Historical Development of the Bible (Episode 6)

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 an important and 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

looking at the extra-biblical sources that elevate the words of Jesus and those

of the apostles to the same high standard of the Hebrew scriptures.

We will also look at the archaeological evidence that shows these texts were

revered in a way no other ancient source was.

Thanks for joining us today.

Two weeks ago we talked about the historical development in terms of what the biblical authors,

pictured their role in as they understood themselves to be a messenger of God

like the prophets of the Old Testament.

And two main scripture passages that really speak to this is Peter saying of

Paul's letters that they are equivalent to scripture.

Peter says that the people are twisting Paul's words in his letters like they

do the other scriptures, putting Paul's letters on equal status as the Old Testament.

And then Paul, when he quotes scripture, he uses an Old Testament passage and

a New Testament passage, bringing home the same point, and of both of those,

he uses the term scripture.

So the scripture passage comes from Luke, and the other one comes from the Old

Testament, and he really pretty much solidifies these two are on equal ground.

And so that's what the New Testament says of itself,

but we can't always take a self-attestation of one's own opinion of themselves to as valid,

unless there's reasons to really understand that that is true.

And so today what we're going to look into is two different ways that Scripture

is being portrayed historically as really Scripture.

So these are outside of Scripture references to help us to understand that the Scripture.

According to really early Christians, is the New Testament is Scripture,

according to those really early Christians.

So before I begin, I want to acknowledge something from 1 Corinthians 15,

1 through 3, that can seem to throw weight behind people who aren't following

Jesus and who don't believe the scriptures are inspired by God.

And I just want to touch briefly on one of the arguments that they have for

that and then get into our opinion

as people who follow Jesus get into our opinion of what that looks like.

So we get into 1 Corinthians 15, starting in verse 1, we read Paul's words where

he says, Let me now remind you, dear brothers and sisters,

of the good news I preached to you before.

You welcomed it then, and you still stand firm in it.

It is this good news that saves you if you continue to believe the message I told you.

Unless, of course, you believed something that was never true in the first place.

I passed on to you what was most important and what had also been passed on to me.

Christ died for our sins, just as the scriptures said.

So when Paul went around the Mediterranean area in the first century,

speaking about Jesus, he tells them right here, when I first visited you, I told you these things.

And all throughout the first 20, 25 years of the New Testament,

the stories of Jesus circulated via oral transmission.

The letters and the Gospels were not written until 25 or so years after the

death and resurrection of Jesus.

Paul claims that here. This is what I told you. I passed on orally what was

most important and what had been passed on to me.

So when Paul encountered the risen Jesus on the road to Damascus,

Jesus was declaring these things to him.

There are other times where Paul is taken up into what he calls the third heaven.

And so revelations were given to him then.

So these messages were passed orally before they were written.

And that's important for us to understand.

When we try to go back to the originals, and we're going to look at dating next week,

when we go back, try to go back to the originals, there is that 20,

25 year gap between when the events of Easter happened and when they actually got written down.

This can cause some people to doubt the validity of the scriptures.

Doubt what they really say, because there is that gap there.

So first and foremost, we need to acknowledge that that did happen for several

years, for a good 20, 25 years, that these stories of Jesus,

the doctrines of the Christian church.

They were handed down in these ways.

So for discussion on this, it is important to note something that historical

theology, that book that I have by Greg Allison, what he says in regards to this.

He says, our discussion may give the wrong impression that the early church

possessed a written Bible readily available to all its members,

much like each of us taking our own copy of the Bible to church and Bible study.

This, however, was not the case. Indeed, for the first few decades of its existence,

the church had only oral stories that it could pass on.

Even when the last writings of what was to become the New Testament were being penned,

the church was still largely dependent on unwritten tradition,

which continued for the first several centuries of the church.

So it takes time after these documents were written in one specific area to

actually be copied and to be transported, whether it's house to house or from city to city,

country to country, whatever it may be.

It took time for this to develop.

