My Conversation With An Actual Bible Scholar | Episode 33

This week on the Year Through the Bible podcast, I had the pleasure of speaking with Dr. Peter Williams of Tyndale House, Cambridge.

We covered a lot of ground. Hope you find it as interesting as I did.

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

Hello, everybody, and welcome to the Air Through the Bible podcast. I'm Andrew Forrest, and my special guest today is not even on this side of the Atlantic, it's Dr. Peter Williams. Dr. Williams is the principal, the leader of a of a group called Tyndale House at Cambridge University, which is a a a biblical a place for biblical scholarship. They have a huge biblical library, they have a long history of funding and being supportive of scholars. People go there, get their PhDs, whatever. And uh the ultimate the goal of Tyndale Health is to help house is to help people understand and trust the Bible, which I just love. Well, I first came uh across uh Dr. Williams' work with this book that came out in 2017 called Can We Trust the Gospels, which it's roll little, get on Amazon, probably arrives today. I cannot recommend this book enough. It is so good, it's just very simple working through things, and it is absolutely brilliant. You'll hear in uh later on in our interview, Dr. Williams says the book uh takes uh four hours to read and twenty years to write. Exactly that's the case, and it's great. Is a more recent book called The Surprising Genius of Jesus. It's about uh the the parable of what we call the prodigal son, or he calls it the two sons in here, and just about the brilliance of this short story. He's lots of different scholarships, he's on a lot of different podcasts, just a there's a long interview, uh discussion he did with the historian Tom Holland, hosted by Justin Brierly. You can search for that on YouTube and find that. And so we reached out to him because and his many other roles, he also is part of the translation committee of the English Standard Version of the Bible, the ESV, which is what we use, and it's part of the one-year Bible. And so my colleague Rodney Adams reached out to Dr. Williams, and he agreed to be on the podcast. So I interviewed him here, and we're gonna divide the interview up into a couple of just different weeks, and like a lot of the stuff that Dr. Williams does, there's a lot here that you kind of have to like really listen to and maybe go back and rewind it and say, oh my gosh, because he's we're kind of all over the place. I just had a bunch of questions about different parts of the Bible and translation that I wanted to ask him. So there's not any kind of like clear, like A, B, C, it's just a bunch of different questions I put to him, and he he takes them all. And he's very kind of generous with his time. So I hope that this conversation will uh help you understand and trust the Bible more. Ladies and gentlemen, here is my discussion with Dr. Peter Williams of Tyndall House, Cambridge. Let's fire it. So, Dr. Williams, could you give us an overview of Tyndall House's work and how you led yourself to be there and and what your what the mission is?

SPEAKER_00 2:42

Yeah, so Tyndall House has been around about 80 years. It's not uh connected with the U.S. Publisher of the same name, but it's a Bible research center in Cambridge. Uh, if you like, uh it's a place for Jesus freaks who are Bible geeks. So we have uh one of the best libraries of the Bible in the world, and people come from around the world and study here, but also when you've got people together, you can uh have all sorts of projects and programs to advance knowledge of the Bible. So we've got a journal, we've got a magazine, which we're happy to send out freely to people, uh, and we have research projects. We bring in people from Brazil, Egypt, all around the world to do special research, and we do cut an edge stuff. We actually discover new stuff. So I've got here Tinderhouse Gorge New Testament. We edited the Greek, and you know, you can see that. And we we went to word by word, letter by letter, make sure we got as accurate as possible uh the original Greek and we do things like that. So real uh geeks uh hang out here, but who are seeking to serve Jesus with that uh geeky knowledge.

SPEAKER_01 3:48

Well, and the reason this is so important is because it's the seminaries that are training our pastors that really determine the direction the church goes. And when and when we uh marry cutting-edge scholarship with faithful commitment to the Lord, amazing stuff happens. And I just love your guys' work. It's it's it's not anti-intellectual, it's intellectual, it's rigorous, it's academic, and your guys are trying to serve the church. And that that the tagline, I don't know if it's a tagline of Tindall House, but it's in one of your videos to help people understand and trust the Bible. I just like ding ding ding. It's so great. I love that, and I'm grateful for it.

SPEAKER_00 4:24

Absolutely. And I mean, one of the things we do in relation to seminaries is actually train the people who become the faculty at seminaries. So often they're doing a PhD, but they could do a PhD physically in our space, in our Christian community, in our library, and they can be affiliated somewhere else while they do that. So yeah, it matters.

