jude[6] in the NT—namely, Ephesians, Colossians, 2 Thessalonians, the Pastoral Epistles, 1 and 2 Peter, James, and Jude. One might also note that several forged, pseudo-apostolic works exist outside of the NT canon—for example, 3 Corinthians, the Epistle to the Laodiceans, and the Gospel of Peter.

Pseudonymity in Greco-Roman and Jewish Writings

To promote the idea that pseudonymity as forgery exists within the canon, critics often appeal to Greco-Roman and Jewish sources. Sometimes scholars justify the presence of pseudonymous writings in Scripture by pointing to the practice in the Greco-Roman schools (e.g., the Pythagorean and Cynic schools). But while some pseudonymity may have been customary in such settings (cf. Iamblichus, de Vita Pythagorica § 198, 158), many school productions, were not created acceptably in this context (cf. Diogenes Laertius 10.3). Authors of no reputation would often write using the pseudonym of an older, reputable figure in order to secure a hearing for their own works, thus the forgeries.

Specific attributions of authorship were not typically found within ancient Jewish writings. This conclusion is reached because ancient Israelite literature was customarily anonymous.[7] Nonetheless, deceptive pseudonymity or forgery can be found amongst the Jews. The phenomenon occurred mostly in apocalyptic writings after 200 BC and arguably was due to a general belief that prophetic inspiration had ceased (cf. Josephus, Against Apion 1.41; Babylonian Talmud, Sanhedrin 11a). Evidently, like many Greco-Roman writers of little or no repute, some Jewish authors also wanted their forged writings to carry clout.

Jewish literature is generally not very helpful to a study of pseudepigraphy/forgery in early Christianity. As far as the NT is concerned, the writings most often classified by critical scholars as forgeries are letters. Thus, one really should look to Jewish epistolary literature to establish a precedent for the NT. Only two pseudonymous letters have come down to us from Jewish sources: the Letter of Aristeas and the Epistle of Jeremiah. The former work, strictly speaking, is not a letter because it does not occur in epistolary form. It is an apologetic narrative providing an account of the translation of the Hebrew OT into Greek. The latter writing, a sermon warning the Jews against pagan idolatry, calls itself a letter and identifies its senders and addressees, but purports to be a copy of an epistle. Thus, neither is entirely comparable to NT epistles. Other pseudonymous Jewish letters exist (e.g., 1 Baruch, 2 Baruch 78–87, 1 Enoch 92–105, and some letters contained in 1 and 2 Maccabees), but such writings occur within composite, apocalyptic, or narrative frameworks. These letters had a different form and function than NT epistles and are not relevant to the latter.

Nonetheless, some pseudonymous letters can be found within Christian circles. However, these epistles are few in number and unremarkable (e.g., the Letters of Christ and Abgarus, the Letter of Lentulus, the Correspondence of Paul and Seneca, the Epistle of Titus, the Epistle to the Laodiceans, the Epistle of the Apostles, 3 Corinthians, and the pseudo-Ignatian letters). They also do not closely resemble any NT epistles and were written at a much later date. Accordingly, though forged letters unquestionably can be found, scholars should not be so quick to consider the presence of forgeries in the NT because no contemporary pseudonymous writings exist which are just like the disputed NT letters. We will specifically look later at an OT book that many consider forged and, according to this view, is also an appropriate precedent for the presence of forgeries in the NT.

People in Antiquity, Including Early Christians, Knew How to Detect Forgery

Sometimes the presence of forgeries in the Bible is defended with the appeal that the ancients were either naïve and thus fooled into receiving forgeries into the canon or not equipped to detect such works like we are today. Nothing could be further from the truth. People in antiquity, including early Christians, knew well how to determine whether a work was genuine or forged.

Since the time of Herodotus, historians, grammarians, and philosophers in antiquity exercised an intensive criticism of documents attributed to recognized figures, not only to determine their authenticity, but also to stop the pseudonymity of various documents from misleading others.[8] For instance, Herodotus questioned, on the grounds of content, whether Homer authored the Cyprian poems (History 2.116–17), and he also doubted that Homer wrote the Epigonean epic (History 4.32);[9] Ion of Chios mentions in his Triagmi that Pythagoras may have ascribed some of his own poems as verses of Orpheus (Diogenes Laertius 8.8; cf. Clement of Alexandria, Stromata 1.131);[10] Aristotle doubted that Orpheus authored the Orphic poems (De Anima 1.5);[11] Cicero generally suspected that the Sibylline utterances were neither inspired nor authentic (De Divinatione 2.85, 2.110–12, 2.116);[12] Herennius Philo doubted that About the Jews was actually written by Hecataeus (Origen, Against Celsus 1.15);[13] and Sextus Julius Africanus questioned in his letter to Origen the authenticity of the Susanna history (Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History 6.31.1).[14]

Some of the criteria used in antiquity to decide whether a work was genuine or forged were the criticism of style, the analysis of vocabulary, the evaluation of teaching, and the discovery of anachronisms.[15] And, people in antiquity, including early Christians, were quite familiar with such methods.[16] For example, Dionysius of Alexandria resolved through a comparison of style and language with the Gospel of John that Revelation was not authored by the evangelist (Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History 7.25, 1–27);[17] Eusebius also referred to and used these grounds when separating false apostolic writings from genuine ones (Ecclesiastical History 3.25,7);[18] and later, Jerome concluded with the help of style criticism that 1 and 2 Peter were written by different authors.[19]

The Early Church View of Forgery

Known early Christian responses to forgery are more numerous than Jewish responses to pseudepigraphy, and they do not affirm the practice in any way whatsoever (cf. Tertullian’s comments in On Baptism 17 on the Acts of Paul; Serapion’s remarks on the Gospel of Peter recorded in Eusebius’ Ecclesiastical History 6.12.2–4.; the reference in the Muratorian Canon to “forged” Pauline letters, etc.). The language used by early church leaders in reference to pseudonymous works clearly describes them as fraudulent and deceptive. Early Christians simply did not embrace pseudonymous works they viewed in such a pejorative manner. If discovered, such writings were firmly rejected as deceptive.

Not all critics agree. Some scholars argue that the early church was really only concerned about the content of works and not their authorship. However, this theory does not explain the exclusion from the church’s canon of several forged pseudonymous writings which were orthodox in their content (e.g., the Preaching of Peter, the Apocalypse of Peter, the Epistle of the Apostles, the Correspondence of Paul and Seneca, the extant Epistle to the Laodiceans).[20]

Other critics object that the evidence of later, Gentile Christian attitudes towards pseudepigrapha and forgery is anachronistic and should not be used to judge the earlier Jewish or the first-century, Jewish-Christian phenomenon of pseudonymity.[21] The fact, however, that the Jews themselves rejected pseudonymous works like 1 Enoch and 4 Ezra from the Hebrew canon helps render the latter theory untenable. Undeniably, second-century orthodox Christians strongly disapproved of pseudonymity and forgery, and it is improbable that Christians and Jews from an earlier era had a different opinion on the matter.

Even more scholars note that the church’s rejection of pseudonymity took place in a period when a great deal of heretical literature attributed to the apostles was circulating. Thus, the latter phenomenon possibly colored the way that orthodox churchmen, who were concerned about heresy, looked at all pseudonymity. The early church, however, could conceivably have responded differently—for example, by only screening the content of documents and not their authorship. Notably, the early Christians did no such thing; instead, they utilized both standards when recognizing books as inspired of God and canonical. They rejected pseudonymous works explicitly written and forged in the apostles’ names.[22]

The New Testament View of Forgery

More so than the Old Testament, the New Testament contains passages which especially have a tremendous bearing on the question of pseudonymity and forgery in early Christianity. For example, in 2 Thessalonians 2:2 Paul warned the church against accepting the false teaching that “the Day of the Lord had come.” He cautioned his readers that, no matter through what agency they had received this heresy—whether through “spirit, word, or letter”—he and his missionary associates had nothing to do with it. Paul would have objected to a pseudonymous letter being attributed to him which contained falsehood, wrong teaching, or material that he did not write. The apostle clearly puts a moratorium on pseudonymity in his name (cf. 2 Thess 3:17).

The Pauline signatures in the NT (cf. 1 Cor 16:21; Gal 6:11; Col 4:18; 2 Thess 3:17; Phlm 19) indicated the apostle’s use of a secretary and provided readers with a sign of his letters’ authenticity and authority. Paul would have frowned upon someone using a facsimile of his signature in a pseudonymous letter which purported to be his.

In Revelation 22:18–19 John warned that no one was to tamper with what he had written in the book by rewriting it in any way. One can extrapolate from this interpretation of these verses to somebody writing another book and falsely attributing it to him by means of pseudonymity. John would object to a forged pseudonymous letter being attributed to him which contained falsehood or material that he did not write. To write a forged work and attribute it to somebody is a sort of extension of tampering with an existing document. Thus, to enlarge pseudonymously an existing body of literature—for example, the Pauline corpus—by adding a few inauthentic works is to tamper with Paul’s actual writings.

Biblical Appeals for Truth

The Old and New Testaments contain several appeals for truth that are difficult to reconcile with the thinking of an author who had deliberately used forgery. If we start with the NT, we see in 1 Timothy 4:1–2 that Paul warned his readers not to embrace the doctrine of “deceitful spirits” and “hypocritical liars” (NIV). In Ephesians 4:15 he instructed his readers to “speak the truth in love.” In Ephesians 4:25 he exhorted the church to “put off falsehood and speak truthfully.” In Colossians 3:9 he admonished his readers: “Do not lie to one another.” Furthermore, the Holy Spirit, who indwells every believer (1 Cor 6:19; 12:13) and is described as the “Spirit of Truth” (John 14:17; 16:3), created an ethos in the Christian community in which pseudonymity and forgery would have been frowned upon and could not have flourished. Also, a careful study of the terms for “deception” (cf. the Greek word group apataō/apatē and the entire Greek pseud—prefixed word group) reveals that a concept of legitimate deception for the NT is difficult to support.

Old Testament axioms and appeals for truth are in keeping with those found in the New Testament. For example, the Lord spoke to Moses and gave him several laws of holiness, one of which in Leviticus 19:11 says, “You must not steal. You must not act deceptively or lie to one another.” Proverbs 12:22 teaches, “Lying lips are detestable to the LORD, but faithful people are His delight.” Isaiah 63:8 describes God’s people as those “who will not deal falsely” (NASB). Psalm 24:4 states that the one “who has not sworn deceitfully” may stand in the Lord’s holy place, and in Psalm 43:1 the psalmist pleads with the Lord to “rescue me from the deceitful and unjust man.” While one can find several examples of people in the OT who used deception in mitigating and understandable circumstances (Abraham, Gen 12:13; 20:2; Isaac, Gen 26:7; Jacob, Gen 27:19; Elisha, 2 Kgs 6:19; David, 1 Sam 21:2; and Jehu, 2 Kgs 10:18–19), the OT clearly never condones it. Again, all of these examples would seem to create an environment in which forgery would have been disapproved of and not have thrived.

Are the Pastoral Epistles Forgeries?

Scholars who point out that forgery was a problem in antiquity—unlike others who say that no concept of literary property existed among the ancients—follow the lead of David Meade and others, to say that the NT contains forgeries, e.g., 1, 2 Timothy and Titus, Ephesians, Colossians, 2 Thessalonians, and 2 Peter. To defend the latter thesis, they marshal arguments against the disputed letters of the NT. Those arguments usually focus on items like: (1) a different vocabulary and style than the purported author’s style; (2) a lack of emphasis on characteristic doctrines taught by the supposed author; (3) occasional and situational details in the letters being later than the purported author’s lifetime; and (4) the letters containing historical allusions to certain details which simply cannot be placed within the book of Acts. In this section, we will look briefly at the authorship of the Pastoral Letters, three NT letters that many critical scholars consider to be forgeries.

Scholars cast more doubt on the authenticity of the Pastoral Epistles (1, 2 Timothy and Titus) than on any of the other Pauline letters.[23] Some argue that the Pastorals were written after Paul’s death by a writer who used the apostle’s name to strengthen the authority of these letters.[24] Others suggest that these writings were composed by a disciple or later admirer of Paul who included some genuine notes from Paul in his work.[25]

Those who argue against the Pauline authorship of the Pastorals do so on the basis of the following (or at least similar) criteria.[26] First, scholars who hold to the inauthenticity of the Pastorals stress that the vocabulary and style of these letters differ from the other Pauline Epistles.[27] Many words found in the PE do not occur in the other Pauline writings[28]—for example, the term “godliness” (eusebeia, 1 Tim 6:11). Moreover, 175 different hapax legomena appear in the Pastoral Epistles that are found nowhere else in the NT[29]—for example, the terms “slavetraders” (andrapodistēs, 1 Tim 1:10), “perjurers” (etiorkos, 1 Tim 1:10) and “integrity” (aphthoria, Titus 2:7). Stylistic differences also exist between the Pastorals and the rest of the Pauline corpus—for example, several particles are absent from the Pastoral Epistles but are present in the other Paulines.[30] Such contrasts lead many to believe that Paul did not write the Pastoral Epistles. However, this argument does not consider that the variations in subject-matter, occasion, purpose, and addressees may account for many of these differences.[31] Rather than pointing to a pseudo-author’s style, the specialized vocabulary and style in the PE arguably reflects instead Paul’s desire to communicate clearly to his audience. The use of a secretary by Paul may also explain the presence of many words in the Pastorals. Stylistic arguments tend to be quite subjective and unimpressive. Differences exist within the other Pauline letters that are just as extensive as those between the Pastorals and the rest of the Pauline corpus.[32] Furthermore, the Pastoral Epistles are simply too brief to determine with accuracy the writing habits of a particular author.[33]

Second, defenders of pseudonymity in the Pastorals contend that the church structure in these letters is too advanced for Paul’s time.[34] That is to say, the Pastorals are said to correspond to a later period when church government was more organized and controlled.[35] Moreover, opponents of authenticity often argue that the Pastoral Epistles reflect a church government of monarchial bishops. However, the fact that Paul appointed elders at the start of his missionary work strongly shows his concern for orderly church government (cf. Acts 14:23).[36] Other biblical passages also indicate that church structure played a key part in Paul’s ministry (cf. Acts 20:17–28; Phil 1:1; see also Rom 12:8; 1 Thess 5:12). Furthermore, the instructions regarding overseers in 1 Timothy and Titus simply do not reflect the monarchial church government which began to develop in the second century.[37] For example, in Titus 1:5–7 the word “overseer” is used interchangeably with “elder,” and since elders are to be appointed in every town, there is no indication of monarchial government.

Third, those who argue against the Pauline authorship of the Pastorals date the heresy opposed in these letters later than Paul’s lifetime. In the second century, gnostic heretics came on the scene denying the resurrection of Christ and practicing both a moral license and rigid asceticism.[38] Some advocates of pseudonymity in the Pastorals argue that the words “myths” (mythoi) and “genealogies” (genealogiai) in 1 Timothy 1:4 pertain to a developed Gnosticism of the second-century.[39] They also contend that the Greek term for “opposing arguments” (antitheseis, another hapax) in 1 Timothy 6:20 referred to the title of a second-century work written by the heretic Marcion. Others note that the false teaching in these letters contains many Jewish elements (1 Tim 1:7; Titus 1:10, 14; 3:9) as well as some ascetic characteristics.[40]

The identity of the opponents in the Pastorals is still debated amongst scholars:[41] some say that the heresy opposed in the PE is some type of Judaism;[42] others view the opposition as Jewish-Christian opponents to the Pauline mission;[43] many say that the false teaching is a form of second-century Gnosticism;[44] still others identify the false teachers with an ascetic movement of some sort.[45] In any event, those who argue that the opponents in these letters are later than Paul—whether Jewish, ascetic, Gnostic, or a combination of these—need to consider that Jewish elements (cf. Galatians 2) and asceticism (cf. Romans 14) also operated in Paul’s time, as well as Gnosticism in its incipient form, which likely stretched back into the first century. Consequently, the opposition combated in the PE does not require a date later than Paul’s lifetime.

Fourth, supporters of pseudonymity contend that the Pastorals do not emphasize characteristic Pauline doctrines like the Fatherhood of God, the believer’s union with Christ, the work of the Holy Spirit, and the cross.[46] Many also suggest that too much of a concern for the transmission of “sound teaching,” i.e., tradition (1 Tim 2:4) and the use of creeds (cf. 1 Tim 3:16; 2 Tim 1:13–14; 2:2; Titus 2:11–14,) in the Pastorals reflect Christianity at the end of the first century.[47] Standards of this nature, however, are not accurate criteria for determining authenticity. The so-called absence of typical Pauline themes is overstated. For example, the lack of references to the Holy Spirit in the Pastoral Epistles (found only in 1 Tim 4:1; 2 Tim 1:14; Titus 3:5) is not as big a problem as it first may seem. Colossians and 2 Thessalonians mention the Holy Spirit only once; Philippians also refers to the Spirit very few times. Moreover, the emphasis on Christian doctrine in the Pastorals does not require a later date. During his ministry, Paul stressed holding firmly to tradition (cf. 1 Cor 11:2) and often cited creedal sayings and hymns in his letters (cf. 1 Cor 15:3–5; Phil 2:6–8; Col 1:15–17).[48]

Finally, opponents of the Pauline authorship of the Pastoral Epistles argue that these letters contain historical allusions to Paul’s life which cannot be placed within the book of Acts. For example, Paul has been with Timothy and left him in Ephesus to combat false teachers while he went to Macedonia (1 Tim 1:3); similarly, he has left Titus in Crete (Titus 1:5); Paul also referred to Onesiphorus who had been searching for him in Rome (2 Tim 1:16–17); and he is now a prisoner (2 Tim 1:8, 16; cf. 4:16). This objection suggests that only what is recorded in the book of Acts may be considered authentic. Traditionally, defenders of the authenticity of the Pastorals respond to this argument with the theory that Paul was released from his imprisonment in Acts 28, travelled back to the East, and was later arrested and imprisoned in Rome again. Under this view, the references to Paul in the Pastorals cannot be placed within the data of Acts because they happened at a later date. Those who hold to the Pauline authorship of the Pastorals also point out that the book of Acts does not record many details of Paul’s life (cf. 2 Cor 11).[49] Thus, the fact that Acts does not record a second Pauline imprisonment in Rome is not unusual. If Paul had been martyred at the end of his imprisonment recorded in Acts 28, it is difficult to imagine that the author would have completed his work without mentioning this event.[50] Moreover, the fact that Paul expected to be released from prison in Philippians (1:19, 25; 2:24), while he did not in the Pastorals (2 Tim 4:6–8), also suggests a subsequent Roman imprisonment. Furthermore, a social-historical study of Paul in Roman custody in Acts 28 indicates that Paul was likely released.[51]

External evidence from the early church also attests to the Pauline authorship of the Pastoral Epistles. Several early church leaders accepted these letters as canonical and Pauline—for example, Ignatius, Polycarp, Clement of Alexandria, Tertullian, and Irenaeus. Eusebius, the early church historian, said, “The epistles of Paul are fourteen, all well known and beyond doubt.”[52] These “fourteen epistles” included the Pastorals. Furthermore, the Pastoral Epistles are listed among the Pauline letters in the Muratorian Canon.[53] The Pauline authorship of the Pastorals was not seriously questioned until the nineteenth century.

In light of the evidence, a resort to a forged authorship for the Pastoral Epistles is not necessary. They, like the rest of the New Testament writings, may be relied upon as authentic and trustworthy. Those who say that the Pastorals are forged need to take a closer look at the evidence for the onus of proof weighs heavily upon them.

Is Daniel a Forgery?

Often critical scholars will argue that forgeries can be found in the Old Testament. Since this is the case, they will say, it should then come as no surprise that forged works are also present in the NT. Amongst other books, these critics frequently point to the OT book of Daniel as being an example of such a work. But is Daniel a forgery?

Daniel claims to be written by the prophet Daniel during the time of the Babylonian captivity in the sixth century BC.[54] In the third century AD, the neo-Platonist Porphyry first proposed that Daniel was instead written by an unknown Jew during the second century BC who wrote under the false name of Daniel. The purpose for composing such a work was to encourage Jews as they resisted the Syrian-Greek tyrant named Antiochus IV Epiphanes, who ruled from 175 to 164 BC during the Maccabean era. If the thesis above is true, then Daniel would be the last of the OT books written.

Critical scholars who place Daniel in the second century BC first say that the book contains several unhistorical accounts and vaticinia ex eventu, i.e., prophecies after the event. They generally think that the author wrote chapters 7–12 and introduced his material with the stories in chapters 1–6, taken from a Danielic body of writings dating from the prior century. They seem neither to believe in predictive prophecy nor think that a sixth-century writer could have known such historical details about the purported setting. For them, the so-called historical inaccuracies concerning events prior to the second century indicate a later date of writing. However, Josephus, the first-century Jewish historian, made plain that Daniel’s prophecies were known prior to the time of Alexander the Great (d. 323 BC).[55] Moreover, the book’s historical reliability has been often established by archaeological discoveries (e.g., the historical authenticity of Belshazzar and Jerusalem’s invasion by the armies of Babylon c. 605 BC). Further, the supposed historical inaccuracies, when closely examined, can be reasonably explained.

Second, those who place Daniel in the second century BC argue that the book’s position in the Hebrew canon with the Writings instead of the Prophets indicates a late date of writing. This objection, however, is not insurmountable. The Masoretes may have been influential in assigning Daniel to the Writings because he was not appointed or ordained as a prophet; further, much of the book bears the character of history more than it does prophecy.[56]

Third, those who hold to a Maccabean thesis for Daniel contend that the language of the book indicates a late date. Daniel contains some words of Persian, Greek, Hebrew, and Aramaic. This mixture of words has led scholars to put forward a late date for the book. However, the presence of such language does not necessitate a late date. Daniel finished his book after Persia conquered Babylon. He also served in the new government’s administration. So, the presence of Persian loanwords is understandable. These Persian words and expressions seem to provide substantial evidence for an early date of writing because they are old words that stopped being used around 300 BC. The presence of three Greek loanwords in Daniel (3:5, 7, 10, 15) also do not demand a late date because archaeology has shown that Greece and other Mediterranean Sea nations had considerable contact with each other prior to the sixth century BC. Conversely, if Daniel was written in the second century during Greek rule over Palestine, one would think that numerous Greek words would instead be present in the text. Daniel’s Aramaic shows noticeable parallels with the early Imperial Aramaic found in texts like the Elephantine papyri that date from the fifth century BC or earlier. Furthermore, Daniel’s Aramaic does not correspond with later examples of Aramaic discovered at Qumran, such as that found in the Genesis Apocryphon.

Fourth, arguments for dating Daniel based on its theology are on shaky ground because if Daniel can be reasonably and objectively dated to the sixth century by other means, as it arguably can be, then the theology within the book would be of the same time period.

Those who hold to the traditional view that Daniel was written in the sixth century BC maintain that the history and predictive prophecy in the book are dependable, accurate, and supernatural. First, those who argue for Daniel’s historicity contend that Jesus and NT authors thought that Daniel composed the book (cf. Matt 24:15 with Mark 13:14; Matt 26:64 with Mark 14:62 and Luke 22:69; Heb 11:32–34). Second, they point out that the book declares to have been written by the prophet Daniel (Dan 12:4), to be the story of a person who actually went through the exile and resided in Babylon, and to be a prophetic forecast of events in the future (Dan 7:2, 4, 6–28; 8; 9:2–27; 10:2–21; 12:4–8). Third, eight manuscripts of Daniel were discovered at Qumran. One of them (4QDanc) dates to c. 125 BC and may have even been written earlier. This fact actually favors an earlier date for Daniel because if the book was originally written in the second century, then it would not have gained widespread acceptance by the Qumran community in such a short time, roughly forty years. R. K. Harrison writes that “there would . . . have been insufficient time for Maccabean compositions to be circulated, venerated, and accepted as canonical Scripture by a Maccabean sect.”[57] Fourth, the Septuagint is the Greek translation of the Hebrew OT by Jewish scholars in Egypt that was widely used by Diaspora Jews. Surely Daniel was already translated into Greek by 130 BC when Ben Sirach’s grandson composed the prologue to Ecclesiasticus. The prologue indicates that the “law and the prophets and the others” had already been translated into Greek and handed down. This means that advocates of the second-century hypothesis propose that around thirty years after Daniel was written, the book was included in the canon, carried to Alexandria, Egypt, then translated into Greek—an unlikely proposal. Fifth, the book of Ezekiel contains three allusions to Daniel (14:14, 20; 28:3). These references from the sixth-century prophet would seem to decide the matter in favor of the traditional view. However, Miller explains,

Since the discoveries at Ras-Shamra . . . scholars who accept the late date have attempted to explain these passages by declaring that Ezekiel was referring to a mythological figure named Danel, who appears in the Ugaritic epic, “The Tale of Aqhat.” A devastating argument against the theory that Ezekiel’s Daniel is this Ugaritic hero is that Danel was an idolater! Ezekiel must have been referring to the author of the book of Daniel. If so, the historicity of Daniel and his book would seem to be established.[58]

The OT book of Daniel can be defended as historically authentic. In light of the evidence, a resort to a forged authorship for Daniel is not necessary. Like the rest of the Old Testament, the book may be relied upon as authentic and trustworthy. Those who say that Daniel is a forged book should closely examine all of the evidence and consider the possibility of miracles and predictive prophecy.

Conclusion

Did the authors of certain biblical books lie about their identities, using the names of apostles or prophets or whomever in order to gain a hearing for their works or to invest them with authority that they themselves did not have? No doubt such writings were in circulation, many from Gnostic and other groups, but when discovered, they were always soundly rejected, most notably by the early church. For example, Asian church elders ousted a colleague from his post for composing a forgery (cf. Tertullian, On Baptism 17), writing out of “love for Paul” the apocryphal Acts of Paul, which included the pseudo-apostolic letter of 3 Corinthians.[59] Despite the presbyter’s profession that he had meant well, his action warranted removal from office. The elders arguably removed him for writing a forgery, either writing a work that fictitiously bore Paul’s name or for composing a fiction about the apostle. Likewise, Serapion, bishop of Antioch, rejected the use of the apocryphal Gospel of Peter in the church at Rhossus.[60] He had initially allowed the church to read the book because he thought it was authentic. However, when he further examined the work, he discovered that it contained false teaching and forbade its use. Serapion rejected the Gospel of Peter because of its heresy and its forged authorship. This documentary evidence is in keeping with the tenor of all that we have seen in this chapter.

Indeed, any alleged forgery present in either the OT or NT would have to have had escaped successfully from some intense scrutiny. As we will see in chapter 16, written by Darrell Bock, Paul Wegner, and myself, we possess the right canon of Scripture; and we also have the correct OT and NT books, none of which, I am convinced, are forgeries.

Those who say that forgeries exist in the Bible really need to take a closer look at the evidence. The onus of proof weighs heavily upon them. As we have seen, any objections to the authenticity of biblical books can be plausibly answered.[61] The evidence we possess points to the trustworthiness of Scripture.

1 See, for example, W. Speyer, Die literarische Fälschung im heidnischen und christlichen Altertum: Ein Versuch ihrer Deutung, Handbuch der Altertumwisssenschaft 1/2 (München: Beck, 1971) for a thorough look at all kinds of forgeries. See also Bruce M. Metzger, “Literary Forgeries and Canonical Pseudepigrapha,” JBL 91 (1972): 3–24.

2 For example, most recently, Bart D. Ehrman, Forged: Writing in the Name of God: Why the Bible’s Authors Are Not Who We Think They Are (New York, NY: HarperOne, 2011), and idem, Forgery and Counterforgery: The Use of Literary Deceit in Early Christian Polemics (Oxford University Press, 2013).

3 Motives cloud the issue. The intention to deceive is what is important. See the definition by J. D. Denniston, “Forgeries, Literary Greek I. Greek,” Oxford Classical Dictionary, ed. N. G. L. Hammond, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1970), 444. Recent treatments of whether pseudonymity, for example, if present in the NT, was meant to deceive have determined, “Yes.” See A. D. Baum, Pseudepigraphie und literarische Fälschung im frühen Christentum. Mit ausgewählten Quellentexten samt deutscher Übersetzung (Tübingen: Mohr-Siebeck, 2001); J. Duff, “A Reconsideration of Pseudepigraphy in Early Christianity” (unpublished D.Phil. thesis; Oxford University, 1998); and T. L. Wilder, Pseudonymity, the New Testament, and Deception (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2004).

4 Speyer, Fälschung; Wilder, Pseudonymity, 35–74, and Ehrman, Forgery and Counterforgery.

5 For a defense of the unity/single authorship of the book of Isaiah see, e.g., the introductions in Gary V. Smith, Isaiah 1–39, NAC 15a (Nashville: B&H, 2007), and idem, Isaiah 40–66, NAC 15b (Nashville: B&H, 2009).

6 E. E. Ellis (“Pseudonymity and Canonicity of New Testament Documents,” Worship, Theology and Ministry in the Early Church: Essays in Honor of Ralph P. Martin, ed. M. Wilkins [Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1993], 212–24; 220) notes that only the Pauline and Petrine epistles can be classified as pseudepigrapha. He says that the letters of James and Jude cannot be classified as such because the names of the authors (“Jude . . . brother of James” [Jude 1] and “James . . . servant of the Lord Jesus Christ” [James 1:1] “are less precise and could refer to a number of individuals.” However, nearly all critics think that the names James and Jude refer to famous individuals of this name and many scholars think that they are used pseudonymously.

7 See Morton Smith, “Pseudepigraphy in the Israelite Literary Tradition,” in Pseudepigrapha I, ed. K. von Fritz (Genève: O. Revedin, 1972), 191–227.

8 Speyer, Fälschung, 114. E. Schnabel, “Der biblische Kanon und das Phänomen der Pseudonymität,” Jahrbuch für Evangelikale Theologie, 3 Jahrgang (1989): 66.

9 Speyer, Fälschung, 114. See Speyer (Fälschung) for a full discussion of Echtheitskritik in antiquity amongst the Greeks and Romans (112–28), the Jews (152–55), and the church fathers (179–210).

10 Ibid.

11 Ibid.

12 Ibid., 123.

13 Ibid., 152, 160.

14 Ibid., 153.

15 Schnabel, “Kanon,” 66.

16 Ibid., 184. Speyer examines some of the criteria used in the Echtheitskritik of the church fathers which included style and language (181–83), chronology, and other criteria (184–86). Newer criteria involved the lack of attestation by the apostolic church (186–90) and the absence of inspiration (190–92).

17 Ibid., 182. Many agree (e.g., W. G. Kümmel, Introduction to the NT [Nashville: Abingdon, 1975], 471), however, that Dionysius is writing in connection against the apocalyptic doctrine of chiliasm, and thus says that Revelation was written by a John other than the apostle John; Dionysius wants to establish the dissimilarities between Revelation on the one hand and the Gospel and Epistle of John on the other (cf. Eusebius, Hist. eccl. 7.25,27).

18 Ibid.

19 Ibid. Speyer notes that Jerome then attempted to clarify the differences of style and language with the explanation that Peter may have had different interpreters.

20 Ellis, “Pseudonymity and Canonicity,” 218.

21 E.g., D. G. Meade, Pseudonymity and Canon: An Investigation into the Relationship of Authorship and Authority in Jewish and Earliest Christian Tradition, WUNT 2.39 (Tübingen: Mohr-Siebeck, 1986), 206.

22 Wilder, Pseudonymity, 123–47.

23 This section on the Pastorals is largely borrowed from Terry L. Wilder, “Pseudonymity and the New Testament,” in Interpreting the New Testament: Essays on Methods and Issues, ed. D. A. Black and D. S. Dockery (Nashville: B&H, 2001), 296–335.

24 For example, Lewis R. Donelson, Pseudepigraphy and Ethical Argument in the Pastoral Epistles (Tübingen, Mohr, 1986). See also David Meade (Pseudonymity and Canon [Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1986]) who argues that the pseudonym is an attribution of authoritative tradition.

25 For example, P. N. Harrison, The Problem of the Pastoral Epistles (London: Oxford, 1921). More recently, see I. Howard Marshall, in collaboration with Philip H. Towner, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Pastoral Epistles, ICC (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1999). He believes the Pastorals are not pseudonymous but allonymous, i.e., a later compiler arranged Pauline traditions and materials without any intention to deceive his readers.

26 The arguments used against the Pauline authorship of the Pastorals are extensive and quite technical and cannot be taken up in full here. For a fuller defense of Pauline authorship, see William D. Mounce, Pastoral Epistles, WBC 46 (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2000).

27 This difference is usually considered the most substantial and significant objection to the Pauline authorship of the PE.

28 D. Guthrie, New Testament Introduction (Downer’s Grove, IL: IVP, 1990), 619.

29 Ibid.

30 Ibid.

31 Ibid., 633.

32 For example, Paul’s letter to the Philippians contains many words that are not found in Paul’s other writings nor in the whole of the NT. Do we then conclude that Philippians is pseudonymous? No scholar that I know of is willing to do so. The unique words found in Philippians, like those in the Pastorals, can be plausibly explained by Paul’s specific purpose for writing these letters.

33 Wilder, “Pseudonymity and the New Testament,” in Black and Dockery, Interpreting the New Testament, 296–335; 325.

34 Guthrie, Introduction, 615.

35 Ibid., 616.

36 Ibid., 625.

37 Ibid., 627.

38 Thomas D. Lea, “Pseudonymity and the in New Testament,” in New Testament Criticism and Interpretation, ed. D. A. Black and D. S. Dockery (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1991); Guthrie, Introduction, 617.

39 Lea, “Pseudonymity,” 554.

40 Guthrie, Introduction, 628.

41 The following characteristics are those provided in a summary by I. H. Marshall, in collaboration with P. H. Towner, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Pastoral Epistles, ICC (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1999), 46–51.

42 See, for example, C. Spicq, Les Épîtres Pastorales, 4th ed., 2 vols., EBib (Paris: J. Gabalda, 1969), esp. 85–119.

43 See Marshall, Pastoral Epistles, 47.

44 This view enjoys the most support. For example, J. Roloff, Der Erste Brief an Timotheus, EKKNT (Zürich/Neukirchen-Vluyn: Benziger/Neukirchener, 1988), 228–38; L. Oberlinner, Die Pastoralbriefe, Dritte Folge, Kommentar zum Titusbrief, Band XI/2, Herders theologischer Kommentar zum NT (Freiburg: Herder, 1996), 52–73; M. Goulder, “The Pastor’s Wolves: Jewish Christian Visionaries Behind the Pastoral Epistles,” NovT 38 (1996): 242–56.

45 See, for example, D. R. MacDonald, The Legend and the Apostle: The Battle for Paul in Story and Canon (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1983).

46 Guthrie, Introduction, 618.

47 Ibid., 619.

48 Ibid., 632.

49 Ibid., 622.

50 Ibid., 624.

51 Brian Rapske, Paul in Roman Custody: The Book of Acts in Its First Century Setting, vol. 3, ed. Bruce W. Winter (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans/Carlisle: Paternoster, 1994), 191. He states, “The custody in Rome as Luke reports it and the probable material basis of the deliberations leading to that custody . . . constitute a significant and highly-placed Roman estimate of the trial’s probable outcome; i.e., that Paul will be released.”

52 Eusebius, Hist. eccl. 3.3.

53 The Muratorian Canon arguably dates from the late second century. See B. M. Metzger, The Canon of the New Testament (Oxford: Clarendon, 1987), 194; and F. F. Bruce, The Canon of Scripture (Downers Grove, IL: IVP, 1988), 158. But see G. M. Hahneman, The Muratorian Fragment and the Development of the Canon (Oxford: Clarendon, 1992), 215, who argues for a fourth-century date.

54 This section on the book of Daniel borrows extensively from the argument in the article by Stephen R. Miller, “Daniel, Book of,” in Holman Illustrated Bible Dictionary, gen. ed. Chad Brand, Charles Draper, and Archie England (Nashville: Holman Bible Publishers, 2003), 386–88. The arguments used against the historicity of Daniel are extensive, quite technical, and cannot be taken up in full here. For a fuller defense, see Stephen R. Miller, Daniel, NAC 18 (Nashville: B&H, 1994), 22–51.

55 Flavius Josephus, The Antiquities of the Jews, 11.8.5.

56 Gleason Archer, A Survey of Old Testament Introduction (Chicago: Moody Press, 1996), 424.

57 R. K. Harrison, Introduction to the Old Testament (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1979), 1127.

58 Miller, “Daniel, Book of,” 387.

59 Tertullian, On Baptism 17.

60 Eusebius, Hist. eccl. 6.12, 2ff.

61 See Wilder, “Pseudonymity and the New Testament,” in Black and Dockery, Interpreting the New Testament, 296–335.

Chapter Eight

Is the Story of Jesus Borrowed from Pagan Myths?

Mary Jo Sharp

There is a popular argument that the biblical account of Jesus Christ is a myth, as it appears to copy earlier stories of mythological dying and rising gods of the ancient Near East such as Horus, Osiris, and Mithras. It raises the question: Did Christians invent a religion based on first-century pagan myths?

This is one of the most frequently viewed topics on my apologetics websites.1 While most modern scholars consider this to be a dead argument—even a liberal scholar such as Bart Ehrman—the claim continues to propagate in the popular realm. For example, it has made its way on to mainstream television. When Bill Maher appeared as a guest on ABC’s daytime talk show The View to promote his movie Religulous (2008), he pushed the idea that the biblical account of Jesus’ life is a rip-off of earlier writings on the mythical gods Horus, Mithra, and Krishna.2 And on the BBC trivia show Quite Interesting, host Stephen Fry listed a dozen similarities between the mythical Mithras and Jesus during a holiday episode titled “Merry Mithras.”

Popular shows and celebrity personalities can be extremely influential to the “man in the street,” who may partly develop his worldview based on what he catches on the radio during his morning commute or on television before bedtime. And once the idea is out there, it travels at the speed of the Internet. My own interactions online and in person seem to verify this is occurring. The following Facebook message typifies the way the question has been presented to me: “My cousin says that Horus was a dying and rising god, and this was written 3,500 years before Jesus. So he says this is evidence that Jesus is not the risen Son of God. What do I say?”

And it is not just the atheist and agnostic who are pressing the Christ-as-myth argument to support their own non-believing position. It has raised doubts about Jesus’ identity among the church faithful as well. At an Evangelical Philosophical Society apologetics conference, a man who attended my talk on “Jesus and Pagan Myths” said he had left the faith after being told that Jesus was just another dying and rising God.

With unsubstantiated claims circulating so widely in the popular realm, there is a real danger that this argument may increasingly be taken seriously—and possibly even seep back into academic settings.3 Even in one of my own debates on the subject, “Did Jesus Die on the Cross?”4 a Muslim debater presented it as one of his main arguments.5

Christians must therefore be prepared to respond to this argument because it poses a serious accusation against the church: If Jesus is a myth, then he does not exist—he is a fictitious character whom Christians have made up. Thus, there is no historical basis for the Christian faith.

Consider this accusation in light of the apostle Paul’s discussion in 1 Corinthians 15:14–15: If there is no factual resurrection of Christ, then the gospel testimony of all believers is a lie. Paul continues to flesh out the implications of a resurrection myth, noting that if Jesus has not been bodily raised, then Christians are giving false testimony about God. And if there is no resurrection, the believer has wasted his life on a misplaced hope—and he is thus to be pitied most among all men. In sum, if the resurrection is a myth, then there is no logical reason for Christian faith.

Paul presents an objective truth claim in this passage. Christ’s bodily resurrection either occurred or it didn’t; it is either a historical event or it isn’t. Paul proclaims that Christ indeed has been raised (15:20). The apostle Peter offers similar testimony: “For we did not follow cleverly contrived myths when we made known to you the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ; instead, we were eyewitnesses of His majesty” (2 Pet 1:16). Paul and Peter both discuss the events of Jesus’ life, including the resurrection, as historical.

If one holds to biblical authority, the account of Jesus cannot be classified in the genre of mythology because Paul and Peter both attest to a literal Jesus. To suggest that Jesus is a mythological character implies Paul was incorrect and Peter was either delusional or lying—which would mean their statements are evidence of major error in the Bible. Asserting that Jesus’ life is factual, then, becomes part of the defense of biblical authority in more ways than one.6

Responding to the Christ-as-Myth Argument

I will use the following method to defend a literal (an historical) biblical account of Jesus and refute the argument that the Bible borrows from older pagan myths. This method involves three action steps:

1. Get the whole story.

2. Take the parallels head to head.

3. Set everything in context.

Step One: Get the Whole Story

The first action step is to get the whole story. This means obtaining and reading the two types of source texts involved in this debate: biblical accounts of Jesus and ancient mythic literature on the relevant gods.7

This may sound obvious, yet those who promote the Christ-as-myth argument often fall short on this score. Consider Zeitgeist, the Movie,8 which compares Jesus with a roster of mythical gods—including Horus, Attis, Krishna, Dionysis, Mithras, and about thirty others—by rattling off a dozen supposed similarities between them (e.g., virgin birth, twelve disciples, sacrificial death followed by resurrection). But the original movie in 2007 did not cite the primary texts where this information might be found, or even offer an overview of the mythological stories that these similarities are supposedly derived from. The viewer is expected to blindly accept the assertions made in the film as fact.9

Good sources are of the utmost importance because these indicate whether an argument has weight—and thus, whether it should be given credence. Once primary sources are obtained and comparisons are made between the two types of texts, one may find that the alleged similarities do not exist. An expert in literature and mythology, C. S. Lewis was struck by the profound contrast between mythology and Scripture, so much so that his own comparison of the two actually moved him toward Christian faith. Lewis self-identified as an atheist at one point in his life, in part because the story of Jesus, with its savior-god theme, seemed to have the same structure as myth. But as Lewis began to study the Bible, he observed that it had a distinct writing structure. He said of the book of John: “I have been reading poems, romances, vision literature, legends, myths all my life. I know what they are like. I know that not one of them is like this.”10

We begin by comparing general qualities, such as literary style, the author’s intent, and attention to historical detail. There are great differences between the myths and the biblical text in all three of these areas.

In ancient mythological literature, the author’s intent was to communicate a story. The style of the storytelling may be best defined by what the author does not do, including: (1) offer proof to show whether the story is factual, (2) offer evidence that can be historically verified (such as names of well-known people or events that could be cross-referenced in other writings), or (3) offer details in the setting that would indicate geographic location and the year (or general time period) when events of the story took place.

This style is in sharp contrast to the gospel accounts. Let’s consider the book of Luke. It opens with a clear statement of the author’s intent:

Many have undertaken to compile a narrative about the events that have been fulfilled among us, just as the original eyewitnesses and servants of the word handed them down to us. It also seemed good to me, since I have carefully investigated everything from the very first, to write to you in an orderly sequence, most honorable Theophilus, so that you may know the certainty of the things about which you have been instructed (1:1–4).

The voice used here is that of a reporter: Luke sounds like he is relaying information he has gathered from an investigation. Luke is not making a subjective claim. His presentation style is not conceptual; it is actual. Luke then offers specific details that allow the reader to pinpoint the time and location in history where these events are said to have taken place. Thus, the reader can fact-check and see whether Luke’s account matches known facts from that time period. For example, the reader is able to research the following: Could the events Luke describes have happened in the fifteenth year of the reign of Tiberius Caesar? Are the details Luke gives about lifestyle, customs, dress, etc., accurate for the time period? Was Tiberius the reigning Caesar at that time? Is there any historical record of a Governor of Judea named Pontius Pilate? How about Herod the Tetrarch of Galilee, and his brother Philip, the tetrarch of Iturea and Trachonitis?

Luke’s presentation differs vastly from any myth. Contrast it with the following account of Zeus and his wives from Hesiod’s Theogony, from the passage “Zeus in Power”:

So the blessed gods had done a hard piece of work settled by force the question of rights with the Titans. Then at Gaia’s suggestion they pressed broad-browed Zeus, the Olympian, to be their king and rule the Immortals. And so Zeus dealt out their privileges and rights. Now king of the gods, Zeus made Metis his first wife, wiser than any other god or any mortal man. But when she was about to deliver the owl-eyed goddess, Athena, Zeus tricked her, gulled her with crafty words and stuffed her in his stomach, taking the advice of Earth and starry Heaven. They told him to do this so that no one but Zeus would hold the title of king among the eternal gods, for it was predestined that very wise children would be born from Metis. . . . but Zeus stuffed the goddess into his stomach first so she would devise with him good and evil both.11

In Hesiod’s story, there are no clues as to whether these events took place in a physical location that could be found on a map, or somewhere otherworldly. There aren’t any recognizable landmarks or historical names that might be cross-referenced with historical records of the time period. Hesiod utilizes some references throughout “Theogony” to places such as Olympos, Tartaros, but he makes no effort to surround the references with investigable evidence as if he were actually locating these places in the searchable universe.

Is Luke’s presentation just like Hesiod’s? Does it sound similar in tone or setting? Does it seem that Luke has the same purpose for telling this story as Hesiod did? If one is to be intellectually responsible, he must admit that the structure of these two types of stories is quite different.

In conversation with the man in the street, who asserts that the story of Jesus sounds like a myth, I typically pose questions like the following in light of what we have discussed under step one of our method:

- Which specific myth does the story of Jesus sound like?

- Have you read that myth?

- Where did you read that myth?

- Did you read it in a primary text, or was it another author’s retelling of the myth?

- In what ways did the text of the myth seem similar to the Bible?

More often than not, these questions reveal that the person has not gotten his information from primary sources or that he has not carefully compared the style and structure of the alleged parallels.

Step Two: Take the Parallels Head to Head

The Christ-as-myth argument tends to follow this line of reasoning:

1. A considerable amount of mythological literature has a savior-god theme.

2. The story of Christ has a savior-god theme.

3. Therefore, the story of Christ must be a myth.

4. Since the story of Christ is a myth, there will be parallels between it and other stories of mythological gods.

5. These parallels serve as evidence that the story of Christ is indeed a myth.

So the next action step in challenging the Christ-as-myth argument is to take the parallels head to head. This can be effectively accomplished only after one has read both the biblical account and the primary sources of the mythological stories. Then, the supposed parallels between the two types of stories may be compared.

But first, there is an important question that must be addressed: Why do myths throughout history have basic similarities in their themes with the story of Christ? Are these similarities the result of a long line of borrowing stories from one generation to the next? For example, two common themes in mythology are belief in the afterlife and salvation of mankind. These themes also are common to most religions.

Basic similarities may be partially attributed to mankind’s longing for answers to existential questions. C. S. Lewis discusses this in his essay, “Myth Became Fact.”12 Mythological stories express man’s yearning for contact with God. Lewis explains that while the story of Jesus sounds like a myth, it is in truth an actuality that fulfills the desire which motivated all previous mythological literature. Jesus offers a true answer, and he is able to satisfy all longing.

Stories will be similar, then, including those before the time of Christ, because mankind always has searched for answers to the same questions: Is there more to life than this? Is there anything beyond this life? Is there any justice or punishment or reward for the things people have done in this life? Or do people just do whatever they please until they die, without any ultimate repercussions for their actions? One way that the human intellect attempts to work through these questions is belief in the afterlife.

Similarly, humans have looked for salvation outside of ourselves because we acknowledge that it can’t be found in ourselves. The theme of salvation is often seen in science fiction. In the 1997 film Contact, Dr. Ellie Arroway, played by actress Jodie Foster, looks to outer space and extraterrestrial intelligences for meaning, answers, and for salvation. She believes these things are not going to come from humanity. The theme also is seen in superhero comics and hero movies: Humanity looks for someone who will rise up and save us. Sometimes that hero must come from afar (e.g., Superman comes from another planet), and sometimes this savior is one of us, living among us (e.g., Batman, Spiderman), but he always is specially equipped to be extraordinary—the hero is no average man.

Throughout history, people worldwide have shared a fundamental understanding that humanity needs to be saved. While men always have pondered the afterlife and possible sources of salvation, it doesn’t necessarily mean that their answers were merely borrowed from past generations. The human intellect is quite capable of interpreting similar experiences in a similar way, without it being necessary to suppose that this similarity of action is irrefutable proof of direct borrowing. In the seminal philosophy work, A History of Philosophy, Frederick Copleston states that it is absurd “to suppose that if some Christian custom or rite is partially found in Asiatic Eastern religion, Christianity must have borrowed that custom or rite from Asia.”13 He further addresses the issue, “After all, human intellect is quite capable of interpreting similar experiences in a similar way . . . without its being necessary to suppose that similarity of reaction is an irrefutable proof of borrowing.”14

Further, if the answers were merely borrowed from one generation to the next, it would present the question of infinite regress: Where did the first answer come from? The fact that mankind always had the same question, and came up with similar answers in different times and places, suggests there is a source of that truth—and the source may be outside of the world and greater than mankind. We may very well assert that God is responsible for similarities in the ideas of salvation and in conceptions of the afterlife. God provided truth to mankind from the beginning, throughout history, throughout the world, but man has often attributed truth to someone or something other than God (Rom 1:18–23).

So there are parallels in the answers to these universally-asked questions, which different cultures have recorded in their literature throughout history. This includes common themes in religions. In their book, The Jesus Mysteries, co-authors Timothy Freke and Peter Gandy claim that up until recently, it was taboo and unthinkable to consider that Christianity might be a myth, based in perennial pagan stories. They assert that while many have pointed towards the parallels between Christianity and pagan mysteries, few have seen the connection.15 But this is untrue. We can trace this assertion far back into history. Celsus, a second-century critic of Christianity, in his discourse entitled, On the True Doctrine, offers a refutation of Christianity specifically by noting commonalities with the pagan religions—miracles, prophecies, and belief in the afterlife (as well as stark differences: bodily resurrection, monotheism).16 Christians have recognized parallels between world religions since the formation of the church. Consider the apostle Paul’s Areopagus address in Acts 17, which he begins by respectfully describing the Athenians as “extremely religious in every respect” (v. 22). He then observes that among their many objects of worship is an altar to an unknown god, and he connects the long held idea of a higher power with the reality of the one true God. Paul even quotes Aratus, noting that this Greek poet who lived centuries earlier had some correct understanding of God (v. 28).17 In the second century, Justin Martyr’s First Apology explains that the pagan believers’ ideas weren’t so entirely dissimilar to Christianity.18 Notably, all of these texts were written long before the discipline of comparative studies of religion was formally introduced in the 1800s.

Therefore, we may admit that Christian and pagan texts have general similarities (e.g., themes), without this necessarily indicating that direct copying has occurred. Now, let’s move on to a line-by-line comparison of the texts.

Taking the parallels head to head means that one should address all of the content of the texts, not just general themes or a few cherry-picked lines that sound similar. This is well illustrated in the often-compared Genesis creation account and the Enuma Elish, the Babylonian creation myth. In the Enuma Elish, divine spirit and cosmic matter are coexistent and coeternal in creation, before creation. Compare this with the biblical account of creation, where divine spirit creates cosmic matter and exists independently of it. These are two opposing views on the nature of reality. Yet there are some thematic similarities. In the Babylonian mythology, Tiamat, the chaos monster, is enveloped in darkness. Compare this with the biblical account: Earth is a desolate waste, covered by darkness. In the Babylonian story, light emerges out of the darkness, emanating from the gods. In Genesis, God speaks light into existence.

At first glance, the stories seem to follow the same order: creation of firmament, creation of dry land, creation of luminaries, creation of man. After creation is complete, the Babylonian gods rest and celebrate. Similarly, God rests and sanctifies the seventh day. Initially, the story appears to be the same. Is it?

Differences between the two accounts only become apparent once the texts are compared head to head. The first 160 lines of the Enuma Elish is an account of the emergence of the gods from Chaos, their multiplication, the plan of Tiamat the Chaos monster and her consort Apsu to kill the gods, and the war that results. The next 130 lines describe Marduk, the champion of the gods. The next 138 lines present the reason for Marduk’s supremacy over all the other gods. Then the next 134 lines are about the destruction of Tiamat.19 None of which is found anywhere in Genesis. It is important to investigate each supposed parallel, putting the text head to head, as some of these similarities are vague at best. “An elephant is not a table because it has four legs,” notes John Oswalt in his book The Bible Among the Myths.20

Proponents of the Christ-as-myth theory should also address aspects of the texts that do not support their position. And these are numerous. In the Babylonian creation story, mankind is created, as an afterthought, to serve the gods and make the gods’ lives easier. Many myths assign a role of servitude to humans. In contrast, Genesis records that humans are created in the image of God himself and are then given charge over all of God’s creation. Humans have a very high position in the Genesis account, which is opposite of humanity’s low position in mythological literature.

Those who support the idea of borrowing also must account for the sexual content in the myths, which is missing from the story of Jesus. After Osiris dies, his body is cut into fourteen pieces and is distributed throughout Egypt—except for one missing piece, his phallus. Since it cannot be located, Osiris’s sister-turned-wife, Isis, makes a model of the phallus. Plutarch, a second-century Greek writer, records a festival in honor of Osiris’s phallus.21 (Is there a parallel to this in Christian rites, beliefs, or gatherings?) And after Osiris’s death, Isis has intercourse with his dead body and then gives birth to Horus.22 (Is there any parallel to this in the story of Jesus’ birth?)

Let’s now consider the three major supposed parallels between Jesus and mythological gods: virgin birth, death, and resurrection.

Virgin Births

The debate here is based on what the concept of a “virgin birth” might include. Here are the so-called virgin births of five of the gods who are frequently compared to Christ: Mithras is born out of a rock on the banks of a river under a sacred fig tree.23 Adonis is born out of a myrrh tree. Dionysius is produced from an incestuous relationship between the god Zeus and his daughter Persephone. Osiris is the product of an affair between an earth god and a sky goddess. And while Osiris and Isis are fetuses within the womb of the sky goddess, they have intercourse and produce Horus. On the other hand, Jesus was born from a human female virgin, being fully God and fully man.

Death Stories

Again, the debate is based on how one defines a “sacrificial” death. None of the death accounts of the mythological gods contain an actual sacrifice—giving oneself up for the sake of others. Adonis is torn to pieces while hunting, by his arch rival, Aries, who takes on the form of a wild boar. Osiris is coaxed by his brother into laying in a sarcophagus, which is shut and locked, then set adrift on the Nile. Some accounts state that Osiris drowned; others say he suffocated. Dionysus is attacked while admiring himself in a mirror. He took on many shapes to avoid his attackers and was cut to pieces when he took the form of a bull. Mithras has no recorded death. An inscription found in Rome titles Mithras as “the Invincible Sun God.”24 He was one of the favorite gods of the Roman military25—most likely because they wanted to be ever-victorious like him.

So it is unlikely that Roman soldiers would have drawn a parallel between invincible Mithras and the sacrificial death of Jesus on the cross. The suffering Christ would not have been a good choice for a Roman military god; it would be contrary to their goals of victory in battle. Jesus died by Roman crucifixion, in the place of all of humanity for all time. Jesus says he laid down his own life so that he could take it up again. His death is the only death that is an actual sacrifice on the part of the one who died.

Resurrection Stories

Once again, debate focuses on the meaning of “resurrection.” There is no known account of Mithras’s death, so there is no resurrection story. Osiris, pieced back together by Isis, was revived by the incantations of several gods, including Thoth who came and performed spells over him. He is brought back to life as king of the dead, thus living in the underworld, Sekhet-hetep. So his “resurrection” occurs in the land of the dead, and there he remains as King of the Dead.

At least five different stories are given about Dionysus: His mother pieced him together after his being cut to pieces; he ascended to heaven after death; Zeus raised him up; Zeus swallowed his heart; his heart was made into a potion and given to Semele, and she then gave birth to a new Dionysus. It is also recorded that Dionysus died and went to reside in the underworld for six months, then was raised to the upper world for the other half of the year—and this continues to occur every year. The reasons given for this cycle include that it is a phenomenological explanation of the crop cycles and also that Dionysus spends half of the year with Persephone, the goddess of the dead, and the other half with Aphrodite, the goddess of love because the two women are both in love with him.26

There is one version of the story of Christ.27 Jesus predicted his death and resurrection. He was resurrected to a redeemed, physical body and afterwards walked around on the earth for a time before ascending into heaven, as witnessed by the twelve disciples and several groups of various sizes, including 500 people at one time. Later, he appears to Paul. Jesus is the first of the resurrection of all God’s people. He provides the model for the resurrection of believers.

In a head-to-head comparison, therefore, we see that the differences between the biblical story of Jesus and the pagan myths are far greater and more significant than the broad thematic similarities.

Step Three: Set Everything in Context

So far we have presented evidence showing that the biblical account of Jesus is quite different than mythological literature. The final action step is to set everything in context. This is done by examining the historical setting of each story.

Though I have argued that the stories do not sound similar when compared using a modern-day understanding, the question also must be asked: Would the stories have appeared similar in their own historical period? Would an ancient Near East audience have understood them differently? These questions help the modern reader determine the author’s intent in writing the text. For example, the creators of the Zeitgeist movie use the Christian term “resurrection” as derived from the biblical accounts of Jesus, then suggest that mythological literature also records resurrection stories. As it has been shown from taking the texts head to head, the events involved in the resurrection of Jesus are nothing like the events in the “resurrection” stories of mythological gods. In his book, The Resurrection of the Son of God, N. T. Wright discusses the term “resurrection,” noting that it meant something different to pagans than it did to Jews and Christians.28 This makes sense in light of Paul’s encounter with Greek philosophers in Acts 17. Some of the Epicurean and Stoic philosophers mocked Paul, suggesting he had seed-picked some philosophical ideas, then randomly put these together to create a completely incoherent story. Others suggested he was a preacher of foreign deities. They were not familiar with Paul’s “gods.” Why didn’t they understand what Paul was saying? Paul was preaching about Jesus and the resurrection, and these stories and concepts were new to the Greeks.

This encounter suggests that the Greek philosophers had not previously heard about this type of resurrection. According to Christ-as-myth proponents, Christians merely copied Greek ideas which were presented in mythology. Yet Acts 17 suggests these Greek scholars had no understanding of the concept of resurrection that Paul discussed: “They took [Paul] and brought him to the Areopagus, and said, ‘May we learn about this new teaching you’re speaking of? For what you say sounds strange to us, and we want to know what these ideas mean’” (vv. 19–20).

The biblical concept of resurrection also may be compared with beliefs held by Osiris’s worshippers about post-death events. After death, they hoped to end up in Sekhet-hetep, a spiritual realm located in the land of the dead, to be with Osiris forever. But not every worshipper would make it to Sekhet-hetep; they believed there was a series of judgments which worshippers first had to pass through.29 If a worshipper did not pass judgment, he either went to an Egyptian version of hell or was annihilated by the eater of the dead, a dog-like creature. This definitely is not the same resurrection that Paul was discussing. For one thing, the Christian concept of resurrection for believers does not occur immediately after death. At God’s appointed time, Christians will experience bodily resurrection: Their souls will be unified with eternal, perfected bodies, and they will live with God forever in Jesus’ kingdom. For another thing, every Christian can have confidence that they are justified by Jesus’ sacrificial death, which is sufficient for their salvation. There are no more hoops for Christians to jump through after death.

It is not enough, however, to merely show that the two concepts of resurrection are different. To set everything in context, we must consider the theological and philosophical thought behind these concepts. What did the basic doctrines of the mythologies teach? What was the worldview that was informing the thought processes of the myth writers?

In The Bible Among the Myths: Unique Revelation or Just Ancient Literature?, John N. Oswalt looks at the worldviews informing the myths versus the worldview informing the biblical stories. He considers the common characteristics—similar themes and philosophical and theological thoughts—found in all the myths, then compares these with the common characteristics found in the biblical stories. Following are some of his findings.

Continuity versus Transcendence

Oswalt suggests the two types of text present two opposing views of the world. In mythological literature, there is a worldview of continuity. Continuity is a philosophical principle that asserts that all things are continuous with each other; all that exists is a part of everything else. (This can be seen in the concept of pantheism, which is found in some New Age, Buddhist, and Hindu thinking.) There is no fundamental distinction between the divine nature and humanity—all are one divine essence. That idea, Oswalt argues, is present in all of the myths.

Other distinctives: (1) myths all have an element of polytheism;30 (2) images in the myths, including idols, are very important; and (3) rites and rituals are held for the purpose of reenacting events worshippers want to see happen in their world (e.g., a priestess and a priest come together sexually to encourage the fertility of the gods, so then the land and people will be fertile)—which is part of the idea of continuity.

In sharp contrast, the biblical worldview is transcendence: God is wholly separate from his creation; he is not continuous with it. God cannot be manipulated to do the will of humans because humans are not continuous with God. There is no polytheism in Christianity, and God prohibits the worship or use of idols.

Eternity and Time

Another contrast is the belief about that which is eternal: What has always existed? In the myths, chaos has always existed. Sometimes chaos is represented as a god, at other times as a material object. In biblical thought, only God has always existed.

There is a cyclical pattern of existence for mythical gods: The gods die and rise over and over, repeating a pattern of death and resurrection. In the biblical account, there’s no cyclical concept of existence: God created, then time moves forward and history is built in a linear fashion from there on out.

Another distinct view in mythology is the actualization of timeless reality. As part of the view of continuity—that man is one with everything—it was believed that man could manipulate the gods and nature. With this in mind, the mythmaker (think author’s intent) believed that by telling stories, he could create order and get things the way they should be. Thus, the mythmaker writes great hero stories because these reflect the way the world ought to be. It was believed that by telling such stories and reenacting heroic events, order would be brought to the universe.

In contrast, the Bible records human interactions with God. This is how man learns about God’s character: He reflects on and learns from previous interactions between God and men. Jesus enters into the biblical story at a particular point, as a particular person who does a certain thing that no other person can do. Jesus shows us who God is. Jesus’ story demonstrates that there is nothing man can do to earn or bring about his own salvation. Unlike in the myths, it is impossible to manipulate God.

Goodness and Ethics

The conception of the biblical God is in sharp contrast to that of the myths, which take a very low view of the gods. In fact, the gods are laughable and portrayed as being worse than most humans. They are ethically corrupt, they have incestuous relationships, they are always having affairs, they are always starting wars, and they are petty. Stories of the mythical gods could be compared to modern soap operas. There is always a source of conflict that leads to the spilling of blood.31

The implication of having flawed gods is illustrated in a conversation between Socrates and Euthyphro in Plato’s The Last Days of Socrates. Socrates is puzzled about how piety can be derived from the gods as Euthyphro claims. Having observed that one god loves some things that another god hates, Socrates wonders how men can establish what is holy or unholy (or fine or despicable or good or bad) if the gods disagree on the issue?32 That’s a conundrum in the mythological worldview. There can be no single standard of ethics because there are multiple gods with multiple agendas.

The Bible, again in sharp contrast, presents a consistent picture of a holy God. He is set apart. There is only one true God, and he is the standard of good; and humans have to line up with that standard. His nature is good—in fact, human understanding of “good” comes from comparing everything else with God, as all pales in comparison to his goodness. Human ethics come from God’s commands, as only a truly good being can define what is good.

If Oswalt is correct, and I think he is, it is an interesting development in apologetic argumentation: Consider that the continuity worldview is present worldwide at the time of the birth of Abraham, and then an opposing worldview, transcendence, is brought into the world through the Israelites. Transcendence is diametrically opposed to continuity. So where do the Israelites get this new perspective? It cannot be explained by the idea that they borrowed it from pagan myths because transcendence is absent from the myths. Alternatively, it does make sense that God revealed it to them.

Conclusion

In conclusion, let’s summarize the main points we have made to refute the Christ-as-myth argument:

1. Mythological literature is different than the biblical account of Jesus. The suggested “parallels”—such as themes of virgin birth, sacrificial death, and resurrection—are not paralleled in the content of the texts. There is no sound evidence of overlap within the details of these two types of texts. The biblical account of Jesus cannot be grouped into the genre of mythological literature based on either story details or structure.

2. Mythological literature presents a different view of the nature of reality (continuity) than the Bible (transcendence). In fact, these two views are diametrically opposed. Therefore, the texts do not have common philosophical or theological viewpoints.

3. Consider again C. S. Lewis’s concept of “myth became fact.” At a philosophical level, the story of Jesus comes into human history and fulfills the deepest human longing. Jesus is what mankind has been looking for: a savior, who has both the means and the power to do something for humans, both in this present life and after death.

I suggest that these considerations provide a powerful refutation of the Christ-as-myth argument, and it ought to be laid to rest, once and for all.

1 See www.maryjosharp.com and www.confidentchristianity.com.

2 The View (September 2008). The spelling of “Mithra” is intentional—Maher used the Persian version of the name on the show.

3 However, it is a fair assumption that the Christ-as-myth theory is already back in academia (or perhaps, more accurately, it never left).

4 See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D9-gyTJ5hu8&feature=related.

5 “Did Jesus Die on the Cross?” Debate between Etheshaam Gulam and Mary Jo Sharp, June 2009 at Calvary Baptist Church in Romulus, Michigan (see at time mark 40:48 in debate).

6 At this point, I should add that there are similar challenges to the authority and reliability of Scripture related to the Old Testament. For example, it is often alleged that the biblical flood narrative (Genesis 6–9) is simply a myth borrowed and modified from the Epic of Gilgamesh (Mark S. Smith, God in Translation: Deities in Cross-Cultural Discourse in the Biblical World [Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2010], 182). See also, Clyde E. Fant and Mitchell G. Reddish, Lost Treasures of the Bible: Understanding the Bible through Archaeological Artifacts in World Museums (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2008), 25. Though I will interact somewhat with such issues in the Old Testament, my focus will be on the more popular and far-reaching Christ-as-myth argument. But my methodology for responding to that argument can be applied just as well to alleged OT myth-borrowing. For direct responses to allegations of OT myth-borrowing, see K. A. Kitchen, On the Reliability of the Old Testament (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003). See also Jeffrey J. Niehaus, Ancient Near Eastern Themes in Biblical Theology (Grand Rapids: Kregel, 2008).

7 Many of the pertinent ANE texts are available for free online. For example, the Egyptian stories of Horus and Osiris may be found in The Egyptian Book of the Dead. An exception to the availability of textual evidence and primary sources is the story of Mithras: Records referring to this god are limited to inscriptions and to surviving Mithraic temples. There are no written accounts of the Mystery of Mithras of any substantive nature (See N. M. Swerdlow, “Review Article: On the Cosmical Mysteries of Mithras,” review of David Ulansey, “The Origins of the Mithraic Mysteries: Cosmology and Salvation in the Ancient World,” Classical Philology 86, no. 1 [Jan. 1991]: 49. With so little to analyze, Mithraic scholars do not agree on the details of Mithras’s life (See Bruce Lincoln, “Mitra, Mithra, Mithras: Problems of a Multiform Diety,” review of John R. Hinnells, “Mithraic Studies: Proceedings of the First International Congress of Mithraic Studies,” History of Religions 17, no. 2 [Chicago: University of Chicago, Nov. 1977]: 200). Despite the lack of Mithraic writings and scholarly consensus, some (including the creators of Zeitgeist) still insist there is a strong correlation between the life stories of Mithras and Jesus. This is intellectually dishonest.

8 The full-length film may be viewed at http://www.zeitgeistthefilm.com.

9 The creators of Zeitgeist, the Movie have since posted a sourcebook for their claims, citing more scholarship than the original movie references, along with some primary source documents. It can be reviewed at http://www.zeitgeistthefilm.com/Zeitgeist,%20The%20Movie-%20Companion%20Guide%20PDF.pdf. However, the original movie was based in much poor scholarship, as I noted in a comment on a blog review of the movie I wrote back in 2007: “When I looked up the references for ‘Zeitgeist, the Movie’ I remember finding one or two people that could even come close to being considered as such (plus, one guy who had been found guilty of using his atheist website to traffic illegal ID’s for foreigners).”

10 C. S. Lewis, Christian Reflections (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1995), 155.

11 Hesiod, “Theogony,” in Anthology of Classical Myth: Primary Sources in Translation, ed. Stephen M. Trzaskoma, R. Scott Smith, and Stephen Brunet (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2004), 156.

12 C. S. Lewis, God in the Dock: Essays on Theology and Ethics (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1970), 63–67.

13 Frederick Copleston, A History of Philosophy, Volume One: Greece and Rome (New York: Bantam Doubleday, 1993), 11.

14 Ibid.

15 Timothy Freke and Peter Gandy, The Jesus Mysteries (New York: Three Rivers Press, 1999), 2.

16 Celsus, On the True Doctrine: A Discourse Against the Christians, trans. R. Joseph Hoffman (New York: Oxford Press, 1987), 120–21. Freke and Gandy include part of this passage of Celsus in their book, The Jesus Mysteries, as well. It is therefore odd for them to assert that it was “taboo” or “unthinkable” to claim that the Jesus story copies the pagan religions before their own work in this area; and perhaps an exaggeration. This accusation has been around for nearly 2,000 years.

17 For the poem quoted in Acts 17, see Aratus, “Phaenomena,” in Callimachus: Hymns and Epigrams, Lycophron and Aratus, trans. A. W. Mair and G. R. Mair, Loeb Classical Library, vol. 129 (London: William Heinemann, 1921). Online text available: accessed Sept. 19, 2011 at http://www.theoi.com/Text/AratusPhaenomena.html.

18 Yet, Martyr explains that they are different enough for the pagans to view the Christians as “atheists” because of the Christian disbelief in all of the gods with the exception of the One God.

19 John Oswalt, The Bible Among the Myths: Unique Revelation or Just Ancient Literature? (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2009), 100–101. The entire breakdown of the lines of Enuma Elish is from Oswalt’s book.

20 Ibid., 45.

21 Plutarch, “Concerning Isis and Osiris,” in Hellenistic Religions: The Age of Syncretism, ed. Frederick C. Grant (Indianapolis: Liberal Arts Press, 1953), 87.

22 This aspect of the story, which was a variation of Horus’s conception story, is depicted in a drawing from the Osiris temple in Dendara. A depiction can be found (fig. 6.2) in T. N. D. Mettinger, The Riddle of Resurrection: Dying and Rising Gods in the Ancient Near East (Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell, 2001), 173.

23 There are other birth stories for Mithras, but none involve a virgin woman giving birth.

24 Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum VI. 510; H. Dessau, Inscriptiones Latinae Selectae II. 1 (1902), No. 4152, as quoted in Grant, Hellenistic Religions, 147.

25 This inference comes from archaeological evidence from the outermost parts of the Roman Empire.

26 Sources for the stories of the gods include: Geoffrey Parrinder, ed., The Illustrated Who’s Who in Mythology (New York: MacMillan, 1985); Jaan Puhvel, Comparative Mythology (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987); Roy Willis, ed., “Persian Myths,” in World Mythology (Richmond Hill: Duncan Baird, 1993); Jessie Weston, From Ritual to Romance, Chapter IV: Tammuz and Adoni, The Internet Sacred Text Archive (accessed May 22, 2007) available from http://www.sacred-texts.com/neu/frr/frr07.htm#fn_39texts.com/neu/frr/frr07.htm#fn_39; Edwin M. Yamauchi, Easter: Myth, Hallucination, or History, accessed January 22, 2007 available from http://www.leaderu.com/everystudent/easter/articles/yama.html; Gary R. Habermas and Michael Licona, The Case for the Resurrection of Jesus (Grand Rapids, Kregel, 2004), 90; Sir James George Frazer, The Golden Bough (accessed May 22, 2007), available from http://www.bartleby.com/196/79.html; Bruce M. Metzger, “Methodology in the Study of Mystery Religions and Early Christianity,” in Historical and Literary Studies: Jewish, Pagan, and Christian (accessed January 22, 2007), available from http://www.frontline-apologetics.com/mystery_religions_early_christianity.htm.

27 The Gospels, though giving different perspectives, all tell the same story of Christ. It doesn’t change over time and history. Good resources for comparative analysis of the Gospels are Johnston M. Cheney, The Life of Christ in Stereo: The Four Gospels Combined as One (Portland, OR: Western Baptist Seminary Press, 1969); Craig Keener, The Historical Jesus of the Gospels (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2009).

28 Wright states that for Christians, “‘Resurrection’ was, by definition, not the existence into which someone might (or might not) go immediately upon death; it was not a disembodied ‘heavenly’ life; it was a further stage, out beyond all that. It was not a redescription or redefinition of death. It was death’s reversal” (N. T. Wright, The Resurrection of the Son of God [Minneapolis: Fortress, 2003], 83). Yet for pagans, death was a one-way street.

29 The worshipper’s heart was weighed on a scale against a feather to see if his good deeds outweighed his bad.

30 The Egyptian pharaoh Amenhoptep IV (1379 BC), who later changed his name to Akhenaten, was monotheistic. But rather than creating new mythology, Akhenaten decided that Egypt would worship only one God, Rē-Herakhte, a God completely lacking in mythology. Akhenaten attempted to have the names of the Egyptian deities and their images expunged from the whole of Egypt and disbanded their priesthoods. But even Akhenaten declared himself “Son of God” and was prayed to as a source of blessing for people after death (see Rodney Stark, Discovering God: The Origins of the Great Religions and the Evolution of Belief [New York: Harper Collins, 2007], 159–60). After his death, great effort was made to clean the Egyptian history of his existence as a sign of their shame of him. The worship of the many gods was reinstated immediately after his death.

Another possible monotheist is Zoroaster. However, his belief is a dualistic monotheism, with an ongoing battle between good and evil: Ahura Mazda and Angra Mainyu. There is still some question for me as to whether Zoroaster was truly monotheistic or truly dualistic; with Angra Mainyu existing as a primordial being along with Ahura Mazda (see “Is Zoroastrianism Dualistic or Monotheistic?” James W. Boyd and Donald A. Crosby, Journal of the American Academy of Religion 47, no. 4 [Dec. 1979]: 557–88). Nevertheless, the commitment of Persian emperors to Zoroastrian monotheism soon relapsed into polytheism with the Zoroastrian priesthood following along (see Stark, Discovering God, 168).

31 For example, Mithras fights with a bull and cuts it open. The material that spills out from the bull is seed for all plant and animal life—this violent image is a creation story. In the biblical creation account, there is no conflict; God simply creates and declares his work to be good.

32 Plato, The Last Days of Socrates, ed. Harold Tarrant, trans. Hugh Tredennick (London: Penguin Books, 1993), 13–16.

Chapter Nine

Is the Old Testament Historically Reliable?

Walter C. Kaiser Jr.

All too frequently these days the complaint is heard that perhaps the Old Testament is not really necessary for an appreciation of the Christian faith, since we now have the New Testament. Immediately the suggestion follows that, at best, the Old Testament informs us on how the Jewish and Christian movements began, but Christians today should now really depend on the New Testament alone to guide us in questions of faith and morals.

But this observation fails to realize that over three-fourths of what God has to say to us is found in the first thirty-nine books of the earlier testament. Moreover, the Old Testament section on the prophets by itself is larger than the entire later testament. If all the Old Testament is likewise a word from God, as it claims to be, then we would certainly be deprived of the majority of what he had to say to us if we jettisoned the entire first thirty-nine books of the Bible.

But perhaps that only raises the larger question: How reliable are the contents of these books and the message of the whole Old Testament? Does the Old Testament possess any greater authority than other religious writings outside of the Bible? In fact, isn’t it true, that it is not uncommon for some to complain that they no longer read the Old Testament because there are too many contradictions and things difficult to understand in these texts? So why, they ask, would we want to involve ourselves in all the trouble of trying to solve each of these annoyances? We should just stick with the New Testament!

But one answer to such an objection was given years ago by the famous Bishop Whately (1786–1863):

The seeming contradictions in Scripture are too numerous not to be the result of design; and doubtless were designed, not as mere difficulties to try our faith and patience, but as furnishing the most suitable mode of introduction that could have been devised by mutually explaining and modifying and limiting or extending one another’s meaning.[1]

He went on to say, “Instructions thus conveyed are evidently more striking and more likely to arouse attention; and thus, from the very circumstance that they call for careful reflection, more likely to make a lasting impression.”

While Bishop Whately’s observations make some sense, the Christian Church over the centuries has also held that there is an essential and discernible unity in all the Holy Scriptures, so that they form a divine library that is consistent and unified in its total approach and teaching.[2] Thus, the whole Bible presents some forty authors writing over a period of some 1,500 years, and representing countries found on three continents such as the Middle East, Africa, and Europe, yet they all form one single continuous story, plan, and purpose.[3] There are no other literary products that could begin to rival this accomplishment when so many who are so far apart still contribute to one and the same story, plan, and purpose of God.

How Did We Get the Old Testament?

This is a harder question to answer than the present state of our scholarship can fully answer. This is not to say that we are devoid of any good suggestions, for these first thirty-nine books came to us over the period of a millennium, from Moses’ day in 1400 BC to the time of Malachi in 400 BC. The New Testament writer of Hebrews summed up the work of the Old Testament very nicely: “Long ago God spoke to the fathers by the prophets at different times and in different ways. In these last days, He has spoken to us by His Son. God has appointed Him heir of all things and made the universe through Him” (1:1–2).

The different times, of course, covered over a thousand years, as noted already, from the days of Moses until the time when the book of Chronicles and the prophetic book of Malachi were completed. Nor should we miss the fact that God used many different ways to communicate his truth as well. For example, to King David, the writer of many of the Psalms, God communicated his message through inspired lyrics, while to those who composed the wisdom literature of the Old Testament, he spoke through observation on creation and social behavior (Prov 24:30–34). And to the prophets of the earlier canon, God used dreams, visions, and their perceiving the word from on high. Truly, the methods were varied.

In one or two cases, the Lord wrote with his own hand what he wanted to communicate, but these are the only examples of what we would call a dictation of the biblical materials. Thus, Exodus 31:18 taught: “When He finished speaking with Moses on Mount Sinai, He gave him the two tablets of the testimony, stone tablets inscribed by the finger of God.” In Daniel 5:24–25, once again we read:

Therefore, He sent the hand, and this writing was inscribed. This is the writing that was inscribed: MENE, MENE, TEKEL, PARSIN [meaning, God has numbered your days and you have been weighed in the balance and found deficient, therefore your kingdom has been divided and given to the Medes and Persians].

