Timothy Keller Sermons Podcast by Gospel in Life - How Do I Know the Bible Is True? (Open Forum)

Episode Date: August 1, 2025

It’s very common for people, even those who want to live the Christian life, to feel they have to check their brains at the door if they’re going to believe. Often, we hear this basic approach to the Bible: the gospels were written down after years of legends, so we don’t really know how much of them are true. But let me give you a case that the Jesus the Bible shows you is historically reliable.  Here is the case in three stages: 1) if you look at what the gospels claim, you’ll see they’re not written as legends or fiction; they’re either historical accounts or a deliberate hoax, 2) we now know now that all of the gospels were written within the lifetime of eyewitnesses, and 3) the same rules of historiography that are used on other documents of antiquity show the gospels to be trustworthy. This talk was given by Dr. Timothy Keller at Redeemer Presbyterian Church on December 4, 1994. Series: Redeemer Open Forums.  Today's podcast is brought to you by Gospel in Life, the site for all sermons, books, study guides and resources from Timothy Keller and Redeemer Presbyterian Church. If you've enjoyed listening to this podcast and would like to support the ongoing efforts of this ministry, you can do so by visiting https://gospelinlife.com/give and making a one-time or recurring donation.

Welcome to Gospel and Life. How comfortable are you when it comes to being open about your faith? This month on the podcast, Tim Keller looks at what the Bible says about having a public faith. He shows us what it looks like to be open about our faith in a pluralistic society, in a way that creates civility and peace and meaningful dialogue with our neighbors. It is very common for a lot of people, even people who want to live the Christian life, to feel that they've got to check their brains at the door. A lot of people will say to me,

I know that probably Christianity isn't really true, but I want it to be true, or I live a general Christian life, but I know that there's all sorts of problems with the historical accounts. If you go to college, generally in Religion 101 or Philosophy 101, if you read the newspaper, you'll get this basic approach to the Bible. It goes like this.

Number one. The Bible, the Gospels, were written down after years of legends and oral tradition circulated about Jesus Christ over the years amongst the followers. Many years after the events, somebody, some gospel writers wrote down these accounts. We really don't know how much of those accounts are factual and how much of them are not. They're embellished, you see, with all sorts of marks. miraculous and fantastic incidents, which was, of course, the want of ancient people, pre-modern people, pre-scientific age. And so when we read the Bible, we have a lot of trouble knowing what's true

and what's not. There's a very well-publicized group of scholars called the Jesus Seminar that you probably read about every year. Usually USA Today puts a front-page article about it. And what they do is they go through the Bible and they color code the Bible, biblical verses. What they'll do is they'll give red if they say, Jesus probably said this. It probably really happened. They give pink if it might be true. They give gray if it's probably not true and they give black if it's not true at all. And generally, the Jesus Seminar says no more than 15 to 20 percent of what the Bible actually says happened really happened,

no more than 15 or 20% of what Jesus is purported to have said really was said. I don't think that's true. You have your handouts yet? You got something there? Let me give you a quick run through the argument. Now, after I'm done with this, I'm going to take 10 minutes at least. We will take questions up here. And you know, you might want to be questioning the left, no, so the left, yeah, the left brain, which is me.

I think it's the left brain. the rational, or you might be wanting to question the right brain, which is Bruce over here, the imaginative. And I actually, I have some imagination, and Bruce is quite rational, but at least for tonight, we're represented. You need some more? We have a few more, yeah. If you look at this, let me give you a case. Tonight, I am not making a case on this sheet for the authority of the Bible. I'm not saying, here's the case for, here's the argument for why we have to believe everything the Bible teaches. Uh-uh.

On here you have a case that the Bible is historically reliable, that the Jesus that shows you really happened. He really existed. Here's the argument outline. Three stages. Then I'll try to break it down. Number one, if you honestly look at what the gospel's claim, you will see they're not written as legends or fiction.

They are either historical accounts or a deliberate hoax. That's right on the front where it says argument outline. The Gospels are not written as legends. They claim to be historical documents, so they're either deliberate hoaxes or else there are historically reliable documents. Number one. Number two, we now know, we didn't 50 years ago, that all the Gospels were written within the lifetime, 30 to 60 years after Jesus died, within the lifetime of eyewitnesses. And since they were written within the lifetime of eyewitnesses, in the lifetime of thousands who heard and saw Jesus, it's very unlikely they were a hoax.