SPEAKER_01 4:41

And so, what we want to do uh on this podcast is I just have a bunch of questions about the Bible that I've it's like I've been storing up for years. I'd love to talk to somebody of Dr. Williams' caliber. And I I'd like to start with a personal story if I could. I I read this book, uh Can We Trust the Gospels when it came out in 2017, and then I subsequently went to Israel, and I remember standing on the cliff in Nazareth and reminded of being reminded of the story in Luke 4, where they they decide they're gonna try to throw Jesus over the cliff and that he escapes. And although you don't reference this particularly in your book, you have a whole section on geography, and it just hit me. Oh my gosh. Luke knew that there's a cliff overlooking Nazareth. And as you make this point in your book, the the geographical knowledge of the gospel writers is incredibly high. Where did you stumble into that? Would you mind giving a praises of that idea to our uh viewers?

SPEAKER_00 5:35

Well, yes, so uh uh effectively if people were sitting on a a Greek island, whatever, making up the gospels, they wouldn't know where the land goes up or down, and they wouldn't know the traveling times and all that sort of thing. And it was gradually realizing how grounded all four gospels are in that. To some extent, I was I'd first seen Richard Borkham's argument about how the names that people have, the personal names, are very accurate in the Gospels. I was looking to extend that and going into place names, started digging down uh on that and seeing how actually extraordinary it is, and actually comparing it with, if I can call the fake gospels, apocryphal gospels that sometimes get uh a bit of uh publicity and realizing just how bad they are. Uh they just don't know uh anything about the land of Jesus. And so I think that's at least it's a baseline it gives us that the gospel writers either come from the land of Jesus or they've had really careful conversations with people who've been there. Those are the only two uh possibilities. Uh that doesn't, on its own, demonstrate that everything you say is reliable, but it gives you a certain baseline, which is very different from where a lot of skeptics are coming from, who are just thinking it's all just made up, it's myths, whatever.

SPEAKER_01 6:57

What you're doing in in the book Can We Trust the Gospels is you're you're constantly knocking down the bad arguments against the trustworthiness of the gospels, allowing space, I guess, for for Jesus to be there, leap off the page. But that that part about geography is just so great. And you know, when I'm a Bible reader, often I skip over geography things unintentionally because I don't know the land. And then if you go to the Holy Land and you see it, so it's all there. Each chapter in the book is like that. The stuff on the names is great. I I can't recommend this book highly enough. Here's some of the some of the questions I love to kind of hit this uh uh today. Just jumping right in off the deep end, Genesis 3.16. So Genesis 3.15 for our readers is that amazing messianic for our viewers, that amazing messianic prophecy. Um I will put enmity between you and the woman and between her offspring and your offspring. He will strike your head and he will crush your head and you will strike his heel. And then he goes on to say, here, I want to read it here. I'm reading in the ESV. Genesis 3.16 says, let me pull it up here. He turns to the woman, and the Lord says to the woman, Genesis 3.16, I will surely multiply your pain in childbearing, and pain you shall bring forth children. Your desire shall be contrary to your husband, and he shall rule over you. And all these verses, particularly these poetic verses in the opening chapters of Genesis, are very difficult, and there's all these multivalent meanings. But my question to you, because am I right, Dr. Williams, you serve on one of the oversight committees for the English data? Yes, in committee. Yeah. Yes. Why is it translated there, I will multiply your pain in childbearing, implying like labor before the fall would have been painless and now it's painful. Whereas often the root word in Hebrew is related to conception. I'll make it difficult conceiving. Tell me that there.

