A Conversation With John Dickson & Andy Stanley

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And now, this week's message.

So I love talking to John.

We had a wonderful dinner last night.

We were just totally nerding out on all this stuff.

Umly green tomatoes.

Right, that's right.

Tomatoes.

Yes, tomatoes.

That's fine.

Okay.

That's just the beginning of the um diction lesson that we're gonna have um because John is not from here.

So, limited time, so I want us to dive right in.

John, you're a professor, you you live in the minutiae and the the nerdiness of historical Bible backgrounds, something we have in common.

But are the gospels reliable accounts of actual events?

And if so, why should we take the historical part of Christianity, the history behind Christianity seriously?

That's the starting point.

Christianity is weird compared to other world religions.

Um, other world religions have sacred texts, but the idea is that they are uh revelations that have come from heaven out of nowhere.

So our Muslim friends will tell us that the Quran isn't a historical document reporting historical events, it's actually a divine dictation that was sent down to Muhammad untouched.

Uh, Buddhists, their texts are the uh account of the revelation the Buddha had.

There are no events that are listed there, but Christianity comes out and says, Oh, yeah, our guy was born under Emperor Augustus, uh, lived most of his life under Emperor Tiberius.

Oh, and by the way, the fifth governor of Judea crucified him.

Now, as soon as you say something like that, smart people are gonna go, uh, okay, so you're claiming something historical.

You're vulnerable now, because I can see if there's any evidence.

But actually, what appears to be Christianity's vulnerability, its historical nature, uh tends, I think, to be its superpower.

Our texts are historical.

And you've already mentioned the Gospels.

I think the opening paragraph of Luke's gospel nails this from the beginning.

Because you can't read this opening paragraph and think we're dealing with a legend or a myth, you know, something like the Iliad or the Odyssey.

Um, if I I can read it here.

Um the opening lines of the account of Luke about the life of Jesus.

Many have undertaken to draw up an account of the things that have been fulfilled among us, just as they were handed down to us by those who from the first were eyewitnesses and servants of the word.

With this in mind, since I myself have carefully investigated everything from the beginning, I too decided to write an orderly account for you, most excellent Theophilus, so that you may know the certainty of the things you have been taught.

This is a historical introduction to a historical text, and he really underlines this by using this word, asphylaya, uh, the uh Greek term that really means solid, right?

Asphalea.

That's where we get our term asphalt.

Do you mean asphalt?

No, asphalt.

Okay.

Okay.

That always throws me, but it's still that's the stuff that you make roads out of.

There's the stuff we make roads out of that's solid, yes.

Well, that's it.

Asphalt.

So Yeah.

Yeah.

Good.

Asphalt.

Um so it's something you can touch and stand on.

It's solid.

Um, and for 20 years or more, um, I I've worn a piece of the ancient world around my neck.

Um, this is uh Roman denarius.

We have a picture of it, or yeah.

Yeah, that's amazing.

I was jealous when you showed me that.

Go ahead.

It's um Emperor Tiberius on the front.

Um this is an actual 2,000-year-old coin from the time of Jesus.

And and the reason I um wear it is it's a great reminder that the events of Jesus' day were as tangible as this piece of silver is still around my neck.

And I touch this, my mind runs wild because I'm touching the time of Jesus here.

And Luke's point is this stuff I'm about to tell you is Asphalaya.

It is solid, historically solid.

That he thoroughly investigated all of these things.

And when he says from the beginning, it doesn't mean from the beginning of time, he means from the beginning of these accounts he's about to tell us, specifically about Jesus.

Yes, and we can place Luke amongst the eyewitnesses in the 40s AD, within about 15 years of the events.

Yes.

Again, these are the things that we read quickly as Bible readers that are so significant.

There's a sense in which, and correct me if you think this is too much, it's almost like he's saying to the readers, fact-check me, I dare you, because I'm putting a pen in a specific period of time when these events happen, which makes it a big fat target.

But it also, if if it passes the test, it gives us extraordinary confidence, the certainty of these things.

That's why I say it's it's it looks like a vulnerability, it turns out to be a superpower.

Wow.

Okay.

My second question, kind of related, and this is something I try to explain, and the people in our churches get this because they're all above average intelligence.

But people outside of our churches, you're welcome.

People outside of our churches, they criticize me for this, and I think maybe I'm just not explaining it well.

So the way I wrote the question is before there was the Bible as we know it, which was the first Bibles assembled in the fourth century, before there was the Bible as we know it, there were independent voices, or you would say independent sources, that brought us the words and works of Jesus.

