OVERTIME: Know God: No Basis! When "The Bible Says So" Doesn't Cut It. with Pastor Clayton Tyner

All right, well, welcome to Overtime Episode 4.

My name is Clayton Tiner.

I'm the lead pastor at MetaChurch and the host of the Clayton Tiner podcast.

This series, Overtime, came out of a sermon series we're doing at MetaCurch right now called No God.

We just finished week four, and we've got so much content in this series that every week all of the material left kind of on the cutting room floor, we're packaging back together and streaming overtimes on Wednesdays, and then they're living in perpetuity on our YouTube channel.

You can find all of the sermons and all of the previous overtimes online at metachurch.tv slash know God.

That's metachurch.tv slash K-N-O-W-G-O-D.

And in this series, what we've been trying to do is ask the very real fundamental conversations that kind of lie at the base of our belief as Christians.

And so in week one, we talked about theism and made arguments for the existence of a God who is spaceless, timeless, immaterial, all-powerful, personal, and perfectly moral.

And while we made arguments for a God, it wasn't necessarily the God of Christianity.

In week two, it was kind of a two-part combo.

We looked at the claims of resurrection of Jesus.

Um Jesus claimed to be God.

He called his own death, burial, and resurrection, and then pulled it off.

And if that's true, then there is good reason to believe that the creator God is in fact the God of the Bible and the God of Christianity.

Last week we talked about justice, and we saw the biggest objection to belief in God, especially today, is the argument from suffering.

If God is good and God is all powerful, then why does a good, all-powerful God allow bad things to happen?

And this week we looked at one of the other top reasons that people are walking away from the faith or staying away from the faith, which is this idea of the Bible and that the Bible says so, and you must blindly follow and believe it.

And um, I grew up in a lot of different churches, and so I had a lot of different church experience, but I definitely was around many Christians in my youth who had a the Bible says so mentality.

The Bible says it, don't question it, just believe it.

We talked on Sunday about how this ends up with circular argumentation, and so it goes something like this.

Well, how do you know God is real?

Well, because I believe in the Bible.

Well, why do you believe in the Bible?

Because of God.

Well, how do you know that God is real?

Because of the Bible.

And you you see, we're arguing in a circle.

We're saying um the Bible's real because God is real, and God is real because the Bible's real, and round and round and round we go.

And the truth is, most people don't know exactly what the Bible is.

And so I'm not going to go back through my whole sermon.

You can find that at metachurch.tv slash know God or by going to the metachurch website.

Uh, but the message this week was called No Basis.

And really, we were asking the question of what is the basis for the Christian faith?

What is the foundation of it?

And the big idea was that Christianity does not exist because of the Bible.

We are not a movement.

We we might have become this, but we were not started as a movement built on the Bible says so.

We are not a people whose faith rises and falls on it is written.

We are a people who rise and fall on he is risen.

First Corinthians 15, the apostle Paul said that if Christ has not been raised, then our proclamation is in vain, and so is our faith.

In other words, all of this hangs and hinges on Jesus.

And so we uh we saw several different really, really interesting facts about what the Bible actually is, and that the Bible isn't a book, it's a collection of books, and it's a collection of books written by dozens of authors across thousands of years, living on different continents at some times and telling one consistent and coherent story.

We also saw that the New Testament of the Bible was a recording of historical events.

It's a big break from religion because what religion does is a sacred person, which is always a man, uh, sacred man writes the sacred texts and then propagates those through fear, force, and compulsion.

And so it's like I give you the prescription of the religion and now you have to follow it.

Well, that's not what the New Testament was.

The New Testament was historical events that spurned a movement, spawned a movement that was then documented rapidly by these people who saw this movement changing the world and who came to believe in the claims of that movement themselves.

And so it's backwards.

It was descriptive of what was going on, not prescriptive of a religion that's starting because Christianity wasn't started as a religion, it began as a movement based on the historical event of Jesus' resurrection.

Now, someone who does a really amazing job and who happens to hold a lot of the theological convictions that we hold at MetaCurch is Pastor Andy Stanley.

I referenced him this week in our sermon.

He's written a book called Irresistible.

This came out a couple of years ago.

I'm gonna try to remember to link the books I talk about in uh in the notes of today's show.

Um, but I uh if you want to kind of read further on this whole idea of what our faith actually hinges on and how it got started, then that's a great book to check out.

We saw that the events of Jesus' uh death and resurrection happened around 30 A.D., around 70 A.D., uh, there was perhaps the most important event in Jewish history, except for the Exodus.

