Isn't the Bible Kind of a Joke? "Discussion Panel" Tim Mackie (The Bible Project) 11/1/2009

all right good evening how you guys doing awesome uh my name is uh john rosenstein i'm a pastor here at blackhawk and uh thanks to all of you for for coming out and many people are watching online or will watch online in real time here are you guys bummed that the packers got demolished yeah oh my own comment so i was just happy because aaron rodgers on my fantasy team so um i didn't care that they lost but enough about me we are here this is our do we have an official name for this tim this is our rotten tomatoes q a expert panel discussion does that sound good let's just say panel okay not expert no rotten tomatoes not an expert and i'm certainly not expert i'm just here to serve these gentlemen and uh being mc i'm security as well if you guys get unruly so we will uh we as you know and we i assume most of you attended an earlier service and you've been texting your questions or you went out in the lobby and wrote a question down and we've been compiling them trying to find commonality amongst questions trying to make sure we represent uh where the heartbeat is in the crowd wanting to know um we want you to understand that as we collect questions each week that night's panel discussion we'll be addressing questions uh of the sermon or the topic that was preached on that day there might have been a little confusion of that so tonight our panel is assembled to discuss the bible and is the bible reliable as tim spoke on today also for those of you who are here live you can continue to text that information will be up on the screen we may be in the middle of a discussion and you may have a follow-up question and that'll go right back to our our intern back there brett can you wave for the people great brit has kind of been doing all the work here collecting your questions so we appreciate him he's our intern that works with our worship arts community so let's give him a hand [Applause] so britt will do his best and if you're if you're texting live like wait wait a second i don't agree with that or i've got to follow up it doesn't mean necessarily it'll get in but we've got a little sign you know he's going to send up smoke signals to me and stuff and we'll uh we'll work it out and we'll try to get that question so with no further ado let me uh introduce our panel here and i'll start uh to your right down at the end this is uh charles yu he is uh soon to finish his phd in hebrew bible here at the university uh his dissertation is on the book of job is that correct and he's recently co-authored an important work on old testament theology and i asked them to tell me each each of them tell me something that most people don't know about them and charles said inform that he once played music for money in a kenyan train station so he'll be putting a hat out in the atrium later with his guitar and following the discussion so uh next up is uh is eric carlson eric received his phd from the history department here at uw a few years back he's taught european history at edgewood college and uw-whitewater he comes this whole topic not necessarily as a theologian or with a biblical perspective or as a scholar but as a historian so we're grateful to have eric here eric also had a music little tidbit he once played guitar on tv with a group of yugoslavian folk singers in sweden so i don't even know what that's about but that's really funny yeah well i was gonna say last year but no it was in sixth grade so and uh finally all of you i'm sure know uh tim mackey he's a teaching pastor here at blackhawk and i think this friday you'll be defending uh your paper right to get your your doctor so that's exciting and he's also from the same department as uh as charles yeah so uh we have doctor doctor and doctor our soon to be doctor and uh so we'll have to we'll use your first names and not doctor all right how's that so uh yeah we're gonna jump in and we're going to throw up our first question here i'll simply read off the question these guys have done a little uh divide and conquer beforehand they're going to take certain questions uh if not i'll kind of ask one of them to step into it all right we ready back there brett correcting the grammar it is text messaging that's right all right here we go first question uh how could peter even remember the exact words of jesus's teachings after so many years what happened to peter's original eyewitness accounts were they only oral and not written panels somebody want to step up and take that one yeah sure so charles and i were going to kind of tag team this one so there's a few a few ways in which this works the quilt analogy is you know it mostly works i think it's a really good analogy it has some has some pitfalls in it but the basic idea is is that we do have peter's eyewitness accounts like that is what we have in the gospel of mark at least that's the argument that i was that i was putting forward the question about oral or written is somewhat complex a lot because we don't know it's very likely that a lot of this was orally memorized and again in that work i referenced by jan von cena about oral tradition as history so i mean we're tv people right i mean we can't we can memorize like two lines and a phone number and that's about it that's brain capacity for us but in ancient cultures and even if you're trained you can get those books on trading your memory well let me let me just jump in on this issue real quick yeah i mean how many of you watch multi python multipython fans now you met people who can recite entire scenes right you probably some of those yourself i mean that we're in a non-oral culture yet when we remember things we we we remember the entire seeing the lines the dialogues that's how our brains work and it's very very likely once jesus says something memorable immediately it became kind of a fixed story form jesus walked into this town and said this and somebody said this back and he went boom and everybody's like wow that's cool story and it became kind of a sermon it became a great swimming illustration that probably peter used over and over again probably the same ones so by the time mark now i don't think mark remember mark as likely peter's translator he probably heard peter tell the same story over and over again over a span of years maybe close to a decade a decade and then and remember he translated it so he took it from aramaic or hebrew and turned it into greek and once peter died he wrote the gospel of mark i think he remembered it pretty well yeah indeed and again just to this isn't uh this isn't far-fetched i mean just it's really it's a cultural thing and in cultures this still happens in jewish culture today where uh young jewish students of the talmud have to commit huge huge sections of the hebrew bible or of the talmud to memory and they can they can go for an hour straight off of the things that they've been reciting and so in a textual culture or an oral culture where oral texts are foundation to your community identity memorizing the stories of your founder i mean it's entirely plausible and really actually the gospels aren't very long like they could be much longer um actually i mean one uh one interesting passage to throw up here would be something like uh john 21 oh what is it 20 something like this you recall this is a fascinating little statement that john makes at the very last verse of the gospel of john there are many other things which jesus did which if they were written in detail i suppose not even the whole world itself could contain the books it could be written so obviously there's a lot more material about jesus that could have been told but the gospel authors have have committed exactly this to accomplish the purposes in the day what they have do you want to say something about the thing about exactly yeah i want to say something about that because i think to an extent we we we get fixated on whether the gospel writers captured the exact word that jesus said and then the first thing to realize of course is jesus didn't speak in greek most likely did not did not speak in greek so what we have then and in the gospels are all in greek so first of all it's a translation okay so our english translations it's a translation translation of what jesus is the translation of what jesus said right so that's our first problem right there it's unlikely that they captured jesus actual words they didn't we know he didn't and second thing is this is that to a certain extent it doesn't matter to a certain extent it doesn't matter i i think what we are our faith tradition claims that the bible is authoritative in that it captures the essence of what jesus is behavior and speech it captures what he was trying to get across but i don't think it makes the claim that it's accurate down to the very last word in terms of this because because the gospel wasn't written for us to go back and historically reconstruct jesus's life that's not what it was written for i mean the gospel john tells you it's written so that we may have have faith and that he is the son of god the gospel have is written for certain things and it's written at a level of precision and accuracy useful for what it's trying to accomplish but it's