Contending with Christianity's Critics (part 2)

Transcript Contending with Christianity's Critics (Part 2)

Kevin Harris: Dr. Craig, we are discussing one of your newer books, Contending with Christianity's Critics: Answering New Atheists and Other Objectors, edited by yourself and Dr. Paul Copan. We’re looking at part 2 of this book. You would never in a million years think that a book on New Testament textual criticism would actually sell more than five copies! [laughter] But Bart Ehrman’s work has gone through the roof and undermined the credibility of the Bible.

Dr. Craig: And you are thinking of his book, Misquoting Jesus, right?

Kevin Harris: Yes, in particular. He has got several others out. You’ve debated him; we’ve talked about it on podcasts. But when you combine him and the Da Vinci Code book and movie and then the sequel that recently came out and so on, you’ve got an attack on the Jesus of history. Part 2 deals with this particular attack.

Dr. Craig: Yes, in part 2 of the book we have assembled some very fine New Testament scholars to address these issues. At the EPS apologetics conferences from which these papers are drawn, we bring not just top philosophers, but we also bring in top New Testament people. So we’ve got folks like Craig Evans, Dan Wallace, Ben Witherington, and others who are addressing these questions as historians and as text critics and I think showing that the attacks upon the credibility of the Gospels and the New Testament from people like Ehrman, Crossan, Borg, and others are really quite unfounded.

Kevin Harris: That is very important because you get the impression that Bart Ehrman has absolutely abolished the Christian faith. [laughter]. You get that idea that he has written the book that has done us all in and we need to turn our churches into bowling alleys and sleep in on Sunday mornings. Really, Bill, that really is the impression that you get; that his book is unstoppable and unanswerable and things like that.

Dr. Craig: Gosh, if that is true, Kevin, that is really sad. Just very honestly, that is not the case and even people who are not evangelical scholars, I think, recognize that; especially with regard to the integrity of the text of the New Testament. The fact is that the New Testament is established over 99% purity with regard to the original words that were written there. Ehrman knows this himself. He just gives lay people the false impression and lets them draw conclusions from his works by insinuating certain things that he really knows aren’t true. I heard Ehrman on a radio program some time ago where the interviewer, after talking to him about the corruption of the New Testament text for some time, finally asked him, “What do you think the New Testament text originally really said?” And Ehrman seemed a little bit puzzled and he said, “I don’t understand what you mean.” And the radio interviewer said, “You’ve described how it has been corrupted in all these ways. What do you think the original text really said?” And Ehrman said, “Well, it said pretty much exactly what we think it says today. It has been reestablished and we know with 99% certainty what the text was. It didn’t say much of anything different.” And I thought, “Holy cow! This is the completely opposite impression of what you would have from reading his books.”

Kevin Harris: It’s the complete opposite impression. If anything, Dr. Ehrman’s work has helped us shore up what we mean by inerrancy and helped us understand textual criticism.

Dr. Craig: Yes, and I think Dan Wallace’s essay in this book is very good on the integrity of the text of the New Testament.

Kevin Harris: Yeah, let’s jump to that. Chapter 11 in part 2 of Contending with Christianity’s Critics – “How Badly Did the Early Scribes Corrupt the New Testament?: An Examination of Bart Ehrman’s Claims.” Dan Wallace examines this. Back to chapter 7, the “Criteria for the Gospels’ Authenticity” by Robert H. Stein.

Dr. Craig: This is a chapter that I wish all adult Christians in Western society would master. I think that the failure to understand the criteria by which New Testament scholars establish the authenticity of Jesus’ sayings and events in the Gospels is just a crying shame. What Stein does is he goes through the various criteria that historians use to establish the authenticity of Jesus’ words and events and shows how they work and then gives examples in the Gospels for facets of the life of Jesus that are established on the basis of these criteria. [1] This is the foundation for a solid apologetic not only to secularists but also to Muslims and other non-Christians to show them that we have very good grounds for believing that the historical Jesus said and did things that implied his divinity as well as his miracles, his proclamation of the inbreaking of God’s Kingdom in his person, and I think his resurrection from the dead. So Stein’s chapter, I think, is just an essential one.

Kevin Harris: These are easy to learn, too.

Dr. Craig: Yes!

Kevin Harris: People don’t need to be intimidated.

