Please note that due to software, not everything recorded in this transcript will be accurate.

Old Papers

Studio – John Dickson:

It’s the turn of the Christian era. Augustus is emperor, Jesus is an infant, and a Roman soldier stationed in Alexandria in northern Egypt, the Wild West of the Roman Empire, writes to his wife.

Hilarion to Alice, many greetings. Know that I am still in Alexandria. Do not worry. I ask you and entreat you, take care of our child.If I receive my pay soon, I will send it up to you. If perhaps you bear a child in my absence, and it is male. Let it be. If it is female, throw it out. 17th June, 29th year of Caesar.

This brief, shocking letter is one of thousands of scraps of paper, that’s papyrus, found throughout this region. They’re now stored in museums and universities around the world. Letters like this provide a powerful window into ancient life, its troubles, its personalities, and its ethics. A few years after Hilarion and Alice, a group of people with a very different view of life would arrive in Alexandria with a message that challenged many of the assumptions we find in the letter. The eternal power of Rome, the divinity of Caesar, and the value of individuals, especially girls. These Christians, as they had come to be called, left their own writings in the sands of Egypt. And without doubt, the most important of these is 86 pages of the letters of the Apostle Paul, author of much of the New Testament. Hilarion’s letter is catalogued as P. OXY 4744. Paul’s letters are known simply as P. 46. And they are among the most precious artefacts of ancient history. And today, we get to play with them. I’m John Dickson, and this is Underceptions.

Undeceptions theme

Every week, we’ll be exploring some aspect of life, faith, history, culture, or ethics. That is either much misunderstood or mostly forgotten. With the help of people who know what they’re talking about, we’ll be trying to un deceive ourselves and let the truth out. Today in our first episode, we are going back almost to the beginning to about as close to the writing of the New Testament.

Brendan Haug:
This is our environmental room, affectionately known as the vault.

John Dickson:
That’s a nice thick vault.

Brendan Haug:
This cabinet here is where we keep all of the, uh, leaves of

John Dickson:
Okay, so this is a locker within a locker within a locker. Exactly, a locker within a

Brendan Haug:
Locker within a locker. Alright, we’re looking for, let me get myself a pen.

John Dickson:
Yeah, I’m a bit of a kid in a candy store here, surrounded by bits of paper. Two millennia old. Theta

Brendan Haug:
Sigma, the first and last letters of the word are usually what is written, and then that abbreviation of the sacred word, or the sacred name, is indicated with a line over the end of it.

Studio – John Dickson:

Brendan Haug is the head archivist of the papyrology collection at the University of Michigan. I’ve handled ancient manuscripts before, but this was special. Normally I’m under really strict time conditions because I’m filming some docker or whatever, and I’m trying to say my lines to camera while absorbing the significance of these precious things in my hand. But here at UM, as they call the University of Michigan, It’s kind of chilled. After we recorded the interview, Brendan just let me sit there with these pages for an hour or so by myself, reading the lines, noticing scribble, scribbles, words underlined or overlined, as the case was in the ancient world. And this is our earliest copy of Paul’s letters to Rome, Ephesus, Galatia. and his second letter to Corinth. Each page, just so you can picture it, is about, uh, half an A4, or for US listeners, letter style. And it’s got like, uh, 23 to 26 lines per page, just depending on what the scribe wants to do at the time. And it’s all on papyrus. And we get the word paper from papyrus. This is strips of papyrus plant, uh, laid in vertical lines, and then you get a second layer and cross it horizontally, and then you press the whole thing down, uh, you dry it out, then you cut it to size. It’s heaps cheaper than what’s called parchment. This is pages made of stretched, dried animal skin. Later biblical texts, when Christianity was a little more prominent, a little wealthier, are written on parchment, but P46 is way earlier. Now I didn’t grow up in a Christian home, uh, nor one that did any history actually, and so I just assumed that someone wrote something down in the Bible or some other ancient document in some funny dead language, and then someone else came along a little while later and copied it out in some other funny dead language, and by the time it gets to us in You know, who knows if what you’re reading today Uh, is what was first composed. It’s a really common view, and it sort of makes sense. But P46 gives us a chance to test the idea.

