EVEIDENCE FOR FAITH: SESSION 1

WE ARE ON VACATION THIS WEEK! WHICH IS GREAT FOR US BUT NOT SO MUCH FOR YOU BECAUSE WE DIDN'T RECORD AN EPISODE! DON'T WORRY WE WON'T LEAVE YOU HIGH AND DRY. THIS IS THE FIRST SESSION OF FIVE FROM A RECENT GOSPEL SERIES THAT TOPHER TAUGHT. WE ARE RELEASING SESSION 1 IN THE PLACE OF THIS WEEK'S EPISODE. ENJOY!

Transcript

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So we're going to take an in-depth look at the gospels. We're going to do it over the course of five weeks. Now you're asking yourself probably why five weeks there are four gospels. Well, the reason is because when I was jumping into the research and doing the research on these on these gospels, what I wound up realizing is that there's so much disinformation and misinformation out there, not just about the gospels, but about the scriptures in general, that it that kind of warranted its own talk. So the the talk tonight is kind of, I would consider the preference, uh the pref preface rather to the to the gospel. So we're going to discuss tonight, we're going to we're going to take a look at kind of all the skepticism about the history of the Bible, about the scriptures itself. We're going to take a look at a bunch of the most some of the most popular myths about the Bible, and we're going to kind of debunk all of them, okay? And so our focus, though, after this talk, our focus is going to be on what we call the canonical gospels. And the reason that we have to differentiate there, I'll get to that in a minute. But what are the canonical gospels? Well, you know, we know them as Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, right? What does canonical mean, though? This is referring to the word canon. Can anybody without looking it up tell me what canon means? Not canon boom boom canon. Single end canon. Don't don't look it up. Go ahead, Jeff. Sorry. Pretty dang close. Pretty dang close. So the defin the dictionary definition would be a uh in a in a in literature is a body of works considered to be authoritative, standard, or essential within a field. So when we say canonical gospels, we mean in context of the entire canon of the entire scripture. And the scripture, in case you didn't know, is our Christian canon. It is the books that we consider authoritative, standard, or essential within our field, aka Christianity, right? So with our, in our case, with biblical canon, we are referring to an officially recognized collection of sacred writings. And these biblical canonical books are the reference to the books that are accepted as scripture. But the big question that we need to answer before we begin our deep dive into the gospels is how do the scriptures that we read in our Bible, how did they even become canon? What was the process in which those books became accepted? And we need to answer this question for a very, very big reason, and that is we need to know if we can trust the Bible, right? Now, as believers in here, we probably all, if you consider yourself a believer in here, you probably already trust the Bible. But I I can go ahead and guarantee you that if any of you guys have engaged in conversations slash debates with anybody who's not a believer, you understand that they don't believe in the authority of Scripture. Right? And so how do we make a defense based on our belief in the authority of Scripture when the other party has does not recognize that belief. So that's why we're talking about can we do how do we know that we can even trust the Bible? How do we know that we can stand on our own convictions when it comes to the scriptures? So we needed to establish. We need to establish whether or not we can trust the Bible. So before we begin, um, we start our journey into Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, we need to establish that. Because if the Bible is not trustworthy, then why even take a deeper look at the gospels, right? If the Bible can't be trusted, there's no use. But the other big question that needs answering is why are we looking at this at all in general? And I'm gonna throw a big word at you right here, and the whole reason that we're doing this is this word right here. Apologetics. Alright, take a picture of that, write that down. Apologetics comes from the Greek word apologia. Not apologiable, as I hear it often mispronounced, but apologia. Say it with me. Apologia. Sounds like some kind of dessert uh that your grandma used to make to me. Uh so apologia. That now this does not mean apology or apologize. Anybody know what apologetics means without looking it up? Got nothing to do with apologizing, it means a formal defense. Yeah. Yes. It is a formal defense. So it's defined as um a reason defense or an explanation of beliefs, especially in religious faith, right? So not only is this kind of our pathway forward, but it's also a command, right? In 1 Peter 3.15, let me pull that up for you. I'll read that for you. But in your hearts, honor Christ the Lord as holy, always being prepared to make a defense to anyone who asks you for a reason for the hope that is in you. And that's where a lot of people stop right there. What does it say continuing on? Yet do it with great gentleness and respect. How many times have you entered into a conversation online, especially online, right? This hardly ever happens in person because everybody's too