To be sure, God is spirit and he does not have a corporeal form. Therefore, the reference to his “finger” “inscribing” the tablets, or the reference to his “hand” writing on the wall points to his direct involvement without asking that the metaphorical language be pressed to involve a literal divine finger.

On other occasions, the whole community heard the very words of God being trumpeted aloud from heaven. Such an event was recorded in Deuteronomy 5:22: “The LORD spoke these commands in a loud voice to your entire assembly from the fire, cloud, and thick darkness on the mountain; He added nothing more. He wrote them on two stone tablets and gave them to me.” In a similar way God spoke through the prophets, but the most revealing description of all these methods that God used and about which the prophets have told us, is the case of Balaam, who as a non-Jewish prophet was the exception to the rule that ordinarily God used Jewish prophets. In Numbers 24:15–17, he described with a fair amount of detail his experience of receiving the word of God:

Then he proclaimed his poem:

The oracle of Balaam son of Beor,

the oracle of the man whose eyes are opened;

the oracle of one who hears the sayings of God

and has knowledge from the Most High,

who sees a vision from the Almighty,

who falls into a trance with his eyes uncovered:

I see him, but not now;

I perceive him, but not near.

A star will come from Jacob,

and a scepter will arise from Israel.

The superscription of “The oracle of Balaam son of Beor, the oracle of the man,” parallels similar superscriptions found elsewhere, such as “The declaration of David son of Jesse, the declaration of the man raised on high” (2 Sam 23:1), or “The words of Agur son of Jakeh. The oracle. The man’s oration” (Prov 30:1).

Accordingly, no matter what literary form the biblical material used, whether poetry, proverb, prose, or prophecy, God’s divine utterance was operative in them all. In spite of the fact that these were utterances from the lips of mere mortals (“the oracle of a man”), all of these writers steadfastly pointed to the fact that they had seen, heard, or had been taught knowledge directly from God; yet, all of this was done is such a way that it still preserved the style, vocabulary, and distinctive individuality of each writer.

The Bible in Diachronic Studies

Chronology, as they say, is the backbone of history. This is especially true for biblical history, because the story told in the Old Testament is a single story that was spread out over space and time. Not only did it take place in particular settings of known countries and known rulers, but it featured special persons who had parts to play in unfolding this single story that stretched from creation to intertestamental times.

Therefore, it is impossible to separate or even to denigrate the role of history in the interpretive process. Just as the church fathers in the fourth Christian century affirmed that Jesus “suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, dead and buried; the third day he rose again,” the story of the Old Testament was just as intimately linked with history and the times of that day.

Unfortunately for us, the old consensus on how history was to be used in understanding the Bible has been abandoned or badly distorted by the so-called “minimalists.” For them, much of what the Old Testament describes about ancient Israel has little or no factual basis, especially the narratives from Abraham to the book of Judges; these, the minimalists say, are pure fictions without factual bases. Even the narratives about the monarchies of David and Solomon are considered late inventions coming from the Persian and Hellenistic periods, and thus are without any real historical substance!

Such skepticism toward the historical value of the Old Testament, despite how fashionable it has become, has led to a division in scholarly circles between these “minimalists” and other less skeptical scholars called “maximalists.” Before examining the evidence for the historical accuracy of the Old Testament, it might be worthwhile for us to set the scene by briefly answering four objections that are raised by the minimalists against the historical claims of Scripture.

Chief among such objections is that the mere presence of the miraculous and the supernatural removes the Bible from the category of history and reality as we know and practice it today. In this argument, history cannot be “interrupted” by the sudden presence of the supernatural or the miraculous. Miracles are ruled out by definition. The very fact that a miracle occurs in a biblical story immediately dictates that this event lies outside the realm of what we call history.

But such objections to the presence of miracle and the supernatural in history are examples of an improper transfer of a uniformitarian method, used in scientific research, into the realm of history. Science depends on the fact that what is observed by one scientist can be repeated in a subsequent experiment by another, but that is not the way history works. Historians need artifacts, inscriptions, epigraphic materials, and credible witnesses to determine whether certain things happened or not. Added to this is the fact that it is pressing too hard to require a cause-and-effect interpretation for all historical events. One cannot use the pattern for regularity in general as an argument against the special interruption or intrusion of the supernatural or miraculous in particular.[4]

Another objection argues that the events of Scripture took place such a long time ago that we are unable to get an objective first-hand view of those events and persons. We can respond to this challenge by noting that “objectivity” does not mean an absolute or comprehensive knowledge of the subject under study. What is sought here is a fair presentation of all the available evidence. Moreover, lack of direct access to eye-witness reports of past events or persons no more handicaps the Bible historian than it handicaps the scientist, whose materials for study are often only indirectly available.[5]

Others complain that the nature of the evidence is so fragmentary that we cannot be certain of any statement about the past. But who is to say that incomplete or partial information is to be treated as false or useless? Rarely is scientific knowledge based on complete evidence, so why should we make this a requirement for biblical historians when we obviously do not require the same for scientific knowledge?

Finally, others object that history involves ethical, factual, and aesthetic considerations that call for a strong “subjective” element in reconstructing the past. But it is not necessary to claim that the historian is completely a product of his or her own value judgments or worldviews. The substance of what is known should not be confused with the process of acquiring that knowledge, nor should the verification of that same evidence be confused with the way that evidence is shaped and formed. If total relativism is what is being sponsored in this objection, then it is self-defeating, for, in that case, the objector is only saying what he or she is saying because of subjective forces within his or her own psyche.[6]

Instead of meeting any additional objections to using history to verify the historical accuracy of the Old Testament, let us go to the accumulating evidence supplied mainly from archaeological sources.

Evidence for the Historical Accuracy of the Old Testament

For the sake of time and space we must be very selective in the examples we choose. We will try to give some of the most outstanding examples of accuracy for each of the sections of the Old Testament. We will begin with the Pentateuch.

The Historical Accuracy of the Torah/Pentateuch

It must be acknowledged that the case for the historical accuracy of the first five books of the Old Testament does not depend solely on the fact that the persons, places, and customs of this era do, as a matter of fact, find support in the archaeological artifacts and epigraphic materials from the ancient Near East. Historical fiction often also employs real events and persons in its otherwise imaginative reconstructions of the past. But the case that must be drawn here is that the entire narrative and thrust of all five books hangs together and exhibits a unity, a wholeness, and a continuity leading to the central message of the complete Bible.

It must be admitted, however, that to this point we do not have direct external confirmation for an Abraham, Isaac, or Jacob, but we do have external evidence for one of the key prophets for this period in the person of Balaam son of Beor. In 1967 at Deir ‘Allah, Jordan, some twenty-five miles north of the Plains of Moab, one of the camping spots for the Israelites, a fragmentary inscription, perhaps of a school boy’s copying exercise, was found written in red and black ink on a plaster wall. This inscription was dated to somewhere between 800 and 700 BC.

Balaam son of Beor was almost certainly the very same prophet who appeared in Numbers 22:1–24:25 (also known from Num 31:8; Neh 13:2; Mic 6:5; 2 Pet 2:15; Rev 2:14), and who was active as a prophet on the eastern side of the Jordan River about the time that Israel entered Canaan. The Deir ‘Allah inscription was written in Aramaic and records a frightening night vision that the prophet shared with his colleagues, but little more is known about him.[7] But the profession, city of origin, and some of his characteristics match well with the biblical story. This is a wonderful confirmation of the Bible’s historical accuracy.

If Balaam is the strongest case for one of the individuals in the Torah, who plays a central role in predicting the coming of the Messiah, then the best case for the oldest biblical manuscripts are found in the Ketef Hinnom Silver Scrolls found in 1979 on the southwest side of Mount Zion, outside the old city in Jerusalem. There the archaeologist G. Barkai unearthed a late seventh to sixth century BC burial complex, which contained two silver scrolls, each about the size of a small cigarette, which were used as amulets for individuals when they were alive or as burial pendants. The texts on these scrolls contain the oldest attestation of the tetragrammaton (the name YHWH = Yahweh) and of a shortened text form of the priestly benediction of Numbers 6:24–26. This points to the antiquity of the text and its accuracy as we currently possess it, contrary to the contention of literary critics of the Bible who date it to the sixth or fifth century period of the exile.

There are additional strong cultural lines of argument that have played a part in pointing to the historical accuracy of the allusions made in the Torah. For example, Kenneth Kitchen has shown that the price paid for a slave, when Joseph was taken as a slave into Egypt sometime around 1800 to 1750 BC, was twenty shekels of silver (Gen 37:28), but by the fourteenth and thirteenth centuries, the price of a slave had risen to thirty shekels, a price that matched the biblical period of the Mosaic Law (Exod 21:32). Five hundred years later, slaves were fetching fifty to sixty shekels, and during the Persian period they soared to ninety and even to one hundred and twenty shekels for each slave. As Kitchen observed:

If all these figures were invented during the exile (sixth Century B.C.) [as literary critiques of the Bible have often argued], or in the Persian period by some fiction writer, why isn’t the price for Joseph 90 to 100 shekels, the cost of a slave at the time when the story was supposedly written [according to liberal critics]? It is more reasonable to assume that the biblical data reflect reality in these cases.[8]

Once again, even though the name Joseph has not turned up in Egyptian sources, the cultural setting is precisely what we would have expected for this period of time. For example, Joseph’s predicament in Egypt is very similar to the famous thirteenth-century Egyptological “Tale of the Two Brothers,” Anubis and Bata. This papyrus was discovered in AD 1860, written in cursive Hieratic script. The story is told about Anubis, the older married brother, who owned a farm where he employed his younger brother Bata. Bata was a good man, one who worked hard, plowed the fields, cared for the cattle, and minded his own business. One day, however, as he returned to Anubis’s house to get something, his brother’s wife suddenly propositioned him: “Come now, sleep with me just this once, and I will sew some new clothes for you.” But Bata wrenched free of her grasp and fled back to the fields to do his work.

Anubis’s wife decided to make a preemptive strike, so she took to bed to arouse her husband’s sympathy when he got home late that evening, much as Potipher’s wife did against Joseph (Gen 39:7, 12). So convincing were her accusations against Bata that Anubis hid behind the barn door ready to strike his brother when he brought the cattle into the barn, but Bata narrowly escaped.

Potipher’s wife played a very similar role as she tried to coax Joseph into having sex with her (Gen 39:7, 12, 17–19), for which Joseph was thrown into prison. Add to this story the Egyptian-type name given to Joseph, Zaphenath-paneah (Gen 41:45), and the name of Joseph’s Egyptian wife, Asenath (Gen 41:45, 50; 46:20), who was a daughter of Potiphera, a priest of On at Heliopolis and whose name is well attested in the later twenty-first dynasty (P3-dj-p3-r’, meaning perhaps, “It is the [god] Re who has given birth to him”). All of this places the Joseph narrative in a second millennium BC Egyptian context.

In the case of Deuteronomy, it can now be argued that the very shape and form covered in that book best fit the Mosaic period of the middle of the second millennium BC, rather than the seventh century, as the claims of the older literary critics have argued. The story here begins with the discovery of the Hittite political treaties known as suzerainty treaties. A suzerainty treaty was a political agreement made by a king in the ancient Near East with a subordinate ruler or nation that pledged his/its allegiance to the greater king. The best examples come from the late Hittite Empire from the years 1400–1200 BC. A modified form of these same types of suzerainty treaties were found from first-century BC Assyrian sources. But the interesting point was that the later Assyrian sources had by that time (almost 800 or more years later) deleted several classical items from the Hittite form, and it is this earlier Hittite form that has close parallels to the form of the book of Deuteronomy.

Typical of the second millennium Hittite Suzerainty Treaties were these six sections:

1. A prelude naming the Great King

2. A historical prologue tracing the history of relations between the two powers

3. A set of stipulations or obligations imposed on the lesser nation

4. A provision for the deposit of the treaty and public readings of the treaty at agreed intervals

5. A list of witnesses, normally the gods of both states

6. A set of curses and blessings should there be a lack of fulfillment or praiseworthy obedience

Surprisingly, the outline for the book of Deuteronomy follows precisely the same format as that of the suzerainty treaty form:

1. Preamble—Deut 1:1–5

2. Historical Prologue—Deut 1:6–4:43

3. Stipulations of the Covenant—Deut 4:44–26:19

4. Deposit and Public Reading—Deut 27:1–8; 31:1–13

5. Curses and Blessings—Deut 27:9–28:68

6. Witnesses and Provisions for Succession and Renewal—Deuteronomy 29–34

Present-day historico-critical theorists place the composition of Deuteronomy to about 621 BC, arguing that it was the book that was “found” (i.e., forged) in King Josiah’s day as the temple was cleaned. Thus, they label it as coming from the “D” document source. But, according to its own form-critical backgrounds, reinforced by archaeology, the book belongs not to the later first millennium times, but to an earlier setting in the middle of the second millennium, the time of Moses! This find has given us a monumental amount of evidence that has been sorely needed to answer those who claimed the JEDP[9] theory for the origins of the first five books of the Old Testament. Yet this evidence has gone, by and large, totally unanswered by those who have continued to deny Mosaic authorship and early dating of this last book in the Torah. Many continue to insist that it belongs to a 621 BC date.

The Historical Accuracy of the Earlier Prophets

In the Jewish reckoning of the canon, the four books of Joshua, Judges, Samuel, and Kings are counted as four “Earlier Prophets.” These same books are sometimes referred to as Historical Books, but the Jewish community saw them as prophets. They also counted 1 and 2 Samuel and 1 and 2 Kings as one book each.

The most dramatic find for the books in these Earlier Prophets has to be the Basalt Stele from the city of Dan, called the “Tell Dan Stele,” which was found in the years 1993 and 1994. For the first time we now had external confirmation for King David and his “house” [=“kingdom”]. Prior to this time we had not had such external witness to the reality of his existence; therefore, it was fashionable for minimalists to dismiss the Davidic narratives in the Bible as just so much priestly propaganda created by those in Babylonian exile who needed a heroic figure to provide a sense of national respectability. But this suggestion turns out to be unnecessary since the historicity of David is now validated by this external witness.

Avraham Biran, from the Hebrew Union College, while excavating in northern Israel at the site known as Dan, found in an exposed wall a basalt stone about twelve inches high. In the same wall, a year later, two other smaller stones were found, which were reused stones made of basalt and employed in building the wall, but which also contained one continuous inscription in paleo-Hebrew script with the reference to the “House of David.” Moreover, the Tell Dan Stele was dated to an event in 841 BC and made reference to eight other biblical kings by name. The stele came from the king of Aram, Hazael, to commemorate his defeat of the Israelite kings Jothan and Ahaziah at the town of Ramoth Gilead (2 Kgs 8:28–29).[10]

This announcement of the presence of David’s name caused scholars to take another look at the well-known Mesha Stone from Moab, found a century earlier. In a broken line on the Mesha Stone, a French scholar named Andre LeMaire supplied the two missing letters and was able to read another reference to the “House of David.”[11] Now we had two external references to a David that some claimed never existed.

The background for the Mesha Stele is found in 2 Kings 3, which told the narrative of Mesha, king of Moab (east of the Dead Sea), who revolted against Israel (3:4–5). In a unique discovery, made in Dhiban, Jordan in 1886, the “Mesha Stele” (also known as the “Moabite Stone”) tells Mesha’s side of the story. In this stele he uses the same language found in the Old Testament, with “Yahweh’s” name appearing along with that of his own god, Chemosh, the national god of Moab. He complained in the inscription of how King Omri of Israel had oppressed him. Numerous details of the Bible were confirmed in this Moabite Stone, including the presence of the tribe Gad (Num 32:34), names of towns in Moab mentioned in Isaiah 15, Jeremiah 48, and Ezekiel 25. King Mesha slaughtered the entire town of Nebo to deliver Moab! This was another most significant find for externally authenticating the biblical narrative.

The third most impressive find has to be the Amarna Tablets. In 1887 a Bedouin woman discovered clay tablets with cuneiform (Babylonian) writing on them among the ruins of Akhetaten in Egypt. Altogether there were some 382 tablets discovered containing diplomatic correspondence addressed to the Pharaoh, and many give us a rare glimpse of conditions that existed in the mid-fourteenth century in Canaan about the time of Israel’s invasion of the land. Some 106 of these letters were from vassal Canaanite kings begging Pharaoh to help them find relief from these invaders. The Egyptian Pharaoh at the time was Amenhotep IV. When he came to the throne of Egypt, he instituted sweeping changes in art, politics, and especially religion. He rejected the usual pantheon of Egyptian gods and ordered all to worship Aten, the sun disc. His new capital, Amarna, where the tablets were discovered, was 250 miles north of the original capital of Thebes.

Specifically, the diplomatic correspondence to Amenhotep IV complained about the “Habiru,” which some scholars at first thought was an exclusive reference to the Hebrews, but the name seemed to apply more widely to nomadic tribesmen from various places in the Near East, covering the years 1750 to 1150 BC. Nevertheless, there still is a possibility that there is a connection to be made between the name “Habiru” and “Hebrew,” for some of the Habiru may in fact have been the Israelites who were invading Canaan just at this same time, along with other mercenaries who went by the same name. The call was for Pharaoh to come to Canaan to deliver the Canaanites from these troublesome Habiru; this is what triggers the possible reference to the Israelites who were entering Canaan at this same time.[12]

Fourth on our list for this period would be “the Merneptah Stele,” which was discovered in Pharaoh Merneptah’s mortuary temple in 1896. On this monument is the earliest reference to “Israel” outside the Bible and is the sole reference to “Israel” in Egyptian records so far. It is dated to around 1210 BC and claims that “Israel is wasted, its seed is not; and Hurru is become a widow because of Egypt.” This is a case of Egyptian exaggeration, as often occurred in ancient records, for Merneptah did not, in fact, totally annihilate Israel as the stele implies. But this stele demonstrates that Israel was a recognized people in the land of Canaan around 1200 BC. It also means that Israel had already entered into the land of Canaan by this time and was in the land long enough to be established.[13]

Another monument that can point to the historical accuracy of the Old Testament in this period is “The Black Obelisk of Shalmaneser III.” Sir Henry Layard found this six foot, six inch tall monument of enormous historical value in 1846, in the Northwest Palace of Numrud. It commemorates Shalmaneser III’s campaigns during his reign and contains a pictorial and written record of the kings who paid him tribute as the Assyrian monarch.

On the second panel from the top, King Jehu of Israel (2 Kgs 10:34) can be seen bowing before the Assyrian King Shalmaneser III. This is the only piece of secular evidence where a historical personage from the Bible is depicted. The inscription below the depiction reads: “the tribute of Jehu [Ia-w-a] son of Omri [Hu-um-ri]; I received from him silver, gold, a golden saplu-bowl, a golden vase with pointed bottom, golden tumblers, golden buckets, tin, a staff for a king [and] wooden puruhtu [javelins?].” Fourteen Israelites are depicted along with him, each bearded, with long hair and pointed caps. They wear belted tunics with a fringe on the bottom.[14] Jehu became king by a bloody coup in 841 BC in the northern kingdom of Israel (2 Kgs 9–10), where he moved to rid Israel of Baal worship (10:18–28), but this did not end idolatry in Israel, for the worship of golden calves continued at Bethel and Dan (10:29).

The site of the Pool of Gibeon, mentioned in 2 Samuel 2:13 and Jeremiah 41:12, was first identified by Edward Robinson in 1833 at the Palestinian village of el-Jib. It was indeed ancient Gibeon. James B. Pritchard excavated here from 1956 to 1960 and confirmed this identification with thirty-one jar handles with the Hebrew word “Gibeon” on them.[15]

Since Gibeon was an exporter of wines, and since the harvest of grapes came during the summer months when they lacked rainfall, she required special amounts of water. Pritchard found two separate water systems: (1) a pool or reservoir measuring thirty-seven feet in diameter and eighty-two feet in depth, and (2) a tunnel that sloped down from the inside of the city walls to a water chamber just outside the city at the base of the tell. The pool had a staircase and a railing cut into the limestone winding down thirty-seven feet to about the halfway mark of the pool. It was around this pool that twelve of David’s men met twelve of King Saul’s men, under the command of Abner, in a wrestling match in which all twenty-four men died as they grabbed each other by the hair with one hand and plunged a sword into each other with the other hand.

The Historical Accuracy of the Later Prophets

In this section our concern is with the sixteen writing or later prophets: the four major prophets (Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and Daniel) along with the twelve minor prophets (from Hosea to Malachi).

The evidence that backs up the prophet Jeremiah is the most fascinating, for many of the names that he mentions have come to the fore only recently.[16] First of all, it was Baruch, son of Neriah, who transcribed Jeremiah’s words (Jer 32:13; 36; 43:1–7; and 45). His name also appeared in a seal. The “Seal of Baruch” was one of 250 inscribed bullae, sealed impressions stamped on a lump of clay or other pliable material and subsequently hardened to seal the contents of a manuscript, deed, or what they protected under the name of their owners. Baruch’s seal turned up in 1975 through an Arab East Jerusalem antiquities dealer. In three lines of ancient Hebrew it read: “belonging to Berekhyahu, son of Neriyahu, the scribe.” The suffix on both names was the longer form of “Yahweh’s” name, but otherwise it must refer to the same scribe known from the book of Jeremiah. A second seal appeared with Baruch’s name on it, but what was significant about this one was that on the back of the seal was a clear fingerprint impressed into the clay as well, which may have been Baruch’s!

Some 400 seal inscriptions have been found, most of them dating from the eighth to the sixth century BC. These seals are the equivalents of finding the personal signatures of these Old Testament persons. One of the most sensational finds of seals came in the 1982 find in the “House of Bullae,” which is on the steep southeastern slope above the Gihon Spring in Jerusalem. There a hoard of fifty-one bullae lay stacked away from the time of Nebuchadnezzar and the Babylonian destruction of Jerusalem. In the intense fire that followed the fall of that city, the papyrus rolls to which these bullae were attached perished, but the fire only baked the bullae into immortality. Among these was one bulla with an oval stamp circled by rings (from which the reference to the “signet ring” [Hebrew hotam] was used metaphorically of King Coniah [= Jehoiachin] in Jer 22:24). It had this inscription: “[Belonging] to Gemariah son of Shephan,” who is no doubt the same person mentioned in Jeremiah 36:10–12, who turned out to be one of the few strong supporters of the prophet Jeremiah at the court of King Jehoiakim.

Another outstanding bulla is the one that reads: “Belonging to Jerahme’el son of the king.” The title “son of the king” may be an official, rather than a literal title. What gives this bulla significance is the fact that King Jehoiakim sent a “Jerahmeel, a son of the king,” to arrest Jeremiah and his scribe Baruch in Jeremiah 36:26.

Other interesting bullae would include one with the inscription “Belonging to Gedalyahu, the one who is over the house.” The name of “Gedaliah” appears in Jeremiah 40:13–14; 41:1–2, as the one who functioned as “the royal steward” under King Zedekiah’s reign. Later he was appointed by the Babylonians as a royal administrator (which is what “one who is over the house” might mean [Jer 40:7–41:3]), but he was murdered by Ishmael.

Another name that appears on a bulla is “Belonging to Ishmael the son of the king,” who may well be the same as “Ishmael son of Nethaniah,” a member of the royal family (Jer 41:1). He was the one who came with ten other men and assassinated Gedaliah, already mentioned as the one who had been appointed as governor over the few who remained in Judah after the Jewish exiles were carted off to Babylon.

One more bulla should be mentioned, and that is the one found in 1984 at an Ammonite city of Tell el-Umeiri in central Transjordan, dating to about 600 BC. It read: “Belonging to Mikomur servant of Baalis.” The Baalis mentioned here was an Ammonite king also mentioned in Jeremiah 40:13–14.

The excitement of these bullae finds can perhaps best be expressed by Nahum Avigad:

In conclusion I cannot refrain from expressing my own feelings when handling and deciphering these two bullae [Baruch the scribe, and Jerahmeel the son of the king] for the first time. One has the feeling of personal contact with persons who figure prominently in the dramatic events in which the giant Jeremiah and his faithful follower Baruch were involved at a most critical time preceding the downfall of Judah.[17]

In addition to the large number of bullae, there was another large cache of twenty-one ostraca or storage-jar fragments, inscribed in black ink, known as the “Lachish Letters” that date from about 590 BC, the time of King Zedekiah. These Lachish Letters were written just before the Babylonian siege of the city of Lachish in southern Judah. They describe the hard conditions caused by the Babylonian invasion of Judah.

Eighteen of these inscribed potsherds, now blackened by the 586 BC fires that destroyed Lachish, were found in 1935 on the floor of the guardroom between the inner and outer city gates. Three other fragments were added in 1938 from the palace-fort. The most interesting of these letters (Ostracon VI) was addressed to Ya’ush, who appears to be a military commander at Lachish. It reads: “And behold: the words of the [prophet] are not good; they weaken the hands [of the people], they sap the strength of the country and the city.” It would appear from this letter that the king and his officials were enraged against a “prophet” (scholars have interpolated the word “prophet” here), who is “weakening the hands” [of the people]. Interestingly enough, that same idiom of “weakening the hands” appears against Jeremiah in 38:4. In fact, there are references to a “prophet” in Letter III and Letter IV; but in this last letter, only the last part of the prophet’s name is preserved—yahu, which could well be Yirmeyahu, or Jeremiah. Jeremiah is being accused of lowering the resistance of the people against the Babylonian invasion under Nebuchadnezzar.

Archaeology has also preserved strong affirmations of the prophet Isaiah. Pride of place has to go to the reference in Isaiah 20 where prior to 1847 a reference to “Sargon king of Assyria,” was without any external validation. In fact, his name was distinctly absent from the list of Assyrian kings in the Khorsabad King Lists. However, despite scholars who prematurely decided that Isaiah’s “Sargon” was not a bona fide king, his vast palace of some 200 rooms and 30 courtyards was found eventually at Khorsabad in northern Iraq. Today we know more about this king than any other Assyrian monarch. Sargon II reigned from 721 to 705 BC, and the massive winged androcephalus (human-headed beast with wings) from the entrance of his palace is perfectly preserved to this day.[18]

Another find was the tomb discovered in 1870 in the village of Siloam, just southeast of Jerusalem. It was hewn in the rock, with an inscription barely visible. In 1954 Avigad finally was able to decipher the archaic Hebrew letters and read, “This is the burial place of [. . .]-yahu, who is over the house. There is no silver and no gold here, but [his bones] and the bones of his handmaiden [slave wife are] with him. Cursed is the one who opens this [tomb].” This may well be the same tomb Isaiah was talking about to Shebna (whose full name would be Shebnayahu). If this identity is correct, he was the same high official, under King Hezekiah, who was designated both as a “secretary” and a “scribe,” yet he also was the one “who [was] in charge of the palace” (Isa 22:15). He apparently had some wealth, for he was rebuked by God for preparing a conspicuous monument in a rock-hewn setting. He seems to be the best candidate for Isaiah 22:15–16 and this archaeological find.[19]

The prophet Ezekiel is the source for a cultural allusion in Ezekiel 19:9. In that text, the prophet compared the king of Judah to a lion that would be pulled by hooks “into a cage” and “brought to the king of Babylon.” A bas-relief from Nineveh depicts the Babylonian king Ashurbanipal riding in his chariot, hunting with his bow and arrow. A lion was brought to him in a cage, then released for him to kill. As the lion leapt to hurl himself against the chariot the king was riding in, the king shot the arrow into the mouth of the lion.[20] In a similar way, according to Ezekiel, God would bring the king of Judah to the Babylonian king in a cage like a locked-up lion.

There are many additional items that could be featured here, but a quick look at the prophet Daniel focuses on Daniel 5 in which Belshazzar is said to be the final king of Babylon. At one time, historians were sure they knew that Nabonidus was that final king (550–540 BC); therefore Daniel must be mistaken. But a Babylonian text we now have relates how Nabonidus placed the military troops under his son Belshazzar before he departed for Arabia.[21] Thus, the Bible was correct all the time even though we had to wait for external confirmation until these cuneiform documents were discovered.

To sample the same type of confirmation in the twelve Minor Prophets, Amos 3:15 is a good illustration. There the prophet stormed against those who had a summer home and a winter home, which houses they “adorned with Ivory.” They had forgotten the poor and destitute around them. But that is exactly what was documented in the “Samaria Ivories.” This is a collection of hundreds of pieces of ivory artwork, which exhibited the state of luxury to which the culture had grown accustomed. In fact, Israel’s King Ahab (c. 874–853 BC) constructed in Samaria a palace “inlaid with ivory” (1 Kgs 22:39). The artistic features of these ivories seems to have originated in Phoenicia but also were influenced by Egyptian artwork as well. Even the beds of that era were “inlaid with ivory” (Amos 6:4). Extravagance and luxury had so grabbed hold of the people of Amos’ day that he cried out for their repentance and change of lifestyle.[22]

The book of Nahum featured God’s judgment of Nineveh and as such was twin to the book of Jonah, where that same capital of the Assyrian empire was the object of God’s mercy and escaped from Jonah’s announcement of God’s word of threatened judgment. Nineveh, today known as Mosul, Iraq, dominated the ancient Near East from the period of 900 to 612 BC under such kings a Sennacherib, Esarhaddon, and Ashurbanipal. The walls of this city stretched for almost eight miles and enclosed 1,700 acres. On the walls of Nineveh’s palace were reliefs of battle scenes depicting the exploits of Sennacherib as he defeated Lachish, Judah, or one of the other great cities of that day. However, a coalition of Babylonian, Median, and Scythian forces overthrew the city in 612 BC, in accordance with Nahum’s prophecy, and her luxury suddenly ended.[23]

Our final selection for this section is the “Cyrus Cylinder.” This cylindrical shaped record of the Persian king’s edicts matches very well what is written in the books of Ezra 1:2–4 and 1 Chronicles 36:22–23. King Cyrus credits his god Marduk with selecting him and giving him the task of ruling the world. Of course, the prophet Isaiah argued differently, for he declared that it was Yahweh who had called Cyrus almost 300 years before he was born and desired him to perform all God’s desires (Isa 44:28; 45:1). In this cylinder, Cyrus announced his policy to allow captive peoples to return to their homelands and his willingness to help them reestablish their sanctuaries, just as it happened for Judah (Isa 44:24–28).[24]

The Historical Accuracy of the Wisdom Writings

The books usually included in the category of the wisdom writings are Job, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and Song of Solomon along with many of the Psalms. While this section is more difficult to document archaeologically, there are some good exemplars.

There is an Akkadian text from around 1000 BC known as “The Babylonian Theodicy,” which has some similarities to the book of Job. It is a dialogue in which a man who is hurting discusses the nature of human suffering with his friend. Like Job, this hurting man has been kind and devout, but in his suffering he has been driven to the level of a destitute beggar. As he complains, the wicked strut about secure in their wealth (cf. Job 30:1–11; 21:1–21). The Babylonian Theodicy does not wrestle with the problem of evil, or how God might be involved, but it is a witness to the fact that the problem of evil was treated as a large problem in the ancient Near Eastern culture as it was for biblical Job.[25]

The genre of proverbs is well attested in the ancient world. Among the oldest forms might be the Sumerian Proverbs, the Instruction of Vizier Ptah-hotep from Egypt’s fifth dynasty (2500–2350 BC), the Instruction of Merikare from tenth dynasty Egypt (2106–2010 BC), the Eloquent Peasant from the twelfth dynasty (1963–1786 BC), and the Instruction of Amenemope (tenth to sixth dynasties BC). The last example of Amenemope is remarkably similar in spots to Proverbs 22:17–24:22. Both collections feature thirty sections of teaching on moral action, though there are also notable differences.[26]

Conclusion

Archaeology has been one of the strongest allies for making the case for the historical accuracy of the Old Testament. No doubt, the twentieth century will go down in history as one of the greatest centuries for the discovery of artifacts and written materials related to the background of the Bible. The discoveries of the Ugaritic Documents and the Dead Sea Scrolls alone could have given this accolade to the twentieth century. But the 1900s combined with what had begun in the previous century are enough to boggle our minds.

True, there were some missteps, as when Sir Leonard Wooley announced he had found evidence for Noah’s flood. As it turned out, that same evidence existed at several layers of flood sediment from different times. Others falsely claimed they had found the garden of Eden, but that too was far off the mark. Nevertheless, biblical persons who had been missing from external confirmation began to turn up, including King Sargon, King Belshazzar, King Jehoiachin now in Babylon, Sanballat the governor of Samaria, Tobiah, governor of Ammon, Geshem the Arab, Balaam the prophet, and loads of others including David, Ahab, Jehu, Hezekiah, and Menahem. This does not mean there is no more work to do, for there still are persons missing from external confirmation. Chief among them is King Darius. The work must go on, but the pattern of confirmed accuracy is too strong to be turned aside in an off-handed way.

But there were also cases of missing peoples including the Hittites and the Horites, and others who were once lost but are now found. Parallel to this list are missing places. Once we had no idea where Ophir was, but now we have a much better idea and know that gold does come from that place.[27] Even the list of stopping places along the route of the exodus in Transjordan have now turned up in a list of cities along a similar route on the temple wall at Karnak, Egypt, from Thutmose III’s time (c. 1504–1450 BC).[28]

In almost every case, when the facts are fully known, they have repeatedly provided an almost uncanny confirmation of the accuracy of the history of the Old Testament. The Scriptures of the first testament are a word that exhibits over and over again its close connections with the world of its day. It took place in our kind of world and in our kind of times.

1 Bishop Richard Whately, On Difficulties in the Writings of St. Paul, Essay VII, sec. 4.

2 See Walter C. Kaiser Jr., Recovering the Unity of the Bible: One Continuous Story, Plan, and Purpose (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2009).

3 For more in defense of the Bible’s theological unity, see the article in this volume by Craig Blaising, “Are There Conflicting Theologies in the Bible?” (p. 375).

4 For more on the possibility of miracles in history, see the article in this volume by William Dembski, “Does the Bible Conflict with Science?” (p. 349).

5 For further response to the interpretive problems posed by historical distance, see the article by Richard Melick in this volume, “Can We Understand the Bible?” (p. 89).

6 For more discussion on history in biblical interpretation, see my article “Why Get Entangled with Historical Interpretation: The Role of History,” in Walter C. Kaiser Jr. and Moises Silva, Introduction to Biblical Hermeneutics: The Search for Meaning, rev. and expand. ed. (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2007), 107–19.

7 For further details, see Walter C. Kaiser Jr., “Balaam Son of Beor in Light of Deir ‘Allah and Scripture: Saint or Soothsayer,” in Go to the Land I Will Show You: Studies in Honor of Dwight W. Young, ed. Joseph E. Coleson and Victor H. Matthews (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 1996), 95–106.

8 Kenneth Kitchen, “The Patriarchal Age: Myth or History?” Biblical Archaeology Review 21 (March/April 1995): 52.

9 This is the famous Graf, Kuenen, Wellhausen theory for the origins of the Pentateuch that claimed that the Torah was composed of stories and legends often told around camp fires and finally written down: the “J” material in 850 BC, the “E” in 750 BC, the “D” in 621 BC, and finally the “P” material around 450 BC, and were successively welded together by different redactors.

10 See A. Biran and J. Naveh, “David Found at Dan,” Biblical Archaeology Review 20, no. 2 (1994): 26–39.

11 See Andre LeMaire, “House of David: Restored in Moabite Inscription,” Biblical Archaeology Review 20, no. 3 (1994): 30–37.

12 For more on the significance of the Amarna tablets, see G. L. Archer, A Survey of Old Testament Introduction (Chicago: Moody, 1964), 253–59.

13 See M. Hasel, “Israel in the Merneptah Stele,” BASOR 196 (1994): 45–61.

14 See D. D. Luckenbill, Ancient Records of Assyria and Babylonia, 2 vols. (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1927), 1:590.

15 J. B. Pritchard, Gibeon Where the Sun Stood Still: The Discovery of the Biblical City (Princeton University Press, 1962).

16 One of the best sources for much of the material here is by Philip J. King, Jeremiah: An Archaeological Companion (Louisville, KY: WJK, 1993).

17 N. Avigad, “Baruch the Scribe and Jerahmeel the King’s Son,” Israel Exploration Journal 28 (1978): 56.

18 See G. Loud, Khorsabad I: Excavations in the Palace and at a City Gate (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1936); and G. Loud and C. B. Altman, Khorsabad II: The Citadel and the Town (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1938.

19 N. Avigad, “The Epitaph of a Royal Steward from Siloam Village,” Israel Exploration Journal 3 (1953): 137–52.

20 See M. Avi-Yonah and A. Malamat, eds., The World of the Bible (New York: Educational Heritage, 1964), 3:174.

21 See R. P. Dougherty, Nabonidus and Belshazzar: A Study of the Closing Events of the Neo-Babylonian Empire (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1929), 93–104.

22 See A. Negev and S. Gibson, eds., Archaeological Encyclopedia of the Holy Land (New York: Continuum, 2001), 249–50. The Samaria Ivories could be further illuminated in the “Nimrud Ivories,” another large collection of ivories found at the Nimrud palace, an Assyrian city on the banks of the Tigris River (see R. D. Barnett, A Catalogue of the Nimrud Ivories with Other Examples of Ancient Near Eastern Ivories in the British Museum [London, 1957]).

23 See Negev and Gibson, Archaeological Encyclopedia of the Holy Land, 369.

24 See B. T. Arnold and H. G. M. Williamson, Dictionary of the Old Testament: Historical Books (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 2005), 487.

25 See Tremper Longman III and Peter Enns, eds., Dictionary of the Old Testament: Wisdom, Poetry, and Writings (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 2008), 111–12.

26 See ibid., 546–47.

27 See E. M. Yamauchi, Africa and the Bible (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2004), 83–90.

28 C. R. Krahmalkov, “Exodus Itinerary Confirmed by Egyptian Evidence,” Biblical Archaeology Review 20 (1994): 54–62.

Chapter Ten

Is the New Testament Historically Reliable?

Paul W. Barnett

It is not too much to say that everything depends on my answer to the question. Would I become a follower of Christ while thinking the records about him were untrue? Would I continue in the faith if I lost confidence in the reliability of these texts? Would I, as a church member, acknowledge the Lord in the challenging things he asks me to think or do if I felt the texts are so uncertain that I could read whatever I liked out of them?

Let me present the case for reliability of the New Testament by way of eight theses.[1]

1. The Texts that Comprise the New Testament Are Historical Texts

At this point I am not arguing that the New Testament is true, only that its texts are historical in character. By this I mean that the original authors wrote each of its twenty-seven “books” for a specific audience for a specific purpose.

How many authors wrote these texts? Although not all agree on the precise number, all scholars would agree that there were multiple authors. In my opinion, there were nine separate authors who wrote these texts that later came to be recognized as the New Testament, to be added to the Old Testament to comprise the complete Bible (see chart on the next page).

These texts have one thing in common: their authors seek to inform, clarify, and deepen the faith and behavior of those for whom they wrote. In other words, these texts are missionary literature, written by missionary leaders for individual churches (e.g., First Corinthians for the Corinthians) or for networks of churches (Galatians for “the churches of Galatia,”[2] James for “the twelve tribes in the Dispersion,” First Peter for the “exiles in Pontus, Galatia, Cappadocia, Asia and Bithynia,” and Revelation for the “seven churches that are in Asia”). As missionary texts, each of these writings is historical in character.[3]

Writer

Number of texts

Matthew

1

Mark

1

Luke

2

Gospel + Acts

John

5

Gospel + 3 letters + Revelation

Paul

13

letters

Author of Hebrews

1

letter

Peter

2

letters

James

1

letter

Jude

1

letter

27

2. The Texts of the New Testament Are Early Texts

While it is not possible to give the precise years our nine missionary writers sent their texts to the churches, we are able to make the following important statement: the writing and the sending of them occurred within a narrow time band of about sixty years. Clearly the texts were written after Jesus (whose crucifixion occurred in AD 30 or 33) and, as I will argue, they were in circulation and use by the mid-90s.

The earlier date calls for little discussion but the latter date does. Basically the reasons are (a) that there are manuscripts of the New Testament dated to the early second century; (b) that early second-century Christian writers refer to, quote from, or allude to texts that had been written beforehand; and (c) that second-century Christians established the names of those who wrote these texts.

Early Manuscripts

Justin, a leader of Christianity in Rome in the middle of the second century, refers to “the memoirs composed by the [apostles], which are called gospels, are read as long as time permits. . . .”[4] Justin describes how the church leaders read and applied the message of the Gospels to the assembled believers each Sunday in every city. This is only one of numerous examples indicating that the Christians of the second century read the New Testament, as well as the Old Testament, in their Sunday-by-Sunday church gatherings.

Consistent with this is the recovery in recent years of manuscripts of the New Testament texts. Significantly these papyrus records are written on both sides indicating that they were parts of books that scholars call codices. A scroll was usually written on only one side, but the codex, which consisted of separate sheets stitched together, was really an early form of a book. It seems that the Christians of the second century moved away from using scrolls (which were cumbersome) and (perhaps) pioneered the employment of the codex for its convenience for reading and teaching in the churches.

As it happens we have the four Gospels and the Acts in a single codex (P^45), Paul’s letters and Hebrews in a single codex (P^46), and the Revelation in a single codex (P^47). It is reasonably clear that these codices had been assembled for reading in churches and for instruction based on those readings.[5] Many scholars date these three codices approximately to the end of the second century, though it is not possible to be absolutely precise. The critical observation is that the texts of the New Testament were thoroughly established within a century or so of the end of the era of the apostles.

Working back from the end of the second century, we note that manuscripts of individual texts have been discovered, whether a more or less whole text or an identifiable fragment of a text. For example, P^52, dated to AD 125, is a fragment of John 18 and may have been a copy of John’s original text. Later in the first century we have P^66 which has most of that Gospel. In between we have fragmentary remains of Matthew (P^67, P^64, P^77, P^103, P^104) and Luke (P^4, P^75).[6]

The classification P stands for “Papyrus” and reminds us that our earliest texts survived on “paper” made from the papyrus reed. These texts from the second century were discovered in Upper Egypt where they have survived due to minimal humidity.

Citations

We know the appeal to New Testament texts was a feature of church life in the second century. It is because the Christian writers in the early second century quoted from or paraphrased the texts from the apostolic era.[7] Clement wrote from Rome to Christians in Corinth in c. 95 urging them, “Show mercy, that you may receive mercy; forgive, that you may be forgiven. As you judge so you shall be judged . . . With the measure you use it will be measured to you. As you show kindness, so shall kindness be shown to you. With the measure you use, it will be measured to you.” Here Clement (1 Clement 13) is adapting passages from Matthew 5:7; 6:14; and Luke 6:31, 36–38.

Similarly, the Didache, which may have been written before the end of the first century, alludes to Matthew and Luke (e.g., Did. 1:2/Matt 7:12; Did. 1:5/Luke 6:30). Ignatius, writing c. 110, echoes John 3:8 (“the Spirit . . . knoweth not whence it comes or whither it goes,” Philadephians 7:1).

Polycarp, Bishop of Smyrna, wrote his short letter to the church in Philippi in c. 110, echoing Matthew, Mark, Luke, Acts, Romans, 1 and 2 Corinthians, Galatians, Ephesians, Philippians, 1 and 2 Thessalonians, 1 and 2 Timothy, Titus, Hebrews, 1 Peter, and 1 John. In Polycarp’s letter (written in only twenty-nine verses) he quotes or adapts from every New Testament text except John, James, 2 and 3 John, and Revelation.

Superscriptions

A third and connected reason based on second-century authorities validating first-century sources is the interest in identifying the names of the writers of the Gospels. Typical of books within that period, they did not give the name of the author or the book’s title. So it should not surprise us that the names of the Gospel writers do not appear in their texts. However, by the end of the first century each Gospel was referred to as “the Gospel according to Matthew,” “the Gospel according to Mark,” “the Gospel according to Luke,” and “the Gospel according to John.” That is to say, there were not four Gospels but only one Gospel of Christ, each narrated “according to” a named person. Within twenty or thirty years of their authorship the names of their writers was formally established, and there is no reason to doubt their identities. Matthew and John were original disciples of Jesus, but Mark was an associate of Peter and Luke and a colleague of Paul. We are surprised that two of the four are second-tier persons, something that enhances their authenticity.

Passages from the second-century continue to identify the four Gospel writers by these names. Papias, Bishop of Hierapolis, writing in the first decades of the second century, explains the origins of two Gospels (without using that word).[8] Papias explains that Mark wrote his work based on Peter’s “instruction” and in an implicit reference to Luke 1:1–3 affirms that “Mark” wrote “accurately.” Papias also states that “Matthew compiled his oracles in the Hebrew language.” Furthermore, it appears that by giving the names of six disciples in the order they appear in the Gospel of John, Papias knew that Gospel also.[9] We conclude that Papias referred directly to the origins of the Gospels of Mark and Matthew and indirectly to the Gospels of Luke and John. Based on Papias’s information it is reasonable to assert that these Gospels were in circulation and use by the end of the first century at the latest.

Each text has an author, an intended audience, and an identifiable purpose. This is not to say that we are able to say precisely when each text was written, by whom or for whom. Someone who called himself “the beloved disciple” wrote the Fourth Gospel. The original recipients knew who he was, but we are left to guess his name, though (as we shall argue) there are good reasons to think the “beloved disciple” was John Zebedee, one of the original twelve disciples of Jesus. We have even less information from the other three Gospels about their authors. Yet the original readers would have known who wrote and sent these texts to them and, furthermore, the reason.

More could be said about the manuscripts, citations, and superscriptions from the second century, and there will be differences of opinion about precise dating and other details. Nonetheless, the evidence points to the writing of the texts of the New Testament within the first century, that is, to within a lifetime of the lifetime of Jesus.

3. The Texts of the New Testament Surpass the Texts for the Roman Caesars

It is instructive to contrast the literary[10] evidence for the Roman Caesars and the literary evidence in the New Testament. Our chief sources of information for the Roman Caesars are Tacitus and Suetonius. Augustus was Caesar 31 BC–AD 14, Tiberius 14–37, Gaius 37–41, Claudius 41–54, Nero 54–68, Vespasian 69–79, Titus 79–81, and Domitian 81–96. Tacitus wrote his Annals of Imperial Rome after c. 116 and Suetonius his Lives of the Caesars in c. 120. These are sources of great importance, but they are significantly further removed from their earlier subjects than the Gospel authors were from Jesus. They wrote only four or five decades after him. The Annals’ coverage of the rule of Augustus is only briefly given.[11]

There were other histories written for this period, but they have not survived; for example, Claudius was author of many historical works. The reason the texts of the New Testament survived is because they, along with the Old Testament, became “Scripture” for church reading. As the Christian movement spread, more and more copies of these texts were made, initially in Greek but then in Latin, Syriac, Armenian, and Coptic. It is this plethora of texts that enables scholars to reconstruct the text that is printed in our Bibles, a reconstruction in which we may have confidence since the problematic passages are few and of relatively minor importance.[12]

Nonetheless, the creation of so many texts and their survival is remarkable and counter-intuitive. Jesus was a Jew, and anti-Semitism was rife in the Greco-Roman world. He came from Nazareth, a tiny village in Galilee, a remote landlocked principality. He was crucified, a brutal and humiliating form of execution reserved for the lowest orders to deter subversives, troublemakers, and slaves like those who followed Spartacus.

History is said to be the chronicle of the victors. The early Christians, however, had little to commend them by this canon. They were Jews from a remote corner of the empire, and their leader had been crucified. Their claims about his resurrection were laughable.

The survival of Christian texts written so close to Jesus is noteworthy. Paul’s letters are the earliest texts of Christianity, written from c. 48–65. The letters of James and Hebrews were probably written within the same period; the letters of Peter and Jude by the mid-60s; and the letters of John and the Revelation by the mid-90s. The Gospel of Mark was probably written in the 60s and the Gospels of Matthew and Luke-Acts in the 70s. The dating of John is much debated, some suggesting the mid-60s, others as late as the 90s. Since many think John wrote independently of the three “Synoptic” Gospels, I see no reason for John being written later than the 60s, especially since his references to buildings and topography for Jerusalem fit the period before the Roman invasion of AD 66–70 after which much of pre-war Palestine was unrecognizable.[13]

The Christian movement made rapid progress for several reasons. It proclaimed resurrection hope in a world where life expectancy was short. The Christian message of the cross of Christ promised assurance of divine forgiveness, as well as providing the sublime example of non-vengeance. Its ethic was based on Christ’s example of others-centered behavior in a society that was marked by self-centered living. This included Paul’s valiant attempt to reconcile Jews and Gentiles within the one community of faith, something unheard of in the ancient world. Not least, it rejected the dissolute gods of Greece and Rome in favor of the One, true and living God.

4. Hostile Sources Confirm the Existence of Jesus and the Broad Sweep of New Testament History

The three earliest non-Christian witnesses to Jesus the Christ and the early Christians are Josephus, Pliny, and Tacitus. We are interested to know how these writers thought about Christ and Christians. Were they sympathetic or hostile? Do they contradict or corroborate what we find in the writings of the earliest Christians?

Josephus

Born c. 37 of aristocratic parents in Jerusalem, Josephus became the military leader defending Galilee from the invading Romans in AD 66–67 but was captured by the future emperor, General Vespasian. Throughout the remainder of the war, Josephus served Vespasian and his son Titus as interpreter and adviser. After the war in Rome, he became their propagandist. Vespasian adopted Josephus as a member of the Flavian dynasty so that he became known as Flavius Josephus.

In the 90s Josephus wrote his massive history of the Jewish people, Jewish Antiquities, where he mentions Jesus and his brother James.

About this time there lived Jesus, a wise man [if indeed one ought to call him a man]. For he was one who wrought surprising feats and was a teacher of such people who accept the truth gladly. He won over many Jews and many of the Greeks. [He was the Christ]. When Pilate, upon hearing him accused by men of the highest standing amongst us had condemned him to be crucified, those who had in the first place come to love him did not give up their affection for him. [On the third day he appeared to them restored to life, for the prophets of God had prophesied these and countless other marvellous things about him.] And the tribe of Christians, so called after him, has still to this day not disappeared.[14]

Ananus (Annas) thought he had a favorable opportunity because Festus was dead and Albinus was still on his way. So he convened the judges of the Sanhedrin and brought before them a man, the brother of Jesus who was called Christ, and certain others. He accused them of having transgressed the law and delivered them up to be stoned. Those of the inhabitants of the city who were considered the most fair-minded and who were strict in observance of the law were offended at this. They therefore secretly sent to King Agrippa urging him, for Ananus had not even been correct in his first step. . . . King Agrippa, because of Ananus’ actions, deposed him from the high priesthood. . . .[15]

The James passage states that Jesus was “called Christ” or “said to be Christ,” which calls into question the Jesus passage above that declares without qualification that Jesus “was the Christ.” This suggests that the Jesus passage may have been interpolated with non-Josephan words about Jesus, as bracketed in the passage above. The third-century Christian writer Origen specifically states that Josephus did not regard Jesus as the Messiah. Yet the unemended text appears exactly in the Christian historian Eusebius’s writing in the first quarter of the fourth century. It seems that a Christian has embellished Josephus’s text sometime between Origen and Eusebius, that is, between AD 250 and 325.

The James passage appears to be free of interpolation. When we remove the interpolations from the first passage and consider it with the second passage, we discover useful information about Jesus:

1. Jesus was a rabbi (“wise man”) who worked miracles;

2. He was said to be the Messiah, i.e., by his followers;

3. He was executed by Pilate (AD 26–36) at the request of leading Jews;

4. Jesus had a brother named James (executed by the high priest in 62);

5. “The tribe of Christians” had still not died out when Josephus wrote in the 90s.

Josephus’s words are a true reflection of the things he would have observed about early Christianity as a young man in Palestine who later lived in Rome where the Christians survived Nero’s assault on them in AD 64–65 (see below). Josephus clearly is no Christian, yet he accurately portrays Christ, his execution, and the survival of Christianity.

Tacitus

Cornelius Tacitus (c. 56–120) served as consul in Rome in 97 and proconsul of Roman Asia in 112–113. His major work, The Annals of Imperial Rome, narrated the eras of emperors Tiberius, Gaius, Claudius, and Nero in eighteen books of which only books 1–4 (Tiberius) and 12–15 (Claudius and Nero) are intact.

The passage following is part of his lengthy account of the fire in AD 64 that raged for six days, leaving only four of the fourteen districts of Rome unaffected (book 15, chaps. 38–45). In the weeks after the fire many came to believe that Nero had ordered the torching of the city so as to rebuild it on a grand scale. To counteract these suspicions Nero engaged in ambitious building projects and elaborate religious sacrifices to appease the gods but to no good effect. Because the rumors about him persisted, Nero arrested, tried, and executed the numerous members of the Christian sect to deflect attention away from him.

But neither human help, nor imperial munificence, nor all the modes of placating Heaven could stifle or dispel the belief that the fire had taken place by order.

Therefore, to scotch the rumour, Nero substituted as culprits, and punished with the utmost refinements of cruelty, a class of men, loathed for their vices, whom the crowd styled Christians.

Christ, the founder of the name, had undergone the death penalty in the reign of Tiberius, by sentence of the procurator Pontius Pilate, and a pernicious superstition was checked for the moment, only to break out once more, not merely in Judea, the home of the disease, but in the capital itself, where all things horrible or shameful in the world collect and find a vogue.

First, then, the confessed members of the sect were arrested; next, on their disclosures, vast numbers were convicted, not so much on the count of arson as for hatred of the human race.

And derision accompanied their end; they were covered with wild beasts’ skins and torn to death by dogs; or they were fastened on crosses, and when daylight failed were burned to serve as lamps by night.

Nero had offered his Gardens for the spectacle, and gave an exhibition in his Circus, mingling with the crowd in the habit of a charioteer, or mounted on his car. Hence, in spite of a guilt which had earned the most exemplary punishment, there arose a sentiment of pity, due to the impression that they were being sacrificed not for the welfare of the state but the ferocity of a single man.[16]

As a former consul in Rome, Tacitus would have had access to official archives and may have seen Pilate’s report to Tiberius about the execution of Jesus and others in Judea in AD 33. Tacitus’s account, which appears not to have been corrupted, contains important information:

1. Christians in Rome were scapegoats for Nero following the fire in AD 64 that destroyed the greater part of Rome.

2. Tacitus says that there were vast numbers of these Christians convicted, though not for arson but for “hatred of the human race,” a probable reference to their refusal to acknowledge the primacy of Rome and her Caesar.

3. Although these Christians were hated for the “vices” (especially their nonconformity in Roman religious practices), the population felt sorry for them.

4. Nero had large numbers crucified and daubed with tar and set alight.

5. Tacitus digresses briefly to explain that (a) the Christians took their name from a certain Christ (a Jew?), (b) who was executed in Judea under Pontius Pilate, but (c) surprisingly Christ’s movement (a Jewish sect?) “broke out afresh” in Judea, and (d) his following spread from Judea to Rome. (Tacitus’s version innocently confirms the resurrection-based “breakout” that is narrated in the early chapter of the Acts of the Apostles.)

Tacitus is no Christian, yet his onlooker’s hostile information coincides with the New Testament’s portrayal of Jesus as one whose followers proclaimed him to be the Christ, who was executed under Pilate but whose movement “broke out afresh”—like a disease—and spread from Judea to Rome.

Pliny the Younger

Pliny the Younger (c. 61–112), formerly a consul in Rome, was sent c. 110 by Trajan Caesar to govern the disorganized province of Bithynia (south of the Black Sea). His correspondence with Trajan from 110–112 is recorded in Book 10 of his Letters.

In Letter 96 he reports on the rapid spread of Christianity in the province, both in rural and urbanized areas. Temples were abandoned and the businesses of those who sold fodder for sacrificial animals had been shut down though lack of demand.

Pliny interrogated those accused of being Christians and sentenced them to death if they insisted on saying they were, despite being asked the question three times. The governor dispatched to Rome for trial those who were Roman citizens.

Others who were accused acknowledged that they had been Christians but no longer were. Pliny subjected them to a formal legal procedure. The accused were required to invoke the state gods according to Pliny’s dictated statement, engage in an act of worship with incense to the emperor’s image, and also “curse Christ.”

Pliny twice refers to Christ but without further explanation. We reasonably assume that Pliny knew (but did not need to tell Trajan) that Christ has been executed in Judea some years before. Since his friend Tacitus (governor of neighboring Asia) made this clear (as noted above), we assume it was common knowledge among Roman bureaucrats.

[T]hey maintained that their guilt or error had amounted only to this: they had been in the habit of meeting on an appointed day before daybreak and singing a hymn antiphonally to Christ as if to a god, and binding themselves with an oath—not to commit any crime but to abstain from theft, robbery, and adultery, from breach of faith, and from repudiating a trust when called upon to honour it. After this ceremony, it had been their custom to disperse and reassemble to take food of a harmless kind. . . .[17]

Pliny provides us with useful information about early Christianity and Christian practices:

1. Christians had become very numerous in Bithynia since at least AD 90, so much so that many pagan temples had been closed.

2. Their practices included meeting on fixed days and chanting hymns to Christ “as if to a god,” confirming very early New Testament texts that Christians met to worship Christ including by singing hymns to him as Lord (e.g., Eph 5:19, “making melody to the Lord with all your heart”).

3. Christians viewed Christ above the emperor and the gods and would die rather than comply with Roman “tests” of praying to statues of the emperor and the gods and cursing Christ.

Pliny the outside observer is deeply opposed to the Christians. Nonetheless, his portrayal of their dedication to Christ and their religious meetings is consistent with the Christians’ own version of these things as we find them in the New Testament.

Summary

These sources are particularly valuable because they were written by “outsiders” who were hostile to the Christians. That is to say, they cannot be accused of pro-Christian bias. This is important since “insiders” who are clearly Christian wrote the Gospels and Letters of the New Testament. These hostile “outsiders” leave us in no doubt that Jesus was a genuine figure of history.

At no point of detail do these sources contradict historical details in the New Testament; they confirm the “raw facts” about the who (Christ), the where (Judea), the when (under Pilate), and the what next (the movement spread out from Judea into the Roman empire, including to Rome itself).[18] They confirm the New Testament’s picture that the Roman authorities took a negative and punitive attitude to the followers of Christ.

Of great importance is Pliny’s window into early Christian meetings where people assembled weekly to worship this crucified man as if alive, “as if to a god.” Pliny confirms the central claims of the New Testament that Jesus of Nazareth was crucified as the Messiah but that he was resurrected and worshipped by his followers in weekly meetings.

It is striking that Josephus, Tacitus, and Pliny each use Christ as a name, as the New Testament letters also frequently do. Yet it is evident from the Gospels that “Christ” was initially a title, “the Christ” (which is Greek for “the Messiah”). The transition from a title to a name probably occurred because outsiders would have been bewildered by a title for someone as “the smeared one” (which the words “the Christ” literally meant). Nonetheless, the consistent non-Christian use of the words “Christ” and “Christian” preserve the original meaning of Jesus as the Messiah, whose followers were dubbed “Messiah’s men,” “Christians” (Christianoi—Acts 11:26). That the non-Christian witnesses never speak of “Jesus’ men” is also likely significant.

5. Archaeology Confirms the Narratives of the New Testament[19]

The following is a brief survey of the major discoveries that have shed light on the historical nature of the New Testament.

In 1871 the warning against a Gentile entering the temple precincts was discovered, confirming Acts 21:28 where the complaint against Paul was that he had brought Greeks into the Temple.[20]

In 1878 an edict was unearthed in Nazareth forbidding grave robbery, on pain of death. This may have some bearing on the chief priests’ propaganda that the disciples had stolen the body of Jesus (Matt 28:13).

In 18[••][21] an inscription in Thessalonica was discovered with the words, “In the time of the Politarchs,”[22] confirming Acts 17:6, “They dragged Jason and some of the brothers before the city authorities (politarchs).”

In 18[••] a pavement in Corinth was unearthed bearing the words, “Erastus, commissioner for public works,” confirming Romans 16:23 (“Erastus, the city treasurer. . . . greet[s] you”).

In 18[••] an inscription at Delphi was found bearing the name of the newly appointed proconsul, Gallio:

[C]laudius . . . year 12 acclaimed emperor for the 26th time [i.e., AD 52] . . . I have long been zealous for the city of Delphi . . . those quarrels of which report has been made by Lucius Junius Gallio my friend and proconsul of Achaia.

This suggests that Gallio had been appointed in AD 51, which casts important light on Acts 18:12 (“When Gallio was proconsul of Achaia . . .”) pinpointing Paul’s probable arrival in the Achaian capital in AD 50. This in turn dovetails with Acts 18:2 where Aquila and Priscilla arrived in Corinth having been expelled with other Jews from Italy, which appears to have occurred in AD 49 (Suetonius, Claudius 25.4, “Since the Jews constantly made disturbances at the instigation of Chrestus he expelled them from Rome”).[23]

In 1913 a dedication was found in Jerusalem relating to a Greek-speaking synagogue that also provided hostel accommodation for foreign Jews.[24] This inscription confirms Acts 6:5, 9 that refers to various synagogues for “Hellenist” Jews from the Diaspora living in Jerusalem.

In 1941, in the Kidron area of Jerusalem, an ossuary (bone chest) was discovered bearing the name “Alexander the Cyrene, son of Simon.”[25] Is it too much a coincidence that Mark 15:21 states “they compelled a passer-by, Simon of Cyrene . . . the father of Alexander . . . to carry his cross”?

In 1956 in Jerusalem an ossuary was found with the words inscribed:

Everything that a man will find to his profit in this ossuary is an offering (qorban) to God from the one within it.[26]

This is in line with Jesus’ words in Mark 7:11–13—“If a man tells his father or his mother, whatever you would have gained from me is Corban (that is, given to God)—then you no longer permit him to do anything for his father or mother, thus making void the word of God by your tradition. . . .”

In 1961 occurred the dramatic discovery in Caesarea Maritima of an inscription made by Pontius Pilate, prefect of Judea in dedication to Tiberius.[27] Tacitus and Philo refer to Pilate, but it was very exciting to discover an artifact that he had commissioned and erected.

In 1964 a succession of digs from the previous century finally established the extent of a pool complex in the grounds of St. Anne’s Church, Jerusalem. Many had believed that the pool of Bethesda was an invention of John (John 5:1–9). This archaeological discovery confirms that the description of this pool in the Gospel of John was not the creation of the evangelist but reflects an accurate and detailed knowledge of the site. The Gospel speaks of (a) the name of the pool as Bethesda; (b) its location near the Sheep Gate; (c) the fact that it has five porticos, with rushing water. All these details are corroborated through literary and archaeological evidence affirming the historical accuracy of John’s account.

Also dramatic was the discovery near Jerusalem in 1968 of the remains of Yehohanan, who had been crucified in the first century and who had been nailed through his feet to the cross.[28] Yehohanan’s lower leg was fractured. This may support John 19:31–35 where it was proposed that Jesus’ legs should be broken. Yehohanan was buried in a family grave, tending to validate Jesus’ burial in a similar family tomb and not in a common pit appropriate to felons, as some maintain in denial of Jesus’ burial in a known tomb.

In 198[•] in Yalvaç in Turkey (Antioch of Pisidia) was discovered an inscription bearing the name Sergius Paulos, son or grandson of the proconsul of Cyprus who had become a believer through Paul’s ministry. Paul may have taken his name to indicate he was now under the patronage of this important man (Acts 13:9). It must be no coincidence that Paul went directly from Cyprus to Antioch in Pisidia where relatives of the proconsul were well established estate owners.[29] Patronage and support, including from non-believers, were important to a vulnerable missionary like Paul (see e.g., Acts 19:31, “Some of the Asiarchs, who were friends of [Paul] . . . were urging him not to venture into the theatre”).[30]

In 1985 near Ginosar in Galilee an ancient fishing boat was discovered and later painstakingly restored. Scholars believe it came from the era of Jesus and was preserved under water during the intervening years. In the museum in the kibbutz En Gev across the Lake are stone anchors and weights for nets, giving us good reason to believe the Gospel narratives about fishing and fishermen. The name of the village Magdala (Migdal) means a “tower” for spotting fish. It was the home of Mary of Magdala, a woman “of means” who with other local women provided financially for Jesus and the disciples (Luke 8:1–3). Josephus refers to Migdal by another name, Tarichaeae, “place of dried fish.”

Very dramatic was the discovery in Jerusalem in 1990 of an ossuary bearing the name Yehoseph bar Qyph, Joseph Caiaphas.[31] Josephus also mentions Caiaphas, but it is only from the New Testament that we know he was the son-in-law of the senior high priest, Annas (John 18:13). The New Testament provides information not found in other sources. We now have “hard evidence” relating to those who were responsible for the crucifixion of Jesus.

Discoveries continue to be made. In 2005 the Pool of Siloam was uncovered confirming the narrative of John 9. Not all the earth has yet been removed from the find, but it appears to have been a substantial pool. Water from Hezekiah’s tunnel was the source of the water for this important pool.

Some of these archaeological discoveries are relatively minor, others spectacular. Taken together they both elucidate and confirm the historical narratives in the New Testament.[32]

6. The New Testament Is Set in the Matrix of Historically Important People and Events[33]

Each of the four Gospels begins and ends by reference to famous people. At the beginning of each Gospel, John the Baptist, a famous prophet, is baptizing people.[34] Each Gospel ends with the trial of Jesus under famous people, Caiaphas and Pontius Pilate.[35] Accordingly, each Gospel is “framed” by references to prominent people who appear in the non-Christian sources.

Luke locates the births of both John and Jesus in the days of Herod the king; Matthew is silent about the birth of John, but he too places Jesus’ birth in the time of Herod. Herod died in 4 BC. Luke also pinpoints the commencement of John’s preaching to “the fifteenth year” of Tiberius (i.e., AD 28/29) when Herod Antipas was tetrarch of Galilee, when Pilate was governor of Judea, and when Annas and Caiaphas were the high priests in Jerusalem (Luke 3:1–3). The Synoptic Gospels each narrate the arrest of John the Baptist, and the Synoptics record his execution at the hands of the ruler of Galilee, Herod Antipas (a detail Josephus confirms).

Clearly, therefore, the Gospel writers set Jesus within the matrix of history, and a fairly complicated history it was. At the time of Jesus, Roman rule was exercised in Judea through military governors with the high priest as surrogate ruler in the holy city, Jerusalem. Rome ruled the other jurisdictions through the sons of Herod as “client” princes. Herod Antipas was tetrarch of Galilee-Perea (4 BC–AD 39) and Herod Philip was tetrarch of Gaulanitis (4 BC–AD 34). Yet despite these complexities, the Gospel writers reflect the situations in which Jesus conducted his ministry in various and diverse jurisdictions: Galilee, Samaria, Gaulanitis, Perea, and Judea.

Luke sets out his narrative of the spread of Christianity in his second volume, the Acts of the Apostles, with numerous references to the historical figures in those times. In turn we meet Annas and Caiaphas and two other members of the high priestly family (4:6); Gamaliel, the famous rabbi (5:34); Cornelius, a centurion (10:1); the Famine in the time of Claudius (11:28); Herod Agrippa I (12:1); Sergius Paulos, proconsul of Cyprus (13:7); Gallio, proconsul of Achaia (18:12); the high priest Ananias (23:2; 24:1); Felix the procurator and his wife Drusilla, daughter of Agrippa I (24:24); the procurator Festus (25:1); King Agrippa II with Queen Bernice, sister and consort of the king (25:13); Julius, centurion of the Augustan Cohort (27:1); and, finally, Publius, chief man of the Island of Malta (28:7). Once again, we cannot but notice that Luke’s narrative is deeply rooted in the soil of history.

Martin Hengel, a noted historian, has compared Acts with other histories written at that time. He commented that Luke’s account “always remains within the limits of what was considered reliable by the standards of antiquity.”[36] Is the book of Acts historically trustworthy? Its attention to detail, as well as its observable style relative to that of other ancient histories gives us grounds for high confidence.[37]

7. We Are Able to Answer Objections to the Integrity of the New Testament

Atheism has been part of the Western intellectual tradition for centuries. Despite the influence of George Bernard Shaw, Bertrand Russell, and Jean Paul Sartre, until recently atheism had relatively few supporters. Terrorist violence was inspired by religion in September 2001 and subsequently seems to have been a catalyst for the dramatic rise in atheism. Its attack has been significantly directed at Christianity.[38]

The “new” atheists’ principal and popular argument is that unjust suffering must mean that God is neither great or good, but in fact is simply “not there.” Religion is a delusion and not a force for good but evil. Apart from the philosophical argument about God, good and evil, a main target for the atheists is the Bible, including the New Testament.

Those who make these arguments seem unaware of the obvious. It is willful, human selfishness that is the source of the greater part of human suffering, including unjust suffering, whether in the past or the present. One has only to read the daily newspaper anywhere at any time to be confronted with the same narrative. Human misery is often a consequence of selfish behavior. Furthermore, it is a given that the physical world is not a benign place, but full of danger through floods, fires, earthquakes, tsunamis, and disease. The simple observable fact is that our world is not the garden of Eden.

But this is precisely the perspective of the Bible, from beginning to end. That perspective holds that God is indeed “sovereign,” but human existence within history is “fallen.” Atheists and skeptics express surprise that the world is not perfect, but the Bible is realistic about the deeply flawed nature of human existence. The narrative of the Bible is written from the viewpoint that humans are willfully self-centered, and our physical environment is not benign but dangerous. Its perceptions agree with our cold-eyed observations about people, life, history, and culture.

The Historical Existence of Jesus

Very few historians deny the historical existence of Jesus.[39] The non-Christian and hostile writers, Josephus, Tacitus, and Pliny referred to previously in this chapter leave us in no doubt that Jesus was, indeed, a true figure of history. They do not, of course, subscribe to the views in the New Testament that he was a divine figure.

The Nativity of Jesus

The main arguments against the Gospel accounts of the birth of Jesus are that (a) there are only two Gospel accounts, (b) they are contradictory and erroneous, and (c) fictional details have been added to them.

Only Two Accounts

It is true that there are only two accounts of Jesus’ birth, by Matthew and Luke. Yet the main thing they teach is that Jesus’ birth was by supernatural intervention, the virginal conception.

But it is no less true that the various New Testament writers effectively teach the same message about the pre-existence, birth, and redemptive death of Jesus. Paul taught the “incarnation” of the Son of God from his pre-existent deity to his human life culminating in his degradation in crucifixion (Phil 2:5–8) and that “when the fullness of time had come, God sent forth his Son, born of a woman, born under the law, to redeem . . .” (Gal 4:4–6). Peter and the writer to the Hebrews give the same “global” message (1 Pet 1:18–21; Heb 1:1–4). John’s entire Gospel is focused on the eternal and divine Word who “became flesh” (1:1–2; 14). John’s description of a believer’s rebirth “not of blood nor of the will of the flesh nor of the will of man, but of God” (1:13) seems to be based on the virgin conception of Christ (born “not of blood nor of the will of the flesh nor of the will of man, but of God”).

So while it is true that there are only two direct narratives of the first Christmas, the writings of Paul, Peter, the letter to the Hebrews, John and Paul are consistent with the main emphasis of those narratives, the virginal conception of the Son of God.

Moreover, careful comparison of the texts of Matthew and Luke make it unlikely that one has copied from or depended on the other. Rather, their Gospels are the result of source material peculiar to them. Furthermore, Matthew was a Jew writing for Jewish Christians and Luke a Gentile (God-fearer?) writing for Gentile readers. Matthew focuses on Joseph with little mention of Mary, and Luke focuses on Mary with little mention of Joseph. Luke writes in terms of OT birth narratives whereas Matthew’s style is more matter of fact. Their respective genealogies are so different as to be irreconcilable.

Despite fundamental differences in style (and genealogies) there is agreement:

Matthew

Luke

Jesus was born in Bethlehem

2:1

2:2–4

In the time of Herod (d. 4 BC)

2:1

1:5

Mother: Mary (betrothed to Joseph)

1:18

1:26; 2:5

Legal father: Joseph (named the child)

1:18

1:26

But not the biological father

1:16, 20, 22

1:34; 3:23

Jesus raised in Nazareth in Galilee

2:22–23

2:39

From the line of David

1:1

1:32

In other words, these independent Gospels agree about the core facts on the birth of Jesus.

Contradictions and Errors

The biggest problem in the accounts is that Matthew already has Joseph and Mary in Bethlehem whereas Luke describes their journey from Nazareth. This is not insurmountable. Perhaps Matthew did not know about the journey or chose, for the sake of brevity, not to report it. Matthew also has a special interest in Jesus as descended from the line of David; and Bethlehem was David’s birthplace and the birthplace of the Messiah as prophesied by Micah (Matt 2:6; Mic 5:2). Luke, however, has a special interest in Mary (see Luke 1:39–56), and may have learned of the journey from Nazareth by talking with her during his years in Palestine in the late 50s.

Reciprocally, Matthew makes no reference to the census registration which, according to Luke 2:1–6, was the reason for the journey to Bethlehem. In verses 1, 3, and 5 Luke explains that Augustus’s decree for a universal census necessitated Joseph’s journey from Nazareth to Bethlehem for he and Mary to be registered.

We know that Augustus conducted a census beginning in 18 BC (Res Gestae 8) and that such a census could have occurred within the domain of a client king like Herod (Tacitus, Annals vi.41).[40] Furthermore, there is evidence of a registration requiring registrants to return to their ancestral homes.[41]

Luke’s pinpointing of the journey of Joseph and Mary to Bethlehem to the time of “the first registration when Quirinius was governor of Syria” (v. 2) presents us with several problems. The first is that Quirinius’s registrations in Judea occurred in AD 6, 7[42] whereas Luke locates the birth of Jesus “in the days of Herod” (Luke 1:5, 26) who died in 4 BC. The second is that Augustus divided Herod’s kingdom at his death, which meant that Joseph of Nazareth in Galilee would not have had to cross into Judea, another jurisdiction, for registration (Luke 3:1–2).

Some have attempted to resolve this impasse historically by locating Quirinius’s governorship in Syria during Herod’s lifetime. However, there is no evidence that Quirinius was legate of Syria before AD 6.[43] Others have attempted to explain the problem grammatically by understanding the word “first” to mean “earlier” or “former.” Strictly speaking, πρώτος (prōtos), when used as an adjective, means “first” in a superlative sense (first of three or more) and this is how most translations render Luke 2:2. However, Acts 1:1 breaks this rule because Luke’s “first book” (πρῶτον λόγον, prōton logon) refers comparatively (not superlatively) to his Gospel, his “former” or “earlier” book. Furthermore, in John 15:18 πρῶτον unambiguously means “before” in a comparative sense: “the world hated me before it hated you.” Accordingly, while grammatical precision supports πρώτη (prōtē) in Luke 2:2 meaning “the first registration,” there is sufficient fluidity in the use of the word to mean “this registration took place before Quirinius was governor of Syria.”[44]

We must keep in mind that Luke was writing seventy or more years after the birth of Jesus. Resources such as textbooks, archives, encyclopaedias, to say nothing of the Internet, were not available to him.

“Fictional” Details

What about “Christmas card” items in the narratives? “Magi” were Mesopotamian students of astrology and astronomy who might have been expected to be interested in spectacular “signs” in the heavens, especially when such signs were held to be portents of great events. According to Matthew, they said that they “saw his star when it rose” (Matt 2:2), suggesting they followed the direction of the heavenly lights. Incidentally, the biblical record does not say there were three magoi.

One of the great prophecies of the Old Testament, which would affect not only the Jews, but the whole world, concerned a star. According to Numbers 24:17, “A star shall come out of Jacob, and a sceptre shall rise out of Israel.” Centuries before Christ, the Jews interpreted this to mean that from the Jewish people a ruler would arise for the whole world. The Greek translation of the Old Testament, for example, translates Numbers 24:17 as “a star shall come forth out of Jacob, a man shall arise. . . .”

A hundred years after Christ, Rabbi Akiba saw the rebel leader ben Kosiba as that “star” who would rule the world. Akiba renamed him bar Kokhba, “son of a star.” The Gentiles also knew of this Jewish prophecy. Tacitus writes of “a mysterious prophecy . . . of the ancient scriptures of their priests” whereby, “the Orient would triumph and from Judea would go forth men destined to rule the world.”[45]

Tacitus changed the prophecy from the singular “man” to the plural “men,” seeing the fulfillment in father and son Vespasian and Titus who, as the Roman victors of the Jews in AD 66–70, were both destined to become emperors. It is probable that a version of this prophecy was known by the magoi from Mesopotamia.

Every 805 years the planets Jupiter and Saturn draw near to each other. Astronomers have calculated that in 7 BC the two planets were conjoined three times: in May, September, and December. In February, 6 BC they were joined by Mars, presenting a spectacular triangular conjunction.[46]

It appears likely that the magoi, knowing the ancient star prophecy, and on seeing the brilliant planetary formation, decided to visit Judea to see the new king of the world. In 1871 the astronomer John Williams published his authoritative list of sightings of comets. Comet number 52 on Williams’s list appeared for seventy days early in 5 BC and would have been visible in the Middle East. Was this the “star” which guided the magoi? Why did Herod kill the boys who were two years old and younger? Could this figure be explained by the timeframe of 7–6 BC when the conjunction of the stars appeared?

Time magazine, in its cover story of December 27, 1976, commented that while “there are those who dismiss the star as nothing more than a metaphor . . . others take the Christmas star more literally, and not without reason. Astronomical records show that there were several significant celestial events around the time of Jesus’ birth.”[47]

Miracles

Although atheists reject Jesus’ miracles on principle, the historical evidence for them is compelling. First, the non-Christian sources, Josephus and the Talmud refer to Jesus’ miracles. Josephus, writing in the 90s, states that “Jesus . . . wrought surprising feats.”[48] The Talmud, written much later, says that “they hanged Yeshu” because “he practised sorcery,”[49] a probable reference to the accusation that Jesus performed exorcisms by the power of the Devil (cf. Matt 12:24 and pars.).

