Historical Development of the Bible (Episode 7)

Music.

Greetings and welcome to the Faith Chapel podcast. My name is Jason and I'm

the pastor of Faith Chapel.

In season one of this podcast, we are looking at the historical development

of the Bible and why it is a trustworthy source of who God is.

The last part of these sessions will be a question and answer time where you

will hear some compelling questions about the development of the Bible.

In this episode, we will continue to look at how the Bible came into being by

searching the approximate dates of when some New Testament books were written.

This dating shows the first Christian eyewitnesses viewed Jesus as divine and

that he really did die on the cross and rise from the dead. Thanks for joining us today.

We are coming from last week talking about and discussing the reasons we have

to believe that the early Christians,

the second and third generations of Christians,

trusted in the New Testament.

And the overwhelming evidence is that all of them did this.

They trusted in the scripture and how it was relaying God's truth.

And ultimately, this comes down to the evidence.

The evidence that those second and third generation Christians had with one

another as they studied from the apostles like John and Peter and those that came forth from them.

And how this was really important to their view of what the scriptures are.

So having declared that, we've talked about what the New Testament says of itself

and how it puts on the same level the Old Testament passages and a New Testament passage,

calling them both scripture, how they believe that God was revealing new things

to them and glorifying themselves in that.

It's all boiling down to the point that we have a a valued text all around us,

valued by many, many people, so much so that they are taking time to copy it.

And the amount of copying they are doing and the meticulous study that they

are doing are also proving that this is a valuable piece of literature in their mind.

And so when we come forward from that.

As we finish up these teachings next week, we have a couple of more ideas to

really go through in order to be able to really trust the New Testament and what it claims to be.

And one of those is the dating, not of the documents that we have,

but dating of the writings of these documents and why that's important for our

trust in these scriptures.

So the actual dating we're going to be talking about tonight is when the disciples,

the apostles wrote these words down.

Now, this takes a lot of things into consideration, and sometimes there's a

pretty big gap in when people believe that these documents were written 10,

15 years potentially as a window in when they could have written these words down.

And so the reason that people put so much painstaking effort into this is because

that they want to know how the message of Christianity developed over time.

And they want to know if they can see any progression in Christian thought or

in Christian teachings.

So there is an agnostic or atheist New Testament scholar by the name of Bart Ehrman.

He works in New Testament studies at the University of North Carolina,

and he has pushed back pretty hard on the idea that Jesus believes that he is God.

When he walked this earth, Ehrman is pushing back on the idea that he doesn't

believe that Jesus testified that he was God.

And this is one of the reasons that it's very important to

detail when these documents were written so that we can trace as far back as

we can to help us to get a gaining clear picture of who Jesus taught he was

and who his first disciples and apostles knew he was or believed he was.

So Ehrman pushes back in this way, and I took this from his blog.

The Problem with Liar, Lunatic, or Lord, is what his document is entitled.

And that pushes back on what C.S.

Lewis taught about who Jesus was, because he famously says that we can boil

Jesus down into three categories.

Either he was who he said he was as God.

He was a liar. He knew he wasn't God, but proclaimed himself to be God. Or he was a lunatic.

He really believed he was God, but he wasn't really God.

When we look at the gospels, according to Lewis, this is what we're going to find.

But Ehrman pushes back on that and says, not so fast.

There is a fourth option here. And to continue the alliteration,

he calls Jesus a legend. And this doesn't mean that he doesn't believe Jesus

ever lived. He fully believes that Jesus lived.

But he is saying that the claims of Jesus, specifically in the Gospel of John,

he doesn't believe that those are Jesus's actual words.

And so that was a legendary status of who Jesus was that was built up over time. That's his argument.

And so in arguing this, this is what he proclaims.

Ehrman says it was a view that almost certainly developed within the Johannine community.

This, again, is the majority view among scholars who are not fundamentalists

and very conservative evangelicals.

And the ultimate payoff is that this view of the fourth gospel is not the view

of the historical Jesus himself.

It is a later view put on his lips by the author of John or his sources.

And so there is an easy response to the false conclusion that because Jesus

called himself God, he must be a liar, a lunatic, or a lord.

The response is that the premise is false.

The idea that Jesus called himself God is not historical.

It is a legend. And so the choices are liar, lunatic, lord, or legend.

Not that Jesus himself was a

legend, far from it, but the idea that he called himself God is a legend.

