Listen or read the following transcript as D. A. Carson speaks on the topic of New Testament Studies in this address from The Gospel Coalition Sermon Library
My brief this morning is to talk about the reliability and relevance of the Bible, especially the New Testament, and what I want to do is sweep through six broad areas. The subject has now become so convoluted one is immediately into not only technical little bits of evidence but also into large conceptualities and epistemology and things of that sort. What I want to do is survey the whole. Then the Q&A can take us in more concrete directions, if you like.
1. A survey of major conceptions and misconceptions.
A. The nature of revelation.
Historically, there are really only three ways people have spoken of coming to know God. Of course, they come up in an array of configurations, but essentially, three ways. First, mysticism. People claim to know God out of some sort of direct knowledge of him, and many world religions have primarily mystical branches. Secondly, reason. They think they can reason their way to God.
Thirdly, revelation. God discloses himself. If you opt for the third, this does not mean there isn’t any place for reason as you think about revelation. It doesn’t mean there is no place for personal intimacy or knowledge of God, some form of mysticism, because God has disclosed himself. Nevertheless, the Christian claim, and in this Christianity stands with some other world religions, is God has actually disclosed himself, which means we are required, then, to talk about and to think about the nature of the revelation.
Strictly speaking, then, Christians who are informed about these matters do not want to begin quite with the Bible; they want to begin with God and the question of how God has disclosed himself. The Christian claim is God has disclosed himself not only in events but also in words and, supremely, in the person of his own dear Son.
One does not want to raise the words above either the Son or the events. Does one want to raise the words above, let us say, the exodus, the event itself, or the death and resurrection of Christ or the incarnation? In fact, the whole thing coheres. That’s why, if you focus too narrowly on the reliability and relevance of the Bible without considering the whole and beginning with God, things are very rapidly distorted, and one is a little off track.
Yet, because we are finite and we can only talk about one thing at a time (at least I can only talk about one thing at a time even though I talk very fast) it is, therefore, possible to talk about one element in this revelatory act of God while still having to say again and again and again with footnotes, with excursuses, with comments, still the focus is not the Bible. As important as the Bible is, the focus is God himself.
B. The mediated nature of Scripture.
There are some religions that treat their putative Scriptures as if dropped holus bolus from heaven. Islam is very much like that. In all fairness, the best text critics of the Muslim Qur’an argue very strongly, although this would be denied by many conservative Islamic scholars, in fact, there was a convoluted and complicated textual tradition amongst the manuscripts of the Qur’an until a decree came along that destroyed all of the antecedent ones and established one dominant, textual tradition which is, then, claimed to have come directly from God. In fact, some earlier manuscripts have escaped.
This is really quite different from the Christian claim. Read the Qur’an with its surahs, its various chapters, organized in descending length, and you’re in another world entirely. One of the things you feel about the Bible is how human the whole thing is. There are parts of the Bible which are claimed to be given by dictation, but certainly not all of it, not even most of it.
For example, there are parts of Daniel where Daniel has received something virtually by dictation from God himself such that Daniel himself claims he doesn’t know what it means. In fact, he asks God, then, what it does mean, and God says, “None of your business. It’s for a later generation. Just make sure you get the transcription right.”
I understand that. For a while I had a very competent secretary. The names have changed at Trinity. They’re no longer secretaries; they’re now administrative assistants. My current administrative assistant is theologically trained. He’s a very capable chap, so he has my vocabulary down, more or less, but my previous one, who was a very capable woman in many respects had no theological training, so because I dictate so many, many letters and even dictate some emails …
As fast as I can type, I can dictate even faster, so all kinds of things went through her hands that were of a theological sort: a project I was working on, answering a pastor somewhere, and so on. She was hearing all kinds of words she had never heard of before. In fact, in the secretarial pool, I found out some time later, there was a joke going around about Carson’s word for the day, and she had one every day we were both on campus together for a year and a half.
I understand that secretaries can put stuff down and it somehow comes through their ears and goes out their fingers into the computer without having a clue what is being said. If they’re really good, they still spell right and so forth. She was a very capable woman. There is some part of the Bible, then, that is given by dictation where dear old Daniel himself admits he doesn’t have a clue.
Jeremiah receives some words from the Lord, dictates them verbatim, then, to his secretary Baruch, and then in the opposition of the day, the bad guys come along, take the manuscript, rip it up, and throw it in the fireplace. If you’re reading this, you’re supposed to laugh. The reason why you’re supposed to laugh, of course, is because God dictated it. Did he forget what he said? Don’t you think he’s capable of giving it to Jeremiah in round two?
So there are parts of the Bible that are generated like that, but there are many parts of the Bible where, clearly, the human authors are speaking out of their own deeply felt experiences, emotions, and understanding of history. For all kinds of reasons, we still believe God has so superintended what was written that was written was simultaneously their perception, their experiences, their slant on things, yet, at the same time, nothing less than what God wanted to be written all the way down to the very words themselves.
We speak of this as God’s Word as well as Isaiah’s word or Luke’s word or whatever, but when Paul comes in in the evening and he has had a long day and he’s getting ready for bed, it doesn’t happen this way. “Paul, not yet. Get your quill pen out.”
“Okay, God. Are you ready?”
“Yes. Take down the following: Paul and Silas …”
“Paul and Silas …”
“To the church …”
“To the church …”
“… which is at Philippi …”
“… which is at Philippi …”
“… with the bishops and deacons.”
“… with the bishops and deacons.” It just isn’t.… All you have to do is read the book, and you discover it is full of thanksgiving for things the Philippian church is given. When David writes, “The Lord is my Shepherd, I shall want nothing,” that’s what he thinks. That is his experience. In other words, there’s a huge human dimension in Holy Scripture.