And because they were so um people because first century people were so confident in, that's why they were later inserted or included in our text.

So talk a little bit about those independent voices.

I mean, it's absolutely true.

I mean, we're fooled into thinking it's just one source that fell from heaven, because now you can buy a Bible and it has an ISBN code on it for being a book, and it has a contents page and everything.

They were added later.

Okay.

Originally, um, the texts were written independently of each other.

So if you just think of these few texts here, uh you've got the Gospel of Mark, right?

When Mark wrote his biography of Jesus, he did not have the letters of Paul in front of him.

And when Paul wrote his letters, he didn't have the Gospel of Mark in front of him.

So here are two separate voices.

Yes, later brought together, but originally, yeah, in the Bible, but originally separate.

Same with the letter of James, and we could multiply this.

These are separate independent sources, and it gets nerdier than that because secular scholars recognize that within the Gospels themselves, uh, there are sources that the Gospel writers used.

I mean, Luke told us, many have undertaken to draw up an account, so he knew sources, but scholars have gone to recognize these sources, and so you don't need to worry about the the titles here: Q, L, SQ, and M.

But these are sources within the Gospels that the writers have used that even predate the writing of the Gospels themselves.

And the the reason this is so important, at least for the historian, is that one of the main tests we use to assess an event from the past or someone's life uh from the past, is we try and work out how many independent voices there are that haven't simply copied each other.

And in the case of Christianity, in the case of the life of Jesus, we have at least five, maybe seven, completely independent writings that have been brought together.

This is called the criterion of multiple attestation, which you can forget as soon as you hear, because I mean scholars like to invent terms that make them sound smart, but it's it's not that smart, it's just obvious.

If you hear amazing news from one friend, you might believe it, right?

It depends whether you trust that friend.

If you hear the same news from a second friend or a third and a fifth, and you're pretty sure they haven't simply copied each other's story to tell you, you're more likely to believe it.

Well, that's what historians do with these multiple sources.

And the great thing about the New Testament is that we have all of these sources together.

But as I say sometimes, we the way we got our Bible is not the way the world got the Bible.

And because we think in terms of that it just, to your point earlier, it just kind of fell out of the sky, it's the B-I-B-L-E, it's just one book.

Um, it's a bit misleading in terms of we miss the extraordinary historical significance of what happened that ultimately brought us the Bible.

And all of this bolsters the credibility of the shouldn't undermine it.

No, 100%.

And the order in which these things were written is also a little bit misleading the way they're laid out in the Bible, because the Apostle Paul was writing earlier than the gospel writers, which again, we could spend a lot of time talking about that.

Okay.

So um the pushback, my my third question, the pushback sometimes is that these documents, Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, or the epistles of Paul, are presented in such a way that they were written so long after the events that perhaps some things got added, some things got subtracted, some things were exaggerated.

And that's true for a lot of ancient literature, but the New Testament is unique in terms of that kind of the dating.

Talk a little bit about that.

Yeah, so it's great to have written sources that are closer in time to the events, for the reason that you you uh explained, but the New Testament scores incredibly well on this test of ancient history.

And the way to work this out is just to think of some comparisons.

And I we brought a slide that lays this out.

Um, if you just think of the Buddha, Siddhartha Guttama, the prince from India, who dies around 500 BC, well, all scholars agree, and Buddhists agree, we don't have any writings about that for 350 years.

350 year time gap.

But there's no doubt that the Buddha existed that he taught.

Yeah.

The first time anything's documented that he taught, 350 years later.

Yeah.

The earliest biography of Muhammad, it's called the Sirah.

Uh Muslims love it, they read it, but they will tell you the biography of Muhammad was composed 180 years after Muhammad had died.

Uh, or you go into the sort of ancient Greek history, Alexander the Great, you know, conquered the world and did all those crazy things.

But how do we know that?

Yeah, well, the earliest biographical uh account of his life comes from 120 years after he's dead.

But, you know, we trust Polybius.

There's another source that's 400 years after, that's Arian, and actually we think Arian is better than Polybius, but that's too much information.

Tiberius, this is the emperor who ruled when Jesus lived, the emperor on the coin that I'm wearing.

Well, our very best account is written by a Roman uh chronicler called Tacitus, and Tacitus writes 80 years after Tiberius died.

That's the norm.

Can I say one thing about this?

And the and again, correct me, you're the professor, but this the significance of Tiberius in particular, he was the emperor of Rome.

He had access to libraries, and people had access to him.

