Exploring My Strange Bible - Making of the Bible Part 2 - Old Testament Manuscripts & The Making of the New Testament

Episode Date: August 23, 2017

In this episode we dive into the composition and writing of the book of the New Testament. Specifically, we'll look at how the books themselves give us clues about when and how they were written. As we learn more about where the Bible came from, we gain a deeper sense of what the Bible is and what we're supposed to do with it.

Tim Mackey, Jr. utterly amazing and worth following with everything that you have. On this podcast, I'm putting together the last 10 years worth of lectures and sermons where I've been exploring the strange and wonderful story of the Bible and how it invites us into the mission of Jesus and the journey of faith. And I hope this can be helpful for you too. I also help start this thing called The Bible Project. We make animated videos and podcasts about all kinds of topics in Bible and theology. You can find those resources at thebibleproject.com. With all that said, let's dive into the episode for this week. All right, this is part two of a three-part series about the making of the Bible. If you haven't listened to the first lecture, this second one isn't going to make any sense at all if you have not listened to lecture one.

So I highly recommend it. The second lecture is diving into some of the details of the manuscript history of the Old Testament, which is fascinating and complicated all at the same time. And also, the second half of this lecture dives into the composition and writing of the books of the New Testament, and specifically looking within the books themselves of the New Testament and how they give us clues and information about how they came into existence and how they were written. Again, this whole lecture is about helping set the foundation for understanding where the Bible came from. That's like one of the first and main goals is to get the basic facts. But two, that in light of where the Bible came from,

in light of where the Bible came from, that ought to deepen and give us a much more rich sense of what the Bible is as a human word through which God speaks to his people and how to hold the two of those together. So we'll be talking more about that within the end of this second lecture, and it'll set the stage for then the third lecture to follow, part three of the series, which will be about the formation of the New Testament as a group of writings all together. So I hope this is helpful for you, turning the fire hose on. A lot of data coming your way, but hopefully it will tie together into a much bigger picture. All right, this is a very kind of, again, 30,000-foot overview.

We're landing at a few detailed points. Other than these basic manuscript groups, there are a handful of other witnesses that we could put on the timeline. But these are the most important ones, basically. There's a group of offshoot from ancient Israel called the Samaritans. So they feature in the New Testament in a couple places. So they were also kind of like the Qumran group, but they broke off at an earlier time in biblical history. And they went north into what's called the West Bank now. But they're a community that still exists today. And they took a form of the Torah with them. And so they have a form of the Torah called the Samaritan Pentateuch. And it also could be placed on the map here. And again,

it's one of these things where sometimes it agrees with the Masoretic text. Sometimes it agrees with the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Septuagint against the Masoretic text. It's just so it's a fascinating, complicated mess. But it's only for the Pentateuch. It's not for the whole Hebrew Bible. And so it's important, but I'm focusing on things that get us to the whole Hebrew Bible. Let's look at a larger example of when we compare all of the families here and try and understand how they get us back to the originals, and then what they tell us about what happened in the history of the making of the

Bible here. So I have a section here of Jeremiah chapter 10. You can see it up here on the screen, or it's on the handout here. So maybe I should say this right now, real quick. For most of the history of the English Bible, our English translations going back to, we'll talk about the history of the English Bible when we get to the New Testament, to Tyndale and the first edition of the King James Version called the Authorized Version,

which just had its 400th birthday last year in 2011, so 1611, most of the earliest English translations were based solely and completely off of the Masoretic text, and specifically the Leningrad Codex, the thing that I showed you right there. So what's happened then, of course, is that in the last 150 or so years, all these things have come to light and people are studying them more and more and more. The question is, when do we, in the English translation, go with a reading that's in here that seems to be correct but that's not in the Masoretic text? We saw that in the Cain and Abel story. Some of your English translation had the,

let's go into the field, that's in these manuscripts, but not in these. So it raises all these other complicated questions of when should your translation go with the Septuagint and the Dead Sea Scrolls against Masoretic text, and so on. The book of Jeremiah is a complicated example, where it's a lot like Ezekiel, where when you compare these families here, you can isolate things that have been added to the book of Jeremiah, likely after the time of the original. So here's an example right here. Here's what I want you to do. So pretend you're with me, like at my desk, five in the morning, cup of coffee, we have Radiohead playing, and we're

comparing the Greek and the Hebrew manuscripts. And here's track with the meaning and the content of the different pieces here. The entire text is what's in the Masoretic text. Bold italics is absent in the Septuagint and in a Hebrew Dead Sea Scroll of Jeremiah. So let's read. For the customs of the people are false. People's referring to non-Israelites here. A tree from the forest is cut down and worked with an axe by the hands of an artisan. People deck it with silver and gold.

