Ankerberg Show

Guest (Male): Welcome to our program. For centuries, people have wrestled with one of life's greatest questions: Does God really exist? And if He does, can we know Him through truth, science, and history? Today, we hear many voices in our culture insisting that truth is relative, science has made God unnecessary, and history cannot be trusted.

University professors, media personalities, and social influencers often tell us that faith belongs in the realm of personal opinion, not objective reality. But what if the evidence points in another direction? What if the universe itself reveals signs of design? What if the laws of science actually point beyond themselves to a creator?

And what if the historical evidence for Jesus Christ is far stronger than most people realize? My guest today is Dr. Frank Turek, co-author of the best-selling book, *I Don't Have Enough Faith to Be an Atheist*, who has spent decades answering some of the toughest questions asked on university campuses around the world.

Together, we're going to examine whether truth really exists, whether science and reason point to God, and whether the evidence for Jesus and His resurrection can stand up to historical scrutiny. If God exists and Christianity is true, that changes everything about who we are, why we are here, and where we are going. I invite you to join us for this edition of the *John Ankerberg Show*.

Dr. John Ankerberg: Welcome to our program. I'm John Ankerberg and we're talking about whether the New Testament documents are reliable. Why are we doing that? I'm talking to a fellow that wrote a book, *I Don't Have Enough Faith to Be an Atheist*. He checked out the claims for atheism and found that they were wanting; they didn't have enough evidence. Christianity had more, and it provided the answers for his life.

It is a fantastic book, and we're taking part of that book today to discuss the New Testament documents. But before we talk about whether they are reliable and how we know they are reliable, I want to emphasize that we have laid a foundation in the first four programs for a reason. The material we covered was important to get to this point. I want Frank to summarize what those first four points were, and then you'll see why we are now talking about the New Testament documents and the people who actually saw and knew Jesus. Frank, where did we start?

Frank Turek: Let's start with truth, John. We covered this in the first show or two. People say there's no truth, and we always ask them, "Is that true?" It is self-defeating to say there's no truth. Of course there's truth. You wouldn't go to school, you wouldn't read a book, and you couldn't catch someone in a lie if there was no truth. Of course there's truth and you can know it. So we established that already.

Also, people will say, "Well, you ought not judge." What I say to them is, "Then why are you judging me for judging?" Everybody makes judgments. Jesus didn't say don't judge. He basically said don't judge lest you be judged. By the same standard you judge others, you will be judged by that same standard. He is not telling us not to judge; He is telling us how to judge. Don't judge hypocritically.

So there is truth, and you can make judgments about it. The next question we covered was: Does God exist? Because the New Testament cannot be reliable if there is no God, and there cannot be a resurrection if there is no God. So we spent some time talking about a couple of arguments for God. One is the argument from the beginning of the universe, known as the cosmological argument. The interesting thing is even atheists are admitting the universe had a beginning, now more than ever.

Stephen Hawking, the famous physicist, said, "Almost everyone now believes that the universe and time itself had a beginning at the Big Bang." We believe in the evidence for the Big Bang. If there was a Big Bang, there has to be a Big Banger. There has to be somebody that started the universe. We went through a lot of evidence for that. Then we talked about the fine-tuning of the universe and the fine-tuning of life.

If there is design in the universe and design in life, there has to be a designer. We know God by His effects. If there is creation, that is the effect; we reason back to a cause, a creator. If there is design, that is the effect; we reason back to a cause, a designer. If there is a moral law written on our hearts, that is the effect; we reason back to a moral law giver.

If space, time, and matter had a beginning out of nothing, there must be a spaceless, timeless, immaterial, powerful, personal, and intelligent cause. That sounds a lot like God. Now the question we want to get to is: Are those New Testament documents telling us the truth? Were they written down way too late? Do we not have enough copies to figure out what was said? That is what we want to cover today.

Dr. John Ankerberg: Jesus came into the world. Who was He? We're going to talk in our next program about what He actually claimed. But for the people that saw Him and wrote about Him, what kind of records do we have? How do they compare when you talk about Plato, Herodotus, or Alexander the Great? People wrote about them, and that is how we know history.

