The Cutting Room Floor - Is the Bible Reliable and True?

This is uh this is the police car.

Welcome to the His Hands Podcast.

Welcome to the His Hands Podcast.

Yeah, I don't know any other words to say.

Uh we've got questions we gotta ask.

Welcome to Hits Hands Podcast.

Podcast.

Yeah, it's funny because I thought for a minute with today's topic, I was like, we might need to do this in two parts.

Then I was like, well, it's just a long video.

Yeah, right.

Like, why did why make it two parts?

It just shows my age and how I'm like thinking in terms of this to be continued.

In reality, it's like just just yeah, I have a BS talk hour and 55 minute.

Madison, you have a Bible.

I have a Bible, I have a Bible on my phone.

Do you like it?

I like my Bible.

Give a review.

I I think I I I have uh Bible envy.

And so when I see people that have cool Bibles, I've got some friends with some really cool Bibles that are made of like camel skin and goat skin and awesome, like nice things, and I like their Bible better.

Do you think there's a correlation between how nice someone's Bible is and how like spiritual they are?

No.

Oh, I definitely do.

When I was in college, the thing so you know, I was in college in the early 2000s before smartphones, and the trend was for Bibles to get smaller.

Yeah, like a pocket Bible.

Pocket Bibles.

You carried your Bible everywhere.

I actually loved, I had this pocket Bible and I could carry it in my pocket to class.

And I say pocket, you think tiny.

It was bigger than yeah, it's like the ones that's like like it wasn't that much smaller than it's like like somewhere in that range.

But it actually had like however they printed it, it was big enough font.

I loved it.

I would break it out in class and just read it in some of my classes because you know some of my classes were super boring.

And that's back when pockets were a lot bigger too.

Cargo, cargo pants were a thing, so you could actually put the Bible in your phone.

I didn't really wear cargo pants.

I didn't say you did, I'm just saying.

I guess they were things, but it was bigger.

Oh, okay.

Shrink shrinkflation.

Skinny jeans wasn't a thing at all.

Right.

So we had more room.

So back then it was how small your Bible is.

Right.

Was how holy you were.

Right.

The holy your word.

What's how uh what's what's the most exotic animal that is shaving your Bible?

What's the what's the most endangered animal that had to die for you to read the Bible?

That is your mind's a rhinoceros leather.

Whoa.

Yeah.

Wow.

You're almost the Pope at that point.

What do you think the Pope's reading his Bible on?

Oh, the Pope's um standard issue paper.

Um, each of the Pope's peep pieces of paper, the Pope's pieces of paper, uh, it's like a limerick or something.

Uh they're all goat skin paper.

Like every every individual sheet of paper is all good.

Some goat skin or something.

Yeah.

It's all goat.

Or sheepskin.

Yeah.

All right.

So why do you bring up the Bible?

Well, because we're gonna talk about it uh specifically about we don't plan this at all.

It's a great intro.

It is a great intro.

I'm gonna stand by it.

So yeah, we we thought we'd talk today a little bit about the reliability of the Bible.

Um I mentioned it in the message yesterday as we're going through the story of Jesus.

We got to where Jesus gets to Jerusalem, or he's on his way to Jerusalem, gets to Jericho, and two of the gospels, Matthew and Mark, say that as Jesus was leaving Jericho, and one of the gospels, Luke, says as Jesus like arrived at Jericho, he heals these blind people.

And that's always been used as one of those kind of gotcha an obvious gotcha, like you can't leave that same place at the same moment.

Yeah, and so one's wrong, one's right.

The Bible doesn't agree with it.

And for people that are a little bit more skeptical or even critics of the Bible looking for those things, that's just been one of the classic ones that they've used.

And we brought a map up.

And actually, Zach, can you bring the map up that we just map right here?

Or the wherever you want to put the map, I don't care.

Um, but there were two Jerichos.

And so it's just interesting little tidbit, and this is sort of what led to me going, we should just talk about this as a topic, is yeah, there's the old Jericho, the old testament Jericho from the Bible, and just the walls fell down, all that kind of stuff.

But during the era of Jesus, they had started building a new Jericho and called it Jericho, and it was located right next to the other Jericho.

And so there's actually two Jerichos.

So literally, like you could be leaving Jericho and going into Jericho.

It's like Springfield.

You can leave Springfield on a road trip and arrive at Springfield.

And arrive at Springfield.

But they are right next to each other.

And like some people would say, oh, well, that's like uh cop-out.

It's like, well, kind of, but also like not really.

Right.

Because it does it does explain it.

It does a plausible explanation.

It's super, and and here's kind of the background for me personally, and then I think we just jump into it, is uh because I'd love to hear what your experience with sort of biblical skepticism would be.

I grew up, started, I didn't go to church till I was in fourth grade, and I think it's just I was watching a lot of X-Men cartoons in fourth grade.

That was like the thing I was into.

So I was primed and ready to believe in like superpowers.

So I hear all these stories of Jesus, he's walking on water and he's healing people, and there wasn't even one thought in my mind that was like, really.

How do I I was like this is primed?

So cool.

This is awesome.

That was literally my thought.

And I get to know him.

What he did that?

Whoa.

Never even occurred to me that this document might not be telling the truth.

Sure.

Or it might not be reliable, or my teachers might be full of something, you know, or whatever.

It just was like, wow.

And I gave my life to Jesus and I kept going to church, and I didn't really have some type of major doubt or anything like that.

And then I went to college, and basically all my professors didn't matter the the course.

It was like, okay, we're teaching communication, and also you shouldn't read the Bible.

Like that was basically the uh Yeah, you probably experienced much more of like the the what's called the new atheism, like correct.

It this is illogical.

Here's a bunch of reasons you shouldn't believe this.

And I'm not exaggerating.

I scientific understanding of like the world disproves the Bible.

Yeah, so I'm in the early 2000s in college.

We're still kind of my professors were part of the modern era.

And so not really post-modern, kind of in the on the meaning, it was the modern era was defined by science, reason.

Scientific rationalism.

Yeah, 100%.

So you're looking at like the 50s and all this kind of stuff and beyond, and just this massive attempt to try to poke holes in anything in the Bible that seemed silly, that seemed, you know, hard to understand.

Uh, obviously miracle stories and whatnot.

But it I'm not exaggerating.

Like I had a professor, uh, Dr.

Harris, and she taught a communication class.

And the class was had nothing to do with scripture.

It was not a religion class, it was not a historical class, it was j it was just how to give good speeches.

And I I bet she spent 20% of her time just trashing the Bible.

And to the point where um and this is kind of a intense example, but it's something that actually happened.

There was a student that was in the class with me, it wasn't me, and she asked him, Oh, so he said something that gave her an indication that he's a Christian.

And she was like, Oh, so you believe the Bible.

And he's like, Yeah.

And she went, and this was you could tell it was something she'd used often.

Well, that means that um you believe that if a woman was on her period and sat in that chair before you, that you can't sit there because it's unclean.

Right.

You believe that?