They fasten it with hammer and nails so that it cannot move. What are we talking about here? Idols, ancient idols. Their idols are like scarecrows in a cucumber field. For they cannot speak, they have to be carried around. They can't even walk. Don't be afraid of them. They can't do evil, nor is it in them to do good.

There's none like you, O Lord, and the divine name, O Yahweh. You are great, your name, O Yahweh. You are great. Your name is great in might. Who would not fear you, O king of the nations? For that is your due. Among all the wise ones of the nations and in their kingdoms, there is no one like you. They are both stupid and foolish. The instruction given by idols is no better than wood.

Beaten silver is brought from Tarshish and gold from Uphaz. They are the work of the artisan in the hands of the goldsmith. Their clothing is blue and purple and all of the product of skilled workers. But Yahweh, he is the true God. He is the living God and the everlasting king.

As his wrath earthquakes and the nations cannot endure his indignation. Thus you will say to them, the gods who did not make the heavens and the earth will perish from the earth and from the heavens. I mean, we're laughing because you can see what's going on. So we have a description, a description of the making of an ancient idol, right? And so of the materials that are used, of the process. And verse 5 and so on, we're kind of poking fun at the idols. All this work for these little statues, and they can't even talk.

But people bow down to them, make sacrifices to them, and so on. What has been added to this passage in the Masoretic text in two places here, or in the tradition of the Masoretic text? How would you characterize the bold italics there? Obviously a clear contrast. or in the tradition of the Mantecetic text? How would you characterize the bold italics there? Obviously a clear contrast. And also notice that the first big extra part here, verses 6 and 7,

we're addressing God directly now. It's almost like a praise song. You know what I mean? It's like a little hymn, worship hymn. And then verse 10, it's offering a contrast. In contrast to these idols that can't talk or anything, the Lord is the true God and so on. Go back to the timeline here. So what this means is likely the passage originally was crafted in its shorter form. And this doesn't mean that the Masoretes added this material,

but that the Masoretes have preserved a version of the text to which there were addition made somewhere in this complicated period, right? So we have two witnesses here. It seems most likely the conclusion to draw is that the praise song was added in two different places to the passage. So let me ask you here. So some of you, this might be really troubling, okay? So that's okay. Part of this whole process of discovering the human history of the Bible passage. So let me ask you here. So some of you, this might be deep, really troubling. Okay, so that's okay. Part of this whole process of discovering the human history of the Bible might break your categories a little bit. So that may be happening in the room right now. I totally respect that. I don't want to poke fun at that. So let's characterize what's happening here.

Is this edition distorting the message or the theology at work in this passage? Is the message of the passage changed? Is there anything in verses 6, 7, and 8 or in 10 in the editions that you wouldn't learn, say, from the book of Psalms? In fact, actually, a lot of the phrases in these editions are just literally quoted and cribbed right out of the book of Psalms. So you learn something there. What you learn is that these additions come from a time period, not just when Baruch and Jeremiah are sitting in

a room, but these additions come from a time period when somebody is reading the book of Jeremiah alongside the book of Psalms as a collected word of God, right? So this is the same thing that happened with Ezekiel, what I was doing in my dissertation, is that there were additions made, and oftentimes they're quotations, not like some scribe playing fast and loose, they're quotations from some other part of the Bible, saying, dear reader, Ezekiel belongs along with Leviticus, and along with Deuteronomy, and along with the book of Psalms. Where do you get, whose favorite donuts in the room? Deuteronomy and along with the book of Psalms. Whose favorite doughnuts in the room?

Krispy Kremes? So you have the doughnut, which is like the raw material of the dough, but then there's the glaze. You know what I'm saying? It's the glaze. And so it's this. There's the composition of the books of the Hebrew Bible, but then when they were collected into the canon to make a collection, it's like there was a glaze laid over the top. Gave it all the same flavor, right? That's uniting. You could use different metaphors. And I think what we're looking at here is glazing. It's the donut glaze. So it's quotations from the book of Psalms. We're reading this passage

in light of the book of Psalms, essentially. And this happens all over the Hebrew Bible, where you're reading, and all of a sudden you're reading it's a quotation from some other book of the Bible. And you're like, well, where'd that come from? This is the glazing. And so I don't think this is people playing fast and loose with the Bible. I think these are people who are reading the Bible along the grain of its authors. It's almost like little cross-reference notes or something. They're saying these books belong together and are meant to be read together.