Second, the apostle Peter refers in speeches to the miracles of Jesus, first in his major address to the Jews in Jerusalem (Acts 2:22, “Jesus of Nazareth, a man attested to you by God with mighty works and wonders and signs . . .”) and later to the Roman centurion, Cornelius in Caesarea (Acts 10:38, “Jesus of Nazareth . . . he went about doing good and healing all who were oppressed by the devil).

Third, the sayings of Jesus about miracles imply their historicity: “Tell John what you hear and see: the blind receive their sight and the lame walk, lepers are cleansed and the deaf hear, and the dead are raised up, and the poor have the gospel preached to them” (Luke 7:22; Matt 11:4–5). Joachim Jeremias, an authority on Aramaic language, argued that these words originally occurred in a speech rhythm that was characteristic of the way Jesus spoke.[50]

Fourth, the sheer number and diversity of Jesus’ miracles as recorded in the Gospels and the sources underlying the Synoptic Gospels are overwhelming:

Mark

20

John

7

Q

1

(Luke 7:1b–10; Matt 8:5–13)

M

2

(Matt 9:32–34)

L

3

(Luke 5:1–11; 7:11–17; 17:11–19)

Mark and John, although literarily independent, both record the feeding of the multitude. It appears that these two Gospels and the sources underlying the Synoptic Gospels attest to more than thirty miracles at the hands of Jesus.

Furthermore, it is no less striking that we find a diversity of miracles across Mark and John and the Synoptic sources (Q, L, M) as shown in the following chart:

See Chart

A wide range of miracle types is thus attested independently. According to Barry Blackburn, “The miracle-working activity of Jesus—at least exorcisms and healings—easily passes the criterion of multiple attestation.”[51] J. P. Meier devoted 500 pages to reviewing Jesus’ miracles and declared their multiple attestation to be “massive.”[52]

Skeptics tend to dismiss the miracles of Jesus by arguing that “miracles” were commonplace in that era. It is agreed that both the Jews and the Greco-Romans were superstitious and preoccupied with irregular phenomena to assist them in making important decisions. Contemporary Jewish attitudes are evident in Josephus’s fascination with portents[53] at many points—for example, in overnight storms, weird phenomena in the heavens, or mysterious happenings in the temple.[54] Though an intelligent man and an observant Jew, Josephus was deeply influenced by portents and signs.[55]

However, this does not necessarily mean that “miracles” were an everyday phenomenon as is often assumed. Following are some of the more prominent miracle-workers from the era of Jesus: (1) The holy rabbi, Honi the Circle-Drawer, also known as Onias[56] (first century BC), was said to have successfully prayed for rain, not merely for a downpour or a drizzle but “a rain of grace.”[57] (2) John the disciple drew Jesus’ attention to a man who was casting out demons in Jesus’ name.[58] It was not the fact of the exorcisms but that they were done in Jesus’ name that caused John’s comment. Josephus reports witnessing a Jewish exorcist named Eleazar drawing a demon through a man’s nostrils and consigning it to a basin of water.[59] Evidently, exorcisms were not unheard of or exceptional. (3) Rabbi Gamaliel, the teacher of Saul of Tarsus, once prayed during a storm at sea, whereupon the sea subsided.[60] (4) In the AD 70s the devout rabbi Hanina ben Dosa prayed for the dangerously ill son of his teacher, Yohanan ben Zakkai, and the boy lived.[61] These phenomena, which are relatively uncommon, are unlike the miracles of Jesus. Jesus’ miracles were immediate and direct, based on his authoritative words. The “miracles” of rabbis like Hanina be Dosa were mostly answered prayers.

When the evidence for miracles in Jesus’ time is investigated they prove to be relatively infrequent, apart from exorcisms. Nonetheless, despite the relative rarity of actually reported miracles in Jesus’ era in Israel, the suspicion remains for some that the Gospel writers invented miracles and attributed them to Jesus as a miracle worker to validate the claims about him. However, the sheer number and the wide diversity of the miracles of Jesus recorded across a range of sources points to their historicity.

The Resurrection[62]

The texts of the New Testament throb with the conviction that Jesus rose alive from the dead. So comprehensive and pervasive is the resurrection of Jesus that, historically speaking, the onus is on the skeptic to overturn it. Were Jews expecting the resurrection of the Messiah? To the contrary, their expectation was for a universal resurrection at the end of history. Were the Greeks awaiting a resurrected savior? Again, to the contrary, the Hellenistic world held no hopes for the “standing up of corpses” which, literally speaking, is what “the resurrection of the dead” means. Greek thought was well summed up in the words of the poet: “When the dust hath drained the blood of a man, once he is slain, there is no resurrection (ἀνάστασις, anastasis).”[63]

There is no single alternative theory to the resurrection of Jesus that has been advanced to explain the historical data. Some say it was a hoax; others say that the Romans crucified the wrong man (the Qur’an), or that Jesus did not actually die on the cross (the “swoon” theory), or that the disciples stole the body, or that the women went to the wrong tomb, or that eastern mystery religions suggested the idea. It is striking that those who reject the resurrection of Jesus have not settled on one major objection to its historicity.[64]

The Jerusalem Tradition

The earliest historical reference to the resurrection of Jesus is found in Paul’s quotation in 1 Corinthians 15:3–8, c. AD 54, of an oral statement that Paul himself “received,” either in 34 (at his baptism in Damascus) or in 36 (from Cephas in Jerusalem), and which had been formulated in Jerusalem beforehand,[65] very soon after Jesus’ death in 33. Here is the quotation in block diagram:

what I . . . received

that Christ died for our sins

in accordance with the Scriptures

that he was buried

that he was raised on the third day

in accordance with the Scriptures

that he appeared to Cephas

then to the twelve

then he appeared to more than five hundred at the one time,

most of whom are still alive,

though some have fallen asleep,

then he appeared to James

then to all the apostles

This passage had been created originally in Jerusalem as a memorizable teaching aid. The fourfold that followed by the fourfold then suggests an original catechetical format.

This carefully crafted statement introduced by “what I received” signifies something objective, an entity, a raft of four facts each introduced by “that.”[66] Each that in effect introduced a separate statement that today we would place within quotation marks (Greek language then lacked punctuation marks). In other words, this oral teaching contains four critical assertions from the earliest believers in Jerusalem.

But the four statements are logically interconnected: Christ died and he was buried and he was raised on the third day and he appeared alive to various people. The four statements are of a piece, forming one complete statement about what happened to Christ at the time of the first Easter. He died; he was buried; he was raised; he appeared. Each statement depends on its predecessor: Christ appeared because he had been raised; he was raised because he had been buried; he was buried because he had died.

Having died, Christ was not so much “buried” (downwards, as in a grave) but entombed (sideways, in a tomb hewn out of rock).[67]

He was raised on the third day. Paul’s Greek here betrays an underlying Aramaic form of words, literally “Christ . . . was raised in the day the third.” Paul’s uncorrected Greek echoes the confession of the Aramaic-speaking community in Jerusalem from whom Paul received it.

He appeared on five occasions, the “then . . . then . . . then . . . then,” suggesting precise sequence. The first two probably occurred in Jerusalem, the third and fourth in Galilee, and the fifth in Jerusalem.

The names of those to whom he appeared—and was seen by—are either given (Cephas/Peter, the twelve, James) or are able to be ascertained readily (the five hundred, all the apostles). The witnesses to this event can be interrogated, including the vast number of five hundred who saw the risen Christ on one occasion. The sources of this remarkable event are identified and accessible. Let those who doubt go and inquire of these people themselves.

Paul states that this fourfold “that,” whose focus is the resurrection sightings, is what he and the Jerusalem apostles preach and what the churches believe (1 Cor 15:11). Clearly, the fact of Jesus’ resurrection was absolutely central in early Christianity.

The Gospels

Mark does not narrate any appearance of the risen Lord. Rather, he recounts Jesus declaring his coming resurrection during his final journey to Jerusalem, words that fell on the disciples’ deaf ears (Mark 8:31; 9:31; 10:34; cf. 9:9–10). Despite the absence of direct narrative, however, Mark intends his readers to know about the bodily resurrection of Jesus. Jesus states that “after” he is “raised up” he will meet them again in Galilee (Mark 14:28). We may only speculate as to Mark’s reasons for failing to provide direct narrative of the disciples’ encounter with the risen Lord. Perhaps he intended to heighten the mysterious in Jesus by baldly introducing him without warning or information about his early life and making him disappear similarly. Whatever his reason, he leaves us in no doubt about the fact of Jesus’ resurrection.

The source common to Matthew and Luke (called Q) is a collection consisting mainly of Jesus’ sayings. It broadly follows the chronology of Mark but trails off before Jesus reaches Jerusalem so that there is an absence of narrative reference to Jesus’ death and resurrection. We may only guess the reason. Did Q originally have a Jerusalem section but Matthew and Luke decided not to employ it since they already had an extended Jerusalem narrative in Mark’s Gospel? Nonetheless, Jesus’ sayings in Q announce that he will be raised from the dead. The theme of future resurrection in “Q” is found in both implicit and explicit references.[68]

Jesus’ words about the patriarchs and believers seated at table in the kingdom while those watching gnashed their teeth implied the notion of a coming resurrection and final judgment (Luke 13:28–29; Matt 8:11–12). Likewise, the Q saying of John the Baptist about “raising up children for Abraham” makes sense only from a setting where the coming general resurrection was believed (Luke 3:8; Matt 3:7–10). Again, Jesus’ promise that his followers will sit upon thrones judging the twelve tribes presupposes future resurrection and final judgment (Luke 22:30; Matt 19:28). Jesus explicitly speaks of his own coming resurrection as the “sign” of the prophet Jonah. As Jonah was a “sign” to the men of Nineveh, so one greater than Jonah, the Son of Man, will be in his generation. That “sign”—explicit in Matthew 12:40, implicit in Luke 11:31–32—appeals to Jonah’s escape after three days from the belly of the great fish as pointing to Jesus’ escape from the heart of the earth by resurrection after three days. In sum, the Q source quotes Jesus affirming both the future general resurrection and his own personal resurrection.

Luke’s special source L, like Mark and Q, follows the broad and well-known sequence of Jesus’ public ministry beginning in Galilee and ending in Jerusalem. L concludes with an extensive account of Jesus’ resurrection appearances.

Luke

24:8–11

The women tell the disciples that the tomb was empty.

24:12

Peter finds the tomb empty but is mystified.

24:13–33

Jesus appears to two men who report this to the disciples.

24:34

Disciples reported that the Lord had earlier appeared to Peter.

24:36–48

Jesus appears to the disciples in Jerusalem.

Like Mark, L assumes that the tomb was empty but adds the detail of Peter visiting the tomb to find it empty. L has the lengthy narrative of two men who meet the risen Jesus and who report this to the disciples in Jerusalem. The appearance of these obscure men points to the genuineness of the text; a contrived account would have involved well-known disciples. Jesus’ subsequent appearance to the gathered disciples occurred at mealtime, and his act of eating with them established the reality of his physical resurrection.

The Jewish tone of the M source points to a Jewish and Palestinian origin, though details of the date and place elude us. The greater part of M consists of Jesus’ teachings and parables. The few narrative sections cluster around the death and resurrection of Jesus: The M source picks up Mark’s account of the women finding the tomb empty and narrates that Jesus himself appeared to them as they were returning home. He instructs them to tell the disciples to go to Galilee where they will meet him. When the disciples arrived in Galilee, Jesus met them and directed them to “go” and “make disciples from the nations.” The M source makes little sense if the resurrection of Jesus is doubted.

The Gospel of John stands apart from Matthew, Mark, and Luke and their underlying sources. This Gospel is the written-up version of a separate stream of oral tradition. In John’s account Mary of Magdala and other women come to the tomb, find it empty, and report this to the disciples. Peter and John then come to the tomb and find only Jesus’ burial cloths. Mary returns to the tomb where the risen Jesus speaks to her, requesting that she not hold on to him physically and directing her to report his words to the disciples. There follows three accounts of the risen Jesus appearing to his disciples. The first was on the evening of that first day of the week (Sunday) inside the room in Jerusalem where the disciples were hiding, with Thomas missing from the group. The second occurs the following Sunday evening when Thomas was present and Jesus demonstrated that his resurrected body was corporeal. The third appearance was lakeside in Galilee where Jesus prepared breakfast for the seven fishermen.

Summary

Reduced to basics, the alternatives are either (1) that one accepts the evidence as true or (2) concludes that the first Christians were mistaken or perpetrated an elaborate fraud. But for many the quality of the evidence and the moral tone of the literature in which it occurs lead them to conclude that Jesus, having been crucified, was, after three days, raised from the dead on the first day of Passover week.

The Words of Jesus

The question of the transmission of Jesus’ words through to written texts is critical to the issue of the reliability of the New Testament. Inseparable from this is the matter of the length of the time between Jesus and the written texts about him. In fact, the time “space” between the historical Jesus and Mark, the earliest Synoptic Gospel, is finite and quite brief. Few would argue that Mark must be dated later than 70. Thus, forty years separate Mark from Jesus (and about fifty years from Jesus are Luke and Matthew). These dates may be shifted a few years earlier or later, but that scarcely affects the observation that the “space” of time was finite and brief.

Furthermore, as we shall see, that “space” was not altogether “blank.”[69] From about twenty years after Jesus, Paul’s letters begin appearing, some of which echo teachings of Jesus that we encounter in Mark twenty years later.[70] In James’s letter and First Peter, though not securely datable, we also find teachings of Jesus that will appear later in the Synoptic Gospels. We may reasonably assume that the task of collecting Jesus’ teachings had begun prior to Paul’s references to them beginning around 50.

Critical Questions

Given that the time “space” between Jesus and the earliest Synoptic Gospel is broadly agreed, the more pressing questions relate to the processes by which Jesus’ teachings were transmitted during those forty years.

First, in which language[71] did Jesus teach? Was it Aramaic or Greek, or Aramaic and Greek, dependent on the audience? Aramaic had been the lingua franca of the Persian Empire that included Palestine. Since the time of Alexander’s conquests three hundred years before, however, Greek had become the lingua franca of the Eastern Mediterranean. Was Aramaic or Greek the common language of Palestine in New Testament times?

In favor of Aramaic we note the frequent occurrence of that language in the Gospels.[72] Embedded within these Greek texts are Aramaic place names (e.g., Akeldama, Bethzatha, Gabbatha, Golgotha), Aramaic surnames (e.g., Cephas, Boanerges), Aramaic words in common usage (e.g., korban, messias, cananaean, hosanna, pascha, rabbi, satan), and words spoken by Jesus (e.g., amen, mammon, raka, talitha cumi, ephthatha, abba, Eloi Eloi). Based on the frequency of these words in the Gospels it is hard to escape the conclusion that Aramaic remained the basic tongue of Jews in Palestine.[73] Furthermore, the Galilean disciples who came to live in Jerusalem were called “Hebrews” to distinguish them from the “Hellenists”; the former spoke Aramaic, the latter Greek.

On the other hand, Jesus travelled extensively in Hellenized regions to the north and east of Galilee where Greek was dominant. The woman of Syria-Phoenicea with whom Jesus conversed is specifically identified as “Greek” (Mark 7:26 HCSB). Most likely their conversation was in Greek.

On balance, Palestine appears to have been “multilingual”; both Aramaic and Greek were in common usage and Latin was not unknown. Nonetheless, it seems likely that Aramaic remained the “first language” of the people and that Jesus taught in that language.[74]

A second question relates to the means by which Jesus established his teachings with his disciples. Was it by repetition of aphorisms, proverbs, and parables so that they remembered his teachings? Or, did one or another of the disciples write down what he said and did? Culturally, Palestine at that time was characterized by both orality and textuality.

We must allow the probability that orality was significant. Within that culture a rabbi would be “followed” by a disciple who memorized his master’s teaching mediated by parables, aphorisms, and poetic forms. Jesus was called “rabbi” and was “followed” by “disciples” who “sat at his feet,” “learned from him,” and took his “yoke” upon themselves. Much teaching by Jesus is cast in poetic form, employing alliteration, paronomasia, assonance, parallelism, and rhyme. According to R. Riesner, 80 percent of Jesus’ teaching was cast in poetic form.[75] J. Neusner, an authority on rabbinic traditions, commented that “no rabbi was so important to Rabbinic Judaism as Jesus was to Christianity.”[76]

At the same time, there is some evidence that Jews of that era engaged in note taking, using waxed tablets.[77] There is no reason in principle that literate members of Jesus’ group might not have written down his teachings.[78] Attention is drawn to the Teacher of Righteousness, founder of the Qumran sect, whose teachings appear to have been written down during his lifetime, perhaps on waxed tablets.[79] According to S. Lieberman, it was “general rabbinic practice” for disciples to write down the sayings of their master.[80] Even so emphatic an advocate of oral transmission as Birger Gerhardsson allows the possibility of the disciples making written records (private notes) of Jesus’ teaching.[81] This may explain the origin and transmission of the longer discourses in the Gospel of John, whose format is dissimilar from the more pithy teachings in the Synoptic Gospels and less easy to memorize.

When did the practice of writing begin in the post-resurrection period? Most likely the teachings of the Lord were committed to writing earlier rather than later. Why was this done? Several overlapping reasons may be suggested. One is that the creation of congregations in Israel (which were based on synagogue proceedings) demanded written texts for instruction and church use. Local churches lacked the ongoing presence of a Peter or a John. Texts were needed for the teachings of the Master, along with whatever summaries had been committed to memory at occasions like baptism (as was likely with Paul in Damascus). Someone who could read aloud was easier to find than an apostle! A further possible reason may be sought in the instability in the late thirties due to Caligula’s assaults on the Jews in the Eastern Mediterranean. If the original disciples were killed, the teachings of the Lord could have died with them.

Summary

The orality evident in “Rabbi” Jesus’ method as continued post-Easter by his disciples was didactic, transmitted authoritatively from teacher to disciple. Oral transmission of the New Testament era was not the orality of the village raconteur nor of a shared community transmission (“by many to many”), but the narrowly focused “traditioning” from teacher to disciple. Gerhardsson refers helpfully to “a controlled transmission of gospel traditions.”[82]

At the same time, however, we must assert that the scribal existed side-by-side with the oral in the world of Jewish Christianity in the four (or less) decades between Jesus and the Gospel of Mark.[83] It is now evident from Qumran studies that written text figured significantly in a wider religious culture (Israel) that was significantly oral. We may speculate that just as written text came to the fore in Qumran, it also began to emerge within this new sect within Judaism, Christianity.[84] That sect, unlike the Qumran community, was mission-minded, overseeing the creation of new synagogues (“churches”) among the Jews.[85] These new assemblies needed instructors who, in turn, needed the wherewithal to teach new members. Here the place of public, aural reading was critical.[86] In our view, at quite an early stage, the expansion of congregations hastened the evolution of written text from oral version. Not that the written replaced the oral; the two existed side-by-side for many years.[87]

8. The New Testament Authors Were Guided by the Spirit of Truth

The writers of the texts of the New Testament were missionary leaders who wrote their texts for the current pastoral needs of their audiences in the congregations. In that sense we should regard their literature as historical literature, written from a specific place and time to particular people for identifiable needs. Although from this distance we are unable to recover all the details of who, when, where and why, it does not alter the reality that these texts are historical.

At the same time, however, these writers were aware that their texts had a special status in continuity with and fulfillment of the Old Testament (also called the Tanak[88]).

John

The “beloved disciple” records Jesus’ promise that after his departure the Spirit of truth will come.

When the Spirit of truth comes, He will guide you into all the truth. For He will not speak on His own, but He will speak whatever He hears. He will also declare to you what is to come. He will glorify Me, because He will take from what is Mine and declare it to you. (John 16:13–14 HCSB)

Following his death, Jesus will depart to the Father and “the Spirit of truth” will come to the disciples. He will not speak from himself but only what he hears (from the Father?) about Jesus. His intention will be (a) to “guide” (hodēgēsei—“lead”) them into “all the truth,” and (b) to “glorify” Jesus to them. In short, in the coming days the Spirit of truth will give them deep insights into Jesus that do not arise from merely human reflection.

In writing his Gospel John provides three windows through which he allows us to see how the Spirit worked within the earliest community of the disciples following the resurrection. Consider, first, John’s retrospective comments about Jesus clearing the temple (John 2:19–22).

So when He was raised from the dead, His disciples remembered that He had said this.

=“Destroy this sanctuary, and I will raise it up in three days”—v. 19

And they believed the Scripture

=“on that day there will be no longer be a [merchant] in the house of the Lord of Hosts”—Zech 14:21

and the statement that Jesus had made

=“Destroy this sanctuary . . .”—v. 19.

Here we see these early disciples remembering that Jesus said “destroy this sanctuary” and the Old Testament reference he used, “Stop turning My Father’s house into a marketplace” (John 2:16). But we see something further, another activity, based on the word “house” in Zechariah 14:21, which prompted them to think of Psalm 69:9, “Zeal for Your house has consumed me.” Its writing guided by the Spirit, this passage was judged especially appropriate since it foreshadowed that “zeal” of Jesus that would “consume” him, in his death. This passage shows us how the Spirit guided the disciples (a) to remember Jesus’ words, and (b) to reflect on his words and action as fulfillment of two prophecies (Zech 14:21 and Ps 69:9).

In a second example, John 7:37–38, in my translation, John relates Jesus’ words and the Old Testament Scripture that he used during the Feast of Tabernacles:

If any one thirsts let him come [to me]

and let him drink he who believes in me.

As the Scripture says,

from within him shall flow rivers of living water.

Jesus here portrays himself as the new Temple from which water would flow, as prophesied in Ezekiel 47:1–12. Later on, and upon further reflection, the disciples saw Jesus’ word and the Old Testament text as fulfilled in the historic outpouring of the Spirit after the first Easter: “He said this about the Spirit. Those who believed in Jesus were going to receive the Spirit, for the Spirit had not yet been received, because Jesus had not yet been glorified” (John 7:39). John’s understanding arose as the disciples in the early community reflected upon the original words of Jesus, and the passage of Scripture he used then, in the light of their experience of the historic coming of the Holy Spirit who was “guid[ing] them into all the truth” (John 16:13).

The third example is John’s description of Jesus’ action riding up to Jerusalem five days before the Passover which was, he said, in accordance with Zechariah 9:9: “Rejoice greatly, Daughter Zion! Shout in triumph, Daughter Jerusalem! Look, your King is coming to you; He is righteous and victorious, humble and riding on a donkey, on a colt, the foal of a donkey.”[89] John continues immediately, “His disciples did not understand these things at first. However, when Jesus was glorified, then they remembered that these things had been written about Him and that they had done those things to Him” (John 12:16).

At the time the disciples did not understand that Jesus’ Palm Sunday entry into Jerusalem was the fulfillment of Zechariah’s prophecy. Only when the Spirit came did they remember “that these things had been written about Him.” Once more John is allowing us to understand the activity of the Spirit after Jesus was “glorified”; he prompted them to comprehend Jesus’ actions in terms of prophecy.

These three examples from the Gospel of John show that the early Christians reflected on what Jesus said and did and upon the Scriptures that he saw brought to fulfillment by his ministry. When did these early Christians engage in this theological reflection? According to John his disciples “remembered” what Jesus said and the Old Testament texts he cited “when Jesus was glorified” (12:16), soon after his resurrection. This is confirmed by a converging comment in John’s Gospel about the Holy Spirit: “But the Counselor, the Holy Spirit—the Father will send Him in My name—will teach you all things and remind you of everything I have told you” (John 14:26). This suggests that the disciples engaged in “remembering,” that is, in Spirit-led reflection, in the period after the day of Pentecost.

John, the “beloved disciple,” wants us to know that his gospel is the result of the activity of the Spirit that Jesus sent to them after Jesus’ departure to the Father. His Gospel is not the result of merely human remembering and reflection but is to be attributed to the Spirit. The Gospel of John is a seriously historical work because it mentions many people, places, and buildings by name.[90] At the same time, however, the writing of this Gospel portrays itself as having been “guided by the Spirit of truth.” It is a historical text, but it is equally a text that is infused by the Holy Spirit who has “led” John into “all the truth” in glorifying Jesus.

New Testament Texts Were Read in Church

It is evident that the core activity in the synagogues in the time of Jesus was the public reading of the Holy Scripture, as two examples indicate. The first is that Theodotus’s synagogue in Jerusalem for Jews of the Diaspora was dedicated to “the reading of the law and the teaching of the commandments. . . .”[91] The second relates to Jesus who entered the synagogue in Nazareth and was handed the scroll of Isaiah, from which he read and then pronounced the prophet’s words to have been fulfilled (Luke 4:16–17). These examples point to the fact that canonically recognized texts (the Law and the Prophets) were publicly read in the synagogues. Jewish scribes wrote paraphrases of texts and commentaries on texts, but so far as we know, these were not read publicly in the synagogues.

It is highly significant, therefore, that the first Christians publicly read their texts in their meetings, conferring on them the same status that Jews had ascribed to the Law, the Prophets, and the Writings. Following are some examples of the public reading of New Testament texts.

A Gospel

But when you see the abomination of desolation standing where it ought not to be (let the reader [lector] understand), then let those who are in Judea flee to the mountains. (Mark 13:14)

Mark is directing the public reader (Lector) of his text to “understand” what Jesus meant by “the abomination of desolation” standing where “he” or “it” ought not to be (i.e., in the Temple). Mark’s direction implies that the reader will explain the meaning of these words to those who are hearing them.

Letters of Paul and Revelation

And when this letter has been read among you, have it also read in the church of the Laodiceans; and see that you also read the letter from Laodicea. (Col 4:16)[92]

Until I come, devote yourself to the public reading of Scripture, to exhortation, to teaching. (1 Tim 4:13)

Blessed is the one who reads aloud the words of this prophecy, and blessed are those who hear, and who keep what is written in it, for the time is near. (Rev 1:3)[93]

In the first text here, Paul is expecting his letters to be copied, exchanged, and read in the churches. In the second example, Paul directed Timothy, a minister, to read publicly the Scripture and to preach and teach thereon. By “Scripture” Paul meant the Old Testament, but possibly New Testament writings also, including Paul’s own letters. Similarly, John is pronouncing a blessing on the public readers of his book of Revelation within the seven congregations in Roman Asia to which it was sent. It is possible that the public reader was the “angel” in the churches that John was addressing (e.g., Rev 2:1). John also pronounces his blessing upon those who hear and keep what they have heard.

These passages indicate that three different genres of text (Gospel, letter, apocalyptic) were read aloud in church. Just as in the synagogues, the public reading of texts indicated that they were regarded as “canonical,” the oracles of God.

Reading from the Old Testament and the New Testament in the Second Century

Justin Martyr was a church leader in Rome. In about 150 he described a typical church meeting at that time.

On the day called Sunday . . . the memoirs of the apostles [which are called gospels] or the writings of the prophets are read as long as time permits. . . . (First Apology 66, 67)

This is an early example of the reading of both the Old Testament and the New Testament in the churches. Jesus read from the Old Testament and declared its promises fulfilled in him (Luke 4:16–21; 24:44–47). Likewise, Paul stated that the promises of God found an eternal “yes” in Jesus Christ, the Son of God, whom he, Silvanus, and Timothy preached to the Corinthians (2 Cor 1:20). Justin’s information tells us that the early Christians read both Old and New Testament passages, implying that both enjoyed a canonical status in the churches.

Summary and Reflection

The public reading of the texts of the New Testament is evidence that the early Christians treated them as “Scripture” in extension and fulfillment of the Sacred Writings of the Old Testament. Accordingly, they regarded them as “God-breathed” and authoritative for faith and life (2 Tim 3:16–17). The Gospel of John is especially important since its author tells us of Jesus’ promise to send the “Spirit of truth” who would “guide” the disciples “into all the truth.” Various passages in this Gospel help us understand the processes by which the Spirit “guided” the disciples.

Conclusion

This Spirit-inspired character is the source of the ultimate reliability of the New Testament. Based on the eight theses a strong case can be made that the New Testament is missionary literature, and therefore historical literature. Furthermore, its accuracy in detail is impressive so that most questions and criticisms can be met, especially when one takes a global perspective that includes the historical Jesus and the rise of Christianity in its overall historical, geographical, and cultural setting.

Yet it is doubtful that this historicity alone would be sufficient in itself to convince the outsider to believe the Christian message, or, for that matter, to sustain the Christian in the long term. In a more ultimate sense the texts of the New Testament evoke a deeply meaningful faith in God who loves and rescues those lost from him and inspires love for neighbor, all in a spirit of reconciliation. The writings of the New Testament encode a noble ethic of humility, caring family relationships, dutiful citizenship, and a robust work ethic. The integrated nature of the message and its profound spiritual impact is the thing.

Thus, the New Testament is “reliable” in two integrally connected ways. It is historically reliable so that a thoughtful person can believe it is factually true. Its integrity can be tested by the same means that historians employ when they weigh the evidence for people and events in the era of the first century. The same rules of evidence apply to the “faith” texts of the New Testament. These texts pass those tests with flying colors. Equally, but more importantly, these texts when read humbly prove to be the voice of God addressing us. It is this that infuses the New Testament with a divine power that redirects and transforms lives. Yet, as I have argued, if I doubt or reject its historical integrity it is unlikely that I will open my life to its message.

1 See generally P. W. Barnett, Jesus and the Logic of History (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1997); Is the New Testament History? (Sydney: Aquila, 2004); The Birth of Christianity (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2005); Paul, Missionary of Jesus (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2008); Finding the Historical Christ (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2009); Messiah: Jesus—the Evidence of History (Leicester: IVP/UK, 2009).

2 Unless otherwise noted Bible translations are cited from the ESV.

3 See E. E. Ellis, The Making of the New Testament Documents (Leiden: Brill, 1999), 307–14, for the argument that the literature of the New Testament arose from the mission leaders Peter (Mark, 1 and 2 Peter, Jude), James (Matthew, James), John (John, 1, 2, 3 John, Revelation) and Paul (Luke-Acts, letters of Paul).

4 Justin, First Apology 66–67.

5 See generally L. Hurtado, The Earliest Christian Artifacts: Manuscripts and Christian Origins (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2006).

6 There are no extant manuscripts of Mark prior to P^45. It is generally believed that Matthew and Luke incorporated Mark in their Gospels, so that their early manuscripts validate the prior existence of Mark.

7 As with the NT writers, their successors in the second century did not always quote exactly but adapted their citations pastorally for the circumstances of their audiences. This in no way diminishes the fact that they were referring to works already in circulation.

8 Reported in Eusebius, Historia ecclesiastica 3.39.3–16.

9 See R. Bauckham, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2006), 417–20. While Bauckham regards the “beloved disciple” who wrote the Gospel as an eyewitness, he does not identify him as John Zebedee. However, the “beloved disciple” is one in the list of six disciples in John 21:2. By process of elimination he is not Simon Peter (who sat next to the “beloved disciple” at the Passover Eve Meal). Thomas called the twin, Nathaniel of Cana, and two unnamed disciples are too insignificant to be those who sat next to Jesus at that meal (13:23). This leaves the Zebedee brothers, John and James. James was killed in the early 40s (Acts 12:2). Clearly, then, since the Gospel was written later than the 40s, we conclude that the “disciple Jesus loved” was John Zebedee.

10 For the sake of brevity, I am not referring to inscriptions and passing or late literary references regarding the Caesars.

11 The major source for Augustus is his Res Gestae, his own eulogy of his achievements that he wrote before his death, and which was “published” in inscriptions around the empire.

12 For a more detailed defense of the reliability of the NT text, see the article in this volume, “Has the New Testament Text Been Hopelessly Corrupted?” by Dan Wallace (p. 139).

13 See P. W. Barnett, “Indications of Earliness in the Gospel of John,” Reformed Theological Review (Melbourne) 64, no. 2 (August 2005): 61–75.

14 Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews 18.63–64 (Feldman, LCL).

15 Ibid., 20.200–201, 203 (Feldman, LCL).

16 Tacitus, Annals of Imperial Rome xv.44 (Jackson, LCL).

17 Pliny, Epistle 10.96.7, trans. M. Harris, “References to Jesus in Early Classical Authors,” in D. Wenham, ed., Gospel Perspectives 5 (Sheffield: JSOT, 1984), 345.

18 It is interesting that Christian evidence is broadly confirmed by non-Christian and hostile evidence. By contrast, there are no outside sources contemporary with the Qur’an that serve the same function as for the New Testament.

19 References include C. J. Hemer, “Luke the Historian,” Bulletin of the John Rylands Library 60 (1977–78): 28–51; C. A. Evans, “Jesus and the Ossuaries,” Bulletin of Biblical Research 13, no. 1 (2003): 21–46; N. Feldman and N. Roth, “The Short List: The New Testament Figures Known to History,” Biblical Archaeology Review (28.6): 34–37; J. A. Charlesworth, Jesus within Judaism (London: SPCK, 1988), 103–30; J. Finegan, The Archaeology of the New Testament: The Life of Jesus and the Beginning of the Early Church (Princeton: University Press, 1969). E. M. Meyers and J. F. Strange, Archaeology, the Rabbis and Early Christianity (London: SCM, 1981); J. McRay, Archaeology and the New Testament (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1991); J. Rousseau and R. Arav, Jesus and His World (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1995); G. A. Smith, The Historical Geography of the Holy Land (London: Fontana, 1894).

20 Evans, “Jesus and the Ossuaries,” 21–46.

21 [••] indicates exact date of discovery is unclear.

22 G. H. R. Horsley, “Politarchs,” Anchor Bible Dictionary 5:384–89.

23 According to Dio, in AD 41 Claudius “did not drive them out” but forbade the Jews “to hold meetings” (History 60.6.6), whereas according to Suetonius he “expelled the Jews from Rome” (Claudius 25.4). The two actions are to be distinguished. We depend on Orosius for dating the expulsion to AD 49, a date that is doubted by some, e.g., Jerome Murphy-O’Connor, St Paul’s Corinth (Wilmington: Michael Glazier, 1983), 130–32, who points out that Orosius depends on information for this dating on Josephus who, however, is silent on this. However, the conjunction of Aquila and Priscilla’s uncertain arrival date and Gallio’s known arrival date makes it likely that the two arrivals occurred within a year or two of each other and that Paul’s arrival in Corinth occurred in between, that is, in AD 50.

24 R. Riesner, “Synagogues in Jerusalem,” in R. Bauckham, ed., The Book of Acts in Its First Century Setting 4 (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1995), 192–200.

25 Evans, “Jesus and the Ossuaries,” 21–46.

26 Ibid.

27 Ibid.

28 Evans, “Jesus and the Ossuaries,” 21–46; Rousseau and Arav, Jesus and His World, 74–78.

29 Inscriptions of this family are also found in Cyprus and Rome.

30 Asiarchs were members of the Supreme Council of the province of Roman Asia and were of necessity cult priests in the temples. Italics mine.

31 Evans, “Jesus and the Ossuaries,” 21–46.

32 There are numerous coins from the era bearing names of Herod, his sons Herod Archelaus and Herod Antipas, his grandson Herod Agrippa I, and his great grandson Herod Agrippa II. Furthermore, there are extant statues of the Roman Caesars of the era: Augustus, Tiberius, Gaius (“Caligula”), Claudius, Nero, Vespasian, Titus, and Domitian. Again, excavations in Gamla, Masada, Tiberias, Capernaum, and Qorazim in Israel convey useful information about houses and synagogues of the era. Restoration in cities like Ephesus give an idea of public spaces, houses, furniture, tools, medical matters, public administration, etc., enlarging our understanding of Paul’s ministry in Greco-Roman cities.

33 Ellis, New Testament Documents, 238–48.

34 Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews xviii.116–19.

35 Caiaphas is mentioned by Josephus (Antiquities xviii. 35, 95) and Pilate by a number of historians (e.g., Josephus, Antiquities xvii.35; Philo, Legatio ad Gaium XXXVIII; Tacitus, Annals XV. 44).

36 Martin Hengel, Acts and the History of Earliest Christianity (London: SCM, 1979), 61.

37 Acts 5:37 quotes Gamaliel saying that “before these days Theudas rose up” and that “after him Judas the Galilean rose up.” This is in apparent conflict with Josephus who states that Theudas led his insurrection in the mid-40s, thirty years after the uprising of Judas the Galilean (Antiquities of the Jews, xviii.3; xx.97–99). This supposed error is compounded by another: Gamaliel’s reference to Theudas in the mid-30s, a decade before Theudas led his revolt.

Those who seize upon Luke’s “mistake” imply that he had misread Josephus. Josephus, however, only refers to Theudas in his Antiquities, which he wrote in the 90s. Almost certainly Luke wrote beforehand and, in any case, it is unlikely that he would have read Josephus (this was before the days of mass publishing via the printing press).

Although we know of no other Theudas, we note that his name is an abbreviation of “Theodotus” which in turn is the Greek version of the Hebrew “Jonathon.” It is possible that Gamaliel is referring to an otherwise unknown insurrectionist who led a revolt before Judas the Galilean. See further F. F. Bruce, Commentary on the Book of Acts (Edinburgh: Marshall, Morgan and Scott, 1956), 125n47.

38 Prominently represented by R. Dawkins, The God Delusion (London: Bantam, 2006); D. C. Dennett, Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon (London: Allen Lane, 2006); S. Harris, The End of Faith: Religion, Terror and the Future of Reason (New York: W. W. Norton & Co, 2004); C. Hitchens, God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything (New York: Twelve, 2007); M. Onfray, The Atheist Manifesto: The Case Against Christianity, Judaism and Islam (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2005).

39 One contemporary scholar who does question that Jesus ever existed is Robert M. Price. See his “Jesus at the Vanishing Point,” in The Historical Jesus: Five Views, ed. J. K. Beilby and P. R. Eddy (Downers Grove, IL: IVP, 2009). For thorough refutations of this view, see the responses to Price in the same volume by John Dominic Crossan, Luke Timothy Johnson, James D. G. Dunn, and Darrell L. Bock; as well as Gary R. Habermas, The Historical Jesus: Ancient Evidence for the Life of Christ (Joplin, MO: College Press, 1996), 27–46.

40 For examples of censuses being conducted in “vassal kingdoms” (e.g., Apamea, Cappadocia, Petra, and Samaria), see H. Hoehner, Chronological Aspects of the Life of Christ (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1977), 16.

41 Ibid., 15.

42 In AD 6 Augustus, having exiled Archelaus, made Judea a Roman province, an adjunct to the Province of Syria. In order to impose direct taxation, payable to Rome, it was necessary to conduct a registration of the property of the population. This was conducted by Coponius, the first prefect of the new province, and was supervised by Quirinius, the Legate of Syria, a senator and man of consular rank. Judas, a Galilean, led an uprising in protest against this census (Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews, xvii.355; xviii.1–2; Jewish War ii.433; vii.253; Acts 5:37).

43 The governors of Syria were Titus (before 10 BC), Saturninus (10–6 BC), and Varus (6–4 BC). Before he came to Syria, Quirinius is known to have fought a war against the Homonadensian tribe in the Taurus Mountains, but that was in Galatia not Syria.

44 Hoehner, Chronological Aspects, 20, cites F. F. Bruce (depending on Nigel Turner the grammarian) who takes πρώτη (prōtē) in Luke 2:2 to mean “before.”

45 Tacitus, Histories v.13.

46 See P. L. Maier, The First Christmas (London: Mowbrays, 1971), 69–88.

47 “The Holy Light, Time (December 27, 1976): 31.

48 Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews xviii.63 (Greek, παραδόξων ἔργων).

49 Babylonian Talmud San 43a. For further (late) Jewish references to Jesus’ miracles see B. Blackburn, “The Miracles of Jesus,” in Studying the Historical Jesus, ed. C. A. Evans and B. Chilton, (Leiden: Brill, 1994), 353–94 [361].

50 J. Jeremias, New Testament Theology 1 (London: SCM, 1971), 21.

51 Blackburn, “The Miracles of Jesus,” 353–94 [356].

52 J. P. Meier, A Marginal Jew: Rethinking the Historical Jesus, vol. 2 (New York: Doubleday, 1994), 631.

53 Greek, τέρατα.

54 See Josephus, Jewish War iv.287; vi.288–300; vi.292.

55 Josephus, the Jewish historian and propagandist, wrote from Rome in the last 30 years of the century.

56 Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews 14.22.

57 Mishnah, Taanith 3.8.

58 Mark 9:38.

59 Antiquities of the Jews 8.46–49.

60 Babylonian Talmud Mes 59b.

61 Babylonian Talmud Ber 34b.

62 N. T. Wright, The Resurrection of the Son of God (London: SPCK, 2003).

63 Aeschylus, Eumenides 647–48.

64 It is clearly beyond the scope of this chapter to provide extensive argument for the resurrection of Jesus.

65 For Paul’s baptism in Damascus see Acts 9:17; 22:12–13, 16, and for his meeting with Cephas (and James) in Jerusalem see Gal 1:18–19.

66 Cf. 1 Cor. 11:23, “For I received from the Lord what I also delivered to you. . . .”

67 Cf. Acts 13:29. The Gospel of Matthew refers to the burial chamber as taphos (27:61, 64, 66; 28:1).

68 See N. T. Wright, “Resurrection in Q,” in D. R. Horrell and C. M. Tuckett, Christology, Controversy and Community (Leiden: Brill, 2000), 85–97; idem, The Resurrection of the Son of God, 429–34.

69 J. D. Crossan (The Birth of Christianity [San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1998], ix) refers to the 30s and 40s as “lost years,” “empty years,” and “darkened decades.”

70 In Rom 14:14 Paul writes, “I know and am persuaded in the Lord Jesus that nothing is unclean [koinos] in itself” (RSV). Almost certainly Paul is echoing a teaching of Jesus that defilement issues from within (Mark 7:20—this “defiles [koinoi] the man”).

71 For a review of literature on languages in Palestine in the first century, see G. H. R. Horsley, New Documents Illustrating Early Christianity 5 (Sydney: Macquarie University, 1989), 19–26.

72 See Alan Millard, Reading and Writing in the Time of Jesus (Understanding the Bible and Its World) (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 2005), 140–41; J. Jeremias, New Testament Theology 1 (London: SCM, 1971), 3–8.

73 Millard, Reading and Writing, 85–102.

74 So Jeremias, Theology, 8–37. S. E. Porter (“Jesus and His use of Greek,” IBR 10, no. 1 [2000], 71–87) argues that Jesus taught in Greek and that the Jesus-tradition existed in Greek from the outset.

75 R. Riesner, “Jesus as Preacher and Teacher,” in Jesus and the Oral Gospel Traditions, ed. H. Wansbrough (Sheffield: JSOT, 1991), 202.

76 Quoted in ibid. 208.

77 See Millard, Reading and Writing, 26, 28, 63, 67.

78 See H. Schürmann, “Die vorösterlichen Anfänge der Logientradition,” Traditiongeschichtlichte Untersuchungen (Düsseldorp, 1968), 39–45.

79 Millard, Reading and Writing, 222–23; S. Talmon, “Oral and Written Tradition in Judaism,” in Wansbrough, Gospel Traditions, 157–58.

80 S. Lieberman, Hellenism in Jewish Palestine (New York: Jewish Theological Society, 1962), 203.

81 B. Gerhardsson, The Origin of the Gospel Traditions (London: SCM, 1977), 68.

82 Ibid., 68; E. E. Ellis, “Reading the Gospel as History,” Criswell Theological Review 3, no. 1 (1988): 3–15.

83 For information on the dynamic relationship between orality and textuality see J. D. Harvey, “Orality and Its Implications for Biblical Studies: Recapturing an Ancient Paradigm,” JETS 45, no. 1 (2002): 99–109.

84 Talmon, “Oral and Written Tradition in Judaism,” Wansbrough, Gospel Traditions, 157–58.

85 E. E. Ellis, “The Making of Narratives in the Synoptic Tradition,” ed. H. Wansbrough, Jesus and the Oral Gospel Tradition, JSNT Sup 64 (Sheffield: JSOT, 1991), 310–33.

86 Talmon, “Oral and Written Tradition in Judaism,” in Wansbrough, Gospel Traditions, 148–56.

87 J. D. G. Dunn (Jesus Remembered [Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003], 205–254; see also Dunn, “Jesus and Oral Memory” SBL Seminar Papers 2000 [Atlanta: SBL, 2000], 287–326) follows Kenneth Bailey’s observations of village storytelling where core elements of the story, with many identical words though with idiosyncratic adaptation and variation, are retained generation by generation. According to Dunn this accounts for similarities and differences between texts in the Synoptics. Dunn is inclined to reject the older text-based adaptations arising from source and redaction criticism in favor of Bailey’s more “sociological” approach.

However, the culture Bailey observed was post-Islamic Arabic whereas the culture of Jesus’ day was Jewish in the Hellenistic, pre-Islamic era. Who can say with confidence that the villages of Jesus’ Galilee had storytellers who gave oracular performances like those described by Bailey? Do we know that the deeds and teachings of Jesus were told as “stories” in the Galilean villages in the years after Jesus? Rather, based on the evidence of the Gospels and archaeology, the towns and villages of Galilee were synagogue-based. Synagogue culture was liturgical (with repetition of prayers and benedictions) and text-based; the reading of Law and Prophets with “sermon” (midrash) was central. It is more likely that “the churches of Christ in Judea” (Gal 1:22; cf. 1 Thess 2:14) followed the praxis of the synagogue. Mark’s instruction, “Let the Lector understand” (Mark 13:14) is but one of many hints that reading aloud a written text to a gathered group was the practice in the early churches.

Dunn’s rejection of the written in favor of the oral flies in the face of the opening lines of Luke’s Gospel where those who “handed over” written “narrative[s]” to Luke were “those who from the beginning were eyewitnesses and ministers of the word.” In other words, these persons (disciples/apostles) spanned the few decades between Jesus and Luke’s text effectively guaranteeing the probity of the tradition. The point is that Luke’s sources were written, not oral. True, Dunn acknowledges the role of Matthew’s and Luke’s dependence on the text of Mark and Q. The issue is: how do we explain the differences in Matthew and Luke against their agreements citing the texts before them? Dunn attributes the differences to differing communal oral performances of the gospel. In our view, however, it is more likely that the differences arose within the differing didactic streams.

88 TaNaK is an acronym where the consonants represent the three parts of the Old Testament: T = Torah; N = Nevi’im, “the prophets”; K = Ketuvim, “the writings.” An alternative name is “Miqra,” “that which is read.” Josephus points to the notion of “canon”: “Our books . . . are two and twenty and contain the record of all time. . . . [F]ive are the books of Moses . . . the prophets subsequent to Moses who wrote the history of the events of their own times in thirteen books. . . . The remaining four books contain hymns to God and precepts for the conduct of human life” (Against Apion 1.37–43). Jesus’ words after the resurrection point to the same threefold division of the “Scriptures”: “These are my words that I spoke to you while I was still with you, that everything written about me in the Law of Moses and the Prophets and the Psalms must be fulfilled. Then he opened their minds to understand the Scriptures and said to them, ‘thus it is written, that the Christ should suffer . . . on the third day rise from the dead . . . ’” (Luke 24:44–45 RSV).

89 Italics added.

90 Barnett, “Indications of Earliness in the Gospel of John,” 61–75.

91 Riesner, “Synagogues in Jerusalem,” 192–200.

92 Italics mine.

93 Italics mine.

Chapter Eleven

Are There Contradictions in the Bible?

Douglas S. Huffman

Hard Sayings in the Bible

There are three kinds of hard sayings in the Bible, depending upon the particular nuance of the term hard.[1] Some passages are hard in the sense of difficult to understand (cf. 2 Pet 3:15–16 where Peter admits this about Paul’s writings).[2] Ironically, other Scripture passages are hard because they are easy to understand but uncomfortable in their demand; that is, they are difficult to accept (see John 6:60). Then some Scriptures are hard because they appear to conflict with other sources of knowledge; that is, they are difficult to reconcile. This kind of difficulty—the question of consistency—is the general concern of this chapter.

The issue of consistency is important in defending the Bible against hostile attacks, but it is also significant for encouraging faith.[3] Several chapters in this volume address the Bible’s consistency with matters of science and ethics.[4] Other chapters deal with consistency issues in the field of theology, either internally or externally—i.e., examining the Bible’s internal theological consistency or comparing the Bible’s message externally to other ancient documents.[5] Still other chapters address questions about the Bible’s consistency with what we know about history from external sources.[6] The primary concern of this chapter, however, is the internal consistency of the Bible on matters of history. That is, do the various portions of the Bible—a volume composed over the course of 1,500 years with the writings of more than a score of people—consistently report the same things? Thus, we are dealing here with passages that are difficult to reconcile with each other.

A good example of the issue that concerns us here is to compare the two New Testament accounts of the death of Judas Iscariot given in Matthew 27:5 (“Then he went and hanged himself”) and Acts 1:18 (“He fell headfirst and burst open in the middle, and all his insides spilled out”). These two Bible passages are difficult to reconcile; is there a contradiction here?

Many others have treated the issue of apparent contradictions in the Bible, and there are several approaches that can be taken. Some choose an encyclopedic approach of paging through the Bible and addressing apparent contradictions as they arise.[7] A different approach focuses not on the problem passages themselves but explores possible techniques for solving apparent discrepancies.[8] Yet another approach begins by classifying apparent contradictions into like categories based on causation and factors giving rise to discrepancies.[9] Our approach here is something like the last mentioned, and we will employ it with a two-fold methodology. First, we outline several cautionary principles against mistaken claims of contradictions in Scripture. Second, we examine the New Testament resurrection narratives and—using the cautionary principles—respond to charges of inconsistency between the Gospels. At the close of the chapter, we offer a simple outline for responding to people who make claims that the Bible contains contradictions.

Cautions Against Mistaken Claims of Contradiction

It is easy to claim that the Bible contains inconsistencies and contradictions. Such claims are made on media talk shows, on Internet blogs and websites, in conversations among friends, and in best-selling books. But making such claims is not the same thing as proving them. In fact, many such claims stem solely from the reader’s misunderstanding of a writer’s purposes; there is no error in what the author is saying. To avoid mistaken claims, readers should attend to the purposes of the biblical authors. So, here we propose to outline three basic cautionary principles against mistaken claims of contradiction. In proposing these cautions (and several subcategories), we provide examples of mistaken claims about inconsistencies in the Bible. Our suggestion here is that every claim about contradictions in the Bible goes against one (or more) of these cautionary principles.

Misplaced Expectations Do Not Necessitate Contradiction

Bible readers can utilize unfair and foreign expectations in their reading of Scripture. Because this can happen on several different levels, this first cautionary principle can be a complex category. So we offer five different cautions regarding misplaced expectations.

Selection Is Not Denial

Authors cannot write everything. They have no choice but to be selective of what they include in their accounts. The selectivity of an author is related to his purpose for writing and does not entail an absolute denial of events not selected. This is true of authors in all time periods everywhere.[10] The truthfulness of an author’s report cannot be questioned simply because it does not satisfy a particular reader’s curiosity for information unrelated to the author’s purposes.

For example, each of the four Gospels has information not contained in any of the others. But this does not necessitate that these records are in contradiction with one another. The Gospel of John even reports on their necessary selectivity: “And there are also many other things that Jesus did, which, if they were written one by one, I suppose not even the world itself could contain the books that would be written” (John 21:25; cf. 20:30).

Even the skeptic Bart Ehrman recognizes this when commenting on a comparative reading (“horizontal reading”) of the Gospels:

For example, in the accounts of Jesus’ birth in Matthew and Luke, a horizontal reading shows that Matthew tells the story of the wise men coming to worship Jesus, whereas Luke tells the story of the shepherds coming to worship him. There are no shepherds in Matthew and no wise men in Luke. This is not a contradiction: Matthew wants (for important reasons, as it turns own) to tell the story of the wise men, and Luke (for other reasons) wants to tell the story of the shepherds.[11]

Indeed, no one would conclude from the silence of Mark and John about Jesus’ birth that Mark and John thought Jesus was not born! No, the selectivity of a Scripture writer does not necessitate his denial of unselected events.[12]

Different Is Not Discrepant

Noting the explainable differences in the advent stories of Matthew and Luke helps us realize that differences between records do not necessitate irreconcilable discrepancy.[13] When it comes to reporting an event, writers must make many choices about what details to include and how to relate it to other events. So, for example, to report two events that happened at the same time, an author must decide which one to mention first. Ehrman claims that the New Testament accounts of Jesus’ death disagree with one another because some report Jesus dying and then the temple curtain being torn (Matt 27:45–51; Mark 15:33–38), while Luke reports the temple curtain being torn and then Jesus dying (Luke 23:44–46).[14] But this kind of complaint ignores the fact that all three Synoptic Gospels note that both things happened at “the ninth hour,” i.e., around 3:00 p.m. (Matt 27:46; Mark 15:34; Luke 23:44); the differing orders in which they are written down does not change the fact that the accounts all report the same two events happening at the same time.

We can add here a converse caution about our expectations: similar events need not be the same and their differences could indicate they are completely different events. So, for example, we should not complain that the parable of the talents (Matt 25:14–30) “contradicts” the parable of the pounds (Luke 19:11–27), with the first having three servants entrusted with varying amounts and the second having ten servants entrusted with the same amounts. These are similar parables with similar lessons, but this does not mean they are contradictory representations of the same event. They may well be similar but completely different events. Jesus was an itinerate preacher who likely gave similar sermons on different occasions. All this to say we should not assume that differences necessitate a discrepancy.

Accuracy Is Not Precision

“Precision” and “accuracy” are not completely synonymous concepts. “It rained last week” can be accurate without being precise. The statement does not say what day or time last week (or even where), but that does not necessarily bring the accuracy of the statement into question. Similarly, “I live three miles from campus” is accurate in terms of miles, even though I might live 3.25 miles from campus or 2.978 miles from campus (and where does “campus” begin, anyway?). Those are issues of how precise we want to make our claim, but precision is different than accuracy. With this caution in place, we can easily realize that there is no necessary contradiction between reports when, for example, in relation to Peter’s confession, Matthew and Mark report the transfiguration happened “after six days” (Matt 17:1; Mark 9:2) and Luke reports that it happened after “about eight days” (Luke 9:28).[15]

Now, to be clear here, inaccuracies are still false and are not to be excused as being merely “less precise”! Precise claims can be false and imprecise claims can be accurate. In our ordinary conversations (which are much like how the Bible has been written to us), we can notice when precision words are used and not used—e.g., “exactly” versus “approximately”; “one and only one” versus “a”; “exactly ten” versus “some, a few, several”—and judge the truth or falsity of the claims accordingly. So Scripture can be accurate even when different reports have varying levels of precision.[16]

Paraphrase Is Not Quotation

In reading the Gospel accounts of Jesus’ life, we notice differences in how the quotations are recorded. For example, what does the voice from heaven say at Jesus’ baptism: “This is My beloved Son. I take delight in Him!” (Matt 3:17) or “You are My beloved Son; I take delight in You!” (Mark 1:11 and Luke 3:22)? Of course, the voice probably did not speak in English at all(!), and perhaps not even in Greek (the language in which the New Testament is written). If the voice spoke in Hebrew or Aramaic (the common language of the Jews in the first century), then what we have in the New Testament are paraphrasing translations of the message into Greek. The idea of exact quotation (with the typographical “ ” marks) is a relatively recent literary convention. What writers were concerned about in the New Testament records was getting the message correct. This is not unlike how we report one another’s speech today. Few of us expect exact quotations when we ask questions like, “What did the speaker say in his lecture?” and “What did the president say in his speech?” But we do expect truthful paraphrases.[17] This is how the Bible reports speech in its narrative sections (not withstanding the quotation marks used in our modern English translations).[18]

Thematic Ordering Is Not Errant

An author’s selection and ordering of events by theme (and not merely by chronology) does not necessitate that the author is being dishonest. We can observe, for example, that the four Gospels are each largely chronological but none claims to be exactly chronological. They each begin in the beginning—albeit different beginnings, depending upon their different purposes.[19] And they each end at the death and resurrection of Jesus. Nevertheless, none claims that each individual story is told in exact chronological order, and we should not expect it.

In fact, the thematic ordering in the Gospels is well noted. One famous example is found in comparing the accounts of Jesus being tempted (Matt 4:1–11 and Luke 4:1–13). While both report the same three temptation stories, they place the three in differing orders. Using the more sequential connecting words “then” and “again” (tote and palin), Matthew lists the three temptations in the order: bread making—temple jumping—Satan worshipping. Luke, however, lists the temptations in a different order: bread making—Satan worshipping—temple jumping. But there is no contradiction here when we notice that, with an apparent desire to end the list with a climatic emphasis on the temple in Jerusalem (a thematic concern for Luke), Luke uses the nonsequencing words “and” and “but” (kai and de) to connect the three items.[20] All this to say, we must not wrongly insist that thematic accounts are intended to be chronological.

So we have cautioned ourselves here against wrongful expectations of the Bible. We should expect it to be accurate in its reporting and to tell the truth in all it says. But that does not mean that it gives us all the information that we crave, in the order that we prefer it, and with all the detail we might desire. Reports can be different than our expectations without necessitating contradiction.

Some might level charges of “illegitimate harmonization” for such solutions as I have offered here, and I agree that some well-intentioned scholars have sometimes unnecessarily offered some rather far-fetched solutions in the name of harmonization.[21] But complaints about “illegitimate harmonization” often amount to illegitimate reductionism whereby skeptics claim that life cannot be more complicated than their personal (and prejudicial) expectations allow.[22] Thus, when we think we have found a contradiction between reports in the Bible, we should be willing to double-check our potentially errant expectations.

Misconstrued Referents Do Not Necessitate Contradiction

Our second category of basic cautionary principles has to do with misconstrued referents. The reader’s wrong assumptions about a writer’s intended subject matter do not necessarily involve the writer in contradiction. This confusion of referents can manifest in several different ways. We will discuss here five different kinds of which we should be especially aware of: unrecognized referents, undifferentiated definitions, unclassified causations, unacknowledged attention, and unseen summary.

Unrecognized Referents

Matthew 27:7–10 clearly quotes Zechariah 11:12–13 but then attributes the citation to Jeremiah. Is this not a mistake on Matthew’s part, precisely with regard to his (and not the reader’s) misconstrued referent? Not necessarily. Kaiser offers a simple explanation for this apparent contradiction:

Matthew probably attributed the text to Jeremiah because Jeremiah, in many Hebrew manuscripts, headed up the collection of the prophets and his name was used to designate all in the collection. Our book titles with their chapter and verse division are a fairly recent innovation. Also Matthew may have attributed this quotation to Jeremiah because this text was paired with Jeremiah 18:1–4; 32:6–9. Thus he cited the name of the better-known and more prominent prophet.[23]

A second example of confused referents involves Jesus’ two differing “for” and “against” statements in the Gospels. On the one hand, “Anyone who is not with Me is against Me, and anyone who does not gather with Me scatters” (Luke 11:23; Matt 12:30). But on the other hand, “For whoever is not against us is for us” (Mark 9:40; cf. Luke 9:50). Ehrman, who calls this one of his favorite examples of divergent reports of Jesus’ words, wonders, “Did he say both things? Could he mean both things? How can both be true at once? Or is it possible that one of the Gospel writers got things switched around?”[24] A moment’s reflection on the actually mentioned referents, however, shows that there is no formal contradiction here at all. Where there are only two options—for or against—both statements have their proper referents: if people are not “for,” they must be “against,” and if people are not “against,” they must be “for.”[25] Complaints like Ehrman’s suffer from unrecognized referents. Rightly recognizing the writer’s referents can restore a respect for the Bible’s reliability.

Undifferentiated Definitions

The reader’s misapplied definition to a writer’s term does not necessarily entail that the writer is in error. So, for example, in Romans 8:8–9, Paul says that those who are “in the flesh” (en sarki) cannot please God, but then in Galatians 2:20, he remarks that the life he was living “in the [flesh]” (en sarki) he was living by faith in the Son of God. But examining these statements in their contexts, we can easily see that life “in the [flesh]” in Galatians 2:20 is used to refer to life “in the physical body.” In Romans 8:8–9, however, life “in the flesh” is not mere physical life. Rather, in this context, it is used as an ethical label referring to a life “lived in orientation away from God.”[26] Paul is not contradicting himself; he merely uses the phrase “in the flesh” in two different but legitimate ways.

If one author can legitimately use one term in two very different ways, certainly we must allow for two different authors to use one term in two very different ways. For example, Matthew clearly indicates that Jesus saw John the Baptist as the Elijah figure who was widely assumed to come before the great and terrible day of the Lord (Matt 17:10–13; cf. Mal 4:5–6). And yet John records that John the Baptist plainly denied being Elijah (John 1:19–22). But this discrepancy disappears when we note that both records are correct if John the Baptist was not literally the person of Elijah (as per the Gospel of John) but was figuratively playing the role of Elijah (as per the Gospel of Matthew).[27] Matthew even presents Jesus offering this figurative understanding (Matt 11:14), and Luke presents this reconciling view with his description of John the Baptist as one who “will go on before the Lord, in the spirit and power of Elijah” (Luke 1:17 NIV). So here we see that properly defining the use of the terms (e.g., “is” as either literal or figurative in meaning) can help dispel apparent discrepancies.

Unclassified Causations

An extreme example of potentially misconstrued referents is seen in the two reports of David’s pride-motivated census of the Israelites. Second Samuel 24:1 reports, “The LORD’s anger burned against Israel again, and He stirred up David against them to say: ‘Go, count the people of Israel and Judah,’” but 1 Chronicles 21:1 reports, “Satan stood up against Israel and incited David to count the people of Israel.” Did God incite David to perform the census or did Satan incite David to it? The answer seems to be that both are correct but in very different senses. The author of 2 Samuel refers to God as the ultimate cause of all things, but the author of 1 Chronicles refers to the secondary cause, the means by which God accomplished His purpose, i.e., his control through the actions of others.[28]

A misconstruing of referent with regard to causation can occur in comparing the New Testament accounts of the healing of the centurion’s servant (Matt 8:5–13; Luke 7:1–10). Matthew seems to report that the centurion himself asked Jesus to come and perform the miracle, but Luke clearly claims that the centurion sent to Jesus an emissary of Jewish elders and a group of friends to speak on his behalf. So which was it? The solution to this apparent discrepancy is that Matthew reports only the ultimate causation, while Luke reports both the ultimate and the secondary causation. The Greek text of Luke makes this clear because the verbs used for speaking the request are in fact singular—it was the centurion’s request, even when delivered by the plural group of Jewish elders.[29] Stein suggests that this is not unlike reporting a conversation between the president of the United States and the premier of Russia. A news reporter could describe the conversation without mentioning the presence of the team of interpreters (“The President said to the Premier . . . and the Premier replied to the President . . . ”) and few would charge the reporter with inaccuracy. “The messengers, or friends, of the centurion are an extension of him. Their words are the words of the centurion. Thus, the problem dissipates when it is realized that Matthew chose for the sake of brevity, to omit any reference to the intermediate messengers.”[30] This sense of representation has been long noted in a proverbial saying that has come to be called the shaliach principle: “The one sent is as he who sent him” (Talmud, Berachoth 5:5). Thus, clarifying the references to causes can clear up apparent contradictions.

Unacknowledged Attention

Error can occur in our thinking with another, more complex kind of misconstrued referent, one that entails recognizing a more heightened level of attention. Here we are thinking of what Ehrman refers to as one of his favorite apparent discrepancies. In the “Farewell Discourse” passage of John 13–17, Jesus engages his disciples in a last dinner conversation before the crucifixion. Early on in the discussion, Simon Peter asks, “Lord, where are You going?” (John 13:36), and a little later Thomas remarks, “Lord, we don’t know where You’re going. How can we know the way?” (14:5). And yet toward the end of the same discussion, John records Jesus saying, “But now I am going away to Him who sent Me, and not one of you asks Me, ‘Where are You going?’”(16:5). This looks like a clear enough contradiction or, as Ehrman suggests, an indication that Jesus had a short attention span.[31] But the better suggestion here is that the disciples had the poor attention span. After Peter asks his question about where Jesus was going, he does not pursue the answer but begins to defend his level of commitment and his willingness to die for Jesus (John 13:37). And Thomas’s comment about not knowing where becomes a discussion of the way (John 14:6–11). So, in John 16:5, Jesus does not complain that no one had asked about his destination, for they obviously had broached the topic; rather, Jesus remarks that no one is asking about his destination: no one was pursuing the topic. So we see here that an author/speaker can properly choose to emphasize some things over others. Examining the author’s emphases can help explain apparent errors.

Unseen Summary

We have already commented on the need to recognize authorial selectivity. Similarly, we should recognize an author’s choice to recount a long series of events in a shortened summary format. This is to say that authors can write in summary and still be truthful. In fact, this is precisely what we expect of good news reporters: to summarize accurately for us the important events of the day. In accordance with their purposes, some authors will give longer summaries of events and others will give shorter summaries of the same events. So, for example, Mark is correctly known as the shortest Gospel, but he actually tends to tell longer stories (albeit fewer stories). Matthew tells more stories than Mark and the stories he has in common with Mark he tends to tell with fewer detail and in fewer words. But the length of summaries need not entail errant reporting.

This accounts for Matthew’s summary telling of the raising of Jairus’s daughter (Matt 9:18–25 in 139 Greek words; Mark 5:21–43 in 345 words; Luke 8:40–56 in 287 words).[32] All three Synoptic Gospels tell this story mixed with the interruptive healing of a hemorrhaging woman (Matt 9:20–22; Mark 5:25–34; Luke 8:43–48). While Mark and Luke report the detail that Jesus was en route to heal the sick girl but learns of her actual death during the interruption, Matthew merely reports from the beginning that Jesus was on his way to raise the dead girl. “Matthew’s account is an inerrant summary of Jesus’ raising of Jairus’s daughter. Difficulties are encountered if the details of this summary are pressed in a way that Matthew never intended.”[33] Seeing summaries helps dissolve suspicions.

Mystery Does Not Necessitate Contradiction

Armed with principles for clearer thinking, the reader will be able to dismiss (in many cases, rather easily) most of the apparent errors and contradictions that are attributed to the Bible. Nevertheless, our discussion of cautionary principles regarding apparent discrepancies in Scripture is not meant to give the impression that we will always be able to have our questions about problematic passages definitively answered. But not having an answer is not the same as saying that an answer does not exist. Thus, we now offer a cautionary principle about acknowledging unsolved mysteries.

For some apparent discrepancies in Scripture, the current suggested solutions seem only possible and otherwise remain mysterious to us. This is the case with the apparent discrepancy between the New Testament accounts of the death of Judas Iscariot (cp. Matt 27:5 and Acts 1:18). It may well have happened that Judas hanged himself (as per Matthew) and the rope (immediately or eventually) broke so that his body fell and ruptured on the ground (as per Acts).[34] While we cannot say definitively that this is how it happened, we can see that there is a possible noncontradictory solution; consequently, there is no necessary discrepancy between these two accounts.[35]

Another example of this kind of difficulty involves the differences in the genealogies for Jesus provided in Matthew 1:1–16 and Luke 3:23–38. That Matthew and Luke have differing authorial purposes for the genealogies is evident from their differing placements of the record (Matthew 1 vs. Luke 3), the differing lengths (Matthew back to Abraham vs. Luke back to Adam), and their differing directions (Matthew forward in time, “father of . . .” vs. Luke backward in time, “son of . . .”). But the real difficulty in comparing these genealogies comes when we note that they do not at all match for the generations between Joseph and David, Matthew tracing Jesus’ ancestry through David’s son Solomon and Luke tracing it through David’s son Nathan.[36]

Scholars have struggled for hundreds of years to reconcile the genealogies of Jesus with each other and with the Old Testament genealogies and four general explanations (and various permutations of them) have been offered. (1) Some (like Tertullian, c. 160–225) suggest that Luke gives Jesus’ genealogy through Joseph’s lineage and Matthew gives it through Mary’s lineage.[37] Conversely, (2) some (like Martin Luther, 1483–1546) suggest that Matthew gives Jesus’ genealogy through Joseph’s lineage and Luke (with his tremendous interest in Jesus’ mother) gives it through Mary’s lineage.[38] With a different approach, (3) some (like John Calvin, 1509–64) suggest that Luke gives Jesus’ genealogy through Joseph’s natural lineage (via Heli) and Matthew gives Joseph’s legal lineage (via Jacob).[39] Conversely, (4) some (like Julius Africanus, c. 170–245, and differently Augustine, c. 400) suggest that Matthew gives Jesus’ genealogy through Joseph’s natural lineage (via Jacob) and Luke gives Joseph’s legal lineage (via Heli).[40] While various scholars will argue for their favorite resolution to this question, for now we have to live with the mystery of not knowing for sure how it all works out. Even without knowing for sure which solution applies, knowing that a workable solution can exist should be enough for us to withhold charges of contradiction in the Bible.

Indeed, this is the reminder of A. T. Robertson.

In explaining a difficulty, it is always to be remembered that even a possible explanation is sufficient to meet the objector. If several possible explanations are suggested, it becomes all the more unreasonable for one to contend that the discrepancy is irreconcilable. It is a work of supererogation to proceed to show that this or that explanation is the real solution of the problem. Sometimes, owing to new light, this might be possible, but it is never necessary. And by reason of the meagre information we have on many points in the gospel narrative, it may always be impossible in various cases to present a solution satisfactory in every point. The harmonist has done his duty, if he can show a reasonable explanation of the problem before him.[41]

This brings us back to our earlier observation: the reader’s dissatisfaction with the completeness (or incompleteness) of a writer’s coverage of an event does not necessarily entail that the writer is in error.

There may well be additional cautionary principles, but those outlined here are the principles that prove most claims of error in the Bible to be insufficient and unconvincing. Furthermore, these cautionary principles may sometimes work together in explaining apparent contradictions in Scripture. For example, the apparent discrepancies between accounts of the sending of the Twelve in the Synoptic Gospels call for a sorting out of definitions and referents as well as noting authorial emphases in the paraphrases of Jesus’ instruction. Does Jesus instruct the Twelve not to take a staff (Greek rhabdon in Matt 10:10 and Luke 9:3) or allow them to take a staff (Greek rhabdon in Mark 6:8)? But a solution is found in noting that the same (rather generic) word could well have two different referents here: the instructions can prohibit a “stick” in the sense of “club-like weapon” (in Matthew and Luke) but allow a “stick” in the sense of “walking staff” (in Mark). Additionally, Mark emphasizes the positive aspect of the instruction with the “go as you are” nature of the command, and Matthew emphasizes the negative aspect with the prohibition against gathering (ktaomai = “acquire”) extra supplies. All three Synoptics specify the prohibition of bringing an extra tunic. Similarly, parallel to the “no staff” instruction, Matthew specifies “no sandals,” which is likely a reference to extra sandals and not a command to go barefoot![42] Thus, we can see several cautionary principles opening up potential solutions and removing charges of contradictions in the Bible.

Defending the Consistency of the New Testament Resurrection Narratives

These cautionary principles are helpful in thinking about Christianity’s central claim: Jesus Christ rose from the dead. This central claim of Christianity is not a mere philosophical, or even theological, proposition; it is an historical claim. The apostle Paul outlines it well in 1 Corinthians 15:3–8,

For I passed on to you as most important what I also received: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, that He was buried, that He was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures, and that He appeared to Cephas, then to the Twelve. Then He appeared to over 500 brothers at one time; most of them are still alive, but some have fallen asleep. Then He appeared to James, then to all the apostles. Last of all, as to one abnormally born, He also appeared to me.

After this Paul gives an extended discussion of the central importance of Jesus’ resurrection to Christian faith (vv. 9–58). The historicity of Jesus’ resurrection is no small matter, for “if Christ has not been raised, then our proclamation is without foundation, and so is your faith” (v. 14), and “if Christ has not been raised, your faith is worthless; you are still in your sins” (v. 17), and “[i]f we have put our hope in Christ for this life only, we should be pitied more than anyone” (v. 19).

The importance of the resurrection can lead to frequent attacks on the Bible’s accounts of it.[43] And it seems to me to represent a fundamental misunderstanding of Christian faith when, in the name of (some kind of) Christianity, scholars suggest that historical discrepancies in the resurrection narratives are no bother at all and that a non-contradictory overall account “may be neither possible nor necessary.”[44] No, the actual resurrection of Jesus Christ is central to Christian faith, and the possibility of a non-contradictory understanding of the Bible’s reports of it is important. So, here we will examine the apparent discrepancies in the New Testament resurrection narratives.

While the resurrection of Jesus is a foundational claim for many passages in the New Testament (e.g., see the sermons in Acts 2:22–24; 4:8–12; 5:30–31; 10:39–40; 13:26–41; 17:22–31), it is the four Gospel passages and the beginning of Acts that come closest to narrating the event: Matthew 28, Mark 16, Luke 24, John 20–21, and Acts 1.[45] And while all report the same main event none tells the same collection of episodes in exactly the same way. Indeed, as one scholar opines about the four Gospels, “They differ from one another more in the recounting of the Easter events than in the telling of any other major narrative which they all have in common.”[46] But the cautionary principles we have discussed above have readied us for just such a phenomenon and observing such cautions proves as valuable here as anywhere when considering multiple accounts of the same event. The observation of William Arndt is worth citing at length in this regard.

To begin with, every well-informed Bible reader will admit without hesitation that not one of the four accounts of the resurrection is complete, reporting all the facts. Neither is there one among them which makes the claim of being exhaustive. Each one reports actual occurrences, but not all the pertinent occurrences. It will be allowed by all fair-minded persons that reports may be fragmentary, incomplete, and yet true. If this simple principle is borne in mind, most of the difficulties contained in the resurrection story will vanish.[47]

Our procedure here will be to outline the resurrection story in eight major segments. Along the way we will be noting the points of agreement between the narratives and accounting for apparent discrepancies by utilizing the cautionary principles discussed above.

Mary Magdalene and Others Go to the Tomb Early on Sunday Morning

All of the Gospel accounts of Jesus’ resurrection agree that Mary Magdalene found Jesus’ tomb empty early in the morning “on the first day of the week.” The Synoptic Gospels all mention that other women also went to the tomb on that Sunday morning, but John’s selective silence about other women is not the same thing as denying that they went (Selection Is Not Denial). Rather, in keeping with his own writing pattern of collecting stories of individual interviews with Jesus,[48] John’s purpose is to focus on the individual Mary and her encounter with the resurrected Jesus (Unacknowledged Attention). Indeed, John hardly denies the presence of other women with Mary Magdalene for he includes them in her report to the disciples of Jesus’ empty tomb, “we don’t know where they have put Him” (John 20:2, emphasis added).[49] None of the Gospel narratives insists that all of the women arrived at the empty tomb at the same time nor that all of them stayed together the whole time (Selection Is Not Denial).[50]

Some might suspect a contradiction between the report of John 20:1 (“while it was still dark”) and Mark 16:2 (“they went to the tomb at sunrise”). But this complaint subsides when we read the more general Matthew 28:1 (“as the first day of the week was dawning”) and Luke 24:1 (“very early in the morning”) and recognize that the women may well have left their homes “while it was still dark” (as per John’s report) and gotten “to the tomb at sunrise” (as per Mark’s report) (Different Is Not Discrepant, Unrecognized Referents).[51] So far, there is no necessary contradiction in these reports of events on “the third day” (cf. Luke 24:21 and 1 Cor 15:4).

The Empty Tomb Is Open and Angels Are Present

While only Matthew reports how the tomb was opened (Matt 28:2–4, an angel rolled the stone away), the other Gospels all comment that the stone was found removed from the door of Jesus’ tomb (Mark 16:4; Luke 24:2; John 20:1). Clearly silence on how the tomb was opened is not meant to be a denial of it being opened (Selection Is Not Denial)! Furthermore, all four Gospels report angelic appearances on the morning of the resurrection, but their reporting of slightly different activities cannot be taken as denials of each other’s reports (Matt 28:2–7; Mark 16:4–7; Luke 24:2–8; cf. John 20:12–13) (Different Is Not Discrepant, Selection Is Not Denial). Luke reports two angels present, but neither Matthew nor Mark reports “one-and-only-one” angel; their focus on the speaking angel and their silence about a second angelic figure need not be construed as denial (Selection Is Not Denial, Unacknowledged Attention).[52] John confirms the presence of two angels at the tomb, although John reports only their appearance to Mary after she returns to the tomb with Peter and the beloved disciple (Different Is Not Discrepant).[53] Even the slightly differing Synoptic paraphrases of the angelic pronouncement to the women are unproblematic (Paraphrase Is Not Quotation). “There is nothing in any of the three messages which is contradictory to anything in either of the others, the matter is complementary. All that is recorded could have been uttered without hurry in a couple of minutes.”[54] In all this, there is no necessary contradiction between accounts here.[55]

The Women Report the Empty Tomb to the Disciples

Matthew and Luke record rather generically that the women reported the empty tomb (and the angelic announcement) to the disciples (Matt 28:8; Luke 24:9–11), but John (in his emphasis on individual encounters) gives the added information that Mary reported the empty tomb to Peter (John 20:2). Mark’s report is thought by some to be contradictory for he reports simply and starkly, “So they went out and started running from the tomb, because trembling and astonishment overwhelmed them. And they said nothing to anyone, since they were afraid” (Mark 16:8). But this is not contradictory information; Mark is here actually giving unique, additional information (Selection Is Not Denial). Mark alone informs us that unlike their conversational trip to the tomb (Mark 16:1–3), the women were silent while en route back to the other believers.[56] This is where Mark ends his report—he does not say that the women never told anyone ever;[57] he just ends his report with the women silently en route (Unacknowledged Attention).[58] The other Gospels continue the story from here.

It is worth noting here that there is room for multiple reports of the women to Jesus’ disciples. Unlike the Synoptic Gospel narratives, which are a bit more telescoped together in summary format (Unseen Summary), John’s narrative has pulled some of the story out into more detail (Unacknowledged Attention). Thus, for example, John is clear in reporting that Mary Magdalene went to the tomb (John 20:1), then she reported to Peter (20:2), then she went back to the tomb where she saw angels after Peter left (20:10–13), and then she reported again to the disciples after she saw Jesus (20:18). John’s detailed focus on Mary Magdalene does not deny the presence of other women, nor does it necessitate that the other women were always with Mary (Different Is Not Discrepant, Unacknowledged Attention).[59] John’s level of detail does not deny the Synoptic summaries, which are still correct: the women went to the tomb, they saw angels, and they reported to the disciples (Unseen Summary). The Gospel accounts have no necessary contradictions here.

