Are the Gospels Historically Accurate? // Dr. Peter Williams

[Music] it's amazing to be here as and such a a privilege uh you've come along and it's been a short notice um only realized I was coming to Indianapolis in the last month or so because I looked at a map and I was speaking in Louisville and going to Chicago and they said do you want to fly and looked at a map of the Indianapolis is on the way we could get there and see those those wonderful Hoosiers and uh so it's lovely uh to to get here and to be with you and uh share um a bit uh relating to God's word and wow I would just love to get to know every single one of you but it's you know time's short isn't it but but God's been incredibly providential and I'm excited to be able to share with you uh about uh the gospels so I wrote a little book can we trust the gospels some of this uh you'll find in in that book um but I want to to start with the very fact that there are four Gospels that is amazing because Jesus was someone who grew up somewhere that wasn't particularly important Nazareth and he's not part of the political Elite and he gets four biographies of him which is as many as the Roman Emperor at the time who's the most famous person in the Roman Empire at the time is the Emperor Tiberius and there on the left-hand column you can see the names of the people who wrote about um Tiberius at the top and the people who wrote about Jesus okay how many words did they write well someone wrote in Latin someone wrote in Greek but roughly the same numbers of words isn't it amazing that the gospels as a group are actually longer in terms of numbers of words than three of the four accounts that we have of the emperor then there's one exception one of the accounts of the emperor test his animals is longer but hang on that's like an account of what happened year by year in the Roman Empire it's not even the biography of him so okay it's longer but less of it is actually about Tiberius whereas when you're in the gospels like it's all about Jesus even when it's talking about John the Baptist it's still telling you about Jesus so that's amazing what how do we have this person in Nazareth get as many biographies of him as the Roman Emperor I mean that is just astounding what about when our manuscripts come from the earliest copies of these biographies well look at the top what centuries the biographies uh come from now these are not sorry this is the manuscript not the actual biographies when they're written but the earliest copies that we have you could put your fingers on okay and with the gospels we got copies from the second and third Century you'll naturally go and I can tell you whether where to find them as for when they're written I've given you in italics at the bottom not the dates I think the gospels come from but the dates by the world's leading Bible skeptic Bart Airman okay let's take the dates from the world's leading Bible skeptic and put them up against the dates of uh the bugfish of Tiberius Tiberius died in the year 37 okay so Jesus's past increased and Resurrection either year 30 or 33 is usually dated okay so look at the difference for three of them okay you can see that three of the four biographies of Tiberius are a lot later one of them is actually during tiberius's own time and that is thought to be the least reliable because it's completely different from the other three and it only ever says nice things about it and the guy was getting paid by the emperor right now one thing you can say about the the rights of the four gospels they weren't in it for the money they didn't make any money out of their books and so what the other three biographies of tiberias tell you is this guy was pretty nasty to his enemies and pretty nasty to his friends as well so actually it's just astounding for me that we have four accounts of Jesus life people say you know show me the sources about Jesus as if they want lots of non-Christian sources about Jesus but hang on like most people who write about golf are golf enthusiasts most people who write about uh footballer football enthusiastic just what happens so most people who write about Jesus a Jesus enthusiasts that doesn't mean you dismiss what they have to say now let's look at Alexander the Great okay you've heard of Alexander the Great think of the biographies there are about him and then think about the time Gap we have between Alex and the people writing about him 250 years 350 years 400 years 450 years and people tell you we can't trust the gospels you think what's wrong with the way people can't see it we've got an abundance of evidence about Jesus now people might say well okay but what about the emperor just before Tiberius he's called Augustus Caesar Augustus remember the decree that went out in his time well there we have actually on the walls of uh it's actually inside this building in Turkey you've got his biography written like two years after he died whoa that's pretty good actually on the walls because um this copy existed in Turkey but it's a copy of something that was done in Rome like straight after he died and it's his own autobiography okay and this is what it is he says uh below is a copy of the acts of the deified Augustus so it's like becomes a god straight after he died yeah right um by which he placed the whole world under the sovereignty of the Roman people and the amounts he expended okay so this is his thing and it's it's less it's like less than half the length of Mark's gospel and it's all about the money he gave out because that's what Roman emperors do isn't it they spend the whole time giving out money so you read his biography and thought the guy never took any money in dude what's the point of becoming a Roman Emperor except to squeeze as much as you can out of people that's what they're in it for so I've got a bit of a problem with this biography yeah it's written close to the time but you know it's not actually that complete an