Not only so, it comes across in the diversity of literary genres. Holy Scripture is not a book of systematic theology. It embraces a theology, all right, which can be systematized (don’t misunderstand me), but it is not cast that way. Read any systematic theology you like, and it feels very different from the diversity of Scripture with its poetry and its prose, its lament, its genealogies, its history, its apocalyptic, its letters. On and on and on, these various literary forms. Proverbs.
All of these different literary forms have their own different ways of making rhetorical appeals. They have to be read and interpreted somewhat differently. It’s a very human sort of book. Moreover, because these different human authors are genuinely speaking out of their experience and vocabulary, the Greek style of Luke is not quite the same as the Greek style of John.
If I dictate letters to my former secretary and then I dictate letters to my current administrative assistant, in fact, the style is boringly similar in the two cases because they’re just putting down my words, but in the case of John and Luke, the style, the vocabulary, the sentence structure are really quite different. You can tell this even when you read the English Bible translations, can’t you?
That’s because, even though we insist for reasons still to be probed, this is nothing less than the Word of God, it is not all in a kind of drop-down-from-heaven-on-golden-tablets-in-the-Mormon-tradition variety. It is God mediating by his Spirit in such a way there is a human dimension to Scripture.
This also comes out even in the fact there is a text-critical tradition. Before the age of the printing press, manuscripts had to be copied by hand, so some people have noticed these manuscripts are not all alike. In fact, no two long manuscripts are ever exactly alike. Until you had the printing press, you couldn’t get endless copies of one manuscript repeated exactly the same as all the other ones, so all of the diversities of these manuscripts generates the discipline of textual criticism. That is, how you analyze the text and see what reading is closest to the original.
I’m going to come back to that a little later with some of Bart Ehrman’s stuff and so on. Yet, at the level of just understanding the human dimension of Scripture, it is important to understand, if God had wanted to preserve the text tradition so that all manuscripts were exactly the same, what would he have had to have done?
He would have had to intervene at the level of supernatural miracle, so that people could not make mistakes, even in the copying. All you have to do is go home and try to copy out five chapters of any biblical book and then get a friend to go through it carefully and correct your mistakes. You do silly things. You do it all the time without meaning to.
Even if you proof your own work, you probably won’t catch your own mistakes. I don’t catch all my mistakes! I proof something very carefully. Then I put it through spell-check and find some more. Then I go and read it again and find a few more things where spell-check didn’t pick up the things because it wasn’t a spelling mistake; it was some abysmal mistake in syntax or the like. It happens, doesn’t it?
But God has so superintended in his providence the transmission of all of these manuscripts that there is no doctrine, not even a minor one, that is in any jeopardy whatsoever. The sheer plethora of manuscripts is stunning. We have precisely three copies of Caesar’s Gallic Wars all from the Middle Ages. We have 5,000 copies of the Greek Testament in whole or part and about 8,000 from earlier translations, which means the range of evidence is just vastly more overwhelming than we have for any other ancient book.
Although there may be some dispute about whether a certain doctrine is taught in this passage or not because of some variables in the manuscript, the doctrine itself is not in any jeopardy because it’s taught in so many places where there are no variables in the manuscript. The overwhelming majority of the variations are of such an incidental nature that they really affect very little. We’ll come back to this one when we consider Bart Ehrman’s very influential recent book, Misquoting Jesus. One must come to grips with the mediated nature of Scripture.
C. One must come to grips with the fact that Christianity is a uniquely historical religion.
This is really coming back, in part, through the back door to the point I made at the beginning. God has not disclosed himself in words only but also in events. Let me approach this tangentially. Supposing you asked a devout Buddhist this question, how would he or she reply?
You say, “Supposing I could prove (I have no idea how) somehow that Gautama the Buddha never lived, what would be jeopardized in your faith?” The answer, of course, is nothing, because, in fact, believability of Buddhism doesn’t depend on any claim made about Gautama. It does depend on his teachings and, thus, their coherence and credibility and attractiveness on all kinds of fronts. It does not depend on any historical claim.
Now go to India. Hindus have, literally, millions of gods. Greeks of the first century had thousands. Contemporary Hindus insist there are millions. “Supposing you could prove (I have no idea how) somehow beyond serious cavil that Krishna never lived, would you destroy Hinduism?” No. Go down the street to a Shiva temple instead. The structure of Hinduism is such that, by the falsification of one god, you do not destroy the structure of the system in which all of reality is truth, and there’s a certain system of karma built into moral accountability and so forth.
Now go to Islam and ask your friendly neighborhood imam this question. “Sir, do you believe Allah, blessed be he, could have given his final revelation to someone other than Muhammad had he chosen to do so?” Probably, the imam will misunderstand you in the first instance and respond somewhat negatively.
He may say, “You don’t understand. We believe God did speak through his prophet Abraham and through his prophet Moses and through his prophet Jesus, but the final revelation came through Muhammad himself.” You reply, “Well, you know I’m a Christian and I don’t see things exactly that way, but it’s not my question. My question is a bit different. My question is could Allah, had he chosen to do so, have given his final revelation through someone other than Muhammad?”
The imam will reply, “Of course. Allah is Allah. He may do what he pleases. He is sovereign. He may give his revelation to whomever he chooses, but we believe he gave his final revelation to Muhammad.” In that sense, then, Muhammad himself is incidental to Islam. He’s not incidental in fact, because, of course, Muslims believe he was the conveyor of this final revelation, but in this derivative sense, he is incidental to Islam.