Peter and Another Visit the Empty Tomb

Both Luke and John report Simon Peter visiting the empty tomb after hearing the report of the women.[60] John’s specificity that it was Mary Magdalene reporting to Peter does not conflict with Luke’s report, which includes more names: “Mary Magdalene, Joanna, Mary the mother of James, and the other women with them were telling the apostles these things” (Luke 24:10). And John’s specificity that “the other disciple” (John 20:3–10, possibly John himself) accompanied Peter to the tomb does not contradict Luke’s report that Peter went to the tomb (Luke 24:12) (Different Is Not Discrepant). In fact, Luke himself indicates multiple male visitors to the tomb initiated by the women’s report, for he later records one of the disciples on the road to Emmaus reporting, “Some of those who were with us went to the tomb and found it just as the women had said” (Luke 24:24). Thus, the broader summary of Luke does not deny the details of John’s lengthier report (Selection Is Not Denial, Unseen Summary).[61] There are no necessary contradictions at this juncture.

Some Women See the Resurrected Jesus

Both Matthew and John report women seeing the resurrected Jesus (Matt 28:9–10; John 20:11–18). A hurried read of Matthew’s report on the heels of the angelic appearances to the women (Matt 28:1–8) might lead one to believe that this meeting of Jesus happened prior to their report to the disciples. But being familiar with Matthew’s simplifying and telescoping writing style, however, we can see that he has completely left out (without denying) the visit of Peter (and some others) to the tomb (Luke 24:9–12; John 20:3–10). While Matthew simply jumps from the report to the disciples (Matt 28:8) to the resurrection appearance (Matt 28:9–10), John’s account gives more detail and includes the intervening report to the disciples and Mary’s return to the tomb before meeting Jesus (Selection Is Not Denial, Unacknowledged Attention, Unseen Summary).

Thus, with consideration of the writers’ differing interests, these reports could be of the same event: in somewhat typical Johannine style, John focuses on the individual conversation between Jesus and Mary Magdalene (John 20:14–18); in a somewhat typical Matthean style that prefers pairs when possible, Matthew mentions the presence of a second woman (also named Mary, Matt 28:1) (Different Is Not Discrepant).[62] On the other hand, it is possible that Matthew and John are reporting two different resurrection appearances to the women, and there is room in the Gospel narratives for more than one such event (Selection Is Not Denial).[63] Whether or not we can make a definitive decision about the identity or difference of these resurrection appearances to the women, we can see that there is no necessary contradiction between the Gospel reports at this juncture (Mystery Does Not Necessitate Contradiction).[64] We also note here that Matthew alone chooses to narrate the guards reporting the morning’s events to the chief priests (Matt 28:11–15), a unique focus that does not conflict with the other resurrection narratives (Unacknowledged Attention).

Jesus Appears on the Emmaus Road and to Peter

With his own unique focus, Luke alone gives the extended report of Jesus’ appearance to the two on the road to Emmaus on the day of the resurrection (Luke 24:13–35; cf. Mark 16:12–13). In the telling of this story, Luke reports that Peter, sometime after his visit to the empty tomb, saw the resurrected Jesus on the day of the resurrection (Luke 24:34). This corroborates Paul’s statement in 1 Corinthians 15:5a (where Paul calls Peter by his Aramaic name, Cephas). While some charge that Paul cites Peter as the first witness of the resurrection and not the women,[65] a careful reading of 1 Corinthians 15:3–8 makes it clear that Paul does not explicitly exclude the possibility of other intervening resurrection appearances. Paul is marshaling the evidence of witnesses, and those he includes are apparently given in chronological order; but he does not claim to comprehensively include all resurrection appearances and we should not force that claim upon him (Selection Is Not Denial).[66] The uniqueness of these episodes does not represent any contradictions in the accounts.

Jesus Appears to the Disciples

Luke and John both mention Jesus appearing rather suddenly to the disciples on the day of the resurrection (Luke 24:36–43, cf. v. 13; and John 20:19–25). As noted above, Luke alone mentions that this appearance to the group of disciples was preceded by an appearance on the road to Emmaus. Conversely, John alone mentions Thomas’s absence. But these selective differences are not in conflict (Selection Is Not Denial, Different Is Not Discrepant). In fact, Luke’s reference to the group of disciples as “the Eleven” (Luke 24:33) fits fine with John’s specification that, apparently late to the meeting, Thomas missed Jesus’ surprise visit and only heard about it after Jesus had departed (John 20:24–25).[67] Paul refers to Jesus appearing to “the Twelve” even though Judas Iscariot is no longer with the apostolic group (1 Cor 15:5b), but this use of the number “twelve” was as a nickname—and not merely the headcount—of the group (Undifferentiated Definitions).[68] Thus, the differences in detail do not at all render these as contradictory reports of this meeting.

Jesus Appears over Forty Days and Then Ascends

Reading Luke and Matthew too quickly can lead one to assume that the resurrection and the ascension are reported as occurring on the same day (Unseen Summary). But Luke’s second account of the ascension very clearly specifies that it occurred after forty days of resurrection appearances (Acts 1:3).[69] Certainly forty days would allow for John’s report of an appearance “eight days later” in Jerusalem (John 20:26–31 ESV) and for the disciples to make a trip to Galilee where they saw Jesus (as per Matt 28:16–20 and John 21:1–25; cf. Mark 16:6 with Matt 28:5–7) and to come back again.[70] And someplace during that forty days is when the appearances to the 500 (1 Cor 15:6), to James (1 Cor 15:7), and again to the apostles (1 Cor 15:7; Luke 24:44–49; Acts 1:3–5), could easily have occurred.[71] After these came the ascension near Bethany (as per Luke 24:50–53), which is on the Mount of Olives (as per Acts 1:6–12). As narrated, these different episodes by no means necessitate their selecting authors being in conflict (Selection Is Not Denial, Different Is Not Discrepant).

So we can say again, the New Testament resurrection narratives have no necessary contradictions with one another. The differences between the accounts are due to the differing interests and purposes of the writers and not to falsifications of any kind.[72] We can thus conclude with Wenham that “the charge of irreconcilability brought against the resurrection stories has not been proved. Rather it has been shown that these records exhibit the characteristics of accurate and independent reporting, for while superficially they show great disharmony, on close examination the details gradually fall into place.”[73] It is not that we have all our questions about the events definitively answered. But we need not have all the answers to recognize that non-contradicting solutions are possible (Mystery Does Not Necessitate Contradiction). This is what we have shown in the discussion above. For ease of reference in a visual format, we can place our outline of the eight story segments with their corresponding passages into a chart structure.[74]

See Chart on A Coordination of the New Testament Resurrection Narratives

Conclusion

We have been arguing that God has the ability to have superintended the writing of Scripture in such ways that the resulting reports bear nothing but the truth of history. Our claim is that correct interpretation—which includes the kinds of cautionary principles outlined here—will continue to demonstrate that the Bible contains no contradictions.

While engaged in a discussion of the interpretation of Scripture, some Sadducees asked Jesus about the idea of resurrection—something they disbelieved. Interestingly Jesus replied, “You are in error because you do not know the Scriptures or the power of God” (Matt 22:29 NIV; cp. Mark 12:24). With reference to this passage, Everett Harrison observes, “How striking it is that the one allusion to error by our Lord in the days of his flesh was not to something in the Scriptures but to failure to know them and interpret them aright.”[75] May God grant us a willingness to know him and his Word aright.

1 In Peter H. Davids, More Hard Sayings of the New Testament (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 1991), 13–14, Davids offers a slightly different three-part taxonomy. Davids’s book is the fourth in a line of five InterVarsity books that includes F. F. Bruce, The Hard Sayings of Jesus (1983); Walter C. Kaiser Jr., Hard Sayings of the Old Testament (1988); Manfred T. Brauch, Hard Sayings of Paul (1989); and Walter C. Kaiser Jr., More Hard Sayings of the Old Testament (1992). These five volumes were combined, reordered, and cross-referenced into one volume with a dozen new introductory articles: Hard Sayings of the Bible (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 1996); see pp. 29–30 in the combined volume for Davids’s three-part taxonomy.

2 On the issue of understanding the Bible, see the article in this book: “Can We Understand the Bible?” by Rick Melick (p. 89).

3 The remarks of Kenneth Kantzer are worth noting here:

But the faith of some troubled souls is hindered by misunderstanding the Scripture. They are confused by what seems to them to be false statements or self-contradiction. We need, therefore, to clear away such false obstacles to faith. If there remains any obstacle to faith, it should be the stumbling block of the cross or the cost of discipleship rather than an imaginary obstacle that could easily be eliminated. In spite of what we sometimes hear, God never asks us to crucify our intellects in order to believe.

See Kenneth S. Kantzer, “Foreword,” in Gleason L. Archer, Encyclopedia of Bible Difficulties (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1982), 8. Regarding the motives of more hostile attackers, see John W. Haley, An Examination of the Alleged Discrepancies of the Bible (Andover, MA: Draper, 1874), 40.

4 See the articles in this volume, “Does the Bible Condone Genocide?” by Matthew Flannagan and Paul Copan (p. 297); “Does the Bible Condone Slavery and Sexism?” by James Hamilton (p. 335); and “Does the Bible Conflict with Science?” by William Dembski (p. 349).

5 See the article in this volume, “Are There Conflicting Theologies in the Bible?” by Craig Blaising; and “Do We Have the Right Canon?” by Wegner, Wilder, and Bock (pp. 375 and 393).

6 See the article in this volume, “Is the Old Testament Historically Reliable?” by Walter C. Kaiser Jr. (p. 201); and “Is the New Testament Historically Reliable?” by Paul W. Barnett (p. 223).

7 This is the approach of Archer’s Encyclopedia of Bible Difficulties and of the Hard Sayings books.

8 For this approach see Craig L. Blomberg, “The Legitimacy and Limits of Harmonization,” in Hermeneutics, Authority, and Canon, ed. D. A. Carson and John D. Woodbridge (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1986), 139–74, esp. 145–61, where Blomberg offers solutions in the following categories of technique: textual-critical, linguistic, historical-contextual, form-critical, audience-critical, source-critical, redaction-critical (both stylistic and theological), and harmonization.

9 This is the approach of Haley, who offers as origins of apparent discrepancies such things as differences in dates, authorship, timing, reference, arrangement, modes of computation, customs, definitions, and manuscript traditions (An Examination of the Alleged Discrepancies of the Bible, 1–29). So also R. A. Torrey, Difficulties and Alleged Errors and Contradictions in the Bible (Chicago: Revell, 1907), 17–25. Among Torrey’s classifications are manuscript errors, inaccurate translations, false interpretations, wrong conceptions of the Bible, use of language, defective history and background knowledge, finite human minds, and dullness of spiritual perception.

10 Paul Feinberg notes, “It must be remembered that from the standpoint of any discipline, even theology, the Scriptures are partial. Often partial is misunderstood to mean incorrect or false. But this idea itself is false. The Bible is a complete revelation of all that man needs for faith and practice. That is, there are many things we might like to know but which God has not seen fit to reveal. It is also true that God has not seen fit to record every detail of every account” (Paul D. Feinberg, “The Meaning of Inerrancy,” in Inerrancy, ed. Norman L. Geisler [Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1980], 301).

11 Bart Ehrman, Jesus, Interrupted: Revealing the Hidden Contradictions in the Bible (and Why We Don’t Know About Them) (New York: HarperCollins, 2009), 22.

12 On such comparative “omissions” of either whole episodes or details within episodes, see Craig L. Blomberg, The Historical Reliability of the Gospels, 2nd ed. (Downers Grove: InterVarsity, 2007), 171–80.

13 See Robert Stein on the nonprejudicial use of the term “differences” in Robert H. Stein, Interpreting Puzzling Texts in the New Testament (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1996), 29. Stein’s book is the combination of three previous Baker volumes: Difficult Passages in the Gospels (1984), Difficult Sayings in the Gospels (1985), and Difficult Passages in the Epistles (1988). These were first combined in the hard cover Difficult Passages in the New Testament: Interpreting Puzzling Texts in the Gospels and Epistles (1990); we reference here the slightly retitled 1996 paperback edition.

14 Ehrman, Jesus, Interrupted, 68.

15 Stein suggests this as the best approach to the apparent discrepancy between Mark’s reporting that Jesus was crucified at “the third hour” (Mark 15:2 Greek) compared to John’s reporting of it at “the sixth hour” (John 19:14–15 Greek): “rounding off” an approximately 10:30 a.m. crucifixion to the 9 o’clock hour by Mark and to the noon hour by John (Stein, Interpreting Puzzling Texts in the New Testament, 66–69).

16 As Feinberg notes in his now classic definition and defense of inerrancy, “Almost any statement is capable of greater precision. Any historiography, even a detailed chronicle, is still only an approximation. . . . The crucial point as I see it for inerrancy is this: Is a sentence as stated true? If so, there is no problem for the doctrine” (Feinberg, “The Meaning of Inerrancy,” 299–300).

17 Scholars distinguish between ipsissima verba (the exact words) and ipsissima vox (the exact voice). Since ancient authors were unequipped to service ipsissima verba with modern literary conventions (and inventions!), they were concerned with accurately reporting the intended meanings—the ipsissima vox—of others. See Feinberg, “The Meaning of Inerrancy,” 301; and Darrell L. Bock, “The Words of Jesus in the Gospels: Live, Jive, or Memorex?” in Jesus Under Fire, ed. Michael J. Wilkins and J. P. Moreland (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1995), 73–99. Blomberg outlines five categories of substantial paraphrasing that nevertheless do not distort the truthfulness of the report (The Historical Reliability of the Gospels, 157–68).

18 A nice example of the first-century approach to “quotation” can be seen in John 4 where Jesus “quotes” the Samaritan woman’s words back to her (John 4:17):

“I don’t have a husband,” she answered.

“You have correctly said, ‘I don’t have a husband,’” Jesus said.

Despite the English translation here (HCSB), the original Greek text gives the woman’s statement in one word order (ouk echō andra) and Jesus’ “quotation” of her in another word order (andra ouk echō). Nevertheless, the woman is convicted by Jesus’ message, and no charge of misquotation is reported. In fact, the reordered words may well be intentionally emphatic (cf. John 4:17–18).

19 Mark starts at the beginning of Jesus’ ministry, Matthew starts at the beginning of Jesus’ life, Luke starts just prior to the beginning of Jesus’ life, and John starts at the beginning of the universe!

20 Blomberg, The Historical Reliability of the Gospels, 171; cf. 168–71.

21 The sixteenth-century scholar Andreas Osiander is famed for his insistence that two similar but slightly differing accounts in Scripture must necessarily be two completely different events. This leads him to conclude that Jairus’s daughter was raised from the dead twice, that Jesus was crowned with thorns twice, and that Peter warmed himself at a courtyard fire four separate times (Andreas Osiander, Harmonia Evangelicae [Basel, 1537], cited in Stein, Interpreting Puzzling Texts in the New Testament, 29).

22 Regarding pejorative charges of “harmonization,” Stein aptly observes, “To reject an explanation because it harmonizes difficult gospel passages is certainly as prejudicial as to accept an explanation on the grounds that it harmonizes these passages. The correctness or incorrectness of an explanation is not dependent on whether or not it harmonizes the disputed passages. It depends on whether that explanation correctly interprets the authors’ meanings and logically illustrates that these meanings do not conflict with each other” (Stein, Interpreting Puzzling Texts in the New Testament, 21). For an erudite treatment of harmonization, see Blomberg, “The Legitimacy and Limits of Harmonization,” 139–74.

23 Kaiser, Hard Sayings of the Old Testament, 242 (= Hard Sayings of the Bible, 344–45). Kaiser adds, “In fact, not one of the four other places where the New Testament quotes from Zechariah does it mention his name” (see Matt 21:4–5; 26:31; John 12:14; and 19:37).

24 Ehrman, Jesus, Interrupted, 41.

25 Cf. Bruce, Hard Sayings of Jesus, 157–58 (= Hard Sayings of the Bible, 466–67).

26 See Manfred T. Brauch, Abusing Scripture: The Consequences of Misreading the Bible (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 2009), 155; Jerome Murphy-O’Connor, 1 Corinthians, The New Testament Message (Wilmington, DE: Michael Glazier, 1979), 42.

27 Stein, Interpreting Puzzling Texts in the New Testament, 61.

28 In comparing 2 Sam 24:1 and 1 Chr 21:1, see the remarks of Davids, More Hard Sayings of the New Testament, 127 (= Hard Sayings of the Bible, 696), and Kaiser, Hard Sayings of the Old Testament, 131 (= Hard Sayings of the Bible, 241). Elsewhere Kaiser explains again, “It happened that the Old Testament writers did not feel the need to distinguish between primary and secondary causation. For them everything was ordained and designed by God. Even sin itself did not appear uncontrolled; it too was superintended by God. The guilt and the responsibility for sin rested, nevertheless, with those who had sinned” (Kaiser, Hard Sayings of the Old Testament, 170; cf. 194–96 [cf. Hard Sayings of the Bible, 305–6]).

29 Stein points out that Luke 7:3 uses the singular participle erōtōn for “asking” and Luke 7:6 uses the singular participle legōn for “saying” showing that the messages delivered by the elders and the friends (respectively) were really the centurion’s (Stein, Interpreting Puzzling Texts in the New Testament, 37).

30 Stein, Interpreting Puzzling Texts in the New Testament, 36–37.

31 Ehrman, Jesus, Interrupted, 9.

32 See Mark Strauss, Four Portraits, One Jesus: A Survey of Jesus and the Gospels (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2007), 216–17.

33 Stein, Interpreting Puzzling Texts in the New Testament, 42. On the summary and composite nature of speeches in the Gospel narratives, see Blomberg, The Historical Reliability of the Gospels, 180–88.

34 Carl G. Johnson, So the Bible Is Full of Contradictions? (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1983), 68.

35 See Davids, More Hard Sayings of the New Testament, 32–34 (= Hard Sayings of the Bible, 511–12); cf. William Arndt, Does the Bible Contradict Itself? A Discussion of Alleged Contradictions in the Bible, 5th ed. (St Louis: Concordia, 1955), 71–72.

36 The differences between Matthew, Luke, and the Old Testament genealogical records (e.g., Gen 5:1–32; 11:10–26; Ruth 4:18–22; 1 Chr 1:1–3:17) that involve missing names are not really as problematic as one might think. The “father of” and “son of” formulas can be used for “progenitor of” and “descendant of” as reflected in the Jewish claim that “Abraham is our father” (John 8:39) and Matthew’s beginning description of Jesus as “the son of David, the son of Abraham” (Matt 1:1). In fact, Matthew even explains his selection of names as something of a memory tool: three series of 14 memorable names each (Matt 1:17). Note that the number “14” is represented by the Hebrew letters dvd, which is how the voweless Hebrew language spells David (See Douglas S. Huffman, “Genealogy,” in Dictionary of Jesus and the Gospels, ed. Joel B. Green, Scot McKnight, and I. Howard Marshall [Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 1992], 253–59).

37 A version of this solution is offered by H. A. Blair, “Matthew 1,6 and the Matthean Genealogy,” Studia Evangelica II (Berlin: Akademie, 1964), 149–54, referenced in Raymond E. Brown, The Birth of the Messiah: A Commentary on the Infancy Narratives in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke, 2nd ed. (New York: Doubleday, 1993), 89n65.

38 Stein favors this solution (Stein, Interpreting Puzzling Texts in the New Testament, 46–50). He suggests that Luke 3:23 be rendered something like, “And when He began his ministry, Jesus Himself was about thirty years of age, being supposedly the son of Joseph, [but actually through Mary was] the son of Heli, . . .” (cp. NASB).

39 This kind of a solution is favored by J. Gresham Machen, The Virgin Birth of Christ, 3rd ed. (Cambridge: James Clarke, 1987), 202–9.

40 A version of this solution combines with proposal 2 above by suggesting that Heli adopted Joseph when Joseph married Heli’s daughter Mary. This approach is favored by John Nolland, Luke 1—9:20 (Dallas: Word, 1989), 170.

41 A. T. Robertson, “Explanatory Notes on Points of Special Difficulty in the Harmony of the Gospels,” in John Albert Broadus, A Harmony of the Gospels (New York: Armstrong, 1893), 232. So also Alfred Plummer, “The various attempts which have been made at reconciling the divergences, although in no case convincingly successful, are yet sufficient to show that reconciliation is not impossible” (Plummer, The Gospel According to Luke, 5th ed., ICC [Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1922], 103). Cf. Kantzer, “Foreword,” 9.

42 See Arndt, Does the Bible Contradict Itself? 63–64.

43 “Perhaps there is nothing in the Bible to which unbelievers, in their attempt to prove that our sacred Book contains contradictions, point with greater frequency than the four accounts of the resurrection of our Savior” (Arndt, Does the Bible Contradict Itself? 79).

44 Gerald O’Collins, The Resurrection of Jesus Christ (Valley Forge, PA: Judson, 1973), 20. See pp. 18–19 for his list of “divergences” between the Gospel accounts. Similarly, Reginald H. Fuller encourages a “resurrection faith” as “not a matter of believing in the historical accuracy of these narratives but of believing the proclamation which these narratives, for all their differences, enshrine” (Reginald H. Fuller, The Formation of the Resurrection Narratives [New York: Macmillan, 1971], 8; cf. 182–83). See also Norman Perrin, The Resurrection According to Matthew, Mark, and Luke (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1977), 78.

45 Of course, the actual resurrection event itself is not narrated; the Easter stories in the Gospel narratives are of two kinds: the discovery of the empty tomb and the resurrection appearances of Jesus; cf. the skeptical Rudolf Bultmann, History of the Synoptic Tradition, rev. ed., trans. John Marsh (Oxford: Blackwell, 1963; reprint, Peabody, MA: Hendrickson), 287–91.

46 Robert H. Smith, Easter Gospels: The Resurrection of Jesus According to the Four Evangelists (Minneapolis: Augsburg, 1983), 199.

47 Arndt, Does the Bible Contradict Itself? 80. John Wenham remarks of the resurrection narratives, “One of the most striking things about them all is their selectivity. None of them attempts to tell the whole story; . . . Each of them ruthlessly selects the details which serve his purpose” (John Wenham, Easter Enigma: Are the Resurrection Accounts in Conflict? [Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1984], 43).

48 See, for example, John’s reports of these individual “interviews” with Jesus: Nicodemus (John 3:1–21), the Samaritan women at the well (4:1–42), the royal official (4:43–54), and the invalid at the pool (5:1–15).

49 Grant R. Osborne, The Resurrection Narratives: A Redactional Study (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1984), 199; Arndt, Does the Bible Contradict Itself? 81. Countering the suggestion that Mary Magdalene uses an editorial “we” for herself alone, Alfred Edersheim notes that she uses the singular “I” of herself just a few verses later in John 20:13 (Edersheim, The Life and Times of Jesus the Messiah, 3rd ed. [1886], one-vol. ed. [Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1971], 2:635 n1); cf. Raymond E. Brown, The Gospel According to John (New York: Doubleday, 1971), 984.

50 Edersheim suggests, “While the Magdalene hastened, probably by another road, to the abode of Peter and John, the other women also had reached the Tomb, either in one party, or, it may be, in two companies” (Edersheim, The Life and Times of Jesus the Messiah, 2:632).

51 Arndt, Does the Bible Contradict Itself? 81–82; and Johnson, So the Bible Is Full of Contradictions? 75. As Wenham puts it, “It needs to be remembered, however, that it could have been undeniably dark on the women’s departure and undeniably light on their arrival, particularly if their starting-point were Bethany” (Wenham, Easter Enigma, 81). See also Osborne, The Resurrection Narratives, 198–99. Osborne notes John’s thematic interest in emphasizing darkness: John 3:2; 6:17; 8:12; 9:4; 11:10; 12:35, 46; 13:30; and 19:39.

52 “Where, out of two or more, only one is spokesman, he is necessarily remembered. The other or others may easily be ignored or forgotten. It is an exaggeration to call such differences absolute discrepancies” (Alfred Plummer, The Gospel According to Luke, 5th ed. [Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1922], 547). On this Wenham colorfully remarks, “It should be said once and for all that the mention by one evangelist of two angels and by another of one does not constitute a contradiction or discrepancy. If there were two, there was one. When learned critics make heavy weather about the accuracy of such accounts, they lack common sense” (Wenham, Easter Enigma, 87).

53 Osborne (The Resurrection Narratives, 208) offers convincing rationale for understanding the angelic appearance in John 20:12 as different from the earlier appearance reported in the Synoptics. See also Henry Barclay Swete, The Appearances of Our Lord After the Passion: A Study in the Earliest Christian Tradition (London: Macmillan, 1922), 6–7.

54 Wenham, Easter Enigma, 85.

55 Indeed, even the noted New Testament scholar–skeptic Ehrman demonstrates that the accounts of angelic appearances in the resurrection narratives need not be considered contradictory at all. Ehrman is clear that he does not like such truly workable solutions: none of the Gospels is as complete as he would have them and they don’t all use the same simple vocabulary he wishes of them. Nevertheless, he has to admit that there are no contradictions in the accounts of the angelic appearances. See Ehrman, Jesus, Interrupted, 8.

56 See also Michael R. Licona, The Resurrection of Jesus: A New Historiographical Approach (Downers Grove: InterVarsity, 2010), 347, who refers to similar wording in Mark 1:44; cf. Zane C. Hodges, “The Women and the Empty Tomb,” BibSac 123 (1966): 305n5; and Arndt, Does the Bible Contradict Itself? 86–87.

57 Offering a blinding glimpse of the obvious, Wenham observes, “It is commonly said that the gospel [of Mark] ends with the women keeping absolute silence. But this is surely absurd. Presumably they said nothing to any one else, perhaps not even to one another, on the way to tell Peter and John. But clearly the whole story came streaming out eventually. How else could anyone have known it?” (Wenham, Easter Enigma, 88–89).

58 Some manuscripts of Mark have added longer endings (Mark 16:9–20), but the shorter ending (at 16:8) is the generally accepted ending of the original Gospel. On this issue, see David Alan Black, ed., Perspectives on the Ending of Mark (Nashville: B&H, 2008). The shorter ending of Mark does not entail that its author was unaware of any resurrection appearances (see Mark 8:31–38; 9:9, 31; 10:34; 12:10–11, 18–27, 35–37; 13:26–27; 14:28, 58, 62; 16:6; cf. Licona, The Resurrection of Jesus, 348).

59 Murray Harris suggests that after going to the tomb with two other women (see Mark 16:1; cp. Matt 28:1; John 20:1), Mary Magdalene immediately returned to report the empty tomb and did not see the angels until her later return (John 20:2–13); Murray J. Harris, 3 Crucial Questions about Jesus (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1994), 107–8; cf. Swete, The Appearances of Our Lord After the Passion, 5; and Wenham, Easter Enigma, 83. Gleason Archer, however, suggests that Mary Magdalene was with the other women the whole time, but that, in the excitement, she neglected to mention the angels in her report of the empty tomb (Archer, Encyclopedia of Bible Difficulties, 348–49). Even though we might not be able to reconstruct the event with this level of detail, either solution seems workable and respectful of the data (cf. Davids, Hard Sayings of the Bible, 507–8).

60 Cf. Mark 16:7 where Peter is singled out to receive the message of the angel—something of a confirmation of Peter’s somewhat unique experiences regarding the resurrection (see Wenham, Easter Enigma, 46–47).

61 “Luke is quite capable of highlighting one person when he knows, and tells us later, that more than one was involved” (N. T. Wright, The Resurrection of the Son of God [Minneapolis: Fortress, 2003], 613).

62 Edersheim, The Life and Times of Jesus the Messiah, 2:633n2; and William Arnold Stevens and Ernest DeWitt Burton, A Harmony of the Gospels for Historical Study: An Analytical Synopsis of the Four Gospels (Chicago: Scribner, 1904), 252, cf. 237.

63 Osborne, The Resurrection Narratives, 235; cf. 159, 221; Arndt, Does the Bible Contradict Itself? 84–85; James Orr, The Resurrection of Jesus (New York: Eaton & Mains, n.d.), 165–68; Archer, Encyclopedia of Bible Difficulties, 350–51; Johnson, So the Bible Is Full of Contradictions? 76; and Wenham, Easter Enigma, 94–97.

64 Hodges suggests a possible mediating view whereby Mary Magdalene meets Jesus both separately (as per John) and with the other women (as per Matthew); see Hodges, “The Women and the Empty Tomb,” 307–8.

65 E.g., Randel Helms, Gospel Fictions (Amherst, NY: Prometheus, 1988), 130–31.

66 See Wenham, Easter Engima, 53–54; cf. Swete, The Appearances of Our Lord After the Passion, xvi.

67 Or perhaps Thomas had been there earlier and left before Jesus appeared to the group suggests Swete, The Appearances of Our Lord After the Passion, 41. Or, yet again, perhaps Thomas had not been at this meeting at all; so James Orr, The Resurrection of Jesus, 183. We don’t need to know the specifics here to recognize the absence of contradiction (Mystery Does Not Necessitate Contradiction).

68 There seems to be biblical precedent for the use of numbers as group names. E.g., the list of David’s mighty men, “the Thirty,” seems to have had as many as thirty-seven named men in it (see 2 Sam 23:8–39).

69 Commenting on the last chapter of Luke’s Gospel, Swete notes “that he has been thought by critics who are lacking in the sense of humour to compress the forty days into one and place the Ascension on the day of the Resurrection” (Swete, The Appearances of Our Lord After the Passion, xvii). But reflecting on both the intense selectivity of the resurrection narratives and the rest of Luke’s work, Wenham remarks that “it is unthinkable that Luke . . . could have supposed (or intended his readers to suppose) that the events between the resurrection and the ascension were crowded into one day, even though his account could be read that way” (Wenham, Easter Enigma, 52).

70 C. F. D. Moule suggests that the disciples may have followed a typical Jewish festival routine of remaining in Jerusalem for the week-long observance of Passover, going home to Galilee, and then returning to Jerusalem for Pentecost (C. F. D. Moule, “The Post-Resurrection Appearances in the Light of Festival Pilgrimages,” NTS 4 (1957–58): 58–61). Cf. the apocryphal Gospel of Peter, §14; and Swete, The Appearances of Our Lord After the Passion, 52, 92–93.

71 Michael Licona calls the appearances to the 500 and to James “especially controversial,” but argues that, because they are given in a chronological listing in the earliest tradition (1 Cor 15) and not in the Gospels, “these appearances cannot be quickly dismissed” (Licona, The Resurrection of Jesus, 320).

72 In fact, the noncontradicting differences between the resurrection narratives are sometimes appealed to as clear evidence that the writers were not in collusion (see, e.g., Wright, The Resurrection of the Son of God, 612).

73 Wenham, Easter Enigma, 124. See also Archer, Encyclopedia of Bible Difficulties, 347; and Wright, The Resurrection of the Son of God, 612.

74 This format was first suggested to me by my long-time friend and now colleague, Jonathan Lunde. See also the charts in Nelson’s Complete Book of Bible Maps and Charts, 3rd ed. (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 1996), 296; Richard Swinburne, The Resurrection of God Incarnate (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 157; Raymond Brown, The Gospel According to John, 968 and 974; and (somewhat differently) Robert L. Thomas, Charts of the Gospels and the Life of Christ (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2000), 97–98.

As another kind of format used to show the noncontradictory nature of the resurrection narratives, Harris offers a 21-point reconstruction of the events in “A Suggested Harmonization of the Resurrection Narratives,” an appendix in his 3 Crucial Questions about Jesus, 107–9.

75 Everett Harrison, “The Phenomena of Scripture,” in Revelation and the Bible: Contemporary Evangelical Thought, ed. Carl F. H. Henry (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1958), 250.

Part Three

Ethical, Scientific, and Theological Challenges

Does the Bible Condone Genocide?

Does the Bible Condone Slavery and Sexism?

Does the Bible Conflict with Science?

Are There Conflicting Theologies in the Bible?

Do We Have the Right Canon?

Is the Bible the Word of God?

Chapter Twelve

Does the Bible Condone Genocide?

Matthew Flannagan and Paul Copan

Christians typically accept that the Bible, being the Word of God, is trustworthy in all it affirms. In particular, they contend it has authority for faith and morals. One perennial challenge to such a stance is a series of jarring passages in the Old Testament which appear to teach that God has commanded genocide: the systematic extermination of entire ethnic groups.[1] But surely killing of an entire ethnic group is morally wrong. The Bible therefore teaches serious moral error.

Our discussion of this challenge will proceed as follows. In the first part, we will look at a representative argument against biblical authority which appeals to these texts; we examine one proposed by Raymond Bradley. We will argue that the cogency of Bradley’s argument relies on two assumptions: first, that a person who accepts biblical authority is committed to claiming that God commands us to slaughter innocent men, women, and children; and, second, that it is always wrong to kill innocent people. We will argue that neither claim is, strictly speaking, correct. When these assumptions are appropriately qualified, the apparent contradiction in accepting the authority of the Bible dissipates.

Bradley’s Argument Against Biblical Authority

A representative example of the kind of objection we will discuss is proposed by Raymond Bradley.[2] He contends that a “logical quandary arises” for any theist who believes that the Bible “is a reliable guide to what we should and should not do.”[3] To show this, he lays out an argument, which takes for granted the following crucial moral principle (P1):

P1: It is morally wrong to deliberately and mercilessly slaughter men, women, and children who are innocent of any serious wrongdoing.[4]

What, then, is the quandary for the Bible-believing theist? Bradley asserts that this theist cannot, without contradiction, believe all of the following four propositions:

(1) Any act that God commands us to perform is morally permissible.

(2) The Bible reveals to us many of the acts that God commands us to perform.

(3) It is morally impermissible for anyone to commit acts that violate principle P1.

(4) The Bible tells us that God commands us to perform acts that violate moral principle P1.[5]

Bradley states that P1 is a universal principle “in the sense of being exceptionless—of holding, that is, for all persons, places, and times.”[6] By “God,” Bradley means a “robust supernatural being”[7] who is “omnipotent, omniscient, and morally perfect.”[8] Bradley’s official formulation of (2) is this: “The Bible reveals to us many of the acts that God commands us to perform.” On the face of it, this states that many of God’s commands are revealed in the Bible. However, the claim that the Bible accurately records many of God’s acts is entirely compatible with the claim that it inaccurately records others, and hence, is not inconsistent with (1), (3), and (4).

However, elsewhere in the same article, Bradley makes it clear that he has a robust view of biblical authority in mind. He cites Peter van Inwagen’s claim that “the Holy Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments are the revealed Word of God.”[9] Bradley also mentions Alvin Plantinga’s contention: “Scripture is inerrant: the Lord makes no mistakes; what he proposes for our belief is what we ought to believe.”[10] Bradley cites these as typifying the view he tries to criticize—a position he refers to as biblical theism. This suggests that the tetrad should be rephrased as follows.

(1)Any act that God commands us to perform is morally permissible.

(2*) God is the author of the Bible.

(3) It is morally impermissible for anyone to commit acts that violate principle P1.

(4*) The author of the Bible commands us to perform acts that violate moral principle P1.

Bradley points out that these propositions (1)-(4*) are inconsistent. The biblical theist, however, is committed to (1) and (2*) and so must reject either (3) or (4*). However, Bradley contends the biblical theist cannot defensibly reject (3) or (4*). To do so is to either deny what the Bible clearly says or to endorse moral absurdities. It is this latter claim that we will dispute in this essay. That is to say, we will argue that a theist can defensibly reject both (3) and (4*).

Does the Bible Command the Killing of Innocent People?

Bradley argues that the biblical theist is committed to (4*), because to deny it flies “in the face of facts ascertainable by anyone who takes the care to read what the Bible actually says.”

[C]onsider the case in which God commands Joshua to slaughter virtually every inhabitant of the land of Canaan. The story commences in chapter 6 of the book of Joshua, telling how the hero and his army conquer the ancient city of Jericho where they “utterly destroyed everything in the city, both man and woman, young and old.” Then, in chapters 7 through 12, it treats us to a chilling chronicle of the 31 kingdoms, and all the cities therein, that fell victim to Joshua’s, and God’s, genocidal policies. Time and again we read the phrases “he utterly destroyed every person who was in it,” “he left no survivor,” and “there was no one left who breathed.”[11]

Bradley contends that the book of Joshua records the Israelites carrying out the “slaughter” of “virtually every man, woman and child in Canaan” at God’s command. Hence, the author of the Bible commands us to perform acts that violate moral principle P1. This argument is flawed for several reasons.

Occasional vs. General Commands

First, the argument is a non sequitur. Bradley argues that because God commanded Joshua to exterminate every single person in Canaan, it follows that God commands us today to violate P1. This, however, does not follow. God commanded Abram to leave Ur of the Chaldees and Jonah to preach in Nineveh; it would be ridiculous to suppose that it is part of every Christian’s duty to obey these commands![12] God is not in these passages commanding us to leave Ur or to preach to Nineveh. Consequently, the mere fact God commands someone to do something in Scripture does not mean he commands us to do it. To determine if a command truly is universal, we need to carefully examine the command in its proper context to determine whether it is a universal command to all people[13] or an occasional command for a particular person at a particular time.

An examination of the commands God gave to Joshua suggests that they are isolated commands for a particular occasion. Deuteronomy 20 limits the command to “completely destroy” and “not leave alive anything that breathes” to the “cities of the nations the LORD your God is giving you as an inheritance” (Deut 20:16 NIV). It is not a general requirement for all military campaigns and is in fact distinguished from other such campaigns. Similarly, in the Torah God prohibited Israel from conquering other neighboring nations such as Moab, Ammon, and Edom (Deut 2:4, 9, 19; 23:7), precisely because these nations did not live in the land God had given Israel. At best, Bradley’s argument shows that at one point in history God commanded Joshua to violate P1 by issuing a command to exterminate every single Canaanite man, woman, and child in the land he had given them. Not that he commands us to violate P1.

Does the Bible Portray the Canaanites as Innocent?

However, even this more limited conclusion is not as straightforward an inference from the text as Bradley thinks. P1 is the principle that: “It is morally wrong to deliberately and mercilessly slaughter men, women, and children who are innocent of any serious wrongdoing.”[14] The Bible, however, does not portray the Canaanites, in general, as innocent of any serious wrongdoing. In the book of Genesis, God gives Abraham and his descendants legal title to the land of Canaan. However, despite having legal title to the land, Abram and his descendants could not take immediate occupation of the land for 400 years. They had to wait until the “sin of the Amorites” had “reached its full measure.”[15]

This was reiterated in the latter books of the Law which, centuries later, authorized Israel to take possession of the land because the Amorite iniquity was then complete. Deuteronomy states that Israel could drive the nations out “because of their wickedness” (Deut 9:4–5). The most exhaustive list of their wickedness comes from Leviticus 18 which chronicles incest, adultery, bestiality, ritual prostitution, homosexual acts, and, most significantly, child sacrifice (v. 10). God tells them that if they do not dispossess the Canaanites, “they will teach you to follow all the detestable things they do in worshiping their gods, and you will sin against the LORD your God” (Deut 20:18 NIV). They “will turn your children away from following me to serve other gods” (Deut 7:4 NIV); they will be a “snare” (Deut 7:16 NIV). Exodus is explicit: “They must not remain in your land, or else they will make you sin against Me. If you worship their gods, it will be a snare for you” (Exod 23:33). Additionally:

Do not make a treaty with the inhabitants of the land, or else when they prostitute themselves with their gods and sacrifice to their gods, they will invite you, and you will eat their sacrifices. Then you will take some of their daughters as brides for your sons. Their daughters will prostitute themselves with their gods and cause your sons to prostitute themselves with their gods. (Exod 34:15–16)

This is prohibited because “in worshiping their gods, they do all kinds of detestable things the LORD hates. They even burn their sons and daughters in the fire as sacrifices to their gods” (Deut 12:31 NIV).

Similarly, there are hints in the text that Canaanites who rejected these kinds of practices were to be spared. In the battle of Jericho, Rahab, the Canaanite innkeeper, is explicitly excluded from the command to destroy the city. The book of Hebrews states: “By faith Rahab the prostitute received the spies in peace and didn’t perish with those who disobeyed” (Heb 11:31). Rahab was a Canaanite, yet she was spared because she was not like those who are disobedient; she responded in faith. This suggests that any Canaanite who turned from the detestable practices mentioned would not be killed. Obedience to God, not ethnicity or national identity, appears to be the issue.[16]

This is further borne out by the fact that other Canaanites (i.e., the Shechemites) are included in Israel’s renewal ceremony mentioned at the end of Joshua 8: “Then all Israel, with their elders and officers and judges, stood on either side of the ark . . . the stranger as well as he who was born among them.” At Shechem, those who heard the Law being read included not only “the assembly of Israel” but also “the strangers who were living among them” (Josh 8:33, 35 NKJV). K. Lawson Younger summarizes the matter:

The hērem was not designed by God to eliminate the Canaanite culture per se but to eliminate the Canaanite religious influence. While it may be readily recognized that it is difficult in many instances to separate the two, there is nonetheless a distinction. The Israelite hērem commandments had close links to the issues of idolatry and the breaking of the second commandment (Ex. 22:20 . . .; Deut. 7:26; 13:16–18 . . .). That this is the case in [the first introduction] of Judges (1:1–2:5) is reinforced by Yahweh’s confrontation of the nation in 2:1–5, where it is their failure on the religious front that is of primary concern.

In other words, the hērem was not concerned with the eradication of Canaanite clothing fashions, pottery styles, music, diet, and other types of particular cultural preferences. But it was deeply concerned with the eradication of the Canaanite religion: its gods/idols, altars, rituals, divinatory practices, uses of magic, and so on.[17]

Does the Bible Claim That God Commanded Extermination of Virtually Everyone in Canaan?

Not only are the inhabitants of Canaan not typically portrayed as innocent, but the Bible does not unequivocally state that God commanded Israel to exterminate every single Canaanite man, woman, and child in the Promised Land. The dominant language used in Scripture is not of extermination but of “driving out” and “thrusting out” the Canaanites (cp. Exod 23:28; Lev 18:24; Num 33:52; Deut 6:19; 7:1; 9:4; 18:12; Josh 10:28, 30, 32, 35, 37, 39; 11:11, 14).[18] The Israelites were to “dispossess” the Canaanites (Num 21:32; Deut 9:1; 11:23; 18:14; 19:1). “Driving out” or “dispossessing” is different from “wiping out” or “destroying.” If you state that you had driven an intruder from your house, no one would assume the intruder was dead in your living room. Similarly, if you say you had killed an intruder, one would not normally think this meant the intruder had been “driven out.” The Hebrew text confirms this; the same language of “driving out” and “casting out” is used elsewhere to refer to Adam and Eve being “driven” from Eden (Gen 3:24), Cain being “driven” into the wilderness (Gen 4:14), and David being “driven out” by Saul (1 Sam 26:19). All are cases where the meaning precludes something being literally exterminated.

This observation is reinforced by the fact that the biblical language of the Canaanites’ destruction is identical to that of Judah’s destruction in the Babylonian exile—clearly not utter annihilation. Indeed, God threatened to “vomit” out Israel from the land just as he had vomited out the Canaanites (Lev 18:25, 28; 20:22). In the context of the Babylonian invasion and Judah’s exile (sixth-century BC), God said he would “lay waste the towns of Judah so no one can live there” (Jer 9:11 NIV). Indeed, God said, “I will completely destroy them and make them an object of horror and scorn, and an everlasting ruin” (Jer 25:9 NIV); note that this is the same verb (haram) as used of “utterly destroying” the Canaanites. God threatened to “stretch out My hand against you and destroy you” (Jer 15:6 NKJV; cp. Ezek 5:16)—to bring “disaster” against Judah (Jer 6:19). However, the biblical text suggests that while Judah’s political and religious structures were ruined or disabled, and that Judahites died in the conflict, the “urban elite” were deported to Babylon while many “poor of the land” remained behind.[19] The language of destruction referred primarily to dispossession.

The same language is used in Isaiah where God says, “I will consign Jacob to destruction [herem] and Israel to scorn” (Isa 43:28 NIV). Then in the very next verse (44:1), God tells “Jacob” whom he has “chosen” that he will restore his people and bring them out of exile under a new covenant in which he pours out his Spirit upon them.

A final point about dispossession: In the ancient Near East, national identity was connected to both a people’s land and the deity they worshipped. So, for example, the Moabites lived south-east of the Jordan; their deity Chemosh ruled from there. In Canaan, Baal was the territorial deity. In the act of destroying Canaanite idols and altars and driving out the Canaanites, this “breaks the ideological nexus between deity-people-land,”[20] We see this deity-nation-land connection in passages such as Isaiah 36:18–20, where the Assyrian emissary Rabshakeh taunts Jerusalem’s king Hezekiah and his dignitaries: “Has any one of the gods of the nations delivered his land from the power of the king of Assyria?” Yahweh, he claims, will not help Judah from Assyria’s attack, so the people and land would be defeated. Likewise, Rahab’s speech to the spies assumes this deity-nation-land connection. Terror filled the Canaanites because Israel’s God defeated nations such as Egypt and the Amorite kings Sihon and Og. Thus, Heath Thomas observes: “As the Canaanites were displaced and defeated, their gods were defeated and shown to be impotent and false,” and he adds that, interestingly, “Israel’s God, Yahweh, is the only God in the ancient Near East who is able to leave his land and people and then return to both in his own power (see Ezek 8–11; 43:1–9).”[21] In sum, Israel’s infiltration into Canaan, the dispersion of the Canaanites, and the destruction of Canaanite religious objects would reveal Yahweh’s superiority over Baal and other Canaanite deities.

What about Joshua 7–12?

What then are we to make of the passages that Bradley cites—the references in Joshua 6–12 which record that Joshua “utterly destroyed everything in the city, both man and woman, young and old”; that “he utterly destroyed every person who was in it,” “he left no survivor,” and “there was no one left who breathed”? Bradley is correct that if these chapters are read in isolation from the rest of the narrative, and in a straightforward literal way, they appear to affirm that Israel slaughtered every inhabitant of the land of Canaan. There are, however, good reasons why these passages should not be read in a straightforward literal way.

Some of these reasons have been recently put forward forcefully by Nicholas Wolterstorff. He provides two lines of argument for rejecting the kind of literalistic reading on which Bradley relies.

Wolterstorff’s Argument against Literalism

Wolterstorff’s first line of argument is that “a careful reading of the text in its literary context makes it implausible to interpret it as claiming that Yahweh ordered extermination.”[22] Wolterstorff begins by noting that “the text of Joshua as we have it today was intended as a component in the larger sequence consisting of Deuteronomy, Joshua, Judges, 1 and 2 Samuel, and 1 and 2 Kings.” For this reason we should interpret the book of Joshua as a “component within this larger sequence—in particular, that we interpret it as preceded by Deuteronomy and succeeded by Judges.”[23] When one reads it this way, certain features of the narrative become apparent.

One is that the passages Bradley cites are in obvious tension with what is affirmed elsewhere in the narrative. Chapters 7–11 state that Joshua went through the cities of southern and northern Canaan and “put all the inhabitants to the sword,” left “no survivors,” and “destroyed everything that breathed” in “the entire land.” Alongside these general claims, the text identifies several specific places and cities where Joshua “put all the inhabitants to the sword” and “left no survivors.” These include Hebron (Josh 10:36–37), Debir (Josh 10:38), the hill country, the Negev, and the western foothills (Josh 10:40). The section finishes in this manner: “So Joshua took the entire land, in keeping with all that the LORD had told Moses. Joshua then gave it as an inheritance to Israel according to their tribal allotments. After this, the land had rest from war” (Josh 11:23).

However, when the text turns to giving an account of these tribal divisions only a chapter or so later, God said, “You have become old, getting on in years, but a great deal of the land remains to be possessed” (Josh 13:1). Then, in the next five chapters, it is stressed repeatedly that the land was not yet conquered, and the Canaanites were, in fact, not literally wiped out. Repeatedly, the author affirms that the very same regions were still occupied by the Canaanites who remained heavily armed and deeply entrenched in the cities. This is then followed by the opening chapters of Judges, which affirm eight times in a single chapter that the Israelites had failed to conquer the land or the cities and had failed to drive the inhabitants out. The Canaanites are said to be occupying the Negev (1:9), in the hill country (Judg 1:9), in Debir (Judg 1:11), in Hebron (Judg 1:10), and in the western foothills (Judg 1:9)—often in significant numbers and strength. It finishes with the angel of the Lord at Bokim rebuking them for failing to drive the inhabitants out (Judg 2:1–5).[24] If one reads the whole narrative as a sequence, these are not subtle contrasts. They are, in Wolterstorff’s words, “flamboyant.” It is unlikely that an intelligent redactor would have missed something this blatant. Wolterstorff concludes:

Those whose occupation it is to try to determine the origins of these writings will suggest that the editors had contradictory records, oral traditions, and so forth to work with. No doubt this is correct. But those who edited the final version of these writings into one sequence were not mindless; they could see, as well as you and I can see, the tensions and contradictions—surface or real—that I have pointed to. So what is going on?[25]

Wolterstorff’s point is that regardless of what sources or strata of tradition are alleged to be behind the final form of Joshua, those who edited the final version of these writings into one sequence would have been well aware of the obvious tensions in the passages mentioned. Moreover, they were not mindless or stupid. Consequently, it is unlikely that those who authorized the final form of Joshua were using the text to assert literally that Joshua carried out an extermination of all the inhabitants of Canaan at God’s command. Something else is going on.

It may be objected that Wolterstorff’s argument here posits a false dichotomy: Either a consistent composite text or a stupid editor. However, that the editor must be intending to present a perfectly consistent narrative (literally or figuratively or a combination of both) is an assumption that is unwarranted by what is known about ancient editors.[26] Ancient editors were not bothered by these sorts of contradictions the way modern people are. Their literary modus operandi—which included political or aesthetic considerations—was to faithfully preserve the source material despite its obviously contradictory nature when taken literally.

This objection misconstrues Wolterstorff’s argument. He does not contend that an intelligent editor would not compose an inconsistent text. Even today, an intelligent person might do this for various reasons: an editor of a collected works for example might juxtapose several essays with quite different perspectives in a single volume to introduce readers to the main positions on a topic, or an author might preserve two sides of an important debate with the intention of convincing readers that a particular side had the better argument.[27] However, in none of these contexts is the editor affirming that the different perspectives are all correct. What Wolterstorff contends is that an intelligent person would not construct such a narrative and use it to affirm both that Joshua exterminated every single person in Canaan and also that large numbers of people in Canaan were not killed. Hence it is not sensible to read the text this way.

With this clarification in place, let’s ask what would need to be the case for Wolterstorff’s argument to be, in fact, postulating a false dichotomy. A false dichotomy occurs when a person postulates two options as mutually exclusive and exhaustive when in fact there is a third option. Hence, to contend that Wolterstorff’s argument posits a false dichotomy, the objector must maintain that there is a viable third option where the authors of the final form use the text to affirm both that Joshua literally killed everyone in the region and to affirm that he did not kill everyone in the region. Moreover, the objector must maintain that the authors of the text maintained this contradiction intelligently. That is a difficult task.

Nor do the reasons given overcome these difficulties. Suppose those who authorized the final form recognized the obvious contradictions in the text but did not care because they were not interested in harmonization. Nevertheless, they preserved their source material. This would suggest that in compiling the text they were not asserting that what it records—both that there were no survivors and that there were many survivors—literally occurred. Hence, it is a mistake for people such as Bradley to claim they did. None of these considerations suggests that, when they preserved the material in this way, they were using the texts to affirm that Joshua killed everyone and also that he did not.

Nor are appeals to ancient standards of accuracy or aesthetics relevant in this context. Whatever differences they had from us, it is clear that ancient Near Easterners knew that if an enemy wiped out their village and killed every last man and woman, then the people in that village were dead. It is exceedingly implausible that they would think it sensible to affirm otherwise.[28]

Consequently, when the passages Bradley cites are read in context, it is implausible that those who authorized the final form of Joshua were using the text to assert that Joshua exterminated virtually every man, woman, and child in Canaan at God’s command.

Wolterstorff’s Argument for Hagiographic Hyperbole

What then is going on? This brings us to Wolterstorff’s second line of argument. He suggests:

[T]he Book of Joshua has to be read as a theologically oriented narration, stylized and hyperbolic at important points, of Israel’s early skirmishes in the Promised Land, with the story of these battles being framed by descriptions of two great ritualized events. The story as a whole celebrates Joshua as the great leader of his people, faithful to Yahweh, worthy successor of Moses. If we strip the word “hagiography” of its negative connotations, we can call it a hagiographic[29] account of Joshua’s exploits. The book is not to be read as claiming that Joshua conquered the entire Promised Land, nor is it to be read as claiming that Joshua exterminated with the edge of the sword the entire population of all the cities on the command of Yahweh to do so. The candor of the opening chapter of Judges, and of Yahweh’s declaration to Joshua in his old age that “very much of the land still remains to be possessed,” are closer to a literal statement of how things actually went.[30]

Wolterstorff cites various literary tropes in the text to support this. While Judges reads as “down to earth history,” a careful reading of Joshua reveals it to be full of ritualistic, stylized, accounts, as well as formulaic language. In a footnote he notes the study of Lawson Younger. In a comprehensive comparative study of ancient Near Eastern conquest accounts, Younger documents that Joshua employs the same stylistic, rhetorical, and literary conventions of other war reports of the same period.[31] Such accounts appear to be broadly hagiographic in nature. Younger also notes that such accounts are “highly figurative”[32] and utilize what he calls a “transmission code”: a common, frequently stylized, stereotyped, and often hyperbolic way of recording history.

What is noteworthy is the hyperbolic nature of such accounts. They hyperbolically describe victories in terms of gods reigning meteors or hailstones down on the foe,[33] series of battles or a whole campaign taking place in one day, the numbers of armies and enemy causalities are rhetorically exaggerated, and, most importantly, victories are often described hyperbolically in terms of total conquest or complete annihilation and destruction of the enemy.

Some examples will illustrate this. In the Merneptah Stele, the Egyptian Pharaoh Merneptah describes a skirmish with Israel in which his armies prevailed, hyperbolically, in terms of the total annihilation of Israel. Similarly, The Bulletin of Ramses II, a historical narrative of Egyptian military campaigns in Syria, narrates Egypt’s considerably less than decisive victory at the battle of Kadesh with the rhetoric, “His majesty slew the entire force of the wretched foe from Hatti, together with his great chiefs and all his brothers, as well as all the chiefs of all the countries that had come with him.” Mesha of Moab records his successful casting off of vassal status as “Israel is destroyed forever.” The examples could be multiplied, but the point is that such accounts are hyperbolic and not intended to be taken as literal descriptions of what occurred.[34]

Several objections to Wolterstorff’s hagiographic hyperbolic reading of Joshua have been raised. Here we will focus on four.

Judges 20–21. The first is an appeal to Judges 20–21. In this story the allied tribes of Israel attack armies from the tribe of Benjamin. After several defeats, they prevail and a small number of Benjamite soldiers escape. After the battle, the allied forces proceeded to kill every last woman and child in the land of Benjamin. This shocking story occurs as one of many illustrations of Israel’s moral degeneration: “In those days there was no king in Israel; everyone did whatever he wanted” (Judg 21:25; 17:6; 18:1; 19:1).[35] What is relevant for our purposes is that this account does not appear to be hyperbolic. After the massacre, the Israelites faced a problem: they wanted to show mercy on the tribe of Benjamin. However, only the few hundred soldiers who escaped are left, all their wives and children have been killed. The narrative consequently proceeds on the assumption that this is not hyperbole.

Prima facie, it is difficult to see an objection to Wolterstorff here. Wolterstorff argues that the accounts of massacre in Joshua are hyperbolic. This objection claims that Judges 20–21 is not hyperbolic. As Wolterstorff was not talking about Judges, it is difficult to see how this calls his conclusion into question. Those who make this argument however, have a rejoinder. They point out that Judges 20–21 uses similar language to Joshua. Seeing that the passage uses the same language as Joshua, and the account is clearly not hyperbolic in Judges, it cannot be hyperbolic in Joshua.

But this objection fails to understand that the same language, even the same phrase, can have different senses, whether hyperbolic or literal, depending on the context. The very nature of hyperbole involves taking language which can be literal in certain contexts and using the same language in a non-literal way. Consider an obvious example: your son throws mud on your newly washed car. Looking at the mess, you angrily say to yourself, I am going to kill that kid! In this context, a sensible and charitable interpretation would understand that what you said was hyperbolic. Suppose, however, that a Mafia boss, referring to a teenager who has refused to pay protection money, states, “I am going to kill that kid!” In that instance we would take it literally in spite of the fact that the same phrase is used nonliterally in other contexts. So, the fact that a phrase is used literally in Judges 20–21, by itself, does not provide grounds for thinking it is used that way in Joshua. What matters is the context in which it is uttered.

When one turns to context, however, it is clear that this argument is unsuccessful. The reason the objector contends that the account in Judges 20–21 is not hyperbolic is because the account is proceeded by a narrative which assumes, and only makes sense, if the massacre actually happened. This context is the very opposite to that which we find in Joshua. In Joshua, the accounts of wiping out all the inhabitants incorporate narratives which assume the inhabitants were not wiped out but exist in large numbers, an assumption that continues into the book of Judges.

Rahab. A second objection to Wolterstorff’s hyperbolic reading appeals to the story of Rahab in Joshua chapter 6. In chapter 5, Joshua encountered an angel who identifies himself as the commander of the Lord’s army. When Joshua asks the angel if he is on Israel’s side or the side of the Canaanites, the response is that the angel is not on either side. He is on the side of the Lord. After this (chap. 6), Rahab, a Canaanite woman who shows faith in God, is saved from destruction. But then (chap. 7) Achan, an Israelite who disobeys, is destroyed. The juxtaposing of these episodes and the similar language leads many commentators to conclude that the author here is making an explicit point: it is faithfulness to God’s commands, and not one’s ethnicity that makes one a true Israelite. Moreover, it is disobedience, not ethnicity, that makes one subject to destruction.

How does this create a problem for Wolterstorff’s hyperbolic reading? The objector suggests that once one sees the point being made, the total destruction of every single Canaanite is essential to the story. If Israel did not kill absolutely every last woman and child in Jericho except for Rahab and her family, then Rahab’s survival could have been explained in ways other than as a reward for her loyalty to God. The author, then, must be asserting literal extermination. He is not offering a hyperbolic or hagiographic account of the events in question.

This conclusion, however, does not follow. First, consider that the suggestion is that unless the author asserts, literally, that everyone was killed, we cannot know Rahab was spared as a reward. This is dubious. Suppose I am given a reward of $5,000 for assisting the police with an investigation. The same day another person wins $5,000 in the lottery. Does the fact that someone else got the same amount of money I got undermine the fact that I got a reward? Would it mean that those who saw me get the reward are suddenly unable to know I did because it could have been luck? Obviously not! Similarly, if the text tells us that Rahab was spared because of her fidelity to God, then we know that she was spared for that reason because the author has told us. Someone else being spared out of luck or any other reason makes no difference.

Second, if the point of the story is that it is disobedience, not ethnicity, that makes one subject to destruction, then surely it is the literalistic reading that contradicts the point of the story not the hyperbolic reading. Taken literally, Joshua 6–11 affirms that God commanded that everyone of a particular ethnicity be killed. He commanded the “total destruction” of the Canaanites not just in Jericho but in the entire land. Such a command is not essential to the point of the story that these critics elucidate. It contradicts the point of the story.[36]

1 Samuel 15. William Lane Craig contends that Wolterstorff’s reading does not “do justice to the biblical text, which seems to say that if the Israelite soldiers were to encounter Canaanite women and children, they should kill them (cf. Samuel’s rebuke of Saul in 1 Sam 15:10–16).”[37]

Craig appeals to the account of Saul exterminating the Amalekites in 1 Samuel 15. While Wolterstorff’s argument relates to Joshua, he applies the same reading to this passage. Like the Joshua accounts, the account in 1 Samuel 15 is part of a broader literary context with the rest of Samuel and the other canonical books, such as 2 Samuel and the book of Chronicles. When one reads the whole sequence, the same tensions one sees in Joshua are apparent: while 1 Samuel 15 describes Saul, at God’s command, exterminating the Amalekites, later passages in Samuel and Chronicles proceed on the assumption that this never literally happened.

The key passage is God’s command to Samuel to “strike [nakah] Amalek and utterly destroy [haram] all that he has, and do not spare [hamal] him; but put to death both man and woman, child and infant, ox and sheep, camel and donkey” (1 Sam 15:3 NASB). The text goes on to explicitly state that the Amalekites were all wiped out:

So Saul defeated [nakah] the Amalekites, from Havilah as you go to Shur, which is east of Egypt. He captured Agag the king of the Amalekites alive, and utterly destroyed [haram] all the people with the edge of the sword. But Saul and the people spared [hamal] Agag and the best of the sheep, the oxen, the fatlings, the lambs, and all that was good, and were not willing to destroy them utterly; but everything despised and worthless, that they utterly destroyed. (1 Sam 15:7–9 NASB)

A few verses later (15:33), the text records that Agag, the sole survivor, was executed. At face value this passage states that all the Amalekites were killed and all their livestock were either destroyed or taken as plunder to be sacrificed to God at Gilgal.[38]

Now the language of “defeated” (or struck), “utterly destroyed,” and the reference to “sparing” and to livestock parallel the language of the command in 15:3. Given this, it seems implausible to suggest that we ought to interpret the command in verse 3 as literal but the fulfilment, just four verses later, as hyperbolic; the text requires that the command and fulfilment be read in the same sense.

However, when one reads this passage as part of a single narrative, it becomes untenable to think that those who edited these works into the final sequence were affirming that God literally commanded Saul to exterminate the Amalekites. This is because the following narrative emphatically states that the Amalekites were not wiped out. This is apparent in 1 Samuel 27:8–9 wherein David invaded a territory full of Amalekites:

David and his men went up and raided the Geshurites, the Girzites, and the Amalekites. From ancient times they had been the inhabitants of the region through Shur as far as the land of Egypt. Whenever David attacked the land, he did not leave a single person alive, either man or woman, but he took flocks, herds, donkeys, camels, and clothing. Then he came back to Achish.

Not only does this affirm the continued existence of the Amalekites, but the reference to Egypt and Shur shows that they existed in the very same area that Saul “utterly destroyed every single one of them” in the previous passages. Moreover, David took sheep and cattle as plunder. Again, livestock was another of the things that Saul supposedly eradicated.

After the text has told us that Saul “utterly destroyed all the people,” including King Agag, and despite the text telling us that when David attacked an area (the very same areas as Saul) he did “not leave a single person alive,” we read three chapters later that an Amalekite army attacked Ziklag (1 Sam 30:1)! David pursued this army, fought a long battle with them, and 400 Amalekites fled on horseback (1 Sam 30:7–17)! If Saul is supposed to have destroyed “every single one of them,” whence come these Amalekites?

But this is not the extent of such examples. In 2 Samuel 1:8, an Amalekite took credit for killing Saul, but didn’t Saul “utterly destroy all the people”? In 1 Chronicles 4:43 Amalekites were still around in battle-ready numbers during the reign of Hezekiah, a king who reigned after Saul and David.

Read literally the narrative affirms both that the Amalekites were and were not totally wiped out. This apparent contradiction in the Samuel narrative is not subtle. Unless we implausibly suppose that they were mindless or stupid, those who put these books into a single narrative would have been well aware of such blatant contradictions. If we read 1 Samuel 15 in the broader context of the rest of 1 Samuel, and also alongside other canonical books such as 2 Samuel and the book of Chronicles, then the authors of the final form cannot be sensibly claiming that 1 Samuel 15, 1 Samuel 27, 1 Samuel 30, and 1 Chronicles 4 are all literally true accounts of battles with the Amalekites.

Furthermore, while David’s battle texts appear to be relatively matter-of-fact records, 1 Samuel 15 appears to be highly hyperbolic and contains obvious rhetorical exaggeration. If we take the biblical numbers as most Bible translations traditionally render them, then Saul’s army was said to include 210,000 men, which would make it larger than any army known at this time in antiquity. Moreover, we are told that Saul struck the Amalekites from Havila to Shur. Shur is on the edge of Egypt, and Havila is in Saudi Arabia. This is an absurdly large battle field! “It’s impossible to imagine the battle actually traversed the enormous distance from Arabia almost to Egypt.”[39] On the other hand, as Daniel Fouts notes, exaggerated numbers are common forms of hyperbole in ancient Near Eastern battle accounts.[40] On the other hand, Colin Humphreys has argued that there is some confusion on how the term eleph (“thousand,” “military division,” or “unit”) is to be understood, and he attempts to make sense of its usage in the Old Testament.[41]

At any rate, 1 Samuel 15’s use of the language of “utterly destroying [haram]” populations “with the sword” is the same phraseology as that which is repeatedly used hyperbolically in Joshua. This language also appears to have been used hyperbolically in 1 Chronicles 4. First Chronicles 4:41 states that “they attacked [nakah]” and “utterly destroyed them [haram]” (NKJV). But only a few verses later, we read that the survivors fled to Amalek where they were later all “destroyed [nakah]” a second time (1 Chron 4:43)! Likewise, the language of killing all inhabitants with the sword is also used hyperbolically in Judges: “after Judah puts Jerusalem to the sword . . . its occupants are still living there ‘to this day’ (Judg 1:8, 21).”[42] Similar language is used hyperbolically in the prophetic writings.[43] Compare, for example, the language of God’s command to “not spare” the Amalekites, to “put to death both man and woman, child and infant, ox and sheep, camel and donkey” (NASB) with the account of Judah’s defeat by the Babylonians in 2 Chronicles 36:16–17 (NIV):

But they mocked God’s messengers, despised his words and scoffed at his prophets until the wrath of the LORD was aroused against his people and there was no remedy. He brought up against them the king of the Babylonians, who killed their young men with the sword in the sanctuary, and did not spare young men or young women, the elderly or the infirm. God gave them all into the hands of Nebuchadnezzar.

This was written to a post-exilic audience who knew full well that not every one of the Judahites had been killed. They, as the descendants of the survivors, knew that Judah had been exiled and was later restored under Cyrus—a fact pointed out only a few verses later (cf. 2 Chr 36:20–23).

So, we see in 1 Samuel that the author(s) juxtaposed several accounts. One tells us that Saul wiped out all the Amalekites at God’s command, using obvious rhetorical exaggeration and language known to be hyperbolic. The other, presented in fairly realistic terms, tells us that the Amalekites continued to live in the land as a military threat. Assuming the author wasn’t mindless or stupid, we are at least owed an argument as to why the literal reading should be preferred in this context.

Craig’s objection suggests an argument: “Samuel’s rebuke of Saul in 1 Samuel 15.10–16” suggests that Saul is condemned by Samuel for not “following God’s instructions.”[44] Now, as noted above, the text tells us that Saul did carry out God’s instruction to kill all the Amalekites. It was livestock, not humans, which were initially spared. Saul is rebuked for taking sheep as spoil. Nevertheless, one could argue that in Samuel’s amplification of his rebuke of Saul, he is rebuked for not taking the command literally; see the immediately preceding verses:

Samuel continued, “Although you once considered yourself unimportant, have you not become the leader of the tribes of Israel? The LORD anointed you king over Israel and then sent you on a mission and said: ‘Go and completely destroy the sinful Amalekites. Fight against them until you have annihilated them.’ So why didn’t you obey the LORD? Why did you rush on the plunder and do what was evil in the LORD’s sight?” (1 Sam. 15:17–19)

Craig appears to be arguing against a hyperbolic reading of 1 Samuel on the grounds that such a reading appears to contradict part of the Samuel narrative; he seems to suggest that a literal reading coheres better with this part. We would argue that the crucial issue is whether the hyperbolic interpretation is more plausible than the literal one. Even if Craig is correct about Samuel’s rebuke, it does not follow that a literal reading is more plausible than a hyperbolic one. As argued, a literal reading creates incoherencies in the narrative; it puts the whole account of 1 Samuel 15 in contradiction with the rest of the 1 Samuel narrative, particularly 1 Samuel 27–30. It also puts the account in contradiction with the recounting of Saul’s death in 2 Samuel 1 and the narrative of 1 Chronicles 4.

It is difficult to believe the author(s) of the final form, who were meticulous in avoiding even a minor incoherence in 1 Samuel 15:17–19, were oblivious to the multiple obvious contradictions highlighted above. It is far more plausible to suppose that the author was willing to allow some minor inconsistencies in that part of the narrative which was not supposed to be taken as literally true than it is to suppose that he intended to affirm a highly contradictory literal reading. The conclusion one should draw is that these war narratives are highly hyperbolic accounts of victory that functioned rhetorically rather than as a precise historical record that was taken as literal truth. Elsewhere in these texts, the authors quite candidly affirm they are not literally true accounts.

The Midianites. Another apparent “genocide” text is Numbers 31, in which the Israelites “waged war against Midian, as the LORD had commanded Moses, and killed every male” (v. 7). Later, Moses commanded them to “kill all the male children and kill every woman who has had sexual relations with a man, but keep alive for yourselves all the young females who have not had sexual relations” (vv. 17–18). Are we to assume that apart from the surviving female virgins, every last Midianite was killed? A closer literary look reveals something similar to the Canaanite and Amalekite passages discussed above—and looks nothing like total slaughter.

When we look beyond Numbers 31 to the broader literary and canonical context and take into account narratives presented elsewhere in this context, we see a much different picture. While we read in Numbers 31:7 that the Israelites “killed every male,” we continue reading in the broader canonical context that this did not literally happen at all. In Judges 6 and 7, which is literarily connected to the Hexateuch (the Pentateuch and Joshua), the Midianites invaded Israel in numbers said to be “like a great swarm of locusts. They and their camels were without number” (Judg 6:5). These swarms of Midianites caused Israel to flee to the “mountains, caves, and strongholds” (Judg 6:2). Just how decimated were the Midianites in Numbers 31? Not very. Once more we encounter a highly exaggerated warfare account: whereas, on the one hand we are told that no one remained alive, we see ample evidence of survivors in robust numbers on the other. “Annihilating” or “utterly destroying” looks more like merely “defeating” or “disabling.”[45]

Rhetorical Function and Ideology. A final objection argues that people like Wolterstorff who appeal to Lawson Younger’s study misunderstand it. One conclusion Younger draws from his study is that the transmission code employed in Joshua 9–11 reflects the same imperialistic ideology as other ancient Near Eastern conquest accounts. This ideology means that “victory must be described in black and white terms since there is only a ‘them’ vs. ‘us’ relationship.”[46] The point of such rhetoric, however, is to inspire fear and obedience in those subjects who hear it.[47] If the reader just heard such rhetoric as exaggeration, then the rhetoric would not have had the effect it was intended to have.

This inference is mistaken, firstly, because it is false that hyperbolic rhetoric must be taken literally in order to inspire fear and obedience. Suppose a boxer before a boxing match states that he is going to murder his opponent and make his children orphans. This sort of rhetoric is designed to inspire fear and intimidate. Does it follow that it is intended to be taken literally? Similarly, school bullies tell potential victims that if they “nark,” the bullies will “kill them and smash their heads in.” Do the victims have to believe they will literally be killed and have their heads actually smashed in order to get the message? Secondly, Younger makes it clear that the accounts in question were hyperbolic. He states that the description of victory in “black and white terms” is an example of the “figurative aspect” of such accounts and part of the “extensive use of hyperbole.”[48]

The Implications of Wolterstorff’s Argument

Wolterstorff draws two conclusions from his hagiographic/hyperbolic reading of Joshua. First, Joshua’s “utter destruction” of the Canaanites is exactly what “Moses the servant of the LORD had commanded”:

- “Joshua captured all these kings and their cities and struck them down with the sword. He completely destroyed them, as Moses the LORD’s servant had commanded” (Josh 11:12).

- “The Israelites plundered all the spoils and cattle of these cities for themselves. But they struck down every person with the sword until they had annihilated them, leaving no one alive. Just as the LORD had commanded His servant Moses, Moses commanded Joshua. That is what Joshua did, leaving nothing undone of all that the LORD had commanded Moses” (Josh 11:14–15).

- “. . . so that they would . . . be completely destroyed without mercy, and be annihilated, just as the LORD had commanded Moses” (Josh 11:20).

Joshua’s comprehensive language echoes Moses’ sweeping commands to “consume” and “utterly destroy” the Canaanites, to not “leave alive anything that breathes.”[49] Scripture clearly indicates that Joshua fulfilled Moses’ charge to him. So if Joshua did just as Moses commanded and if Joshua’s described destruction was really massive hyperbole common in ancient Near Eastern warfare language and familiar to Moses, then clearly Moses himself did not intend a literal, comprehensive Canaanite destruction.[50]

Second, because the accounts are highly hyperbolic, one cannot draw the conclusion that the author uses them to assert that the Israelites were literally commanded to exterminate every man, woman, and child in Canaan.

So what was the writer asserting—assuming he did not intend it as pure fiction, which I very much doubt? Not easy to tell. When a high-school basketball player says his team slaughtered the other team last night he’s not asserting, literally now, that they slaughtered the other team. What is he asserting? Not easy to tell. That they scored a decisive victory? Maybe, but suppose they barely eked out a win. Was he lying? Maybe not. Maybe he was speaking with a wink of the eye hyperbole. High school kids do.[51]

In the same way, when one realizes that Joshua is hagiographic and highly hyperbolic in its narration of what occurred, the best one can conclude from the accounts of “killing everyone that breathed” is that

Israel scored a decisive victory and once you recognize the presence of hyperbole it is not even clear how decisive the victories were. Joshua did not conquer all the cities in the land, nor did he slaughter all the inhabitants in the cities that he did conquer. The book of Joshua does not say that he did.[52]

Conclusion

When we bring together the threads of the above discussion, several things are evident. First, God does not, in the Bible, command us to engage in acts that violate P1. The Bible records a command to a specific people for a specific time, not a general command to all people. Second, it portrays the Canaanites as guilty of serious crimes and suggests that people who turned from these crimes could be saved. Third, the command is typically phrased, not in terms of extermination, but in terms of “driving out” the occupants. Fourth, while some accounts talk of “putting all inhabitants to death with the sword” and “leaving alive nothing that breathes,” the evidence suggests that these are highly hyperbolic hagiographic accounts and that those who authorized the text were not asserting that this language is literally true. Clearly, a biblical theist can reject (4) of Bradley’s argument. That is, she rightly rejects the conclusion that God commands us to mercilessly kill men, women, and children who have committed no serious wrong.

Still, one might object that God does command the Israelites to drive the Canaanites out with force, and that, even granting the general wickedness of the Canaanites and the presence of extensive hyperbole, it seems implausible that in such battles no innocent people were killed—or that every single innocent person escaped destruction. This brings us to our next question: “Can the biblical theist reject (3)?” Proposition (3) states: “It is morally impermissible for anyone to commit acts that violate principle P1”—namely, that “it is morally wrong to deliberately and mercilessly slaughter men, women, and children who are innocent of any serious wrongdoing.”

Is It Always Wrong to Kill Innocent People?

Bradley suggests a biblical theist cannot reject (3). To do so

would be to ally oneself with moral monsters like Genghis Khan, Hitler, Stalin, and Pol Pot. It would be to abandon all pretense to a belief in objective moral values. The denial of (3), then, would be tantamount to an embrace of moral nihilism. And no theist who believes in the Ten Commandments or the Sermon on the Mount could assent to that.[53]

Bradley claims that denying (3) has two problematic implications. First, denying (3) entails nihilism: it entails that no action is morally wrong. Second, denying (3) entails that the atrocities of Genghis Khan, Hitler, Stalin, and Pol Pot were not morally wrong. Both stances are incompatible with the moral teachings of Scripture, and hence with what a biblical theist is committed to affirm.

William Lane Craig’s Argument

William Lane Craig has provided a straightforward way that a biblical theist can deny P1 without embracing nihilism. Bradley’s argument relies on the claim that P1 is a “universal principle” in the sense of “being exception-less—of holding, that is, for all persons, places, and times.” However, Craig argues that technically P1 is not an exceptionless principle. Reflecting on God’s command to Abraham to sacrifice Isaac, Craig argues that in this highly unusual case, God, for the sake of some greater good, exempted Abraham from a moral principle that otherwise would be binding on him.[54]

Craig’s argument for this conclusion consists of three premises.[55]

(i) “Our moral duties are constituted by the commands of a loving and just God.”[56] (Craig here proposes a divine command theory of ethics, whose thesis is analogous to the way water is constituted by H20.)

(ii) A loving and just God, in normal circumstances, prohibits killing the innocent.

(iii) In very unusual circumstances in the past, God commanded people to kill the innocent for the sake of some greater good.

These three claims entail that (3) is false. Propositions (i) and (ii) entail that killing the innocent is normally wrong. However, (i) and (iii) entail that it was not wrong, in those highly unusual situations, where a loving and just God had morally sufficient reasons and valuable ends in mind when commanding killing in these instances. Hence, strictly speaking, P1 does not hold for all persons, places, and times.

Craig’s argument suggests a way biblical theists can reject (3) without committing to either of the problematic implications that Bradley points to. Craig’s position does not entail that no action is morally wrong. Both (i) and (ii) entail that with the exception of a few highly unusual cases, killing of the innocent is wrong. Nor does Craig’s position commit a biblical theist to endorsing the atrocities of Genghis Khan, Hitler, Stalin, and Pol Pot. This would follow only if the biblical theist believes that Hitler, Stalin, and Genghis Khan were commanded by God to do what they did. However, nothing about Craig’s position commits a biblical theist to this claim. Craig maintains that cases where God commands this are highly unusual past occurrences. He believes they occurred only because there is compelling Scriptural evidence they did. There is no comparable evidence that Hitler or Stalin received such a command, and in the absence of such evidence, “we should be highly skeptical of someone who says, ‘God has commanded me to kill so and so!’”[57] In fact, a biblical Christian may have theological reasons for thinking that such commands would not occur outside of the extremely unusual events recorded in salvation history.[58] Therefore, adopting this view, one could even accept that killing the innocent is, for practical purposes, absolutely wrong.

