Bible Mistakes

Please note that due to software, not everything recorded here will be accurate.

Reader:

I am the Lord thy God, which hath brought thee out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage.  Thou shalt have no other gods before me.

Studio – John Dickson:

That’s the intro to the Bible’s famous Ten Commandments in the Book of Exodus.  No problem so far.  In 1631, a thousand copies of this particular translation, the King James Version, were published in England.  This was the period when individuals, not just churches, could own a full copy of the Bible for themselves.  People could read it at home, not just hear it on a Sunday.  About a year after publication, someone noticed something odd in the list of Ten Commandments here in the Book of Exodus.

Reader:

Honor thy father and thy mother.

Studio – John Dickson:

 So far, so good.

Reader: 

Thou shalt not kill.

Studio – John Dickson: 

Yep.  Then?

Reader:

Thou shalt commit adultery.

Studio – John Dickson:

Um, thou shalt commit adultery.  Hmm.  The missing “not” is kind of important.  This particular publication of the Bible, now known as the Wicked Bible or Sinner’s Bible, was printed by the royal printer Robert Barker, who also printed the first edition of the King James Bible 20 years earlier.  King Charles I was not amused.  He ordered every copy of this Bible to be burned.  He summoned Barker to the Star Chamber, the king’s court now infamous as a symbol of oppression, where he was fined 300 pounds, that’s about 60,000 US dollars, and stripped of his printer’s license.  It ruined the poor guy and he died in a debtor’s prison.  There was a rumor that the mistake was actually an act of sabotage by Barker’s rival, Bonham Norton.  One indication of sabotage is that there is another error, and it appears in the other rendition of the Ten Commandments in Deuteronomy 5.  Instead of reading, the Lord our God hath shewed us his greatness, this 1631 version reads, and please forgive me, hath shewed us his great arse.  Could it be a coincidence that both dramatic typos appear in the only two passages in the Bible that recount the Ten Commandments, probably the most read chapters of the Old Testament at the time?  Maybe, but it looks like something fishy was going on.  Either way, the Archbishop of Canterbury at the time, George Abbott, was not impressed.  

Reader:

I knew the time when great care was had about printing, the Bibles especially, good compositors, and the best correctors were gotten, being grave and learned men, the paper and the letter rare, and fair every way of the best.  But now the paper is naught, the composer’s boys, and the correctors unlearned.  

Studio – John Dickson::

Ten copies of the wicked Bible survived, and one came up for auction in 2015 in England.  It sold for over 31,000 pounds.  That’s 55,000 Aussie.  Well, Bible typos are one thing.  It’s sloppy work, but no reason to throw the baby out with the bathwater.  It doesn’t really reflect on the original text itself.  But what about the real mistakes in the Bible?  Not typos, but wholesale factual errors and inconsistencies that many people have pointed out over the years.  What do we do with those? I’m John Dickson, and this is Undeceptions.  

Undeceptions theme

 

CRAIG BLOMBERG:
The Gospels are the first four books in the collection of sacred scripture distinctive to Christians called the New Testament.

Studio – John Dickson:

That’s Craig Blomberg, distinguished professor of New Testament at Denver Seminary in the US and a prolific author.  He’s an expert in the historical critical dimensions of the New Testament.  He’s read, well, everything on the topic.  He’s confronted every conceivable question, and he’s written a book about it called The Historical Reliability of the New Testament.  I met him in Denver in the freezing cold on my last overseas trip before Australia went into full international lockdown.  I raised with him some of the common mistakes people find in the New Testament, starting with the Gospels.

CRAIG BLOMBERG:
They are called Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John after the names of the people that most of church history believed were the authors.  There is some debate about that in scholarship today, but I think good cases can still be made for them.

JOHN:
That’s right.  Before we even get into the facts and figures of the Gospels, there is a real question mark over who wrote them.  We’ll get to that in just a second, but first, who were Matthew, Mark, Luke and John meant to be?

CRAIG BLOMBERG:
Matthew, one of Jesus’ 12 followers, closest followers, often called the apostles, former tax collector.  Mark, companion of the apostle Peter, and also of Paul at the beginning of some of his missionary undertakings.  Luke, Paul’s beloved physician, to use the old-fashioned language of the authorized version, and to John, one of the inner core of the three followers of Jesus closest to him during his lifetime that he sometimes called his beloved disciple.

