Can we trust the Bible? Feat. Michael Williams

In our second interview we are joined by Michael Williams, who has a degree in divinity, a masters degree in education, a master philosophy degree in pastoral care and people addicted to alcohol, a Phd in individual differences and alcohol dependencies, as well as experience in rehabilitation work for over thirty plus years.

Michael explores the question of whether or not we can actually trust the Bible. Why trust the Old Testament, why trust the New Testament? What about the errors that appear in the Bible?

Michael outlines the overwhelming evidence for the authenticity and credibility of the Bible, leaving the skeptic convicted and the christian assured.

Music by
Over the limits
Vernacolmusic

Chapters

• 0:00 Intro
• 5:58 Can we trust the Old Testament?
• 17:00 Manuscript history
• 19:41 Can we trust the New Testament?
• 28:00 External sources
• 30:50 Proximity test
• 45:00 Conclusions
• 48:31 "Never be afraid to let your faith go into the witness stand"

Transcript

Wildfire podcast is an extension of Wildfire, which has a focus of igniting men and women of God into a deeper discipleship with Christ, instilling people with a passion to radically and relentlessly pursue Christ wherever that leads.

That God's truth will spread like a wildfire.

Hello, welcome back to another podcast.

And I'm joined with a very special guest this evening, this afternoon, this morning, whenever you're listening to this podcast.

Would you like to introduce yourself, sir?

Sure.

My name is Michael Williams, and I was born in Coleraine.

And do you want me to say a bit more?

Go for it.

Just go.

I was born and bred in Coleraine, and educated in the Irish Society, and went to Coleraine Inst, and so on.

Yeah, that's me.

And then after I finished school, I went to Bible College for a year.

But I ended up staying four years.

And the year that I went there was just one year training in Bible education.

And so I did that.

But then I applied for a second year in training in evangelism, which I did.

And then they offered me a post there to stay on as an evangelist for two years working for the Methodist Church in England.

So the college called Cliff College, which was located in Derbyshire, near a village called Calver.

And it's basically Methodist, but there were other denominations there as well.

And so for two and a half years, I spent traveling the length and breadth of England.

I think the longest time I slept in one bed was two weeks for about three and a half years, because I was on the move all the time.

It was right at that time I met Rose, who is now my wife.

And so then when that all finished, I went to university and felt that the Lord was leading me into becoming a school teacher, particularly a teacher of religious education.

So I did my Divinity degree at Glasgow University, and then my PGCE at Queen's, and then subsequently became an RE teacher.

I taught in Balamone in Dalriada for 12 years.

I was head of RE there for 12 years.

And then I worked for the Western Educational Library Board as the RE advisor.

I did that for four years.

And then after that, well, I changed direction entirely.

Since 1980, I've been involved with an organization called Styrus.

And I used to run the local committee meetings and speak at the Styrus meeting.

Styrus is the Greek word for the cross.

And it's an organization that reaches out to people who have addiction issues.

My own family was troubled by addiction, so that's what gave me the interest.

My brother Arthur was the founder of Styrus.

And so I got alongside him.

He was in Glasgow as a pastor at that time.

I got alongside him and tried to help out as much as I could.

So that was from 1980.

And so then when I retired from education, or rather left education, didn't retire, left education, I went to work for Styrus full time.

And retired from Styrus after 49 years of involvement, one way or another, just in 2019.

And so yeah, that's me.

Well, the people, we've literally just jumped right in.

They now know you and your life story.

I'm sorry, I shouldn't have done that.

I personally loved it.

They're gonna love it.

But you did say, ince, you said ince, now called the grammar.

Absolutely.

Absolutely.

Contra-controversial.

But then you also said within the same breath that you taught at Dariada.

Yes.

So the hot question is, why you're really here is, what was better, ince or Dariada?

As a school teacher, Dariada was really good.

As a pupil, calling ince was much better.

Yes.

Diplomatic answer.

Fantastic.

OK.

So just to summarize, if you could give us your credentials, because you threw out a few, that is your degrees, that is your experience.

If you had to just give us a bullet point.

OK.

First degree was divinity.

That's the degree that a Presbyterian minister would study for.

In Scotland, it would be the Church of Scotland ministry.

That was my first degree.

Then when I was teaching, I did a master's degree in education, looking at educational issues, because that's what my job was.

Then when I moved into Styrist, the main thrust of the work of Styrist working among alcoholics is that pastoral care is the approach that we adopted, that we adopt.

And so I thought I would put that to the test.

So applied to University of Wales, in Bangor, North Wales, and I did an M.Phil, a Master of Philosophy degree, looking at pastoral care and people addicted to alcohol.

And then later on, that led to a PhD in individual differences and alcohol dependence.

And so, yeah, that was it.

Fantastic, fantastic.

Wow, so that's about a million more degrees than me and Peter have combined.

You have more degrees than I do of Des in this earth.

So all of that to say, the reason why I got to say it is to show what a special guest we have in yourself here, the credibility that you have, the knowledge, the wisdom that you have, and also add on to that your relationship with God and His Spirit, ministering to you.

So we've truly got a special guest in yourself, and we're very excited for you to unpack this topic, which leads to the topic of, can we trust the Bible?

And so where we want to start off is, it's a topic that every generation struggles with, because that's it.

That's the crux of what we believe.

If the Bible will not be true, then nothing is, we have no foundation.

