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Author: Eric V. Snow |
A Rational Defense of the Judeo-Christian Scriptures
second edition
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction: Why Should the Bible Matter to Us Today?
Does the Hypocrisy of Believers Allow Others to Safely Reject the Bible?
How Do We Know for Certain that "All Paths Lead to God" Is True?
How the Bible Can Rationally Be Proven to Be the Word of God
Part I: The Old Testament Successfully Predicts the Future: Babylon's Fate
The Destruction of Nineveh Predicted, Once the Capital of the Assyrian Empire
Switching the Names of the Cities in the Prophecies Would Make Them False
The Ancient Phoenician City of Tyre Prophesied to Become "a Bare Rock"
Alexander the Great Attacks Tyre, Fulfills More of the Prophecy Against It
Has the Prophecy Against Tyre Been Totally Fulfilled?
The City of Sidon, Tyre's Rival and Probable Mother City
The Fate of Gaza, Ashkelon, and Ashdod, Cities of the Philistines
Thebes (No) and Memphis (Noph), Major Egyptian Cities with Different Fates
The Fate of Thebes, Once the Capital City of Ancient Egypt
Other Predictions Made about Egypt
Prophecies Against Edom, Another Rival of Israel, Fulfilled
Alexander the Great's Successful Invasion of Persia Predicted Long in Advance
Daniel Predicts the Division of Alexander's Empire into Four Parts
A Reply to a Standard Objection: Was History Masquerading as Prophecy?
The Dating to Ezekiel to the Early Sixth Century B.C. Defended
The Hebrew Prophets' Prophecies Were Clear and Fulfilled Independently
Fulfilled Prophecy as God's Challenge to the Skeptic
The Practical Implications for Our Lives of Fulfilled Prophecy
Part II: How Can Someone Judge Whether the Bible is Historically Reliable?
The Bibliographical Test as Applied to the New Testament
How Can You Know Whether the New Testament is a First-Century Document?
Scholars Move Away from a Second-Century Date for the New Testament
How People in Cultures More Dependent on Oral Tradition Have Better Memories
How the Book of Acts Implies the New Testament Was Written Before C. 63 A.D.
The New Testament Wasn't Subject to a Long Period of Oral Tradition
It Has a Shorter Gap Between Its Original Writing and Oldest Extant Copies
Significant Parts of the New Testament Are in Manuscripts Older Than the Fourth Century
The Dead Sea Scrolls as Evidence for the Old Testament's Accurate Preservation
Some Problems with Form Criticism, a School of Higher Criticism
The New Testament's Eyewitness Testimony Undermines the Form Critics' Arguments
Why Should This Eyewitness Evidence Be Believed?
Ancient People Knew the Difference Between Truth and Fables
The Battle Between the Received and Critical Texts of the New Testament
How the Large Number of Manuscripts Helps Eliminate New Testament Variations
How the Science of Textual Criticism Can Rule Out Variations with Certainty
The Average People of Judea Could Have Known Greek
The Semitic (Jewish) Flavor and Language of the Gospels
The Ancient Jewish Historian Josephus Says Judea's Jews Often Could Speak Greek
The New Testament Was Not Written in a Highly Scholarly Greek
How Can Anyone Be Certain that the Right Books Are in the New Testament?
Apostolic Authority and Reactions Against Heresy Make the Canon Clear
Was the Canon Determined from the Top-Down by the Catholic Church's Hierarchy?
Jerome, the Latin Vulgate's Translator, Refers to a Bottom-Up Determination
Persecution by Rome Plays a Role in Determining the Canon
How External Historical Evidence Confirms the Bible
How Faith in the Bible Involves an Inference Like a Scientist's
Applying the External Evidence Test to the Old Testament
King Sargon's Existence, Once Doubted, Now Proven
The Old Testament Was Right about How Sennacherib's Sons Assassinated Him
Evidence for Sodom and Gomorrah Actually Once Existing
How a Biblical Reference Enabled an Archeologist to Make a Successful Prediction
How Other Ancient Writings Confirm the Old Testament: Shishak's Inscription
The Moabite Stone and Other Records Prove Various Israelite Kings Lived
The Account of Sennacherib, King of Assyria, of His First Invasion of Judah
The Book of Daniel Vindicated about Belshazzar, the Last King of Babylon
Lions in Mesopotamia and Domesticated Camels: The Bible Is Right After All
Other Cases in which Biblical References Have Been Confirmed
The Case History of Jericho's Dating: How Archeology Isn't Always Reliable
How the New Testament's General Background Can Be Checked
The Archeological Evidence for Pontius Pilate Versus the Argument from Silence
Luke's Reliability as a Historian Persuades an Atheist to Become a Believer
Specific Examples Showing Luke Was Right After His Critics Said HeWas Wrong
Further External Evidence for Luke's Reliability
The Date of Christ's Birth and the Census by Quirinius
Evidence for Luke Being Right about the Date of the Census
Why It's Rational to Infer Luke Was Right about the Timing of This Census
Why This New Testament Census Was Not Absurdly Conducted
Early Pagan Sources which Refer to Jesus Besides the New Testament
Josephus as Independent Testimony for the New Testament and Jesus' Life
The Evidence for Josephus' Testimony Having Some Validity
The First Problem with the Argument from Silence
The Logical Problem with the Argument from Silence
An Ancient Jewish Slander Rebutted: Jesus Ben Panthera
The Internal Evidence Test: Does the Bible Contradict Itself?
Does an Addition or Subtraction of Detail Create a "Contradiction"?
It's Necessary to Collect All the Data First to Draw Any Conclusions
Selected Alleged "Contradictions" in the Bible Briefly Examined
Did Christ Say Abiathar Instead of Ahimelech Gave King David the Showbread?
Stephen's Speech About Old Testament Events: Was the First Christian Martyr Wrong?
Stephen on Jacob's Family Moving into Egypt
Did Abraham or Jacob Buy a Tomb from the Sons of Hamor?
How Many Died in the Plague Sent by God Against Israel?
Did Matthew Misquote Zechariah?
How Did Judas Iscariot Die?
How or Where Did Jacob Worship?
Are the Genealogies of Christ in Luke and Matthew Contradictory or False?
The "Discrepancies" as Evidence for Multiple Witnesses Writing the Bible
How Knowing the Original Language Can Resolve "Contradictions"
Knowing the Bible Uses a Language's Standard Conventions Can Solve Problems
Are Miracles Possible?
Some Basic Arguments Against Hume's attack on Miracles Being Possible
Just How Do We "Prove" a Miracle Occurred?
Evidence from Hostile Sources That Jesus Could Do Miracles
Testing Miracle Claims by Their Intrinsic Plausibility or Absurdity
Why Pagan Myths Are Intrinsically Unreliable Accounts of Miracles
The Life of Jesus: The Great Trilemma--Jesus Christ: Lord, Liar,or Lunatic?
Does Any New Testament Evidence Support Jesus Being a Madman or a Fraud?
The Problems of the Empty Tomb and the Resurrection
Could the Gospels Be Myths or Legends?
Why Denying the Tomb Was Empty Is Implausible
The Guards Were Romans, Not the Jewish Temple Guard
Were the Resurrection Appearances Hallucinations?
Hallucinations Need Certain Types of People and Experiences to Be Possible
Did the Disciples Steal the Body?
The Swoon Theory Weighed and Found Wanting
Jesus Was Killed by a Spear Being Thrown into His Back
Further Proof that Jesus Really Was Dead
How Can the Transformed Behavior of the Disciples Be Explained Otherwise?
The Differences from the Alleged Eyewitness Testimony for the Book of Mormon
Conclusion: Attacks on the Bible's Reliability Faulty
Appendix: A Brief Look at the Quran (Koran) of Islam
Muhammad's Revisions of Earlier Revelations
Why Even by Secular Logic the Quran is Less Reliable Than the Bible
Alexander the Great as a Prophet of God and Other Historical Mistakes
Chronological Mistakes in the Quran
Islam: The Cult of the Moon God Allah?
For Further Reading
INTRODUCTION: WHY SHOULD THE BIBLE MATTER TO US TODAY?
Is the Bible the infallible word of an Almighty God, as fundamentalist Christians believe? Or is the Bible a collection of Hebrew myths and legends, as atheists and agnostics allege? Do you believe in the Bible by faith alone, trusting that the faith of your parents was correct? Is there any way to prove the Bible is the word of God instead of the Islamic holy book, the Quran (Koran)? Does historical and archeological evidence favor the Bible, or are they against it? Can the Bible's inspiration be proven by human reason? Does God allow us to believe in any religion we want, because "all ways lead to God"? Do human beings live in a world without meaning, in which random natural processes created their bodies and they decompose them for similar reasons? Is the purpose of life merely to maximize pleasure and minimize pain while avoiding getting "caught"? Or do men and women's lives have purpose, because an Almighty God is working out a great plan of His own here below? If the Bible is the Word of God, what is your part in God's plan for humanity? Are there any real answers to the mystery of life? Or are we just supposed to try to figure it all out on our own, using human reason and emotion to stumble along?
DOES THE HYPOCRISY OF BELIEVERS ALLOW OTHERS TO SAFELY REJECT THE BIBLE?
Before considering the evidence for the Bible, it's necessary first to consider two popular objections to belief in it: The hypocrisy of many believers in it, and whether "all paths lead to God." Taking up the issue of Christians believing one thing yet doing another first, many people will reason: "Because my relative, friend, co-worker, boss, or that famous TV evangelist or politician is a hypocrite while professing Christianity, therefore, I won't believe in the Bible." Fundamentally, this argument is unsound for a very simple reason: As a matter of philosophical logic, the Bible is true or false regardless of the behavior of those believing in it. Whether Jesus is or isn't the Son of God and the Savior of humanity has nothing to do over how dishonest is (say) your brother-in-law who claims to be a Christian. Furthermore, each individual's spiritual status before God is determined individually, by one's own conduct and faith, not by someone else's. The sins of (say) a minister who committed adultery have nothing to do over what someone else's spiritual status is before God: One's own actions and faith determine that, not his. If God wishes someone to be a Christian (John 6:44; Eph. 1:4-5; Rom. 8:29-30), the sins of some Christian one knows won't save one if one commits similar sins. As the prophet Ezekiel wrote: "The son will not bear the punishment for the father's iniquity, nor will the father bear the punishment for the son's iniquity; the righteousness of the righteous will be upon himself, and the wickedness of the wicked will be upon himself" (Eze. 18:20). The sins of someone professing Christianity don't cancel out God's commands for someone else. The proper response to seeing someone who sins yet says he or she is a Christian isn't, "That allows me to do as I please!," but, "I shall do better!"
Then, we need to consider how someone who professes Christianity who sins (say) half as much as he used to is better than the equivalent person who still denies Christianity whose behavior is totally unaffected by God's commands. It's also unfair to demand perfection of others who uphold an absolute morality, while committing the same sins oneself, since human frailty and weakness will inevitably manifest itself in all individuals. (We just tend to overlook the problems we cause for others, saying we had good excuses or motives, while judging others as having the worst possible motives when they do something that hurts us or someone we love). The Bible makes it plain that Christians will sin sometimes (I John 1:8-9): "If we say that we have no sin, we are deceiving ourselves, and the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins, He is faithful and righteous to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness." Finally, often people will reason, "Because professing Christians killed people through the Crusades, the Inquisition, the Troubles in Northern Ireland, the Thirty Years War, etc., therefore, I refuse to believe in the Bible." This argument is rarely run against the other side, though logically it should be: How many people have given up belief in atheism due to the sins of the communist dictators Joseph Stalin and Mao Tse-Tung, who butchered roughly 100 million people between them? The body count that atheists have run up in this century alone far exceeds anything that the Roman Catholic Church has accomplished over the past (say) 1700 years combined. Therefore, using the sins of professing Christians to reject the Bible is illogical, since the sins of others don't cancel out God's law as it applies to us individually, and the truth or falsity of the Bible (or God's existence) is logically independent of the sins of anyone believing in it (or Him).
HOW DO WE KNOW FOR CERTAIN THAT "ALL PATHS LEAD TO GOD" IS TRUE?