And I was like, I've always been a little bit of a I'm totally comfortable with conflict most of the time.

And it was such a disingenuous argument because it was like we didn't have tampons back then.

I'm not being gross, but you're talking about she was acting as if that existed totally a culture, a cleanliness culture that that relates to germs, whatever.

100% like completely differently.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And I know it's I'm not trying to be crass, but that was the example she used.

And I think she used it on purpose to kind of create that, and all of a sudden it now it's got if he says whatever, he's either he's either like a anti-feminist or he's it put him in a weird spot.

A bigot.

A bigot.

And and it was ridiculous because you're like, lady, you're talking about something 3,000 years ago plus, and it's a whole that's my point, is there was such an attempt to find whatever you could to discredit the Bible.

And it put me in this interesting place in college where I my heart knew I had this like deep faith that this is truth.

So what I found is I would go and I would research when professors would bring stuff up and they would say this or that, I would go research, and what I found is almost everything they gave that was a gotcha, that was some type of of discrediting of the Bible, there was tons of research by every bit as educated, if not more so, sure people that was super interesting.

And there's at least a reasonable response, but because you're dealing with 19-year-olds, there's not going to be the ability to you know correct respond to that.

Yeah, so and that stuff was never brought up.

It was never brought up in a way of saying, now, some people have said that this is an explanation, it was always just the one side.

So it gave me an appreciation in college where I realized, oh, everyone has an agenda.

And if you've heard people criticize scripture, I mean, yeah, listen to it.

Why not?

If anything's true, it'll hold up to scrutiny, and I believe that about scripture.

But it also let me realize there's a lot of stuff out there, there's a lot of research that's been done.

So when someone comes along and just says, Oh, the Bible's garbage because blah, blah, blah, right, not so fast.

Like, don't just believe that.

Um, so yeah.

So I thought we might just talk about that.

Yeah, my my encounters with people trying to discredit the Bible.

So you came up in that, like, this is not logical.

Yes.

And mine are probably much more like this is not loving.

Yeah, you're in the the postmodern.

Yeah, postmodern basically to say, like, to say that something is truth is to discount the lived experience of somebody else.

Correct.

And so um, it kind of creates more of a um you are aligning yourself with hateful ideas to believe that.

And what you should really say is, it's okay that I believe this and it's okay that you believe that, but there isn't a grounding truth to be found anywhere in the world.

Yeah, you've talked to me before about even conversations you've had in in people that are you know part of that world, the post-postmodern, whatever, is it's like really hard just get people to make a stance on something.

Yeah, everything's well for me, but for them.

Yeah, the I think the phrase that someone shared with me in college was like, I'm just glad for you that Jesus is your homeboy, but he's not mine.

Right.

I was like, that's such a weird Well, and not to bring up cultural issues that sort of put it, I'm not bringing up controversial issues for the sake of it, but it a concept like transgenderism is really indicative of that in our culture now because you have someone saying, Essentially, I'm I'm not what I would test out to be with every scientific measurement.

Look at my chromosomes, look at my anatomy, right, all that stuff.

It will tell you this, but I'm not that.

And we live in a culture that is actually fairly open to say, oh yeah, if that's how you feel, if that's what you believe.

Post rationalism, post-scientific um way of thinking.

And I honestly And so that group of people is not objecting to the Bible because of historical discrepancies per so much as it is just they might bring that stuff up in passing, but it's not the um it's not the core of their argument.

Right.

And even that, honestly, I think that that's going away now too.

I agree.

And I think the new wave that if I had to say, like, what are the high schoolers gonna have to contend with is probably um some some of the blind uh blind faith, extremism, maybe more like uh what's the word?

When someone's really really really religious.

Like fundamental?

Fundamentalism, yeah.

I think fundamentalism is probably gonna be the thing that comes back and it's gonna loop back to more what you experienced.

You're just seeing like the pendulum swinging.

And so it's it swung as far as it could.

Yeah, everyone's kind of sick of post-rationalism and like come on, guys.

Think certain things are just true or not true.

So I'm like, there's a lot of people in my generation that are converting to Catholicism, which seems so strange and ridiculous.

But it's a swing back to that more religious, like black and white.

Answers for everything, here's doctrine, and I'm I'm just looking for someone to tell me what's true and what's not.

So the the temptation will be to not to swing into that and have it be like, okay, now I can pick apart any anything.

So and all that is just set up to say this, and I'll say that this document that we have, or this collection of documents, is amazing.

And this is what survives the swings.

Correct.

Like this this stays through all of that.

Yeah, you look at the history of our faith, and I I've told you I've been listening to a podcast um that's all about the history of the church, and I'm gonna listen to a lot more because it's easy for us as Christians to be like, well, there was the last page of the Bible, and then there's me.

Yep.

And you know, there's thousands of years.

No one has thought about this except for me.

Yeah, there's thousands of years of history in between those, and it's cool to know that.

And you're right, throughout all of it, throughout all the crazy, the wild swings, all the stuff that you would even look at and go, well, that was a horrible era.

Scripture has stood the test of time, and here we are, and we are reading the same words that the early Christians read.

That's that's remarkable.

Um, but even though it's not uh Wait, how are they the same words if it's been translated?

That the the scripture, all the scriptures, the Bible, whatever phrase you want to use, the the collection that we have, Old Testament, New Testament, is the truth of God preserved throughout history, uh, there, and and it's and it teaches us what is true, and we can trust it and we can rely on it both in small ways and big ways.

Like I believe that.

And it's that's I've not encountered anything yet that has made has shook my faith in obviously in God, and there's this weird kind of splitting of hairs right now where a lot of pastors are talking about, well, you know, God, not the Bible.

We don't worship the Bible, we don't worship the Bible, but pretty much everything we know about God is comes from our framework from for understanding him.

It's not like an a little extra thing that you can, you know, they're very intricately connected.

So Jesus is the word of God, right?

Made flesh.

Um, anyway, this thing's amazing.

Um, and if you're someone that has ever had doubts or you've been you're a Jesus follower and you're like, oh, I've heard people say this or that.

You mentioned the how can we trust this?

It's who knows how many times it's been retranslated and we don't know if what we're reading is is like actually we we we do.

So I thought maybe just a general uh just a general discussion about that.

For me, what hits me is some of the some of the reliability we have in translations.

Uh that's a thing.

I love talking about the Big Bang Theory.

That's like an interesting part of it for me.

Uh, what about you?

What are what are some of the the things that have been the things that jump out to me?

It's the, and I actually have questions about this, but the fact that scripture records kind of all the faults of the people that it's talking about.

It's like definitely one of those uh enlightening things of like if this was supposed to be some piece of propaganda.

Yeah, is it propaganda?

Great.

Oh, that's a phenomenal thing.

It wouldn't it wouldn't record the uh reality of some of the things that we get to see.

So that's great.

And uh so we've got yeah, so I'll I would talk about the kind of historicity of the Bible.

That's probably the word to use there in that chapter.

Uh there's that.

I would say the unusual accuracy of the Bible compared to other ancient documents, especially.