account of really what went on in his days now what we can do when we've got the gospels is it's not only who can say it's amazing we have four gospels we can actually put them in the lab you can test them that they will uh they they can be scrutinized so let's just do some simple tests like do they know the stuff they're talking about so do they know the place they're talking about they talk about Jesus going around the Holy Land um do they even know about the Holy Land well this is a thing they do they actually have lots of different towns that they all mention and Villages even and they don't all mention the same ones so we know the four gospels can't all have just like copied each other because each of them mentioned some ones that the other ones don't have and that in itself is a striking thing because like back in the Roman Empire they didn't have the internet Okay so yeah archaeologists have found out they didn't have the internet and um what that means is if you were living somewhere else you wouldn't really easily know what the names even The Villages were in that country you can't go to a Bookshop in Rome and get a book of all the villages in you know in Israel it just won't work that no one writes books like that so this sort of thing that's just on the surface of the Gospels is signs that these people know some stuff and the great thing is God has built the gospels so that ordinary people can see them and see the evidence they're trustworthy so we as humans are built to detect trustworthiness and untrustworthiness we sometimes get it wrong we sometimes get Hoodwinked sometimes people con us but actually in life that's what we're doing all the time many of you have just taken food not knowing who prepared it in fact even the people who prepared it and you know wouldn't necessarily know well-known ingredients come from and all this sort of thing like we did this all the time we actually consume enough of things uh produced by people who never you know we've we've never met and it couldn't be poisoned but we trust our lives like that because we're social creatures we have to I mean guy came in I've never met before like two years ago and said um excuse me can I pierce your Redrum and I said yes is wearing a white coat and we're in a hospital and you know it just seemed like the right thing to do um but like the amount we trust to complete strangers and but we are actually built to detect trustworthiness um and so we can see that but it's not just that you know the names of the towns they also know the shape of the land because it's a hilly land so Jerusalem 750 meters above sea level and what's interesting is they're always using the right verb the gospel writers to go up to Jerusalem or go down from it now to get that sort of stuff is uh not trivial so you know Jesus will tell a story about a man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho Jericho's the lowest city on the planet you know you're going down uh uh most of a mile to get there and Jesus using the right verb or you get it when you go from Nazareth to Capernaum uh it said he went down uh to Capernaum or from Cana to Capernaum again it's using the right verbs that's an impressive thing because it shows these people know something about the shape of the land um there's this part in John 4 where this is man who's asking Jesus uh to come and and uh heal his child and he keeps on saying come down please will you come down he's using the right verb uh for the geography there's this part in uh Matthew and Luke where Jesus criticizes them towns and Villages woe to you karazin woe to you bethsaida if the mighty Works done in you have been done in Tire inside and they would have repented long ago sitting in sackcloth's ashes but are we more bearable in this judgment for Tyran side and than for you and you Capernaum will you be exalted to Heaven you should be brought down to Hades well where are these places look on Google Maps that's where they are yeah it suddenly makes sense that someone and Jesus moved remember from Nazareth to Capernaum which is the top of the Sea of the Galilee they're all within a few miles of each other it makes sense that only someone from the locality says that sort of stuff we can also compare what we have in the four gospels with the fake gospels you know these apocryphal gospels that sometimes people will say hey have you come across you know this other gospel that the church somehow kicked out of the Bible you know as if that didn't happen um but if they do that you say oh that's really cool please can you bring along your favorite other gospel and I'll bring you my favorite gospel and we'll study them side by side because absolutely nothing to be afraid of this people produce fake Bank notes because there are real ones now what we see with these other gospels firstly never use the names Matthew Mark Luke and John because they've already been taken um is there's one called The Gospel of Philip isn't by Philip but it's you know quite a bit later how many towns does it know it knows Jerusalem which is the capital so not very impressive and it knows Nazareth which it thinks is Jesus's middle name couple more ones something called The Gospel of Peter not by Peter the gospel of the savior they got one town and that's Jerusalem and the next 13 earliest apocal gospels how many do they have precisely zero so we've actually got a control group right you know when you're testing out a new drug Eli Lilly and you know that sort of thing you know you've got a control group here and we know the gospel writers it's not that they're trying to put the the names of towns in to make it look real because lots of people were trying to make things look real and they didn't bother putting towels in because they never thought of that it's just that they are real they're just reporting accurately or you can look at what people were called you know if you go to different places people are calling