scared to actually talk about it. But online, you know, everybody's a, what do they call them, keyboard warrior? Uh how many times and I'm and I'm guilty of this, so you know, you can maybe we can relate to one another on this. I'm guilty of entering into these conversations and getting downright mad. Getting downright mad that they're not seeing my perspective, dog on it. Don't you know that I have the right perspective? Right. But the last part of this scripture says, do it with gentleness, great gentleness and respect. I wonder why that is. Why do we do it with gentleness and respect? Spoiler alert, it's for the gospel, right? It's to point people towards Jesus, always. But in our context, when it comes to Christianity, the definition of apologetics can be summed up into three different parts. Explaining why Christians believe what they believe, defending the faith against objections or misunderstanding, and presenting a logical, historical, and philosophical reasons for belief. Most of y'all in here know me, and especially my my wife is going to do the biggest amen ever when I say I'm a person of logic and reason. Right. I I appreciate if it if I can't rationalize it, it just doesn't make sense to me, and I don't really want anything to do with it, right? So if you're like me, you're gonna appreciate, you know, I I appreciate having things broken down like this so that I can wrap my brain around them and then put them into practice, right? So Chris often talks about counting the cost when it comes to our submission to Christ. I believe this this to me is a very important part of counting that cost, is under fully understanding, having a full grasp of the scripture and also being able to trust it 100%. That's called faith, right? Now, don't get me wrong, God deals with the heart, right? God deals with the heart, the Holy Spirit exists for a reason, but he also deals with your mind, and while the Holy Spirit draws your heart, God desires for you to use your brain. Else, why would he have put it in your head? And he has very much provided us a way to approach our faith from a spiritual place as well as a logical one. Now, this is like I hear people all the time when they don't, when they don't, especially online, again, when they don't know how to answer a question, it's always, well, that's just why we have faith. And a lot and oftentimes that's true, but nine times out of ten, there's an answer. It's just that that person doesn't know it. And that's okay. Uh that's something that I want to tell you. Um, if you if you don't hear anything else, just understand that it's okay to not have the answers. Um I I didn't have a lot of these answers until I started researching this topic. It's okay to say I don't know. But just understanding that it's important not to try and rationalize it with faith when the person that you're talking to doesn't understand faith. They have no grasp or concept of what of what that actually means. And so that's kind of the reason that I feel like Christians are often misconstrued and misrepresented as mindless drones that follow a bunch of ancient texts and um people blindly, right? But I would argue that history, art, culture, and even innovation in modern society would disagree with that notion altogether. Since the beginning of the first church, Christians have been the main driving force in those aforementioned areas. When you look back on all of the invention over the last at least millennia, you think about guys like Da Vinci, Galileo, these guys were Christians. They might have a skewed view of Christianity, but they were professing Christians. Christians have been on the forefront of these areas. And it's only within the last few decades that people seem to have forgotten that. But I would also argue that despite what secular society tells you today, we're still on the forefront of those areas. That's a talk for another time. Maybe we'll get there one day. So, in the light of all the different disinformation out there about the Bible, Christian and church history, and even specifically the gospels, we have to do a little bit of groundwork before we dive full on into the gospels. We need to take a little time to separate fact from fiction. And so I want to take some time to bring up some of said fiction and also give you some facts. So these right here are myths about the Bible. And some of these may, some of these you may have uh have heard about before. Some of them they may be brand new to you. Uh, but we're going to dive into them. So the first one, and this is a biggie. These are no in particular order of importance, but this is a biggie right here. The Council of Nicaea. Anybody seen the Da Vinci Code or read the Da Vinci Code ever? Nobody's read the Da Vinci Code? It's actually a great book. Don't take it as gospel truth, but it's a great book and uh and a great movie. Tom Hanks. But um, so I say it's the Da Vinci Code myth because they reference the Council of Nicaea all throughout that book and they give it a bunch of, they they assign a bunch of stuff to it that I think the people that were involved in the Council of Nicaea would find very, very surprising. But this myth basically says that in 325 A.D., the fourth century, church leaders gathered together and essentially invented the Bible that we have today. It says that they gathered up all