How many people wrote manuscripts or stories about those figures? How long did it take before they wrote down the information about Alexander the Great? We're going to talk about the 27 books in the New Testament. We want to find out if we have early testimony. Do we have eyewitness testimony from people who said, "I actually saw what I'm writing about"?

Then we're going to talk about the people who were not Christians. You had Jewish people who were against some of the things written in the New Testament, but they still wrote about them. The way they wrote parallels what was said in the New Testament, even though they were against it. Then you've got Romans, Greeks, and other historians. They either met people or heard about it, and they wrote in their histories about what was said about Jesus.

Finally, we find out that for the people who actually wrote the 27 books of the New Testament, we have more manuscript evidence than for anything else in ancient history. It was 2,000 years ago, so what do we have today? Let's start with the first point: early testimony. How early were some of these books written?

Frank Turek: We make the case in the book that most, if not all, of the New Testament documents were written prior to 70 AD. There's a lot of evidence for this. First of all, Paul had to have written all of his works before he died. He died in the mid-60s, so everything Paul wrote is prior to 67 AD. The newest research on this says that Mark was probably written in the 40s.

We know that Acts had to have been written by 62 AD. Roman historian Colin Hemer went through painstaking detail as to why Acts had to be written by 62. He listed 80 archaeological facts about what Luke wrote in the book of Acts alone—historically known facts about that area. Colin Hemer says these 80-plus facts are reliable.

Acts had to have been written by 62 AD because Paul is still alive in Rome at the end of the book. There is no hint of the Jewish war starting or the problems that culminated in 70 AD. If Acts was written by 62, Luke's Gospel is prior to that because it was the first work Luke wrote. Mark, Luke, and Matthew all tell the same basic story with varying detail. If Luke is prior to 62 and Mark is somewhere in the 40s, this is very early testimony.

I would argue that John is prior to 70 AD too. Dan Wallace, who taught at Dallas Theological Seminary for many years, said the same thing. One of the reasons is that John is written as if the temple and Jerusalem still stand. In John 5:2, he says that there is a pool called Bethesda near the temple. There was no pool after 70 AD; the whole thing was destroyed. I am very confident that the New Testament documents were written prior to 70 AD, and the sources are even earlier. This is early stuff, John.

Dr. John Ankerberg: You have a great illustration in your book. You can look at Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, and Acts, and you will find the temple area in Jerusalem mentioned. Jesus is walking along the temple that Herod had built for the Jews. It was a beautiful place. He really put money into it over many years. He used stones that were 13 feet high and about 7 feet wide for the temple foundation.

He included ornaments like a grape tree made entirely of gold. The disciples said, "Jesus, isn't this beautiful?" Jesus replied, "Yeah, it is a beautiful spot, but pretty soon there won't be one stone left upon another and this place will be utterly destroyed." He meant the temple and the city. Some of the Jewish people rebelled against the Roman Empire around 65 AD, and the Romans came against them.

Josephus was captured in 64 AD and was on the Roman side. When he wrote in his book *The Antiquities*, he said that was the worst war in history. They ripped up every one of those huge rocks, which are still lying there today. They killed many Jews and destroyed the temple completely, which was the center of Jewish life. That was where you went to talk to God and get your sins forgiven.

They destroyed the temple and all the outlying villages, killing thousands of people. The temple is talked about throughout the New Testament, yet not one writer in the New Testament ever mentions that the Romans came and destroyed everything. You would have thought they would have said that if they had written the documents after 70 AD.

It would be like writing a history of the Twin Towers in New York, describing how magnificent they were and how they were built, and ending the book without mentioning they were destroyed on 9/11. You would know that book had to have been written prior to 9/11. This shows, beyond any reasonable doubt, that the documents were written prior to 70 AD.

Frank Turek: It is not just an argument from silence, John, because as I mentioned, John says the temple still stands. Even the book of Revelation talks about the temple still standing. If it were written after 70 AD, somebody would have mentioned it and said, "Jesus predicted this and it came true." They never said that. These are early eyewitness documents with details found throughout.