This is the kind of person historically you would think they would be walking around behind him, taking notes of everything he said and everything he did, and that on the moment he passed away, they would publish all this, and yet still it's 80 years before anything shows up.

To get the best account, the one all historians rely on, it's Tacitus.

I mean, obviously Tiberius got coins, I've got one, all right.

Uh Jesus didn't get any coins because the Roman Empire didn't really honor him.

Yeah.

But my point is look at the texts for Jesus.

He dies around the year 30, but we've we've got texts written by the year 50 that give us accounts of Jesus.

By the by 60 years after Jesus, we have all of the New Testament texts.

So even the latest New Testament text is still written closer in time to Jesus than our best source for the Emperor of the same time.

Who, again, was you know world famous at the at that time, as far as you could be famous throughout the world, right?

Yeah.

And we can do even better than this.

Uh we we have one scrap, one formal summary of the Christian faith, which even atheist scholars agree was composed and memorized by Christians.

Here it is, by 10 years after Jesus.

So at least by 40.

Most scholars think by 35, so within five years of Jesus.

And uh this is the earliest uh written fragment of it from a text called P46, and I have, not not the original, don't worry, I have handled the original, but this is an exact replica printed on ancient Egyptian papyri.

And I have held the real thing in Chester Beattie Library, and I couldn't tell the difference.

And this summary of the Christian faith, written at least within ten years of Jesus, says this.

Uh I hand over to you what is of read a verse.

It's it's amazing.

I'm serious, it's wonderful.

I I love it.

Hoti Christos epethen, pupeton hemation, catatasgraf.

That Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures.

Cai hoti etarfe, and that he was buried.

Chaihoti, eger hemorrhacatas graphas, and that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures.

Caihoti Ofthere Kepha ate toystade, that he appeared to Kephas, which is Peter, Kephas, and then to the Twelve.

Okay, so you've got Jesus' status as Christ, his death for sins, his burial in a tomb, his resurrection, his appearances to Peter and the Twelve, already locked down in a formal summary within ten years of Jesus.

And by the way, Andy, I actually had this museum grade copy made as a gift for you.

What?

Yep.

Oh, you're kidding.

Ah.

You didn't do this in the nine o'clock service.

I did not.

Oh my goodness.

You're kidding.

No, I'm not kidding.

Oh.

We had it made this week for you.

Okay, so let me.

Okay, I know.

Thank you.

Oh, is right.

Okay, here's what's amazing that you didn't know.

If you have a copy of the New Testament, you have a copy in English of what he just read.

And let me tell you what I think is even more amazing, but again, you see, what Paul wrote in 1 Corinthians, this is from 1 Corinthians, what he wrote, he wrote to the church in Corinth, and he was reiterating what he had already taught them.

Which means you take the date of this writing, and then you push the date when he was with them and taught them this even closer to the event of the resurrection.

And this is the most, uh perhaps the most, if you can use the word, strategic, um, or I guess the big most important leverage point in terms of how early Christians believed Jesus rose from the dead.

This wasn't a story that became a story that became a story, and by the time everybody was gone, it this myth became history.

So it's impossible for someone who knows the history to think that the story of Jesus' death and burial and resurrection appearances was a late accumulating legend.

Right.

Because it's already locked in that place within 10 years.

Wow.

Okay.

Um anything else on this for the yeah.

Yeah, no, it's good.

I know we could stay there all day.

I love that.

Okay.

Then beyond the um New Testament authors that we're familiar with, there are other people, ancient writers, um, who referred to Jesus.

Talk a little bit about that because they uh attest to the his existence for sure, but even beyond that.

Yeah, well, there they are.

Um yeah, there are about 11 non-Christian references in the ancient world that mention Jesus, right?

Uh Tacitus simply mentions his crucifixion under Pontius Pilate and how much he hates Christians, which is fun.

He calls them a disease that has infected the world.

Um Serapian simply uh calls Jesus a Jewish king.

Pliny refers to the Christians worshipping the man Jesus as God, and it confuses Pliny no end.

Uh Josephus is a Jewish aristocrat writing in the first century.

He mentions uh Jesus twice and gives us enough information that we can outline Jesus' life.

He's a famous teacher, Josephus says.

He performed Paradoxa erga, the Greek for baffling deeds.

Josephus isn't sure what to call them, those miracles, so he calls them weird things, right?

Baffling deeds, paradoxa erga.

Uh and Thallus uh references the eclipse that coincides with the death of Jesus.

And I guess my point is, um, historians look at this and go, look, there can be no doubt that the figure of Jesus lived, that the broad outline of his life, as mentioned by non-Christians, really, really happened.