the ancient writings, they picked through them all, and they decided on what best suited their agenda, and they declared them to be inspired by God and thus canon. Alright, so here's the truth of the matter. And this was what may surprise you. The Council of Nicaea was very, very much a real thing. It was called by Emperor Constantine in 325 AD in the city of Nicaea, which is modern day Turkey. It was comprised of several Christian bishops and early church fathers. Now, this council's main objective was to settle disputes about Christian beliefs, especially a major controversy known as the Aryan controversy. Arius, a priest from Alexandria, was teaching that Jesus was created by God and therefore not equal to God the Father. His main opponent in this debate was Athanasius, and he and others argued that Jesus is fully divine and of the same substance of the Father. So let me break it down for you just a little bit here. There was a bunch of false doctrine going around. There was some bishop, or there was a particular bishop who took it upon himself to introduce his own theology to his church, and it was starting to spread. So there was a bunch of false doctrine going around. Does that sound familiar? Bunch of false doctrine going on right now. And so this council, because Christianity at this point, and we'll get to this a little bit later, but Constantine had just legalized Christianity. Um so he called this council together because all of these, he had all he had access to all of these church, early church fathers, and they debated. They debated the false doctrine that was going on. And we uh as we read here, we had these two opponents, Arius and Athanasius. And so ultimately, after hearing the arguments from both sides, ultimately the council voted to condemn Arianism and Arius' teachings as heretical. Heretical meaning unbiblical, non-biblical, and against biblical teachings. And so this resulted in the right, in the writing of the Nicene Creed. Now, this might be something that you've heard of before. We'll pull it up and we can read it together. We believe in one God, the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and of earth, and of all things visible and invisible, and in one Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God, the only begotten, begotten of the Father before all ages, light of light, true God of true God, begotten, not made, of one essence with the Father, by whom all things were made, who for us men and for our salvation came down from heaven and was incarnate of the Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary, and became man. He was crucified for us under Pontius Pilate, and suffered, and was buried, and the third day he rose again, according to the Scriptures, and ascended into heaven, and sits at the right hand of the Father, and he shall come again with glory to judge the living and the dead, whose kingdom shall have no end, and in the Holy Spirit. Amen. So because of the Council of Nicaea, we get the Nicene Creed, which millions upon millions upon millions of cr of Christians have recited in their own church services all throughout the millennia. It's pretty an it's an amazing thing. The Apostles' Creed was birthed out of the Nicene Creed. It's a beautiful thing. But the skeptics would have you believe that these people, um, for some nefarious reason that we'll get to in a little bit, um, just magically chose all of these books out of a pulled them out of a hat and put them together, and that was the Bible. So absolutely incorrect. Myth number two one person wrote or edited the entire Bible. This attributes the writing of scripture to a central authority figure like a king or emperor, and this is also often attributed to Emperor Constantine, um, who was the Roman Emperor from 306 uh A.D. to 337 A.D. Constantine is, after all, the person who called the Council of Nicaea. But here's the truth, and we just talked about this uh not too long ago. Chris talked about this. The Bible is written by dozens of authors, anywhere from 35 to 40 authors. And it was written over 1,500 years in different cultures and languages, the three most popular being Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek. This is a big one. The Bible has been heavily changed over time. How many of you guys have heard this one? They call it, uh Chris referenced it last week, the the world's largest game of telephone. Right? It states that the original message has been lost due to copying and editing. But here's the truth. While in fact there are some slight variations in some versions of the Bible, the vast number of ancient manuscripts that we possess today allow scholars to identify the original wording with an extreme degree of confidence. In other words, we have in our possession the original manuscripts. No other historical book can that be said for, except the Bible. We have the original manuscript, many of the original manuscripts. And what did we find? That the core doctrine of the Bible has remained unchanged over the course of millennia. Wrap your mind around that. Over the course of over 2,000 years up to this point, the core doctrine of the Bible has remained unchanged. So not only is it not the world's largest game of telephone, it is quite literally the opposite. It is one of the very few unchanging documents and has stood the test of time over