Now come to Christianity. Could God have given his final revelation in someone other than Jesus? The question is almost incoherent because the revelation is Jesus. The Word became flesh and lived for a while among us. He is himself the God-man. As I tried to show last night, this historical particularity extends to certain crucial and non-negotiable elements in the account, including the resurrection of Christ.
If Christ did not rise from the dead, if the tomb was not really empty, if you could show Christ never really lived, if you could prove somehow (I’m not quite sure how) beyond reasonable cavil that Jesus never lived or that he never rose from the dead, biblical Christianity is utterly destroyed without hope of reprieve.
It is very important to see the issues are not over a really tight definition of inerrancy, although those things are important. Yet, the issue is more fundamental than that. It comes, ultimately, to whether God has disclosed himself in space-time history in the person and work of Christ to which the Scriptures attest. It is a profoundly historical revelation.
Because it is a historical revelation, then, on the one hand, there are these witnesses that attest to these events in Scripture, and on the other hand, there are all of these words about the events to help us understand what they mean. There are words that explain. Yet, biblical Christianity is not simply an abstract, philosophical system that can be removed from the contingencies of history. It just isn’t. That is going to be foundationally important in any of our attempts to understand what Scripture is about in its reliability and relevance today.
D. The category of so-called literal interpretation is a slippery one.
Many people say (not least the press today) evangelicals and/or fundamentalists believe in literal interpretation. In the press, that is often a form of abuse. Even the category, literal interpretation, is slippery. It has a long, complex, intellectual history, but at the strictest level of what literal means, I don’t know anybody from any place on the theological spectrum who takes a literal interpretation in every respect. It’s not intellectually possible.
When Jesus says, “I am the door,” no one thinks he’s flat on both sides, turns on hinges, and squeaks, with all due respect. No one does. In other words, we recognize there is a place for metaphor and simile and different genres and so on. The dispute, then, is between those who understand the texts in their most natural sense granted the understanding of literary genre and the location in history, and that comes to mean what is meant by literal.
If that’s what you mean by literal, then I want literal interpretation, but at the same time, that’s not what comes across in the popular press today. Literal has to do with sort of crassly stupid, and that surely is sort of stacking the deck as we start thinking about these things, isn’t it? Moreover, often there is another layer in the debate over what’s literal interpretation that has to be probed a wee bit.
There are quite a lot of people who want to talk about a kind of metaphorical or mystical or allegorical interpretation of Scripture. In other words, they can see what it actually says in the most natural reading of that particular literary genre, but they’re so uncomfortable with it that, in fact, they want some other kind of interpretation. Maybe an allegorical interpretation.
After all, doesn’t the Bible itself use the word allegory? Do you remember the famous passage in Galatians, chapter 4, verse 21 to 31? The NIV has “Which things may be taken figuratively.” The Greek has, “Hostis esti allēgoreō.” That is to say, “Which things are allegorical,” the only time the word allegory or its cognates is used anywhere in the New Testament.
But, of course, even there one has to be careful. What is meant by various literary tropes in the ancient world isn’t always the same as what is meant by literary tropes today. In the ancient world, allegory meant something like to speak another way or to speak a parallel way. That’s all it meant, so it could include a wide variety of literary forms, but today, allegory is usually understood to have a more technical definition.
Today, allegory is usually bound up in most treatments with an interpretation of text such that the key to the interpretation, the grid for the interpretation, is outside the text. Thus, for example, Philo in the first century, a rough contemporary with Paul, reads the accounts of Genesis, and he believes Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob are historical figures, but at the same time, he thinks their real significance, their real meaning, their meaning in terms of understanding what life is about is that they actually refer to the three basic principles of a Greek education.
With all due respect to Philo, there is no way on God’s green earth you’re going to get that interpretation out of Genesis. You just are not. In other words, that connection, that way of reading the text, is not itself textually determined. Whereas Paul’s argument in Galatians 4:21–31 is precisely, if you read the account and its salvation-historical sequence, in fact, the interpretation he finds there, the parallels he finds there, in fact, determined by the text itself. It’s a slightly different way of reading it, but it’s determined by the text itself, he says.
That means, when we are wrestling with popular questions about the Bible, we sometimes have to take time to explain what things like literal means. “Are you one of those Christians who reads the Bible literally?” It’s a bit like asking, “Do you wipe your nose in public?” or “Do you know how to eat at the table in a polite way?” or “Are you rude?” It’s a form of abuse rather than an analysis of literary sensitivity, so sometimes those things have to be unpacked as one deals with these things.
E. The impact of the Enlightenment.
There are many, many scholars who have argued, under the impact of the Enlightenment, for reasons I’ll talk about a little more this afternoon when we consider the emerging church movement, Christians in the West became far too concerned with questions of truth, with questions of proposition, with questions of assertion.
Before that, they tend to argue, people read the Bible for edification, or they read it for moral instruction, but now, because of the impact of the Enlightenment, people learn to ask, “Yes, but is it true?” The liberals went in one direction, and conservatives went in another direction. If they would just stop asking rude questions like that and read it for their own personal benefit, for moral direction in order to build a world frame of reference, then we could avoid those sorts of nasty divisions amongst us.
If this subject interests you a great deal, I strongly recommend you read a little book by John Woodbridge. Unfortunately, it’s out of print, but the book is called Biblical Authority: A Critique of the Rogers/McKim Proposal. What Woodbridge does in his 250 pages or so is survey a great deal of the primary sources across church history. It’s all a book of primary sources, so he is actually reading Irenaeus, and he’s reading Saint Augustine across church history to see what they have to say about Scripture.
He looks at Augustine’s Letter 82, Sections 3 and 4, where he’s writing to Jerome. You’re back at the end of the fourth century now long before the Enlightenment, and Augustine works out how Scripture must be true and without error or there are serious problems that show up in your epistemology and so on.