not to fulfill all of our curiosity about you know you know jesus was born exactly which year he's first second grade and where do you go to school what about high school you know you know his entire life did you have a girlfriend those questions are not in the gospel not answered and if we ask those questions um the bible would just kind of i guess the biblical authors were just going to laugh at us they don't they don't care about those questions and um and we're asking the inappropriate questions when we push the text to tell us that much too that much for detail could you put up that quote with papers you know i just realized that i don't have you don't have that you don't have to mark one let me let me read something um this is out of eusebius's ecclesiastical history he's a church historian around the second third century fourth century sorry um he um he was passing on church traditions this is a great guy to have here uh church he's passing on church traditions and this is what he said about mark he's quoting talking about mark he's talking about the author of god's mark the author of the gospels and this is what he said a mark having become the interpreter of peter wrote down accurately though not indeed in order whatsoever he remembered of the things done or said by christ for he neither heard the lord nor followed him but afterward as i said he followed peter who adapted his teaching to the needs of his hearer but with no intention of giving a connected account of the lord's discourses so that mark committed no error while he he thus wrote some things as he remembered them for he was careful of one thing not to omit anything he had heard but not to state any and not to say anything falsely okay so this is the account the tradition about mark the interpreter peter the idea is that he wrote down everything he said but the chronology of mark he makes no claim that this this happened exactly before this there were no such claims in the gospel of mark and it's perfectly fine everybody knew it and it was okay because the gospel of mark wasn't written to give you a precise blow-by-blow chronology of jesus's life that was not his intention so when it's out of order it doesn't matter maybe just so just to clarify that point i think that can be important yeah for us because oftentimes we have we have a conception or people hear a conception of what the bible ought to be because we connect it to that it comes from god in some way if it comes from god then it ought to be what we expect it to be you know what i mean it ought to tell jesus's life blow by blow and tell me everything i want to know that's exactly opposite of what the situation is each biblical author has it as a goal and it is it may not to be give us a blow-by-blow account and we can't fault it for not not doing so you see what i'm saying there so the gospel of mark accomplishes exactly what it's supposed to accomplish which is uh to present peter's eyewitness testimony all right uh so a couple things one uh to just kind of clear up you guys said a lot of great things but to to go with the question um you would say kind of answer the question and oral culture wouldn't uh we're not in oral culture so we have a trouble understanding maybe how that could happen but if we were we wouldn't have that much trouble understanding correct another thing i heard all of you saying and eric shaking his head and nodding is and maybe we can return to this later is it might clear up a lot of questions for us if we kind of understand again what the purpose scripture was or rethink what the purpose of scripture was or what scripture itself is purporting to be is that correct i hear kind of all of you saying that and i think that might be a key theme that we return to so and thanks for keeping us in the right century historian these loose cannon hebrew guys on the end you know they just you know so uh we'll go to the next questions that go with you and if you had again if you have follow-ups to any of that um text right now and we'll see if we can get that in so brit we ready with the next one corrected the grammar we're good he looks really intense back there doesn't it yeah it sure does wow wow it must be a really good question all right here we go what is the evidence for jesus's resurrection how do you explain the differences and inconsistencies in the different resurrection accounts in the four gospels and if i'm correct eric this is kind of going to be your area there you go i can start maybe a little bit with that um well i think the first thing to be said about this is that um [Music] well these these two questions i think are related um in some important ways what is the evidence for jesus resurrection now there are a lot of um arguments that can and have been made for uh the uh the reality of jesus resurrection and so um maybe i can just mention a few of what i think are the big arguments in favor of some of the some of the most important evidence and then maybe we can um mention some some great things that have been written about that and some things that that you can get your hands on um actually the question about the inconsistencies and and the uh the resurrection accounts we have in the four gospels four uh different accounts uh or and four different angles sort of on what actually took place uh on easter morning and uh the fact that we have these slight differences the number of women who go to the tomb the number of angels that they uh see that the number of men who are present actually speaks in their favor uh as uh as historical um uh historically reliable testimony because what it tells us is that they weren't trying to work together uh to try to harmonize accounts to try to to create something that would be sort of a water tight uh case what we have what the evidence points is we have some really really early oral accounts of what happened um and and why we think that they're really early um in fact stemming from that when the eyewitnesses themselves um has to do with the fact that while we have these different angles the fact that when you look at how the resurrection is talked about later on in the new testament it's often associated with with some big theological themes like the theme of hope what jesus resurrection means for us when we look at the uh um the accounts in the in the gospels they don't they don't do a lot of theologizing they don't know a lot of sort of unpacking the significance of them uh they talk about what jesus has done and what that means in terms of his claims to be messiah uh and that they're fulfilled and the fact that he did what he said he was going to do that this means there's a new creation that's that's um coming into being but there's not connected to some of the later themes uh that that get played up on by by paul and some of the other new testament writers like hope in particular another thing that you don't see too much of in the uh the resurrection accounts that you see in much of the rest of the in fact chuck chalk through the gospel maybe i'm i'm not sure if the inconsistencies piece if you're going to come back to it just because i think that's pretty significant and it might be worth playing out are you going to come uh if not i'll just fill it just say what you want yeah yeah so what he was saying was this idea that the small level inconsistencies in the four resurrection accounts are often used as evidence somehow used as evidence against what really happened and from a historian's perspective it's precisely the opposite the fact that there are these small inconsistencies doesn't mean nothing happened it means that something did happen and the memories preserved are so early that it's like the famous story of four different people's accounts of the same car accident you know what i mean and they're all these small surface level inconsistencies because the memories were captured right very early so the inconsistencies actually work in the favor of their authenticity i think it's a counter-intuitive thing for us and it's significant those have been there from the beginning and when the early church started using these different gospels they didn't make any attempt to try to harmonize and try to make them look like they were working together in a different kind of way they do work together at the most basic way every every story that you get comes from somebody's perspective every photograph is taken from an angle and that's what we have there as well basically there there's some other arguments that can be made to uh a good number of them if if you're really interested in this topic a couple of books that i would recommend that came out in uh 2003 good year for resurrection studies one of them uh was by a philosopher who also deals somewhat with history named richard swinburne and maybe some of you were here because he came to blackhawk a few years ago and gave lectures on this and i think those lectures are still available on the the blackhawk website is that is that right um and that he wrote a book into the 2003 the uh resurrection oh it's no e swinburne without the one burn without oh without the e no without this first c without the first e so that's a great one and you can get lectures of that and about that um on the blank website i think right