The success of Craig’s position depends on whether a biblical theist can rationally accept (i), (ii), and (iii). The claim that a biblical Christian can accept (ii) seems uncontroversial. The biblical theist already accepts that a loving and just God exists, and it is obvious that such a God would, in normal circumstances, prohibit killing the innocent. The question, then, is whether a biblical theist can accept (i) and (iii).

Standard Objections to Divine Command Ethics

Craig’s argument relies on a divine command theory of ethics. Many, however, contend that such theories are indefensible for a variety of reasons. Here we will focus on one. Divine command theories are said to suffer a debilitating problem: they make morality arbitrary; anything at all could be deemed “right” as long as God commanded it—even raping or torturing other people for fun. This objection assumes that it is possible that God could command atrocious, intrinsically evil acts. However, this assumption goes beyond being dubious to being obviously false. We need to remember that we are not talking about right or wrong as being based on the commands of just anyone. We are talking about God, who is defined by Bradley as “omnipotent, omniscient, and morally perfect.”[59] A necessarily good being is incapable of issuing such commands.

So, as the terms are defined, the claim that it is possible for God to command people to torture others for fun is true only if it is possible for a morally perfect person to command such an atrocious thing. But this is analytically impossible! The very reason critics cite examples such as torturing people for fun is because these actions are paradigms of conduct that no morally good person could ever entertain or endorse.

One rejoinder to this response is that if some action is wrong because God prohibits it, then God cannot be said to be good in any meaningful sense. The claim “God is good” turns into no more than the claim that God obeys his own commands. If this is so, can God be said to have any duties at all?

The suggestion that if God has no duties, then he cannot be said to be good in any meaningful sense, has a grain of truth to it. If we are going to understand God’s goodness in terms of God having duties that he consistently fulfils, then a divine command theory cannot account for God’s goodness. However, why must the phrase “God is good” be understood in terms of God having duties?

Critics commonly misconstrue divine command theory because they confuse “morality” and “goodness,”[60] and many theologians and philosophers have suggested an alternative, namely, that God’s goodness should be understood in terms of God having certain character traits. To claim God is good is to claim that he is truthful, benevolent, loving, gracious, merciful. He is opposed to certain actions such as murder, rape, torturing people for fun, and so on. Now, even if God does not have duties, it does not follow that he cannot have character traits such as these. It is true that God is not under any obligation to love others or to tell the truth or what have you, but that does not mean he cannot love others or tell the truth. While God does not have to have a duty to do something in order to do it, God’s intrinsic goodness of character means that he does act in these ways despite not being obligated or required to do so.[61]

So the most common criticism of a divine command theory fails. We contend that the other objections raised in the literature fare no better.[62]

Robert Adams’s Objection: Can One Coherently Claim That God Commands a Violation of P1?

The real question about Craig’s argument involves his premise (iii). To escape the objection that a divine command theory makes morality arbitrary, the divine command theorist must appeal to the fact that God is good: he possesses certain virtues such as being loving, just, truthful, benevolent, gracious, merciful, and so on. God’s possession of these traits means that it is not possible for him to command just anything, such as the torture of children. Robert Adams has argued this means there are limits to the commands one can coherently attribute to God.[63] We have some grasp of what goodness is and what kinds of things a good person does not command. It follows that God cannot coherently be called good if what he commands is contrary to “our existing moral beliefs.”[64] To do so would be “playing word games which are intellectually dishonest”[65] and would deprive “the word ‘holy’ of its ordinary meaning and make it a synonym for ‘evil.’”[66] But one of our existing moral beliefs is P1, so we cannot coherently attribute this command to a loving and just God.

This argument is too quick. Critics of Adams have pointed out that his conclusion is more qualified than it appears. While he states that “our existing moral beliefs” are a constraint on our beliefs about God’s commands, he goes on to state that God cannot issue “a set of commands that is too much at variance with the ethical outlook we bring to our ethical thinking.”[67] The phrase “too much” suggests that one can accept a set of commands that is somewhat at odds with the outlook we bring to our ethical thinking.

Two points Adams makes elsewhere suggest that this qualification is necessary. First, while we do have some grasp of what is good and some grasp of what is right and wrong, it is evident that our moral judgements are fallible.[68] While God does not command wrongdoing, it is likely that a perfectly good omniscient being would command something contrary to what we think is wrong. To say otherwise dogmatically assumes we are such good judges of morality that God could never disagree with us.

Second, our moral concepts are subject to revision. We change our opinions about the goodness and rightness of certain things without “playing word games which are intellectually dishonest” or depriving “the word ‘holy’ of its ordinary meaning and making it a synonym for ‘evil.’” If this were not the case, one could never honestly or rationally change one’s mind on an ethical issue. Adams notes this when he writes that he accepts “the possibility of a conversion in which one’s whole ethical outlook is revolutionized, and reorganized around a new center,”[69] but argues that “we can hardly hold open the possibility of anything too closely approaching a revolution in which, so to speak, good and evil would trade places.”[70]

These points, however, limit Adams’ conclusion. What his argument, in fact, shows is not that “our existing moral beliefs must serve as a constraint on our beliefs about what God commands,” but rather that certain types of our existing beliefs do this. Namely, those ethical beliefs which are so central to our concept of goodness that rejecting them would be “approaching a revolution in which, so to speak, good and evil would trade places.”[71] Baggett and Walls refer to these as “convictions of the deepest ingression that they are truly non-negotiable, and unable to be relinquished—not just psychologically, but rationally, at least without perverting morality itself.”[72] They refer to such convictions as non-negotiable moral beliefs.

Rissler gives two examples of cases where a purported divine command violates a non-negotiable belief.[73] The first is where God issues a command to reverse one’s conception of right and wrong or issues a set of commands that negates a large number of moral imperatives that one currently accepts. Second, he suggests that a command might contradict a moral belief “sufficiently integral to one’s conception of morality” that abandoning that belief would force such a radical revision as to destroy one’s concept of goodness altogether. Imagine a command to kill everyone around you purely for entertainment, or a command that said harming, hurting, and inflicting suffering on people for no reason at all is permissible. Or consider a command to hate God and despise all other human beings. Similarly, one cannot accept a system of divine commands where every duty we believe in is declared false. Nor can we accept a system which suggests that the vast majority of our moral beliefs are mistaken. This would come too close to the problematic revolution of which Adams speaks.

The key question, then, is not whether P1 is one of our existing moral beliefs, but whether it is a non-negotiable belief. On closer investigation, it becomes apparent that P1 is not a non-negotiable belief. Many ethicists contend that while the claim “It is wrong to kill innocent people” is correct as a general rule, it can be overridden in rare circumstances of “supreme emergency”[74]—for example, when the alternative to killing non-combatants in war is to tolerate significantly greater evils, and the consequences of refraining from killing are significantly bad. Whatever one thinks of this position, it cannot be dismissed as conceptually incoherent. If a proponent of an absolutist position on killing non-combatants examined the arguments and concluded that, in rare circumstances of supreme emergency, killing non-combatants was not wrong, then it is implausible to suggest that their concept of goodness was so radically at odds with prior beliefs that “good and evil would trade places,” or that their position consisted of mere word games. This position may be false, but it is not obviously incoherent. Hence, taken as a universal, P1 is not a non-negotiable principle.

Of course it is plausible that P1 is a non-negotiable belief when it is not taken as universal. The claim that in normal circumstances it is wrong to kill the innocent is central to our understanding of morality. Craig’s position accepts P1 as a generally valid principle like this. He states that only in highly extraordinary, unusual cases in the past has God commanded such killing.

Kant’s Objection: Can One Rationally Believe God Commands a Violation of P1?

Even if one can coherently believe that God commanded a violation of P1, questions can be raised as to whether it is ever rational to believe this. The classic statement of this objection comes from Immanuel Kant:

Abraham should have replied to this supposedly divine voice: “That I ought not kill my good son is quite certain. But that you, this apparition, are God—of that I am not certain, and never can be, not even is [read: if] this voice rings down to me from (visible) heaven.”[75]

Kant’s argument presupposes an epistemic principle: whenever two conflicting claims differ in epistemic status, the claim with the lower status is to be rejected.[76] He contends that moral claims such as “it is wrong to kill innocent people” are certain. However, claims that God commands or forbids a certain action are not certain and never can be. Hence, even if it is coherent to claim that God has commanded P1, one can never rationally accept such a claim is true.

Philip Quinn notes two problems with Kant’s argument. First, “Kant has an extremely optimistic view of our ability to attain epistemic certainty about principles of moral wrongness.”[77] He thinks we can be certain of moral claims across the board. This, however, is dubious. There are some moral claims of which we are very confident. We are certain, for example, that it is wrong to inflict as much pain as we can on another merely for our own entertainment. We are quite certain that killing, assault, theft, and lying are prima facie wrong; they can only be justified if some overriding moral reason applies. However, many moral claims are far from certain at all. Similarly, consider moral debates about capital punishment or euthanasia or affirmative action. While there are defensible and justified answers to these questions, we doubt that we can claim certainty about answers to these questions.

Second, Kant claims that we can never be certain that God has commanded a particular action. Even if this is true, Quinn notes, “It would thus seem to be well within God’s power to communicate to us a sign that confers on the claim that God commands [an action] a fairly high epistemic status.”[78] So there appears no reason for thinking that moral claims about the wrongness of specific actions must always have a higher epistemic status than claims about God’s commands.

In fact, the claim that moral claims have a higher epistemic status than theological claims is very dubious. Christopher Eberle has masterfully argued that many skeptical worries raised about belief in God’s commands apply with equal force to moral beliefs.[79] Eberle notes problems such as the lack of public intelligibility, public accessibility, replicability, fallibilism, external criticism, independent confirmability, and proof of reliability, levelled against theological beliefs all apply to moral beliefs.[80] It’s not true, then, that moral beliefs always have a higher epistemic status than beliefs about God’s commands.

At this point the objector could offer this rejoinder: “True, not all moral claims have a high epistemic status, but surely the claim that it is morally wrong to deliberately kill the innocent is one that does.” However, this response fails to note a distinction: the claim that in normal circumstances it is wrong to kill innocent people strikes us as almost fairly certain. However, the claim that it’s never under any circumstances permissible to do so, is, in contemporary ethical theory, extremely controversial.[81] That there are rare exceptions to rules against killing when there is some greater good involved is widely accepted in contemporary ethics: threshold deontology, act-utilitarianism, rule-utilitarianism, situation ethics, and Rossian deontology all accept this conclusion. It is, at best, controversial that a principle rejected by almost all of the major ethical theories on offer today is more plausible than belief that God on rare occasions commanded violations of P1. Surely, some argument is needed before the biblical theist is required to accept this controversial claim.

So, the standard arguments against Craig’s premise (iii) fail. There does not seem any compelling reason why a biblical theist cannot claim that God has on rare occasions, for the sake of a greater good, exempted people from the prohibition to kill by commanding them to do so.

Conclusion

Our discussion has led to two conclusions. First, those who accept biblical authority are not committed to the claim that God commanded the extermination of every single man, woman, and child in Canaan. The biblical narrative is far more nuanced. Rather, the picture is predominately one of God commanding the Israelites to drive out people who were occupying land they (the Israelites) had title to—a people who had been engaging in criminal activity for centuries. Furthermore, there is evidence within the text itself that exceptions could readily be made, and Canaanites who rejected these evil practices were spared. Moreover, many of the accounts are highly hyperbolic and are not to be taken as literally affirming extermination. Also, this hyperbolic command was an occasional one for a specific situation and was not a general requirement for all people at all times.

Second, people who accept theism can defensibly claim that God has in the past, and on rare occasions, exempted people from the moral requirement to not kill the innocent to achieve some greater good without being committed to morally absurd conclusions. Taken together, we think these conclusions mean that the biblical theist is not committed to either contradictions or moral absurdity by accepting the conquest narratives as part of the authoritative Word of God.[82]

1 The Oxford English Dictionary defines “genocide” as “the deliberate and systematic extermination of an ethnic or national group” (OED 2010). This definition is standardly used in the skeptical literature on this topic as, for example, in Wes Morriston, “Ethical Criticism of the Bible: The Case of Divinely Mandated Genocide,” Sophia 51, no. 1 (2012): 117; and Edwin Curley, “The God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob,” in Divine Evil? The Moral Character of the God of Abraham, ed. Michael Bergmann, Michael J. Murray, and Michael C. Rea (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 62.

2 Raymond Bradley, “A Moral Argument for Atheism,” in The Impossibility of God, ed. Michael Martin and Ricki Monnier (Amherst, NY: Prometheus, 2003), 144. Similar arguments have been made in Wes Morriston, “Did God Command Genocide? A Challenge to the Biblical Inerrantist,” Philosophia Christi 11, no. 1 (2009): 8–26; Randal Rauser “Let Nothing that Breathes Remain Alive: On the Problem of Divinely Commanded Genocide,” Philosophia Christi 11, no. 1 (2009) 27–41; Michael Tooley “Does God Exist?” in Michael Tooley and Alvin Plantinga, The Knowledge of God (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 2008), 73–77; Evan Fales, “Satanic Verses: Moral Chaos in Holy Writ,” and Curley, “The God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob” in Divine Evil?; Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, “Why Traditional Theism Cannot Provide an Adequate Foundation for Morality,” and Louise Antony, “Atheism as Perfect Piety,” in Is Goodness without God Good Enough? A Debate on Faith, Secularism and Ethics, ed. Robert K. Garcia and Nathan L. King (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2008).

3 Bradley, “A Moral Argument for Atheism,” 144.

4 Ibid., 132.

5 Ibid., 144.

6 Ibid.

7 Ibid.,131

8 Raymond Bradley, “Opening Statement” in a debate with Matthew Flannagan, “Is God the Source of Morality? Is It Defensible to Ground Right and Wrong in the Commands of God?” (Auckland University, Auckland, New Zealand), accessed February 26, 2012 at http://www.mandm.org.nz/2010/08/raymond-bradleys-opening-statement-bradley-v-flannagan-debate.html.

9 Peter van Inwagen, “Genesis and Evolution,” in Reasoned Faith, ed. Eleonore Stump (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993), 97.

10 Alvin Plantinga, “When Faith and Reason Clash: Evolution and the Bible,” Christian Scholar’s Review 21, no. 1 (September 1991): 8.

11 Bradley, “A Moral Argument for Atheism,” 137.

12 Richard Mouw, “Biblical Revelation and Medical Decisions” in Stephen E. Lammers and Allen Verhey, On Moral Medicine (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1987), 56.

13 Or more often a specific application of a universal command to a particular context.

14 One objection to this point can be quickly dealt with: that one cannot trust the biblical accounts of Canaanite practises because the authors of this text engaged in unjustified extermination of the peoples in question. This objection is obviously circular: it assumes that the Bible is not trustworthy because it commands extermination. That, however, is precisely the conclusion the argument is supposed to establish. One cannot assume it is unreliable in one’s interpretation of the text and then use the interpretation to argue that it is unreliable. In any event, the question being asked in this section is whether a person who accepts the Bible as the Word of God and hence authoritative, is committed to holding God commands the killing of innocent people. Pointing out these people are mistaken for accepting the Bible is authoritative does not answer the question of how one should interpret it if it is assumed it is.

15 Gary Anderson comments: “Even if the land of Canaan will become part of the eternal patrimony of the descendants of Abraham it is not a land that God can simply hand over at will. The rights of the citizens who presently reside upon it must be respected. God will not evict them until their immoral ways justify such a punishment.” Gary Anderson, “What About the Canaanites?” in Bergmann, Murray, and Rea, Divine Evil? The Moral Character of the God of Abraham, 280 (italics added).

16 See the section on Rahab (pp. 312–13).

17 K. Lawson Younger Jr., Judges/Ruth, NIVAC (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2002), 26–77.

18 Glenn Miller notes that the “dispossession” words outnumber the “destruction” words by three to one! “This would indicate that the dominant ‘intended effect’ was for the peoples in the land to migrate somewhere else.” So, consider Deut 12:29–30: “When the Lord your God annihilates the nations before you, which you are entering to take possession of, and you drive them out and live in their land, be careful not to be ensnared by their ways after they have been destroyed before you. Do not inquire about their gods, asking, ‘How did these nations worship their gods? I’ll also do the same’” (see Glenn Miller, “How Could a God of Love Order the Massacre/Annihilation of the Canaanites?” Accessed February 27, 2012 at http://christianthinktank.com/qamorite.html).

19 Iain Provan, V. Philips Long, and Tremper Longman III, A Biblical History of Israel (Louisville, KY: WJK, 2003), 281–85.

20 Heath Thomas, “The Old Testament ‘Holy War’ and Christian Morality,” in How and Why We Should Read the Old Testament for Public Life Today, an issue of Comment (Fall 2010): 24.

21 Ibid. For further discussion on this triad, see Daniel I. Block, The Gods of the Nations (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2000); Daniel I. Block, Ezekiel, NICOT, 2 vols. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1997, 1998); Walter Brueggemann, The Land, 2nd ed. (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2002). Thanks to Heath Thomas for his comments on this point.

22 Nicholas Wolterstorff, “Reading Joshua,” in Bergmann, Murray, and Rea, Divine Evil? 249.

23 Ibid.

24 In addition to these general claims about exterminating populations, Josh 11:21 states, “Joshua proceeded to exterminate the Anakim from the hill country—Hebron, Debir, Anab—all the hill country of Judah and of Israel.” This happened after Joshua is already said to have killed the inhabitants in these areas in Josh 10:30–40. Joshua 11:22 states that no Anakim were left living in Israelite territory after this campaign. In Judg 1:20 the text explicitly states that Anakim are in Hebron.

25 Wolterstorff, “Reading Joshua,” 251.

26 This modernistic literary imposition on ancient texts is quite evident when it comes to the first-century Mediterranean world, let alone the ancient Near Eastern world. Modern misunderstandings about ancient matters such as, say, exact quotations, journalistic precision, and what counts for plagiarism exemplify the kind of false expectations raised in the sphere of contemporary scholarship. See E. Randolph Richards, “Will the Real Author Please Stand Up? The Author in Greco-Roman Letter Writing,” in Come Let Us Reason, ed. Paul Copan and William Lane Craig (Nashville: B&H Academic, 2012).

27 Plato’s dialogues would be an obvious example.

28 Another problem with this objection is that it assumes the tensions in question are between different sources that those who edited the final form into a single sequence used. This, however, is false. Several of the same tensions Wolterstorff notes occur within literary units which source critics attribute to a single source. Consider three examples: (a) Joshua 10:20 states that Joshua and the sons of Israel had “finished striking” and “wiped out” (ESV) their enemies. Immediately thereafter, however, the text affirms that the “survivors went to fortified cities.” In this context, the language of total destruction is clearly hyperbolic. (b) In the account of the battle of Ai, Joshua’s troops feign a retreat; the text states that “all the men of Ai” are pressed to chase them. “Not a man remained in Ai or Bethel who did not go after Israel” (Josh 8:16–17 NIV). Joshua lures the pursuers into a trap “so that they were caught in the middle, with Israelites on both sides. Israel cut them down, leaving them neither survivors nor fugitives” (Josh 8:22–23 NIV). Then the text immediately following states: “When Israel had finished killing all the men of Ai in the fields and in the desert where they had chased them, and when every one of them had been put to the sword,” they went to the city of Ai and killed all the men in it (Josh 8:24 NIV). (c) Joshua 11:21–22 states: “At that time Joshua proceeded to exterminate the Anakim from the hill country—Hebron, Debir, Anab—all the hill country of Judah and of Israel. Joshua completely destroyed them with their cities.” This happened after Joshua is already said to have killed the inhabitants in these areas in Josh 10:30–40. All these tensions are within the block material that makes up Joshua 1–12 which typically are attributed to the same source. Further examples could be supplied. Goldingay notes the same tensions occur not just between Joshua 1–12 and Judges 1–2, but within Judges 1–2 itself: “While Joshua does speak of Israel’s utterly destroying the Canaanites, even these accounts can give a misleading impression: peoples that have been annihilated have no trouble reappearing later in the story; after Judah puts Jerusalem to the sword, its occupants are still living there ‘to this day’ (Judg 1:8, 21)” (see his “City and Nation,” in Old Testament Theology: Israel’s Life, vol. 3 (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 2009), 570.

29 As contemporary examples of what he means by hagiography Wolterstorff provides the example of North American tales of the noble Puritan or Washington crossing the Delaware. These are idealized, exaggerated accounts of the past designed to teach a moral lesson; those who tell them are not intending to affirm them as precise accounts of what actually occurred. There is obvious literary embellishment and hyperbole involved in the telling of such stories.

30 Wolterstorff, “Reading Joshua,” 252–53.

31 K. Lawson Younger Jr., Ancient Conquest Accounts: A Study in Ancient Near Eastern and Biblical History Writing (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1990).

32 Younger states, “As the ancient historian (ancient near eastern biblical or otherwise) reconstructed historical referents into a coherent description, he produced a figurative account, a re-presenting representation.” Younger suggests such an historian functioned as “a literary artist.” He goes on to state: “Ancient near eastern conquest accounts are figurative in three ways: (1) the structural and ideological codes that are the apparatus for the texts production, (2) the themes or motifs that the text utilises, and (3) the usage of rhetorical figures in the accounts.” See K. Lawson Younger Jr, “Judges 1 in Its Near Eastern Literary Context,” in Faith Tradition and History: Old Testament Historiography and Its Ancient Near Eastern Context, ed. A. R. Millard, J. K. Hoffmeier, and D. W. Baker (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 1994), 207.

33 Younger, Ancient Conquest Accounts, 208–11 and 217.

34 These examples are taken from Kenneth A. Kitchen, On the Reliability of the Old Testament (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003), 173–74 (emphasis added); and Younger, Ancient Conquest Accounts, 227–28, 245.

35 Prior to the battle, Yahweh tells Judah to go first, but God doesn’t promise victory (20:18); they badly lose the battle, and God says to go up against them (20:23). After the second defeat, God promises that he will give Benjamin into their hands (20:28). The upshot is that God intentionally allows Israel to lose as judgment on the general moral decay throughout the land. Younger argues that the tone of Yahweh is sarcastic and ultimately disapproving (see K. Lawson Younger, Judges and Ruth, NIVAC [Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2002], 370–76); and Daniel I. Block Judges, Ruth, NAC 6 (Nashville: B&H Academic, 1999), 342–45, 567–70.

36 Hebrews 11:31 states, “By faith Rahab the prostitute received the spies in peace and didn’t perish with those who disobeyed.” One might argue that this teaches that Rahab was the only person in the city who was not disobedient and hence was the only one who survived. The objector could then go on to argue that it is implausible that in a city which contains men, women, and children, everyone would be guilty, and so in reality Joshua did slaughter innocent children.

This argument, however, appears to be dialectically confused. The person who makes it assumes that the text is accurate when it claims that Joshua killed everyone but that the Bible is inaccurate when it calls everyone in the city guilty. In other words, this argument cannot be an argument which shows the Bible is inaccurate because it assumes this as a premise. Also, it is worth noting that this conclusion relies on the assumption that the text portrays everyone in the city, except Rahab, as guilty and that this is implausible because in real life cities contain innocent people. But that is exactly Wolterstorff’s point—the text is hyperbolic; it’s exaggerated; it’s not intended to describe exactly what happened in real life. So, far from being an argument against the hyperbolic hagiographic reading, this argument assumes its falsity. But one does not refute an interpretation by assuming it is false and then using this assumption to prove that it is.

Indeed, a couple of other interesting layers to our discussion could be added. (1) The “city [‘ir]” in Canaan was more like a citadel—a military and administrative center rather than a location where women and children resided (which would have been in the hill country). See Richard S. Hess, “The Jericho and Ai of the Book of Joshua,” in Critical Issues in Early Israelite History, ed. Richard S. Hess, Gerald A. Klingbeil, and Paul J. Ray Jr. (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2008), 33–46. (2) The Israelite attacks on cities were merely disabling raids—not acts of utter decimation—something we see both from archaeology and the biblical text: “these campaigns were essentially disabling raids: they were not territorial conquests with instant Hebrew occupation. The text is very clear about this.” Kitchen, On the Reliability of the Old Testament, 162.

37 William Lane Craig, “Question 225: The ‘Slaughter’ of the Canaanites Re-visited.” Available at http://www.reasonablefaith.org/site/News2?page=NewsArticle&id=8973.

38 “‘But I did obey the Lord!’ Saul answered. ‘I went on the mission the LORD gave me: I brought back Agag, king of Amalek, and I completely destroyed the Amalekites. The troops took sheep and cattle from the plunder—the best of what was set apart for destruction—to sacrifice to the LORD your God at Gilgal’” (1 Sam 15:20–21).

39 Ralph W. Klein, 1 Samuel, WBC 10 (Waco, TX: Word, 1983), 150.

40 Daniel M. Fouts, “A Defense of the Hyperbolic Interpretation of Numbers in the Old Testament,” Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society 40, no. 3 (1997): 377–87.

41 Confusion about these numbers is connected to the term eleph (commonly translated as “thousand”). Old Testament scholar Colin Humphreys seeks to makes sense of the extraordinarily large numbers. For instance, he argues that the total number of men, women, and children who left Egypt at the exodus were 20,000 rather than 2 million. The total number of Israel’s fighting men (in Num 2:32) was written as 598 + 5 eleph (meaning “military division” or “unit”). We have mixed numbers in Num 1:46:

- 598 military divisions (eleph)

- 5 thousand (eleph) and

- 5 hundred and 50 men

A plausible interpretation of this is that the number of military men over 20 years of age was not 603,550 but around 5,550. Humphreys argues that this number was conflated by a later scribe or editor (adding 598 eleph + 5 eleph = 603,550 men), and the original meaning was overlooked or forgotten. Or perhaps the last unit in the sequence could refer to the final tally (“adding up to”). For example, a number like 74,600 (in Num. 2:4) could be read as 74 military divisions adding up to 600 men. At any rate, Humphreys suggests that the original meaning of eleph came to be overlooked or forgotten.

Consider another example: “three thousand” go and fight Ai, and “thirty-six” Israelites are killed, frightened, and routed (Josh 7:5); this would be strange if 3,000 went in to fight at Ai (see Colin J. Humphreys, “The Numbers in the Exodus from Egypt: A Further Appraisal,” Vetus Testamentum 48 (1998): 196–213; and Colin J. Humphreys, “The Numbers in the Exodus from Egypt” Vetus Testamentum 50, no. 3 (2000): 323–28.

42 Goldingay, “City and Nation,” in Old Testament Theology, vol. 3 (Downers Grove, IL: Intervarsity, 2009), 570.

43 On the similarities between the hyperbolic language used to describe the destruction of the Canaanites and of the Judahites in the exile in the prophetic literature, see the discussion in the section titled, “Does the Bible Claim That God Commanded Extermination of Virtually Everyone in Canaan?” (p. 303.)

44 William Lane Craig, “Question 225: The ‘Slaughter’ of the Canaanites Re-visited.”

45 This is argued in more detail by Jacob Milgrom, Numbers: The Traditional Hebrew Text with the New JPS Translation (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1990), 490–91.

46 Younger, Ancient Conquest Accounts, 234.

47 Except of course in Joshua, the object one is to fear and obey is God; in the other accounts it is human rulers. We think this makes a substantive moral difference, the unqualified allegiance to an all-knowing, all-powerful, all-good God is very different to unqualified obedience to a human ruler.

48 Younger, Ancient Conquest Accounts, 234.

49 Deuteronomy 7:2 declares: “when the LORD your God delivers them over to you and you defeat them, you must completely destroy them.” Similarly, Deut 20:16–17 commands: “you must not let any living thing survive. . . . You must completely destroy them.” In Joshua 10 one sees the formulaic language of “and the LORD gave [the city]” and he/they “struck it and its king with the edge of the sword” until “there was no one remaining” (NRSV). The chapter is summarized this way: “So Joshua defeated the whole land . . . ; he left no one remaining, but utterly destroyed all that breathed” (v. 40 NRSV). The similar phraseology between Deuteronomy and Joshua is quite evident.

50 Wolterstorff, “Reading Joshua,” 252. Younger himself notes that something like this is the case. On p. 235 he suggests that the phrase “totally destroy” expresses the concept of a “total war (i.e., the destruction of the population as well as the military).” Some have cited this to suggest that Lawson’s study shows that such warfare by definition involved the killing of both the military and the civilian population, and so this language cannot be chalked up to hyperbole. This, however, does not follow.

First, the fact that a concept by definition means something does not mean the word used to express the concept cannot be used hyperbolically. The concept of a dog by definition refers to a canine animal; it does not follow one cannot talk about “raining cats and dogs” or one cannot insult a person by calling him a dog. Yet in neither case does the person intend to assert, literally, that canines fall from the sky or that a person is a canine.

Second, in a footnote to this same reference, Younger notes the fact that elsewhere in the biblical text God states that the Canaanites will be slowly “driven out” and not literally exterminated; this meant that in practice the command to “totally destroy” the population was not intended to be always literally carried out in practice. Similarly, on pp. 226–28, he repeatedly states that the phrase “totally destroy” is “used hyperbolically” in Joshua. Similarly, on pp. 243–47, he argues that the accounts of total destruction in Joshua are “figurative and hyperbolic,” meaning that these passages do not contradict the accounts elsewhere in Joshua and Judges that presuppose the population has not been wiped out.

51 Wolterstorff, “Reply to Antony,” in Bergmann, Murray, and Rea, Divine Evil? 263.

52 Wolterstorff, “Reading Joshua,” presented at the “My Ways Are Not Your Ways” conference; this paragraph was in the paper presented at the conference but was omitted from the published version.

53 Raymond Bradley, “A Moral Argument for Atheism,” 136.

54 See section 21 of William Lane Craig’s “Post Debate Comments” in The Craig-Curley Debate: The Existence of the Christian God, University of Michigan, February 5, 1998 accessed February 28, 2012 http://www.reasonablefaith.org/site/News2?page=NewsArticle&id=5283. Philip Quinn documents that Craig here reflects a long line of Christian interpretation (see his “The Recent Revival of Divine Command Ethics,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 50 (Fall 1990): 345–65).

55 Craig has presented his position largely in popular writings and debates; the argument here given is a reconstruction of what we believe is the argument in these writings and debates.

56 William Lane Craig and J. P. Moreland, Philosophical Foundations of a Christian Worldview (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2003), 531.

57 Craig, “Post Debate Comments,” section 21.

58 Consider, for example, the cessationist view held by people like B. B. Warfield, J. Gresham Machen, F. N. Lee, Richard B. Gaffin Jr., John F. MacArthur, and Daniel B. Wallace that prophetic utterances ceased with the close of the apostolic period.

59 Raymond Bradley, “Opening Statement.”

60 For further discussion of this common confusion, see Matthew Flannagan, “The Premature Dismissal of Voluntarism,” Colloquium: The Australian and New Zealand Theological Review 42, no. 1 (2010): 38–66.

61 For further discussion of this point, see Matthew Flannagan, “Tooley, Plantinga and the Deontological Argument from Evil,” Philosophia Christi 13, no. 2 (2011): 385–88.

62 For a discussion and rebuttal of the standard objections to divine command theories, see Philip L. Quinn, Divine Commands and Moral Requirements (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978); Philip L. Quinn, “Divine Command Theory,” in Blackwell Guide to Ethical Theory, ed. Hugh Lafollette (Cambridge: Blackwell Publishers, 2000), 53–73; Philip L. Quinn, “Theological Voluntarism,” The Oxford Handbook of Ethical Theory (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 63–90. See also Edward Wierenga, The Nature of God: An Inquiry into the Divine Attributes (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989), 215–27; idem,“Utilitarianism and the Divine Command Theory,” American Philosophical Quarterly 21 (1984): 311–18; idem, “A Defensible Divine Command Theory,” Nous 17 (1983): 387–408; David Baggett and Jerry L. Walls, Good God: The Theistic Foundations of Morality (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011); Flannagan “The Premature Dismissal of Voluntarism,” 38–66.

63 Robert M. Adams, Finite and Infinite Goods: A Framework for Ethics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 250.

64 Ibid., 256.

65 Raymond Bradley’s opening statement in “Can a Loving God Send People to Hell?” in his debate with William Lane Craig (Vancouver, BC Canada: Simon Fraser University, 1994), accessed January 14, 2011 at http://www.reasonablefaith.org/site/News2?page=NewsArticle&id=5301.

66 Bradley, “A Moral Argument for Atheism,” 143.

67 Adams, Finite and Infinite Goods, 256.

68 Adams calls this the “transcendence” of the good. “All of God’s commands and judgments are right; God is the ethical standard. But our beliefs (even the most cherished) about them must be distinguished from God’s commands and judgments themselves. To fail to make that distinction is idolatry. We express our respect for the distinction between God and us by maintaining a critical stance toward ethical and theological beliefs, being ready in principle to consider arguments against any of them, though we may quite rightly be strongly attached to some of them” (Robert M. Adams, “Responses,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 64, no. 2 [2002]: 485).

69 Adams, Finite and Infinite Goods, 256.

70 Ibid.

71 James Rissler, “A Psychological Constraint on Obedience to God’s Commands: The Reasonableness of Obeying the Abhorrently Evil,” Religious Studies 38 (2002): 140–41.

72 Baggett and Walls, God Good, 135.

73 Rissler explains this: “In such an instance, obedience requires that one give up everything one previously believed about morality . . . one has been commanded to relinquish everything one understands about the nature of goodness, one will have no concept of the good with which to identify God’s command, there will be complete breakdown between everything one currently affirms about goodness and everything one is asked to believe about goodness” (“A Psychological Constraint on Obedience to God’s Commands,” 140–41).

74 See Michael Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars: A Moral Argument with Historical Illustrations, 3rd ed. (New York: Basic Books, 2000), esp. chap. 16. See also Igor Primoratz, “The Morality of Terrorism,” Journal of Applied Philosophy 14 (1997): 221–33.

75 Immanuel Kant, “Religion Within the Boundaries of Mere Reason” (1793), in Religion and Rational Theology, trans. A. W. Wood and G. Di Giovanni (Cambridge University Press, 1996), 203–4. Elsewhere Kant writes:

That to take a human being’s life because of his religious faith is wrong is certain, unless (to allow the most extreme possibility) a divine will, made known to the inquisitor in some extraordinary way, has decreed otherwise. But that God has ever manifested this awful will is a matter of historical documentation and never apodictically certain. After all, the revelation reached the inquisitor only through the intermediary of human beings and their interpretation, and even if it were to appear to him to have come from God himself (like the command issued to Abraham to slaughter his own son like a sheep), yet it is at least possible that on this point error has prevailed. (Immanuel Kant, “The Conflict of the Faculties” [1798], in Religion and Rational Theology, 283).

76 Philip Quinn “Religion and Politics,” in The Blackwell Guide to Philosophy of Religion, ed. William Mann (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2005), 316.

77 Ibid., 318.

78 Ibid., 319.

79 Christopher Eberle, Religious Convictions in Liberal Politics (Cambridge University Press, 2002), 234–87.

80 Kant’s own reasoning suggests this. As noted above (n75), he contends we can never be certain that God has commanded an action because “the revelation reached the inquisitor only through the intermediary of human beings and their interpretation, and even if it were to appear to him to have come from God himself (like the command issued to Abraham to slaughter his own son like a sheep), yet it is at least possible that on this point error has prevailed” (“The “Conflict on the Faculties,” 283). But this is equally true of many moral beliefs. A good amount of what people believe with regards to morality comes to them through the intermediary of human beings and their interpretation. Most Westerners’ beliefs in liberal ideals, such as the equality of women, opposition to slavery, and so on, are mediated through human beings and traditions our parents bequeathed to us—indeed, have been given shape by the biblical tradition (see Alvin Schmidt, How Christianity Changed the World [Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2004]. Moreover, even if we directly intuit moral properties, it is possible that we are mistaken. Human moral intuitions and judgments are fallible and can err.

81 Remember, Bradley understands P1 as a universal norm.

82 Matthew Flannagan would like to thank Zachary Ardern and Andrew Harland-Smith for help with getting this essay into shape. Paul Copan would like to thank Heath Thomas for his input.

Chapter Thirteen

Does the Bible Condone Slavery and Sexism?

James M. Hamilton

Does the Bible condone slavery and sexism? Of course not! The suggestion is ridiculous, but we live in a world where absurd conclusions seem as rational as the truth is preposterous. All sorts of wicked ideas advance on the power of subtle insinuation and grow strong by the sneaking suggestion.

If there is a surface-level appearance that an allegation is true, the suggestions and insinuations appear plausible, perhaps even obviously correct. When we look beyond the surface, however, to what is really the case, suggestive insinuations are obliterated by reality. But how many people have the logical, theological, or biblical backbone to push past a veneer, to look past the surface, to think their way through the fog of falsehood to solid truth? This essay aims to get past surface-level indications of sexism and slavery to what the Bible really teaches about humans of all genders and races.

On the surface, the Bible appears to endorse sexism. Women are told to keep quiet in church (1 Cor 14:33–34), to submit to their husbands (Eph 5:22–24), and they are not permitted to teach or exercise authority over men (1 Tim 2:12). Viewed from a certain perspective, this looks like sexism. One of my tasks in this essay is to show how it is not. But before we get to that, we need to make the other task of this essay just as hard.

The other task of this essay is to show how the Bible neither endorses nor condones slavery, and here again we have a set of statements that make it look like the Bible does just that. On the surface, Israel was given laws that regulated the treatment of slaves (e.g., Exod 21:1–11; Lev 25:6, 47–55; Deut 15:12–18), and both Paul and Peter told slaves to obey their masters (Eph 6:5–8; Col 3:22; 1 Tim 6:1–2; 1 Pet 2:18). How can it be denied that the Bible condones slavery?

This essay is not a sophisticated denial of reality. I hope to do more than acknowledge the evidence and say, “Nuh-uh.” I don’t want anyone to go away from this essay thinking that Hamilton has done nothing but insist that the Bible does not say what it obviously says.

With the Bible making these statements about women and slaves, how can anyone maintain that it doesn’t condone sexism and slavery? Because it can be shown that the Bible does not present the world as a place in which God intended people to be owned by other people or abused because of their sex. God did not make the world for slavers and sexists. This essay seeks to go beyond the surface level of what the Bible says about these matters into the “deep structure” of the Bible’s teaching about male and female, slave and free.[1]

I contend that when we understand what the Bible teaches about how God made the world, the role of humans in the world, and the curse God visited in response to human sin, we see that God intends neither one gender to be subordinate to another nor one human to be enslaved to another.

This essay, then, is a foray into the realm of biblical theology.[2] The purpose of this reconnaissance mission to the thought-world of the Bible is to understand how the biblical authors understood relations between males and females, slaves and masters. To pursue a biblical theological understanding demands more than mere word studies, cataloguing of texts, or surveys of what previous scholars have said.[3] I will be seeking to show that if we understand how the biblical authors viewed God, humanity, the world, and the plot of world history, we will never conclude that the Bible condones slavery and sexism.

As we approach the Bible’s presentation of humanity as it relates to slavery and sexism, we must distinguish between the way the world was when God created it good and the way it became after humans sinned and God leveled judgment and curse on both the transgressors and the world they inhabited.

Sexism?

God made the world good. Genesis 1–2 is a picture of that world made good, and neither sexism nor slavery has any place in it. The sexists, whether male or female, do not find their agenda in Genesis 1–2. Modern feminism has an anti-male underbelly that is sexist.[4] We don’t find that in Genesis 1 and 2, nor do we find a neutered, de-estroginized androgyny. What we do find is a balanced complementarity, opposites in happy harmony. In what they are as human beings, man and woman enjoy ontological equality. In what they are given to do, man and woman enjoy functional subordination. The man and woman are equal in what they are as humans, but they are assigned different roles and relate to one another within a structure of God-ordained authority. Those who reject the possibility of ontological equality and functional subordination, and some do,[5] are unwilling to grapple with the profound simplicity of the biblical evidence.

Note the ontological equality in Genesis 1:27: “So God created man in His own image; He created him in the image of God; He created them male and female.” Both man and woman are in the image of God. The woman is not less than the man as a human being. It is not the man alone who bears God’s image and likeness. Both man and woman are made in the image and likeness of God.

With this ontological equality, however, there are clear indications of functional subordination. Genesis 2 presents a righteous hierarchy in edenic gender relations—pre-sin, pre-fall, pre-curse. We see the functional subordination of the woman to the man when we read that God made the man to work and keep the garden (Gen 2:15), the woman to help the man (2:18). The woman was not made to do what the man was made to do but to help him do what God made him to do. This indicates that within the ontological equality between the man and the woman, they are given different roles. The woman’s role in helping the man is clearly subordinate to his role of working and keeping the garden. She does not have a specified task other than that of helping him in his work. Some egalitarians observe that God, too, is described as a helper, but this is hardly analogous. God is Creator, sovereign moral authority, and much else, so the fact that he, too, is a helper is irrelevant to the situation in the garden. The man’s role is to work and keep, and the woman’s role is to help the man. The tasks given to man and woman in the garden present a much narrower situation than we find when a man in need appeals to God to be his help. False analogy.

We also see a structure of authority reflected in the fact that God commanded the man not to eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil prior to the making of the woman (2:16–17). It was evidently the man’s responsibility to communicate the command to the woman.

Then there are the differences in the descriptions of how the man and woman were made: the man was formed from the dust (2:7), while the woman was fashioned from the man’s rib (2:22). I am not claiming that this communicates the man’s authority, merely observing that while man and woman are both in the image of God, there are differences between them. The narrative does not present them being absolutely the same in every respect.

Then God brought the woman to the man, and the man exercised the same authority over the woman when he named her that God had exercised as he named creation in Genesis 1. God has the authority to name what he has made, but he delegates that authority to man when he brings the animals to him and allows him to name them. The man exercises this same authority over the woman.

Man’s first poem powerfully communicates ontological equality and functional subordination. There is solidarity: the woman is bone of man’s bone, flesh of his flesh. And there is authority: Adam announces that she will be called woman (2:23). Prior to sin, within righteous hierarchy, man and woman were unashamed and uninhibited in unfallen intimacy (2:25).

God created the world very good (Gen 1:31), and God, not popular culture, defines goodness. The world might not call ontological equality with functional subordination good, but that remains the picture given to us by the Bible. It is not a sexist picture. The man and woman were to cooperate together to “be fruitful, multiply, fill the earth, and subdue it” (1:28). They were to do this as the man worked and kept with the woman’s help, as the two became one flesh to be fruitful and multiply. Before we reject all hierarchy, all authority, all subordination, we should try to imagine a righteous, holy, God-like exercise of authority within a hierarchy in which women accept the leadership of (i.e., are functionally subordinate to) men who protect, provide, and love those under their care. This is what we see in Genesis 1–2.

Slavery?

Before we pass on to sin and its consequences in Genesis 3, we should observe that there is not even a whisper of slavery in Genesis 1–2. Male and female are made in God’s image (Gen 1:26–27), are blessed by God, are told to fill and subdue the land, and are given dominion over fish, birds, and all creeping critters (1:28). They have the plants for food (1:29), and all is very good (1:31). God gives no authorization for one human to own another as property, and there is no indication that anything of the kind was ever his intention.

God made the world as a cosmic temple, a place in which he would be known, served, worshipped, and present with his image bearers.[6] Charging them to “fill the earth and subdue it,” God apparently wanted them to make all the dry land like the garden, a place where his glory was known and enjoyed (cf. Num 14:21; Ps 72:19; Isa 11:9; Hab 2:1). Because all humans are made in God’s image (Gen 1:28), God’s glory is not advanced by the unrighteous abuse of one gender by another, nor is his glory shown when one human enslaves another.

Sin

God did not intend humans to practice sexism or slavery, so how did these specters come to haunt the world? Sin. When Adam and Eve sinned by eating forbidden fruit, God cursed the serpent, and he made the roles of the man and woman more difficult (Gen 3:16–19).

Sin and Sexism

The woman’s role was to help the man work and keep the garden and to multiply with him. God did not curse her like he cursed the serpent (3:14–15), but he did give her pain in childbearing and a “desire for” her husband (3:16). Those who refuse to obey God forfeit their right to God’s goodness and suffer the penalty of his justice.

Sexism enters the world when God tells the woman that her desire will be for her husband, but he will rule over her. What does this mean? The same language is used in Genesis 4:7 when God tells Cain that sin’s desire is for him, but he must rule over it. Sin desires Cain in the sense that it wants to control Cain’s actions, and if Cain is to overcome, he must be ruthless against sin. Cain needs to “rule over” sin in a take-no-prisoners, zero-tolerance kind of way. From the use of the same language of “desiring” and “ruling over” in Genesis 3:16 and 4:7, it seems that what God says to the woman in Genesis 3:16 means that she will want to control the actions of her husband the way sin wants to control Cain’s; further, her husband will rule over her the way Cain should rule over sin.

If we believe what the Bible tells us, we must conclude that human sin is responsible for sexism. One of Dictionary.com’s definitions of sexism goes like this: “attitudes or behavior based on traditional stereotypes of sexual roles.” But neither tradition nor stereotypes are the real problem. The real problem derives from human sin. Both feminism, the female desire to control, and chauvinism, harsh male abuse of females, result from sin. Articulated in God’s words in Genesis 3:16, sexism entered the world as a judgment against sin. It was not part of God’s good creation. Sexism can take on different forms, but in any form it will be the opposite of love for God expressed in appropriate gender relations. Appropriate gender relations, again, are defined by the Bible, which stands over and against both tradition and the way people typically behave. It is clear from Genesis 3:16 that conflict between the genders is a punishment, a curse, a judgment that makes it difficult for humans to experience God’s original, good intention.

Does the Bible condone sexism? Let’s compare sexism, which is a punishment, with another punishment: death also results from sin. Death also entered the world as a visitation of God’s justice against sin. Does the Bible condone death? The Bible says that all people are sinners, so all people will die; but the Bible also tells of the One who triumphed over death. Through his death and resurrection Jesus opened the way to life. Similarly, we can say that all people are sinners, so all people will suffer the consequences of sexism (this is not to say that all people are sexist all the time, any more than all people are dead all the time). Just as the Bible points to the defeat of death, the Bible points to the defeat of sexism through what Jesus has accomplished.

In a renewal of edenic harmony the rollback of the curse through the defeat of sexism brings about a situation like the one in Eden, where there was equality and subordination. This involves men sacrificing themselves for their wives the way Christ sacrificed himself for the church, and it involves women submitting to their husbands the way the church submits to Christ (Eph 5:22–33).[7] Sexism will not be conquered by either secular feminism or chauvinism, nor will it be overcome by an unbiblical evangelical egalitarianism. Sexism will be overcome by those who live out the gospel as they relate to members of the opposite sex, whether in marriage (Eph 5:22–33) or in the family of the faith (e.g., 1 Tim 5:1–2). The Bible does not teach that gender will be obliterated but redeemed and made new.

Sin and Slavery

We don’t know exactly when slavery was first practiced,[8] but the first mention of it in the Bible comes when Noah curses the descendants of his youngest son: “Canaan will be cursed. He will be the lowest of slaves to his brothers” (Gen 9:25). This shows that slavery was not part of God’s original good creation. Rather, slavery is mentioned in response to the sin of Ham.

It is interesting to observe that after the sin narrated in Genesis 3, only the serpent is directly cursed (Gen 3:14). Then God speaks the same words to Cain in Genesis 4:11 that he had spoken to the serpent, “You are cursed.” Ham is cursed, and then God tells Abram that he will curse those who dishonor him (12:3). Like the curse on gender relations that results in sexism (3:16), then, slavery first appears in the Bible in a curse spoken in response to sin (9:25).

In Genesis 12:1–3 God makes promises to Abraham that answer the curses of Genesis 3:14–19 point for point.[9] This means that God promises to overcome the distortion of human relationships that result in slavery and sexism through the blessing of Abraham. God made the world good. Sin brought the curse of death into the world, along with the curses of slavery and sexism. God promised to overcome curses with blessings. God promised to redeem and renew. The Bible’s statements about women and slaves are best understood when considered in light of God’s purpose to redeem and renew relations between genders and peoples.

Redemption

Having forfeited Eden, humanity faces life in a world cursed because of sin. The instructions in the Old and New Testaments about women and slaves are given to address life in this world.

The statements on slaves in the Pentateuch are given to limit the evil of a wicked human practice. Douglas Stuart observes, “The various Hebrew terms translated by terms such as ‘servant,’ ‘slave,’ ‘maidservant,’ occur more than a thousand times in the Old Testament.”[10] Any Israelite whose economic situation became desperate could engage in what amounted to a contract to serve another Israelite until the next sabbatical year, and if he chose to stay for life with that particular household, he could do so (Exod 21:1–6). The laws make it so that everyone knows what the rules are, which protects both servants and masters. Daughters of poorer families were protected by these regulations (21:7–11), and Kenneth Laing Harris observes that “[a]lthough the restitution for slaves is governed by their social situation, their identity as full human beings, rather than mere possessions, is assumed, since they are not included in the laws governing the loss of property (see Exod 21:33–22:15).”[11] Stuart rightly observes that slavery in ancient Israel is very different from what has been practiced in the modern west and that Israel’s regulations on the practice are consistently set against their own experience in Egypt, where they were themselves mistreated.[12]

The statements on women in the Pentateuch are similar to the statements on slaves/servants in that they protect the vulnerable in a world where women need men to protect and provide for them.[13] These statutes and commands regarding the treatment of women and slaves were not addressed to people living in Eden before the fall but to people living outside Eden after the curse. The commands and statutes themselves do not restore an edenic way of life, but they are meant to limit human evil until God accomplishes redemption.

Under the Old Covenant the people of God are a nation with boundaries and ethnic identity. This results in regulations on both slavery and marriage that reflect ethnic and political concerns. Members of the covenant people, the Israelites, relate to one another in ways that they do not relate to outsiders.

Under the New Covenant the people of God are not a nation with boundaries but are trans-national, from every tribe. Moreover, Christians are repeatedly instructed to submit to the governing authorities (Rom 13:1–7; 1 Pet 2:13–14). It is in this context that we must understand the New Testament instructions for slaves to submit to their masters (Eph 6:5; 1 Pet 2:18).

Slavery in the New Testament

The authors of the New Testament are not out to revolutionize the existing social order but to make disciples of Jesus. They are not trying to overthrow governments or renovate social relations but make the gospel attractive. This is explicit in 1 Timothy 6:1, where having commanded slaves to regard their masters as worthy of all honor, Paul explains that this is “so that God’s name and His teaching will not be blasphemed.” The same thing is seen in Titus 2:9–10, where slaves are to be obedient and trustworthy “so that they may adorn the teaching of God our Savior in everything.” The gospel is the issue, not social justice. A day will come when social justice will be achieved, when Jesus will establish his kingdom, but the authors of the New Testament expect tribulation and affliction, the messianic woes, until that day comes.[14]

Slaves who become believers are to find their identity in Christ and not be worried about their slavery, though if they can get their freedom they should do so (1 Cor 7:21). The Lord has set them truly free to be slaves of Christ (1 Cor 7:22), and those who have been bought by Christ should “not become slaves of men” (7:23).[15] Along these lines, Paul calls on Philemon to receive Onesimus back no longer as a slave but as a brother (Phlm 16). Since slavery was no part of God’s good created order, Paul’s instructions to Philemon provide an example of how relationships within the family of God can overcome evil with good.

Gender Relations in the New Testament

When we consider the New Testament’s instructions on gender relations, we are dealing with a different animal than slavery. Slavery has no place in the garden of Eden, nothing being said about it in Genesis 1–2. Sexism has no place in Eden, either, though gender roles have a place there, and this indicates that gender roles within a hierarchy of authority is not the same thing as sexism. There are indications of how the male and female related to one another in Genesis 1–2. This shows us that while male and female gender roles are part of God’s good creation, slave and master roles are not. Slave and master roles result from the altered state of the world once sin, curse, death, and slavery have been introduced.[16]

The difference between male and female, slave and free on this point appears to result in a difference in the way these issues are treated in the New Testament. Again, male and female roles are part of God’s good creation, slave and master roles are not. So we are dealing with one good thing that has been corrupted (male/female roles and relations), and one bad thing whose evil is being mitigated (slave/master roles and relations).

When we consider the New Testament calls for women to submit to male leadership and authority, again and again the original order of creation is appealed to as the basis for the instruction. We see this in 1 Corinthians 11, where Paul explains that man is the head of woman (1 Cor 11:3), which means that women should cover their heads when they pray or prophesy in church (11:4–6). Paul then appeals to the Eden narratives of Genesis 1–2, explaining that woman is the glory of man (11:7), that woman was made from man (11:8), and that woman was made for man (11:9). These ideas seem to be what he has in mind when he later says that women “should be submissive, as the law also says” (14:34). Paul appeals to the created order in a similar way to explain his prohibition of women teaching or exercising authority over men in 1 Timothy 2:9–15.[17]

Here too the concern is for the advance of the gospel. Paul explains in Ephesians 5 that marriage exists to display the relationship between Christ and the church (esp. Eph 5:32).[18] Wives are to submit and husbands are to lay down their lives so that they can display the gospel. Peter, too, calls for women to submit to their husbands “so that . . . they may be won” to the gospel (1 Pet 3:1–6), and he calls husbands to be Christ-like as they relate to their wives (3:7).[19]

What about Galatians 3:28? Paul writes, “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus” (NKJV). This statement has to be understood in context. Paul has asserted that the blessings to Abraham were not made to many seeds but to one, “who is Christ” (Gal 3:16). He then explains the relationship between the promises to Abraham and the Law of Moses (cf. 3:15–25), before asserting that “you are all sons of God through faith in Christ Jesus” (3:26). This means that all who trust Christ have the status of sonship, and Paul declares that union with Christ makes this possible in 3:27: “For as many of you as have been baptized into Christ have put on Christ like a garment.” This is the reason for the declaration in Galatians 3:28—those who are united to Christ by faith, who have been baptized into him, “are all one in Christ Jesus.” And this means that what Paul said in 3:16 about the promise to the one seed, “who is Christ,” applies to them: “And if you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham’s seed, heirs according to the promise” (3:29).

Galatians 3:28 no more does away with gender roles than it does away with slave status. Paul wrote 1 Corinthians, Ephesians, Colossians, 1 Timothy, and Titus after he wrote Galatians, and in every one of those letters he makes statements about slaves obeying their masters and about women submitting to the authority of men. Paul’s concern in Galatians 3:28 is not the obliteration of gender and societal realities but the reality of union with Christ. Those who believe are one in Christ Jesus, but from Paul’s statements elsewhere we know that he expects Christians to continue to live in ways appropriate to their gender and societal status.[20]

Renewal

Gender roles, then, are about the gospel. The relations between male and female, husband and wife, are to reflect the relationship between Christ and the church. The relationship between Yahweh and Israel was treated as a marriage, prompting the charges the prophets make of spiritual adultery—these can be seen most prominently in Jeremiah and Hosea. The relationship between Christ and the church is also treated as a marriage, and the curse that led to sexism has been overcome by the death and resurrection of Jesus. Its affects are also being overcome as Christians live out the gospel as they relate to members of the opposite sex. When we are finally freed from our bondage to corruption, sexism will be no more. All things will be fulfilled in Christ. Though in the resurrection man and woman will no longer marry (Mark 12:25), the resurrected Christ remains a man, so we cannot conclude that gender will be nullified by the resurrection.

Sexism is a distortion, a perversion of something good. That good will be restored at “the revealing of the sons of God” (Rom 8:19 NKJV), when “the creation itself also will be delivered from the bondage of corruption into the glorious liberty of the children of God” (8:21 NKJV).

Slavery, too, is a distortion. The reality is that all people belong to God. Even when humans rebelled against their Creator and found themselves in bondage to one another, God redeemed a people for himself. That people, Israel, was to serve God freely, willingly.[21] They rebelled because humans are not merely enslaved to one another but to sin. Through the death of the Lamb of God, Jesus, God redeemed people from sin. Just as Christ became a curse to redeem us from the curse of the law (Gal 3:13), he took on the form of a slave to redeem us from slavery (Phil 2:7–8).[22] Here again the idea is that people will no longer be slaves of sin but slaves of righteousness (cf. Rom 6:15–23). One day those redeemed from slavery to sin will also be redeemed from bondage to corruption (8:21), and when our bodies are redeemed (8:23) we will serve God perfectly.

Conclusion

The Bible has instructions for males and females, masters and slaves, but the Bible does not condone slavery and sexism. The Bible has a vision of male and female relations that are harmonious and beautiful, appropriate and fitting, and it teaches neither androgynous egalitarianism nor chauvinistic sexism. The Bible’s teaching on how males and females relate enables people to live in ways that adorn the gospel of Jesus Christ, and these realities point forward to the consummation and fulfillment of marriage and gender relations at the marriage supper of the Lamb (Rev 19:9).

Similarly, the Bible has instructions for slaves and masters, but the Bible does not condone slavery. God did not create humans to be slaves but to serve him freely. God redeemed slaves, set them free, broke the yoke from upon them, and made them walk erect that they might serve him in dignified freedom. Those who trust in Christ are no longer slaves of sin but slaves of God (Rom 6:18, 22). Even if they are enslaved in the present, their identity is to be found in their union with Christ by faith (Gal 3:28), by which they are sons of God (3:26). This will enable them to rise above the burden of slavery, which they should cast off if they can (1 Cor 7:21).

The distortion of human relations that is slavery will not be perpetuated in the future. The statements in texts such as Isaiah 14:1–2 are about the triumph of the people of God over their enemies rather than the continuation of slavery. There is reason to think that Isaiah is describing the future with the terms and categories known by himself and his contemporaries, for he speaks of the new heavens and earth as including death and sinners (Isa 65:17, 20), even as he also points to the resurrection (26:19). This would seem to indicate that the statement that the nations will be slaves in Isaiah 14:2 is about the people of Israel taking “captive those who were their captors” (ESV), while the statement that “the young man shall die a hundred years old” (ESV) is about long life, and the statement that “the sinner a hundred years old shall be accursed” (ESV) is about the joy and blessing of righteousness.

Those who do not repent and believe will be enslaved to their torment forever. Those who call on the name of the Lord Jesus will perfectly obey the dictates of righteousness as they serve God, and they will experience the joy and fulfillment of appropriate gender relationships when the bridegroom returns for the bride who has made herself ready.

1 In these sentences I am drawing an equal sign between what the Bible teaches and what God intends, and this will continue throughout because I am convinced that God speaks in the Bible (cf., e.g., 2 Kgs 17:37; Ezra 7:6; 2 Tim 3:16; 2 Pet 1:20–21). See further James M. Hamilton, “Still Sola Scriptura: An Evangelical View of Scripture,” in The Sacred Text: Excavating the Texts, Exploring the Interpretations, and Engaging the Theologies of the Christian Scriptures (Piscataway: Gorgias, 2010), 215–40; and Timothy Ward, Words of Life: Scripture as the Living and Active Word of God (Downers Grove: InterVarsity, 2009).

2 For a wider discussion of biblical theology, see my attempt to show that biblical theology has a center in God’s Glory in Salvation through Judgment: A Biblical Theology (Wheaton: Crossway, 2010). For a shorter, more introductory treatment, see my What Is Biblical Theology? (Wheaton: Crossway, 2013). Thomas R. Schreiner is correct that William J. Webb fundamentally fails to understand redemptive history (see Thomas R. Schreiner, “William J. Webb’s Slaves, Women & Homosexuals: A Review Article,” The Southern Baptist Journal of Theology 6, no. 1 [2002]: 46–64).

3 Others have done this work well. See, e.g., John Byron, Slavery Metaphors in Early Judaism and Pauline Christianity: A Traditio-Historical and Exegetical Examination, WUNT (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2003); John Byron, Recent Research on Paul and Slavery (Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix Press, 2008); Murray J. Harris, Slave of Christ: A New Testament Metaphor for Total Devotion to Christ, NSBT (Downers Grove: InterVarsity, 2001).

4 See Mary Kassian, The Feminist Mistake: The Radical Impact of Feminism on Church and Culture (Wheaton: Crossway, 2005).

5 E.g., Philip B. Payne, Man and Woman, One in Christ: An Exegetical and Theological Study of Paul’s Letters (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2009), 86, 131, 133.

6 G. K. Beale, The Temple and the Church’s Mission: A Biblical Theology of the Dwelling Place of God (Downers Grove: InterVarsity, 2004).

7 See my essay, “The Mystery of Marriage,” in For the Fame of God’s Name: Essays in Honor of John Piper, ed. Sam Storms and Justin Taylor (Wheaton: Crossway, 2010), 253–71.

8 For discussion of slavery in the ancient Near East and in ancient Israel, see Byron, Slavery Metaphors in Early Judaism and Pauline Christianity, 37–47; Gregory C. Chirichigno, Debt-Slavery in Israel and the Ancient Near East, JSOTSupp (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1993).

9 For a full explanation, see James M. Hamilton, “The Seed of the Woman and the Blessing of Abraham,” Tyndale Bulletin 58 (2007): 253–73.

10 Douglas K. Stuart, Exodus, NAC (Nashville: B&H, 2006), 474. Also, see his excellent excursus, “Slavery and Slave Laws in Ancient Israel,” 474–76.

11 Kenneth Laing Harris, “Exodus,” in The ESV Study Bible, ed. Wayne Grudem (Wheaton: Crossway, 2008), 177, note on Exod 21:2–11.

12 Stuart, Exodus, 475–76.

13 For a good discussion of these realities, see Sandra Richter, The Epic of Eden: A Christian Entry into the Old Testament (Downers Grove: InterVarsity, 2008), 25–46.

14 See Table 6.2, “The Messianic Woes in the Old and New Testaments,” in Hamilton, God’s Glory in Salvation through Judgment, 493.

15 See the excellent summary of the NT’s teaching on slavery in Thomas R. Schreiner, New Testament Theology: Magnifying God in Christ (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2008), 794–800.

16 Thomas R. Schreiner, Paul, Apostle of God’s Glory in Christ: A Pauline Theology (Downers Grove: InterVarsity, 2001), 436.

17 See further James M. Hamilton, “What Women Can Do in Ministry: Full Participation within Biblical Boundaries,” in Women, Ministry and the Gospel: Exploring New Paradigms, ed. Mark Husbands and Timothy Larsen (Downers Grove: InterVarsity, 2007), 32–52.

18 For a full exposition, see Hamilton, “The Mystery of Marriage.”

19 For a wider discussion of the New Testament’s teaching on women, marriage/divorce, and parenting/children, see Schreiner, New Testament Theology, 768–86.

20 Similarly ibid., 796.

21 For a discussion of “The Exodus as the Source of Enslavement to God,” see Byron, Slavery Metaphors in Early Judaism and Pauline Christianity, 47–54.

22 See the full discussion of Phil 2:6–11 as it relates to this issue in ibid., 156–80.

Chapter Fourteen

Does the Bible Conflict with Science?

William A. Dembski

Essays on whether the Bible and science conflict typically come in four varieties: (1) Yes, of course they conflict, and so much the worse for the Bible because science shows that the Good Book is riddled with errors and misconceptions. This is the line taken by atheists such as Richard Dawkins.[1] (2) Yes, of course they conflict, and so much the worse for science, which, far from being unbiased and self-correcting, is an ideologically driven enterprise committed to a materialistic worldview. True science, properly so called, needs to take its cues from the Bible. This line is taken by many young-earth creationists.[2] (3) No, they don’t conflict because, by their very nature, they can’t conflict—the Bible and science address fundamentally different aspects of reality. Rather than compete, they complement each other. Stephen Jay Gould’s NOMA (Non-Overlapping Magisteria) and much of the Templeton-funded science-religion dialogue take this line.[3] (4) Not only don’t the Bible and science conflict, but, as good fortune would have it, they overlap and speak in unison where they do. This is the line of concordists or harmonizers.[4]

Given a forced choice among these positions, I would go with the last. This is where my sympathies lie. To put my cards on the table, I am a biblical inerrantist. Thus, I hold that the Bible doesn’t err in all matters to which it speaks, not only in faith and morals but also in history and science. Though rejecting a dictationist view of the Bible’s formation, I hold to its plenary verbal inspiration—the Bible, down to its very words and letters, is, in my view, inspired. On some of the most contentious areas in the dialogue between science and theology, I take a thoroughly traditional line. Adam and Eve, the progenitors of the human race, were, in my view, exactly two people specially created by God apart from primate ancestors. More generally, common descent, the claim that all organisms trace their lineage to a common ancestor is, in my view, ill-supported by the scientific evidence. I regard the power of evolutionary processes as wildly exaggerated by the scientific mainstream. In particular, natural selection has, in my view, little creative potential and can at best explain small-scale evolutionary changes.[5]

Given such views, I could write this essay along traditional concordist lines, describing how mainstream science gets it wrong where it conflicts with the Bible and indicating how certain tradition-bound interpretations of the Bible get it wrong where they conflict with rigorously established areas of science.[6] This genre has filled the apologetics literature at least since William Paley’s Natural Theology (1802). It has merit, but I’m not convinced we need more of it. Apologetics, it seems to me, needs to do more than simply shore up the faith of the faithful—it needs to shake up the unbelief of the unbelieving. In examining whether the Bible and science conflict, I would therefore like to challenge those who think they do as well as those who think they don’t.

Faith, Reason, and Apologetics

Philosophers and theologians like to place views, their own and others’, in tidy categories. With their own preferred view, they want to show that everything conforms with it neatly and tightly. With unwelcome alternatives, they want to show that these are riddled with dissonance and incoherence. Although I think Christianity, conceived as a worldview, has far more going for it than any of the other worldviews out there, we misrepresent the cogency of the Christian worldview by suggesting it is a slamdunk once we know the relevant facts, concepts, and arguments.

Richard Dawkins is on record as saying that anyone who denies evolutionary theory is either ignorant, stupid, insane, or wicked.[7] For him, evolution is like one of Descartes’ clear and distinct ideas—short of gross mental malfunction, to entertain it is to accept it. When it comes to broader worldview questions, however, such certainty is unsustainable. There’s too much that we don’t know. Moreover, our reasoning about the truly big questions always contains leaps or discontinuities, which, though often quite plausibly spanned, cannot be filled in with anything like mathematical precision. To say that the reasonableness of the Christian faith is not a slamdunk is not to embrace an irrationalism that denies any concord between Athens and Jerusalem or thinks it impious to use one’s natural intellect to try to understand aspects of the faith. It seems that both rationalism and irrationalism can be roads to idolatry and that God countenances neither.

If apologetics could nail down the truth of Christianity with such rigor that one would, as Dawkins puts it, have to be ignorant, stupid, insane, or wicked to reject it, then we could depend solely on our intellects to determine the truth of Christianity and thus take pride in how smart we are for seeing its truth. In our pride, we would thus turn our intellects into an idol. But renouncing the intellect and its effectiveness in the apologetic enterprise faces no less a temptation to pride and idolatry. “We can understand nothing about God except what he has directly revealed to us,” be it through his Word or by the Holy Spirit or through some other means that are not the common patrimony of all humanity. In that case, it’s only the holy few who are privileged with seeing the light of truth. Moreover, in dismissing apologetics for its emphasis on rational argument, they must use words and reason to argue why the truth of God may not properly be defended through rational argument. The irrationalists on apologetics thus cast themselves as occupying the intellectual high ground (based on what, reason?) over the poor benighted rationalists who think that reason can take us at least some distance in the direction of God.

The truth about apologetics, therefore, lies somewhere in the middle. It is neither a slamdunk method for compelling faith nor a feeble method with no purchase on faith. Indeed, the New Testament takes such a middle course, underscoring the need for apologetics, but without overstating or understating its importance. Viewed rhetorically, apologetics is about persuasion—persuading people that the truths proclaimed in the Gospel hold up under scrutiny. And that’s exactly what we find in Scripture.

Proclamation throughout the New Testament works hand-in-glove with persuasion. Believe because ____________, where the biblical writer fills in the blank, and the blank constitutes a means of persuasion. The blank is some stated reason, which may be the miracles of Jesus (John 14:11), or the eye-witness testimony of the apostles (Acts 2:32), or an appeal to shared philosophical sensibilities (Acts 17:28). The reason given helps to support faith, but it never is quite enough to mandate faith, at least not on strictly intellectual grounds. If anything, the mandating of faith comes from the heart rather than the head—it is moral rather than intellectual. It’s as though God were saying, “You’ve been given enough to believe, and even if your mind is not completely satisfied, your heart, were it not corrupted, should be satisfied, so your refusal is culpable even if you can find loopholes on purely intellectual grounds.”

To see this, consider Romans 1:18–20 (KJV). There Paul attempts to make sense of human unbelief and, in every instance, finds it inexcusable:

The wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men who hold the truth in unrighteousness; Because that which may be known of God is manifest in them; for God hath shewed it to them. For the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead; so that they are without excuse.

Thus, when people fail to believe in the Christian God and then try to justify their unbelief on intellectual grounds by claiming insufficient evidence, their failure is not intellectual but moral in that they willfully suppress what light their intellects ought to be giving them.

Still, God seems to avoid making himself over-obvious. Isaiah 45:15 stresses the hiddenness of God: “Verily thou art a God that hidest thyself, O God of Israel, the Savior” (KJV). Some Christian thinkers, notably Pascal, have made much of the hidden God—the Deus absconditus.[8] Although, in my view, Pascal went a bit overboard reveling in divine hiddenness, there is an important truth here. God certainly does reveal himself, both in natural and in salvation history. To those with eyes to see, that evidence is compelling. But it is not overwhelming, certainly not for those who prefer to remain unconvinced. It’s not just that God respects human freedom. It’s that our freedom must respect God—a good heart will use its freedom to seek after God and find him, a corrupt heart will not.

Why did Judas Iscariot think he could get away with betraying Jesus? If Jesus had, at every moment in his ministry, displayed a clairvoyance that left no doubt that he knew exactly what his disciples were thinking and planning, would Judas have betrayed him? In that case, would Judas have dared to betray him? But Jesus, in his humanity, seems not to have continuously hit the disciples over the head with his divinity. Even in the miracles of Jesus, we find less flamboyance than one might expect from the supreme being of the universe (albeit one taking human form). For instance, nowhere in the ministry of Jesus, as described in the New Testament, do we see him miraculously replace a person’s missing limbs or other body parts. In every instance, however diseased or misshapen, what Jesus heals is there already.[9] Jesus, in Mark 11, talks about a faith that can move mountains, but Jesus himself left Mounts Zion, Hermon, Sinai as well as all the other mountains in Israel exactly where he found them.

When Jesus was resurrected, he was not immediately identifiable with his former self. Compare this to Lazarus who, when raised from the dead, was clearly his old self. The disciples on the road to Emmaus recognized Jesus only after he broke bread with them (Luke 24:30–31). The apostle Thomas refused to believe that Jesus was raised until he could see in Jesus the marks of crucifixion (John 20:26–28). And even when Jesus was nearing his ascension, right before he gave the Great Commission, Matthew 28:17 records, “When they saw him, they worshipped, but some doubted.” Some doubted? What did they doubt? Presumably that this was the same Jesus who had walked with them before the crucifixion and that he was indeed the God of the universe. Could not Jesus have made his resurrection clearer to the disciples, thereby removing all doubt? Why didn’t Jesus appear to the disciples with exactly the same physical characteristics as his pre-crucifixion form?

Skeptics love to jump in at such points and sneer, “See, this just shows that Christianity is bunk.” But the absence of total clarity that would remove all doubt is hardly reason to deny that there is sufficient clarity to engender faith, especially in those with a pure heart. Jesus himself says in the Sermon on the Mount that seeing God is reserved for those with pure hearts (Matt 5:8). This seems to be the pattern in God’s revelation of himself: provide enough evidence to convince those who are honestly seeking truth but not so much evidence as to force belief on those who prefer to believe a lie.

No doubt, God could make his role as the Creator of nature clearer by signing every sunset, in the bottom right corner, “Made by Yahweh.” God could have implanted in every string of our DNA the phrase, perhaps in ASCII code, “Made by Yahweh.” But who other than God could make a sunset? And who other than God could have designed our DNA? Yet in that case, why should he sign either? Such a signature would constitute an undignified display unworthy of the author and unnecessary for all but the most recalcitrant observers, who, save for God’s grace, include each of us.

Let’s consider this point about signatures a bit further. Typically, we sign the things that we make because our role in making them might otherwise be lost. We want our identity to be known through the things we have made. We want the recognition for having made them, and signing things is how we ensure that. But when the set of possible makers is, and could only be, a single individual, there’s no need to sign something. To sign something, in that case, might even signify affectation or insecurity, which would be unworthy of God in his greatness.

Indeed, if we found that nature were full of “Made by Yahweh” signatures, skeptics could counter: “The God who made nature and has placed his signature throughout it is clearly neurotic, worried that he gets proper credit for his works. But God, if he exists, would have to be perfect, and not a neurotic who is scrupulously concerned about obtaining proper credit. Accordingly, it follows that God doesn’t exist.” Skeptics, it seems, would not be satisfied even if God made himself more obvious.

A poignant example of this mindset comes from a website with the memorable domain name whywontgodhealamputees.com. On this website, one reads,

Does God heal amputees? The Bible clearly promises that God answers prayers. For example, in Mark 11:24 Jesus says, “Therefore I tell you, whatever you ask for in prayer, believe that you have received it, and it will be yours.” And billions of Christians believe these promises. You can find thousands of books, magazine articles and websites talking about the power of prayer. According to believers, God is answering millions of their prayers every day. So what should happen if we pray to God to restore amputated limbs? Clearly, if God is real, limbs should regenerate through prayer. In reality, they do not. Why not? Because God is imaginary.[10]

This website draws inspiration from the nineteenth-century atheist Anatole France, who is widely quoted for dismissing the purported miracles at the French shrine Lourdes. France’s dismissal of miracles at Lourdes took the form of a question: why do we only see crutches at Lourdes but not wooden legs? Crutches are for those who have legs, but their legs are not working very well. Wooden legs are for those who have no legs at all. To leave a wooden leg at Lourdes would testify to a lost leg that grew back. By contrast, to leave merely a crutch testifies to an existing leg that might have gotten better on its own.

Yet France, in raising this objection, also considered the possibility of finding wooden legs at Lourdes. Writing in The Garden of Epicurus, in a passage rarely quoted by atheists in full, France remarks,

Happening to be at Lourdes, in August, I paid a visit to the grotto where innumerable crutches were hung up in token of a cure. My companion pointed to these trophies of the sick-room and hospital ward, and whispered in my ear: “One wooden leg would be more to the point.” It was the word of a man of sense; but speaking philosophically, the wooden leg would be no whit more convincing than a crutch. If an observer of a genuinely scientific spirit were called upon to verify that a man’s leg, after amputation, had suddenly grown again as before, whether in a miraculous pool or anywhere else, he would not cry: “Lo! a miracle.” He would say this: “An observation, so far unique, points us to a presumption that under conditions still undetermined, the tissues of a human leg have the property of reorganizing themselves like a crab’s or lobster’s claws and a lizard’s tail, but much more rapidly. Here we have a fact of nature in apparent contradiction with several other facts of the like sort. The contradiction arises from our ignorance, and clearly shows that the science of animal physiology must be reconstituted, or to speak more accurately, that it has never yet been properly constituted.”[11]

This remarkable passage shows that no evidence could ever get a hardcore atheist to admit that God exists, much less that the Bible is true. In every case, such atheists will invoke alternative naturalistic explanations. And even if no such explanation is forthcoming, they can rationalize that no actual miracle occurred, simply asserting that we don’t know the underlying naturalistic causes. Disbelieving in God and ridiculing the Bible, they nonetheless have unbounded faith in the power of nature. Note that France is not saying that science, as a limited form of inquiry, can only admit naturalistic explanations, and therefore that a regrown leg might signify a miracle beyond the reach of science. Rather, he is saying (based on what except his atheist presuppositions?) that a naturalistic explanation most assuredly exists, even for legs that grow back, and that the only challenge is for scientists to find that explanation. This is scientism (the view that science is the only legitimate source of knowledge), and it stacks the deck so that the very possibility of miracles is ruled out from the start.

I have offered these preliminary remarks in an essay about presumed conflicts between the Bible and science because this topic is too easily diverted down unproductive paths. God’s revelation, whether in salvation or natural history, is good enough to warrant Christian faith. Certainly, God’s revelation could have been more obvious. Likewise, it could have been less obvious. So let us grant that the fit between science and the Bible is somewhere in the middle—not totally neat but not totally at odds either. If the fit were too neat or too contrary, there would be nothing to argue about—this paper would be unnecessary and we wouldn’t have all the different approaches to the dialogue between science and faith described earlier. Still, I want to argue that the fit between the two is plenty good and not nearly as bad as critics make out.

The Compatibility of Science and the Bible

No one thinks there is a conflict between Rand McNally and Betty Crocker—between map making and cake baking. Indeed, how could there be? The two are independent enterprises. Not so the Bible and science. Even those who argue for complementarity or compartmentalization of the two have to address the presumption that the two seem to be speaking to some of the same topics and thus are not entirely independent. Where did the Earth come from? How did life originate? What does it mean to be human? These questions and many more lie at the intersection between science and the Bible. And even if we think the two are not in outright conflict, the Bible and science display certain tensions. I want in the sequel to unwind some of these tensions, showing that the Bible and science are far less at odds than is often imagined. At the same time, some tensions (such as over the age of the earth) show no signs of being resolved quickly. But even in such cases, I want to suggest ways in which the tensions can be alleviated.