Does that make sense? I'm saying Not all, but many, many of these types of examples, we're looking at some form of glazing of the Hebrew text. And so what this means is that these manuscripts, when you compare them, they get us back into the final phases of the making of the Bible, which to me is just thrilling and fascinating, right? Because this is the final steps of how the books were collected, assembled together. So the New Testament often quotes from the Old Testament. And here it gets very, this is another layer of complication, right? Oftentimes, what they're quoting is the Septuagint.

They're quoting this right here. And so there are some cases where we're reading in our New Testament, translated from the Greek, a quotation of the Old Testament. Have you ever, has this ever happened to you? And then you turn back in your Old Testament and say, hold on, what? Like the wording isn't quite matched. Have you ever done this before? So that's because your Old Testament is a translation of this. But what the New Testament authors are quoting is this. And thus the differences between the two. And sometimes it's totally inconsequential. It doesn't matter much at all. Sometimes it's profound and you've got to get in

and dig. And most of the differences and what's going on there you can trace it all out. Our good scholars will do that for you if you read a commentary. But most of that stuff, you can do the homework and figure out what happened and where and so on. But yeah, that's a great... The New Testament quotations are also another manuscript witness that we could add here because they come from this time period right here. With the Mazarites, in terms of their putting notes around the margin of the text, they're preserving, they're not making up this tradition.

And basically, in Jewish culture, training to be a rabbi, the first steps, like from a kid, is memorizing the Hebrew Bible. That's just for beginners, right? Then you go on to memorize the other writings. This is a people who are steeped in their sacred texts. And so, really, it seems crazy to us that people would be this into the Bible, but this is just how you do it in Jewish culture. And so likely what the Mazarites are doing is they're preserving techniques and so on

that date right back to, I think, the composition of the biblical books. It's a living tradition, so you would say, yes, it's not a bad way of saying it. This is an early form of cross-referencing it to other parts of the Bible. So it's a good observation. But yeah, reading the Hebrew Bible, again, is like walking through a library or a museum. Lots of materials from over a thousand different years of Israelite history, which is complicated. If you're doing the Eat This Book challenge, you're right into the thick of Israel's history now. It's complicated. And so the method and the process by which the books

were combined and compiled and so on, its own complicated history that isn't preserved in the manuscript witnesses. It's mostly you have to look for clues within the books, the books themselves. So I showed you a few of them earlier. And so what this scholar is paying attention to is more clues like that. So more updated English translations. The NIV just went through an updated form, and what they've done is included more of these footnotes. So what I've got right here is the first 1984 edition of the New International Version. There was the 2011 update, and they've included more based on new scholarship. This is a growing thing. And different translations and the committees that make them have different philosophies about if they're going to go with the reading from these manuscripts or from these. Okay, let me show you

just one example of how this would work out, how these additions would be made. This is an image from the Isaiah scroll. So here we go. So the Isaiah scroll was one of the best preserved Dead Sea scrolls. Oh, here we'll click on it here. You can literally look at the whole thing online now. So these were all made out of leather. Animal skin is how papyrus is more difficult, more expensive to make. If you just Google Isaiah scroll, zoom in, you will get the sites. This is just a good time waiting to happen here for you. And if you have ever sat down and tried to hand write a copy of one text all the way through, a long text like this,

so this is early correcting and copying. So, you know, this is just a theory, but most likely at some point, going back to Jeremiah chapter 10, this extra material was likely marginal material that at some point got inserted into the text of Jeremiah by later scribes. There you go. It's complicated. Should we expect this? Totally.

