Was Moses tripping?

Professor Benny Shanon, professor of cognitive psychology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, experienced a hallucinatory trip a few years ago when he participated in a tribal ceremony in the Amazon and drank a cocktail made from a plant called "ayahuasca."

This experience led him to believe that the miracles and visions Moses experienced in the Sinai desert, and presumably when Pharoah in Egypt witnessed miracles, were nothing more than delusions induced by acid trips.

"I have no direct proof of this interpretation," he says. "It seems logical that something was altered in people's consciousness. There are other stories in the Bible that mention the use of plants: for example, the tree of the knowledge of good and evil in the Garden of Eden."

Of his own drug use, Shanon says, "I experienced visions that had spiritual-religious connotations. Hypotheses have been around for 20 years connecting the beginning of religions with psychoactive materials."

The acacia tree also has psychedelic properties, according to Shanon. Acacia is mentioned frequently in the Bible. It was the type of wood from which the Ark of the Covenant was made.

Metaphysical Naturalism

Metaphysical naturalism is a worldview in which nature is all there is, and all things supernatural, such as spirits and souls, supernatural beings, miracles, and transcendent truth as taught by the Bible, do not exist.

This view is distinguished from methodological naturalism, which is a worldview that claims that the scientific method is limited to the study of the natural world, but unlike metaphysical naturalism does not deny the possibility of supernatural or paranormal phenomena.

In other words, a methodological naturalist who believes the Bible is God's inerrant Word may do so without violating the principles of science, because the scientific method cannot use natural means to study the supernatural. It is simply not the purpose of science to prove or disprove the supernatural. It's not a proper measuring tool any more than a yard stick can be used to measure barometric pressure. For instance, science can be used to tell us something about the world's geological history and it's possible origin, but it cannot ever negate the possibility of a Creation in six days.

Much of the western world has absorbed the philosophy of Enlightenment thinkers such as Hume, Kant and Hegel, who moved from a belief that the proper role of philosophy and science was to study only natural phenomena, to a presupposition that the supernatural simply does not exist.

The metaphysical naturalist rejects the supernatural from the outset and automatically discounts any belief system that includes God or a supernatural world as primitive superstition.

The common method of metaphysical naturalists when interpreting the Bible is to reject the miracles and doubt both the history and authenticity of the literature that would give any credence to eyewitness records of supernatural events. However, much of the Bible is supported by corroborating history and archaeology. It gives historical context and purports eyewitness testimony.

The metaphyscial naturalist, if he is to be consistent with a scientific trust in empirical records, has to accept that at least some of these phenomena have a basis in fact. He is left with the only option of reinterpreting the data in terms of a "scientific explanation." The Apostle John on Patmos saw visions because he ate wild mushrooms. The Ark of the Covenant shot bolts of lightning because it was a giant primitive battery. Visions and revelations are the result of psychological stress and trauma. And so on.

Hence Shanon's hypothesis. He guesses that Ten Commandments, with the voice of God heard in the "thunder," had its origin in a psychedelic experience.

Was Moses tripping when he heard the Law of God?

"But not everyone who uses a plant like this brings the Torah," Shanon concedes. "For that, you have to be Moses."

Shanon should know. He reports that since his Amazon trip, he has used the plant hundreds of times.

C.S. Lewis on the Liberal Higher Criticism of the Bible

"These men ask me to believe they can read between the lines of old texts; the evidence is their obvious inability to read (in any sense worth discussing) the lines themselves. They claim to see fern-seed and can't see an elephant ten yards away in broad daylight."

C. S. Lewis, "Modern Thought and Biblical Criticism," Christian Reflection, ed. Walter Hooper (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1967), p. 157.

Bible Babylon (part 5)

Manuscript Evidence for the Reliability of the New Testament

Left: a leaf from Codex Vaticanus. Click on the image to see a larger view.

When we say that the Bible has over 25,000 early manuscripts that prove its reliability, we are talking about mainly documents from the fifth century onward. These are "early" compared to the documents supporting most other ancient works. Yet there are about one hundred early manuscripts from the second to the fourth century that were not known to us until the late 1800s and the most significant of these have been rediscovered in the last 60 years.

To understand why so many of the early manuscript copies have been lost, we need to first look at two mediums for writing that were used in ancient times, papyrus and vellum.

Papyrus is similar to modern day paper – it was durable and inexpensive – yet most papyrus could not last more than a few hundred years without crumbling into dust. Therefore, most of the papyrus manuscripts from more than 1500 years ago are fragments, decaying pages or at best books with significant parts missing.

Vellum is made from animal skins processed into parchments used for writing. The oldest scrolls and books from ancient times are parchments of the highest quality. The problem with vellum is that even though it was available during the time of the first writing of the New Testament, it was expensive and only became a common medium for the New Testament when the church became state-sponsored at the time of the Emperor Constantine in 325 A.D.

In fact, Constantine commissioned Bishop Eusebius of Caesarea to produce 50 copies of the complete Bible on vellum in 332 A.D. The two oldest nearly complete biblical manuscripts we have from ancient times, Codex Sinaiticus and Codex Vaticanus were probably copied sometime between 325 to 350 A.D. Many think that these are copies from one of Eusebius’ manuscripts and perhaps two of the original 50 manuscripts, although some think Vaticanus may be a few years older than Eusebius’ copies.

Codex Vaticanus contains nearly the entire Bible except for Genesis 1:1–46:2 and ends abruptly at Hebrews 9:14 lacking also 1 and 2 Timothy, Titus, Philemon and Revelation. Thus the beginning and end of the manuscript were lost. Yet despite its great importance, Vaticanus was almost unknown prior to the 1800s. It had been in the possession of the Vatican library since at least the 1300s, hence the name, but no one knew exactly how old it actually was and was inaccessible to scholars until the end of the 1800s.

Likewise, Codex Sinaiticus was discovered in 1859 by Constantin Tischendorf in a convent at the foot of Mount Sinai. Tischendorf wrote that the codex was actually in a pile of parchments waiting to be burned as trash when he rescued it! Sinaiticus contains the entire Greek Bible, plus the Epistle of Barnabas and most of the Shepherd of Hermas (early Christian writings which were widely used in teaching). It is believed to be from the fourth century, but later than Vaticanus. The two great codices are in general agreement and both attest to the general reliability of the received text. In fact, Codex Vaticanus was later used by Hort and Westcott in their edition, The New Testament in the Original Greek (1881).

For those wanting to research for themselves the textual reliability of the New Testament over two millennia, I suggest purchasing an interlinear Greek New Testament that has a literal word for word rendering in English above each Greek word in the text and usually a modern English translation of the scriptures in the side column. The simple conclusion any honest inquirer will draw is that the New Testament scriptures have come down to us in virtually unaltered form.

Bible Babylon (part 4)

What about variant texts in biblical manuscripts?

I was first introduced to the concept of biblical textual criticism in a biblical interpretation class sponsored by Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary at the Center for Urban Ministries in Boston. The professor teaching the course was a conservative who nevertheless upset many of the evangelical pastors in attendance by leading a discussion on how variants in newly discovered New Testament manuscripts have altered newer translations of the Bible such as the New American Standard Bible and the New International Version.

The thought that even small portions of the Bible are in dispute rankles evangelicals because it is thought that the original autographs of the Bible were inspired of God and therefore inerrant and infallible. There is no quick and easy answer to this question, but any editor can tell you that the text of a manuscript is often adjusted as it is prepared for publication in different editions. This occurs for many reasons.

