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- If God could speak, what would he say?

What would he tell us about the world?

What would he tell us about himself?

If God could speak, how would he speak?

Would he tell us everything at once?

Would he have an angel bring heavenly books to Earth?

If God could speak, would we understand?

Would his language be so far beyond us,

would his intention be impossible to see?

When God speaks, what does he say?

- The Bible's a revelation of the character

and the will of God.

It tells us who he is and how we can live

in a relationship with him.

That's the primary thrust, I think, of the Bible.

It's interesting the Bible starts in Eden

and it ends in Eden, so it's all about living

in a relationship with him, and what that looks like.

- When we ask the question what the Bible is,

the best way to say it is the Bible

is God's written relation to his people.

Now, God reveals himself in all kinds of ways,

and he actually speaks in ways outside the Bible,

in days of old to prophets and to the people of God,

and so you'd hear the voice of the Lord

and call it the word of the Lord,

but over time, that became inscripturated,

became written down into his word,

and over time we've collected the books

that contain those words into 66 smaller books

that collectively we call the Bible.

- The Bible is a collection of divinely-inspired texts

that document not only what God has done throughout history,

but also what that means.

So it interprets what those events mean.

- You have a book written by 40-some authors

over 1,500-plus years, and dozens of different topics

that have absolute unity.

Most of the people didn't know each other who wrote it,

so it has amazing unity within great diversity,

which is best accounted for by deity.

- But here we have this grand narrative that is meant

to bring us back into fellowship with him.

To bring us into a harmonious fellowship with one another,

where we live together, reflecting his character.

And ultimately, a redeemed humanity

in a new heaven and a new Earth.

- Here is the one who made us, addressing us about how

life should be lived and how we should approach life.

It's full of wisdom.

It's full of discernment.

It's full of direction and guidance.

In some cases, correction.

And so, I think to get a good look at who we really are,

as people, the image and metaphor that's used about

the Bible is that it's a good mirror.

It helps us to see things as they really are.

- I often tell people that one of the ways

that I know that the Bible is true

is the way that it diagnoses my sin.

I'm often reading through a passage and I'm thinking:

this was written 3,000 years ago,

and yet it perfectly diagnoses the state

of the sin of my heart.

How could human beings have been able to do that?

And the only way that can happen is if my creator

is actually the author of the book.

- We read books so that we might understand them.

But when we read the Bible, we realize that it is describing

who we are and what we are.

It's also unique in that it provides the only satisfying

answer to the question of our human existence.

It tells us why we're here and where we're going.

And why it matters.

- You need God, specifically, in propositional language,

telling us certain facts about reality, including himself.

You can get some of those facts from nature,

but you can't get all of them.

You can't get that God is triune,

you can't get the plan of salvation from the stars.

You can only get it from special revelations.

So if we're gonna be saved and sanctified,

we need the scriptures.

- The study of the word of God, at any level,

is the study of God, himself.

There's some kind of identity between God and his word,

and yet, to say that the study of the word

as words and propositions on a page,

is not an end in itself, because it's to drive us to Christ.

To God, himself.

- In the upper room, in the great intercessory prayer,

Jesus prayed for the sanctification of his disciples,

and he said: sanctify them by thy word.

That's the means by which we are sanctified.

Then he went on to say: thy word is truth.

- So the scriptures should dominate

everything that the church does.

It shouldn't be an aside to what the church does.

The foundation of what the church should do

should be about advancing the message of scripture.

- Where you find a healthy biblical church,

by definition, you're going to find a church happily,

faithfully, living under the authority of that word.

Understanding that the most historic formula

for the Christian church has been this:

when the scripture speaks, God speaks.

And if you understand that rightly,

then everything else simply falls into place.

- Language is an incredible mystery, really.

What is it that makes human beings

able to communicate in word?

Personally, I think that is the image of God in us.

Because God speaks right at the beginning of the Bible.

God spoke the world into existence.

- You know, you think about words and whether or not

their important, and we realize we can't even have

a conversation without words.

What's really interesting is that we can't

even think to ourselves without words.

We can't explain ourselves to ourselves without words.

Now, that's either an accident of evolutionary biology

and development, or it is evidence

to the fact that God made us in his image.

And so, here the Bible tells us that we are

God's creatures, made in his image.

And what distinguishes us from other creatures?

Well, at least in part the use of words.

- And because he's made himself accessible,

through speaking to us and through the display

of his character in what he's made,

he's made himself accessible, that means that truth,

also, is accessible.

Now, that includes ordinary truths like two plus two

is equal to four, but it also includes the truths

about who God is, that he's everlasting,

that he's all powerful, that he's supremely good.

- So for God to speak is for God to engage

in self-revelation; we only know God

because God has condescended to speak to us.

So one of the first things we say about God

is that he is a speaking God.

We would not know him, except that he speaks to us.

- And the beautiful thing, really,

what makes life worth living and gives us

the ability to, with hope, with joy,

with tenacity, make it through the valleys of life,

is the fact that the eternal god who created us

can be personally known.

He's with us, and according to one passage of scripture

in Hebrews, chapter 13, if we will commit our lives to him,

he will never, never leave us or forsake us.

- The Bible is essentially God's self-revelation,

and God doesn't just reveal himself

in terms of what you must do.

That is the consequence of who he is,

and the way in which he wants us to understand his world.

- If God created us,

then he sets the terms of his revelation.

What we know, when we know it, how it is revealed,

it's all dependent on him.

But it seems so strange.

An eternal God, tying himself to human history?

Illustrating his character in law, prophecy and wisdom?

What happens when he appears?

When he steps down into history and speaks?

- You know, the question that always exists in people's mind

is simply this: what is God like?

And are there many gods, or is there one God?

Of course, left on our own, all of these are mysteries.

What you have at Sinai is very remarkable.

You find, for example, that the people were to stand back.

God says: stand back.

No animal was even to touch the mountain.

If an animal touched the mountain,

it was to be put to death, but not directly

with the human hand; it was to be shot with an arrow.

Because God says: I'm coming, stand back.

Get out of the way.

What God was revealing there was his holiness.

So when we think of the 10 commandments,

they were not simply given for a certain point in time.

They really are, let me use the word omnitemporal.

By that I mean they exist as the basic law of God,

throughout all eras.

And God is really saying, in the 10 commandments,

this is what I'm like.

- And so there's no other words

like them in all of scripture.

Jesus speaks in the New Testament, God's,

but nowhere else does God thunder words

to the entire congregation of the people of God.

These obviously are of fundamental importance

to God's covenant with these people.

- God speaks in an audible voice to the people,

but then he writes it down in the 10 commandments

in written form; it was written the first time

by the very finger of God, God himself did the writing.

That's hammering home the fact that this original writing

was the very word of God, and had the authority

of the same God who spoke in thunder and fire

at Mount Sinai, but that written form of the 10 commandments

was the first piece of what we call canon.

That is, it's the body of things that God set aside,

of his own word, for impermanent form.

There's some things that God said that he said

to particular people, and they weren't recorded

in written form for posterity.

That's okay; there are many things, for instance,

in Jesus's earthly life that he taught.

Not all of those have been written down.

It would be overwhelming if we had all of those.

But God purposed that there would be a selection

of those things that would be there in permanent form.

- If God wrote a book,

would it be a history book?

The transcendent being interacting with creatures

who are separated by sin, distanced by unbelief.

What would he write about these people?

Would bh paint grand pictures?

Would he hide the embarrassing details?

Is human experience beyond him?

- It's been said that the Bible is not a book

that man would write, if he could write,

or could write if he would write.

Every now and then, I'll be in a debate

at a university, and someone will say:

well, the Old Testament is merely pro-Israeli,

Zionistic propaganda.

It's just the Jewish people were trying

to feel good about who they were.

But that claim falls apart upon closer look

at the content, because look, you've got

one of the greatest kings of Israel, David,

was an adulterer.