John Dickson:
Is this the guy in question here? Yes, indeed. Excellent. Oh, dear oh dear. Lead the way, sir.

Brendan Haug:
Very well. So we’re a little bit different than some collections. Um, we still put some restrictions in the sense that, uh, I don’t want you to, you know, eat, drink, or smoke while using these. You know, no licking them, no putting them in your mouth. Uh, you’d be surprised what people would do if you don’t tell them.

Studio – John Dickson:

It’s remarkable that anyone can just make an appointment at the University of Michigan papyrology department and come and have a look at these. Brendan actually told me to tell you all to drop on by, preferably email him first. He’s easy to find online. But how on earth did the oldest copy of Paul’s letters end up here in the Midwest of the US?

Brendan Haug:
The collection here at the University of Michigan comprises, we estimate, anywhere between 15, 000 fragments, that is, you know, separate pieces of papyrus. We’ve never counted them all because that’s a task that’s beyond us, uh, at the moment. Um, but, uh, those fragments are grouped under a little bit over 7, 100 inventory numbers. And really they span, um, Uh, many centuries of, uh, Egyptian history. But in between that, that sort of, um, uh, multi century span between the Ptolemaic Hellenistic period, the Greek ruled period of Egypt, to the, uh, Roman period of Egypt, and into the late Antique period, that’s where the strength of our collection, uh, lies. Greek documentation produced by, uh, the central administration or by the demands of the central administration made on everyday people. Really anything, anything that you can imagine committing to paper today, uh, you’ll find some rough analog in the papyrus. So everything from government documentation down to, you know, an invitation to your kid’s birthday party.

John Dickson:
Have you got a love letter?

Brendan Haug:
I don’t believe we have any love letters. We have some very, uh, Unhappy letters between a husband and his wife, uh, but no love letters, I’m afraid. Not that I’ve come across. I think I have a love charm. I have a love, uh, spell. So the, uh, I, I really do as well.

Studio – John Dickson:

The collection at the University of Michigan was gathered in the early 20th century. This was a time when trade in historical artifacts was rife. And Brendan tells me that UM wanted to bring a little bit of the Mediterranean world to their students, many of whom would never. Get out of the Midwest and have a chance to travel to Europe. So in the early 1930s, the university had a large budget to acquire antiquities, including papyri. So when 30 leaves of Paul’s letters turned up on the market, they jumped.

Brendan Haug:
The, uh, leaves of Paul, uh, are part of Michigan’s leaves of Paul are part of our larger. uh, corpus of biblical papyri that are known by the collector who purchased the vast majority of them, uh, Sir Alfred Chester Beatty, a copper mining tycoon, Irish American, later naturalized citizen of Ireland, uh, who was a major collector of antiquities. These, uh, this portion of, uh, the so called Chester Beatty Biblical Papyri came onto the antiquities market in the very early 30s. Uh, antiquities dealers didn’t usually put high value, sort of high demand pieces like this, that sure to attract major attention. They wouldn’t put them all out at once. They would, uh, let them out, let them go by dribs and drabs to, you know, drum up interest, uh, to drum up competition, increase the price, and so forth. And we acquired these leaves, uh, from the dealer at some rather extravagant price, some multiple thousands of dollars in 1932 dollars, which is, uh, uh, quite an outstanding, uh, sum. We were Unable to secure the remaining 56 leaves that survived, those were purchased by Alfred Chester Beatty. We negotiated with him in the attempt to get the entire corpus. He, of course, understandably refused to part with his leaves. So those two portions of this ancient codex remain separated, the Chester Beatty Library. Sorry,

Studio – John Dickson:

Just a couple of things to clear up here. Who was Paul? Paul, he used to be called Saul, he’s the one time persecutor of the early Christians. But in the year or so after Jesus death, he’s making it his personal mission to get rid of Christians. And he has the original Damascus Road experience. We get that phrase from him traveling to Damascus to persecute Christians. It’s beautiful. The year 31 or maybe 32. We have his own eyewitness testimony in the letter to the Galatians, which is one of the letters I got to play with at the University of Michigan, and he, he basically says that Jesus appeared to him. The risen Jesus appeared to him, and you can make what you like of that, but it changed his life from that time until his death, maybe 30 years later, he traveled throughout the Roman world, not just. Preaching like a modern evangelist who moves on to the next place, you know, the next day he would preach, gather disciples into little clubs, which probably looked more like schools to onlookers. And in these schools, he stayed with them for months, sometimes a couple of years training them up. And then he’d go to the next town and stay in touch with his little schools, what we call churches by letter. And in the new Testament today, we have a bunch of these letters. Some of them are the manuscripts we have in front of us. So it’s kind of sad. You’ve got 56 leaves over there in Dublin, 30 here, uh, that seems a tragedy.

Brendan Haug:
It is unfortunate. It’s the reality of, uh, the antiquities market. So that’s the reason why, um, institutions like ours no longer purchase. But it, because it encourages, um, the, you know, dissolution of things that, should be kept together. They get scattered to the winds. Uh, in fact, uh, our earliest papyrus we have in our entire collection, a fragment of the Book of the Dead, uh, another portion ripped off of that is in Germany, because, uh, an Egyptian, uh, dealer realized that if he had one piece, he can sell it to one person. If he cuts it in half, he has two, he can sell it to two. So the antiquities, uh, market encourages that sort of, um, uh, separation of material. It’s understandable. And

John Dickson:
Sadly, somewhere in there They lost some pages. So we can tell that this was originally 104 pages. So, uh, I’m pretty sure 30 plus 56 is 86. There’s some missing.

Brendan Haug:
There are some missing pages. And that’s the question. So either they never survived at all, uh, or they were destroyed at some point, either knowingly or unwittingly by people who had acquired this codex from, well, wherever it came from, we, we simply don’t know, where it came from.

Studio – John Dickson:

A codex is just, uh, a book rather than a scroll. Uh, the pages were folded in half, forming four panels like you might do with a modern A4 page. And then the pages were sewn together to create what we just take for granted now as a book. Well, that’s a codex. And the amazing thing is Christians were amongst the first to use this technology anywhere in history. By the 400s, pretty much everyone’s trying to use the codex form, but the Christians were doing it in the 200s and maybe even earlier. We don’t know why. Uh, I know that may sound, you know, bizarre, because Christians sometimes are You know, a little behind technology, uh, it, it could just be random. Um, some Christians uncle in Alexandria might’ve been experimenting with this new method and the Christians just adopted the local innovation. I call this the uncle Bob thesis. Uh, but perhaps more likely, uh, the codex was really easy to carry much easier. Then carrying bags full of scrolls rolled up. And one thing we know about the early Christians is that they traveled. And wherever they went on their missionary journeys, they took their New Testament in a little book that they can put under their arm. Back to our little codex, what’s the date of this thing?

Brendan Haug:
That’s a tough question. So, uh, Papyrologists can date documentary text. By documents, I mean anything that isn’t what we would call broadly literature. That’s because a document, uh, for the most part, it has some sort of official life. Uh, and it will have Like it’ll

John Dickson:
Say 50 years.

Brendan Haug:
Yeah, it’ll say, it’ll have a date on it. If it’s a tax receipt, it’ll tell you often, you know, the month, the day, uh, and especially the year. Um, Private letters don’t have that. Those are still documents, uh, so those are a little bit more difficult. But by and large, we have such a mass of dated documentary texts that even a documentary text that doesn’t have a date or the date wasn’t preserved because the text is damaged, we can look at the handwriting and a trained papyrologist can estimate to, within a century, sometimes within 50 years of where that document fits, and they are generally more or less right. If you go to an archival library today and if you compare all the handwriting of American presidents over time, you’ll see that handwriting changes. If you take out a handwritten text by Abraham Lincoln and compare it to a handwritten text by George Washington, even if you don’t have names or dates, anything on there, you can tell that, uh, that this handwriting dates to a specific period because this is how students are taught, this is how they’re acculturated into writing. Scribes are no different. You heard it right. 

Studio – John Dickson:

You can date things, seriously, by handwriting. It’s called paleography, from the words old and writing. It’s just the study of ancient hands.