Um, in 70 AD, Jerusalem was ransacked by the emperor of Rome named Titus, and it was completely destroyed.

The temple, the center of Judaism, was torn down to its foundation.

Classical Judaism, with its sacrificial system, died that day and it never came back.

None of that makes the pages of any of the New Testament documents other than Jesus' prediction of it.

But none of the epistles and none of the letters and the New Testament, if you've read it, it's constantly comparing Judaism to Christianity, to this new movement.

It's constantly talking about the sacrificial system.

I mean, it's not like they just moved on from Judaism and never looked back.

The majority of early believers were Jewish themselves and they were having to decide what to do about following the law and still making sacrifices.

The events of 70 AD, really 66 through 70 AD, this horrible time with the dispersion of the Jews from the Holy Land, none of it makes the pages of the New Testament because more and more scholars have become convinced that the New Testament documents were written early.

They were written the majority of them between 30 and 70 A.D.

And then we saw that it isn't until around 350 AD, 320 years after Jesus' resurrection, that the New Testament documents are actually compiled and put together with the Old Testament Jewish scriptures.

And it's not actually called the Bible until 388 A.D.

And so what that means is the first 300 years of the Christian movement, which happens to be probably the most successful and impactful year, so impactful that it actually revolutionized Rome itself.

Rome, including the emperor, gave up their pantheon of gods in order to become a Christian empire.

And Constantine did this to unify the state.

That's how much impact it had while it was under persecution the entire time.

And they did not have a Bible.

So we say Christianity does not exist because of the Bible.

The Bible exists because of Christianity, because of this movement started by a resurrection.

And so that's kind of the gist of what we talked about on Sunday.

This leads us to a really, really important distinction when it comes to matters of faith, especially those who are on the fence or who have left the faith or those who have stayed away from it because people pointed out that there seems like there's lots of contradictions in the Bible.

The question is not, is every single word of the Bible true?

The question is not, is every single word of the Bible true?

Now, as a believer, you may have done your work and done your research and actually believe in the inerrant, infallible word of God.

I happen to believe that myself.

But that's not the starting point.

That's not the starting question for faith.

The question is whether or not any of the gospels are true, Matthew, Mark, Luke, or John.

If any of the gospels are true, if we have good reason to accept them as historically reliable books, and I pointed out a lot of reasons in this sermon that you can check out from Sunday.

If we have any good reasons to believe that the gospels are true, then that means the events of Jesus' life are true.

And if the events of Jesus' life are true, that changes everything.

It means that Jesus is God, that Jesus is the creator, come down to creation to pay the price of creatures' sins.

So we've got to really, really pay attention to that.

And a couple hundred years ago, the Christian church decided that we were going to build a defense and build our apologetics around and kind of build our entire ecclesiology, the functioning of the church, around defending the Bible instead of defending Jesus.

And uh, so if any of the gospels are true, that means the life of Jesus is true.

And that means that we have to start paying attention.

So uh the question that I want to kind of explore today is how much veracity is there to the gospels, to these New Testament ancient documents?

Uh so I want to see something.

I want to see uh how the New Testament documents stack up against other ancient literature.

How does the New Testament stack up against other ancient literature?

Now, there's a few factors that really matter when they try to determine the veracity of an ancient document.

And the truth is that most ancient documents we don't have the autographs or the originals of because they were written on something like papyrus that has simply been lost to time.

And so most of these things we have copies of.

And the things that you're looking at, really the three primary factors to determine whether or not you can actually trust something as a reliable recording of the original document, is the number of copies that exists.

So how many copies do we have, the dating of those copies, and the accuracy of those copies, number of copies and dating of copies.

I want to give you just a little example before we look at a chart of ancient literature and see how the New Testament actually stacks up in these three crucial factor factors for determining uh ancient literature and its veracity.

I want to give you an example of why a number of copies, a high volume of copies, and a close dating of copies actually works to our advantage.

All ancient copies have errors.

And that doesn't mean that it changes anything about the actual message and when it comes to the matters of the faith, that it would change anything about our actual doctrine.

It just means that in the ancient times when people were copying by hand, uh, copying by candlelight, copying with uh, you know, ink and quill on papyrus, um, copying in a largely uneducated world, no printing press, no printers, no computers, uh, that they would write two very similar-looking letters and at one time it would look like one, and another time it would look like another, that they would make very small grammatical errors, um, things that happen all of the time.

