← Know What You Believe with Michael Horton
Know What You Believe with Michael Horton
The Truth About the Bible and Early Christianity: Wes Huff, Michael Kruger, and Daniel Wallace
01:09:26
Wesley Huff, Michael Kruger, and Daniel Wallace join Michael Horton for a roundtable discussion on textual criticism, the reliability of the New Testament manuscripts, Gnosticism, the divinity of Christ, the canon, and early Christian origins. GET...
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- [00:01]
A
How did the New Testament come to be? Was the canon created by the early church or was it recognized as sacred from the start? In the Question of Canon, biblical scholar Michael Krueger challenges the modern assumption that the Bible was chosen arbitrarily. With clarity and care, he explores the historical, theological, and cultural evidence that the canon wasn't imposed by, but emerged with, an early Christian community. Whether you're a student of Scripture or simply curious about the Bible's origins, this book offers insight that will deepen your understanding and strengthen your faith. And now, for a limited time, you can receive the Question of Canon. For a donation of $15 or more, visit solamedia.org offers to request your copy.
- [00:52]
B
We don't want to live in the Village Green. At the end of the day, we can all leave and return to our houses of worship. But our goal is to encourage conversational theology in the Village Green where we can rub shoulders with Christians from different traditions and expressions. Well, I'm really excited about the conversation. We're about to have conversation about the Bible, and I get to have it with some people I really respect on this subject who can deep sea dive for, but also explain things in ways perhaps we haven't heard before. How can we trust the Scriptures? Hasn't the text been corrupted? And so we're going to get into a lot of these questions. And with me are Michael Krueger. First of all, he's Samuel C. Patterson, Chancellor's professor of New Testament and Early Christianity at Reformed Theological Seminary in Charlotte, North Carolina. He's the author of many books, including the Heresy of Orthodoxy, Canon Revisited, and the Question of Canon. And he obviously focuses a lot on what we're talking about, the origins of Christianity. Great to have you, Mike.
- [02:11]
C
Thanks, Mike. Great to be with you. This is going to be a fun conversation. I'm looking forward to it.
- [02:15]
B
Yeah. Daniel Wallace is Senior Research professor of New Testament Studies Emeritus at Dallas Theological Seminary and the Executive Director of the center for the Study of New Testament Manuscripts. He's written, edited, or contributed to more than three dozen books and has published many articles in New Testament studies. His exegetical syntax of the New Testament is the Standard Intermediate Greek grammar and has been translated into more than a half dozen languages. It's a real pleasure to have you on, Dan.
- [02:46]
D
Yeah, thank you, Mike. I've been on a podcast with you once before, but not with these august fellows to join in. This is going to be great.
- [02:54]
B
Yeah, I'm looking forward to it. And Wes Huff is the Central Canada Director for Apologetics Canada and has been a guest on a variety of public platforms, from the Joe Rogan experience to numerous public dialogues, debates, and interfaith events on issues of belief in religion across North America. He's working on a PhD in New Testament at the University of Toronto's Wycliffe College. Wes, it's a pleasure to have you on.
- [03:22]
E
Well, it's a pleasure to be here. Admitting that I am fully the novice in the room, but looking forward to it nonetheless.
- [03:27]
C
Not quite.
- [03:28]
B
Not from what I've heard. First of all, brothers, I'd like to go at the outset to the whole issue of misconceptions that people have. What is textual criticism and why does it matter?
- [03:45]
D
Yeah, I'll start off with a definition. Textual criticism is related to any text where we don't have the originals anymore and the copies that we have are going to be different in some degree. All of ancient literature requires textual criticism. In fact, this is the foundational discipline for doing historical study. We wouldn't know what Livy said or what Tacitus said or Plato or Aristophanes or Sophocles or any author from the ancient world without textual criticism, because we have no Greco Roman literature in the original's extent. Consequently, it's a necessary thing to do. The criticism simply means research. We're not trying to criticize the Bible. We're trying to, when it comes to the New Testament, ascertain what the original wording is based on the extant evidence.
- [04:43]
B
So not criticizing what the canon says, but. But critically analyzing what is in the canon.
- [04:51]
D
Exactly. Yeah. And. And in fact, criticism is often translated as research. Like the Institute for Testament, like a text for Schung can be either the Institute for New Testament Textual Criticism or Textual Research, the standard institute in Germany that is the granddaddy of all New Testament textual critical institutes. So the goal of all ancient literature is to try to get back to that original wording. In some recent years, recent decades, New Testament scholars have kind of changed the goal. Many of them have. Not all. Their goal is to try to get back to the earliest available or accessible text. The problem with that as a goal is that it cuts out the authority. And what I mean by that is textual criticism using all available evidence, including the external evidence, the hard evidence, manuscripts, ancient translations of a document, quotations by church fathers, other hard evidence. That's the external evidence, but there's also internal evidence. And that is going to look at two different things. What would a scribe be likely to have done in terms of changing the text? And what is the author likely to have written originally. Now we can determine what an author would be likely to have written originally based on places where we just don't have variants and where all the manuscripts agree so we can tell what that author is likely to have done. When you do textual criticism without trying to look at the authorial meaning, you're cutting out one of the four legs of textual criticism. Other ancient literature is still, for the most part, trying to get back to the original wording. But this has been a change in many scholars thinkings about New Testament textual criticism, where the real goal should be, as has been for up until the last three or four decades, for most scholars to ascertain the wording of the original. In fact, all of exegetical literature, every single commentary that's ever been done on any book of the Bible, is assuming that they have the original wording to try to get back to. Otherwise, how can you tell if you're writing about. Well, Luke meant this. Well, if you don't care about the original wording, you can't say those things.
- [07:17]
B
So one of the things that we hear from the person sitting next to us on the plane is it's so far back, there are so many copies and so many distortions, and we can't really get back to Jesus and the apostles. Why do you say it's sort of like the telephone game? You know, one person tells another person, they tell another person, they tell so many copies. This is what people hear often from skeptics. How do we answer that?