Abraham twice lied about the identity of his wife.

So one of the things that bears the ring of truth

is the thing that we probably would have excluded,

had the Bible been a merely human invention.

The sin, the foibles, the failures

of many of the Bible's great figures,

we probably would have left out.

- The Bible's appeal to prophecy and fulfillment,

before and after, all of that depends

on historical progress, on continuity,

on the sequence of time.

So God himself doubtless inhabits eternity,

and is, in some sense, above space and time.

In that sense, he's transcendent.

That's what we mean by transcendent:

not limited by space and time.

Yet, at the same time, he discloses himself to us

in space and time, that is to say, in history.

- Now, one of the things to understand about the Bible

is that it talks about God's plan through the ages.

And we call it: redemptive history.

And the Bible is intrinsically

connected to that, in two ways.

One is that it gives a lot of attention to explaining

how God was dealing with the human race,

from creation onwards, the fall into sin,

and then various periods of redemption.

So it talks about redemptive history,

but the second way is that it's given,

progressively, in history.

God didn't have it just drop from heaven,

at one point in time.

There's some people who practically treat it

as if it was that way; it is a book from God.

But it's a book where he addresses people

where they are in history,

and he doesn't reveal everything all at once.

His plan of redemption keeps pace

with his speaking about redemption.

- Redemptive history moves forward,

through prophets, priests, and kings,

to an ultimate prophet, priest, and king.

But people need proof.

How can we be confident that Jesus is the fulfillment?

How do we see it the way his

earliest followers would see it?

- When Jesus came and the disciples preached,

there wasn't a New Testament to appeal to.

They were dealing with promises that were coming

out of the Old Testament, tied to the great covenants.

The covenant of Abraham, that God was gonna bless

the world through Abraham's family.

The covenant to David that there would be a king

and a line of kings that would represent the way of God,

and then finally, the new covenant,

the idea that God was gonna write his law on our hearts,

put his spirit within us, and that we were gonna do that

in the context of having our sins forgiven.

And the story of Jesus steps into those promises,

made centuries before, and addresses really the reconnecting

of God to us in what had been a broken relationship.

- You know, the very first book of the New Testament,

Matthew, opens with the genealogy of Jesus.

And the purpose of that genealogy is to affirm

that Jesus is the fulfillment

of the whole Old Testament story.

It's crafted very, we could go into detail,

but there's not time, very carefully crafted,

to show that he fulfills the whole history of Israel,

the whole story of the Old Testament.

As we look through the New Testament,

I mean, he fulfills everything in the Old Testament.

He is the revelation of God that fulfills

God's revelation in Moses, and brings it to its completion.

He is the lamb slain from the foundation of the world,

the lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.

That fulfills all the old sacrificial system

in the Old Testament.

- I would imagine that Jesus probably knew the whole

Old Testament off by heart, so that when he, then,

in the synagogue in Nazareth says, you know,

this is about me.

He is able too say "this is about me" because he knows

what this is about, and that the prophecy of Isaiah

was revealing who and what the messiah truly is.

- I would talk about these prophecies, and a professor

would say: well, I don't believe this ever happened,

I don't think these prophecies in the Old Testament

were written down until Jesus was born,

and then they were written out so they

would coincide with his life.

I said: wow.

That's amazing, that sounds pretty good.

Unless you wanna think.

I would say: look, if you say there's not a 500-year gap,

minimum, from the completion of the Old Testament

and the time of Christ, I said, you got a problem

with the Septuagint, the Greek translation

of the Hebrew Old Testament, documented in history,

that was initiated right around 250 years before Christ.

- Well, first of all, the Septuagint is the ancient

translation of the Hebrew scriptures into Greek.

It was probably the first translation made

of the Hebrew scriptures.

It was begun in the third century before Christ,

with the Pentateuch being translated,

probably in Alexandria, Egypt.

Tradition has it that there were about 70 translators,

so it was the Bible of Greek-speaking Judaism,

before Christ came, and because Greek was the lingua franca

of the Mediterranean world, when the apostles go out

to preach the gospel, they naturally preach in Greek,

because their language, Aramaic, probably,

wasn't widely used outside of first-century Palestine.

- If the Old Testament is composed of 39 books,

written across hundreds of years

from a diversity of authors, how do we know

that these are the books that God intended?

Would Jesus even recognize

the Old Testament we hold in our hands?

- The books that were being discussed as possibly

a part of the Old Testament canon by the time

we get to the first century are books like Lamentations,

Song of Songs, Ecclesiastes, works like that.

And maybe a few other works that end up showing up

in what we call the apocrypha.

Wisdom, Sirrac, those kinds of works.

But the works that everyone recognizes were seen

as inspired and a part of the Jewish scripture at the time

include the Torah, the first five books,

Proverbs, Psalms, your major prophets,

most of your minor prophets, and so,

if we don't know the exact limits of the Old Testament canon

in the first century, which is possible,

it may be that it was already decided by then.

That's also conceivable.

That which is being excluded doesn't really represent

any significant portion of the text

that the New Testament's interacting with.

- We all know now that, if we have Catholic friends,

their Bibles will generally be bigger than ours

because they contain a number of books in the Old Testament.

Book of Maccabees, for example,

that Protestant books exclude.

And they're excluded, by and large, on the grounds

that we don't find them in the Hebrew,

they don't seem to have the kind of longstanding,

universal acceptance within the church

prior to, say, the Council of Trent,

that one expects from canonical books.

- One of the primary reasons we don't use those books,

or don't view those books as scripture,

is because Jesus and the apostles did not use those books,

or view those books as scripture.

That's a very basic way of putting it.

If those books, indeed, were viewed as scripture

and that people were using them widely as scripture

and they were considered part of the Old Testament canon,

we would have expected Jesus and the apostles somewhere,

sometime, at least once, using at least one of those books

as scripture, and the fact is,

we don't see that even a single time.

- They were respected and utilized because

they were regarded as helpful Jewish sources of material

and information, particularly about

what was called the Maccabean War,

in the case of the historical apocryphal books,

which is a very traumatic period in Israel's history,

when she was almost wiped out by Antiochus Epiphanes,

and had the Jews not won the Maccabean War,

we may not have Judaism today.

It might have been extinguished from the Earth.

- It's true that some of the apocryphal books

are found bound within some of the biblical manuscripts,

but not all of them, and not in every codex.

And I don't think that that necessarily entails

that they must be canonical.

If you look at our Bibles today, we've got,

between the cover's called the Holy Bible,

we've got essays, we've got maps,

we've got indices, we've got reader resources,

we've got study notes on the bottom of the page.

There's lots of material in our modern Bibles

that none of us would consider canonical or inspired.

- It's noteworthy, for example, that Jesus disagrees

with the Pharisees and Sadducees over a number

of different issues, theologically and doctrinally.

They debate all kinds of things, all throughout

the pages of the gospels, but one of the things

that's noteworthy is they never debate about

which books belong in the canon

and which books do not belong in the canon.

Jesus refers to the scripture, and the Pharisees

seem to understand what books he's talking about.

Jesus refers to the Old Testament writings,

Sadducees seem to be fairly content that we all agree

on which books are in and which books are out.

There's no oddity of them saying:

well, you're quoting from a book that's not in the canon.

And Jesus never says that to a Pharisee or a Sadducee,

and there seems to be every good reason to think

that that issue was relatively settled in the time of Jesus.

- You know, of course, one of the most favored verses

in all the Bible is John 1:1, where it says:

in the beginning was the word.

The Greek word is "logos".

We could say: in the beginning was logic.

And why is that word used and applied to Jesus?

As John later says in verse 14: the word became flesh.

First of all, because the word had a great meaning,

in those days, and there's some debate as to

whether or not it's based on the Greek or other meanings,

but here's the idea: Jesus is the logic

and the intelligibility of God.

- The word signifies God's self-disclosure.

The word is God's self-revelation.

It's how God makes himself known.