This is human beings responding to God speaking in and through human authors and passing that down. So we'll draw some conclusions from this. Even though this is complicated, and some of you may be having your categories blown, here would be an irresponsible conclusion to draw. Oh, this is all screwed up. We can't know anything about what the Bible originally said. That is not a logical conclusion of all of this. But what the Mazarites have preserved, carefully and meticulously,

is a version, a version of the text out of this period right here. So in other words, in some cases, they were meticulously preserving an incorrect text. Does that make sense? So those practices, while they may have been practiced at some time period, they latched onto one text version and meticulously protected it. But the time period that preceded them was a little bit more complicated. So what I think are the right conclusions to draw from all of this. complicated. So what I think are the right conclusions to draw from all of this. In almost all of these cases, the differences have to do with a scribe's eye skipped over something in

one text tradition, say in the Masoretic text version, like we saw in the Cain and Abel story. But lo and behold, we have the Septuagint. We have the Dead Sea Scrolls that have the correct text. So essentially, and often what happens is not usually omission, much more common is additions. So what we don't have is, oh, we only have 90% of the Bible because 10% of it fell out somewhere. No, that's incorrect. What we have is 103% of the Bible. We have too much Bible because things have been accumulated throughout transmission period. And so what you do is there's a whole tradition, particularly in Protestant scholarship, has been the most forward, aggressive. It's Protestant scholars, Catholic scholarship.

In the last 50 years, we'll talk about Catholic collections of the Bible in a little bit, but it's a little bit different. Like there's tomes and tomes of people studying and giving their whole careers to working on these issues here. So there's no lost Bible. If anything, we need to shave off some accumulation or a little too much glazing on the donut. And so in terms of theology, there's no inherent contradiction here. Both Judaism and Christianity embrace the idea that God speaks through people. It's through history and human processes that God has given his revelation. So there may be a shaking of categories, but at the end of the day, we're really on pretty good ground here for recovering

the text of the Bible. So here's how this works out in practicality here, is that for the Hebrew Bible, this is a page of the Hebrew Bible. I've got it right here with me. So this is a modern scholarly edition of the Hebrew Bible called the Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia. And there's actually a new updated edition even of this being formed as we speak. It won't be finished until almost all of us are dead, I'm sure. But that's how these things go in scholarship. Very slow because it's so meticulous. And so what this is, this is an official text of the Bible. The main text in the center here, this is from the book of Genesis,

Genesis chapter one. The main text is the Leningrad Codex that's sitting on the table right there. That's what they use as the base text. And then what they've done is for each book, they've collected all of the manuscript variants between the Septuagint and the Dead Sea Scrolls, Samaritan, Pentateuch, all of them. We're on very good ground for recovering the original text of the Bible. And so there are whole versions and series of commentaries that are just dedicated to digging through that material and working with it. So that's probably not anyone in here's idea of a good time, but there are people who have given their lives and their careers to this, and thank

God for these people, right? Because they produce the basic foundation from which our English translations are made. So all which our English translations are made. So all of our English translations of the Old Testament are made from this edition of the Hebrew Bible right here. And then different translation committees will have different philosophies of how much of this do we pay attention to and lock onto in the English translation. In terms of the amount of energy and sheer number of manuscripts and so on, yeah, the Bible is pretty much at the top of the heap in terms of amount of manuscripts and so on. So the New Testament is one of the most well-documented texts of the ancient world by a few thousand manuscripts, you know. So Homer and Plato and so on. Some of these authors, they actually maybe only have

about 30, 50 copies of their works, period, you know, in Greek or something like that. And for the New Testament, we have 6,000. So the Bible's kind of at the top of the heap here. So it's one of the best documented texts in human history. Sometimes the Masoretic text agrees with stuff we find in the Dead Sea Scrolls. Apparently at some point there was a break, which is why you get differences here and so on. And so essentially with those little notes at the bottom of the page, scholars just have to reconstruct a little tree and do it. That's essentially the status of the situation for the Hebrew Bible. And things will just only get more accurate and more firm grounding

as people write more dissertations as we go on. There's also a New Testament timeline. The history of the making and the manuscript history of the New Testament is totally fascinating. It's like it's the best mystery novel ever, except it's true and there are no conspiracies. So that's the best thing. But it is a mystery novel in terms of the process of discovering manuscripts and so on. It's great. So you'll enjoy this.

The writing of the books of the New Testament, not the collecting of the New Testament. That took place over a longer period of time. But all the books that we find in our New Testament were written between 45 through 100. No matter what views of scholarship, most everyone falls in between these broad numbers here, 45, 50. The Apostle Paul never said, here I am in this date and time writing this. No one ever did that. But based on a basic trajectory, the last written books of the New Testament are likely the Gospel of John or the Book of Revelation, the Apocalypse of John. And he was the last surviving apostle, you know, likely into the late 90s, somewhere in there. So that's, in most, that's a broad consensus.