But the important thing to note is what he says next.

These written records and unwritten tradition were seen as two parts of a unified whole.

And the early church appealed to both to express its doctrine and to fight heresy.

So the idea here is that the oral stories that were being told were not in contradiction

to the ones that were written.

They all meshed together.

They were all one unified story. While some of the stories probably did get

lost in the copying process or in the oral transmission to the writing tradition.

It is something that always lined up with who Jesus was and what Jesus taught,

what he did, and what the church did as a response to Jesus's death and resurrection.

That's always been the case.

Now, there are people, and we'll talk about it a little bit later on,

there are people who disagree with Greg Allison here, but this is the understanding

of what was going on through the church.

And we have some historical evidence to back this up.

So when I say historical evidence, I'm going to break it down into two different categories.

One I'm going to call historical evidence, and these are going to be the stories

of the early church fathers who are outside of the Bible.

Their writings never appear in Scripture, but their writings do exist.

Two of them we're going to talk about happened to be disciples of John,

who is the gospel of John writer, the writer of the Revelation.

He had disciples and two of the ones that we're going to talk about were actually learning from him.

Then we go a little bit further down into church history to see how these ideas

and concepts of what the New Testament is really came in to form.

And from my perspective, they are going to go along with this idea that the

written and unwritten traditions were one unified story.

So getting into that historical evidence, we are going to just start with the

idea of something else Greg Allison says.

He comments, the earliest Christian writings outside of our New Testament continued

this practice of elevating the words of Jesus and the writings of the apostles,

recognizing in them the authority of divine revelation.

So after the apostles pinned their words, and their followers.

Their disciples, whether it was like the church in Corinth, whether it was the

church in Philippi, or where John went, or where Peter went.

Wherever these disciples went, whatever they taught, the earliest Christian

writings affirm that they believe the words of Jesus and the writings of the

apostles have divine authority.

They came from God.

And this goes along with what's in 2 Timothy 3, 16 and 17, which is the idea

that all scripture is God-breathed.

It comes from the mouth of God. It is useful for teaching, correcting,

rebuking, and training in righteousness that the men and women of God may be

thoroughly equipped for every good word.

And so that's the idea that they really carried on.

And in the book, The Cradle, the Cross and the Crown,

we get that same idea that the where it says a survey of the early patristic

literature reveals that the early church fathers had no hesitancy whatsoever

to quote the various New Testament books as scripture.

So not just the people who wrote the Bible, but the generation that came after

them also held and affirmed these beliefs.

It is true that they believe they were the words of God. And so we're going

to look at a couple of those and some of what they wrote.

So the first one is a guy by the name of Clement of Rome. I don't know when

he was born, but he died in 99 AD.

So this is the first century, the century where Jesus lived.

He is one of the ones that is described as a disciple of John.

And in his letter of the Romans to the Corinthians, he writes the glorious and

holy rule of our tradition.

So by the time he died, I think this letter was, so he was the Bishop of Rome.

It's written from Rome to a city in Corinth. And in his day,

he believed, he truly wrote that there is a glorious and holy rule of our tradition.

There is this collection of truth that we need to follow.

Then when we go into another one of his writings, it becomes even more evident.

So again, from the cradle, the cross, and the crown, we read,

the author of one Clement,

which is Clement of Rome, the first existent non-biblical Christian document,

which was written in about AD 96.

Tended to quote scripture organically.

That means without introductory formula.

You can see that in the New Testament, it sometimes refers to,

as it is said, where it refers to Scripture.

That would be like an introduction to Scripture, but it just cites it organically

without an introduction like that.

And Clement cited the Old Testament and the New Testament equally in this manner.

So he didn't say, he didn't have a lead in to the passages that we find in the

canon of the New Testament, but he did it for the Old Testament. It wasn't like that.

He treated both of them equally.

And so this is evidence that he had them on the same level. He put them on the same rule.

And so this is how the earliest non-biblical Christian writing handled scripture.