What Woodbridge is trying to show is a high view of Scripture’s reliability, its truthfulness, its inerrancy.… That’s all that is really meant by this word inerrancy. Its truthful reliability is paradigm-independent. It is independent of any controlling worldview, whether it’s the Enlightenment, or it’s Common Sense Realism, or it’s high medieval epistemological structures or whatever.
In other words, this high view of Scripture comes across the ages again and again and again. It wasn’t invented by the Reformation. It wasn’t invented by post-Reformation scholastics. It wasn’t invented by Benjamin Warfield. That was the whole thesis of Ernest Sandeen, a historian, for example, who argued this high view of Scripture really didn’t exist before Benjamin Warfield at the end of the nineteenth century. He invented the whole thing himself! Bless his heart. Wasn’t he clever?
In fact, what Woodbridge does in this book is simply document things across the centuries so that, if you wish to overthrow this, you must understand you’re not overthrowing some slightly aberrant theologian at the end of the nineteenth century named Warfield; there is 2,000 years of very serious Christian thought from paradigm after paradigm after paradigm trying to work this thing out. It is important to see that.
Similarly, the charge that this high view of Scripture is too concerned with propositions and assertions and not enough concerned with the fact, for example, that Jesus is the truth or there are different literary tropes to which the term inerrancy does not really suitably apply, I have just finished reviewing a fairly recent book (it will appear in RBL) called But Is It All True? This is a book of nine essays that asks this question of the Bible, “But is it all true?” These various authors come from various camps.
There is one evangelical, a philosopher by the name of Stephen Davis. Then these folks come from an array of positions across the entire spectrum. One of the things that interested me about this book when I reviewed it was that most of the authors said something like, “Of course, we all acknowledge there are some propositions in the Bible, some assertions about which we can debate whether they’re true or not, but of course, the most important thing in the Bible is that Jesus is the truth, or that it is dealing with how to shape a worldview.”
Not once did I ever read, “Of course, we all acknowledge Jesus is the truth, but of course, there are also lots of propositions in the Bible about which you must decide whether they’re true or not.” In other words, the slant in the argumentation is always away from propositions and assertions as if we’re embarrassed by them and trying to get as immediately as possible into truth is personal or truth is Christological or something like that, as if we’re embarrassed by anything that considers propositions.
I begin to ask myself, “Could it possibly be we are not now so much influenced by the Enlightenment as by rebellion against the Enlightenment that is suspicious against anything about which it can be said, ‘This is true’?” For example, when the Queen of Sheba comes to Solomon’s Courts, and she looks around at everything, and she says at the end of it, “Everything that was told me was ‘emeth,” (in Hebrew, the truth) what she means by that, of course, is the report conformed to the reality that she witnessed. It’s the truth.
In other words, personal reliability in the domain of assertion or proposition is what we mean today by truth, and there are hundreds and hundreds of utterances in Scripture about matters incidental and important that are of that sort. It is important not to duck these sorts of issues simply because there is an appeal to some sort of paradigm to rule them out of court.
F. We are ourselves today located in a certain culture.
In other words, the surrounding culture of which we are a part in which we live and move and have our being has its own impact on our biases. I’m going to raise some of these issues at the epistemological level, how you come to know something, in a few minutes (that’s a separate point), but let me deal with just one element in our culture now that shapes us a great deal, whether we like it or not. That is the changed definition, implicitly or explicitly changed, of what we mean by tolerance.
For quite a long time, most of us in the Western world thought of tolerance very much in the terms of Voltaire. Voltaire is the one of whom it is said that he argued for a vision of tolerance something like, “I may disagree with everything you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.” That was understood to be tolerant. In other words, Voltaire was not saying he liked what you said or he agreed with what you said. He might actually despise what you say, but he is still a tolerant person if he defends your right to say it. That is what guarantees tolerance.
The alternative to that, from Voltaire’s position, is intolerance in which those in authority clamp down and wipe off the face of the map those who have a different view just because you dislike their view, and it is out of such a view of tolerance you, then, generate notions such as freedom of religion or freedom of speech or the freedom of the press.
You might think the press is dead wrong on the left or the right or in its moral assumptions or in its analysis or whatever, but if you try to clamp down on the press so only one view prevails, then sooner or later, the corruptions bound up with all of us mean the issue has become bound up with power rather than truth.
There is more likelihood of truth being achieved where there is a free interplay of ideas, and that means stupid ideas, ridiculous ideas, corrupt ideas, and perverse ideas. Still, all things considered, there is more hope of truth being outed in this free exchange of really stupid and ridiculous ideas than if only one view is allowed to prevail.
That was Voltaire’s assumption, but for various reasons, the new view of tolerance is a little different. It argues you are intolerant if you say anybody else is wrong. You are tolerant if you refuse to say anybody else is wrong. That’s massively different from Voltaire’s view. In a poll done a few years ago across many university campuses here in the United States, students were asked, “Which person is more tolerant? Person A or person B?”
Person A is the one who adopts Voltaire’s position. “I may detest what you’re doing and I’ll argue very strongly about it, but I will defend to the death your right to speak, as you must defend my right to speak.” Alternatively, person B who refuses to say anybody is wrong except for the person who claims some people are wrong. That person is so narrow-minded he must be shut up because he’s intolerant. “Which person is more tolerant?” Eighty-five percent of the student population in the United States opted for Person B.
The point is that second view of tolerance is, in my judgment, both intellectually incoherent and morally perverse. It is intellectually incoherent in that I’m not even sure I know what being tolerant means until you disagree with somebody. In other words, how does a Marxist turn to a Capitalist and say, “I don’t disagree with you; I tolerate you”? Don’t you have to say, “I think you’re dead wrong, but I tolerate you”?