oh yeah that's right his lectures are available on the blackhawk website yeah and then the other um tome of a book that came out that year was by uh anti wright or tom wright uh similar title called the resurrection of the son of god and it's just just an exhaust to probably one of the most exhaustive studies ever done on this topic and he helpfully as he always does then writes more popular works that are more accessible and summarizes them and the book that was referred to a number of times this past spring called surprised by hope by uh by tom wright includes some of those those basic arguments essentially the problem the issue with the resurrection is this if we had this kind of testimony about any other ancient event it would be uh we would we would we would be very very happy because it would be about as well established as anything could could be well established the issue of course is that it's something that's unique something that's miraculous and that as tim said helpfully today in his talk uh takes us back to the to the uh question of uh philosophical presuppositions and that's kind of a separate issue but there's nothing uh in the uh in the evidences or nothing in historical method itself that should lead us to to deny that possibility if the god of the bible is true and real uh then uh the miraculous follows from that but that's that's an important uh question but not that's not the question right now so let me can i follow up and just press that point a little more just trying to think of maybe somebody in our audience because this inconsistency thing about the resurrection accounts is something that skeptics press a lot so uh what i hear you're saying is that as a historian that's proof for uh the veracity of the story but for people that have maybe grown up with their bibles and saying man everything in these pages is factually true and you know i'm just gonna go to my death bed believing that and that's just how i was born and raised and then for them to hear you say that i mean well obviously if there's differences then somebody has to be wrong or maybe they misremembered uh and not to put words in your mouth but how would you maybe address that question if somebody is thinking out in the crowd what does that kind of tell us about scripture yeah well um it tells us i think that in some ways the gospel writers were great writers um they they um when they chose to tell a story perhaps if they were coming from one particular eyewitness then they were maybe they would they would like maybe maybe the analogy is good with a movie where you sort of cut the angle out you focus on one person as opposed to focusing on everybody who's there for the sake of telling a more compelling story that way not that they didn't know that the other people weren't around but that's sort of the angle that the author is choosing to go in order to get uh get his story across in a way that's that's that's a good story as well as being true i think that's one thing you wouldn't want to take into consideration and i can't think of right now the the specific author the gospel writers who's doing what they're but maybe you guys have the differences have to do with the number of people who were there the order in which different people showed up in the time of day like was it well it was still dark or was it well while it was still like the light of the sun had just come and so on i mean it's they're pretty small level things how many how many people were there and if you think about it those are exactly the kinds of differences you would expect to find in different in different accounts uh and different especially if they've been captured very early and there wouldn't be a concern to harmonize them so the fact that you know that john says mary showed up it doesn't mean that salome and some of the other women weren't there it means he's focusing on mary's testimony of this event and i think john's question is great it's you know our thinking is well somebody's got to be wrong if there's a conflict somebody's somebody's right somebody's wrong and i think that's precisely what he's getting at in terms of level or level of accuracy a level of precision i mean uh an example i come up with let's say you know somebody asked me you know maybe you shouldn't ask me but you know how much money did you make last year and i i tossed out you know what let's use somebody asked eric how much money you mentioned that's my problem too it doesn't really work okay so let's let's say i'm i'm a high school teacher somebody asked me how much was your big last year oh i say 40 000 okay is that accurate well it depends on who's asking if somebody comes along who's a college student wants to learn about how much public teachers make forty thousand is a perfectly accurate answer but if a person was an irs agent okay my answer is not only wrong i'm in trouble okay so level of precision depends on context depends on audience okay if i told you i was just this morning i was eight o'clock oh i was at home doing uh doing something roughly at home okay that answer is very different to if i'm asking your question versus a police officer who's wondering without an alibi or not for a particular crime okay context matters so on something like this gospel writers were not working on that level of precision it simply isn't demanded from the text and they feel free to play around with things okay but a gospel authors feel free to in this happen the old testament as well this chronologized change order of things they will put characters in different places they will do different things simply because the level precision isn't required to achieve what they're trying to achieve that doesn't mean the event didn't happen the core event didn't happen it just means when they're recounting it like when you recount stories before certain audiences details sometimes shift and it doesn't matter to the truth of the story okay that's great i think we're hearing a lot of the same things here with you know it clears up a lot in our mind maybe uh what the writers were attempting to accomplish uh the culture in which they were writing in who they were writing to is maybe some crucial questions as we we go at some of these things we ready uh for the next one there bret should i should i tell a few jokes to fill in oh yeah i don't think they won't be telling jokes so like like two minutes what what should i tell the panel keep talking 30 seconds anybody any final thoughts on on the inconsistencies uh question before we go to the next one um i suppose you know for the resurrection this would be different than inconsistencies but in terms of evidence we stand you know post christianity having been influential and widespread but the idea of resurrection was a specifically jewish belief held by an ethnic and religious minority in the ancient world it was not a widespread belief a physically bodily rising from the dead and that that was a hope for all of god's people and one interesting thing about the resurrection stories of jesus is there was there was nowhere did anybody believe that one man the messiah would be resurrected from the dead in advance of the rest of god's people that idea had just never occurred to anybody and so the resurrection of jesus it's not like people were waiting for it you know what i'm saying nobody was the the very point of the gospel says this surprised and took everybody by surprise because no one is was expecting it to happen and so again it's kind of reversing the equation in my mind it's a very strong argument that no one had even envisioned that such a thing could happen um and that's hard for us to hear being so familiar with the story but when it was there in my mind that's kind of a strong argument for the fact that someone didn't just make it up it was not even anyone's minds in in the first place and just add on to that i think that the one of the thing about greco-roman worlds that they all believed in life after death not resurrection but they believed that there were souls and there were ghosts and things like that so for a jewish officer for the for the disciples to say we saw jesus resurrect okay it means they know they didn't see a ghost because they know what ghosts are okay they know what ghosts are they wouldn't call that resurrection nobody would they wouldn't make that mistake so something happened they saw something that convinced them of resurrection not expected and not an apparition of any sort that they can say this is just a ghost thing something weird happened it's worth uh i think underlying too that people in the ancient world didn't go around thinking that people rose from the ev you know they weren't expecting that any more than we do today they knew what was out of the ordinary uh they knew what was miraculous and that's not just a modern uh yeah it's not that we're we're completely different from them in that regard great thanks guys and again as follow-up reading uh the two books that that were recommended surprised by hope by n.t wright it's a pretty accessible book and we mentioned it a number of times a while back in our easter series uh nt wright is a bishop for the church of england and and widely read uh swinburne book is also highly recommended but if you