I like talking about the Big Bang Theory, I think it's an interesting case study.

The whole thing about uh what what you just said.

Yeah, there's also just like an element of uh this is more of like a thought thing, but just the technology available.

Like you you go around and ask, what would it take to prove that a person was God?

Like if they were doing miracles, what would you do?

And kids these days would probably like film it on their phones, and like even filming it on their phones were in this generation of like AI and people faking things and whatnot.

It's like, well, people would probably still think it's fake, even if it was filmed on their phone.

So how would you know if something's true?

So yeah, this is the technology available at the time, and that the people that were writing this, while um while working class and while you know simple in many ways from our perspective, were also just really smart people, and God inspired them to write really complex and thoughtful things about what 100% to.

So I had a guy in college one time tell me he was super skeptical of that and trained to be by the college I went to, honestly.

And so he said, Oh man, if I wrote something down and buried it in the ground and thousands of years later people dug it up, and they're like, Oh, this is a I was like, Yeah, that's not what happened with the Bible at all.

Right.

That's not the story of the Bible, like at all.

So let's start here.

Um, this is kind of boring, but I think it's really cool.

So I want to look at the historicity of the Bible.

I love what you talk about, how it's not propaganda.

Um, so let's go like topic one, the historicity of the Bible.

Sounds good.

All right.

So you're a well-read guy.

Well, you mentioned Homer.

Like you've read the Odyssey or the Illuminati.

I've read in fiction, probably, but not anything else beyond that.

Like I don't have a bunch of like first century historical things in my brain.

I just I've read Homer.

Well, one of the things, so do you know about the library at at Alexandria?

Are you familiar with the burning of the library?

The burning of the library.

Like, we don't even know how much knowledge we lost.

Yeah, we lost a bunch of math, apparently.

Oh, when you look and you go, okay, you look at the things that the ancient world built, and you're sitting there going, like, how is it possible?

How is it possible?

They knew things, they wrote it down and they were really burned up.

Yeah, no, and and there's this Alexandria, which in today would be modern-day Egypt, I believe, is where Alexandria would be.

It how's the library?

And it was like the the most the biggest collection of knowledge that had ever existed.

It's something it's hard for us to appreciate with the internet, but there was a time where the reason you went to a college was because they had a big library.

Right.

And they had amassed a collection of knowledge, and you could go to one place and read on a bunch of stuff when you could never do that in a normal setting.

And so, you know, who knows how much we lost.

We lost untold amounts of knowledge, of documents, and what that's done with ancient history is really interesting.

So check this out Julius Caesar.

Okay.

When I was in college, I took Latin for two semesters.

That's two brute.

Correct.

I don't remember any of the Latin that I took, but where it finished was I remember one of my last assignments was we were given a chunk of the writings of Julius Caesar and we had to translate it from Latin to English.

Fun.

No, horrible, horrible.

And I got through it, but it was like a chore.

Okay, so Julius Caesar wrote stuff.

We have several writings of Julius Caesar, but check this out.

Um the earliest they call these manuscripts, like the earliest copies.

Okay.

The earliest manuscript copy we have of Julius Caesar's writings.

Guess the the time period from his life to when we have the the earliest copy we have.

Like a couple hundred years, maybe?

A thousand years.

Wow.

So the earliest copy we have of the writings of Julius Caesar, a thousand years after he was he was alive, and we have ten of those copies.

So we got ten of those.

10,000-year-old manuscripts, roughly in that same year.

Right, right.

And archaeologists and historians are fine to give that's what Julius Caesar says.

This is what Julius Caesar, this is these are his ideas.

These are his ideas.

And so the question you could ask, you could be skeptical.

Hey, I like a thousand years is a long time.

I'm just supposed to trust that in that thousand-year period that whatever copies were made.

Um, all right, let's go with someone else.

Plato.

Plato, Greek philosopher.

Yeah.

Not the not the not the thing that gets under your fingernails and tastes salty.

Yeah, but Plato is one of the most influential thinkers in the history of the world.

And so we've we've got his writings.

Um go ahead and and give me a guess.

I couldn't even earliest copy we have of Plato's writings, 1200 years after he lived.

And we have seven of those.

Okay.

Um we'll go to actually one, Homer, who wrote the Iliad of the Odyssey, but specifically the Iliad.

Uh, that's ancient.

Like it we're talking about, I mean, 900 BC, right?

Thousand years before Jesus or so that he lived and wrote.

Um, the approximate time span we have between his life is actually 500 years, which is insane.

In the ancient world, you're looking at uh Aristotle, 1400 years.

Um, Caesar, like I said, a thousand years, all these other, most of these are like Greek Roman thinkers.

You're talking 1200 years, 800 years, thousand years.

Homer lived in 900 BC.

The earliest manuscript copies we have are actually from 400 BC, and we got a bunch of them.

We have 643.

Popular dude, very popular dude.

And so historians are like, yeah, we're very confident.

Yeah, because we only have a 500-year gap and we have tons of copies, and they and they're accurate.

They all say the same thing.

All right, New Testament.

Here's what's great uh the approximate time span between the uh the actual copies of the New Testament that we have and when the events happen, less than 100 years.

Okay, pretty good.

We have 5,600 manuscript copies.

That's pretty good.

That's a lot.

Yeah.

Okay.

And they have a 99.5% accuracy between copy to copy.

Okay, like Homer's has a 95% accuracy.

Right.

So these have some slight changes, you know, but 99%.

Yeah, and what's really I mean, it's kind of self-explanatory because the way the early church was structured.

It's like a bunch of different home churches that are trying to pursue the truth and identify what's what's going on about Jesus.

So when they get like something they can trust, they're like, George, sit, write this down.

Yes, like you, you are the scribe, please.

We need this copy.

Because Jesus comes when the Roman Empire has done a couple of things, built roads everywhere.

So you can actually, hey, write this letter and go take it to there.

Uh, united the world, uh, the civilized world at that time under a common language.

So you can write.

In Greek.

And a bunch of people can read it.

Yeah.

Yeah.

From in places that Greek is the English of yesteryear.

Correct.

Yeah.

And you start going back.

I mean, even a few centuries before Jesus, that wouldn't have happened.

You're like, I wrote this in Greek.

Well, they don't speak Greek.

But Rome, you know, conquers you, tells you you're going to speak Greek, and builds roads that go there.

Okay.

So here's what's so cool about that.

There have been all these skeptics throughout history that have, you know, kind of postulated, oh, well, you know, we don't know when this stuff got written.

We've discovered manuscript copies.

Yeah, in the 80s.

The Dead Sea Scrolls.

Well, the Dead Sea Scrolls, okay, cool.

Well, sorry.

Old Testament.

But also great though.

So the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered.

I don't know the actual date of their discovery.

Um I'm going to say 1982.

Look it up.

I don't I can't look it up.

No.

I'm going to look it up now.

Dang it.

Hold on.

Hold on.

We're going to find this.

I think it's earlier than that.

But when were the Dead Sea Scrolls discovered?