SPEAKER_00 8:44

Yeah, so a few things. Firstly, when you want a translation committee, you know, that quite a few of you, 12, 15 or whatever, uh, and so and we discuss things, but you've also got to think there are let's say 800,000 uh words in an English Bible. So you just have to do some simple calculations to recognize that not everything is going to be individually discussed. So the English standard version is a revision of the revised standard version. And sometimes what you need to do in order to work out why there's a particular rendering the way is to look back in the history and say who first did this. So that that's one thing. Um, but I think what you're saying is there's a particular Hindu word that's more or root that's more often connected with conception than with actually giving birth. Um, and that's absolutely correct. But what I want to say is um nowadays we we can run things with our vantage point, where we think of fertilization, implantation, that's conception. And what happens is over time words become more precise in English. Uh, so that that's one of the things because we're moving towards a more um scientific sort of vocabulary in in in the modern age. Now, of course, the ancient world knows how long it is between a man and woman getting together and um the woman giving birth, all that all that's sort of known. But what you see is that in their language, people haven't yes yet distinguished. I mean, uh at one level, if a woman um is uh her egg is fertilized and implanted, that makes absolutely no difference to anyone in the ancient world. They see nothing, they have no scans. Um, what they they notice is you know when the bump appears, and as that leads towards the child. So that means Hebrew hasn't fully distinguished these words. And so you can see that in say Job's opening words when he's cursing the day that he was born, and he says in Job chapter 3, verse 3, let the day perish on which I was born, and a night in which it was said a man is conceived. And that's what I'm reading from the ESV, and and you think, well, well, hang on. And did someone come along in a night and say, hey, a man has just been conceived, in our sense of um uh fertilization implantation? Absolutely not. No one has has a sense of that, and they wouldn't know it was a male child. Okay, so so clearly what we're seeing is the Hebrew um doesn't distinguish these words, it is simply not culturally necessary uh to do that, it's not very helpful at all. So cultures make the distinctions that's that helpful for them. Now, why does God speak in this way? Because God speaks in simple language, which can actually be useful for every culture. So if you were to put um everything in scientifically say modern terms, it wouldn't actually be useful until that time um uh that the the modern knowledge, it wouldn't be useful for God's church for most of history. And so that's where I think um that it would be um when when I look at what's going on in Genesis 3, it certainly is um associating, I think, a lot of um pain with the overall um birth process that you know uh uh and and I would say everything leading up to that, whether it's it's it's mourning sickness or uh you know actually uh coming out, I I think the whole thing, if that makes sense.

SPEAKER_01 12:26

Yes, it does. So in a way, we are reading it too narrowly if we are assuming Genesis 3.16 I'll multiply your pain in childbearing refers only to what we call labor, the narrow process of a child coming into the world.

SPEAKER_00 12:42

It is around the whole childbearing experience is now becoming more difficult, including I think um just to nuance that what I want to say is I don't think we should overly specify unless we've got a reason to. It could be that the focus is more towards the end uh of uh of that experience. That's that's possible. If there were other things in the text that were indicating that, that would that would be possible. But the words themselves aren't uh very neat for this is the final uh stage after contractions have begun, labor's begun, um, or this this is earlier. It's not doing that.

SPEAKER_01 13:22

Yeah, okay, good. Okay, so I have another uh English translation question, maybe going back to the namesake of your house, the great uh English martyr William Tyndale, who whether he's the first person to ever literally translate the Bible in English is not, of course, the case. Other people maybe phrased it, did things, but he was the first one to kind of create a full version of it. Is that right?

SPEAKER_00 13:43

Who's the first one to do the New Testament from the original language into Greek? Okay. So obviously before that, Wycliffe and then his associate John Purvey had done done that maybe 150 years earlier than Tyndale. And then there's uh Richard Runner, who does a Yorkshire dialect of the Psalms. Oh uh actually a little bit earlier even than Wycliffe. And and but but the first person to say, hey, let's use the original language is martyred for it, uh William Tyndale.

SPEAKER_01 14:12

And a lot of our um English words were created by William Tyndall that we still use. Like, isn't scapegoat is a is a Tyndale phrase, right?

SPEAKER_00 14:21

From the atonement, loving kindness, lots of lots of words, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 14:25

Yeah, yeah, beautiful ideas. So I don't know if this is a Tyndale uh the these the antecedents go back to Tyndale or not, but Genesis 6, we have the story of the flood. And Noah builds this craft, this boxy craft thing that everyone in the whole English-speaking world knows as the ark, the tevah is the Hebrew word. Then in Exodus chapter two, when Moses' mother puts him in a basket in the bull rushes in the Nile River, the Hebrew word is Teva, it's the same word. So, why in English Bibles do you have an ark in Genesis 6 and a basket or some version of that in Exodus 2? Why, why, why not use the same uh word both places? Because you miss the beautiful wordplay that Moses is being delivered from the flood just like Noah was. Why is that there?