Most New Testament scholars would agree with that. So here's the breakdown of how the New Testament works. We have five large narrative works. We have the four Gospels and the book of Acts. We have a collection of someone else's mail, a large portion of the New Testament. We're reading someone else's mail. And then a unique work in the New Testament, a first century Jewish apocalypse, which to us is unique in the Bible. It doesn't read quite like anything else, but it was a well-known style of literature and writing in first century Jewish culture. People would have tracked with what John was doing when he talked about dragons and beasts and prostitutes and all

the crazy symbolism that he uses in the book of Revelation. So that's what we've got for the New Testament. And each of these collections has their own unique history and so on. So we're going to start here first with the narrative books. What you'll often hear and books that make the New York Times bestseller list will often put forward a theory about the making of the Gospels, the four Gospels, right? These are the basic foundation stories about Jesus of Nazareth. That's my picture of Jesus right there. Has anyone seen that picture before? It came out a year ago. A team of Israeli scholars who became extremely frustrated over the years with the history of depictions of first century Jewish people as white Europeans. And so just think about whatever images of Jesus you've ever seen,

likely he looks like a white, skinny Anglo-Saxon, right? And so what they did is, these are Israeli scholars, they dig up tombs, they dig up skulls and bones of Israelites and Jewish people, and so they put together a composite of a number of first century Jewish skulls, male skulls, male skulls. And, you know, they can do all kinds of stuff nowadays with face shape based off of skull shape. And so here is A, it's one first century Jewish man.

Of course, Jesus almost certainly didn't look like this. You know, it wasn't Jesus' skull that was the basis. But I think it's helpful just to put it out there and to at least help us realize Jesus for sure wasn't white. You know what I'm saying? And his face shape was probably very distinct and not like anything in European ancestry.

The theory will go essentially that gets put out there in the public a lot is that here's Jesus. He lived roughly in his early 30s. We can date most likely the time period that he was born. The first person who put together the Christian calendar was wrong by about four years. That calendar was put together in about 500 AD. So our tools have improved somewhat for dating things.

So likely Jesus was born in what we would call 4 BC, was crucified, and the empty tomb happens around 30. What happens then is that the Gospels, as we call them, the best scholars can do in terms of the dating of the language, you know, so language changes through time, yes? And so you can date how language changes, and so based on the type of language in the Gospels, they can roughly date the age of the Greek and so on. Jesus was likely spoken primarily Aramaic, though he likely also spoke Greek. And he didn't hang out with very many non-Jewish people,

so most likely all of his teachings are in Aramaic and so on. And so what we have in our English translations of the gospels are translations of the Greek text, which is of the gospels. But then at some point, the teachings of Jesus were in Aramaic and were translated into Greek and passed down. So it's from Aramaic into at least the teachings, you know, teachings of Jesus and so on. And so, you know, we have probably somewhere about a, you know, 30 to 40, 50 year gap in between the finished text of the Gospels as you and I have them and the events surrounding Jesus of Nazareth. So the theory goes is what was going

on in this period right here. And there is no end to scholarly speculation about what was going on in this period right here. And usually what it comes down to, historically, throughout the last 200 years of modern New Testament scholarship, is people who have an axe to grind and were burned by the church at some point in their lives, they have a very negative view of what was going on in this period and that the stories about Jesus were so garbled and embellished and so on that what ends up here in this process is not at all historically reliable. And then you have other scholars who have golden tablets falling out of heaven view to say, no, what we're reading is like exactly the words of

there's been no development or change in this process. Golden tablets falling out of heaven. So those are the two extremes. And whenever there are extremes, you just need to step back, take a deep breath, right? And say reality is likely more complicated than both extremes. I think about the last 60 years of gospel scholarship has been an edge of your seat ride in terms of the discoveries being made, people doing research in other cultures that are oral storytelling cultures about how designated storytellers,

elders in a community preserve the traditions of the earlier and stories from earlier generations. Ethnographic studies, just awesome. I think it's awesome. Because it's getting us into the shoes of what this early period must have been like here. And what we find, lo and behold, is something like this. This is my metaphor for what's going on here. The reading of the Gospels as we have them is a lot like looking at a quilt, a finished quilt. Now just take two seconds, think this metaphor through. Is the age of the quilt the same as the age of the materials compiled in the quilt?

Answer, no, of course not. Like that just makes all the sense in the world. So who knows, like some of these squares were in Grandma's basket underneath her bed. Some of these squares were in Joanne's fabrics. So whatever, it depends on the kind of quilt that you're making. But to trace this process here doesn't say anything about the age of these individual pieces right here.