They didn't have this.

I'm sorry.

1947.

Ah.

But they still would have been being translated and worked on.

Yeah.

So when these were discovered, what the Dead Sea Scrolls were, there was a group of a sect in Judaism called the Essenes.

And the Essenes were basically hermits who went out to the desert and they just like, leave us alone, and we're just going to r make copies of the Bible, of their Bible, the Hebrew, you know, Scottish Old Testament.

And we found in the 40s this like unsealed cave, essentially, that this stuff had been stored in.

And it had been sealed for years and all this kind of stuff.

We unsealed it.

And the assumption these were the oldest uh manuscript copies of the Old Testament that we had.

And the assumption was that these were going to show just how this will show the game of telephone.

Correct.

This will show that and the exact opposite happened.

Right.

They translated it, and I, oh my gosh, this is I mean, this is what we've been reading.

These are the same things.

And so as history has gone on and we've discovered more and more ancient manuscripts, it's actually given us the ability, like so the reason why the King James Bible is not as accurate as our modern translations.

Because well, they didn't have access to the manuscripts that we have access to.

Yeah, they were well, and they were translating a translation.

A translation.

Yeah, they were translating the Latin Vulgate, right?

Which was a Latin translation of the Greek, doing that into English.

And the King James Bible accomplished amazing things.

It put it in common language.

But it's not nearly as accurate as, say, something like the NASB.

Yeah.

Or and that's what's great.

Uh, too, I think there's always this uh maybe Facebook theology, this it's kind of a similar gotcha sort of situation where someone's like, look up this verse in your Bible, it's not even there.

This proves that X, Y, and Z has happened.

What I'm really grateful for is uh the fact that this is truth and this is so foundational has led people to take it very seriously.

So that when there are changes or when there are discrepancies, your Bible usually tells you.

Yeah, no, this is an academic, you have to understand this is the highest, this document, this collection of documents, the most scrutinized, right, studied.

Um all this stuff, it's academic.

So when, for example, uh Mark, the last section of the book of Mark that we have, every Bible that you've got is gonna have a footnote that says earlier manuscripts do not include this actually.

That's a section, and they're like it's it's in there, but the earliest manuscript copies of it don't have it.

Same with um Jesus' story of the woman caught in adultery, and he says go and send no more.

Earliest manuscript copies don't have that story in there.

So what they say is, oh, this was added by well, what it could mean is that people, yeah, it wasn't in there, but people talked about that story so much and it was part of the the the church and it was there, then when it got it got added, or yeah, they're having that conversation about the story they heard about Jesus and then go, like, well, let's go find it.

Oh, it's not in here.

Well, who who hasn't recorded that?

And then they have that conversation and someone puts it in there.

Because again, we're talking less than a hundred years here, and I'll share this one thing, we'll move on to a different topic.

I just think it's super interesting.

So um look, in in like the 1830s, 1800s, you started having a huge upswing of people making claims that, oh, well, this this stuff was actually written hundreds of years after the events, and people are writing in the name of a disciple and they're just making it say what they want it to say.

Um which did happen, you know, in other, there are not for this, there are other texts that are produced similar.

Gospel of Thomas.

Yeah, right.

Great example of that.

Yeah, it is not written by Thomas.

Right.

And we're confident and doesn't communicate truth about Jesus.

No, that's a Gnostic gospel.

It was a whole different conversation, like a heresy thing.

But this one scholar, he's like, I think that these books are, you know, 300 years after the day.

But here's what's crazy.

Um, we discovered, uh, let me see here.

Okay.

Clement of Rome, who lived in 95 AD.

This is one of the early church fathers, right?

Clement of Rome would have been one of the earliest non-Jesus-led disciples, but he would have known people who were his spiritual dads would have been.

Yeah, yeah.

They're like OGs.

Yeah, yeah.

So we we discovered uh a letter that he wrote to the church in Corinth, okay.

Um, and he wrote this in 95 AD.

Okay, and in it, he quotes directly from 10 of the 27 books of the New Testament.

Like we have quotes, which is just this evidence that goes, oh, this was stuff they had it.

They had it, they were reading it, they were writing because he quotes directly.

It's it's as Paul says, it's whatever.

And so all that to say this.

Anyone who comes around and says, Well, this thing, who knows how many times it was translated, they that not being mean, they just don't know what they're talking about.

That's not the story of the Bible.

This wasn't a document someone buried in the ground, and then years later from the very especially the New Testament.

Old Testament's more ancient, Dead Sea Scrolls and stuff like that.

But the New Testament, if you're gonna say, I don't believe that the New Testament is accurate, you have to throw away every ancient document in history.

I don't believe Caesar wrote what Caesar wrote.

I don't believe Plato ever said that.

I don't believe because the number of manuscript copies, the amount of them that we have, the accuracy that they have between each other, and the small time period between when they were written and when the events happened, I mean, again, you're like, we have 10 copies of Julius Caesar's writings a thousand years after.

We have 5,600 copies of New Testament books within a hundred years.

It's like And I think the the difference is that you know, I think most people would be like, I'm kind of willing to be like Plato didn't didn't write that.

And so if it's a if it's a document that you're building your worldview and your life on rather than it's just entertainment or food for thought, you know, like Plato's like obviously foundations of Western thinking and and all of that, but it's like people are saying this has such a truth claim that it should impact your everyday decisions, it has to be at a much higher threshold, held accountable to that much higher threshold to be because it's that important.

It's that important.

And I think what this shows you, and for for people, I'm gonna say this there's kind of a modern wing of American Christianity at least that try just diminishes scripture a little bit, like deconstructionism and stuff.

The reason that we have so many copies, and the reason that they're so well preserved, is because from the get-go, the church saw them as that valuable.

Right.

That's why they preserved them so well, that's why they made so many copies.

What is it?

They dedicated themselves to the breaking of bread, to the apostles' teaching and to the fellowship of believers, where it's like from the very early gatherings of the church, it's like the teachings of the apostles are held with high regard.

When the when the whole you know council gets together in 300 to decide the canon of scripture, some people like to argue that, oh, these guys are randomly decided.

I think this book should be in.

It's like that's not how it went at all.

These were already clearly treasured and accepted.

There might have been a few controversial, I don't know about this, but but literally like from the earliest days of the church, what we have as scripture was treasured and seen as that, which is why these were preserved and written and rewritten and kept and all that.

That's why we have so many manuscript copies, because they they were like and what's cool is like by those same um criteria, there could be more stuff added to this one day based on some discovery we find some Corinthian letter that like is the gap letter, and maybe yeah, we I mean unseal a uh old Christian cave and that would be that would be one of the most interesting developments ever.

Well, there's no that Paul wrote more than two letters to the Corinthians.

A recent one where it was like someone's pendant had like a little silver scroll inside of it and it had quotes from Zechariah that like were re you know, reproving that those are accurate.

Oh, yeah, that's the segments or whatever.

Yeah, there is nothing like the Bible in all of history.

No book has been as well preserved, as well documented, and is scrutinized.