Brendan Haug:
However, when it comes to what we would call books literature, so that means anything from classical literature, Christian scripture, uh, the Handwriting styles are relatively fossilized. They change very slowly over time. Scribes don’t begin, uh, um, a text of Homer. They don’t begin a text of Paul or the Gospels with, Hi, my name is John the Scribe and it’s, you know, 1 A. D. They don’t write these sorts of things. So the only way we can, with 100 percent accuracy, date a, uh, literary document, whether Christian or, um, uh, non Christian, is to have it written on a scroll that was then reused, and so we can at least have a rough date, uh, we can see that, uh, you know, the back was used for, say, a dated marriage contract or something. Um, something like Uh, or, or if they’re found in an archaeological context that gives us a rough approximation of the date, that is also very helpful. Something like the Paul Codex, uh, which was acquired on the antiquities market from unknown provenance, it’s extremely difficult to date. So the date ranges anywhere from the second century A.D. up to the first half of the fourth century A. D. based on what Any one particular scholar feels in his heart, uh, about the paleography of the text.

Studio – John Dickson:

Brendan is probably being a little cautious, modest, by placing P46 in the 4th century. Uh, most other scholars and most publications put P46 somewhere between 175 AD and 225 AD. Let’s just say the year 200 AD. Whether it’s the late 2nd century or the early 4th, everyone agrees P46 is super important. We’ll find out why after the break.

Break

Studio – John Dickson:

Hey, we’re back in my happy place, playing with some really old bits of paper, otherwise known as P46, the earliest manuscript copies of Paul’s letters to Rome, Ephesus, Corinth, Galatia. They’re right in front of me in the reading room of the papyrology department at the University of Michigan, where I’m talking to the head archivist, Dr. Brendan Haug, and he tells me what we can learn from these flimsy leaves.

Brendan Haug:
I like to point out that a document like, uh, P46 shows the sort of, uh, slow and halting creation of a canon. This is a book that is, uh, bound, uh, together, containing most of the letters of Paul, not, uh, I believe, the pastoral letters. So this, even the corpus of Paul, is still in the process of formation.

Studio – John Dickson:

Hey, canon It’s just a nerdy scholar term for like a rule, you know, it comes from the Greek word meaning measuring stick, and it’s like, what are the official documents of the Bible? That’s called the canon.

Brendan Haug:
The letters are not presented in the canonical order. They’re presented in the New Testament today, and they were almost certainly not part of a larger corpus that we might, um, uh, call a Bible. This is a period in which Christianity is beginning to form its, uh, canonical, um, body of scripture that we will come to know as the New Testament.

John Dickson:
But I mean, one of these pages ends Romans and goes into Hebrews.

Brendan Haug:
Yeah. So we have a Romans ending here. Hebrews begins here.

John Dickson:
Which is, uh, not how it appears in the New Testament.

Brendan Haug:
Certainly not. But, um. You can already see that here, let’s say, early 4th century, that, um, this, author, Paul, already has an extremely high stature. This would have been a relatively expensive document, uh, to produce. If you think, as I tend to, that it is early 4th century, uh, and you go by the, uh, the then contemporary standards, uh, of, uh, text production, this text would have cost anywhere between, say, two and four years of a day laborer’s salary. So imagine working You know, for two to four years at minimum wage in the United States and spending every penny of that just to own most of the leaves of Paul. This is how expensive this document would be, uh, but it already shows that in the minds of the people who had this copied, Paul already occupied an extremely, I think, extremely high, uh, uh, position. So he is in the process, really, here, of becoming, uh, a, uh, canonical author. That said, when you put this document, uh, beside other, you know, roughly contemporary texts in our collection, you’ll see that an early Christian library is made up not just of documents, uh, like this. The letters of Paul, uh, that are now canonical, but, um, numerous other, um, uh, apocryphal texts, uh, such as, uh, the Shepherd of Hermas, which you would know if this is the second century. . 