These reasons may include:

1. Corrections and mistakes that have crept into the text due to careless copying;
2. Adjusting spelling and grammar to reflect modern changes to the language;
3. Smoothing of the text for style and consistency;
4. Edits for emphasis or to make the meaning of certain words and phrases more clear.

The long and short end of the discussion was that none of these minor variants affect the meaning of any text in the New Testament.

Skeptics and atheists who criticize the Bible’s integrity like to point out that among the 25,000 manuscripts and portions of the Bible there are supposedly hundreds of thousands of variants.

My answer to this is that the number of “variants” depends on what you use as your denominator.

If variant means simply the total number of places where the text varies in each manuscript, then the number is high simply because each variant text is counted each time it occurs in any text. For instance, let’s say that an original manuscript had the Greek word for “him” in the text, but a scribe decided that the word is better understood in the reflexive tense as “himself.”

The new manuscript is then copied 2027 times. This would equal 2028 in this way of numbering “variants.” The numerator here is each instance of a variant in all manuscripts over a denominator of 1.

2028/1 then equals 2028 variants.

But if we count each example of the variant only once, whether the same variant occurs once or over 2000 times in different manuscripts, the number shrinks dramatically because the same variant copied over and again are counted only as one variant.

2027/2027 + 1 equals one variant and the original. So there are only two variants.

We also need to distinguish between “significant” and “insignificant.”

If a word is spelled differently or contains a different case or tense, but means the same thing, then it is thought to be an insignificant variant. For instance, if meaning of the original “him” was reflexive and a scribe simply wished to emphasize this, then practically speaking these 2027 instances of the “himself” variant are insignificant because it doesn't change the meaning of the text at all.

It is only when the actual meaning of a sentence changes even slightly that the variant is termed “significant.”

How to number the total amount of variants that would significant change the meaning of a text is highly subjective. Just to give an idea of how insignificant even the most “significant” of these variations can be, the following example is often used. In some early manuscripts, the word “yet” does not appear in John 7:8. Some manuscripts read, “I am not going up to this feast,” while others read, “I am not yet going up to the feast.” Then John 7:10 says, “However, after his brothers had left for the feast, he went also, not publicly, but in secret.” Some critics say that a copyist probably added the word “yet” to verse 8 to bring it in harmony with verse 10 and prevent the appearance that Jesus lied even though the original text would not have included “yet.”

However, editors of the most recent modern translations of the Bible agree that the total number of significant variants in the New Testament is somewhere between 300 to 1500. The modern translations mentioned above include these variants in the form of footnotes. Usually these are small words or different spellings of place names and people’s names.

If you are like me, such differences seem trite. In fact, the professor of the biblical interpretation class I was attending challenged us that if one’s faith was shaken by such variants, then it was not really a true “faith” in God. In fact, no text – even including modern printed texts that also contain errors – could withstand such a scrutiny of details if this would be our definition of “inerrancy.”

This does not affect the concept of inerrancy because the general meaning is not changed at all. Inerrancy does not mean that there is no variation is the 25,000 manuscripts of the Bible available to us. It simply means that none of the variations in the most reliable texts are so significant that the meaning of the text varies from copy to copy. The transmission of divine inspiration isn’t dependant of an exact wording nor on how the meaning of the text is rendered; but solely on a facet of divine intent that is communicated by the text. If this were not true then books could not be translated into various languages without losing the sense or meaning of the texts.

The loudest detractors to the Bible's accuracy and reliability are the atheists and skeptics who use the “hundreds of thousands of errors” argument as a weak propaganda ploy. However, the objection that supposedly “the Bible is full of errors” is based on such variants as those found in John 7:8. The vast majority of variants are not “significant” and even those variants that are significant do not change the meaning of the text so greatly that the original intent of the larger passage is lost. Christians who have examined the evidence first hand are often surprised at how trivial these differences really are.

Although some of the earliest New Testament manuscripts are corrupted and contain many copyist errors, these manuscripts are easy to discern as bad manuscripts. There are a number of early manuscripts that match the received text almost exactly, while worst of the New Testament manuscripts are still over 90 percent similar to the received text.

Many ancient works of literature have only one existing manuscript written hundreds of years after the originals. The Bible has literally thousands of manuscripts – and over a hundred of these still existing manuscripts were copied very early – from about 120 A.D. to 400 A.D. – more manuscript evidence than any other ancient writing.

Bible Babylon (part 3)

Lower criticism vs. Higher criticism

To fully understand German Higher Criticism, one must first examine the social and political situation in Germany and Europe in the mid to late-1800s. To understand the background of these men sheds incredible light on their motivations and lends nothing but discredit to their conclusions.

The German “Higher Criticism” gets is name as a distinguishing mark from the so-called lower criticism. Lower criticism is named because it is the first method of criticism and the foundation for all other criticism. Lower criticism is simply textual criticism of the various early manuscripts of the Bible. Christians should be involved in the study of lower criticism because it attempts to determine the original wording of the original text of the scriptures. Higher criticism then analyzes the text to determine its authorship, date of composition, literary structure, and meaning.

Higher criticism in its basic meaning is just interpreting the text. Anyone who has an opinion on what the Bible means is a higher critic. However, “Higher Criticism” (especially when capitalized) has come to have the connotation of the liberal criticism that began in Germany in the 1800s. The Higher Critics purported to study the Bible as they would any other literary document, but in reality they approached it with a high degree of skepticism attempting to discredit the historicity and reliability of the received texts. Not only are the received texts doubted, but the early dates of composition are interpreted as spurious and the authors as pseudonymous. In other words, the books of the Bible were written at a much later date than claimed in the text by unknown authors using the names of apostles and prophets.

Much of the discussion among today's liberal critics revolves around methods of interpretation that make the people, places and events of scripture allegorical not intended to be read as history. The fact is that these works were received by ancient Jews and Christians as historically accurate documents by authentic authors. To impute a figurative or allegorical intention on the part of the authors is essentially accusing these men as being false prophets who intentionally and fraudulently forged the names of historical persons on their works in some sort of perverse religious power play.

Up until the 1800s, the view was that the books of the Bible were written by the named authors approximately at the time the events occurred. This wasn’t questioned simply because there was no hard evidence to the contrary. Then came the Enlightenment. Rationalists began to apply the skepticism of modern science to literary criticism. The burden of proof shifted from the skeptic having to prove the Bible was false, to believers having to prove it was true. The persons, places and events of scripture were deemed “guilty until proven innocent.” Therefore, much of the work of the higher critics has been pure speculation. For example, they might try to guess the motivation of the person who wrote the Gospel of Matthew based on conjectural imputations to the author’s character and motivations.

The problem with much of the speculation of liberal higher criticism is that it is based on the idea that the received texts are not authentic and reliable documents. This ignores the fact that “lower” textual criticism began very early. We actually have canonical lists, extensive commentaries and criticisms of the variant texts as early as the second century. The Higher Critics treated these sources skeptically as a basis for biblical interpretation while ignoring the huge amount of data and documents for use in textual analysis.

Prior to the 20th century, the received text from which all English translations were compiled relied heavily on the Latin Vulgate, the Bible translated by Jerome in early fifth century Rome from the Hebrew Masoretic text, the Septuagint and the Greek codices of the New Testament. Codices (singular: “codex”) is simply a name for the earliest books. Up until about the first or second centuries ancient writers wrote on scrolls or tablets. In fact, books in their modern form were probably invented by Christians as a method of collating the various books of the New Testament and other Christian writings.