It did quote the Old Testament. It did quote the New Testament.

It handled them in exactly the same way.

The next guy is by the name of Polycarp.

He was born in 69 AD and lived to 155 AD.

And again, he is described as a disciple of John.

And he again continues this understanding of the New Testament being on the same level as the old.

So in Greg Allison's book, it says, one example was a reference by Polycarp

to a portion of Paul's letter to the Ephesians, which we can find in Ephesians 4.26,

and Polycarp announces this as Scripture.

So this is something that he denotes as Scripture, again, putting it on the

same level as the Old Testament.

And then we read in the cradle, the cross, and the crown, this by far Polycarp's

most intriguing comment comes at Philippians 12.1.

Now, if you pause there, you know that Philippians in our Bible does not have 12 chapters in it.

So this is referencing to Polycarp's own letter to the Philippians,

which is known as the epistle to the Philippians.

So in Polycarp's letter to the Philippian church, he writes,

For I am convinced that you are all well trained in the sacred scriptures,

only as it is said in these scriptures, be not angry or sorry,

be angry, but do not sin and do not let the sun set on your anger.

The clear implication is that there was a body of literature called the Scriptures

of which the book of Ephesians was a part where those passages come from.

So beyond this, it is more likely that Polycarp viewed Paul's letter in their entirety as Scripture.

So by quoting those and sending them with the word scriptures.

He is saying that this body of literature is also equivalent to the Old Testament.

So again, he lived in the first century.

I'm not sure if that was before the turn of the first century into the second

century, because he lived a lot into the second century.

But really early in Christian development, they had this concept and idea of

the writings that we have, the teachings of Jesus,

the stories of Jesus are on the same level as the Old Testament.

The next one is a guy by the name of Irenaeus.

Irenaeus was born in 130 AD, so he is a little bit later.

He is what we would call the third generation of Christian believers.

And where what he, again, carries on this idea of the New Testament being equivalent to the old.

In Greg Allison's book, we read, the only true and life-giving faith which the

church has received from the apostles and imparted to her sons.

So that is quoting, that is a quote of Irenaeus in his letter against heresies,

and he is basically saying there is the only true and life-giving faith the

church has received from the apostles.

Their teachings are what is true and life-giving.

Then a little bit later on, he quotes these teachings as the rule of truth.

And the rule there can also be translated as the word canon,

which is where we get the canon of scripture.

So the rule of truth, This is what they truly thought of these writings from the first century.

Again, another guy, this guy is in the fourth or fifth generation.

His name is Tertullian. He lived from 160 AD to 240 AD.

And again, he used the context of the writings and the teachings of the apostles

as the rule of our faith in his letter that's known as Prescription Against Heretics.

So the rule of our faith, there is a right and wrong belief in Christianity, and this is what it is.

It goes back to what the apostles taught. It goes back to their writings.

Just a couple of more that I found in study.

This comes from Greg Allison's book, again,

where he writes another one of these examples came from an anonymous work that

noted the complementary authority of the books, that's in quotations,

which is in reference to the Old Testament,

and the apostles, so they're complementary of each other.

Moreover, the letter of Barnabas, which is another author.

Outside of that anonymous one, quoted Jesus's words in Matthew 22,

14, where it says, many are invited, but few are chosen.

With the introductory formula, it is written, which is an expression that was

reserved for citations from the Old Testament scriptures.

So again, more and more evidence that the early church fathers took these writings

of the disciples, the apostles,

the stories of Jesus, the gospels, the letters, all of it as the word of God

and a continuation of the Old Testament.

Allison sums it all up with this quote, where he says,

this tradition was essentially fixed and agreed upon by all the churches with

its content being a succinct statement of essential Christian doctrine.

Whatever was believed in the church had to conform to this rule of faith.

Indeed, true doctrine could be distinguished from false by tracing its origin

to the tradition of the apostles.

So even back then, they dealt with heretical ideas and concepts.