If you were to write three paragraphs and then pass it through a hundred of your friends, uh, if you have a hundred friends, congratulations if you have a hundred friends.

I I can maintain like seven at a time.

So congratulations to you.

If you have a hundred people and you take three paragraphs and you write it, and you have everyone copy it by hand, and and so the first person copies and the next person copies their copy and the next person copies their copy, and then kind of like a game of telephone, but with actually written copy, then by the end of that, you're going to have some significant grammatical errors, even if people are as careful as they can be.

And so this happens, right?

And an example that we can understand is autocorrect, you know.

Um, there's all kinds of autocorrects that happen to me all of the time, some, you know, more embarrassing than others.

But I'll give you an example.

You know, when I first got my iPhone and I was an early adopter, I didn't have the very first one, but I had that the second generation iPhone.

And the autocorrect wasn't great, you know, and so I would send some wonky messages all the time.

So let's say that I was trying to text you to say, uh, I'm going to the mall, meet you at three o'clock.

And I might go through a series of text messages.

You know, you get the first one wrong, and so then you write it again as fast as you can, and you correct one of the words, but then you get another one where wrong and on and on it goes.

And so maybe I say, uh, I'm going to the meow, meet you at three o'clock, right?

So close, but like early iPhone, it's not working great.

So I'm embarrassed.

Uh, I send it to you again and I say, Hey, I am growing to the mall, meet young at three o'clock.

And it's like, well, so close, but but but not yet, you know.

And then I have a third one and it says, uh, I'm going to the mall, mark you at three o'clock.

And so what would happen, and I don't have the ability to do this in my streaming software, but if I could put all three of those right next to each other, you would see that across my three text messages, I actually get my entire message across.

Um, in the first one, I have I am going to the uh meet you at o'clock, right?

And then the second one, I have uh I am to the mall, meet at three o'clock.

And then the third one, I have I'm going to the mall, um, you at three o'clock.

And so what you could do with all three of those copies, so you have numerous copies, right?

That's one of the three factors, and you have the dating of copies.

I'm sending them back to back to back.

So it's not like I'm having a different thought three years from now.

They're they're coming to you in real time, is you could take those and across the three, you could easily decipher the accurate message that I'm intending to send.

And so we don't have serious, serious differences uh in the copies of the New Testament documents, but there are small differences.

That's why it matters to have a lot of copies.

And in the ancient world, if you only have one copy of something, then you don't know if something is an error or if it's intentional.

If you have two copies, then those copies can corroborate each other.

If you have 200 copies of something, then across those 200 copies, you can have a high level of confidence that you have the accurate transmission of the autograph of the original writing.

So let's let's actually look at some of ancient literature's uh most well-known writings and most well-known authors.

So if you'll see if if if you're watching this, if you're not uh and you're just listening on audio podcasts, I'll try my best to describe this.

We have uh one, two, three, four, five, six columns.

Uh, you have the author, the date that the original was written, the autograph was written, the earliest copy, then you have the approximate time span between the original and the first copy, then you have the number of copies, and then finally the accuracy of those copies, uh, which is only available for two on this list.

Now remember, three factors we're looking for the number of copies, for the dating of copies, which is the time span between the original and when the copy is made, and the accuracy of the copies.

Uh, if you look, you have uh people like uh Pliny or Pliny the Younger, who was a Roman, who wrote around AD 61 through 113.

The earliest copy that we have in antiquity comes in AD 850, 750 years approximately between the original and the copy.

And in total, we only have seven of those copies, and so we have a limited number of corroborating evidence to try to get to the accuracy of the original copy.

Um, if you make your way down, uh you have Caesar, who wrote between uh 100 and 44 BC, and his earliest copy of Caesar's writing is AD 900.

That's a thousand-year gap between the original and the earliest copies.

And the writings of Caesar, which we take as historically accurate, those writings only have 10 copies in circulation.

Just 10 copies uh to corroborate and cross-check and look, and if there's uh a missing segment that decayed over time, and if there's uh some clerical errors, spelling errors, grammar errors.

We have 10 copies where we can compare and contrast.

And the vast majority of historians believe that we have an accurate view of what Caesar originally wrote.

Aristotle wrote uh in the fourth century, and his copies didn't begin until the 1100s AD.

So 4th century BC to 1100 AD.

That's 1400 years in between his original writings and his copies.

And Aristotle, one of the greatest philosophers of all time, we have 49 copies from antiquity.

Now that's getting to a higher number, 49, where we can really piece this together and see what the great Aristotle actually thought.