haven't taken a philosophy it's pretty pretty deep philosophy stuff so it you'd have to slog through it quite a bit um let's go to the next question are you saying this was the oh yeah this is an impressive question or not impromptu but this was texted here live um while we've been here so this is kind of maybe a follow-up are you saying that the gospel is translated and is not exact word for word how does that tie into revelation 22 18 or john warns from adding anything to it who wants to tackle that question i guess i probably should because i i think i triggered this one what i mean let me let me back up um the gospels we have is written in greek the original authors wrote them in greek so in that sense it's not translated okay and we have it in greek and we don't we don't know there's a misconception out there that the bible is translated from a translation from a translation and all that kind of stuff that's come completely nonsense the english bible you have that you can buy modern translation translates directly from the the greek new testament that we have from the best papyrus best work being done it's just one translation greek to english okay what i was getting at earlier is that jesus when he spoke most likely did not speak in greek okay so that that was the point of being made so that the the people retelling the stories the eyewitnesses if they told the story in greek they have to do a mental translation if they told it in aramaic and then the gospel writer who got it from them had to do the translation into greek okay so there's a there's a step in the process prior to the writing of the gospels where translation happened with jesus's words specifically um that's what i'm getting at um you want to add to that um i suppose and again the point is is that if we have we have an expectation that the gospel writers preserve word for word what jesus said on a given occasion and i would just come back and say why do you have that expectation the gospel writers don't say that that's what they're doing and because you believe that the bible is inspired by god or comes from god doesn't necessitate that you have that expectation so think of the sermon on the mount right matthew five through seven i mean literally it takes about maybe like seven minutes to say it aloud surely jesus was with those people on a hillside for more than seven minutes you know what i'm saying so the gospel authors feel free to summarize and give us the gist of what jesus said on different occasions and that's appropriate to their purpose let me make one more point which i think ties into the second part of the question and maybe maybe i shouldn't bring theology into this but but i think our if our where evangelicals are our evangelical theology says that the text is inspired the the authority of the gospel doesn't come from the fact that it mirrors what jesus says exactly that's not the source of authority okay the source of the authority comes from the fact that the author in writing the text is inspired by god and i like putting it this way the gospel is god's official interpretation of what his son did okay so jesus as god act on earth and then god inspired four writers to comment on it okay so the authority of the gospel doesn't come from the fact that it exactly mirrors what jesus said and did it comes from the text's own authority that's actually our theology right so in that sense i think the point from revelation it's kind of misunderstanding it doesn't apply in this context the gospel authors weren't taking away or adding but they were doing exactly what they intended to do which to summarize on some occasions right i think you're going to prompt some more questions charles causing the problems that's why we want you here we love you uh we uh just for clarification i think you mentioned this charles but we we to best of our knowledge jesus spoke aramaic which was the common spoken language of the time correct all right do we have uh the next question brit now is this uh one that's come from the audience here was this previously familiar today okay what do you make of extra text such as the gospel of thomas that claimed to record parts of jesus's life as a child which didn't make it into the bible how were the books of the bible chosen exclusively to be the true revelation of god's word uh this this was a question and just talking about earlier that came in again and again and again and again kind of how did certain books make it and certain books not make the cut and i think you know as tim mentioned today the da vinci code has prompted a lot of those questions because dan brown came up with his own theories uh on on how that might have occurred so uh this is probably a pretty big one so let's spend some time here on how did the come to be who wants to tackle that i can start yeah this is this is thank you to dan brown and tom hanks for putting this on our cultural radar really i know that's and that's not a a a bad thing at all i uh the first uh i guess one thing that should be said right away is that that the the um we should dispel the the myth and i think this is it's been a while since i read the da vinci code but i think this is in there somewhere that that the what we have in the new testament is basically the result of of a bunch of uh guys getting together in a smoky room and and uh and uh they had a whole bunch of books in front of them and they saw this one's in this one's out we like this and we don't like this one and they had some kind of agenda that we're trying to promote because that's not the way that it happened um the way that the bible the the what we call the canon of scripture which is the uh the list of books that are taken to be authoritative scripture for the church the way that that canon came into being was a process but it wasn't a process that was dictated above by a few bishops rather it was a process that that sort of grew out from below from what actual practice was within the christian church uh in the early uh and the first centuries and so when we um when we look back when historians who specialize in this look back and try to figure out what it was that determined how a book became part of that sort of group of authoritative works it seems like there were a few general principles that they were working with one of them was was it connected to the apostles was it connected to these eyewitnesses that we've that we've been hearing about two does it does it seem to does it is the um the teaching in it in line with uh what the apostles were teaching um it would be another uh criterion that seems to have been used uh and the third one yeah just to clarify what exactly that means so in other words did is the representation of jesus in a particular book is it in line with the representation of jesus that comes directly from the first eyewitnesses and that's the reason for why a lot of these non-biblical accounts of jesus were not widespread throughout the church it's because they present a wacko jesus if you actually read some of them who's talking about weird a weirdo stuff clearly they're later pieces so this that's the connection to the apostles and their teachings right um yeah i mean and that's that's important that these other gospel of thomas which is probably the earliest one we think of the other um gospels that are out there most scholars would date to the second century so well after the time that the the canonical gospels were uh not only written but accepted widely as being um being authoritative works there was a big there was a treasure trove it was funny in the 1940s they discovered both not only the dead sea scrolls uh which was which is a huge find and i think it was 47 or 48. yes uh they were called the nag hamadi yes and 45 yeah this is i think that was in 45 in egypt they just discovered this just an enormous stash of these so-called gnostic gospels which include the gospel of thomas and others uh which uh point to the existence of these these gnostic christian communities in egypt um but well later most of them are between the second and the fourth century so they're they're later and therefore and and they are kind of a it's a wacko jesus that gets presented from there so they were never really considered part of the the canon for uh um the church at large and that takes me to just the last the last criteria that was used and that is were these books why did they have widespread use not just one church that might just choose a book but uh but these were the books that we now have in our new testament were used by churches all across the mediterranean and the first couple centuries so by the fourth century we have the authoritative list of the books that are that are uh in our new testaments when we look so that's that it's a lot yeah a good analogy i i've heard is that it's really the the books that we have in the new testament it's like they went viral and sort of how things spread online it's a certain analogy but it's really that as the christian community was blossoming there were certain books linked to the first followers of jesus and that contained the teaching linked right to them and those were the books that just exploded and you find them everywhere the reason why these random gospels were found buried in egypt