The reverse for a Capitalist speaking to a Marxist or a Christian talking to a Muslim or an atheist talking to a Jew who is devout or whatever. Don’t you have to begin by saying, “I, quite frankly, think your ideas are nuts, but I insist on your freedom to articulate them”? Otherwise, how can you say, if you’re an atheist, “I think you God people are.… Well, I can’t say you’re wrong”? It’s not even intellectually coherent. That is not even an intellectually coherent view. “I tolerate you.”
You can only speak of tolerance once you disagree with someone and still give them the right to speak, but it is morally perverse in that the one place where this new tolerance really does insist that other people are wrong is in their views of tolerance, and at that point, they want to shut them up.
Thus, the Canadian Charter has been revised in recent years to say, “We tolerate everything except intolerance.” Oh, it sounds so broadminded, but what this means is, if you start saying, even in cool, calm terms let alone with heated hatred, something about what you disagree with in the domain of sexuality or in the domain of religion, you could be taken to court for a hate crime because, in fact, you are intolerant.
The end result of that, if you push it far enough, is going to be prison terms for people who disagree with other people, and freedom itself will gradually get snuffed out. Sooner or later, you’re going to face a choice between whether you want the kind of freedom that allows for a lot of stupid ideas around but allows them to flourish and be argued out in freedom or the kind of ostensible tolerance which is, in fact, intolerant of everything except the prevailing view established by the positive law of judicial decisions.
The only reason I mentioned that is it’s of great interest. It’s of great interest for all kinds of reasons, and there are initial rumblings of what’s going on in many courts of nations of the Western world. It’s of great interest, yet, the only reason I bring it up here is that, with this sort of thing pulsing through our culture, we, too, are so affected that after a while we get nervous about saying anybody is wrong.
Then, even the exclusive claims of Scripture seem to our own eyes slightly embarrassing. “It’s just too narrow because the exclusive claims of Scripture, implicitly or explicitly, are saying other people are wrong.” Then, we carry that bias when we start talking about the truthfulness of Scripture, the reliability of Scripture, and the faithfulness of Scripture.
“How can it be? It’s a bit narrow-minded and right-winged, isn’t it?” That’s also one of the things that stands behind the current drive in some parts of media and in certain parts of the world of scholarship, too, for insisting not only the Canonical Gospels should be things we read, but also all the second- and third-century Gnostic gospels, because initial Christianity, it is argued, was much, much wider. It was more tolerant than the Christianity that has come to us in the Christian Bible with its narrow exclusiveness.
That springs, in part, not from a neutral reading of historical evidences. There is no such thing as a neutral reading of historical evidences. We all have slants on things, and this particular slant is coming out of a new postmodern definition of tolerance that affects how we read history, too. That’s my survey of some of the conceptions and misconceptions that attends this subject.
2. Some popular contemporary treatments.
I’m going to spend a bit of time on this. Let me tell you where I’m heading so you have some idea of where we will end up. In the third place, I will deal with some large-scale epistemological issues. In the fourth place, with some bits and bobs from Scripture and Scripture self-attestation, the kind of evidences you find in Scripture. In the fifth place, Christ the center. In the last place, I want to talk a bit about the relevance of all of this to our lives.
The various points will not all receive the same amount of detail. Let me deal now with some popular contemporary treatments. I’m sure most of us, perhaps all of us, have come across one or all four of the ones I’ll briefly mention.
A. The gospel of Thomas, the Jesus Seminar, and the like.
Are you familiar with some of this debate? The so-called Jesus Seminar on the sort of theological spectrum from sort of a conservative to liberal is so far out on the liberal side most liberals disown them. In other words, you almost need field glasses to see them there so far out on the liberal side.
Nevertheless, they have been hyped quite a bit in the press. They are the ones that put out a New Testament with different colored texts for Jesus’ words, and the gray or black has to do with, “He didn’t say it,” or “We’re pretty sure he didn’t say it.” Pink is, “Yeah, he might have said it.” Red is, “He certainly did say it.” In the gospel of Mark they have managed to get one verse that was pink and nothing that was red. That was it.
You must understand, in the whole arena of critical studies, the Jesus Seminar people are a pretty long way out. One of their first efforts was a book called The Five Gospels. What they really want out of this is for Thomas to be included. If you push most of them far enough, they want John excluded, and they want Q to come back in.
Q is an ostensible gospel that is made up of the material that overlaps between Matthew and Luke. It is argued that material once existed as a separate document that is conveniently labeled Q, which is the first letter of the German word quelle for source. This Q was a separate gospel, it is argued. Then there is Matthew, Mark, Luke, and the gospel of Thomas, which we’ve known about for a long time.
The gospel of Thomas is a Coptic document. Almost all scholars date it after 140, some even later than that and a few as early as 120. The Jesus Seminar types want it in the middle or two-thirds along of the first century. Thus, it becomes a source of equivalent significance to the Synoptic Gospels, but quite apart from the complexities of how you date a document in Coptic, in the first or second or third century, there is another matter that is just ignored by them that needs to be thought through.
We speak today of our Bibles having the gospel of Matthew, the gospel of Mark, the gospel of Luke, and the gospel of John (four Gospels). Nobody in the first century spoke that way. Nobody. In fact, when you read a Greek New Testament, the title of each of these four is in our printed editions.
In this sense, they’re being faithful to the original Greek of the first century. Matthew is listed as Kata Matthaion, according to Matthew. John is Kata Johannine, according to John, because the four Gospels in the first century were all headed up, in effect, “The Gospel According to Matthew,” “The Gospel According to Mark,” “The Gospel According to Luke,” and so on.
