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[Jet Ski]

Of course truths are true regardless of how old they are or when they were discovered. The age of the Bible is only important because over the millenia it has been copied and translated and copied and translated from translations of translations and so on. That is a process very prone to error, don't you think? Not only because humans make mistakes, but because it's possible that some people willingly changed a few words, a sentence here or there or even added or removed a whole paragraph to make it fit there personal interpretation of the events. Perhaps they even made something up entirely to make it a better, more appealing story in their eyes. Do you agree that all of this could be the case?

[jimwalton]

Sounds great. I'm always glad to discuss. You're right that when there are multiple topics on the table, the discussion gets messy and too large to manage well. We can discuss what you wish when you wish.

You should know that, in contrast to you, I'm very much deeply convinced of the truth of Christianity and that it gives us truth that is the foundation for all truth. Just putting all the cards on the table.

You first want to discuss the Bible and its reliability as a source of knowledge. Glad to.

> The age of the Bible is only important because over the millenia it has been copied and translated and copied and translated from translations of translations and so on. That is a process very prone to error, don't you think?

Much work has been done on the accuracy of the copying of the Bible. The result from those studies have been that we can be confident that the version of the Bible we hold in our hands is so accurate as to be considered virtually identical to the autographs (the original writings themselves). First of all, for a millennia the earliest copy of the Old Testament we had was the Masoretic text, circa AD 970. Suddenly in 1946 the Dead Sea Scrolls were found, with copies or pieces from every Old Testament book except Esther, written in about 150 BC. By studying and comparing the documents we are able to see that discrepancies in the texts 1000 years apart are so minimal as to be almost miraculous. The painstaking work of scribes through the years yielded a minimum of errors.

Secondly, the abundance of NT manuscripts and fragments (over 5800) give us so much material to work with, with known dates, comparing and criticizing, that we can establish a better than 98% accuracy rendering of the NT text. Almost all of the discrepancies are discernible spelling errors and obvious scribal mistakes that are easily sorted out. Of all the discrepancies, less than 50 amount to anything, and even of those 50 not one of them affects any theology—what we believe. Therefore, we can be confident that we have an accurate text.

> Not only because humans make mistakes, but because it's possible that some people willingly changed a few words, a sentence here or there or even added or removed a whole paragraph to make it fit there personal interpretation of the events.

Because of the abundance of manuscripts, we know this editing was not the case. There are several other pieces of this pie you need to recognize.

1. Manuscripts, like our books, could and did last for centuries. We are not to think these things appeared and then were gone. They were around for so long there was a continuity of content.

2. There were so many manuscripts that it would be impossible to change a few words, a sentence here or there, or even a whole paragraph that would affect all of them. There were many copies, spread out over the Roman Empire. A change in one would not create change in any of the others. So as we examine those manuscripts, we can see where one may have entered an edit that was not part of the original, and we can know what the original said.

There are scholars who work on this material continually. We have great confidence in the authenticity of the text in our hands.

> Perhaps they even made something up entirely to make it a better, more appealing story in their eyes.

There's no evidence of this. The texts both corroborate and support each other in their similarities and differences. There is no evidence that anyone made anything up to make it a better, more appealing story.

I'll be glad to hear your reply and to keep discussing.

[Jet Ski]

Are you a professional Bible scholar of some sort or did you just read up on all this? I really don't know anything about it and it would probably take years to study it in a satisfactory manner. So I'll simply assume that we have the original, unaltered text.

> The texts both corroborate and support each other in their similarities and differences. There is no evidence that anyone made anything up [...]

What do you mean by "support each other in their differences"?

[jimwalton]

Yes, and yes.

> What do you mean by "support each other in their differences"?

What I mean by that is that the Gospels are not rote copies of each other. They give different renditions of the same event, but those differences support the whole story rather than detract from it. It's like the police interviewing eyewitnesses to a car accident. Based on where people were they might tell different stories, but those stories mesh into a whole—they support each other in their differences to give a more complete picture than we would get from one observer.

[Jet Ski]

So there are differences but no contradictions?

[jimwalton]

I don't consider there to be contradictions because I would define a contradiction as: If you sat the two authors down at a table and had them discuss the event they would not come to agreement about it and would disagree with each other about it. I fully believe that if you sat the 4 Gospel authors down for a discussion, they would come to full agreement about what happened, which means that their accounts are differences in perspective and in emphasis but not contradictions.

As readers 2000 years later, we have some difficulty reconciling the disparate accounts, but these aren't true contradictions. We just don't have all the information (yet).

[Jet Ski]

How long after the events did the gospel authors write about them? Were any of them eye witnesses?

[jimwalton]

My study has led me to the conclusion that the Gospels were written fairly early, compared to what other scholars conclude. My case is as follows:

The book of Acts doesn't mention the Fall of Jerusalem (70 AD), Nero’s persecutions (mid-60s), the martyrdoms of James (61), Paul (64), and Peter (65), the Jewish war against Rome from 66 on. All of this is very odd for a book about the early church purportedly written, according to many scholars, in the 70s. In addition, many of the expressions in Acts are very early and primitive. Acts doesn't deal with issues that were particularly important prior to Jerusalem's fall in AD 70. These facts would indicate that Acts was written in the very early 60s.

Since Acts is a two-part work, if it were written in the early 60s, that would mean Luke was probably written in the very late 50s or in 60.

Since Luke is based on Mark, that puts Mark in the 50s, where some resources from the early church put it. That most likely also puts Matthew in the very late 50s or very early 60s.

As far as eyewitnesses, there are good reasons to think that Matthew, Mark, and John were written by eyewitnesses. I have extensive lists about such things, but I don't just want to dump them on you unless you want to see them.

If the Gospels were written in the late 50s, that puts them 30 years after the life and ministry of Jesus. That's like us talking about 1988 and the presidency of Ronald Reagan. There are plenty of people around who were alive in 1988 (even Madonna and Cyndi Lauper!) who know the era and events well. Plenty of eyewitnesses for research, to confirm events, etc.

[Jet Ski]

Interesting. You say Luke is based on Mark. Are the other accounts also based on it as well? Basically, was there one original account that everyone else based their account on, or were some of them created completely independent of one another?

[jimwalton]

It it thought that Mark was the first Gospel written, and that Mark used a document we call "Q" as a source along with possibly the logia of Matthew (something Papias tells us in about AD 125). But no evidence of Q has ever been found. In any case, it is thought, then, that Matthew and Luke used Mark as one source among others as they wrote their Gospels. But if the logia of Matthew was one of Mark's sources, then Matthew was tapping into his own source as he cut and pasted some of Mark's stuff. Those three Gospels are called the "Synoptic Gospels" because of their direct interrelatedness. Regardless of their similarities, they are all quite different perspectives on the life of Jesus.

The Gospel of John is completely independent of the other three.