So by defending that, you've defend the central core of the Christian message, and that includes the resurrection of Jesus.

So the first question that I want to ask you is, can we trust the Old Testament?

Okay, trusting the Old Testament.

First of all, I want to say that as a Christian, I want to put all, for me, the Bible holds all authority.

And so we'll maybe come to that later on, unpack a little bit more.

Well, the thing about the Old Testament, we have to understand that we inherited the Old Testament from the Jewish background.

And the Jews had it for a long time.

And most early Christians from the day of Pentecost, when the birthday of the church, most of the early Christians were Jewish.

So they simply brought their scriptures with them.

And so when we think about the Old Testament, we have to think about the story of how the Jews put it all together.

From the way back from when God began to instruct people to write this down.

I mean, God was the first person to actually write the scripture.

Did you know that?

Writing of the Ten Commandments, the Bible tells us that it was with his own finger that God wrote the Ten Commandments and then gave the tablets to Moses.

So that writing process began with God himself.

And then afterwards, he said to Moses, now Moses, write this down.

And then after that, there were other people.

Joshua, God said to Joshua, now Joshua, write this down.

And then he said to Isaiah, Isaiah, write this down.

And then he said to Jeremiah, Jeremiah, write this down.

So there was a whole process there going over many, many hundreds of years when God was encouraging people to write things down, to have a written document.

And those were all collated in the Jewish tradition.

Those were all collated over a period of time into three main categories, the law, the prophets and the history books.

And then the other literature, the law was the first five books of the Old Testament.

The prophets were Isaiah, Ezekiel, the minor prophets, and the history books for the Jewish Bible, the history books.

And then of course, moving into the third part, the other literature was things like Psalms and Proverbs and Ecclesiastes and other wisdom literature like that.

So the Jews brought all of that together.

And because they brought all of that together, they then gave it the importance of the written script.

It had to be copied because we don't have the originals.

So it had to be copied.

So what did they do?

Well, they actually formed a group of people that they called scribes, whose job it was to literally spend their life, their career copying scriptures.

They weren't allowed to, of course, there were no photocopiers, there was no handiwavering.

They literally had to do it longhand.

And so from about 400 BC, the first group of scribes were called the Sophoram.

And the Sophoram, they started copying the scripture about 400 BC, and that went into about 100 AD.

And then after the Sophoram, there was the Talmudic Jews, scribes.

And after the Talmudic scribes, there was the Masoretic scribes, and so on.

For 1300 years, from 400 BC to 900 AD, the Jews copied the scriptures meticulously.

And they did it meticulously.

And they weren't allowed to read a word.

They had to copy it letter by letter.

And they did it all by counting.

They gave every word a number, every letter a number, every vowel a number, not vowel, every letter a number.

And then they measured out what was the middle letter of the book that they were copying, the middle letter of the Old Testament, the middle letter of the Pentateuch, and so on.

And by counting all of these things up, they were able to then check that one copy was as good as the other, that it was copied accurately enough.

Now that's the way it went on.

And then, of course, it came by about 167 BC.

Their canon of scripture was fixed into those three groups that I mentioned.

Christianity came along.

We took those three groups and we split them into five.

But the books are exactly the same.

There was really no difference.

Sometimes the Jews would have had, in Judaism, the Jewish Bible would have had two books put in, and one or two was just Samuel, whereas we would split it up and have more books.

So their 22 books became our 39 in the Old Testament.

And so, yeah, that was how all of that developed.

Big question is, can we really trust it?

Yeah.

Hold on.

I know what it was like copying out lines when I was at school.

Yeah.

After a few lines, you make mistakes, you add words in, you get it wrong.

What do you, just natural human nature.

Of course.

So the big question, well, how accurate was it?

Well, really, the truth is we really didn't know that.

Until 1947.

And a wee Arab boy called Muhammad Ad-Dib was looking after his goats in the area of Qumran by the Dead Sea.

And one of his goats climbed up.

Have you heard this story?

One of his goats climbed up the hill and rather than climb up to bring it back down again, he started throwing stones to try and scare it back down again.

And as he threw the stones up, one didn't hit rock, it hit something that broke.

And he climbed up and looked inside a small hole, looked inside a cave where he saw large clay pots about five feet tall.

And he saw them lined up in this cave.

And that was the discovery of 1947 of the Dead Sea Scrolls.

And what they did then was they were able to take those scrolls and they were able to study them.

And from those scrolls, we were able to actually say, well, we've got the documents that we have now 1300 years, and we can go back to documents that are now within 200, 300 years of the actual events, look, of the actual events within a couple of hundred years of things that took place.

And we could measure, well, that's what we've got now.

And these are these documents that date right back.

The documents were put there, by the way, by people called the Essenes in the Qumran community.

And they were frightened of the Romans when the Romans came that they would destroy all the scriptures.

So they hid them away.

And it was this little boy, Muhammad, that found them.

And eventually archaeologists came to hear of them and began to study them.

And what they found was that 95% of the text of our Christian Old Testament was exactly the same, identical, to those texts that were now dated to be within two or 300 years of the actual events.

It was phenomenal.

And you might say to yourself, oh, hold on a minute, 95% is not 100%.

That's exactly what I was going to say.

What the 5% differences, well, I'll give you an illustration of the 5%.

Help me, Michael, understand.

The 5%, let's take, for example, Isaiah 53 and the Suffering Servant Song.

In the original language, 166 words.