And so this is the argument that, according to Ehrman here, that is the majority

view among scholars who are not fundamentalists or evangelicals.

And that is the premise that the gospel of John is not a trustworthy document for...

That Jesus's words have been twisted, and that the idea of who Jesus was has

been contorted into something that he himself did not believe.

He has become a legendary status.

So in order to combat this, we need to understand the development of the Bible,

particularly the Gospels and the letters of the New Testament,

and how they developed over from the time of the oral transmission of the gospel

to the time of the actual writings.

And the goal and objective here is to pinpoint down the date so that we know

a firm idea of when these teachings actually came into being,

when these teachings actually were proclaimed and what they actually say of themselves.

And so to do that, we're going to break down two of the books of the New Testament.

The book of Mark and the letter to the Galatians.

These two are proving to be what scholarship believes are the oldest two in

their category, Mark in the Gospels and the letter to the Galatians in the Epistles.

These are the oldest two documents that we can have. So we're going to look

at how they date these. And then ultimately at the end, we're going to look

at what they teach us about who Jesus was.

And in Mark's case, who Jesus said he was.

So the dating process is a fascinating, fascinating, maybe too entertaining of a word.

It is a deep dive into trying to figure out a puzzle that does not have a picture

that you are going off of.

Like you're just looking through pieces, trying to piece them together as you

think the puzzle is supposed to go together.

So it is a tedious effort on behalf of those who are really studying these documents.

And the first thing we have to dissect is who the author is.

Now, that might be obvious to us who have read through the New Testament multiple times.

We know who the author of Mark is. We know who the author of the letter to the Galatians is.

These are things that we would probably know.

But looking at the development of this is going to give us a better picture

of a window or a time frame in which we can date these documents.

So we're going to start with the gospel according to Mark. So as we discover,

there are the early church fathers in this patristic period of church history.

We have documentation that clearly attests to the authorship of Mark.

So one of those early church fathers is Euspius.

He lived in the early fourth century, so around 300 AD,

and he quoted in his works, Ecclesiastical history from the work of Papias,

who lived from 60 AD to 130 AD and is more than likely a disciple of the apostle John.

So Papias, his work survived until Euspius' day.

It's not surviving to this day, but we don't have a copy of it,

but we have Papias' words as recorded by Euspius.

And this is what Papias is quoted as saying.

And John, the presbyter or elder, as he is called in the letters of John, also said this.

Mark, being the interpreter of Peter, whatsoever he recorded,

he wrote with great accuracy, but not, however, in the order in which it was

spoken or done by our Lord.

For he neither heard nor followed our Lord, but as he said, he was in the company

with Peter, who gave him such instruction as was necessary,

but not to give a history of our Lord's discourses.

Wherefore, Mark has not erred in anything by writing some things as he has recorded

them, for he was carefully attentive to one thing,

not to pass by anything that he heard or to state anything falsely in these accounts.

So he is clearly being described here as the author of the gospel of John.

Mark got these teachings from Peter because Mark wasn't always with Jesus.

There are times where John Mark is described in the Bible, but they are in the

book of Acts after Jesus's ascension into heaven.

But he is mentioned in the Bible, but not as someone who followed Jesus.

And so he was with Peter and he wrote down Peter's ideas and concepts,

his sermons about Jesus and put them in an account.

And so early church fathers, really early church fathers, second generation

followers of Jesus were attributing this work to Mark himself.

In the the book, The Cradle, the Cross, and the Crown, we have this declaration.

So tradition may vary with respect to certain details, such as Peter's exact

role in connection with the composition of the gospel and the date of authorship.

All agree Mark wrote this gospel and that Peter's preaching in Rome played a central role.

So from the early church fathers, this is a declaration of who the author is.

But we can also see this in the evidence inside the gospel itself.

So the ESV study Bible describes it this way.

The internal evidence also supports the patristic testimony that Peter stands behind Mark's gospel.

Mark's account is especially vivid when recounting incidents involving Peter.

It presents the weakness of Peter as well as the disciples as a whole and omits

praiseworthy or noticeable references to Peter reported in Matthew and Luke.

It has also been observed that there exists a certain structural proximity between

Peter's Caesarea speech that's found in the book of Acts and the gospel of Mark.

And so the idea here is that when it presents the incidents that Peter was involved

in, they have greater detail than the other incidents that Peter was not involved in.