Do all paths lead to God? Can we be saved regardless of our beliefs, so long as we are sincere enough? The Bible is very clear that there is only one path to God, not many: "Jesus said to him, "I am the way, and the truth, and the life; no one comes to the Father, but through Me" (John 14:6). Similarly, the apostle Peter said: "And there is salvation in no one else [Jesus]: for there is no other name under heaven that has been given among men, by which we must be saved" (Acts 4:12). Saying "all paths lead to God" sounds nice and tolerant, but is it in fact true? What sounds nice may actually be false! (Consider how many think the dogmas of Marxism sound nice, yet they unleashed rivers of blood in practice!) This statement needs investigating before we accept it, just like any other important belief we have, not mere blind, unthinking acceptance. Today, in our pluralistic, multicultural society, it's condemned as intolerant and politically incorrect to say there is only one true religion. But if an Almighty God inspired these two statements, and they are true, it doesn't matter what any human thinks otherwise. Our job then is to line up our lives with Him, and proclaim that truth to others, regardless of what others may think. The Bible clearly states that there is only one God and one true religion. To say otherwise, and believe (say) Hinduism, Islam, and Buddhism are also true religions, is to deny the Bible. For true Christianity, it's incorrect to say that believers in an absolute truth will cause them to persecute others. Although so many professing His name have violated this, Jesus made it clear Christians are to love their enemies, which means persecuting non-believers is always immoral (Matthew 5:44): "But I say to you, love your enemies, and pray for those who persecute you." Likewise the apostle Paul wrote (Romans 12:17-18): "Never pay back evil for evil to anyone. . . . If possible, so far as it depends on you, be at peace with all men." Sincerity simply isn't enough, since one can be sincerely wrong: Consider all the enthusiastic believers in communism in this century, truly a god that failed. We need to be rational in our religious beliefs, and not just determine them by emotion and tradition alone. But now, how can we know whether the Bible is right when it proclaims it has the only true way to reach God?
HOW THE BIBLE CAN RATIONALLY BE PROVEN TO BE THE WORD OF GOD
The Bible has the answers, but how do you know whether these are the right ones? Suppose you were raised knowing nothing about the Bible, Old Testament or New Testament, like some tribe in the jungles of New Guinea or along the Amazon in Brazil. One day, a missionary comes along, and drops on you a copy of the Bible. Suppose it was in your own language and you are literate enough to read it. How could you judge whether its contents are true? Suppose a competing religion's missionary left a Quran (Koran) behind. How could you judge whether that book was reliable? To be rational in our religious beliefs, instead of just blindly following what our parents believe, we need to apply reason and not just emotion to figuring out what our religious beliefs should be. Later on in this booklet, evidence for the historical reliability of the Bible is presented. But first, fulfilled prophecy is presented as the ultimate proof for the Bible's inspiration. Historical accuracy merely is a necessary condition for inspiration, not a sufficient one. A book could be perfectly accurate historically, such as one on the life of Abraham Lincoln, yet not be inspired by God or hold any authority over our lives. Historical accuracy merely keeps the Bible from being ruled out as the Word of God, but by itself doesn't present much of a positive case for its inspiration. But it's another story to explain how the Bible could predict the future in advance accurately centuries after its prophets died. Rationally, this requires belief that its authors received supernatural guidance. Below prophecies that were fulfilled after some part of the Bible was written but before the twentieth century are examined. Predictions of events yet to happen, such as judgment day, the second coming, the resurrection of the dead, etc. aren't examined here, because they have yet to happen. Hence, although the Quran may predict repeatedly a day of judgment, that does little to prove God inspired it since that event hasn't happened yet! So let's explore the evidence that the Bible successfully predicted the future, which leads us to infer that its authors received supernatural help.
PART I: THE OLD TESTAMENT SUCCESSFULLY PREDICTS THE FUTURE: BABYLON'S FATE
The great Hebrew prophet Isaiah prophesied in the general period c. 740-700 b.c. Long before the King of Babylon, Nebuchadnezzar, destroyed Jerusalem, Judah's capital, in 586 b.c., Isaiah predicted the destruction of the city of Babylon itself. Note Isaiah 13:19-20: "And Babylon, the beauty of the kingdoms, the glory of the Chaldeans' pride, will be as when God overthrew Sodom and Gomorrah. It will never be inhabited or lived in from generation to generation . . ." This vast city had (if the ancient Greek historian Herodotus is trusted) a 56-mile circumference and 14-mile long sides, with walls 311 feet high and 87 feet wide. These figures appear exaggerated: Archeological digs indicate the inner city had double inner walls of twelve and twenty feet wide and double outer walls twenty-four and twenty-six feet wide. Nevertheless, since sometimes dirt was put into the area between the double walls such that four horses' spans would fit, Herodotus's figures on the width of the walls weren't that far off. Occupying some 196 square miles (including protected farmland within the outer walls), it was one of the ancient world's greatest cities. In modern terms, Isaiah's prophesy would be the equivalent of predicting the complete devastation and permanent desolation of New York, London, or Tokyo. Situated on the Euphrates River in what is now Iraq, Babylon had been a great center of Middle Eastern culture for some 2000 years. Additionally, predicting the site wouldn't be rebuilt upon again was very bold, since this commonly happened after a city's destruction in the ancient Middle East. After the Greek geographer and historian Strabo visited the site of Babylon during the reign of the Roman Emperor Augustus (27 b.c.-17 A.D.), he commented jokingly: "The great city is a great desert." It hasn't been rebuilt since either!
THE DESTRUCTION OF NINEVEH PREDICTED, ONCE THE CAPITAL OF THE ASSYRIAN EMPIRE
Nineveh, the capital of the Assyrian Empire, was a great city on the Tigris River in what is now Iraq (ancient Mesopotamia). Willingly burning cities, the ancient Assyrian Empire began under Tilgath-Pileser I a policy of terror and unusual cruelty even in ancient warfare's annals that inspired hatred and frequent revolts from those they conquered. Saving the worst punishments for cities and people who rose in rebellion, as Assurnasirpal's inscribed boasts about skinning people alive imply, in order to discourage future revolts, it also burned children, impaled enemies on stakes, and chopped off hands and heads. Writing around 627 b.c., the prophet Zephaniah predicted Nineveh's destruction along with the Assyrian Empire's: "And He [God] will stretch out His hand against the north and destroy Assyria, and He will make Nineveh a desolation" (Zeph. 2:13). Writing between 661 and 612 b.c., the prophet Nahum predicted Nineveh's destruction (Nahum 2:10; 3:19), with the help of a flood (Nahum 2:6) and fire (Nahum 3:13), during which many of its people would be drunk (Nahum 1:10). Like Babylon, Nineveh was one of the ancient world's greatest cities. Its inner wall was 100 feet tall and 50 feet thick, complete with a 150-foot- wide moat. It boasted a 7-mile circumference. But all this couldn't save it! As predicted (Nahum 3:12), the city fell easily, after a mere three-month siege, to the combined forces of the Medes, Scythians, and Babylonians under Nabopolassar in 612 b.c. Showing this wasn't all mere coincidence, guess work, or hopeful wishing, all of Nahum's specific predictions about how Nineveh would fall were fulfilled.
SWITCHING THE NAMES OF THE CITIES IN THE PROPHECIES WOULD MAKE THEM FALSE
Now let's examine more closely the fate of Babylon and Nineveh, which were by no means fully identical. Since both cities were capitals of nations that were major enemies of Israel, Israel's prophets easily could have switched the names of these cities. Then they would have predicted wrongly, if they had not been inspired by God. Although both cities suffered destruction, Babylon was clearly predicted to never be inhabited again, but this was never prophesied for Nineveh. Today, the site of Babylon is totally uninhabited. The Euphrates River, which still flows through the site, has eroded the ruins on its west side, turning them into a swamp. On its east side, the ruins are mere low hills of debris. Isaiah predicted wild animals would inhabit the ruins. No shepherd would remain there, or stay to rest their flocks (Isa. 13:20-22). As Floyd Hamilton relates, this has literally happened: "Travelers [to Babylon] report that the city is absolutely uninhabited, even [by] Bedouins [Arab nomads]. There are various superstitions current among the Arabs that prevent them from pitching their tents there, while the character of the soil prevents the growth of vegetation suitable for the pasturage of flocks." By contrast, even when the nineteenth-century archeologist Austen Henry Layard investigated the site, a small village sat upon the ruins of Nineveh, nowadays near the outskirts of Mosul, Iraq. Unlike Babylon, the plains around Nineveh's mound are farmed, and animals can graze on it during seasonal rains. Significantly, the site's largest mound has an Arabic name meaning "many sheep." Clearly, if Isaiah had condemned Nineveh instead of Babylon, which would have made sense when he wrote since Assyria was much the greater threat to Israel and Judah in the eighth century BC, his specific predictions about site of its ruins would have been wrong. The skeptic can't argue that it's easy to predict the destruction of ancient cities, thinking in time all cities eventually will be destroyed. The Bible also predicts specifically how these cities would cease to exist, so these predictions can't be called mere lucky guesses. Furthermore, many ancient cities of the Middle East are still inhabited today, such as Damascus, Jerusalem, Sidon, Aleppo, etc. Why was Babylon's fate different, its site now having been desolate for centuries after being a center of Mesopotamian civilization for centuries, a city dwelled in for perhaps over two thousand years? Because the God of the Bible yet lives, He intervenes in the affairs of men!
THE ANCIENT PHOENICIAN CITY OF TYRE PROPHESIED TO BECOME "A BARE ROCK"
The seacoast of what is now Lebanon once was the center of the ancient maritime civilization of the Phoenicians. Two of their leading cities were Tyre and Sidon. Colonists sent out from Tyre settled in and established the city of Carthage in what today is Tunisia in north Africa, which later fought (and lost) the three Punic Wars against the Roman Republic in the period 246-146 b.c.. Tyre was most unusual, since one part was built on the mainland opposite the remainder occupying an island about a half mile off the coast. God through the prophet Ezekiel condemned Tyre, predicting its complete demise:
Thus says the Lord God, 'Behold, I am against you, O Tyre, and I will bring up many nations against you, as the sea brings up its waves. And they will destroy the walls of Tyre and break down her towers; and I will scrape her debris from her and make her a bare rock. She will be a place for the spreading of nets in the midst of the sea, for I have spoken . . . and she will become spoil for the nations.' (Ezekiel 26:3-5)
This prophecy initially was fulfilled in several steps. First, as Ezekiel 26:7-11; 29:18 described in advance, the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar besieged the part of Tyre that was on the mainland for some thirteen years (585-573 b.c.). He was robbed of the fruits of victory: After his army broke down its walls and occupied it, he found most of the people (and their transportable wealth) had departed for the island city off the coast. Since Tyre had a strong navy, he couldn't attack it without a fleet. When Tyre made peace, it only admitted to Babylon's suzerainty (limited overlordship). Nevertheless, by destroying the mainland part of the city, Nebuchadnezzar fulfilled part of Ezekiel's predictions.
ALEXANDER THE GREAT ATTACKS TYRE, FULFILLS MORE OF THE PROPHECY AGAINST IT
Significantly, Ezekiel uses "he" to refer to Nebuchadnezzar in verses 8-11, but switches over to a more anonymous "they" for verse 12: "Also they will make a spoil of your riches and a prey of your merchandise, break down your walls and destroy your pleasant houses, and throw your stones and your timbers and your debris into the water." Surely this wasn't the normal fate for an ancient city's rubble, since usually when ancient cities were rebuilt, the new buildings were conveniently placed on top of the old ones' remnants. What could possibly cause anyone to go through this much bother, to throw a city's ruins into the sea? The main part of the "they" was the next major actor in the drama of Tyre's fate, Alexander the Great (356-323 b.c.). During his campaign of conquest against Persia, he attacked Tyre (332 b.c.) after it denied him permission to sacrifice to the Tyrian god Heracles. He insisted on making the offering in the temple dedicated to Heracles on the island off the coast, not the one in the mainland part of Tyre. (The mainland city had been partially rebuilt after the destruction wrought by Nebuchadnezzar over two centuries earlier). In a remarkable operation, Alexander besieged the island city by taking the rubble of the old mainland city and throwing it into the Mediterranean to build a causeway out to it. After building this land bridge, his army intended to place siege engines up against the island city's strong walls, which seemingly jutted up right out of sea. The siege lasted seven monthsonce Alexander gained naval supremacy, the city's conquest followed in short order. After the city was finally taken, 8,000 of its people were killed and Alexander sold 30,000 of those left alive into slavery. Ezekiel prophesied that Tyre's walls and towers would be broken down, and that God "will scrape her debris from her and make her a bare rock." It happened! In order to build the 200 foot wide causeway into the sea about a half mile, Alexander's army left no visible ruins behind. Is this all mere coincidence?
HAS THE PROPHECY AGAINST TYRE BEEN TOTALLY FULFILLED?