So it's profound and immensely significant

and actually quite logical that Christ would be called

the word made flesh, because now, visibly,

before our eyes, we have the revelation of God, himself.

- As much as I love the book of Hebrews,

if I were marooned on a desert island

and could only have one biblical book,

it would be one of the gospels.

Because it's there we meet Jesus.

It's there that the narrative, the story, the account,

of the actual incarnation of the son of God takes place.

- So he sent his son as the god-man,

just as much man as if he'd never been god,

and just as much god as if he'd never been man.

So that we could see and hear in a way that we could

comprehend the truth of God's very heart and mind.

- In order that you might know that the son of man

has authority on Earth to forgive sins,

I say to you: get up and walk.

He does something that you can see,

and links it to something you can't see.

You can't see forgiveness of sins.

You can see someone being healed.

And if that guy gets up and walks, his walk talks.

And it says: the son of man has authority

on Earth to forgive sins.

And then the context for that remark is:

but no one can forgive sins but God.

And words are cheap, I mean, they, I can utter it

and you know, then you're left with the choice

of whether to believe it or not.

But if I can show it, if I can compellingly demonstrate

that what I'm claiming might have, you know,

some avenue to the truth and be reflective

of what's going on, that's a more powerful way to do it.

So the Bible calls the miracles that Jesus does

things like signs, or powers.

Those are the words that are used to describe the miracles.

And the miracles are really what I call: power-points.

They're audio-visuals to a truth about who Jesus is,

that shows his power and authority.

- I love the beginning of the Gospel of Mark,

where Jesus stands forward and he says:

the time is fulfilled, the kingdom of God is at hand.

Repent and believe the good news.

Because there had been 400 years, essentially,

of silence in the inter-testamental period.

John the Baptist had stepped forward

and he was pointing the way, and it was all pregnant

for the appearing of this one, and the very fact

that Mark begins by Jesus reaching into the old,

in order to put himself in the present

is so wonderfully helpful.

- For him to unroll the Isaiah scroll

and explain, today, this is fulfilled in your hearing,

speaks of his own messianic identity and mission.

But also suggests that he has studied the scriptures.

Someone had taught them to him.

And he saw fit to announce his own mission and ministry

with a reference to the Bible.

If anyone could have just announced: it's me.

You don't need to read that dusty book anymore,

that old scroll, it would have been Jesus.

But he never did that, because he understood

that his ministry was an extension and a fulfilling,

but never an abolishing or an eradicating.

- I remember when I was in Bible college,

I said to myself: I can believe in the New Testament,

but it's hard for me to believe in the Old Testament.

And then I realized something.

I can't believe less than Jesus believed.

And he had absolute confidence in the Old Testament.

There's no debate about what his view of scripture was.

He says, you know, his word is true, thy word is truth.

He said that: not one jot or tittle will pass away.

To all this will, he got jot and tittle inspiration,

is what he taught.

- He never sets scripture aside.

What he did was to make very clear

that he perfectly fulfilled scripture.

And of course, he went beyond even the Old Testament law

in the Sermon on the Mount, saying: you've heard it said.

And he never reverses it, he never minimizes it.

Instead, he goes even beyond it.

You've heard it said, you shall not commit adultery.

I will tell you that if you've lusted in your heart,

you have already committed adultery.

- Our popular evangelical understanding

of Jesus and the Pharisees is this.

We think that Jesus's big message to the Pharisees is:

aw, come on guys, don't be so nitpicky.

You will never once find Jesus in the gospels

saying to the Pharisees: you care too much about the law.

Invariably, Jesus will say: you have added to the law,

and thus contradicted it.

Or he'll say: you guys make a whole lot about the law,

but you don't really follow it.

Over and over, watch him make that move.

Those are what he says.

And what is that flowing out of?

A rock-solid commitment to the sole, final authority

and sufficiency of the word of God.

What does Jesus wanna see?

The word of God as the sole, final authority

for faith and practice in the life of believers.

And he's saying Pharisees, for all the bells and whistles

that you attach to your teaching on the law,

you undermine it.

- So, every evidence is that Jesus knew our Old testament,

the books that we have, that he affirmed them as holy

scripture, along with the other Jewish people of his day,

and that from beginning to end,

he interpreted and understood his own life in that way.

He is the Messiah, he is the fulfillment

of the history of God's people in the Old Testament.

So, yes, Jesus very much affirmed the authority

of the Old Testament, so if you deny it,

you have to disagree with Jesus.

- The New Testament needed to be written because

the Old Testament hadn't completed the story.

That the timeline and the arc of God's redemptive purposes

reached a point where everybody, if you like,

was standing on their tiptoes

to see how the thing would finish.

And so, in the way that the writer to the Hebrews says,

that God, you know, has spoken in the past in various ways

and by different prophets and so on, it anticipates the fact

that that story will then come to completion.

And it's the New Testament that does that for us.

In the Old Testament, Jesus is anticipated

and in the gospels, Jesus is revealed.

In the acts, he's preached.

In the epistles, he's explained.

So, in other words, everything is just pointing forward

to that great fulfillment, which comes in Jesus.

- You have to understand, the early Jews

were not looking for a crucified messiah.

They did not expect a crucified messiah.

Even Isaiah 53, the great Old Testament text

that's thought to refer to this, right?

Early Jews didn't interpret that as a crucified messiah.

For one thing, my servant, Israel, was assumed

to be the nation of Israel, suffering for the sins

of the world, not a particular individual.

On the one hand, they had to explain this to the world.

On the other hand, they had to explain this to themselves.

Because they were not expecting this.

This was an unexpected outcome.

And let's be clear, if crucifixion was the end

of Jesus's story, there is really no good historical

explanation for why we have the gospels.

Or the rest of the New Testament at all.

There had to be a reversal of that final judgment.

- When you think about where the New Testament came from,

it came out of Judaism.

Why would these Jewish believers who thought

they were God's chosen people,

why would they invent a resurrected Jesus?

What motivation would they have for that?

Why would they invent this?

It makes no sense at all.

I mean, if one of them said:

hey, we're gonna start a new religion!

And one of the others said: we are?

Yeah!

Well, what's it gonna get us?

Well, first of all, we're gonna

get kicked out of the synagogue.

And then we're gonna get beaten, tortured and killed.

You think the other guy's gonna go: hey, great idea!

Sign me up!

No, he's not gonna say that, right?

There's no motivation for Jews

to invent a resurrected Jesus.

In fact, let me put it this way,

because I hear some people out there thinking

that the New Testament writers invented the resurrection.

No, the New Testament writers did not invent

or create the resurrection.

The resurrection created the New Testament writers.

There would be no New Testament

unless there was a resurrection.

- The resurrection is God's amen to Christ's atoning work.

It is the signal evidence that what Jesus has accomplished

has been, if you like, ratified by the Father.

That what God the Father, if you like, has planned

that God the Son has procured.

And the resurrection is the signal to the entire world

that the mission upon which Jesus has embarked

has actually been accomplished.

- So we're not just talking about a reversal of death.

We're talking about a whole new kind of life.

That he gets by means of resurrection,

and that's what the earliest writers about Jesus

were trying to make clear, is this is not just

a kindness or a mercy of God on Jesus.

No, this is a vindication of who he was

and of his claims and you need to pay attention now.

- The First Corinthians 15, I mean, that is a,

a text that has a robust resurrection theology,

where Paul says on multiple occasions

that Jesus died and was raised according to the scriptures,

according to the scriptures, according to the scriptures.

And he suggests that there was a real, physical,

bodily resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead.

And without that, there is no Christian faith.

In my view, it is theological insanity.

And an exegetical suicide to argue that there is

no real resurrection of Jesus from the dead,

it's something spiritual, Jesus lives in the heart

of his people; that belief does not save anybody.

- If Jesus's Bible only consisted

of the Old Testament, why do we need the new?

When was the story written down?