When we think of a follower of Jesus, we would expect that we would highlight

our weaknesses as Peter, as the gospel of Mark does for Peter.

And so highlights our weaknesses and downplays our praiseworthy,

our noteworthy accomplishments.

And so we see here, not only in the external evidence, but in the internal evidence

that Mark is this author.

So boiling that down, we have a period that we need to look at as far as when

this gospel could have been written.

It was a time when Mark was near or just after being with Peter.

And so there is a range of dates that we can boil it down to.

So early Christians, so this is the patristic fathers, date this gospel differently.

There are two different ways to look at it through the early church fathers.

So one document called the Anti-Marcionite Prologue, and then a guy by the name

of Irenaeus and his work against heresies date this gospel after the death of Peter,

which is presumed Peter died in AD 64.

So they date this gospel to 65 or 66 AD.

And so after Peter's execution, Mark wanted to write, according to their tradition,

Mark wanted to write down what Peter had spoken. And so he wrote down these words after his birth.

But there are other early church fathers, such as Clement of Alexandria,

who give a different date for the writing of this gospel.

Clement dates this gospel to be written between 45 and 65 AD.

So those are two examples of how early Christians were dating this document.

But when we come back to modern scholarship, there's another aspect that they

put into dating of this document.

And it is the idea that scholarship today believes that Luke and Matthew used

Mark's gospel to fill in some of the gaps that they had in their own gospel writing.

And if this were the case, that means we have to look at when Luke and Matthew

were written to get a more firm date.

Because right now we're between 45 AD and about 66 AD as a time frame for this.

So according to the cradle, the cross, and the crown,

they say if Mark was the first to write his gospel,

and if Luke used Mark in writing his gospel, and since the book of Acts was

likely written in the early 60s and Luke was written before that,

then all of these factors would place the most probable date for the writing

of Mark's gospel in the second half of the 50s.

So the idea here is it comes from the ending of the book of Acts.

It ends very abruptly. what happens is Paul goes into Rome. He is on trial and he asks his.

He asks for his case to be heard in front of Caesar.

And so there's this long journey from the Middle East all the way to Rome in order to do that.

That's documented in the book of Acts. And then they get to Rome and Paul is there.

He is teaching about Jesus. And that's the end of the book of Acts.

And the idea is that Luke ended the book of Acts right then because that's all that had happened.

The rest of the history, what happened to Paul, when he eventually went before

Caesar, hadn't happened yet. So he didn't write it. And so he just shipped it off.

He sent it to the guy that was Theophilus, the guy that was paying for him to

write this and to take this orderly account because he had caught up to the

history. This is where we're at.

Nothing else had happened. And so if that is in the early 60s, about,

I believe that's considered about 62 AD when Paul makes his way to Rome and

he's awaiting trial in front of Caesar, it has to be before that, that Luke was written.

And if Luke was written and used Mark as a source material, then Mark has to predate that,

also taking it from about 45 AD, which is what we heard from the early church

fathers, to about 59, 58, 57 AD, so shortening that window.

And so that's the idea that modern scholarship is bringing to try to find the

date of these documents.

But that's not the only way you to look at the book of Acts and Luke, that combination.

And so in the ESV study Bible, we read again here that,

however, if a somewhat later date for Luke and Acts is adopted,

or if the similarities between Mark and Luke do not demonstrate that Luke used

a completed written copy of Mark,

then a date for Mark in the mid to late 60s is possible.

And that's after Peter's death.

Some find support for this in a statement from Irenaeus, which we have already

talked about, where he says, after their, when he was talking about Peter and Paul,

after their departure, Mark the disciple and interpreter of Peter did also hand

down to us in writing what had been preached by Peter.

So if Peter's departure refers to his death and Peter died in AD 64,

then the gospel of Mark would have been written after 64, the year Peter died.

On the other hand, this may refer not to the writing, but to the publication

of Mark, or may speak of Peter and Paul's departure, not from life, but from Rome itself.

So a date in the mid to late 50s is most likely, but a date in the mid 60s is still possible.

So boiling all that down, we have a window for when the gospel of Mark was written.

That window comes from the mid-50s all the way to the late 60s,

about a 10-year period, 10 to 13-year period there where this gospel could have been written.

Why this matters is that we

are trying to get as close to the events of the death and resurrection of Jesus

and his ministry as we can so that we know what the earliest church believers

knew and thought about Jesus.