Jerome relied on the version of the Greek New Testament known as the Western Text. There are several surviving manuscript “families” from the early church era. These codices are derived from the three great centers of Christianity in the early centuries, Byzantium, Alexandria and Rome.

No one today knows exactly what the original autographs of the New Testament looked like, but textual criticism had proven that the text has altered so little over thousands of years, that we can be certain that few changes have entered into the picture. Even if small portions of the text have been altered, none of these changes would be considered significant in changing the overall meaning of a passage. Evangelicals and conservatives accept the authenticity and reliability of the received text which has come to us through the Latin Vulgate with some modern translations making some minor redaction due to a comparison of recent discoveries of early copies of Greek versions of the Western, Eastern (Byzantine) and Alexandrian texts. If we were to compile a list of these variants, we could fit them all on one page.

The reason for these variants is that no ancient or medieval manuscript -- even up until the time of William Shakespeare -- is without variations. No ancient work comes down to us from an original copy – or “autograph” – and most are derived from copies of copies that are hundreds and even thousands of years older than the originals. Since all books were copied by hand, mistakes in copying entered into the equation. It is also certain that scribes edited or added materials in order to make the text more understandable to the reader, to modernize spellings or numbering systems, to add their own contribution or put a “spin” on the work of literature.

The Hebrew Bible and the Christian scriptures we treated differently. Since the scriptures were considered to be inspired oracles of God, there are warnings in the text prohibiting changes by scribes. Holy Scripture was obviously treated differently than stories and poems told for entertainment purposes and even histories. However, small mistakes and changes for various reasons entered in. For instance, out of the thousands of manuscripts and fragments of the New Testament available for study, there are some manuscripts that are highly corrupted and may be easily separated from what is called the “majority text” which is derived from a comparison between the oldest manuscripts that have the highest degree of agreement.

The most common type of textual corruption in the most reliable manuscripts of the Bible consists of small words, spellings of names, prepositions and numbers. Lower criticism is the process of arriving at a text that is closest to what the original autographs looked like. Since there are thousands more extant manuscripts of Bible than of other ancient manuscripts, we can be more certain about the text of scripture than about any other ancient or medieval work of literature.

It is generally agreed that the majority text derived from the most reliable manuscripts is at least 99.5 percent accurate to what the original autographs had. Such a high degree of reliability is so unlikely, that many Christians see a divine Providence in the preservation of scripture.

The Reliability of the Hebrew Bible

The earliest surviving copies of the Hebrew Bible were originally copied from the so-called “Masoretic text.” Up until 1947, the earliest Hebrew manuscript of the Hebrew text was from about 900 A.D. Since the text was 1copied 200 to 2000 years after than the original autographs, modern critics had legitimate questions as to how many mistakes had entered into the received text. Much of this concern over textual reliability was laid to rest after the discovery of the Dead Sea scrolls, which were at least 1000 years older than the oldest surviving copies of the Masoretic text. In the Dead Sea Scrolls, not only do we have portions of all the books of the Old Testament (except Esther) from deep antiquity, but we can compare long portions of these biblical manuscripts to the Masoretic text. To put it simply, the Dead Sea Scrolls confirmed the reliability of the received text of the Hebrew scriptures to a surprising degree.

Unfortunately, even the most durable scrolls and parchments don’t last thousands of year. So if we want to see what the Bible looked like at the time of King David for instance, we have to rely on artifacts other than paper, which are few and far between.

The oldest biblical scroll yet discovered are the two silver scrolls uncovered at Ketef Hinnom near Jerusalem in 1979. This artifact is 400 years older than the Dead Sea Scroll manuscripts, and perhaps older. One is inscribed with portions of the Priestly Blessing from the Book of Numbers.

Numbers 6:25--Yahweh bless you and keep you;
Numbers 6:25--Yahweh make his face shine upon you, and be gracious to you;
Numbers 6:26--Yahweh lift up his countenance upon you, and give you peace.

Left: One of the silver scrolls of Ketef Hinnom

The bold words are missing from the inscription (probably to save space on a small amulet) but this is undoubtedly a quotation from the Pentateuch. The amulet is thought to be from about 725 to 650 B.C. Another silver scroll from the same time period contains allusions to the book of Deuteronomy. At this early date, the combination of two different passages from the Pentateuch proves that a larger document containing these texts was composed prior Josiah’s reform and not after the return from Babylon under Ezra as the Higher Critics maintained.

The existence of this text lays waste to the Higher Critical “Documentary Hypothesis,” the theory that the Pentateuch was not written by Moses, but that large segments of the first five books of the Bible were written in the period of Ezra, 400 to 500 B.C. The documentary hypothesis arguments revolve around the use of YHWH, the divine name of God, which the Higher Critics claimed was a later innovation after the more primitive names of ELOHIM and ADONAI.

The fact that the silver scrolls contain the name YHWH refutes the entire basis for the theory. Since the skeptical speculations of the Higher Critics have so often been wrong, the burden of proof ought to shift toward the liberal theologians. The hard evidence is in favor of the Bible’s authenticity. Notions of a “Documentary Hypothesis” have been weighed in the balance and found bankrupt. This hasn't stopped the liberal critics of course. The documentary hypothesis has been simply adjusted to fit the new evidence and is still accepted in many academic circles.

What does the evidence really tell us? When we compare the textual integrity of the Old Testament against comparisons of the manuscripts of the Dead Sea Scrolls, a few tablets describing the kings of Israel and the two silver scrolls, we can be confident that the text of the Old Testament has remained consistent and reliable for thousands of years.

How old is the oldest Latin manuscript of the Bible?

I was talking to internet radio show host, Joe Dunn, who is a pastor from Chicago about the integrity and reliability of the New Testament. We were talking about the three most famous disputed passages in the New Testament: 1 John 5:7-8 (the so-called Johannine Comma, which I've written on) ; John 7:53-8:11; and Mark 16:9-20.

Basically, the argument comes down to whether or not one thinks the earliest extant Greek manuscripts of the Bible are more reliable than the church fathers and the later Latin manuscripts of the Bible. Up until the 1800s, biblical scholarship relied mainly on the Textus Receptus, a manuscript of textual consensus that was compiled from the Latin Vulgate, the Hebrew Masoretic text and the Greek Septuagint. But then dozens of older Greek manuscripts were discovered in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Because there are textual variations in these manuscripts, a debate over the correct text of the New Testament ensued with many textual critics arriving at the conclusion that many of these passages ought to be changed in modern translations.

I am not claiming to know conclusively the answer to this question, but I have some objections to the modern liberal approach of redacting the received text.

1. Some of the church fathers quoted these passages as though they were scripture. So if they were added, they were added in the early century. And since we have no manuscript evidence from the first century, there is no way to prove that these passages were added.

2. The church fathers who translated the New Testament from Greek to Old Latin and Vulgar Latin were living a lot closer to the source and certainly had more early manuscript copies than we do today. Therefore, I don't see any reason why modern critics would know better than early textual critics.

3. We assume that just because a manuscript is older it is better. Yet the Dead Sea Scroll proved to us that the surviving copies of the Masoretic text, which were copied hundreds of years after than the oldest surviving Greek Septuagint manuscripts, were generally more reliable than their Greek translation counterparts. There is no reason why copies in Latin -- which is more closely related to Greek than Greek is to Hebrew -- would be so much less reliable than Greek copies of the New Testament especially in identifying interpolated and deleted passages.