Ezekiel 26:14 predicted: "'And I will make you a bare rock; you will be a place for the spreading of nets. You will be built no more, for I the Lord have spoken,' declares the Lord God." Have these predictions been fulfilled? Clearly, the part concerning the spreading of fishing nets was. After visiting the site of Tyre in recent years, Nina Nelson noted "Pale turquoise fishing nets were drying on the shore." The mainland city became a bare rock due to Alexander's actions in building the causeway, but what about the island city off the coast? Although it never recovered its former great power, it was rebuilt, becoming a major port in the time of Christ during the first century. But after the Muslim Mamelukes captured it from the Crusaders during the Middle Ages, they completely wiped it out in 1291. They wished to ensure some future possible counterattack wouldn't recapture its fort and use it against them again. Today, a small fishing town of about 12,000 sits on the site of ancient Tyre, due to the Metualis reoccupying the island city site in 1766. The mainland city site remains abandoned, despite it has large natural freshwater springs. Since the town of Sur occupies part of the island city site today, was Ezekiel wrong? Remember, the mainland site is indeed "a bare rock," and no city has ever been rebuilt there. Furthermore, the switch in Ezekiel's language from "he" (Nebuchadnezzar) to "they" (Alexander and the Muslims mainly) to "I" may imply the last part of Tyre's drama will be played out when God directly intervenes during the Second Coming and beyond. By this understanding, this prophecy isn't totally fulfilled yet. Even as it is, the town of Sur has no organic and direct tie to ancient Tyre, since hundreds of years lie between Tyre's destruction by the Muslims in the thirteenth century and the resettlers of the eighteen century. For example, no buildings of old Tyre survived to be used by the present inhabitants of Surunlike the case for Jerusalem. Furthermore, some fishermen must be living nearby to supply the nets to be dried on the rocks of Tyrethey aren't going to sail miles out of their way to do that! The witness of the mainland site's desolation should be enough to convince skeptics.
THE CITY OF SIDON, TYRE'S RIVAL AND PROBABLE MOTHER CITY
Twenty-two miles up the Lebanese coast, Sidon was the mother city of Tyre. Although mentioned together often in the Bible, Sidon's fate was to be quite different.
Thus says the Lord God, "Behold, I am against you, O Sidon . . . For I shall send pestilence to her and blood to her streets, and the wounded will fall in her midst by the sword upon her on every side; Then they will know that I am the Lord. (Eze. 28:22-23)
Notice how the prediction prophesies a war torn future for Sidon, but nothing about her total destruction, complete abandonment, or never being inhabited again. Even today, Sidon remains a Lebanese port of some significance, although the capital of Beirut (to the north) is presently more important. After rebelling against the Persian Empire in 351 b.c., the city beat off the initial Persian attempts to quell her. Following betrayal by her king, 40,000 of Sidon's citizens chose to set fire to their own homes and die rather than let the conquering Persians torture them. Three times it changed hands between the Crusaders and Muslims during the Middle Ages. Even in modern times, it has been the scene of conflicts between the Druzes and Turks, the Turks and the French. In 1840, the fleets of France, England, and Turkey bombarded Sidon. Clearly, blood has been spilled in her streetsbut each time after being destroyed or damaged, Sidon was quickly rebuilt. Even when the city revolted against Assyrian rule in 677 b.c. and got destroyed in retaliation, the Assyrians created a new provincial capital called "Fort Esarhaddon" on or near the site of the old city. Now, if Ezekiel had switched Tyre's name for Sidon's, wouldn't his prophecies have been proven wrong? Nobody came along to toss Sidon's ruins into the sea! How did he know so far in advance that Tyre's fate would be so much worse than Sidon's? How was he able to get the specific details correct? Both cities' ancient inhabitants worshipped false gods using idols, something which Jehovah, the God of Israel, condemned time and time again through His prophets. Rationally speaking, is it plausible Ezekiel just blindly guessed correctly the different destinies of these two cities, although both were similarly sinful in his God's sight?
THE FATE OF GAZA, ASHKELON, AND ASHDOD, CITIES OF THE PHILISTINES
One of the leading traditional enemies of Israel, against whom mighty Samson focused his heroics, were the Philistines. Once living along the Mediterranean coast, devastation for the Philistines' major cities and the end of their national existence was predicted (Eze. 25:15-17; Amos 2:6-8; Jer. 47:5). In particular, notice the grim fates in store for the cities of Ashdod, Gaza, Ashkelon, and Ekron:
For Gaza will be abandoned, and Ashkelon a desolation; Ashdod will be driven out at noon, and Ekron will be uprooted . . . So the seacoast will be pastures, with caves for shepherds and folds for flocks. And the coast will be for the remnant of the house of Judah. They will pasture on it. In the houses of Ashkelon they will lie down at evening; For the Lord their God will care for them and restore their fortune. (Zephaniah 2:4-5, 6-7)
As Eze. 25:15-17 and Zephaniah 2:5 predicted, the Philistines ceased to be an identifiable nation, unlike the Jews. Ashkelon's fate is portrayed differently from the rest. Remaining inhabited and an operational port until the Sultan Bibars destroyed it in 1270, Ashkelon's natural harbor then was intentionally filled with stones to render it useless. A Turkish garrison remained in it until the seventeenth century. As Zephaniah predicted, sheepherding occurred around its site. Most remarkably, since the modern establishment of the state of Israel, Ashkelon has been rebuilt as a "garden city." Indeed today "the remnant of the house of Judah" does lie down "in the houses of Ashkelon" at evening! By contrast, the present-day Palestinian city of Gaza isn't built on the site of its ancient namesake. Although some thought this prophecy was wrong, the ruins of ancient Philistine city of Gaza were found some distance away. During his conquest of Persia, Alexander the Great took this city, killed many of its inhabitants, and sold the survivors into slavery. Buried under sand dunes today, indeed "baldness has come upon Gaza"! (Jer. 47:5). As for Ekron, its location has been evidently lost, after being inhabited until the time of the Crusaders in the Middle Ages. Tell Miqne is the most probable location. Having been tilled in recent times, it remains unsettled. Hence, the "remnant of Judah" dwells in Ashkelon today, but neither Ekron nor Gaza. Without supernatural guidance, how could have Zephaniah have foretold the future so accurately? Couldn't he have randomly switched Gaza's or Ekron's name with Ashkelon, and criticized as wrong (at least to date)?
THEBES (NO) AND MEMPHIS (NOPH), MAJOR EGYPTIAN CITIES WITH DIFFERENT FATES
Hugging the Nile River as its lifeline, ancient Egypt boasted one of the world's earliest civilizations. Two of its major cities were Thebes (No or No-Amon in Egyptian) and Memphis (Noph). Thebes was the dominant city of southern (upper) Egypt, while Memphis was one of the capitals from which the Pharaohs ruled and the dominant city of northern (lower) Egypt. (Since the Nile flows from the south to the north, unlike most major rivers, "upper" corresponds with "southern," and "lower" with "northern.") Since Egypt was the nation that oppressed Israel as slaves and was a dominant power in Middle Eastern politics for many centuries, these two cities naturally drew the attention of the Hebrew prophets for their idolatry (worshiping false gods using statues). First, consider the fate of Memphis, as prophesied by Ezekiel:
Thus says the Lord God, I will also destroy idols and make the images cease from Memphis. And there will no longer be a prince in the land of Egypt; and I will put fear in the land of Egypt. And I will make Pathros desolate, set a fire in Zoan and execute judgments on Thebes. . . . I will also cut off the multitude of Thebes. And I will set a fire in Egypt; Sin will writhe in anguish, Thebes will be breached, and Memphis will have distresses daily. (Eze. 30:13-16)
Most remarkably, these predictions were fulfilled. Although the Assyrians under Esarhaddon (670 b.c.) and the Persians under Cambyses (525 b.c.) captured Memphis, the city recovered much of its former position. After visiting it, the Greek geographer Strabo (64 b.c.-after 23 A.D.) declared it second in size to the Egyptian port of Alexandria. But Memphis's doom came with the Muslim invasion of Egypt in the seventh century A.D. After the invading Islamic army conquered Egypt, the caliph Umar (ruled 634-644 A.D.) ordered it not to settle in Alexandria, buy property or take root in Egypt. As a result, it took up residence in an encampment near the fort that had protected Memphis. Over the centuries, this army base (Fustat) became the city of Cairo, Egypt's modern capital. Memphis was progressively abandoned in the meantime, with its people drifting over to Cairo. While one Arab traveler of the thirteen century, Abdul- Latif, declared Memphis to be a "collection of wonderful works," later on the very site was lost. Why? The buildings/ruins of Memphis became a convenient quarry for Cairo. As a result, hardly any stonework was left above ground. The founder of modern scientific archeology, the English Egyptologist Flinders Petrie (1853-1942) commented about the Temple of Ptah area in what once was Memphis: "The site has been so much exhausted for building stone in the Arab ages, that it is not likely that a complete turning over of the whole ground would repay the work." Amelia Edwards commented that the few ruins remaining were hardly worth observing and could easily be listed: "One can hardly believe that a great city ever flourished on this spot." This desolation clearly shows the idols of Memphis ceased to exist, just as Ezekiel foresaw.
THE FATE OF THEBES, ONCE THE CAPITAL CITY OF ANCIENT EGYPT
The leading ancient Egyptian city in upper Egypt (i.e. further up the Nile from the Mediterranean, some 330 miles south of modern Cairo), Thebes's fate differed some from Memphis's. Being a center of the worship of the god Amon, Thebes also served as the capital of ancient Egypt for centuries. Here tourists can still visit the huge temple complexes at Karnak and Luxor. Across the Nile on its west bank lies the famous "Valley of the Kings" where Howard Carter found the tomb of Tutankhamen ("King Tut") in 1923. Although the Assyrian king Ashurbanipal, the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar, and the Persian king Cambyses all took and destroyed Thebes, it was still revived each time. Centuries later, Thebes in 92-89 b.c. suffered a three-year siege by Ptolemy Lathyrus (Cleopatra's grandfather) before getting sacked and burned in punishment. Although Thebes recovered once again, Cornelius Gallus destroyed it (30-29 b.c.) for good during the reign of the Roman emperor Augustus (27 b.c.- 14 A.D.) for joining a tax revolt. The area the city occupied became a small collection of villages. Nine of them mark the spot today. But the ruins remain impressive, complete with many, many idols. When he wrote, Francis Llewellyn Griffith maintained: "Thebes still offers the greatest assemblage of monumental ruins in the world." Importantly, as Ezekiel's prophecy outlined, Thebes suffered from a much more violent history than Memphis's before its very violent end. Ezekiel said Jehovah would "execute judgments on Thebes," would "cut off [kill] the multitude of Thebes," and that "Thebes would be breached." By contrast, besides having her idols destroyed, Memphis merely would have "distresses daily." The multitude of Thebes was suddenly cut off, but Memphis's population just drifted a few miles away to Cairo over the centuries. The ruins of Thebes are far more impressive than the scraps that meet the traveler's eye at Memphis: The idols still stand at Thebes, but not at Memphis. Suppose Ezekiel had switched the names of the two cities. Since the idols have not been cut off from Thebes, he easily could have been called wrong (the escape clause of saying it wasn't yet fulfilled wouldn't look very promising). Skeptics might claim Ezekiel wrote out of some uninspired emotional Hebrew proto-nationalism that hated Egypt and desired its downfall. But then, had he randomly reversed these two cities' names, unbelievers easily could have stamped him as wrong. So then, did he merely "guess" right? Isn't it more sensible, given the mute testimony of the stones in Egypt, to say Ezekiel had supernatural help?
OTHER PREDICTIONS MADE ABOUT EGYPT
Consider other predictions made against Egypt. Although Egypt had been a glorious civilization for centuries, even millennia, when Ezekiel prophesied, he still boldly predicted its coming fall from greatness:
And I shall turn the fortunes of Egypt and shall make them return to the land of Pathros [upper Egypt between roughly Aswan and Cairo], to the land of their origin; and there they will be a lowly kingdom. It will be the lowest of the kingdoms; and it will never again lift itself up above the nations. And I shall make them so small that they will not rule over the nations. (Eze. 29:14-15)
Since the time Ezekiel lived, other nations and empires have repeatedly conquered Egypt, including Persia, Greece, Rome, the Arabs, the Turks, the French, and finally the British. Although independent today, Egypt is a relatively insignificant Third World country which has lost some four wars against Israel in the past half century. Notice how its fate differed from Assyria's or Babylon'stoday Egypt still exists, but total desolation overcame the two Mesopotamian civilizations. Egypt was also no longer to be ruled by its own kings: "And there will no longer be a prince in the land of Egypt" (Eze. 30:13). The line of Pharaohs with even some minimal semi-independence ended with the reestablishment of Persian rule in 341 b.c. Almost ever since, Egypt generally has endured foreign overlords and/or foreign monarchs. A critic can't say that the Bible only predicts about the destruction of cities or empiresin Egypt's case it predicts its humbling and abasement despite its past centuries of great power, but not its destruction.