And so for the gospel of Mark, which they believe is the earliest gospel written,

we have a date between 28 and 38 years after Jesus's ministry.

That's when this was written down. That's when this was proclaimed.

That's where we can trace this back to.

So that's the gospels, the earliest gospel written. The next one is the book

of Galatians that we are going to go in.

And what we have in the cradle, the cross, and the crown is the declaration

that the letter to the Galatians is in all likelihood the first letter Paul

wrote that is included in the New Testament.

And what that means is that Paul could have written other letters.

They just aren't surviving and they have not been held onto as a canon of scripture.

When we go through the book of Galatians, we also have to go through these same

steps to formulate the date of it.

And the first one is the authorship of Paul.

We can know by reading the gospel that the author of Galatians claims to be Paul.

It's the first word of the letter.

But scholarship is kind of skeptical about some of the letters of Paul.

But Galatians is not one of them.

There's almost uniform agreement that Paul is the writer to the Galatians.

So in the cradle, the cross and the crown, we read this.

The letter to the Galatians is regarded as an authentic letter of the apostle

Paul by all but the most radical critics.

Most critics are so convinced of Paul's authorship of Galatians that they use

Galatians as the standard by which to test the authenticity of the other letters.

So it is almost a uniform agreement that Paul is the author of this letter.

Now, there is scholarship that debates it, but it's only the most radical critics,

according to Kostenberger in his book here.

And so this is something that we're just going to take on face value because

it is mostly agreed upon in scholarship.

And that leads us then into the dating of Galatians, which comes down to two

visits that Paul mentions in the book of Galatians.

The first one is uniformly agreed to correspond with after his ministry in Damascus,

after coming to faith in Jesus,

Paul spent some time in Arabia, but then he came back after that soul-searching

time in Arabia, thinking through the scriptures, Is Jesus possibly the Messiah?

That sort of thing. He came back to Damascus and taught them for a season.

And then he went to Jerusalem.

So the idea here is that Paul lists two visits to Jerusalem in the first two

chapters of this letter to the Galatians.

The visit mentioned in Galatians 1.18 corresponds with his coming back from

Damascus and interacting with just a couple of the apostles at that time.

The visit described in the next chapter, though, in chapter two,

could correspond to two different visits to Jerusalem.

One is recorded in Acts 11,

28 to 30, which is when Paul comes back to Jerusalem and brings with him a donation

because the people in Judea are going through a famine and it's a very impoverished time for them.

So that happens in Acts chapter 11 verses 28 to 30.

Acts 11:28–30

But the visit in Galatians chapter 2 could also correspond to his visit to Jerusalem

Galatians 2 · chapter mention

for the council that decides whether or not Gentiles need to be circumcised.

So if Galatians 2, 1 through 10 corresponds with him bringing money back to

the impoverished nation or the impoverished area of Judea,

then that letter was written before the Jerusalem council.

And we have a firm date for that.

But if Galatians 2 corresponds with the Jerusalem council, Galatians was written after that moment.

And so this is what they try to decipher?

Is it happening with the Jerusalem council happened about 50 or 51 AD,

maybe 52 AD, but it's a very tight window for when that happened?

Or was his visit described in Galatians 2, was that about him taking money back

to Jerusalem to help with the famine that was on there.

Well, according to the cradle, the cross, and the crown, we have this quote,

the preponderance of evidence favors the equation of the famine relief visit

in Acts 11 30, with the visit recounted in Galatians 2 1 through 10.

Although superficial similarities between Acts 15 and Galatians 2 exist,

close examination of the date suggests that the Galatian 2 visit holds more

in common with the famine relief visit of Acts 11.

Hence, Galatians was most likely written in approximately 48 or 49 AD.

So the idea here is that the evidence points to an early date for Galatians.

And the ESV study Bible solidifies that with other evidence.

So it says, It would have been enormously helpful to Paul's argument if he could

have mentioned the decision of the council that the Gentiles should not be circumcised.

This, after all, appears to be a major point of contingency between Paul and

the false teachers influencing the Galatians.

Since the council took place in AD 48-49 and Paul evangelized South Galatia in AD 47-48,

sometime around AD 48 is a plausible date for the composition of Galatians.

However, determining dates in Paul's life is always somewhat uncertain,

and so one cannot place too much weight on the date in the interpretation of the letter.