JOHN:
These are the guys some listeners might have met in Sunday school.  Many just take for granted that the book of Mark was indeed written by Mark.  Same for the gospels of Matthew, Luke, and John.  But plenty of scholars today argue that the gospels were written anonymously and that the names Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John were added much later to lend credibility to the documents.

CRAIG BLOMBERG:
It is very possible that what first circulated in scroll or parchment form, containing what today we call the verses, the chapters and verses of a book, it’s very possible that those circulated without a formal name of who wrote them until there were four of them and Christians began to value them distinctively from other documents and began to call them the gospel according to so-and-so to distinguish one from another.  And even that is debated, but it’s certainly possible.  But that’s a separate question from whenever they first put the names Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John on them. Did they have good reason to say, these are the people who wrote them?  And that I think you can still make a good defense for.

 

Studio – John Dickson:

 I totally agree with Blomberg.  The fact is, there is zero evidence that the names Matthew, Mark, Luke and John were added to originally anonymous works.  If that were the case, we’d expect there to be some variation in the titles in our earliest manuscripts, as people tried to fill in the blanks and assign credible names to anonymous writings.  But it’s totally uniform.  We don’t find any manuscripts of, say, Mark that have any other name than Mark.  Ditto for the other Gospels.  That’s a huge problem for the theory of anonymity.  The other thing that strikes me is that two of the Gospel writers, Mark and Luke, are not given prominent names at all.  If these Gospels were anonymous, why didn’t the early Christians give them more prominent names?  If they had the freedom to invent the author’s name, why didn’t they give the Gospel of Mark, I don’t know, the name Gospel of Peter, an actual eyewitness?  Why isn’t Luke something like the Gospel of Barnabas?  The very fact that these are such marginal names runs counter to any suggestion these authors were added to pump up the authority of these writings.

CRAIG BLOMBERG:
I would call the gospel’s theological biographies.  They’re not, first of all, history in the sense of purporting to talk about lots of characters during a distinctive period of time, but they’re biography in that they focus on one main character, and they do what all ancient biographies did, proceed very selectively, not attempting to give a comprehensive survey of a person’s entire life with what the biographers deemed most important.  And yes, they had an ideological set of convictions that they were trying to promote.  That was not distinct from anybody writing biography in the ancient world.  You didn’t write biography or history unless you had a reason to say this person was significant.  We ought to learn something from them.

JOHN:
OK, so did the ideological agenda of the Gospel writers lead them to make some sloppy mistakes?  There are lots of people who think so, and it starts right at the beginning of the Gospel.  In the second chapter of the Gospel of Luke, the famous Christmas story, there are some interesting details about the timing of Jesus’ birth.  

Reader:

In those days, Caesar Augustus issued a decree that a census should be taken of the entire Roman world.  This was the first census that took place while Quirinius was governor of Syria.  And everyone went to their own town to register.  So Joseph also went up from the town of Nazareth in Galilee to Judea, to Bethlehem, the town of David, because he belonged to the house and line of David.  He went there to register with Mary, who was pledged to be married to him and was expecting a child.  

Studio – John Dickson:

That child, of course, was Jesus.  The problem?  There’s no evidence of a census around the time Jesus was born.  There is evidence of a census in Quirinius’ time in AD 6.  That’s 10 years after Jesus was meant to be born.  Yes, Jesus was born around 4 BC, but that’s another story. But we know Quirinius had a census in AD 6, and that’s 10 years too late, if Jesus was born, you know, 4 BC or somewhere around there.  So this seems to be too many, just an out and out little historical error on the part of Luke.

CRAIG BLOMBERG:
Yeah, maybe, maybe not.  There are a couple of ways that that passage can be translated.  It’s Luke 2:2, speaking of the census that Augustus Caesar called for.  This was the first census that took place while Quirinius was governor of Syria.  Reading from the NIV, but the same would be true of several other modern translations. You can also read in a footnote. Or this census took place before Quirinius was governor of Syria.

 

Studio – John Dickson:

Craig goes into more detail about all this in his book.  It hinges on the meaning of the Greek adjective protos, which sometimes means first and sometimes means former, as in before.  Craig points out that the problem is solved if we translate the sentence not as, “this was the first census when Quirinius was governor of Syria,” but as “this was the census before Quirinius was governor of Syria.”  In this case, Luke would be distinguishing between the census at the time of Jesus’ birth and the much more famous census under Quirinius ten years later.  Everyone remembered the census of AD 6 because it set off a full-scale Jewish rebellion.  Luke is just saying, this is a census before that one.  That seems natural enough.

