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Can You Trust The Bible? | Your Big Questions Answered · Regina UNSCRIPTED

• 0:06
  SPEAKER_00: This sounds like a question about an ancient book, but actually it touches upon almost everything that matters.
• 0:13
  SPEAKER_00: Who am I?
• 0:14
  SPEAKER_00: Why am I here?
• 0:15
  SPEAKER_00: What am I for?
• 0:16
  SPEAKER_00: Why is there suffering?
• 0:17
  SPEAKER_00: Why do I seem to know that some things are genuinely good and others genuinely evil?
• 0:23
  SPEAKER_00: What happens when I die?
• 0:24
  SPEAKER_00: And perhaps the most immediate question of all: can I actually be happy?
• 0:29
  SPEAKER_00: Not merely distracted, not comfortable, not successful, not temporarily pleased with how life is going.
• 0:36
  SPEAKER_00: I mean happy in the deepest sense.
• 0:39
  SPEAKER_00: Really fulfilled, a peace.
• 0:41
  SPEAKER_00: Living a life which corresponds to what I was actually made for.
• 0:45
  SPEAKER_00: Christianity makes an extraordinary claim about that question.
• 0:49
  SPEAKER_00: It says that you were made by God for God.
• 0:52
  SPEAKER_00: That the deepest hunger in the human heart is ultimately a hunger for Him.
• 0:58
  SPEAKER_00: And that when we try to put something else where God belongs, whether that's money, sex, status, career, politics, pleasure, even another human being, we inevitably ask a creative thing to bear a weight it cannot possibly carry.
• 1:14
  SPEAKER_00: That's why we possess so much and feel so strangely empty.
• 1:18
  SPEAKER_00: That's why success can disappoint us so much.
• 1:21
  SPEAKER_00: That's why pleasure fades.
• 1:23
  SPEAKER_00: And why even the people we love the most cannot finally answer every longing within us.
• 1:29
  SPEAKER_00: St.
• 1:29
  SPEAKER_00: Augustine expressed it more than 16 centuries ago.
• 1:32
  SPEAKER_00: He said our hearts are restless until they rest in God.
• 1:35
  SPEAKER_00: And Christianity claims that this is not merely a beautiful religious sentiment, rather, it's a statement about what a human being is.
• 1:44
  SPEAKER_00: You were created by God.
• 1:46
  SPEAKER_00: You are loved by God.
• 1:48
  SPEAKER_00: Indeed, classical Christianity makes an even more astonishing claim.
• 1:53
  SPEAKER_00: At this very moment, you continue to exist solely because God wills you to exist.
• 1:59
  SPEAKER_00: If he ceased to will your existence, you would simply vanish.
• 2:04
  SPEAKER_00: There would be no you.
• 2:05
  SPEAKER_00: This means that the Bible is not simply an old religious book containing some interesting moral teachings.
• 2:11
  SPEAKER_00: At its heart, it tells the story of who God is, who we are, what has gone wrong between us and what God has done to bring us home.
• 2:20
  SPEAKER_00: It tells us what we were made for, and ultimately it leads us to a particular man living in a particular place at a particular moment in history, Jesus of Nazareth.
• 2:31
  SPEAKER_00: Christians make the extraordinary claim that this man is not simply another prophet or religious teacher, but God made flesh, that he was crucified, that he died, and that he rose again.
• 2:44
  SPEAKER_00: So asking whether we can trust the Bible isn't merely an obscure academic argument about ancient manuscripts, because if these texts really do bear trustworthy witness to God's revelation in human history, they offer something astonishing, a key capable of unlocking the mystery of human existence itself.
• 3:06
  SPEAKER_00: So can we trust them?
• 3:09
  SPEAKER_00: There is an interesting assumption in modern Western culture that the Bible is unreliable.
• 3:15
  SPEAKER_00: You've probably heard some version of this.
• 3:17
  SPEAKER_00: The Bible was written hundreds of years after Jesus.