Uh so you won't find uh professional ancient historian uh who disputes that.

In fact, Andy, in a rush of blood to the head some years ago, I wrote for our um ABC, the Australian uh Broadcasting Commission, which is a bit like um, I guess PBS, is that except people watch it, um the ABC.

Um, did I say that or just think that?

Um so ABC is like hugely watched in Australia.

Anyway, I I I wrote this crazy article where I challenged people.

If you can find just one professor of ancient history or classics in any real university in the world who says Jesus didn't live, I will eat a page of my Bible.

I will eat a page of my Bible if Jesus didn't exist.

You put this 2014.

Yeah.

So what's happened since then?

Um how much of your Bible is missing?

Yeah, my Bible is safe and sound.

Uh uh, Twitter went nuts when this came out, and people started quoting professors that had argued Jesus didn't live, but they were professors of poetry, I kid you not, uh psychology, philosophy, one professor of folklore, and a famous professor of German language, but no professor of classics or ancient history, which are the disciplines that know this stuff, and my Bible has been safe for all those years.

But you shared that you had a backup plan.

I had to develop a backup plan because accidentally, a few years later, I lobbed in to an online atheist forum, and they were planning to get a film crew together, find a professor, and then come into my offices with a film crew live and say, ha ha, we found a professor.

So I had to develop a plan, which was I will chop up Matthew chapter one, like the first page of the New Testament, and put it on vegemite toast.

Vegemite's like this thing you eat that you can't taste anything else for hours after you've eaten it.

And so I sort of had a plan, and I would have given a speech to camera.

Yeah, they found one.

It's taken them years, there are thousands out there, they found one.

But actually, they never found one.

So the the this this still stands.

If someone's here today, yeah.

Yeah.

But but the point is, once upon a time in universities, they would just disp they would just dismiss Christianity.

Well, we don't even think Jesus actually lived.

Nobody is there anymore because of of the evidence.

Okay, so I as we were preparing for this, I read this statement that I had to read twice, that uh that turns out to be a leverage point as well.

Um here, I'll do it.

But this uh this kind of again shut another door, um, another off-ramp to the histor historical nature of Christianity.

Talk about this.

Yeah, I mean, it's it's commonly used, this expression within uh history circles, uh, for the simple reason that we we know that only less than one percent of the evidence from the first century still survives.

Uh for anything.

For anything.

Yeah.

Less than one percent of the buildings, inscriptions, coins, less than one percent of the written documents.

We know this because the written documents mention tons of other writers that are all lost to us, but they must have existed when these writers.

They reference people that we don't have any of their writings for.

So we can work it out, it's less than one percent that we have.

Okay.

So you can still tell a whole bunch.

Of stuff from that 1%, right?

But you can't i if if you find a document that says something, but no other document that says something, it doesn't mean that's wrong.

Because when 99% of the evidence is missing, you cannot say that didn't exist when 99% of the evidence is missing.

So absence of evidence in the 99% is no evidence of absence.

And there are some good examples of this.

So let me say it back.

So so when somebody says, Well, the New Testament mentions this, but nobody else references it, so we should doubt it happened.

Yeah, exactly.

Give you a cracking example.

Um what?

Oh, really good example.

Okay, just so years ago in Australia, the Australian Rationalist magazine, which was constantly publishing sort of things against Christianity, had this article by by someone who, I don't know, he had an undergraduate degree in modern history or something, and so they thought, he'll do.

And they one of the key arguments against Christianity in in this um article was that um Pontius Pilate, the governor of Judea, that interviewed Jesus and executed him, um, must have written many, many letters back to Emperor Tiberius, because governors had to, yeah.

So this guy's argument was where are the mentions of Jesus in all of the letters Pontius Pilate must have written back to Tiberius.

Jesus must have been a big deal, crucifying someone was a big deal, then you know, where is the mention?

There's no mention.

He didn't realize we don't have a single letter of Pontius Pilate back to Tiberius.

About anything.

About anything.

Even though he was governor for 10 years, all of it's disappeared.

That's what I mean.

99% is gone.

We don't even have a letter from Tiberius, even though Tiberius must have written to Pontius Pilate.

So it's all gone.

So he was making the classic error of thinking that absence of evidence was evidence of absence.

Gotcha.

So again, the one-offs that we find in the New Testament, just because they're not corroborated by other historical sources, that's not necessarily and plus, who knows what we find next week or next month or that happens.

Yeah, that's true.

Okay.

Another challenge, um, that the way I wrote it out here is for us modern readers, is we have no context for how rare it is that anything from the first or second century survive, as you just said.