And they were like, if it doesn't match what the apostles wrote,

if it doesn't match what the apostles taught, it is not scripture. It is not canon.

It is not what we follow.

And so the historical evidence is pretty strong when you get to the first,

second, and third generation of followers after the disciples.

They are resolute in their affirmation that the New Testament and the Old Testament

are on the same level and that God was speaking through the apostles as they

were writing down the New Testament.

So that as the first believers of Jesus outside of the apostles,

they affirm the validity of the New Testament as scripture.

We also have what I call strong evidence in terms of archaeological evidence

reinforcing this idea that these are sacred texts,

that people revered them and held them close, and that they wanted to know what they said.

And so we're going to switch gears.

Archaeological evidence can also be considered historical evidence,

but I split them up into two different divisions.

One I call historical and this one archaeological.

So the first archaeological evidence we have that reinforces the idea of the

importance of scripture is the idea that there are thousands of surviving ancient

New Testament manuscripts.

For example, the Greek language, which is the language it was originally written in,

the language when Alexander the Great came and conquered the known world at

that time, or almost the known world, It became the official language,

and so the New Testament was originally written in that language.

And in the Greek language, we have 5,686 copies from the 2nd century to the

15th century AD of these texts. Some of them are partial.

Some of them are complete documents. But we have more than 5,600 of these copies found.

And this book was published a few years ago, so that might have even increased from then.

But in addition to those, we have more than 10,000 copies,

again, sometimes partial, sometimes complete, of the New Testament documents in the Latin Vulgate.

So this is written in the Latin language. It was translated from Greek into

Latin, and there are more than 10,000 of those.

And on top of that, there are an additional 9,284 documents written in other

languages like Aramean,

Ethiopic, which is from Ethiopia, and other languages in that area.

So altogether, that totals up to nearly 25,000 copies of the New Testament documents.

And again, sometimes they're fragments, sometimes they are complete,

all 27 books of the New Testament. But it is a really big volume of documents

that scholarship can sort through and look through.

So for F.E. Peters, he is a historian.

He states that on the basis of manuscript tradition alone, the works that made

up the Christian's New Testament were the most frequently copied and widely

circulated books of antiquity.

Now, it took time to copy these documents. It took lots of energy,

lots of effort to go into just making one copy.

And so this reinforces the idea that not just the earliest Christians found

these books to be needing to be revered,

but even more and more as we go down through the generations,

people saw the value of these documents.

It is testifying to their worth as scripture.

So by comparison, just to show you how big the difference is,

there are, this is the nearly 25,000 number,

24,970 copies of the New Testament available today from antiquity.

Comparing that to the copies of the Iliad by Homer, there are only 643 that

are existing to this day.

So that was a book that was revered. That was a book that was honored.

That was a book that I had to read in school.

It was something that people revered, but we only have 643 copies of that compared

to the 24,970 of the New Testament.

And so that leads in the Archaeological Study Bible that I have them to say

this, No other ancient text is substantiated by such a wealth of ancient textual witnesses,

as is the New Testament.

Roughly 5,500 separate manuscripts are available, and that's just in Greek.

Variously containing anything from the entire New Testament corpus to a slight

fragment of a single verse.

There are also hundreds of copies of ancient translations or versions of the

New Testament that reveal the form of the text known to their translators,

as well as numerous New Testament quotations in the writings of the early church

fathers that disclose the form of the particular text known to them.

So again, it is just a copious amount of text that scholarship has the ability to go over.

From the quotations from the ancient church fathers, from the copies that were

translated into other languages,

that they can get the idea of what they saw in that text and could see how they

were translating it and getting different nuances in that way.

And then from the original Greek manuscripts as well. It's just really impressive.

And again, it shows the reverence that people had for these documents.

They wanted these documents. They took the time to copy them,

and it was something that they revered.

Another concept from archaeology that

we get is in reference to believing in the New Testament documents is the time

span that elapsed between when the New Testament books were written and where

the oldest surviving copies,

what are the oldest surviving copies that we have.