I explained to my pastor friend that the passages in question are found in the oldest surviving Latin manuscripts and in quotations in the Church Fathers. Then I was then asked something I did not know the answer to.

How old is the oldest Latin manuscript of the Bible?

The answer depends on whether we mean the whole Bible or significant fragments. Are we talking about both the Old Testament or the New Testament? It also depends on whether we mean the Latin Vulgate or the "Old Latin" manuscripts.

This following is compiled from various Internet sources.

What are the oldest extant Latin manuscripts of the Bible?

The official Latin version of the Roman Catholic Church was prepared between A.D. 383–405 by St. Jerome (c.342–420). This is the Latin Vulgate. Prior to that there were some Old Latin texts of the Bible. The term "Old Latin" or "Vetus Latina" refers to classical Latin as opposed to the Latin of common vernacular or "Vulgar Latin" from which the Vulgate gets its name. There is no single version of the Old Latin Bible, and many have significant corruptions and variants. Jerome was commissioned by the Bishop of Rome to produce a reliable text based on a good translation of the Greek.

Old Latin Texts

The language of the Old Latin translations is uneven in quality, as Augustine of Hippo lamented in De Doctrina Christiana (2,16). Grammatical mistakes abound; some reproduce literally Greek or Hebrew idioms as they appear in the Septuagint. Likewise, the various Old Latin translations reflect the various versions of the Septuagint circulating, with the African manuscripts (such as the Codex Bobiensis) preserving readings of the Western text-type, while readings in the European manuscripts are closer to the Byzantine text-type. Many grammatical idiosyncrasies come from the use of Vulgar Latin grammatical forms in the text.

The Latin Vulgate

With the publication of Jerome's Vulgate, which offered a single, stylistically consistent Latin text translated from the original tongues, the Vetus Latina gradually fell out of use. Jerome, in a letter, complains that his new version was initially disliked by Christians who were familiar with the phrasing of the old translations. However, as copies of the complete Bible were infrequently found, Old Latin translations of various books of the Bible were copied into manuscripts along side Vulgate translations, inevitably exchanging readings; Old Latin translations of single books can be found in manuscripts as late as the 13th century.

Jerome was originally commissioned to produce a Latin text of the four Gospels based on the most reliable Greek manuscripts. But he was soon able to complete the entire Bible from the Greek including a translation of the Greek Old Testament including the apocrypha which he considered non-canonical. For this he used the Hexapla, a polyglot version of the Old Testament in six columns that contained the Hebrew Masoretic text, a Greek transliteration, the Septuagint, and Greek translations by Aquila, Symmachus, and Theodotion,

From 390 to 405 A.D., Jerome eventually began translating the Old Testament from the Hebrew. By this time he believed that the Masoretic text was the superior version. But the received text of the Vulgate comes from the Hexapla. Most modern English translations until the 1900s relied on the received text.

In my own study of translated Dead Sea Scolls along side the Received Text, the differences are minuscule.

The Oldest Latin manuscripts

The oldest known Latin manuscript of the Bible is a lengthy fragment of the New Testament known as Codex Vercellensis (the "Codex of Vercelli"). It part of a collection of biblical manuscript codices preserved in the cathedral library of Vercelli, in the Province of Vercelli, Italy.

Codex Vercellensis is from the 4th century. It is a purple-stained vellum codex, the earliest manuscript of the "Old Latin" Gospels (called simply "Codex a"). The Gospels are in the usual order of the Western Church — Matthew, John, Luke and Mark. It does not now contain the last twelve verses of the Gospel of Mark. It is generally believed to have been written under the direction of bishop Eusebius of Vercelli.

It's interesting that some Greek and Latin codices had Mark as the last Gospel. Could this be the sole reason why the last 16 verses are missing from the oldest extant Greek and Latin manuscripts?

Greek/Latin Diglots

There is a diglot manuscript, with Greek on one page and Latin on the other facing side, called Codex Bezae Cantabrigiensis. It contains most of the four Gospels and Acts and a small part of III John. This codex is from the 5th century.

Another diglot manuscript, Codex Claromontanus is a 6th century manuscript containing only the Epistles of Paul and the Epistle to the Hebrews in Greek and Latin on facing pages.

The Oldest Latin Vulgate manuscripts

The Codex Fuldensis dates from around 545 A.D. It contains most of the New Testament in the Vulgate version, but the four Vulgate Gospels are harmonized into a continuous narrative derived from the Diatessaron.

The Codex Amiatinus is the earliest surviving manuscript of the complete Bible in the Latin Vulgate version. Originally three copies of the Bible were commissioned by Ceolfrid, an Anglo Saxon monk, in 692 A.D. The only surviving copy is dated to 716 A.D.

The Codex Amiatinus is considered to be the most accurate copy of St. Jerome's text. Although very aged, Ceolfrid undertook to carry one copy to the Pope in Rome personally. After a long sea voyage, he landed in Germany, but war detained him in the monastery of Langres in Burgundy, where he died. This is thought to be the manuscript that survived.

What do the Latin manuscripts tell us about disputed passages in the New Testament?

Note on the Johannine Comma (1 John 5:7-8): Neither of the two oldest Latin Vulgate manuscripts contain the Johannine Comma. This clause is found mainly in the Old Latin texts from the fourth century onward and in later versions of the Vulgate. It is mentioned by many of the Latin church fathers, however, and my article on the Johannine Comma goes more into detail. I wrote a longer article on this earlier this year that I won't reproduce again here.

Note on the woman caught in adultery (John 7:53-8:11): This is otherwise known as Pericope Adulterae because it does not appear in Codex Sinaiticus and Codex Vaticanus or in other Greek manuscripts fragment from the third century known as P66 and P75.

It is mentioned by Jerome as being found in many copies. It is also mentioned by Ambrose, Augustine, and other writers from the fourth century onward.

St. Augustine of Hippo was aware that the passage as missing from some of the copies then extant. He wrote the following explanation of why he thought it was omitted in some manuscripts:

Certain persons of little faith, or rather enemies of the true faith, fearing, I suppose, lest their wives should be given impunity in sinning, removed from their manuscripts the Lord's act of forgiveness toward the adulteress, as if he who had said, Sin no more, had granted permission to sin (De Adult. Conj., ii. 6).

The passage was not controversial until the time of the Reformation. During the 16th Century, Western European scholars sought to recover the original Greek text of the New Testament, rather than relying on the Vulgate Latin translation. At this time, it was noticed that a number of early manuscripts containing John's Gospel lacked John 7:53-8:11.

Until recently, it was not thought that any Greek Church Father had taken note of the passage before the 12th Century; but in 1941 a large collection of the writings of Didymus the Blind (c. 313- 398) was discovered in Egypt, including a reference to the Pericope Adulterae; and it is now considered established that this passage was present in its canonical place in a minority of Greek manuscripts known in Alexandria from the 4th Century onwards. In support of this it is noted that the 4th century Codex Vaticanus, which was written in Egypt, marks the end of John chapter 7 with an "umlaut" (two dots) indicating that an alternative reading was known at this point.

See a defense of this passage here: http://www.bible-researcher.com/adult-hills.html

Note on the end of Mark 16:9-20: The earliest existing copies of Mark end abruptly after 16:8. Scholars are almost united on the idea that the final leaf of an early manuscript was lost causing numerous manuscripts to be copied without the ending. Then one of several things happened:

1. There were two or more manuscript traditions, one with and one without the ending, but the only early copies that have survived are those without the ending;
2. Earlier copies with the correct ending were recovered and the ending was re-inserted;
3. The ending was interpolated from some other source.