right is why it's because no one ever wrote and read them except this random little sec down in the deserts of egypt right and so the point is that they were never accepted by the church at large as being authentic and presenting anything connected to the apostles and so whatever metaphor you want to use for how the new testament happened it was really an organic kind of grassroots process not something that was dictated from above and i think it bears underlying too that there was there was no uh virtually no discussion no debate about most of what's in the new testament the four gospels acts paul's thinking to have 13 epistles first peter first john revelation those books were pretty much accepted anywhere and we get this from from some of the writers at the time there were a few that that that were had some some debate about but none of those that i just mentioned so the three things i already say as far as the criteria except books on the canon were connected to an early eyewitness or an apostle someone who saw jesus or was there uh unity with the old testament canon and and the other books and then usage and and subsequent life change i would expect too within the local communities i've just put up here a resource what i've found to be one of the best it's not written for scholars it's a popular level and just kind of entry into all of this stuff the writing of the biblical books the canon how it was put together how our translations are made by a scholar named paul wegner the journey from text to translations really excellent good entry into the whole topic are we are we getting this on video can you get this center screen no so tim when you recommend things if you can just read the name of the yeah paul wagner uh the title is journey from text to translations so eric one quick follow-up question again going kind of back to the davinci code thing the idea that constantine was a power job and you know the men in the room and all that a lot of that is is putting the solidification of the 26 7 books later how early as a historian would you say that these 27 books begin to circulate in the christian community i know there's there's an easter letter that mentions them early on and some other things but what's your your best question already in your new testament if you look at the book of second peter chapter 3 verse 16 he refers to paul who at that point is grouped with other scriptures so that's that's uh uh you know there's debate about when peter has been certainly within the first century and and so already by that time paul's writings have been collected and are being viewed as scripture so by the eighties uh the paul's letters had been collected by the early first century they're circulating widely the gospels likewise widely cert wide circulation by the early second century same as true of acts and some others so yeah there is uh the i think it's the um was athanasius's past easter letter from the is it 367 i believe something like that that has the that has the the 27 the same that we have and then you have other councils later on but the point but the point about the councils is they didn't decide they just recognized what had happened from below they didn't decide from above and i think that's that's the key point the hebrew guys are making fun of you you know sorry they're like history nerd everything had a circa something yeah cool great um how are we doing next question there brett we ready now is this a question from from the group here tonight or previous from the group right now all right so this is perhaps a a follow-up question to our discussion are we still going for the same sign that we had he was gonna like put his coffee cup up to kind of signal something but it's just been up there the whole time so i think that system fell apart it's okay man all right here we go so uh this is a question from one of you uh here tonight i asked then uh don't colts thrive on outrageous claims that isolate members from the rest of society somebody want to jump on that i need a sociologist up here talk about that um i guess i'm trying to think of what we were saying that would have sparked the question maybe i'm trying to apply the question to what we were talking about is is it possible that early christianity was really just a small cult that perpetuated this outrageous story of the resurrection to isolate members from the rest of society i'm afraid i don't understand the question i'll connect sorry yeah okay [Music] oh i see so like ufo cult actually thrives on the fact that we're the only ones that believe this and that kind of argument yes yes let me let me repeat that because people aren't hearing it so the question that was clarified from the audience was tim spoke this morning and tonight on on a idea of the embarrassment criteria meaning that christians have put things in the gospels that would embarrass them or not reflect well on the story why would they ever do that that that that lends itself to the veracity of the story is kind of what you said and the question from the audience is well that's true and and holds water for like political organizations stuff like that but cults that sometimes are fringe organizations that that make outlandish claims sometimes end up growing or attracting followers because of their outlandish claims is that a fair estimation of your question all right so who wants to take that who has been in a cult well i guess i g i guess i would just respond by saying our modern definite i'm not a sociologist i'm not really qualified to say things like this but in my understanding what the early christians were doing was not forming a group of people that were believing things that no one would have ever imagined or thing that or thought of before what they were claiming was that the long hope of the people of israel was finally coming to fruition which was widely held by all all jews of their time period what what was novel about what they were doing was they were linking it to a specific individual and saying what makes jesus the messiah is not that he came to into rome and like you know kicked the romans out but that he was crucified and that he was raised from the dead and so even though that message did isolate the early christians in many ways uh we hear in the beginning of acts it uh brought them a lot of favor within early jewish communities because they were tapping into the hopes of the jewish people that that existed they were claiming that the jewish hopes had been fulfilled so i'm not sure that early christianity as a sociological profile really fits the type of profile of of cults as they might be defined today i'm not sure that's that uh would be a fruitful angle to to get on early christianity to truly understand what was going on that would be a response eric charles need a sociologist on the panel right that's the answer well i mean i mean i i think that this question is basically i mean it seems right that cults they do isolate members from society and they thrive on outrageous claims but i'm not sure i think you're right i don't think how make sure i'm not sure how that connects to the christian uh the christ community the people who follow who follow christ um they were um i guess your point is they were making outrageous claims so as to increase converts is the history of the bible story is inconsistent with other stories colts it's certainly not at all like growth of a political organization because as we pointed out the claims that are made by christianity would not be very uh would not be very plausible to most people but within the idea of the claim that perhaps christianity grew as a cult instead of as a political movement that doesn't seem to be at all inconsistent with others i would say that um this this is problematic because we're assuming that cult members are if they're acting rationally maybe maybe that's the problem we're assuming they're not acting rationally but acting rationally nobody would invent the christian story the christian story i think that's the that's the that's the comment that you were making that people don't invent this stuff because it led them no good i mean the early christians got themselves killed off right they were persecuted by the jews they're persecuted by the roman empire um the early disciples were mostly killed off there were really no good reason it was it wasn't it wasn't bringing them any benefit whatsoever but if you act if the assumption is they're irrational this is a cult they they were behaving in an irrational way then all we can say is it's kind of you your assumption is mass delusion a whole group of people all have the same delusion um at the same time which i think i think that's a possible uh hypothesis just not a very plausible one all right we're gonna we're gonna move on to the next question britt you got it ready all right oh long research in neurology and cognitive psychology provides some evidence that a person's recall of narrative and events is not an objective record of what actually occurred personal accounts are a mix of a person's belief prior knowledge and attitudes how does this relate to the credibility of the eyewitnesses of jesus so this kind of returns to a lot of the ground the some of the ground that we covered in the