- [07:53]
E
Yeah, so I recently actually did a talk at Liberty University where I played a clip of stand up comedian David Cross where he used that exact illustration. He talked about popes and kings and scribes throughout history who have altered the text. And how do you know that you have what the original author wrote when you just have such a span of time in between? And I kind of retorted at the end of playing this clip of him that if you get your history from a comedian, don't be surprised when it turns out to be a joke. But, you know, we hear these narratives and I think what they miss is just the complexity that happens in what Dr. Wallace was just describing. The telephone game assumes a single line of transm, right? You whisper into one person person's ear. There are rules. You have to say it once. You can't say very loudly. Whereas if you look at the history of the transmission, the copies and the dissemination of something like the New Testament text, it's spread out all around and we even have, you know, multiple translations that we can use as kind of comparative analysis other than the Greek. And so it's not one line of transmission as much as it's multiple lines of transmission spread over a long period of time, with scribes in different locations writing to different audiences, who the audiences themselves are at different locations. So there are ways to vet this process via what Dr. Wallace just described in the methodologies of textual criticism that really cut out the telephone game assumption. And really, when you talk to people who use the telephone game analogy, often what they have in mind is not necessarily transmission in a text being disseminated throughout the ancient world, but translation. They kind of assume that the Greek is being translated into Latin and then the Greek copies are destroyed, and then the Latin is being translated into German, and then the Latin copies are destroyed and the Germans translate into Old French and Old English, and eventually we get our modern English translation. And so you have this long span of time of translations, of translations, of translations. And sometimes when people accuse me of having a translation of a translation of a translation, I pull, you know, my nesi alon text out of my backpack and say, well, I've translated this multiple times over and over and over. But I don't think that's what you mean. Right. What they mean is something that is actually not representative of how we go from ancient papyrus to modern day print and how we go from the Hebrew and Greek directly into modern English translations. So while you can understand someone's ignorance in using an analogy like the telephone game, it really is that it's an ignorance of both the translation process of the New Testament and the Old Testament, likewise, and how we go from ancient papyrus and parchment into modern day print for any ancient document.
- [10:41]
D
That was great. I should listen to you more, Wes.
- [10:45]
B
Mike, do you want to chime in there?
- [10:47]
C
Well, yeah, I mean, my friends here have laid out the standard case right. For the reliability of the New Testament text. One of the things that's disappointing for us as scholars is it doesn't actually take that much work to go and find out what the transmission process is really like. And when you do, you realize it's remarkably reliable and consistent. You know, one of the things that's come up in all this is what, what I would call scribal infrastructure, which is, did the early Christians have the right mechanism, the right uniformity, the right sort of unification around this, what the scribes are doing, to think that this could have been done reliably? And I think there's massive evidence for that. There's the corrections in the text. No one's mentioned yet the nature of the scribal hand, which is more of a book hand than a documentary hand, and they've shown that it's much better than they used to think it was. The more manuscripts we find, there's the use of the codex and nomena sacra, which I think also speak to scribal uniformity. So there's just so much encouraging news here.
- [11:38]
D
In December 2014, Kurt Eichenwald wrote an article for Newsweek, which is purportedly an accurate magazine on politics and other issues. The article was titled, the Bible so Misunderstood It's a Sin. Now here's. He compares the transmission of the Bible, particularly the New Testament, to the telephone game. And he makes this statement that fits right into what Wes has said. No television preacher has ever read the Bible. Neither has any evangelical politician, neither has the Pope, and neither have I so far. He may be right. But then he goes on and says, and neither have you. At best, we've all read a bad translation. Now get this, a translation of translations of translations. So three generations of translations where the previous ones apparently were all destroyed of hand copied copies of copies of copies of copies and on and on hundreds of times. Now, what that sounds like very much is if that's the case, the New Testament would be very much like the telephone game. As Wes pointed out, the telephone game has one line of transmission. Let me just kind of lay out the rules of the game. When you play this, you're whispering into the ear of the next person down the line. You don't get to say it twice. Somebody doesn't hear exactly what you said. They're going to make stuff up, fill stuff in, and it goes down the line. And when you get to the last person, it's not at all like what the first person said. That's the point of the game with the copying of the New Testament. The point is to make an accurate copy each time. And it's a written copy, not an oral copy. It was handed down from manuscript to manuscript. We have virtually no evidence of any scriptorium where the lecturer read the text and people copied it out. That used to be the idea, but it's been demonstrated that almost all of our copies have been done by somebody seeing a manuscript in front of them and copying that manuscript. So we have that kind of a thing going on, accurate written transmission. And then you have what's called a d', orthotes. That's a person who is kind of like the corrector of a manuscript before it leaves the scriptorium to the church or the person who has purchased the manuscript, the de Orthotes checks that manuscript against what they copied to make sure it's accurate. Now, I was a professor for 40 years. If somebody turned in a quiz and I marked off several questions and they got a 75 on it, and they complained, no, I got this right. I say, you know, you didn't understand the Greek here and here, who are you going to think is going to be more accurate? The student 75, where he got all of it right, or did I correct those and I was more accurate? That was the role of the d'. Arthotes. There have been some who said that the early copies of the scribes, they were not professional scribes. Like Bart Ehrman said the early copyists were not professional scribes. So they just added all sorts of things. The problem with that is that what we have evidence for is so many of our early papyri and even some of our parchment manuscripts that came a little bit later. These scribes, although not professionally trained as scribes, were professionally trained as accountants. And C.H. roberts argued this in 1977 in his Schweik lectures at Oxford University, where he said he only found one manuscript outside of New Testament copies, where they did something that only accountants did when they were writing out the text, and that is that accountants, instead of writing out the word for a number like 167, they'd put 167 in Greek. They'd have to use letters that represented that, and they'd put a line over it, say, don't read this as these letters, but read it as a word. And Roberts only found one manuscript, one literary manuscript, that did that. But he found lots of the New Testament manuscripts that did that. What this means is these early copyists were not the kind of people to come up with wild imaginations and add to the text from whatever they want to get it from. Their accuracy had to do with copying down as exactly and carefully as they could. I like to use the illustration that the kinds of mistakes that these early scribes, for the most part, committed are the kinds that are the most easily detectable. If you saw a handwritten manuscript to, say, the Constitution and you were reading the preamble, it starts out, we the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect onion. If you saw that, you say, oh, that's stupid. It's supposed to be union. The guy wrote an O instead of a U. That's the kind of mistake these early scribes make. What we found is, in fact A very, very important, I think our second most important manuscript, papyrus number 75, the scribe copied one or two letters at a time. And so you've got this kind of careful copying. Now back to the telephone game. We don't just interview the last person in line, we get to interview all sorts of scribes all the way up the line as close to the original. And it's not just one line, but several lines of transmission.
- [17:05]
C
I think the thing to take note of is the fact that these are well known facts. These aren't hidden. It's not like we just found these out five years ago. It's the standard fare. Dan mentioned Kurt Eichenwald's article. When that came out, I actually wrote a two part review of it on my website, lengthily rebutting much of his misconceptions. And it was full of misconceptions about the way the New Testament was transmitted. It's actually one of those examples of something that we really even shouldn't be talking about much anymore. I wish we would kind of move on to other topics because it's so well established that for people to still sort of complain about it just shows that you really don't understand the way documents worked in the ancient world because everybody's in the same boat. And Christianity actually emerges in a much stronger place and even comparable texts in the ancient world.