Given these three possibilities, the Christian who believes in scriptural inerrancy (at least in the original autographs) has a choice to make. Either we have the correct ending or we don't. Those who think the passage is an outright interpolation must admit that the ending was not written by Mark. They have the option of saying that the passage is a "Gospel tradition" known to the church fathers and therefore inerrant scripture.

Furthermore, there are two versions of the ending that deserve consideration as the correct ending. The so-called "shorter ending" reads:

And they reported all the things that had been commanded them briefly (or immediately) to the companions of Peter. And after this Jesus himself also sent forth by them from the East even unto the West the holy and incorruptible preaching of eternal salvation.

The "longer ending" is the one that appears in today's English versions (v. 9-20).

The longer ending is absent from the oldest Greek, Latin, Syriac, Coptic, and Armenian manuscripts. The main reason it is included in modern translations (usually with qualifying brackets and footnotes) is that it was known to Justin Martyr, Irenaeus (both in Greek and Latin), Tertullian, Hippolytus, and Tatian, who incorporated it into his Diatesseron.

Justin alludes to Mark 16:20 -- "And they went forth, and preached everywhere, the Lord working with them, and confirming the word with signs following" -- in the following passage from his First Apology chapter 45, "His apostles, going forth from Jerusalem, preached everywhere."

This is thought to be only a slight allusion by some except for the fact that Irenaeus uses the Greek word pantachou -- a word for "everywhere" that appears only seven times in the New Testament.

Irenaeus wrote in Against Heresies (c. 185 A.D. ), Book III, 10:5-6: "Also, towards the conclusion of his Gospel, Mark says: 'So then, after the Lord Jesus had spoken to them, He was received up into heaven, and sitteth on the right hand of God." This is an outright quotation of Mark 16:19.

At the seventh Council of Carthage in 256, a bishop named Vincentius of Thibaris said, "We have assuredly the rule of truth which the Lord by His divine precept commanded to His apostles, saying, 'Go ye, lay on hands in My name, expel demons.' And in another place: "Go ye and teach the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost.'"

There seems to be good reason, therefore, to conclude that the passage was known as part of the canonical text of Mark in the second century even though we have no extant manuscripts from this early period to confirm this. The earliest known copy of Mark -- Papyrus 45, from about A.D. 225 -- is damaged and for this reason is missing all of Mark 16.

My view is that given the textual consistency of the rest of the New Testament scriptures in the early manuscripts, and since the none of the earliest manuscript fragments contain any of Mark 16, to say that the passage is an outright interpolation is at best a reasoned guess. The passage ought to stand as it is recorded in modern translations, with brackets stating to the interested reader that the "earliest manuscripts do not have Mark 16:9-20."

However, it also should be known that none of these manuscripts are earlier than the writings of Irenaeus and Cyprian. The number of the manuscripts that have the deletion are simply too small to confirm the tradition that would suggest that the original autograph did not have these verses. That the passage was known to Justin, Irenaeus and Cyprian infers that the text was contained in manuscripts that existed in the second century.

Left is part of the Codex Vercellensis, scribed by Eusebius, the Bishop of Vercelli in northern Italy, in the year 370 A.D.

This section contains the Gospel of John, 16:23-30.

Source: Plate XXXII. The S.S. Teacher's Edition: The Holy Bible. New York: Henry Frowde, Publisher to the University of Oxford, 1896.

Bible Babylon (part 2)

The Contribution of Dr. John Henry Ludlum, Jr.
Refuting the Marcan Priority Hypothesis and the Fabled "Q" Gospel

One of the theologians mentioned in The Real Jesus (DVD) is a little known linguistics prodigy named John Henry Ludlum, Jr.

Ludlum is known today for a groundbreaking article that was published in four parts in Christianity Today.

"New Light On The Synoptic Problem," Vol. III, Nos. 3 and 4, 1958

"Are We Sure of Mark's Priority?" Vol. III, Nos. 24 and 25, 1959

The article is cited in lots of places, but isn't on the WWW at this point. I am currently trying to locate copies of the article and if you know quick and easy way I can get them, let me know.

One book that cites the articles is The Jesus Crisis: The Inroads of Historical Criticism into Evangelical Scholarship by Robert L.Thomas and F. David Farnell, which is on my reading list. You can read a limited version here:

http://books.google.com/books?id=QtE1orv4Xg0C&dq

If you are like me, you can't get your hands on nearly enough articles and books on textual criticism for your reading pleasure, so I've pointed you to this paper by John Henry Ludlum. Sorry that it's 260 pages of tiff files and hence the size.

You can download the PDF file from the following link:

http://messiahskingdom.com/jhludjr/anewcomprehensiveapproachtothegospels.pdf

John Henry Ludlum, Jr. was the only doctoral candidate at Yale University to receive honors in all seven of his oral examinations. He was a linguistics expert and textual criticism prodigy. His first assignment after graduating gave him enough free time to read many of the German Higher Critics including Bruno Bauer, who has only one theological work translated into English.

He was shocked as a liberal to find out how flimsy the arguments of the historical criticism -- so widely accepted as iron-clad among liberals -- really were. They were so bad in fact, that Ludlum did his own Synoptic harmony of the Gospels and found many errors on the part of the liberal critics. He spent the rest of his career lambasting the liberals and he was blacklisted in his own denomination -- eventually founding a Bible College in Maine.

Today, there is very little published by Ludlum. His most notable work is the series of articles published in Christianity Today in the 1950s debunking the Marcan Priority Hypothesis. Many at the time thought his argument -- in embryonic form in the attached paper -- was irrefutable. I am not committed to any Synoptic hypothesis -- Matthean, Marcan or Independence -- at this point, but I am concerned that so many evangelicals accept the Marcan Hypothesis without understanding the liberal presuppositions that gave rise to its popularity.

Anyway, if you skim through the paper, I am sure you'll find a few fascinating insights even if you don't have time to read all of it carefully.

A Short Bio

Dr. John H. Ludlum, Jr. is one of those Bible scholars whose experience was the mirror image of other liberal theologians. Too often conservatives are corrupted by seminary education. Ludlum was one who began as a liberal, but as his education was steeped in skepticism, it made him question the foundation of such skepticism.

David Lutzweiler has written the following biography of Ludlum:

Back in 1951, Dr. Ludlum received his Ph.D. from Yale University and received on his orals in seven fields at the Department. of Ancient Near Eastern Languages and Literature the highest scores that anyone ever had received as far as they had records going back for the department at the time. (I have a copy of the department's report on his rating). At that time, of course, he was a liberal. He studied under Marvin Pope and that crowd.

Then he got a job that was more or less a sinecure, an office which requires or involves little or no responsibility, in NYC at a Reformed Church, and had a lot of time to pursue his own studies independently. He read the whole German higher criticism in the original language, and a lot of other stuff; and the more he read, the more he saw that the whole liberal position was just plain silly, not to mention dishonest. In a few years, he moved out of liberalism (or "Up From Liberalism," as William F. Buckley put it) and into evangelicalism.

This created problems. The RCA liberals could not stand up to him, because he was too good. He knew the scholarship inside out and backwards. Thus, the word went around that under no circumstances was Ludlum going to be permitted ever to teach at New Brunswick, etc.