Homer is the closest that we have to the veracity of documents in the New Testament.

He wrote around 900 BC, incredibly early uh literature.

And his earliest copy came around 400 BC, 500 years later.

But there are 643 copies, so many copies of the Iliad.

And that has given historians an idea that these copies are about 95% accurate because there are 643 copies, not all of them complete copies of the Iliad, but 643 very real from antiquity versions of the Iliad.

We know that we have about 95% accuracy on the original Iliad that Homer wrote.

And next to the Bible, or next to the New Testament documents, rather, that is the the most verified ancient historical fact.

Then we get to the New Testament down at the bottom.

Uh the date that these documents were written uh were between A.D.

50 and 100.

Uh, some parts of scripture, this document is from 2016.

People are beginning to date things earlier and earlier in the New Testament writings.

Um, I believe the majority of the New Testament documents were written before 70 AD, as I mentioned in my sermon.

The earliest copies are somewhere around A.D.

130 that we've been able to trace back.

That means there were less than 100 years, less than 100 years between the originals that were written and the copies.

So that's a big deal because the factors we're looking for is the number of copies and the dating of copies, that approximate time span between the autograph and when the copies began.

So this is, if you just look across the list, we've got 1100-year gap, 750, 1200, 800, 1300, 1800, 1300, 1200, 1000, 1000, 1400, 1400.

Uh, Homer is one of the closest with 500 years between his original and the copies.

And the New Testament, we have within a century, and in some cases, within mere decades, we have evidence of these copies.

And that matters because the closer we have the copies to the original, the more we can feel confident that they are actually telling us what the original document said.

Now, when you look at the number of copies, it just gets mind-blowing.

The number of copies that we have of the New Testament documents from antiquity is 5,600.

Remember, Homer blew everyone out of the water with 643.

The New Testament has 5,600 copies.

Now, this number's from 2016.

This number has grown, but I don't have an exact number.

And this is the most conservative estimate because the 5,600 number is the number just of the Greek copies of manuscripts that we have.

When you add in the fact that the message and movement of Christianity was spreading across the world into Gentile nations, we also have copies that are written in Syriac, in Coptic, in Aramaic, and in Latin.

And when you include all of those, we have over 25,000 copies and new discoveries in archaeology were able to trace back writings of scripture that were written on all kinds of things, not just things like papyrus and uh and leather.

And so Sean McGow, who's a leading apologist, has said that when it's all said and done, we have evidence from over 60,000 copies.

Okay, Homer beats everyone else in antiquity with 600.

We have at the most conservative number 5,600, more likely at the upper end of 60,000 copies.

Okay, so how do we get my text message right where I'm saying I'm going to the meow, I'm growing to the mall, mark you at three o'clock, you know, meet you at three o'clock, and I send all of these crazy text messages.

We we get to the accuracy because we have uh a number of copies that are dated close to each other where you can corroborate those copies and pull out my original intention for my message.

When it comes to the New Testament, there is greater testimony, there are more documents, vastly more documents, there's more eyewitness, there's more geographical and historical corroboration than anything else in the ancient world.

And nothing, as you just saw, nothing comes close.

It is no contest.

And these are the factors that are used to tell the veracity of ancient literature, of ancient documents, of ancient history.

And so by using the very same secular standards that are used for other things from antiquity, we see that there is this explosion of copies and documents within the New Testament.

And we said on Sunday that people noted this, they notated it because it was notable.

In fact, the life of Jesus, what he did and what he offers as God come to earth is the most notable event in human history, and in fact, in the history of the universe.

So how does the New Testament stack up against other ancient literature?

Um, it blows it out of the water.

Like it is, it's no contest.

You would have to mercy rule if this was like a sporting event.

You know, it it's 60,000 to 600 right now.

Um, nothing even comes close.

And just remember, I mean, historians believe in the life of Caesar, we believe in the writings of Aristotle, we we hold those things as historically verified.

Those are historically verified, and the New Testament documents are historically verified as well.

So uh I want to look at uh whether or not we can trust the gospels.

So it's like it's one thing to say, okay, these really happened.

They were really written.

Um, but can we trust them?

You know, do the do the writers know what they're talking about?

And here's the thing that you'll hear more often than not, uh Bart Ehrman, who's really, in my opinion, uh the greatest antagonist to the scriptures and especially the gospels in existence today.

He he's brilliant and he's really, really smart.

Um, he's very, very intelligent.

