Busting Bible Myths
Notes
Transcript
I used to love watching the TV show Mythbusters.
Anyone ever watch that show?
There are myths about how various things work, and they set out to prove or disprove the myth.
For example. Why do most people run in the rain? They want to minimize the amount of time they are exposed to water pouring from the sky.
But what if I told you that by running you are actually running into more water that would have otherwise avoided you and thus you end up more wet than if you had walked? Mythbusters went to work and they weighed the dry person before they went into the rain, and then afterward again to see how much weight they gained from the water. The end result? Those who walked gained less wight than those who ran!
Another water related one is that if you were driving a convertable, if you acheive a certain speed in the rain the water deflecting off the car and windsheild would essentially function as a shield and water falling from the sky would make it into the car and you could stay dry.
What do you think about that?
The answer? this one is true…ish. yes, there is a speed at which you could drive that would prevent water from falling into the car because of the deflected water become a shield. HOWEVER, you would have to somehow drive in a tunnel or something just to get up to that speed and that takes time, AND you would have to drive way faster than would be safe for the wet conditions.
What I loved most about the show is that they tried the most creative and ingenuitive means to try to make the myth work before they gave up on it. You’ve heard the phrase, it went over like a lead balloon. Well, they wanted to see if they could make a led balloon fly. And so they found a place to make lead so thin that it would tear easier than paper. They filled it with helium and they made it float. It’s possible to make a lead balloon.
But they used every available means to try to see if the myth would work or not.
I have wondered in the past how they would approach the myths about the Bible. There are several things are commonly said about the Bible that are historically and factually inaccurate. And yet they are repeated by people who really should know better! Smart people! Educated People! They repeat these myths over and over and it doesn’t matter how often they are proven incorrect, they continue to propagate them.
And I have to conclude. These individuals aren’t actually seeking truth. They want the myths to be true, so they fail to approach it with the correct methodology, mind, and, most importantly, heart.
As a result, even when the details are staring them square in the face they still refuse to believe.
Something that I have said numerous times and has been impressed upon me since high school is that truth never needs to be afraid of investigation. If its true, it will withstand the scrutiny.
HOWEVER. If you are looking for reasons to disbelieve you will find it. Something I have seen over and over again is people “investigating” something for themselves, which I encourage, but they only read one side of the debate. They only read the skeptics side. They don’t give a fair hearing to the response of those defending the faith.
So even though they claim to be researching everything for themselves to try and discover the truth, in reality their mind is already set. They have no intention of discovering the truth. They are looking for reasons to disbelieve.
I pray that never happens to any of us. By all means investigate! If you are having doubts, instead of running from those, be willing to look at them. Be willing to hear the best both sides have to offer.
I firmly believe that the Bible and consequently our entire faith CAN withstand the scrutiny.
What I want to do today is examine some myths that are advanced and commonly held to both inside of and outside of Christianity. Two myths coming from skeptics. One myth from within Christendom. We are in this mini series I’ve title “From God to Us” which borrows from a book by the same title.
This is really not going to be a sermon today. I’m not opening a text and expositing the Word. Last week we talked about the nature of God’s Word as Inspired. But which works comprise the canon of Scripture? Scripture is inspired, but which books are Scripture?
How has God preserved his word over the centuries such that we can have confidence that we have the very word of God today?
I’m looking to bust three major myths today. I’m only going to scratch the surface on these issues. I could have made each myth it’s own lecture, but I don’t want to use our time this way. I want us to actually study the inspired, inerrant, infallible word of God!
My hope with this is it will equip us and strengthen us for our conversations with others around us.
Myth #1: The Canon was Decided at Nicaea.
Myth #1: The Canon was Decided at Nicaea.
We have the 66 books of the Bible that we consider to be the Canon of Scripture. The word canon means “rule” or “rule of measurement”. The word canon has to do with the idea that it is these books are the “rule of faith” it is by these books that form our faith, our doctrine, our practice, and from no other books.
But other ancient books exists. Why aren’t they “canonical”? Some have argued that books titled, the shepherd of Hermas should be part of the canon. Others have argued that the books of Hebrews, James, or even Revelation, should NOT be considered part of the canon.
If you had a first edition copy of the KJV, or a modern copy of the NRSV, or the CEB, you would find books labeled “apocrypha”
Are these book inspired? Do they belong in the canon?
How was the Canon developed or determined?
A myth that significantly popularized by the DaVinci Code was that the Canon was decided by a bunch of men in funny hats at the Council of Nicea.
If you aren’t familial with the Council of Nicea, it was an incredibly important council that was primarily about the nature of the trinity and how Christ relates to the Father. There were people teaching heresies about Jesus and the Council met to give to help articulate the Biblical position with precision. THis council was held in the year 325 AD.
As important as this council was, there is, however zero historical evidence that the canon of Scripture was discussed on any level at Nicaea, much less determined the canon.
I’ve heard some wild myths about what happened at Nicea, including the men putting all the puts of the bible on the table which formed a massive heap, and then some fell off and whatever stayed on the table was put into the Bible.
That’s an absurd story. It never happened.
How, then was the canon established?