CRAIG BLOMBERG:
I happen to think a good case can be made for that as the better translation, in which case there’s no error.

Studio – John Dickson:

At the other end of the Gospels, there are also some problems.  People often point out that the risen Jesus appears to the disciples only in Jerusalem, in Luke’s Gospel, and only in Galilee, a hundred kilometres north, in Matthew’s Gospel.  Many feel this is a real historical contradiction.

CRAIG BLOMBERG:
Those aren’t hills that I die on.  I respect people who say the basic story is trustworthy.  Some of these details on the fringes, there may be issues with them.  But that’s not actually the position that I hold.  A contradiction in my mind is when a writer says Jesus appeared only in Jerusalem and another writer says Jesus appeared only in Galilee.  We don’t get that.  We just get narratives that are chosen from presumably a larger collection, which we know of from the Gospel of John, that you didn’t mention, that has Jesus appearing in both Jerusalem and Galilee.

Studio – John Dickson:

Anyway, there’s much more to say about the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke, the so-called synoptic Gospels, the Gospels that are viewed together.  And actually, back in season one, we had a cracking conversation with Peter Williams from Cambridge,  where he outlines numerous overlooked details in the Gospels which confirm their historical worth.  It was season one, episode seven, producer Kaley assures me.  And it’s called Gospel Truth.  Go check that out.  But I wanted to ask Craig about the Gospel of John, which everyone acknowledges is very different from the synoptic Gospels. 

JOHN:
There aren’t any parables in John.  Well, hardly any.  There’s hardly any talk of the kingdom of God, which appears everywhere in the synoptic gospels.  And it goes on and on.  Instead, we get these long monologues from the Jesus in John’s gospel, or dialogues between Jesus and, say, the Jerusalem leaders, or a woman in Samaria, stuff that we don’t get in the other gospels.  John also offers up the most dramatic miracle of all, the raising to life of Jesus’ friend Lazarus.  It’s only in John.  None of the other gospels thinks to mention it.  So for many years, decades, historians, New Testament historians have sort of almost dismissed John.  And you’ve written at length on this.  You see it very differently.  You think you do hear the register of Jesus in John.

CRAIG BLOMBERG:
And the tide is starting to turn in the Society of Biblical Literature, which is by no means a Christian organization, but has people who teach on the Bible from every perspective imaginable throughout the world.  There has been for more than a dozen years now a seminar called John, Jesus, and History, that has led to the publication of three large volumes of papers with three more in the works.  And they are saying, despite the obvious truth that John or whoever wrote the fourth gospel wrote in his own style, a lot of information that was not there in the first three, probably precisely because it was not there in the first three, probably a generation later than the first three, to the Christian community in and around Ephesus that had unique challenges in its day.  Nevertheless, there are, as you start comparing in passage after passage, in line after line, at least conceptual, if not verbal, parallels to material in the first three gospels.  It’s one thing to read it rapidly, especially if you’ve just read Matthew, Mark, and Luke.  And of course, that’s kind of cheating because you sort of read the same story three times.  It’s not really more than one independent witness.  And then you go to John and you go, yeah, this is really different.  But how different is it?  And if you take it apart, as I say almost line by line, it’s amazing how many of the thoughts, even if the wording at times is John’s own paraphrase, matches what you find earlier on.

Studio – John Dickson:

You should check out Craig’s book for the details on all this.  But other important scholars have written similar things about John, the great Martin Hangel from Germany, for example, and Richard Bauckham from Cambridge, who, by the way, is coming up in a later episode. On the raising of Lazarus in particular, Craig makes the point that it’s no big deal that it only appears in John’s Gospel.  For one thing, the other Gospels only narrate one visit of Jesus to Jerusalem.  They seem to structure things so that most of the ministry we read about is set in Galilee, and then Jesus makes one big trip to the south, to Jerusalem, where he dies.  There is, by definition, lots of stuff they had to leave out in order to maintain this dramatic outline.  But Jesus certainly will have visited Jerusalem every year, just like other faithful Jews in the period.  And John reflects that historical reality.  In John, we find Jesus going to Jerusalem several times, and it’s on the second occasion that this incident with Lazarus is said to occur.  That would interrupt the outline of Jesus’ ministry in the synoptic gospels, but it doesn’t interrupt the way John tells the story.  In any case, Blomberg points out the other gospels do narrate the resurrections of two other individuals, Jairus’ daughter in Mark and the son of the widow of Nain in Luke.  Quantitatively, the raising of Lazarus is more spectacular, Blomberg says.  Lazarus is dead for longer, and there’s more space in the Gospel of John given to this story.  But qualitatively, they’re pretty much the same.  All four Gospels have Jesus raising someone from the dead.  We might dismiss these stories, but there’s no reason to find the differences between the Gospels suspicious at this point.  