Um, but the New Testament documents are an exception.

That the we can put this next screen up, that the New Testament is probably, or you would say more than probably, the best preserved text of all ancient history.

Um, and considering who wrote it and when it was written and the um lack of social um that the society had not embraced this new cult, this Nazarene cult, this is this is remarkable.

Talk a little bit about this.

Yeah, I mean you could delete probably and go into any ancient history department or classics department and say uh the New Testament is the best preserved text of ancient history.

And they'd say, yeah, we all know that.

Because they're used to other uh ancient texts.

They have something to compare it to.

They have something to compare it to.

And I brought along the best comparison, and I say the best because Virgil's Aeneid was incredibly popular amongst the Romans in the first century, the same period of the New Testament.

And so some good copies survived.

And it's a poem.

It's a beautiful poem that tells a story about the founding of Rome.

Okay.

Um and it was copied a lot, but what has survived, I've given you the numbers there because I know there are nerds in the audience.

Um, we have three complete copies of Virgil's Aeneid.

Uh so that's great, so we can lay them out, as scholars do, and go line by line to see what mistakes or changes or anything that have happened between the copies.

And then we have seven substantial manuscripts.

This might be 50 pages, maybe even a hundred pages of the Aeneid.

That's one substantial copy.

And then twenty fragments.

That's just twenty single pages, or maybe just a paragraph.

So would this be considered a fragment?

Well, um something of this.

It it might look like that, but that happens to be one of about a hundred pages of Paul's letters.

Okay.

Um, so that that brings me to this, because with the New Testament, we have at least four.

Some might quibble that it's a bit more than that, but let's just go with the low number.

Four complete ancient copies of the New Testament, right?

Um, and that compares pretty well to the Aeneid.

But where it gets exciting is substantial manuscripts.

We've got at least 340 substantial manuscripts in the U.S.

Of the entire New Testament.

No, there it might be 80 to 100 pages.

Gotcha, okay.

And and and and this is a good example.

Um, in the next slide, uh I'm I'm uh actually handling a page of what is a hundred pages that have survived of Paul's letters, and that's one substantial manuscript.

Gotcha, right?

We've got 340 of these.

And by the way, people don't know that the earliest manuscripts of Paul's letters are at the University of Michigan.

You got them.

And you miss, yeah.

All right.

Um, and you can go to the paprology department, like, go and ring them up tomorrow and say, hey, we had Dick O at church the other day, John Dixon, um, and he said we're allowed to turn up and go and play with Paul's letters.

Actually, don't say play, say be very responsible with Paul's letters.

And Brendan Haug, he will let you do it.

He told me to let Americans know this is here.

Well, anyway, I'm getting distracted.

But if you if you go to the next slide, the real exciting thing about this is that we have over 4,000 fragments, little pieces of paper with scraps of the New Testament on it.

When you've got four, 340, and 4,000, you can line them all up, see where errors or mistakes have been made, and account for them and leave them to this to the side.

So that we can today have every confidence that what you read in a New Testament is what was written in the first century, and that is a statement that every classicist or ancient historian can agree with.

The other thing, and I I that I did not know when I went to graduate school, that so impressed me was that these manuscripts and fragments were found in three or more, but three very diverse areas of the world.

Um, Alexandria, Egypt, um, uh some in the there's the Byzantine manuscripts.

Uh so talk a little bit about the dispersion because the fact that copies of the New Testament were just um distributed so quickly, and there are treasure troves of these, especially the fragments, found all over the not all over the world, but um basically all over the Roman world quickly, which is a message in and of itself.

Yeah, I mean it's fun because you can take a copy of, say, Luke's gospel that we know is about, copied out in about the year 200, found in, say, Syria, and compare it with one from, say, 400 copied in Rome.

So it's quite distant.

There's a time gap, and they're the same.

It's remarkable.

And of course, the reason we have this geographical spread is that Christians were so active in taking this message.

They loved the Gospels especially.

Uh, evangelists would go to new towns, preach the message of Jesus, and then leave them a copy of the four gospels.

And as a result, even though the Romans tried to burn all New Testament manuscripts they could get their hands on, we still have so many that have survived.

That's another thing, too.

If there had not been, I guess specifically it was Emperor Emperor Diocletian that realized, okay, we can't just get rid of the Christians.

We have to get rid of their literature because religions didn't have literature.

This was something else that was unique to Christianity.

So imagine, apart from that, from that short period of persecution, imagine then how many manuscripts we would have and how many fragments it would be remarkable.