Studio – John Dickson:

If you’ve never heard of the Shepherd of Hermas, don’t worry. Most Christians don’t know it today. In this very early period, there was no fixed canon, no rule about which books were in and out. There was universal agreement about the four gospels, the. Book of Acts and the letters of Paul, but some of the other texts were regarded as possibly authoritative writings from the apostles or their colleagues, and some they just weren’t sure about. And so some got in, in some versions of our New Testament, and some didn’t. And Shepherd of Hermas And the Epistle of Barnabas are two such texts. They almost got in. In a copy of the Bible from the mid 300s, a beautiful copy called Sinaiticus, these two texts appear at the back of the New Testament. So you’ve got the 27 books that are now in a modern New Testament, and then these two thrown at the end. You can almost detect that the copyist didn’t quite know what to do with the two texts, so they’re not in with the other letters. Which is where they sort of logically should be. They’re thrown at the back, kind of like an appendix. So we’ll, we’ll keep them here so you can read them, but we’re not quite sure of their status. The church eventually decided not to include them anywhere. Uh, this wasn’t because They didn’t like what was in it. It wasn’t for political motivations. It was just because they weren’t super confident that they came from the apostolic period and that’s really what they wanted stuff that had the authority, the glow of the original apostles. And frankly, it’s just as well because every scholar today now knows the epistle of Barnabas and the shepherd of Hermas to be written in the name of those characters in the second century, long after those guys. were dead. The gut instincts of the ancient church are verified by contemporary scholarship. But it’s true, in this early period in which P46 was copied, there wasn’t universal agreement about every New Testament text.

Brendan Haug:
All sorts of various, um, uh, documents, uh, texts that are, uh, almost forgotten today except amongst, uh, the rarefied world of, uh, New Testament studies, uh, that make up really a, it’s a sort of, it’s the wild, wild west of, uh, Christian, uh, scripture.

Studio – John Dickson:

Studying these leaves of Paul also gives us insight into how texts like this were produced. When I say scribe. You may have a picture in your head of some holy monk in a room with candlelight, you know, sort of in prayer as he copies each line and then illuminates it with gold and draws little pictures of saints in the margin or something like that. Maybe I’m just making that up. But the thing is, in this very early period with P46, that picture couldn’t be further from the truth.

Brendan Haug:
For us, uh, in, uh, Egyptian antiquity, this text is produced by a scribe who might also be the guy that you go to to dictate a private letter. Uh, this is the guy that you’ll go to to, uh, uh, you know, draw up a contract for the sale of a donkey to your neighbor. The public scribe does, uh, anything and everything, uh, that you need. So we can look at this text and know immediately that this is not a monk copying it, because at the end of every letter, here we’re looking at the end of Romans, the beginning of Hebrews, at the end of every letter there’s, um, a, uh, Scribal notation that indicates how many lines he’s copied because that’s how he’s going to be paid.

Studio – John Dickson:

I find this really interesting. I hope I’m not the only one. These people copying out this stuff in this very early period were not priests or, you know, religious officials. They probably weren’t even Christians. These are disinterested, semi professional scribes. Their whole gig was not to, um, innovate or do any theology. They probably couldn’t have done any theology. They had to just copy what was in the original in front of them.

Brendan Haug:
So this is, uh, a normal scribal transaction. One imagines that when the scribe is finished doing this, he might go off and, uh, copy Homer. He might, uh, you know, write a marriage contract. He might do, uh, whatever it is he’s contracted to do. So here at the end of Romans, for instance, we have an abbreviation. Uh, of the word stichoi or stichi, which means lines. And then a symbol that means, uh, 1, 000. He estimates roughly 1, 000 lines for, uh, Romans. It’s a bit of an overestimate. Each estimate is a little bit over, a little bit under. How under?

John Dickson:
How under?

Brendan Haug:
A little over, a little under. He comes out more or less right. Um, but it’s, this is part of, uh, an everyday, um, an everyday transaction.