They shunted him off to pastor a small church in Englewood, NJ.It was a bad decision on their part. That only gave him more time to study, write, and fight, which he did. I came to know him when he was in Englewood, in the middle of his prime, and that was one of the most enriching contacts in my life.

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Bible Babylon (part 1)

How liberal academic criticism of the New Testament was co-opted by the anti-semitic 19th century German Higher Critics

This series outlines the history of liberal criticism in the church, it fallacious premises and anti-Semitic motivating forces, and then proposes some solutions as to how it can be refuted soundly and systematically rooted out of the popular culture.

All but vanquished in the early 20th century, liberal criticism has experienced a revival in the last 50 years on three fronts – among the intellectual academicians, among liberal “mainline” Protestant churches and in the popular media. The main tenets of liberalism – that Jesus was merely a man and not the Son of God risen from the dead in conquest over sin and death; that the received text of the Bible is unreliable and historically inaccurate; that the miraculous events of scripture did not really occur, but were merely stories told to embellish legendary events – are popular in small pockets of the church especially among British and European denominations and among the faculty of large secular universities with Divinity Schools.

In America, the conservative evangelical churches are far outpacing the growth of liberal denominations to the point where the mainline is no longer the “mainstream.” However, the viewpoints expressed in the books and articles of a liberal elite are given credence by the popular media over their conservative evangelical counterparts, even though the actual numbers of the liberal professors of religion are far fewer than the faculty at more numerous conservative Bible Colleges and Seminaries.

Most conservative Christians in America don’t understand exactly how liberalism within the church began and why its influence is still being felt. We tend to simply dismiss the liberals as skeptics and atheists, as wolves in sheep’s clothing, without giving them a hearing. However, when a group like the Jesus Seminar gets its press releases published far and wide, when books like The Da Vinci Code become runaway bestsellers with movie blockbusters and a myriad of television documentaries in tow, evangelicals chafe at the very suggestion that the biblical doctrine of the divinity of Jesus is not a settled issue among lettered churchmen. Even among those who claim to be conservatives, a “neo-orthodox” influence is felt in the form of a low view of the inerrancy of scripture.

The three greatest controversies in the church began early in its history. The Gnostic threat actually preceded Christianity. Gnosticism was actually a broad tendency in several eastern religions that had infected the Hellenistic Jews in the few centuries prior to Christ. Gnosticism in the church later gave way to Arianism and Pelagianism.

In his History of Redemption, Jonathan Edwards notes the irony that the Arian and Pelagian threats came only after several centuries of Jewish and Roman persecution had failed to quench the revival fire of the early church.

After the destruction of the heathen Roman Empire, Satan infested the church with heresies. Though there had been so glorious a work of God in delivering the church from her heathen persecutors, and overthrowing the heathen empire…. But the church soon began to be greatly infested with heresies; the two principal, and those which did most infest the church, were the Arian and Pelagian.

Indeed, the second century Church Father, Tertullian of Carthage, noted that “the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church.” It turned out that heresy within the church was its gravest threat. Gnosticism in its various forms -- Mithraism, Manichaeism, Zoroastrianism, etc. --was a threat to the church from the beginning because these mystery religions influenced nearly every world religion at the time including Judaism. However, the later “Christian” Gnostics did not deny the deity of Christ, but instead perverted the nature of the Godhead and the Incarnation by deemphasizing either the material or spiritual aspect of Jesus.

Likewise, Arianism was a heresy that denied a proper understanding of the Trinity, while Pelagianism compromised the Gospel by denying salvation by free grace. None of these heresies denied that Jesus was divine. Although there have been numerous atheist, pagan, Jewish and Muslim skeptics throughout history, the idea that Jesus was fully God and fully man was a settled issue among Christians long before the Council of Chalcedon in 451 A.D.

Even if we consider the Enlightenment thinkers, rationalists, Deists and free-thinkers of the 1600s and 1700s, who denied the deity of Christ, the attacks were from those rightly called “infidels” -- those against the faith -- rather than from churchmen who had become liberalized in their interpretation of scripture.

Then beginning in the early 1800s, a group of German theologians began to reexamine and deconstruct the history of the Old and New Covenant Church and along with it question the reliability, integrity and historicity of most of the Bible. Here was the first time in history that skeptics and doubters arose within the church. As Jonathan Edwards noted, it is as though the devil decided that attacks from without could not fail, so therefore he once again fought a battle from within.

Jesus, Mohammed, Shakespeare: Did they really exist? (part 3)

What about Hillel, Gamaliel, Confucius, Buddha and Mohammed?

If we applied the same level of scrutiny that the Jesus-mythists apply to the historical figure of Jesus of Nazareth, many religious figures from antiquity would vanish from history. The Jewish rabbis Hillel and Gamaliel who lived at the time of Jesus then have no “contemporary eyewitness accounts” according to the skeptics’ accepted criteria. The eastern religious figures of Confucius and Siddhartha (Buddha) don’t have any surviving accounts written until hundreds of years after they lived.

In fact, only few ancient figures had biographies of their lives written while they still lived and any surviving record written in their own hand comes down to us from copies hundreds and even over a thousand years after the original autographs were written.

The Sira and the al-Maghazi were accounts about the life of Mohammed written after his death. Like the New Testament we do not the original autographs of the Koran, so using this level of scrutiny we have to discount Mohammed as a real figure too.

Was William Shakespeare a real person?

Just for fun, I searched for “Was Shakespeare a real person?” I wasn’t too surprised to find out that numerous Shakespeare doubters are out there on the blogosphere too. As a high school English teacher who has taught units on Hamlet, Macbeth, Julius Caesar, Romeo and Juliet and The Tempest, I am familiar with the popular yet spurious idea that Shakespeare did not write his own plays.

The evidence that Shakespeare was an actor and a playwright who lived in the late 16th and early 17th centuries is overwhelming. Since Shakespeare has become renowned as the world’s greatest writer in any language, there is understandably a thirst for more information about his personal life than we have available. However, there was no E! television in the 1600s to chronicle the personal foibles of famous actors and play writers. Shakespeare was one of hundreds of other actors and playwrights in London.

Therefore, little is known about his personal life. He left no Memoirs but we know quite a bit of biographical information including his date of birth and death, his family background, and the names of his wife and children. He was not a self-promoter like his contemporary, Ben Johnson, who although stingy in his description of other playwrights, predicted that Shakespeare would become known as the greatest writer calling his plays “not of an age, but for all time.” A more reliable witness than Johnson cannot be hoped for since he knew Shakespeare closely and the Bard even acted in Johnson’s plays.

Shakespeare still has enough contemporary corroboration to prove that he wrote about 37 plays. Some are doubted as “apocryphal” and it is thought that playwrights often culled lines and refined their stories from works of other writers, but it is certain that the work entitled the plays of William Shakespeare were both penned and at times performed by a man by that name who was born at Stratford on Avon, married Anne Hathaway at age 18, had three children, and so on.

As Mark Twain supposedly quipped, “William Shakespeare did not write the plays attributed to him; they were written by someone else with the same name.”

The same could be said of the Apostles, "If Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, James, Peter, Paul and Jude did not write the books and letters that bear their name, then the New Testament was written by eight other men by the same name who were contemporary witnesses to the events they described."

So … Did Jesus Exist?