So in that case, they're saying if Paul is writing to the Galatians as they

are trusting the advice and the teaching of false prophets, of false teachers.

That they need to go back to the ways of Judaism, they need to be circumcised,

they need to obey the festival schedule that the Israelites were supposed to follow,

then he would have mentioned the Jerusalem council in this.

He would have said, hey, this is, we got everyone together. We had the first council.

This is what we decided. You do not have to be circumcised, but there's no mention of that in there.

And then in the archaeological study Bible, we read that most scholars today

accept the South Galatian theory, and the earlier date for the letter, which is around 48 A.D.

And so that's a lot of information because it's so important that we understand

the dating of these documents,

not the oldest documents that we have, but the dating of the official writing

of these so that we can wrestle with the idea that I first shared,

that over time, the story of Christianity changed.

Over time, the deity of Jesus became a reality when that's not what the historical

Jesus actually thought about himself.

And so in order to do that, we have to trace these documents as back as far

as we can go and then dive into what did they actually say about Jesus.

So we're going to take a look at that. The earliest written evidence we have

is the book of Galatians.

This is the first Christian document we have.

And it says that Jesus died and that Jesus rose from the grave and that Jesus is Lord.

Let's take a look at how it describes all of these things.

So Paul, as the author of Galatians, writes in chapter 2, verse 21,

I do not nullify the grace of God.

For if righteousness were through the law, then Christ died for no purpose.

So he is saying that if we could attain righteousness through the law of Moses,

then Christ died for no purpose.

What we get from this are multiple things that solidify our Christian faith.

The first is that Jesus actually died for us.

Because if we can't be righteousness from our own works and efforts of the law,

then we get our righteousness, according to this, if we dissect it, from Jesus' death.

Our righteousness, which is what Christians teach to this day,

is from the death of Jesus.

We can stand in front of God Almighty because we have Jesus's righteousness gifted to us.

No other way can we do that. That is Christian teaching. That is Christian doctrine.

And that is what the earliest Christian document states.

Then we go to Galatians chapter one, where we read Paul saying,

Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ,

who gave himself for our sins to deliver us from the present evil age,

according to the will of God our Father, to whom be the glory forever and ever. Amen.

So first of all here, Paul calls Jesus Lord.

That is a huge statement in the first century. So the Greek word is kurios.

And you don't call yourself a, you don't call someone a kurios unless you are

willing to call yourself a doulos. So kurios can be translated as master or lord.

Dulos is servant or slave. And so Paul here is declaring in this first Christian

document that Jesus is master and that Paul is his servant.

He is also saying that Jesus gave himself, and we already know that Paul believes that he died.

He gave himself for our sins to deliver us. That is a very important statement.

What we believe and trust in Good Friday is that Jesus took our place and the

punishment that we deserved was put upon him.

We become righteousness like Galatians 2.21 tells us when Jesus dies for our sins.

Hugely important for this is the Christian faith, this is what we believe,

and this is in the earliest Christian documents.

And the most important thing I think from Galatians we get is in the very first

verse where Paul says, Paul, an apostle,

not from men, nor through man, but through Jesus Christ and God the Father who

raised him from the dead.

So we have again the assertion, the teaching that Jesus died for us,

but ultimately here that he was resurrected by God himself.

So we have the death of Jesus. we have the resurrection of Jesus,

we have the lordship of Jesus, all testified to in this first Christian document.

And again, this was 48 AD. And how you date Jesus's death,

this is either 15 years after his death or 18 years after his death,

depending on there's the Nisan 13 is the the date scripture gives for his death.

And that falls on a Friday on AD 30 and AD 33.

So those are the two guesses as to when Jesus died.

So 15 years to 18 years, we have the Christian belief that is being taught that

Jesus died and that he rose from the grave.

We have the idea that he is a master over all of us.

And so these are really important ideas as we try to combat the idea of a growing

legend of Jesus, what he actually said, and then what he is different from what

he actually taught and believed.

One more letter we're going to go through. This is the second letter.

This is considered the second letter written by Peter.

It is 1 Thessalonians, and the ESB Study Bible says the reason why.

It says, most scholars today date 1 Thessalonians to AD 49 to 51.

So just after the writing of Galatians.

So this is early in Paul's 18-month stay in Corinth during his second missionary

journey. So he's writing it in that time frame, and again, it's within 20 years

of Jesus's death and resurrection.

