(unedited/draft show notes here, not a totally dialed-in transcript — what a great time to listen, compare, and experience the superiority of the podcast to the text below!)
It’s brutal to think about the American Civil War. It’s bad enough that brother should fight brother, but the fact that it had to be fought to begin with is a reminder of a less savory part of United States history – that human beings used to be owned like property. Of course, the United States is not alone in having a history such as this.
Abraham Lincoln, our president at the time, delivered what is perhaps the most famous speech in our history in which he reiterated a declaration of intrinsic human worth – that all people are created equals.[1] This is now known as the Gettysburg Address.
Except that it didn’t happen.
You see, we don’t have the original copy of that address. And who knows what Lincoln actually said. Sure, there are a few copies, but surely those were made by people who just wanted to make him look good.
“Wait!” you say. “Just because we don’t have the original copy doesn’t mean we don’t have reliable copies.”
Nice try. Wikipedia – which every academic institution everywhere accepts as a valid research source[2] – says that scholars don’t agree on the exact wording. There are conflicts between copies, and newspapers have even more differences. Surely you can’t expect me to believe those. Besides, the North was hurting in the war and that’s what everybody wanted Lincoln to say (if he actually even existed, let alone said something).
“Not true!” you say. “There were eyewitnesses, a lot of them. Sure, they might have slightly different takes on what happened, but any court of law would totally find their testimonies corroborate the story beyond reasonable doubt. And even if the manuscript copies aren’t exact word-for-word, we can compare them and know with a high degree of certainty what the original said. AND those tiny discrepancies don’t affect the meaning of what Lincoln said at all. All in all, we can, beyond reasonable doubt, know that the speech happened and what was said.”
You can see where this is going, I trust. Nobody actually believes that the Gettysburg Address didn’t happen. Sure, one expert wants to argue that the location identified as where Lincoln gave his address is wrong and that the correct spot is 40 yards away. (Can you believe it? How can we trust anything these people say? I’m therefore throwing out the whole thing unless you prove to me where he stood!)
Historians use a number of factors to determine the accuracy of an old copy of a text, but two are the foundation of everything else. One is how soon was the copy made after the original. Generally speaking earlier is better, because it’s closer to the source and presumed more accurate. The second is the number of copies there are. This is important especially for ancient writings because they were copied by hand.
So, do you think we can have any confidence in the Gettysburg Address or were we getting fed a line of baloney when taught it as “fact” in a U.S. History class? Of course we can have confidence in it (for all the reasons we poked at above). We have five solid copies, each created very close in time to the original. Plus several newspaper accounts that bear witness as well.
But what about other, older writings? Consider the following classics: (2a)
Caesar’s Gallic Wars has about 250 copies. Caesar lived from 100-44 BC, but the earliest copies we have date to about the ninth century, and most to the fifteenth century AD. That’s a millennium between the time of creation and our oldest copy.
Pliny the Elder lived from about AD 23-79 and wrote Natural History. Apparently there is a fragment of Natural History that dates to the end of the fifth century – a 250 year gap – but the oldest complete manuscript of the 200 that exist is some 1200 years later in the fourteen century.
Tacitus (AD 56-120) was public official in Rome to whom much is credited with us knowing what the Roman Empire was like. We’ve got a couple manuscripts that date to the ninth and eleventh centuries respectively, and a total of thirty one more from the fifteenth century.
I could go on and on, but you get the idea. Manuscripts of ancient writings are in short supply and often have centuries (if not a millennium!) between the original and the copies we do have. This is true for Homer and Plato and Thucydides and Demosthenes and on and on.
But it’s not true for the New Testament in the Bible.
We have more 5800 manuscripts. And the time gaps? In some cases decades. Not for all of them or even most of them, of course, but on the whole, and as “historical document” standards go, it’s something that exceeds the qualifications we deem acceptable for other historical documents.
In short, there is simply nothing like it in the ancient world.