One of the ways scholars like Blomberg and others argue for the reliability of the Gospels is the accuracy of incidental historical details, like the names of obscure villages or towns, or the way people’s names in the Gospels match the relative frequency of those names in inscriptions and other documents from that time and place.  If the Gospel writers get such small, unconscious details correct, it speaks well of their general ability to record larger historical facts.  

So this next one is awkward.  After the Gospels comes the Book of Acts, the account written by Luke of the 30 years of the early church after Jesus.  The book narrates the journeys of the Apostles, especially the Apostle Paul, throughout the Mediterranean, declaring the message of Christ.  And there’s a reference to an insurrection led by a man named Theudas.  Luke records a speech of a Jewish leader named Gamaliel, whom we know about from other sources, by the way. In the speech, Luke’s Gamaliel basically says, let’s wait and see what happens to the Christian movement.  If it’s from God, we can’t fight it.  If it’s just another human revolutionary movement, it’ll soon disappear, just like the one led by Theudas, he says.  It disappeared without a trace.  Maybe Christianity will as well.  But the reference to Theudas is awkward, because Acts sets this speech of Gamaliel in the 30s AD.  But according to a non-Christian record, the revolt of Theudas happened 10 years later, in the 40s.  Aha, we’ve finally got Luke, surely.

CRAIG BLOMBERG:
Well, we know that because we have one testimony from a late first century Jewish historian by the name of Josephus, who is not a bad historian, but on average, not necessarily any better or any worse than Luke.  So it’s one versus one.  But let’s assume that we give both writers the benefit of the doubt because they have a fairly good track record.  We also know from Josephus that there are about a dozen different rebellions of various sizes and shapes between the first by Judas the Galilean in AD 6 and the final huge revolt against Rome that led to the Jewish people being massacred and Jerusalem being destroyed.  And Josephus is very selective in what he reports.  Jews and especially the wing that eventually came to be known as the zealots were fed up with Roman rule.  If they had had the manpower, the horsepower, the artillery power, they would have knocked them out any chance they could, but they didn’t.  But sporadic revolts came up.  Theudas is actually a shortened form of one or more than one longer names, perhaps Thaddeus, perhaps Theodorus.  And interestingly, those names were pretty common in ancient Judaism.  Could more than one person with that name have led some kind of revolt?  It’s interesting that it’s not a Christian writer to whom that observation is attributed.  It’s the Jewish rabbi Gamaliel and Gamaliel completely accurately talks about the revolt under Judas the Galilean and puts it at the right time period.  So maybe he got this other one right too.  And it’s not quite the same thing that Josephus is talking about.

Studio – John Dickson:

So how are you doing?  Producer Kaley tells me that when she was helping put this episode together, she had to go and buy Professor Blomberg’s book because she couldn’t quite believe that she’d been a Christian for such a long time and never realized that there was such a back and forth over the mistakes and errors in the Bible, the Bible that she loved so much.  She’s sitting right here in the studio.  How are you feeling, Kaley?  

Producer Kaley:

I felt shaken. I didn’t like it.

Studio – John Dickson:

Uh, glad to see that I’ve helped you along the way.  Whether you’re a doubter or a believer or somewhere in between, maybe you’re feeling a little bit like Kaley.  In which case, you should definitely get your hands on Blomberg’s book.  We’ll put a link in the show notes.  

But we’re not done. There’s more stress for Kaley coming up.  After the Gospels and Acts in the New Testament come the letters of Paul.  He’s certainly one of the most important figures in early Christianity.  Some say he invented or perverted the whole show.  Some people raise genuine concerns about his writings, and we’re going to get stuck into those.