From the originals to the one that we have now, there were 17 differences.

Not in the words, but in the letters.

So think about this.

17 letters different from 166 words.

Of those letters, I'm going from memory, not looking at my notes, going from memory.

Of those letters, 10 were to do with spelling changes.

Three or four were to do with stylistic.

And four were to do with stylistic.

Three were to do with changes in other letters, other changes in the letters.

And three were to do with the insertion of the word light.

If you check in your Bible, you'll see that in Isaiah 53, that'll give you a little footnote to say that the word light has been inserted here, that it wasn't in the original manuscript, but it was in the later manuscript.

So when you think about those differences, I mean, Mark, we're talking about 2,000 years.

To have 17 letters with miniscule, one scholar called it, excruciatingly minor changes or minor differences.

Nothing to do with the truth, nothing to do with anything else like that, nothing to do with the fundamental story or the theology of it all.

Just those spelling were letters that were different.

It was a phenomenal breakthrough for that to be the case.

So the way that I would answer your question, having gone around about it all, would be to say, is it reasonable for a Christian today to believe that in the trustworthy of the Old Testament?

And I think I would say definitely it is, knowing the story of the transition that it went through and how accurate it was and how it was proven to be accurate.

The paleontologists, they were the ones that dated the Dead Sea Scrolls to within 125 years of some of the original events.

It's a remarkable discovery that that was made and a tremendous boost for the Christian faith and the authority of the Old Testament.

Yeah, go Christians.

That is incredible.

So just to summarize a few key points there.

You said that it was broken down by the Jews, the Old Testament, the category.

Yeah, give me those three main categories again.

The three categories again were the law, that's Exodus, I'm sorry, Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Nub the law, then the middle section was the prophets.

And in that, they included the history books.

So the prophets would be the minor prophets, Amos, Hosea, the major prophets, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and the history books, one or two, Samuel, Judges, Joshua, and so on, Chronicles, Kings and those historical books.

Then the other, the third category is that they just called it the other literature or sometimes called the wisdom literature, Psalms, Ecclesiastes, the Song of Songs, Proverbs, Lamentations.

Those would be the sort of books that would fit into that.

Yeah.

And we came along and we divided it into five.

Now, I'm wondering if I can get my brain to get around.

We kept the law.

We divided the law and the prophets up into three sections.

We had the minor prophets.

Yeah.

Then we had the major prophets.

Then we had the history books.

Yes.

And then we had the wisdom literature, what we would call.

So that gives us five categories.

Yeah.

But they're exactly the same.

22 books of the Hebrew Bible became the 39 books of the Christian Bible.

They're exactly the same.

Just a way of categorizing the content that is there.

So that's phenomenal.

So we've got the actual content itself and you've got ethics, poetry, you've got law, and those are just fact.

So if you've got a poem, there's no real way to attest it.

It's just a poem or you've got ethics or law.

And so you've got the idea of the variety of content, which we've discussed.

And then you've also got the people that documented it.

Now I'm going to butcher these.

Sufahim.

Sufahim.

Sufahim, yes.

N-O-P-H-E-R-I-M.

So you've got the Jewish community and you've got Sufahim's Talmudics.

Talmudics.

Talmudics.

And then the Masoretics.

And the Masoretics, yes.

And so they are all the different types of people who are documenting this variety of content.

They are the ones that are copying it from the original texts to make new texts because they had no other way of helping it to survive.

They had no other way of maintaining it.

Yes.

So you've got the content itself and how diverse that is.

And you've got the people who are documenting the content.

And then you've got the type.

So that is what they're writing on.

And you said yourself the type of material wouldn't have been able to be preserved.

And so you then have the introduction of scribes who then document that.

And so then you have the beginning of this idea of manuscripts, manuscriptal history.

Two main sources of materials that they wrote on, papyrus and vellum.

Vellum was the one that lasted much longer.

And because it was in the dry area of the Holy Land, near the Dead Sea Scrolls, no moisture, very little moisture in the air, documents like that tended to last, particularly the vellum.

Written in vellum, that's to have leather.

Written in leather.

The papyrus was really just like a reed that was interwoven like basket and then hammered flat and then they wrote in that, but that didn't last too long.

So mostly written on vellum.

Yes, of course.

And that dry.

And of course, the Jewish scriptures that the Christians inherited was only a, I mean, there's a whole vast array of documents that were found there.

Gnostic writings, the Gnostic Gospels, the Nag Hammadi that were found.

A guy was walking across the desert and tripped over something.

He found it was the lid of one of those big tall things and lifted up the lid and found Gnostic Gospels in it that are apocryphal.

We don't hold them as authoritative.

They're not part of our canon, but the phenomenal amount of literature that was there that could be studied and looked at and so on.

Very interesting.

Yeah.

And then that, because I can already hear the people, they're like, okay, so how do you determine about what is canonical and what is not, what is divine?

And I'm not going to get you to talk about that because that's separate, but we have addressed that before in another podcast.

So the Second John podcast, if you're interested in that, we address that right at the start.

So that's brilliant.

And these are all, the reason why we're spending a lot of time in this first question is because a lot of it is going to be transferable here to the new, the same principles.

But we know that from an external point of view, whenever we look at any documents of antiquity or relating to this period, thousands and thousands of years ago, we can apply the same historical principle to attest the reliability or authenticity.

And we're able to identify the date, the origin, the people.