Studio – John Dickson:

The big question is, uh, what’s different? In P46, this really old copy of Paul’s letters compared to, you know, a modern Bible or even, you know, a copy of the letters of Paul from a century or so later. There are differences, uh, usually really small ones. In P46, you get some weird contractions of words, especially holy words like the word God, spirit, Jesus Christ, they’re reduced to just a couple of letters. And then the scribe overlines, which is the ancient equivalent of underlining. There were other differences like in Romans 16, 20, right, right. Toward the end of Romans, a page I got to play with in a modern Bible. It goes the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ be with you. But in P 46, it goes the grace of the Lord Jesus. Be with you. No Christ, right? So that’s a, you know, it’s a, it’s a difference. And in Romans 12, one, a really famous sort of pivot point in the letter. Normally you get, therefore I urge you brothers and sisters in view of God’s mercy, et cetera, et cetera. But the really funny thing happened in P46. The scribe goes, uh, therefore. I urge brothers and sisters, and then went, Oh, I forgot the word you, and he scribbled you above brothers and sisters. And that causes some confusion in the copying after that. There is one pretty big difference at the end of Romans, uh, that does raise the question Is some Chinese whispers going on here? In most of our Bibles, the letter to the Romans ends with this lofty paragraph called a doxology. It goes, Now to him who is able to establish you in accordance with my gospel, the message I proclaim about Jesus Christ in keeping with the revelation of the mystery hidden for long ages past. And, uh, and so on, worth opening your Bible and reading it. That whole paragraph doesn’t appear in P46. P46 literally ends with Quartus ho Adelphos. That’s basically Quartus says G’day. And then it’s just full stop and then the very next line of this page goes to the next letter the scribe was going to copy, which is the letter. We mentioned Codex Sinaiticus, uh, earlier. It’s like the beautiful, full on copy of the Bible. Produced when Christianity was now, uh, officially legal as a religion in the Roman Empire. And so the best scribes. in the Roman Empire produced this one. It’s very different from our P46. But even with this missing paragraph, P46 is still a very good.

Brendan Haug:
This is a very fine, a very fine copy. It’s not, um, the quality is not at the level of some of the

John Dickson:
Like Sinaiticus or something like that.

Brendan Haug: Yes, something like that. But there are also, you know, uh, copies of, you know, classical literature from, uh, some of the larger cities in Egypt that are clearly produced at, uh, they’re the Maseratis of ancient literature. Really fine. Uh, this is, you know, maybe a step down, uh, from, um, uh, the highest production in terms of just the layout of the text, uh, the line lengths are sometimes not exact, uh, in the most expensive text it will be exactly columnar, everything is, you know, measured, uh, but in terms of the general, um, uh, accuracy of the text, that’s where, uh, the scribe, uh, is scrupulous. He’ll sometimes, uh, misspell words here and there in terms of, um, You know, misspellings that reflect, uh, common, uh, pronunciation, uh, of Greek in the period. Uh, but other than that, the text is, uh, a fine example.

Studio – John Dickson:

So was I right as a teenager to think that the New Testament is really the result of a kind of Chinese whispers? You know, once we get our final copy today, it’s nothing like what was in the original. I think the simple answer is no. It’s true that in P46 you get little bits and pieces that are different. Missing word Christ here, different spelling there, a grammatical error. But here’s the cool thing about New Testament studies. We have so Many copies of the New Testament, we’ve just been talking about P46, the earliest, but we have hundreds of manuscript fragments and huge portions from different periods of Roman history in different parts of the empire, and we can line them up all together and work out where the variations have taken place. I mean, if you have, uh, just two copies of a handwritten letter, and one of them, yeah, it’s different from the other, just at one line, you, you can’t, with two copies, work out which is the original and which is the variation. But if you have 50 copies of the same letter, you’re more likely to work out what is the variation and what is the standard. And the great thing is, in New Testament studies, everyone realizes this is the best preserved text from antiquity. That’s not just something I can say in the safe confines of a church. You can say this in any classics or ancient history department in the world. Uh, the copies of our New Testament are so plentiful, we can work out the variations. And the other great thing is a modern Bible very often tells us, uh, where the little changes or variations have taken place. So if you just open a modern English Bible, you’ll often get little footnotes saying the earliest manuscripts add, or the earliest manuscripts don’t have, or, uh, some manuscripts have this word. And so everything’s very, very upfront. So what about that missing? Paragraph at the end of Romans. It’s not there in P46, but it’s there in our modern Bibles. Well, here’s the thing I didn’t say earlier. It’s actually not at the end of chapter 16 in P46, it’s at the end of chapter 15. It’s there, but just somehow, it’s a chapter earlier. We don’t know why. Other manuscripts later have it at the very end of the letter. It looks like a more formal ending to the letter. We may never know why the P46 scribe had it at the end of chapter 15 and most manuscripts had it at the end of chapter 16. Either way, it’s there.