New research by Richard Bauckham in the UK shows that the writers of the New Testament got the names right, including the percentages of those names. For example, 60 or 70 years ago in the United States, the top female name was Mary and the top male name was Robert. Today, Mary is about 135th on the list. Mildred was number nine a hundred years ago, but how many babies are named Mildred now? Name usage changes over time.

Bauckham found that the percentage of name usage in the New Testament is correct for that period, which couldn't have been done if it were written at another time or place. There are also archaeological details. Titus Kennedy points out that there are 37 names in the New Testament, like Herod, Pilate, Jesus, James, and John the Baptist, that have been found outside the Bible. Seven names associated with the crucifixion have been found in archaeology, including Simon of Cyrene, Annas, and Caiaphas.

Dr. John Ankerberg: When I was at the university, I studied Plato and had to read him in Greek. I wondered where we got Plato's writings. We have seven copies, and there is a 1,200-year gap between when he wrote and our earliest copies. We don't have the originals; we just have seven copies. How many do we have for the New Testament?

Frank Turek: In Greek, we have about 5,800 copies dating from the early second century to the time of the printing press. If you include other languages, you have another 20,000. We don't have the originals, which may have degraded over time, but the way to preserve the original was to spread copies all around the ancient world. We can pull those copies together and reconstruct the original.

Even atheists like Bart Ehrman admit that the New Testament written 2,000 years ago is the same basic New Testament we have on our shelves today. That is not even a question anymore. There are also 10 non-Christian writers from the first 150 years who wrote about Jesus' life. They were against Him, but their writings back up what the New Testament writers recorded.

We have the John Rylands papyrus, which was found in Egypt and is dated to about 120 AD. They say there is only about a 25-year gap between that copy and the original. If you read the Bible, it's the same words. There are so many ways to check this. Another reason the New Testament documents are reliable is that they contain embarrassing testimony. You don't make up things that are embarrassing.

The leader of the disciples is Peter, and Jesus calls him Satan. That's embarrassing. Peter says he will never deny Jesus, but he winds up denying Him three times. At the crucifixion, almost all the disciples run away for fear, and the women are the ones who discover the empty tomb. In that era, a woman's testimony was not considered on par with a man's.

If you were making up the story, you would never have women be the first witnesses, and you would never say the men were cowards who ran away. Nobody would invent this. If we were trying to make this up, we would make ourselves look good. We would say we overpowered the Roman guard. Instead, the documents tell the truth, as embarrassing as it was.

Dr. John Ankerberg: Do we have eyewitness testimony about Jesus in the New Testament? Peter said, "For we did not follow cleverly devised stories when we told you about the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ in power, but we were eyewitnesses of His majesty." Luke wrote, "God has raised this Jesus to life and we all are witnesses of it." In Acts, it says, "You killed the author of life, but God raised Him from the dead and we are witnesses of this."

Frank Turek: There was no motive to make this up. Usually, people lie to get sex, money, or power. The apostles did not get any of that. Instead, they were kicked out of the synagogues, beaten, tortured, and killed. This is not a list of perks. They were Jews; they didn't think a man could claim to be God or rise from the dead in the middle of time. But they went to their deaths because they said it happened.

Dr. John Ankerberg: Luke wrote Acts, and he was an eyewitness. That was his second book; the first was the Gospel of Luke. This is how he starts that book: "Many have undertaken to draw up an account of the things that have been fulfilled among us, just as they were handed down to us by those who from the first were eyewitnesses and servants of the word." He traveled with Paul, heard the stories, and interviewed the disciples. He says he got it from the eyewitnesses.

Frank Turek: This is how the New Testament was written. We have accurate information in these 27 books, documented by archaeology. The more we learn about that time period, the more the New Testament is proven true. This sets a foundation for our next program: Did these writers report being there when Jesus claimed, "I am God"? We're going to talk about that next week. I hope you'll join us.

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