We're able to identify the manuscripts, the type of material, and we're able to identify the history of how they're recorded.

You can go and see, you can go and look at some of these manuscripts.

Some of them are in the British museums and libraries.

It's amazing.

And it's incredible.

The Dead Sea Scrolls is just, again, we can never actually consider.

95% people just don't, they always focus on that 5% and even that 5% is relevant as you discussed, but 95% is just honestly from an archaeological point of view, an historical point of view, that's groundbreaking stuff for antiquity.

So Christians are in good stead in summary.

Absolutely, absolutely.

Brilliant.

Okay.

So the next thing you've hit that out of the park right there.

So the next one I want to ask you is, can we trust the New Testament?

Okay.

Well, the New Testament is different because we haven't inherited it.

So we're starting from scratch.

This is our own literature based after the time of Jesus, probably the earliest, excuse me, I can go to cause.

Some of the earliest documents, probably some of the epistles dated around 50, 55 AD.

Jesus born around 5 BC died around at the age of 33, around 30 AD, somewhere in that region.

Yeah.

And thereafter then the Christian story was begun.

Within two or three months of that, we've got the day of Pentecost and the ascension of Jesus and the birthday of the church.

Some of the first epistles written in Corinthians, I think, dated about 55 AD.

That's within 25 years of the death of Jesus.

That's remarkable.

25 years in the history of ancient literature is nothing.

So 25 years.

Now, the first gospel, probably Mark's gospel, dated around 64 AD, 65 AD, somewhere around there, just after the death of Peter in the Neuronian persecution in 64 AD.

So there in 65 AD, there's Mark writing his gospel and recording a lot of Peter.

There's a big in, Mark's gospel could be described the gospel of Peter, because there's so much of Peter in it.

In fact, Papias, the bishop of Hierapolis in the second century recorded that it was actually someone suggested to Mark, write down what Peter says, write down the sermons of Peter.

And so that's where Mark's gospel came from.

He probably wrote it in Antioch and Syria, and history tells us.

And so yeah, so that was the beginning.

And then after that, Matthew's gospel by 80, Luke's gospel 85, John's gospel before the end of the first century and so on.

So yeah, remarkable.

All of that.

Now, when you're coming to look at the four, at the New Testament literature, then we have to apply this, what is sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander, as the proverb says.

And so we have to say, well, look, if we were studying a secular document, what would be the criteria that we would use to decide, actually, this is probably trustworthy?

And there are four criteria.

First of all, we'd ask the question of authorship.

Who wrote these books?

And of course, if we have an eyewitness that wrote them, or someone who was connected to an eyewitness, well, that's fantastic.

The next thing that they would ask is, how many documents are there?

Is there just one copy or are there many copies?

And again, the theory behind it is, the more copies that there are, then the better the chance of something being authentic.

And if the person who wrote the book was an eyewitness, then the chances are it's probably more likely to be authentic.

So that's authorship, number of documents.

Another thing is how close was it written to the actual events?

How close to the actual events was it?

And so the closer to the event, then the more chances of it being trustworthy.

And the last one then was, of course, are there any references in other literature that we can cross reference and say, well, actually, here's a person writing 100 years, 200 years, 300 years later, and they're referring to it.

So those are the four major criteria that scholars would use to identify the validity of any scripture.

Let's take one, for example, another scripture, not a Christian scripture.

Let's take the Roman historian Suetonius.

Suetonius was an interesting character.

He was a member of the Senate in Rome about the second century.

And he was a politician, he was an historian, and particularly his role as an historian.

Now we have some of his documents that we put by.

I'm going to refer to me notes just to get it right.

He was writing around 75 to 160 AD.

So around about the same time, maybe the tail end of the Christian era when we were writing our, when Christians were writing their documentation.

So Suetonius dates to about the same time, 75 to 160 AD.

The earliest document that we have, the actual earliest copy of what he wrote is 950 AD.

So although he wrote then, the earliest copy of that that we have is 950.

Then the other thing we have to think about is that that's a gap of 800 years.

How many manuscripts of his do we have?

Well, we've got eight.

So let's apply those.

We've got Suetonius, the author, he's writing about the same time as Christianity.

We've got him, but the earliest copy that we have is 800 years later.

There's eight versions of it.

So that's not bad.

When we come to compare that with the New Testament documents, we find that all of the New Testament authors were either eyewitnesses or associated with eyewitnesses.

So we've got Matthew, one of the disciples.

We've got John, one of the disciples.

John didn't just write the John's gospel.

He wrote the book of Revelation.

He wrote one or two, three John as well.

And we've got Luke.

Luke wasn't an eyewitness to Jesus himself, but he was an eyewitness to those that were.

And he spent time in Jerusalem, two or three years in Jerusalem, talking to Jesus' own family, including his mother.

It's interesting.

Luke's the only one that tells us of the time that Jesus, when he was 12, got lost.

Is that not the sort of story that a mother would tell?

I remember the time when Jesus got lost.

We thought he was with so and so.

And it turned out we were halfway home.

We realized he wasn't with us.

We had to go back and look for him.

And that's a typical family story.

Luke tells us that.

He's the only one that does.

Luke chapter two.

And because Luke is spending time with those people that were eyewitnesses and family and so on.

So we've got Matthew.

We've got Mark, who was Peter's cousin and was a fellow traveler of Paul, the young John Mark that accompanied Paul and Barnabas on the first missionary journey.