SPEAKER_00 15:18

Yeah, so I mean to some extent, some of these things go back into the history of translation, and certainly the word ark um that is used in William Timdale's translation, it's used also for the Ark of the Covenant, which is a different word. Different Hebrew word, yeah. It goes back to the Latin Vulgate, at least, uh, where it uses the Latin word arca, A-R-C-A, um, both for Noah's Ark and for the Ark of the Covenant. Um and I am just looking up what goes on in Exodus chapter two, uh, but uh to see what what happens uh there. And I'm okay, so no, it's not the word ark, so it's a it's a different word. Um that's that's an interesting uh thing. Maybe it's because it's thinking more about it being to do with re um made of reeds and and so on. So um yeah, that's that's uh an interesting um it's an interesting thing that you just have those those different words over time, and to some extent, if you were a Bible translator and you decided no uh not to call it an arc, you're gonna call it a boat or a box or something else, I think you you your ringers would would uh protest. Uh so there's a certain amount it which once the um the rendering has become traditional, normal translators don't want to vary away from that unless they've got a really good reason. I mean, there was one time when uh there was a riot in North Africa because uh the Latin translation was being read out in Genna chapter four, and the the the Latin word for the plant uh that grew up over Janina was changed, and and you know, people protested pretty pretty vociferously about that.

SPEAKER_01 17:07

So I'll tell you an example where that's the case is um, and I don't know if these if these go back to Tyndale or to the translators of the King James, but um through the valley of the shadow of death, a beautiful evocative English phrase that you really can't do away with now, even though that's a poetic way of expressing what's in Hebrew there, right? That'd be a place where translators kind of they try to be they try to go with the precedent that's been given to them often.

SPEAKER_00 17:34

Yeah, so I mean that's an interesting case because the the Hebrew um is written in consonants, and then you have vowels put around that, and the vowels seem to say shadow of death, and there's a modern theory that says it's actually just darkness, not shadow of death, but there's one belotic parallel in Job where it's in parallel with death, so you you know you you can get arguments more than one way, the majority opinion at the moment is it's not shadow of death, it's deep darkness. Um, but it's some of these things aren't always knocked down, right? Uh in in terms of the the uh the case, and so so that that's that's one of those things. And so you've got to have a good reason to to change that.

SPEAKER_01 18:18

It seems like to me, uh uh when I'm reading the ESV compared to the NIV or some other translation, says the ESV had placed one of its translation values, is is the continuity with the rhythms of the English language that are so familiar from the past. Is that right? Yeah. So that would be again, I haven't looked here. Let's look in uh in uh 1 Kings uh 19. When Elijah hears, does he hear a still small voice in the does?

SPEAKER_00 18:48

I mean, there's there is a rule called the Lord's Prayer rule, yeah. In former which is you you know, you don't really change the Lord's Prayer, and that's why the word hallowed has managed to last over a thousand years in the English language, because it's it's the only opening line of the Lord's Prayer, um, and therefore it becomes one of the most famous things that there is, and so even a comparatively modern translation like the international version is still full, it can't change that. It it yeah, there are all sorts of things you can change, but not that.

SPEAKER_01 19:20

Right. Um, I'm looking here in 1 Kings 19. The ESV has this is 1 Kings. So the story to our viewers is Elijah hears uh he goes out, and the Lord is not on the fire, not in the wind. Yeah, it's a low whisper, and I have a textual note that says, or a sound, a thin silence. But there's just something more evocative about the still small voice, I think. Uh uh and and I like to tell our folks, and and Dr. Williams, if I'm if I'm um correct, your your uh your PhD was in the Hebrew language, but your first teaching job was in uh the New Testament in New Testament Greek, right? And teaching the New Testament. So you could work in both.

SPEAKER_00 20:00

On Syriac or Eastern Aramaic, okay. Comparing it with Greek. Uh, and then I taught Hebrew and Aramaic at Cambridge for a few years, uh, while working at Tinderhouse. Um I was just as an adjunct there, and and then I I had a teaching job in Aberdeen teaching New Testament. So uh that was great. Uh getting to co-teach with Howard Marshall. Um and uh that was that was lovely. Did that for four years before coming back here.

SPEAKER_01 20:26

So you have your your your thumbs and all different kinds of pies, uh languages. I'm a jack of all trays, but master of none. So yes, we we appreciate it. So um uh moving moving on to some other questions here. There's been a book that came out last year uh in Oxford University Press by a guy named Tom Schmidt about a famous passage in Josephus' work that has long been considered inauthentic because the the passage says something about this man Jesus who was known as the Christ and he was said to have done this or that. And people claim that a later Christian scholar wrote it into a Josephus manuscript. And Tom Schmidt's new book says actually, when you research it and you compare it occurrences of words and so on, it could be seen as authentic. It's not that Josephus is saying that he believes Jesus was the Christ, it's more that Josephus is saying people said he was the Christ. Have you looked into that at all?