The Christian Roots of Modern Science

With neo-atheism on the rise, it’s common these days to hear that the Bible is composed of bronze-age myths that fly in the face of science.[12] The Bible, we are told, is so out of touch with our present scientific conception of the world that it is best left on the trash-heap of pre-scientific superstition. But how out of step, really, is the Bible with modern science? Most of the founders of modern science, from Copernicus to Kepler to Galileo to Newton, venerated the Bible. Even in the nineteenth century, most of the top scientists were persons of faith. Take, for instance, James Clerk Maxwell, the preeminent physicist of that time. He spent every Sunday away from physics reading theology.[13]

So, somehow, many top scientists have seen no fundamental conflict between the Bible and science. In fact, some historians of science have argued, notably Stanley Jaki, that the worldview of the Bible, in which God created a world separate from himself, allowed scientists to see the world as the invention of a mind (God’s) and thus to view their role as trying to track how this mind had constructed the world (“reading God’s thoughts after him”).[14] Moreover, because the world was an invention, it was contingent—God could have invented it differently. Thus, experimentation with the world was necessary to see what God had actually done in creation. Armchair philosophy was therefore no longer the proper route for understanding nature. And finally, because the world was not identical with God, experimentation with the things of the world was not a sacrilege. Indeed, it could even be sacramental, as a means for uncovering God’s wisdom and glory in creation.[15]

Christianity’s role in inspiring the rise of modern science cuts little ice these days. A few years back I was lecturing at the University of Toronto when a biologist on faculty confronted me over my Christian faith. To him it was incomprehensible that any scientist could believe in God. I asked him, “What about Newton?” He instantly shot back, “Yeah, but Newton didn’t know about evolution.” According to this biologist, evolution so thoroughly undermined belief in God that it led to a mass exodus of scientists from the faith. He had a point: the percentage of scientists, especially in the upper echelons, who keep faith has significantly decreased with the advent of Darwin and the widespread acceptance of his theory.[16] But it is also true that many outstanding scientists currently on the scene are Christians, take the Bible seriously, and question evolutionary theory.[17] Thus, a simple head-count of scientists who believe or disbelieve in the biblical God will not answer whether the Bible and science do in fact conflict—we can each point to our favorite believing or unbelieving champions of science. For that reason, we need to look deeper.

The Bible as a Non-Scientific Text

Let’s therefore turn to the Bible itself. The world rendered by the Bible, we are told, is radically different from the world rendered by contemporary science. Skeptics portray the Bible as scientifically out of touch. Such a charge, however, stems from a mistaken and uncharitable reading of the Bible. To see this, it helps to compare the Bible with some of the other highly regarded literature of antiquity and to note how the Bible avoids the scientific “boners” (foolish mistakes) that abound in that literature. This essay is not the place for an exhaustive examination of such mistakes, but I’ll mention two here because they set off the Bible as far less problematic scientifically than much of that literature.

Part of the reason the Bible is able to avoid scientific boners is that it tends not to address scientific topics directly and thus avoids the degree of specificity that could get it into scientific trouble. The Bible, for instance, certainly mentions that humans have teeth (“an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth”). But nowhere in the Bible does it say how many teeth humans have in their mouths. Aristotle, however, did attempt to answer this question and claimed in his History of Animals that men have more teeth than women.[18] In fact, men and women have the same number of teeth, as Aristotle might readily have determined had he simply looked into human mouths and started counting. But that’s the point: in scientific matters that can readily be investigated through direct observation, the Bible seems unproblematic.

Aristotle wrote 300 years before New Testament times. Basil the Great, regarded in his day as the preeminent theologian, and writing 300 years after New Testament times, committed a scientific boner at least as bad. Writing in his Hexaemeron (a collection of sermons on the days of Genesis 1), Basil describes the following case of two species interbreeding:

The viper, the cruelest of reptiles, unites itself with the sea lamprey, and, announcing its presence by a hiss, it calls it from the depths to conjugal union. The lamprey obeys, and is united to this venomous animal. What does this mean? However hard, however fierce a husband may be, the wife ought to bear with him, and not wish to find any pretext for breaking the union. He strikes you, but he is your husband. He is a drunkard, but he is united to you by nature. He is brutal and cross, but he is henceforth one of your members, and the most precious of all.[19]

This passage is biological nonsense. The viper and the sea lamprey are different species (or different kinds, to use the biblical term). They do not interbreed and indeed cannot interbreed. Moreover, Basil attempts to draw from this biological nonsense a moral lesson that is at odds with Scripture and is morally repugnant. Basil, who was celibate and never married, is here saying that no amount of abuse of a wife by her husband is sufficient to justify her leaving him. Even the Bible, with its rigorous views on marriage and divorce, doesn’t go that far (see, for instance, 1 Corinthians 7, where, under certain circumstances, the wife is free to leave her husband). Basil presents natural theology at its worst: that he looks to behaviors of animals to draw unbiblical moral lessons for humanity is bad enough, but then getting the very biology wrong is beyond the pale.

In the Westminster Shorter Catechism, the third question reads, “What do the Scriptures principally teach?” to which the answer reads, “The Scriptures principally teach what man is to believe concerning God and what duty God requires of man.”[20] This answer, it seems to me, is on the mark. The fact is, the Bible tends not to venture into areas where it could commit gross scientific blunders, such as assigning the wrong number of teeth to humans or claiming that distinct species are capable of interbreeding when in fact they cannot. Simply in virtue of the type of book the Bible is and the types of things its authors are trying to get across, it avoids many of the scientific boners of antiquity.

Nonetheless, for many contemporary critics of the Bible, the mere fact that the Bible avoids certain obvious scientific mistakes does little to resolve the tensions that they perceive between the Bible and science. To them, the Bible appears outlandish. It describes a world in which demons account for mental, and at times also physical, illness; in which miraculous events occur repeatedly and openly (not in some hidden corner but where CNN could send a film crew to record those events if they were happening today); in which curses and blessings seem to have real efficacy; in which prophets accurately foretell future events; and in which the writers of Scripture seem to display an understanding of the cosmos that we now know with confidence to be wrong.

Although these concerns need to be taken seriously, they are answerable provided one recognizes four things: (1) the antiquity of the Bible, which assures that some of the ways it puts things are bound to strike modern readers as foreign; (2) the distinction between phenomenological and realistic uses of language; (3) one’s prior commitment, or lack thereof, to naturalism; and (4) the primacy of text over authorial intention in interpretation. These points are crucial to maintaining the Bible’s reasonableness in the face of science. Let’s examine them in turn.

The Antiquity of the Bible and Face-Value Meaning

The first is straightforward. The Bible is an old book written by people in cultures distinct from our own. Its conceptual grid differs from ours. In consequence, we need to read it charitably, attempting to understand its claims on its own terms. A common point of contention between theological conservatives and liberals is over whether the Bible should be interpreted literally. In a sense, all interpretation must be literal in that it must pay attention to the actual letters on a page (that’s where all interpretation begins). But in these debates the real question is whether one is bound, as a faithful interpreter of Scripture, to adopt its most obvious face-value meaning.

It would seem that the biblical writers themselves were not literalists in this sense. For all the references in the Old Testament to various events taking “forty years,” very few of them probably refer to periods of time that are even close to 14,600 days (= 40 × 365). Jesus himself said many paradoxical things that were not meant to be taken literally (such as gouging out one’s eye if it causes offence). That’s not to say we should eschew the face-value meaning of Scripture. At times—perhaps most of the time—the right interpretation is the most obvious interpretation. And at other times it is not. Hence, Paul enjoins that the Christian “correctly handles the word of truth” (2 Tim 2:15 NIV).

The Bible’s Use of Phenomenological Language

The second point, about phenomenological and realistic language, relates to the first. In recognizing that the Bible is an old book written by people with cultural backgrounds quite different from our own, we need to keep in mind that they didn’t distinguish between appearance and reality with quite the same obsessiveness that we do. This is not to say that they didn’t recognize the distinction. But their language tends to focus more on appearance and theological significance than on underlying reality—it is more phenomenological than realistic. Take the claim in Psalm 93 about the world being firmly established so that it cannot be moved. Some Bible-believing contemporaries of Copernicus took this psalm to mean that the earth doesn’t actually move around the sun, implying that Copernicus must be wrong.[21]

Anticipating such concerns, Osiander, Copernicus’s publisher of De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium, made sure, in the foreword, to stress that Copernicus’s theory provided a way of accounting for the movements of heavenly bodies without claiming that these were their actual movements (Copernicus’s theory was thus attempting to “save the phenomena,” thereby meeting a criterion for empirical adequacy known to the ancient Greeks).[22] Osiander thus enabled Copernicus to keep peace with the Catholic Church in a way that Galileo could not, for Galileo claimed that the earth did not merely appear to rotate around the sun but actually did so. Accordingly, when Copernicus proposed his theory, given Osiander’s foreword, he could be seen as providing one way of describing what heavenly bodies appeared to be doing without committing himself to the literal truth of this description. Motion, as we know now and Copernicus knew then, is relative. We may think we are moving, but in fact we may be stationary and other things may be moving relative to us.

Phenomenological language has a certain logical priority over realistic language. The world, in the first instance, presents itself to us via phenomena, which are then most naturally described phenomenologically. Realistic language, which purports to get at the underlying reality behind these phenomena, is then logically downstream. Even when we conduct scientific experiments to try to get at the underlying reality behind phenomena, we depend on phenomena. When, for instance, Charles Wilson conducted his cloud chamber experiments tracking electrons, what he saw were tracks in the cloud chamber. The underlying reality—that is, the electrons tracing those tracks—were inferred from the phenomena produced through his experiment.

The distinction between phenomenological and realistic language helps mitigate the jarring to our modern sensibilities when the Bible speaks of physical events having spiritual causes. Take, for instance, demons. Anyone acquainted with mental illness recognizes that some psychological conditions give all appearance of an invisible malevolent force acting to ruin the sufferer’s life. Is the underlying reality here an evil spirit that needs to be exorcised? Is it a brain imbalance that needs to be medicated (as with bipolar disorder that responds to lithium)? Is it some combination of the two?

I personally take the accounts of demons in the New Testament literally and don’t try to explain them away in purely medical terms. My point, however, is that regardless of what one thinks about the ultimate reality of demons, the language of demons, treated phenomenologically, makes perfect sense. Take drug addiction. We sometimes describe people addicted to drugs as “having a monkey on their back.” The monkey isn’t visible. One might say it’s a metaphor. Or one might say it’s a demon. Does it matter? Recently, a friend of mine committed suicide. His mother had committed suicide years earlier. As a mutual acquaintance put it, his mother’s suicide was “a demon he faced all his life.” Even in our colloquial language, we refer to someone who engages in self-defeating behaviors as wrestling with one’s “demons.”

Naturalism and Miracles

Now a skeptic of the Bible might reply that metaphorical references to demons are fine and well, but that the Bible also teaches a full-scale demonology in which demons are real spiritual beings that can affect both body and mind. Let’s grant, for the sake of argument, that this is in fact the biblical teaching. That brings us to our third point—one’s prior commitment to naturalism. Even if a skeptic were inclined to read the Scriptures charitably and thus interpret references to demons in modern medical terms, he will still find plenty that’s objectionable in the Scriptures. Skeptics typically have a prior commitment to naturalism, the view that nature operates by unbroken natural law and that supernatural powers play no role in the world. In other words, they are naturalists. Now the Bible is clearly a supernatural book in the sense that it attributes many extraordinary events to supernatural agency. So here we will necessarily have to part company with the naturalists.

As orthodox Christians, we believe that the miracles, prophesies, answered prayers, blessings, and curses recorded in Scripture happened and that God or lesser spiritual agencies (angels and demons) played a key causal role. Naturalists, obviously, reject this view. But in doing so, are they more rational and measured than supernaturalists? That’s how naturalists usually portray themselves. A world not governed by unbroken natural law is for them a lunatic asylum, one in which capricious gods operate without restraint, violating rational expectations and rendering science impossible. When money in a safe is missing, don’t look for a human thief; instead, conclude that the Devil made it magically dematerialize—that’s how naturalists view supernaturalists. According to naturalists, only a world operating by unbroken natural law is rational and open to scientific inquiry.[23]

But the doctrine of divine omnipotence, which teaches that God can do anything that’s logically possible, hardly entails that God need act capriciously or unreasonably. God, who is supremely rational, who embodies all rationality, who in Jesus was reason (logos) incarnate, can surely be trusted to act reasonably. By wisdom God created an orderly world, a cosmos that provides a window into his glory. True, that window is darkened to us on account of sin, but the glory of God is still evident in creation. Creation presents us with regularities—the sun rises and sets, seasons come and go. But the God who created this world and endowed it with regularities is not bound by them. If he chooses, he can override the laws of nature—they are, after all, part of his creation. For the naturalist, the laws of nature are primary: everything that happens must in principle be characterizable by them. But the God who created nature is free to intervene in nature: God can do things that the causal powers of nature, left to themselves, could never accomplish.

Note that when God overrides natural laws by intervening in the world, he is not violating or even suspending these laws. The laws and the natural powers they characterize are still operating, but they are not having their ordinary effect because other powers are also operating. Divine intervention here parallels human intervention. Imagine, for instance, that an earthquake causes a lamp to fall off your desk. You intervene by holding out your hand and breaking the fall before it smashes to the ground. Your intervention did not stop gravity from working or the laws of gravity from applying. Rather, by intervening, you overrode what gravity would otherwise have accomplished (in this case, destroying the lamp). In the science-theology dialogue, “intervention” has become a dirty word, as though it is beneath God’s dignity to intervene in the world. Yet if we’re sick, we certainly desire the intervention of a physician. God is the world’s physician, and the Bible clearly teaches that God intervenes.

But when God intervenes in the world, must he act unreasonably or capriciously? To see that this is not the case, consider again human intervention. No law of nature characterizes how your car navigates from home to work. You, as the driver, are free to direct the car any way you like. You could drive capriciously, weaving the car madly between lanes. You could also drive it into a ditch. But, as a rational agent, you don’t engage in such bizarre acts. Your purpose is to drive safely to work, and that’s exactly what you do. If intelligent agency in human contexts can avoid the charge of capriciousness or unreasonableness, why not in the context of divine action? Why can’t God, by intervening in the world, direct it to fulfill his good purposes? And if the world has no natural capacity to fulfill God’s good purposes, why can’t God, who transcends nature, exercise powers in nature that nature itself doesn’t have? Christ’s resurrection is a case in point: bodies that have been dead three days do not naturally get up and go back to living. That requires a supernatural act.

Naturalism is best viewed as a Pelagian heresy. Pelagius, the fifth-century heretic, proposed that humanity already has everything it needs to be saved. Accordingly, the faith and good works that bring salvation were for him entirely under human control and required no divine aid. By simply directing their wills aright, said Pelagius, humans can achieve salvation. Orthodox Christianity has always regarded Pelagianism as a heresy, teaching instead that humans require God’s grace to be saved.[24] And what is grace? It is the gift of something that we cannot manufacture on our own. Pelagianism closes off humanity from divine grace, regarding it as unnecessary. Naturalism does the same at the level of the cosmos, closing it off from effective divine action. Humans need divine intervention to be saved. Likewise, the world needs divine intervention to fulfill God’s good purposes. Pelagianism denies the one, naturalism the other.

The Primacy of Text in Interpretation

The final point to keep in mind in maintaining the Bible’s reasonableness in the face of science is hermeneutic and stresses the primacy of text over authorial intention in the interpretive enterprise.[25] When I teach apologetics, I find that students have the most difficulty with the point. It is natural to think of verbal communication as an attempt to represent the intention of the author (whether speaker or writer), and thus regard successful interpretation as uncovering the author’s original intention. But when interpreting a text, we typically have no direct access to the mind of the author and what he or she intends. All we have are words and gestures. Authorial intention is always inferred. It is always logically downstream from text.

We readily appreciate this point in ordinary situations. For instance, imagine you’re driving down the road with your spouse, lost in a strange town. The GPS isn’t working. You’re at the wheel, and your spouse is frantically trying to read a map. You come to a crucial intersection and your spouse says “turn right” but really means turn left. How do you know that your spouse really meant to turn left? Because, after you turn right, your spouse utters in frustration (text again), “Oh no, I meant for you to turn left.” And so, after turning right, you make a U-turn and drive in the opposite direction. In such cases, the mismatch between text (“turn right”) and intention (expressed subsequently by “I meant for you to turn left”) becomes clear because the texts interact dynamically, with one clarifying the other.

But with written texts, unlike oral exchanges, where the author is unavailable for further clarification, we are simply left with a given text that needs to be interpreted. Our natural tendency, then, is to think that because authorial intention is causally upstream from text, authorial intention should have primacy over text. Primacy in that case, however, is not hermeneutic but causal (authorial intention is causally responsible, in the sense of agent causation, for the author’s text). Yet, when it comes to making sense of the text itself, the primacy is hermeneutic, and we must start and end with the text. Ordinarily, assigning priority to text in this way is not a problem. Indeed, we don’t fault the spouse at the wheel for turning right when the spouse on the passenger side utters “turn right” but in fact meant that the driver should turn left.

But the primacy of text in the hermeneutic enterprise does run into resistance when we have faulty preconceptions about an author’s intention and employ them unbidden in our interpretive efforts. C. S. Lewis makes this point when he describes a young girl who conceived of poison as “horrid red things.”[26] Thus, when she looked at nonred substances, she didn’t regard them as poisonous, even if they were. Her misconception about poison could easily lead her to mistakenly describe some poisons as nonpoisonous. And yet, if she were to utter “that stuff is poisonous because mommy said so,” it would be mistaken to dismiss her warning because of her erroneous conception of poison. Her statement might be accurate and true despite her faulty conception of poison.

Now it seems that this disjunction between what the biblical writers actually wrote versus what their worldview led them to believe about what they wrote is signally important in how we interpret the Bible generally and how we make scientific sense of the Bible in particular. It may well be that the biblical writers thought that the earth floated in water and that the sky was a giant canopy with stars embedded in it like jewels. Such a cosmology appears to have been widespread in the ancient Near East, and the biblical writers were probably not immune to it. But when we look at the actual text of the Bible, are we required to interpret it that way? Is this misconception of the cosmos something we can actually get out of the text? Or, like the young girl of C. S. Lewis’s acquaintance, who despite her misconceptions about poisons could nonetheless utter true statements about them, did the biblical writers, even if laboring under certain misconceptions about the cosmos, make claims that were and remain cosmologically sound?

As a biblical inerrantist, I’m bound to answer yes to this question. All the same, biblical inerrancy doesn’t demand that this answer be given reflexively. Biblical inerrancy is falsifiable in the sense that this position depends on the Bible not saying crazy and patently false things. The girl in C. S. Lewis’s story would be ascertainably wrong if she claimed that aspirin in large doses is nonpoisonous because when you crush it up, no horrid red things are visible. Perhaps the biblical writers had similar misconceptions about the cosmos. But my point is that if they did, they did not give expression to their misconceptions and, as a result, steered clear of error. If the Bible explicitly stated that the sun is smaller than the earth or that the moon is made of cheese, it would be ascertainably wrong and give evidence of a mistaken underlying cosmology. But such errors are, I submit, not evident in Scripture.

By emphasizing the primacy of text over authorial intention in interpretation, one avoids the hermeneutic pitfall in which one assumes the biblical writers had particular misconceptions and then reads the text to confirm those misconceptions. Given the primacy of text over authorial intention, the critic of the Bible must show that the text fails on its own terms and not with the help of some presumed faulty ideas attributed to the biblical writers. Granted, this doesn’t eliminate all scientific difficulties associated with the Bible, but it does significantly mitigate them.

Throughout this discussion about text and authorial intention, I have referred to the “biblical writers” rather than to the “authors of the Bible.” This was deliberate. As Christians, we regard the Bible as God’s Word—God, ultimately, is the author of the Bible. To be sure, from a purely human vantage, the biblical writers are the Bible’s authors. But, as Christians, we regard God as intimately involved in all aspects of the world, especially in the formation of the Bible. The Christian doctrine of divine concursus holds that even in ordinary events that seem to have ordinary causes, God is active. Genesis 50:20 is the locus classicus for this view: Joseph’s brothers sold him into slavery with evil intent; but God, wanting to send Joseph to Egypt to save the Israelites from a coming famine, acted with good intent—even through the misdeeds of his brothers. Thus, in the formation of the Bible, despite whatever scientific misconceptions the biblical writers may have had, God expressed his intentions accurately and preserved them from error, scientific and otherwise.

In stressing the primacy of text over authorial intention in interpretation, I don’t mean to place myself at odds with that staple of evangelical hermeneutics in which grammatico-historical exegesis has as its principal aim to approximate authorial intention. So long as we understand that the ultimate author is God and that the human writers are God’s instruments, this approach is fine. Indeed, as Christians we want to know God’s mind, at least as much of it as our limited minds can handle. But we run into trouble if we limit God’s Word, when stated in human language, to the intentions of the human writers or speakers. Consider Caiaphas, who as high priest, stated in John 11:50 that it was expedient for one man (Jesus) to die for the people. John 11:51 comments on Caiaphas’s statement: “This he did not say on his own authority; but being high priest that year he prophesied that Jesus would die for the nation” (NKJV). Caiaphas saw the need for Jesus’ death purely in political terms. Yet John 11:51 makes clear that there was a deeper intention underlying Caiaphas’s statement so that, as high priest, he was actually prophesying about the necessity of the Messiah dying for the sins of the people. Biblical hermeneutics is about getting at this deeper intention by means of texts. It’s in this sense that I refer to their primacy.

This discussion of hermeneutics would be incomplete without noting that science is itself a hermeneutic enterprise. When we talk about the Bible and science as possibly conflicting, we are really comparing two hermeneutic enterprises and are doing so in a way that could be confusing, mixing apples and oranges. Hermeneutics is about explaining data. There is the datum that needs to be explained, the explanandum; and there is what does the explaining, the explanans. Hermeneutically speaking, the role of the Bible is as explanandum, the role of science as explanans. What explains the Bible? Theology. What is science explaining? Nature. Theology is to the Bible as science is to nature. The Bible is God’s special revelation to humanity; nature is God’s general revelation to humanity. Theology explains the one, science the other. Thus, it would be more accurate to ask whether theology and science conflict. Strictly speaking, the Bible and science can conflict no more than nature and theology can conflict.

When Science and Theology Conflict

Still, there are things that the Bible seems clearly to teach and likewise there are things that nature seems clearly to teach. In other words, theology, looking to the Bible, seems to mandate certain views and likewise science, looking to nature, seems to mandate certain views. So what happens when these views conflict? Obviously, one or the other has to give. Thus, it may be that our interpretation of the Bible has to give or that our interpretation of nature has to give. How this shakes out must be decided on a case-by-case basis. Let me suggest, however, that such resolutions are not a one-way street, with science always having the upper hand and theology always having to fall in line. Rather, it is a two-way street, with both having to make adjustments to each other. To see how this works, let’s look briefly at the biblical account of creation in Genesis, since it is here that critics of the Bible focus most of their energy. I note three main points in dispute and respond briefly to each.

Genesis Teaches Creation Ex Nihilo

Yes it does, and good for it. Even fifty years ago, many scientists thought the physical universe was eternal. But with the rise of big-bang cosmology, the best scientific evidence now points to the physical universe having a beginning.[27] That means the universe wasn’t made out of prior physical stuff, otherwise it couldn’t really be said to have a beginning. So the universe must have come into existence ex nihilo. That leaves essentially two options: God created the universe, or it popped into existence from nothing. Some critics of the Bible, in fact, opt for the latter, arguing that because the universe’s net energy is zero, it might have arisen through a separation of positive and negative energy in a vacuum.[28] But such a vacuum would not be a genuine nothing but a thing with properties characterizable in terms of a well-defined physical theory (e.g., a theory of quantum gravity). A genuine nothing, however, admits no predicates—one couldn’t rightly ascribe to it various energy states or anything else for that matter. Thus, when Richard Dawkins, for example, looks to science to explain the origin of the universe, he commits a logical error: science presupposes a causal nexus operating by natural laws. Science therefore presupposes the very thing that Dawkins claims it is trying to explain. He is therefore arguing in a circle.[29]

Genesis Teaches that the Earth and Universe Are Only Thousands of Years Old

Certainly, most interpreters of the Bible until the rise of modern science took the earth and universe to be less than 10,000 years old—I show this in detail in my book The End of Christianity.[30] (And while many contemporary young-earth creationists would allow that the world is somewhat older than that, they still argue that it is much younger than what is claimed by today’s scientific consensus.) But does the mere fact that a given interpretation held sway for a long time mandate that this interpretation is correct or must be held in perpetuity? Psalm 93 claims that the earth is established forever and cannot be moved. Most interpreters of the Bible, until the rise of modern science, held this psalm to teach that the earth is stationary. But with the rise of modern astronomy and physics, that interpretation has been widely rejected, even by the most ardent supporters of biblical literalism. In any case, there now appears to be not just good scientific evidence for a much older earth and universe but also good exegetical evidence from the Bible suggesting that it need not be read as teaching a young earth. I discuss this evidence at length in The End of Christianity.[31]

Genesis Teaches that Basic Types of Organisms, and Humans in Particular, Were Specially Created Rather than the Result of Evolution

Although I don’t think the scientific evidence supports large-scale evolution, it is not clear to me that the biblical evidence categorically rules out large-scale evolution or mandates a form of special creation where organisms materialize from strictly inorganic substrates. To see this, consider that Genesis claims humans are made of dust, at one point even referring to humans as dust (“dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return”—Gen 3:19 KJV). But if humans are dust, then so are other animals. Thus, when Genesis says that humans were made from dust, what is to prevent God from transforming preexisting ape-like primates (who are dust) into humans (who are also dust) by some evolutionary process? Compare Genesis 1:25–27. Let me emphasize, I personally don’t accept this argument, but it is one readily advanced by evolutionists against special creationists. One can reject evolution because, as a believer in the Bible, one interprets it as teaching a mode of divine creation that rules out evolution. Or one can reject evolution because, as a scientific inquirer, one regards the evidence for such large-scale evolutionary change as weak. Or one can appeal to a combination of these factors.

Conclusion

I close this essay by dispelling a myth, the myth of the scientific juggernaut. Those who would turn science into an idol for worship portray it as a juggernaut that relentlessly pushes back the frontiers of knowledge and so ever shrinks the relevance of religion, rendering the Bible passé. But science is no such juggernaut. It is, rather, an interconnected web of factual and theoretical claims about the world that are constantly in need of revision and for which changes in one portion of the web can induce far-reaching changes in another. Specifically, science regularly confronts the problem of having to withdraw claims that it once confidently asserted.

Consider an example from geology. In the nineteenth century the geosynclinal theory was proposed to explain how mountain ranges form. According to this theory, large trough-like depressions, known as geosynclines, once filled with sediment, gradually became unstable, and then, when crushed and heated by the earth, rose to form mountain ranges. As late as 1960, geologists asserted that the geosynclinal theory decisively answered how mountain ranges formed. In the 1960 edition of Clark and Stearn’s Geological Evolution of North America, the geosynclinal theory was said to be as well established as Darwin’s theory of evolution. Whatever became of the geosynclinal theory? (And what is to become of Darwin’s theory?) Within a few years, the theory of plate tectonics, which explained mountain formation through continental drift and sea-floor spreading, decisively replaced the geosynclinal theory.[32]

The history of science is filled with such reversals in which confident claims to knowledge suddenly disappear from the scientific literature.[33] Science can get things wrong—indeed, massively wrong. Moreover, often we can tell that science has gotten it wrong without having to come up with a viable alternative—some theories collapse of internal contradiction, others die because they fail to match up with new empirical data. All that to say, Christians ought never to feel intimidated by science. This is God’s world. He created it. He gave us minds to understand it. But that understanding, especially on scientific matters, is fallible and constantly requires critical scrutiny. Thus, our first reaction to any presumed conflicts between the Bible and science should not be to jettison the Bible but rather to achieve a deeper understanding of what God is speaking through the Bible as well as through nature.

1 Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2006).

2 According to Kurt Wise, a prominent young-earth creationist whose dissertation supervisor was Stephen Jay Gould, “Although there are scientific reasons for accepting a young earth, I am a young-age creationist because that is my understanding of the Scripture. As I shared with my professors years ago when I was in college, if all the evidence in the universe turns against creationism, I would be the first to admit it, but I would still be a creationist because that is what the Word of God seems to indicate. Here I must stand.” Quoted in John F. Ashton, ed., In Six Days: Why Fifty Scientists Choose to Believe in Creation (Green Forest, AR: Master, 2001), 355. Compare Wise’s “fundamentalism of the Bible” with Dawkins’s “fundamentalism of science”: “Darwinism is the only known theory that is in principle capable of explaining certain aspects of life. If I am right it means that, even if there were no actual evidence in favour of Darwinian theory (there is, of course) we should still be justified in preferring it over all rival theories” (Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe Without Design [New York: Norton, 1986], 287).

3 Stephen Jay Gould, Rocks of Ages: Science and Religion in the Fullness of Life (New York: Ballantine, 1999).

4 See William A. Dembski and Stephen C. Meyer, “Fruitful Interchange or Polite Chitchat? The Dialogue between Theology and Science,” Zygon 33, no. 3 (1998): 415–30. Here we argue for “qualified agreement” between theology and science.

5 For a detailed account of my skepticism of conventional evolutionary theory, see William A. Dembski and Jonathan Wells, The Design of Life: Discovering Signs of Intelligence in Biological Systems (Dallas: Foundation for Thought and Ethics, 2008).

6 On this last point, I regard conventional evolutionary theory as falling in the category of “joke science.” Malcolm Muggeridge, in my view, hit the nail on the head: “I myself am convinced that the theory of evolution, especially the extent to which it’s been applied, will be one of the great jokes in the history books in the future. Posterity will marvel that so very flimsy and dubious an hypothesis could be accepted with the incredible credulity that it has.” Quoted from Malcolm Muggeridge, The End of Christendom (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1980), 59.

7 Richard Dawkins, book review of Blueprints: Solving the Mystery of Evolution by Maitland A. Edey and Donald C. Johanson, in The New York Times (April 9, 1989, sec. 7): 34.

8 “Let them at least learn what is the religion they attack, before attacking it. If this religion boasted of having a clear view of God, and of possessing it open and unveiled, it would be attacking it to say that we see nothing in the world which shows it with this clearness. But since, on the contrary, it says that men are in darkness and estranged from God, that He has hidden Himself from their knowledge, that this is in fact the name which He gives Himself in the Scriptures, Deus absconditus.” Quoted from Pascal’s Pensées, no. 194, accessed December 8, 2011 at http://www.classicallibrary.org/pascal/pensees/pensees03.htm.

9 The case of the high priest’s servant, whose ear Peter cut off in the garden of Gethsemane, comes closest to Jesus healing an amputee (see Luke 22:50–51). But even here Jesus did not make a new ear grow from scratch but rather reattached the old ear (which is the sort of thing doctors do today with severed body parts). The only case I know of an amputee supposedly regaining a severed limb is the famous seventeenth-century Miracle of Calanda, in which a peasant named Miguel-Juan Pellicer had his leg amputated in 1637 and then, while sleeping, miraculously recovered it in 1640. Interestingly, the new leg seemed identical to the one lost, with the same scars. Moreover, the place where the old leg had been buried was found empty. So was this a case of a completely new leg growing back or of an old leg being resurrected and reattached? Was this a true miracle at all? I’ll withhold judgment here and simply refer readers to the following account: accessed February 2, 2012 at http://www.clairval.com/lettres/en/2006/12/08/2061206.htm, as well as the following skeptical response: http://skeptoid.com/episodes/4247.

10 Accessed August 15, 2011 at http://whywontgodhealamputees.com/important.htm.

11 Anatole France, The Garden of Epicurus, trans. Alfred Allinson (New York: John Lane, 1908), 176–77.

12 Dawkins used this rhetoric in his 2006 BBC documentary titled The Root of All Evil? See also his God Delusion, 37.

13 “On Sundays, after returning from the kirk, he would bury himself in the works of the old divines.” Quoted from Lewis Campbell and William Garnett, The Life of James Clerk Maxwell: With Selections from His Correspondence and Occasional Writings (London: Macmillan, 1882), 321.

14 Stanley L. Jaki, The Road of Science and the Ways to God (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978).

15 See Walter H. Conser Jr., “Baconianism,” in The History of Science and Religion in the Western Tradition: An Encyclopedia, ed. Gary B. Ferngren (New York: Garland, 2000), 169–71.

16 Among America’s top scientists—those who belong to the National Academy of Sciences—only 7 percent admit believing in God. See Edward J. Larson and Larry Witham, “Leading Scientists Still Reject God,” Nature 394(6691) (July 23, 1998): 313.

17 See Discovery Institute’s “A Scientific Dissent from Darwinism”: accessed December 8, 2011 at http://www.discovery.org/articleFiles/PDFs/100ScientistsAd.pdf.

18 “Males have more teeth than females in the case of men, sheep, goats, and swine; in the case of other animals observations have not yet been made.” Apparently the proper observations had not been made in the case of men, sheep, goats, and swine either. Quoted from Aristotle, History of Animals, Book 2, 501b20–21, trans. d’A. W. Thompson, in Jonathan Barnes, ed., The Complete Works of Aristotle, vol. 1 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), 797.

19 From the seventh homily in Basil’s Hexaemeron, accessed December 8, 2011 at http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/32017.htm.

20 For the Westminster Shorter Catechism, accessed December 8, 2011 at http://www.reformed.org/documents/WSC.html.

21 In his commentary on Ps 93:1, John Calvin writes, “The heavens revolve daily, and, immense as is their fabric and inconceivable the rapidity of their revolutions, we experience no concussion—no disturbance in the harmony of their motion. The sun, though varying its course every diurnal revolution, returns annually to the same point. The planets, in all their wanderings, maintain their respective positions. How could the earth hang suspended in the air were it not upheld by God’s hand? By what means could it maintain itself unmoved, while the heavens above are in constant rapid motion, did not its Divine Maker fix and establish it?” Quoted from John Calvin, Calvin’s Commentaries, Vol. 11: Psalms, Pt. 4, trans. J. Anderson (Edinburgh: Calvin Translation Society, 1845–49), accessed December 9, 2011 at http://www.sacred-texts.com/chr/calvin/cc11/cc11001.htm.

22 See Owen Gingrich, “The Copernican Revolution,” in The History of Science and Religion in the Western Tradition: An Encyclopedia, ed. Gary B. Ferngren (New York: Garland, 2000), 335. On “saving the phenomena,” see Pierre Duhem, To Save the Phenomena: An Essay on the Idea of Physical Theory from Plato to Galileo, trans. E. Dolan and C. Maschler (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969).

23 Robert Pennock takes this line throughout Tower of Babel: The Evidence Against the New Creationism (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999).

24 See, for instance, John A. Mourant and William J. Collinge, trans., The Fathers of the Church: Saint Augustine—Four Anti-Pelagian Writings (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1992).

25 Compare Umberto Eco, Interpretation and Overinterpretation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992).

26 See C. S. Lewis, Miracles: A Preliminary Study, rev. ed. (1960; repr. San Francisco: HarperCollins, 2001), chap. 10.

27 For the most current thinking about the universe’s beginning, see the section on cosmology in Bruce L. Gordon and William A. Dembski, eds., The Nature of Nature: Examining the Role of Naturalism in Science (Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2011). See also Guillermo Gonzalez and Jay W. Richards, The Privileged Planet: How Our Place in the Cosmos Is Designed for Discovery (Washington, DC: Regnery, 2004); Robert Jastrow, God and the Astronomers, 2nd ed. (Toronto: McLeod, 2000); and Simon Singh, Big Bang: The Origin of the Universe (New York: Harper, 2005).

28 For this style of reasoning, see Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow, The Grand Design (New York: Bantam, 2010), 179–80.

29 “The origin of the universe is a mystery; it’s a mystery to everyone. Physicists are working on it. They have theories. But if science can’t answer that question then as sure as hell theology can’t either.” Dawkins in his 2006 debate with David Quinn on the Ryan Tubridy Show, transcript accessed December 8, 2011 at http://www.catholiceducation.org/articles/science/sc0086.htm. Dawkins here displays not only arrogance but also foolishness. How can physicists possibly account for the ultimate origin of the universe when all their theories necessarily depend on and apply to a universe that is already in place? Theology, contra Dawkins, does have an advantage over science in addressing the question of ultimate origins.

30 William A. Dembski, The End of Christianity: Finding a Good God in an Evil World (Nashville: B&H, 2009), see esp. chap. 5.

31 Ibid., especially chaps. 6–8, 20. For exegetical support of an older earth, see also Lee Irons and Meredith G. Kline, “The Framework View,” in The Genesis Debate: Three Views on the Days of Creation, ed. David G. Hagopian (Mission Viejo, CA: Crux Press, 2001), 217–56; Henri Blocher, In the Beginning: The Opening Chapters of Genesis (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 1984); and Robert C. Newman and Herman J. Eckelmann Jr., Genesis One and the Origin of the Earth (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 1977). For scientific support of an older earth, see also Gonzalez and Richards, Privileged Planet; Davis A. Young and Ralph Stearley, The Bible, Rocks and Time: Geological Evidence and the Age of the Earth (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 2008); and Fazale Rana and Hugh Ross, Who Was Adam? A Creation Model Approach to the Origin of Man (Colorado Springs: NavPress, 2005).

32 Thomas H. Clark and Colin W. Stearn, The Geological Evolution of North America (New York: Ronald Press, 1960), 43: “The geosynclinal theory is one of the great unifying principles in geology. In many ways its role in geology is similar to that of the theory of evolution, which serves to integrate the many branches of the biological sciences.” Clark and Stearn continue, “Just as the doctrine of evolution is universally accepted among biologists, so also the geosynclinal origin of the major mountain systems is an established principle in geology.” For the contemporary view of mountain formation, see Philip Kearey and Frederick J. Vine, Global Tectonics (Oxford: Blackwell Sciences, 1996).

33 See Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970) as well as Larry Laudan, Progress and Its Problems: Towards a Theory of Scientific Growth (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1977).

Chapter Fifteen

Are There Conflicting Theologies in the Bible?

Craig A. Blaising

For most of the history of the Christian church, the question posed in the title of this chapter would have been answered with a resounding “No.” The Scriptures present to us the promises, plans, works, and will of God in relation to his creation, especially to human beings, to Israel and to Gentile peoples. Its narrative climax focuses on Jesus Christ and the good news of redemption, forgiveness, and the fulfillment of God’s purpose in him. The Scriptures present a coherent message that forms and structures the faith of the church. There is one faith, just as there is one God the Father, one Lord, and one Spirit. Certainly, there are those who have tried to “twist the Scripture” to proclaim false teachings and aberrant theologies. Examples are recorded within Scripture itself. But the church is exhorted to grow up into the unity of the one faith, avoiding countervailing “wind[s] of doctrine” (Eph 4:4–16), knowing that for this faith, “all Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness” (2 Tim 3:16–17).[1] So, no, the predominant word of the church throughout its history has been clear on this point. Scripture does not present the church with a haphazard collection of conflicting theologies. Rather, it is the Word of God which structures and informs a true theology—a true and living knowledge of God.

Challenges to the Unity of Scripture

Of course, there are those who have claimed otherwise. We will begin with a historical survey of such challenges to the unity of Scripture.

Marcion and the Gnostics

The claim of conflicting theologies within the Bible was first raised in the second century by Marcion of Sinope.[2] Our earliest references to Marcion, about AD 150, come from a time when he was already quite influential beyond his native region of Pontus. Marcion taught that the God of Christianity, the Father of Jesus Christ, was not identical with God in the Old Testament. They were different gods. In the Old Testament, God is the Creator of the world, the God of Israel, the One who instituted the Law and made promises of a coming kingdom and of a coming Messiah to rule over it. According to Marcion, Jesus Christ was not that Messiah predicted by the Old Testament. Rather, he was sent by a different god with a completely different message. According to Marcion, God in the New Testament is a higher god characterized completely by grace in contrast to the God of the Old Testament, who Marcion believed was legalistic, wrathful, and petty. The gospel, according to Marcion, was a gospel of pure grace in contrast to the Old Testament demands of law. Marcion believed his understanding of grace was the gospel of Paul in the New Testament and that he (Marcion) was defending the Pauline gospel against Old Testament legalism. Recognizing that his extreme view of grace had obvious conflicts even with some New Testament writings, Marcion promoted a limited biblical canon composed of ten epistles, all of which he considered Pauline, and an abridged version of Luke. The Old Testament was excluded completely.

To summarize, from Marcion’s perspective, our present Bibles contain two conflicting theologies focused on two different gods. To solve the problem, one has to choose which Scripture and which theology one will follow.

Marcion was not alone in his criticism of Christian Scripture. Similar charges of conflicted theology within the Old and New Testament Scriptures were made by various religious movements in the second to fifth centuries that have together been given the label Gnosticism.[3] Not all claimed a “Christian” identity—there were “Jewish” and even pagan Gnosticisms within this broad religious phenomenon. However, in spite of their diversity, similarities can be seen among them in terms of cosmology or cosmogony, salvation through gnosis, and a common dualism that puts the Scripture into theological conflict with dual or multiple gods. In some cases, accompanying this theological criticism were revisionary readings and hermeneutical practices that subverted the literary and narrative structure of Scripture in order to eisegete elements of Gnostic mythology.[4] The Gnostic threat posed such a problem by the end of the second century that major refutations were called for, such as Irenaeus of Lyon’s Adversus Haereses, and Tertullian’s Contra Marcionem.[5]

Irenaeus and Tertullian argued for a unified theology in Scripture.[6] The Old and New Testaments speak of the same God in a narratological structure of promise and fulfillment. Jesus Christ fulfills the messianic promises of the Old Testament. Types and patterns link the biblical story as a unified message, and hermeneutics must give attention to the natural coherence of the text (and texts in the collection of Scripture). Irenaeus employed his now famous metaphor of a mosaic to illustrate this point. Scripture can be compared to a mosaic of a king. Like the pieces of tile in the mosaic, the literary elements of Scripture in their proper arrangement present in coherent fashion an overall unified portrait (or message). Gnostic interpretation makes use of the same bits and pieces but rearranges their relationship so as to convey an alien portrait. It is as if someone rearranged the tiles from the mosaic of the king so as to portray a fox or dog. They refer to actual texts of Scripture but contrary to their natural (literary, grammatical, and theological) structure to present a different god.[7]

These early Christian writers spoke of a rule of faith which naturally belonged to the biblical narrative and functioned to guide its overall interpretation. The key points were the affirmation of one God, Creator of all things; and the economy (the incarnation, death, resurrection, ascension, and future coming in judgment) of his Son, Jesus Christ, the Word of God; and the sending of the Holy Spirit by the Son from the Father.[8] The rule of faith was not an exhaustive exposition of the theology of the Scriptures but an abstract, an epitome, which could be drawn from Scripture and which would function to guard against the misapplication of “bits and pieces” to Gnostic myth. It was acknowledged that the richness of Scripture exceeded this bare summary and that a process of growth and development in the church’s understanding of biblical exposition was expected. Learning was to take place in accordance with the faith clearly perceived and expounded according to the natural sense of the text, not contrary to it as was the case with Gnosticism. In this way, the theological unity of Scripture would be seen and affirmed even through growth in knowledge and understanding of Scripture’s teachings.

Medieval Church Tradition

The theological coherence of Scripture was reaffirmed by the Reformers in their criticism of medieval church tradition and practice. The problem they encountered was a shift of authority from Scripture to the church’s own tradition, a development which had its roots in the fifth century but came to expression in the eighth century in the so-called Seventh Ecumenical Council (Nicea, AD 787) which declared church tradition to be of the Holy Spirit and anathematized anyone who dissented from it.[9] With this shift of authority there developed practices and teachings that not only obscured but contradicted the biblical teaching of justification by faith as well as other doctrines of salvation including regeneration and sanctification. This is what stands behind the reformation solas—sola Scriptura, sola fide. The Reformers reaffirmed the rule of faith as inherent to Scripture, a rule which had come to be expressed more formally in the early creeds (Nicea, AD 325; Constantinople, AD 381; Ephesus, AD 431; Chalcedon, AD 456), and they appealed to the same notion of the theological coherence and unity of Scripture to explicate the gospel of justification by grace through faith in Christ.[10]

The affirmation of the theological unity of Scripture does not mean that all theological matters in Scripture are equally and clearly understood. Like the early church Fathers, the Reformers recognized that a process of growth in knowledge and understanding of Scripture was expected on the individual level as well as for the church as a whole. The reason for this involves various factors, including the spiritual maturity and faithfulness of the interpreter together with the illumination of the Holy Spirit and the hermeneutical competence of interpreters including attentiveness, skill, and knowledge level corresponding to the literary and theological features of the biblical text. Undergirding the whole process was a belief in the divine inspiration of Scripture, such that Scripture as a whole and in all its parts was understood to be the Word of God. It was the nature of Scripture as the Word of the One God that gave confidence in its overall theological unity even while questions pertaining to its meaning were being pursued. This is why—although various Protestant churches drew different confessional boundaries beyond the rule and creed defined by the early church and even beyond the doctrine of justification, the article by which the church stands or falls—no question was raised concerning the theological unity of Scripture itself.

Enlightenment Rationalism

That question would be raised, however, in modern times coordinate with a reappraisal of the nature of Scripture and the corresponding development of new hermeneutical methodologies. The change first took place as a theological accommodation to the Enlightenment, which was a political, religious, and philosophical challenge to post-Reformation Christian culture. Enlightenment philosophy confronted the Christianity of its day with an alternative worldview, which some sought to accommodate by reinterpreting Scripture and recasting Christianity in accordance with Enlightenment principles. Key to this was the denial of the traditional doctrine of inspiration, the substitution of reason for revelation, and the reformulation of the Protestant principle of the illuminating witness of the Spirit (which in orthodox Protestantism is focused on Scripture) into the psychological certitude of autonomous reason. Enlightenment hermeneutics, following the direction laid down by Spinoza, subjected the Bible to “rationalist” criticism designed to strip away or reinterpret elements which were considered to be myth, superstition, and mere contingency in order to convert the textual narrative into a “rational” or “natural” (as opposed to supernatural) sequence of cause and effect promoting what was considered to be universal moral truths. Thus began the practice of modern biblical criticism which has developed in various ways over the past two hundred years in concert with ideological trends of post-Enlightenment modern culture whether that is positivism, romanticism, various idealisms, historicism, and even materialism. It has carried over into the present time in concert with various forms of postmodernism which have the distinction of denying the validity of those universal moral truths for which the project of biblical criticism began in the first place.[11]

Once again, it is not possible, nor is it the purpose of this chapter, to develop this sketch in detail except to note how it relates to the accusation of conflicting theologies in Scripture. Enlightenment criticism set as its task the removal of what it considered to be superstition, false, or morally objectionable elements from Scripture in favor of universal truths recognized by autonomous reason. The new theology did not initially view Scripture as theologically conflicted since it related theology only to its supposed latter content, not the former. By the late eighteenth century, however, all of Scripture, including its “universal moral” ideas, came to be viewed as historically conditioned. The early nineteenth century witnessed the rise of the modern discipline of history involving the historical conception of all human reality, the development of “scientific” historical methodology, and the formulation of new philosophies of history.[12] The critical study of Scripture took on these new concerns and was reshaped into what became known as the historical-critical method. This method came to exercise hegemony over all other methods of biblical study throughout the nineteenth and into the twentieth century.

The purpose of the historical-critical method was to offer a new historical understanding of Scripture in contrast to both the canonical-theological interpretations of Reformation and post-Reformation theologies on the one hand and the moralistic, naturalistic interpretation of Enlightenment rationalism on the other. Although it claimed a traditional precedent in the “canonical criticism” of Luther, who questioned the theological content of certain biblical books and on that basis rearranged their place in the canon of Scripture, the new historical criticism took as its starting point the rationalist reappraisal of the nature of Scripture, rejecting the Protestant doctrine of inspiration and re-estimating the canon of Scripture to be nothing more than a list of books that just happened to be compiled by the early church for liturgical use. The rationalist negative assessment of supernatural events and miracles in Scripture was extended to a more comprehensive critical assessment so that the quest for a greater historical understanding of Scripture was at the same time the search for another “more true” history that accounted for the entirety of biblical content. Viewing the biblical narratives as conflicted and contradictory was widely seen as presuppositional to the method and guided the search for underlying sources, the reconstruction of historical settings, and the postulation of “what really happened”—a sequence of events supposedly lying behind the text. To explain the structure of “what really happened,” historical criticism drew upon new philosophies of history such as Hegelian idealism and positivism. Since it was assumed at the time that such philosophies explained all true history, surely they would explain the actual course of events that lay behind the biblical narratives. The charge of conflicting theologies in Scripture follows the development of this method.

For example, F. C. Baur restructured the narrative and writings of the New Testament as a dialectical movement in accordance with Hegelian idealism.[13] As he saw it, the supposedly harmonious narrative in the book of Acts was actually a literary attempt to achieve a Hegelian-like synthesis resolving an early conflict between the presumed antithetical theologies of Peter and Paul. From that starting point, the whole of New Testament history and its literary products could be restructured in accordance with a hypothetical series of conflicts and resolutions stemming from this clash. Baur’s proposal was soon rejected for inaccuracies in its handling of the source material. However, Baur showed in principle that the “bits and pieces” of biblical material could be rearranged in accordance with a modern ideological paradigm imposed on the text.

It is not hard to see how the historical-critical treatment of Scripture could fall under the same criticism the early church lodged against the Gnostics. However, the connection to ancient heresy was made even more explicit by Adolf von Harnack in his proposed correction to Baur. Harnack realized that a Hegelian dialectic applied to Scripture and early Christianity would connect the Old Testament, Jesus, the New Testament, and the early church in a trajectory that would lead to Catholicism. This was unacceptable from a Protestant standpoint. So Harnack proposed that the gospel of Jesus and apostolic Christianity should be separated from the Old Testament as a historically new and unique religious idea. The dialectic of Christian history began only after that point in a conflict between the gospel and Hellenism. In that dialectic, an alien Hellenistic spirit imposed itself on “the soil of the gospel” and began to develop as Catholicism. The Reformation was to be seen as a rejection of that alien Catholic spirit and a recovery of the historically unique, pure religious idea of Jesus.[14] Aside from a misreading of the “spirit” of early Christianity, this view quite obviously and quite radically separates the teaching of Jesus from the Old Testament. Harnack himself saw the similarity to Marcion and defended it![15]

The History of Religions School

As historical-critical study progressed, efforts were undertaken to understand the religious context of ancient Israel and early Christianity. By the late nineteenth century, archaeological work had yielded a treasure trove of ancient documents and artifacts for expanding the scholarly knowledge of the religion of the ancient near east, the Hellenistic world of late Judaism, and the religious context of the Roman world in which Christianity spread. The methodological and ideological application of this new knowledge to historical-criticism was especially developed in the so-called “history of religions school.”[16] Here was developed an approach which was to have profound influence on the direction of critical study of the Bible generally.

According to the history-of-religion approach, biblical religion in both its practice and conceptuality was to be seen as a product of its pagan and syncretistic Jewish religious context. Herman Gunkel, a key influential figure in this “school,” argued that biblical religion was itself thoroughly syncretistic. The biblical thought world was derived from ancient Near Eastern religions (for the Old Testament) as well as from the Hellenistic religious syncretism of late antiquity involving oriental Gnosticism and mystery religions (for the New Testament). It was thought that common vocabulary and similar motifs, metaphors, and poetic imagery found in Scripture and ancient religious documents were evidence of this syncretism. Consequently, word and genre studies were combined with hypothetical historical reconstructions to conceptualize an evolving religious history as the reality behind the biblical texts. Clearly, in this view, no portion of Scripture could be privileged as the exclusive domain of “theology” as opposed to religious superstition. Even the person of Jesus could not be insulated from this approach. Contrary to Harnack’s supposed historically unique Jesus, the history of religions school argued for a syncretistic Jesus of various designs. William Bousset even argued that the central New Testament confession of Jesus as Lord was merely the early church’s application of pagan conceptuality to Jesus.[17]

The extreme “contextualizing” approach of history of religion methodology eventually led to the claim that the New Testament gives no reliable historical information at all on the actual person of Jesus. The text of New Testament Scripture merely draws upon the faith of early Christian communities arising out of their religious practices of devotion to an imaginatively constructed Jesus figure. Supposed differences in the religious views and practices of these communities manifest themselves as the literary variety of the New Testament. In this way, the New Testament came to be seen as a collection of diverse, even conflicting theologies.

Most important for the claim of conflicting theologies in Scripture was the publication of Walter Bauer’s Orthodoxy and Heresy, the German original appearing in 1934. It was translated into English in 1971.[18] Focusing on second-century Christianity, Bauer argued that there was no evidence of an original orthodoxy from which various heresies subsequently departed. Rather, early Christianity was from the beginning diverse and conflicted. Focusing on four geographical areas: Edessa, Egypt, Asia Minor, and Rome, Bauer offered what he claimed to be evidence that in some regions what was later to be judged as heretical—such as Marcionism or Gnosticism—was actually the earliest historical form of “Christianity.” Bauer argued that what was true of second-century Christianity was true of the New Testament itself. Christianity was from its beginning theologically diverse, and that diversity could be best appreciated by setting New Testament writings into the wider context of early Christian writings.

Bauer’s claims of evidence have been severely criticized, and his thesis regarding second-century Christianity has been disproved.[19] However, the idea of an originally diverse Christianity, including a theologically diverse and conflicted New Testament, has been attractive to many.[20] Helmut Koester and James Robinson sought to extend the Bauer thesis by proposing a “trajectories” model of early Christian theology that linked the supposed diversity of the New Testament to early Christian diversity.[21] Koester argued, “Christianity in all its diversified appearances, including its so-called orthodox developments, is a thoroughly syncretistic religion.”[22] Robinson edited the collection of Gnostic writings discovered at Nag Hammadi between the first publication of Bauer’s work and its English translation.[23] Bart Ehrman has added his efforts to those of Robinson and others to establish a broader canon of writings for early Christianity while also explicating the diversity supposedly inherent in traditional canonical books. However, Ehrman has also tried to give evidence of not only a conceptual diversity but of political conflict which supposedly led to the perception (or as he sees it, deception) of early Christian unity. This he has tried to do by transposing the Bauer thesis of diversity suppression in geographical regions by a hostile and powerful early Roman church (a theory which has been disproved) to diversity suppression through textual alteration by unknown proto-orthodox scribes rendering a canon of writings that appear to be unified theologically![24]

Postmodernism

The theme of diversity in early Christianity found a warm reception in the new cultural sensibilities emerging in Western societies in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Biblical critical studies have ridden the wave of the massive sea change in social science conceptuality and methodology that has deeply impacted Western culture.[25] Aspects of this sea change include the application of neo-Marxist Critical Theory to Western political, economic, and societal structures and values with a view toward the “liberation” of “oppressed” (supposedly by majority social ideologies) minority social (ethnic and gender) groups. The change also includes the postmodern critique of epistemology and language that ranges from general skepticism to nihilism. Especially provocative have been French deconstructionists, postulating a pervasive pluralism in linguistic phenomena that subverts claims of objectivity and proposals of unifying theories, ideas, themes, or narratives. From this postmodern perspective, claims of truth are simply willful power plays, the exertion of completely subjective willfulness.

Since postmodern literary theory sees texts as inherently pluriform, the concern in interpretation from that perspective shifts from the authors and the text per se to the interpreter who makes claims about it.[26] Critical Theory is then employed to “unmask” the “oppressive” economic and social values of establishment interpreters so that minority interpreters can find their voice in the text. Here we find varieties of gender, ethnic, and social-political interpretation. The point to be made here is that postmodern interpretation not only asserts the idea of conflicting theologies in the biblical text but would see this as an inevitable feature of its linguistic textuality as well as its diverse social and cultural contexts. Writing from this perspective, Erhard Gerstenberger titles his theological study of the Old Testament, for example, not Theology of the Old Testament but Theologies in the Old Testament.[27]

Why the Challenges Fail

When one considers the more than two-hundred-year history of historical-critical study of Scripture, one is struck by its failure to accomplish the task it originally set for itself, which was to produce a completely objective historical account of Scripture—of both its content and its textual origins and development. Not only has it failed to do this, but the proposals that have been advanced differ radically among themselves, resulting in what one proponent of the method has called “a ruinous heap of hypothetical possibilities.”[28]

This is not to deny that critical studies of Scripture have produced many useful insights and that the efforts have raised the consciousness level on historical issues in the text.[29] But one has to say, looking back on it all, that these have come for the most part in spite of the primary interpretative and theoretical proposals that scholars have advanced rather than because of them.

Inadequate Epistemology

One of the reasons for this failure is an inadequate epistemology which contributed to a faulty methodology that crippled the enterprise throughout its various manifestations. Misled by the early rationalist fascination with clear and indubitable ideas, early historical-criticism set its quest for a completely objective, unbiased interpretation contrary to the claims of the text itself. It was not unaware of the role of tradition and presupposition in interpretation, but it chose to view those primarily in a negative light and saw them as epistemologically unnecessary and capable of being eliminated methodologically. Looking back, one can see that all this did was to allow Enlightenment presuppositions to function uncritically in the interpretation process, which meant that a certain kind of interpretative result would be the inevitable outcome. This problem would only come to light later as interpretation per se became a focused object of study in the social sciences. This paralleled developments in understanding logical operations in scientific thought generally. For example, C. S. Peirce introduced the concepts of abduction and retroduction to explain more clearly the process of induction, the preferred method of modern science.[30] This was necessary to explain the formation, function, testing, and reformulation of hypotheses in science. In the social science field of hermeneutics, William Dilthey similarly explained the necessary role of preunderstanding in interpretation.[31] An initial understanding of the object to be interpreted necessarily and unavoidably functions like a hypothesis in scientific thought suggesting the conclusion, or at least the possibilities for conclusion, ahead of time. Pure, blank-slate objectivity is a myth. However, realistic objectivity is possible, not by ridding oneself of one’s preunderstanding, tradition, prior beliefs, or presuppositions (which is really not possible), but by testing them along with initial interpretative results against the object of interpretation. What one looks for is exactness and appropriateness of fit between one’s proposed interpretation and the textual object of interpretation, as well as the adequacy and validity of one’s presumptions, presuppositions, and preunderstanding of the text and its subject matter in the process of assessing interpretative “fit.”

It is not that critical interpreters failed to test their interpretations against the text. The history of biblical criticism shows the discarding of many proposals and the creation of new ones. Of course, external factors, such as new ideas about features of the historical and religious context of Scripture, bear upon these changes. But sometimes internal factors—stubborn textual features that resist interpretative proposals—are often cited as reasons for reformulating and offering new interpretations as well. What is inevitably missing, however, is criticism directed at the critical scholar’s preunderstanding of the realities claimed by the text, preunderstanding that is shaped by philosophical and theological commitments common to critical scholarship.

One of the contributions of postmodern criticism has been to raise suspicion of the critical scholar’s presumed objectivity. It has raised the question of interpretative bias in a way that can no longer be ignored by critical scholars. However, the failure of postmodern interpretation lies in its inability to account for any realistic objectivity in linguistic interpretation. It fails to account for the realistic objectivity that functions in everyday life—from successfully navigating one’s car by means of road signage, doing the shopping, paying bills, scheduling and processing appointments, taking care of legal matters, and many other everyday communicative activities.[32]

Undoubtedly, a postmodernist might point to interpretive failures, mistakes, and misunderstandings that sometimes occur in these tasks. But making instances of miscommunication the norm does not “fit” real life, and that failure to fit reality calls into question the extreme epistemological skepticism of postmodern theory. In other words, postmodern skepticism typically fails to criticize its own interpretative bias. Postmodern ideology is relativistic and, as is the case with relativism, it relativizes itself, subverting its own truth claims. Even if its truth claims were to be accepted, by its own estimation such acceptance would simply be the acquiescence to a speaker’s (or writer’s) attempt to gain power over a hearer (or reader). They would not be and could not be claims about actual states of affairs outside the minds of the speakers. They could not be truthful statements about the text of Scripture in and of itself, or even interpretations about what Scripture is saying that others should pay attention to except that they will to subject themselves to the wills of postmodern interpreters.

Dismissal of the Text’s Claims

The primary reason why biblical criticism fails to grasp the coherent theology of the biblical text is that it presuppositionally dismisses claims made by the text itself that are intrinsic to its linguistic and narrative structure. In general, biblical criticism has treated the text as an artifact to be studied, analyzed into various components, and classified according to an interpretative scheme brought to it by the critical scholar. Certainly, biblical criticism has produced a great deal of exegetical work, extending from word studies to grammatical and syntactical analyses appearing in commentaries and lexical works. Under the methods of form, redaction, and rhetorical criticism, the scope has widened to larger literary units. But this has been driven by historical-critical presuppositions about textual origins, especially in a history of religions framework; therefore, it suffers from the fragmentation that has been characteristic of the discipline as a whole.

More recently, however, advances in literary study have shifted interest to the final form of the text as a cohesive and coherent literary work.[33] Studies in narrative, biblical narrative in particular, have brought into light more clearly the literary artistry pervading the biblical books.[34] This includes narrative plot structure which functions to order the various genres into a coherent whole. Narrative art, such as repetition of words, use of poetic structures, relationships of characters and events, intertextual allusions and types, and narrator comments by which events are interpreted or relationships are disclosed, all combine to indicate that the text functions as a unified communication. Even “tensions” within the storyline, which may puzzle a reader, can be seen as intentional, part of the narrative art designed to communicate something.

Not only can the individual biblical books be seen in this way, but the canon itself displays literary connection and coherence in remarkable ways. A storyline runs through the whole of the canon from Old Testament to New Testament. Themes and types thread through the various works. There is even a genealogy of characters. But most importantly the continuity and progressive revelation of the character of God stand out. The structure of promise and fulfillment projects the story forward. Narrative art appears to link various writings together such that word repetition and intertextual allusion, as is found within biblical books, is seen to interconnect books as well. One feature of this is a history of biblical interpretation taking place within the Bible itself in which later writings comment on earlier texts.

The Bible’s Literary Coherence

What this has to do with our topic is precisely this: the Bible, even though it is a collection of writings from different times and in different literary forms, exhibits a literary coherence which demands to be taken as a unified communication. Since that communication is about God in relationship to the world, especially its human inhabitants, Israel and Gentile peoples collectively and individually, that communication is clearly theological.[35] Claims are being made about God and about relations between God, man, and the world, which comes to convergence in the New Testament in the incarnation, pre-cross activity, death on the cross, burial, resurrection, ascension, present session, and expected future parousia in various stages of consummation. It is this coherent, theological communication revealed in cohesive literary art which is missed by biblical criticism, both modern and postmodern, which imputes alien ideologies (whether ancient religious ideology or critical liberationist sociology and psychology) to “bits and fragments” of the biblical text, thereby pronouncing the Bible a syncretistic compilation of conflicting theologies!

Consistent through the biblical narrative is the revelation of one God and a historical narrative that is unified by an overarching divine plan. Structuring that divine plan is a history of covenants made by God and a succession of economies that carry the narrative of divine works forward through both the Old Testament and New Testament. The history is a history of redemption of an original creation purpose, which is not entirely disclosed at first but is progressively revealed along with the plan for its redemption. This includes a complex anthropology including not just individuals but collective ethnicities and nations. Their redemption takes place through the particular election of one nation, Israel, and one chosen from that nation, Jesus of the house of David, for both the salvation of that nation and the rest of the world. The mystery of the plan reaches its high point in the revelation of the incarnation of God as Jesus. The mystery of law and grace, justice and mercy, expressing the character and works of God, is revealed both historically and eschatologically on the corporate and individual levels of human life in a story of wisdom and folly, sin and obedience. The theological scope covers the entirety of creation, connecting it to the history of salvation in anticipation of a new creation in a comprehensive accomplishment of the divine plan.

The theological coherence of the overall narrative is reinforced by explicit as well as implicit intertextual linkage among Old Testament writings, in the New Testament use of the Old Testament, and within the New Testament itself. Perhaps the high point can be seen in Luke 24:44: “Then [Jesus] said to them, ‘These are my words that I spoke to you while I was still with you, that everything written about me in the Law of Moses and the Prophets and the Psalms must be fulfilled.’” The connection of all Scripture to the Christ covered not just the accomplishment of redemption at the cross but extended to a history of fulfillment that would extend from that point forward to the consummation of his inheritance. It is fitting in this respect that the final book in the canon of Scripture, the book of Revelation, which anticipates that consummation, is the richest intertextual literary composition in the entirety of the Scripture.

As the New Testament closes, several writings speak of “the faith” which has been given to the church by God in his Word. This is the faith “once for all delivered to the saints” (Jude 3). It is found in the Word of God, which has been given to the church and covers the “whole counsel of God” (Acts 20:27; cf. 20:32). That Word is the Scripture “breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness.” This renders one “complete,” competent (2 Tim 3:16–17). It makes one wise unto salvation and leads one into the whole counsel of God. This whole counsel revealed by the whole Scripture is the theology that coheres within the biblical text.

1 Bible quotations in this essay are taken from the English Standard Version (ESV).

2 For an overview and bibliographic sources, see the entry by Hendrik F. Stander in Everett Ferguson, Michael P. McHugh, and Frederick W. Norris, Encyclopedia of Early Christianity (New York: Garland, 1997), http://www.loc.gov/catdir/enhancements/fy0652/96036865-d.html., s.v. “Marcion,” 2:715–17. Still valuable is Adolf von Harnack, Marcion: The Gospel of the Alien God, trans. John E. Steely and Lyle D. Bierma (Durham, NC: Labyrinth, 1990).

3 For classic treatments of Gnosticism, see Kurt Rudolph, Gnosis: The Nature and History of Gnosticism, trans. Robert McLachlan Wilson (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1983); and Hans Jonas, The Gnostic Religion: The Message of the Alien God and the Beginnings of Christianity, 2nd ed. (Boston: Beacon, 1963). For a collection of classic Gnostic texts, see Bentley Layton, The Gnostic Scriptures: A New Translation with Annotations and Introductions (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1987). Most important is the collection of texts edited by James McConkey Robinson, The Nag Hammadi Library in English (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1988). The discovery of these writings marked a new direction in studies on Gnosticism. See esp. Elaine Pagels, The Gnostic Gospels (New York: Vintage, 1979). For a recent introduction to the subject, see David Brakke, The Gnostics: Myth, Ritual, and Diversity in Early Christianity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010).

4 See David Dawson, Allegorical Readers and Cultural Revision in Ancient Alexandria (Berkley, CA: University of California Press, 1992).

5 For standard English translations of Irenaeus and Tertullian see Ante-Nicene Fathers, vols. 1, 3. More recent English translations include St. Irenaeus of Lyons Against the Heresies, trans. Dominic Unger, rev. John Dillon, Ancient Christian Writers 55 (New York: Paulist, 1992). Also see Tertullian, Adversus Marcionem, ed. and trans. Ernest Evans, Oxford Early Christian Texts (Oxford: Clarendon, 1972).

6 Helpful introductions to Irenaeus include Mary Ann Donovan, One Right Reading? A Guide to Irenaeus (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical, 1997); Robert McQueen Grant, Irenaeus of Lyons, The Early Church Fathers (London: Routledge, 1997). For Irenaeus’s use of Scripture see D. Jeffrey Bingham, Irenaeus’ Use of Matthew’s Gospel in Adversus Haereses, Traditio Exegetica Graeca 7 (Lovanii: Peeters, 1998). For Tertullian, see Eric Osborn, Tertullian, First Theologian of the West (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); and T. P. O’Malley, Tertullian and the Bible: Language, Imagery, Exegesis (Nijmegen: Dekker & Van de Vegt, 1967).

7 Irenaeus, Adversus Haereses 1.9.4.

8 Ibid., 1.10.1; 3.4.2. See also Irenaeus, Demonstration of Apostolic Preaching 3.6. See Tertullian’s references to the rule of faith in Prescription Against Heretics 13 and Veiling of Virgins 1.3. For contemporary studies on the rule of faith, see Paul Blowers, “The Regula Fidei and the Narrative Character of Early Christian Faith,” Pro Ecclesia 6 (1997): 199–228; Henri Blocher, “The ‘Analogy of Faith’ in the Study of Scripture,” in The Challenge of Evangelical Theology: Essays in Approach and Method, ed. Nigel M. de S. Cameron (Edinburgh: Rutherford House, 1987), 17–38; L. W. Countryman, “Tertullian and the Regula Fidei,” Second Century 2 (1982): 208–27.

9 The change can be seen by comparing the statements of the first and second Nicene councils. See Jaroslav Pelikan and Valerie R. Hotchkiss, Creeds and Confessions of Faith in the Christian Tradition (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003), 1:158–59, 232–41.

10 See the comments of John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, 2 vols, trans. and ed. Ford Battles, The Library of Christian Classics 20–21 (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1960).

11 There are various works that trace the history of biblical criticism. Especially helpful are Magne Saebo, ed., Hebrew Bible Old Testament: The History of Its Interpretation, vols. 2–3 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1996). See also Leo G. Perdue, The Collapse of History: Reconstructing Old Testament Theology, Overtures to Biblical Theology (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1994); and Reconstructing Old Testament Theology: After the Collapse of History (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2005). With respect to the New Testament, see Werner Georg Kümmel, The New Testament: The History of the Investigation of Its Problems (Nashville: Abingdon, 1972). Kümmel provides an excellent collection of source material. See also Stephen Neill and Tom Wright, The Interpretation of the New Testament 1861–1986 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988); and William Baird, History of New Testament Research, 4 vols. (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1996f). Note also Roy A. Harrisville and Walter Sundberg, The Bible in Modern Culture: Theology and Historical-Critical Method from Spinoza to Käsemann (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1995); and Henning Graf Reventlow, History of Biblical Interpretation, vol. 4, From the Enlightenment to the Twentieth Century, trans. Leo G. Perdue, Society of Biblical Literature Resources for Biblical Study 63 (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2010). For postmodern biblical interpretation, see especially John J. Collins, The Bible after Babel: Historical Criticism in a Postmodern Age (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2005).

12 For an overview of the development of the idea of history, see R. G. Collingwood, The Idea of History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1956); also D. W. Bebbington, Patterns in History: A Christian View (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 1979).

13 Especially helpful is Kümmel’s discussion of Baur in The New Testament, 127–43. See also the philosophical analysis of Baur in Robert W. Yarbrough, The Salvation Historical Fallacy? Reassessing the History of New Testament Theology, History of Biblical Interpretation Series 2 (Leiden: Deo, 2004), 8–28.

14 See Adolf von Harnack, What Is Christianity? Lectures Delivered in the University of Berlin During the Winter-term 1899–1900, 4th ed., Crown Theological Library, vol. 5 (London: Williams and Norgate, 1901); see also History of Dogma, 7 vols., trans. Neil Buchanan (Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith, 1976).

15 See n. 2 above.

16 Kümmel treats the history of religions school in two phases. See Kümmel, The New Testament, 245–362. Also see Hans Dieter Betz et al., eds., Religion Past and Present: Encyclopedia of Theology and Religion, vol. 6 (Leiden: Brill, 2009), s.v. “History of Religions School.”

17 Wilhelm Bousset, Kyrios Christos: A History of the Belief in Christ from the Beginnings of Christianity to Irenaeus, trans. John E. Steely (Nashville: Abingdon, 1970).

18 Walter Bauer, Rechtgläubigkeit und Ketzerei im ältesten Christentum, Beitrage zur historischen Theologie 10 (Tübingen: Mohr/Siebeck, 1934); trans. Orthodoxy and Heresy in Earliest Christianity (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1971).

19 An early critic is H. E. W. Turner, The Pattern of Christian Truth: A Study in the Relations Between Orthodoxy and Heresy in the Early Church (London: Mowbray, 1978); see D. Jeffery Bingham, “Development and Diversity in Early Christianity,” JETS 49 (2006): 45–66. For a thorough review of Bauer and the tradition influenced by Bauer, see Andreas J. Köstenberger and Michael J. Kruger, The Heresy of Orthodoxy: How Contemporary Culture’s Fascination with Diversity Has Reshaped Our Understanding of Early Christianity (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2010).

20 See for example, Paul D. Hanson, The Diversity of Scripture: A Theological Interpretation, Overtures to Biblical Theology (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1982); and James D. G. Dunn, Unity and Diversity in the New Testament: An Inquiry into the Character of Earliest Christianity (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1977).

21 James M. Robinson and Helmut Koester, Trajectories through Early Christianity (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 1971).

22 Helmut Koester, “GNOMAI DIAPHOROI: The Origin and Nature of Diversification in the History of Early Christianity,” in ibid., 115.

23 See n. 3 above.

24 See Bart D. Ehrman, Lost Scriptures: Books That Did Not Make It into the New Testament (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003); idem, Lost Christianities: The Battle for Scripture and the Faiths We Never Knew (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003). For responses to Ehrman, see Köstenberger and Kruger, The Heresy of Orthodoxy; and the article in this volume, “Do We Have the Right Canon?” by Paul Wegner, Terry Wilder, and Darrell Bock (p. 393).

25 The literature here is extensive. For a typical overview of the impact of postmodernism on historical studies, see Elizabeth A. Clark, History, Theory, Text: Historians and the Linguistic Turn (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004). For a useful reference work on postmodernism and biblical interpretation see A. K. M. Adam, Handbook of Postmodern Biblical Interpretation (St. Louis, MO: Chalice, 2000). See also Perdue, Reconstructing Old Testament Theology.

26 For more on postmodern approaches to interpretation see “Can We Understand the Bible?” by Richard Melick in this volume (p. 89).

27 Erhard Gerstenberger, Theologies in the Old Testament, trans. John Bowden (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2002).

28 Peter Stuhlmacher, Historical Criticism and Theological Interpretation of Scripture: Toward a Hermeneutics of Consent, trans. Roy Harrisville (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1977), 75.

29 For more on the development of historical criticism generally and both its dangers and benefits, see the article in this volume, “Higher Criticism: What Has It Shown?” by Charles Quarles (p. 63).

30 Charles S. Peirce, Philosophical Writings of Peirce (New York: Dover, 1955), 150–56. See also James K. Feibleman, An Introduction to the Philosophy of Charles S. Peirce: Interpreted as a System (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1969), 344–52.

31 Dilthey’s contribution to hermeneutics was further developed by Hans-Georg Gadamer. For an overview of the history of this development, see Georgia Warnke, Gadamer: Hermeneutics, Tradition, and Reason, Key Contemporary Thinkers (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1987).

32 For a critique of postmodern hermeneutics from the standpoint of speech-language philosophy, see Kevin J. Vanhoozer, Is There a Meaning in This Text? The Bible, the Reader, and the Morality of Literary Knowledge (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1998).

33 Interest in the final form of the text within critical circles can be traced back to the work of Hans Frei (see Hans W. Frei, The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative: A Study in Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century Hermeneutics [New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1974]). Frei’s work influenced Brevard Childs who argued for a canonical biblical theology based on the final form of the text. See Brevard S. Childs, Biblical Theology in Crisis (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1970); and idem, Biblical Theology of the Old and New Testaments: Theological Reflection on the Christian Bible, 1st ed. (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1992). The canonical approach has been taken up by many. See the discussion in Rolf Rendtorff, Canon and Theology: Overtures to an Old Testament Theology, Overtures to Biblical Theology (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1993); and Peter Stuhlmacher, How to Do Biblical Theology, Princeton Theological Monograph Series (Allison Park, PA: Pickwick, 1995).

34 Especially important here: Robert Alter, The Art of Biblical Narrative (New York: Basic, 2011); idem, The Art of Biblical Poetry (New York: Basic, 2011); Meir Sternberg, The Poetics of Biblical Narrative: Ideological Literature and the Drama of Reading, Indiana Studies in Biblical Literature (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1985); Shimeon Bar-Efrat, Narrative Art in the Bible (London: T&T Clark International, 1989). See also, V. Philips Long, The Art of Biblical History, Foundations of Contemporary Interpretation, vol. 5 (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1994); and Tremper Longman, Literary Approaches to Biblical Interpretation, Foundations of Contemporary Interpretation, vol. 3 (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, Apollos, 1987).

35 Goldingay, though sympathetic to a postmodern approach, argues for a “thick” understanding of Old Testament theology. His argument is not primarily in consideration of the literary coherence as it is of a theological coherence of the “diversity” claimed in modern biblical criticism. The coherence is at a deeper level than the typical claims of diversity. See John Goldingay, Theological Diversity and the Authority of the Old Testament (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1987).

Chapter Sixteen

Do We Have the Right Canon?

Paul D. Wegner, Terry L. Wilder, and Darrell L. Bock

The word “canon” (kanōn) originally meant “measuring reed” but eventually developed the meaning “standard.” Pertaining to the Bible, the term refers to those books accepted by the church as the standard that governs Christian belief and conduct. The canon of Scripture, therefore, is that “list or collections of books which were accepted as an authoritative rule of faith and practice.”[1]

The Protestant canon consists of the sixty-six individual books that are familiar to Protestant readers of the Bible. Of course, not everyone agrees that this is the true extent of the canon. Roman Catholics, for example, have a canon of Scripture that includes more than sixty-six books. And in recent years there has been a powerful push in some popular and scholarly circles to argue that neither the Protestant nor Catholic churches have got it right. This movement contends that in the first century, after Jesus was crucified, there was no single, unified Christian community; there was no unified, and thus no one correct interpretation of Jesus’ life and ministry; there was no settled Christian orthodoxy. In other words, it is argued today that Christian doctrine at the beginning was very diverse even on such things as the deity of Jesus. And, for this reason, the canon was in flux, with many different Gospels and other works offering very divergent perspectives on the nature and mission of Christ. This changed in the fourth century when a certain orthodoxy and a certain canon was imposed on the church for political reasons, and other legitimate viewpoints were declared heretical and violently suppressed.