PROPHECIES AGAINST EDOM, ANOTHER RIVAL OF ISRAEL, FULFILLED
Once occupying an area nearly the size of New Jersey to Israel's southeast, the kingdom of Edom had an especially grim future predicted for it. Isaiah 34:9-15; Jeremiah 49:17-18; Ezekiel 25:13-14; 35:5-9 all predict Edom's permanent desolation and destruction. Jeremiah even predicted "no one will live there," while Isaiah predicted "none shall pass through it forever and ever." Although their language sounds extravagant, especially because cities in the Middle East were often rebuilt after their devastation, but it has almost literally been fulfilled. Despite Ezekiel prophesied during the time Nebuchadnezzar was applying pressure against Judah, who finally virtually leveled Jerusalem (587 b.c.) and hauled the Jews into exile in Babylon, he still predicted Judah would defeat Edom one day. Since Judah had just endured utterly total defeat, his prediction would have seemed absurd in the early sixth century b.c. Nevertheless, during the Maccabean Wars of the second century b.c. it actually happened, when Judas Maccabeus defeated them. (See I Maccabees 5:3, as found in Catholic Bibles). Attacking them as well were John Hyrcanus, who forced them to accept Judaism, and Simon of Gerasa. Although the Edomites took advantage of Rome's impending siege of Jerusalem in 70 A.D. to rob and kill the Jews therein, soon afterwards they disappear from history. (Rome took formal control of Petra and the Nabataean kingdom that had absorbed Edom in 106 A.D.) Today, Edom's stone city of Petra stands out as one of the most spectacular set of ruins in the world, since it has buildings hewn from cliffs of bare rock. Around the beginning of the first century A.D., the Greek geographer Strabo reported that Petra was a major terminal for caravans crossing the Middle East from Asia. Later, the city had already fallen into decline when the Arabs invaded the area in the seventh century. The Crusaders built a castle there in the twelfth century. But soon afterwards the outside world forgot about the city's very existence, until the Swiss traveler J.L. Burckhardt discovered it in 1812. Once a center of the Eurasian caravan trade, the caravan routes shifted elsewhere and Petra was abandoned. The sounds of jackals and owls at night and the presence of scorpions under its rocks have given visitors (like Arab nomads) good reasons to avoid hanging around. The rarity of people staying long or inhabiting significantly this region is sufficient evidence for this prophecy's fulfillment.
ALEXANDER THE GREAT'S SUCCESSFUL INVASION OF PERSIA PREDICTED LONG IN ADVANCE
The prophet Daniel, writing during the period 605-536 b.c., predicted Greece would destroy the Persian Empire. Using a goat to stand for Greece, and a ram to symbolize Persia, he wrote:
While I was observing [in a prophetic vision], behold, a male goat was coming from the west over the surface of the whole earth without touching the ground; and the goat had a conspicuous horn between his eyes. And he came up to the ram that had the two horns, which I had seen standing in front of the canal, and rushed at him in his mighty wrath. . . . So he [the goat] hurled him [the ram] to the ground and trampled on him, and there was none to rescue the ram from his power. . . . The ram which you saw with two horns represented the kings of Media and Persia. And the shaggy goat represented the kingdom of Greece, and the large horn that is between his eyes is the first king. (Dan. 8:5-7, 20-21; cf. Dan. 11:2-4).
Over two hundred years after Daniel's death, his inspired predictions came true. Alexander the Great invaded and conquered Persia during the years 334-330 b.c.
DANIEL PREDICTS THE DIVISION OF ALEXANDER'S EMPIRE INTO FOUR PARTS
Daniel also foresaw the division of Alexander's empire into four parts, after the Macedonian conqueror's death:
Then the male goat magnified himself exceedingly. But as soon as he was mighty, the large horn was broken; and in its place there came up four conspicuous horns towards the four winds of heaven. . . . the large horn that is between his eyes is the first king. And the broken horn and the four horns that arose in its place represent four kingdoms which will arise from his nation, although not with his power" (Dan. 8:8, 21-22).
Following Alexander the Great's sudden and early death, his generals divided up his empire. Ptolemy (Soter) took Egypt, Lysimachus ran Thrace, Cassander controlled Greece and Macedonia, and Seleucus (Nicator) eventually grabbed what is now Iraq and Syria on into Iran. This prophecy was fulfilled to the letter, since these four kingdoms never reached the size or power of Alexander's empire, and Alexander died soon after conquering Persia at age 33. This was hardly a lucky guess. Daniel just as easily could have written that the Greek king's empire would be split up into a different number of parts, be defeated by Persia, or that Alexander would reign long.
A REPLY TO A STANDARD OBJECTION: WAS HISTORY MASQUERADING AS PROPHECY?
At this point, skeptics may argue that fulfilled prophecy is merely history in disguise. To avoid the ominous implications for their spiritual lives that these Hebrew prophets predicted the future accurately, they will postdate their books to some time after the events they predicted happened. (Of course, this concession admits the Bible isn't myths or fairy tales, but historically accurate in these cases). This argument suffers from some major objections. It assumes ahead of the fact (a priori) what it wishes to prove: Implicitly claiming there is no God and/or that He doesn't intervene in history, it asserts all fulfilled prophecies are actually history pretending to be prophecy. Therefore, the books of Isaiah, Ezekiel, Jeremiah, Daniel, etc. were written centuries after their putative authors lived. This reasoning is actually circular, and ignores any contrary archeological or historical evidence raised against it. For example, because Daniel accurately describes in advance important events in Middle Eastern history down into the second century b.c., many higher critics conclude it had to be written in or finished by that century. Now about half of Daniel was written in the language of Aramaic. Since Aramaic changed over the centuries, much like English has since the time of Chaucer or even Shakespeare, documents written in it can be roughly dated. The skeptics ignore how its style, in vocabulary, structure, and syntax, doesn't fit the second century b.c. Consider the implications of the Elephantine Papyri of the fifth century b.c. The structure of their Aramaic more closely matches Daniel than the Aramaic of the Maccabean period of the second century. As Old Testament scholar Gleason L. Archer comments: "Hence these chapters [Dan. 2-7] could not have been composed as late as the second century or the third century, but rather based on purely philological [language structure] groundsthey have to be dated in the fifth or late sixth century . . ."
THE DATING OF EZEKIEL TO THE EARLY SIXTH CENTURY B.C. DEFENDED
Then consider the book of Ezekiel, which has been frequently cited above. Did Ezekiel write it and prophesy between about 597 b.c. and 570 b.c.? To claim someone else wrote this book ignores how, unlike other Biblical books, the personal pronoun "I" is used throughout. It contains commonly used catch phrases, such as: "Then they will know that I am the Lord" (over 50 times), "As I live, says the Lord God" (13 times), "my sabbaths" (12 times), "countries" (24 times), "idols" (around 40 times), and "walking in my statutes" (11 times). Commonly, higher critics assert authors always keep the same literary style no matter what subject or time they write something. (If this kind of reasoning was always true, the English poet John Milton (1608- 74) couldn't have written the poem "Paradise Lost," the poem "L'Allegro," and his political tracts). But here this kind of reasoning undermines their own arguments against the unity (single authorship) of Ezekiel. Although the authenticity of Ezekiel has been attacked for dating events by some year "of king Jehoiachin's captivity," more recently this has become an excellent argument for dating it to early in the sixth century b.c. During much of the time Ezekiel prophesied Zedekiah was king in Jerusalem. But the people of Judah considered Zedekiah (the uncle of Jehoiachin) as only a regent for Jehoiachin, who had been taken into captivity earlier by Nebuchadnezzar during an earlier assault on Judah. The archeological discovery of seal impressions on three jar handles that referred to "Eliakim steward of Jehoiachin" implies that Jehoiachin still had property in Judah despite being in exile. Ultimately, the only reason to believe Ezekiel didn't write Ezekiel are the assumptions of liberal skeptics who automatically disbelieve any book of the Bible was composed when it said it was: It would challenge their presuppositions that God doesn't exist and/or doesn't intervene in history.
THE HEBREW PROPHETS' PROPHECIES WERE CLEAR AND FULFILLED INDEPENDENTLY
The prophecies of the Hebrew prophets outlined above clearly are not ambiguous statements that can be interpreted in myriads of ways. They avoid (say) the deliberately obscure predictions of astrologers which allow for many widely varying events to "fulfill" them. Similarly, consider their differences from the ancient Greeks' Oracle at Delphi. At this shrine to the god Apollo, Croesus, the king of Lydia, asked the "prophetess" whether he should attack Persia, the empire next door. She replied: "If Croesus should make war on the Persians, he would destroy a mighty empire." This prediction encouraged Croesus to attack Persiaand he did indeed destroy a "mighty empire"--his own! In another case, Athenians argued over how to interpret one prediction by the prophetess at Delphi as the Persian king Xerxes's invading army threatened Greece. She predicted: "Yet Zeus the all-seeing grants to Athene's prayer that the wooden wall only shall not fall, but help you and your children." The Athenians then debated whether the "wooden wall" referred to their navy protecting them or to the thorn-hedge that surrounded the Acropolis where the Parthenon stands today. Thanks to Themistocles, they opted for the former interpretation. They went on to win the naval battle of Salamis as a result (480 b.c.) In contrast, when Isaiah predicts Babylon would be destroyed and not inhabited again forever, no ambiguity exists: Either Babylon is or isn't destroyed. Either Babylon is or isn't inhabited again. Furthermore, Daniel, Ezekiel, and Isaiah were in no position to make sure their prophecies were fulfilled. The cities and empires listed as destroyed or humbled above were finished off centuries later by non-Jewish nations in most cases, especially Greece, Rome, or the Arabs and Muslims. The prophecies were not self-fulfilling, but accomplished independently of any actions by the prophets themselves. The nation of Judah was unable to fulfill these for them. Since Judah lacked significant military power, it was prey for the great empires of the Middle East except when Yahweh intervened for it.
FULFILLED PROPHECY AS GOD'S CHALLENGE TO THE SKEPTIC
Other prophecies could be related to the reader. Christ's prediction of the destruction of Jerusalem (Luke 21:20-24; Matt. 24:1-2) comes to mind. The longest single prophecy in the Bible, Daniel 11, is a remarkably detailed summary of centuries of struggles between the Selucid and Ptolemic dynasties after Alexander the Great's conquest of Persia and beyond. These predictions all confirm God's challenge to the skeptic:
"Present your case," the Lord says. "Bring forward your strong arguments," the King of Jacob says. Let them bring forth and declare to us what is going to take place; as for the former events, declare what they were, that we may consider them, and know their outcome; or announce to us what is coming. Declare the things that are going to come afterward, that we may know that you are gods. (Isaiah 41:21-23)
Compare this to how successful today's supermarket tabloid psychics are. You will find they are normally wrong. (Just save a few pages of predictions out of one of these newspapers for a couple of years, and check them out against what actually happens). Remarkably, a minor nation's seers were routinely correct about the downfall and desolation of much more powerful enemies who worshipped (they believed) false gods. As McDowell describes:
There were many centers of religious worship in the ancient world: Memphis-Thebes, Babylon, Nineveh, and Jerusalem were among them. The pagan deities which men said claimed an equal footing with the One-God, Yahweh [Jehovah, "the Lord"], never did last, especially after Jesus Christ. Yet Yahweh refused to even consider Himself on equal terms with these pagan gods, and even went further by condemning the cities in which these gods flourished. It is one thing to issue threats, but the point here is to look at history. Which city out of the above listed has remained?
To say these specific predictions are all just lucky guesses is a self-deluding rationalization.
THE PRACTICAL IMPLICATIONS FOR OUR LIVES OF FULFILLED PROPHECY
The sufficient criterion for the Bible's inspiration is fulfilled prophecy, since attributing successful long-term prophecies to guesswork is preposterous. This means the Bible's moral standards, such as on sexual morality, can't be lightly dismissed: The God who destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah, Babylon and Nineveh, is very much alive and well. When facing what God has done to so many in the past who defied Him by worshipping false gods, we should consider putting our own lives in order. We Americans, in particular, shouldn't delude ourselves into thinking we don't worship false gods. We don't worship Zeus, Apollo, Dagon, Baal, Asarte, Chemosh, Apis, Amon-Re, or Bel, but instead we worship money, power, sex without commitment, and the endless distractions produced by Western materialism and consumerism. If we don't repent, we'll meet the same fate. Furthermore, many of the end-time prophecies of the Bible found in the books of Daniel and Revelation could happen in our lifetimes. These books describe catastrophic disasters, as does Christ's Olivet prophecy (Matt. 24; Luke 21; Mark 13), that make the Second World War look like a firecracker by comparison, such as the great tribulation and the Day of the Lord. In the light of the above, they should not be scoffed at. The God who decreed doom in the past to Babylon, Nineveh, and Thebes could well do so today against London, Paris, New York, or Tokyo. Although Christ warns against setting dates (Matt. 24:36, 42), He also described there would be general indications that His Second Coming was near:
Now learn the parable from the fig tree: when its branch has already become tender, and puts forth its leaves, you know that summer is near; even so you too, when you see all these things, recognize that He is near, right at the door. Truly I say to you, this generation will not pass away until all these things take place. (Matt. 24:32-34)
Although the world today laughs at the thought of a wrathful God who punishes nations for their sins, the ruins of cities scattered throughout the Middle East bear witness that this is no laughing matter. The God of the Bible is a God of love (I John 4:16), as shown by His sacrifice by His Son's life for us (I John 3:16). But this same God hates sin. He demands that we repent from breaking His holy law (II Peter 3:9; Romans 6:12-16; 8:4). As the book of Revelation shows, the unrepentant during the Second Coming will meet the same fate as ancient Babylon, Assyria, and Egypt.