Why was the story written down at all?

How do sinful people write

the undefiled words of transcendence?

If memories fade, people exaggerate,

and events get misinterpreted,

if the New Testament is true,

how could we know?

- You know, there's a difference between

what happened two days ago, which was just a benign event,

and what we call psychologically, an impact event.

An impact event is something that impacts you

so dramatically, you'll never forget what happened.

Like, for example, where were you

when the second plane hit the tower?

Right, right now as we record this, that was 15 years ago.

But I can remember what happened exactly.

I remember who I was talking to,

and what I was saying, and what he was saying to me.

And the question is: do you think

a resurrection would have been an impact event?

Do you think if Jesus really rose from the dead,

that would have had an impact on the people that saw him,

after he had resurrected?

Yeah, they would have remembered that til their grave.

So I don't have any doubt that even if the eyewitnesses

wrote it down 20 years later or 30 years later,

doesn't matter; they remembered it.

- The reason to not just rely on oral tradition,

and to actually write down a gospel,

like the earliest gospel, probably the Gospel of Mark,

the reason to do that is because you're losing

the living voice, you're losing the eyewitnesses.

So there is this huge impetus in the second half

of the first century AD to produce documents

that would allow us to not lose the memory

of what Jesus was like, what he did, what he said,

and what his earliest followers were like, as well.

And that's really the impetus behind the writing

of the New Testament, and when they got busy with it,

they got busy with it, between about 49 and about 100,

all 27 documents of the New Testament

seem to have been written.

- When we think in terms of authorship of the Bible,

we have essentially a dual authorship.

So it's true to say that Paul wrote Romans.

It's equally true to say that God wrote Romans.

And the great wonder of it is that without any violation

of Paul's personality or his intellect,

God, through the instrumentation of the Holy Spirit,

both provided Paul and enabled Paul to write as he wrote.

And that would be true for all the Bible authors.

- When David writes Psalm 23, it's not as if he came in

after a hard day's work and was about to fall asleep

when a voice spoke to him out of the gloom and said:

not yet, David, pick up your stylus.

I've got some dictation for you.

And then God said: the Lord, the Lord,

is my, is my, shepherd, shepherd.

I shall lack nothing, I shall lack nothing.

There's no way in God's green Earth

that Psalm 23 was written that way.

It was spoken out of the fullness of David's experience,

both as a believer and as a shepherd.

And he thought about these things, turned them over

in his mind, and he picked up his stylus and he wrote.

Nevertheless, scripture insists that God so worked

through such forms of inspiration that the result

was nonetheless, the word of God.

- I think, on the other end of that spectrum,

perhaps, we also can't get too loose between the text

of scripture and the meaning of scripture.

That those words really are there for a reason,

and they're not dictated, but that doesn't mean

that we can just kind of loosely paraphrase

or understand the text.

That we do have to respect what

the biblical authors actually wrote.

- Of course, the Christian claim from the start

is that this is a supernatural event.

We don't believe that it just happened to work out

that human beings wrote down perfect words.

Or that they just tried a lot and eventually got it right,

or something like this, no, we believe that God

superintended the whole process by his Holy Spirit.

And this is why, a common complaint by non-Christians

and by critics of Christianity often misses the point.

People would say: well, you can't believe the Bible

is the word of God, because it was written by men.

But of course, that presumes the non-Christian view

of the way it happened.

That's not the Christian claim.

The Christian claim is that, wasn't just that it was

written by men, our claim is that it was written

by men who were carried along by the Holy Spirit.

And it's that second step that's so key.

- Behind your doctrine of scripture is the doctrine of God.

And behind the product of scripture is the activity of God.

The scripture is the product of God, the Holy Spirit.

Which is why God, the Holy Spirit, uses it in conversion

and in sanctification.

So what we believe about the Bible

is based on what we believe about its source.

And because we believe God to be the author of the Bible,

we talk about the quality of the Bible as inspired,

or God-breathed.

- Paul's letters were written somewhere between

about 49 and maybe 63 or 64 AD.

Not a big timeline.

But that's almost half the New Testament.

13 of the documents of the New Testament are attributed

to Paul, and they are by consensus the earliest

New Testament documents.

So we don't have any documents that are, today,

part of the New Testament, from before about 49.

- Even the Atheists admit that Paul is writing

First Corinthians in about 55 AD, and we can date that

from an archeological discovery in Delphi in Greece,

and we can date all of Paul's missionary journeys

from that archeological inscription,

and we're almost certain that Paul is writing

First Corinthians in either 55 or 56 AD.

I think Collin Hemmer's work, who is a Roman historian,

I don't even think he was a Christian,

he wrote a book called, back in the late '80s,

called: Acts in the Setting of Helenistic History.

In which he makes, in my view, a very persuasive case

that Acts, the Book of Acts, had to be written by 62 AD.

In fact, he gives a number of reasons in the book.

If Acts is 62 AD, that means Luke has to be prior to Acts.

Because Acts is Luke's second work.

And then if Luke is written, say, sometime in the 50s,

it appears that Luke, maybe one of his sources is Mark.

Which means Mark is prior to Luke, so you're very early now.

You're in the early 50s, maybe 40s.

- So the bulk of the New Testament is said to be written

from the end of the 40s, 49 thereabouts,

all the way up to the last decade of the first century,

and you're dealing with a period

of about 50 years from start to finish.

- I would say that Mark is our earliest gospel.

That yes, Matthew and Luke used the vast majority of Mark.

There's 95 percent of Mark is in Matthew's gospel,

but Matthew was not just copying Mark,

he added another 50 percent to his document

from various other sources.

So he was using a variety of sources

to produce his document.

And under the inspiration of God, each one wanted

to present a slightly different portrait of Jesus.

- It's not as if, let's say, Matthew says

that Jesus is the king in the line of David.

He emphasizes that, even in the beginning of his gospel.

Is that incompatible with John, who emphasizes

that Jesus is the revelation of God the Father?

Well, no, they're both true, right?

But they're complementary.

- What's hard for people to remember is,

is that when you wrote a gospel and you did it

on a running scroll of papyrus, if you wanna think about

it that way, there's a certain length that,

oftentimes, is the maximum that you can deal with,

and particularly when we get into Matthew, Luke,

and John, our longer gospels,

they're running up into those limits.

And so that impacts how much detail they communicate

about the stories that they present.

- Still another issue is in recorded speech.

Because some people expect that recorded speech

will be verbatim accurate.

It will be like a court stenographer

who just takes down every word, exactly.

- If we did most preaching classes

and used the Sermon on the Mount as an example,

most of our church services would be very short.

Because you can read through the Sermon on the Mount

in five to seven minutes.

What we know is that Jesus spoke to people all day.

And you know, when you bring a crowd out from the city

to come sit in the fields, and listen to a teacher,

he isn't speaking for just five to seven minutes.

So there are cases where you may not be getting always

the exact words of Jesus, you may be getting a summary

of something that he actually spent a much longer time

talking about, and you may be getting snippets of that,

or a summary of that, that's boiled down into,

you know, into a package-able length,

given everything else that's going on in the gospel.

- We need to stop thinking about the gospels

as if they were like modern photographs.

They're not.

They're like portraits.

And portraits are inherently, interpretive.

They're not just history, they are interpreted history.

History from a particular theological and ethical angle.

And this is true of all four gospels.

It's not just true about John, which is highly theological.

All four gospels provide us with a theological

interpretation of the historical figure, Jesus.

And we may be thankful to have four of them

that have differences of angles of incidence.

And yet recognizably, it's the same person.

Remember, ancient biographies,

their issue was characterization.

Who is this person, as revealed by his words and deeds?

That's what they're trying to get at.

- One of the big challenges in biblical studies today

is the very subtle suggestion that, well, it's the

theological teachings of the Bible that are inspired,

and whether any of those historical narratives

that the teachings come out of, whether they ever happened

or not, it really doesn't matter.