Not surprisingly, when we compare the vacuous arguments of the Shakespeare doubters with those of the Jesus mythists, they are similar. The intellectual quality of this theory is aptly described here:

A woman from New England named Delia Bacon who taught Shakespeare in school went to England in 1853 to try to dig him up to prove that there was no body in his grave, just a bag of rocks. She went to his grave at night with shovel in hand, but the British authorities, in furtherance of the scheme or conspiracy to hide the fact that there was no Shakespeare, stopped her from digging him up…. An additional factor was that the tombstone of Shakespeare specifically states that under no circumstances should this grave be dug up. His tombstone reads: "Good frend for Jesus sake forebeare, To digg the dust enclosed heare. Blese be ye man that spares the stones, And curst be he that moves my bones." Why would a gravestone possibly contain such an injunction? The answer must be that, in reality, there are no bones in that grave.

Follow here the faulty logic. Since no one has ever dug up Shakespeare’s bones, the bones must not exist, therefore Shakespeare did not exist. This argument too, is similar to the level of logic used by the Jesus Mythists.

Gary Lenaire writes in An Infidel Manifesto: Why Sincere Believers Lose Faith:

Roman records give us no verified indication of an arrest or crucifixion of Jesus.

Again, here is a doubter using the argument from silence fallacy. There are no “Roman records” of Jesus arrest and execution, therefore Jesus did not exist. The claim is that there is a glaring hole in the “Roman records of crucifixions” where Jesus ought to be. To make such a claim then there should be some records of other crucifixions from the time when Jesus would have been crucified. The problem with this is that we have no Roman records of any first century Jew’s crucifixion during this time. Josephus and Philo record that there were many crucifixions under Pilate and later rulers, but there are no Roman records that exist today.

Likewise, the claim that “none of the contemporary historians of Jesus mentioned Him,” necessitates at least one extant eyewitness history of Palestine in the three years that Jesus ministered. If people were not living in Palestine or the immediate vicinity, they never would have heard of Jesus until Christianity began to spread in the decades that followed. That much ought to be obvious, but I am amazed at how often people unthinkingly swallow this line with no clue as to why it’s unreasonable.

This illustrates one of the reasons why the Jesus Myth fallacy is experiencing a resurgence in popularity. We live in a postmodernist era. Few people are trained to think logically. So ironically, we have a group calling itself the Rational Responders (the promoters of the Blasphemy Challenge videos on YouTube) whose arguments against the existence of Jesus are the most irrational lines of logic one could ever come up with. Therefore, their critics, some of whom are atheists, have taken to calling them the "Irrational Responders." In fact, if I had to come up with a worse argument to convince people of their position, I’d be hard pressed to do it.


This leads me to believe that their modus operandus is intentional. Like the Blasphemy Challenge, the goal is not to get people to think, but to create a band wagon appeal, “Look, everyone is blaspheming God, so you should too. Look, no rational person thinks that Jesus was a real person any more. Neither should you.”

The goal is not to get atheists to feel safe about coming out of the closet, as they claim, but rather to enrage Christians with sibilant screeds against Jesus’ existence. This is the way that postmodernist thinking works. It’s mainly an appeal to emotion and consensus. And the information revolution has only made it worse. If there are a thousand blogs, websites and YouTube comments out there all telling the same lie, then pretty soon people will start to believe it.

Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s minister of propaganda in Nazi Germany, understood this tactic well:

If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the state can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie.

There is one of two things going on. The new generation of atheists has either lost the ability to reason, or they understand that there is no need to construct logically coherent arguments in order to get people to jump on the blasphemy bandwagon. Unlike the time of Nazi Germany, however, they don’t need to shield people from reality. They can simply rely on the fact that most people of the postmodernist worldview are motivated by emotional gratification – they believe only what backs up their mental grid rather than a critically formulated and coherent worldview based on factual data.

Hitler and Goebbels would be impressed.

Jesus, Mohammed, Shakespeare: Did they really exist? (part 2)

The “New” Skepticism

Even though the vast majority liberal scholars have rejected the Jesus as myth hypothesis it has been popularized in numerous books written by authors such Earl Doherty, Timothy Freke and Peter Gandy. More strident in the promotion of the Jesus-as-myth hypothesis are several young, uneducated atheists, who are usually former religionists with an axe to grind. Groups such as the Rational Responders post V-logs on YouTube and promote with evangelical fervor that “Jesus was a myth.” The annoying part of their behavior is that they will often state their idea as though it is a widely accepted fact. They use the fallacious bandwagon appeal. I compare them to the sports pundit who wants to prove that Babe Ruth was not the most revered athlete who ever lived by arguing, “Everyone knows that baseball is not sport anyway.”

The Jesus-as-myth argument is so indefensible that that no one even ventured to propose it until the last 130 years. It should be obvious to any educated person that the argument is so barren of any depth that it should be discarded at first glance. Ph.D. candidates don’t bother doing exhaustive research on whether a universally accepted famous figure did or did not exist. Such an exercise in futility is spitting in the wind. Association with crackpot ideas – pro or con – does nothing to enhance one’s academic reputation.

Since so few accomplished historians will bother to argue against silly conspiracy theories, there are many more books written on the Jesus-myth hypothesis than there are scholarly refutations of the idea. Ridiculousness, ironically, has become its strength. In fact, I hesitate to broach the topic because attention only enhances the Jesus mythists’ credibility

A brief outline of the Jesus-as-myth argument

At the risk of making this paper tiger more ferocious in appearance, the Jesus-as-myth hypothesis may be outlined as follows.

There is not a single “eyewitness” historian who left a testimony of the events surrounding Jesus life and ministry around the year 30 A.D.

The eight New Testament writers -- Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, Paul, Peter, James, Jude -- don’t count because they were biased fanatics, fraudulent pseudonymous writers, or non-eyewitnesses.

Other first century Christian writers – Clement, Polycarp, Ignatius*, the writer of the Didache, and others – don’t count for the same reasons.

The Jewish historian Josephus doesn’t count because he was born a full eight years after Jesus died and therefore could not have known anything about Jesus.

Tacitus, Pliny, Suetonius, Talmudic Jewish writers and others don’t count because they too lived after Jesus and were not eyewitnesses.

The skeptics ignore the fact that there is not a single “eyewitness” historian who left a testimony to any of the events of 27 to 35 A.D. in first century Judea. They use the slogan, “The silence is deafening,” referring to the alleged lack of eyewitness testimony on Jesus. It is like arguing that Neil Armstrong did not land on the moon because there were no reporters physically present on the lunar surface to record the event. The fact of the matter is that there weren’t any contemporary historians who recorded eyewitness accounts of events in Judea from this time.

Only the New Testament gives us an eyewitness account from the time when Jesus and the Apostles established the church. There are no other extant writings of historians who lived in Judea in this time period. Pontius Pilate, a historical figure corroborated by archaeological artifacts, was not recorded by any first century eyewitness in any extant writing. The Jewish historian Philo, who was a contemporary of Pilate, lived in Alexandria and although he wrote about Pilate, he did not witness Jesus or Pilate first hand. But no one doubts Philo's testimony.

When the Jesus mythists refer to the lack of evidence, they are making an unreasonable demand for accounts that simply do not exist during this one decade of the first century.

____________________________________________________

* Ignatius was Bishop of Antioch from 69 to c. 96 A.D. Ignatius wrote seven letters in the first century that are considered authentic (there are later spurious letters of Ignatius as well). Ignatius of Antioch died around 96-97 A.D. as a martyr in Rome. He was the third Bishop of Antioch. When the Apostle Peter left Antioch for Rome, Evodius succeeded him as bishop. Peter was martyred in Rome under Nero around AD 66-67. Evodius was bishop of Antioch until AD 69, when Ignatius succeeded him.