PART II: HOW CAN SOMEONE JUDGE WHETHER THE BIBLE IS HISTORICALLY RELIABLE?
Concerning the trustworthiness of the Bible, how can its claims be analyzed, especially in comparison with (say) the Quran? The military historian C. Sanders developed three ways of evaluating the trustworthiness of any document historically: (1) the bibliographical test, (2) the internal evidence test, and (3) the external evidence test. The bibliographical test maintains that as there are more handwritten manuscript copies of an ancient historical document, the more reliable it is. It also states that the closer in time the oldest surviving manuscript is to the original first copy (autograph) of the author, the more reliable that document is. There is less time for distortions to creep into the text by scribes down through the generations copying by hand (before, in Europe, Gutenberg's perfection of printing using moveable type by c. 1440). The internal evidence test involves analyzing the document itself for contradictions and self-evident absurdities. How close in time and place the writer of the document was to the events and people he describes is examined: The bigger the gap, the less likely it is reliable. The external evidence test checks the document's reliability by comparing it to other documents on the same subjects, seeing whether its claims are different from theirs. Archeological evidence also figures into this test, since archeological discoveries in the Middle East have confirmed many Biblical sites and people. How do the Old and New Testaments stack up under these tests? Let's check them out!
THE BIBLIOGRAPHICAL TEST AS APPLIED TO THE NEW TESTAMENT
By the two parts of the bibliographical test, the New Testament is the best attested ancient historical writing. Some 24,633 known copies (including fragments, lectionaries, etc.) exist, of which 5309 are in Greek. The Hebrew Old Testament has over 1700 copies (A more recent estimate is 6,000 copies, including fragments). By contrast, the document with the next highest number of copies is Homer's Iliad, with 643. Other writings by prominent ancient historians have far fewer copies: Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War, 8; Herodotus, The Histories, 8; Julius Caesar, Gallic Wars, 10; Livy, History from the Founding of the City, 20; Suetonius, Lives of the Caesars, 8. Tacitus was perhaps the best Roman historian. His Annals has at the most 20 surviving manuscript copies, and only 1 (!) copy endured of his minor works.
The large number of manuscripts is a reason for belief in the New Testament, not disbelief. Now, a skeptic could cite the 1908-12 Catholic Encyclopedia, which says "the greatest difficulty confronting the editor of the New Testament is the endless variety of the documents at his disposal." Are these differences good reason for disbelief? After all, scholars (ideally) would have to sift through all of its ancient manuscripts to figure out what words were originally inspired to be there. In order to decide what to put into a printed version of the New Testament, they have to reconstruct a single text out of hundreds of manuscript witnesses. Actually, the higher manuscript evidence mounts, the easier it becomes to catch any errors that occurred by comparing them with one another. As F.F. Bruce observes:
Fortunately, if the great number of mss [manuscripts] increases the number of scribal errors, it increases proportionately the means of correcting such errors, so that the margin of doubt left in the process of recovering the exact original wording is not so large as might be feared. The variant readings about which any doubt remains among textual critics of the New Testament affect no material question of historic fact or of Christian faith and practice.
Having over 5300 Greek manuscripts to work with, detecting scribal errors in the New Testament is more certain when comparing between its manuscripts than for the Caesar's Gallic Wars with its mere 10 copies, long a standard work of Latin teachers to use with beginning students. The science and art of textual criticism has an embarrassmentof riches for the New Testament.
HOW CAN YOU KNOW WHETHER THE NEW TESTAMENT IS A FIRST-CENTURY DOCUMENT?
Is there any evidence for the New Testament being written in the first century? After all, liberal scholars, atheists, and agnostics normally have said the New Testament was written long after the time Jesus and his disciples (students) lived. And if the New Testament was written around (say) the year A.D. 150, how could you trust what was in it? Since Jesus died in the year A.D. 31, a gap of a hundred or more years would mean that all the eyewitnesses would have died by then. You would be left with believing in stories passed down over three or more generations. This creates major obstacles to believing in it, as the game "whispering lane" implies. If you played this game in elementary school, you might remember how the first kid would be told a message by the teacher. Then the rest of the class would pass the message along from one kid to another. The final kid to hear it rarely, if ever, correctly got the full, original message. Does a similar problem confront believers in the New Testament when judging whether it is an accurate record for the life and ministry of Jesus and his disciples?
SCHOLARS MOVE AWAY FROM A SECOND-CENTURY DATE FOR THE NEW TESTAMENT
Recently among scholars a move away from a second- century composition date for the New Testament has developed. For example, Biblical archeologist William Foxwell Albright remarks: "In my opinion, every book of the New Testament was written by a baptized Jew [Luke presumably would be an exceptionEVS] between the forties and eighties of the first century A.D. (very probably sometime between about A.D. 50 and 75)." Elsewhere he states: "Thanks to the Qumran discoveries [meaning, the Dead Sea Scrolls, which first were uncovered in 1947 in the West Bank of Jordan], the New Testament proves to be in fact what it was formerly believed to be: the teaching of Christ and his immediate followers between cir. 25 and cir. 80 A.D." Scholar John A.T. Robertson (in Redating the New Testament) maintains that every New Testament book was written before 70 A.D., including even the Gospel of John and Revelation. He argues that no New Testament book mentions the actual destruction of Jerusalem in 70 A.D. by Rome, it must have been all written before that date. If the New Testament is a product of the first century, composed within one or two generations of Jesus' crucifixion, worries about the possible inaccuracies of oral transmission (people telling each other stories about Jesus between generations) are unjustified. As scholar Simon Kistemaker writes:
Normally, the accumulation of folklore among people of primitive culture takes many generations: it is a gradual process spread over centuries of time. But in conformity with the thinking of the form critic [a school of higher criticism that studies how oral transmission shaped the present organization of the New Testament], we must conclude that the Gospel stories were produced and collected within little more than one generation.
HOW PEOPLE IN CULTURES MORE DEPENDENT ON ORAL TRADITION HAVE BETTER MEMORIES
In cultures where the written word and literacy are scarce commodities, where very few people able to read or afford to own any books, they develop much better memories about what they are told, unlike people in America and other Western countries today. For example, Alex Haley (the author of Roots) was able to travel to Africa, and hear a man in his ancestors' African tribe, whose job was to memorize his people's past, mention his ancestor Kunta Kinte's disappearance. In the Jewish culture in which Jesus and His disciples moved, the students of a rabbi had to memorize his words. Hence, Mishna, Aboth, ii, 8 reads: "A good pupil was like a plastered cistern that loses not a drop." The present-day Uppsala school of Harald Riesenfeld and Birger Gerhardsson analyzes Jesus' relationship with His disciples in the context of Jewish rabbinical practices of c. 200 A.D. Jesus, in the role of the authoritative teacher or rabbi, trained his disciples to believe in and remember His teachings. Because their culture was so strongly oriented towards oral transmission of knowledge, they could memorize amazing amounts of material by today's standards. This culture's values emphasized the need of disciples to remember their teacher's teachings and deeds accurately, then to pass on this (now) tradition faithfully and as unaltered as possible to new disciples they make in the future. Paul's language in I Cor. 15:3-8 reflects this ethos, especially in verse 3: "For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received, that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures . . ." Correspondingly, the apostles were seen as having authority due to being eyewitness guardians of the tradition since they knew their Teacher well (cf. the criterion for choosing an apostle listed in Acts 1:21-22; cf. I Cor. 9:1). Furthermore, the words of Jesus were recorded within a few decades of His death while eyewitnesses, both friendly and hostile, still lived. These could easily publicly challenge any inaccuracies in circulation. As scholar Laurence McGinley writes: "The fact that the whole process took less than thirty years, and that its essential part was accomplished in a decade and a half, finds no parallel in any [oral] tradition to which the Synoptic Gospels [Mark, Luke, and Matthew] have been compared."
HOW THE BOOK OF ACTS IMPLIES THE NEW TESTAMENT WAS WRITTEN BEFORE C. 63 A.D.
A very straightforward argument for the date of the New Testament can be derived from the contents of Acts. The Gospel of Luke and Acts were originally one book, later divided into two. As a result, Luke was necessarily written a bit earlier than Acts. In turn, Luke is traditionally seen as having depended upon Mark over and above his own sources, so Mark was necessarily written still earlier. Furthermore, Matthew is normally seen as having been written after Mark but before Luke. Hence, if a firm date can be given to Acts, all of the Synoptic Gospels (Mark, Luke, and Matthew) had to have been composed still earlier. There are six good reasons to date Acts as being written by c. 63 A.D. First, Acts doesn't mention the fall of Jerusalem in 70 A.D., despite much of its action focuses in and around that city. Only if it was written earlier does the omission of this incredibly disruptive event in the Holy Land make sense. Since in his Gospel Luke himself relates Jesus' predictions of Jerusalem's destruction in the Mount Olivet Prophecy (chapter 21), it's hard to believe he would overlook its fulfillment if he had written Acts after 70 A.D. Second, Nero's persecutions of the mid-60's aren't covered. Luke's general tone towards the Roman government was peaceful and calm, which wouldn't fit if Rome had just launched a major persecution campaign against the church. (The later book of Revelation has a very different spirit on this score, even if it is in symbolic prophetic code, since the Beast was Rome). Third, the martyrdoms of James (61 A.D.) as well as Paul and Peter (mid-60s A.D.) aren't mentioned in Acts. The ancient Jewish historian Josephus (c. 37-100 A.D.) does record the death of James, so this event can be easily dated. Since these three men are leading figures in the Book of Acts, it would be curious to omit how they died, yet include the martyrdoms of other Christians like Stephen and James the brother of John. Fourth, the key conflicts and issues raised in the church that it records make sense in the context of a mainly Jewish Messianic Church centered on Jerusalem before 70 A.D. It describes disputes over circumcision and admitting the gentiles into the church as having God's favor, the division between Palestinian and Hellenistic Jews (Acts 6:1), and the Holy Spirit falling on different ethnic groups (Jews followed by gentiles). These issues had a much lower priority after 70 A.D. than before. The destruction of Jerusalem in 70 A.D. basically wiped out Jewish Christianity as a strong organized movement. Fifth, some of the phrases used in Acts are primitive and very early, such as "the Son of man," "the Servant of God" (to refer to Jesus), "the first day of the week," and "the people" (to refer to Jews). After 70 A.D., these expressions would need explanation, but before then they didn't in the Messianic Jewish Christian community. Finally, of course, the Jewish revolt against Rome starting in 66 A.D. that led to destruction of Jerusalem in 70 A.D. isn't referred to in Acts despite its ultimately apocalyptic effects on the Jewish Christian community. Hence, judging from what the author included as important historically, if Acts was written about c. 63 A.D., the Gospel of Luke would be slightly older, and correspondingly Matthew and Mark probably should be dated to the mid-40s to mid- 50s A.D. Paul's letters have to be older than Acts as well. This internal evidence points to a first-century date of composition for the New Testament; There's no need to find first- century manuscripts of the New Testament to know it was composed then.
THE NEW TESTAMENT WASN'T SUBJECT TO A LONG PERIOD OF ORAL TRADITION
Several reasons indicate that the New Testament wasn't subject to a long period of oral tradition, of people retelling each other stories over the generations. Let's assume the document scholars call "Q" did exist, which they say Matthew and Luke relied upon to write their Gospels. If "Q" can be dated to around 50 A.D. after Jesus's death in 31 A.D., little time remains in between for distortions to creep in due to failed memory. Furthermore, the sayings of Jesus found in the Gospels were in an easily memorized, often poetic form in the original Aramaic. Then, since Paul was taken captive about 58 A.D., how he wrote to the Romans, Corinthians, Thessalonians, and Galatians indicates that he assumed they already had a detailed knowledge of Jesus. He almost never quotes Jesus' words his letters (besides in I Cor. 11:24-25). Hence, as James Martin comments:
As a matter of fact, there was no time for the Gospel story of Jesus to have been produced by legendary accretion. The growth of legend is always a slow and gradual thing. But in this instance the story of Jesus was being proclaimed, substantially as the Gospels now record it, simultaneously with the beginning of the Church.
Using the writing of the ancient Greek historian Herodotus (c. 484-430 to 420 b.c.) as a test case, A.N. Sherwin-White, a University of Oxford scholar in ancient Roman and Greek history, studied the rate at which legend developed in the ancient world. Even two generations (c. 60+ years) is not enough to wipe out a solid foundation of historical facts, he argues. J. Warwick Montgomery remarked that form criticism [a school of higher criticism] fails because "the time interval between the writing of the New Testament documents as we have them and the events of Jesus' life which they record is too brief to allow for communal redaction [editing] by the Church." Anderson adds, in a statement that higher critics must reckon with:
What is beyond dispute is that every attempt to date the Gospels late in the first century has now definitely failed, crushed under the weight of convincing evidence. If the majority of the five hundred witnesses to the resurrection were still alive around AD 55 . . . then our Gospels must have begun to appear when many who had seen and heard the earthly Jesusincluding some of the apostleswere still available to confirm or question the traditions.