Number three, as long as you don't come with a build-in bias against miracles, we conclude that if you refuse the evidence for the historicity of the Gospels, we have to refuse to admit that we can know anything about antiquity for the same rules of historiography used on other documents show the Gospels to be trustworthy as well. That's the case. The Bible tells us that there was a man named Jesus who claimed to be God, who did many, many miracles that people saw. When he died on the cross, after that he was raised from the dead,

at least hundreds of people saw him raised from the dead. Those are historical facts, and the Bible gives them to us. Now, let me just quickly run through what I just mentioned as, how do you judge any historical document? How do you make decisions that any ancient, here's Caesar's Gallic Wars, here's Herodotus, Thucydides, all these guys that had written histories. Why do we trust them as basically reliable?

We're not saying that they're inerrant, but as basically reliable. Why do you trust them? There's several rules. And if you, several tests that you give to historical documents, and if you give those tests to the Bible, it comes out as a reliable historical document too. Here are the test. Number one, and this one I won't even read through, the bibliographic test. If somebody, pardon me?

Oh, he's got one. No. You don't have one. How did you not get one? Did you save one? Thank you. Okay. The bibliographic test, you can always get more, you know? When it comes to handouts, it's sort of like mana. Yeah. Okay. It'll come down every day. It'll just appear. The bibliographic test, I won't mention unless somebody brings it up later. Some people say, well, we don't have the original, so how do we know? The fact is that we have, we don't have the originals, but we have hundreds of, hundreds of documents within a few decades, hundreds of copies within a few decades of the originals. And so nobody really denies that we have essentially what originally was written by the gospel writers. If anybody's got a problem with that, I'll go into that. That's number one. Number two, now this is important. The genre test, if you want to know whether historical document is historical, an ancient document, that is, you have to ask yourself, was it written to be a history, was it written as a myth? Was it written as an epic? Was it written as

a legend. You know, it's very convenient to say the Gospels are legends. People on the street will tell you that all the time. You say, ah, well, the Gospels, they're not history. They were myths. They were legends. But the problem is that the Gospels, in two ways, rule that out as a possibility. Number one, the Gospels claim to be historical accounts. Now, you know, Bruce didn't do the very, very first part of Luke. But in the very, very beginning of Luke, we read, Luke says, let's see if I can find it here. In the very beginning of the first thing, you know, we're going to do it. In the very beginning of of Luke, you would know it. Many others, well, yeah, I'm just giving you this section. Actually, that's when I was going back to, you're right, you did say that. I heard it. But at the time I sat down,

you had gone through it. Many others have drawn up accounts of Jesus' life, just as they were handed down to us by the eyewitnesses. So I have made a careful investigation of everything from the beginning and written an orderly account so that you may know the certainty of these things. You did say that? But in King James English. Right. Now, Luke, therefore, is telling us that the Gospels were written in four stages. Number one, and I have these in here, first of all, there were eyewitnesses who testified to what they saw. Number two, the eyewitness accounts were handed down. Fifty years ago, modern scholarship believed that the gospel accounts were circulated through oral tradition for years and years and embellished,

and therefore it was a kind of whispered down the valley phenomenon. You know how you whisper down the valley? Somebody whispers one person's ear. By the time it gets to the end of a string of 10 persons, it comes out different. People change it in the, they hear it wrong, and they change it in the transmission. We now know that the way rabbis in Judaism did their teaching was they would give the disciples an account and make them memorize it rigidly. It was absolutely never done that the disciples who were getting this from the rabbiards,

would make revisions. And so we know that the way in which accounts were handed down was through rigid memorization. And so if Luke was getting accounts from eyewitnesses, they would have been handed down for a number of years, but they certainly wouldn't have been monkeyed with. So he says they were handed down. The number three, he says other accounts had already been written before he wrote. There were earlier gospels. We don't have them. But they'd already been written down. But then last of all, Luke says that he checked them out. And the way he checked them out would have been the way any kind of writer would have checked them out. He would have made an orderly investigation.

He probably would have checked written records out that he had to make sure what he wrote down didn't contradict them. He would have interviewed eyewitnesses that were still around to check out as accounts. And so what Luke is saying is not I wrote a legend. Luke is saying, I made every effort to make sure that what I wrote to you, what I am writing is an absolutely accurate and historical account. But not only that, the gospel forms do not fit other fictional genres of the time. Even if you didn't have these kinds of claims, the gospel writer of John claimed to be an eyewitness. Luke claimed to use eyewitnesses. C.S. Lewis, who was a literature, a guy who wrote and was an expert on literature, he taught at