So this goes into helping us to understand the validity of the words we are reading.

We all know and have played the telephone game and can see that as you go through

it, whether someone manipulates the phrase on purpose or they do it by accident,

these messages can get twisted.

And so the earliest documents that we have are the most important ones for us,

because those are the ones that God breathed onto the prophets,

breathed onto the apostles so that we could have God's revelation to us.

And the time span that gets us closest to the original documents is very well

attested to in the New Testament books.

So the four gospel books that describe the life of Jesus all have surviving

fragments that date back to the second or third centuries.

So the idea here is that the gospel stories can be verified by very old copies,

and they're only fragments,

but they're very old, and the words that are written on those are compared to

the later complete documents, and they match and are accurate to those.

And so the earliest documents that we have are from the 2nd and 3rd centuries.

So in the next bullet point down, we have the oldest known copy of any portion

of the New Testament is the John Ryland's Papyrus, officially designated P-52,

and it dates approximately to A.D. 125.

It contains a couple of verses, John 18, 31 to 33, and John 18, 37 to 38.

So I do have a copy of it. For those of you here, it should be on the screen

up there. As you can see, it's a fragment.

It's just very small. It's written in Greek. I have.

I know what, I can look up what John 18 says, but I don't know what these,

I can't read these texts right here.

But it's a front, and it's flipped over on the back.

And so on the front and back of this papyrus, we have these words that come from John chapter 18.

John 18 · chapter mention

And so the idea is that when we get into the dating of John next week,

we're going to see that this document is 30, roughly 30 years away from the original.

So it's very, very close to when the document of the gospel of John was written.

And again, the closer we get back to the original, the less errors could possibly

have occurred and the more accurate they are to the original.

And so this one, as it denotes John 18, 31 to 33, and they compare it to later

versions, it is highly accurate to what it was written,

and it's only 30 years, 35 years maybe, after the writing of the Gospel of John.

So that is the oldest fragment, and there are gospel fragments that have been

found through the second and third

centuries that solidify all four of the Gospels as having been written,

as having been circulated that early in this time.

So when we go to the oldest complete or nearly complete manuscripts,

we go to ones we've already mentioned for the Old Testament.

Which are the Codex Vaticanus and the Codex Sinaiticus.

Both are from the 300 ADs. Then when we look at other New Testament partial

manuscripts, there have been 65 found from the 4th century or earlier.

So this is the 500s or earlier before them.

And again, this is really good evidence that we can compare,

we can contrast what the fragments are saying with the Codex Vaticanus or with

the Codex Sinaticus so that we can see the validity that they are.

And every time it comes back that people copied them very carefully.

There are variants, there are differences, but they are copied very,

very carefully, which again reinforces the idea that people took these words

seriously, and they wanted to be as precise as they could as they were putting

them on different parchments.

So, really huge amounts of documents that testify to the New Testament.

Then we have really early documents, the earliest one about 30,

35 years after John was written. So, very close time frame in that.

So, we're getting what we need to be reinforced about if the New Testament can be trusted.

I just found a couple of other ancient books that have gaps between when the

original was written and when the fragment or the complete document was found,

and the New Testament blows all of these away.

So there is a historical document known as the Histories by Herodas,

and the document that we found was 400 years after the original,

and that's just a fragment.

And the oldest surviving complete copy was created 1,300 years after the original.

So those are the ones that have survived to this day. Again,

this is called the Histories by Herodotus.

And so that is that The New Testament blows that out with 35 years after the

gospel of John and only 300 years for the full and complete document.

So when we go to Tacitus, this is another first century, this is a first century Roman historian.

In his book, The Annals, it was made about 700 years after the original,

and that's a fragment that we have.

And the oldest surviving copy of Tacitus' Histories was made a thousand years after the original.

So this leads New Testament scholars to identify that this is really good evidence.