And so essentially, I think that's precisely what we have going on here in the Gospels. Why don't you go to Luke chapter 1 with me? So Luke chapter 1 is one of the most rare passages in the Gospels. Why don't you go to Luke chapter 1 with me. So Luke chapter 1 is one of the most rare passages in the Bible, because here you have a biblical author stopping before he begins the historical account and saying, dear reader, here I am, here's what I'm doing, and here's how I did it. You know, it's just awesome. And so this is what he says. He says, many have undertaken to draw up an account of the things that have been fulfilled among us. What's he talking about here? What

has been fulfilled among us? The story of Jesus. And as Luke tells the story, he makes it very clear that he believes the story of Jesus is the fulfillment of the Old Testament story. That's what he means here. So how many accounts of Jesus are floating around out there, according to Luke? What does he say? There's lots of quilt pieces floating around. He didn't do this in a corner. He traveled all over Israel.

And he impacted people all up and down the Jordan Valley and in the hill countries, traveling everywhere up in the Sea of Galilee. None of this happened in secret. And so there are quilt pieces about Jesus, his stories, his teachings, floating around all over the place. Many have undertaken to even collect those things into one place. So we know for sure one section of quilt, or one collection of quilt pieces that he's talking about right here. We know for sure one section of quilt, one collection of quilt pieces that he's talking about right here.

We know for sure one of them. And that is the Gospel of Mark. And we'll talk about this in a second here, but the majority position in New Testament scholarship is that Mark is the first, chronologically first. It's the second in the order of our New Testament, but in terms of the order of the writing of the books, Mark was almost certainly first.

And then Matthew and Luke both took Mark up and then also had access to other quilt pieces, and then broke Mark open in certain places and inserted different material and so on. So that's likely at least one of the things he's talking about here. So many have undertaken to draw up an account of the things that have been fulfilled among us, just as they were handed down to us, by whom? By those who from the first were eyewitnesses, people who saw and heard these things done by Jesus and talked about by Jesus. And then also, what's this next phrase here?

Servants of the Word. Now, what he's getting at here, and what more research has uncovered here, is he's talking about officially designated storytellers of the Jesus stories. So these would be apostles, or these would be Jesus went into a village, did a bunch of things there, and then there would be appointed in oral cultures a designated storyteller. He is the one who has memorized, you want to know what really happened? Go talk to that servant of the account. And so this is a very common feature in oral cultures.

And so in their cultures, a living eyewitness was much more reliable than a written account. Because you can go talk to the person and they're the designated person. Sometimes there's multiple ones so they can cross-check each other. So there are eyewitnesses, there are designated preservers of the stories about Jesus, and people are making accounts about Jesus based off of those materials. So he says, therefore, since I myself have carefully investigated everything from the beginning, he's gone around and talked to a whole bunch of other people. It seemed good also to me to write an orderly account for you, most excellent Theophilus, so that you may know the certainty of the things that you have been taught. Okay, so Luke is now dedicating his book to Theophilus. Who's Theophilus? Well, Theophilus is a Greek name, and a very common practice in Greco-Roman culture would be for someone, essentially,

he probably got a grant from Theophilus to do his research project. That's what he's saying here. So Theophilus is likely the patron of Luke in his project of compiling the book of Luke. And it's clear that Luke, the convert to Christianity, and so he dedicates the work to Theophilus to help him understand the certainty of the Jesus traditions that he has learned. Isn't this awesome? It's the only passage like this in the Bible that he tells you why he's doing what he's doing, how he did it, and what he's done. So if you're interested, again, this is the most recent, only I would say something, most exciting research project done on this whole thing of eyewitnesses and so on is by a scholar named Richard Baucom called Jesus and the Eyewitnesses. Dude, this guy has done his homework. It's just unbelievable.

And so if this is an issue for you, this is not an easy read, but if you make your way even halfway through it, you'll just be amazed by how much we actually can know about how the Gospels were written and their historical reliability. This guy is not a conservative, what we would call a theologically conservative Christian. He is very much a devout Christian. He loves Jesus very much. He's very comfortable with historical leeway in the reliability of different books of the Bible. And so that's why he's such a great person to write this book. He doesn't have an ax to grind, you know what I'm saying? So he's done an amazing job. This is about five years old now. It's been well and widely reviewed across all spectrums of scholarship. And for him, he takes his theme

passage, these few verses right here, and this is his entry point into studying the Gospels. Here's what I think is going on here. You've got Jesus here, and then right from the bat, you have the apostles and servants of the Word, people who are official, reliable, cross-checking, people preserving the traditions and sayings of Jesus. And then at some point, they commit those traditions to writing.