He studied across the different biblical uh disciplines, including the biblical languages.

Uh, he grew up as a believer, but he lost his faith.

And now he spends, you know, um, not all of his time.

He does a lot of things, but he he spends a good portion of his time going around and debating and writing books and trying to destroy any credibility of the scriptures.

Now we're gonna see in week six a very important distinction.

Week six to the no God series, we're gonna talk about the difference in not believing in God and not wanting to believe in God.

It's a really, really important distinction.

Um, but it begs the question can we trust the gospels?

Uh, I'm gonna recommend another book.

It's called Can We Trust the Gospels?

Uh, it's by Peter J.

Williams.

It's a small book.

You know, a lot of these, uh, a lot of these books on apologetics and trying to figure some of this stuff out, they're really big because it's it's a lot of information.

And Peter J.

Williams has done an incredible job of really distilling this down.

And again, I'm gonna try to remember to put that uh in the description of the video.

I want to go through just a few of the things that he points out that I think are really worth taking note because what people like Bart Ehrman will say is that these scriptures weren't written in the first century.

They weren't written before 70 AD.

In fact, they weren't written by Jewish people, they were written by people uh in Greece or in Egypt.

They were written by people who were coming up with a legend, you know, just like all of the other legends that exist out there.

And when you actually look at the Gospels and the way that Peter J.

Williams kind of helps unfold, a lot of it makes so much sense, like common sense, uh, that this surely was written by people, the gospel specifically of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.

This was written by people who lived in the area, who knew the area intimately, who knew the culture, who weren't making this up.

And you can see that when you compare it to uh literature that that does tell legend and that is written hundreds of years after actual events.

And so I'm gonna do my best to go through a few of the points that Peter J.

Williams makes.

And then um, I'm just gonna really encourage you to pick this book up uh on Amazon to read it.

It's a great read.

It really builds your faith.

And if you uh are not a believer, it could really challenge you.

So uh one of the first things that he brings up is the geographical knowledge that the writers of the gospels had.

Um, they knew their geography, they knew their towns.

There are over 26 towns that are mentioned in the gospels, all the way from the very obvious ones like Jerusalem and Jericho, down to like the most obscure villages that really, unless you live there, you wouldn't really know about.

I come from a small town.

Um, you know, Jesus was from a small town, Nazareth.

There was a saying, uh, nothing good comes from Nazareth, or it would be asked as a question, like, can anything good come from Nazareth?

And so Lampasas is, you know, kind of like Nazareth.

It's it's a small town, it's a great town, but it doesn't get its due.

Everyone makes fun of it, especially the people who who grew up there.

And uh, and it's like if you don't know about Lampasas, then you definitely don't know about Lomeda, because to Lomeda, Lampasas is the big city, you know.

So there's like there's the obscure of the obscure that unless you live there, you you wouldn't know about.

And um, not only is there uh very, very frequent mention of actual um cities and provinces, um, but there are different ones in all four of the gospels.

So it's not like they were just corroborating those towns off of each other, which is something that is often claimed about the gospels that they just copied everything off of each other.

It's actually great diversity in the gospels and especially in their geographical understanding.

Um, not only do they know these obscure towns, but they also know the general topography of the area that you would kind of have to know to to uh you'd have to live there to know.

You have to actually really be ingrained in there.

And so they will use language about going up to Jerusalem or going down to Jericho.

Uh, they would go down to the Sea of Galilee.

They knew the actual topography of where they would go and and how the area worked.

And, you know, we're somewhat aware of that these days, um, but we have cars that climb hills for us, and so we don't really understand that here in San Antonio, you know, Helotus is at a much higher elevation than downtown San Antonio.

We don't have to think about that because we're not walking everywhere we go.

But in the ancient world, where you were walking or you were actually absolutely exhausting, you know, your donkey or whatever you were riding on, you'd be very aware of what was up and what was down, and the writers were aware of that as well.

Um, not only that, but we look at the bodies of water.

They were incredibly acquainted with the bodies of water, and they spoke about them how we would expect for them to speak about them.

Um, Matthew, Mark, and John all talk about the sea.

And when they're talking about the sea, they are most often talking about the sea of Galilee.

It's really interesting because um they allude to many bodies of water, they know the geography very well, they know where it is, they know the topography, but we also see differences uh within the writers of the Gospels, because um, what is a sea to John, the Sea of Galilee, Luke calls the lake.

Well, Luke is believed to be from Antioch, which is right around the Mediterranean Sea.

The Mediterranean Sea is a sea.