Dan Brown, in his best-selling novel, The Da Vinci Code, espouses this viewpoint through one of his characters, writing,

More than eighty gospels were considered for the New Testament, and yet only a relative few were chosen for inclusion—Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John among them. . . . The Bible, as we know it today, was collated by the pagan Roman emperor Constantine the Great. . . . Constantine commissioned and financed a new Bible, which omitted those gospels that spoke of Christ’s human traits and embellished those gospels that made him godlike. The earlier gospels were outlawed, gathered up, and burned. . . .The modern Bible was compiled and edited by men who possessed a political agenda—to promote the divinity of the man Jesus Christ and use His influence to solidify their own power base.[2]

Bart Ehrman is a well-known Bible scholar who espouses similar views. In his book, Lost Christianities, he writes,

This one form of Christianity [the party that came to be known as “orthodox”] decided what was the “correct” Christian perspective; it decided who could exercise authority over Christian belief and practice; and it determined what forms of Christianity would be marginalized, set aside, destroyed. It also decided which books to canonize into Scripture and which books to set aside as “heretical,” teaching false ideas. . . . And then, as a coup de grace, this victorious party rewrote the history of the controversy, making it appear that there had not been much of a conflict at all, claiming that its own views had always been those of the majority of Christians at all times . . . , had always been “orthodox” (i.e., the “right belief”) and that its opponents in the conflict, with their other scriptural texts, had always represented small splinter groups invested in deceiving people into “heresy.”[3]

So, how are we to understand the canonization of Scripture? Do we have the right books? Is there even one set of right books? Our goal in this article is to argue that we do, in fact, have the right books, and the political story that Brown and Ehrman tell is not what happened. We will begin with a discussion of the formation of the Old Testament canon, then one of the New Testament canon, and then we will conclude with a detailed assessment of the extrabiblical gospels championed by Ehrman and others.

The Old Testament Canon[4]

Throughout church history there has been active discussion between the Protestant, Roman Catholic, and Greek Orthodox churches regarding which books belong in the Old Testament canon. But how did these canons develop? And is it possible to determine which canon of the Old Testament the early church used? What are the apocryphal books, and how did they come into being? These are the types of questions we would like to examine in this section, and there is a significant amount of controversy surrounding them.

Formative Years of the Early Church

Initially early Christians and Jews both worshipped in synagogues (Acts 3:1; 4:1; 5:42; 6:9–10; 13:14–15; 14:1; 17:1–2), using the same books of Scripture, namely the Old Testament, which they viewed as authoritative. It is essential to remember that the Old Testament was the Bible for Jesus and his followers; however, the Jews and Christians had significantly different vantage points, since Christians understood messianic prophecies in the Old Testament to be fulfilled in Jesus, whereas Jews still awaited the Messiah. When the Christian Church broke away from the Jewish synagogue in the latter half of the first century, the Old Testament remained an integral part of its canon. Traditionally the Church has held that both the Old and New Testaments are direct revelation from God and are equally part of God’s redemptive plan for mankind. They adopted this high view of the Old Testament from Jesus himself, who clearly declared his views in Matthew 5:17–18, “Do not think that I came to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I did not come to abolish but to fulfill. For truly I say to you, until heaven and earth pass away, not the smallest letter or stroke shall pass from the Law until all is accomplished” (NASB). But is there enough evidence to confirm which books were considered part of the Old Testament canon?

Evidence for the Old Testament Canon

Early Jewish Evidence

Jewish Traditions (First Century to Sixth Century AD). Jewish traditions claimed that divine prophecy ceased about 400 BC in Israel:

Since the death of the last prophets, Haggai, Zechariah and Malachi, the Holy Spirit [of prophetic inspiration] departed from Israel; yet they were still able to avail themselves of the bath kol (T.B. Sanh. 11a; Tos. Soṭah 13:2; baraita in T.B. Yoma 9b; T.B. Soṭah 48b, and T.B. Sanh. 11a).

The phrase bath kol is literally translated as “daughter of a voice” (i.e., its sound or perhaps its echo),[5] connoting something that was not as reliable as the voice of the prophets themselves. After direct revelation from God had ceased, the Jewish people were directed to listen to the words of the wise men—those who had been trained in the words of God. Other passages state:

“Until then [the coming of Alexander the Great who destroyed the Persian Empire] the prophets prophesied through the Holy Spirit. From then on, ‘incline thine ear and hear the words of the wise.’” (Seder Olam Rabbah 30, quoting Prov. 22:17)

Rab Samuel bar Inia said, in the name of Rab Aha: . . . “The Second Temple lacked five things which the First Temple possessed, namely, the fire, the ark, the Urim and Thummim, the oil of anointing and the Holy Spirit [of Prophecy].” (T.P. Taʽanit 2:1; T.P. Makkot 2.4–8; T. B. Yoma 21b)

Rabbi Abdimi of Haifa said, “Since the day when the Temple was destroyed, prophecy has been taken from the prophets and given to the wise.” (T.B. Baba Batra 12a)

These passages indicate that according to Jewish tradition, the voice of God had ceased following the time of Malachi (about 400 BC); thus, new books were no longer being added to the sacred Scriptures. In the apocryphal book of 1 Maccabees, Simon Maccabees speaks of the great sorrow in Israel such as there had not been since the prophets ceased to appear to them (9:27). In the Pseudepigrapha, the author of 2 Baruch (85:3) claims that the prophets had fallen asleep.

The Babylonian Talmud, which was compiled over a period from about the third to the sixth centuries, provides a thorough list of the books of Scripture and their order, although not in the same order as our modern Hebrew Old Testament. As the books of the Pentateuch were not in question, they are not mentioned in this passage:

Our Rabbis taught: The order of the Prophets is, Joshua, Judges, Samuel, Kings, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Isaiah, and the Twelve Minor Prophets. Let us examine this. Hosea came first, as it is written, God spake first to Hosea. But did God speak first to Hosea? Were there not many prophets between Moses and Hosea? R. Joxanan, however, has explained that [what it means is that] he was the first of the four prophets who prophesied at that period, namely, Hosea, Isaiah, Amos and Micah. Should not then Hosea come first?—Since his prophecy is written along with those of Haggai, Zechariah and Malachi, and Haggai, Zechariah and Malachi came at the end of the prophets, he is reckoned with them. But why should he not be written separately and placed first?—Since his book is so small, it might be lost [if copied separately]. Let us see again. Isaiah was prior to Jeremiah and Ezekiel. Then why should not Isaiah be placed first?—Because the Book of Kings ends with a record of destruction and Jeremiah speaks throughout of destruction and Ezekiel commences with destruction and ends with consolation and Isaiah is full of consolation; therefore we put the destruction next to destruction and consolation next to consolation.

The order of the Hagiographa is Ruth, the Book of Psalms, Job, Prophets, Ecclesiastes, Song of Songs, Lamentations, Daniel and the Scroll of Esther, Ezra and Chronicles. Now on the view that Job lived in the days of Moses, should not the book of Job come first?—We do not begin with a record of suffering. But Ruth also is a record of suffering?—It is a suffering with a sequel [of happiness], as R. Joxanan said: Why was her name called Ruth?—Because there issued from her David who replenished the Holy One, blessed be He, with hymns and praises. (T.B. Baba Batra 14b)[6]

Philo of Alexandria (20 BC–AD 50). Philo, a well-educated Jew from Alexandria, appears to have accepted the Hebrew canon of Scripture as distinct from the Apocrypha. He mentions the common three-part designation of Scripture, and he summarizes the Old Testament as “the Laws, and the oracle given by inspiration through the Prophets, and the Psalms.”[7] Regarding Philo’s view of the canon, Roger Beckwith observes that “though Philo quotes all the books of the Pentateuch, most of the books of the Prophets and several of the book of the Hagiographa, often with formulas recognizing their divine authority, he never once quotes a book of the Apocrypha.”[8]

2 Esdras (First Century AD). The apocryphal book of 2 Esdras (sometimes called 4 Ezra) contains a fictional account of Ezra rewriting the biblical books after they had been burned, most likely in the destruction of Jerusalem by Nebuchadrezzar (14:21). During forty days, Ezra dictated to five scribes, who were trained to inscribe quickly, ninety-four books. God then told Ezra:

Make public the twenty-four books that you wrote first and let the worthy and the unworthy read them; but keep the seventy books that were written last, in order to give them to the wise among your people. For in them is the spring of understanding, the fountain of wisdom, and the river of knowledge (14:45–48).[9]

The twenty-four books are most likely the same as our thirty-nine Old Testament books (just grouped differently—the book of twelve is counted as only one book). Josephus and Origen refer to their Old Testament as containing twenty-two books, but once again they contain the same books as our Hebrew Old Testament.

Josephus (c. AD 60–100). Josephus, a Jewish historian writing during the latter part of the first century AD, states that the Jews had only twenty-two sacred books (he combines Ruth and Judges; Jeremiah and Lamentations).[10]

Early Christian Evidence

Jesus (Early First Century AD). Jesus describes the extent of the canon in Matthew 23:34–35 and Luke 11:49–51, of which F. F. Bruce observes: “No body of literature ever had its credentials confirmed by a higher authority.”[11] Both passages state that the Jewish nation will be held responsible for the blood of the prophets from “the blood of Abel” (Gen 4:8), the first recorded murder, “to the blood of Zechariah” (2 Chr 24:20–22), the last recorded murder. The implication is that biblical history spans from Genesis to Chronicles, which is the same order as the oldest complete manuscripts of the Old Testament (i.e., Codex Leningradensis [AD 1008] and the Aleppo Codex [most likely about fifty years earlier]). There were certainly other martyrs following Zechariah, but the Jewish nation will not be held responsible for them, since they fall outside of the parameters of the Jewish authoritative sacred history.

Jesus also uses the common tripartite division of the Hebrew Bible to refer to the canon in Luke 24:44: “These are My words which I spoke to you while I was still with you, that all things which are written about Me in the Law of Moses and the Prophets and the Psalms must be fulfilled” (NASB). This last designation is evidently representative of the final group of Old Testament writings, of which Psalms was the first and largest book.[12] A similar designation for the Old Testament canon was in use from the time of Philo in the early first century (“[the] laws, and oracles delivered through the mouths of prophets, and psalms, and anything else which fosters and perfects knowledge and piety”[13]) until at least the tenth century (al-Masudi, an Arabian historian and geographer, describes the Hebrew canon as “the Law, the Prophets and the Psalms, which are the 24 books”).[14] It is also interesting to note that Jesus quotes from each of the three parts of Scripture as authoritative material (e.g., Law: Matt 4:4=Deut 8:3; Prophets: Matt 10:35–36=Mic 7:6; Writings: Matt 13:43=Dan 12:3).[15]

Melito, Bishop of Sardis (c. AD 170). Melito, Bishop of Sardis, about AD 170, who learned about the Old Testament canon while traveling in Syria,[16] wrote to his friend Onesimus and described the books in the Old Testament canon.[17] In his listing of the books, Lamentations is not mentioned but is probably included with Jeremiah; similarly, Nehemiah is probably included with Ezra. The book of Esther is missing, but Melito’s list may derive from the Syriac church which does not include Esther in its canon.[18]

A List in Jerusalem (c. AD 170). F. F. Bruce cites a list of Old Testament books from about the same time or slightly later than Melito’s list. He states:

. . . [it was] preserved in a manuscript in the Library of the Greek Patriarchate in Jerusalem, and reproduced in a somewhat later form in a treatise by the late fourth-century writer Epiphanius, bishop of Salamis in Cyprus. In this list the name of each Old Testament book is given twice, first in Hebrew or Aramaic transcribed into Greek characters, and then in the Greek Septuagint form. The total of the books listed is twenty-seven. . . . But these twenty-seven correspond to our thirty-nine, except that Lamentations is not included by name. The omission of Lamentations, however, may be only apparent; probably it was reckoned as an appendix to Jeremiah.[19]

Origen (c. AD 185–254, Alexandrian Theologian). Origen, one of the greatest biblical scholars of the early church, states: “But it should be known that there are twenty-two canonical books, according to the Hebrew tradition; the same as the number of the letters of their alphabet.” He then lists them according to their Hebrew and Greek names, and they correspond to the thirty-nine books in the Hebrew Old Testament.[20]

Athanasius (c. AD 296–373, Bishop of Alexandria). In response to false teachers who claimed that other books were to be considered authoritative, Athanasius discussed the canon in his Easter letter to parishioners in AD 367. In it he delineated the twenty-two Old Testament books (corresponding closely to our thirty-nine books, except that Esther is not mentioned and Jeremiah includes Lamentations, Baruch, and the Epistle of Jeremiah).[21] He also mentions the apocryphal books but makes a clear distinction between canonical and noncanonical works. Nevertheless, questions still arose as to which books were canonical. See also similar lists by Jerome (c. AD 345–420)[22] and Rufinus,[23] both of which contain the same books as the Hebrew Old Testament.

In the early period of the church before AD 90, the Christians lived among the Jews and knew which books were held to be authoritative. The evidence presented above reflects this consensus. However, after AD 90, when the church was dispersed because of persecution, there was far less agreement in the church concerning the books of the canon. As time passed, some Christians had no contact with Jews and thus had very little knowledge about the Old Testament canon. This is almost certainly why the earliest copies of the Septuagint from the fourth and fifth centuries (Codex Vaticanus, c. AD 350; Codex Sinaiticus, c. AD 400; Codex Alexandrinus, c. AD 450) contain some apocryphal books.

Determining OT Canonicity

While there is no record as to how the Jewish nation determined what works were canonical, some hints are found in Josephus’s statement about the Jewish canon:

It therefore naturally, or rather necessarily, follows (seeing that with us it is not open to everybody to write the records, and that there is no discrepancy in what is written; seeing that, on the contrary, the prophets alone had this privilege, obtaining their knowledge of the most remote and ancient history through the inspiration which they owed to God, and committing to writing a clear account of the events of their own time just as they occurred)—it follows, I say, that we do not possess myriads of inconsistent books conflicting with each other. Our books, those which are justly accredited, are but two and twenty, and contain the record of all time.

Of these, five are the books of Moses, comprising the laws and the traditional history from the birth of man down to the death of the lawgiver. . . . [T]he prophets subsequent to Moses wrote the history of the events of their own times in thirteen books. The remaining four books contain hymns to God, and precepts for the conduct of human life.

From Artaxerxes to our own time the complete history has been written, but has not been deemed worthy of equal credit with the earlier records, because of the failure of the exact succession of the prophets.

We have given practical proof of our reverence for our own Scriptures. For, although such long ages have now passed, no one has ventured either to add, or to remove, or to alter a syllable; and it is an instinct with every Jew, from the day of his birth to regard them as the decrees of God, to abide by them, and, if need be, cheerfully to die for them.[24]

The statements in bold print above suggest some of the criteria that may have helped determine the books of the Old Testament canon:

1. They do not contain contradictions.

2. They were written by prophets or by persons recognized as having divine authority.

3. They originated through inspiration from God.

4. They were accepted by the Jews as authoritative material.

When these criteria are used together, they form a strong case as to how Scriptures were recognized as authoritative. With regard to item 3, it is interesting to note that biblical books often claim to be from God by phrases such as “the word of the LORD came to” (Jer 1:2, 4; 2:1; Ezek 6:1; 7:1) or “the LORD says” (Isa 37:22; 43:1; Jer 13:1), whereas none of the apocryphal books include such statements. The Jews believed that prophecy ceased about 400 BC so that apocryphal works, written later, were necessarily attributed to prophets already recognized as authoritative.

Why Were the Apocryphal Books Not Canonical?

A common list of the Apocryphal books include:

1. The Wisdom of Solomon (c. 30 BC)

2. Ecclesiasticus (Sirach) (132 BC)

3. Tobit (c. 200 BC)

4. Judith (c. 150 BC)

5. 1 Esdras (c. 150–100 BC)

6. 1 Maccabees (c. 110 BC)

7. 2 Maccabees (c. 110–70 BC)

8. Baruch (c. 150–50 BC)

9. The Letter of Jeremiah (c. 300–100 BC)

10. 2 Esdras (c. AD 100)

11. Additions to Esther (140–130 BC)

12. The Prayer of Azariah (second or first century BC)

13. Susanna (second or first century BC)

14. Bel and the Dragon (c. 100 BC)

15. The Prayer of Manasseh (second or first century BC)

As already noted, there is good evidence that none of the apocryphal or pseudepigraphal works were included in the Old Testament Hebrew canon used by the Jews and early Christians. However, it is interesting that the earliest manuscripts of the Septuagint include several of them. There is no evidence that these books were ever accepted by Alexandrian Jews to form an Alexandrian canon in contrast to a Palestinian canon as some have suggested.[25] From where did they originate? Most likely these books developed from Jewish traditions or folklore concerning the biblical text during the Second Temple period (more specifically, from about 300 BC to AD 100). Perhaps the Jews desired further revelatory material after Old Testament revelation had ceased. It is possible that these noncanonical scrolls were stored together with canonical ones, and in time the distinctions between the two may have broken down.

Important evidence against the apocryphal books being part of the canon includes:

1. The New Testament never cites any apocryphal books as inspired; Jesus’ use of Scripture suggests that only the books in the Hebrew Bible were thought to be authoritative (Matt 23:34–35; Luke 11:50–51).

2. None of the apocryphal books claim to be the word of the Lord as do many Old Testament books (Num 35:1, 9; Josh 1:1; Isa 1:10, 18, 24; Jer 1:2; Ezek 1:3; Hos 1:1; Joel 1:1).

3. The Old Testament canon is confirmed by many sources: 2 Esdras 14:45–48 (24 books); Josephus Contra Apion, 1:37–42 (22 books); Melito (all Old Testament books except possibly Esther); Jerusalem List (all 39 books); Origen (22 books). Each of these sources lists the same 39 Old Testament books we have today (except possibly Melito).

4. There are significant mistakes in the apocryphal books—some are simple mistakes, others are chronological or geographical inaccuracies. For example, the events in the book of Tobit (1:3–5) are chronologically incompatible—Tobit is said to have lived in Nineveh about 722 BC, yet he saw the division of the United Kingdom in 931 BC. Eleven out of fifteen apocryphal books have some type of inaccuracies in them.[26] Those that do not are either very short (Prayer of Azariah and the Song of the Three Young Men; Prayer of Manasseh) or their content is such that inaccuracies are difficult to determine (Wisdom of Solomon; Susanna).

Conclusion

There is ample evidence to confirm that Jews and early Christians had an established canon in the early first century AD. As time went on and the two groups drifted further apart both theologically and geographically, the Old Testament canon became less certain. Augustine favored including the apocryphal books in the Old Testament canon and requested Jerome to include them in the Latin Vulgate even though Jerome was against doing so. This became the foothold for the Apocrypha to gain in popularity since the Latin Vulgate became the standard translation of the Bible for the Western Church for about a thousand years. During the debates between Martin Luther and the Roman Catholic Church at the Council of Trent in 1546, the authority of the apocryphal books was decreed by the Roman Catholic Church, thus providing much of the foundation for the modern controversy.

The New Testament Canon[27]

When the apostles were alive and operating in the first century, no great need existed for a NT canon to be defined.[28] This was because the apostles were divinely appointed and ordained men who had in themselves the authority of the Lord Jesus (cf. Matt 10:40; 1 Cor 9:1–3; Gal 4:14).[29] The Lord himself had commissioned the apostles and given them this authority and given them the task to get the church “off the ground,” in a manner of speaking. They were to be God’s authority on this earth in between the time of the Lord’s ascension into heaven and the completion of the NT Scriptures, which would then become a final and continuing authority.

As long as the apostles and their immediate disciples were alive, people could easily determine what constituted apostolic teaching. That is to say, the pressure or need for a NT canon was not felt because the apostles’ teaching was still fresh in everyone’s mind. People were living who had actually heard the apostles teach in person. As time wore on, however, certain developments occurred which prompted the need for the definition of a NT canon.

The Original Need for Establishing a NT Canon

The Rise of Heresies

First, the rise of certain heresies occasioned the need for defining a NT canon. For example, Marcion came on the scene around AD 144 advocating some strange views on God and the Scriptures. He held to the existence of two different gods: an OT god, who was a harsh, judgmental, and vindictive being; and a NT god, who was a loving, gracious, and kind individual. According to Marcion, the NT god sent Jesus to redeem people from the OT god. This is obviously a false teaching.

Further, Marcion contended that the apostle Paul was the only preacher of the true word of God, and so he compiled his own Bible. He rejected the OT as inferior. His “canon” consisted of the Gospel of Luke (with certain adjustments for things he did not like) and ten of the Pauline epistles. He did not include the Pastoral Epistles and Hebrews. So, Marcion’s canon was quite restricted and truncated.

This development was one of the things that pushed the church towards a formal recognition of a NT canon. For, when heretics began to publish their various views and establish their own canons, it became incumbent upon the true church of Jesus Christ to refute them by publishing genuine editions of the canon and defining what the whole church regards as the canon. Therefore, the rise of heresies was one of the impetuses towards defining a canon.[30]

The Roman Persecution

Another factor which occasioned the need for establishing a NT canon was the Roman persecution of the church. At intermittent times in the first centuries of the church, Christians were subject to imprisonment and even death if they should have any of the Christian Scriptures in their homes or personal possession. Clearly, if you are facing imprisonment or possibly death for possessing the Christian Scriptures, it becomes rather important to know what the Christian Scriptures are. Therefore, this factor was another push in the direction of deciding which books were generally recognized as being a part of the NT canon (i.e., the Word of God) and which books were simply corollary, supplemental works.[31]

The Demise of the Apostles

Another factor which occasioned the need for establishing a NT canon was the fact that the apostles were off the scene. As the second century wore on, the oral teaching of the apostles was becoming less and less familiar to believers, and even the disciples of the apostles were beginning to die. Therefore, Christians were being separated further and further from the oral, authoritative teaching of the apostles. Consequently, as this trend continued, it became evident that there had to be less reliance upon the oral teaching of the apostles and more reliance upon the written teaching of the apostles and those under their supervision. Thus, it became necessary that the canon of Scripture be defined and recognized in order that succeeding generations in the church might know just what apostolic doctrine was and what it was not.[32]

Criteria of Canonicity

How did the church know which books were canonical and which were not? What were the principal criteria by which various books were recognized as part of the NT Scriptures?

Inspired of God

The basic criterion by which books were recognized as part of the Scriptures, whether we are discussing the OT or the NT, is whether they were considered “God-breathed” (theopneustos). Books do not become inspired because they are recognized as being canonical; rather, they are recognized as being canonical because they are inspired by God. That is to say, the intrinsic inspiration of a book led to it being recognized as such by the ancient Jewish community and by the church, and not the other way around.[33] We have already examined how the OT books came to be recognized as canonical. Regarding the NT canon, however, how did the church determine which books were inspired by God and which were not?

Three Principal Criteria

Three principal criteria seem to have emerged by which the early church recognized books that had been inspired of God and were thus canonical.[34]

Apostolic Origin (Apostolicity). The apostles were commissioned by the Lord himself to be his authoritative spokesmen on this earth during the interval between the ascension of Christ and the completion of the NT Scriptures. Thus, they were given authority and the inspiration and gifting of the Holy Spirit which would enable them to write inerrant Scripture and teach inerrant doctrine. Therefore, the books of the NT were to be related in some way to one of these authoritative, inspired apostles. So, one criterion was apostolicity.[35] The early Christians essentially asked, “Is this particular work under question the work of one of the apostles?” Or, “If it is not the work of an apostle, was it produced under the supervision and given the stamp of approval of one of the apostles?”

Most of the books of the NT were written by the apostles of Jesus Christ.[36] For example, Paul accounts for roughly half of our NT books; John and Matthew were apostles, and so on.[37] But Luke was not an apostle, and we have two books in the NT written by Luke. So how is it that they were accepted? They were included because although Luke was not an apostle, he was a close advisor, confidant, traveling companion, and physician to the apostle Paul. That is, he was generally recognized to be a protégé of the apostle Paul, and what Luke wrote was in effect supervised by and approved by Paul.[38] As another example, consider John Mark and the Gospel of Mark. Mark was not an apostle, but it was generally recognized among early Christians that Peter was behind Mark’s Gospel.[39] And thus, the work meets the criterion of having been written either by an apostle or by one under the immediate influence and supervision of an apostle.

Recognition by the Churches. Recognition by the churches was another criterion used by the early church to determine what books were inspired of God.[40] This principle asked whether the book was recognized by a leading church or group of churches. In other words, this criterion was concerned with the opinion and judgment of the leading churches of Christendom regarding a particular book. If a book was accepted as authoritative by the churches at Ephesus, Jerusalem, Antioch, Rome, Carthage, and so on, then, due to the influence of these churches, the chances were great that the church as a whole would consider it to be part of the Word of God.

The Content of the Book. A third criterion, which, along with apostolicity, would be the most important, was the content of the book.[41] In other words, does the content of a particular book under scrutiny agree with the oral apostolic doctrine, i.e., the teaching of the apostles? Does it agree with the doctrine which the apostles themselves taught orally in person when they were alive on the earth? All of this really revolved around the apostles, these divinely empowered and appointed men, who were given this great responsibility and authority. They taught and wrote the Word of God, and anything that was written, regardless of who wrote it, or what name it bore, or what connections it might have, if it was contrary to the teaching of the apostles, it was considered to be false, spurious, and not part of the Word of God. As time wore on, it would be more and more difficult for Christians to use this criterion because the oral teaching of the apostles would be less and less evident and clear. This development is the reason why the determination of NT canonicity must of necessity have been done in the very earliest centuries. It would be impossible in our day to try to compare the content of a particular book that we might be examining to the oral apostolic doctrine, because the only apostolic doctrine we know today is what we get out of the written Scriptures. Today, for the most part, we do not have access to the oral teaching of the apostles.

Oral tradition gets garbled, perverted, and distorted; therefore, the further away from the oral apostolic teaching that you get, the less certain you can be that you are comparing the real apostolic doctrine with what is written in particular books. Thus, it was necessary that this criterion be applied in the early church while the real apostolic doctrine was still fresh in the minds of those who had heard the apostles—or who at least had heard the immediate disciples of the apostles.

So, all of this leads to what was perhaps the “prime” criterion: “Was this book produced by an apostle or under the auspices of an apostle, and does it obviously correspond in doctrine to what the apostles themselves taught when they were on earth as God’s divinely appointed spokesmen?”

The New Testament Books

The Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke were accepted as canonical quite early with very little question or problem. Matthew was an apostle, one of the Twelve. Mark’s Gospel was recognized because of his connection with the apostle Peter. Luke’s writings were accepted due to his association with the apostle Paul.

The Gospel of John was in some dispute early on because it was written much later than the other Gospels. Further, John’s Gospel took longer to be accepted universally by the church because some Gnostic heretics used it to support their doctrines.[42] But by the late second century it was widely accepted in the church and became a very important part of some of the doctrinal debates which occurred shortly thereafter in the early church.

Acts is mentioned very few times in early on church history in the writings of the Fathers until about the time of Irenaeus.[43] From that time on, the book of Acts was firmly fixed as part of the Christian Scriptures. Acts was written by Luke, a protégé of the apostle Paul.

Paul’s letters were circulated and accepted very early as a group. Various theories have been proposed as to how and when this took place.[44] For example, years ago E. J. Goodspeed argued that by about AD 80–85 the entire Pauline corpus was probably being circulated among the churches as a part of Holy Scripture.[45] Second Peter 3:15 mentions that Paul’s epistles were recognized as “Scripture” along with the “other” Scriptures, probably the OT.[46]

Hebrews was not accepted so early, at least not in the West. The book was disputed for centuries because no one knew who wrote it, and we still do not know. Even though some in the early centuries attributed it to Paul, a difference in style exists in Hebrews that is clearly not Paul’s. Further, the author of Hebrews says that he received his doctrine from the first generation of Christians (cf. Heb 2:3). Paul would contend that he did not receive his doctrine this way (cf. Galatians 1 and 2). Many others have been suggested (e.g., Apollos, Luke, Barnabas, Priscilla), but no consensus exists concerning who wrote it. We must agree with the church father Origen, who said that God alone knows who wrote Hebrews.[47] So, it is easy to see why Hebrews was somewhat disputed in the early church. However, the book was eventually recognized as canonical because of its correspondence with apostolic doctrine, its early first-century date, and the fact that it was widely circulated in the Eastern half of the church.[48]

The General Epistles are called such because they were not written to a particular church or known person. Consider, for example, the Johannine letters. First John was considered as obviously the work of the apostle John and was accepted from the time of Irenaeus, i.e., about the time of the Gospel of John. But the epistles of 2 and 3 John were unknown to much of the church until rather late, and they were very short in length. Nonetheless, these epistles were also eventually accepted as they were attributed to the apostle John.

Of the Petrine letters, 1 Peter was accepted early without serious question. However, of all the NT books, 2 Peter was the most disputed. The primary problem is that the Greek style of 2 Peter is totally different from the refined Greek style of 1 Peter. And thus, the question arose: “How could the same man have written both epistles in such totally different Greek?” No problem is present in English, but in Greek there is a definite difference of style. However, the latter fact does not necessarily mean that these letters are not from the same man.

In 1 Peter, the apostle says, “I have written you this brief letter through Silvanus” (5:12). Many suggest that Silas possibly served as Peter’s amanuensis or secretarial assistant.[49] As a cultured and educated man, Silas may well have given some assistance to Peter in wording his statements into better Greek.[50] If so, it would explain the more classical, cultured style of 1 Peter as contrasted with the rougher, plainer style of 2 Peter (which we may surmise that Peter wrote without Silas’s help).

Some also objected to 2 Peter because of its similarity with the book of Jude. However, this fact does not mean that 2 Peter was not inspired; instead, both men were led by the Spirit of God to write about the same things. So, despite the serious controversy over 2 Peter, it was eventually recognized as a genuine work of Peter and thus inspired of God.

James was disputed in the early church until the early fourth century because of the Jewish flavor of the book. There is little distinctive Christian doctrine in it. The most famous (later) opponent of James was Martin Luther. He called the book a “right strawy epistle.” The great problem that Luther saw was that James seemed to contradict Paul’s doctrine of justification by faith alone apart from works of Law (cf. Rom 3:28, etc.). For example, James 2:24 says that “a man is justified by works and not by faith alone.”

This problem, however, was overcome by a careful examination of both Paul’s and James’s language. On the one hand, Paul argues that the works of the Mosaic Law, a Jewish legal righteousness, is neither required by nor contributes to one’s salvation. On the other hand, James contends that a genuine faith will produce the fruit of righteous acts. If not, then one’s salvation can be questioned as to its authenticity. Thus, no contradiction exists between James and Paul. They are simply speaking on two different aspects of the same thing. Even Martin Luther later came to moderate his views on James.

Jude too was slow in being accepted. This was due to its similarity with 2 Peter, but perhaps more so because it quotes from or alludes to some non-canonical books (the Assumption of Moses [v. 9] and the Apocalypse of Enoch [v. 14]) known as “pseudepigrapha” (false writings). This matter was problematic because it suggested to some that Jude saw these works as divinely authoritative. However, when he cites them, Jude does not accept or authenticate these entire books. He simply accepts a particular statement within them as true.

Revelation was accepted early in the Western Church and was given a very high place. The book was accepted more slowly in the Eastern Church because some felt that it might have given some comfort to the Montanists. This was a heretical group who emphasized the pursuit of all sorts of esoteric experiences, visions, and dreams, which resulted in teachings contrary to sound doctrine.[51] But Revelation did not really support Montanist doctrine and practice, and it was soon accepted by the Eastern Church as the obvious work of the apostle John.

Some Books Considered but Not Received

There were several works that were well-loved and read by many churches that some believed should be seen as canonical. Their theology was generally orthodox. These included books like The Didache, The Shepherd of Hermas, 1 Clement, and the letters of Ignatius. We note here that if the church were inclined to receive books as canonical for political or other less than stellar reasons, the fact that these books did not make it in defies explanation. They were rejected for one simple reason: they had no legitimate claim to apostolicity. They were not old enough; they were known to be second-century works, written by second- and third-generation Christians. So, they were not written by apostles, nor were they endorsed by apostles.

Conclusion

In the Eastern Church, the Thirty-ninth Paschal Letter of Athanasius, the Bishop of Alexandria, is dated AD 367. This document was the bishop’s letter to the faithful and was written on the occasion of Passover. In this letter Athanasius mentions twenty-seven books of the NT accepted by the church. In the Western Church, the Council of Carthage met in AD 397. One of the outcomes of the Council was its publication of the names of the twenty-seven books held to be Scripture by the church of Jesus Christ. When these two dates are put together, it is evident that by the middle-to-late fourth century there was little or no question concerning the twenty-seven canonical books of the NT. No really serious question about this canonical list has arisen since.

But might there have been some books that were left out of the NT canon? Were there some other “Gospels,” as claimed by Bart Ehrman, that have just as much right to canonicity as the books we have discussed but which were excluded for less than stellar reasons? We conclude this article with a discussion of these extrabiblical Gospels.

The Extrabiblical Gospels

The extrabiblical Gospels have received much attention in the last several decades ever since the discovery of the fifty-two Nag Hammadi texts in the deserts of Egypt in 1945. Although not all of them were Gospels, many did present Jesus and his teaching as the central feature of their content. Those texts are fascinating to consider. Some scholars claim that we need to reassess our understanding of the earliest Christianity as a result of these works. They contend that they give evidence of a more diverse kind of Christianity in the early centuries with no one group really having an inherently better claim to being rooted in Jesus than the other groups. This reading of earliest Christianity speaks of alternative Christianities in the early period. The issue is not really whether some variety of groupings existed. Our first-century sources, mostly texts in our New Testament, tell us this in the evidence they give of contention within the church, especially with groups the epistles and Revelation suggest are not really reflecting what Jesus represented. Other scholars argue that these extrabiblical texts are valuable to have and give us important, direct insight into these other groups, but they do not rise to a level of significance that means the history of early Christianity needs radical reconfiguration. This section of the article considers the character of these other works and suggests why they never were seriously considered to reflect the core teaching of Jesus or the communities most directly rooted in him. So we shall introduce these works and take a closer look at the roots of some of the more important of these extrabiblical Gospels. Can they teach us about the diversity in the earliest Jesus communities?

The Full List of Gospels

When Dan Brown’s The DaVinci Code was published, he presented his fictional work as steeped in careful research in terms of the story’s background. Among his claims were that there were eighty-four Gospels, most of which were unknown or covered up. Many millions of readers were exposed to this claim with little or no means of knowing if it was true. In fact, the number was exaggerated. Below is a list of all the Gospels or Gospel-like texts we have outside of the four Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.

First to be named are fragments that we can identify as having Jesus as their main topic, but they are so small we can say little else. These are Papyrus Egerton 2, Papyrus Oxyrhynchus 840, the Strasbourg Coptic Papyrus, the “Unknown Berlin Gospel,” and a highly disputed “Secret Gospel of Mark.” There is doubt about whether this last work is an ancient Gospel at all.[52]

We have some contents from three Gospels that are briefly noted for us in descriptions from church fathers, but for which we do not have any copies. We know very little about these works nor even if they are related to each other in some way as different names for the same text or whether they are a distinct form of Matthew. These include the Gospel of the Hebrews, the Gospel of the Ebionites, and the Gospel of the Nazareans. There is uncertainty about exactly what the Gospel of the Hebrews is. Was it Matthew or a Gospel used by the Ebionites?[53]

There are infancy Gospels as well, including the Protoevangelium of James, the Infancy Gospel of Thomas, and the Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew. These add supposed events to Jesus’ infancy and childhood. They also often seek to elevate Mary’s role or explain Jesus’ power as a youth. Their goal is to exalt Jesus. These works range from the late second to sixth century. As such, they do not impact the discussion of alternative Christianities in the early period but reflect the pious reflections of later generations.

Yet another work is variously named. It is the Gospel of Nicodemus, a work of piety that is a passion Gospel and is also called the Acts of Pilate. Justin referred to the tradition it reflects.[54] Klauck dates the Gospel itself to the early fourth century, too late to be of value for our topic.[55]

The Epistula Apostolorum is a mid-second-century document involving a series of questions and answers in the form of a letter to the apostles. It is a work of traditional piety as well, defending a physical Jesus and a material resurrection.[56] This work is not technically speaking a Gospel. It simply gives us a look at how one second-century group understood some key aspects of Jesus’ life. The work claims to react to views said to be from Simon Magus and Cerinthus.[57] This is less than certain. Simon Magus is blamed for all types of heresies by the second century, and the ideas said to be rooted in Cerinthus are also not clearly attested in him. Thus the work may be a defense of the faith in relationship to views extant at the time of the work.

The remaining list is long. I shall only discuss in more detail the more prominent works in this list. But I give it for the sake of completeness. The remaining works are Apocalypse of Peter, Apocryphon of James, Apocryphon of John (the most important work with the most copies found at Nag Hammadi), Dialogue of the Savior, Eugnostos the Blessed, Excerpta ex Theodoto, Gospel(s) of Bartholomew, Gospel of the Egyptians, Gospel of Mary Magdalene, Gospel of Peter, Gospel of Philip, Gospel of the Savior, Gospel of Thomas (the most famous of these Gospels), Gospel of Thomas the Contender, Gospel of Truth, Hypostasis of the Archons, Interpretation of Knowledge, Letter to Rheginos (= Treatise on the Resurrection), Pistis Sophia, Second Treatise of the Great Seth, Sophia of Jesus Christ, Teachings of Silvanus, Treatise on the Resurrection (see Letter to Rheginos), Tripartite Tractate, A Valentinian Exposition, and the most recently discovered Gospel of Judas.

This list yields a total of thirty-nine works, assuming we distinguish between the Gospel of the Hebrews, Ebionites, and Nazareans which may or may not be different works. This number is a far cry from Dan Brown’s eighty-four.

In what follows we will examine a few of these key Gospels: Peter, Mary Magdalene, Judas, The Apocryphon of John, and Thomas. I take them in this order.

A Closer Look at Some Key Extrabiblical Gospels

The Gospel of Peter

This is one of the few texts that treats Jesus’ death and resurrection exclusively. It is a passion narrative. Eusebius names the Gospel of Peter and notes that some churches of the area initially read this Gospel.[58] However, it came to be adopted by some docetic groups that distinguished between Jesus in the flesh and the spiritual Christ that inhabited him. In the latter part of the second century, the association of this work with these groups led Serapion, bishop of Antioch, to give instructions that put an end of its being read in church. Two examples of potential docetic influence appear: 4:10, where Jesus hangs on the cross but feels no pain; and 5:19, where Jesus notes that power is departing from him rather than feeling God forsaking him. At the same point, it is said that Jesus “was taken up,” possibly indicating that his ascension took place at the cross, although this meaning is debated.[59]

John Dominic Crossan proposed a date of AD 50–70, but that is an idiosyncratic view.[60] Klauck notes that many themes are a development of the Gospel tradition, with material like that in Matthew, Mark, and Luke.[61] Klauck lists these developed ideas: calling Jesus “Lord,” the lack of knowledge about Jewish custom, the transfer of responsibility for Jesus’ death away from Pilate to Herod and the Jews, the presence of direct eyewitnesses to the resurrection itself, a descent into hell, huge angelic figures, and a cross that talks. Raymond Brown’s critique shows that elements that are parallel to other apocryphal Gospels also indicate that it is not as old as Crossan suggests.[62] Lapham and Rebell note that the connection to Serapion means this is a second-century work, probably rooted in Syria and from the middle of that period.[63] The Gospel of Peter’s history shows that it operated on the edges of the church from the time of its composition until the judgment was made that it was docetic. So it tells us nothing about the earliest period of Christianity.

The Gospel of Mary Magdalene

The Gospel of Mary Magdalene exists only in partial form. We know this because of the nature of the breaks in the three manuscripts we have.[64] The bulk of the manuscripts describe a discussion between the resurrected Jesus and Mary about the afterlife. These newfound Gospels often have a dialogue format between post-resurrection Jesus and a disciple. Using such extended dialogues, especially in resurrection settings, is unlike the biblical Gospels. The form suggests the special and secret nature of the revelation, something coming directly from the raised Jesus. This message Mary reports to the Twelve. Some of them are jealous that Jesus has given it to her while others come to her defense. The entire final exchange from Mary 17:10–18:21 is presented elsewhere.[65] Klauck describes its contents as reflecting nothing of the real relationship between Mary and Jesus but presenting “cosmological and ethical speculations, and with a description in mythical language about the ascent of the soul.”[66] One theme of Gnostic eschatology is the return of the soul (but not the body) to God.

The issue of dating is complex, although there is consensus on its literary character. One manuscript in which the Gospel of Mary Magdalene appears (the Berlin Codex = BG 8502 = Akhmim Codex) has it alongside other well-known Gnostic works like the Apocryphon of John and Sophia of Jesus Christ.[67] This codex has only chapter 7 of this Gospel. That manuscript find dates to 1896 and comes from the fifth century, but the Gospel was not published until Nag Hammadi showed where it fit. The find’s small size makes dating difficult. King places it in the early second century, while Klauck places it in the second half of the second century and calls earlier dates “not convincing.”[68] Lapham speaks of it being relatively early and no later than the mid-second century and places its roots in Egypt.[69] The introduction in The Coptic Gnostic Library simply says its date must come before the third century, the date for one of the manuscripts we have.[70]

Thus, this Gospel is not usually treated as a major source because of its fragmentary nature, which leads to uncertainty about its date.

The Gospel of Judas

Judas is an authentic, ancient text. It appears to have been found in Al Minya province of Middle Egypt in 1978, about 120 miles south of Cairo. The date places this find some thirty-one years after the Nag Hammadi texts to which it is so similar.[71] It was held alternately in Cairo; Switzerland; in a safety deposit box at Citibank, in Hicksville, Long Island in New York state, where it deteriorated to an almost unrecoverable level; as well as a brief stay at Yale University. Somewhere around April 3, 2000, Frieda Tchacos Nussberger purchased the manuscript from an antiquities dealer for an undisclosed high amount that has been rumored to be well over a million dollars. She is the present owner, and her name is tied to the manuscript since the text is contained in what is known as the Tchacos manuscript. She eventually called on National Geographic to help her make the text public and procure the use of experts to publicize it. That public release took place on Easter week 2006.

Testing on the manuscript indicates that it comes from a late third or early fourth century manuscript.[72] It also is likely that this manuscript goes back to an original work that belongs to the second century, since Irenaeus apparently cites it in AD 180.[73] More precisely, its detailed presentation of creation reflects a developed Gnosticism which belongs to the second century. This date makes it clear that the Gospel’s origin is too late to be authentically from Judas. It consists of thirty-three folios that comprise sixty-six pages of manuscript. It is written in Sahidic Coptic (a dialect form of Egyptian hieroglyphics that uses mostly Greek-like letters). It survives with 85–90 percent of the original intact.[74] As such, it gives us a direct look at what is likely one strand of Gnostic Christianity from the second century.

What did Gnostics teach? Gnosticism comes from the Greek word for knowledge (gnosis). It refers to a faith in which some believers have inside knowledge about the faith. This includes the ideas that the world of ideas and the spirit are good but the physical world is bad; that there is no resurrection of the body; and that what counts in understanding is that the spirit lives and returns to heaven as light, with all other ideas being described as ignorant. That was an alternative faith expressed in the second century. Included in this view is something the Apocryphon of John will also teach as we shall see. It is that God did not create the material world. Rather, it was the result of a flawed creation by underling aeons. This is something that never could have come out of the Judaism that Jesus came out of and embraced when he used their sacred texts. Judas is really less about Judas and more about this alternative story of creation, which goes into great detail about emanations and other such origins of the cosmos. So it also is too distant in origin and in perspective to really be tied back to the earliest period of the apostles.[75]

The Apocryphon of John

If any work embodies a fully developed Gnostic perspective, it is the Apocryphon of John. Found at Nag Hammadi, it is “a dialogue with the risen Jesus,” presenting a full description of the creation with emanation after emanation.[76] Four copies of this work exist in two versions, one longer and another shorter. It is agreed that the longer version emerged from the shorter one.[77] The four distinct copies are indicated by abbreviations that let us know which one is being cited (III and BG—earlier short versions; II and IV—later long versions). Versions II and IV match. The second half of Apocryphon treats the early chapters of Genesis. Irenaeus’s reference to “Barbelo Gnostics” is probably a version of this work.[78] This detail is important because when this work was discovered scholars recognized that Irenaeus had told us the story of this work well when he summarized it. This means we knew what it contained for about eighteen hundred years! This new Gospel was not so new to our knowledge after all. This potential use by Irenaeus dates the basic ideas of Apocryphon to 150–60 at the latest.[79] Klauck, with others, argues that the shorter version we have comes from about 200, and the longer version, which is later, comes from sometime in the third century.[80]

One sequence is particularly illustrative of this work. The Apocryphon of John II 2:33–4:10 is a long description of God’s uniqueness. He is “more than a god, nothing is above him” (2:35). He is illimitable, total perfection, immeasurable, invisible, eternal, unnamable, pure, holy, not corporeal, and superior from other beings among a variety of attributes. He is an “aeon giving aeon” (4:3). He is at rest (4:11). It was his thought that performed a deed and she came forth (4:27). She is the “forethought of the All” (4:31–32) and the glory of the Barbelo (4:36). The Barbelo is the invisible, virginal Spirit (5:13). Next is named a series of aeons that came from the Father (6:2–10). In 7:11, “Christ, the divine Autogenes created everything.” A series of lights and aeons are the product (8:25–28). These aeons are important to the creation account that follows.

The key event in that creation starts with Sophia, an aeon herself. She conceives of a thought from herself (9:25–26). She sought to conceive without her consort’s consent (9:34). So creation started as an act of independence from the Autogenes. What she produced was “imperfect and different from her appearance” (10:4), a lion-faced serpent called Yaltabaoth, the first archon to take power from his mother (10:9–19). He is also called the Great Ruler. Here is the start of evil, emerging from an act independent of the highest God. A woman, Sophia, acts on her own. She repents and asks for forgiveness (13:36–14:10).

Yet the account continues. Yaltabaoth moves to create the first man, which chapters 15 and 16 detail part by part. Later, the command of “the Mother-Father of all” sends five lights to Yaltabaoth to tell him to breathe into the being a breath. Unknown to him, Yaltabaoth breathes into the body an element of power from his mother. The being moves, coming to life (19:15–33). The archons will have power over the “natural and perceptible body.” This body is evil. However in the created person was an Epinoia, hidden in Adam that was the correction of the mother’s deficiency (20:9–29).

This complex creation story has God tied indirectly to creation, which involves the work of underlings and a creation with flaws. Evil resulted from a female deity’s failure to seek out God’s will. Matter is evil with an evil impulse. But the potential for the right kind of life exists, hidden within so evil forces cannot get to it. Creation is the work of others with God the Facilitator working to recover what his divided Godhead lost. None of this corresponds to Second Temple Jewish views of creation in which God is the Creator of all and his creation was good at the start. This is the view of creation that Jesus and the earliest disciples surely had. So this important work shows its distance from the earliest Jesus community.

The Gospel of Thomas

This Gospel is one of the few that may belong to a period in the early second century. It is a collection of 114 independently listed sayings of Jesus. So it is unlike most of the other Gospels, including the extrabiblical Gospels, in this respect. It comes closest to being like the sayings source Q that New Testament scholars work with in relationship to the Synoptic Gospels.

The potentially early age of the work in the early second century, the sayings format, and the closeness of some sayings to what we see in the biblical Gospels is why some have attributed importance to this Gospel. For example, White argues that the earliest layers of Thomas date from 60–70 with roots in some material that goes back to Jesus, while later layers are from the late first or early second century.[81] Ehrman places it in the early second century but with parts that may go back to Jesus.[82] On the other hand, Klauck dates the work outside this period, between 120 and 140.[83] Snodgrass argues that there is much evidence of dependence of Thomas on Luke and the synoptic tradition, for several of Thomas’s sayings appeal to rarely used words and editorial tendencies in these other works (sayings 10, 16, 31, 33, 39, 47, 53, 65–66, 72, 76b ,79, 104).[84] Perrin sees a relationship between Thomas and Tatian’s Diatessaron from circa 170. This suggests the Gospel has roots in a late tradition, not an early one.[85] Hedrick (1989–90) has shown it is likely that some material in Thomas comes from sources other than the Synoptic Gospels, so the material has to be assessed one saying at a time.[86] In sum, it is possible that a portion of the material in Thomas reflects tradition circulating among the churches that could belong to this early period, but these must be examined on a saying-by-saying basis.[87] Part of what makes this Gospel so fascinating is that treading through it one has the sense that a quarter of it is quite like the four biblical Gospels, about a quarter of it is somewhat similar, and then half of it comprises material unlike those Gospels. Nevertheless, the Gospel itself is likely later rather than earlier.

The sayings that parallel those in Matthew, Mark, and Luke help us see the later date for Thomas. Klauck notes that roughly 50 percent of Thomas has no contact with anything expressed in the New Testament.[88] In his view, the other half is split between texts that resemble things in Matthew, Mark, and Luke and independent sayings that claim to be revelatory and have a “more strongly gnostic character.”[89] The debate over Thomas is about what and how much of this material goes back to Jesus and how much of it is a reflection of later Gnostic concerns. Most of Thomas does not go back to Jesus, but a few pieces could.

This has led some to make important claims for what this Gospel teaches us about early Christianity and an early alternative Jesus. Elaine Pagels says it this way:

Many Christians today who read the Gospel of Thomas assume at first that it is simply wrong, and deservedly called heretical. Yet what Christians have disparagingly called Gnostic and heretical sometimes turns out to be forms of Christian teaching that are merely unfamiliar to us—unfamiliar precisely because of the active and successful opposition of Christians such as John.[90]

She contrasts Thomas and John’s Gospel as follows:

Now we can see how John’s message contrasts with that of Thomas. Thomas’s Jesus directs each disciple to discover the light within (“within a person of light there is light” [Thomas 24]); but John’s Jesus declares instead that “I am the light of the world” [John 8:12] and that “whoever does not come to me walks in darkness” [John 8:12]. In Thomas, Jesus reveals to the disciples that “you are from the kingdom, and to it you shall return” [Thomas 49] and teaches them to say for themselves that “we come from the light” [Thomas 50]; but John’s Jesus speaks as the one who comes “from above” and so has rightful priority over everyone else: “You are from below; I am from above . . . The one who comes from above is above all” [John 8:23].[91]

Remember, this claim often adds the idea that Thomas is early or at least almost as early as John, so the contrastive portraits of Thomas and John are equally old.

So does Thomas teach a nonexalted Jesus? A close look at sources shows that Pagels has overplayed the contrast. Yes, Thomas is a sayings-only source, but does it present Jesus only as a teacher of the way to wisdom, a nonexalted Jesus? What is to be done with Thomas 77? It reads, “Jesus said, ‘It is I who am the light which is above them all. It is I who am the all. From me did the all come forth, and unto me did the all extend. Split a piece of wood and I am there. Lift up the stone, and you will find me there.’”[92] Does this not suggest a higher view for a unique Jesus than Pagels presents? The verse looks to some type of transcendent, omnipresent Jesus. It may not be everything we see in John, but it is not the portrait of a mere human teacher. This omission indicates that the source’s teaching may be more complex than the new school suggests. Even if Thomas is early and has only sayings, it does not present a Jesus who only teaches about wisdom. In other words, the fact that Thomas has only teaching need not indicate that Jesus be viewed as a teacher only. The content of the sources, not their form, is key. All the evidence needs attention. Thus, these texts are different in form from the Gospels, but they are not as contrastive in their perspective as some in the new school claim. Nor does the form of their content, as sayings collections, point necessarily to their view of who Jesus is. To suggest this conclusion is to confuse form with content.

So what does Thomas teach? The Gospel of Thomas presents wisdom sayings like proverbs or contains parables about the kingdom of God (sayings 22, 27, 46, 50, 57, 96–99, 107, 109, 113). For example, saying 27 reads, “If you do not fast as regards the world, you will not find the kingdom. If you do not observe the Sabbath as a Sabbath, you will not see the Father.” It also has sayings that are prophetic in tone (51, 111), beatitudes (18–19), cries of lament (103), words of law (53, 104), and community rules (12, 25). Unlike the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, there is neither narrative sequence nor a clear outline. The work is not clearly Gnostic as it lacks discussion about how the world was created. However, some concepts sound Gnostic (2–3, 37, 50–51, 60, 77, 84, 86–87, 90). For example, saying 2 reads, “Jesus said, ‘Let him who seeks continue seeking until he finds. When he finds, he will become troubled, he will be astonished, and he will rule over all.’” Finding knowledge is the key to ruling here. The end of saying 50 reads, “If they ask you, ‘What is the sign of your father in you?’ say to them, ‘It is movement and rest.’” Rest is a key concept of salvation in Gnosticism. Another key idea in Gnosticism is the bridal chamber, a largely unknown Gnostic community rite. Saying 75 alludes to this idea in a way that looks not at the rite, but at what it pictured, entry into full relationship with God. It reads, “Jesus said, ‘Many are standing at the door, but it is the solitary who will enter the bridal chamber.’”

Thomas’s dating is disputed and important for the discussion. Many regard the book as reflecting the views of the Encratites. This connection means it holds to a strict ascetic lifestyle that was frequent among some Jewish Christians, as well as possessing less than fully developed Gnostic ideas. Rebell is probably right when he sees a mix of old and young material in Thomas.[93] Perhaps some of the Gospel contains a few genuine sayings from the Jesus tradition, from sources independent of the Gospels. However, the bulk of the Gospel seems to reflect recastings of synoptic material, that is, a reworking of material from Matthew, Mark, and Luke. As was already noted, most scholars regard the book as an early second-century work. So a few sayings in it may get us back to Jesus, but the bulk of it seems a space or two removed from him.

How much should be made of these few links and the book as a whole? Some do place the bulk of the Gospel earlier, around the mid- to late first century. Koester argues that the Gospel reflects first-century views and that its sayings tradition “pre-dates the canonical Gospels.” Finally he compares Q and Thomas, noting that both “must belong to a very early stage of the transmission of Jesus’ sayings.” He similarly handles the many parables of Thomas (99).[94] Koester is more cautious in his introduction to the translation of Thomas in The Coptic Gnostic Library.[95] Here he simply compares Thomas to Q, advocates its independence from the canonical Gospels, and concludes that the date is “well before Justin, possibly even in the first century AD.” Koester’s views on the early origin of Thomas have been central to the new school. The argument is that Thomas gives first-century evidence of an alternative Christianity, one of Jesus as a teacher of wisdom only. This existed alongside other, more traditional expressions of Christianity. This claim for a very early, alternative view of Jesus makes the date of Thomas important.

Most historical Jesus scholars largely reject this new school dating. James Dunn, professor of New Testament in Durham, England, argues that Koester’s observation that Thomas presents a Jesus who does not teach an apocalyptic coming of the kingdom is understandable when considering Thomas’s theological perspective.[96] Gnostic-like thought emphasized the fact that the kingdom had come and that knowledge places one in the kingdom. Dunn argues that any themes in the Jesus tradition highlighting a kingdom to come and God’s future vindication would have been edited out by those holding such views. Thomas is a Gospel with this Gnostic-like point of view. In contrast to Thomas, Dunn claims that Jesus taught in a manner similar to Jewish expectations about the end, looking for God’s vindication expressed in a kingdom to come.

Jesus scholars debate whether Jesus was a teacher of wisdom or held to Jewish views of the end. The debate is about whether Jesus reflected such Jewish hopes and taught about apocalyptic themes that looked for God to vindicate the righteous in a final judgment. A significant majority of Jesus scholars hold that he did teach such ideas, just as Dunn argues. The fact that Jesus was baptized by John the Baptist, who held to such views, speaks to Jesus holding them as well. That John baptized Jesus is taken by most critical scholars as an authentic event of Jesus’ life indicating his theological orientation.[97]

Against Koester is the depth of distribution of apocalyptic themes in the traditional materials that have Jesus teaching about the end. These apocalyptic themes appear in the multiple strands of the Jesus tradition, thus satisfying the criterion of multiple attestation. The idea is that the more widely distributed a particular theme is across the various sources in the tradition about Jesus, the stronger the evidence that this material is old and rooted in Jesus’ teaching. It is like having multiple witnesses to an event. These sources are seen as (1) Mark, (2) the teaching that Matthew and Luke share (also known as Q), (3) what is unique to Matthew, and (4) what is unique to Luke. Jesus’ teaching on this theme appears in all levels of this tradition. The wide distribution suggests that Jesus taught about God’s vindication in the end. So it is likely that Dunn has the better of this argument.[98]

Thomas may contain an authentic saying of Jesus here and there, making parts of it early. However, for most scholars, the bulk of it is later, reflecting a second-century work. Each saying of Thomas has to be assessed on its own terms; but as a whole, Thomas is later than Matthew, Mark, and Luke. Efforts to argue it is early as a whole distort the historical record for our first-century sources. Thus, as valuable as this work is for the second century as well as for the possibility of some earlier ideas, it still is a work mostly disconnected from Jesus and the earliest community.

Conclusion

The extrabiblical Gospels are important works, especially for the state of people making associations to Jesus in the second century and beyond. The faith showed evidence of becoming quite diverse in that period. However, our survey has attempted to argue and show that making these texts reach back into the first century to tell us about the earliest communities is a stretch. They cannot take us there. They lack the roots and reflect a perspective that is distinct from the concerns of the earliest Jesus community, especially in their views on creation and the material world.

The diversity we do see in the earliest first-century texts has to go in two key directions. First, some claims involve people wishing to have all believers follow the Law out of sympathy for this group’s Jewish roots (the party that challenged the Gentile mission of Paul). Second, some forms of speculation existed about Jesus that suggested he was not really human, that the resurrection was not a physical event, and that the body would not be raised (reflecting neo-platonic ideas of matter more than Gnosticism). We see evidence for the former in Galatians and Acts, evidence for the latter in 1 Corinthians 6 and 15, as well as in 1 John 1. The clearly first-century sources that we have in what became the New Testament indicate that there was some serious contention on these two themes by those who claimed to embrace Jesus in this early period. But the evidence we have suggests also that these alternatives were not as rooted in Jesus and those closest to him. However diverse the early period was, it was not as diverse as those espousing alternative Christianities suggest. The extrabiblical Gospels cannot take us to this earliest period.

Regarding the question of canonicity, our discussion shows that these works have little or no claim to apostolicity. Besides their unorthodox theology, they could not have been written by apostles or their associates given their late dates. Thus, these works are not legitimate candidates for canonicity.

Conclusion

Our conclusion is that the sixty-six-book Protestant canon is well-justified. The early Christians embraced the thirty-nine books of the Hebrew Scriptures simply and rightly because these books (without the Apocrypha) were those embraced by their Lord Jesus Christ and his apostles and the Jewish community of faith in which they lived. The NT canon was naturally grounded in the perception of apostolic authority. Believing that the apostles were commissioned by Christ to be his authoritative spokesmen, the only significant question the early church had was whether or not a book carried the apostolic imprimatur. Such authority was recognized in books that were seen to be authored or endorsed by an apostle, were consistent with apostolic doctrine, and were widely accepted in the apostolic churches. The twenty-seven books of the NT passed these tests. Other books, including the Gnostic Gospels, did not.

1 Richard N. Soulen, Handbook of Biblical Criticism, 2nd ed. (Atlanta: John Knox, 1981), 37.

2 Dan Brown, The Da Vinci Code (New York: Doubleday, 2003), 231, 234.

3 Bart Ehrman, Lost Christianities: The Battles for Scripture and the Faiths We Never Knew (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 4.

4 This section of the article is revised and adapted from Paul D. Wegner, “The Canon of Scripture in Jesus’ Day,” Areopagus Journal 5, no. 6 (2005): 4–9.

5 Roger Beckwith, The Old Testament Canon of the New Testament Church and Its Background in Early Judaism (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1985), 370.

6 The Babylonian Talmud, ed. I. Epstein, Seder Nezi’in, 4 vols. (London: Soncino, 1935), II.70–71.

7 Philo, De Vit. Cont. 25.

8 Beckwith, Old Testament Canon, 386.

9 The Oxford Annotated Apocrypha, Revised Standard Version (Oxford University Press, 1965), 57–58.

10 See Contra Apion I.37–39.

11 F. F. Bruce, Books and the Parchments, 5th ed. (London: Marshall Pickering, 1991), 96.

12 Beckwith, Old Testament Canon, 112.

13 Philo, Contemp. 3 §25.

14 Paul E. Kahle, The Cairo Geniza, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1959), 88–89.

15 For a full list see Paul D. Wegner, The Journey from Texts to Translations (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2004), 110.

16 Eusebius, Historia ecclesiastica IV.26.

17 Ibid., 1:393.

18 George F. Moore, Judaism in the First Centuries of the Christian Era, the Age of the Tannaim (Cambridge University Press, 1962), I.238, 244–45.

19 J. P. Audet, “A Hebrew-Aramaic List of Books of the Old Testament in Greek Transcriptions,” JTS n.s. 1 (1950): 135–54.

20 Eusebius, Hist. eccl. VI.XXV.1–2.

21 P. Schaff and H. Wace, A Select Library of Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church, 2nd Series, 14 vols. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1991) 4.551–52.

22 The preface to his commentary on Daniel states: “for all Scripture is by them divided into three parts: the law, the Prophets, and the Hagiographa (Writings), which have respectively five, eight and eleven books” (Schaff and Wace, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, 6.493).

23 Rufinus states, “Of the Old Testament, therefore, first of all there have been handed down five books of Moses, Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy; then Jesus Nave, (Joshua the son of Nun), the Book of Judges together with Ruth; then four books of Kings (Reigns), which the Hebrew reckon two; the Book of Omissions, which is entitled the Book of Days (Chronicles), and two books of Ezra (Ezra and Nehemiah), which the Hebrew reckon one, and Esther; of the Prophets, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and Daniel; moreover of the twelve (minor) Prophets, one book; Job also and the Psalms of David, each one book. Solomon gave three books to the Churches, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Canticles. These comprise the books of the Old Testament” (Schaff and Wace, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, III.557–58).

24 Josephus, Contra Apion I:37–42 (boldface added for emphasis).

25 George W. Anderson, “Canonical and Non-canonical,” in Cambridge History of the Bible, ed. P. R. Ackroyd, C. F. Evans, G. W. H. Lampe, and S. L. Greenslade, 3 vols. (Cambridge University Press, 1963–70) 1:145.

26 For a full list, see Wegner, Journey from Texts to Translations, 125.

27 This section of the article is revised and adapted from Terry L. Wilder, “New Testament Canonicity,” Areopagus Journal 5, no. 6 (2005): 10–15.

28 I (Terry) am indebted to my former professor, William E. Bell Jr., who first stirred up in me an interest in the subject of canonicity. This section greatly reflects his excellent teaching on the subject. For standard works on the New Testament canon see F. F. Bruce, The Canon of Scripture (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 1988); Bruce M. Metzger, The Canon of the New Testament (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987); and Herman N. Ridderbos, Redemptive History and the New Testament Scriptures, 2nd ed. (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R, 1988).

29 For the authority of the apostles of Jesus Christ see Bruce, Canon of Scripture, 119–20, 256–59; and Terry L. Wilder, Pseudonymity, the New Testament, and Deception (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2004), 165–216.

30 See the section on heresies and the development of the canon in Metzger, Canon of the NT, 75–106.

31 Cf. Metzger, Canon of the NT, 106–8.

32 Cf. the very helpful sections on the apostolate, tradition, and tradition as Scripture in Ridderbos, Redemptive History and the NT, 12–24.

33 In other words, the church “recognized” the books to be included in the NT canon; it did not “produce” the canon.

34 There were other related criteria as well, e.g., antiquity, but the following three seemed to be the main ones. Cf. Bruce’s section on the criteria of canonicity in Canon of Scripture, 255–69.

35 Cf. Bruce, Canon of Scripture; Metzger, Canon of the NT, 253; Ridderbos, Redemptive History, 12–15.

36 On the distinction between the “apostles of Jesus Christ” and the “apostles of the churches” (cf. 2 Cor 8:23; Phil 2:25), see E. E. Ellis, Pauline Theology: Ministry and Society (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1989), 66, 89–91.

37 For evidence for traditional ascriptions of authorship of biblical books, see the article in this volume, “Does the Bible Contain Forgeries?” by Terry L. Wilder (p. 165).

38 Cf. Col 4:14. Tertullian spoke of Luke as “not an apostle but apostolic” (Against Marcion, 4.2.4; cited from Bruce, Canon of Scripture, 257).

39 See Eusebius (Hist. eccl. 3.39.15), who records Papias’s remarks on Mark’s Gospel that “Mark became Peter’s interpreter. . . .”

40 Cf. Metzger, Canon of the NT, 253–54.

41 This criterion is what Metzger calls “conformity to the rule of faith” (Canon of the NT, 251–53), while Bruce calls it “orthodoxy” (Canon of Scripture, 260–61, 279–80).

42 Bruce, Canon of Scripture, 128.

43 Irenaeus was an early church father, the Bishop of Gaul in France in the latter part of the second century.

44 See the brief survey of these theories in E. Randolph Richards, Paul and First-Century Letter Writing (Downers Grove, IL: IVP, 2004), 210–14.

45 See E. J. Goodspeed, New Solutions to New Testament Problems (University of Chicago Press, 1927), 1–64.

46 These remarks occur at a very early date, given that 2 Peter was written in the mid to late AD 60s, a date hotly contested by critical scholars.

47 See Origen’s remarks on Hebrews in Eusebius, Hist. eccl. 6.25.11–14.

48 Though Origen did not know who wrote Hebrews, he also said, “. . . the thoughts are the apostle’s [i.e., Paul’s], but that the style and composition belong to one who called to mind the apostle’s teachings and, as it were, made short notes of what his master said.” In other words, he recognized the book as Pauline, and thus apostolic, in content.

49 See the excellent article by E. Randolph Richards, “Silvanus Was Not Peter’s Secretary,” JETS 43, no. 3 (September 2000): 417–32. Richards maintains that 1 Pet 5:12 identifies Silas (Silvanus) solely as the apostle’s letter-carrier and not his secretary. He goes on to say that Silas still could have been Peter’s amanuensis but not on the basis of 1 Pet 5:12 (432).

50 This practice is not inconsistent with inspiration because it was under the control of Peter, and the final product was supervised and approved by Peter.

51 Metzger (Canon of the NT, 102) notes that Montanism’s influence on the church led to “a mistrust of apocalyptic literature, including even the Johannine Apocalypse.”

52 Hans-Josef Klauck, Apocryphal Gospels, trans. Brian McNeil (London: T&T Clark), 22–35.

53 Sakari Häkkinen, “Ebionites,” in A Companion to Second-Century Christian ‘Heretics,’ ed. Antti Majjanen and Petri Luomenen (Leiden: Brill, 2008), 260–64. The Ebionites were Jewish in roots. They accepted Jesus as a teacher-prophet, and as Son of God only in an adoptionistic sense. They also appear to have rejected Paul. These were the reasons the Fathers challenged them. The best description of this group appears in Epiphanius’s Panarion 30. The origin of another Jewish-rooted group, the Nazareans, is heavily discussed and debated. They are treated as distinct from the Ebionites (see Petri Luomanen, “Nazareans,” in A Companion to Second-Century Christian ‘Heretics,’ 279–314). They appear to be law-abiding Jewish believers who accepted Jesus. Thus, they were more “orthodox” in their Christology but were challenged because they kept the law (see Epiphanius, Panarion 29). Some, like Luomanen, question how accurate he is and thus whether we can really know anything about them. Some support the portrayal as we see in Epiphanius and Jerome (so Ray Pritz, Nazarean Jewish Christianity [Leiden: Brill, 1988]). Sum it up to say that the character of this group is shrouded in uncertainty about the sources that describe them and whether we can know anything about them.

54 Justin Martyr, 1 Apology 21.24.

55 Klauck, Apocryphal Gospels, 90–91.

56 Ibid., 152–59.

57 Matti Myllykoski, “Cerinthus,” in Majjanen and Luomenen, A Companion to Second-Century Christian ‘Heretics,’ 213–46.

58 Eusebius, Hist. eccl. 6.12.1–6.

59 Fred Lapham, An Introduction to the New Testament Apocrypha (London: T&T Clark, 2003), 91–92.

60 John Dominic Crossan, The Cross that Spoke: The Origins of the Passion Narrative (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1988). A famous part of this Gospel includes the appearance of three men from the cross, two who reach to heaven and one who reaches beyond it. The last figure is the raised Jesus (Peter 10:38–40).

61 Klauck, Apocryphal Gospels, 87.

62 Raymond Brown, The Death of the Messiah, 2 vols. (New York: Doubleday, 1994), 1317–49.

63 Lapham, An Introduction to the New Testament Apocrypha, 94; Walter Rebell, Neutestamentliche Apokryphon und Apostolische Väter (Munich: Chr. Kaiser, 1992), 98.

64 Karen King, The Gospel of Mary Magdala: Jesus and the First Woman Apostle (Santa Rosa, CA: Polebridge Press, 2003).

65 Darrell L. Bock, Breaking the DaVinci Code (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2004), 25–26.

66 Klauck, Apocryphal Gospels, 167–68.

67 Ibid., 160.

68 King, The Gospel of Mary Magdela, 3; Klauck, Apocryphal Gospels, 160.

69 Lapham, An Introduction to the New Testament Apocrypha, 167.

70 James Robinson, ed., The Coptic Gnostic Library: A Complete Edition of the Nag Hammadi Codices, 5 vols. (Leiden: Brill, 2000), 3:454. This work was originally published in 1975–95 in 14 volumes.

71 Bart Ehrman, The Lost Gospel of Judas Iscariot: A New Look at Betrayer and Betrayed (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 70–83.

72 Ibid., 8.

73 Irenaeus, Against Heresies, Book 1, chap. 31. See Rodolphe Kasser, Marvin Meyer, Gregor Wurst, eds., Francois Gaudard, contributor, The Gospel of Judas (Washington, DC: National Geographic, 2006), 121–35.

74 Kasser, Meyer, Wurst, Gaudard, The Gospel of Judas, 47–76.

75 For a more detailed description of Gnosticism, see Darrell L. Bock, The Missing Gospels (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2006), 15–21.

76 Klauck, Apocryphal Gospels, 169.

77 M. Waldstein and F. Wisse in Robinson, The Coptic Gnostic Library, 2:7.

78 Irenaeus, Against Heresies 1.29.1–4.

79 Rebell, Neutestamentliche Apokryphon und Apostolische Väter, 51–52, calls it a “key Gnostic text.”

80 Klauck, Apocryphal Gospels, 169–70.

81 Michael L. White, From Jesus to Christianity: How Four Generations of Visionaries and Storytellers Created the New Testament and Christian Faith (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2004), 304.

82 Ehrman, Lost Christianities, xii.

83 Klauck, Apocryphal Gospels, 108.

84 Klyne Snodgrass, “The Gospel of Thomas: A Secondary Gospel,” Second Century 7 (1989–90): 19–38.

85 Nicolas Perrin, Thomas and Tatian: The Relationship Between the Gospel of Thomas and the Diatessaron, Academia Biblica 5 (Leiden: Brill, 2002).

86 Charles W. Hedrick, “Thomas and the Synoptics: Aiming at a Consensus,” Second Century 7 (1989–90): 39–56

87 So Klauck, Apocryphal Gospels, 108.

88 Klauck, Apocryphal Gospels, 108.

89 Ibid.

90 Elaine Pagels, Beyond Belief: The Secret Gospel of Thomas (New York: Random House, 2003), 75.

91 Ibid., 68.

92 Citation is from Robinson, The Coptic Gnostic Library, 2:83.

93 Rebell, Neutestamentliche Apokryphon und Apostolische Väter, 41.

94 Helmut Koester, Ancient Christian Gospels: Their History and Development (Philadelphia: Trinity Press International, 1990), 75–128.

95 Koester in Robinson, The Coptic Gnostic Library, 2:39.

96 James Dunn, Jesus Remembered, vol. 1 of Christianity in the Making (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003), 164–65.

97 Robert Webb, “Jesus’ Baptism by John: Its Historicity and Theological Significance,” in Darrell L. Bock and Robert Webb, eds., Key Events in the Life of the Historical Jesus, WUNT 247 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2009), 95–150, esp. 135.

98 Darrell L. Bock, Studying the Historical Jesus (Grand Rapids; Baker, 2002), 199–203. These pages discuss all these criteria that assess the strength of the evidence within the Jesus tradition. See also now Robert Webb, “The Historical Enterprise and Historical Jesus Research,” in Key Events in the Life of the Historical Jesus, 54–75. In the present volume, the reader may also consult the article by Charles Quarles, “Higher Criticism: What Has It Shown?” (p. 63) for a brief discussion of the criteria of authenticity and their use.

Chapter Seventeen

Is the Bible the Word of God?

Steven B. Cowan

Most of the articles in this volume have addressed various questions related to the Bible’s accuracy and truthfulness. This is all well and good. But one question remains. Christians throughout the centuries have claimed much more for Scripture than that it is historically reliable, consistent, and truthful. We have claimed that the Bible is the Word of God. That is, we believe that God is the (ultimate) author of the sixty-six books of the Protestant canon. Despite the real authorial input of the human writers, the very words (graphē) of the biblical autographs find their origin in the mind of God (2 Tim 3:16). As Peter put it, “[M]oved by the Holy Spirit, . . . [they] spoke from God” (2 Pet 1:21 NLT). In ways that may be difficult or impossible to explain (and we will not attempt to explain it here), God worked providentially in the lives of the human authors, and sometimes spoke directly to them, so that the words they wrote were his words. This is what Christians mean when they say that the Bible is divinely inspired.

How can this faith in the divine inspiration of Scripture be justified? That is the question we seek to answer in this article. After discussing briefly various approaches to answering this question, I will present and defend what I take to be the strongest argument for the Bible’s divine inspiration, an argument based on the authoritative testimony of Jesus, the Son of God.

Before beginning this discussion, however, I want to point out three assumptions that my argument will make. First, I will assume that God exists. This assumption entails that the universe and all that is in it are the creation ex nihilo of a transcendent, self-existent, omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent, and omnibenevolent Person. Though I will not defend this assumption here, it should be known that it is not an arbitrary or unreasonable one. There is ample evidence for the existence of God.[1] It is not a matter of blind faith but is eminently rational. For what it’s worth, the Bible presents God’s existence as a matter of knowledge (cf. Rom 1:18–20; Ps 19:1–6), and the vast majority of people in the history of the world (including today) find belief in a transcendent, personal God unproblematic.

Second, I will assume that God can intervene in the course of history to perform miracles which can be identified as such by human beings. A miracle may be simply defined as an event that is so unusual and contrary to the ordinary course of nature that the causal activity of God is the best explanation for the event. Modern skepticism toward the miraculous is rooted in metaphysical and/or methodological naturalism. The former is a philosophy that denies the reality of anything beyond the realm of nature and what can be studied by the scientific method. Accordingly, miracles, understood as acts of God, are rejected as impossible. But if God exists, metaphysical naturalism is false and miracles cannot be said to be strictly impossible. Methodological naturalism is the view that science and history may only appeal to natural causes in scientific and historical explanations. If a scholar invokes a supernatural cause to explain some natural phenomenon, then according to methodological naturalism he is no longer doing science or history but theology. Methodological naturalism, like atheism/agnosticism, is unjustified. If God causes a miraculous event to occur in space and time, and that event leaves empirical and historical traces (e.g., eyewitness testimony or physical changes in the world), there is no good reason why that event cannot be the subject of scientific and historical study; no reason why the scientist or historian, qua scientist and qua historian, cannot investigate that event and seek to discern its cause. And no reason, in principle, why a scientist or historian cannot conclude that the event has a supernatural cause. The view to the contrary assumes that God is not capable of leaving sufficient evidence—his “footprints” if you will—of his intervention in history.[2]

My third and final assumption is that God is able to communicate verbally with human beings. That is, God has the ability to reveal propositional truths to us about himself, about us, and about the world. We reject the notion that God is so totally other as to be ineffable and any “revelation” of himself so vague as to be unintelligible. As Doug Geivett has defended this assumption elsewhere in this volume,[3] I will not belabor the point here. Suffice it to say that this assumption implies that there is no obstacle to God inspiring a written revelation as the Bible purports and as Christians claim it to be. All that remains is to explain how we would recognize such a revelation should it occur.

The Question of Method

How can we tell if the Bible is divinely inspired—as opposed to some other putatively revealed book such as the Qur’an? Let’s divide the answers that Christians have given into two broad families of views.[4]

Non-Evidentialism

First, there is the non-evidentialist family. Those in this family eschew or minimize objective arguments and evidences for the divine inspiration of the Bible. The most popular non-evidentialist view among evangelicals is presuppositionalism, defended by Cornelius Van Til, Greg Bahnsen, John Frame, and others.[5] According to the the presuppositionalist, the truth and authority of Scripture must be presupposed. To argue rationally for the authority of Scripture is to appeal to an authority (i.e., human reason) that is inferior to that of Scripture which, for the Christian, is the highest authority. Rather than let human reason judge the authority of Scripture, the presuppositionalist insists that Scripture should judge human reason.[6]

While no Christian wants to diminish the authority of Scripture or elevate finite, fallen human reason over the Bible, I do believe that presuppositionalism is guilty of confusing ontology and epistemology (i.e., the order of being versus the order of knowing). Of course, on the Christian worldview, the Bible is (order of being) the highest authority—because it is authored by he who has the highest authority, namely, God. But this does not tell us how we finite human beings are to recognize (order of knowing) the Bible as God’s Word and distinguish it from other claimants to that title. What if a genuine seeker after God (call him Sam) wants to know if God has revealed himself in writing. But he is confronted by two different persons, a Christian and a Muslim, who claim that the Bible and the Qur’an are, respectively, the true Word of God. How is Sam to decide which claim is correct? It won’t help for the Christian to say that Sam must simply presuppose the authority of the Bible or else subject the Bible to the judgment of a lesser authority. This problem is especially acute given the fact that the Muslim can tell Sam the very same thing!