In other words, it was perceived universally that there was only one gospel. Gospel was not a literary category. It was not a genre category. The gospel was the good news, and it was the good news, the one good news. There was only one gospel not four. It was, “The Gospel According to Matthew.” In other words, Matthew gave his witness to it, his slant, his perspective, and “The Gospel According to Mark,” and “The Gospel According to John,” and “The Gospel According to Luke,” and so forth.
Then, what becomes obvious just from scanning these four books we now call Gospels is that, for all of them, the gospel, the good news, was bound up not only with Jesus’ coming and teaching and so on but with his death and resurrection. Some WAG has argued in some ways the four books we call the four Gospels are really sort of passion narratives with long introductions.
In other words, they’re focusing on the death of Christ and the resurrection of Christ, aren’t they? In other words, you don’t have the gospel, the good news, without Jesus’ death and resurrection. You don’t have it because the good news of sinners being reconciled to God and sins being paid for and hope for what is to come and the promise of the Spirit all turns on Christ’s death and resurrection, doesn’t it? Without that, you don’t have the good news.
Now you come to Q. Even if it ever existed (I’m not sure), it’s not more than a collection of sayings, and you come to the gospel of Thomas. In fact, it’s made up of 114 sayings, two tiny, tiny half clauses of alleged historical claim, and that’s it. There’s no death. There’s no resurrection. There’s no storyline. In any first-century sense, it is not “The Gospel According to Thomas.”
By the second century, then, you are beginning to get the dominant influence of what came to be called Gnosticism, the Gnostic heresy, in which people were saved by gnosis, by knowledge. The death and resurrection of Christ were marginalized. They were set aside and had very little to do with anything. In fact, the different forms of Gnosticism had different ways of handling it.
In one form, for example, when Jesus cries on the cross, “My God! My God! Why have you forsaken me?” it’s the eternal Son abandoning Jesus who dies on the cross. That doesn’t matter. He’s just a man. The eternal Son, the Messiah, abandons Jesus, and that’s why Jesus calls out like that.
So the death of Jesus is irrelevant, and the resurrection, whether it took place or not, is irrelevant because the real source of all of this revelation, of all of this teaching, is bound up with this person who came on Jesus in his baptism and left him before he actually died. It’s the teaching that’s important. It’s the gnosis. It’s the knowledge. But in the first century, that would be called the gospel.
In due course, then, the word gospel was transmuted to refer to those books that tell the gospel, so I don’t mind today if people want to speak of the New Testament having four gospels. The problem with it, however, then, is the fact that by the end of the second century and into the third century, there were a whole lot of other books that claimed to be gospels like the gospel of Thomas. Now people are trying to read their material back into the New Testament when nobody in the first century would have seen them as gospel reports at all. They’re abstracted from the heart of the good news.
How about the gospel of Judas? Have you heard about that one? In some ways, that one’s more interesting than the gospel of Thomas. We’ve had the gospel of Thomas for a long time. The gospel of Judas we’ve known about. Irenaeus refers to it about 180, but we didn’t have any copy of it until about 35 years ago. We’ve had a copy, but it hasn’t been translated into English, so all the hype about it.… The scholars have known about the gospel of Judas, in any case, for a long time, for several decades, and now it’s published in English.
Some people are saying, “Yes! Yes! Yes! It’s authentic.” What does authentic mean? When the scholars say, “This document, the gospel of Judas, is authentic,” they do not mean it is authentically from Judas. I don’t know any scholar from anywhere on the theological spectrum who understands authentic to mean that with respect to this document.
Rather, they mean it is authentically the so-called gospel of Judas of which Irenaeus speaks about 180. It is a late, second-century, Gnostic document that was called the gospel of Judas. We now have a copy of it. The copy itself was from the late third century or early fourth century, and it has now been translated into English, so it’s authentically, a Gnostic document called The Gospel of Judas we already knew about from the writings of Irenaeus in 180, but nobody who is a scholar believes it was written by Judas.
In what sense, then, is this authentically from Judas such that it has the power or the right to overturn what the first-century documents that make up the New Testament say about Judas and who he was and so on? The thing has been horribly mangled in the press.
Of course, I suppose I should say at least a bit of something about The Da Vinci Code. Have most of you read it? Have some of you read it? Confession is good for the soul. It won’t hurt you. Have you seen the film? Not many of you. You’re not much into paganism, are you? By all means, read it. Don’t duck some of these things.
I read a fair number of mysteries and the like, and in my view, it’s not even a well-written thing. It’s too preachy. As a novel, it’s trying to convince you all the time of stuff, so I found it pretty boring. In fact, I read it when it first came out and didn’t think it was.… I was surprised it took on the life it did. In fact, I threw my copy away after I read it. I mean, some whodunits are.… It’s plane reading when you’re taking a four-hour flight from Chicago to LA. You land on the other side. You’re not going to keep that one in your library. It was one of those.
Then, when the thing took on a life of its own and I had to start giving answers to it, I had to go buy myself another copy just so I could check out things. I’m on my second copy. I read it right through this time and marked it all up with rude comments. In it, Jesus marries Mary Magdalene. Their progeny perpetuate the truth faith even today, and this true faith is bound up with feminism and fertility cults and the like.
At the heart of the argumentation is a discipline that is called symbology, in which symbols show the real heart of the faith and structure of various people across time and space. Pretty soon, you’re into the Knights Templar and the Priory of Sion and secret, sexual, cultic acts that really come from ancient fertility cults and so on. No wonder it’s selling.
There are a lot of responses now. I will mention some you can follow at your leisure if this is of interest to you. There’s a book by Ben Witherington III who documents carefully (the documentation is there) more than 100 historical errors. There’s a book by Darrell Bock, and he has gone around the country lecturing on it from time to time.