I mean, you look at it, it's expansive like the ocean.

Um, to Luke, the Sea of Galilee is like a pond, you know.

And so it's very interesting when you look in the Gospel of Luke, when he refers to the Sea of Galilee, he calls it the lake when Jesus was out on the lake.

And when the other writers who grew up in Jerusalem, to them, the Sea of Galilee was the sea.

It was humongous.

And that just shows that this is what we would expect from who these authors actually were.

It's kind of like how to Texans, um, when you get uh kind of into the hill country, you'll see a big hill and a Texan will say, Look at that mountain, you know.

And someone who is from like uh the region of the Rocky Mountains or the Appalachian Mountains or from a different country where there's real mountains will be like, that's a hill, you know, but it's all relative to a Texan, a large hill is a mountain.

And to people who grew up around mountains, um, a large hill is is a hill, kind of a small hill.

And same thing.

It's kind of like to Texans, 40 degrees is freezing.

Um, to Alaskans, 40 degrees is, you know, like a nice spring day.

And so it's all relative, and we see that relativity even within the authors.

Um, when you look at the later gospels, like the Gospel of Thomas, uh, the Gospel of Philip, some of these things that didn't make the canon because we know they were written hundreds of years after Jesus' life here on earth, um, they make almost no allusions to any form of geography.

The writers of the New Testament Gospels, they knew uh about the actual uh uh flora and fauna.

I mean, really, like really specifically what grew where, um, that there was a sycamore tree in Jericho.

Uh, I mean, specific specific things to those regions where they only grow in one area and they're calling it out.

They talked about multiple different gardens, um, which we know exist but don't show up in ancient uh writings or ancient geographical uh documents.

And so, you know, they're known in the area, but they're not known broadly.

They wouldn't be known to someone writing that in Greece hundreds of years later or in Egypt or Syria.

So the geography is very, very telling because it shows what we would expect if these were the writers that we think they were, which are uh people who were in the area, uh who were followers of Jesus, knew the area well, and who could speak to the geography and topography in incredible detail.

And so you can read about more of that in the book, but unbelievable detail.

The other thing that really stands out in the Gospels is their use of names.

Um, not only their use of names, but their uh disambiguation of names.

And I'm gonna tell you what I mean by that in a minute.

When studies have been done about the names of Jewish people in the ancient world, what they found is that there is great um dysregularity uh across different regions.

And so, especially when you look at areas inside of Palestine and areas outside of Palestine, the most common names were vastly different with very little overlap.

And when you look at the area of Jerusalem and Judea where the gospels took place and where Jesus' ministry took place, what you find is the frequency of common names that match the actual census data that we have from antiquity of the names that were prevalent.

And so it's not like he lived in a time uh where these five male names were the most popular and none of them show up, and these five female names were the least popular and they always show up.

Uh, you see corresponding to what the names actually were at the time that that same uh that same frequency of those names being used.

And so they knew the names.

And this isn't something that someone writing in the third century in Egypt would know, uh, third, third or fourth century in Greece would know.

Um, they know the names, and it's the names that you would expect in that area at that time.

Not only that, but there is a disambiguation of names.

And so what I mean by that is anytime they are using one of the more frequent names of that time period, they would always give it a qualifier, like you would expect to happen.

And if they're using a name that is rare, then they don't give it a qualifier because a qualifier isn't necessary.

We see an example of that in Matthew chapter 14.

Matthew 14 · chapter mention

Um, I think that this is like the coolest thing, and and maybe I'll be the only one, but this disambiguation of names.

And so this is the story of John the Baptist being beheaded.

It reads like this At that time, Herod, the Tetrarch, heard the report about Jesus.

This is John the Baptist, he told his servants.

That's a disambiguator.

John was the fourth or fifth most common name in the Judean area at that time.

And so if he would have said, This is John, this is John, he told his servants, they would have said, which John?

They didn't know.

So he gives he gives uh a reference to that.

This is John the Baptist.

He's been raised from the dead, and that's why miraculous powers are at work in him.

For Herod had arrested John, no disambiguator, chained him and put him in prison on account of Herodias, his brother Philip's wife.

Since John had been telling him it's not lawful for you to love her, though Herod wanted to kill John, he feared the crowd as they regarded John as a prophet.

Now, notice in that second paragraph, John, John, John, John.

No qualifiers.

And it's because the narrator is talking to us, the audience.

He's already established what John we're talking about.