Andy, we even have an actual Roman transcript of a trial of a Christian found with books that were confiscated.

The Christian was found with the books.

The Christian was found with books.

And the it's the actual Roman side interview with him, and the Christian tried to lie his way out of it, didn't want to uh uh inform on his friends who had even more books, and then they took this guy away and no doubt executed him and took his books.

So people literally lost their lives protecting these manuscripts because of the confidence they had in the story that they told.

And it's why we even have the Bible today.

It's uh it's remarkable.

I know we gotta keep moving.

Um, what about archaeology?

And again, this is a this is a deep dive, but you have, I think, a couple of great examples.

What does archaeology say about the New Testament?

We we we could spend hours on this here, right?

But um, look, there are fun examples uh that historians sort of go, yeah.

And then there are really boring examples that historians go, yeah.

Right?

So some Which one are we doing?

Oh, I'll do I'll do uh two fun ones.

Okay.

So these are like random discoveries that demonstrate the gospels weren't making stuff up.

Uh, like in John chapter 9, there's a pool, a public bathing pool described by John, said to be the pool of Siloam, which is a district uh now known as Silwan, in just in Jerusalem, in East Jerusalem.

John 9 · chapter mention

And we had dug up all over that district and not found a bathing pool.

So some scholars doubted John got it right.

Maybe John was making it up.

And then in 2004, during some random sewerage works in what kind of works?

Sewage.

Sewerage works.

Okay.

It's good.

Just one of us all know what you're talking about.

Okay, okay.

Pipes underground.

They had to go and fix a pipe underground, and they sort of had to dig a lot deeper than they had done, and they uncovered this amazing Jewish pool.

Don't worry about what he's saying, I can say it better.

This is, these are the steps down to a pool, and the steps are Herodian style, which tells us early first century.

Smackbang in the middle of the Siloan district where John said it would be, 2004.

That's just like three minutes ago in ancient history terms.

And it's the largest Jewish bathing pool.

That's an artist's impression that now stands at the pool.

You can go there.

Artist impression of how big it was.

So John has proved right.

Uh, another example would be uh until very recently, some skeptical scholars doubted uh the gospel's constant claim that Jesus went and preached in synagogues in Galilee.

Uh, because we hadn't found any purpose-built synagogues, buildings for the religious services.

So some scholars said John or Luke or Matthew were making that up.

And then, 20 years ago, we started finding synagogues.

And then we started finding loads of synagogues, like this one, in the Galilean town of Magdala.

This was uncovered in 2009.

It's Magdala should ring a bell, because it's why we call Mary Magdalene, Mary of Magdala.

This is her town.

This is her synagogue.

Jesus almost certainly preached in that building I'm sitting in here.

And then just four years ago, they found a second first century synagogue in this same town.

So now I think we've got 12 first century synagogues.

So any scholar who had said there were no synagogues in Galilee in the first century, I'm sure they've put their PhD at the back of the library where no one will find it.

And the the significance is if if in the gospels it references a synagogue, historians say there weren't synagogues.

What that does, it says, well, when Luke wrote, or John wrote, there were synagogues, so clearly they're writing much later than the events.

But when we find synagogues that did it, again, we pull the date back, we pull the writings back, anyway.

So these are fun.

These verify what the gospels say.

But there's a really profound thing that might sound a bit boring and technical, but for historians, it's even more significant than these random finds.

Because the question has always been why, if Jesus was Jewish, where the main language is Aramaic, are all the New Testament documents written in Greek?

This is big, this is huge.

Which was the main language around the Roman Empire, but not the main language in Galilee and Judea.

And so it seemed suspicious.

An Aramaic Jesus, but Greek records.

Until we started finding so many Greek inscriptions in Galilee and Judea.

And some of the most important ones are like a big sign.

I think we have a picture of it.

This is a big sign on the left there, uh indicating a Greek-speaking synagogue in Jerusalem, right next to the Jerusalem Temple.

And it says that this is set up for the reading of the Torah and the teaching of the commandments, but it's all in Greek.

Then we kept on finding these ossiries.

These are bone boxes.

Jews and only Jews laid their loved one in a tomb, came back one year later, washed the bones, and put them in a burial box.

Which is probably what would have happened to Jesus had He not created Easter, right?

I mean, that was the idea.

And this is important because they didn't get a burial box.

They did get a burial box.

But the the point was they put him in a cave, it dries, they come back later.

So this would have been what this is why they put him in that cave.

So keep going, yeah.

Exactly.

And and then uh once you wash the bones, uh you you put them in the ossuary, the burial box, and then write their name or a little message on the outside.