Claims that the New Testament wasn't finished by c. 100 A.D. are simply untenable.
IT HAS A SHORTER GAP BETWEEN ITS ORIGINAL WRITING AND OLDEST EXTANT COPIES
As shown above, scholars have in recent decades increasingly discredited dates that make the New Testament a second-century document. As Albright comments: "We can already say emphatically that there is no longer any solid basis for dating any book of the New Testament after about A.D. 80, two full generations before the date[s] between 130 and 150 given by the more radical New Testament critics of today." This development makes the time gap between the oldest surviving copies and the first manuscript much smaller for the New Testament than the pagan historical works cited earlier. The gap between its original copy (autograph) and the oldest still-preserved manuscript is 90 years or less, since most of the New Testament was first written before 70 A.D. and first-century fragments of it have been found. One fragment of John, dated to 125 A.D., was in the past cited as the earliest copy known of any part of the New Testament. But in 1972, nine possible fragments of the New Testament were found in a cave by the Dead Sea. Among these pieces, part of Mark was dated to around 50 A.D., Luke 57 A.D., and Acts from 66 A.D. Although this continues to be a source of dispute since only a small minority of scholars accept the existence of first-century manuscripts of the New Testament, there's no question the Dead Sea Scrolls document first century Judaism had ideas like early Christianity's. The earliest major manuscriptsVaticanus and Sinaiticusare dated to 325-50 A.D. and 350 A.D. respectively. By contrast, the time gap is much larger for the pagan works mentioned above. For Homer, the gap is 500 years (900 b.c. for the original writing, 400 b.c. for the oldest existing copy), Caesar, it's 900-1000 years (c. 100-44 b.c. to 900 A.D.), Herodotus, 1300 years (c. 480-425 b.c. to 900 A.D.) and Thucydides, 1300 years (c. 400 b.c. to 900 A.D.). Hence, the New Testament can be objectively judged more reliable than these pagan historical works both by having a much smaller time gap between its first writing and the oldest preserved copies, and in the number of ancient handwritten copies. While the earliest manuscripts have a different text type from the bulk of later ones that have been preserved, their witness still powerfully testified for the New Testament's accurate preservation since these variations compose only a relatively small part of its text.
SIGNIFICANT PARTS OF THE NEW TESTAMENT ARE IN MANUSCRIPTS OLDER THAN THE FOURTH CENTURY
It's mistaken to believe only small fragments of the New Testament exist before the copying of the great fourth-century manuscripts (mss) Vaticanus and Sinaiticus, dated to 325-350 A.D. and 350 A.D. respectively. Describing earlier partially complete mss., C.L. Blomberg writes: "The Chester Beatty and the more recently discovered Bodmer papyri contain large sections of the NT [New Testament], e.g., virtually the complete Gospel of John, most of Luke and Acts, and extensive portions of Epistles and Revelation." Below his statement comes a list of various papyrus manuscripts of the New Testament that summarizes names, dates, manuscript locations, and what books (or parts of books) they contain:
p40 Rom. 1-4; 6; 9. 3rd cent. Heidelberg. . . . p45 Gospels, Acts. 3rd cent. Chester Beatty Library, Dublin; Vienna. p46 Pauline Epistles. 3rd cent. Chester Beatty Library, Dublin; University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. . . . p47 Rev. 9-17. 3rd cent. Chester Beatty Library, Dublin. . . . p66 John. 2nd/3rd cent. Papyrus Bodmer 2. Bodmer Library, Geneva. . . . p75 Luke, John. Early 3rd cent. Papyrus Bodmer 14-15. Bodmer Library, Geneva.
The Ryland fragment for the Gospel of John, dated to 125-130 A.D., is the earliest generally accepted fragment for any part of the NT. Since John traditionally was said to have been written in Asia Minor, but this fragment was found in Egypt, the difference implies the original date of composition was (at least) two or three decades earlier. McDowell notes the Chester Beatty Papyri and the Bodmer Papyri II dates as 200 A.D. and 150- 200 A.D. respectively (evidently, for their oldest parts). Because of these discoveries, Millar Burrows of Yale notes: "Another result of comparing New Testament Greek with the language of the papyri [discoveries] is an increase in confidence in the accurate transmission of the text of the New Testament itself." It's misleading to claim we should be fearful of what the "Roman Catholic" church did in preserving the New Testament for the three hundred years before the copying of Vaticanus and Sinaiticus because only "fragments" precede these fourth-century manuscripts. Historian Robin Lane Fox claims that because the Gnostic heretic Marcion (c. 140's A.D.) intentionally perverted Scripture and the canon, we can't trust the NT being accurately preserved in his book The Unauthorized Version. This reasoning ignores how the persecuted mainstream orthodox Sunday-keeping church was the main agent God used to preserve the New Testament during much of its first 300 years of existence, not Gnostic heretics. Similarly, God used disbelieving Jews who denied Jesus was the Messiah to preserve the Hebrew Old Testament during the Middle Ages. Since a number of them gave their lives or otherwise suffered persecution for Christ, this shows the sincerity of their convictions. Such people aren't good candidates for perverting the New Testament, which they would have revered as the word of God, just as the Jews revered the Old Testament. Furthermore, Fox would not likely apply this same reasoning to the ancient texts of classics, for reasons F.F. Bruce explains: "No classical scholar would listen to an argument that the authenticity of Herodotus or Thucydides is in doubt because the earliest MSS [manuscripts] of their works which are of any use to us are over 1,300 years later than the originals." Then, as shown above, based upon the dating for Acts, the New Testament's own internal evidence points to its writing in the first century, over and above the archeological evidence for Acts that indicated it was a first-century composition that helped persuade Ramsay to give up his atheism and to embrace Christianity.
THE DEAD SEA SCROLLS AS EVIDENCE FOR THE OLD TESTAMENT'S ACCURATE PRESERVATION
For the Old Testament, the Dead Sea Scroll discoveries have shrunk the gap for the Pentateuch (the first five books of the Bible) at a stroke by a thousand years, though a gap of 1300 years or more remains. These discoveries still demonstrate faith in its accurate transmission is rational, since few mistakes crept in between about 100 b.c. and c. 900 A.D. for the book of Isaiah. For example, as Geisler and Nix explain, for the 166 words found in Isaiah 53, only 17 letters are in question when comparing the Masoretic (standard Hebrew) text of 916 A.D. and the Dead Sea Scrolls' main copy of Isaiah, copied about 125 b.c. Ten of these letters concern different spellings, so they don't affect meaning. Four more concern small stylistic changes like conjunctions. The last three letters add the word "light" to verse 11, which doesn't affect the verse's meaning much. The Septuagint (the ancient Greek translation of the Old Testament) also has this word. Thus, only one word in a chapter of 166 words can be questioned after a thousand years of transmission, of generations of scribes copying the work of previous scribes. Gleason Archer said the Dead Sea Scrolls' copies of Isaiah agree with the standard printed Masoretic Hebrew text "in more than 95 percent of the text. The 5 percent of variation consisted chiefly of obvious slips of the pen and variations in spelling." Their discovery further justifies William Green's conclusion written nearly 50 years earlier: "It may safely be said that no other work of antiquity has been so accurately transmitted." If it was so well preserved for this period of time (c. 100 b.c. to 900 A.D.) that previously wasn't checkable, it's hardly foolhardy to have faith that it was for an earlier period that still can't be checked.
SOME PROBLEMS WITH FORM CRITICISM, A SCHOOL OF HIGHER CRITICISM
Form Critics maintain the early church had little or no biographical interest in recording the details of Jesus' life, but was interested mainly in his sayings for the purposes of preaching. First, in reply, these critics evidently use a limited definition of "biography." Analyses by Stanton and Gundry show the Gospels were similar enough to Hellenistic (the ancient Greek world's) biographies so they can be included under that category. The sermons of the early church recorded in Acts routinely and integrally include biographical information about Jesus. C.H. Dodd has even argued that these sermons when describing Jesus' ministry use the same chronological order found in the Gospel of Mark. The manner in which Mark, for example, recorded the names of many individuals and specific geographical locations shows he wasn't creating a legend, myth, or literary piece, but (Barnes) "drew from a living tradition." Mark didn't note that Pilate was the Procurator of Judea, which was a particular matter of historical knowledge. Instead, he emphasized Pilate's belief that Jesus was innocent while on trial before hima point of biographical interest, not general historical interest. As W.E. Barnes explains:
The Christian tradition which St. Mark followed had a vivid biographical memory. It told that Simon of Cyrene, the father of Alexander and Rufus, had borne the cross of Jesus, and it recorded the names of three of the women who saw Jesus dieMary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James the less, and Salome.
Those denying the Gospels are biographical implicitly assume that because they promote a certain (moral) message, they can't be historically accurate. In fact, moral analysis and the historical facts can be on the same side. Even in secular history, points about values can be made without corrupting or ignoring the facts: "The Holocaust shows why people shouldn't let anti-Semitism or racism go unchallenged publicly." Furthermore, why did the Church after the first generation supposedly suddenly develop such an interest in biographical details about Jesus' life, but lacked this earlier? After all, if they had the typical pagan mentality in their religious beliefs, maintaining myths were fine and actual historical events were unimportant, why did this abruptly change later? As Manson notes:
If the outline [the basic chronology of Jesus' life as found in the Gospels] had then to be created ad hoc [by improvisation], it can only be that for the thirty years between the end of the Ministry and the production of Mark, Christians in general were not interested in the story of the Ministry and allowed it to be forgotten. One would like to know why the first generation were not interested while the second generation demanded a continuous narrative [my emphasis hereEVS]. More than that, we need some explanation why it was possible for the details of the story [which would include what He said] to be remembered and the general outline forgotten. It is not the normal way of remembering important periods in our experience.
Since human nature is more consistent than this, it makes the notion that later Christians would be more interested in details of Jesus' life than earlier ones patently absurd.
THE NEW TESTAMENT'S EYEWITNESS TESTIMONY UNDERMINES THE FORM CRITICS' ARGUMENTS
Form Critics and other skeptics also ignore the implications of Jesus' followers being eyewitnesses of His life. After his death, they could easily record what they remembered. Some clearly mentioned being eyewitnesses and desiring to accurately preserve what they saw (John 21:24; Heb. 2:3-4; II Pet. 1:16). What attitude could be more contrary to a mythmaker's and more of a historian's than Luke's?
Inasmuch as many have undertaken to compile an account of the things accomplished among us, just as those who from the beginning were eyewitnesses and servants of the word have handed them down to us, it seemed fitting for me as well, having investigated everything carefully from the beginning, to write it out for you in consecutive order, most excellent Theophilus; so that you might know the exact truth about the things you have been taught. (Acts 1:1-4)
Eyewitness evidence is one of the best reasons for belief in the New Testament's inspiration. As Barnes notes:
When critics deny the preservation of an 'historical' (or, better, a 'biographical') tradition of the ministry of Jesus, they forget that Jesus had a mother who survived Him, and also devoted followers both women and men. Are we to believe that these stored up no memories of the words (and acts also) of the Master? And the Twelvethough they often misunderstood Him, would they not preserve among themselves either by happy recollection or by eager discussion many of His startling sayings and of His unexpected deeds?
Not only did friendly disciples observe Jesus' doings. Many hostile witnesses lived among non-Messianic Jews who wished to pounce on anything that could possibly be used against Christianity or its Founder.
Then were details added as oral transmission about Jesus' life proceeded down the generations? This claim goes against studies that show stories, when continually retold, become simpler, shorter, and increasingly apt to omit specific details like place names. For example, E.L. Abel observes: "Contrary to the conclusions derived from Form Criticism, studies of rumor transmission indicate that as information is transmitted, the general form or outline of a story remains intact, but fewer words and fewer original details are preserved." Once the New Testament is seen as a document composed by eyewitnesses, those they talked to, and could be easily critiqued by hostile ones, skeptical attacks on its reliability take a nose dive.
WHY SHOULD THIS EYEWITNESS EVIDENCE BE BELIEVED?