Break

Richard Carrier Tape:

“But in Paul there’s no life of Jesus.  It’s just not there.  The whole thing is just shelled out.”

Studio – John Dickson:

That’s American atheist Richard Carrier, who’s published a few books arguing Jesus never even lived.  An important part of his theory is that the Apostle Paul, whose letters make up a fair bit of the New Testament, didn’t know anything about a historical Jesus.  He only believed in a mystical Jesus, one who lives in a kind of angelic plane, not in the flesh and blood history of Galilee and Judea in the first century.  He suggests Paul doesn’t mention a single historical detail of Jesus’ life.  All we’ve got are descriptions of a heavenly realm.  And this heavenly Jesus, he says, was later historicized, that is, turned into historical sources 10, 20, 30 years after Paul.  Given that Paul’s letters are the earliest evidence in the New Testament, we have to conclude that the Jesus of the Gospels is a late fiction.  That’s the argument anyway.

Richard Carrier Tape:

“So what’s going on here?  Like, why does Paul not know any of the stories?  Why does Paul not know any of the parables?  When Paul wants to teach something, he has these revelations.  He says, o’h, I have a revelation from Jesus, and this is what he said’. He doesn’t have a collection of sayings.  He doesn’t have stories to tell about Jesus.  Oh, you remember, you should do what Jesus did.  You remember when he did this thing?  No, that kind of, like, he doesn’t use analogies from Jesus’s life.  You know, it’s like none of the things that you would expect.  And so this is one of the principal bases, I think, of arguing that maybe there wasn’t a Jesus.  Maybe this is stuff that all went on as they understood it celestially, and it was only known by Revelation, only known by secret messages in Scripture.”

Studio – John Dickson:

Now we go to Paul.  And there are many problems with Paul in the minds of many.  What about the thesis that’s become, or has gained a little bit of traction amongst a small set, that really Paul didn’t know a historical Jesus, or not just didn’t know, didn’t believe in a historical Jesus, he only had a mystical Jesus, he had a heavenly Jesus, a Jesus that, you know, in the higher realms had died in some way like a dying and rising God, and that this spiritual mystical Jesus in the 40s and 50s when Paul’s around becomes the historicized Jesus of the later Gospels?

CRAIG BLOMBERG:
I’m glad you threw out the dates because it is important to realize that the majority of Paul’s letters were probably written in the 50s.  Jesus’ crucifixion is usually dated to 30.  Some would put it in 33.  But even the earliest plausible dates for the gospels are not until the 60s.  So when Paul, as he does throughout his letters, particularly in Romans, particularly in first Corinthians, particularly in first and second Thessalonians talks about what the Lord said, and he uses that language repeatedly, is this something he got from one of his so-called mystical revelations?  What’s interesting is that every time he uses that language, you can find in our written gospels, something that Jesus, when he walked on earth, taught.  It sounds like Paul actually knows a tradition of what the historical Jesus taught.  It can be as long as something like the words of institution for Holy Communion in 1 Corinthians 11.  It can be a brief mention to Jesus coming like a thief in the night.  What early Christian would liken Christ to a burglar?  Which of course is not the point.  It’s the surprise.  And unless Jesus had provided the precedent for that, which he did in a parable in the gospels to teaching on divorce, to teaching about paying taxes, to teaching about loving your enemy, nobody was going around making that kind of thing up.  That was very unique to Jesus.  And yet Paul quotes it in Romans.  Sounds like he knew a lot more about Jesus than some people give him credit for.

JOHN:
But why isn’t it the other way around that the gospel saw this teaching, the gospel writers or later Christians saw this teaching Paul had mystically invented or discovered, and they historicized it?  And so…

Studio – John Dickson:

Let me just interrupt myself for a second, because I think it’s probably useful to run through the dates again so that we get this argument clear in our heads.  Historians agree that Paul’s letters were written in the 50s AD.  That’s 20 or so years after Jesus’ death.  They usually date the Gospels to the 60s for Mark, 70s and 80s for Luke and Matthew, and the 90s for John.  Paul’s letters then were definitely the first written evidence.  What I’m asking, Professor Blomberg, is what Richard Carrier asks us to believe.  Isn’t Paul the true founder of Christianity?  The one who invented Jesus, or maybe had some kind of vision of a heavenly Jesus, and then the Gospel writers later took these visions and put them into a historical narrative of first century Judea?