Oxford and Cambridge, taught medieval and Renaissance literature, he pointed out of the literature. He pointed out something that, boy, made a big difference to me. He says, when people say the Gospels were fiction, they were myths, they were legends. He says, you have to remember that when the Gospels were written, there was no such thing as realistic prose fiction. Today we have something called a novel, and in a novel, you have realistic fiction. It's written like a historical account. The person went to the door, turned the knob, sweat was dripping from his nose. You read fiction like that, but not then. See, the fictional forms then, Lewis says, were apocalyptic writing, legend, tragedy, and parable, and they were not realistic prose. And so

Lewis points this out. He says, something has to be said about the historicity of the Gospels. I was a professional literary critic, and I thought I did know the difference between legend and historical writing, that the Gospels were certainly not legends. In one sense, they're not good enough. They aren't good enough. Now, Bruce did a pretty good job. But what Lewis is trying to say is if you're really writing fiction, there's too many little details that are put in there that really have nothing to do with the plot. He says, if they are not history, they're realistic prose fiction of a kind that actually never existed before the 18th century. Little episodes like Jesus writing in the dust when they brought him the woman taken in adultery, which have no

doctrinal significance at all, are the mark of it. So you see, the second point you've got here is either the gospels are total hoaxes, deliberate lies, or else they're historical documents. But The one thing you can't say is, well, they're legends. You can't say that. The third test of historiography would be the corroboration test. If you have a historical document, the question that comes up is, is there any way to know that other witnesses, other authorities, corroborate the testimony?

And we have a lot of corroboration. We have some historical witnesses we still have, and then we have some witnesses we don't have. Now look, the witnesses we still have here, Tacitus, who was a Roman historian, wrote in AD 115, writes that in 64 AD, AD, Nero punished the Christians, and then he says, Christ was executed when Tiberius was emperor by the order of the procurator, Pontius Pilate. There was a Samaritan historian named Thalus, writing in AD 52, wrote a history of the world, and he included the fact that there was also an eclipse of the sun on the day that Jesus was crucified, something that the Bible talks about. the darkness. Pliny the Younger, AD 112, mentions Christ and how his followers worshipped him as God. Josephus was a historian, a Jewish historian, who wrote in 80 AD. And recently, some people question

whether Josephus's history has been doctored up by Christians because he says some strong things about Jesus. However, recently, we've discovered some very old documents, some copies. There's a 10th century copy of Josephus written in Arabic that was dug up somewhere in the Near East. And we're pretty sure that this would have been pretty much the original. And he says this. He says, Jesus' disciples reported that he had appeared to them three days after his crucifixion and that he was alive. Accordingly, he was perhaps the Messiah concerning whom the prophets have recounted wonders. So you put these guys together. And outside of the Gospels, you have got corroboration from other historical authorities that the basic outline of the gospel account. Jesus existed,

claimed to be God, he did miracles, he was crucified, he was seen by his followers as physically raised from the dead. That's the basics. But the stronger corroboration is what I may have already mentioned, exerted by European scholarship, that the Gospels and Acts did not exist before the third century of the third decade of the second century. It was confidently asserted, in the late 1800s and so on by many, many, especially German and European biblical scholars, that you can't trust the Bible historically because it was written at least 100 years. The gospel was written at least 100 years later, that the accounts had been circulating for 100 years, and then somebody wrote them down, so who knows whether they're really accurate.

However, in the middle to the latter part of this century, both archaeology and other kinds of scholarship has proven that the Gospels were all written by 90 AD. Now, if somebody wants to ask me more questions about that, we can go into it. But a quick example was back, I think, in the 30s or the 40s, they discovered a papyrus, a very small fragment of the Gospel of John. It's like three verses. That's all that they found. But they found it in Alexandria, Egypt, and they carbonated it.

125 AD at the latest. And so they were able to realize if John, which was the last of all the books of the gospels written, was in Alexandria by 120 AD, it must have been written by 90 to 100, and therefore the other gospels were written all within the lifetime of the eyewitnesses, within the lifetime of people who saw Jesus and heard his preaching and were there when all the events happened. Now, what's interesting is a lot of modern scholars will not admit the implications of this change. But here's what they are. are. The essential historical claims of the New Testament. The tomb of Jesus was empty. The authorities couldn't produce the body. Many saw the risen Christ. Jesus claimed to be God. Jesus did public

miracles, such as feeding the 5,000, healings, raising people from the dead, all that. All of those things were written in public documents. They were circulating around the Mediterranean, the Gospels or the letters of Paul even. And they were all written within the lifetime of hundreds of people who were still alive. So, for example, when Paul wrote in 1 Corinthians 15, that hundreds of people saw the risen Christ after he was resurrected, and that most of them are alive, and he writes this in a public document, and Christianity, which was very unpopular, as you know, people desperately wanted to wipe it out. And Christianity was completely based on these historical accounts. Hundreds of people were still around. There is no way in the world, therefore,