different things two the gospels give people the right names well we can actually get statistics nowadays in the last like 20 30 years on what the most common names were because you can look up historians the Dead Sea Scrolls you could look at boxes with bones that sometimes people wrote you know so and so life here um that that's that that's what you can do um and you can get statistics on it and what you find is outside the gospels the most common name for a Jewish male from Palestine I'm using that word in the Roman sense okay uh from Roman Palestine um is Simon for a Jewish man and it's also the most popular name in gospels and acts the one there are eight different individuals outside name number two Joseph inside the gospels name number two is Joseph and so on and you can also say if we start Gathering Together outside the gospels we're looking at like 15 16 uh have those names Simon Joseph inside the gospels it's 18 get the top nine men's names together outside the gospels and inside the gospels and they get Incredibly Close 40 and 41 that is just amazingly close women's name there isn't as much uh information nowadays and a little bit less imagination but what we can say is outside the gospel's the most popular name was Mary it's also the most common name uh for the the Jewish women inside the Gospels it really is astounding slow me likewise name number two and so on and contrast that with Jews in other parts of the Roman Empire you see it's not that like there was if you just knew a few Jewish names you could write a story it's not like that because Jews in Rome have lots of Latin names Jews in Egypt here's a um list of names of Jews and Egypt they have different names now do you know anyone called dosethius do you know anyone called polymyus no why not because the gospels weren't written about Jewish men in Egypt if they had been maybe you would have come across those names maybe it'd be common but they're not so you've got a completely different set of names and they're getting those things right and they're getting them in the right proportion now do you ever struggle to remember names just forget names yeah we've do it all the time I've forgotten several names already this morning yeah um and and the reason why is because names are quite arbitrary label so isn't really recently stick on people okay so that's why probably if you've forgotten someone's name in this room you still might remember your last conversation with them you might remember what they do all sorts of things about them you watch a film you remember the story of the film you forget the names of the characters in the film that really aren't very important are they all the time so think about this if the gospels are getting the names right that's the hardest bit to get right if they could get that bit getting the storyline of who was with whom and all that sort of stuff that's easy and the gospels have got that and that shows you it's not from the telephone game the whole idea of the telephone game is a game specifically designed to get information corrupted you can't play it with two of you don't want to have 10 of you you don't have enough of you and you're only allowed to say things once and you're only allowed to hear them once and you've got to whisper it and all this sort of stuff we optimize all the conditions to get stuff corrupted and some people say early Christianity was like the telephone game really it just doesn't make any sense this only happened if the gospels are getting their information really close up first generation or something like that but we could do other tests let's think about money let's think about a tax system okay so in Matthew and Mark and only in Matthew and Mark it describes this time when Jesus sits down with lots of tax collectors toll collectors and people are criticizing it and that is in Capernaum now we just seen where caponium was it's at the top of the Sea of Galilee that is a really good place to have toll collectors because people are just coming over a border within the Roman Empire from one territory to another territory and you say okay you're carrying a card or whatever it is I need to have three percent of that that's the way it works okay um it's also a Sea border between areas so that's where Tax Collectors are in the right place that's in Matthew and in mark now in Luke's gospel and only in Luke we have the story of the tax collector Zacchaeus except he's not a tax collector he's a chief tax collector he's in charge of lots of other tax collectors and he's not up there at the top of the Sea of Galilee he's down south in Jericho and guess what Jericho is also the Border Town you come over the river Jordan from the East and it's the town you've got to go past that's where you put a shed load of toll collectors making people's lives less happy um and so the gospels have got this sort of stuff right are we going to do tests and after test I'll give you another one botany think about the story of Zacchaeus again what sort of tree did he climb up oh it was a sycamore tree you know the song right and where is he he's in Jericho the lowest city on earth which therefore has a different climate from uh from Jerusalem and other places so you ask yourself the question are there sycamore trees in Jericho and yes here is a picture of some people in a sycamore tree in Jericho there are so how does Luke know that there are sycamore trees in Jericho well either he's been there or he's spoken to some people who who are there and taken really careful note now I can't prove where the gospel writers were but I can show you this either they came from the land or they must have had really really really careful conversations with people who have and passed on that information that's what we can tell from the text now where does this sort of um Sycamore grow well this is uh a map from a very authoritative Source um of where this sort of um tree would be actually