We've got him, we've got this group of people.

And of course, Paul, the last of the apostles, the last one to meet Jesus face to face, albeit on the road to Damascus.

So we've got all of these.

So in terms of authorship, we really couldn't get any better.

We've got Peter, one or two Peter.

We've got James.

The only book in the New Testament that has a question mark about authorship is the book of Hebrews.

And some people believe it was Paul that wrote it and others don't.

So that's the only book in the New Testament that we have a question mark about authorship.

When we think about those other things, the number of the time lapse.

Well, 800 years for Setonius, 25 years for Christianity.

I mean, 25 years to have documents that were written within 25 years of the actual events is phenomenal.

Yeah.

In terms of it being copied or New Testament references being copied, the early Church Fathers, Oregon, Tertullian, Justin Martyr, Irenaeus, Bishop of Leon, and so on.

Others like that.

Those early Church Fathers.

When we bring all of the Church Fathers together, how many quotations do we have from the New Testament literature?

Have a guess.

How many quotations?

Pick a number.

I'm going to go with a thousand.

A thousand.

87,000 quotations from the early Church Fathers.

87,000.

In fact, one scholar sat down and he went through all of the early Church Fathers' literatures from the documents of the New Testament they were able to bring up.

And you know what he did?

He put it all together.

And if we lost all the, God forbid, if we lost all of the manuscripts of the New Testament, just from the early Church Fathers, we could put it all together again.

We could rebuild it.

It's like having insurance for a car that you don't even need because it's indestructible.

Exactly.

So we've got all of those books.

We've got the authorship pretty much tidied up.

We've got a very short period of time between when the documents were written from the actual events, 25 years.

And we've got 87,000 quotations in other documents that make reference to the books of the New Testament.

Now, I've forgotten what the fourth criteria was.

I've got it right here for you.

It would be external sources.

So it's referenced outside.

That's the early Church Fathers.

Brilliant.

You've got authorship, how many documents, and the date.

The number of documents.

We said that Suetonius had eight.

If we were to look at some of these written down, Tacitus was another Roman historian.

We've got 20 documents that relate to Tacitus.

If we think of Homer, not Simpson, come on.

Okay.

Homer, as in the author of the Iliad, in terms of his documents, we've got 643, 24,000 fragments, manuscripts of New Testament documents.

24,000 compare 643 Homer, compare eight with Suetonius, compare 20 with Tacitus and others as well.

Thucydides and other Plato, Socrates, all of those famous guys that we put so much stone to their writings.

And according to the New Testament standards, on every account, we really surpass them all.

Yeah.

Here's the question that we started with.

Is it reasonable, reasonable for a person to say, actually, do you know what?

I think there's something in this New Testament.

I believe that it's actually true, that the documents are real and are valid and are authentic, and you can trust it.

Based on our comparison from a secular point of view of all of those other criteria, that's how I would answer that question.

I think it is yes.

Yes.

By all means, it is yes and yes again to accepting the validity and authentication.

Listen, there's people have written books about this.

Yes, of course.

Listen, let me give you one good book.

Do it.

Amy R.

Ewing, Amy R.

Ewing, graduate from Oxford, studied theology and is now working as an apologist.

Anything that Amy R.

Ewing writes is worth reading.

And she wrote a book, Can We Trust the Bible?

Yeah.

Worth looking at.

Amazing.

Okay, so we've got, can we trust the Old Testament, which is the first aspect of the completed Bible that we have today, old and new.

And we were able to track and trace the origin of the manuscripts and apply an external, so a secular framework that is used to test any form in particular, and a passage with flying colors in the Old Testament.

Then you go to the New Testament, and there's a lot riding on the New Testament, considering the Old Testament, its reliability.

And the New Testament is absolutely breathtaking with regards to its credibility.

Absolutely.

100%.

And the framework that we use for that is the authorship, which we've talked about so many, so such well connected to the original, the original people that is in question, the original events, you've got how many documents and how close, which is known as the proximity test.

And it's something that we've discussed in Luke's Gospel.

If you want to read more, more on that.

Even more than I did.

So you've got like original manuscripts, you've got over 5,700 eclectic texts.

Amazing.

24,000 in total.

And then you yourself named Aristotle 8 to 10.

You've got Pliny and Tacitus significantly less.

And then you've also got the Dain.

Within the first century, again, it's just a remarkable feat of history with this time period.

All the rest of them are coming 500, 800, 1,000 years after.

And so with all of that being said, we can trust the old, we can trust the new, and we've let it out.

I've done nothing.

You've let it out as to how we can trust it.

But the question is then, if it's this clear and apparent, you've got the writings of Pliny and Tacitus, which contain significantly less reliability, yet they're elevated to a status of reliability and authenticity and are talked about in university arenas as completely reliable and people are educated on it.

But yet we come to the documents of the New Testament, significantly more reliability and tenacity and adestation, but yet people are laughed out of these arenas.

Why do you think that is?

Is it now no longer a logical thought, a logical problem?

Is it now a heart problem?

Let's put a health warning in this.

Not all the scholars will go along with what Suetonius says or what Tacitus say.

All we're doing is making the comparison between those ancient documents and New Testament documents.

So all of those documents, secular and sacred alike, come on to great scrutiny.

When I was at university, one of my professors, the dean of the faculty was Professor Galloway, a very interesting, remarkable academic and systematic theologian.