that these accounts could have been circulating within the lifetime of eyewitnesses of the Ministry of Jesus Christ unless they had, unless they were corroborated by those witnesses. And, you know, there's all sorts of examples you can say, you know, and one example I often use is that even though it was 30 years ago, it would not be that hard. For example, in 1913, there was the 50th anniversary of the Battle of Gettys Because when was the Battle of Gettysburg? 1863. 50th anniversary. Do you know how many veterans were still alive 50 years after that? There were like 20,000 still alive. It was incredible. They all came together and they talked about things and could somebody really have written a book within those 50 years that talked about battles or talked about things that happened

that hundreds and thousands of the people on the battlefield had seen within the lifetime of those people unless they'd happened? You see? There must have been corroboration within that time frame. The gospel's written too soon after the events. And so we know that there must have been eyewitness corroboration as well. Over to the end, we are now in the, at the end. The problem of miracles. Now see where we are? Bibliographically, we know we have the originals, basically. Number two, the genre, they are historical documents or hoaxes. Number three, it is extremely unlikely they could have been hoaxes. It's extremely unlikely that they could have been.

We see how the corroboration. So are we ready to admit that these documents are showing us what really happened? And if somebody says, it can't be. Why? And the answer is because people say, because there's miracles in there and therefore it can't be. Now, if you want to read this next section, and if you want to get into that, I will. But 50 years ago, Newtonian physics, reigned in the Western world, and Newtonian physics says there are absolute laws of nature

which cannot be violated. Today, it's quantum theory. And quantum theory says all we know are customary ways in which nature operates. See, the real problem is this. If you say miracles can't happen, the only evidence that a miracle would happen is if somebody wrote an account, and said, I saw it, and here it is. And if you say miracles can't happen, and you obviate an account of the evidence of a miracle before you even read it, you're arguing in a circle. You're saying miracles cannot happen, therefore miracles have not happened. And that's arguing in a circle. So as long as you're not willing not to come with a kind of unscientific, anti-logical, dogmatic assertion that if there's miracles in this account, it can't be historical, you are to

this point. If you get rid of that bias, you have to say, this is telling us in a historically reliable way that there was a man named Jesus who claimed the things he claimed and did the things he did. Now, where that brings me is this. C.S. Lewis years ago said, and he wasn't the first one. He says, there's only four possible ways to explain Jesus. He was either a legend, a liar, a lunatic, or lord. Now, if you hide behind the idea that he was a legend, If you say we can't know really what he taught and what he claimed and what he did, then you're able to make up any kind of Jesus you want, right? You can say, I think he was a flower child, I think he was a revolutionary, you know,

I think he was a great teacher. But if he's not a legend, if the gospel of Luke tells you the real Jesus, then you are stuck. Either he was an absolute charlatan, or he was a complete lunatic, or he is who he said he was. But there's no other alternative. and the reason that I'm a Christian, one of the main reasons, is because as crazy as it is that he actually might be the Son of God,

it actually makes less sense that either the other two alternatives would be true. And so that's where we are. Now, I've also attached to your handout a fairly nine-point... I'm sorry, it was nine-point times Roman. It's pretty hard to read. But if somebody wants me to go into it, I will. The Jesus Seminar is a bunch of radical scholars who, in spite of historiographical evidence that the Bible is reliable,

they insist that any verse of the Bible is guilty unless it is proven to be true. If you would go at any other ancient historical document, if you would go through Caesar's Gallic Wars, if you go through any ancient document and say, everything and every page I consider untrue unless I find some corroborating witness that proves to me it's true. If you would do that, we would know nothing about our past at all, but that's how the Jesus seminar operates. But on that page, I try to show you that if you even take their criteria

for deciding which of Jesus' sayings and deeds are authentic, even with their criteria, you can really show that the Bible is an accurate, reliable document. If somebody wants me to go into that, we will. Now, you may not want to get into any of this stuff. You may not want to ask the left brain anything. You may want to ask Bruce about something that he said tonight or one of the stories that accounts that he made. But at this point, I will take questions. You need to say it loud enough so I can repeat it into the mic because I think we're being taped. And then after that, we'll try to answer.

We always say the gospel changes everything, and we believe it really does. That's why here at Gospel in Life, August is Go and Share Month. Throughout August, we're inviting thousands of our listeners to take a small step in sharing the gospel with someone God has placed in your life. For those of you who make a gift to gospel in life this month, we'll send you two copies of Making Sense of God by Tim Keller. It's a powerful resource that explores how Christianity makes emotional, cultural, and rational sense in today's world. It's our thanks for your gift and provides a way you can do a small act to share the gospel, by reading the book with a friend, giving one to a coworker, or passing on both copies to people who are exploring the Christian faith. It's a simple way to start a gospel conversation or continue it.