There are special reasons for believing in the reliability of the New Testament authors. A document is more apt to be reliable when it is a personal letter, was intended for a small audience, was written in a rough, unpolished literary style, and contains rather irrelevant information such as lists of details such as the names of individuals. Although a document can lack these characteristics and still be perfectly sound historically, they still remain prima facie powerful points in favor of a document being accurate when its origin is unclear. When something is written for propagandistic efforts among a vast audience, it's more likely to shade the truth or omit inconvenient, embarrassing facts. Now much of the New Testament is made up of letters intended for small churches or individuals, especially Paul's, which sometimes reflect rather hurried writing (consider I Corinthians and Galatians, both of which are pervaded by a crisis atmosphere). Mostly written in the rough koine Greek of average people, it contains inconsequential details even in the Gospels which were intended for a broad audience (see John 21:2, 11; Mark 14:51-52). The sixteenth chapter of the Letter (epistle) to the Romans is largely taken up with Paul's greetings and instructions to various individuals. Furthermore, eyewitnesses who have much to lose and little to gain from telling what they saw are reliable. The Jewish Christians of the first century, persecuted by their kinsmen, often paid for their beliefs with their lives. Eleven of the twelve apostles died martyrs' deaths, according to reasonably reliable tradition: How did they benefit materially from proclaiming Jesus as the Jewish Messiah? Paul mentioned the many trials he endured for proclaiming the gospel (II Cor. 11:23- 28). If the goal was to make lots of converts to makes lots of money, the apostles could easily have found easier and safer messages to preach by changing their beliefs. This Paul refused to do: "But I, brethren, if I still preach circumcision [he didn't], why am I still persecuted? Then the stumbling block of the cross has been abolished" (Gal. 5:11). Being Jews, if they proclaimed falsehoods about God, they had every reason to fear their God's wrath in the hereafter, so they had strong motives for telling the truth about the God they worshiped. Christianity emerged from Judaism's capital, Jerusalem and its vicinity: If the Gospels' portrait of Jesus was seriously wrong, then-living hostile witnesses (which were hardly few in number) could have easily shot it down. Peter and company didn't pack up and go to (say) Athens and start proclaiming the Gospel far away from where anybody could easily check up on their assertions, but started in Jerusalem within weeks of Jesus' death on Pentecost. All in all, these eyewitnesses proclaimed the truth as they knew it, having strong reasons for doing so: Who dies for a lie, knowing that it is a lie?
ANCIENT PEOPLE KNEW THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN TRUTH AND FABLES
Some today may believe that the educated people of the ancient world didn't have a real grasp of the difference between the facts of what really happened and telling moral stories to make points. In reality, ancient pagan historians of the West clearly knew the difference, even if they weren't always sufficiently critical of their sources. Herodotus didn't automatically believe his sources, and did emphasize the role of eyewitnesses. Although Thucydides presumably did invent most of the speeches found in his history of the Peloponnesian War, he still attempted to have them express the views of the speakers. He never felt free to invent any of the narrative. Lucian believed the historian's only task was to tell the story as it really happened, and Cicero thought similarly. Polybius advocated judging eyewitnesses and analyzing sources. More careful than most, Tacitus did attempt to test his sources and to avoid intentionally distorting what information he had received. The Jewish rabbinical tradition had a similar respect for what had really happened: The duty of the disciples of a rabbi was to pass on accurately what they had learned from their teacher, as described above. Josephus stated his commitment to being accurate and truthful, trying also to correct mistaken sources.
A standard higher critic view of the New Testament says the church made up stories about Jesus' life and teachings over the decades after His death because of later controversies it suffered. In fact, much indicates Jesus expressed Himself differently from how His disciples did. Jesus used questions and the Aramaic words "amen" and "abba" in unique ways. Sixty-four times Jesus uses threefold expressions (such as ask, seek, knock). He uses passive verbs when referring to God, such as in this case: "All things have been delivered to me by my Father" (Matt. 11:27). Paul, Peter, etc. did not copy His use of "how much more," "which of you," and "disciple." Often when Jesus' words, as written in Greek, are translated back into Aramaic, literary qualities such as parallelism, alliteration, and assonance appear. Greek-speaking gentile disciples could not have fabricated His speeches whole cloth since their poetic quality in Aramaic can't be accidental. Also, if the church had created Jesus' ideas decades later, why is it that "Jesus" never was made to comment on major controversies that divided the church? The Jesus of the Gospels says little or nothing about circumcision, specific gifts of the Holy Spirit, food laws, baptism, evangelizing the gentiles, rules controlling church meetings, and relations between the church and state. Paul almost never quotes Jesus directly: If he felt free to make up stories about Jesus, he could have easily and directly justified what he did by manufacturing sayings supposedly by Jesus. (Some Muslims through the centuries evidently didn't hesitate to do this for the hadiths (traditional sayings) of Muhammad, "discovering" quotes convenient for the doctrinal or political controversies of the moment!)
Jesus' life and ideas also had aspects that were problematic, even embarrassing, starting with the deep shame of being executed by crucifixion. (Roman citizens had the right of being beheaded instead!) Facing opposition from within His own family, Jesus was a mere carpenter, not someone materially rich or powerful. Jesus had views about legalism, divorce, fasting, women, and sinners that certainly presented stumbling blocks to mainstream Jews. Similar to the Old Testament's portrayal of Abraham, Jacob, Moses, Aaron, David, and Elijah, the New Testament repeatedly and plainly describes the sins and personal flaws of the disciples, such as Peter denying Christ three times and their arguments over who was to be the greatest in the kingdom of God. Surely, if the church concocted the New Testament to spread its message about Jesus, editing out embarrassing facts about its founders should have been a top priority! If you invented a historical document to promote your beliefs, you could come up with something more favorable to your cause's leaders than this! The unfavorable facts about Christianity found in the New Testament show its early leaders didn't feel free to rewrite history or ignore historical facts, and the New Testament's contents point to a pre-70 A.D. date of composition.
THE BATTLE BETWEEN THE RECEIVED AND CRITICAL TEXTS OF THE NEW TESTAMENT
To undermine people's belief in the New Testament, someone could seize upon the long running dispute between the advocates of the Westcott-Hort/"Critical" (Alexandrine and Western) text and the Received (Byzantine) text. By citing extremists in this debate, a skeptic can make the differences in the New Testament's Greek manuscripts seem worse than they really are. The Critical text basically underlies almost all modern Bible translations, while the Received text underlies the King James Version (KJV) and the New King James Version (NKJV). The basic dispute involves a trade-off of two competing, conflicting claims. On the one hand, far more Greek manuscripts reflect the Received text. About 80-90% have this text type, but they are mostly later manuscripts. On the other hand, the earliest major manuscripts, such as Vaticanus and Sinaiticus from the fourth century, reflect the Critical text type, but they are much fewer in number. The biggest differences between the two concern the last twelve verses of Mark (16:9-20) and the episode of the woman caught in adultery (John 7:53-8:11). The Critical text omits them, but the Received text contains them. The dispute concerns (by McDowell and Stewart's account) 10% of the text, a figure that may be a high end estimate, judging from the statements by Abbott and Geisler and Nix below. Furthermore, the Vaticanus manuscript, which is one of the foundational texts for the Critical (Alexandrine) text, undercuts its own evidence omitting Mark's last twelve verses. It (called "B" by scholars) has a blank column of the right size where the last twelve verses of Mark would have been, showing the original scribe knew something was missing. Before Vaticanus and Sinaiticus were copied (c. 350 A.D.), Catholic Church Fathers also cited from Mark's last twelve verses, such as Papias, Justin Martyr, Irenaeus, and Tertullian. The early Old Latin and Syriac translations also contain them. Altogether, since these sources were copied originally in the second or third centuries, before Vaticanus or Sinaiticus were in the fourth, excellent evidence exists for Mark originally writing them. Importantly, the disputed territory (the 10%) can be further reduced after accepting arguments for the Received text's reliability (such as for the last twelve verses of Mark). Debates over 10% of the New Testament's text is a poor reason for doubting all of it, especially when no major doctrines hinge on this controversy's outcome.
HOW THE LARGE NUMBER OF MANUSCRIPTS HELPS ELIMINATE NEW TESTAMENT VARIATIONS
Forlong's Encyclopedia of Religion says 150,000 variations have been computed to exist among the Greek manuscripts of the New Testament. Do they justify doubts about its textual reliability? True, since it has such a vast number of handwritten copies, a large number of scribal errors are inevitable. Having more manuscripts than any other anciently preserved document before the invention of printing and moveable type (in Europe), this reality should be regarded as producing more benefits than drawbacks. As scholars C.F. Sitterly and J.H. Greenlee comment:
Such a wealth of evidence makes it all the more certain that the original words of the NT [New Testament] have been preserved somewhere within the MSS [manuscripts]. Conjectural emendation (suggesting a reading that is not found in any MS [manuscript]), to which editors have restored in the restoration of other ancient writings, has almost no place in the textual criticism of the NT. The materials are so abundant that at times the difficulty is to select the correct rendering from a number of variant readings in the MSS.
HOW THE SCIENCE OF TEXTUAL CRITICISM CAN RULE OUT VARIATIONS WITH CERTAINTY
Having faith that the scribes preserved the New Testament accurately is rational because most of the variations between manuscripts can be ruled out by using the principles of textual criticism. By its standards, such a flawed text as I John 5:7's Trinitarian interpolation sticks out like a sore thumb. Very few Greek manuscripts contain it (exactly two, one from the fourteenth or fifteenth centuries, and the other from the sixteenth). Even the earliest copies of the Latin Vulgate omit it. Furthermore, most of the "200,000 variations" (by another, more recent count) are spelling mistakes, homophones (such as in English, "two," "too," "to"), words accidentally repeated twice by scribes, etc. For example, if the same word is misspelled 3000 times, that counts for 3000 variations. The number of significant variations is relatively few. Ezra Abbott maintains 19/20ths of New Testament variations have so little support that they can be automatically ruled out. Scholars Geisler and Nix, building upon the work of F.J.A. Hort, say only about 1/8 have weight, and 1/60 are "substantial variations." Ironically, the high number of copies allows more scribal errors to develop while simultaneously providing the antidote for their elimination. The more the copies, the easier it is to find and delete mistakes. By contrast, since Caesar's Gallic Wars has a mere 10 copies, it might be harder to find the correct original text among the surviving old manuscripts. Philip Schaff declares that only 400 of all the 150,000 variations he knew of caused doubt on textual meaning. Only 50 were of great significance. Even then, no variation altered "an article of faith or a precept of duty which is not abundantly sustained by other and undoubted passages, or by the whole tenor of scripture teaching." A citation of Sir Robert Anderson's found in The Bible and Modern Criticism explains how groundless are the worries about textual difficulties in the New Testament:
All of them face that formidable phantom of textual criticism,
with its 120,000 various readings in the New Testament alone, and will enable us to march up to it, and discover that it is empty air; that still we may say with the boldest and acutest of English [textual] critics, Bentley, 'choose (out of the whole MSS) as awkwardly as you will, choose the worst by design out of the whole lump of readings, and not one article of faith or moral precept is either perverted or lost in them. Put them [the different readings] into the hands of a knave or a fool [to choose], and even with the most sinistrous and absurd choice, he shall not extinguish the light of any one chapter, or so disguise Christianity but that every feature of it will still be the same.'
Simply put, nothing major is at risk in the debate between the Critical and Received texts. (I think the Received text decisively wins this dispute, which means the real number of variations is far lower than 10%, but there's not the space to prove that here).
THE AVERAGE PEOPLE OF JUDEA COULD HAVE KNOWN GREEK
Who really wrote the Gospels? They were written in Greek. Could have the simple fishermen and other disciples of Jesus, Jews one and all, have known Greek? It has been claimed that scholarly gentile Catholic monks and/or church fathers of later centuries really wrote the four stories of Christ's life and ministry found in the New Testament. This simply isn't true. First, although it was written in Greek, the New Testament reflects Semitic (not Greek gentile) language patterns, over and above the many scattered Aramaic and Hebrew words found on its pages. Semitic languages, such as Hebrew, Aramaic, and Arabic, differ sharply from Indo-European languages, such as French, Greek, English, German, and Russian. As a result, it would be easy to expose any attempts by any later gentile writers who were ignorant of Aramaic and/or Hebrew to pretend they were Jews by analyzing how they wrote the Greek of the New Testament. As William Most notes concerning Luke's Gospel:
All scholars know and admit that the Greek of Luke's Gospel shows far more Semitisms than do the Gospels written by Semites. A Semitism consists in bringing some features of Semitic speech or structure into Greek, where it does not really belong. For example, in the parable of the wicked husbandmen, Mark's Gospel is content to merely say that after the first servant was mistreated, the master "sent another," and later again, "he sent another." But Luke 20:9-12 reads oddly, "And he added to send another servant"; and later, he added to send a third." The language sounds stilted in English, and so did it in Greek. The reason is evident. Hebrew, in such a sentence, would use the root ysf, to add. So we can see Luke, who is not a Semite, is taking care to reproduce the precise structure of his source, a Hebrew source, although Mark, who was a Semite [i.e., a Jew], did not do it.