- [17:47]
B
Can you touch on that, Mike? Compare for us the textual tradition of the New Testament and Plato's works or Herodotus or Virgil.
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C
Yeah, well, what people don't realize is that if you have a document that was somewhere written near the first century, and here we are living in roughly 2,000 years later, how many copies of such a document written in the first century would we expect to have people even know the answer to that question? And what is a normal amount of copies you would have from a document written in the first century? And you know, I would say the average is probably somewhere around 10 copies would be great. We have some ancient documents with one, you look at some of the works of Josephus, you have maybe around 50. I think Tacitus sits around 10. And these numbers change because we find new ones from time to time. Some of these copies are very fragmentary, some of these are more full. But to have handwritten copies like the New Testament that well over 5,500 now, 5,700 now, depending on how you count the duplicates, is just a stunning number. And that's just in Greek. That's not even talking about our versional manuscripts. It's not even talking about patristic citations of the New Testament. It's just simply talking about Greek manuscripts. Now, yes, many of those are late and medieval. Okay, fair enough. But that's true for the way we count any documents. Some of our best copies of Josephus work are 10th century. And so the idea that once you get into the Middle Ages and we don't pay attention anymore is simply not true. We don't do that for other texts, because other texts, you hardly have anything before the 10th century. So the fact that we have so many thousands of copies, many of which go back to the second, third or fourth century. I just wrote an article for a forthcoming volume on second century Christianity, and I was tasked with documenting all what you would call possible New Testament manuscripts that are dated to the second century. And depends what you define as possible, of course. But I highlighted 12 manuscripts that I think are reliably and at least reasonably possibly dated to the second century that I think cover a significant portion of the New Testament text. So as Dan was saying, if you have a line of people in a communication train, you don't go talk to the last person. If you can go back to the second century, you can almost talk to the first person. If you count the first person as first century, you're pretty darn close to it and better than almost any comparable document in the ancient world. So that's what I mean. I mean, if someone's going to complain about Christian history, you have to complain really about about all of human history.
- [20:09]
D
The best thing I can come up with is the Empire State Building. The Empire State building is about 1454ft tall with the radio antennas. And when you count the Greek New Testament manuscripts and the translations, it comes to well over 1 mile high. It's 4 1/2 Empire State buildings compared to a podium. And in terms of the date, our earliest copies come within decades. We're not waiting a thousand years. By a thousand years after the completion of the New Testament, we have 1800 copies within 900 years. It really picked up after that because by the end of the 10th century, 900 years after Revelation was written, we have 900 copies. And you go through the early centuries, as Micah said, we've got so many good copies on those early centuries. One of the things I think that's really interesting here is again going back to the telephone game. We can Compare, for example, p.75 and Codex Vaticanus. P75 has most of Luke and John in it, and it's a third century Papyrus Vaticanus, which I think is our most important New Testament manuscript, a 4th century parchment that had the whole Bible in it originally. When you compare codex Vaticanus with P75, they have more agreement with each other than any two manuscripts in the first eight centuries of Christianity. And where they differ, many times what Vaticanus does is, has a better reading, one that we would say that's original P75 is later or it's not original, which means that although they come from a similar stream, Vaticanus is not a copy of P75. It's a copy of an ancestor of P75. So this is where you do these comparisons and you say, gee, the telephone game. Kurt Eichenwald actually plays the telephone game when he's trying to represent what the telephone game is. He's trying to say what scholars said. But no scholar's ever made the kind of nonsense that he has said in the paragraph that I read or what Mike has done in his website.
- [22:24]
B
You've debated Bart Ehrman, where he has made this claim and we've heard it. It's like, you know, every Christmas and Easter on the History Channel, this sort of thing comes out that the telephone game has been played for so long that we really don't have any access to what an original Gospel of Luke would have said. And I forget the number. What number does he give of all of the contra or the discrepancies?
- [22:56]
D
He said it's between 3 and 400,000.
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B
And what did you say to that?
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D
First of all, it's funny, Barth elsewhere has said we actually do have very early copies of Mark. They are Matthew and Luke in that Matthew and Luke used Mark to write their Gospels. And 600 of Mark's 660 verses appear in Matthew, although they're modified to some degree. But he had elsewhere said that those are copies of Mark with an author changing in light of what he knew or what he thought. So Ehrman kind of contradicts himself on that. But when it comes to the number of variants, that figure was actually low. It was about three or four hundred thousand, he said. He's often said we have more variants in the manuscripts than we have words in the New Testament. And that is actually an understatement as well. We have approximately 138,162 words in the Greek New Testament, give or take a dozen, but we have the number of variants. Peter Gurry actually was the first person to do more than just a guess out in the wild. He compared places where exhaustive research has been done on certain books or Chapters of the New Testament and was able to extrapolate how many variants we have. Now, he published this in New Testament Studies. Peter was an intern of mine and he worked at CS&TM for some time. He's now a professor at Midwestern Baptist Seminary. And Peter said he excluded spelling differences and nonsense readings, which happen to be the majority of the readings. About two thirds of all our variances are either spelling or nonsense. But he came up with a number factually, based on the evidence he found of about half a million variants. Now, if you look at the spelling and nonsense variants, my estimate is we have about one and a half million differences among our manuscripts today, just our Greek manuscripts. That sounds terribly frightening and discouraging, but here's a way to think about it. Put this into four different categories. All of our variants fit into one of four categories. And I'm taking the quadrant from two, viable and meaningful. A meaningful variant changes the meaning of the text to some degree, like Jesus versus Lord Jesus or Jesus versus Christ. It changes the meaning of the text in terms of translation. Now, obviously you don't have manuscripts that have Jesus or some have Peter. That's not going to happen. But it does change it and it affects translation. In fact, there's some that can change the meaning of the effect without affecting translation. So those are meaningful, viable means. It has a good shot at going back to the original wording. Now, I'm being very generous in what I would consider to be a viable variant and very generous in what I'm considering to be a meaningful variant. The categories in are not meaningful and not viable, which is our largest category of variants, the more manuscripts we find. Each new manuscript adds Approximately, on average, 20 new variances, wording differences that we've not seen in any other manuscript every single time we discover another manuscript. And the average size of all of our manuscripts Overall is over 400 pages. That's pretty significant. So you get these variants that come down the pike. But say it's an 11th century manuscript, none of it's going to go back to the original. So it just adds to the number of differences, but it doesn't challenge what we think the original is. So you look at all this and those that are not meaningful and not