I mean this sort of thing Wikipedia is actually quite good for um but really if you lived in Turkey Greece or Italy you had never even heard of this tree it's right for the climber it makes sense now let's bring some of the tests together and we're going to look at the feeding of the 5000. okay this is the one Miracle other than the resurrection which is in all four gospels and let's look at some of the details does it stack up okay in Mark and in John there's a comment about the grass Mark tells you the grass was Green and John tells you there's a lot of graphs now is that a detail put into the story to trick you into believing it's true for very similitude to make you feel oh it's real but it's not actually real or is it an eyewitness just saying what it was like let's park that question for a moment Mark tells you lots of people are coming and going but he doesn't tell you why lots of people are coming and going I mean Jesus says let's go aside into a deserted place because there's a load of traffic okay but John tells you it was Passover time oh Passover times like their Thanksgiving I mean you try and ever try and book a flight near Thanksgiving like it's not a great thing to do is it it it's tough so what you realize is there's a subtle agreement between Mark and John if you read mark on its own you don't understand the detail why lots of people are coming and going and why they have to go into a deserted place in the first place but you put the information of the time of the year from John and you suddenly realize it makes sense so you get subtle agreements like if you are doing um sort of investigating witnesses to an event you're trying to see is it true those sort of subtle agreements really count so this is interesting then we got the fact that in John's gospel Jesus asked Philip where to buy bread from why is he asked Philip well we don't know but what we see in John's gospel Philip and Andrew both reply you know how could we get this much bread in this area okay why does Jesus ask Philip we don't know but Luke tells us that the feeling took place near the town of bethsaida and back in the beginning of John's gospel we find out that Philip and Andrew are from bethsider wow so if I just read through John's gospel on its own I see no significance whatsoever to the fact that he turned to this man and said where should we get bread plug in the information only in Luke and we see he turned to a man with local knowledge and asked him where to get bread it suddenly makes sense the actual details of a conversation that little detail of a conversation who was speaking to whom what exactly they said it all Stacks up even the fact that the little boy according to John's gospel had barley lows fits with you just got the um Passover time that means you just had the barley Harvest but what about the grass would the grass be green well why don't we get a precipitation chart from a nearby town and plug in when Passover would be like April ish and you just had five of the greatest months of rain rain in the entire year would the grass have been green you bet of course now does that prove the miracle no but the usual way people want to say that Miracle stories in the Bible arose isn't it it's like um one person entangled the story to another to another and it gradually got exaggerated until you had the miracle story but don't you realize you can't have that sort of selective Corruption of information so that all the little less important bits of the story get preserved exactly right and the main bit gets changed that just doesn't make sense so if you've got the small details right that seems to be evidence that the big stuff is right so what I think when I look at the gospels is you really can scrutinize them and they're just simply amazing and they're true and the really exciting thing is that they're about Jesus Christ and Jesus Christ is just the center of everything it's not just that we've got lots more than we've got to say for the Roman Emperor it's the fact that you have this person of Jesus and he can't be made up you go to a synagogue and find their scriptures their scriptures begin with a story and the story goes um you know right early on like somewhere around Genesis maybe chapter three-ish okay there's this scene of a a human couple at a tree taking a fruit and death coming in that sort of story if you were going to think if that's how a Story begins how should it end uh if we're gonna um you know like fill that out what about a story ending like this uh someone uh yeah the Story begins with uh you know she took and she Heir at the fruit okay and um later on you've got in the Christian scriptures um Jesus sitting around having a meal saying take eat and then he he dies and he he dies on this Roman cross which they don't you know plane their crosses to make them all smooth they're trees he dies on a tree and that's the big scene that you have in all four gospels the climactic scene and then the resurrection and you think that's an amazing story end to the thing that we find in the synagogue and that's historically reliable and how do you get that all fitting together that you can have someone's Own Story making a story that's just astounding we know that the Christians didn't write the beginnings of Genesis go to the Jews and ask did the Christians write the beginning of Genesis they're going to say no they're all scriptures so his story makes story and then you look at his teaching the Golden Rule do unto others what you'd have them do to you and all the other things and you should think his stories it's just astounding you say this can't all be made up this has to be true and I I know most of you uh probably Christians but maybe some of you aren't and I just want to say this is true this is as true as anything you're gonna find and it makes complete sense of life and so just give your life to Jesus and it will may get harder for you but it's the best thing to do