CRAIG BLOMBERG:
Well, if you’re thinking of Carrier, then you have to go back and say, where did these ideas come to Paul from, since Carrier doesn’t believe in any kind of supernatural.  He actually sees them derived from Greco-Roman religious beliefs.  Never mind the fact that in virtually every other verse in some parts of Paul’s letters, he is steeped in Old Testament and Jewish imagery and language.  Derivation from the Greco-Roman source is the most improbable option in that light.  All it does is keep throwing Carrier back on the question of where did this come from and where did this come from, and he ends up in a quagmire without being able to explain it.  But the other answer I think you hinted at earlier on when you talked about this is not an age of the internet.  It’s not as if when the gospel writers wrote in some cases within just years of some of Paul’s major letters that they had necessarily ever seen those letters of Paul.  They’re doing their own thing independently sometimes in different parts of the empire.  It’s much less likely that they got material from Paul than that Paul at an earlier date.  So whatever you do with the gospels, you still have to account for the fact that before there was any gospel written, Paul is making striking claims about the person and life of Jesus that cannot be accounted for in purely humanistic or rationalistic terms.

 

Studio – John Dickson:

Let’s press pause.  I’ve got a five-minute Jesus for you.  At first glance, Paul’s letters are not very exciting sources for the history of Jesus.  You’ll search in vain for anything like a narrative description of Jesus’ birth, teachings, healings, or even the death and resurrection.  Buoyed by this observation, some dismiss or simply overlook the letters of Paul as sources of information for the history of Jesus. But on closer inspection, Paul’s letters turn out to be first-rate witnesses for the earthly Jesus.  Donald Harmon Atkinson, professor of history at Queen’s University in Canada, has even called Paul’s letters a skeleton key to understanding the historical Jesus, a kind of master key that unlocks the whole show.  In his fascinating Saint Paul, A Skeleton Key to the Historical Jesus, published by Oxford University Press, Atkinson, who’s no Christian believer, made the case that Paul’s letters have remarkable proximity to the first years after Jesus’ death.  As a man personally acquainted with the first disciples, including Jesus’ brothers, Paul is about as close to the action as we could hope for in a primary source from antiquity.  The value of Paul’s letters in addition to their early date lies not in any narration of Jesus’ life, but in his numerous passing references to things Jesus said and did while he’s discussing various other topics.  So when talking about marriage, for instance, Paul recalls what Christ said about marital fidelity.  When rebuking the rich for their drunken feasts, he reminds them of the sober significance of Jesus’ Last Supper.  On the night he was betrayed, Jesus took bread and all that.  When talking about supporting travelling missionaries, he cites something Jesus actually commanded on the topic.  And it’s perfectly clear in all of these cases that Paul expects his readers in the 50s to know what he’s talking about already.  The reason he can mention these things so fleetingly is that the substance of them was already fully known.  

Paul’s seemingly slender evidence turns out to be highly significant because it indicates that what is mentioned in brief in his letters must already have been talked about in detail when Paul first taught his converts face to face.  This virtually rules out any idea that Paul only knew of a visionary or heavenly Jesus.  Professor Atkinson insists, to quote him, Saul, that’s Paul, did indeed know his life of the historical Yeshua.  He had a full awareness of the miracle stories, sayings, and of various folk beliefs about Yeshua, most of which are now forever lost.  He taught the most important stories and sayings to his own followers.  

Atkinson is no defender of the Christian faith.  He’s actually skeptical about loads of things, including whether or not Paul and Jesus agreed on certain matters.  But that Paul provides compelling historical evidence for an actual Jesus is perfectly clear, Atkinson insists.  

So let’s imagine we had no other sources for Jesus.  What information would we glean about the historical life of Jesus just from Paul’s letters?  Donald Atkinson lists about 15 historical details unassumingly tucked away in Paul’s passing remarks.  Other scholars detect more than 20 pieces of historical data.  Here’s a widely accepted list: 