To request your two copies of making sense of God, simply go to gospelandlife.com slash give. Again, that's gospelonlife.com slash give. Now, here's Dr. Keller with the remainder of today's teaching. So let's get started firsthand. That's a good question. Yeah, but you may not be able to get to them. Are you going to, listen, yeah, I'll tell you what, would you try asking your question at the mic to see if it works since you're on the aisle?

I don't think we can do that for everybody, though. See if it works. Oh, it does. Okay, ask the question. Kind of short. I know. I know. Pull it around.

That way, your question is on the tape. A simple question. If we're assuming the New Testament, what you're saying, historical fact, let's assume that with the miracles, part of the basis of that would be that we have to rely also in the Old Testament. Would that be correct? based on what you're saying? Because if I'm assuming you could correct me if I'm wrong, the New Testament in his performance of Luke today is to confirm what was in the Old Testament. Is that

correct? Or am I wrong? I just want to know if I'm right or wrong. Well, simple question. You mean, are you asking what Bruce's intention was or? No, no, you're saying the New Testament. When you say the Bible, do you mean the New Testament and the Old Testament? you're just talking about the Gospels, because I think you've made a very persuasive type of point of showing the New Testament may be very valid. But part of the basis of the New Testament is in the Old Testament, and just to mention one thing, if you read Psalm 15, it says define the Lord means to walk humble and do the work of the Lord, and it does not mention the Son of Man. So my question is, if we assume the New Testament is right, what you're saying, part of the

basis is the Old Testament, you know, does it fit in? And that means Adam and Eve. That means Noah. That means Abraham. That means Isaac. That means Jacob. Are we to you? Do we follow that that also has to be provable like you're doing with this? Or is it just a New Testament? No, it's a long question. Great. Have a seat now. If you have a seat, I'll answer that. And I don't think that my case for the New Testament documents being reliable proves that the Old Testament documents are reliable. I don't think so. Well, no, listen, just because I think I can show you that Luke, John, Matthew, Mark are giving us reliable eyewitness accounts of what happened doesn't mean that because they believe Noah existed, that that means Noah existed. I think all I'm trying to do is give you a case for the fact that Jesus did live the life and said the things he said.

Now, I told you in the beginning, though, and maybe you're trying to get at this, was not making a case for the authority of the whole Bible tonight. But if I were, here's how I would do it. I would say, does the New Testament give us historically reliable picture of Jesus? If so, then we have to decide what to do with Jesus. You have to decide, do I believe what he said he is? Do I submit to him as Lord? Do I receive him as the son of God? If you do that, the New Testament shows you what any scholar will tell you, and that is that Jesus believed the Old Testament to be true. So you've got, there's really three steps to the syllogism. If the Bible's reliable, then Jesus is God. If the New, pardon me, I'm sorry, my syllogism is all up. If the New Testament is historic reliable,

then I can see that Jesus is God. Now, you may not be ready to do that. If you're not ready to do that, then I'm not going to be able to say anything about the Old Testament. But if you believe that Jesus is who he said he is, then I believe in the authority of the rest of the Bible. of the Bible because Jesus treated it with authority. But my case for the historical liability of the New Testament is really no case for the historical liability of the Old Testament at all. Now, you want to say anything to that, Bruce? You're trying to get at the Old Testament tonight? You do quote the Old Testament where? Propheas. He just quotes it.

Yeah. Jesus doesn't, occasionally, in parts that you didn't see tonight, he will he will quote passages from Isaiah, and he will say to people to fellow Jews, this passage has been fulfilled in your ears, which is like, wait a minute, are you saying the reason that was written was so that this happens to you? Who are you saying you are?

I mean, he did that a lot, and he talked a lot about the prophecies and that kind of stuff, And some of them are, some of them don't work with 20th century reasoning. Some of them are like, you know, some of the things he refers to himself as fulfilling certain prophecies. We go back and look those up and it's like, wait a minute, that does, are we sure that's talking about Jesus? It doesn't seem to fit. It doesn't seem to, with our sort of rational.

So we got to be careful about taking our culture and going, aha, this doesn't work this way. because it's, I mean, Old Testament Hebrew culture very different from Western Greek thinking even. In other words, so Jesus did believe that the Old Testament was supernaturally divine. But you have to believe Jesus, you have to believe in Jesus before I think you can make a case for the divinity of the Old Testament. I think with just using the facts, you can make a good case for the historical liability of the New Testament. That gets you to Jesus. but you have to get through Jesus to get to the Old Testament. That's what Bruce is saying there.