Another example of Luke employing Semitic language patterns was to use "the Hebrew (not Aramaic) construction called apodotic wau (which becomes apodotic kai in Greek, if used." For example, in Luke 5:1, in Most's literal translation, this construction appears: "It happened, when the crowd pressed on Him to hear the word of God, AND He stood by the lake." Inserting that "and" between an opening subordinate clause to connect it with the main clause sounds funny in Greek, not just English. Luke does this about 20-25% of the possible times it could happen, which evidently means he depended on a Hebrew-speaking source that often. He was so careful in using his Hebrew sources, he choose to reproduce literally what are rather clumsy grammatical patterns in Greek!
Shooting down claims that highly literate Christian Church Fathers wrote the Gospels is the simple reality McDowell and Wilson note: "The word order in much of the Greek manuscripts of the gospels is actually more Hebrew than Greek." The Greek of the New Testament is sometimes loaded full of "ands," indicating Semitic sources and/or authors, since Greek normally wasn't written that way. Furthermore, if the Christian church was primarily gentile by the early second century, it's highly unlikely "a Gentile of the second century or later [would] mold an account of the life of Jesus which so thoroughly reflected the first-century Hebrew culture." Such a gentile forger would be apt to make easily detected mistakes which the external evidence test would expose, accidentally imputing to Jesus and his disciples aspects of gentile culture that he took for granted, but which didn't exist in their Semitic culture.
THE SEMITIC (JEWISH) FLAVOR AND LANGUAGE OF THE GOSPELS
The words that definitely or are likely Aramaic appearing in the Gospels are further proof of their Semitic flavor. These include "abba" (father), "talitha cum," (maid arise), "Bar" (son), "perisha" (separated one), "hakel dema" (bloody ground), "shiloha" (Siloam), "reka" ("raca"--silly fool), "kepha" (rock), "toma" (Thomas), and "rabbuni" (rabboni). Even more Hebrew words than Aramaic ones appear in the Gospels. These include "levonah," (frankincense), "mammon," (money), "moreh," (rebel), "bath," (a unit of wet measure), "mor," (myrrh), "cammon," (cummin), "zuneem," (tares), "sheekmah," (sycamore), "Wai," (Woe!), "amen," "rabbi," "corban," and "Satan." Although the routine, everyday language of Jesus and His disciples was most likely Aramaic, they still could have known other languages. In recent years, newly uncovered evidence indicates that Hebrew still was a language in common, everyday use in Judea in the time of Roman rule. Consequently, McDowell and Wilson say there are "good indications" that Jesus and his disciples were trilingual. Greek was the lingua franca of the eastern Mediterranean during Roman rule. At that time, Hellenistic (Greek cultural) influences penetrated deeply into ancient Judea, including its language. Much like English increasingly has become late in this century, Greek was the language of "default" for educated people of different nationalities. When neither knows the native mother tongue of the other, they used it to communicate when encountering each other abroad or in their home territories. (English is the language for air traffic controllers at major international airports, regardless of their location or where the jet airliners land or take off).
THE ANCIENT JEWISH HISTORIAN JOSEPHUS SAYS JUDEA'S JEWS OFTEN COULD SPEAK GREEK
Consider the witness of the ancient Jewish historian Josephus:
I have also taken a great deal of pains to obtain the learning of the Greeks, and understand the elements of the Greek language . . . for our nation does not encourage those who learnt the languages of other nations, and so adorn their discourses with the smoothness of their periods; because they look upon this sort of accomplishment [mastering Greek] as common, not only to all sorts of freemen, but to as many of the servants [slaves?] as pleased to learn them.
Josephus doesn't say the Jews felt only the scholarly learned Greek. Instead, he says no incentive existed to learn it as a mark of educational distinction because many common people could speak it in Judea. Jesus himself must have spoken Greek. For example, in John 21, Jesus used two different words for "love," and two different ones for "know." Neither of these pairs can be replicated in Aramaic or Hebrew. Nor can the word play on the word for "rock" or "stone" (for the Greek words "petros" and "petra") in Matt. 16:18 be reproduced in these two Semitic languages. When conversing with the gentile Greek-speaking Syrophoenician woman in Mark 7:24-28, Jesus used a diminutive Greek word (like "doggie" in English) for dogs that meant household pets, not strays or wild dogs. (This obviously softened His use of a traditional Jewish term of contempt, "dogs," for gentiles). Since Greek was in common use by average Jews like fishermen, then, unsurprisingly, the disciples composed the New Testament in it in order to communicate with others in the wider eastern Mediterranean community about Jesus and His teachings.
There's additional evidence for average people speaking Greek in first-century Judea. For example, later in the second-century, Rabbi Judah the prince contended: "Why (use) the Syrian language [i.e., Aramaic] in the land of Israel? Either the sacred language or the Greek language." The ossuaries (stone boxes) that archeologists have discovered from the general time of Jesus indicate that Greek, Aramaic, and Hebrew were all spoken in the Holy Land. Mostly fairly average people had the inscriptions placed on ossuaries' outsides, not the highly intellectual and literate whose writings have been preserved down through the ages. Stambaugh and Balch note that two-thirds of these inscriptions found in Palestine were in Greek only, while one tenth were bilingual inscriptions in Greek as well as Hebrew (or Aramaic). The Hasmonaean rulers (originating in the Maccabees) issued coins only in Hebrew until Alexander Jannaeus had coins minted with both Hebrew and Greek writing. Although a Jew, his grandson used only Greek on his coins, as did the Herodian princes and Roman procurators over Judea. Even a letter possibly written by the leader of the 132-35 A.D. Jewish revolt against Rome, Bar Kokhba, reads: "Now this has been written in Greek because a desire has not been found to write in Hebrew." They note that "whether more Greek or Aramaic was spoken in Palestine is debated." Furthermore, a number of towns, cities, and areas in Judea were primarily made up of Hellenized Jews, such as Hippus, Julius, Sepphoris, Tiberias, Gadara, Scythopolis, and Caesarea Philippi. Although Jews presumably predominated in these cities, they would have spoken Greek instead of Aramaic or Hebrew. Clearly, average people in first- century Judea could have spoken Greek.
THE NEW TESTAMENT WAS NOT WRITTEN IN A HIGHLY SCHOLARLY GREEK
Was the Greek of the New Testament fluent and well done, such as a scholar might write? Or was it composed in the rough hewn language of the common people? The New Testament was basically written in the koine Greek of the average people of the Roman empire, not the classical Greek of the philosophers Plato (c. 428-348 b.c.) and Aristotle (384-322 b.c.), or the Athens of Pericles (c. 495-427 b.c.). Did a gentile write the book of Acts in a very polished Greek? Although Luke was a gentile, he generally used the koine for Acts. As historian Robin Fox, no friend of Christianity, explains:
[Paul's] companion, the author of Acts [i.e., Luke], has also been mistaken for a Hellenistic historian and a man of considerable literary culture; in fact, he has no great acquaintance with literary style, and when he tries to give a speech to [by?] a trained pagan orator, he falls away into clumsiness after a few good phrases. His literary gifts lay, rather, with the Greek translation of Scripture, the Septuagint, which he knew in depth and exploited freely: to pagans, its style was impossibly barbarous.
Although Luke could write in a highly literary vein sometimes, such as in the parable of the prodigal son, he wrote other ways as well. The Holy Spirit allowed the distinct literary styles of different authors to shine through, even as it protected them from writing errors or contradictions. The apostle Paul clearly wrote differently from the apostles John or Peter, yet the Holy Spirit guarded them all against mistakes. The New Testament was written so average people could hear the Good News ("Gospel") of Jesus Christ. Thus, not having a highly scholarly or polished style, the New Testament was composed in the everyday, semi-universal language of the Roman empire, koine Greek.
HOW CAN ANYONE BE CERTAIN THAT THE RIGHT BOOKS ARE IN THE NEW TESTAMENT?
What books should be in the New Testament? This subject raises the issue of the canon, which concerns which books should and shouldn't be in it. After all, up to 200 various "Gospels" floated around in the ancient Roman Empire. These apocryphal (so- called "missing") books boasted such titles as "The Shepherd of Hermas," "The Gospel of Peter," "The Gospel of Thomas," etc. Why should Christians believe only four Gospels were inspired by God? Since apocryphal books' quality is much lower and/or their teachings so greatly vary from the canonical books, they can be easily dismissed from serious consideration. The Christian community followed implicitly (at least) the procedure of Deuteronomy 13:1-5. This Old Testament text says that later revelationshere specifically ones about following false gods which contradict previous ones are automatically invalid, even when the false prophet made some accurate predictions. Some of the apocryphal gospels supported the Gnostic cause. Claiming the Old Testament's God was evil and totally different from the New Testament's God, the Gnostics also denied Jesus had a body of flesh and blood before His crucifixion. Since their teachings totally contradict the Gospels and Letters (epistles) of the New Testament, not to mention the Old Testament, their writings could automatically be stamped heretical and rejected as fraudulent. As F.F. Bruce explains:
The gnostic schools lost because they deserved to lose. A comparison of the New Testament writings with the contents of The Nag Hammadi Library [a collection of ancient Gnostic books discovered in 1945 in Egypt] should be instructive, once the novelty of the latter is not allowed to weigh in its favour against the familiarity of the former.
Similarly, James comments: "There is no question of any one's having excluded them from the New Testament: They have done that for themselves." Scholar Milligan remarks: "We have only to compare our New Testament books as a whole with other literature of the kind to realise how wide is the gulf which separates them from it. The uncanonical gospels, it is often said, are in reality the best evidence for the canonical." And Aland maintains: "It cannot be said of a single writing preserved to us from the early period of the church outside the New Testament that it could properly be added today to the Canon." For these reasons it's absurd to claim that the Gospel of Peter's account of Jesus being resurrected on the Last Day of Unleavened Bread (which is a historical inaccuracy) proves the other four Gospels are wrong. Instead, the Gospel of Peter is simply false: It is just one document written later than the earlier four canonical Gospels. It also contains the false Gnostic/docetic teaching that Jesus did not come in the flesh. Even judging by secular criteria, the four Gospels are far more likely to be historically reliable. Furthermore, archeological discoveries have repeatedly sustained Luke's reliability as a historian. Their collective witness against this historical mistake found in "The Gospel of Peter" should be seen as decisive.
APOSTOLIC AUTHORITY AND REACTIONS AGAINST HERESY MAKE THE CANON CLEAR
In evident reaction against the heretic (and Gnostic) Marcion's (c. 140 A.D.) attempt to edit the canon, lists of the canonical books were made from the late second century onwards. These lists, even from the beginning, contain most of the books found in the New Testament today. The author of the Muratorian fragment (c. 170 A.D.), Irenaeus (c. 180 A.D.), Clement (c. 190 A.D.), Tertullian (c. 200 A.D.), Origen (c. 230 A.D.), Eusebius (c. 310 A.D.), and Cyril of Jerusalem (c. 348 A.D.) all compiled lists of canonical books. Furthermore, a fundamentally false skeptical assumption must be avoided: The Gospels are not canonical because the church decreed them to be authoritative, but because they are inspired, the church accepted them as having authority. A leading criterion for the church to accept a book as scripture was whether the church believed an apostle (Paul, John, Matthew, James) or someone associated with an apostle (traditionally, Mark was seen as associated with Peter, and Luke with Paul) wrote it. Nothing written after c. 100 A.D. made it into the canon. Only the books written within a generation or two of Jesus' death were deemed proper to include in the canon. What mattered was apostolic authority, not just authorship. Thus, N.B. Stonehouse says: "In the Epistles [Letters, such as by Paul] there is consistent recognition that in the church there is only one absolute authority, the authority of the Lord himself. Wherever the apostles speak with authority, they do so as exercising the Lord's authority." High levels of skepticism about the New Testament's canon simply aren't justified.
WAS THE CANON DETERMINED FROM THE TOP-DOWN BY THE CATHOLIC CHURCH'S HIERARCHY?
Did the Roman Catholic Church chose the canon? It claims this, but this wasn't true. First of all, it is quite problematic to label "Roman Catholic" the persecuted Sunday- keeping church that survived before the time the Roman Emperor Constantine granted toleration through the Edict of Milan (A.D. 313). The increasing union of church and state in the fourth century and afterwards inevitably caused Rome to corrupt doctrinally and spiritually the church. Second, the Roman Catholic Church's leadership (which is the crucial issue) did not choose the canon, and then impose it from the top down. Even after the time of Nicea (325 A.D.), the Greek church showed its independence of Rome, showing the Pope did not have the power to unilaterally determine the canon. Even the bishops in synods didn't have this power. This claim also ignores how God can move men who are not true believers to make the right decisions. Would God be so careless to let those with false doctrines ultimately pervert His holy word? Similarly, the Old Testament was preserved and had the right books placed in it despite Israel often fell into idolatry and later rejected the Messiah as a nation. For secular historians of ancient history to even be able to do their jobs, they have to assume the texts they analyze have a certain amount of reliability themselves, so both Christians and unbelievers share this kind of faith some. Finally, the mainstream Church before the time of Emperor Constantine and the Edict of Milan was hardly a tightly controlled, highly organized, monolithic group. It had suffered terrible persec