uh he gave his life for you yeah yeah thanks for coming Dr Williams a question about preaching from the gospels I see you filling out the story using the other gospels yeah yeah um how is that so just talk about best practice for using that sort of method of using the other gospels of Philadelphia versus preaching the intended point in in the gospel that you used to work great so I think it's a really really good discipline when you're preaching from Luke to stick with Luke as much as you can as you really want to get the flow of that but of course God has has given us four gospels so I don't feel that I need to be overly constrained by that and particularly uh there may be additional information but I mean it's interesting when Matthew tells the story of the man let through the let through the roof uh he doesn't actually have to let through the roof bit uh you know uh that that's the bit we know we know from Mark but he he has your sins are forgiven and that's a really interesting thing because probably people wouldn't want to mention that the guy uh you know preach on it without mentioning the guy was that through the roof but actually it can be a really good discipline to stick with what's in front of you I'm trying to bring things together just to show how these gospels reinforce each other and actually having four gospels gives us more than four sources gives us actually six or more different sorts of information because of where the different gospels overlap and the way you can test their information is actually optimal there are three gospels Matthew Mark and Luke which are more similar to each other than John okay um and people debate about the order in which Things are Written um but imagine if you had four gospels that were all equally different from each other or four gospels that all are similar to each other as Matthew Markham uh and Luke in neither of those cases would you have as much that you could road test or if you had two gospels where there were two of them were quite similar together and another two were similar to each other let's call Big A and little a big b and little B well then people would decide one of those came before the other one and then they'd actually say you've only got two sorts of information what we've got with four gospels and I could try and map this out mathematically but I'm not a mathematician is we actually have the optimal um evidential base for the amount of tax and it's really nice because the four gospels are nine hours long basically between them as you read them out loud so it's not overloading any human but wow you can spend your life looking at those things again and again and just the things Jesus said and did just astounding so I feel that God in his graciousness has given us just the right amount of each sort of thing in the Bible which is really cool yeah yeah sure that's a great question um and it's not a question is often asked but it's a question that's sort of presupposes something you know like those when did you stop beating your wife questions and so it's um the it's a question that presupposes there was a group that sat down and kicked some books out and there never was um and what I look is the analogy I push back is well who chose the winner of the marathon okay uh you say well the judges of the marathon there must have been some umpire our group but no I mean they was the person who won the marathon was so far ahead of the others I mean you don't often get a photo finish with a marathon like who chose them it's really that they distinguish themselves so the four gospels are so far ahead of the rest of the pack there was never even a group sitting down saying I wonder which ones we should have um you know they just um there's this idea that the Gospels gradually grew up in authority over time right but that won't work and the reason why is the gospels say to you from the beginning you they give you a yes or no choice am I going to accept it like John's gospel begins in the beginning with the word have you ever heard a book beginning in the beginning before oh yeah that would be Genesis John's gospel is telling you you know that book of the Jews that's accepted as absolute Authority I'm the same sort of book so you can't gradually have John's gospel exalting over time Matthew's gospel begins you know the book of the genealogy of Jesus Christ It's Beginning you with begott begot just like genesis chapter five it's saying you know that book of Genesis find the same sort of book Luke's Luke's gospel begins with this Barren righteous couple leading up to a song and think uh this sounds a bit like first Samuel and Hannah and and elkana and this sort of stuff yeah and it's saying you know that authoritative book of First Samuel we're the same sort of book um and then you've got Mark's gospel Elijah's back like last time Elijah was around there was some scripture don't don't you think that you know uh so so I think they all give you this thing from the beginning they claim to be authoritative and so you have this you know take it or leave it choice you can't say gradually over time they get Authority then what you have with the Gospel of Thomas okay the Gospel of Thomas begins these are the secret sayings which the living Jesus spoke and which did them as Judas Thomas wrote down so what they're saying is you know all that stuff that's been said publicly that Jesus said do you know he really delivered his secret message just to his one disciple to Thomas and you need to get in on that so it's like why has no one ever heard this before it was the secret inside track how does the Gospel of Judas begins these are the secret sayings that Jesus said to Judas like well make up your mind which one is it which one is the special you can't just put these all in a collection because the Gospel of Judas is is saying it trumps all the other ones gospel Thomas is saying it trumps all the other ones you know so I just think