Ten Minute Bible Talks Devotional Bible Study - Debunking the New Testament? | New Testament | John 5

Episode Date: December 7, 2023

Why do scholars often try to disprove the New Testament? Is the gospel of John trustworthy? In today's episode, Patrick uses John 5 to discuss the authenticity of the New Testament. Your support makes TMBT possible. Ten Minute Bible Talks is a crowd-funded project. Join the TMBTeam to reach more people with the Bible. Give now. Like this content? Make sure to leave us a rating and share it with others, so others can find it too. Use #asktmbt to connect with us, ask questions, and suggest topics. We'd love to hear from you! To learn more, visit our website and follow us on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter@TenMinuteBibleTalks. Don't forget to subscribe to the TMBT Newsletter here. Passages: John 5

Welcome to 10-minute Bible Talks, where we connect the Bible to your life. In the time it takes to get to work. I'm Patrick Miller. In college, I took a New Testament class because I wanted to learn more about the New Testament. Now, I know that sounds obvious, and it seemed obvious to me at the time, but I was actually just oblivious because the minute I set my 21-year-old rumped down, I didn't receive a deep dive into the history and text, at least as I understood it. Instead, I had the New Testament deep, constructed, locked stock and barrel, by someone who was, admittedly, a brilliant professor. She even studied under Bart Ehrman. Now, you might recognize that name because he's known at a popular

level for writing books targeted at Bible-believing Christians, and they all argue that the New Testament is a farce. The Gospels weren't written by disciples of Jesus. They were written well after his death. Some by a century or two centuries. The letters of Paul, besides a few parts of them, weren't written by Paul either, according to Bart Airman. The case for all of this is academic, and it sounds really impressive, especially if you're young and impressionable like I was, especially if you've never heard someone talk about papyri and codices and Vaticanus and Sinaiaticus and archaeological evidence and textual studies. But my rump has aged since then, and with age comes experience and a lot of reading and a lot of research. And it turns out that

the case against the New Testament's authenticity is a strange one, because it has a habit of falling apart. What I mean is that many of the claims scholars make against the New Testament are arguments from silence, but history always has a way of talking back. One such example comes from today's passage, John 5. For almost a century, serious academics believe that this gospel, the gospel of John, was a late document, that it was written something like 100 to 200 years after the time of Jesus. And part of the proof was that some of the places mentioned in the Gospel of John never existed. For example, in John 5, we read about the pool at Bethesda, and John describes it in great detail. Let's pick up in verse 1. Sometime later, Jesus went up to Jerusalem for one of the Jewish festivals. Now, there is

in Jerusalem near the sheep gate a pool, which in Aramaic is called Bethesda, and which is surrounded by five covered colonnades. Here, a great number of disabled people used to lie, the blind, the and the paralyzed. John goes on to say that people believe that when the waters in the pool began to swirl, if you were the first person in, you would be healed of your illnesses, which explains why so many people who suffered terribly were surrounding the pool at the time. Now, the problem, according to scholars, was that there was no such pool mentioned in any other ancient document. And that's strange, because if people thought it had healing properties, surely someone else would have written about it. Worse than that, though, archaeologists had never found the pool to begin with.

You see, this is a argument from silence. If no one wrote about it and we can't find it, then it must not exist. The problem with arguments from silence about the ancient world is twofold. First, we actually have shockingly little textual documents from that period of time. It turns out that papyrus, which is what most people wrote on at the time, doesn't last a long time. I mean, think about your own paper. These materials only survive in very dry, arid, and safe spaces. The reality is that we only have a fraction of a percent of what was written from the time of Jesus. So to say that no one wrote about this pool sounds convincing until you realize what's being said. No one mentioned the pool in the taincy tintsy-tincey number of documents we have from that era.

It's a bit like reading all the books on one shelf in a giant library and concluding that anything not mentioned on that shelf never existed. Well, that would be ridiculous. And the same thing goes for archaeology. Plenty of objects and places aren't discovered either because we don't know where to dig or, more commonly, because people had a habit of tearing places down for parts to build new things on top of them. This is especially the case in places like Jerusalem that have been inhabited for thousands of years. And so the scholar says there's no archaeological evidence. But the truth is, We've not found anything like this in the places we've dug around, and we don't expect to because plenty of places are lost to history.

But nonetheless, given this evidence, scholars concluded that the Gospel of John must have been written well after the time of Jesus, perhaps a century or two. And thus the author was using his imagination. He was inventing people or places that sounded real to convince his readers that his text was authentic, that it was actually quite old. Or maybe he was simply mentioning places that he was. he'd heard in rumors. But again, they didn't exist and he didn't know it because he was writing hundreds of years later. At the end of the day, this is proof. The Gospel of John is a ruse.

Until it's not proof, because, like I said earlier, sometimes history speaks back. A later archaeological dig in Jerusalem uncovered a first century pool near the sheep gate with five colonnades. Let's read John's description again. Now there is in Jerusalem near the sheep gate a pool, which in Aramaic is called Bethesda, and which is surrounded by five covered colonnades. But does this evidence convince scholars to turn tail and acknowledge that such a detailed description of a little-known place is evidence that the text might have actually been written by a first-century eyewitness? Well, of course not. They just move on to other parts of John and drift away. when a papyrus fragment from the Gospel of John was discovered and it was carbon dated to a century after the gospel was written, did that evidence cause scholars to say, perhaps the text is authentic, perhaps it was by one of Jesus's disciples? No, they just said, well, we thought it was 200 years after the time of Jesus, but maybe it's just 100 years after the time of Jesus. At some point, you start to wonder whether all this evidence suggests anything except for what's publishable in academic

journals run by people who don't want the New Testament to be authentic. Of course, I could be accused of motivated reasoning myself, and I certainly am motivated, but the simple fact is that time and again, the arguments used to debunk the New Testament get debunked as we get more information. And more importantly, the New Testament gets worse treatment than any other ancient document when it comes to authenticity. And this is despite the fact that it's the document we have the most evidence for. people argue about the authenticity of Pliny? No, not really, even though we only have seven copies of his work, and the earliest of those was created 750 years after his death. What about Plato? Well, we only have eight copies of his work, and they were created 1,300 years after his death. And what

about Homer? He fares a bit better. We have 643 copies of his work, and the earliest was 400 years after his death. What about the New Testament? We have 5,366 ancient copies, far more than any other document. We have fragments from 114 years after the composition of the New Testament, and we have entire copies of the New Testament from 225 years later. No other ancient document has this many copies, nor does any other ancient document have copies so close to their original composition. And yet, this is the document that we have entire academic departments deconstructing. Perhaps that's why they need hold departments of brilliant people. It's really hard to make a lie out of such great truth. So today, I want you to walk away confident. The New Testament is authentic. It is reliable. It has been

passed down to us from Jesus's earliest followers.