• 3:20
  SPEAKER_00: It was all passed down by word of mouth, Chinese whispers.
• 3:23
  SPEAKER_00: Nobody knows who wrote the Gospels.
• 3:25
  SPEAKER_00: It's been translated and retranslated so many times that nobody knows what the original said.
• 3:31
  SPEAKER_00: Or simply, it's all myths and legends.
• 3:33
  SPEAKER_00: What's interesting is that so many people who repeat these claims have never seriously investigated them.
• 3:39
  SPEAKER_00: We've absorbed a cultural assumption that an ancient religious text must somehow be historically suspect.
• 3:46
  SPEAKER_00: And this is where I think Lee Strobel's approach in the case for Christ remains extremely useful.
• 3:52
  SPEAKER_00: Strobel was a journalist and former legal editor at the Chicago Tribune, and he approached Christianity as though he were investigating a case.
• 4:01
  SPEAKER_00: Forget for a moment whether you believe in Christianity.
• 4:03
  SPEAKER_00: What is the evidence?
• 4:05
  SPEAKER_00: Who are the witnesses?
• 4:06
  SPEAKER_00: How early are the sources?
• 4:08
  SPEAKER_00: Can their testimony be corroborated?
• 4:10
  SPEAKER_00: Are there reasons for thinking they invented the story?
• 4:14
  SPEAKER_00: And above all, what explanation best accounts for the evidence we actually possess?
• 4:19
  SPEAKER_00: That seems to me to be a very sensible place to begin.
• 4:22
  SPEAKER_00: But we can take Strobel's basic approach and go considerably deeper.
• 4:27
  SPEAKER_00: And I want to concentrate particularly on the work of three scholars, Richard Balcombe, Brant Petrie, and N.
• 4:33
  SPEAKER_00: T.
• 4:33
  SPEAKER_00: Wright.
• 4:34
  SPEAKER_00: Because together they allow us to ask three extremely important questions.
• 4:38
  SPEAKER_00: How close are the Gospels to eyewitness testimony?
• 4:41
  SPEAKER_00: Do they genuinely belong to the historical and Jewish world they claim to describe?
• 4:47
  SPEAKER_00: And what on earth explains the extraordinary events which followed the crucifixion of Jesus?
• 4:52
  SPEAKER_00: Richard Balcom's monumental work, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses, challenged an influential assumption in modern New Testament scholarship that the Gospels emerged largely from anonymous communities passing stories around for decades until eventually somebody wrote them down.
• 5:10
  SPEAKER_00: Balcom argues instead that eyewitness testimonies remained much closer to the gospel tradition than that model allows, and there are fascinating clues within the texts themselves.
• 5:22
  SPEAKER_00: Take something as apparently insignificant as people's names.
• 5:26
  SPEAKER_00: The Gospels repeatedly identify particular people.
• 5:30
  SPEAKER_00: Sometimes they give us names which appear completely unnecessary to the story.
• 5:35
  SPEAKER_00: For example, Mark tells us that the man forced to carry Jesus' cross was Simon of Cyrene, the father of Alexander and Rufus.
• 5:44
  SPEAKER_00: So why did he tell us who his sons were?
• 5:46
  SPEAKER_00: If you were simply inventing a dramatic account of the crucifixion, what possible purpose does that information serve?
• 5:53
  SPEAKER_00: One intriguing explanation is that Alexander and Rufus were known to Mark's original audience.
• 6:00
  SPEAKER_00: In effect, Mark is saying, You know Alexander and Rufus, well their father was there.
• 6:06
  SPEAKER_00: Suddenly we have something which sounds much less like anonymous folklore and much more like testimony embedded within a living community.
• 6:15
  SPEAKER_00: And Balcombe goes considerably further than this.
• 6:18
  SPEAKER_00: When the personal names found in the Gospels are compared with what we know about Jewish names in the first century of Palestine, from sources such as inscriptions, ossuaries and other contemporary evidence, the patterns correspond remarkably well.