We have found that about 20% of these have Greek written on them, Aramaic and Greek.

Suddenly we now know loads of people who were Jews in Galilee and Judea were also Greek speakers as a second language.

The point is this now we know that the message of Jesus would have been spoken in Greek from the very beginning.

Which is a huge step forward in terms of evidence and connecting the Greek text with the actual teaching of Jesus, because the the gap was Jesus spoke Aramaic, but what he said was then translated into Greek, which may be the case, but that does and that doesn't diminish what he taught.

But to bring those, but to bring this into focus was a was was huge.

And it ties in with the fact that two of the twelve apostles have Greek names, Philip and Andrew.

Yeah.

And so they're like Jews we find on the Osri boxes, they have an Aramaic name and a Greek name.

Last question.

Um, so perhaps you've heard, or I know you have, but we've heard, that the winners write history.

So you only get the storyline and the version of history that the that supports the winners because they're the ones that have access, libraries.

Of course, we only hear from their perspective.

So maybe Christianity survived the way it did because in the end Rome capitulated, so consequently, they lifted up and elevated the Christian story because they won and Rome embraced.

Talk a little bit about that because it's it's again.

I mean, it is a worry with all ancient sources.

So you just think of these uh classical sources, Tacitus I've mentioned, Pliny, Josephus, all of these.

They all all written by elites, uh, people who had the power.

And the historian is always worrying that we're just getting a story designed to control.

So we have to account for that.

Or we're just getting a tiny glimpse of one segment of society, so it's not representative.

Now the thing is, you're right, people say that about the New Testament, but the New Testament is the only body of literature from the ancient Greek and Roman world written by non-elites.

Our texts were written by people who are much lower class than all of these.

The Greek is common Greek compared to all of these.

Uh, the manuscript copies are in copies we know were written by amateurs, not professionals.

And so everything about the movement is from below.

The New Testament is a history from below, not from above.

And that chimes with the actual story it tells as well, which begins in a manger, right?

An animal feeding area.

We're told that God entered the world, not in pomp and circumstance, but in a manger.

He taught the lowly, he healed the sick, he had meals with sinners, and ultimately he ends up on the cross, destroyed by the powers.

And I I know there are people who have been sort of crushed by religion through their life, where religion has been controlled, but the last thing that the New Testament is about is controlling you.

This is a history from below.

It comes to us.

Wow.

There, again, within the context of history and ancient history, there's no real good explanation as to why any of these manuscripts were written or survived the first century when we think again about who was writing them and who was distributing them and what they did not have access to.

Then you flip it around, and the the most famous people in those times, we have virtually nothing from them, or it's later before we learn anything about them.

So I want I want to close this way, John, and I asked John for permission to do this.

Um I'm gonna put this on top.

This is amazing.

For people who don't know you, you you would listen to you and go, oh, well, John's an intellectual and he's so smart.

I bet he reasoned his way into faith.

He, you know, it was probably apologetics that got your attention and brought you to faith.

But that's not the story at all.

So would you close with the story of how you discovered faith in Jesus?

I think it's amazing.

I mean, I I I never stopped trying to reason through, but but actually, it was a teacher at my public school.

There she is, yeah.

Uh who was a really open Christian.

I I had never been inside a church, which is very typical of an Australian childhood, uh, till I was 16.

But I had this teacher who was really open about Christianity, in a way that would probably be illegal now, but she was.

In a public school.

Got away with it in a public school.

And I remember being intrigued, and I went up to her after class once, and I said, um, Mrs.

Weldon, if God is true, and I'm not saying he is, but if he is, what does he think of media reckon?

And she said, Oh, John, he sees everything you've done, said, and thought.

And I remember thinking, because she left a really nice long pause.

And then she said, But he loves you, even still.

And I thanked her, I shot out into the playground.

I couldn't get those words out of my head.

He knows everything about me, sees me, and loves me.

So when a few weeks later, she said to the school she was running these feasts at her home, right near school, and anyone was welcome.

Hamburgers, milkshakes, and scones are plenty.

Scone.

Scones.

Go ahead.

I'm sure scones are different.

Um we turned up, and she fed us so much food, like only 16-year-old boys can eat.

And I remember sitting in her beautiful lounge chairs full of her food, and then she brought out the Bible, and I thought, oh no, it's a trap.

Because I was so full, I don't know, I could get up.

But she didn't Bible bash us or anything.

She said, Have you got questions?

And we had questions.

She invited us back the next week.

We started going back Friday afternoons to her home for about two years.