viable, that's by far the largest category. Then you got those that are viable but not meaningful. And this is going to be things that they may go back to the original wording, but it doesn't affect anything. And so spelling differences are one of those things. Word order differences that affects emphasis, but doesn't really affect the meaning, then you've got those that are meaningful but not viable, and those are going to be the ones that are interesting. But if it's found in one late manuscript, nobody thinks it goes back to the original. The smallest category of our approximately one and a half million differences in our manuscripts are those readings that are both meaningful and viable. And the best estimate is that it's approximately 1/10 of 1% of all these variants are both meaningful and viable. And yet even quite a few of them don't change, even in translation. It's massive. Bart Ehrman at one point says we could go on speaking forever about the differences in the manuscripts. They're not just in the hundreds, they're in the thousands. Well, they're in the hundreds of thousands. But I did a little experiment a few years ago. Twelve years ago, I was teaching a seminar for a week on textual criticism in Oklahoma, and I looked at just the statement, John loves Mary. How many ways can you say John loves Mary in Greek using the same verb, agapao? You know, we get agape from it. For your listeners, some who don't know Greek, how many ways can you say John loves Mary in Greek? Not Mary is loved by John, Not John loved Mary, but John loves Mary present tense. And I spent eight hours writing out the different ways you could say it. Both John and Mary have different spellings. The word order can be different in Greek, it doesn't matter. Both can occur with the article like it'd be the John loves the Mary, but we don't translate that, and it doesn't affect any doctrine in those places. I came up with more than 1,000 ways you could say John loves Mary in Greek. If there's more than a thousand ways to translate the Greek into John loves Mary, then it doesn't matter if we have hundreds of thousands of variants. What matters is what are the ones that are meaningful and viable? And those are the only ones that scholars ever really talk about.
- [29:15]
C
Mike One story I tell my students all the time is I tell about the story about the archaeological dig going on at Oxyrhynchus, Egypt, which is one of the longest running archaeological digs we have when it pertains to ancient manuscripts started in the late 1800s, still going on today, probably well over 120 years active dig. And my students don't realize it, that we continue to find more manuscripts of the New Testament periodically and they never hear about them. And one of the most common questions I get is why don't we ever hear about these New manuscripts that are discovered, you know, if we get a new copy of Luke or Romans or what have you. And I tell them, I say largely, the reason you never hear about it is because it pretty much is like the Luke you already know and pretty much like the Romans you already know. And I said, do you think if there's a really different version of Luke that was discovered, you think you'd hear about that on the news? And the answer is yes. And so part of the story of actual criticism, as I was saying in my earlier comment, is it's sort of a non story. I mean, the funny part about it is we keep talking about it and I get it, people don't understand it, it's complicated. But at the end of the day, the fact that we don't actually even hear about these manuscripts at the popular level shows you that there's no real meaningful change to the text that ever really derives from them. And for the most part, the text has been really, really stable for a really long period of time.
- [30:27]
A
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- [31:07]
B
Wes we often hear in popular discourse, podcasting, journalism, history channel, so forth, that the Gnostics in particular, they had all these gospels and ironically a lot of the scholars who publish these tomes saying that there was no Christian canon early on, publish these Gnostic Gospels as the Gnostic Gospels or the Gnostic Scriptures when they wouldn't give that credit to the New Testament. Help us out here to see that the Gospel of Judas and the Gospel of Mary and so forth aren't sifted out of a biblical canon. They didn't belong to it in the first place.
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E
Yeah, well, Dr. Krueger has some excellent work published on this particular topic. And a couple of summers ago I had the privilege to go to a few key locations in Egypt, chief amongst which was Oxyrhynchus. I actually went to Oxynchus and saw some of the work that was being done there currently. But I also went out to Nag Hammadi and I went to the approximate location that the non commodity library was discovered which revealed documents like the Gospel of Thomas and the Gospel of Philip. And so actually in the series that we did at Apologetics Canada, in the first episode, Can We Trust the Bible? Episode one, we talked about the canon of Scripture and we filmed that actually at Nag Hammadi and we talked about this discovery and then went to the Coptic Museum in Cairo and looked at the actual few pages that are on there on display of the Gospel of Thomas. And then we went to this little village called Al Qasr out in the desert where the Bedouin who had discovered the Gospel of Thomas actually brought it back to where it was famously thrown into a courtyard where some goats supposedly ate pages of it. And other pages were of the Nak Hammadi library were burnt to cook bread, unfortunately. But so what these kind of discoveries, that was in 1945 when that was discovered by an individual named Muhammad Ali, probably not the Muhammad Ali that the listener is thinking of, Muhammad Ali, this Muhammad Ali had nothing to do with boxing. He probably wore a headscarf and hung out with goats more often than he did in a ring with boxing gloves. But those types of discoveries made waves in the theory of this kind of theological quagmire that was supposed by individuals like Bauer back in this German New Testament scholarship, which kind of proposed that there wasn't any one thing called Christianity, but rather Christian Christianities, and that you had groups like the Gnostics and the Ebionites and the Docetics. They were all kind of vying for their own theological perspective. And I think what we, we've kind of developed and discovered now is that, you know, the Gnostics weren't one group as much as they were an umbrella group. And there were multiple different variations of what we call Gnosticism. But despite kind of the variation that existed within the religious or theological perspectives in those religious ideologies was that they produced these documents that are tied to individuals like Thomas and Philip and Peter and Mary and Judas, names that we would recognize from the Bible. But like I sometimes like to say that what's happening there is that those groups which are writing in later subsequent decades and centuries are appropriating these individuals. They're written in timeframes when we know that Peter and Mary and Thomas and Judas were long dead and they're appropriating those names and chiefly Jesus appropriating the name of Jesus and writing their own theologies and ideologies back on his lips. And there are multiple ways that we can identify their unreliability in terms of going back to 1st century Roman occupied Judea. Whereas when we evaluate the biblical Gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, what do we find? We find actually that they mention places and people and names and locations and details that we should expect if they were written in those places at that time. Whereas if you evaluate some of these others, we actually find both in the internal evidence of the names and peoples and places and locations and then the external evidence in terms of where they start to pop up, some of the clues in their inception as being a written document that they weren't written in 1st century Judea, they were written in places like 3rd and 4th century Egypt. And so despite what you might hear in headlines from the Discovery Channel or from your, you know, popular conspiracy theory YouTube channel, these documents really don't have a credibility in terms of being tied directly to the actual historical Jesus. And the only documents that do are the ones that, unsurprisingly, you would find at the beginning of your New Testament that we call Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.