• 6:34
  SPEAKER_00: Now that really matters, because names are extraordinarily sensitive to geography and period.
• 6:40
  SPEAKER_00: Someone inventing stories far away or generations later can easily forget those incidental details, and they can easily get those incidental details wrong.
• 6:50
  SPEAKER_00: Yet the gospels repeatedly appear at home in precisely the human world they claim to describe.
• 6:56
  SPEAKER_00: Now that doesn't prove Christianity, but notice what has happened.
• 7:00
  SPEAKER_00: The easy caricature of anonymous legends floating around for generations, untethered from identifiable people, is already beginning to look considerably less secure.
• 7:12
  SPEAKER_00: There's another test we can apply.
• 7:14
  SPEAKER_00: Do these writers actually understand the places that they are describing?
• 7:18
  SPEAKER_00: The Gospels are full of geographical detail.
• 7:20
  SPEAKER_00: Villages, roads, pools, gates, rivers, distances, local customs.
• 7:26
  SPEAKER_00: And archaeology has repeatedly illuminated details which once seemed obscure.
• 7:31
  SPEAKER_00: Take John's Gospel.
• 7:32
  SPEAKER_00: John describes Jesus healing a man beside the pool of Beth Sida in Jerusalem and makes the curious observation that the pool has five porticos.
• 7:42
  SPEAKER_00: That's an oddly specific detail.
• 7:44
  SPEAKER_00: Why five?
• 7:45
  SPEAKER_00: A rectangular pool ought to have four sides.
• 7:48
  SPEAKER_00: But extraordinarily, archaeological investigation revealed a double pool complex divided by a central partition, four surrounding colonnades, with another running through the middle.
• 8:00
  SPEAKER_00: Five.
• 8:00
  SPEAKER_00: John also mentions the pool of Siloam.
• 8:03
  SPEAKER_00: Again, archaeology has helped reconstruct precisely the Jerusalem landscape in which John's narrative is situated.
• 8:11
  SPEAKER_00: Now, let's be careful about what this proves.
• 8:14
  SPEAKER_00: Archaeology cannot tell us that Jesus healed a man at Bethsida.
• 8:18
  SPEAKER_00: It cannot excavate a miracle.
• 8:20
  SPEAKER_00: But that isn't what we're asking archaeology to do.
• 8:23
  SPEAKER_00: We're asking, does this author actually know the world he's describing?
• 8:28
  SPEAKER_00: And again and again the answer appears to be yes.
• 8:32
  SPEAKER_00: This brings us to the Catholic biblical scholar Brent Petrie because Petrie approaches the reliability question from another extremely fruitful direction.
• 8:42
  SPEAKER_00: He puts Jesus back into his Jewish world.
• 8:45
  SPEAKER_00: Modern people sometimes read the Gospels as though Jesus were essentially a twenty first century religious teacher who happened to wear sandals.
• 8:53
  SPEAKER_00: But Jesus was Jewish.
• 8:55
  SPEAKER_00: His mother was Jewish, his apostles were Jewish.
• 8:58
  SPEAKER_00: The Last Supper was Jewish.
• 9:00
  SPEAKER_00: The scriptures Jesus quoted were Jewish.
• 9:03
  SPEAKER_00: The categories through which his followers understood sacrifice, Messiah, covenant, temple, priesthood, and Passover were Jewish.
• 9:13
  SPEAKER_00: And when you reconstruct that world, passages which can appear strange to modern readers suddenly become much more intelligible.
• 9:21
  SPEAKER_00: Consider the Last Supper.
• 9:22
  SPEAKER_00: Jesus takes bread and says this is my body, and he takes wine and identifies it with his blood.
• 9:30
  SPEAKER_00: Then within hours he is crucified at Passover.
• 9:33
  SPEAKER_00: To our modern ears these can sound like disconnected religious ideas, but within the Jewish scriptural world, sacrifice, covenant, Passover and deliverance are intimately connected.