I wanna argue, that's absolutely wrong.

It does matter.

- The fundamental divide on the issue of inspiration

is whether it is subjective or objective.

When I was a first year PhD student in Edinburgh,

Scotland, the very first debatE that I witnessed

at the University of Edinburgh was a debate

on the topic of the inspiration of the Old Testament.

And a liberal Old Testament scholar

and an evangelical were going to have a debate.

And the moderator's first question to both of them was:

how do you define inspiration?

And Dr. Alls said: well, I believe that the Bible

is inspired because it inspires me.

Now, that is a classic subjective definition

of inspiration, in other words, whatever inspiration is,

doesn't reside in scripture, itself.

It resides in its effect on or in me.

Whereas the Bible claims an objective inspiration.

Listen again to Paul's words: all scripture is God-breathed.

It's not something that has been put into scripture.

It's not something that scripture does to me.

It is something that is inherent in scripture

because of where it comes from.

- Peter, in particular, draws this contrast

between myths, just stories, fables, legends,

versus eyewitness accounts.

He says: we saw this.

We didn't make up a story to make you feel better.

We're not just giving you, you know,

the spirit of Christmas, or the inspiration of Easter.

I was on the mountain, I saw Jesus Christ transfigured

in glory; these are things we saw with our eyes,

we heard with our ears, they happened.

You can count on them, and that sets the Bible apart

from almost everything else in the ancient world

and its religious pantheon of gods and goddesses,

because this good news is rooted in history.

Something that happened.

And based on a future that we know, then, will happen.

- One of the remarkable things about the gospels

that we have in our New Testament,

as well as the whole Bible, is that the Bible

subjects itself to historical verification.

It puts itself at risk of inquiry.

Unlike the gospel of Thomas, unlike the Koran.

Unlike the Bhagavad Gita or the teachings

of the compassionate Buddha that are talking-head theology.

The Bible says: Jesus did this at a certain place.

Here's the guy's name whom he healed.

Or here's the house where he did it at,

like in Mark two, where you had these four men

who lift parts of the thatched roof at Peter's house,

and they drop this paralyzed man right in front of Jesus,

and he heals the man and he walks out.

I've been to Peter's house, it's in Coppernium,

on the shore of the Sea of Galilee.

You can see the very place where Jesus stood

when he was lecturing to this crowd that was packed,

and the actual door that this man walked out of.

That's historically verifiable stuff.

You don't have that in these other documents.

- A faith rooted in history.

A revelation coming through human instruments.

A religion spreading through the entire region and beyond.

But we wonder: who wrote these books?

How did they spread?

Can we be confident they are the actual words

that God meant for us to have?

- The question of authorship is a common one.

If we're gonna rely on these books,

we wanna know who wrote them.

We wanna know when they were written, and whether we should

listen to the person who's names are attached to them.

Many people doubt whether we can know those things.

I don't think those things are out of the range of knowing.

In fact, we have a tremendously good amount of evidence

about the authors of these books.

And there's all kinds of ways we know who wrote these books.

Certainly, the titles attached to these books are a key part

of that evidence that go back very, very early.

When we look at the gospels themselves, for example,

we know those titles were attached probably by the end

of the first century, if not the early second century.

- There's a second-century impulse that begins

that says: add the name of an apostle to a book,

to make sure that we know that it really is by that person.

Those kinds of things we see in these apocryphal books.

The Gospel of Thomas, the Gospel of Phillip, of Mary,

of Judas, all these works ascribe authorship in the text,

not as a title above it, but actually in the text.

The New Testament gospels don't do that.

They were originally anonymous, I believe.

The ancient church fathers were unanimous that Mark

got his gospel from the apostle Peter.

And Mark was a follower of Paul, an associate of Paul's

to start with, but he got his gospel from Peter.

If you have this apostolic authorship impulse,

why isn't the Gospel of Mark ever,

ever called the Gospel of Peter?

It isn't.

So that apostolic authorship impulse is not something

that's intrinsic to the New Testament.

It's intrinsic to pseudepigrapha, apocryphal books,

books that came later.

And guys like Bart Erman, who wrote this book, Forged,

about the books that were not really written

by the people that we think they were,

he tries to argue for this apostolic authorship impulse

in the first century.

If that's the case,

why don't we have it for the gospel of Mark?

- Did Jesus change over the first

three hundred years of the church?

The depiction of Jesus?

And when you look at people who followed the apostles,

Clement, Papias, Irenaeus, these types of individuals,

Justin Martyr, these folks, when you look at their writings

you see they're given the same basic data

that the New Testament writers gave.

So you have this chain of custody,

going through the first three centuries of the church,

before we have, say, the first full copy of,

say, the New Testament or the Old Testament.

- Early Christianity was basically an evangelistic movement,

which is distinctive in early Judaism.

The other early Jewish movements like the Kumran community

or John the Baptizer, they were not evangelistic

in the sense that they were going out and getting recruits

that were non-Jews.

This is something pretty distinctive about early

Christianity is, A, it was a missionary movement,

and B, it went after Gentiles, deliberately, by intention.

So, in that kind of environment, they needed some tools

to do a better job evangelizing and teaching

in those kinds of environments,

and so the impetus to generate sources

of important material to convince both Jews

and Gentiles about Jesus was paramount.

- When it comes to the New Testament writings,

authors not only had to write a book,

and then people would read that book,

but eventually that book had to be copied

and then transmitted over time.

Obviously this was before the printing press.

This was before you could go down to your copy machine

and run off a few copies, and so if people wanted

their book to be spread far and wide,

if people wanted their book to be published, so to speak,

that book had to be copied.

- I would reckon it would take somebody, oh,

a good three or four hours to just take dictation

for a document like Romans, and then on top of that,

you'd have to produce a fair-hand copy.

That's the one that would be given.

So, from the start, there would be two copies.

The one that the scribe and the author retained,

and the one that was sent to whoever the recipients

of the document are.

It is a laborious process.

You know, if it was me, my hand would have fallen off

about halfway through the job, at best.

They, and they had to be clear.

Because without punctuation and division of words,

the capital letters had to be absolutely clear

as to what they are, and somebody

knew where to divide the words, right?

So it's an expensive process.

- The longest usable scroll that was still wieldy,

of some sort, would be no more than about 35 feet long.

And when taking the average sized lettering,

what that means is it could only contain one gospel.

The Gospel of Luke, the Book of Acts,

would be right around 28 feet long by those estimates.

You couldn't put Luke and another gospel in there.

Just Luke or just Acts.

This is why Luke himself wrote both

of these books as separate volumes.

They almost surely were written at the same time,

but because of the material that was used,

namely Papyrus scrolls, they couldn't be

bound together as a single book.

- The number two manuscript authority

in history is the Iliad by Homer.

More manuscripts are being discovered of Homer

than any other classical work.

And right now, we have about a thousand,

see, the moment I make this statement, it's obsolete.

1,820-some manuscripts of the Iliad by Homer.

But when it comes to this Bible now, and this is incredible,

it's hard to grasp, I can now document

66,000 manuscripts and scrolls of the Bible.

66,000.

- The manuscripts are divided between two different groups.

Those that are written in the original language, Greek,

and those that are written in other languages,

or translations of the Greek into other languages.

And those are typically called versions.

The vast majority of these are not complete New Testaments.

We only have about 60 that are

complete New Testament manuscripts.

But the vast majority of them also are very large.

The average Greek New Testament manuscript

is more than 450 pages long.

So they're big texts.

And we have well over two million pages

of Greek manuscripts, hand-written manuscripts,

from before the time of the printing press,

and they come pretty early on.

Starting in the second century,

we have as many as a dozen manuscripts.

The earliest, to date, is still considered P-52,

which is at Manchester University in Manchester, England.

- P-52 still stands today as one of our earliest

New Testament manuscripts, maybe even still the earliest.

Dated around 100 to 125 AD,

and it's a little fragment of John 18.