So I think that just know that if if you're ever like, well, how do I know what I'm reading is who's there?

Now, quick thing, and we'll move on.

I want to talk about yours the whole propaganda thing.

Bible translations, just when we're talking about this.

There's a few different categories.

Um, there's there's some that are just paraphrases, like the message is one of those.

Um there's one called the passion translation, which is garbage.

Don't even like that.

Is a there's videos about the passion translation.

Don't there's two main kinds of translations that are helpful.

There's word for word and thought for thought.

Word for word would be like the new American standard, prioritizes we're translating the words.

Yeah, thought for thought would be like the new living translation, which is what we use.

It is a scholarly, it's not a paraphrase.

They're not just randomly doing stuff, but they recognize that there's certain phrases that mean mean things in our language.

Correct.

So great example would be the word heneni in the Hebrew.

I've talked about this on a message, um, literally translates here I am.

Uh and so in the New American Standard, I'm pretty sure when you read, you know, in the Old Testament, when Samuel responds to the voice of God and says, Here I am.

But in English, we hear here I am is like present, sure.

Like a teacher taking role.

But the word heneni means here I am literally, but uh it also has this obvious connotation, it means more than here I am and I'm ready.

Yeah.

I'm willing.

I am willing might be a thought-for-thought translation of the words.

The new living will put it as yes, here I am.

Like here I am, but in the sense of I'm ready to do whatever, not just like here.

Right.

And so that's a thought for thought.

Um, most of our modern translations, they are translations of ancient manuscripts, like the earliest copies we have.

They've been done in an incredibly scholarly way, and they're either gonna be word for word, thought for thought, somewhere on that spectrum.

And they're all they're mostly great, you know.

Yeah, just don't.

I mean, if go to people you trust and ask them about their Bible translation, you know, thoughts.

And the drop-down menu on the Bible apps isn't always the best place to be searching for because it's just gonna it gives them all equal weight.

Yeah, right.

Like it's just oh the alphabetized, it's not like here's the top three you should use.

No, no, no, absolutely.

Um, what do you typically read from?

ESV?

ESV, yeah.

That's a good one.

It's just like what I've memorized, I think, the most scripturally.

It's probably right in the middle of word for word and thought for thought.

It's a little bit um, it's a little bit clunky sometimes, which the word for words tend to be right because yeah, uh, they talked different back then.

All right, you mentioned propaganda.

Propaganda, yeah.

So how do I know the Bible isn't just this is our next chapter?

Sure.

All right, how do I know the Bible isn't propaganda?

Uh the propaganda thing is like if you go and look up writings of people that are propagandized, they are um, you know, shown to be godlike in every way from every perspective and in every moment.

And there's not a humanness to the dictators of the past from the writings that they've commissioned.

Yeah, because they would they had a hand in making sure that they came out looking good.

This is a this is a person.

And so Jesus stands as a contrast to every person that is in the story of Scripture up to that point, which up to that point still claims to be the definitive story of the one true God doing what he wants to do with with humanity.

So you get people like Abraham, where Abraham's faith is recognized as like this big thumbs up.

The father of the faith.

Right, but it's to the Jewish people, but still carries with him the you know, pawning off of his wife as his sister, still carries with him some major, um, major horrible mistakes that if you were the person who conceivably wrote this, yeah, you wouldn't include uh about yourself.

That's a good point.

Like great example would be just go to any bookstore and buy a biography.

Oh, buy a like a biography of a YouTuber.

Do those exist?

Oh, yeah.

They're they're everywhere.

They they will paint.

Can I just watch their YouTube videos?

You can, but it's kind of just like you know, the play to be like, I'm gonna go buy like a Jake Paul.

Definitely.

Those definitely exist.

Okay.

They're probably coming off looking like the best person ever.

And then when I was four, I looked at the sun and I realized, or like the controversy chapter is probably gonna be like, here's what I learned from the mistakes that I've made without any real ownership of whatever is happening.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Point being is like, then you go and look up so-and-so controversies, and there's a whole big list that's not included in the book.

No, I mean, political figures are great.

I'm not gonna go political, but any political figure, read their their official biography, whoever they endorsed as their biographer, and they're just I mean, there might be things they have to talk about because it's such a point of public record.

Yeah, right.

But even those are quickly swept away and dismissed.

The Bible's so weird because it records the the most, I mean, horrifically embarrassing things.

And you go back to the Old Testament, like you said, but the New Testament.

I mean, the disciples do not look great.

The disciples, the authors and friends of each other that they're writing about.

It's like, uh, yeah, I went from being like this rock star person, like Peter, who's identifying Jesus as who he is, and Jesus is getting giving me the denies of him.

And then yeah, and then it's like, well, no, I've I don't have anything to do with him.

It's like, well, if you're kind of Peter, the person in charge of the church, you probably want to edit that out to be like, you know, you know, I'm hey man, I mean, we I that story doesn't need to be.

I'm your pastor, so you need to leave that out.

There's a really funny video I saw, and it was just like a short, but it was this guy talking about like uh when John wrote his gospel, which was later, how maybe he and Peter because like one of the the other gospels would be like one of the disciples cut off the ear of the guy who comes to arrest Jesus, and then John's like, it was it was Peter.

Peter did.

And then the others are like, they one of the disciples got there first.

Right.

And then John's like, it was me.

I beat Peter.

Peter was slow.

The disciple that Jesus loved.

That was me.

Yeah, that was John.

Um, yeah, I know.

You're it's it's a it truly is strange.

So a great way to look at it is if you want to be honest about it, we know historically what life was like for the disciples.

The movement of Jesus did not afford them any luxuries in life.

I mean, it was persecution, beatings, death, torture, you name it.

I mean, they're all they're all martyred except for John, killed very early.

I mean, some of the disciples were killed shortly after Jesus.

Um, in fact, James, his brother, one of the first apostles to be killed, not very long after.

And even I think Peter, I believe this is true.

I think Peter and Paul both died in the same year.

You imagine that year for the church, like we lost Peter and Paul, like what in the world?

Um so this was like living this out was it gave it profited them nothing.

Right.

And if it was a lie, A, if it was a lie, you you'd write it different.

Yeah, but you set it up, you you we see the modern nature, cult like creation.

And if you're like in charge of a religion and you're able to do that, it probably gets you more perks, honestly.

Yeah, you set it up to to get you more women, get you more money, and 100%.

Uh, this does not establish that that kind of culture uh of of of people worship.

It establishes a culture of God worship, and that's why I think Jesus stands so um stands out so much in the scriptures, is because up until this point, we don't really have a person that has been able to accomplish what every other human you know fails to do, kind of thing.

And it just so much as you say that, yeah, it's not how propaganda would be written.

Um the worst mistakes of the disciples are aired out in the open, preserved, like you'd be like, don't put that in the story, please.

Um, and also, I mean, they're the best, they are the best-selling authors of all time.

They're the most read people of all time.

And other than Paul, they're just not no one thinks of that.

They're not educated, they're not trained, and so you're thinking, like, oh, these guys somehow wrote the it's just cool.