first question going back to you know the validity of the gospels resting on these eye witnesses uh kind of a sociology question again so who uh who wants to take a stab at this yeah i'll go at this mostly not as a as an expert but just passing on a book that i mentioned in the message by richard balcom jesus and the eyewitnesses falcon's my hero he he's just an amazing individual and not only does he uh cover historical issues he has a whole section of this book where he puts he cut gathers all the up-to-date research on neurology and psychology of human memory fascinating fascinating stuff how do humans remember things and what types of things do we tend to remember best in what environments and this kind of thing great great reading and uh what he gets at this is that uh psychologists i'll just kind of represent what i recall from these these chapters of balcom at least to just um it is true obviously that when we remember events we remember them from certain perspectives right we're humans we can't we can't do that but there are certain types of environments that trigger the human memory to remember really precise types of things how many of you remember exactly where you were when you first heard about the world trade towers being destroyed in new york i mean exactly the moment like what what you know what i mean why is that so moments uh that have emotional and huge significance for our lives tend to be lodged in our memory in ways that like what i did during well i had had breakfast two days ago you know what i mean like it's just we don't remember that kind of stuff routine and so part of what he develops in this chapter is that clearly if jesus was anything he was extraordinary and that the kinds of events and encounters that people had with jesus and and the effect of you know blind bartimaeus seeing again you know what i mean he's not going to forget that event now when he retells it he's going to apply some sort of narrative framework for it right so you know jesus may have been on his way to somewhere one day but bartimaeus may retell the story as if he ran right into me it was like divinely appointed is he distorting the memory no no no he's doing what we all do he's applying a framework to the memory and putting it in a narrative context and that doesn't mean the memory is distorted so anyhow there's a lot of psychological research on human memory and balcom pulls on it in a few chapters fascinating uh really fascinating stuff and then i think it connects also with our thing about eyewitnesses and the ability to remember and memorize i mean my my you know sanctified imagination but my guess is from the first two or three years after jesus was off the scene the apostles had gathered all of the stories into a consolidated form and started passing them off in uh in groups and bundles as they went to different communities and the recall wasn't a 60 year gap that's bill maher's mistake of thinking that there's a huge gap there wasn't a gap the eyewitnesses from the very beginning were telling and retelling you know you can see blind bartimaeus jesus says or to the number of people he heals what does he say after he heals someone go tell people what happened to you right from the event people were retelling their memories so anyway i hope that's the helpful way but read i don't know if you have the guts it's 500 pages but it's just fascinating stuff about human memory and this kind of thing so one basic point it looks like in the question it's implied that there's somehow a big disjunct between what's objective and what's told from the standpoint of beliefs prior knowledge and attitudes and we have in the gospel rights tell us what their point is often they they this has been written so that you may believe and and john tells us that but he's also claiming that this is actual things that actually happen so i guess my my my simple point there is that any uh any historical narrative any historical account will come from some standpoint there is no such thing as just an in you know completely disembodied objective account um that doesn't mean that what it's that what it's talking about isn't for that reason true and real and and objective in that sense so i would i would question the sort of the disjunct that's implied there all right anything else to add no all right brit got another question for us why aren't there any records from the eyewitnesses during jesus's time there must be some records from that time don't any of them mention jesus just a couple couple of reactions one one is um the i people who would want to make a record of jesus did and it got passed into the gospels that would be the those people who all the people who who actually had an interest in jesus and really wanted his his words and actions to pass on eventually got collected and once it's collected the individual pieces don't seem as relevant if you have the compendiums that why do you have the individual right if you got the they know the billy joel collection you don't need the individual albums anymore um you just showed your age now now from people who are outside of this group of people who are actually interested in keeping anything of jesus i don't think jesus made it big enough he simply wasn't important enough person to be noted by his contemporaries i mean here's this guy he's some carpenter's son probably a bastard child you know out in the boondocks of of of of uh you know galilee up there not even in the political center he said okay he's a preacher but he preached among the poor among the he's not in he's not big time among the influential type he gets into jerusalem gets himself killed now we may think crucifixion is a big deal but it wasn't romans were executing potential rebels all over the place during that period they were constant pretenders to um to be messiahs people want to overthrow the romans you saw the life of brian well there were people they were executing people left and right so it is not surprising should i miss that one you and monty python so it is not surprising that jesus contemporaries who are not interested in jesus or not his followers would have no record of jesus whatsoever he simply never made it big enough but afterwards um after he died and after his p that the christian church starts spreading then the christian church made it big enough to make it into secular historian historians yeah yeah now that's that's a great point i mean this is it's hard to have over emphasize this is a backwater a galilee is a backwater within a and kind of a a marginal roman province uh and and so what happens there registers in roman records when it's when it causes problems or when it's still into something that they need to sort of put down but they're not they're not going to have interest in this uh the official historiographers until it comes comes to be something that's that's a much bigger deal and that's when it creeps up in the roman records there is there is there i think tacitus mentions it in passing refers to jesus as crestus i believe uh but uh it's it's when christianity grows and moves and this is this is also a splinter movement within within a minority religion within the roman empire so it i think there's some theological significance to this this is where uh where where the incarnation takes place but from the standpoint of of records that's why it wouldn't show up in the roman records well this was mentioned in a previous question um and i think tim to use your quilt illustration you know luke taking pieces from mark to build his quilt i think a question previously inferred uh you know mark probably took pieces from peter did peter write any of that down uh the really really early eyewitness stuff um and if not why didn't he um and how does that go with the kind of culture this the gospels were coming to fruition in if you can maybe addre i think that's a little bit of what the questions you know really back in the time when when jesus existed or maybe right after his death why don't we have any of those early pieces other than the things that we do have do you think they they did exist and disappeared or or or not did peter never write anything down does it not matter go with that a little bit yeah i mean we don't know i mean uh charles illustration of the billy joel collection is a good one and that uh i mean it's really true i mean why do texts survive from the ancient world at all because people read them a lot and are passing them down like crazy if things are not passed down to us it's because only a few people read them and then they got buried in whatever the family treasure chest and they don't exist anymore and so again so the individual if there were written accounts paul um in a letter uh in his letter to timothy talks about hey next time you come visit me bring some scrolls along so you know paul had a little cachet of scrolls with him as he was cruising around so there was likely some written pieces but if you have the gospel of luke or a few scraps and sayings of jesus you're going to obviously take the gospel of luke with you if you're going to a new christian community or something like that so it's likely that written materials exist there were probably lots of oral materials too but once you have the billy joel