what we've got the four gospels is yeah they've been accepted from the beginning um and there was never a committee that sat down and said these are the ones we're going to have um even though some quite educated people will sometimes say oh wasn't there a council of nicaea where they discuss what books there should be no they discussed whether people who have been made eunuchs could become deacons and things like that and they discuss the Trinity they didn't discuss what books could be in the Bible yeah so I mean I think the Holy Spirit did um [Music] write the whole scripture I think every book of the Bible is entirely God's words and he is the primary author and then the humans are the secondary authors um but I I think sometimes the Bible it accommodates to us he's got this bit in first John where it says if you don't love your brother who you have seen how can you love God whom you haven't seen and that what we do is God says it's okay to approach him the Unseen one through the scene so God gives us evidence of his writing through the human writers so what I've tried to do in presenting some historical evidence that the four writers you know should be taken seriously is to do that which I think is is modeling the way God uh accommodates himself to us rather than just like demands that we believe does that make sense to these different things rather than just saying oh yeah and I think part of the issue is we're in a 24 7 information War right now with I mean the whole sort of secular um edifice that there is in educational institutions and and so on and and through media is we are all um and even the most cocooned Christians are being bombarded with lots of stuff um which is you know secular information more propaganda um we're all getting bombarded and therefore you know it's it's really important that we actually push back with real content that that's where you know people need to be equipped with that yeah so I mean if the um John's gospel is is different from the other ones but it's not surprisingly different so if I look at this there's a philosopher Socrates and you've got a couple of biographies of him you've got one by Plato one by xenophon they are sort of more different from each other than you would have say John being different from Luke and what you find is even though there are differences between them you suddenly get these little agreements as we saw with Passover and in John lots of people coming in going in Mark we could find the same connection between John and Luke where John and Luke both mentioned Mary and Martha they each mentioned one incident with Mary and Martha uh and they're different incidents uh so in Lucas Martha's all busy you know the ideal um uh caterer and Mary is there sitting at Jesus feet over in John's gospel it's uh the raising of Lazarus and Martha is Dashing around going at fiji's as well Mary is sitting at home so she's in the same position both times she's sitting but what you find is there's an agreement there and a subtle agreement of character in both cases Martha is the activist and Mary is the more contemplative one and so and then with between um John and Matthew I can find the same sort of uh little links where Matthew 11 25 to 27 Jesus suddenly starts talking the sort of way he talks in John's gospel where he says father I thank you that you've hidden these things uh from the wise and reeled them the babes and and that was what was pleasing in your side this is sort of way he talks in John's gospel or at the resurrection narrative there's a stunning little agreement where um Jesus says in Matthew go and tell my brothers and over in John it's go and tell my brothers for I've not yet ascended to my father and your father well you've got the same father Therefore your brothers that is amazing they're just talking about his disciples as brothers is something Jesus doesn't do elsewhere and then suddenly you get this one word agreement like that between the different gospels so what I'd say is even though they're different we can actually see lots of ways in which uh you know there's good evidence that um these things are historically true so um but yeah it's a blessing that that they're different you you don't get I am uh um stories uh yeah I am sayings in Matthew Mark and Luke but you do get them in John there's an early tradition that John specifically wrote later than the rest in order to fill up what wasn't in the others um but even when Jesus speaks in different ways like I am sayings in John's gospel from what you've got in the other Gospels it still agrees so for instance he says in John's gospel I am the bread and life and Matthew Mark and Luke he says take eat this is my body that you need to live by so you can actually see there's a fundamental agreement there yeah so so I think it's it's um when there are differences between the accounts um firstly we shouldn't be surprised um and if they fitted too neatly you might suspect uh conspiracy but there aren't differences that are irreconcilable so part of the thing is step back and look at what's this difficulty someone's presenting with me with and imagining another difficulty so what if you had um One account told you Jesus is born in Bethlehem in Judea and the other one telling you he was born in Alexandria in Egypt okay that's tough you know but we don't have anything like that so any of the most difficult difficulties that you get in the gospels are not on that sort of plane they're more like okay was there one or two angels at the tomb uh and and those sort of things not obviously um you've got at least six women going to the the tomb and they don't all have to stay together and angels are allowed to move so when you sort of set some certain parameters you can actually makes sense of those sort of things so I I think of the various difficulties that are on the gospels none of them are defeaters and then as a further element which is that Jesus himself