I think the first question we need to ask is who gets to determine if something is canon or not? Some have argued that age determines canon. The oldest books get in.
Other have argued the church has that authority to determine canon. This is what the Catholic Church claims.
Others have a variety of other criteria such as authorship, spiritual value, or widespread usage. While these factors may help gives clues about why a book is recognized as canon, they don’t actually determine the canon itself.
Who, then determines that canon?
God does. Canon is determined by inspiration. The books that God breathed out, as we discussed last week, those are canon; no more, no less.
Geisler and nix put it this way
It is the inspiration of a book which determines its canonicity. God gives the divine authority to a book and men receive of God receive it. God reveals and His people recognize what he reveals. Canonicity is determined by God and discovered by man
Our responsibility then is to discover and recognize what God has inspired, not make our own determinations of what is or isn’t canon.
For some this doesn’t solve the problem because we still have to ask how we know if something is inspired or not. But this really is an important distinction and asking the right questions will lead us to the right answers. If canonicity is determined by anything else we are essentially placing human authority over the Scriptures, and that is not a position we should take.
We must take the posture of recognition and discovery.
Where does that lead us?
How were books recognized as authoritative by those who received the works in the first place?
Inspired books were written by a prophet, apostle, or someone who had a close connection with a prophet or apostle. Several books were rejected on this criteria, including many of the apocryphal books. Some of the books that we now consider canon were doubted by some on this critera. We don’t know who wrote the book of Hebrews, so some wanted to reject it on that basis. The book, however, contains many marks of close association with the apostles, and thus it was eventually universally recognized.
Inspired books contain only true information, spiritually and historically. It could not contradict an older book that was already recognized as Scripture. Some of the apocryphal books fail this test. They have teachings that contradict books that had previously been received as Scripture. Others contain historically inaccurate information. Some books are called “psudopigraphal” which means they were written by someone who put an apostles name on it. Many of the so-call gnostic Gospels fit this category. There is a book called the Gospel of Thomas, and it claims to have been written by Thomas, the doubting disciple. There is ample evidence, however, to demonstrate that he didn’t actually write it. Books whose author’s lied about their identity are not inspired works.
Inspired books are life-giving and spiritually profitable. How many of you have read the apocrypha? Feel free to read them. I haven’t read all of the apocrypha, but I have read a lot of it. It lacks the life-giving and spiritually profitable qualities that our Bible has. They’re interesting, but not life-giving.
Inspired books were immediately recognized and received as inspired by the recipients. Paul wrote more letters than we have in the New Testament. Why aren’t they all in the Bible? Some books were clearly inspired from the very beginning. Others were not. The early church recognized which were which immediately, and those which were inspired have been preserved.
When these criteria are applied, we end up with the 66 books of the bible we know and love as our Scripture.
A walk through history reveals that the church almost universally accepted these exact books. Lists of books from different people in different places during the first 200 years of church history reveals remarkable consistency.
This doesn’t ignore the fact that there have been debates. But often these debates are born out of someone disagreeing with the doctrine taught in a given book, not on the criteria of what we talked through above. In many ways, that is a gross oversimplification. But we only have so much time.
The canon was not determined by the catholic church. The canon was not determined at Nicaea. The canon was not determined by any human. God spoke, and the church responded. Inspired books were nearly universally recognized as inspired from the very beginning, and documentation from church history gives us confidence that is that case.
Myth #2: The Bible is like a Game of Telephone.
Myth #2: The Bible is like a Game of Telephone.
I’m sure some of you have had the opportunity to looks at books that were over 100 years old. I think the oldest book I’ve personally handled was probably in the 150-200 year range.
These books are dusty and very fragile, and they are only 200 years old.
The Bible is between 2000-4000 years old. The most recent book is Revelation, written around 2000 years ago, and the oldest book is probably Job written around 4000 years ago.
What happens to old books? They deteriorate. Especially because of the available technology their documents didn’t last as long unless it was a stone tablet.
The net result? We do not have the original documents of even a single biblical book. Or really any book from that era.
What we have are copies of copies of the original. That’s just a historical fact.
There are some people who take this fact and create one of the most common myths out of it: The bible is like a game of telephone.
I’m sure you’ve all played telephone at some point in your lives. As the message moves from person to person, the message changes and what you get at the end is nothing like what was originally said.
People say that because we only have copies of copies of copies of copies of the original bible, we cannot know what the original said.
As it was copied they changed theology, they’ve changed what the verses say, they changed what Jesus did or said. This is what many claim.
But is that accurate? Is that true?
There are ways of figuring this out.
There are essentially three main criteria for determining the historical reliability of an ancient text.
How Old? The time proximity of copies to the original document
How Many? The number of available copies to compare
How Far? The geographical spread of those copies.
The closest to the original documents you can get, the better!
The more copies you have to compare and contrast how well people have copied what was written, the better!
The more widespread those copies are the better because if it still shows consistency we can have confidence it was copied accurately.
The Bible has the oldest (and I’m defining oldest as closest to the original) of all old books
The Bible has the most copies of all old books.
The bible is the most widely distributed document in the history of the world.
Let’s illustrate this by way of comparison.