Okay, Ann, you want to try the mic? Okay. In light of the discussion we're having, and in light of the fact that it is said that there are more Jews in New York City than in Israel, at the end of the presentation, Bruce was talking about the scriptures where Jesus himself was explaining that he was the Messiah.

Can you recommend a book that would help the people at Redeemer who have Jewish friends or co-workers, to explain that Jesus is the Messiah. Wait, and now, Anne, I'm sorry. Usually I like it when people sit down after they ask the question, but maybe, can you tell me, are you mean you're looking for a book

that shows that Jesus fulfills Old Testament prophecies? In other words, a list of the prophecies like Isaiah 53, Isaiah 7, Isaiah 9, Psalm 22, Deuteronomy, especially Deuteronomy, because a Jewish person, especially an Orthodox Jewish person, Josh McDonough. Okay. All right, well, I just wanted to get the name of it so that people would be aware because especially at this time of year, you run into these conversations in your office with people.

Well, Jesus is the Messiah, but I don't quite know how to explain it to you in your own terms. Okay. I know that Josh McDowell's evidence of the demands of verdict does spend a lot of time on how Jesus fulfilled Old Testament prophecies. There's a book by John Guest that it's at the office. if you called the office and ask for a book by John guest that has a I can give you some other things to anybody I mean this is dangerous to say this with so many people but if you I could give you a Xerox of a short chapter on how Jesus fulfills Old Testament prophecies I know that if you contacted Jews for Jesus they would

got to have all kinds of documents about that but I think that's what you're looking for can we put it on the book table downstairs so that when we, because I have a lot of Orthodox Jews in my office and there was talking to me about the Talmud and how the Torah talks about the Talmud, but I don't quite know how to explain that Jesus fulfilled all those prophecies. Good suggestion. That's fine. Okay, somebody else. I don't know whether you can get to a mic or not. You got a question? Yeah, I see you. Why don't you, well, come on down. It would help us because this way it gets on the tape. Sorry to make you do that. I'm

Maybe I'm only making, I won't make everybody do that if you're not sitting where you can get out. Go ahead. I don't know if you've heard of Chuck Colson came up with a conspiracy theory argument. He refuted the, he tried to refute the conspiracy argument, and he used his life in government. And he talked about the benefits of keeping a conspiracy going, and the judgments of if the if the conspiracy is revealed. And also he related that to what he believed the apostles were, you know, how they were witnessing and what the benefits and judgments of keeping that so-called if there was a conspiracy going.

Do you have any, have you read that? Don't leave that mic yet. I have to get this question a little better focused. Okay. Chuck Holson talks about a conspiracy theory about the resurrection, you mean? No, he... He attempted to refuse... What you're talking about is when he said...

When he was involved in Watergate, the top people in the country, the minute self-interest was threatened, the lie fell apart. Yes. And he, that's the reason he became a Christian was because he looked at what happened, and those people's... The disciples' lies were threatened. But they died for what... So this couldn't...

This wasn't a normal lie, if that's what... Is that what you're... Yeah, he was... So was there a question about that? No, I just... I was wondering if Tim had heard of this and what his thoughts were on... No, but Bruce has. Okay.

I have. Yes, thank you. Thanks. Somebody else? Go ahead. Just say it, and I'll repeat it. Why is the apocrypha not in the Bible? Tim?

Wait, now, do you mean the Old Testament Apocrypha or the New Testament Apocrypha? Yeah, okay. Well, yeah, you're bringing up the whole issue of the canon, which is a real thorny thing. And I hadn't heard of the Chuck Colson conspiracy theory. By the way, that is a great point. That's a great point. Did you all hear that? I'm not sure. Bruce understood it. He understood it. That point was Chuck Colson knows that when, if you're all working together on a hoax,

when it looks like people are actually their heads are going to roll for it, it falls apart. People will not stay true to a lie if it means. dying for it. And he said, what, obviously what Colson was doing is when he read the Bible, it's very clear that the whole, the resurrection was either an incredible hoax or reality. And he says, when people start dying for the hoax and nobody recants and it doesn't fall apart, that means it wasn't a hoax. Okay? So I wanted you to, so I thought that was a, I had not heard that, but it was a wonderful argument. Now, on the canon, The canon refers to the number of books in the Bible that are received as divine-inspired books of the Bible.