• 9:47
  SPEAKER_00: This is one of the great strengths of Petrie's work.
• 9:50
  SPEAKER_00: He shows just how saturated the gospel narratives are, a Jewish world which modern readers frequently fail to see, and that matters historically, because these aren't simply stories with a few Jewish decorations sprinkled over them to make them sound authentic.
• 10:07
  SPEAKER_00: Their underlying logic is Jewish.
• 10:10
  SPEAKER_00: The writers frequently assume things which they don't even bother to explain.
• 10:15
  SPEAKER_00: In other words, these texts are deeply embedded within the religious culture of the world they claim to describe.
• 10:21
  SPEAKER_00: Once again, that does not prove divine inspiration, but look at the cumulative picture that's emerging.
• 10:28
  SPEAKER_00: Documents containing identifiable people, accurately situated within a recognizable geography, saturated with the religious culture of first century Judaism, preserving incidental details which make perfect sense in their historical setting.
• 10:44
  SPEAKER_00: Perhaps these texts deserve rather more respect as historical sources than our culture normally affords them.
• 10:51
  SPEAKER_00: And then we arrive at the claim around which everything else revolves, the resurrection.
• 10:57
  SPEAKER_00: Jesus rose from the dead.
• 10:58
  SPEAKER_00: Christianity ultimately stands or falls upon that claim.
• 11:02
  SPEAKER_00: And interestingly, St.
• 11:04
  SPEAKER_00: Paul himself effectively says so.
• 11:06
  SPEAKER_00: This is where the enormous historical work of N.
• 11:09
  SPEAKER_00: T.
• 11:10
  SPEAKER_00: Wright becomes particularly important.
• 11:11
  SPEAKER_00: Wright asks us to approach the resurrection as an historical problem.
• 11:17
  SPEAKER_00: Because whatever you believe about Christianity, something happened after the crucifixion which requires explanation.
• 11:25
  SPEAKER_00: Jesus was executed by the Romans.
• 11:27
  SPEAKER_00: His movement should have ended.
• 11:29
  SPEAKER_00: That is generally what happens when the charismatic leader of a messianic movement is publicly and brutally executed.
• 11:38
  SPEAKER_00: His followers had scattered.
• 11:39
  SPEAKER_00: Their apparent Messiah was dead, and crucifixion did not merely kill Jesus, it appeared to disprove him.
• 11:46
  SPEAKER_00: And yet something extraordinary happens.
• 11:49
  SPEAKER_00: These same followers very rapidly begin publicly proclaiming that God has raised Jesus from the dead.
• 11:55
  SPEAKER_00: Not that his teachings lived on, not that his spirit was with them, not simply that he had gone to heaven.
• 12:02
  SPEAKER_00: They claimed that the man who had been crucified was alive again.
• 12:07
  SPEAKER_00: And we know that this proclamation is extraordinarily early.
• 12:11
  SPEAKER_00: One of the most important pieces of evidence appears not in the Gospels, but in Paul's first letter to the Corinthians.
• 12:19
  SPEAKER_00: Paul writes, Christ died for our sins.
• 12:22
  SPEAKER_00: He was buried.
• 12:23
  SPEAKER_00: He was raised on the third day.
• 12:25
  SPEAKER_00: He appeared to Caphas, then to the twelve.
• 12:28
  SPEAKER_00: Paul explicitly tells us that he is passing on something which he himself had previously received.
• 12:34
  SPEAKER_00: Scholars widely recognize that this tradition predates the writing of 1 Corinthians, taking us considerably closer to the events themselves.
• 12:43
  SPEAKER_00: This matters enormously.
• 12:45
  SPEAKER_00: One of the most common explanations of Christianity is that the resurrection was a legend which developed long after Jesus died.
• 12:53
  SPEAKER_00: But the historical evidence presents us with a problem.
• 12:56
  SPEAKER_00: The resurrection isn't a late addition to Christianity.