Consider the following analogy. Jack Bauer is a government agent who gets his orders directly from the president of the United States. One day he gets a letter purporting to come from the president that orders him to assassinate enemy agent X. A few minutes later he gets another letter, allegedly from the president, telling him that under no circumstances is he to harm enemy agent X. Now it is an ontological fact that the president has authority over Jack. And it follows from this that the letter that actually came from the president has authority over Jack. But which one? How is Jack to tell? The ontological facts don’t solve Jack’s epistemological problem. It seems that the only solution to this problem is for the president to provide some kind of objective indices by which Jack can discern the genuine article from the counterfeit. Likewise, for Sam to know that the Bible (and not the Qur’an) is from God, it would seem that God must provide him with some objective indices by which he can recognize the Bible for what it is.

The second non-evidentialist view makes some progress in meeting this requirement. Reformed epistemology suggests that God offers compelling indication of the divine inspiration of the Bible by means of the internal testimony of the Holy Spirit.[7] The idea here is that a human may have the Holy Spirit impress upon him as he reads the Bible that what he reads is God’s Word. God “speaks to the person’s heart” as it were, giving him first-person assurance of the Bible’s divine authority (or perhaps more precisely, that a portion of Scripture that he’s reading is divine speech directed toward him). We might imagine that receiving the internal testimony of the Spirit would be analogous to Jack Bauer getting a phone call after he received the two letters, and recognizing the voice on the other end as that of the president who says, “Jack, the first letter you received is the one I sent. Follow its instructions.”

Now it would seem that the Bible itself teaches that there is something like the internal testimony of the Holy Spirit (Rom 8:16; 1 Cor 2:10–16; 1 Thess 2:13; 1 John 4:6; 5:10–11). And several Protestant confessions of faith describe the internal testimony of the Spirit as the primary means by which Christians can know that the Bible is God’s Word.[8] So we want to acknowledge the legitimacy of this approach. However, the internal testimony works only for the person who has it. Because of its subjective nature, it has little or no apologetic value for non-recipients. Back to our analogy. Suppose Jack Bauer needs to enlist the aid of another person, Chloe, to carry out his assignment. But Chloe, who was not privy to the president’s phone call, would very much like to have some kind of confirmation that the letter that Jack is certifying really is from the president. Barring a direct phone call of her own, she would need some kind of publicly accessible evidence of the president’s authorship. Likewise, we might wonder whether or not God has provided some further, public indications of the divine origin of the Bible which would be beneficial to both Christian and non-Christian.

Evidentialism

Those who believe that God has in fact provided us with objective, public evidence of the divine inspiration of the Bible belong to the second family of approaches to our question. Call this the evidentialist family.[9] Among its proponents, appeal is made to a wide variety of types of evidences, but speaking generally there are two broad approaches within this family. The first of these I will call the inherent character approach. According to this approach, the Bible has within itself certain properties that imply its divine inspiration.[10] Chief among the properties cited by those who take this approach are (1) the unity of the Bible’s teaching given that it was written by more than forty individuals over the span of almost two thousand years, (2) the spiritually and morally transforming affect that the Bible has on those who read and study it, and (3) the Bible’s amazing ability to survive attempts in history to eradicate it. Whether these or other factors, the idea is to draw attention to certain characteristics that the Bible has that would seem best explained by appeal to divine inspiration.

This approach certainly has merit. We might very well expect a divinely inspired book to have such properties. We might expect, for example, that its message be unified and that it have a life-altering affect on readers. We might also expect that God would insure the preservation of his Word despite attacks against it. However, this approach also has significant weaknesses if it is used as the primary way of arguing for divine inspiration. For one thing, the unity of the Bible’s content,[11] as remarkable as it is, does not prove that it is divinely inspired. A book, even a large book written by multiple authors over a long period of time, can have a unified, consistent message and not be divinely inspired. I surmise that Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings trilogy also has thematic unity, but we do not believe that Tolkien was divinely inspired. Likewise, the fact that the message of the Bible has a life-transforming effect does not establish the inspiration of the Bible unless we are willing to concede that the Qur’an, The Lotus Sutra, The Book of Mormon, and Marx’s The Communist Manifesto are all inspired as well. People who read these books report life-changing experiences just as dramatic and positive as those who read the Bible. Again, we would expect that a book inspired by God would have transforming effects on people, but having such effects is not a sufficient condition for divine inspiration. So, though the inherent character approach is helpful in supporting the Christian belief in the authority and inspiration of the Bible, it would be worthwhile to consider other, perhaps stronger, alternatives.

The second, and I think better, evidentialist approach is called the Christological approach. It is better because it provides a strong argument that establishes a sufficient condition for inspiration. Essentially, the argument is that we should accept the divine inspiration of the Bible on the authoritative testimony of Jesus. To put it somewhat simply, we should believe the Bible is inspired because Jesus said so.

This argument is not new. One of the earliest defenders of this approach was B. B. Warfield. He wrote, “We believe this doctrine of the plenary inspiration of the Scriptures primarily because it is the doctrine of which Christ and his apostles believed, and which they have taught us.”[12] More contemporary proponents of the Christological approach are Norman Geisler and R. C. Sproul. As Geisler presents it, the argument has this structure:[13]

1. (1) The New Testament documents are historically reliable.

2. (2) These documents accurately present Christ as claiming to be God incarnate and proving it by fulfilled messianic prophecy, by a sinless and miraculous life, and by predicting and accomplishing his resurrection from the dead.

3. (3) Whatever Christ (who is God) teaches is true.

4. (4) Christ taught that the Old Testament is the written Word of God and promised that his disciples would write the New Testament.

5. (5) Therefore, the Bible is the written Word of God.

As this argument shows, the Christological approach has two essential features. First, it seeks to establish the deity (and thus the infallible authority) of Jesus. Various evidences may be cited in support of this claim, but central to it are Jesus’ own teaching concerning his divine nature and the authenticating role of his resurrection. Second, this approach presents evidence that Jesus believed and/or taught that the Bible is divinely inspired. From these two crucial facts we may deduce that the Bible is divinely inspired.

We need to distinguish two versions of the Christological approach, however. Norman Geisler’s argument above exemplifies the version adopted by most who have written on the topic. I will call it the historical reliability version (HRV). I call it that because the first premise in the argument is the claim that the New Testament is a historically reliable document. That is, the premise asserts that the New Testament is a generally reliable source for historical information about Jesus. This version, then, depends for its success upon establishing that the New Testament is historically reliable. Only on that condition can the argument proceed to appeal to statements in the New Testament concerning Jesus’ words and deeds—statements crucial to establishing the truth of premises (2) and (4) that assert Jesus’ resurrection and deity and his teaching concerning the Bible.

Put another way, the HRV requires that one provide strong reasons to believe that the New Testament is historically reliable and then, on that premise, requires that one assume that whatever the New Testament says about the words and deeds of Jesus is true. As Craig Blomberg explains, once one has established that a particular work is historically reliable,

one must immediately recognize an important presupposition that guides most historians in their work. Unless there is good reason for believing otherwise, one will assume that a given detail in the work of a particular historian is factual. This method places the burden of proof squarely on the person who would doubt the reliability of a given portion of the text.[14]

It is important to not misunderstand what the HRV requires here. It might be thought that what the HRV actually requires after premise (1) is that one assume that the New Testament is inerrant. But that would not be quite right. As Blomberg states here, all it requires is that the New Testament accounts of Jesus are innocent until proven guilty; that the critic of the authenticity of any account bears the burden of proof. So, the HRV does not strictly require an assumption of inerrancy. Yet, it does require something close to that, namely, the working hypothesis that any assertions in the New Testament are to be taken as true unless and until they are shown to be false. We might say that the HRV requires a kind of provisional, practical inerrancy. Of course, establishing the plausibility of this working hypothesis requires that one do the hard work of showing that the New Testament is historically reliable. Followers of HRV will accomplish this task typically by subjecting the New Testament documents to standard tests for historical reliability.[15]

I am sympathetic to such arguments for historical reliability. I believe that there is ample evidence to support the conviction that the New Testament Gospels are indeed reliable sources for the historical Jesus. Furthermore, I believe that the HRV provides the apologist with a plausible and potentially persuasive argument for the inspiration of the Bible.[16] Certainly, if the apologist is engaging someone who is willing to grant the historical reliability of the New Testament and assume that the text is true unless proven false, then the apologist may have a relatively easy time in arguing for the other premises in the argument. Nevertheless, I do not believe that it gives the apologist the best and strongest case for the Bible’s inspiration—at least not in the current academic climate.

Despite the arguments for reliability put forth by evangelical apologists, it is still the case that many, if not most, biblical scholars believe that the New Testament Gospels are largely fictitious fabrications of the early church. Now if this opinion was simply that of a few ivory-tower academics, it would not be that significant to the apologist’s task. But the fact is that this attitude toward the New Testament books has widely infected the popular culture in part because the mainstream media have given a platform to scholars like those in the Jesus Seminar, Bart Ehrman, and others. And it does not help matters when novels like Dan Brown’s Da Vinci Code concoct conspiracy theories about the origins of the Gospels and pass them off as historical facts. So, good arguments or not, the idea that the New Testament is historically reliable is in serious disfavor culturally.

Of course, one possible response to this cultural trend is to fight the uphill battle and continue defending the historical reliability of the New Testament as the first step in an argument for the Bible’s inspiration. The advocate of HRV certainly has that option. However, would it not be an advantage to the Christological approach if it could provide an argument for inspiration that does not require the premise of historical reliability—one that even seeks to give positive evidence for the New Testament’s more spectacular claims?

This is the promise of the second version of the Christological approach, which I will call the critical version (CV). As indicated above, most contemporary NT scholars approach the Gospels, fairly or unfairly, with a skeptical eye, treating the portrait of Jesus contained in them as largely legendary, the fabrication of the post-Easter consciousness of the early church. Yet most contemporary NT scholars, to varying degrees, believe that it is possible to peer through the legendary accretions and recover accurate information about the sayings and deeds of the historical Jesus. They accomplish this feat through the use of what are called the criteria of authenticity. These are principles that may be employed to study works that may not be considered generally reliable historically in order to identify stories and sayings within those works that are historically authentic. So, in theory, the NT scholar can apply these criteria to particular sayings or deeds of Jesus as recorded in the Gospels and make probable (sometimes highly probable) judgments to the affect that, “Yes, Jesus really said (or did) that.” The most commonly employed criteria of authenticity are as follows:[17]

1. The criterion of multiple attestation. This is perhaps the single most important criterion. It stipulates that a saying or deed of Jesus that is attested in more than one independent source is very likely authentic. This criterion is most often employed (and I will follow suit) in light of the Four-Source Hypothesis that holds that there are four independent sources behind the Synoptic Gospels: Mark (from whom Luke and Matthew borrowed), Q (the source for the material common to Luke and Matthew but absent from Mark), L (the source for the material unique to Luke), and M (the source for the material unique to Matthew).[18] When one adds the material in John’s Gospel and the testimony of Paul’s epistles, there are six potential sources for applying the criterion of multiple attestation. (Of course, my use of this criterion does not necessarily depend on the Four-Source Hypothesis; it can be adapted to other solutions to the Synoptic Problem.)

2. The criterion of dissimilarity. According to this criterion, if a saying of Jesus is different from what was taught in first-century Judaism and from what was taught in the post-Easter church, then it is likely authentic.

3. The criterion of embarrassment. A saying or deed of Jesus, or other report in the Gospels, that would prove awkward or embarrassing from the standpoint of the writer or the early church is probably authentic.

4. The criterion of Palestinian environment. This criterion allows that a saying or deed of Jesus that reflects an early Palestinian linguistic, cultural, or social context is likely to be authentic.[19]

5. The criterion of coherence. Not every saying or deed of Jesus in the NT passes the above criteria. But many that don’t are similar in content or theme to those that do. On this criterion, a saying or deed of Jesus that does not pass any of the previous four criteria is plausibly authentic if it significantly coheres with sayings and deeds which do.

The basic point behind the use of these criteria is that individual stories, pericope, sayings, and deeds within the Gospels that meet these criteria may be said to be items of historical knowledge (or at least justified belief). And these items are known (or justified) apart from any assumption of the Gospels’ divine inspiration or even historical reliability. The items that pass these tests are known on purely historical grounds—grounds accessible to believer and unbeliever alike.[20]

Many Christian scholars are probably familiar with the use of these criteria in recent years in support of the biblical portrait of Jesus and his resurrection. Conservative NT scholars like Craig Blomberg, Darrell Bock, Craig Evans, Ben Witherington, and others, have used this historical methodology to authenticate a wide range of material in the Gospel tradition and to show that the historical Jesus was very much like what Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John describe him to be.[21] Furthermore, apologists such as William Lane Craig, Gary Habermas, and Michael Licona have utilized these criteria to make powerful arguments for the resurrection of Jesus by showing that the NT accounts of Jesus’ resurrection are authentic.[22]

Somewhat less known are attempts to argue for the divine inspiration of Scripture on the same grounds, utilizing the criteria of authenticity to establish the historical fact that Jesus taught the Bible’s divine authority, and bolstering that teaching with the evidence for his resurrection and claims to deity. James E. Taylor is one scholar who gives a brief sketch of this approach but does not develop it. He writes,

If Jesus is the risen Son of God, then we can trust what he says. We have good historical grounds for believing that Jesus regarded the Old Testament as God’s Word, and therefore we have good reason to believe that it is. In addition, to the extent that we have good historical reasons to think that Jesus really said what the Gospel writers report, we have good reason to regard those dominical sayings as the Word of God. Moreover, Jesus commissioned the apostles to preach the gospel about him to the world. He told them he would send the Holy Spirit to enable them to remember what he had taught them. Since we have good historical grounds for thinking that the New Testament documents were written by an apostle, someone closely associated with an apostle who would be able reliably to record his teaching, or at least someone who faithfully employed apostolic sources, it is reasonable to conclude that the New Testament is God’s Word.[23]

After giving a brief discussion of Jesus’ teaching on the inspiration of Old and New Testaments from both a more traditional (i.e., HRV) stance and a critical one, Gary Habermas also provides a sketch of the structure of the whole argument:

Using both traditional and critical paths to determine that Jesus firmly taught inspiration, we may reassert our earlier assumption that if God raised Jesus from the dead, then the most likely reason was to confirm the truthfulness of Jesus’ teachings. If we are correct in this, then the inspiration of Scripture follows as a verified doctrine, affirmed by God Himself when He raised Jesus from the dead.[24]

This approach to defending the inspiration of Scripture by utilizing the criteria of authenticity to establish Jesus’ belief in the Bible’s inspiration, together with his teaching concerning his own deity and the historicity of the resurrection verified by the same means, I will lay out in some detail in the remainder of this paper.

The Case for Divine Inspiration

The structure of the argument may be formalized as follows:

1. (1) Jesus taught that he is God incarnate.

2. (2) God authenticated Jesus’ teaching by raising him from the dead.

3. (3) Hence, Jesus is God incarnate.

4. (4) Jesus (i.e., God incarnate) taught that the Old Testament is divinely inspired, and he promised the inspiration of the New Testament through his apostles.

5. (5) Therefore, the Bible (both Old and New Testaments) is divinely inspired.

In presenting this argument, no assertion or assumption is made that the NT is in general historically reliable. We will not assume but we will allow, for the sake of argument, that the NT Gospels may be comprised of large amounts of material about Jesus and his teachings that is legendary, the literary inventions of his early followers. The CV defends each of the premises—(1), (2), and (4)—by employing the criteria of authenticity. This clearly sets the CV apart from the HRV and shows it to be a stronger and potentially more persuasive argument. Let’s consider now the premises of the argument in order.

Jesus Claimed to Be God

Much work has already been done by conservative scholars in showing that the historical Jesus made exalted claims about his identity.[25] I cannot rehearse all of that research here, but I will mention a few lines of evidence. First, it is impossible to explain the early church’s worship of Jesus unless he made the claim to being divine. The apostle Paul, our earliest NT source, says that “the entire fullness of God’s nature dwells bodily in Christ” (Col 2:9). He also declared that Christ,

existing in the form of God, did not consider equality with God as something to be used for His own advantage. . . . For this reason God highly exalted Him and gave Him the name that is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee will bow—of those who are in heaven and on earth and under the earth—and every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father. (Phil 6:9–11)

All four Gospels and many of the non-Pauline epistles echo this theme, declaring the deity of Jesus of Nazareth. William Lane Craig spells out the problem: “[W]ithin twenty years of the crucifixion a full-blown Christology proclaiming Jesus as God incarnate existed. How does one explain this worship by monotheistic Jews of one of their countrymen whom they had accompanied during his lifetime, apart from the claims of Jesus himself?”[26]

Second, it is well-known that Jesus’ favorite self-designation was “the Son of Man.” We know that Jesus used this title of himself, first, because it meets the criterion of dissimilarity. The title is used of Jesus only once in the New Testament outside the Gospels (Acts 7:56) and just as rarely in other early Christian writings. It was also not a title often given to the Messiah in ancient Judaism. The title also meets the criterion of multiple attestation, being found in every layer of the Gospel tradition (e.g., Mark: Mark 2:10; 10:45; 14:62 / Q: Matt 11:19=Luke 7:34 / M: Matt 13:37, 41 / L: Luke 18:8 / John 3:13). The significance of this title, first and foremost, is that it is connected by Mark (8:38; 13:26–27; 14:62) and Q (Matt 10:32–33=Luke 12:8–9; Matt 24:27–39=Luke 17:24–30) to the divine Son of Man figure in Daniel 7:13–14. In Daniel’s prophecy we read of a person who is “like a son of man” (i.e., he appears like a man) who is presented to the Ancient of Days (i.e., Yahweh). But he comes “with the clouds of heaven” and he was “given authority to rule, and glory, and a kingdom; so that those of every people, nation, and language should serve [i.e., worship] Him.” This “son of man” is obviously no mere mortal. And so, in Mark 2:10, the Son of Man has the power on earth to forgive sins, something that only God can do. In John 3:13–18, the Son of Man is the one who “came down from heaven” and is the “only begotten Son” of God (NKJV). Most dramatically, in response to the high priest’s question as to whether or not he is the Messiah, Jesus said, “I am, and all of you will see the Son of Man seated at the right hand of the Power and coming with the clouds of heaven” (Mark 14:62 HCSB). The high priest’s response in tearing his robes and accusing Jesus of blasphemy strongly indicates Jesus’ claim to be divine.[27]

It is also worth considering at least one line of evidence from Jesus’ fulfillment of OT prophecy. Though greatly disparaged by critical scholars, Jesus’ virgin birth in Bethlehem is multiply attested in narratives that present his coming as the culmination of Israel’s Messianic expectations (Matt 1:18–2:23; Luke 1:5–2:20).[28] In Matthew’s version, Jesus is called “Immanuel”—God with us (Matt 1:23); in Luke he is “the Son of the Most High” who will be given “the throne of His father David” (Luke 1:32). And these exalted claims for him are confirmed by the miraculous nature of his conception. These affirmations of Jesus’ deity do not come from the lips of Jesus, of course. But on the assumption of the authenticity of these texts,[29] we have here traditions concerning Jesus’ deity that are traceable to his mother and would surely have been embraced by Jesus himself.

So, as startling as it may seem, there is strong evidence that Jesus of Nazareth considered himself to be the incarnation of God.

God Raised Jesus from the Dead

The evidence for the resurrection of Jesus is well-attested and has been elaborated and defended ably by several Christian apologists as mentioned above. Those who defend the resurrection using the criteria of authenticity typically argue that there are a handful of facts established by the criteria that are best explained by the hypothesis that God raised Jesus from the dead.[30] Though lists vary slightly among scholars, they often include (1) Jesus’ empty tomb, (2) the post-mortem appearances of Jesus, and (3) the belief of the disciples in the resurrection of Jesus. I will not rehearse the details of these arguments, either, but suffice it to say that each of these facts is multiply attested and passes other of the criteria of authenticity. It is important to emphasize, though, that there are no plausible naturalistic explanations for these facts. All the naturalistic proposals to date lack explanatory power and scope (i.e., no naturalistic hypothesis really explains the facts adequately, and no one naturalistic hypothesis explains all the facts). The hypothesis that God raised Jesus from the dead, on the other hand, has clear explanatory power and maximum explanatory scope. If God raised Jesus from the dead, then we can explain why the tomb was found empty, why the disciples saw post-mortem appearances of Jesus, and why they came to believe he was resurrected. And this one hypothesis accounts for all the facts together. Hence, we have strong evidence that God raised Jesus from the dead. The only obstacle to accepting this hypothesis is an unwarranted skepticism toward miracles.

The significance of Jesus’ resurrection to our purpose should not be hard to see. Craig makes it explicit when he concludes, “Given the religio-historical context in which this event occurred, the significance of Jesus’ resurrection is clear: it is the divine vindication of Jesus’ radical personal claims.”[31] Being a divine miracle, Jesus’ resurrection is ipso facto a divine endorsement of his teaching. We may reasonably surmise that God is not in the habit of raising false prophets from the dead. And Jesus certainly claimed to be a prophet and much more—he claimed to be God incarnate as we have seen. God’s resurrecting him, then, must constitute a vindication of his teaching about himself. This point allows us to draw the inference in step (3) of the argument that Jesus is God incarnate.

Jesus Taught the Divine Inspiration of Scripture

Premise (4) of our argument carries the burden of showing that Jesus had something to say about the inspiration of Scripture. That burden can be met by citing texts in the Gospels in which Jesus teaches the inspiration of Scripture and showing that those texts meet the criteria of authenticity.[32]

The Old Testament

We can be confident that Jesus acknowledged and embraced the canon of the Hebrew Scriptures held by his Jewish contemporaries. He referred more than once to the Hebrew Scriptures by the common phrase, “The Law and the Prophets” (Matt 5:17; 22:40), and at least once to the three-fold division of the Hebrew Old Testament, “Law, Prophets, and Psalms” (Luke 24:44). This should come as no surprise. These sayings aptly meet the criterion of Palestinian environment. Being a Jew in first-century Palestine, Jesus would naturally appeal to the same body of Scripture and have the same view of them as his contemporaries. And what view, precisely, would Jesus and his Jewish contemporaries have of the Hebrew Scriptures? Obviously, they would have thought of them as the Word of God. Even as skeptical a scholar as Bart Ehrman admits as much. He states that Jesus “maintained that God’s will was revealed in the books written by Moses, especially in ‘the Law’ that was delivered to Moses on Mount Sinai.”[33] Jesus’ high view of Scripture, according to Ehrman, “is thoroughly rooted in our tradition [i.e., the layers of Gospel tradition]. It is therefore to be trusted as historical.”[34]

This perspective on Jesus’ view of the Old Testament is corroborated in several ways in many texts throughout the NT Gospels. All of the major points below satisfy one or more of the criteria of authenticity.

Jesus’ Direct Testimony to the Divine Authority of the Old Testament. Jesus testified or alluded to the divine origin of the Hebrew Scriptures on numerous occasions. First, consider his use of the expression “It is written” during his temptations. That Jesus was led by the Holy Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by Satan is multiply attested in Mark (1:12–13) and Q (Matt 4:1–11=Luke 4:1–13). Mark does not include the details of the nature of Jesus’ temptations or his responses to them, but Q is considered to be an early reliable source. There, in answer to all three temptations, Jesus introduces an Old Testament quotation with the phrase, “It is written” (gegraptai, literally “it stands written”). Jesus also uses this expression to introduce OT quotations in several other places, most notably in Mark (e.g., 7:6; 11:17; 14:27) and elsewhere in Q (Matt 11:10=Luke 7:27). These references provide us with multiple attestation of Jesus’ use of gegraptai when quoting the OT. Moreover, Jesus’ quotation of Scripture in response to the temptations fits well with the first-century Palestinian attitude toward the Hebrew Scriptures.[35] The significance of this term is that it introduces a text that is taken to be absolutely authoritative. It is equivalent to “God says.” As John Wenham puts it, the use of gegraptai implies that “here is the permanent, unchangeable witness of the Eternal God, committed to writing for our instruction.”[36]

Second, there are numerous places where Jesus introduces references to OT texts with an equally significant expression. For example, when challenged by the Pharisees for his disciples plucking grain on the Sabbath, Jesus made an allusion to 1 Samuel 21:1–6, introducing it with, “Have you never read what David and those who were with him did when he was in need and hungry?” (Mark 2:25; cf. Matt 12:3; Luke 6:3).[37] Likewise, when his authority to preach is questioned, Jesus said, “Haven’t you read this Scripture: ‘The stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone’?” (Mark 12:10, Jesus quoting Ps 118:22; cf. Matt 21:42; Luke 20:17). In these and other texts, Jesus uses the expression, “Have you never read . . . ?” in order to introduce a quotation or an allusion to an OT text. John Wenham claims that this expression is equivalent in significance to gegraptai and means something like, “Don’t you know that God’s Word says . . . ?”[38] That he is correct in this assessment is confirmed by the fact that in almost every case in which both “Have you not read . . . ?” and “It is written . . .” are used, Jesus quotes or alludes to the OT text in order to settle some controversy with his enemies. For example, in Mark 2:25, he alludes to 1 Samuel 21:1–6 to justify his disciples’ plucking grain on the Sabbath. In Mark 12:26, he quotes Exodus 3:6 to prove to the Sadducees that there is a resurrection of the dead. In Matthew 19:3–6, Jesus quotes Genesis 2:24 to settle a Jewish dispute over the grounds for divorce. Why would Jesus or his enemies think that quoting an OT text would (or could) settle these controversies? Surely it has to be because they believed that the OT Scriptures carried divine authority. Thus, the authenticity of Jesus’ use of this expression is established by the criterion of coherence with those texts in which he uses gegraptai. It is also multiply attested by its use in Mark (2:25; 12:10), M (Matt 12:5; 21:16), and L (Luke 10:26).

Third, Jesus frequently connects the OT Scriptures to his own life and ministry. For one thing, Jesus taught that the OT Scriptures bore witness to him. In Luke 4:16–21, we read of Jesus going to the synagogue in Nazareth and reading the words of a Messianic prophecy from Isaiah 61:1–2. After reading it, he declared, “Today as you listen, this Scripture has been fulfilled.” Later he says, “Listen! We are going up to Jerusalem. Everything that is written through the prophets about the Son of Man will be accomplished” (Luke 18:31). Mark has Jesus saying at the Last Supper, “For the Son of Man will go just as it is written about Him” (Mark 14:21). And in John’s Gospel, Jesus rebukes the Jewish leaders, “You pore over the Scriptures because you think you have eternal life in them, yet they testify about Me” (John 5:39). Jesus’ believing that his life and ministry fulfilled OT prophecy is seen to be multiply attested, these references coming, respectively, from L, Mark, and John. These texts also cohere nicely with his belief in his Messiahship and deity (see above). It should be no surprise that if Jesus thought of himself in such exalted terms that he would also see himself as directly fulfilling OT Messianic prophecies. For our purposes here, though, note that Jesus’ belief that he fulfilled OT prophecies strongly suggests his belief that these prophetic Scriptures were divinely inspired. His appeals to his prophetic fulfillments were made to justify his Messianic identity to his hearers or otherwise convince them to believe something. Such purposes would fail if Jesus and his hearers did not attribute divine authority to the prophetic Scriptures.

Jesus’ belief in the authority of the prophets is even more strongly indicated in those texts where he mentions the necessity of their fulfillment. There are numerous places in the Gospels where Jesus uses the verb deō (literally “to bind” or “tie”) in connection to the fulfillment of OT prophecies. It is invariously translated in these contexts as “must” or “have to,” indicating necessity. I will mention only four texts from independent sources that provide multiple attestation for Jesus’ attitude toward the fulfillment of OT prophecies. In Matthew 26:54 (an M text), in rebuking Peter for violently trying to prevent his arrest, Jesus asks, “How, then, would the Scriptures be fulfilled that say it must happen this way?” In Luke 24:25–26 (an L text), Jesus tells the two men on the Emmaus Road, “How unwise and slow you are to believe in your hearts all that the prophets have spoken! Didn’t the Messiah have to suffer these things and enter into His glory?” Later in the same chapter (v. 44), Jesus says to all his disciples, “These are My words that I spoke to you while I was still with you—that everything written about Me in the Law of Moses, the Prophets, and the Psalms must be fulfilled.” Finally, alluding to Judas’s betrayal, John records Jesus saying, “I’m not speaking about all of you; I know those I have chosen. But the Scripture must be fulfilled: ‘The one who eats My bread has raised his heel against Me’” (13:18; see also John 15:25; 17:12). The Johannine texts do not contain the verb deō, but instead the phrase hina hē graphē plērōthē (“in order that the Scriptures may (or might) be fulfilled”) which for John carries the same connotation.[39] The question that we must ask, then, is why did Jesus think that the OT Scriptures must be fulfilled? If he thought of these prophetic Scriptures the way most people today think, say, of the prophecies of Nostradamus, he would not have attributed any necessity to their fulfillment. The only explanation is that he believed these prophecies originated from God who cannot utter false prophecies.

Fourth, there are several places where Jesus attributes the authorship of certain OT texts to God. Consider Mark 7:9–13:

He also said to them, “You completely invalidate God’s command in order to maintain your tradition! For Moses said: ‘Honor your father and your mother’; and ‘Whoever speaks evil of father or mother must be put to death.’ But you say, ‘If a man tells his father or mother: Whatever benefit you might have received from me is Corban’” (that is, a gift committed to the temple), “you no longer let him do anything for his father or mother. You revoke God’s word by your tradition that you have handed down. And you do many other similar things.”

In this text, Jesus accuses the Pharisees of hypocrisy in the way they treat their parents. The authenticity of this text is supported in part by Jesus’ use of the Aramaic expression corban in verse 11 (satisfying the criterion of Palestinian environment). In verse 10, Jesus quotes two OT texts that he attributes to Moses (Exod 20:12 and 21:17). However, although “Moses said” these things, for Jesus they are “God’s command” (v. 9) and “God’s word” (v. 13).

A second example from Mark is found in the text where Jesus asserts the lordship of the Messiah over David (12:35–37). Jesus introduces a quote from Psalm 110:1 with the words, “David himself says by the Holy Spirit.” Notice that he claims that David spoke the words of the psalm “by the Holy Spirit.” Consider also the Matthean parallel to Mark 10:1–12, Jesus’ teaching on divorce:

“Haven’t you read,” He replied, “that He who created them in the beginning made them male and female,” and He also said: “For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two will become one flesh? So they are no longer two, but one flesh. Therefore, what God has joined together, man must not separate.” (Matt 19:4–6)

When the Pharisees in the context question Jesus on divorce, their question derives from a debate in Jewish culture between Rabbis Shammai and Hillel. The former taught that divorce was prohibited except on narrow grounds. The latter said divorce was permissible for any reason. To settle the controversy (he essentially sides with Shammai), Jesus quotes Genesis 2:24 (cf. Mark 10:5). In their original context, these words are a commentary by the writer of Genesis on the earlier words of Adam at being presented with Eve. Yet Jesus attributes these words to “He who created them” (i.e., God).[40]

Lastly, consider Jesus’ words in John 10:34–36:

Jesus answered them, “Isn’t it written in your scripture, I said, you are gods? If He called those whom the word of God came to ‘gods’—and the Scripture cannot be broken—do you say, ‘You are blaspheming’ to the One the Father set apart and sent into the world, because I said: I am the Son of God?”

The Jews were threatening to stone Jesus for claiming to be God when he spoke these words and quoted Psalm 82:6. Jesus here offers an a fortiori (from the lesser to the greater) argument to establish the appropriateness of his claim to deity. If God (notice the “He” in v. 35) called the earlier Jewish recipients of the Word of God “gods,” then it cannot be inappropriate for the One God the Father sent to call himself God. Jesus attributes Psalm 82 to God. He also refers to the corpus of Scripture received by the Jews as “the word of God.”

So, across a wide range of material that encompasses Mark, M, L, Q, and John, we find Jesus directly attributing the OT Scriptures to God and using those Scripture in ways that imply his belief in their divine inspiration. We should add that all of the texts cited in the last few paragraphs cohere with what we have already established with regard to Jesus’ use of phrases such as “It is written” and his beliefs about OT prophecy. If Jesus believed the OT to be divinely inspired (as our discussion in previous paragraphs already shows), then it should come as no surprise that he would occasionally make direct references to the OT’s divine authorship.[41]

Jesus’ Testimony to the Accuracy and Trustworthiness of the Old Testament. Also relevant to our purpose is the fact that Jesus uses and quotes OT passages with the conviction of their utter truthfulness. Even texts that many today would eye with suspicion, Jesus treats as being historically accurate and trustworthy. Consider again Mark 2:25–26:

He said to them, “Have you never read what David and those who were with him did when he was in need and hungry—how he entered the house of God in the time of Abiathar the high priest and ate the sacred bread—which is not lawful for anyone to eat except the priests—and also gave some to his companions?”

Jesus refers to “what David did,” alluding to the account in 1 Samuel 21:1–6. If this pericope is authentic, then we learn here that Jesus assumes that the story about David and his men eating the bread of the Presence is a true story. This also implies that Jesus believed that David was a real person.[42]

In a Q text, Jesus excoriates several cities for their rejection of him, among them Capernaum. The text reads:

“And you, Capernaum, will you be exalted to heaven? You will go down to Hades. For if the miracles that were done in you had been done in Sodom, it would have remained until today. But I tell you, it will be more tolerable for the land of Sodom on the day of judgment than for you.” (Matt 11:23–24; cf. Luke 10:13–15)

As proof that the unbelieving inhabitants of Capernaum will be judged by God, Jesus speaks of the inhabitants of Sodom whose destruction is recorded in Genesis 19. They would have repented if they had seen Jesus’ miracles. And thus it will be “more tolerable” for them on judgment day than for Capernaum. These statements would have no force unless it is assumed that the account of Sodom and its destruction in Genesis 19 is historically reliable.

Jesus apparently thinks similarly of the account of Noah and the Flood (Genesis 6–7). In Matthew 24:37–39 (an M text), we read:

“As the days of Noah were, so the coming of the Son of Man will be. For in those days before the flood they were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, until the day Noah boarded the ark. They didn’t know until the flood came and swept them all away. So this is the way the coming of the Son of Man will be.”

Here Jesus likens his coming to the sudden, unexpected nature of the flood which occurred “in Noah’s day.” The people then “were eating and drinking,” until “the day Noah entered the ark.” Again, these words have no meaning in context if it’s not assumed that Noah was a real person and the Flood a real event.

Consider another Q text as recorded in Matthew 23:34–36 (cf. Luke 11:49–51):

“This is why I am sending you prophets, sages, and scribes. Some of them you will kill and crucify, and some of them you will flog in your synagogues and hound from town to town. So all the righteous blood shed on the earth will be charged to you, from the blood of righteous Abel to the blood of Zechariah, son of Berechiah, whom you murdered between the sanctuary and the altar. I assure you: All these things will come on this generation!”

Jesus had accused the Pharisees of being of a kind with the OT Israelites who killed the prophets. He spoke of his sending “prophets and wise men and scribes” whom they would likewise kill. On them God will visit judgment “for all the righteous blood shed on earth.” Specifically, the blood of the prophets murdered “from innocent Abel to . . . Zechariah the son of Berechiah.” The book that records the murder of Abel is Genesis, the first book in the Bible. The most likely referent of the Zechariah Jesus mentions is the one attested in 2 Chronicles 24:20–22.[43] Second Chronicles is the last book in the Hebrew canon. Jesus’ meaning, therefore, is “from the beginning to the end of the Bible, thus including the first to the last of the righteous martyrs of the OT, as well as all between.”[44] Not only do we have in these words an endorsement by Jesus of the parameters of the Hebrew canon, but he clearly authenticates the broad sweep of Israel’s rebellious history as recorded throughout the OT Scriptures.

Hence, we have ample evidence that Jesus taught the divine inspiration of the OT. Now we turn to what he had to say about the NT.

The New Testament

We have no evidence that Jesus spoke directly of the New Testament Scriptures. But we do have strong indications that he anticipated their inspired production.

His Commissioning of the Twelve. We have significant multiple attestation that Jesus chose twelve disciples and authorized them to represent him and his teachings to the world. According to Mark, Jesus “went up the mountain and summoned those He wanted, and they came to Him. He also appointed 12—He also named them apostles—to be with Him, to send them out to preach, and to have authority to drive out demons” (Mark 3:13–15). In M, Jesus tells Simon bar Jonah (one of the twelve), “And I also say to you that you are Peter, and on this rock I will build My church, and the forces of Hades will not overpower it. I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven, and whatever you bind on earth is already bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth is already loosed in heaven” (Matt 16:18–19). Later he gives this same privilege to the rest of the apostles (Matt 18:18). At the end of Matthew’s Gospel, Jesus directly commissions them to represent him: “Then Jesus came near and said to them, ‘All authority has been given to Me in heaven and on earth. Go, therefore, and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe everything I have commanded you. And remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age’” (28:18–20). In Q, Jesus tells them that in the future Messianic Kingdom, they “will also sit on 12 thrones, judging the 12 tribes of Israel (Matt 19:28=Luke 22:29–30). According to L, after his resurrection, Jesus “opened [the apostles’] minds to understand the Scriptures. He also said to them, ‘This is what is written: The Messiah would suffer and rise from the dead the third day, and repentance for forgiveness of sins would be proclaimed in His name to all the nations, beginning at Jerusalem. You are witnesses of these things’” (Luke 24:45–48; cf. also Acts 1:8). In John’s Gospel, Jesus tells the apostles, “As the Father has sent Me, I also send you” (20:21).[45]

Scot McKnight points out that “[i]f Jesus called twelve to be his apostles, then it follows that he thought they would be the new leaders, the new tribal heads as it were, for the restoration of Israel.”[46] Craig Evans concurs, adding, “His apostles . . . were to act as heralds proclaiming both the dawning of the kingdom of God and the one who was to sit on a throne of glory in this new kingdom.”[47] So, the apostles of Jesus were commissioned by him to be the leaders of his church, the restored Israel of God. They were authorized especially to speak for him as his ambassadors and regents.

His Promise to Continue Guiding and Teaching Them through the Holy Spirit. Not only did Jesus appoint his apostles to speak authoritatively for him, he also promised to give them supernatural assistance in their task. For example, after he predicts that the apostles will be persecuted and brought to account before governors and kings, Jesus asserts, “So when they arrest you and hand you over, don’t worry beforehand what you will say. On the contrary, whatever is given to you in that hour—say it. For it isn’t you speaking, but the Holy Spirit” (Mark 13:11; cf. Matt 10:19–20; and Luke 12:12). In connection with Jesus’ commission of them to be witnesses to his resurrection (see above), Luke’s Gospel reports that Jesus said, “And look, I am sending you what My Father promised. As for you, stay in the city until you are empowered from on high” (24:49). What the Father promised is the coming of the Holy Spirit (Luke 3:16; Acts 1:4–5), which Luke describes as taking place at Pentecost (Acts 2:1, 4, 33).

John’s Gospel also speaks of Jesus’ promise of the Holy Spirit’s empowerment of his apostles. What he says there is even more specific. In the Farewell Discourse, he says, “I have spoken these things to you while I remain with you. But the Counselor, the Holy Spirit—the Father will send Him in My name—will teach you all things and remind you of everything I have told you” (14:25–26; cf. also 15:26–27). Notice that in this text, Jesus promised the apostles that the Holy Spirit would supernaturally empower them to remember what he taught them during his earthly ministry. Later in the Discourse he adds,

“I still have many things to tell you, but you can’t bear them now. When the Spirit of truth comes, He will guide you into all the truth. For He will not speak on His own, but He will speak whatever He hears. He will also declare to you what is to come. He will glorify Me, because He will take from what is Mine and declare it to you. Everything the Father has is Mine. This is why I told you that He takes from what is Mine and will declare it to you.” (John 16:12–15)

These words promise to go beyond a reminder of Jesus’ earlier teaching. There were further teachings that Jesus wanted to pass along to his disciples that they were as yet unable to bear. So, Jesus indicates that the Holy Spirit will teach them further divinely authoritative truths. That is, he promises them that they will be the recipients of additional divine revelation.

Concerning the authenticity of the Johannine references, Blomberg explains,

Jesus’ words cohere well with Luke’s emphasis throughout his Gospel on Jesus’ empowerment by the Spirit, and throughout Acts on the role of the Spirit as baptizing all of God’s people and indwelling them permanently. But none of that is spelled out at all explicitly here, as one would expect if a later Christian writer were freely inventing central doctrinal material.[48]

Therefore, we have authentic testimony from Jesus—the risen God incarnate—in which he promises to guide, direct, and teach his apostles through the divine inspiration of the Holy Spirit. But what has this got to do with the New Testament Scriptures? Blomberg notes, “While Jesus’ promise encompasses more than simply inspiring his disciples to write further Scripture, it surely includes what John understood himself to be doing in producing this Gospel.”[49] Indeed, it is striking that many of those who penned NT documents understood that they were, as Jesus’ authoritative spokesmen, producing divinely inspired literature.

For example, Paul began most of his letters by announcing his apostolic authority.[50] He told the Corinthian church that he was writing them “in keeping with the authority the Lord gave me for building up and not for tearing down” (2 Cor 13:10). He also declared, “If anyone thinks he is a prophet or spiritual, he should recognize that what I write to you is the Lord’s command” (1 Cor 14:37). Paul’s conviction that he wrote with divine authority was grounded in his sense of being called as an apostle and that his gospel “was made known to [him] by revelation” (Eph 3:3). Indeed, the mystery of the gospel is “now revealed to His holy apostles and prophets by the Spirit” (Eph 3:5). Therefore, all of the apostles “speak these things, not in words taught by human wisdom, but in those taught by the Spirit, explaining spiritual things to spiritual people” (1 Cor 2:13).

Peter had the same sense of his own authority. He told his readers that they “have been born again—not of perishable seed but of imperishable—through the living and enduring word of God. . . . And this is the word that was preached as the gospel to you” (1 Pet 1:23, 25). In his second epistle, he writes, “Dear friends, this is now the second letter I have written to you; in both letters, I want to develop a genuine understanding with a reminder, so that you can remember the words previously spoken by the holy prophets and the command of our Lord and Savior given through your apostles” (2 Pet 3:1–2).[51] Peter equates his writing with “the command of our Lord and Savior” which came to his readers “through your apostles.”

John indicates his own sense of apostolic authority for his writings when he declares, “This is the disciple who testifies to these things and who wrote them down. We know that his testimony is true” (John 21:24). In his first epistle, he wrote,

What was from the beginning, what we have heard, what we have seen with our eyes, what we have observed and have touched with our hands, concerning the Word of life—that life was revealed, and we have seen it and we testify and declare to you the eternal life that was with the Father and was revealed to us—what we have seen and heard we also declare to you, so that you may have fellowship along with us; and indeed our fellowship is with the Father and with His Son Jesus Christ. We are writing these things so that our joy may be complete. (1 John 1:1–4)

A few paragraphs later, he warned, “We [i.e., the apostles] are from God. Anyone who knows God listens to us; anyone who is not from God does not listen to us. From this we know the Spirit of truth and the spirit of deception” (1 John 4:6).

It is also very significant that Peter refers to Paul’s letters and groups them with “the rest of the Scriptures” (2 Pet 3:16), and Paul quotes a passage from the Gospel of Luke, introducing it with the phrase, “For the Scripture says” (1 Tim 5:18). It is abundantly clear, therefore, that most, if not all, the NT writers claimed divine authority for themselves and their writings, sometimes even authenticating each others’ writings as such. What can explain this except their being convinced that Jesus had promised them the supernatural guidance of the Holy Spirit, so that their teachings—both verbal and written—would be divinely inspired?

Acknowledging that Jesus did not explicitly refer to the New Testament documents, John Wenham nevertheless notes,

The last two promises quoted [John 14:26; 16:12–13] do not of course refer specifically or exclusively to the inspiration of a New Testament Canon, but they provide in principle all that is required for the formation of such a Canon, should that be God’s purpose. If God-given words are promised for the emergencies of persecution, how much more might they be expected for her abiding Scripture. If remembrance of the Lord’s words was necessary for the proper instruction of the infant church when many eyewitnesses were still alive, how much more when they were dead. It would be most natural to believe that the promises of remembrance and of guidance into new truth found their most far-reaching fulfillment in a New Testament Canon.[52]

The naturalness of this belief finds confirmation in our last point under this heading.

The Expectation of a New Covenant Canon. We can be sure that Jesus thought of himself as inaugurating the new covenant that God promised through the OT prophet Jeremiah (cf. Jer 31:31–34). The fact that he saw himself as instigating the restoration of Israel in the appointment of his twelve apostles virtually guarantees that he would have advanced the notion of the new covenant’s inauguration since these two concepts are thematically connected in the OT (cf. Jer 31:21–30). Also, as we have seen, Jesus believed himself to be Israel’s long-awaited Messiah. With him, the Messianic age begins. So, too, must the new covenant. Thus we read in all three Synoptics and in Paul’s writings his announcing the establishment of the new covenant at the Last Supper (Matt 26:26–30; Mark 14:22–26; Luke 22:14–23; 1 Cor 11:23–26). Interestingly, Matthew’s version of this event follows Mark pretty closely.[53] However, Luke’s version differs in significant ways that are closely paralleled by Paul in 1 Corinthians 11:23–26. For his part, Paul indicates that the tradition of the Last Supper he “received from the Lord” (v. 23), presumably meaning that it was a saying of Jesus passed down to him by the Jerusalem apostles.[54] Given the verbal divergences between Mark/Matthew and Luke/Paul in the accounts of the Last Supper, we likely have two independent traditions that multiply attest the authenticity of Jesus’ words inaugurating the new covenant.

Later NT writers confirm the likelihood that Jesus formally inaugurated the new covenant. As indicated, Paul quotes what he takes to be Jesus’ words of institution which includes the line, “This cup is the new covenant established by My blood” (1 Cor 11:25). In another place, he claims that he and the apostles were made “ministers of a new covenant” (2 Cor 3:6). And the author of Hebrews declares that Jesus “is the mediator of a new covenant” (Heb 9:15; see also 8:8–13 and 12:24). The Synoptic Gospel authors, of course, along with their audiences we may presume, also believed Jesus inaugurated the new covenant. The best explanation for this belief is that it traces back to the words of the historical Jesus.

The significance of this is that the inauguration of the new covenant very likely indicates an anticipation, on the part of Jesus and his apostles, of new covenant documents. In the ancient Near East, the practice of establishing suzerain-vassal treaties was always accompanied by documents that inscripturated the treaty. Meredith Kline explains,

In these treaties an overlord addressed his vassals, sovereignly regulating their relations with him, with his other vassals, and with other nations. The central role played by the treaty tablet in which the covenant was customarily inscripturated is attested by the fact that the preservation of these tablets was at times made the subject of a special document clause in the text of the treaties. Moreover, as such a clause would stipulate, copies of the text, duplicates of which were prepared for all the parties concerned, were to be deposited in the presence of a god, carefully guarded, and periodically read publicly in the vassal kingdom.[55]

The covenant that God established with Israel followed this pattern precisely.[56] The tablets of the Decalogue, the legal writings that followed, and the book of Deuteronomy were explicitly called “books of the covenant” (Exod 24:7; 25:16, 21; 40:20; Deut 10:1–5; 29:20; 31:9–13; 2 Kgs 23:2, 21; 2 Chr 34:30). The historical narratives of the Pentateuch and the Former Prophets served as historical contexts for and extensions of the covenant. The Latter Prophets served to enforce the covenantal sanctions. The Psalter was “a part of Israel’s tributary obligations,” and the Wisdom literature functioned as “an explication of the covenant . . . by translating the covenant stipulations into maxims and instructions regulative of conduct in different areas of life and under its varying conditions.”[57] Thus the apostle Paul, a former Pharisee, “speaks of the Israelites’ reading of their Scriptures as a reading of ‘the old covenant’ (2 Cor 3:14).”[58] So, the old covenant was established and accompanied by covenant documents that were, in the minds of the Israelites (or at least first-century Jews), identified conceptually with the covenant itself.

It would be no surprise, then, if Jesus and his earliest disciples expected there to be covenant documents that accompanied the inauguration of the new covenant. As Köstenberger, Kellum, and Quarles put it,

Since the establishment of the old covenant was accompanied by covenant documents, it would seem to have been a reasonable expectation that there would be new covenant documents upon the institution of the new covenant. This expectation would not only explain the rapid reception of the NT writings in the churches but also the recognition that these documents were Scripture on a par with the OT in virtually contemporaneous documents (1 Tim 5:18; 2 Pet 3:16). . . . [Thus,] the concept of a New Testament flows organically from the establishment of a new covenant, predicted by the OT prophets and instituted in and through the Lord Jesus Christ himself.[59]

So, we have reason to believe that Jesus and his apostles, in light of the inauguration of the new covenant, expected the production of new covenant documents.

Therefore, while it is true that Jesus never explicitly spoke of any NT documents, the historical evidence shows that “Jesus in principle authenticated the New Testament.”[60] The fact that he appointed the apostles as his authoritative spokesmen, the fact that he promised them the supernatural guidance of the Holy Spirit both to recall his earthly teaching and deliver to them further divine revelation, and the fact that they and Jesus would naturally have expected the writing of new covenant documents, provide sufficient reason to believe that Jesus promised the inspiration of the NT.

Conclusion

We have seen that there is ample support for the truth of premise (4) of our argument for the inspiration of Scripture—the claim that Jesus taught that the OT is divinely inspired and promised the inspiration of the NT through his apostles. Given that Jesus also taught that he is God incarnate (premise (1)), and given that God authenticated Jesus’ claim by raising him from the dead (premise (2)), we may readily conclude, therefore, that the Bible is the divinely inspired Word of God.

Throughout this volume, the reader has been given evidence that claims implied by the divine inspiration of the Bible are also true. The texts of the Old and New Testaments have been remarkably preserved through thousands of years of copying; the historical assertions of both Testaments have been seen to be reliable; the ethical teachings and assumptions of Scripture are rationally defensible when rightly interpreted; the Bible’s teachings are consistent with the best contemporary science; and the canonization process faithfully delivered to the church a collection of new covenant documents that bear the apostolic imprimatur. What’s more, there are no proven contradictions in the Bible regarding either its historical or theological teachings. The Bible presents a consistent, unified message concerning the great drama of God’s redemption of fallen humanity through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

It is our humble prayer that through this book Christians may be strengthened in the confidence that the Bible is the perfect Word of God. May seekers and skeptics have obstacles removed that will enable them to embrace the Lord Jesus Christ in saving faith and repentance.

1 For detailed evidence for God’s existence, see Paul Copan and Paul K. Moser, eds., The Rationality of Theism (New York: Routledge, 2003); James F. Sennett and Douglas Groothuis, In Defense of Natural Theology: A Post-Humean Assessment (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 2005); William Lane Craig, Reasonable Faith: Christian Truth and Apologetics, 3rd ed. (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2008), 93–204; J. P. Moreland, Consciousness and the Existence of God: A Theistic Argument (New York: Routledge, 2008); R. Scott Smith, Naturalism and Our Knowledge of Reality: Testing Religious Truth-Claims (Surrey, UK: Ashgate, 2012); Stephen T. Davis, God, Reason, and Theistic Proofs (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1997).

2 For thorough responses to methodological naturalism in both science and history, as well as responses to objections to miracles, the following sources may be consulted: Steven B. Cowan, “But Is It Science?” Areopagus Journal 5, no. 1 (2005): 22–26; Alvin Plantinga, “Should Methodological Naturalism Constrain Science?” in Science: Christian Perspectives for the New Millennium, ed. Scott B. Luley, Paul Copan, and Stan W. Wallace (Norcross, GA: RZIM, 2003), 107–34; idem, Where the Conflict Really Lies: Science, Religion, and Naturalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011); J. P. Moreland, “Theistic Science and Methodological Naturalism,” in The Creation Hypothesis: Scientific Evidence for an Intelligent Designer (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 1994), 41–66; idem, Christianity and the Nature of Science: A Philosophical Investigation (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1989), esp. 213–46; William A. Dembski, Intelligent Design: The Bridge Between Science and Theology (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 1999), 49–69, 252–60; idem, “Does the Bible Conflict with Science?” in this book (p. 349); Craig L. Blomberg, The Historical Reliability of the Gospels, 2nd ed. (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 2007), 104–51; Michael R. Licona, The Resurrection of Jesus: A New Historiographical Approach (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 2010), 133–98; Norman L. Geisler, Miracles and the Modern Mind (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1992), 75–82; C. Stephen Evans, The Historical Christ and the Jesus of Faith: The Incarnational Narrative as History (Oxford: Clarendon, 1996), 137–202; Richard Swinburne, The Concept of Miracle (New York: Macmillan, 1970); idem, The Resurrection of God Incarnate (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 17–26; Stephen T. Davis, Risen Indeed: Making Sense of the Resurrection (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1993), 1–42; R. Douglas Geivett and Gary R. Habermas, eds., In Defense of Miracles: A Comprehensive Case for God’s Action in History (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 1997); Craig S. Keener, Miracles: The Credibility of the New Testament Accounts, 2 vols. (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2011); Francis J. Beckwith, “Theism, Miracles, and the Modern Mind,” in The Rationality of Theism, 221–36; Winfried Corduan, “Miracles,” in To Everyone an Answer, ed. Francis J. Beckwith, William Lane Craig, and J. P. Moreland (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 2004), 160–79; Paul Rhodes Eddy and Gregory A. Boyd, The Jesus Legend: The Case for the Historical Reliability of the Synoptic Jesus Tradition (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2007), 39–90; The New Dictionary of Christian Apologetics, ed. W. C. Campbell-Jack and Gavin McGrath (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 2006), s.v. “Miracles in Scripture” by P. G. Bolt; The Encyclopedia of Christian Civilization, ed. George T. Kurian (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), s.v. “miracles” by Steven B. Cowan.

3 R. Douglas Geivett, “Can and Would God Speak to Us?” (p. 13).

4 Much of the remainder of this paper appeared in an abbreviated form in Steven B. Cowan, “How to Make a Case for the Inspiration of Scripture in the Current Milieu,” Journal of the International Society of Christian Apologetics 2, no. 1 (2009): 65–85.

5 See Cornelius Van Til, The Defense of the Faith (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R, 1955); idem, Christian Apologetics (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R, 1976); Greg Bahnsen, Always Ready: Directions for Defending the Faith, ed. Robert R. Booth (Atlanta: American Vision, 1996); John Frame, Apologetics to the Glory of God: An Introduction (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R, 1994); “Presuppositional Apologetics,” in Five Views on Apologetics, ed. Steven B. Cowan (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2000), 208–31, 350–63; K. Scott Oliphint, The Battle Belongs to the Lord: The Power of Scripture for Defending our Faith (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R, 2003); and Wayne Grudem, Systematic Theology: An Introduction to Biblical Doctrine (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1994), 77–80.

6 There are other reasons that presuppositionalists give for their view, but this one has always seemed to me to be the most cogent and persuasive. Therefore, I will limit myself to discussing this one argument.

7 See Alvin Plantinga, Warranted Christian Belief (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 241–89, 374–80; Kelly James Clark, “Reformed Epistemology Apologetics,” in Cowan, Five Views on Apologetics, 266–84; and Evans, The Historical Christ and the Jesus of Faith, 259–82.

8 For example, the Westminster Confession of Faith asserts in chap. I, sec. V, “We may be moved and induced by the testimony of the Church to an high and reverent esteem of the Holy Scripture. And the heavenliness of the matter, the efficacy of the doctrine, the majesty of the style, the consent of all the parts, the scope of the whole (which is, to give all glory to God), the full discovery it makes of the only way of man’s salvation, the many other incomparable excellencies, and the entire perfection thereof, are arguments whereby it does abundantly evidence itself to be the Word of God: yet notwithstanding, our full persuasion and assurance of the infallible truth and divine authority thereof, is from the inward work of the Holy Spirit bearing witness by and with the Word in our hearts” (emphasis added).

9 The term “evidentialism” is used in three distinct ways in apologetic and philosophical circles. First, it may refer to a family of apologetic methods that share a similar approach to the relationship between faith and reason, namely, that they are compatible and that reason may provide rational support for the truth of the Christian religion in the form of reasons that appeal to “common ground” between believers and unbelievers. Secondly, “evidentialism” refers to one particular school of apologetics in the family of methods mentioned under the first sense—the school that stresses the offering primarily of historical evidences for the deity and resurrection of Jesus without a prior philosophical argument for God’s existence. Thirdly, “evidentialism” can refer to the arch-enemy of Reformed epistemology, namely, the view that it is wrong to accept any belief without sufficient evidence. In this paper, I am using “evidentialism” in the first sense only.

10 For those who take this approach, see Chad Meister, Building Belief: Constructing Faith from the Ground Up (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2006); A. W. Pink, The Divine Inspiration of the Bible (Authors for Christ, 2007); and James Montgomery Boice, Foundations of the Christian Faith (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 1986), 57–66.

11 See the article in this volume by Craig Blaising, “Are There Conflicting Theologies in the Bible?” (p. 375), for a defense of the unity of the Bible.

12 Benjamin B. Warfield, The Inspiration and Authority of the Bible (Philadelphia: P&R, 1967), esp. 114–18. Another early voice for the Christological approach was Adolph Saphir, Christ and the Scriptures (New York: Francis E. Fitch, n.d.), though he combines it with the inherent character approach.

13 See Norman L. Geisler, Christian Apologetics (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1976), 353. R. C. Sproul’s argument is worded somewhat differently, but it is essentially the same (see his “The Case for Inerrancy: A Methodological Analysis,” in God’s Inerrant Word: An International Symposium on the Trustworthiness of Scripture, ed. John W. Montgomery [Minneapolis: Bethany, 1974], 242–61). Others who explicitly defend this approach include Gary Habermas, The Resurrection of Jesus (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1980); idem, “Jesus and the Inspiration of Scripture,” Areopagus Journal 2, no. 1 (2002): 11–16; James Taylor, Introducing Apologetics: Cultivating Christian Commitment (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2006), 277–78; Douglas Groothuis, Christian Apologetics: A Comprehensive Case for Biblical Faith (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 2011), 503–6; and Winfried Corduan, No Doubt About It: The Case for Christianity (Nashville: B&H, 1997), 233–39.

14 Blomberg, The Historical Reliability of the Gospels, 304.

15 For discussions and applications of these tests, see Josh McDowell, Evidence that Demands a Verdict, rev. ed. (San Bernadino, CA: Campus Crusade for Christ, 1979), 39–78; Meister, Building Belief, 129–47; Geisler, Christian Apologetics, 305–27; Corduan, No Doubt About It, 185–203; Craig Blomberg, “Where Do We Start Studying Jesus?” in Jesus Under Fire: Modern Scholarship Reinvents the Historical Jesus, ed. Michael Wilkins and J. P. Moreland (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1995), 17–50; Douglas Groothuis, “Jesus of Nazareth: How Historians Can Know Him and Why It Matters,” in Christian Apologetics, 438–74; and J. P. Moreland, Scaling the Secular City (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1987), 133–57.

16 In addition to the sources in the previous note, see the articles in this volume by Walter Kaiser (“Is the Old Testament Historically Reliable?” p. 201) and Paul Barnett (“Is the New Testament Historically Reliable?” p. 223) for more evidence of the historical reliability of both Old and New Testaments.

17 These criteria and their rationale, as well as their benefits and shortcomings, are discussed in Charles Quarles’s article in this volume, “Higher Criticism: What Has It Shown?” (p. 63). For a more detailed account, see Robert H. Stein, Gospels and Tradition: Studies on Redaction Criticism of the Gospels (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1991), 153–87.

18 For more on the Four-Source Hypothesis and the evidence for it, see Robert L. Stein, The Synoptic Problem: An Introduction (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1987); Blomberg, The Historical Reliability of the Gospels, 37–47; Scot McKnight, “Source Criticism,” in New Testament Criticism and Interpretation, ed. David A. Black and David S. Dockery (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1991), 137–72; and Andreas Köstenberger, L. Scott Kellum, and Charles L. Quarles, The Cradle, the Cross, and the Crown: An Introduction to the New Testament (Nashville: B&H, 2009), 158–75. For alternative views see Eta Linnemann, Is There a Synoptic Problem? Rethinking the Literary Dependence of the First Three Gospels (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1992); David A. Black and David R. Beck, eds., Rethinking the Synoptic Problem (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2001); John Wenham, Redating Matthew, Mark, and Luke: A Fresh Assault on the Synoptic Problem (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 1992); and Robert L. Thomas, ed., Three Views on the Origins of the Synoptic Gospels (Grand Rapids: Kregel, 2002).

19 It might be thought that the use of this criterion as I’ve stated it would create a conflict with the criterion of dissimilarity, for the latter authenticates those sayings of Jesus that distinguish him from his Jewish cultural background (and the early church), while the former authenticates those that share ideas in common with Judaism. And if both criteria are used, then virtually all of Jesus’ sayings will be authenticated! However, this problem arises only if one erroneously uses the criterion of dissimilarity to judge inauthentic those sayings that are not dissimilar. Or, put another way, there is a potential conflict between these criteria only if one assumes that the statements that pass the criterion of dissimilarity are those most characteristic of Jesus. But Robert Stein warns, “The tool does not claim to be able to arrive at what is ‘characteristic’ of Jesus’ teaching, even if some scholars have falsely assumed that what is distinct was in fact the essence of his teaching. The tool is primarily concerned with ascertaining ‘a critically assured minimum’” (Gospels and Tradition, 176). Indeed, it would appear to be a necessary assumption of the so-called “Third Quest for the Historical Jesus” that Jesus has more in common with his Jewish contemporaries than not (See Ben Witherington III, The Jesus Quest: The Third Search for the Jew of Nazareth [Downers Grove: InterVarsity, 1995]; Darrell L. Bock, Studying the Historical Jesus: A Guide to Sources and Methods [Grand Rapids: Baker, 2002], 147–52; Blomberg, “Where Do We Start Studying Jesus?” 25–28). So, without these false assumptions, we may plausibly surmise that those sayings and deeds which reflect a first-century Jewish cultural-theological background are authentic, along with some additional statements and deeds that identify unique characteristics of Jesus’ life and teaching. This would not authenticate all of Jesus’ sayings and deeds since those reflective of later distinctively Christian belief, as well as those that are consistent with ideas from multiple cultural settings, would fail to be authenticated by either criterion.

20 At this point we need to note that from the standpoint of logic, these criteria can only be used as positive, and not negative, tests for authenticity. That is, we can say with some confidence that New Testament texts that pass these criteria are authentic. But we cannot say that texts which fail to meet these criteria are inauthentic. It simply doesn’t follow logically that texts that cannot be known by these means to be authentic must therefore be inauthentic. All we can legitimately say about texts that do not meet the criteria is that they are not known (on historical grounds) to be authentic. Sound historical method requires a withholding of judgment one way or the other on such texts. Yet, it is here that many liberal scholars—especially the Jesus Seminar—falter. They tend to approach the Gospels with the unwarranted assumption that they are guilty until proven innocent, legendary unless proven authentic. Armed with this assumption they automatically assume further that any text that fails to meet the criteria of authenticity must be a fabrication of the early church. (For documentation of this egregious approach to the NT Gospels, see Quarles, “Higher Criticism: What Has It Shown?” and the articles in Wilkins and Moreland, Jesus Under Fire.) Another critical error in methodology that many liberal scholars commit is the inconsistent application of the criteria of authenticity. This results in many texts that ought to pass muster being dismissed as inauthentic. Such inconsistent application of the criteria appears usually to be motivated by a hidden Christological criterion that refuses to allow any text to be recognized as authentic if it supports a high Christology, whether or not it meets stated criteria of authenticity. As Darrell Bock puts it, this approach is not good historiography but philosophical bias (see Darrell L. Bock, “The Words of Jesus in the Gospels: Live, Jive, or Memorex?” in Wilkins and Moreland, Jesus Under Fire, 90–94).

21 See Blomberg, The Historical Reliability of the Gospels, 310–21; idem, The Historical Reliability of John’s Gospel: Issues and Commentary (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 2001); Scot McKnight, “Who Is Jesus? An Introduction to Jesus Studies,” in Wilkins and Moreland, Jesus Under Fire, 51–72; Craig A. Evans, “What Did Jesus Do?” in ibid., 101–15; idem, Fabricating Jesus: How Modern Scholars Distort the Gospels (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 2006); Bock, “The Words of Jesus”; Darrell L. Bock, Jesus According to Scripture: Restoring the Portrait from the Gospels (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2002); Witherington, The Jesus Quest; and Eddy and Boyd, The Jesus Legend.

22 William Lane Craig, The Son Rises: The Historical Evidence for the Resurrection of Jesus (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 1981); idem, Reasonable Faith, 255–98; “Did Jesus Rise from the Dead?” in Wilkins and Moreland, Jesus Under Fire, 141–76; Gary R. Habermas and Michael R. Licona, The Case of the Resurrection of Jesus (Grand Rapids: Kregel, 2004); and Licona, The Resurrection of Jesus. See also, N.T. Wright, The Resurrection of the Son of God (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2003); and Richard Swinburne, The Resurrection of God Incarnate, 145–86.

23 Taylor, Introducing Apologetics, 277–78.

24 Gary R. Habermas, “Jesus and the Inspiration of Scripture,” 15.

25 See, e.g., Craig, Reasonable Faith, 299–327; Ben Witherington, “The Christology of Jesus Revisted,” in Beckwith, Craig, and Moreland, To Everyone an Answer, 145–59; Habermas and Licona, The Case for the Resurrection of Jesus, 166–71; and Craig A. Evans, “What Can We Know about the Historical Jesus?” Areopagus Journal 3, no. 4 (2003): 5–13. For more in-depth accounts, see Craig S. Keener, The Historical Jesus of the Gospels (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2009), esp. 256–82; N. T. Wright, Jesus and the Victory of God (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 1997); Larry W. Hurtado, How on Earth Did Jesus Become a God? Historical Questions about Earliest Devotion to Jesus (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2005); and Michael F. Bird, Are You the One Who Is to Come? The Historical Jesus and the Messianic Question (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2009).

26 Craig, Reasonable Faith, 300.

27 For more on the authenticity of Jesus’ use of “Son of Man” and its significance, see Craig, Reasonable Faith, 315–18; Ben Witherington III, The Christology of Jesus (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1990), 233–62; and Blomberg, The Historical Reliability of the Gospels, 314–15.

28 The notion of Jesus’ virgin conception would also seem to meet the criterion of dissimilarity (see John Nolland, The Gospel of Matthew: A Commentary on the Greek Text [Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2005], 92).

29 For a defense of which see Dictionary of Jesus and the Gospels, ed. Joel B. Green and Scot McKnight (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 1992), s.v. “Birth of Jesus” by Ben Witherington III; Darrell L. Bock, Luke, 2 vols. (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1994, 1996), 103–5, 199–201; D. A. Carson, Matthew 1–12 (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1995), 71–73.

30 See Craig, Reasonable Faith, 333–404; Davis, Risen Indeed, 62–84, 168–90; Habermas and Licona, The Case for the Resurrection of Jesus, 43–77; and Licona, The Resurrection of Jesus, 582–610. I should point out that the latter work by Licona is the most thorough and careful defense of the resurrection to date using this approach.

31 Craig, Reasonable Faith, 399.

32 Much of what follows is adapted from John Wenham’s seminal work on this topic, Christ and the Bible, 3rd ed. (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1994). Wenham, however, did not explicitly appeal to the criteria of authenticity to justify his use of particular texts.

33 Bart D. Ehrman, Jesus: Apocalyptic Prophet of the New Millennium (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 164.

34 Ibid., 165.

35 See Bruce M. Metzger, “The Formulas Introducing Quotations of Scripture in the NT and the Mishnah,” JBL 70, no. 4 (1951): 297–307; Michael Fishbane, “Use, Authority, and Interpretation of Mikra at Qumran,” in Mikra: Text, Translation, Reading, and Interpretation of the Hebrew Bible in Ancient Judaism and Early Christianity, ed. Martin Jan Mulder and Harry Sysling (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1988), 339–77; Devorah Dimant, “Use and Interpretation of Mikra in the Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha,” in ibid., 379–419; Yehoshua Amir, “Authority and Interpretation of Scripture in the Writings of Philo,” in ibid., 421–53; Louis H. Feldman, “Use, Authority and Exegesis of Mikra in the Writings of Josephus,” in ibid., 455–518; and Rimon Kasher, “The Interpretation of Scripture in Rabbinic Literature,” in ibid., 547–94. Both Metzger and Fishbane specifically address the issue of introductory formulas such as gegraptai. Hebrew equivalents of gegraptai which are frequently used both in the Qumran literature and the Mishnah are šnʼmr (the niphal of ʼmr) and šktôb.

36 Wenham, Christ and the Bible, 28.

37 The authenticity of this episode is support by (1) the fact that it is part of a “Son of Man” text, meeting the criterion of dissimilarity (see discussion above); and (2) the proverbial saying that Jesus uses to justify both his and David’s actions—“The Sabbath was made for man and not man for the Sabbath”—echoes an earlier rabbinic teaching (Mekilta on Exod 31:12–17 [Shabbat 1]). Thanks to Craig Evans (Fabricating Jesus, 120) for this latter point.

38 Wenham, Christ and the Bible, 33. Cf. B. M. Metzger who shows that the use in early Christianity and Judaism of such stylized formulas introducing quotations of the OT indicates that the writers “had the very highest view of the inspiration of the Scriptures which they quote” (“The Formulas Introducing Quotations,” 306).

39 See Raymond E. Brown, The Gospel According to John, 2 vols. (New York: Doubleday, 1966, 1970), 483, 553–54.

40 We owe this insight to John Wenham, Christ and the Bible, 34.

41 It is important to point out here that the point being made does not depend upon being able to demonstrate the authenticity of each cited pericope, many of which are disputed. All that matters is that the motif of Jesus attributing OT texts to God’s authorship is multiply attested in texts whose settings sometimes manifest an early Palestinian Jewish background. The best explanation for the pervasive existence of this motif in multiple layers of the Gospel tradition is that it traces back to the historical Jesus. But for defenses of the authenticity of these and other relevant pericope, see Bock, Luke; Blomberg, Matthew (Nashville: B&H, 1992); idem, The Historical Reliability of the Gospels; idem The Historical Reliability of John’s Gospel; and Keener, The Historical Jesus of the Gospels.

42 For solid evidence for the historicity of David and the United Monarchy, see Walter C. Kaiser Jr., “Is the Old Testament Historically Reliable?” in this volume (p. 201); and K. A. Kitchen, On the Reliability of the Old Testament (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003), 81–158.

43 Identifying the Zechariah Jesus refers to in this text is notoriously difficult. He appears to refer, in accordance with Matthew’s wording, to Zechariah the prophet who is explicitly called “the son of Berechiah” (Zech 1:1). But there is no indication in the OT that this Zechariah was martyred (though there are some post-Christian rabbinic traditions that may indicate such—see Targum to Lam 2:20 and Midrash Rabbah on Eccl 3:16). Most scholars think that the correct referent is the Zechariah described in 2 Chr 24:20–22 and who was killed “in the courtyard of the LORD’s temple.” Yet this Zechariah is called “the son of Jehoiada.” Whether the discrepancy is due to a textual error (William Hendriksen, Matthew [Grand Rapids: Baker, 1973], 838), or Jehoiada being Zechariah’s grandfather and Berechiah his otherwise unknown father (D. A. Carson, Matthew 13–28 [Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1995], 485n), or an intentional literary conflation of the prophet Zechariah son of Berechiah and 2 Chronicles’s Zechariah son of Jehoiada (Robert H. Gundry, Matthew: A Commentary on His Literary and Theological Art [Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1982], 471; and Nolland, The Gospel of Matthew, 946–47), it seems best to understand this Zechariah as the son of Jehoiada described in 2 Chr 24:20–22. For a strong case for this view, see Donald A. Hagner, Matthew 14–28 (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 1995), 676–77. For some contrary views, see Blomberg, The Historical Reliability of the Gospels, 246–48; and J. M. Ross, “Which Zechariah?” IBS 9 (1987): 70–73.

44 Donald A. Hagner, Matthew 14–28, 677. On the alternative view that Jesus refers in this text to Zechariah the prophet (Zech 1:1), he would be making an almost identical point, though his inclusio would be chronological rather than canonical. That is, he would be saying “from the beginning of human history (when Abel was martyred) to the time of the last martyred prophet (presumably Zechariah who ministered near the end of OT history).”

45 One might question the authenticity of these Lucan and Johannine texts on the grounds that they are post-resurrection narratives. In response, we first note that these pericope, even if inauthentic, provide independent attestation to the theme of Jesus’ delegation of authority to the apostles found in Mark, M, and Q. Moreover, in the linear structure of my argument, the points being defended here come after we have already established the historical fact of Jesus’ resurrection. So, one cannot deny the authenticity of these texts on the sole ground that they portray a post-resurrection (i.e., supernatural) Jesus.

46 McKnight, “Who Is Jesus?” in Jesus Under Fire, 63.

47 Evans, “What Did Jesus Do?” in Jesus Under Fire, 105.

48 Blomberg, The Historical Reliability of John’s Gospel, 201 (italics his).

49 Ibid., 214.

50 Philippians, 1–2 Thessalonians, and Philemon are the only exceptions.

51 On the authorship of 2 Peter by the apostle Peter, see Wegner, Wilder, and Bock, “Do We Have the Right Canon?” in this volume (p. 393).

52 Wenham, Christ and the Bible, 117.

53 See Hagner, Matthew 14–28, 771.

54 See Richard Bauckham, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses: The Gospels as Eyewitness Testimony (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2006), 267; and Bock, Luke, 1716–17.

55 Meredith G. Kline, The Structure of Biblical Authority (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1972), 27.

56 See ibid., 35–38, 45–68.

57 Ibid., 63, 65.

58 Ibid., 45.

59 Köstenberger, Kellum, and Quarles, The Cradle, the Cross, and the Crown, 30.

60 Wenham, Christ and the Bible, 113.

MS Number

Date

Contents

Classification

P^1

3rd

Matt 1:1–9, 12, 14–20 (17 vv)

Category I, Strict text

P^15

3rd

1 Cor 7:18–8:4 (28 vv)

Category I, at least normal text

P^22

3rd

John 15:25–16:2, 21–32 (17 vv)

Category I, at least normal text

P^23

3rd

Jas 1:10–12, 15–18 (7 vv)

Category I, Strict text

P^27

3rd

Rom 8:12–22, 24–27; 8:33–9:3, 5–9 (30 vv)

Category I, Strict text

P^30

3rd

1 Thess 4:12–13, 16–17; 5:3, 8–10, 12–18, 25–28 (19 vv)

Category I, at least normal text

P^32

c. 200

Titus 1:11–15; 2:3–8 (11 vv)

Category I, at least normal text

P^35

4th? 3rd?

Matt 25:12–15, 20–23 (8 vv)

Category I, Strict text

P^39

3rd

John 8:14 (1 v)

Category I, Strict text

P^49

3rd

Eph 4:16–29; 4:31–5:13 (29 vv)

Category I, at least normal text

P^53

3rd

Matt 26:29–40; Acts 9:33–10:1 (24 vv)

Category I, at least normal text

P^64 + P^67

c. 200

Matt 3:9–15; 5:20–22, 25–28; 26:7–8, 10, 14–15, 22–23, 31–33 (24 vv)

Category I, Strict text

P^65

3rd

1 Thess 1:3–2:1, 6–13 (17 vv)

Category I, Strict text (too brief for certainty)

P^70

3rd

Matt 2:13–16; 2:22–3:1; 11:26–27; 12:4–5; 24:3–6, 12–15 (19 vv)

Category I, Strict text

P^72

3rd /4th

1 Pet 1:1–5:14; 2 Pet 1:1–3:18; Jude (191 vv)

Category I, at least normal text

P^75

3rd

Luke 3:18–4:2; 4:34–5:10; 5:37–18:18; 22:4–24:53; John 1:1–11:45, 48–57; 12:3–13:1, 8–9; 14:8–30; 15:7–8

Category I, Strict text

P^77

2nd/3rd

Matt 23:30–39 (10 vv)

Category I, at least normal text, carelessly written

0189

2nd/3rd

Acts 5:3–21 (19 vv)

Category I, at least normal text

Mark

John

Q

L

M

Exorcisms

Capernaum demoniac (1:21–28)

The mute demoniac

(9:32–34; cf. 10:5–8)

Gerasene demoniac (5:1–20)

Nature Miracles

Stilling the storm (4:35–41)

Feeding the five thousand (6:30–44)

Feeding the five thousand (6:1–13)

Draft of fishes (5:1–11)

Walking on the water (6:45–52)

Walking on the water (6:16–21)

Healings

Withered hand (3:1–6)

Official’s son (4:46–54)

Centurion’s boy (Matt 8:5–13)

Bent woman (13:10–17)

Blind Bartimaeus (10:46–52)

Man born blind (9:1–34)

Resurrections

Daughter of Jairus (5:21–43)

Lazarus (11:1–44)

Widow’s son (7:11–17)

A Coordination of the New Testament Resurrection Narratives

Story Segments

Matt 28

Mark 16

Luke 24

John 20–21

1 Cor 15

A. Mary Magdalene and Others Go to the Tomb Early on Sunday Morning

28:1

16:1–3

24:1

(cf. v. 21)

20:1

15:4

B. The Empty Tomb Is Open and Angels Are Present

28:2–7

16:4–7

24:2–8

20:1

(cf. vv. 12–13)

C. The Women Report the Empty Tomb to the Disciples

28:8

16:8

24:9–11

20:2

D. Peter and Another Visit the Empty Tomb

(cf. v. 7)

24:12

(cf. v. 24)

20:3–10

E. Some Women See the Resurrected Jesus

28:9–15

16:9–11

20:11–18

F. Jesus Appears on the Emmaus Road and to Peter

16:12–13

24:13–35

15:5

G. Jesus Appears to the Disciples

16:14

24:36–43

20:19–25

15:5

H. Jesus (8 days later)

Appears

Over (in Galilee)

Forty

Days (in Jerusalem)

and

Then (Mt. of Olives)

Ascends

20:26–31

28:16–20

16:15–18

21:1–25

15:6

Luke 24:44–49

and Acts 1:3–5

15:7

16:19–20

Luke 24:50–53

and Acts 1:6–12