Ignatius, who also called himself Theophorus ("bearer of God"), was most likely a disciple of both the Apostles Peter and John. His association with the Apostles and his vast number of quotations of New Testament scripture are proof that the canon of the New Testament was transmitted directly from James, Peter, John and Paul to bishops such as Ignatius.

Jesus, Mohammed, Shakespeare: Did they really exist? (part 1)

For about a year now, I’ve been trying to wrap my brain around the cultural phenomenon known as the “Jesus-as-myth” hypothesis. It’s an idea that is gaining steam, not with credible historians and scholars, but among “popularizers” who state categorically as fact that “Jesus never existed” on numerous websites, blogs and discussion boards. This crackpot conspiracy theory may be simply stated as follows:

“Since there was no contemporary historian living in Judea in the first century who recorded the life of Jesus, then there is no proof that Jesus existed.”

What is being contended against is not the historicity of the miraculous works, the resurrection, or the divinity of Jesus, but the very existence of a historical person named Jesus of Nazareth. The Jesus-myth hypothesis was first proposed by Bruno Bauer in a work entitled Christ and the Caesars in 1877. Prior to the 1800s, no pagan, Jewish, Muslim, or atheist critic of the New Testament ever thought to challenge the veracity of the person called Jesus. Then Bauer came along and claimed that the bulk of the New Testament was written in the late second century -- a full 150 years after Jesus lived -- and took skepticism to the next level by claiming that the very existence of Jesus was doubtful.

At the time, Bauer was thought of as a radical fringe free thinker. Even his former students, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, both atheistic communists, sought to distance themselves from his writings. The idea then gained some popularity among scholars in the early 20th century, but when serious critics began to see the solid evidence for the first century dates of New Testament books -- still interpreting them as pseudonymous works written after the time of Apostles, but accepting that they were written early enough to have been read and circulated by the earliest Christians -- they rejected Higher Criticism for a modified form of liberalism.

The works of Bauer and the German Higher Critics were not respected even in their own day, even by atheists and skeptics such Mark and Engels. Most of their works have never been translated into English. One liberal theologian, Dr. John Henry Ludlum, one of the greatest linguistic scholars ever to come out of Yale University, began to study the Higher Critics in German only to see that the whole thrust of their work as baseless conjecture to support a political agenda of anti-semitism. In fact, Bauer and several of the 19th century German critics sought to prove that Christianity could not have had its roots in Semitic Judaism. Therefore, the Jesus-as-myth hypothesis has had a serious credibility gap even among liberal theologians.

To sum up, modern critical methods fail to support the Christ myth theory. It has 'again and again been answered and annihilated by first rank scholars.' In recent years, 'no serious scholar has ventured to postulate the non historicity of Jesus' or at any rate very few, and they have not succeeded in disposing of the much stronger, indeed very abundant, evidence to the contrary. - Michael Grant, Jesus: An Historian's Review of the Gospels (Scribner, 1995).

There are those who argue that Jesus is a figment of the Church’s imagination, that there never was a Jesus at all. I have to say that I do not know any respectable critical scholar who says that any more. - Burridge, R & Gould, G, Jesus Now and Then, Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2004, p.34.

Special deal on Amazing Grace (DVD)

Amazing Grace: The History and Theology of Calvinism, is a DVD produced by The Apologetics Group. I recently helped to remaster the DVD and I have about 100 copies on hand for the special price of $12.95 -- a great deal for a four and a half hour presentation.

Here's a description of the video and ordering information.

Amazing Grace:
The History and Theology of Calvinism (DVD)
Two discs, three parts, over four hours of instruction!

Just what is “Calvinism?” Does this teaching make man a deterministic robot and God the author of sin? What about free will? If the church accepts Calvinism, won’t evangelism be stifled, perhaps even extinguished? How can we balance God’s sovereignty and man’s responsibility? What are the differences between historic Calvinism and hyper-Calvinism? Why did men like Augustine, Luther, Calvin, Spurgeon, Whitefield, Edwards and a host of renowned Protestant evangelists embrace the teaching of predestination and election and deny free will theology?

This is the first video documentary that answers these and other related questions. Hosted by Eric Holmberg, this fascinating three-part, four-hour presentation is detailed enough so as to not gloss over the controversy. At the same time, it is broken up into ten “Sunday-school-sized” sections to make the rich content manageable and accessible for the average viewer.

Part One explores the history of the debate. It begins with the pivotal dispute between Augustine and Pelagius and continues through the semi-pelagian controversy; focusing particularly on the debate between Martin Luther and Desiderius Erasmus. The history section ends with a definitive historical explanation of the issues that arose during the Calvinist/Arminian controversy. By examining the five points of Arminianism and the Synod of Dort’s response, the viewer will clearly see that the Protestant Church understood how the Gospel would be compromised if Arminianism prevailed.

Part Two opens the Word of God, our ultimate authority for life and faith. The five points of Arminianism are put on trial as what would later come to be known as the “five points of Calvinism” are clearly and forcefully presented.

Part Three asks and answers the provocative question: If Calvinism is true, if God is absolutely sovereign; then why should we evangelize? It also explores the vital issue of how to and to whom the gospel should be presented so as to be faithful to the great doctrines of God’s sovereignty, man’s depravity, and the miracle of amazing grace.

Rich in graphics, dramatic vignettes, and biblical analogies, this presentation also features many of the finest reformed thinkers and pastors of our time: Dr. R.C. Sproul, Dr. D. James Kennedy, Dr. George Grant, Dr. Stephen Mansfield, Dr. Thomas Ascol, Dr. Thomas Nettles, Dr. Roger Schultz, Pastor Walt Chantry, Dr. Joe Morecraft, Dr. Ken Talbot, Pastor Walter Bowie and Dr. R.C. Sproul, Jr.

Two discs, three parts, over four hours of instruction. Price: $12.95

Was there really a "Massacre of the Innocents" in Bethlehem around the time of Jesus' birth?

According to Matthew chapter 2, in the days of Herod the Great, astrological portents brought Magi from the east naively inquiring about a newborn King. Ironically, this triggered a reaction from Herod that closely resembled the events surrounding Augustus Caesar's own birth.

Most liberals will say that the so-called "Massacre of the Innocents" is a myth. However, they are using the "argument from silence" fallacy. There is only one account of this isolated event in a small country that isn't recorded elsewhere. But that doesn't disprove Matthew's account by any stretch of the imagination. In fact, the massacring of infants was a common practice in Roman days.

According to Julius Marathus, a personal confidant of Augustus Caesar, the Roman Senate ordered all the baby boys killed who were born in 63 B.C. because prophetic dreams and astrological signs suggested that a "King of the Romans" was to be born.

Ironically, Augustus was born on Sept. 23 of that year! Since we only have one account of this event, do we discount this massacre as well? No, historians accept Suetonius as generally reliable.

So all things being equal, Herod's "Massacre of the Innocents" recorded in Matthew 2 is not a myth.

The following is from Suetonius, The Divine Augustus, 94:

"Since we are upon this subject, it may not be improper to give an account of the omens, before and at his birth, as well as afterwards, which gave hopes of his future greatness, and the good fortune that constantly attended him. A part of the wall of Velletri having in former times been struck with thunder