So from the Archaeological Study Bible,

again, it says this textual support of the New Testament is far superior to

that available for any other ancient documents,

such as the classical texts from Greek and Roman writers like Aristotle, Plato.

Aristotle, and Cicero.

Only partial manuscripts have survived for many works of antiquity,

and it is not unusual to find that the only complete manuscript for some ancient

writing is a copy dating from 1,000 years after its composition.

Again, these were books that were revered. These are books that people learn history from.

And the idea is that the New Testament was more revered.

It was more honored. It was more taken care of than any other book from antiquity.

And again, this leads to the belief that they saw the validity of the New Testament

and said, yes, we need to take care of these.

Another idea, and we touched briefly on it a little bit earlier tonight,

is that the texts of the various ancient New Testament manuscripts agree with

each other to a very high degree.

So from the Archaeological Study Bible, we read,

As was invariably the case in antiquity, no two copies of a manuscript were

exactly alike, despite meticulous care on the part of copyists.

Although we can no longer consult the original manuscripts.

The richness and antiquity of those that are at the disposal of scholars are

such that it is usually not difficult to determine what the original authors wrote.

In most cases, we can also discern how and why variations arose in the manuscripts.

In no case does a fundamental Christian

teaching depend upon accepting one manuscript reading over another.

So when we compile all of the evidence that we have, these 24,000 plus copies,

they're saying they all agree. There is no doctrine that can be found on one, but not another.

And it is just absolutely astounding how in sync they are.

And it just testifies to their belief in the authority of these texts and they

wanting to get what God actually said and revealed to them.

This next quote is from Wikipedia, and Wikipedia isn't the most respected site,

but I liked what they said, and it agrees with the scholars that I found.

So it says, Almost all of these, which it's talking about the New Testament

textual variants, are minor, and most of them are spelling or grammatical errors.

Almost all can be explained by some type of unintentional scribal mistake, such as poor eyesight.

Very few variants are contested among scholars, and few or none of the contested

variants carry any theological significance.

Modern biblical translations reflect this scholarly consensus where the variants

exist, while the disputed variants are typically noted as such in the translations.

So again, the idea is that where there are discrepancies, it could be just a

matter of a slip of the pen.

It could be misreading one of the characters of a letter, and none of them deal

with theologically significant points in the Christian faith.

There are differences that do come up in my study for this week in John 15,

where it's talking about the branches that are being taken out of the vine that is Jesus.

They are cast aside and they are burned in the fire.

Some people believe that that is about the idea of people who are just playing

church. They're in the church, but they are not really true followers of Jesus.

And so that's the taking that branch away because it's not producing any fruit

because they're not true believers. And then they get into final judgment.

And then other people take that passage to mean these are true believers who

have fallen away, but they go to a passage of Paul where Paul says.

And you will be saved, but you will have to go through fire.

Meaning that all of your works are burnt up, but you still get into heaven.

And so they disagree on what that means, but it's not a core biblical truth.

And so looking at the variants, we can see some nuances and differences in this,

but none of them affect the complete doctrines that we have been handed down

from the time of the apostles.

And all of this leads me to a quotation.

I think I might have shared it last time, but I really, really think it fits

in well here from Paula Friedrichson, who is a historian of ancient Christianity at Boston University.

She is not a believer in Jesus as far as I can tell, but she does think that

based upon the historical evidence of what we see in the Bible,

what we see in the early church fathers,

what we see from the archaeological evidence of the entirety of these documents that we have,

she says this, I know in their own terms what they saw was the raised Jesus.

That's what they say. And then all the historical evidence we have afterwards

attests to their conviction that that's what they saw.

I'm not saying that they really did see the raised Jesus. I wasn't there.

But I do know that as a historian, that they must have seen something.

And so, again, the historical evidence goes back to the stories being true.

They lived these stories out. They taught these stories from generation to generation.

They revered these stories, and it gives me evidence and proof to not need to

take a leap of faith in believing that these documents are the true revelation of God.

It makes me to take a step, but I believe it's a step in the evidence.

