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Is the Bible we have now the Bible they had then?

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OK, I think Dan Wallace is the best guy out there on the reliability of the New Testament documents. He even debated Bart Ehrman and cleaned his clock.

One of the set of 32 lectures I just ordered was given by Dan Wallace on the reliability of the New Testament.

So what does Brian Auten of Apologetics 315 do?

He finds you a free version of that same lecture!!!

Here is the MP3 file.

I had to pay $5 for mine, but Brian found you a free one! Not fair!

Here is my post on Bart Ehrman, a prominent skeptic much loved by the media and liberal Christians, who argues against what Wallace says in the lecture.

UPDATE: This thing is 42 minutes long and it is AWESOME! Filled with humor, really entertaining. If you guys want to get the 2008 debate between Dan Wallace and Bart Ehrman, you can get it here. I got the MP3s, they’re cheap!

By the way, check out the topic for 2010 Greer-Heard debate: atheist John Dominic Crossan vs Ben Witherington.

24 thoughts on “Is the Bible we have now the Bible they had then?”

  2. I hope it’s the same – I mean Constantine spent a lot of time rounding up people to decide which books and passages should go into the bible. So man put forth a lot of effort sculpting “what god said” and putting it in a book we can all read.

    And without the bible, how would we have figured out that dinosaurs walked the earth at the same time as man – I mean Genesis 1:24–31 tells us god created all land animals on day 6 – the same day adam and eve were created, right? so we know for a biblical fact man and dinosaurs lived together.

    God bless that man-made book of fiction, er, I meant, that book of complete and total truth!

    It’s why I believe I don’t get to see my god – Wintery’s god’s T-Rex ate the flying spaghetti monster:)

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  3. My assertion is it’s irrelevant if it’s the same book – either way the book is fake. My previous post indicates that we can use the bible to prove man and dinosaurs lived together and there are a boat load of other inconsistencies. Nothing in it can be verified except by other “documents” that were created only to be self-validating. It would be the same as if all atheists created documents on the flying spaghetti monster – we would have plenty of supporting documentation, but does that make it correct?

    Like I’ve said before – don’t you find it ironic that all of these biblical miracles stopped when we developed the means to investigate the extraordinary claims? Or that the only places that still have these claims today are in third world countries?

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    1. Jerry, do I believe that humans and dinosaurs existed together?

      Also, did St. Augustine – a pillar of the church who wrote in the 4th century – believe that the days of Genesis should be taken as literal 24-hour days?

      Does the Hebrew word yom always mean a literal 24-hour day?

      Regarding the miracles, they have stopped in one sense, and in another sense, they go on. I have half-dozen scientific arguments for the insufficiency of naturalism TODAY that I did not have 100 years ago. The progress of science has falsified atheism six times over, in six different ways, by proving six different interventions into nature by an intelligent agent of immense power.

      We started off thinking that nature did all of this, and today we know it didn’t. Speak in specifics. Point me to the naturalistic explanation of the big bang. The fine-tuning, the origin of DNA. The origin of the Cambrian-era fossils. Galactic and stellar fine-tuning. Irreducible complexity. You can’t do it. Because there is not one shred of support from science for atheism. Not one shred.

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      1. I know you don’t, but I am truly, honestly, and completely baffled that anyone can believe a book that makes that claim!

        To be honest with you Wintery, until I met you, I didn’t think intelligent christians existed. I truly thought christians were just a bunch of backwards hicks that wanted to live in the dark ages; good thing I grew up in a place were almost no one was religious.

        I guess to bring it a bit back on topic, I had never heard of this Erhman before your post, so I was looking at some of his books and they sound very interesting…but they are on religion, so I still have to deduct points for that!

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        1. Thank you, sir. I try my best. Hope you are free for lunch tomorrow.

          No, no, no. You must watch and hear DEBATES with Bart Ehrman. No books! He can cheat in his books because there is no other side.

          I have one DVD with him against Craig but I lent it to a young lady. And I have debate on MP3 that Robb bought me for a surprise present. I can lend you that one if you want to listen to it.

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        2. Jerry, that’s a boldly honest and open admission, and I’ll challenge you from it:

          I believe that you are convinced that you hold the truth, not dogmatically, but from the total presentation of the evidence you have seen, that there is no God and that the Bible is an invention of man and not a direct revelation from God. Is that right?

          Further, I deduce that truth is very important to you, that you would prefer to set aside personal foibles and preferences if they are predicated on a lie (and that you’d expect others to do the same). Is that right?

          If so, I’d encourage you to well and truly venture out from the bubble you’ve been in and really look up what Christians who are intelligent and scholarly and sound have to say about Christiantiy, rather than just reading what anti-Christians have to say about it. I think you’ll agree that no matter how careful the presentation, someone who is hostile to an idea from the outset is not likely to be able to present a consistently fair defense for that idea.