There is an interesting discussion by the chap on Mars Hill tapes who comments just by the side (it’s almost an aside on this audio journal of Mars Hill) that he had read Dan Brown’s previous book. Again, an adventure book. I haven’t read it. In this previous book, it opens up with a secret agent, a woman, arriving at NSA headquarters near Baltimore. It’s all described as the wooded slopes of Maryland. Hidden behind trees so nobody could see the towers and the high security, she lands at Dulles Airport to get there. It’s all carefully described.
The critic comes along and says, “Hasn’t Dan Brown even had the decency to visit the site? Maryland, at this point, is not wooded. You can see all of the towers from the road. There are huge signposts announcing you’re getting there. It’s not some secret backwoods road, and nobody in his right mind would get there by flying into Dulles. That’s 37 miles away. They’d go into Baltimore. It’s faster. You get there in less than half an hour. Doesn’t this guy do anything to check this out?”
As a result, he starts asking, “When the second book came along and I saw how badly he had handled the most elementary geographical elements in the first in areas where you can check them out in the twenty-first century, how confident should I be in his handling of sources from the first century?”
That’s a good question, isn’t it? Some other critics have come down in the whole domain of symbology. There was an essay by Sandra Miesel in the Journal of Crisis Intervention and Suicide Prevention, really trying to argue against the dangers of endless associative thinking. She draws some parallels.
She says, “Let’s take the Princess Diana. As every conspiracy theorist knows, Diana was murdered.” By whom? “Well, think 13. The Mercedes in which she died crashed into the thirteenth pillar of the Pont de l’Alma, and this happened on August 31 which is 13 backwards. Diana was in her thirty-seventh year. Now remember the crucial date, Friday the thirteenth, 1307. Transpose a couple of digits and everything is going to be very clear.
Di, after all, is named after the moon goddess Diana. Pont de l’Alma can be understood, if you stretch the French, a bit, to old French, as the passage of the moon goddess who killed her. Perhaps it was the Babylonian brotherhood who offered sacrifices to their lunar and solar pagan deities. After all, they sacrificed JFK. Their sun god, who died on the anniversary of the papal bull banning the Knights Templar in 1307.”
Where do you stop? Of course, there are the anachronisms. Adam Gopnik, in the New Yorker, writes, “The finding of the new gospel no more challenges the basis of the church’s faith than the discovery of a document from the nineteenth century written in Ohio defending King George would be a challenge to the basis of the American democracy.”
A friend of mine at the University of Aberdeen said on the BBC, “The gospel of Thomas, for example, is as authentic as a newly discovered diary of Queen Victoria on a CD discussing the merits of Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings.” That’s the kind of thing you’re dealing with here. Within this framework, then, the more serious criticism of Bart Ehrman has become really quite important in a lot of university circles. He teaches in North Carolina.
Amongst his books are Lost Scriptures published in 2003 which really produces 47 translations, all known to scholars. All of us have had to read these things ourselves at one point or another. They’re all very well known. Lost Scriptures from second, third, and fourth centuries which he claims represent an earlier expansion of Christianity before the so-called orthodox one. History is written by the guys who triumph. The orthodox one. They call themselves orthodox, and all the others were crushed, it is argued.
Likewise, he has written The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture and another book, Misquoting Jesus. If I had more time, I would go into that. If you want to raise those issues in the Q&A, by all means, do. Once again, there are very, very good essays now out. If you have access to the web and you’re interested in the Misquoting Jesus book, look up Dan Wallace. His 30- or 40-page treatment of Misquoting Jesus is absolutely masterful.
If you read the journal, Books and Culture, there was an article on Ehrman by Robert Gundry that is well worth reading as well. Nowadays, there are lots and lots of responses to these things if you know where to look.
3. Epistemological issues.
Instead of diving into it, the four I have that remain are big issues, but they’re not going to take me as much time as the first issues have taken, so let me pause now for some questions, comments, and personal abuse. Questions? Comments? If not, you’re going to be stuck with epistemological issues already.
Male: I find it very interesting in the secular media people such as the man you just mentioned get all kinds of press coverage but orthodox people from the evangelical world who can easily refute these people seem to get very little coverage. It’s almost as if the world is trying to discredit Christianity more and more, and I’m just wondering if there is anything we can do about that.
Don: Probably not. Except be courteous and kind and persistent. There are factors that need to go into that. It’s not only that this country has certain pockets where secularism is particularly pronounced (the Pacific Northwest and the New England states), but there are certain societal groupings.
By and large, Christianity at the moment for reasons good, bad, and indifferent has not penetrated very deeply into university faculty circles, into the media, and into the arts communities. It’s not because it can’t. There are some churches that have made an effort to do so. Tim Keller of Redeemer Presbyterian in New York City has permeated a long way into all of those areas, but by and large around the country, that’s the case.
If you’re dealing with media people, often their only perception of what Christians are is what they see on tele-evangelist programs. That would scare me off, too, to be quite frank. Part of it is our responsibility to make good contacts and to be friends and to know how to talk to people. Then, every once in a while, you can be asked to stick an oar in.
A few months ago I was on 20/20 and Nightline responding to another one of these I hadn’t.… I was in the ABC studios for two hours of detailed taping. By the time I got boiled down, I think I got a total of about 4 minutes on there. Nevertheless, that book has dropped dead in the water, and I’ve had contacts from all over the country saying, “Thank you.” Sometimes you do get that sort of thing, too.