SPEAKER_00 21:23

Have you found that argument persuasive? So uh, and in fact, I spent quite a bit of time with uh Tom, the author, uh, last week and uh had a detailed conversation with him uh about that. So, yes, I mean it's it's a fascinating thesis, it's been quite well received. Um, and it's really got two parts to it. One is that this passage is authentic. Secondly, that Josephus, this Jewish historian, probably, if you look at his LinkedIn profile, if you like, the people he's close to, he's actually close to people who are probably at Jesus' trial. And that's a really interesting part to it. So it's when he says about um Jesus having been executed, or that actually he's getting his information from um sources that are close to the events. So those are the two parts to it. But the bit about the authenticity is quite interesting. And is it a one that was challenging because you wouldn't expect a Jew who hasn't become a Christian, Josephus, to call Jesus the Christ. But then there is this side where you know someone might call Elvis the king. Let's say an American calls Elvis the King. Does that mean they're saying, okay, we're going to go back to being a monarchy? Um, no, it it it doesn't. It it's it's it's a way of identifying him. Now, Elvis isn't that common a name, so maybe that's not a good analogy, but Jesus was a common name. It was the sixth most common uh male name for Jews in the land, and so that's why to have an extra thing and say, Oh, I'm talking about the one who gets called Christ, that's quite that could that could be an explanation for why it is. So I think that the jury will be out for a while, and that probably people won't ever reach agreement on it, but it's a fascinating and powerful thesis, and I think um I think there's just so much evidence for Jesus, uh, and this is this is part of it. If I if you don't start with a um unjustifiably skeptical view of things, then you can actually see that there's really quite a lot of evidence, and this can be part of it, but but not a piece that I absolutely need. It's it's not like um the four wheels of my car that I I I have to have to go along.

SPEAKER_01 23:34

As you talk about in the your book, Can I Can We Trust the Gospels? People, modern skeptical people want to rule out the miraculous parts of the life of Jesus. But if you take out the miraculous part and you look at the other parts, there's really no question at all that he existed, that he lived. We have so many testimonies to him, extra biblical sources, some a Roman governor writes about him and these sorts of things. It's that people come to the idea that because of the miraculous, it can't be trusted.

SPEAKER_00 24:03

Yes, and I think it's also worth observing that uh people are sort of more open to the miraculous in both good and bad ways. Uh nowadays. I mean, I was doing some street outreach the other day, and uh, you know, someone was telling me that there was some alien spacecraft just up beyond where we could see that was watching our every movement sort of thing. And so people have got all these weird and wonderful views uh right now. And uh but what that means is that perhaps the old skepticism um is not as widely shared. That the sort of anti-supernatural thing, what we're finding is uh younger people could be more open uh to the fact that the world may be a bit weirder or more wonderful than they had expected.

SPEAKER_01 24:44

Well, and I've already said it, but I will say it again. In this little book, Can We Trust the Gospels, if you just work your way through it. I mean, I'm a believer in Jesus, I'm a pastor, uh, and I'd read the book previously, but I just read it in preparation for our congregate uh conversation yet again, and you come to the end of it and you're like, oh my gosh, this is so persuasive. And I think you make the point in there. Like, so take the gospel writers, we already referenced the geographical knowledge they have. Well, they get all the small details right. So then you have to argue, they get the small details right and they totally make up out a whole cloth, the large miraculous. It doesn't work. Like you know, like the feeding of the 5,000, you do a good job of comparing John's account and Mark's account and how they they agree it's the time of the year, it's springtime, hence the green grass, Mark tells us, and all these things. It just it it almost requires a larger miracle to explain how they get all the small details right and make up the big one than just accepting it's because of what happened.