He once forgot Jesus' name in the midst of a theological lecture on systematic theology.

We were doing the atonement and he said something like, this is what, oh, what's his name?

This is what Jesus really forgot.

Happens to the best of us then, thank goodness.

No, Professor Galloway mentioned him because he said, if you want to be a theologian today, you've got to think of something new.

You've got to come up with something new.

Well, you see, as a Christian, I want to hold fast to what is there in the past.

I want to hold fast and be faithful to what the truth was, as it was from the very beginning.

But in terms of new, there's always people that are scrutinizing these texts and coming up with these texts.

And of course, that is true in the secular world as it is.

And so there are questions raised and so on.

There are questions raised about the New Testament.

Yeah.

Let's look at that for a moment.

Just very briefly, so many people will come along and say, well, hold on.

Surely, you don't believe the Bible contradicts itself as a popular criticism.

The Bible is just simply wrong.

So many errors.

There's so many errors in the Bible.

How would you address that?

And so we have to...

As the ability to study semantics, as the ability to study language and understand language has increased dramatically in these years, so it's not unlikely for it to raise certain issues like that.

I don't think there's a one size fits all with regard to these.

I'm not denying that there are texts in the Bible that are difficult.

So let's unpick this for just a moment and think about it logically.

If we were wanting to really understand what the text has to say, we would have to say rather than throw all of the Bible out, we would have to say, well, let's look at the areas that are problematic, and let's take those down, put them onto the microscope as it were, and begin to unpick them.

So if we begin to study that, then what would help us would if we had a knowledge of the original Hebrew or a knowledge of the original Greek, and if we were grammarians, in other words, we studied grammar in both Hebrew and Greek, we'd be able to weigh up the pros and cons of the different things.

That's not to say that the verse is easy, that's just to say that's how you would approach coming up with a solution.

If that's being the case, then the next step away from that would be to looking at commentators who are writing about this from different points of view and from different angles, and we would need to look at those.

And as we've done that, some people have written books on the problem, if you Google the problem verses of the Bible or worse that effect, you'll come up with different texts that look at it.

Because they're probably the same verses that have been there for youngs.

But if we take that, that's another part of the approach.

But a major part of the approach for me is in eyewitness accounts.

If you send two people to watch a football match between whoever, Coleraine and Linfield, and one's a Coleraine fan and one's a Linfield fan, and you come back and you'll ask them to give a report of the same match, they both saw the same game, the score will be the same, but you'll get a completely different version of events according to what standpoint they were looking at.

Also too, if you take a father and a son to the same, you're supporting the same team, and ask dad what he thought of the game, and then ask the child what he thought of the game, you'll get a completely different answer.

So it's the way that language is used.

So in the Bible, we don't have scientific language.

Wouldn't it be great if we did, that it was sterile, sterile language, that was laboratory language, that left a legal language, that left no ambiguity, that used no forms of the vernacular, that simply just was pure truth written down.

Wouldn't that be great?

But that's not how they wrote in the years that we were recording.

That's not how they spoke.

They didn't think scientifically.

They didn't think legally.

They thought street language.

They thought in terms of everyday language.

So all of the phenomena of everyday language applied to them.

You and I will go home tonight and someone will say to you, how long did Mike speak for today?

And you'll say, oh, I don't know, a couple of minutes, or an hour and a half.

It might only have been 50 minutes, but to you, it seemed an hour and a half.

I'll go home and Rose will say, my wife will say, how long did you speak for tonight?

And I'll say, I really don't know, I didn't look at the watch.

Seconds for me is my answer.

You're very kind.

But the point that I'm making is, your perception of time and my perception of time is vernacular.

It's an instinct.

It's a feeling that we have.

And when people come to write the New Testament, there will be variations in terms of numbers, in terms of times.

That's to be expected.

That's just human nature.

Does that mean that it's not true?

Well, no.

It can still be true.

You can have a wee boy of six who stands up, who can't speak in proper English or in good grammar, and he can point at a guy and say, he was the boy that done it.

And it's true.

But his language is not sophisticated, but it's just true.

So that's the question.

The question that we're moving away from is, the language that the Bible uses.

The Bible is full of metaphor.

Jesus said, I'm the door.

Oh, really?

I'm the door.

Jesus is using a metaphor.

There's truth behind it.

There's a literal truth behind it, but he doesn't literally mean.

Jesus said, if your right hand offends, he cut it off.

Well, what?

If you're right, I pluck it.

Literally?

Well, of course not.

It's a metaphor.

It's a picture.

He's using that kind of language.

One of the things that the Bible does a lot of, particularly in Genesis, is that it speaks phenomenologically.

That means that it speaks as it sees.

So it talks about the sun rising in the morning and traveling.

That's Psalm 19.

Sun rises in the morning and travels like a bridegroom rushing across the sky, and it sets.

Well, now Copernicus got into trouble with this.

Copernicus set out for years, years.

Aristotle started this.

Aristotle taught that the earth was the center of the universe, and the sun moved around the earth.

Then Copernicus came up with, yeah, actually guys, I think the sun's fixed.

It's the center, and we're the ones that are moving.

Oh, goodness.

Well, all hell broke loose when he came up with that idea.

Because, well, the Bible says that the sun moves around, it's phenomenal.

It's describing what it looks like, and so on.

So, and then of course, later on Galileo came, he picked up what Copernicus had to say.