• The name Jesus, 1Thessalonians 1:1, and many other paragraphs.  
• Jesus was born of a Jewish woman and was therefore a Jew himself, Galatians 4:4, from the lineage of King David, Romans 1:3.  
• Jesus earthly mission focused exclusively on the Jewish people, Romans 5.  
• Jesus had several brothers, 1 Corinthians 9:5, one of whom was named James, Galatians 1:19.  
• Jesus appointed a special group of 12 apostles, 1 Corinthians 15:9, two of whom acquired special status as pillars, Cephas, James and John, Galatians 2:9.  
• Jesus was called the Christ or Messiah, Romans 9:35.  
• Jesus granted his missionaries the right to material support from fellow believers, 1 Corinthians 9:14.  
• Jesus poured on marriage, 1 Corinthians 7:10.  
• He summarized his law in terms of compassion, Galatians 6:2, and declared that he would return in glory, 1 Thessalonians 4:15.  
• Jesus had a special last meal with his disciples which involved red and wine, 1 Corinthians 11:23-25.  
• Jesus was betrayed by one of his companions on the night of the last supper, 1 Corinthians 11:3.  
• Jesus was executed by crucifixion, Philippians 2:8.  
• Jesus was buried in the tomb, 1 Corinthians 15:4, rather than left to the elements as convicted criminals often were.  
• Jesus was raised to life, Romans 1:4.  
• The risen Jesus appeared to many, including to Peter, or Cephas, and his brother James, and Paul himself,  1 Corinthians 15:5-6.  

Paul’s letters were not intended to inform readers about the life of Jesus, as the Gospels obviously were.  Paul just assumes his readers already know all this stuff.  And that is the significant historical point.  The narrative of Jesus was so widely known amongst Christians by the middle of the first century that Paul can allude to all of these details just listed, confident that his readers knew exactly what he was talking about.  The passing nature of those references and the occasional nature of his letters means that in reality this list must be the tip of the iceberg of what Paul and his converts already knew about the figure of Jesus. Paul’s letters are a very different kind of literature from that of the Gospels, but the same historical life lies behind both.  You can press play now.  

Studio – John Dickson:

There is also debate about whether some of the letters attributed to Paul were actually written by Paul at all.  Scholars like Bart Ehrman and many others believe that Ephesians, Colossians, 2 Thessalonians, 1 and 2 Timothy, and Titus are actually pseudonymous, that is, written under the false name of Paul.  The majority view in scholarship today is that only seven of the 13 Pauline epistles in the Bible were written by Paul.  That’s Romans 1 and 2 Corinthians, Galatians, Philippians, Philemon, and 1 Thessalonians.  Are we reading letters in the Bible that are actually forgeries?

CRAIG BLOMBERG:
In my experience, very few scholars will come right out and call them forgeries.  It’s true that some prominent ones have, like Bart Ehrman.  Most would say this was an accepted literary device in the first century, just as today we publish biographies or autobiographies of celebrities, of sports stars, and if the publishers are honest enough to not hide it in the fine print it will be my life and times by famous person as told to or they’ll be a name of a ghost writer present not intended to deceive anyone.  If that’s what’s going on in some of the letters, that seems to me to be the much more likely option than that anyone was attempting a deceitful forgery.  However, even then there are good arguments that another group of scholars has made to say, Yes, some of these letters emphasize some different topics, maybe have a different style of writing.  People’s styles are versatile, they’re not uniform.  Everything that is distinctive to some of those letters can be found at least in small measure  in the undisputed letters of Paul.  And on top of that, it was common in the ancient world to dictate a letter to a scribe, and sometimes to give the scribe the freedom to put your thoughts in his own words.  When you add up all of those factors, it’s much more difficult to say this has to be the product of somebody other than Paul.

Studio – John Dickson:

Actually, when I was writing my PhD, I played along with this standard critical view of Paul’s letters.  My work on the origins of Christianity was done in a secular ancient history department in a major state university.  And there’s no way you can just cite, say, Ephesians as evidence of what Paul said.  Historians will happily accept quotations from 1 Corinthians as statements from Paul, but not from Ephesians, or 1 Timothy, and so on.  I really wrestled with this because, frankly, I think the majority opinion is just wrong.  But I wanted to do well, so I tried to fly under the radar, the way I approached it, without completely defying my own convictions,  was to speak of primary and secondary evidence.  I cited the undisputed letters of Paul as primary evidence, that is, direct evidence of his views, and the disputed letters as secondary evidence, that is, as supplemental evidence of Paul’s views when that evidence simply supports something we get from one of the primary epistles.  