- [36:17]
B
That's a great, great summary. I also think one thing cutting across all of these so called Gnostic gospels is their defiance of the Old Testament God. Whereas the Christians had adopted the Old Testament en bloc, just the whole thing. And also saying, well, it's not as Peter said, they're a joke. Abraham is a joke, Moses is a joke. Not exactly comparable to what you find in the New Testament. But then also, the first commentary on John, if I'm not mistaken, was written by one of the Gnostic leaders associates, Heraclion. And it's striking that the first commentary on the Gospel of John is not written by an orthodox Christian, but written by a Gnostic because he knows it's canonical. So none of the Christians referred to the Gnostic gospels as canonical. In fact, they said that they were apostate. But Gnostics were quoting the canonical scriptures. And that seems to make the case, doesn't it, that orthodoxy came before heresy.
- [37:34]
C
Absolutely, yeah. I mean, Wes mentioned a person by the name of Walter Bauer a minute ago and his influence here is massive. And people don't actually recognize how influential he is. When he published his original book, Heresy and Orthodoxy and Earliest Christianity, it was in 1934 in Germany. It got kind of lost in the obvious shuffle of World War II. It wasn't until 1971 when it was translated into English that it kind of had its impact. And here's the essence of what Bauer argued. It's what west said. Hey, there was no early Christianity. There was only early Christianities, multiple versions of the faith fighting it out for the claim to be original, but here's the next part of the story, Bower said, is that each of these groups has their books, and they claim that their books are the right books. And then why do you have the books in your canon that you have today? Well, because that group won. And if another group had won, you may not be reading Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. You may be reading Philip, Thomas and Peter. And so here's the payoff of Bower's view. And it's very postmodern. Basically, the argument is no gospel is any better, any more meritorious, any more authentic than any other. The only reason we have one set of Gospels as opposed to another set of Gospels is just it's the accident of history. If someone else had won, then you'd be reading another set of gospels. So there's a whole movement in our modern scholarship discussions to never say one gospel is better than another, or one is more right, or one is orthodox, one is correct, one is true. And so now we have scholars saying you can't use terms like apocryphal and canonical. You can't use terms like heresy and orthodoxy. All gospels are by definition equal and none should be prejudicially elevated above another. Believe it or not, that is the narrative of our modern universities in our modern scholarly scenario. And it only works as long as you don't look at the historical data. And when you start looking at the historical data, you realize, wait a second, I'm supposed to say that all Gospels are the same, but they're factually not the same. And as you mentioned, Mike, the Gospels that represent a much more full version of Gnosticism are obviously downstream from Orthodoxy because they're second century phenomenon. We know that the Gnosticism didn't even reach full bloom until really the Valentinian version of it in the middle of the second century. And so all the arrows suggest that actually it wasn't that way. There was gospels that seem to have predated the larger movement. And when we ask which ones, it's always the same. It's Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. Because people don't realize that they're actually still the only gospels that are dated to the first century, even by secular scholars. You just let that sink in.
- [40:00]
B
Yeah, interesting too that Bauer himself was fascinated with Gnosticism and Elaine Pagels. And so many of the contemporary scholars of early Christianity and Gnosticism are as well. And these are the professors at Harvard and Stanford, and you name it, making basically a pitch for the Gnostics. And so it's not unprejudiced.
- [40:30]
C
It's fascinating. I tell my students, I said I don't know when Gnosticism became the darling of the academy, but really since the 1970s there's been this sense that Gnosticism is really the version of Christianity we wish had won. And it's the warm version, it's the inviting version, it's the inclusive version, and the so called orthodox Christianity that prevailed is the one we wish hadn't. Hadn't won. The problem is, again, that's a great narrative, but it's not true historically. If you look historically, the Gnostics were not the warm and inviting and inclusive ones. They're actually very elitist and they're very exclusive and they're very. We have the secret knowledge, you don't. Ignatius makes numerous comments about how the Gnostics were known for being very unloving and very uninterested in the orphan and the widow. So the idea that Gnosticism is the great religion that Christianity could have been, again, that sounds really good in a modern scenario where you're supposed to say all religions are the same, but when you look at it historically, it wasn't the religion it was painted to be.
- [41:29]
E
You know, it's an interesting fact to point out, Dr. Krueger, because I find in not just in the halls of academia, but in the kind of popular culture, there's a preoccupation with Gnosticism as well. New Age philosophy is ingrained and saturated with a preoccupation with the Gnostic Gospels or the Ebionites or these different groups who, like you said, if you were to hop in a time machine and go back in time and actually see what these people were like, they wouldn't be the inclusive group that would jive with a modern New Age person.
- [42:04]
B
They didn't even want to be a part of what they called the Great Church or the soulish or fleshly Church. They didn't want to be included.
- [42:14]
E
Yeah, and I think it's interesting, I think it's a bit of, kind of the symptomatic nature of our subjective society that groups like New Agers who want to piecemeal Christianity and Islam and Buddhism also want to do it to ancient philosophies and religions as well. Because if they actually were respectful to any one of these groups, whether it was Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism or ancient Gnosticism, then they would realize that these are all mutually exclusive, that the secretive nature of the Gnosis, of the knowledge that was communicated by the Jesus of you Know, pick your Gnostic gospel. Although even some of the Gnostic gospels contradict each other, that that wouldn't really be what a lot of people who I talk to who are the quote unquote spiritual but not religious would actually want to associate themselves with.
- [43:05]
B
I that reminds me of lecture series of lectures that I attended at Oxford with a professor who filled the largest auditorium. And what he did was, and he was a former evangelical intervarsity guy, but he had moved in a liberal direction. He each week put up another circle of his Venn diagram of a world religion. And then by the time he finished and we kind of saw where this was going, all of the overlapping circles at the center were the mystical parts of that religion and they all unite there. And he actually did have an ecumenical effect on a number of us who, you know, from different religions who went out afterwards for a pint and talked about how condescending it was for a middle class white European to decide for all the rest of us what our religion really was and how all those.
- [44:05]
C
Religions have been wrong. But he basically will say that all, you know, Christianity is wrong to be exclusive, Islam's wrong to be exclusive. Let me tell you how religion really works.
- [44:13]
B
Yeah, and as if that's not exclusive.
- [44:15]
C
Yeah, exactly.