• 13:00
  SPEAKER_00: The resurrection is there at the beginning.
• 13:03
  SPEAKER_00: So what happened?
• 13:04
  SPEAKER_00: Perhaps the disciples invented it.
• 13:06
  SPEAKER_00: But then we have to explain why.
• 13:08
  SPEAKER_00: The Gospels themselves hardly portray the apostles as heroic founders of a new religion.
• 13:14
  SPEAKER_00: They misunderstand Jesus.
• 13:16
  SPEAKER_00: They argue amongst themselves.
• 13:18
  SPEAKER_00: They fall asleep when he asks them to remain awake.
• 13:21
  SPEAKER_00: Peter denies even knowing him.
• 13:23
  SPEAKER_00: Most of them flee when Jesus is arrested.
• 13:25
  SPEAKER_00: And yet shortly afterwards, this terrified group is publicly proclaiming that the crucified Jesus has risen from the dead.
• 13:34
  SPEAKER_00: Perhaps they conspired to invent it.
• 13:37
  SPEAKER_00: But then we would have to explain why they persisted.
• 13:41
  SPEAKER_00: Now, we need to be precise here.
• 13:42
  SPEAKER_00: The fact that someone is prepared to suffer for a belief doesn't prove that the belief is true.
• 13:48
  SPEAKER_00: Human beings have died for false beliefs throughout history.
• 13:51
  SPEAKER_00: But there is an important distinction.
• 13:53
  SPEAKER_00: A person can die for something he sincerely but mistakenly believes to be true.
• 13:58
  SPEAKER_00: It is considerably harder to explain why someone would accept persecution for something he personally knows he fabricated.
• 14:08
  SPEAKER_00: So conspiracy doesn't dispose of the problem.
• 14:10
  SPEAKER_00: Were they hallucinating?
• 14:12
  SPEAKER_00: Perhaps they sincerely believed that they had seen Jesus but were just hallucinating.
• 14:17
  SPEAKER_00: That might explain sincerity.
• 14:19
  SPEAKER_00: But does it explain everything else?
• 14:21
  SPEAKER_00: The traditions describe appearances to individuals and groups in different circumstances and over a period of time.
• 14:29
  SPEAKER_00: And even then there is another problem.
• 14:31
  SPEAKER_00: Why did these experiences produce the very particular claim that Jesus had been resurrected?
• 14:37
  SPEAKER_00: This is an important part of Wright's argument.
• 14:39
  SPEAKER_00: First century Jews already possessed categories for visions.
• 14:43
  SPEAKER_00: They knew about angels.
• 14:45
  SPEAKER_00: They believed in spirits.
• 14:47
  SPEAKER_00: They possessed concepts of heaven and the afterlife.
• 14:50
  SPEAKER_00: But resurrection meant something much more specific.
• 14:54
  SPEAKER_00: It meant bodily life after bodily death.
• 14:57
  SPEAKER_00: And critically, resurrection was generally expected to occur at the end of history.
• 15:02
  SPEAKER_00: Yet suddenly a group of first century Jews begins announcing something completely unexpected.
• 15:09
  SPEAKER_00: It has happened already.
• 15:10
  SPEAKER_00: To one man in the middle of history.
• 15:13
  SPEAKER_00: Something had forced them radically to rethink their existing categories.
• 15:18
  SPEAKER_00: Perhaps the story grew with the telling.
• 15:20
  SPEAKER_00: We know legends develop, so perhaps Jesus was remembered initially as a great teacher, then gradually became a miracle worker.
• 15:28
  SPEAKER_00: And eventually somebody added the ultimate miracle, resurrection.
• 15:33
  SPEAKER_00: It's an intuitively plausible theory, but again, we encounter the chronological problem.
• 15:39
  SPEAKER_00: Paul's letters take us very close to the events.
• 15:42
  SPEAKER_00: The tradition Paul quotes takes us earlier still, and the resurrection proclamation is already there.