The evidence that they give it is not just internal evidence from the Bible,

but there's also an archaeological find called the Delphi inscription,

which dates Galileo's procounselship of Achaia, which Paul mentions in the book

of 1 Thessalonians, to AD 51 to 52.

So that took place in the latter part of Paul's stay in Corinth,

and it happened in AD 51 or 52, and so this predates that, and the guess is between 49 and 51.

Now, in the book of Galatians, Paul refers to Jesus as Lord three times,

but in the book of 1 Thessalonians, he refers to Lord Jesus 11 times in this epistle,

almost quadrupling what he wrote in the book of Galatians.

But again, testifying that he is master, that Paul is a servant of him.

And we also see the evidence that the belief of the death and resurrection of Jesus is there.

I'm going to read from 1 Thessalonians 1 verses 9 through 10.

1 Thessalonians 1:9–10

For they themselves report concerning us the kind of reception we had among

you, and how you turned to God from idols to serve the living and true God,

and to wait for his Son from heaven,

whom he raised from the dead.

Jesus who delivers us from the wrath of God.

So again, we have the idea of the resurrection of Jesus, that God raised his

son. We have that as a title here, the son of God for Jesus.

And we have that his death and resurrection deliver us from the wrath to come.

Again, these are the ideas and concepts that are all the way back to the earliest Christian writing.

Jesus died. Jesus rose.

Jesus is Lord. Jesus is the Son of God.

And this is the idea that we are, this is the evidence that we have to combat

the idea that what John wrote when he writes Jesus' words as saying,

before Abraham was, I am.

When John writes the idea, the father and I are one.

And so that as a later development in Christian thought, we have these to combat that.

Lastly, we go to the gospel of Mark and the idea of who Jesus said himself to be.

Who Jesus said himself to be.

So Mark records him in his trial.

In Mark 14, verses 61 to 64, this is during Jesus's trial.

Mark 14:61–64

Mark writes, but he, Jesus, remained silent and made no answer.

Again, the high priest asked him, are you the Christ, the son of the blessed?

And Jesus said, I am. And you will see the son of man seated at the right hand

of power and coming with the clouds of heaven.

And the high priest tore his garments and said, what further witnesses do we need?

You have heard his blasphemy.

What is your decision?

And they all condemned Jesus as deserving death.

So this is the earliest gospel account of who Jesus says he was.

And it takes some digging to really figure out who he said he was here.

First of all, Jesus uses the phrase, I am, which refers back to Exodus chapter

three, when Moses is at the burning bush and the declaration of God's name.

He is the great I am. And multiple times, especially in the book of John,

Jesus uses this declaration.

And so here in this moment, he proclaims, I am. And then he calls himself the

Son of Man, which is a designation that can be traced back to the book of Daniel.

And we'll get to that in a moment. But he calls himself the Son of Man,

and he's seated at the right hand of power.

This is a phrase taken from Psalm 110, verse 1, where the Messiah is seated at God's right hand.

Psalms 110:1

So Jesus uses the phrase, I am.

Jesus uses a phrase that is describing the Messiah about himself.

And then Jesus uses a phrase from Daniel chapter 7 verses 13 and 14 when he

Daniel 7:13

says, coming with the clouds of heaven.

And when we get to Daniel 7, 13 and 14, it is someone who looks like a human

being coming before God and riding on the clouds of heaven.

When the Old Testament mentions riding on the clouds of heaven,

it is exclusively talking about God.

It is exclusively about God.

And this human-like figure who is described as God, he is given everlasting dominion.

So he has this eternal nature about him, as well as glory and a kingdom over all people.

He is a king over the whole earth.

So this shows his divine eternal power.

This shows his divine eternal power.

And so while Jesus doesn't come out and say, yes, I am the son of God. I am equal to God.

I am a part of God in totality.

He clearly makes it.

Visible to his hearers that he is claiming equality with God.

That's why the high priest tears his robe.

That should not be done, but he is claiming to be God in this instance.

And so the high priest tears his robe and calls out blasphemy.

This is what Mark presents as Jesus's own words.

And while it is not a, yes, I am the divine God, I am Yahweh in human form,

it is clear enough to his hearers that that's who he is claiming to be.

And when we trace these words through the Old Testament, that's ultimately what we find.