Once that manuscript was discovered,

they realized that the dating of John

had to be much earlier than even that manuscript.

Which ended up putting the dating

well into the first century.

- So it's just a small fragment.

It's about the size of a credit card.

But it proves that the Gospel of John

existed before that time.

And for almost 100 years up until then,

there was European scholarship that argued

that the Gospel of John could not have been written

before 160, and should have been written at about 170.

When this scrap of papyrus was discovered

in 1934 at Manchester University,

it sent two tons of German scholarship to the flames.

Here was an ounce of evidence that proved a pound

of presumption dead wrong.

And that's what Christians have, is we have lots

and lots of ounces of evidence.

- We have to recognize a problem.

The original autographs, written by the apostles, are gone.

Lost to time.

What we have are the thousands of copies that survive.

But is that enough?

Can we really rely on the Bible if we don't even have

the very first copies?

- One of the most common questions I receive is:

what good is a belief in an errancy if an errancy

only applies to the original autographs,

and we don't have the original autographs,

so how can we believe in an errancy.

But I think that objection makes a fundament mistake.

It assumes that, when we talk about the original text

that thinks of it as only a physical object.

As if we have to have the actual autographs

in order to have access to the original texts,

and since those physical objects are lost,

therefore we don't have access to the original texts.

But the text, itself, the words of God, themselves,

aren't necessarily a physical object

that you can put in a museum.

The words of God can be preserved in other ways,

beyond just the autographs, and we think that's happened.

- You see, the more manuscripts or scrolls that you have,

the easier it is to reconstruct the original,

called the autographa, auto-grapha,

the autographa, the original,

and check out any errors or discrepancies.

And you try through the bibliographical test

to create what is called a pure text.

What percentage of the original texts do you know,

for sure, today, what percentage is a pure text?

- The problem is, the way I like to describe it is

that we have 105 percent of the text.

We have the text as it was, and then we have the variations

that have been introduced to the text, and text criticism

is the job of trying to pare off that 105 percent

down to what we originally had.

And the places where we're not sure are noted.

I tell people, you actually have the opportunity

to be a little bit of a textural critic,

because in some places in your Bible,

in the margin note, it will say "or",

or "some manuscripts say" and that's telling you

those places that are really the most discussed.

- A lot of the people out there talking about these things

sort of give the impression that every word is questioned,

and that's just simply not true.

At any level, it's not true.

99 percent of the text is sure.

There are, yes, there are some places

in the Greek text where we scratch our heads and go:

I don't, hm, I'm not sure which one it is.

They're called C-ratings, in our Bibles.

So things like spellings.

Is it Gadarenes or Gergesenes?

Is it Bethsaida, Bethzatha, or Bethesda?

Is the form of the verb esti or estin?

Is there an N sound on the end?

It doesn't affect the meaning at all,

but we can't really tell.

A lot of that is, that's what makes up that one percent.

99 percent of the text, we're very comfortable with.

This is what was originally said,

and just as importantly, that one percent

that we're not sure, doesn't bring

any major Christian doctrine into question.

There is simply is no major, and I don't even think

any minor, doctrine that's raising the question.

I mean, not many of us are gonna go to Heaven or Hell

based on whether it's Gadarenes or Gergesenes.

- Of the hundreds of thousands of textural variants

that we actually have, the smallest group

are those that are both meaningful and viable.

It's less than one-fifth of one percent

of all textural variants, and yet these are the ones

that Christians and non-Christians always hear about.

The ones that skeptics talk about.

The ones that make the news, because they're so interesting

and they seem to destroy the Christian faith,

or uphold the Christian faith.

It's a very small fraction.

- Well, you get textural variants of all kinds.

Perhaps the two most discussed in relationship

to the gospels is the percopi, where the woman's caught

in adultery in the middle of John, John,

the last part of seven and eight,

and then the ending to the Gospel of Mark.

- The only thing that is different about that passage

is that it is a longer one.

Most textural variants are a word or two,

whereas this is a whole unit.

In both of those cases, I would argue pretty strongly

that those units were not part of the original given by God.

But if you think that they are, nothing much depends on it.

If you think that they're not,

nothing much depends on it, either.

The message of the Bible is secure in any case.

- When skeptics talk about how we can't get back

to the original texts, because we don't have the original

manuscripts, they typically have never examined

the texts of Greco-Roman literature.

If they're right, that we can't get back

to the New Testament, then we might as well kiss

the ancient world goodbye, and the Middle Ages

would still be the dark ages.

We would never have the Renaissance,

because we can't possibly tell what these ancients said.

If we're gonna be skeptical about the New Testament,

on average, we should be a thousand times

more skeptical about Greco-Roman writings.

- The textural richness of what is found

in the New Testament and now in the Old Testament

with the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls,

is really very remarkable.

It's utterly unique from documentation

from the ancient world.

So God in his providence has been wonderful

in providing so much.

We would be at fault if we criticized him

for not providing infallible copies with new miracles

every time somebody picked up a pen.

- How did the church come to embrace

these New Testament books?

Were they chosen out of a list?

Did a council determine their worth?

As the church grows and the religion formalizes,

what is the God?

Who gives authority to the Bible?

- There's a perception again, out there in the world today,

whether in popular literature or on the internet,

that there were votes that took place in councils,

and that people put, picked these books,

and that there was some shady deal going on

in a smoke-filled room where one book barely got

in by a vote and some books got out.

And I can tell you all of that is a misunderstanding

of the way things happened in the early church.

The fact of the matter is, when it comes to most

of the books of the New Testament, again,

probably 22, 23 out of the 27, there was never

any real discussion about them.

There was never any real debate about them.

There was never any sense that you had to decide

on which books these were.

These were the books that were simply handed down

to the early church, in fact, that language,

handed down, we see used in numerous places,

throughout the second century, where early church fathers

refer to these books as the books that were passed down

to them, that were given to them by the apostles,

that were ones that the church had always known.

- You have these documents produced in the first century AD.

By the second century AD, we had a collection

of the four canonical gospels,

and a collection of Paul's letters.

This we know.

In the second century AD, these were already

considered sacred texts, and you already have

house churches, where people are saying,

bishops are saying: we're not gonna read

from any text from the lectern,

or at the meeting, except our sacred texts

or the sacred texts of the Old Testament.

- There were criteria that the church used to

recognize these, and these criteria are essentially three:

apostolicity, which means the book is either written

by an apostle or an associate of an apostle.

And that's the most important criterion.

Secondly is orthodoxy.

Does the book conform to what we know to be true

from the other books that we know to be inspired?

The gospels were the very first ones, almost surely,

to be accepted.

We don't have any period when there was a time

when there was any hint that they were not accepted.

And then the third criterion is catholicity.

That doesn't mean Roman Catholic,

it means accepted by the majority of the churches.

Now, there's some that would be considered orthodox,

like the Epistle of Barnabas.

And that may be a first century document,

late first century document, but the church

recognized early on that the Epistle of Barnabas

was not written by Barnabas.

Any time the church recognized that a book

was not written by the name that it claims

to be written by, automatically it got rejected.

- When it was discovered that some deacon

had produced the letter to the Laodecians, the bishop said:

not only are we not reading these in church,

we're defrocking you for producing false documents.

- And the first person to name the books

that make up our New Testament was Athenasius,

and he did it in 367 AD in a letter on Easter,

that was written in that year.

Irenaeus, writing long before Athenasius,

talks about four gospels, he talks about Acts,

he talks about the Pauline Epistles,

he talks about First John and First Peter,

that's the bulk of your New Testament,

clearly being seen and utilized as inspired

and valuable to the church,

at the end of the second century.

But what's interesting is, if you go a little earlier,

if you go to the first part of the second century,

or the middle part of the second century,

and you read what's written there,

what you see are writers who may have access

to one gospel or two, they may have access to one,

two, or three of the Pauline Epistles,

but they aren't thinking of the New Testament

the way we think about it, because they only had

exposure and access to some of the works.