To be honest, I hated playing the game.  Not so much because I felt spiritually unfaithful.  I know plenty of faithful Christians who accept the standard scholarly view.  But because I genuinely think the mainstream opinion is pretty dumb.  For one thing, 13 letters just isn’t enough of a sample to make any firm statistical judgments about Paul’s writing style, which is the main argument against some of Paul’s letters.  If we had 100 letters, as we do for, say, the Roman governor Pliny, that would definitely be enough to find the outliers, letters whose grammar and syntax don’t read like Pliny.  But 13 letters written across a 12 to 15 year period, I just don’t buy it.  If you took just 13 of my long emails to different recipients since, say, 2008, you’d find words and expressions and arguments in some of them that never appear in others.  Any statistical analysis you tried to run about Dixon’s vocabulary and style would have a massive margin for error because of the small sample size.  And that’s before we even think about the different contexts of Paul’s letters.  

Mainstream scholars are most confident that the so-called pastoral epistles are not from Paul.  These are the letters 1 and 2 Timothy and Titus, and they’re called pastoral epistles because they’re written not to congregations like Romans or 1 and 2 Corinthians, but to other pastors, Paul’s proteges in formal ministry.  And there is no way Paul writes in the same style about the same things to pastors as he does to lay people in a congregation.  If scholars compared one of my long emails to a new Christian or not yet Christian with a detailed email to a fellow scholar or minister, the differences would be huge.  The statistics would confirm two different authors, but they’d be wrong.  So no, I’m sticking with all 13 of Paul’s epistles as Paul’s epistles.  They are documents from the hand or dictation of the Apostle Paul, and they are reliable early sources for the study of Jesus and the first Christians.  

But that word, reliable, is an interesting one.  Does it mean proven?  Does it mean without fault?  Does it mean vaguely trustworthy?  Since Professor Blomberg put that word in the title of his book, I thought I’d ask him about it.

CRAIG BLOMBERG:
It’s a term that I’ve deliberately chosen, short of some full-orbed claim to be completely without error.  I don’t think that’s the type of thing a historian can ever prove about anything.  That’s the type of thing that belongs in a confession of faith if you believe something is God-originated.  But it is also a word that suggests in the narrative portions that purport to give historical facts by the standards of the day.  And that is a crucial statement to make.  We live in such a highly precise world that our standards of precision would blow the minds of ancient people, where a sundial was the most precise timekeeping device.  By the standards of the day, this was a book that when it claimed it was recording things that happened, they actually happened.  And when Jesus or other people are said to have said things, this is a world without quotation marks or any felt need for them.  It may not be a verbatim transcript, but it’s faithful to the intention of the original speaker.

Studio – John Dickson:

Craig Blomberg is definitely what you’d call an expert in the alleged mistakes of the New Testament.  None of those mistakes trouble his Christian faith at all.  So I wanted to ask him, as politely as I could, if this is all just confirmation bias.  What do you say to those who might describe your work as ultimately driven by theology rather than history?  You want the Bible to be true and so you’ve found intellectually plausible ways to claim that it might be.

CRAIG BLOMBERG:
Well, the first way you put it, I was tempted to agree with you.  The second way I would reject.  I did not come from an evangelical Christian upbringing.  I came to faith in a context that did not particularly teach that the Bible was absolutely infallible and inerrant, although it had a high respect for Scripture.  I came to the convictions that I held on the basis of prolonged study.  So, in that sense, what you said I would reject.  However, the nugget of truth in it is that after time most people live with what D.A. Carson once called functional non-negotiables, which is a big fancy way of saying,  “These are things that I stake my life on, I live by, I believe in them.”  I could change my mind, but it would take a complete overturning of my way of thinking, a lot of evidence for me to do that.  And if we’re open and honest people, that should always be a possibility, but it should take some pretty strong evidence.  If you substitute the word ideology for theology, I submit to you that most skeptics and atheists, especially the more outspoken one, are every bit as ideologically driven.  And I could just rephrase what you said.  They don’t want the Bible to be true and will look for every way to bolster their presuppositions and preunderstandings.  So, I think we have to acknowledge that we all come with those, but we all have to be willing to hold them at least lightly enough that under some circumstances they could be overthrown.

Studio – John Dickson:

So Professor Blomberg is at least theoretically open to circumstances changing, to some dramatic discovery confirming a mistake in his beloved New Testament.  But we’re certainly not there yet.  And I agree.  

Undeceptions theme