Jesus claiming to be the Messiah, Jesus claiming divine power.

And so when we look at the gospel of Mark and what Jesus said of himself,

we have a date range that can be from the early 50s to the about 70 AD.

In my next quote, it's even going to take it to 75 AD. So that would be about

a 30 to 45 year gap between Jesus's actual death and resurrection and what happened

and the writing of this gospel.

But even in the earliest gospel, this is what we find, that Jesus proclaims that he is God.

So lastly, and I found this on a website, it says this, the gospel of Mark was

written no later than 75 AD.

And there are arguments that it was written in the 50s or even the late 30s.

Mark records an angel as saying, you are looking for Jesus the Nazarene who was crucified.

He has risen. He is not here.

See the place where they laid him.

Lastly, the gospel of Mark carries on the idea that Jesus died and that he rose from the grave.

The earliest Christian witnesses we have are declaring these things.

And so while they can claim there are decades between the actual events and the writing of Jesus,

they cannot claim that it was a story arc that began with little information

in the beginning and then crescendoed to the end.

We have documented evidence that Jesus claims to be the divine son of God.

We have documented evidence that they believed Jesus died and that he rose from the grave.

This is what the dating of these gospels leads us to.

The earliest Christian documents show us that our continued belief of Jesus

as God in human form and as the resurrected Savior has been that way from the

recorded history that we have.

So that was, again, a lot. But again, I do want to challenge the idea here.

The people who claim that the gospel has a crescendo, it has a legendary effect,

they would have arguments to combat these.

But this is clearly evidence for believing in the divinity of Jesus and in the

death and resurrection of him.

The earliest Christian witnesses that we have testify to this.

Do you have any comments or questions?

You know, when the earliest document we have so clearly states,

where are they going to cross things? It's a legend.

Yeah. I don't get that. Are they trying to talk us out of it?

Trying to talk us out of the obvious?

I have feelings about biblical scholars in the universities who write all this stuff.

I'm worried that they're not solid to Christians and that they're really trying

to devoke it as they teach it. So we'll slow up.

So there is a lot of effort put into human wisdom.

There's a lot of, maybe not effort, a lot of dignity put on human wisdom and

reasoning rather than trust.

And so people get paid ultimately to write documents.

People ultimately, especially in academia, get paid to have their name presented

and their ideas put forward.

And I believe that that ultimately is a source of the problem.

I know for a fact that Bart Ehrman was a person in a church,

a conservative church, before he became agnostic or atheist.

I can't remember how he labels himself, but he did have this idea of this being reality.

And I've heard him say that he was standing up one time reciting the Apostles'

Creed and he was like, yeah, I don't believe that anymore.

And so I think he really, I don't, I don't know how much, how solid he was before

that, but it was just a progression for him that he fell away.

And there are lots of people who walk away from the faith.

I mean, it's not out of the norm to just have a falling out.

So that does happen.

And he just happens to be in a field where he can influence lots and lots of

people in a way that I don't think the evidence points to.

Yeah, you mentioned what he got paid to publish.

I got to have something to say so I'll come up with something crazy and get

published to get my name out there.

It's a little like ego, God, the way.

Yeah. And that's the danger. I mean, there are pastors who walk away from the faith.

When you really put your effort and energy into trusting and not following the evidence,

You can get into a situation where you look at somebody's well-put argument

that convinces you that these are myths that developed years after that.

So you can become jaded in lots of different ways.

Yeah. Or the point of view of perspective is everything.

And, yes, it is believable. Yeah.

Except it was real or not. Yeah. And I just want to reiterate here,

and I know you've heard me say this, but it is about trust.

It is about believing in Jesus and trusting him as our Lord and Savior.

But from everything that I've researched and everything I've presented It's

not a blind step of faith It is a coordinated,

calculated step of faith It is faith, it is belief, it is trust But it is because

of the evidence Not because you felt something at a concert,

Yeah Walks upon a dog and quacks upon a dog Walks upon a dog,

the problem is It looks like God, sounds like God, acts like God, probably is.

I 100% agree.

And no one has been a better teacher than Jesus.

No one has taught what true love is more than him.

Thank you again for joining us in our discussion of the historical development of the Bible.

If you are interested in learning more about Faith Chapel and its ministries,

please visit gofaithchapel.org.

We will continue our learning next time as we discuss the process of defining

the canon that is the New Testament.

Music.