They hadn't, some of the works hadn't circulated

across the church yet.

- When you look at the state of the canon

in the early church, there's two important

facts to get right about it.

One is to recognize that very early,

there was a core collection of books

that the church recognized almost out of the gate.

What that means is, by the second century,

we've got 22, maybe 23 out of the 27 books, already there.

That's one thing to recognize, but there's a second thing

to recognize, and that is that there were

some books that were disputed.

We have some books that, you know, we can call

the books around the edges, or the peripheral books.

The smaller books that there was some more controversy about

and these would be books like Second Peter,

and James, and Jude, and Second and Third John.

And there was some controversy about some of these books.

There was some discussion about them.

The kind of books that typically

were disputed were little books.

And this is noteworthy.

Small books, for obvious reasons,

were not as impactful in the literature of the day.

They weren't read as often, they weren't as widely known.

They were cited less, so that they weren't familiar

across different geographical regions,

so it would take more time to recognize these books,

and you can understand why they

might be disputed more than others.

And here's what's interesting.

Despite occasional challenges here and there,

once the church had reached a consensus on these 27 books,

that consensus has been wide and longstanding.

And I think that's an encouraging

truth for us as Christians.

We can look at the church through the ages

with a great deal of unanimity around these books.

Not absolute unanimity, where there's never an objection

from any quarter, but a predominant unity,

which I think is evidence of the Spirit's work in the church

to receive these 27 books and just these 27 books.

- Why don't we include some of these other books,

like the Gospel of Thomas or Philip or Mary?

Or Third Corinthians, or Paul's letter to the Laodiceans?

Or the Acts of Paul or the Revelation of John?

There's a second Revelation of John,

besides the one that's in the New Testament,

or the Revelation of Peter.

Why don't we include these books in the New Testament?

There's a fundamental reason why none of those are included,

and that is: they are not first century documents.

So they could not have been written by an apostle,

or an associate of an apostle.

That right there excludes all of these documents.

- What makes Thomas such an interesting work,

we think it's a second century work of some kind,

is that it seems to have one element of sources

feeding into it that do come from Jesus,

and another set of materials

that is coming from somewhere else.

It's what I call a hybrid gospel.

And that's why it didn't make it into the canon,

is because what is represented by the hybrid

is not a representation of the kind of orthodox

Christianity the other gospels reflect.

Most scholars think that the Gospel of Thomas,

while it contains some really early material,

was not assembled until the second century, AD.

And the reason they assume that is because it seems

to know all four canonical gospels.

Well, where could a person have been

to have had access to all four

canonical gospels, together at one time?

That surely didn't happen before the second century AD.

- The Gospel of Thomas has, in its last logion,

or last saying, something that scholars are embarrassed by,

those who want it to go into our New Testament,

they're embarrassed, or they really

should be embarrassed by it.

Peter starts out bey saying,

let Mary, namely Mary Magdalene, go out from us,

because women are not worthy of the life.

And then Jesus responds and he says:

look, I'm gonna change her into a male

so she'll look like you guys,

so that she can make it into heaven just like you guys.

Because any woman who makes herself

into a male is gonna get saved.

That, really?

Is that how we should view this?

- Let me tell you how the canon

of the New Testament was not produced.

It was not produced by the Emperor Constantine,

the supposed bad guy, getting a bunch of people together

and saying: you need to get your act together.

Tell me, what are the sacred texts?

You all decide right here at the Council of Nicea,

and we're done.

The Da Vinci Code myth,

about how the New Testament was created is just that.

It's a myth; it's not historical fiction.

It's hysterical fiction.

- One main misconception is that the Council of Nicea

was where they chose the books of the New Testament canon,

and in my field, I hear that all the time.

That no one knew what books to read,

and then finally, with Constantine's help,

we got it figured out at Nicea.

That is patently false.

There is no evidence at all that the New Testament canon

was a topic of conversation at Nicea,

and so there's no reason to think Nicea really has

anything to do with what books we're reading now.

The council at Nicea was about how to best articulate

the divinity of Jesus and the humanity of Jesus,

so when we did articulate it, we made sense

and got it right and reflected the true reasons of scripture

and didn't contradict ourselves.

- When it comes to the question of the canon

of the New Testament or what books belong

in the New Testament, there are two broad views

within Christendom.

One is that it's an authoritative list of books.

The other is that it's a list of authoritative books.

If it's an authoritative list of books, then that means

there is some authority over the New Testament,

that it establishes what the New Testament is.

That's the Catholic view, that's the Greek Orthodox view.

If it's a list of authoritative books,

then there is no authority over the New Testament

that establishes the New Testament as our final authority.

Instead, it's the final authority.

- You know, I think the very first thing to recognize

about the authority of scripture is that the word "author"

is right there in the center of the word "authority".

So the foundation for the authority of scripture

can never be scripture, and it can never be the church,

even as the believing community receiving scripture.

It goes back by the very word to the author.

The ultimate author of scripture being God, himself.

- The Bible has authority in the sense

that it is the word of God.

And therefore, the authority is not so much

in the black and white letters that we are seeing

in that book, but in the God who has communicated with us.

- If you remember when Jesus was being tempted by Satan

in the wilderness, in the very first temptation,

Satan says: look, Jesus, I know you're hungry.

You've been out here fasting for 40 days and 40 nights,

and I know that you have the power to turn

those stones into bread and to sate your hunger.

And Jesus responds to Satan by quoting Moses,

from Deuteronomy: man shall not live by bread alone.

But by what?

Every word that proceeds from the mouth of God.

And I think that when Paul says:

all scripture, God breathed.

Just listen to that:

every word that comes from the mouth of God.

I think Paul has Jesus and Moses in his mind,

when he says that.

So there you see Moses view of biblical authority,

Jesus's view of biblical authority,

Paul's view of biblical authority,

in three Greek words.

- If the Bible is reliable, the questions

to the canon answered, the means of inspiration understood,

how do we interpret it?

Are there true interpretations,

or is there just a sea of opinions?

Is the Bible a book locked in mystery,

only opened to the religious elite,

or can an ordinary person sit down

and know what the living God has to say to them?

- Before the Reformation came,

a church service would have been very pedantic.

It would have been ritualistic,

and unfortunately, often, not understood.

You must understand that in Catholic theology,

the idea is that the ritual itself, the Mass itself,

has validity, and therefore people don't even have

to understand what is going on.

That's why the Mass was done in Latin.

It didn't matter if you understood it.

As long as you were there, as long as you were

participating, as long as somehow you were

spiritually connected, you did not need to know

what the words were that were being spoken.

- The Catholic church's attitude to the scriptures

in the run up to the 16th century

and during the 16th century is quite intriguing.

Certainly the intellectual hierarchy of the church

regarded the scriptures as important.

One of the reasons they weren't keen on laypeople

reading the scriptures was they regarded them

as important and had a concern that the scriptures

would be abused if they fell into the hands of laypeople.

On the other hand, however, the Catholic church,

at I believe, a demotic level, at a grassroots level,

did not have a high view of the scriptures.

The scriptures did not feature highly in the piety

of your typical parish priest.

Didn't feature highly in the liturgical practices

of the church.

There were, of course, very low literacy rates

in Europe at that time, so no book functioned

particularly significantly in the life of ordinary people.

- One of the chief things that Reformers wanted to recover

about the Bible was the sense of its clarity.

Its perspicuity.

It really wasn't a debate that the Bible was authoritative.

Everyone in Christendom understood that it was inspired

and it was infallible, or they would have used

some term similar to that, but it was often the clarity.

Do we have to rely on priests,

on a magisterium, on church tradition?

Now, we don't throw out those things.

We don't come to the scripture by ourselves.

We do want to stand on the shoulders of giants

to understand it, but of course, God wouldn't be God

and he wouldn't be good if he didn't communicate with us

in a way that we could understand,

since language is his idea anyways.