collection you just don't need the individuals anymore you have you have the full thing so i don't know failing to connect to the modern generation yeah you have uh i don't know if you have yeah wow got to get you guys some music all right um we got another question is is this okay if if uh if this is from in-house brit why don't you just kind of stand up or wave at me or something like that does that sound good okay uh christianity seems to bar stories from other ancient religions predating christianity including the story of the virgin birth is this true and again this is another question that came in a lot if you've seen bill maher's movie he has a rather lengthy bit on this um some of the the books that have come out by richard dawkins another atheist really hone in on this point um so maybe we'll start with a historian um maybe not let me well i i'm i should say i'm in a story of early modern europe so this is not this is not my he's punting yeah i'm funny um but let me say in principle uh if there were echoes within ancient literature ancient mythology of things that you also see in the gospels that wouldn't that would be really neither here nor there uh so i think that that that that's this is an important question but but if you see some parallels uh uh parallels of dying and rising gods uh you hear talking i think that's from like the pythagorean sec perhaps and others that does not necessarily it doesn't say anything other than that some of these ideas were around but then you have to go in and you have to look at specifically what's being claimed here and i think it's when you get that that more specific level that the differences uh diverge and that uh you understand that if if there's if there are if christianity is borrowing from another ancient religion it's it's it's borrowing it's it's extended judaism it's it's it's it's thoroughly jewish and it's the new testament is in its categories and so um that's that's not really a full answer by any means but just just an initial thought and uh almost uh this argument has been out there been put out there um in a number of recent kind of popular cultural venues there's a few problems with it and i haven't done my homework on this issue back to the sources yet and i guess i might have to if this is a question a lot of people are asking but um the most prominent one that makes it into bill maher's movie and richard dawkins talks about this is the horus mythology he was a egyptian god he was an agricultural god it was connected with the the birthing and the new life of the crops in spring and summer and then the dying of the crops in late fall and winter and so on and somebody somewhere has made some lame documentary claiming that christianity borrowed horus mythology and just adapted it and then pretended it was history or something like that because it's made its way into bill maher's film and into a number of different source sources um here's the main way you know that this is just utterly ridiculous right is just look at whose names are attached to these arguments when you hear them if they don't teach at a major university or don't have like a degree after their name or they work for an obscure newspaper and i'm not just trying to like pull an elitist move here i'm saying scholarship moves forward by putting public arguments out there being subject to peer review by other scholars critique move forward let's move on nobody in new testament scholarship is having this debate right now like this is an old argument that gets brought up by fringe journalists trying to i don't know and they make it on their way to the history channel it's so frustrating uh and people see it and then like oh jesus is just horus mythology turned into history it's just utterly ridiculous nobody serious is having this discussion um and the fact that say the the virgin birth theme i mean all of these there's a claim out there that uh the origin of zoroastrianism was born of a virgin and then someone does the homework and oh yeah this actually post dates christianity and it was actually borrowing from the jesus story you know and it so anyhow i don't that's my response to this this whole this whole thing let me just pull that into maybe a slightly broader perspective it's a 19th century biblical scholarship there's a lot of interest in ancient eastern egyptian all the archaeological work uncovered all these texts and people said oh we've had the bible for thousands of years but these ancient texts where do they come from what do they believe look at all the similarities and people start i mean there's a period of time when people were very excited and were trying to attach parallel similarities dependence everywhere for about a generation of scholars and then people kind of took a deep breath and said they're really not that similar and and they kind of pulled back and and i think tim's absolutely right the biblical scholarships is has really left that road but you get residuals from that period some books ancient books somebody picked in the library some college professor somewhere is teaching a class on bible not a biblical scholar but a religious studies guy and he's going to teach some of this stuff and it gets out there and then one of them goes to college and picks it up and then so i produce a documentary and here we go and these things keep popping up again and again even though in mainstream biblical scholarship it's really just not it's it's it's really old and outdated so well if you are really interested in this i know that one of the places where uh where you can get a very full discussion of this is that book i mentioned earlier by nt wright the resurrection of the son of god he has a very long section on beliefs about uh about resurrection and afterlife and so forth in the ancient world inc including in greek and roman mythology so all right great so what time am i supposed to go to i don't know that's the first time we've ever done this all right uh in your message today i did not hear you talk about the scribes with the gospel account why not it's an integral piece to learn that eyewitnesses plus gospel writers have to hire scribes and the likelihood of preferential editing increases interesting i think they're talking about your message today so why don't you start dr mackey right right what did you talk about the tim uh yeah why didn't i talk about this yes uh so i'm inscribed i'm seeing two potential issues at work here one it seems like we're talking about middlemen so we have eyewitnesses and then we have middlemen scribes who put those accounts to writing and then when those writing takes places preferential editing i'm guessing that means that a scribe might be tempted to distort a story or something like that so i i i think i i addressed this pretty clearly but the point was that luke as a middle man is both representing the material from the eyewitnesses but it doesn't mean again as we were talking about earlier that he's trying to give a blow-by-blow minute-by-minute account of the life of jesus so he is putting the work together according to his preferences that's one way of saying it another way would justif say he has goals in compiling his quilt to make it look a certain way and so on and to be faithful to the account of the eyewitnesses um if the question of scribes if we're talking about like the manuscript history of the new testament like could is it possible that some scribe a hundred years after the book of luke's and existent like change it you know and do stuff like this uh to his preferences that's totally possible and uh we actually do know like things like that did happen but again this is the beauty of the grassroots explosion of christianity is if the gospel of luke within you know 50 years makes its way down to egypt into eastern asia up to rome up into eastern europe if somebody describes changing something down in egypt in a manuscript down in egypt you know what i mean you have the whole rest that scribe would have to travel and find every copy of luke and change it all in exactly the same place you know all over the world and so i i the the beauty of the mess of new testament manuscript history is that there's just so much of it it's just all over the world and there's so many manuscripts but the advantage is that anybody who wanted to introduce changes was out of you know automatically uh kind of out of luck because the thing had spread already too much to change the manuscripts in different places so uh the idea of these preferential editing by scribes later on is uh is just kind of out of the realm of of possibility well we've talked a lot tonight about the veracity of eyewitnesses and kind of the original accounts it's kind of the other side of the coin the the reproduction of those manuscripts and how do we know when we walk walk into barnes and noble and we grab a bible that it's been faithfully reproduced um and so is there is there a book that you guys would recommend i know there's a lot of scholarship out there on this type of thing because some people really do have have questions and and air controls or anything you wanted to add on that kind of reproduction question let me just throw that in there i mean there are over what 5 000 pieces of manuscript new testament