Galileo was made to recant all his ideas about the earth moving around the sun.

Now, is there a Christian today that doesn't believe that the earth moves around the sun?

Well, there might be, but not many.

We most accept that scientific thing.

Why?

Because the use of language in the New Testament, we understand it so much better now.

So, when we put all of that in together, yes, we're going to have differences.

Yes, we're going to have, how many angels were there at the tomb when Jesus was raised from the dead?

One says one angel, another gospel says two angels.

One gospel has the angels in the tomb, the other gospel has the angels outside, another gospel might not mention the angels at all.

Does that mean that it's not true?

Well, no, it doesn't.

It just means that there are different ways that people have recorded that kind of language and they're using their own memories and doing their best because it's not scientific.

There's no reporter there taking down all the details and figuring it all out and putting it into sequence.

They didn't think like that, but the truth of it is there.

And that's what I think what we mean when we talk about the Bible being inerrant or being infallible.

It's not inerrant in the sense that the grammar is perfect or the spelling is perfect.

It's not inerrant in the sense that there's no vernacular language in it.

It's inerrant in the truth that it conveys, in the message that it brings, in that which lies beneath the language.

The Bible is a bit like a walnut, and the language is like the shell that's along the outside, and we've got to crack the language open to get to the nut that's on the inside, the truth that's on the inside.

That's why one of the greatest responsibilities that we have at the beginning of the 21st century is in the area of hermeneutics.

Hermeneutics is the ability to interpret scripture accurately.

Huge issue.

You've done Genesis, yeah?

We've done Genesis.

So how long is the day in Genesis?

There's so many different, because that's hermeneutics.

It has to do with how we interpret that time.

Was it an aeon or was it 24 hours?

And language.

Exactly.

All of that.

It's fun.

You see, Genesis 1 is a phenomenological language.

It's language that you see, that you see it as a...

Here's an example.

I like watching Detective.

A week while ago, I was watching Miss Marple, and one of the Miss...

a small child witnessed a murder.

And she said that the murderer, she saw the murderer strangle a lady.

This is not very nice, but it's just a story, and I get a crispy, a sleeping murderer, I think the verdict.

And she said, the man, he had monkey's paws.

Monkey's paws, strangling the person that was the victim.

Well, as it turned out, he was wearing gray gloves.

But to a child, that's what it reminded her of.

Of course, yeah.

She described his hands as the man had monkey paws.

It's just a use of language.

It's hermeneutics.

It's interpreting, breaking the nut of the language, the shell of the language to get at the nut of the truth that's on the inside.

Yeah, of course.

So it's to do with vantage point as well, because I could say that their house is perfect.

But then we could look and someone could, oh no, that's not painted correctly on that side.

But they've presupposed what I mean by perfect.

They're talking about a meticulous outside.

But I'm talking about the house is perfect in its function of sheltering people.

And so the Bible is perfect in its function, and its function is to convey truth.

And there's language that is used.

You've got Hebrew, and then you've got Greek, and then you've got English.

Language is diverse, even within English.

So diversely, words, one word can mean something completely different.

So its functionality in regards to what it conveys is true.

And we've conveyed that and argued that, and attested that, Old Testament and New Testament.

The credibility, authenticity is all there.

And so whenever you've got errors, such as people say the 400,000 variables, they are again, it's 95% in the Old Testament variable, 99% in the New Testament.

That 1% is comprised of a scribe, not a full stop, not a comma, and missing a letter.

And then what you've been talking about is the language that is used.

Exactly.

And then it's called Meaningful and Viable.

Yes.

So a Meaningful is whenever it's translated from Greek into English, but it makes no difference.

So that's considered a variable whenever you have the English translating, but it is no bearing on the text, on the truth of what the text is saying.

And then Viable is it's not competing to change the original text.

And that's the important thing to remember, as you have argued, the language is very different, but there's no questions of the truth.

And yes, you might address three texts, which can be dressed in their own merit in their own time, but the Bible, the question of is it reliable?

The answer is yes, old and new.

And it would be naive for people to think that any document could be meticulously perfect, especially through the manuscriptal history.

But the Bible with regards to truth is, it serves its function, the truth remains true, although the language, what it's wrapped up in, how it's conveyed, takes time and effort to understand.

Which we can do, which is another good thing.

It's something that we can learn and educate ourselves in.

That's absolutely brilliant.

So the last question that I want to ask you is a final comment about the way the Bible, actually you've answered that, about the Bible uses language.

So perhaps the best way of what you can do now is some concluding thoughts.

How would you, I did this with Paul.

I sprung it on him, hopefully it's not sprung on you, but can you summarize in your own words what we've discussed in 30, 60 seconds?

And then what is your main takeaway for the people listening?

So I think for me, to sum up and to try and bring it down into the hard groups, let me just talk about my own experience.

And that's simply this.

In the family that I grew up in, troubled by alcohol addiction, I think I've said to you before working with styros and so on, the reason I got into that was because of the alcohol, the problem that was in my own family's story.

And so at that time, we had tremendous need.

We had tremendous emotional, mental, but primarily spiritual need.

We were crying out, we were crying out for help.

We were crying out just to deal with the fears and the anxieties, the uncertainties, the worries, the violence, all of that stuff that was going on in the family.

We had a tremendous sense of need.

Now that need doesn't come intellectually.