the course of over 2,000 years. And the Bible even talks about that, God preserving his word, right? Myth number four. And here's a big one. How many of you guys have heard this one? How many of you guys have seen this right here? Banned from the Bible. History Channel. You guys remember this show? It used to come on all the time. Secrets of the Apostles. So the banned books of the Bible, otherwise known as the Gnostic Gospels. This is supposedly like the boogeyman for Christians, right? This is what a lot of uh skeptics and non-believers will kind of throw at us and go, what about all these other books that didn't get put in the Bible? Why didn't they get put in the Bible? Well, I'm gonna spend a little extra time on these because it's worth noting. This is like one of the most popular ones. But this myth states that gospels, quote unquote gospels like the Gospel of Thomas or Mary, were suppressed because they challenged church authority. There are around fifty-two Gnostic texts, many of which claim to be quote unquote gospels. Some of the most famous ones include the Gospel of Thomas, Gospel of Mary Magdalene, the Gospel of Philip, Gospel of Truth, Gospel of Judas, and Sophia of Jesus Christ. Anyone heard of any of these? Anybody heard of the Gnostic Gospels before? This is tough because I've actually encountered people before who uh actually a good buddy of mine came up to me one time who is a believer, came up to me one time and said, Man, you ever heard of the Gnostic Gospels? And I'm thinking to myself, yeah. Why? I've been reading those, man. It's some c'est some wild stuff, man. And I'm like, Yeah, you're right, it is wild. Um, but these writings, so here's the truth of the matter. What they would claim is that these were gospels that were written at the same time as the canonical gospels, right? And they're gonna claim to you that these books um got removed from the original uh compilation of the Bible because they went against. Against quote unquote church authority. Or they might have said some different things about Jesus. They 100% did say some different things about Jesus. But here's the truth of the matter. These gospels were not written even remotely close to the time period that the canonical gospels were written. Some of these gospels, these quote-unquote gospels were written as much as three and four hundred years after the fact. So they appeared much later and they lacked apostolic authorship. So, in other words, the Gospel of Thomas, why would you, if the Gospel of Thomas was written 300 something years after the book of Revelation, right? So why do you think that somebody, and this is non-retorical, you can answer, why would you think that somebody would call their writing the Gospel of Thomas? Or the Gospel of Philip or the Gospel of Judas. Right. And they can't put their own name on it. It doesn't give it any credibility, right? If I put out something called the Gospel of Topher, everybody would go, who? And immediately write it off. But if I put something out that's called the Gospel of Jesus Christ, then somebody's going to go, whoa, that sounds like that might be interesting. Let's read that. And so what you have, what we have what we have to have in canon, especially in the Gospels, is what we're going to find out as we deep dive into the Gospels, is that the Gospels were written, and this is verifiable, the Gospels were written either by an apostle, aka a disciple, in the case of Matthew and John, or apostolic adjacent, somebody who was a traveling companion or a direct eyewitness to the events that happened, a traveling companion of a disciple, I should say. And so none of these Gnostic Gospels can claim that. They were all written way too far after the original gospels were written. The authors that they are attributed to would have been dead for literally hundreds of years. So though that's verified. Historians and scholars have verified this. These are not scripture. They also contained several historical and linguistic errors that would have been common knowledge had they been written when they claimed to have been written. For example, some of these Gospels include the names, you know, the Bible's big on names, right? There's tons of names in the Bible. They're trying to copy the Bible, so they're including tons of names. Well, turns out some of the names that they're including didn't come along until two or three hundred years after the events of the Bible. So immediately it's out. So you can go and read these. That's another thing. You can go right now and you can Google these and you can download a copy of the Gospel of Judas. And I would even say, if you want some entertainment, go read it. It's wild. Okay. I think it's the Gospel of Peter, I think it's called. And right behind Jesus is also the cross walking out of the tomb. And the cross then begins speaking to the disciples who were there somehow. The disciples were also there, and the cross begins speaking to the disciples. So, you know, needless to say, these are crazy, crazy town. I would encourage you to read them, but be very careful not in any way, shape, or form to liken these to scripture, okay? These are not. They're far from it. But if you do choose uh to read some, you'll see uh immediately how utterly flawed and in some cases, as I just laid out, ridiculous they are. Why were they