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The Historical Reliability of the New Testament: A Response to Skepticism || RTTB Topical Study
•Glenn Smith and Steve Allem•Season 3•Episode 155
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Unlock the New Testament's historical accuracy and discover why skeptics might need to rethink their positions. Our latest episode makes a bold claim: the evidence supporting the Bible's reliability as a historical document is so robust that it's up to the skeptics to prove otherwise. Dive deep into the intriguing work of Colin Hemmer and find out how details like ancient sailing routes and city locations lend credibility to biblical accounts. We focus on the veracity of the New Testament, particularly the works of Luke, emphasizing how accurately these texts reflect the complexities of Jewish, Roman, and Greek cultures.
Join us as we tackle skepticism with clarity and precision. Through our discussion, we explore the unique historical claims of Christianity, centered around the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. We scrutinize the credibility of New Testament authors and draw on external sources to strengthen our case. This episode invites you to challenge yourself and explore further with our main teaching ministry, "Through the Word of God," and to continue your journey with us at reasoningthroughthebible.com. Embrace this opportunity to gain insights that might just reshape your understanding of historical and theological truths.
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Under the realm of Christianity. We often encounter skeptics and critics and non-believers who throw rocks at the Bible, accusing it of being historical novels or accusing it of being a made-up religious account, dismissing it as a book of just old fables, saying that it's not reliable historically. What I'd like to do today is to respond to that and show that the Bible is indeed historically reliable and it's trustworthy in what it says. That's really what the skeptics are trying to say is that a Bible is not trustworthy. So I think that if we really look at the history, then we can show that the Bible is trustworthy and those of us that have a Bible can trust it for what it says. What makes Christianity unique from most of, if not all, other religions is that Christianity claims to be a point in actual history where Jesus Christ came into the world, died on a cross and rose again from the dead, and that these were events that actually happened. The question then arises do we have historical corroboration for these events? And history works differently than empirical science. We can't do a tabletop experiment on history. We have to ask the question do we trust those who are giving us the message? I can tell you what I had for breakfast this morning, but you weren't there, so you'd have to judge my character to know whether I'm telling you the truth. The question then arises can we trust the witnesses that have handed the Bible down to us? What I wanted to do is talk specifically about the New Testament, history and about some things that I think will be very insightful.
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The conclusion that I'm going to drive to is that the Bible is very solidly, historically reliable and that there is a great deal of historical corroboration from outside the Bible of the things inside the Bible. Many skeptics and critics wave a hand and say oh, all you really have is the Bible and you can't really quote from that to prove itself. Well, that's not exactly what we're doing. First of all, the New Testament itself has eight or nine authors, depending on who wrote Hebrews. By dismissing that, what you're saying is well, if it wasn't for those nine eyewitnesses that you wouldn't have a case. We do have a case. Wasn't for those nine eyewitnesses that you wouldn't have a case. We do have a case. We do have nine eyewitnesses. But even apart from that, there's quite a bit of historical corroboration for the things that we find in the Bible. I'd like to go through two or three sources to show you and I think you'll be somewhat surprised.
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The first book I want to talk about is the Book of Acts in the Setting of Hellenistic History by Colin Hemmer, h-e-m-e-r, and that book is rather dense. It's really made for professional historians, but it's quite a wonderful work. If you're at all interested in biblical history, that's a book I would highly recommend. Even just a bibliography is worth the price of admission. What Hemmer has done is gone through the book of Acts and, to a great extent, the last half of the book of Acts, showing that it is tremendously historically reliable. He goes into quite a bit of detail and has the citations for the historical corroborations outside the Bible, more so than we'll be able to demonstrate here. What I can do is go through many of the things that he gave in this book. That shows that the book of Acts is very highly reliable. The traditional author of Acts is Luke, who was a cohort of the Apostle Paul. He wrote both Luke and Acts. We can see that from the first few verses of each book. What I want to do now is just go through a quick list of some of these things that Hemmer holds as being historically reliable from the book of Acts being historically reliable, from the book of Acts.
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In Acts, luke gets things such as a correct sailing route between ports that are named. You remember the last half of Acts? It's like a travel log. The apostle Paul would go from this place and he'd travel to this town, to that town, and he'd get on a ship and he'd sail from here to there. It talks about how long it took for the voyage and things like that. Well, luke gets a correct sailing route between the cities, as when you were sailing from one place to the other, that would be correct. The correct family names for many of the local officials. The proper port, namely Perga, when you're sailing from there to Cyprus. The location of several cities in Lyconia.