SPEAKER_00 25:41

Yeah, that's that's right. I mean, what you've got in the Feeling of the 5,000, where you've got four different accounts, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, and there are what are sometimes called underlying coincidences between Matthew, Mark, and Luke. That is, uh, in John, Jesus turns to Philip and asks where to get bread from. And in John, you see no reason why he should do that. But over in Luke, it's told you the feeding is near Bethsider, and back in John, it tells you John uh that Philip is from Bethsider. And that's just the way that the um accounts dovetail. Mark tells you lots of people are traveling, coming and going, doesn't explain why. John tells you it's Passover time, which I guess is the equivalent of Thanksgiving, and it's hard to book a plane ticket at the time, you know, and and so all of that come together, it exactly fits. If it's Passover time, that would make the grass green because you've just had five more months of rainfall than you'd normally have. So those sort of things fit with the miracle, and to say that somehow by the telephone game, um, that those details got kept and then the miracle got exaggerated, that makes no sense at all.

SPEAKER_01 26:51

One of the things that when I first read it, I just like underlined it, and that's it was so it like any like any good book, you point out things that are so staggeringly obvious, and none of us had seen it. You so so yeah, we we talk about the telephone game, and that means I whisper to here, and then by the time it goes around the room, it's all corrupted. And people say, you know, that's what happened with the Bible. It started one thing and then it came out over here as another thing. But you say the problem with the telephone game is that when you play that in elementary school, the purpose is to corrupt, first of all. It's only funny if the answer at the end is different, and secondly, it's done in secret and you whisper. Yeah. Whereas that that's not at all how Christian testimony worked from one person to the other.

SPEAKER_00 27:30

Yeah, it's a game with very strict rules to maximize the chance you get the message corrupted. And so to say that's an analogy for Christianity, uh, I think is again not very helpful.

SPEAKER_01 27:41

Yes, I love that. So speaking of history, so so earlier this year you were on a video uh you you did an event with the historian Tom Holland, yeah, uh hosted by Justin Brierly. Uh just uh in the the tagline was like an historian and a New Testament scholar, a biblical scholar, you know, talk about different things about Jesus. And Tom Holland is famous now for being more open to the claims of Christianity and certainly acknowledging that our entire civilization depends on gospel values. And but he's still a skeptic about certain things in in the scriptures, and he raises what then you have called in a couple of places the biggest historical problem in the New Testament. So I could sum it up here, it's that it seems perhaps that King Herod the Great dies around four BC. Is that right? That's the standard date, yeah. Standard date, and Quirinius, we usually mark as being the uh governor in or uh in eight AD eight. Yeah, 86 normally, yeah. Herod is dead, AD6 Quirinius is the governor. Famously, Luke says, in the days of Caesar Augustus, a decree went out that all the world should be registered. This was the first census that took place while Quirinius was the governor of Syria. And you say this is the biggest historical problem in the New Testament. And Tom Holland says, well, obviously it couldn't have happened like this because Herod was dead by the time Quirinius was the governor. Can you speak to our viewers about that, how you understand that and reconcile that?