As you might imagine, there scholars all over this like flies on stink, but not all of them are “Christians trying to prove the Jesus thing.” Interestingly an approach that Christian Bible scholars take is to ask, “What do historians agree on with a very high degree of consensus, especially those who are decidedly skeptical, atheist, or even anti-Christian?”
Why would they do that?
Because then you end up with a group of documents[3] that are as historically reliable[4] as the texts upon which we build oodles of college courses and documentaries for our knowledge of other parts of ancient history.
So get this: you’ve read books or sat in classes telling you the history of the Greeks or Romans or Babylonians or Egyptians and on and on, and you were taught those things as historical facts without so much as batting an eye at the reliability of the manuscript evidence.
And then here comes the Bible – the best attested manuscripts of the ancient near east by a country mile, a fact that even secular and atheistic historians agree on – and somebody wants to tell you it’s a myth?
As Colonel Potter (on M*A*S*H) used to say, “Mule muffins!”
Remember, this isn’t the argument for the Bible’s divine inspiration or Godly authority yet, just its validity as a historical document.
The Bible isn’t, of course, just historically reliable as a document. It’s documentation of history – history that is verifiable. In other words, it’s testable.
So if it is reasonable to believe the documents are credible, what do they claim?
Consider the letters written by a weird looking guy named Paul – bowlegged, short, big nose, and sporting a unibrow. One letter he wrote to a church in Corinth (Greece) said, “Look at these witnesses who saw the risen Jesus – go ask them! Peter? You know him personally (in other words, you trust him, just ask him!). James, Jesus’ half-brother who didn’t believe his brother was God until after Jesus’ appeared to him after the resurrection went on to be an influential leader in the church.” Then Paul says, “Oh, and then there are 500 more people who saw Jesus alive, with a physical body that some actually touched, after the resurrection, and most of them are still alive. You should go ask them.”
Why would he do that?
Because, as he himself says, if the resurrection didn’t happen, we’re all idiots. But it did, and with way more eyewitnesses than it’s take in a court of law to reach a conclusion that’s beyond reasonable doubt.
So to summarize our argument, we have documents that are at least as historically reliable as anything else you’ll find, and one of them not only claims Jesus physically rose from the dead, but says there were hundreds of witnesses.
Here’s the bottom line:
Can you imagine some professor saying, “Well, I know what your parents taught you about Plato, but that was just a myth perpetuated by a superstitious empire of long ago?”
Or what if a prof said, “That Gettysburg Address…we don’t have the original copy and just look at the discrepancies in the five copies and newspaper versions -- you can’t trust ANY of it.”
There isn’t a perfect history report, a perfect eyewitness, a perfect newspaper article, even today. But we don’t confuse “reasonable to believe” with “100%, absolute certainty” in any of life’s decisions, because there is no 100%, absolute certainty. But there very much a conclusion like “almost certainly true, at least enough so that belief is a very reasonable thing if not the most reasonable explanation of the data that we have.”
Except for the Gettysburg Address. That, my friends, is pure hogwash.
ForTheHope is a daily audio Bible + apologetics podcast and blog. We’ve got a passion for just keepin’ it real, having conversations like normal people, and living out the love of Jesus better every single day.
Roger Courville, CSP is a globally-recognized expert in digitally-extended communication and connection, an award-winning speaker, award-winning author, and a passionately bad guitarist. Follow him on Twitter -- @RogerCourville and @JoinForTheHope – or his blog: www.forthehope.org.
Sources and resources:
[1] Interestingly every instance of slavery (and often war, too), is based on a belief that some people are lesser, that somehow they don’t fully qualify as persons.
[2] Now that is humor folks. Enjoy it while you can.
(2a) I forget my source on this, sorry. It’s also likely slightly out of date. But it’s close enough for this discussion.
[3] Remember, the Bible’s various parts weren’t all put in one ‘book’ to begin with.
[4] More historically reliable!