- [44:16]
D
I think a couple of things that are fascinating to me about these Gnostic gospels and Mike Krueger is going to be able to get into this when we talk about the canon, is that one of the criteria for canonicity is the book written by an apostle or an associate of an apostle. It's called apostolicity. And these Gnostic gospels immediately are excluded because they're not from the first century. Now, unless you're holding some very strange views, some people think that the Gospel of Thomas actually goes back to the first century, but that's exceedingly rare to hold to that viewpoint. But I find it interesting that these gospels, in order to gain some credibility, as Wes was alluding to earlier, they have to put an apostle's name or a well known person who is an associate of Jesus as the author. So the Gospel of Thomas, you see that very plainly in the Nagamati Codex that this is the Gospel of Thomas. Our original gospels though, did not have any names on them at all. They were all anonymous. And they're not the Gospel of Matthew and the Gospel of Mark et cetera. They're the gospel according to Matthew and according to Mark. There's one gospel and it's not this guy's gospel, it's one gospel, one good news about Jesus. Christ and Matthew, Mark, Luke and John are all those who are giving different perspectives of and their own personal experiences. Luke a little bit later, of course, but on who Jesus was. So they made the rise in the number of copies and popularity, not because those names were associated with it from the very beginning in terms of what the author wrote down. But we have these early church fathers who give us a unanimous testimony. The Gospel of Matthew is written by Matthew and Mark, by Mark, et cetera. Even though we don't have those kinds of statements in the. As far as we can tell, the original manuscripts of those gospels, I think that's pretty significant to show that this other stuff is not considered canonical because it came later. The Jesus Seminar that Robert W. Funk started several years ago, they published a book called the Five Gospels. And this was very much one that wanted to rewrite what the New Testament looked like. The five Gospels included the Gospel of Thomas. And Bob Funk was a master of marketability. He knew how to communicate scholarly issues in lay terms. And so what he did is he actually took these beads that you put into wood after you've put a screw in and it goes in a little bit deeper, you have to put some kind of a piece of wood over it to hide it. That's what he did. He took them in his garage, he took a spray paint, and he painted some of them red, some pink, some gray, and some black. I have a set of those beads that he gave to me because we were working on a revision of the Bloss der Brunner Funk grammar together for several years. Red meant Jesus definitely said this. Pink meant he may have said it, but certainly the idea goes back to him. Gray means he didn't say it, and maybe the idea goes back to him. Black means this is not Jesus. What's interesting is, even though they admit Thomas is a later document, there is more red in Thomas than there is in the Gospel of John. Because they say, look at how early it is. John's earlier, and that's the last Gospel. How can you make these kinds of claims? It's just remarkable how biased they were in these things. And when it came to prophecy, not a single prophecy of the Lord is in red. The whole Olivet discourse is black. Because of course, we know that prophecy doesn't exist since there is no supernatural knowledge, someone knowing the future, this kind of thing.
- [48:10]
B
Well, let's turn now to the divinity of Christ and the canon. Obviously, all these issues are interrelated. But some critical scholars say the Bible doesn't portray Jesus as God. I mean, not just recent. This is for a long time. It's really when you get out into the Greek world where you have the myth of dying and rising gods like Dionysus, that you get this sort of idea of Jesus Christ as divine. What textual evidence can we point to to say that Jesus is not just one of these semi divine figures, but is God incarnate?
- [48:57]
C
When I was at the University of Edinburgh, I got to study with Larry Hurtado there, who was my PhD supervisor. And ironically, Larry was known for both the topics we've been talking about today. He was known for textual criticism, which we spent a good bit of time on already. But he was also known for his work on early Christology. And when I was there as his student, he was in the middle of writing his book, which has now been out for a while, called Lord Jesus Christ, which is really a replacement of Boussat's famous Kurios Christos book of sorts. And he even riffs off the title of Bossett's original book. But Larry's work, I would argue Richard Bauckham's work has all shown that this idea that the best way to interpret Jesus's divinity is in the context of a Greco Roman world with semi divine beings that get elevated to divine status is simply the wrong matrix as a whole to even look at it in. You have to look at it through the lens of monotheistic 1st century Judaism. And monotheistic 1st century Judaism and Balkan even goes further than Larry on this says. There really wasn't a concept of half divine figures even in the historic Judaism. There's certain statements that sound that way, but when you bore down into it, there's only two categories, God and everything else. And so if you call Jesus God in a first century monotheistic context, you don't mean he's a God like Alexander the Great became a son of God and was elevated to some divine status. You don't mean he's God like some philosopher or king or military hero. You mean he was God in the way you would think of God as a Jew. So the first thing to say in the whole debate, and there's much more to be said than this, and I know that Wes and Dan will chime in, but the first thing to say is that we just got to get the context right historically. And if you look at the work of Larry Curtado and Richard Bauckham and others in this world of early Christology, we need to get away from the Greco Roman context as dominant, which is really coming out of The German Enlightenment sort of Rudolf Bultmann stuff and get back to Jesus Jewish roots. And when you do that, you realize, wait a second, his claim to divinity is going to have to look very different than what we would see in the Greco Roman world.
- [50:51]
B
And we have to remember he was crucified by the Roman authorities, handed over by the Sanhedrin on the charge of blasphemy for making himself equal with God. That was a no, no.