teaches using Paradox okay so he says things like uh I didn't come to judge the world John's gospel and he also says for judgment I came into this world he says both or if I bear witness about myself my witness is not true and then but even if I do bear witness of myself my witness is true now I think when you're given those sort of tensions you're meant to pause and meditate and say what you know what am I being told here and it's more like those puzzles you get at Christmas just because you can't do them straight away doesn't mean that they cannot possibly be done God's allowed to speak in difficult ways I mean look at the Book of Ezekiel like clearly The Book of Ezekiel has not been designed to be as easy as possible right so we what we've got in in scripture is this whole lot of graded information where some of it's really easy some of it's really hard and what Heretics do people who want to just go their own way is they put the difficult bits as the foundation blocks for their system rather than starting with the easy bits and so scripture is written so that if you think you find and if you don't seek you stumble so God has actually put scripture there and difficulties in scripture to see whether we're going to seek him so I think that that's sometimes in apologetics there's a difficulty that we can try and be salesmen okay so we're trying to just get the decision make things look as as pretty as possible and I think it's important for us in evangelism apologetics to explain to people the difficulties yes we are asking you to give up everything you know we don't know what the cost of this could be of you becoming a disciple of Jesus this could be really really awful for you you know and and once you do that and and we're doing the same uh when we're looking at difficulties not saying that every difficulty is going to go away so actually uh but if you do think you will find yeah um so I spend my time dealing with a dangerous substance uh namely knowledge so there's a couple of dangerous substances that are specifically said to be dangerous in the Bible one is money and the other is knowledge so it specifically says knowledge puffs up but love builds up we also told about the deceitfulness of riches okay so um you could be dealing with different things and one of the problems about both of these substances is just the corrupting effect they have when combined with human nature now God has all money all resources doesn't corrupt him God has all knowledge it doesn't corrupt in there's nothing wrong with knowledge nothing wrong with money okay so that they're good things the problem is human nature and somehow when we get like I've been studying what 34 years in University sort of type context it's like when someone's been doing that they start thinking wow I know a lot dude you hardly know anything of all the things that there are to know you know this much and God knows that much it's just incredible the drunkness that happens to people when they like been studying for a few decades they start thinking you know how much I know and they start becoming all clever in their own eyes and it's it's a real problem and so we've got a big problem with uh Pride same can happen with money someone can think look how much money I've got I've got hundreds of millions dude hundreds of millions is so little I mean for God that's just like ridiculously I mean some people lose that in a day you know it's like it's it it's it's so little and so the way you our perceptions of ourselves can just distort so that's the sort of realization you've got to have about the things uh we're dealing with so um it can be a daily struggle it's not something you you solve it in one day um the kingdom of God needs us to be good stewards in whatever our area um uh that we're in whether that's that's handing money handling knowledge handling whatever it is um so I have the privilege of working in a community so Tinder house in Cambridge is a physical Community you're welcome to come and visit us we're not the same as Tinder House Publishers they came 18 years after us um so we're a physical Community there and God's given us this real estate basically on the doorstep of the University of Cambridge so they can't cancel us um and uh you know we have lots of people from the University come in and out um all the time even some university courses have begun being you know taught in our space which is which is amazing but it's basically secular type University um so um we have to be accountable to each other and as we're trying to look people for people to be in our team I'm looking for two particular virtues that are different from the vices in the academy so one is humility and the other is courage now I want to just uh explain about those two virtues and why they're important um often people know that academics are proud okay I think there's an even bigger problem and that is that they're cowardly okay and a similar issue in journalism people can know what they're seeing and know what to say but not want to say it because of the consequences it will have for them and so that's actually one of the biggest issues that we have you know when when the Hitler comes along the academics in Germany just kept their heads down except for this guy called Dietrich Bonhoeffer who said no I'm going to speak out and I mean C.S Lewis a very bright guy but he's also a brave guy he was prepared to speak out whatever it's going to cost his career that actually makes a difference so it's not just about the number of people you have who have have got knowledge in a particular area which which is important for the church but also that you've got people who are prepared to be Brave now I'm not actually very brave myself but apparently it can be learned like Peter went from being a coward to being brave and so that is something that we Aspire uh to um and of course you know all of these things uh do you know for the glory of God and just