• 15:49
  SPEAKER_00: The central claim hasn't been slowly added to Christianity.
• 15:53
  SPEAKER_00: It is the thing which created Christianity in the first place.
• 15:57
  SPEAKER_00: Without the resurrection proclamation, there isn't a Christian movement waiting around for somebody later to embellish it with a resurrection story.
• 16:06
  SPEAKER_00: So what does all this actually prove?
• 16:08
  SPEAKER_00: At this point we need to be disciplined.
• 16:10
  SPEAKER_00: None of these arguments means archaeology as prove the Bible.
• 16:14
  SPEAKER_00: Balcombe doesn't prove every gospel sentence by demonstrating the importance of eyewitness testimony.
• 16:21
  SPEAKER_00: Petrie doesn't prove Christianity simply by showing how deeply the gospels belong within first century Judaism.
• 16:28
  SPEAKER_00: And entire cannot put the resurrection into a laboratory and repeat the experiment.
• 16:33
  SPEAKER_00: History doesn't work like that.
• 16:35
  SPEAKER_00: What we do in historical reasoning is accumulate evidence and ask which explanation best accounts for it.
• 16:42
  SPEAKER_00: And when we do that, something begins to happen to the familiar modern caricature of the Bible.
• 16:48
  SPEAKER_00: These are not simply religious stories written hundreds of years afterwards by people completely ignorant of the world they describe.
• 16:55
  SPEAKER_00: They are texts deeply embedded in first century Judaism.
• 16:59
  SPEAKER_00: They contain identifiable people, they know the geography.
• 17:03
  SPEAKER_00: They preserve awkward, embarrassing, and apparently incidental details.
• 17:08
  SPEAKER_00: They transmit traditions which take us remarkably close to the events themselves, and at the center of them stands a historical claim so extraordinary that it transformed a frightened collection of Jewish disciples into a movement which would eventually transform the world.
• 17:28
  SPEAKER_00: Now you may reasonably object that we've concentrated heavily on the gospels and the resurrection, but what about the rest of the Bible?
• 17:36
  SPEAKER_00: And this is where we need to avoid another common mistake.
• 17:39
  SPEAKER_00: The Bible isn't actually a single book written by one person at one moment.
• 17:44
  SPEAKER_00: It is a library.
• 17:45
  SPEAKER_00: It contains history, poetry, prophecy, wisdom literature, letters, theological reflection and apocalyptic writing composed across many centuries.
• 17:56
  SPEAKER_00: So asking is the Bible reliable can mean several different things.
• 18:01
  SPEAKER_00: Do you mean has the text been accurately transmitted?
• 18:04
  SPEAKER_00: That is a question for textual criticism.
• 18:07
  SPEAKER_00: Do you mean did these authors understand the historical worlds they describe?
• 18:12
  SPEAKER_00: That's something history and archaeology can investigate.
• 18:16
  SPEAKER_00: Do you mean are Genesis, Psalms, and Revelation all supposed to be read in exactly the same way?
• 18:22
  SPEAKER_00: No.
• 18:22
  SPEAKER_00: The church has never required us to pretend that poetry, history, parable, and apocalyptic imagery are identical literary genres.
• 18:31
  SPEAKER_00: But behind that extraordinary collection of writings, Christianity perceives something else.
• 18:37
  SPEAKER_00: A story, creation, fall, covenant, Israel, incarnation, redemption, resurrection, and ultimately the restoration of all things in Christ.
• 18:48
  SPEAKER_00: It is the story of God seeking man.
• 18:51
  SPEAKER_00: Remember the questions with which we began.
• 18:53
  SPEAKER_00: Who am I?
• 18:54
  SPEAKER_00: Why am I here?
• 18:55
  SPEAKER_00: What am I for?
• 18:56
  SPEAKER_00: Why is there something wrong with the world?
• 18:58
  SPEAKER_00: Why is there something wrong with me?