And since he saw fit to communicate and make himself known

in language, he wants to be understood.

And the doctrine of the clarity of scripture

asserts that if God wants to be understood,

he is able to be understood.

- Now, there are areas of the Bible

that are harder for us to grapple with.

You know, Peter says the same of Paul's writings.

He says, you know, some of the stuff

that he writes is not just real obvious.

Well, that's very helpful to me.

I'm glad he felt that way.

We studied Daniel recently, and Daniel,

you know, half, the second half of Daniel

was a great encouragement to me to realize that Daniel,

when he was on the receiving end of some

of these revelations actually fell on the floor

and then went to bed for two weeks

because he was so overwhelmed by it,

and he couldn't really figure it all out.

Now, that would be alarming if we were dealing

with main things and plain things,

but there are certain things that are even secrets to God,

as Deuteronomy 29:29 tells us.

You know, the things that have been revealed are there,

and with some work, with some hard work,

with some dependence upon the spirit of God,

with some help from those who are brighter than ourselves,

we'll be able to get to this.

Because the Bible actually is clear.

- Well, there are many, many wrong approaches to scripture.

Many individual examples.

For example, people sometimes cite Philippians four,

I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me.

Which warrants them to do anything they really want to do.

Or a pastor can use it: we would like you

to teach such and such a Sunday school class.

Oh, I can't do that.

Oh, you can't say "can't"; you can do all things

through Christ who strengthens you.

- And the fact is: no you can't.

I can't sing.

And you know, I just can't sing.

That's not a gift that God gave me.

And I can't say, I mean, silly example,

but I can't do all things through Christ who strengthens me.

But the "all things" is pointing back

to what Paul just said, and Paul just said:

I am content in all circumstances.

Good times and bad.

Persecutions and not.

In having money and not having money.

I can do all these things, is what it really says.

I can do all these things through Christ who strengthens me.

So Paul's not just carte blanche saying:

Christians can do anything they want.

But Christians can learn to be content in all circumstances.

- We can't make one part of scripture say something

that contradicts the rest of scripture.

Therefore, if we are having difficulty with this section,

then perhaps we don't know the totality

of scripture well enough to be able to place

this properly and then to interpret it accurately.

- We can say, dogmatically, God loves the world.

We can say that without fear of being contradicted.

We may not know everything that we could know,

should know, would like to know

about the word "God", or even the word "loves",

or even the word "world", but nevertheless,

the proposition "God loves the world" is a faithful

interpretation of John three and many other passages.

- We have to make clear the difference between

meaning and significance.

Sometimes people have tried to point out, well,

look, you can hear 10 different sermons

about Jesus's encounter with the woman at the well,

and one preacher will make the text about evangelism

and another one about apologetics,

and another about confronting sin,

another about how to befriend strangers,

and someone will say: look, no one can agree on the meaning.

Well, no, the issue there is really significance.

The text of scripture will never be fully exhausted,

and any good preacher is going to find ways to apply it

in a number of different avenues.

But the meaning, nevertheless, is fixed.

That the meaning of the text is what the author intended

to communicate by that text, which, dealing with scripture,

uniquely, means there is both the intention

of the human author and sometimes even superseding that

in ways they may not have fully understood,

is the intention of the divine author.

- We work on the basis of evidence,

not on the basis of speculation or weird ideas

or philosophy, and whenever you argue

with somebody who is not a believer,

they almost always bring in non-evidence.

Well, God would not have done this.

Or this is really what I think happened.

It's just all speculation.

Let's look at what the evidence says.

Our faith is rooted in history.

And consequently, we need to use the evidence

and never be afraid of it.

- Half the battle of dealing with the trustworthiness

or reliability of the Bible is to know:

what are the subjects of the Bible.

And the subjects of the Bible are really pretty simple.

History, theology, and ethics.

The three major subjects of the Bible are history,

because we have a historical God

who intervenes in human history.

It's about theology, the character of God,

and the character of his people.

And it's about ethics.

How should we behave in response to all of that?

- It's very sad in our culture that we've seen

the body of Christ called, charged, and mandated

to proclaim and even defend the faith,

but in many quarters, the church has denied,

questioned the faith.

We're not to spin it, nuance it, change it,

undermine it, we're called to proclaim it.

- The church of Jesus Christ always faces

a tremendous temptation, and that is to deviate

from the word of God.

And when we do that, what happens?

First of all, we may get wrong doctrine,

because we no longer see the clarity of the deity

of Jesus Christ and the issues of salvation.

The other thing that's going to happen,

almost immediately, is there is going to be

a devaluation of moral teaching.

And pretty soon we begin to reason based on our own notions,

based on our own desires, and the word of God is there,

but it is not believed, it is not preached,

and it is not lived.

- Often, a contemporary drifting church is very comfortable.

What is preached may sound very orthodox.

But it doesn't challenge anybody.

It doesn't call them back to the gospel,

where they are drifting.

This saying is attributed to Martin Luther.

So many pungent sayings are.

I'm not sure if it comes from him or not,

but it's a true saying.

If you preach the gospel, at every point,

except where the gospel is being challenged,

you're not preaching the gospel at all.

If you preach the gospel to a church,

at every point except the place where they need it,

or the place they need to be called back

to obedience to God, you're not preaching the gospel.

At all.

- If you can get people to doubt the Bible,

then you will get them, sooner or later, to deny.

But you have to doubt first, before you can deny.

Then as they deny, then you're going to get them to disobey.

And that's worked so well since the Garden of Eden,

he hasn't had to change his tactics.

He still uses it.

- God made us for himself.

He has made us for his own glory.

He communicates with us, telling us how we ought to live.

Through his word, he has given us an entire library there,

to fit into quite a lot of the various words

in which we think, and all that is authoritative.

So we don't go to the Bible wanting to judge the scriptures.

We go to the Bible with a sense of submission.

Wanting to hear what the living God has to say to us.

And that's crucial.

I have a good friend who is famous for saying:

I love the word of God.

He loves it, and he does, he truly loves the Bible.

We're talking about it one day, and I said:

I have a question for you.

You love the Bible, don't you?

You love the word of God, don't you?

Yes I do.

I said: do you love its author?

And do you know that there's a difference?

And he just went blank.

It had never occurred to him that there

was something beyond Bible study.

- I've read from Genesis to Revelation in the Bible.

And not once does anyone ever have an encounter

with the true and living God and come away and say:

it was kind of boring and irrelevant.

He said: people encounter God and die.

They encounter God and they are paralyzed with fear.

They encounter God and they're overwhelmed with joy.

They encounter God and they cry because all their hopes

are realized, but nobody ever encounters God and says:

that was boring and irrelevant.

Well, when people say that about the Bible, it just says

to me they've not encountered the God of the Bible.

If you think the Bible is boring,

then either you don't realize what you need,

or you've never met the God that the Bible talks about.

And very frankly, I do think that there are a lot of people

that are preachers by profession that have never met God.

Or they'd never say his word is boring and irrelevant.

- I love the way Psalm 119 unfolds.

It's the longest chapter in the Bible,

and it's all about the word.

And you see there what the word produces.

It produces delight.

It produces desire for God.

It produces obedience.

So, sometimes it's helpful to look at a text like Psalm 119

and say: what does it look like and feel like?

What's the experience of the person, of the heart,

of the soul that's been captivated by the word of God?

And you see there they're singing the word,

they're storing up the word, they're treasuring God's word.

They have the greatest sense of delight in it.

They are pained when people don't follow it.

It's their greatest longing to obey it.

They see God's character and smile, and that's what we want.

That's why having the right view of scripture matters.

Because without it, we're going to come to

not only wrong conclusions about God and the gospel

and ourselves, but we won't think rightly,

we won't feel rightly, we won't be the sort

of human beings that God made us to be,

if we don't take him at his word, and understand all

that he means for us to know about himself.