There is an ancient book call the Gallic Wars by Julius Ceasar.
This book was written around 50 BC.
The earliest known copy is from around AD 900. That’s a 950 year time gap.
There are only 10 known manuscripts of the Gallic Wars available to us.
What about the New Testament?
It was written between AD 40-90 depending on the book we are studying.
The earliest known manuscript is estimated to be around AD 114 for a fragment, and around 200 for entire books.
There are over 5800 manuscripts have been found of the NT from across all these years. And if we count quotations from sermons, and other translations, that number balloons to over 20,000 references of text.
In fact, the bible was so heavily quoted in sermons, and so many sermons have been preserved for us, that even if we didn’t have a single manuscript of the NT, we could piece together the fact majority of it just from sermon quotations.
So there are 20,000+ copies and we can compare and contrast all the manuscripts. And when you read a manuscript from AD 700 and it agrees almost entirely with the copes we have from AD 150, and the one from 400, and the 500, and so on, the whole “The bible is a game a telephone thing” Doesn’t ring true.
That was an amazing pun just then.
We don’t just have the beginning and the end. We have all the stops in between and there is over 99% agreement across all manuscripts, fragments, and quotations.
no one doubts that our copies of Gallic wars or other similar documents reflect the original work. But they want to throw shade at the Bible.
So many of the early copies that we have are old enough to be first or second second generation copies.
Even the staunchest critics of the bible, men like Bart Erhman that I mentioned last week, has to admit that the Bible is the most well attested book of ancient history. What it said when it was first written it still says today, and we can have absolute confidence in that reality.
Myth #3: Textual Criticism is for Liberals and Heretics.
Myth #3: Textual Criticism is for Liberals and Heretics.
I think I’m actually going to save the bulk of this for next week. It really does pair with Bible translations questions.
One of the things that we have to reckon with when it comes to studying ancient manuscripts is that we have over 20,000 references to compare....they don’t all match up 100%. There is 99% agreement, but what do we do with that 1%?
Every time there is a difference between manuscripts, that difference is called a variant.
We evaluate those variants with a process called textual criticism.
What is textual criticism? The word criticism doesn’t mean being negative about the text. it refers to looking at the differences that do exist between ancient manuscripts with a critical eye in an effort to determine what the original reading was.
Textual Criticism is the process of evaluating variants to determine the original reading
There are people who believe that this process of textual criticism was developed by and is used by liberal scholars who hate God’s word, or heretics who want to pervert God’s Word. This is a common thing that you might hear from a KJV only person. Not all KJVers, but some.
But what many KJV only folks don’t understand is that this process has been going on for almost as long as the Bible has been copied. The KJV was primarily based on the Textus Receptus. The TR was assembling using textual criticism. The translators of the KJV itself used textual criticism as they wrote the translation. Textual criticism has always been part of the preservation and translation of the Bible.
Why is Textual criticism necessary?
We believe the original books of the bible were without any errors. We don’t believe that those who copied the Bible were necessarily always perfect. They made mistakes. Sometimes it was spelling. Sometimes they messed up word order. But there are mistakes.
Let’s say you live in 300 AD and your job is to copy the bible. You have two copies available to you, and one has an apparent spelling error and the other doesn’t. Which one do you copy? The one without a spelling error. That, at base level, is textual criticism.
Sometimes Scribes got that process right. Sometimes they made mistakes even as they made those judgment calls.
Here we are today doing the best we can to sort it out.
Here are a few of the basic facts you need to know.
All available documents agree 99% percent.
The 1% that disagrees, the vast majority of those are spelling changes or word order errors.
Of the ones that aren’t spelling errors, the differences are subtle enough that they don’t change any major doctrines.
Of the ones that might have an impact on theological understanding, it is on a minor point of theology that has microscopic implications for our understanding. The net result? The Bible still teaches the same thing, even after you consider the variants.
We’ve already noted that the Bible is not like a game of telephone. Textual Criticism doesn’t change that.
The goal of textual criticism should be to answer this question: What did God say?
Whatever we can do to understand that, we do it!
By understanding the process of textual criticism, we should be filled with even more confidence that God has preserved his word!
Even where there are uncertainties about what the original text said in certain places, there is no uncertainty about the message that God intended to give to us.
Textual Criticism is a massive topic, and I’ll talk about it a little more next week. But for now I hope this was enough information to provide an understanding of what it is and why its necessary, and why it isn’t for liberals and heretics. It’s for people who want to know what God said as precisely as possible.
And the end result of busting all these myths should be a renewed confidence in the Word!
The canon was no decided by men in funny hats. The canon was universally recognized even from the earliest days.
The Bible has not undergone massive changes like a game of telephone. The manuscripts available to us have remarkable consistency.
Textual criticism is not merely for liberals and heretics. Even as we sort through the variants, it only increases our confidence that the message of the Bible has not changed from day one.
God has preserved His word!
Next week I’ll go into a few more details about Textual Criticism and then start walking through how to select a translation.
If you want more information about textual variants, textual criticism, and God’s preservation, I brought with me a few resources that you can thumb through and feel free to ask me any questions.
For now, let’s pray.