It's cool.

So that's that's neat.

That is cool.

Um on that note.

Well, maybe that's a whole side conversation.

What is it?

We can do it later, but just Daniel, uh, maybe Joseph.

Like, there's a few people that kind of stand out as like Old Testament Daniel, like in particular.

Old Testament Joseph.

Yeah.

Like a little bit sinless, maybe not perfectly sinless.

No, not I mean, like Joseph.

Joseph technically lies at the end.

He's well, Joseph is sinless.

Oh, what do you mean he technically lies?

Like where he pulls that prank on his brothers.

But is it pulling a prank is a lie?

Testing them.

Right.

No, I mean Joseph, so at the very least, he's unwise.

Right.

When he's a kid and he's like, I had this dream, and like the beers were bound down to me.

I don't know if that's on if that's on wisdom.

I think that's that's uh that's what I'm saying.

It opens up a whole thing.

Right.

He uh Daniel's a little bit afraid multiple times.

Yeah, I think it's a dream that's a good thing.

The difference would be with uh yeah, I mean, Daniel, I agree.

Daniel and Joseph are the two most admirable characters we have, men that we have in the Old Testament to read from, as far as guys go.

Right.

There's some ladies that are like pretty awesome, like pretty awesome, like not a lot of negative there.

But you know, those guys.

Um, but the interesting thing about them is like they're definitely at the mercy of their circumstances, they're kind of powerless.

Like they have interest, like Joseph's like, ah, my brother sold me into slavery, and then I was here and I was there, and it was he's sort of just at the mercy of the events happening around him.

And for Daniel, it's like my nation was conquered, and I'm I gotta serve this king.

Well, and I think what what ends up you know showing through all that is if you want to really get nerdy about like types and and all of that, is like it's pointing to the kind of savior that's gonna come in Jesus, where it's like Well, they give us like, is this the guy?

He might be the guy.

Oh, he's not that feeling.

Even Joseph at the very end doesn't really like the blessing that he's not the one that gets the biggest blessing from his father.

Right?

When his father dies and blesses all of his sons, it's not Joseph's house.

There's no tribe of Joseph.

Right.

Right.

It's like you know.

Um yeah, it gets kind of split into two half tribes with his sons because so it's it's a nerdi aside, I think.

But it but there are these little like there's these glimpses of someone that will be like Jesus one day.

Um yeah.

And I think that's what all all people, if Jesus is the perfect human, all people have those moments of their like the highs are really high and the lows for us are pretty low.

So all that, but then that fatal flaw, and then there's no fatal flaw in Jesus.

Yeah, so that's cool.

So propaganda, it is not.

If it is propaganda, it's like playing uh what they call like 4D chess.

Yeah.

Where you're it's like, well, I'm pretending I'm bad so that you believe it.

And when that it really doesn't benefit me at all, but it will benefit me.

I'll die, all my friends will die.

Uh all my family will die.

They'll all be killed.

But you know, I'm doing it so that it's more believable, so that a thousand years from now, yeah.

Like that's okay.

If you want to believe that, then anything else that's stands out as helps with the reliability?

Well, a couple things for me.

Um, and then I do want to talk about the Big Bang Theory as a thing, because I had a conversation with a guy yesterday about it, and it's like on my mind.

Um, it's one of my favorite things to talk about.

But yeah, I think the other thing I would just say is um maybe this could be the next chapter, just sort of random, random stuff that has been shown to be true in the Bible that shouldn't be.

Okay, so I used the Jericho example earlier on, and I'll give you guys another map.

I already have it.

Um there's a there's a com there's a place in Mark.

Okay, I think it's Mark chapter seven.

Um can you you have a Bible right there?

Can you go to like Mark 731?

Oh, not not New Testament.

You got there.

I thought I was gonna do it.

It goes Matthew, Mark.

Mark seven, thirty-one.

I think so.

Mark seven thirty-one.

Then he returned from the region of Tyre and went through Sidon to the Sea of Galilee in the region of the Decapolis.

Okay, perfect.

So you'll see this on the map that Zach is putting up right now.

Um so Tyre and Sidon were on the Mediterranean coast in an area that we would call the the Phoenicia at that time of Jesus.

Decapolis, so that's that's west of like the Sea of Galilee.

Decapolis was a region, the ten cities is what Decapolis means, and it was on the eastern side of the Sea of Galilee.

So Mark says that they're in Tyre, and they're like, let's go to the Decapolis now.

And so they go north through Sidon so that they can go way to the Sea of Galilee.

To the Decapolis.

I can picture it.

On a map, it's like, why?

Right.

Because that would be like we live in Woodstock, Georgia.

Like, hey, I gotta go to Roswell.

You want to ride in the car with me?

Yeah, what are you doing?

I'm gonna go up to Waleska and then go to Roswell's like, that's the longest way you could go.

Right.

Actually, this was there's well documented.

It's another one of those gotcha texts where well documented biblical critics were like, This is look at a map.

Why would you ever go that way?

And then actually, uh topographically, if you look at a map, you go, Oh, that's why there's a mountain range.

In between a mountain range.

It's not a super mountainous reason, but there's a mountain in between uh Tyre and Decapolis, and it's very high, and then it drops on the northern side.

So if you're Jesus and those guys back in the day, like, okay, we want to go to Decapolis, we're in Tyre.

Well, we can we can just go straight east, but we're gonna have to climb a mountain and go over it.

And or we go up north on well-traveled roads that already exist, and there's a there's a path.

There's a road that takes us through Sidon, and then it goes, it bypasses the mountain, goes around the mountain, and it's like one of those little things that there were well-documented biblical critics, scholarly people who were like, This is so stupid.

And then, oh, and what they would use is they would say, Well, so this shows that whoever wrote this didn't even know the area.

They would never write that.

This is clearly evidence.

Like, oh, actually, you're dumb.

And that's what's annoying about all this is that there are so many like interesting things in the creation of the Bible that are worth like pondering and discovering and thinking about, but it's all the uh what I call like I'm 14 and I'm deep.

It's like that, it's like that like that feeling of just like, oh, I've I figured it out.

I figured out the one thing that you're you've never thought of, and it's kind of easily proven wrong.

So any other random things?

Yeah, well, there are some really interesting ones.

Um, and that's not to say that there aren't struggles and things you have to go, huh?

Why does that one seem to say okay?

Yeah, there's there's definitely tension in the Bible.

I think one tension to bring bring up a fair one is like I know some Christians who believe that Jesus uh cleansed the temple twice.

Because in John, he goes to the temple.

In John, it's like his first thing in his ministry.

John chapter two.

And in Matthew, it's the last thing.

It's like him approaching his um crucifixion.

And so uh that's something to wrestle with.

Did he do it twice or did he do it once?

And the authors are placing it there to show you something about Jesus.

Yeah, no.

So that's actually another good, maybe we can make this like a little mini chapter, uh, like narrative structure.

And so we struggle with some things we struggle with hyperbole, exaggeration.