Meanwhile, meanwhile, meanwhile, it’s really important to see you don’t want to just start playing political games and seeing who has access and who has pull? He who sits in the heavens shall laugh. The Lord shall have them in derision. It’s important to be courteous, to make friends with people. In fact, I’ll tell you this after the fact. I won’t tell you which book it was. People have forgotten it already. It’s probably a good thing.
When I was doing one of these things, I befriended the whole crew. I went around with the sound man. There was a whole crew of different people. Lights and all this. I got to know them all and chatted them all up and so on, and one of them pulled me aside afterward and said, “When we taped the first guy who was pushing this other book hard, he arrived late, he was drunk, and he didn’t even acknowledge we were here. You care for us, don’t you?” It’s very important not to think politically all the time. Courtesy can go a long way.
Male: Dr. Carson, you made reference to the impact of the Enlightenment and how people have sort of rebelled against that and taken a position where they’re embarrassed by proposition. Is there anything.… Not being in that category.… Being one who is concerned about propositional truth, is there anything we need to be on guard against concerning the impact of the Enlightenment? Has it influenced us more in any area and will it prevent us from honoring God and Christ in any of our actions or thinking? Do you understand what I’m asking?
Don: I said I would deal more with epistemological issues of that sort in this next part. I don’t think Christians should align themselves wholly with either the Enlightenment or postmodernism, but on the other hand, there are some things to learn from both, too, but I’ll come back to that one.
Female: This is also about the propositional truth and that as sort of a reaction to.… Oh, yeah. The book you mentioned by John Woodbridge, Biblical Authority, and the slant of the articles in there away from propositional truth toward Jesus. All we need to do is believe in Jesus, right? Didn’t you say something like that?
Don: You’re probably slightly conflating two things I said. John Woodbridge’s book, Biblical Authority, is really trying to show how this high view of Scripture prevails right across history and isn’t the product of nineteenth-century developments or twentieth-century developments.
Female: But is it all true?
Don: Yes. That one is edited by Ben Chapman.
Female: The slant in that books is, you said, away from propositional truth. It just makes so much sense. Propositional truth is important and needs to be embraced and so on, but how do you avoid being gnostic? Relying on.… I think it’s a little bit my husband’s question last night. Relying on knowledge to get you to faith when, really, it’s an act of grace, and there’s an experiential grace spirit aspect of faith. How do you stand between those two?
Don: Some of the things I said to your husband last night I’d want to reiterate and then a whole lot more if I had more time. One has to avoid reductionisms. That’s one of the reasons why I began with God and history. By the time I come to the end of this and start talking about relevance and the whole business of being reconciled to God and establishing a frame of reference in worldview that looks to eternity and is built on grace, some of this will get slotted in a little later.
In the contemporary university world, especially, there is much less hesitation about talking of the commitment inherent in faith than there is in talking about the truth that must be faith’s object. If I’m speaking in a university crowd or to younger people, that’s the side I have to emphasize today because that’s where the problem is.
With respect, you and your husband probably come from a slightly different generation with a different set of problems and challenges in the whole thing. The other sorts of things do have to be said as strongly. It’s not just a question of recognizing there are propositions. Jesus himself says, “I am the truth.” That’s a personal claim. At the same time, there is also a component of bending the knee, and even the perception that these things are true according to a passage like 1 Corinthians 2, is dependent in some way on the Spirit giving us understanding.
I’m going to be dealing a bit more with that in epistemology here, and I’ll be dealing with it still more at the end of the morning when I talk a bit more about relevance. I couldn’t agree with you more. There is a total package here, but what I tend to emphasize, especially in university campuses today dealing with people under 30, is the connection between the validity of faith and the validity of faith’s object because that is what is breaking down in our world. Does that scratch where you itch?
Male: When you were talking about the different ways God discloses himself, you mentioned the words (I assume you’re talking about the Bible), and then the Son is another source of disclosure. For us, most of our knowledge of the Son comes through the Word. How is that a useful distinction for us?
Don: That’s a very good question. One way of getting at it might be functionally and then you’ll see, I think, what I mean. Most devout Muslims (not quite all), because there are two passages in the Qur’an that can be read a couple of different ways on this particular subject, think Christ didn’t die on the cross. He was crucified but he was taken down and lived in secret amongst his followers to a ripe old age. Some believe he died on the cross, but he certainly didn’t rise from the dead.
At this point, Christians and Muslims have competing historical claims. If you take away any notion of history, per se, then it’s what their Scripture says versus what our Scripture says. That’s all it is. It’s their fiedeistic commitment to their Scriptures versus our fiedeistic commitment to our Scriptures.
Where do you go from there? Is there anywhere to go? Isn’t it just a question of whose Scripture is right and that’s it? But precisely because we’re claiming God has disclosed himself in history, even if that history has been mediated in substantial measure (not quite exclusively but in substantial measure) through books that constitute our Scriptures, then there are historical canons you can usefully argue about and think about.
The fact of the matter is our historical Scriptures with respect to the death and resurrection of Christ were written in the first century within decades of the events and most, if not all, by eyewitnesses. Their Scriptures are written in the seventh century by somebody who is more than half a millennium removed and has no historical access whatsoever. It’s a purely fiedeistic claim.
Clearly, it’s Scripture versus Scripture (that’s true), but at a certain historical level, there is open access to historical claims. In other words, even if you are not a believer, even if you’re not a committed Christian, even if you don’t think the documents that constitute the New Testament and the Old Testament constitute canonical Scripture that is binding on the consciences of men and women, even if you don’t think of all of that; nevertheless, just at the raw level of history, who has a better claim to attesting the death of Christ?
Although there is a sense in which these things do revert at some level merely to Scripture, it really is important to keep mentioning the historical dimensions precisely so this does not retreat too fast into a purely fiedeistic debate (my faith versus your faith). Where do you go from there?