written? As is very much the case today, there are people who have a very skewed and selfish agenda when it comes to Christianity, right? We experience this today. So in order to give their blasphemous and heretical writing clout, they attach these famous figures onto it. But make no mistake, these gospels have been thoroughly, thoroughly debunked. There is no shred of evidence to suggest that these were actually written by the person attributed to the work. There is, however, mountains of evidence suggesting just the opposite. Many of these writings have been verified by experts and scholars to have been written hundreds of years after the supposed author had died, so we talked about that. Alright, so you raise a question about the Maccabees. The book of Maccabees is part of something called the Apocrypha. And I was going to talk about it just a second by talking about the book of Enoch. Have you guys heard of the book of Enoch? This is also included in the Apocrypha. Alright. So these aren't Gnostic texts. These are texts that have some credibility. And the reason they have some credibility is because they kind of run parallel to the scriptures. They don't make a bunch of outlandish claims that go contrary to the scriptures. They kind of coincide with it. So what can we make of that, right? And this is the best way that I can that I can think to communicate to you know how to how to look at the Apocrypha. Bible commentary. It's essentially ancient Bible commentary. We have the book of Enoch, right? So Enoch was in Genesis. Genesis described Enoch as somebody, a man who walked with God, right? It's just very briefly mentioned, but there's a whole book of Enoch that goes way deeper into his story. It goes deeper. And it's actually referenced, or some a lot of scholars believe it was referenced in the book of Jude. Jude 14 and 15. You can read that later if you want to. Jude actually talks about Enoch in those scriptures. And so it's not considered canon because it wasn't broadly or accepted or taught during that early time, if that answers your question. So that's one thing to make note of. And we're going to get, I'm jumping ahead a little bit, but the scriptures that we have in the Bible today, no, all that all that someone did is take the scriptures that were already being taught and widely distributed amongst the ancient people and put them together. Book of Enoch, Maccabees, these weren't texts that were being taught broadly, and they weren't texts that were accepted broadly. But they were they were referenced from time to time, just like we have in Jude. I like to consider it kind of an early commentary to scripture. You know, we have my Bible and a lot of other guys' Bibles in here is the Mc MacArthur study Bible. You have you have all the scriptures and then you have MacArthur's kind of commentary on the scripture. I kind of think of the Apocrypha in this way. Um fun to read, just don't take it as scripture. That's all. Uh could it could it be helpful? Sure. But it's not scripture. We just have to remember that. Um what I would say to to you about the Apocrypha. There are other books in the Apocrypha. Book of Enoch, uh, first and second Maccabees, or there's several in there. Um go ahead and read it, but just make sure not to um read it through the lens of it being inspired scripture from God. The Apocrypha was written between 300 BC and 100 AD. Is the common scholarship belief. All right. Myth number five. And this is another kind of another lengthy one. That Constantine control controlled the Bible to unify the empire. So this is a myth that I remember being taught in school. Uh, and I wonder how many of you have you guys were taught this in school. Were you guys taught that um that con you know we were all taught that Constantine was the first Christian emperor, right? And that he was the first one to legalize Christianity. But the reasoning behind what the reasoning behind the uh him doing it, that's the myth, right? And I remember being taught, even at our lovely Brookhaven Academy, which is a Christian school, and we love them. God bless them. But I remember being taught that the reason he did it was because he was getting pressured from the religious leaders at the time, that Christianity was on the rise and that it was fast becoming the religion of the people, and that you better convert and legalize this or you're gonna have an uprising on your hands. I remember being taught that in school. That's not even close to what happened, by the way. And so the myth is that Constantine manipulated Scripture for political unity. But here's the truth: Constantine legalized Christianity, but not determine, he did not determine the biblical canon. Christian texts were already in use across the empire. And so let's take, let's take a second to dispel this myth about political unity. The truth is that the prevailing religion in Rome at the time, and this was 312 AD, was traditional Roman paganism. All right. Christianity, I think, I didn't, I don't think that I wrote this down, but okay, I did. Christianity only accounted for 5 to 10% of the population at the time. And so in no way, shape, or form was Christianity the prevailing religion. It was your standard Roman paganism at the time. Uh polytheistic worship of gods like Jupiter, Mars, Venus, Apollo, so on. And how many of you guys