Apocryphal books are books that were written and were never brought into the canon as part of the Bible. And the way this worked, it wasn't that difficult, actually. When the apostles died off and the last of the apostles died, not long after that, the church decided it was very important since you didn't have a living canon. That means when somebody would write something or teach something, as long as you had some of the apostles alive, you always had a way of checking whether or not the teaching was in line with what Jesus had taught. But when the apostles died, they realized that they no longer had a living straight edge for their lives. So they needed to pull together

all the books of the Bible, the New Testament, which were written by an apostle or by an associate of an apostle. So it embodied either it was apostolic teaching directly or it was apostolic teaching that was, they were part of the apostolic band. So you have Luke, you know, who wasn't an apostle or an eyewitness, but he was Paul's associate. And so what you have in Luke, in the sense, was Pauline apostolic teaching. And you have Mark, who, though he wasn't an apostle was Peter's associate. And you have Matthew and John and on and on and so on. And what they did was they took the books of the Bible that they understood were written by an apostle or a part of the apostolic band. So they knew the apostolic teaching was there. Any book that purported to be of an apostle, but they decided it was pseudonymous or anonymous.

Or as one teacher once said, the pseudonymous, while not necessarily synonymous with anonymous, is equally post-elonymous. But if they felt that a book was not written by an apostle or it didn't represent apostolic teaching, then they removed it. They said it wasn't, they didn't admit it, I mean. And they were very careful. Not only did they check out the pedigree of the books, but they also checked out whether or not the books had been used by God in the lives of the church, whether or not the Lord really worked through them, and they came up with a canon.

pretty soon after the death of the last of the eyewitnesses. And that's how they did it. Now, there's a lot. The Old Testament canon was set before Jesus came along at the Council of Jamnia, and it was set earlier. And the reason that we accept the Old Testament canon is because Jesus did. Again, you know, everything we believe about the Old Testament is really based on Jesus. Jesus quotes from every book of the Old Testament but Esther.

he quotes from, and the apostles, who are, of course, his disciples quote from the, from the canonical Old Testament that we have today. So basically, Jesus is the reason why apocryphal books, both New and Old Testament, aren't part of the Bible. They had to be written by an apostle or an associate of Jesus, or in the Old Testament they had to be one that he subscribed to. And that's the reason. Okay, let's go. Seth. Seth is saying that there were times in which he was talking with a friend, a Jewish friend, and making a case that Jesus fulfilled Old Testament prophecies. He'd pull out an Old Testament prophecy from his Bible, and it didn't match the translation that his friend had in his Bible.

And listen, you're not going to overcome that. Here's why. Unless you get, well, you can always go to school. I mean, you can always take a graduate course in Hebrew and Old Testament. It's very normal. If you have a, boy, I've got to be careful here, it is only natural that the translators try as they may to be objective, tend to be, you know, when they come out of text, translation is always to some degree interpretation. Translation is never transliteration.

You have to interpret. You try very hard to be objective, but the point is you have a point of view. and interpreters who really don't believe that Jesus is fulfilling prophecies, they're very often going to translate prophecies away, and they're going to use words that take you away. The Jewish movement, the non-Christian Jewish movement, of course is, you know, 1990 census indicated that 10% of all Jewish people said they believed in Jesus as the Messiah. Did you know that? That's been a big, hard thing to swallow for a lot of people.

But the non-Christian Jewish movement has a vested interest in making sure that those passages, which they've had thrown at them for centuries, are not translated anything like the way the Christian Old Testament is translated. Now, I don't mean to say that it's an out-and-out, you know, twisting, but I'm just telling you that's the issue. So what you'd have to do yourself is you'd actually have to get a hold of those passages and do some checking out. And if he's an Orthodox Jew, he's going to know Hebrew better than you are. And so when it comes to those passages, I wouldn't argue with him about those, I would find something else to talk to him about. Okay? No, I would. I mean, in other words, you're not ready for that, so find other ways to talk. That's all. Yes, sir?

Yes, sir? Yeah. The question is, if you compare to each other, it's different, but exactly. The question is, if you compare translations, even though you don't know Hebrew or Greek, doesn't that help you? And the answer is yes, but it still doesn't completely overcome the problem. I was going to ask Bruce a question. I love the fact that you used the King James. Was it straight King James, or did you do some rendering of it yourself?

What translation did you use? Thanks, Tim. No, it was mostly King James. There were some passages from John from the new revised standard. And there are occasional, there are some words, some 15th century words like... I trow not. Yeah, yeah, like that one. And that I don't know the meaning of, and I thought, hmm, I think I'll use a new translation.