Dr. Craig: I know! Kevin, this isn’t difficult. They’re easy to understand, and yet our pastors don’t teach these to people, we don’t share them in our churches, and so people think of the New Testament like a book of ancient fables, and that you just either take them by faith or not. And they have no understanding of the criteria that historians use that show these documents to be very credible as sources for the life of the historical Jesus.

Kevin Harris: Ben Witherington writes chapter 8. Dr. Witherington is someone I am hearing from a lot these days; it seems his work is starting to get some notice. An unusual title: “Jesus the Seer.” What is his chapter about?

Dr. Craig: He deals with Jesus’ claim to be the Son of Man who was prophesied by Daniel in the seventh chapter of Daniel’s book, then, also, with Jesus’ proclamation of the Kingdom of God. He shows on the basis of criteria of authenticity that we have good grounds for thinking that Jesus regarded himself as this sort of divine human figure that appears in Daniel’s vision of the Son of Man to whom all dominion and authority and power is given by God.

Kevin Harris: Chapter 9 from Gary Habermas – and you would expect Gary to write a chapter on the resurrection, which he has.

Dr. Craig: Yes, you would. I asked Gary once to speak on the resurrection at one of these EPS conferences and he said, “I’d be happy to speak on it. What other topic is there, really?” You know, for him this is the focal point of his interest. So in this chapter he goes behind the Gospels and the New Testament letters to look at their sources and shows how close these sources go back to the original events that they describe. This is so important, Kevin, because folks like Richard Carrier and other internet infidel types will often say, “Well, these Gospels were written in AD 70 or 80 or later. Even Paul’s correspondence comes some 25 years or more after the events. Why should we regard them as trustworthy?” And they don’t understand that historians excavate the sources on which these documents rely and these push back to within a couple of years or even months of the crucifixion of Jesus. So the window of opportunity for the accrual of legend or even editorial changes is very small.

Kevin Harris: Chapter 10 is from Craig Evans: “How Scholars Fabricate Jesus.” This would distinguish between popularizers like The Da Vinci Code, Dan Brown and so on. When you are dealing with scholars, you are dealing with a whole new can of worms.

Dr. Craig: Yes, and Craig Evans is one of the principal historical Jesus scholars in the academy today. He speaks with real authority on this. In this chapter which is very entertaining, he goes through some of the wild speculations about Jesus that have been floating on the fringes of New Testament scholarship and just shows how groundless they are. Perhaps the most interesting is Evans exposing Morton Smith’s so-called Secret Gospel of Mark to have been a deliberate forgery – a hoax – perpetrated by the late Morton Smith himself. Craig Evans believes that this very eminent scholar, Morton Smith, actually hoaxed this fragment from the supposed Gospel of Mark and pawned it off on these unwitting, radical critics like John Dominic Crossan who have now been just completely embarrassed to have bought into what has turned out to be a hoax that is comparable to the Piltdown Man in evolutionary biology. It is really very entertaining.

Kevin Harris: Not only on a scholarly level, but on a popular level we do need to read this chapter in this particular part of the book because Dan Brown is going to keep writing these novels and these movies are going to continue to be made as long as they are successful, and Bill they are quite successful and just filled with error that people take to be research and true. [2]

Dr. Craig: That’s right. If you digest Evans’ chapter or Ben Witherington’s work here, then you will know when the popularizers are misrepresenting things. You will know this at a deeper level than typically the person that you are interacting with. That is the advantage, I think, of a book like his. It gives you deeper resources to deal with the kind of popularistic, sensationalistic stuff that is floated in our culture by Dan Brown and others.

Kevin Harris: We discussed chapter 11 earlier, “An Examination of Bart Ehrman’s Claims” from Dan Wallace. Michael J. Wilkins wraps up part 2 of this book with chapter 12: “Who Did Jesus Think He Was?”

Dr. Craig: Wilkins is, again, a New Testament scholar who examines the claims of Jesus and tries to show that among the historically authentic claims of Jesus are claims that imply Jesus’ sense of divinity, so you have the old kind of liar, lunatic, or Lord dilemma, but in a more sophisticated fashion.

Kevin Harris: Let’s take a look at part 3 of this book next time we get together.

Dr. Craig: All right, we’ll do it. [3]