- [51:04]
D
Mark 15:61, 64, I think is the text. I'm going to quote it from the net Bible. Caiaphas said, are you the Christ, the Son of the Blessed One? I am, said Jesus. And you will see the Son of Man sitting at the right hand of the power and coming with the clouds of heaven. Then the high priest tore his clothes and said, why do we still need witnesses? You have heard the blasphemy. What is your verdict? They all condemned him as deserving death. This is before the Sanhedrin. And what's interesting here is that blasphemy, the only thing that would even apply in this context is that Jesus was claiming to be deity. Paul was actually thought of as a God when a snake bit him on an island and the people living there called him a God and he ripped his shirt. That's an evidence of a Jewish leader who's saying, that's blasphemy. I've heard blasphemy. And so he said, no, I'm not even close to that category. So I think you've got some strong evidence in what Jesus himself says that points to him as recognizing his own deity. There's also, I think, what Mike has pointed out about reading it in the context of monotheistic Judaism of the first century. One of the things that I find fascinating is that Mark's Gospel, the most primitive Gospel that Matthew and Luke both used, and they changed from their own perspective to some degree. Although all the views, I think, are quite complementary. Mark's Gospel presents the disciples in a way that almost seems like they're idiots. They just don't seem to get it. And I think if we look at Mark's Gospel through the lens of this is him recording how this actually happened to a very large degree. What you've got is early on in Mark's Gospel, you've got the religious leaders recognizing who Jesus is. Mark 2, 5, the paralytic has dropped through the roof of Peter's house in Capernaum. And as he's dropped down, Jesus, instead of healing him, says, my son, your sins are forgiven. The religious Leaders are muttering to themselves, this man blasphemes. And then Jesus says, I know what you guys are thinking. And he says, but to prove that I am who I said I am, then he heals the man. You've got this sense that these religious leaders know what Jesus is about. But the disciples are clueless. And I think the reason they are is because they have a double loyalty. They have a loyalty to monotheism, just like the Pharisees and the Sadducees did. But they also have a loyalty to Jesus, which these others did not. And they were still trying to figure out what kind of a person he is two chapters later when they cross the Sea of Galilee and there's a storm that kicks up. Jesus is sleeping in this boat and the disciples come to him and say, lord, don't you care that we're dying? And he gets up and he stills the storm. It just says, shut up. And the storm quiets down. And what's fascinating is what Mark says after that. They were really afraid of Jesus at that point. I think they were more afraid of Jesus than they were of the storm. And it says that they wondered what kind of a man this was. I mean, who is this guy who can still the storm? They still have a category for him. And so through the rest of the Gospel's narrative and even into the Book of Acts, you get this developing understanding that Jesus Christ is actually God in the flesh. And the Pharisees seem to understand that Jesus is making such claims. The disciples are slow to get it because Jesus didn't explicitly say that to them in a way that they would understand at this stage.
- [55:05]
E
I often describe it as the Gospel of Mark presents the duh sciples. They're not quite getting it quite yet. And I like that. I did a debate with a Muslim imam a number of years ago and he used what I think is the standard kind of argumentation that the Gospel of Mark is written first and then you see this mythological drift up until the Gospel of John, which is written at the latest point. And then you have the divinity of Christ articulated the most concretely. Now, I would adhere to that approximately with the caveat that, like as Dr. Darrell Bock says, that the synoptics are kind of presenting a ground up presentation of who Jesus's deity is from looking at humanity and them trying to figure it out. Whereas, you know, you get the Gospel of John and he starts off right, you know, he's not beating around the bush. In the beginning was the Word, and the word was with God. And the word was God. And in that sense is looking down, you're starting with that assumption. But in this debate that I did with this Muslim imam where he kind of presented this case, I said exactly what was just said by Dr. Wallace and Krueger in the sense that I said, okay, let's assume that the Gospel of Mark was written the earliest. I actually think that the Gospel of Mark holds this inherently high Christology that someone like Larry Hurtado would himself hold to. In the sense that you start with Mark, chapter one, and John the Baptist makes, you know, you get this quotation of Isaiah, chapter one, verse three, which says, behold, I send a messenger before your face who will prepare the way of Yahweh in the wilderness. And you expect. Is it John the Baptist who is supposed to be preparing the way for Yahweh? No, he's preparing the way for Jesus. So then if he's preparing the way for Jesus, but he's quoting something like Isaiah, chapter 40, verse 3, then who is Jesus? And you move on to mark chapter two, where the same passage that Dr. Wallace was presenting, you know, no one can forgive sins, but God alone is the retort by the Pharisees. And Jesus is like, yeah, you know, why does this fellow talk like this? He's blaspheming. You know, the answer to what he's doing is very clear. And then Mark, chapter three, Jesus casts out demons by his power. Who is the one who has the ability to plunder the strong man's house? That's the devil. Well, Jesus says it's him. And the one who has the control over the demons is Yahweh God. Mark, chapter four. Jesus calms the storm, which Dr. Wallace just alluded to. Again, you know, the disciples are in the boat they woke, and Jesus rebukes the wind. It's interesting that in Psalm 107, 28, 29, it says that when the people cry out to God, it's Yahweh who calms the storm and makes the waves quiet with a whisper.
- [57:47]
B
And even though John emphasizes right out of the gate the deity of Christ, there's not a trace of docetic or gnostic teaching. He is just as earthy and historical. At this particular gate, at this particular time, this happened. And then that happened over here. And then this person came along. Pinchas lapid Jewish scholar, said the writers of the New Testament gospels were practically competing with each other to give earthy physical evidence. And that's why he came to believe that Jesus was raised on the evidence, but he didn't believe that he was the Messiah.
- [58:35]
E
Yeah. And I think. And what I did for this Muslim Imam was walk through every chapter of the Gospel of Mark with my Bible in front of me, presenting how the. I think Mark shows that Jesus is divine, leading right up to that case in the end of the Gospel where Daniel chapter 7 is quoted in, in Mark 14, Daniel 7, 13 and 14, where Jesus calls himself the Son of man, who was the one who approached the ancient of days. And so I think, you know, outside of a textual conversation, when we look and we evaluate the actual claims of what the Gospels themselves say, I think Jesus is presented as God. Now, does he ever make a statement like, I am God, worship me? Well, no, but he makes these claims of divinity in a Jewish accent in a way that the Hebraic audience would have understood. What are these things he's doing? Rob Bowman and Ed Kamiachowski in their latest book, Christ and His Critics, go through this acronym which was actually developed in their previous publication, putting Jesus in his place, where they have this acronym, HANDS H A N D S the honors, the attributes, the names, the deeds and the seat of God. And if you evaluate the things that Jesus does and you look at who Yahweh and who the Spirit are described as, they're all given the honors, attributes, names, deeds and seat of Yahweh God. Well, there isn't more than one Yahweh. So what does that mean? Well, that's where we come up with the complex unity of the description of who the doctrine of the Trinity, you know, the Father, the Son and the Spirit, one being in three co equal persons, are based on the actual content.
- [60:12]
B
I'd love to hear. I know. Wes, you are headed to Turkey to celebrate the 1700th anniversary of Nicaea. Tell us about that.
- [60:25]
E
Yeah. So in this series that we're producing, Can I Trust the Bible, where we already have two episodes out with the organization at work for Apologetics Canada, we really want to dig into some of the topics though, that we've been discussing today. And I'm very appreciative of the ability to flesh these things out with all of you is we're going to be going to some of the places where these conversations really happened and particularly in regards to Nicaea, talking about what it was and what it was not and these accusations of these Dan Brown esque conspiracy theories that that's where the books of the Bible were chosen, that's where the divinity of Jesus was invented. Well, when we look at the actual history, we see something very different. So we're going to be going over to Turkey, going, going over to Italy as well, and talking about what did and didn't happen there and presenting a case for why you really can have confidence in what we believe is directly organic to the pages of Scripture, chiefly being that Jesus is who he claimed to be.