recognize that this is my particular part of the um yeah particular stewardship people are giving different stewardships I've got on my team someone who's you know curated the oldest copy of the New Testament I've got someone on the team who's uh discovered a twin of the earliest copy of the Old Testament and they've got just an absolute great uh team as a stewardship uh that that comes with that but also that's just your job to do you know so we're sometimes given um a job to do and recognize that God can uh call you out at any time you know just say it's time for your heart to stop beating and and that that's uh that's his prerogative he doesn't need any of us so occasionally you can carbon date manuscripts but you have to destroy a bit to do just you know a tiny bit at the edge but that would only tell you when the physical material came from and it's not very accurate all the time like it can't actually tell between a fifth and 6th Century A.D manuscript uh with that sort of thing so then people use hand writing now the problem about handwriting is you know well my granny is 102 and her handwriting maybe it isn't as good as it used to be but you know it you can have one person who lives a long time and keeps uh pretty similar handwriting over a long time but there are lots and lots of commercial documents that survive from the ancient world someone sold this field this slave whatever it is on this particular day and they date them and that gives you examples of dated handwriting and you then compare those with Biblical manuscripts and you can get some ideas so there are some styles that you can say it's that Century or some scribal marks that it's that Century or when a new ink is invented it's that century and there are other ones where you say you know it could be this 300 year space and and we don't know and obviously the more you have the better but when someone says to me I've got this tiny fragment it's just a you know a few inches wide and it definitely comes from like early on you think how do you really know because you've only got a small sample that can be really hard so you you should give a degree of latitude with with all of these things and don't build an apologetic argument on a claim that someone's found a super early manuscript build it on the whole breadth of the home spread of the Christian Church rather than on one little secret piece of information hidden away somewhere if that makes sense so yeah just to repeat the question uh it's inerrancy the scriptures being without error or reliability in general terms which should we argue for and I I think I wouldn't want to argue for both and part of it is I don't want to concede any ground uh so you know if you uh let let this them put their Siege engines up around your city and say I'm gonna Retreat Behind the Walls uh you know you're not going to be as well as if you actually don't even let them put the siege engines up so that so tactically I I would go for a maximalist view and I just think uh it actually works rhetorically I mean you know uh people who are bold in their views uh you know do do better on almost anything just at a human level and than those who are you know retreating and apologetic about them um but I I do think yes when I give a presentation like this I'm arguing for broad reliability so when you're trying to build up with people who have got no background that's what I want to do to I want to get them to see that basically the gospels are a basically reliable account of Jesus's life enough for me to bother reading them now the Apologetics isn't an end in itself apologetics ought to get out of the way as soon as it's not needed so faith comes by hearing hearing by the word of Christ we want people to get reading and hearing the scriptures so our aim is uh they may not even open a Bible but we want to say little talk say it really is worth opening a Bible and hopefully they do that and and we're wanting you know God to get all the glory that it's his word converts uh people's life not our arguments and and so on so um I would just say uh we should get out of the way as soon as we can let the lion loose uh sometimes said you know in terms of um the the scriptures rather than think that we need to keep on doing our um uh defense of the scriptures um yeah the other thing is just when you're talking with anyone is one thing that Jesus taught us is uh if they don't accept you in one city uh Shake the Dust off your feet and go to another one now the equivalent today is look some people really are don't want to know and we can say oh no please please will you listen but after a while there are other things to do and I think it depends on the person but some people just want an argument and don't give them one um you know you you and it can be hard because actually you can feel like oh I've witnessed to someone if you've just got involved in the argument but maybe it may be better actually say uh no no I'm not to have a certain um seriousness test but we then we've got to commit ourselves when we're really talking with someone if they say there's a book that I've read um you know we've got to read their book as much as we ask them to read our book you know that's that's how serious we've got to be and when we don't know so we don't know but just keep engaging with [Music] thank you

Channel: Heart of a Man

Views: 4,545

Keywords: Peter Williams, Dr. Peter Williams, Peter Williams Tyndale, Peter Williams Tyndale House, Tyndale House, Are the gospels historically accurate, Is the Bible historically accurate?, Is the Bible trustworthy, peter williams are the gospels historically accurate, are the gospels accurate peter williams, proof the bible is true, how to prove the bible, Heart of a Man, Heart of a Man Indy, HOAM, HOAM Indy, are the gospels accurate, Peter Williams vs. Bart Ehrman

Id: 5SaweVrQk40

Length: 51min 28sec (3088 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 11 2023