Let’s press pause. I’ve got a five minute Jesus for you. Christianity has a problem. Only one, we might ask. Unlike other religions, it gambles its plausibility on supposed historical texts and events. Christians don’t just say otherworldly things like God loves you, we all need forgiveness, heaven is open to all. None of that sort of thing is the least bit confirmable or falsifiable. Listen closely, and you’ll often hear them saying things like, Jesus lived in the Galilean village of Nazareth. Or, he had a wide reputation as a healer. Or, he caused a scandal in the Temple of Jerusalem in the late 20s, early 30s AD. Or, he suffered execution under a Roman governor named Pontius Pilate. Or even, his tomb outside the city was found empty a few days later. after his crucifixion. Statements like these are not completely immune from historical scrutiny. They touch times and places we know quite a bit about. They intersect with other figures, like Pontius Pilate, about whom we have reasonably good The alleged events all take place in a cultural and political melting pot, Roman Galilee and Judea, for which we have thousands of archaeological remains and hundreds of thousands of words of ancient inscriptions and written records. When people proclaim an intangible thing like God’s love is universal, they’re in safe territory. But as soon as they say that their guy was crucified by the 5th governor of Judea. They’re stepping onto public ground, secular ground, and someone’s bound to want to double check. As it turns out, an entire industry of double checking has developed over the last 250 years. The study of what’s called the historical Jesus is a vast secular discipline today, found in major universities all around the world, including the two with which I’m closely associated, Sidney and Macquarie. While there are certainly plenty of active Christians involved in this sub discipline of ancient history, there are also a great many half Christians, ex Christians, Jews, lots of Jews, as well as self confessed agnostics and atheists. This makes it very difficult for anyone to get away with publishing theology under the guise. or privileging the biblical documents over the non biblical ones, or of pretending we can prove most of what the New Testament says about Jesus. The process of peer review, where scholars publish their work in a professional journal, only to be double checked by two or more independent, anonymous scholars of rank, might not be foolproof, but it certainly filters out any work of preaching under the guise of scholarship. It also reduces the risk of fraudulent claims and keeps scholars constantly mindful of the rules of the game of history. Adherents of other faiths bear no such burden. Hinduism, Buddhism, And Islam, to take the next three largest religions, don’t risk their credibility on historical claims. I’ve often thought it’d feel quite safe to be a devout Hindu, Buddhist, or Muslim in today’s sceptical West. I mean, sure, they get criticized, but they’re unlikely to have some history channel documentary that explodes the truth about their founder. For better or worse, Christianity’s central claims. are historical. The form of the New Testament documents is recognizably historical. The Gospels clearly present themselves as historical biographies of a famous life. The letters follow precisely the conventions of other occasional letters from the period, complete with traceable itineraries and lists of greetings to concrete events. The core content of the New Testament is also obviously historical. While there’s plenty of talk of the Kingdom of God and being justified by faith and entering eternal life and all that sort of stuff, these things are premised on the actual events of of Jesus life, his deeds, his teaching, death, and yes, his resurrection. All of which, so the documents themselves say, are reported by eyewitnesses. Without these events in historical time, nothing in Christianity has merit. Christianity seems to go out on a historical limb and invites anyone who wishes to try and cut it off. In a strange way then, the barrage of historical criticism directed at the Bible and the life of Jesus in particular is not just reasonable, it’s a kind of compliment. It’s a sign that critics understand the form and content of the Christian faith. Unless Christianity’s claimed events really happened and left some indications that they happened, the whole thing is a lie. Is empty. You can press play now.

Why kick off Undeceptions in the pathology department looking at Paul’s letters? I think the simple answer is because it’s foundational. The truth of Christianity flows from this foundation, and so all of the deceptions. Flows from misunderstanding this kind of foundation.

Undeceptions theme