- [61:25]
B
And have you talked to Joe Rogan since you're out of the park, conversation with him?
- [61:29]
E
Well, my conversation with Rogan went 3 hours and 15 minutes. Oh, my goodness, it was a little bit longer than this conversation. But yes, Joe Rogan and I have had on and off communication since then. I can tell you for a fact that he is attending a church and that that has been a consistent thing. And so, you know, things are happening. And he's a very inquisitive individual. And I think for the better in that he's communicating with me and other people, people in his life who are influences that can speak into, you know, these issues of reliability and trustworthiness and verisimilitude of something like the pages of Scripture and where he should and shouldn't be looking for the information in regards to that. So I am very encouraged by the communication that I have been able to have with him and others over these last few months in this kind of crazy season that I find myself in. But we're seeing what I don't think is an exaggeration to say somewhat of a resurgence in interest in these topics that we've been talking about, even the nitty gritty. We had someone who reached out to us recently at Apologetics Canada who is probably the last bricks and mortar Christian bookstore that I've ever heard of. But they said we have people walking through our doors asking young people, teenagers, saying, I want a Bible. All my friends are reading this thing. So if the Bible is becoming popular with teenagers, then something is happening and the Lord is moving.
- [62:55]
B
Mike, you are sort of the king of canon, and you've written quite a lot on canon studies. If anybody wants to go to Amazon and check that out, we have it in the show notes, too. But your next book coming out with.
- [63:12]
C
Oxford is Miniature Codices in Early Christianity, which is a book on early Christian manuscripts that are small and tiny. And it's part of the matrix of canon studies I've done for a long time. And I'm looking at how Christians valued their books so much that they made them portable in size so they could carry them with them, wear them around their necks, even sleep in their beds with them. And that really says a lot about the way early Christians valued their scriptures. Let me say Wes has got the most fun sort of travel itinerary. Wes, next time you're off to Oxyrhynchus or Naga, Maddie, I expect a phone call, and I'll be happy to join you for one of these crazy journeys. And apparently off to Nicaea, too. And that brings us back to canon, because, as you indicated, one of the reasons I think you're going to Nicaea is to talk about the Internet lore that surrounds Nicaea in the development of the New Testament canon, which is, of course, the idea that it was picked there and chosen there, or that the divinity of Jesus was decided there. The answer to both those questions is really along the trajectory. We've been talking about this entire podcast, which is the evidence for both those things goes back so much earlier than the 4th century. It wasn't even mentioned in the prior discussion about the divinity of Jesus. But our earliest evidence for the divinity of Jesus isn't even in the Gospels. It's in Paul in 1 Corinthians 8, just as 1 example, Paul builds the Shema, the monotheistic Shema of Israel, around Jesus. You don't get more divine than that. And that's what, mid-50s of the first century, predating Mark, Matthew, Luke, and John. And the evidence for that is interesting because scholars think that what Paul is using there is an inherited tradition that goes back even older than him. So that puts you in the 40s with a monotheistic creed around Jesus, which is stunning. And then as far as the canon at Nicaea, you mentioned the work I've done on canon, and. And one of the things I'll just sort of summarize here is that there's such a tremendous amount of evidence for Christians rallying around a core collection of New Testament books from a very early time. I've made the case, and Dan's done some of this, too, and Wes talks about this, too, that by the middle of the second century, you've got a core canon. And what I mean by core is 22 out of 27 books are solidly established, widely used, received as scripture. You don't need a church council. You don't need a vote. You don't need Constantine pushing buttons to get that. That, I think, grew up organically and naturally and innately within the church, not because someone made a decision, but because the church, by the help of the Holy Spirit, recognized these books were the books that were handed down from the apostles. That's the way I summarize canon and that's why I think we can have a lot of trust in where it came from.
- [65:43]
E
And if someone is interested in the books that they should look at for that particular topic, I happen to have them directly on the website.
- [65:49]
B
These are Mike Krueger's books.
- [65:51]
E
Yeah, Mike Krueger's books. If someone hears 22 out of the 27 and that feels kind of uncertain to them, let me just reassure you that I think there was actually a good process for the dust to settle on those other books in that the early church was doing their due diligence to make sure that they were connecting those books with the criteria that Dr. Dan Wallace mentioned earlier, the apostolicity to connect the books with someone who knew Jesus or someone who knew someone who knew Jesus. And so it wasn't a wild, you know, free for all in terms of those books were just all up in the air. And they could have chosen any books. The fact that some of these other books took a little bit longer to make their way into the agreement of the universal church, I think is a good thing because the church was really making sure that they could track the chain of custody right back to the early Jesus community. And that's exactly what they did.
- [66:41]
B
Great point. And, Dan, do you have any projects right now that on the immediate horizon?
- [66:48]
D
The center for the Study of New Testament Manuscripts always has projects coming up. I will be in Constantinople and Rome this next year. Early on this last year, I was in Germany and Oxford, Cambridge, London, Germany, in eight different places. And there's just so. In Poland too. The thing about Poland and Austria, Vienna. We went to these places to see what they've got in terms of the manuscripts, what needs to be digitized, and that's what our initial project is Poland. We went to Krakow, where they have quite a few manuscripts, about 20, if I'm not mistaken, about 20 manuscripts at Jangli olonian Library. And none of them had ever been photographed, even microfilmed. So we were able to examine four of them that day. The rest of them are in various states of conservation, but we have gotten photographs of those manuscripts. So this is exciting to have stuff that people have only had minimal access to. And I spent the time looking at a 10th century gospel manuscript, which was very exciting to spend the whole day with that. There's places in Eastern Europe also that are really remote places, but we are hoping that we will get a contract to go there. So there's. I'd say this year we should be in as many as six or seven different countries for digitizing these manuscripts of the New Testament.
- [68:22]
B
That's fantastic. What a service to the church for generations to come. Brothers, thank you so much for your valuable time, time and your expertise.
- [68:34]
A
How did the New Testament come to be? Was the canon created by the early church, or was it recognized as sacred from the start? In the Question of Canon, biblical scholar Michael Krueger challenges the modern assumption that the Bible was chosen arbitrarily. With clarity and care, he explores the historical, theological, and cultural evidence that the canon wasn't imposed but emerged within early Christian community. Whether you're a student of Scripture or simply curious about the Bible's origins, this book offers insight that will deepen your understanding and strengthen your faith. And now, for a limited time, you can receive the Question of Canon for a donation of $15 or more. Visit solarmedia.orgoffers to request your copy.