have heard the story of Constantine's, the true story of Constantine's conversion? It's unbelievable. It's a heck of a lot more interesting than political pressure. So, according to Constantine, just before the Battle of the Melvin Bridge, he reported having a vision involving a common Christian symbol called the Shairo. I don't know if you guys ever seen it. It kind of looks like a P with a cross. But he reported having a vision involving this symbol, and he credited I didn't write this down, but this is what happened. He had this vision of the Shiro. He saw the Shiro in his vision. He then went and commanded his generals to emblazon that symbol on the shields of every soldier. And they won. Decidedly, they won the victory. And he credited Yahweh with that victory. And that vision and subsequent battle victory was all the evidence he needed to convert. Constantine converted in 312 and legalized Christianity in 313. He was baptized in 337 shortly before his death, which was actually common in those times. So, in short, Constantine's conversion and legal edict was in no way due to political pressure, but instead due to an encounter with the living God. Which I find that incredibly interesting. Because we're taught, it seems like we're taught something different. Myth number six. The Bible is just a collection of myths copied from pagan religions. I hear this one a lot, too. This myth states that biblical stories were plagiarized from older myths, aka Greek, pagan, and etc. But here's the truth. While the Bible shares cultural language with the time in which it was written, it often deliberately contrasts pagan myths rather than copying them. In other words, it's going to share some of the same language as some of those pagan myths because they were written in the same time frame. So they're people speaking the same language. But it deliberately contrasts them rather than copying them. Myth number seven, and we're getting close to done. The canon was decided by a close vote. This myth states that some books barely made it in the completed works by a slim margin, but the truth is most biblical books were broadly accepted early. Only a few were debated, and consensus developed gradually and not by razor-thin votes. We talked about that earlier. The vast majority of the scriptures were already, especially before the Council of Nicaea, this would have been maybe a couple of decades after Jesus ascended. Scriptures were already being widely circulated and taught in the early Christian church. Here's a good one. But the truth is that biblical texts were read publicly, they were copied widely, and they were translated early so that communities could hear and understand them. But the truth is that is that the texts were being spread like wildfire. They were spreading just just like the uh just like Christianity was, so were the scriptures. And we're gonna get into um whenever we whenever we deep dive the gospels themselves. We're gonna get into the reasoning behind the writing, and some of it is absolutely fascinating. Um especially John. I'll just I'm not gonna spoil it for you, but John's reasoning for writing was pretty extraordinary. So let's wrap this thing up. Uh, why is it important to know all of these common misconceptions? So you can know how to beat them. Right? This is just the beginning, though. This talk was designed to set your mind at ease about some of the things that you've heard and maybe some of the things you've struggled with. There's a ton of information we just covered, but we've only scratched the surface. And it's gonna be up to you guys to dig deeper and develop that hunger to soak up every everything you can about the scriptures because oftentimes people are gonna want you to provide proof, right? Um, how many conversations have you had with people where they they need you to prove that God exists? But we need to understand that there's a difference between proof and evidence, right? Any good lawyer is gonna tell you that it's only very rarely that a case is won by providing proof, a smoking gun, right? That's rare. Rather, an investigative case is almost always decided based on evidence. So the next four weeks, we're gonna look at the best case evidence that we have for the gospels. I want to read you some scripture and then we'll we'll close. And the scriptures are meant to encourage you in the fact that God that that that our Bibles that we have today is the inspired, God-breathed word of the living God. And here are some scriptures before we get to back that up. Old Testament, Proverbs 30, verse 5. Every word of God proves true. He is a shield to those who take refuge in him. The words of the Lord are pure words, like silver refined in a furnace on the ground, purified seven times. The sum of your word is truth, and every one of your righteous rules endures forever. Psalm 119 160. Sorry, I jumped ahead there. All scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work. Second Timothy three, sixteen and seventeen. Knowing this first of all, that no prophecy of Scripture comes from someone's own interpretation, for no prophecy was ever produced by the will of man, but men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit. Second Peter one twenty twenty-one. Sanctify them in truth, your word is truth. John seventeen seventeen. Matthew twenty four thirty five.