SPEAKER_00 29:14

Yeah, so what I think I I want to do is I want to sit back and help us think a little bit. So let's say you're you're charged with making sure that uh the US's energy supply is secure, right? You don't just have one solution to that. You think of all the different ways you can produce energy. In the same way, when people try and solve a viable problem, sometimes what they try and say is, here's a problem, here's my solution, the probability of my solution is greater than uh the probability the problem. Now that that isn't the way it has to be because you actually have all solutions, just as you would with energy supply, you can say, you know, I can get solar, I can get oil, I can get wind, all sorts of different ways of getting uh um power. And in a so, when we're dealing with a viable problem, we don't have to commit ourselves to any particular solution because we don't know everything. And it's absolutely fine to say, I trust that there is a solution, and one of this range could be true. So um it's a problem, but it's not an unsolvable problem. So at the very least, you could say, well, uh, we hardly have any records from the time, and Josephus could be wrong. I mean, after all, I mean he admits he was a liar. He basically entered into a suicide pact with 40 people, him and another guy were the last left, and they decided, oh, let's stay alive. You know, and and there are other things as well. You could say, you know, he's he's not the world's most trustworthy guy. So you you could say that, and some people try and do that. They actually say Josephus has got confused in his sources, he makes a really nice narrative from the sources. So that's just one solution. Let's give it 2% probability. It doesn't have to be very much, but you know, it's something there. There's another one that says actually um Herod didn't die in the year four, he died, let's say, 1 BC. Now, how does that happen? Well, Josephus is the guy we're relying on who says there's a lunar eclipse shortly before Herod dies. So actually, lunar eclipses in 6, 5, 4, and 1 BC. Now, for the last 400 years, people have believed that Herod died in 4 BC. And I hope you're tracking me some of the details here. But at the time when they calculated that 400 years ago, we didn't know as much about lunar eclipses as we do now. And now we know that actually the 4 BC is not a complete lunar eclipse, and so on. So we just sometimes wonder if we ran the evidence, would we would we come up with something different? So there's a couple of journal articles, uh, people like Andrew Steinman and others who try and claim no, Hera didn't die in uh 4 BC, and uh then there were people who say maybe Quirinius was governor more than once. And then there is a um Swiss historian, Sabina Hudna, who's written a book saying, you know, we're actually with an essay on this, confusing two different sorts of um title. So the um Pontius Pilate was not in charge of all of Syria, he's just in charge of Judea and he's the procurator, which means he's got a boss who's boss of all uh Syria, but the boss isn't actually there, he's in Rome. Lucius Ilias Lamia isn't even around. So that's at the time of Jesus' crucifixion. Now let's go back um uh uh 30 years uh and uh to the time of Jesus' birth, and you say, well, who's in charge when it says Coronius was governor of Syria, what are we thinking about that? Because it's exactly the same word used there as it is for Pontius Pilate, who's on a lesser rank. Are we thinking about um the top thing, boss of the whole lot, or are we actually looking for the guy who just deals with the finances more locally? So again, that's another thing. What we can say though is this that we know from other records that um Caesar Augustus loved to measure things. He tells us this himself. He's the first guy to reintroduce censuses when uh that there's actually been a gap. He loved metrics, and so it makes complete sense that Luke would um tell us about about a decree going from Caesar Augustus. Now, go back 200 years, we didn't have the census records of Caesar Augustus. The only thing we had telling us that Augustus took censuses was Luke. Now we actually have Egyptian papyrus tell us about his censuses, and so you suddenly realize, hmm. So if the Bible's so long, it shouldn't be giving us correct information, but it has given us correct information. So that's not to solve the problem for you. As I say, it's it's it's the biggest uh problem, historical problem I can think of. And I don't want to just jump on board with this solution or that solution, and I just simply say, you know, I don't know. I I try and uh use a British expression about cricket, play with a straight bat, uh about uh about the evidence, and if the evidence isn't going one particular way, just just say that. But there's no particular reason to say, oh, there's no way that Luke could be getting stuff right. Right. Um and people say, well, Augustus doesn't record this particular sentence, but hang on. Augustus' autobiography only tells you about money he gave out. It literally talks about him being uh in charge of the Roman world and talks as if he spent all his time just giving people money. Well, I don't think that's what Caesar spent all their time doing. I think they actually tax. Yeah. Um so so that you can letting see his own account is not representative.

SPEAKER_01 35:06

In verse 2, Luke 2, 2, it says this was the first registration. So already Luke is telling us that he knows of more than one, which is just interesting. He he Luke felt like it was important enough to disambiguate, is that the right way of saying it? Yeah. Uh uh the registrations that Quirenius has made.

SPEAKER_00 35:22

And and so you're you're bringing up a solution I didn't even mention, which is favored by uh N. T. White, uh New Testament scholar David Armitage and others, that actually um it's it's looking back over more than one uh census. And the the grammar in Luke 2, 2 is not at all straightforward. So, yeah, people translate that that differently, and again, that's another whole area of solution. And I think it's okay. I mean, people haven't solved all sorts of problems about the ancient world, right? Um, and so why would we expect everything to be tied up and neat?

SPEAKER_01 35:55

And and it does depend on what is your starting point. Am I starting with the idea the Bible is not the gospels are not trustworthy, or am I starting with the idea that they have proved themselves trustworthy over the years, and they're only ever becoming more trustworthy, it seems, as we find more about the ancient world. All right, let's stop there for this week. We'll have more to come next week. There's a lot there I just want you to chew on as you're thinking about the reliability of the scripture and what these different things mean. And I'm familiar with some of his ideas because again, I've read some of his books and thinking about this stuff, and you know, I think I'm obsessed with the Bible and its reliability and all that kind of thing. So some of these ideas might be new to you. Let's stop it there, uh, so you can kind of hold on to what you've been given so far. We'll come back next week. In the meantime, I don't think I could say anything better to sum it up than to say, read your Bible. And if you're not reading, you fall on the habit. Let's go, baby. Get back into it, read the Bible, we're reading through the one year Bible, and there's readings every day. And the more we read it, the more we love it, and we realize it's a beautiful work of art. So keep reading, and I'll see you next week.