I don't think it's a leap of faith. I just think it's a step forward and saying,

yes, I'm looked at the evidence.

I see the validity here and the magnitude of this.

I see their lives. I see the, I understand what the documents mean.

And it just makes sense that I just take that step into believing in him,

to trusting in Jesus, because that's what the evidence proves.

So to me, this fits in well here because it reinforces the idea that it's a

step in faith, not a leap in faith.

And so I find this to be very exciting stuff when it comes to the historical

development of especially the New Testament.

There's just so much evidence there that we can rely and trust upon.

So do we have any questions or comments from you guys tonight about anything

we covered or anything that came to mind?

It's absolutely miraculous that so much survived. It's got to mean something.

Yeah. It's got to mean something.

Yeah, the sheer volume is, I would agree, absolutely miraculous.

The sheer volume. They didn't have heavy-duty paper to write on,

and they didn't have good ink and all that stuff to preserve all this stuff,

and yet here it is. Right.

People marvel at Christian's belief, but this woman,

Paula Fredrickson, who has studied this and has seen the evidence that these things are true,

she still can't come to the realization that it is true because of,

I don't know, her own doubts, her own prejudice.

It just shows to me that what Christ said about, and what the Bible says about those, well,

those are blind, those are blind that cannot see.

Any other thing that had this much evidence historians would accept as fact.

Anything else. Anything else but Jesus.

Yeah, I heard a poet one time, and I don't remember where, but someone told

me, I don't have enough faith to be an atheist.

Exactly. Exactly. Because of the overwhelming evidence that is there. Yeah.

It's no wonder that God says, if you seek me, you will find me.

Right. If you seek me sincerely. Yeah.

And that's her problem. She's not looking for him. Mm-hmm. She sees the evidence

and agrees they must have seen something, but she's not looking for Jesus.

She's not trying to find him, so she won't acknowledge that that's what they saw. Yeah.

It's still sad for him. Absolutely. Because it's just as plain as a nun and a Pharisee.

Yeah. You can't see that.

So we do have these three levels of testimony about what the New Testament is.

The testimony that the, what the New Testament says of itself.

We have the testimony of what the outside sources see in the New Testament, and the.

I guess it would be in the same category, but this archaeological

evidence where people really trust in what the apostles handed down and in how

it is a continuation of the scripture and how it ultimately fulfills and completes

what the Old Testament is.

And so this is really, I mean, there's lots and lots of evidence,

as you guys were mentioning, to really solidify and verify.

Again, what really hit me today was like, it's not a leap of faith.

It's technically just a step of faith going from where Paula is to where we are.

It's not going to take a complete trust fall. It's literally just taking the next step.

And so that's what really stood out to me today.

I was, it's not something, it's something that I probably should have thought

about, but I didn't stop to think about the disciples having disciples.

Well, of course they would because it was their job to make disciples.

And it was really pleasant to hear the names of the disciples that John had.

And it started my mind going to, well,

I wonder about how many disciples Matthew had and how many disciples Nathaniel

had and what their names were and what did they accomplish and that kind of thing.

Being in different countries, et cetera. Heaven's going to be so interesting.

Tell me about yours. What did you do? Who is your master? Oh, wow.

Whose disciple were you? Yeah.

Oh, it'll take eternity to hear everybody's stories.

Absolutely. Yeah. That's exciting. It is exciting.

And I see it as, again, the idea of carrying on what Jesus taught.

Jesus says, go and make disciples of all nations.

And here we have John with Polycarp, and I don't remember the other guy's name,

Clement, and how he was doing that.

He was telling them about Jesus.

And it's a good reminder for us today that that's still what we should be continuing.

We have this legacy of what John said, what John did as he followed the Holy

Spirit's prompting in his life and Jesus'

teaching, and then who that impacted behind him.

And it is a really cool thing to process.

Music.

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 dating of a few New

Testament books and why that is important to trust in the New Testament accounts. Have a great day.

Thank you.

Music.