I didn't sit down and think, well, as a child or as a teenager rather, of 18 when I was from beginning of Christian, I didn't sit down and think about the reliability of the new, I didn't, I didn't.

I came because I was just desperate for truth.

I didn't figure out is God there, isn't God there?

What are the arguments for God?

What are the arguments against God?

I didn't come out like that.

I just came as a broken teenager, whose father was alcoholic, whose brother was alcoholic, whose sister was alcoholic, and a dysfunctional family that just needed something to be normal.

And a witness in my spirit spoke, it's a spiritual thing, a conviction that there was truth there, a conviction inside my spirit that God could help me.

That's the best way I could put it.

Did it make logical sense?

No.

And there's probably thousands of people listening to me saying, your man's in Egypt.

But that's my story.

I came with a tremendous sense of spiritual need, and I had it in my head that God could be an answer to that.

And so I began to cry out to him.

And for those initial experiences of God that I had, were ones where he came and met me, where he began to work with me, where I began to settle down, where I began to see hope, where fears began to dissipate, where purpose began to come in, where he began to show me a new way to live, began to build up my self-esteem, began to have less distractions so that I was able to concentrate on my studies.

And my academic career shows that I'm not stupid.

But I failed my 11 plus, not because I'm stupid, because there was so much nonsense going on in the house.

Failed my O levels, because there was so much trouble at home.

And I was being distracted from being able to focus on those studies that were acquired.

So when I came, I came with a spiritual sense of need and a deep conviction.

The deep conviction that I had, Luke, was there's truth in this.

God is real.

I need him to be real.

And as I began to reach out to him and he began to reach out to me and draw me to himself, so that began to unfold.

It wasn't until years later, going through Bible College and University that all of these questions began to.

And I had to sit back and think.

I remember one of my teachers at Bible College, he used to say, never be afraid to let your faith go into the witness stand.

It was a great stand.

Never be a faith of your faith.

And I thought, oh, well, okay, let's go, let's do this.

And so when I went through University at Glasgow, it was an academic course.

We studied the scripture.

My Old Testament lecturer, professor was an atheist.

So we did the hard yards and thinking things too.

Well, is it reasonable or is it not reasonable?

So I, but I started, I started from a point of view of need, of a conviction that God could help me.

And a point of view of conviction that I needed that help.

And as I reached out to him, he reached out to me.

And that's touching on the truth that the scripture has.

That's touching on the, on the, on the, on the truth.

I'll finish with this quick story.

Yes, this can be your main takeaway.

This is my takeaway.

18 years of age, playing rugby for the school, playing rugby for Ulster, doing fantastic, and still a troubled teenager who needed something strong in his life.

And I went along, my brother Arthur got converted some months beforehand.

And I went along to a youth fellowship one night.

I think it was the second time that I went along.

I didn't really want to go, but I went along anyway.

And the guy spoke from 2 Corinthians 5.17.

And he said this, and this was the first time that I believed the Bible with all my heart.

He said this, 2 Corinthians 5.17 says this, if any man be in Christ, he's a new creation.

The old has gone, the new has come.

And I thought, I believe that.

And I believe that because my experience proved that to me because some months before, my brother, the alcoholic, had come home on a Thursday night in November and said, I've become a Christian.

And guess what?

He changed.

God began to change him.

And when I heard that verse from 2 Corinthians 5.17, I could put two and two together and get four because I could say, I've seen that.

I know the truth of that verse.

And I believe that message that is there.

And as the man went on to talk about, he began to say about how we all needed Christ in our lives, how we all needed to surrender that.

And I went home that night, I was living with my brother.

At that time, mom had passed away and I was living with my mom, sorry, living with my brother and his wife.

And I said to him, Marty, how does a person become a Christian?

And he certainly said, look, you confess your sins, get down on your knees, pray, say, Lord, I'm sorry for the things that have done wrong, come into my life and change my life.

I remember doing that.

I prayed that prayer to worsen that effect.

And I remember getting up, expecting such a change.

I went and looked in the mirror to see if it looked any different.

That's the truth.

That's how naive I was.

Cause I expected to have, you know, halos and wings as angels, you know, something to be different.

I didn't really feel it.

I went to bed thinking that nothing really had changed.

But within two days, I knew that it had.

God had met me.

That's the conviction.

That's the truth.

Look, that's the truth and the message of scripture that's there behind all that language stuff.

Yeah.

God bless you.

Amazing.

Michael, thank you so much.

Amazing.

Thank you so much.

So to summarize and bring this amazing podcast to a close, whenever we think about putting faith on the witness stand and testing all of this, number one, we can trust the Old Testament and we've proved that.

We can trust the New Testament, the errors that are there.

They are inconsequential and can quickly be refuted.

And so it remains true that there comes a point where, like any relationship, you have to make a commitment that transcends the evidence.

You can say all the things, but there comes a point where you must make a commitment and step into it and then it will be validated.

And so for those who are not saved, the answer or the question that we pose to you is, behind all of this, behind the logic, behind the understanding and the knowledge that is there, have you made that commitment that transcends the evidence?

Because then and only then will all of this have the clarity.

Yes.

And for the Christian, for the follower of Jesus, know and cling on to that relationship that you have and that commitment that you've made and the experience that you have.

But also remember that we have a firm foundation and we can be confident that we can defend the faith and give an answer for what we believe and it's glorious, it's awesome and we can be joyful.

So see you on the next podcast.

Thanks so much.