But when John's name is quoted, like it will be here in a minute, and it's actually in the narrative, then you see the qualifier is giving so that it's not ambiguous who they're talking about in the story.

When Herod's birthday came, Herodias' daughter danced before them and pleased Herod, so he promised with an oath to give her whatever she asked.

Prompted by her mother, she answered, Give me John the Baptist's head here on a platter.

And although the king regretted it, he commanded that he be granted because of his oaths and his guests.

So he sent orders and had John, no qualifier, just John beheaded in prison.

There's other disambiguators in here as well.

If you go back to verse one, at that time, Herod, which Herod?

Herod the Tetrarch heard the report about Jesus.

You go down and you look in verse three, it says he had arrested John, chained him, and put him in prison on account of Herodias.

Well, who's Herodias?

His brother Philip's wife.

There are these disclaimers.

And so John's name is used five times in this passage, but only two times is it given a qualifier exactly when you would expect it.

And so I don't know anything about Harry Potter.

I've never read it, I've never watched the movies, but I assume that at Hogwarts, there's probably one Harry, you know, because if you're gonna write a movie and your main character is named Harry, the thing you don't do is make 10 other people named Harry, you know, that would be very confusing.

And if there were 10 other kids at Hogwarts named Harry, then you would always have to give your Harry a qualifier when people were talking about him.

If uh Ron, whoever with the red hair, Harry Potter fans are gonna be so mad at me.

I don't I don't know.

The if the red-headed guy was talking about Harry and Harry wasn't there and he just said, Hey, have you guys seen Harry?

And there was 10 of them, then you know, uh Emma Watson would have said, which Harry, right?

So when you're writing a story, you make one of each character.

When you're writing a legend, you make one of each character.

There's like 74 Marys in the story of Jesus, which is why all of them get these disambiguating qualifiers.

So there's Mary the mother of Jesus, there's Mary Magdalene, there's Mary the cousin Martha, there's there's all of these different Marys.

And so when they are spoken about in the narrative, they give they're given qualifiers.

There's a lot of Marys.

You know why?

Because the number one name for women at that time at that place was Mary.

So there's a lot of Marys.

There's a lot of John's because John was one of the most common names.

There's a lot of Philips, a lot of Simons, because Philip and Simon were two of the most common male names.

And so they are used exactly the way you would expect them to be used if someone is writing history, if someone was actually there, if someone knew the culture and knew the name.

So these names, the geography, topography, it matters.

It's what we would expect from people who lived in the first century in Jerusalem.

We also see Jewish culture.

These guys knew the Jewish culture, and they knew about specifics of the Jewish culture and customs in ways that someone could not have known, living, you know, thousands of miles away or hundreds of miles away, hundreds of years later.

They also, within the New Testament, they talk about finance just naturally.

It just flows out of what the currency was, how much things were worth, the way that people used it.

There are dozens of financial uh allusions and financial terms that are used.

They're all used correctly.

They talk about customs of the area and customs of that time that you just had to be there to know, and so much more.

It's like, I don't know where you're from, but I'm from Lampasas.

And anyone could write a story about Lampasas.

You know, you just kind of take a generic small town Texas uh place and you write about, you know, you could probably guess some things like we really cared about football, and we all went to the football game on Friday night, and we all went to pastures and partied, you know, with cows, watching us act a fool.

And, you know, everyone wore their letter jackets, and the more patches you had, the more popular you were.

And I mean, they could guess all those things because you know those things about uh hometowns.

And we had some cool people come out of our hometown, like Johnny Lamb Jones, who is an Olympic gold medalist at 18 years old, and second-round pick in uh one of the NFL drafts in the 1980s.

And you could write the story uh of Johnny Lamb Jones, having not been to Lampasas or grown up in Lampasas, you could do some research and and you could write a story that maybe even had some accuracy in it, but you couldn't write it like someone who's from Lampasas.

You couldn't describe the customs that no one knows about unless they live there.

You couldn't describe the area and you know, because there's the area and what things are actually called, and then there's the area and the things that we call them because we live in Lamp Pasas.

You know, you can uh you can describe Key Avenue as Key Avenue, you can describe it as uh an intersecting point of three major highways, but you don't know that that's the strip.

You don't know that that's where you drive your diesel truck up and down and just waste gas back when gas wasn't$5 a gallon.

So basically, when you look at the way that the gospels were written, there are these factors and so many more that were obviously written by someone who is there.

And you know, it's easy to poke holes in things.

And I know that our culture right now is real big on um critical criticizing theories, um, theories that are based in uh ruthless criticism.