full full manuscript as well as bits and fragments this small i mean there's over 5000 piece and i think what is said is not one of them is identical to each other i mean when people copy grammatical mistakes happen letters get dropped off things like that happen all over the place and then biblical scholars they sit there and they study how people copy okay there's a science called text criticism you figure out how people copy and how mistakes happen when you copy and there's all these great names for all the things you do when you copy and you skip words skip lines there's names for all of them and biblical scholars sit there and look at manuscripts and compare all 5000 of them and they try to reconstruct the original and um isn't that what you want to do isn't it it's a great it's a great okay i actually i'll show you this is um this is the um greek new testament this is i think the ubs uh 2.0 version and um and and they actually compiled this from all these different manuscripts and they try to tell you and they actually um when they're variants they'll tell you this is gray level a like we're very certain this is the original and when there's like management parts that are very very different and they can't figure it out they say we're not so sure about this one i mean scholars are very very diligent that's a c level c level a variant and d level variant and they're very very diligent and they work very very hard and those variants if you grab them all they don't make a difference they change no theology they change there's no major difference in any of these go ahead uh so i threw a picture of what he's talking about um in all greek new editions of the greek new testament you have the greek text up here and then there's all sorts of little squiggles and symbols and here's where scholars spend all their time down here uh mapping out all these different variants and the manuscripts and the codes and so on if you want to do this like go you know well not you can go to cambridge and get a phd and do this stuff but this is all this work has been done to map out all of all of these things and it's pretty it's pretty rock solid uh what's in the greek new testament nobody's really arguing about that all right i want to ask you guys kind of one final question to kind of draw this to a close and it's kind of maybe kind of put away the notes and you know that kind of deal if you uh just from your perspective kind of coming off where tim approached his message today i think where a lot of us live um if you're just kind of sitting in a coffee shop or walking down the street you bump into a friend that's a skeptic or someone that's not a christ follower and maybe you haven't seen them in many years and you're catching up on what you do or that kind of deal and man you guys are all three of you are clearly intelligent you've spent most of your adult life in school you know that kind of deal um and they look at you and clearly man you teach at universities and they just kind of put to you man how you guys really believe like the bibles are reliable like you live your your life on and clearly you do um what's your you know person's looking at their watch you can't sit down and have a three-hour conversation with them what's your what's your 30-second kind of one-minute from the gut uh answer uh to that person and i'd just like to hear quickly from each of you kind of as we close charles you want to you want to start you do good off the cuff so i do get off the cuff well i'll take it from one perspective i i think i think the perspective you're posing is gee what is somebody like you who who try to think about things and and and be real rational about things how do you end up believing something like this and i would start with well i think uh the problem is that we have in in the culture that we live in a view of bible and christianity that is well frankly completely distorted it's it's somehow christians are the christianity is for the fools for the people who who need a crutch people who um just need to believe um and and those are the of what the popular culture presents to us um but that's not how it has been uh christianity has in in traditional in previous time attracted some of the most intelligent um um people because of the depth of its teaching and and the beauty of what is being taught so it's not it's not merely experiential or not merely a sociological i'm i'm a christian i just believe but it attracts deep thinkers okay and when you push deep thinkers together and and and confront them with the truth of the gospel um i mean bill maher that's just he's intellectually dishonest i mean just forget it um talk to people who actually open mind and willing to think about this you will be surprised okay about how much basis there is for this and how i would say it is more rational to believe in christianity than not to believe it that's where i stand okay and people say christian faith and rationality are opposite i say that's misunderstanding of faith faith faith is once you have the rational basis and you knew that you need that personal commitment that's where faith is it's when you take the things you know to be true and try to live it out that's the faith part that's what i was saying john can you repeat that repeat the note of the question yeah just kind of the harder you know that was more than 30 seconds sorry sorry i'm gonna make up for you you know eric you're you're you're a professor you're you know history and i think what charles is getting there's this kind of idea and culture the people that that are educated and not naive any longer could never really believe in the the veracity of scripture what would your answer be to them well in my experience both through my study and through my experience of life in a big way i believe that what's in scripture is true and i'm not the only one there a lot of other people found the same thing to be true i would challenge you as my friend uh to uh to um read the bible for yourself and to ask that if this is indeed a message from god that god would make that clear to you yeah i guess that's that's the real simple version of it tim yeah you know i'm just trying to think about what personally to me are the most compelling parts about a christian world view um i i suppose what i'd say is christianity or the christian worldview is is not a system of belief it's not a a spiritual lifestyle or something like this it's it's connecting myself to a claim about events that happened in our world and in history um and that god acted in those events uh in extraordinary ways to to uh to rescue and redeem our world and address the human situation that we're in and personally as i've probed and questioned and doubted i've actually tried to make myself not believe all this a few times but the more that i get into the historical details there just simply aren't rival explanations that get and explain what happened in jesus of nazareth as much as just saying this is what happened i mean this really is far and away in my mind the most reasonable explanation is that this man actually did and said these things and then i would invite my friend to read a book together and let's start the conversation i i personally am just incredibly grateful for for i know all these guys personally through the years just the time you guys spent getting educated and exploring these questions and just to have resources like you guys in our community and thanks a lot for coming tonight especially tim you for preaching all day and coming up here again so can we give these guys a hand and i don't want to uh you know i don't want to get you uh caught here too late but i'm sure you'll hang out a little bit for people that might have uh some follow-up questions and this deo again we're kind of working out the kinks here so thanks for your patience but we're trying to do this because we don't want to be a spiritual community that kind of gets up and just preaches and it's just kind of passive and we're coming at you and that's how it is we want to engage you and we want dialogue that's really important to us we as tim said today in this message we have doubts we don't have all the answers we're on a journey ourselves and we want to be a community that's on a journey pushing towards truth pressing on questions there's no reason to hide and that's kind of what these q and a's are about we want to start and continue dialogue no matter where you may be tonight or or watching at home no matter where you may be on your journey we want to walk with you and engage you so let us know how we can continue to do that so we'll be here for the next three sundays next week tim remind me the the topic is uh what about other religions what about other religions so i think that that's a pretty big question uh so if that's something that you wrestle with or or you have friends just come on out um we'd love to kind of pack this place out and and hear from our gifted thinkers so thanks again for coming tonight feel free to kind of hang out and and talk to these guys drive safely

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Rating: 4.9120879 out of 5

Keywords: Tim Mackie, Bible Project

Id: 7g7Uq8wSAuM

Length: 77min 10sec (4630 seconds)

Published: Sat Sep 19 2020