Like in the old testament, there's times where it says, and every man, woman, and child was wiped out, and then you see like they're still there and every and all the cattle were killed.

Yeah, and then like the next chapter is like, so he sacrificed one of the cows.

Yeah, right.

And there's these people.

Well, those are hyper hyperbolic statements that we're very comfortable with in our culture.

We say, Oh, I haven't eaten in days.

I don't mean that.

I haven't eaten in a few hours, I'm hungry, I'm starving.

Right?

We use that all the time, and so did they.

That is a narrative tool that when you're writing something, you're communicating like without giving boring and this many cows and this many people, like it just it was a massacre, right?

You know.

Um there is that in the in the Bible, but also specifically with other books, there's these are authors.

And just like a writer would sit down, and even inspired by God, they didn't fall into a trance and their hands started moving, and they're like, Oh wow, what is this?

The Holy Spirit would have worked within them to give them ideas and creativity.

You give messages, I give messages.

There's times where I just jump right into it, and there's times where I tell a story at a certain point.

I almost, great example.

I almost, this last week I talked about a lot.

It was healing the blind guys, the triumphant entry, triumphal entry of Jesus, the uh tossing over the temple tables, and then the fig tree.

I almost started with the fig tree story.

I said, I'm gonna read you guys a really interesting story that's gonna throw you off.

It shows up later, but you're using it for narrative purposes to illustrate a tone.

Right.

And then we're gonna come back to it later.

That is a totally valid way to communicate, to grab attention for the reader.

And like John, he wrote his last, it has a different structure.

It's not that it's wrong, because even our understanding of how you should write a well, it should be completely chronological.

I would say Matthew probably Luke's is probably the most chronological.

If you want to just say which one is the most he uh sets up a uh accountability at the beginning to say, I've I've set up an orderly account of the things that have happened among us for for you.

Most scholars think that Matthew will sometimes take sections of his and thematically join them together that here's a bunch of teachings of Jesus that are all related to each other, like nesting a story inside of a story to help you understand the point of the other story, you know.

Correct.

Oh, I'm gonna put this one here because it connects to this, but they didn't happen at the same time.

Right.

So you can still be recording accurate things and painting an accurate picture of Jesus while the author is having intention.

Like creative, there's creative ways to put something together.

So that's a great point.

But as far as uh interesting things in the Bible, and again, this doesn't I don't want to be um intellectually dishonest and just say, oh yeah, we you can't find anything in scripture that's a challenging thing.

You can, but there's a lot of stuff in the Bible that shouldn't be there.

For example, the earth being round.

Okay.

Old Testament says that God sits above the circle of the earth.

And the Hebrew word for there is like sphere, like he sits above the circle of the earth.

It is not going to be discovered that the earth is spherical, circular for like thousands of years after this.

It shouldn't be in there.

Um there's a quote in uh the Old Testament how God how God suspended the earth on nothing.

That it's just like its foundation is nothing, floating in space.

And all ancient cultures have ideas for what the earth is on the back of a turtle.

It's on the back of a turtle.

On the back of another turtle.

Yeah.

On the back of another turtle.

Turtles all the way down, right?

But but there are all kinds all cultures were like, no, no, the earth is here, what's it sitting on?

And they all had ideas for that.

And you know, they would have laughed at like, what do you mean it's on nothing?

How is that even possible?

Oh, well, you know, it is on nothing.

There's lots of stuff like that.

There's so many things.

Um, the the amount of little details like that that pop up in these ancient documents that completely go against what the ancient people believed.

Uh, one of my favorite examples of this is the Jewish diet.

To this day, if you decide, hey, for a year, I mean you are we're gonna follow the mosaic Jewish diet, we would be eating one of the healthiest diets that human beings could eat.

Like we would eat, we would be so healthy.

There are laws about cleansing things, so what to do with dead bodies, carcasses, how to deal with waste.

The ancient world did not have like there was no health inspector in Egypt.

Right.

You know what I mean?

Yeah, so there's thousands of years ahead of those things.

It it God obviously knows about all that stuff, so in his communication, he is clarifying that for people of like, hey, there's stuff you don't know about, but just wash your hands.

Wash your hands.

No, even in like there was a famous doctor, I can't remember his name, but he even like uh just several hundred years ago, there was like mortality rates and like pregnancies were really high.

Right, and then he and he just started like having all of his nurses wash their hands before, and then their mortality rate went way down, and they're like, Oh you think like, wait a minute, people weren't washing their hands 400 years ago?

It's like no, they didn't know about germs.

But it I think what's cool about that too is that isn't the only explanation because it's also shaping their imagination, it's shaping the story that God's trying to tell so that they're ready for the Messiah when He comes and they're ready for And He's using language they understand.

He's not like, hey guys, there's these things called germs, they're microorganisms that no, he's like it's a it's in a uh spiritual sense.

He's shaping his people and yeah, in the spiritual sense, and the bonus added effect is it's a healthy thing.

But it's like thousands of years ahead of its time, and there's no reason why this group of people who were slaves in Egypt, which by the way, in Egypt, uh feces was one of the primary ingredients in most medicinal remedies.

They didn't have a long lifespan in Egypt.

They didn't wonder why.

Yeah.

And then you have these people who are slaves in Egypt, they come out, they start living this very different lifestyle, they eat different foods, they prepare their foods differently, and it's kosher, right?

They drain blood, they do all this kind of stuff.

That the ancient world is like, What are you doing?

Right.

And it's like actually doing what everyone should do.

Yeah, it's like when Daniel's in Babylon, he's like, Can you can you just let us eat what we would eat?

And if we're still strong as the other guys, could we keep our diet?

And they go, sure.

And it shouldn't be there.

It's not, there's no there's no like anthropological reason why they should have known these things.

So it just shows that there's a there's a knowledge source that exists that doesn't make sense, and I think that those things are just cool.

Yeah.

Last thing we talk about, if you're cool with it, the last thing is the beginning.

That's one of my favorite things to talk about.

And you you probably are pretty well versed in this too.

I think I've just heard you talk about it 150 times.

But it's because I've known you for many years.

Many, yeah, many moons.

Uh so it's funny, I was talking with a guy yesterday, he called me and he was like, Man, I just I'm waiting for the scientific.

If this stuff is true, then shouldn't the scientific world at some point in time get on board and just be like, Yeah, there was a flood.

Which to be fair, it's kind of happening.

Okay, elaborate.

Just like we're talking about the new atheists, where Dawkins recently recently was like, uh, I'm a cultural Christian.

Yeah, like I believe all the values, I just don't believe the God at the center of it.

It's like, well, that's a little wishy-washy there, Richard Dawkins.

But it's it's getting closer.

One of Richard Dawkins' like most well-known kind of disciples, he she toured with him.

She became a she converted to Christianity not that long ago.

I was gonna make a dumb joke.

What was your joke?

I was gonna say, is that Ilhan Ilhan Omar?

What's her name?

No, it wasn't.

No, she's she's next.

Uh no, I don't know.

But uh, I can't remember her name.