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Hemmer in his book has about 80 of these. I'd like to point out just a few of them. One he has the correct length of the voyage from Troas to Neapolis in Acts 16.11. Hemmer has pointed out that the person writing this, luke, got it correct when he described how long it would sail from Troas to Neapolis. He also gets the correct location and distance from the river to the gates of Philippi in Acts 16, 13. It says they went out on a Sabbath morning and there were women by the river. Well, they wouldn't have been able to walk that far on a Sabbath without it coming to work. Jews had rules on these things. That tells us. The fact they went out there on a Sabbath morning. Tells us how far the river was from the city gates. Luke gets this correct. He also gets the correct location of cities when journeying from Thyatira to Thessalonica. He gets the correct location description of the philosophical debate in Athens in Acts 17. Think of it.
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In Acts 17, the apostle has a talk that he does with two groups of philosophers the Epicureans and the Stoics. The ancient philosophies, epicureanism and Stoicism, are not the same things as the modern words. And if we look at the questions and the responses from these philosophers and compare that to what the apostle Paul was saying in Acts 17, the apostle was, through his speech, giving point by point refutations of what these philosophers believed. So the author of Acts now knows the Greek philosophy in two different schools of philosophy and what they would believe. He also gets in that same chapter, acts 17,. The people there gave a slang word that was an insult. Most of the English translations just say babbler, but the original Greek word was spermalogos. So now we have someone that has a very intimate knowledge of Greek culture, greek philosophy, the Greek language and knows the geography when you're sailing and traveling from city to city.
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In Acts 18.12, the author gets right this person, galio, as proconsul. Now what's interesting there is that Galio was proconsul for one year, so he was a very minor official. Now Luke gets that right. In fact that's one of the ways we can date the book of Acts is because Galio was proc-consul in this town for the year 52. We can then corroborate Paul's journeys both before and after based on that timestamp. So he gets the local officials right in these minor officials in these small towns, as well as major things like Greek philosophy and geography. In Acts 1938, luke uses a plural noun when he refers to two men who were the leaders of that town in this time. The fact that particular time there were two people that held that office at the same time he uses the plural, whereas normally there would just be one and he would use the singular. So now we have accuracy down to singulars and plurals in local officials in specific time periods.
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He gets the correct distance between Ptolemy and Caesarea in Acts 21.8. He gets the correct purification rites done for pious Jews in Acts 21.24. Jews had a purification rite that they had to do if they had been out, away from the Jewish culture. Well, the description in Acts 21 gets the steps of that purification rite correct. Now the author has to know Jewish culture and Jewish law and Jewish purification rites, including down to how many animals had to be sacrificed during this purification rite, how the Greek philosophy, culture, language and the Greek slang insults, as well as how long it takes to sail from one city to the other and how many of which kind of proconsul you're narrowing down the people that could have written the book to a very small number of people, simply because not very many people would have known both Jewish detailed culture and Greek detailed culture. There just weren't that many people that knew both cultures.
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He gets the correct reference to the correct port that would have been left when Paul was trying to sail to Italy from Jerusalem. He gets the correct direction of the wind that would have been blowing at that time of year, what they would have done when that wind came and the local term that was used for that type of wind that came in that particular time of year. The English translations say it was a nor'easter. Well, the original Greek term was again a local weather term. That's why many scholars say the only way somebody could have written the book of Acts was to have been on that ship on that sea in the first century. In those storms he gets the correct sailing terms for the ships, the titles of the ship tackle. We have someone that was intimately familiar with sailing terms, with land geography who was the leader, in which towns, what direction the wind blows at certain times of the year? Jewish culture, greek culture All of this is historically reliable and it's all there in the book of Acts and documented in Hemmer's book.
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The idea that somebody could have made this up as a religious novel hundreds of years later in a foreign land and gotten all these details right is very few people that would have even known the details, let alone being able to get them correct and get down to which cities you'd have to go to, where it would have been too easy to make a mistake, especially when the existing maps that we have today get it wrong compared to what we know today from modern surveying and things like that. It even gets down to and I'll leave this part of the talk to this one. In Acts 27, there's a detailed description of a shipwreck. They wreck in the storm into the island of Malta. In the story they drop an anchor and test the depth of the seabed going into Malta. They take soundings at different times because it's dark and a storm they can't see. They're trying to tell how close to land they're going to get. The people that read Acts 27 can then tell the depth of the seabed leading from that direction into Malta. Of course nowadays we can go there and we know exactly how deep it is going into Malta. Luke even gets that right. There's detailed after detail that he all gets right. It gets even better.