And in that time, she read the gospels to us and fielded our questions.

We were terrible to her, Andy.

Sometimes we said, Yeah, we're coming this Friday, and we wouldn't turn up.

And she'd made all this food.

Sometimes we said, Oh, we'll be three or four this week.

And honestly, we came with 20.

She had a giant home, so you know, she fit us, but she'd have to go out and make more hamburgers, milkshakes, and scones.

On one occasion, when she's out making more hamburgers, one of us stole her DVD player for drug money.

The next week we're there.

She simply says she seems to have misplaced her DVD player.

If we ever hear where it might be, she'd love to know.

That's all she said.

We knew, she knew we'd taken it, but she wanted us there.

And I guess here's my point when you meet a Christian like that, it's the easiest thing in the world to believe that God knows everything about you and loves you even still.

And I found myself over those two years utterly compelled by Jesus and finding him trustworthy with my life.

I stayed in touch with this woman.

We all did.

Five of us became Christians.

These three here all went into full-time ministry from this one class.

She died in uh 2017, and I kept up with her right through to her death.

And actually, she died about the same time I was finishing off one of my books on Jesus, and I dedicated one of my books to her, and just I mean, she was gone, but I wanted the world to know what a remarkable.

So I asked her in the last service I could read this because this is a very unusual book dedication.

Yeah.

Um, in memory of Glendon Natasha Weldon, who put up with this godless 16-year-old.

This is the dedication of your book, who put up with this godless 16-year-old and his scoundrel mates every Friday afternoon after school as we ate her hamburgers and scones, debated her God, and lost, listened to her read and explain the four gospels, took advantage of her generosity, caused her frequent headaches before eventually finding ourselves captivated by the story she told about the man from Nazareth.

Wow.

The power of an invitation.

That's amazing.

So, real quick, John, you know, if I give you I want you to be the preacher for just a minute, and I want you to just address us.

What?

What do we do with this?

You know, what what how how do we respond to this?

I guess for Christians, if you face doubts, just know that there are probably answers to your doubts, so don't panic.

Doubt your doubts.

That is my t-shirt today, Andy.

I saw that.

Doubt, doubt.

But maybe if you're not sure if you're a Christian, I often find there are two kinds of people who are thinking about Christianity.

One won't take any step toward Christianity until they've had every question answered.

Cross every T, dot every I.

A mate of mine, Graham, is exactly like this.

He's a statistician by trade.

And I took him out to coffee and I said, mate, you just keep asking sort of really basic questions.

Like, when are you going to take even one step?

Like, even just start going to church or something.

He said, Oh no, I've got to cross every T and dot every I.

I said, Christianity is not like one of your statistical formulas.

It's more like a relationship.

Can you imagine applying this methodology to a relationship?

And he said, Oh yeah, I've done that.

It's terrible.

I said, Well, what do you do in a relationship?

You take a little step in the right direction, see what comes back.

And if something comes back, you take a little step.

And I'd say to people here who are like that, just take some steps.

Not a giant leap off the stage, some steps in the right direction toward Christ.

And then there are different kinds of people who they've taken every step.

They've been hanging around Christianity, they've joined Bible studies, maybe, they read the Bible occasionally, but they've taken every step except the last one of just entrusting themselves to Jesus Christ.

And I remember meeting this woman in the UK at an event, and she was at her like hundredth Christian event.

I said, okay, and you're not a Christian?

No, no, no, I'm still thinking.

I said, you know, have you sorted this out, this out, this out?

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

You know, Jesus died for your sins and he rose again.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

I said, okay, hang on.

What's going on?

She said, I just feel like I'm circling.

And I said, Do you have any good reasons not to land?

And bless her, in her honesty, she said, I have practical reasons, but none of them are good.

And I'd say if you're in that situation, you've taken every step.

Except you just haven't had a moment where you said, okay, you're Lord.

You see everything I've done, said, and thought, and you love me.

I want you.

I trust you.

Land.

So would you give uh folks who are there who you're not gonna learn anything new that's gonna you you know what you need to know.

You've been circling.

Would you give that group an opportunity to land today and lead us and lead them in a prayer to where they say, Okay, I'm ready.

Sure, it'd be a great privilege.

Um you can just echo my words to God.

Dear God, I know you are the Lord of all things.

You know me through and through, and still you love me.

Thank you for coming into this world in Jesus Christ.

Living the life I could never live, giving that life on the cross for my forgiveness.

Rising again.

Because of all that, please forgive me.

Today, Lord, I trust you.

I trust you in Jesus' name.

Amen.