And then those traditions are passed down directly and inserted into the quilts here. And then I have the order of the quilts here. So I think Mark is the first quilt. I don't think. Most scholars think so. And then Matthew and Luke have taken up Mark, but then also drawn on other quilt pieces that were not in Mark. John has a unique relationship,

because these two have material right from Mark and then others. John has some material that relates to Matthew, Mark, and Luke, but John comes from a different group of quilt piece collectors, which makes John awesome, because he's like an independent witness to the life and the teachings of Jesus. So if you ever notice, John reads very differently than Matthew, Mark, and Luke. This is why. He's drawing on a different collection of quilt pieces, essentially. And so when you put this together, what you notice is, were there changes to the wording of the teachings of Jesus sometimes? Just compare some of the teachings of Jesus and Luke

to the teachings of Jesus and Matthew. Are they profound differences? Yeah. What I would consider profound, which you might say are insignificant, but I think they're profound. And so, you know, if you've ever compared things in Matthew, Mark, and Luke, they may bother you. And there are some tensions, real challenging. So, for example, in John, the Last Supper takes place essentially the day before Passover, it seems. In Matthew, Mark, and Luke, the Last Supper seems to take place on the night of Passover. How do you iron out that difference?

Well, they're drawing on different quilt pieces here, and there's a few different solutions to what's going on there, but it's a genuine tension here that comes from the complexity of this period. Is anything about the essential doctrines of Christian faith or what Jesus was about and so on? You know, is one of these Gospels, is Jesus saying something completely different than he says in another one? No, no. They're collective witness that are coherent at their most basic points, but there are differences. And we should expect that because this is people working through a historical process. Let me pause right here. Thoughts or questions here? So that's essentially where things stand for the Gospels. The letters have a very different kind of process to them. New Testament letters, the letter of Romans.

It's not a book, it's a letter. Last chapter of Paul's letter to the Romans. Turn to Romans chapter 16. Why don't you put your thumb right there and keep your thumb in Romans chapter 16, but turn to chapter 1 just so we all know what chapter 1 verse 1 is going to say, but I just want us to see it with our own eyes. The letter to the Romans, chapter 1, verse 1. Who's this letter from? Paul, a servant of Christ Jesus, called to be an apostle. He has a long introduction here. Who is this letter to? Go down to verse 7. To all who are in Rome, who are loved by God and called to be saints,

grace and peace to you from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. Okay, so who wrote this letter? Paul. Who's he writing to? The Romans. Go to chapter 16 with me. So chapter 16 is Paul's little greeting to all of his friends in Rome and friends from other people. Sort of at the end of some of his letters, Paul puts a little say hi to so-and-so list at the end.

So verse 1, he says, I commend to you our sister Phoebe, a servant of the church in Sancria. I ask you to receive her in the Lord in a way worthy of the saints. Give her any help she may need from you. She has been a great help to many people, including me. Here's what's interesting. He calls Phoebe a servant of the church. This is just interesting. Interesting aside, Paul has, there's a number, people have done studies, and you can do this too. Just go through and put together a little map of all the people that Paul greets. and he's constantly greeting and talking

about men and women, and he uses the same titles to talk about them. He talks about men and women as co-workers, as servants, and remember servant was a technical term, at least in Luke 1, to talk about people who pass on the writings of someone. And most likely he mentions Phoebe first because Phoebe is the one who delivered the letter of Romans to the people in Rome, which means she would also be the person who would be designated to read and teach the content of the book of Romans to the Romans, which has all kinds of interesting implications about that, doesn't it? Okay, so he's greeting his people. Hey, I'm Paul. I'm saying hi to this person. Greet, greet, greet, greet, greet, greet.

Go down to verse 21 with me. Then he says, Timothy, my fellow worker, he also sends his greetings to you, as do Lucius and Jason and Sociopater, my relatives. I, Tertius, who wrote down this letter, greet you in the Lord. Gaius, whose hospitality I and the whole church here enjoy, sends you his greetings. Who wrote the letter of Romans? Tertius. Who's Tertius? No, nobody knows. Who? I don't know.