You can look it up though.

But new, if you're not familiar, the new atheists are this pretty recent movement in the last 30 years or so of really academic people who are very passionate about atheism and basically traveled and did huge circuits about how you shouldn't believe in God.

Right.

And you're dumb if you do.

And several of them are now Christians.

Yeah.

Um, and even like you said, Richard Dawkins, he's the most famous of them.

He's not a Christian, right?

But even he's like realized, oh, um, I fought so hard against this thing, and it's kind of worked in certain areas of the world and it's gone really poorly.

Right.

It's almost like the the consequences of believing that God made the universe and is good and generous and loving creates a world that's better to live in than the one that is created in the vacuum of the big bang theory is interesting.

So I told this guy on the phone, I said that has happened.

And I mentioned the big bang theory, and he's kind of like, Wait, I thought the big bang theory is a problem for Christianity, and it's not.

It's super cool.

So Big Bang Theory is relatively new in human history, 1930s, 40s, 50s is when it really took hold.

Before the Big Bang Theory was the prevailing scientific theory of the start of things, the prevailing view is called steady state theory.

And its view is that there was never a start of things, that the universe is always kind of like the way we see God, the universe has always existed.

And every major scientist believed that.

Um, Albert Einstein would have been one of those.

And then Edwin Hubble, who like the telescope got named after, he has all these discoveries, and basically his discoveries mathematically seem to indicate that, and I don't know all this math, I'm not that smart.

This was like cosmic background radiation sort of stuff.

The universe is expanding.

Right.

And it's measuring the temperature of the universe and seeing that there's leftover microwave, whatever it is.

And it's expanding from at an ever-increasing rate of speed, like an explosion.

From a point.

From a point of origin.

And this was a massive issue.

Because if that's true, you rewind the clock, you're at an origin point, you have a beginning.

And the scientific world denied a beginning.

And so what's funny is there are this is well documented.

There are like well-respected scientists of that era who wrote, passionately wrote against the Big Bang Theory.

And one of their primary arguments is not the scientific merit of it, but that it's just too close to creationism.

Right.

That is like, hey guys, this is a because for them it was a total shift in thinking.

Yeah, I was listening to a thing this morning actually about the Big Bang Theory.

And it was just there's talking about entropy and how um things would have had to be so entropy would have had to be at a like a zero point at the beginning, because if if entropy exists in the way that we see it in our And what is entropy?

Oh, just like things fall apart, like everything the chaotic randomness of the world kind of hence my body.

My body decays.

It's just gay.

Right.

Uh you hit dominoes, they fall over, kind of thing.

And so uh it would have had to been so ordered at the beginning that it begs the question like what ordered the beginning point?

Like, yeah.

Most today modern people, we don't A, very few people know how old the Big Bang Theory is or how new.

Sure.

And B, don't know the history behind it and what it actually proves, because it what it proves is a beginning.

Right.

And that was a huge issue.

And so these guys are like, we can't, guys, we can't do this.

Like this is uh It validates the first sections of the Bible.

First sentence of it.

You're right.

In the beginning.

Yes.

So the Big Bang Theory in its modern like hey, what is it?

Okay, in the beginning, something caused everything to be.

Something started everything.

It's like, okay, that's how did that become such a in the Christian world a problem?

Like it just doesn't seem like was it just because those institutions, science and faith, were so butting heads that it's like we found God in the Big Bang or something?

No, I I think I can probably I don't think I can speak to this with like a lot of knowledge.

I think a lot of it has to do with the way American schools are structured.

So you can't, you cannot teach creationism in a public school.

Right.

But you can teach the Big Bang Theory.

The Big Bang Theory is actually the only other, it's like the only non-religious origin story of the universe, really, that has any you know credibility.

And so it was always like the, you know, I go to church and I'm taught about God created the universe.

I go to school and a big bang theory.

A big bang created the universe.

And so it just these are opposed to each other.

In reality, the Big Bang Theory when God speaks.

Yeah, it validated the Christian view.

It's it's like you've gone from saying you science, the scientific community went from saying there never was a beginning to in the beginning.

And it's like, hey, we're so glad you've joined us.

Because and there's this famous quote.

Um, I'm gonna butcher it, but I can you can look it up.

But it's a famous quote from a guy who said, like, the you know, the scientists and the scholars of the world scale the highest summit of the mountaintop of knowledge just to discover religious people who've been living here for years, kind of thing.

And it's not like a dunk on you, like whatever.

It's cool that my point to this guy was, hey, that's happened.

There have been major scientific discoveries that have actually caused the backtrack in the scientific community to say, oh, wait, okay, we actually have more agreement than we thought.

And they still wouldn't say God did it, an intelligent person did it, although that is actually gaining in the scientific community more and more traction uh than ever.

It's just a cool example of how something you might think discredits your view of God actually is more supportive of that.

So I don't yeah, and there's plenty of reasons, and they'll there will still continue to be issues that people take with the Bible that have answers to them.

And so be I think be cautious and be just genuine when someone throws a gotcha your way.

Think about it.

Um, it might be coming from you know a genuine place of curiosity, even of like, hey, like that conversation you're having.

Like, I don't know.

It was a great conversation about the flood.

Like, let's have that conversation.

Yeah.

And then seek out someone um to have that conversation with and seek out scripture.

There's some good podcasts that are, you know, around, I'm sure.

Oh, definitely.

There's lots of stuff.

Nothing I've said here is like some new thing that I'm saying.

I'm just trying to put it together for people because as I was preparing the message this last week, I'm like, yeah, this is one of those, it's interesting.

Yeah, at the very least.

Uh I'm sorry for not saying the word that we're talking about, which is apologetics.

Yeah, there you go.

There you go.

Apologetics.

So when you're kind of looking for resource for the people, no, no.

It's uh defense of the faith kind of thing.

And so if you are interested in more topics like this or have specific squat specific questions, just type in those phrases and then write apologetics.

Yeah.

Or Christian apologies.

And maybe we'll end with this.

I said earlier, like accuracy versus truth, and I was like, ah, I'm split hairs.

When I look at scripture and I say, okay, what are the odds that this ancient, ancient document would be so well preserved, so well kept, even though it's been scrutinized and fought against and barred and all that kind of stuff?

And it and what are the odds that it records such detail that can be verified and knowledge that didn't exist at that time that's outside of time?

Like this, why?

And it it just gives me so much trust that I I have a comfort level with trusting the things in it that there aren't an explanation for.

Sure.

You know, like okay, there's things that it records that I can't scientifically prove.

But I'm okay with that because not just because I have blind faith, but because so many of the other things have to be.

What would you need to prove those things?

That is true.

It's like do I need every single thing the Bible records to have some type of like photographic evidence to support it?

If I do that or some uh biblical or some scientific theory that validates it in the end, it's like, yeah, maybe sure one day, but I don't need to know that.

What I need to know is is this document worth trusting at all to the beat to begin with?

Right.

And I think it is.

And it is cool, cool.

Good talk.

All right, bye, everybody.

Bye.