But there's only like 20 or 30 words in the hour and a half that I've changed. It's mostly King James. Why did you use the King James version? I use the King James version because my boss told me I had to. Who's that? His name is John Jury. He's the artistic director of Actors Theatre of Louisville. This was a regular equity.

Actors Theatre of Louisville is a major regional theater, completely non-Christian, take my word for it. And this was done on Broadway, and like I said in the introduction, it was his Easter offering. But do you see the advantages of using the King James? Well, you know, King James was written to be spoken as a pulpit version because so many people were illiterate, and it's the same thing as Shakespeare.

You know, boy, I'm an actor, and I've done a fair amount of Shakespeare, and it's difficult to read because it was written to be spoken and to be. And these actually, if you think about it, these were eyewitness accounts. So originally, Luke, the historian, got these as spoken testimony, probably. and he probably had other sources, but eyewitness accounts. So originally people were telling these to people. And you can imagine the guy who said, I came into a city called Nain,

and Jesus was there, a lot of his disciples, his dead body was being taken out. Jesus said a couple of words of the dead body. It sat up. It started talking. He delivered him unto his mother, and there came a fear upon. You can imagine the way Jesus,

the way that original eyewitness told that to Luke, was not, who pass in those days that he cameth unto the city of Nain. You know, it's been badly read in church for 300 years, and people, I did a, there was a student doing a review of the show down in Florida, and he said, I want to show you what I wrote, Bruce, and he said, Bruce Cune takes otherwise boring material, and it's like, wait a minute, this is not boring material. I mean, withered hands become whole. This is a, dead bodies.

The whole, this is, right, it's been made maybe a little too sacred, and it is that. But, yes. I'm going to take a couple more questions, but I want you to know, I loved him using the King James. First of all, it is gorgeous. But secondly, the King James really probably makes more sense when it's orally interpreted, not just read, but I mean, orally interpreted, it made so much more sense than the way it makes, the way it looks when you actually read it to yourself. I just absolutely loved it.

Now, I can take a couple more questions. And it is the way Jesus himself spoke. Right. As somebody once said about the King James Bible, if it was good enough for St. Paul, it was good enough for me. That's right. Yeah, go ahead.

We'll take a couple more. We have to be done by 815. So if you can stick around for 10 more minutes, I'm sending everybody away by then. Yes, go ahead. For the tape, someone just complimented Bruce Cune, said it was a fantastic performance. just for the record now.

Statements that I have to make, and I'll give you the question up front. How truthful is Jesus' existence? That's where I'll wind. How truthful is Jesus' existence? Okay. Why are the books of the New Testament? We can both believe that God wrote the Old Testament through Moses. Then why would he have changed his format in the New Testament?

Therefore, how true is Jesus' existence? Okay. The question is, the New Testament is written in very different form than the Old Testament. If God wrote the Old and the New Testament, why would it be so different? Okay? And the answer is, just as Jesus was fully human and fully divine, he wasn't half human, half divine, he was 100%, 100%. The Bible is not only a divine book, it's a human book. It's not only a human book.

It's a divine book. To say it's really human, that the people who wrote it were writing it consciously, they were using their own personalities and their own cultural forms to write it, does not compromise the fact that everything that was written was written by God, and every word was the word that God wanted to be written. So you can put those two things together. To say that since God wrote the whole Bible, the same literary form or personality would be evident throughout isn't right.

The themes are there. The truth all coheres. But the fact is that, for example, Luke says to the person he's writing to, Theophilus, he says, I wrote this account because I thought it would be good. Luke did not, here's what I'm trying to say, Luke did not one day was sitting at his table, and all of a sudden his hand started to move. He says, and he picked up a pen. And he says, my gosh, what's going on here? and it all became, you know, it wasn't automatic writing. His personality, his foibles even, his culture was all reflected.

And that's the reason why you have such, Hebrews, the Greek of Hebrews is so lofty. And the Greek of John is almost like talking to a little kid. Because that's what's so wonderful about the Bible. It is an absolutely human book. And yet, it is absolutely thoroughly divine. So it's not the form, but the content and the coherence that shows it's divine, but not the form. Thanks for joining us here on the Gospel and Life podcast. We hope that today's teaching encourages you to share the gospel with someone you know.

This August is Go and Share Month at Gospel in Life, and we've curated a wide range of free resources to help you take simple steps to share the gospel. You can access them at gospelandlife.com slash share. We believe God uses small acts to do God. great things. And we're inviting you to do simple, small acts to go and share the gospel this month, because the gospel changes everything. Today's sermon was recorded in 1994. The sermons and talks you hear on the Gospel and Life podcast were recorded between 1989 and 2017, while Dr. Keller was senior pastor at Redeemer Presbyterian Church.