This is the only time he appears. So this is a similar situation to Jeremiah. So Jeremiah is obviously behind the book of Jeremiah, but it's actually Baruch who is responsible for writing and compiling the book of Jeremiah. And we have a similar kind of situation right here with Paul's letter. Go to 1 Peter, chapter 5. 1 Peter, again, you can put your thumb there and turn to chapter 1. And this is a letter from Peter.

Two gods elect strangers in the world scattered throughout all these areas. He has a very wide audience he's writing to. Two gods elect strangers in the world scattered throughout all these areas. He has a very wide audience. He's writing to. But in chapter 5, verse 12, we hear this comment right here. He says, with the help of Silas, or does anyone else have a different spelling of the name? Silvanus. So this is a good example. In the New Testament, we'll talk about this.

There's a text variant in the manuscripts about the spelling of this guy's name. It's likely that Silas is an abbreviation of Silvanus. So with the help of this guy, Silas of Silvanus, whom I regard as a faithful brother, I have written to you briefly, encouraging and testifying to you that this is the true grace of God. Stand fast in it. Who wrote the letter of 1 Peter? Well, it's obviously from Peter, but it's with the help of Silas stand fast in it. Who wrote the letter of 1 Peter? Well, it's obviously from Peter, but it's with the help of Silas, the scribe. This solves a bit of a puzzle that comes as some people

think, well, Peter is a fisherman, you know, likely spoke Aramaic first. He likely knew Greek, but 1 Peter is written in beautiful, high style Greek, like literary, beautiful Homer, beautiful Greek. So what's a first century Aramaic-speaking fisherman doing writing this? Well, clearly he has brought along someone who knows Greek a lot better than he does to write and communicate what he wanted to communicate. So just imagine what's going on here then. Peter's communicating his ideas, what's going on here then. Peter's communicating his ideas, and this guy is wording them into beautiful high-style Greek. So who wrote the letter of 1 Peter? Okay, actually a couple people then were involved in the project. And this should not bother us. This is just part of the making of the Bible. So these are, again, these are just little clues that we have about the making of the

letters. We also have a little clue in Paul's letter to the Colossians about how the letters spread. I've never thought about this. How did Paul's letter to the Corinthians become God's word to the church everywhere? How did that happen? And that raises all kinds of problems, because sometimes Paul was talking about very specific issues to the Corinthian church, about the length of people's hair, right? And you're like, what does that have to do with anybody else's hair?

And it's because Paul had this practice here. He says in his letter to the Colossians, he says, After this letter has been read to you, see to it that it is also read in the church of the Laodiceans and that you in turn read the letter that I wrote to Laodicea. Who are the Laodiceans? Well, we know where Laodicea was. Do we have the letter from Laodicea? Nope. It didn't get preserved.

Or, for one reason or another, it was not included within the official collection of Paul's letters. We'll talk about that in the next session. So very clearly, Paul had in mind, it's sort of like he's writing to the Colossians, but he's looking over his shoulder at the rest of the church, capital C church. And so this is why sometimes you're reading in Paul's letters, and he's talking about the length of hair, and it seems like very specific to the Corinthians. But then he'll begin to talk about

that issue in light of a larger theological point he's making about the gospel and about Jesus and about God's nature. And these are profound ideas that help us shape our theology and our beliefs as a whole. And so what these letters do is they're sort of like case studies or something like that in how Paul's larger theology got worked out and applied to specific places and times. So that creates for us the challenge of how do you know what Paul meant to be just to the Corinthians and to everybody else? That's a whole other challenge. That's about how to read the Bible type of class. But that's what Paul seemed to have had in mind. And so you've got these, essentially, I think a great metaphor

is for how things go viral on YouTube or Facebook these days. Essentially, Paul's letters begin to go viral and just get spread and copied and recopied and spread and spread to other churches and all of the letters in the New Testament. And that's how things begin to raise to the top of the heap. This is a raw material for the making of the books of the New Testament. Here we are, and we're separated by a big time gap. So what are the links in the chain, the length of the Bibles you have in your hands of the New Testament,

to the writing of the documents right there? All right, that was the end of episode two of Making of the Bible. I hope your brain is full of historical facts, and I'm sure all kinds of things will fall out and you won't remember them a week from now, but that's okay. The point is getting the big picture. This is going to be the setup for the last, the third part of the Making of the Bible series. We're going to get into the collection of what's called the canon, or the overall collection of books of the Old Testament and the New Testament,

all the dynamics and history involved there. Thanks for listening to The Strange Bible Podcast.