And um you have to evaluate and you have to criticize, uh, but you have to do it in a balanced way.

You have to have a balanced approach to things because you can find seeming contradictions across the gospels, which I am convinced in my study um that there are answers to those contradictions, but you can find those and feel like you've hit some kind of goal to such a degree that you miss out on on the very kind of obvious, kind of like common sense factors that really show these are reliable documents written by reliable narratives who are writing down what they believe to be real history.

And so when you look at all of this data together, uh when you look at the major works of ancient history and you see that most of them had fewer than a hundred copies, that the average dating between when the original was written and when the first copies uh have been found is over a thousand years.

When you see that the accuracy across the copies of the New Testament documents, thousands and thousands of them that we have, the most by a mile, and you see that those copies are 99.5% accurate.

And you'll hear the people who are railing against scripture, and they'll say things like there are 400 contradictions, there are uh 400 errors or 4,000 errors.

And what they failed to miss uh to mention is that what they actually mean by that is there are 4,000 errors or 40,000 or however many they're they're making up or quoting across the tens of thousands of New Testament copies that we have, and that not a single one of those actually changes the message or the original meaning of those.

In my example of the autocorrect area errors earlier, uh nothing I said, which to be fair are far greater errors than actually exist in the New Testament copies.

Um, but none of those, when corroborated against each other, are enough to change the actual meaning of what I'm trying to get across.

Uh, there's nothing that you're gonna find in the New Testament copies where one says Jesus died on a cross and the other one says that Jesus tripped and fell down a hill.

Like those kinds of errors don't exist.

There's nothing that says that, you know, uh salvation is through by grace through faith, and something else that, you know, outlines Jesus's seven steps to get to heaven.

You don't find those kind of errors.

You don't find doctrinal errors.

Uh you find where someone didn't dot their I or didn't cross their T.

Um, you find where an author wrote something in the margin of the text that got lost across time.

You find these very, very small, minute things that don't change the New Testament documents, and they certainly don't change the actual events because Christianity does not exist because of the Bible.

However, the documents in the Bible are reliable.

If the gospels are not reliable, then nothing in ancient history is reliable.

If we just look at the data that we've just very briefly gone through today, if the gospels are not reliable ancient historical data, then nothing in ancient history is reliable.

And I don't think anyone's willing to say that.

I don't think anyone is willing to give up all of ancient history and all that is there and all that we can glean from and learn from.

So what is the basis?

What's the foundation for our faith?

The foundation for our faith is Jesus.

Jesus come to earth, crucified, resurrected, ascended back to heaven with a promise that he will return for us.

We learn about the life of Jesus in the gospels.

And remember, the question is not if every single word of the Bible is true.

That's a conclusion that you can work through and come to on your own.

The question is whether or not any of the gospels are true.

The question is whether or not we can trust the gospels, whether they have the the the status and stature of ancient uh veracity that we look for in ancient literature.

And that is absolutely the case.

And the question is whether this was just some legend written hundreds of years later, or whether there's good reason to believe that this was written by real people who lived at this place at this time, who were eyewitnesses to this event and wrote it down and documented it.

There was an explosion of copies because people actually believed this was the one thing in all of history that could change the world forever.

Um, the Bible is worth really considering as something that should be looked into, should be seen as reliable, historically reliable, as well as reliable for doctrine and for faith.

We are in our no god series.

Uh, you can catch up on all on all of it.

If you want like the full picture of what we're doing, metachurch.tv slash know god.

That's k-n-o-w-g-o-d.

If you're in the San Antonio area, and I would love to invite you out to Medichurch sometime.

We meet on Sunday mornings at 9 45 and 1130.

Our address is 1207 Richland Hills Drive.

Uh, that's like right off of 151 and 410.

We kind of sit in this little pocket of uh 151 and 410.

You can come out, man.

It's come as you are.

We are a grace culture.

Uh, everyone is invited.

If you don't believe the claims of Christianity, we are the church for you to come to.

You can belong, even if you don't believe like we believe.

It's a safe community to come and wrestle with the big questions of life and faith and spirituality.

Something we're trying to do in this series.

Make sure you're following MetaCurch on Facebook and on Instagram.

Subscribe to the MetaCurch YouTube channel.

I'd also love for you to subscribe uh to the Clayton Tyner podcast on YouTube and on audio platforms.

I love you guys.

Uh, I hope all this content is helpful for you, and I hope to see some of you on Sunday.