          (I struggle to think of how I can construct the above sentence and leave no room for it to be taken with offense. I’m reacting directly to you saying, “I grew up in a place were almost no one was religious,” and so mean to address the self professed situation and not to offer any insult, however slight or hidden, what-so-ever. Please give me the benefit of the doubt if you took it any other way)

          Ultimately the truth will play out, and as a person concerned with truth, you’ve got nothing to fear. At the very least it will allow you to engage in atheistic argumentation from a more informed standpoint. You may discover that what you’ve heard about Christianity isn’t always true, defensible, or even possibly something worse.

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      2. If science has falsified atheism six times over, do you have an explanation for why a disproportionate number of scientists are not theists?

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          1. I assume that scientists suffer from the same proportion of pride and sin as the rest of the population. I also assume that scientists have a deeper understanding of science than the rest of the population.

            If both of these assumptions are correct, and science has falsified atheism six times over, then the question is why are a disproportionate number of scientists not theists? In other words, why does it seem as if the more you learn about science, the more proud and sinful you become?

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          3. That may be the case, but why is that peer pressure any greater than in the rest of the population?

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          5. I understand that the movie explains that there is a lot of peer pressure because a disproportionate number of scientists are not theists. But my question is, why are a disproportionate number of scientists not theists to begin with?

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          6. That does assume that they weren’t theists to begin with.

            I would imagine that they know more about science than theism, see a conflict, and go with what they know. It is a false dichotomy.

            If you really wanted to get to the bottom of it, you’d have to ask them. :)

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    2. We have dinosaurs even today, smarty-pants. They’re called crocodiles and komodo dragons. Sometimes they even eat people. I personally don’t have much problem believing that real-life “dragons” existed to give rise to the various legends.

      But if you’re adamant about resisting the idea, here’s an interesting article about the “gap theory” for Genesis which might resolve the issue for you:

      http://www.ichthys.com/sr2-copy.htm

      Granted, the article is speculative and extrabiblical.

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  5. When first examining the evidence on this (having been well versed in Dan Brownian history previous to my conversion), one thing that really stood out was P46. It’s a very early multi-author grouping that contains much of the NT and nothing extra. Once I got my Nestle-Aland Greek NT (27) and learned how to use the critical apparatus, the immensity of just how awesome the textual evidence is for the NT we have today made me feel like a kid in a candy shop with $100.

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    1. You have to tell people who don’t know about manuscript fragments about what P46 is! They may not know! I don’t even know which fragment you’re talking about!

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  6. Sorry, sometimes I do that because I know there’s a lot of value in people looking things up themselves… but I probably didn’t create a big enough hook on that one. :p

    Wiki has a fairly even handed page on it:

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Papyrus_46

    What’s very exciting, is to see just how much of the NT is contained into a very early text. Conservative dating puts the text at around 200AD, which doesn’t seem TOO exciting, until you consider that it contains:

    Romans, 1 & 2 Corinthians, Galatians, Ephesians, Phillipians, Colossians, Hebrews, and some of 1 Thessalonians.

    So before this document could be created some time around 200AD, the letters had to be written, copied and distributed, accepted by the widely scattered church, compiled, and recopied.

    It’s multiple authors (if you’re in the Hebrews was not written by Paul crowd, probably worth a whole seperate discussion if there’s much disagreement, I’m much convinced it’s not based on style: apostolic appeal to authority, and lack of 1st person pronouns), and includes almost the entire Pauline corpus. It was found in Cairo and follows the Alexandrian tradition, which means there was also travel time from the original recipients north of the mediterranian to the church in Egypt. It, among other things, demonstrates very early church adoption of the scriptures we call the Bible.

    Oh, and all this on what amounts to grass pounded flat by wooden hammers and laminated with primitive glue lasting thousands of years.

    I think that might just have something to do with God’s providence and love for us, and His desire for us to know Him and make Him known.

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    1. I’ve come across this thread much later than the original posting (unfortunately we lack the bandwidth for watching longer videos, so I can’t view them).
      When one reads the New Testament and examines the evidence, it is clear that most of it was written before 70AD, and all of it during the first century, i.e. before 100AD. See the reasoning here: http://4simpsons.wordpress.com/2006/06/29/when-was-the-new-testament-written-2/
      The Old Testament was copied down through the centuries, and while one may ascribe a few discrepancies to errors in transcription by the scribes, these are minimal. When I first read the Old Testament after I came to know the Lord, I was amazed as it was like seeing the pieces of a jig-saw fall into place, gaining an overview of God’s interaction with humankind and his plan from beginning to end. But I couldn’t even comprehend any of that before I received Jesus Christ as my Saviour and Lord, along receiving with the Holy Spirit, who opens our spiritual “eyes”.

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