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There's another book that I would recommend, which is this one, the Historical Jesus by Gary Habermas. This one is much more readable. It's much more of a laybook, but he does quite a bit of research. One of Habermas's strong points is reading sources outside the Bible, and he has in here, where he has about 39 sources, if I remember correctly, where he talks about people, some of which were antagonistic towards the Christians, and he recreates the entire gospel message from sources outside the Bible the fact that there were people running around the countryside claiming that Jesus had died on a cross and had risen from the dead and claiming they had seen them. Habermas recreates about 129 facts, that is the entire gospel message around Jesus' life, death and resurrection, all from sources outside the Bible. Here's a quote from Habermas. He says quote of our 39 sources, 13 specifically record the resurrection. He means people outside this Bible, not the scriptures. 13 of these 39 sources specifically record the resurrection, while an additional 10 more provide relevant facts surrounding the occurrence. Even if we were to only use the known facts which are accepted as historical by critical scholars, we still arrive at four major categories of evidence for the resurrection of Jesus. What Habermas shows is that there's a great deal of support for the death, burial and resurrection of Christ from sources outside the Bible in the first century.
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Next we'll quote Josephus. Josephus was a Jew that was hired by the Roman government to write a history of the Jews. He was not Christian. He was either indifferent or antagonistic towards Christianity. He was just being paid to do a job to write a history of the Jews. If we go through Josephus' work, the Antiquity of the Jews, and compare that to what we find in the Bible, we have a tremendous amount of corroboration. Josephus corroborates the entire temple ceremony, including the candlesticks, the table of showbread, altar of incense, burnt offering. He mentions details such as there's animosity between the Jews and the Samaritans. He quotes that the Jews, where they would sometimes travel through the Samaritans and sometimes go around it, sacrifices were made at the temple and when they were made, the people called Gadarenes were there in that country. Talks about the Galileans.
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The strong point that I think is perhaps arguably the greatest support for New Testament things that we can get from Josephus is just the number of people that Josephus mentions that are also mentioned in the Bible, namely Annas the high priest is mentioned both in the Bible and in Josephus, mentions that are also mentioned in the Bible, namely Annas the high priest is mentioned both in the Bible and in Josephus. Felix was governor of Judea is mentioned in both places. Philip being tetrarch of Trachonitis, is mentioned in Josephus and in the book of Acts. Felix was married to Drusilla. That's in both places. King Agrippa came with Bernice, not married to Bernice. Acts gets that right. It never mentions Bernice as the wife of Agrippa, whereas Josephus corroborates that.
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We have all these bits of evidence. Festus was governor. James was the brother of Jesus. Pilate was the procurator of Judea. We have stones with Pontius Pilate's name chiseled in it. We have bones that were recovered that had been crucified.
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Arguably the strongest one, at least to me, is in about 1990, I believe it was they uncovered a bone box, an ossuary of Caiaphas. Caiaphas was the high priest in the first century. Imagine this they recovered a skeleton of somebody who very likely spoke with Jesus. They reburied the skeleton, but the bone box is still in a museum somewhere. Add all this up we have a long, detailed, tremendously accurate corroboration of the biblical history and the biblical accounts, especially the New Testament ones, down to names, dates, places, people.
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So the question then comes so what? And it's a valid question. Well, the so what is this? It is unreasonable to say that somebody would know Jewish culture would get all that right. They would get the exact Jewish purification rights correct, they would get the Roman soldiers correct, the Greek philosophy right, they would get all the geography right, the religious aspects right, but then the other parts they'd get wrong, namely the teachings of Jesus and the fact parts they'd get wrong, namely the teachings of Jesus and the fact that they spoke about Jesus in between. That's just unreasonable, and I'll leave you with a quote from Hemmer.
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He says there's so much evidence that the burden of proof is hardly on us to show that it's correct. The burden of proof lies on the skeptic to show why these things don't line up to where we can trust all the statements that Luke makes and the rest of the New Testament authors make. We have proven our case. If someone questions this, the burden of proof has to fall on the skeptic and the critic to show why they would hold these things to not be true. We can't just wave a hand and say it's a historical novel when there is such a tremendous, tremendous mountain of solid, corroborated evidence to where they've been proven over and over again to be accurate historians. So I'll leave you with that. If you want more of this, please see our podcast. Our main teaching ministry is Through the Word of God. Check out our website, reasoningthroughthebiblecom, and we will continue to reason through these topics as we go through the Bible. Thank you.