• 19:00
  SPEAKER_00: Why do I hunger for love, beauty, justice, and meaning?
• 19:04
  SPEAKER_00: Why do the things I think will finally satisfy me somehow never quite manage it?
• 19:10
  SPEAKER_00: And can I be happy?
• 19:12
  SPEAKER_00: The Bible's answer is extraordinary.
• 19:14
  SPEAKER_00: Yes.
• 19:15
  SPEAKER_00: But perhaps not in the way our culture has taught us to think about happiness.
• 19:20
  SPEAKER_00: Christianity says that happiness is not finally something you can purchase.
• 19:24
  SPEAKER_00: It cannot be achieved simply by accumulating experiences.
• 19:28
  SPEAKER_00: It isn't the same thing as pleasure, and it cannot be obtained through the endless project of constructing and expressing the self.
• 19:36
  SPEAKER_00: Because if God really created you, then he created you for something.
• 19:40
  SPEAKER_00: And the fullest human life must therefore be the life which corresponds to that purpose.
• 19:45
  SPEAKER_00: The Christian tradition calls this beatitude.
• 19:48
  SPEAKER_00: Our final happiness is God Himself.
• 19:51
  SPEAKER_00: Created things can give us genuine happiness because created things are genuinely good.
• 19:57
  SPEAKER_00: Friendship is good.
• 19:59
  SPEAKER_00: Marriage is good.
• 20:01
  SPEAKER_00: Family is good.
• 20:02
  SPEAKER_00: Food and wine are good.
• 20:04
  SPEAKER_00: Beauty is good.
• 20:06
  SPEAKER_00: Work can be good.
• 20:07
  SPEAKER_00: It can be bad as well, but it can be good.
• 20:10
  SPEAKER_00: Human love is an extraordinary good, but none of them is the ultimate good.
• 20:14
  SPEAKER_00: The problem begins when we take one of these created goods and ask it to become our God.
• 20:20
  SPEAKER_00: Money can't do it.
• 20:22
  SPEAKER_00: Sex cannot do it.
• 20:23
  SPEAKER_00: Success cannot do it.
• 20:25
  SPEAKER_00: Politics cannot do it.
• 20:27
  SPEAKER_00: Another human being cannot do it.
• 20:29
  SPEAKER_00: Even the entire created universe cannot finally satisfy a creature whose deepest destiny lies beyond the created universe.
• 20:38
  SPEAKER_00: Augustine understood this 16 centuries ago.
• 20:41
  SPEAKER_00: Our hearts remain restless until they rest in God.
• 20:45
  SPEAKER_00: And this is why the Bible matters.
• 20:47
  SPEAKER_00: Not because it is a divine instruction manual which gives us an easy answer to every problem.
• 20:52
  SPEAKER_00: It doesn't.
• 20:53
  SPEAKER_00: The Bible is not always simple.
• 20:55
  SPEAKER_00: It isn't always easy.
• 20:57
  SPEAKER_00: There are passages which are difficult, disturbing, and extraordinarily challenging.
• 21:01
  SPEAKER_00: And for somebody opening it for the first time, it may not be immediately convincing at all.
• 21:07
  SPEAKER_00: But what the Bible ultimately does is introduce us to Him.
• 21:11
  SPEAKER_00: It tells us who God is and it tells us who we are.
• 21:15
  SPEAKER_00: It tells us what has gone wrong.
• 21:17
  SPEAKER_00: It tells us why we cannot save ourselves.
• 21:20
  SPEAKER_00: It records the extraordinary history of God's relationship with humanity.
• 21:25
  SPEAKER_00: And above all, it leads us to Jesus Christ.
• 21:29
  SPEAKER_00: The Bible isn't ultimately about becoming an expert on an ancient text.
• 21:33
  SPEAKER_00: It's about coming to know the God to whom that text bears witness.
• 21:38
  SPEAKER_00: The creator who made you, who loves you, who holds you in existence at this very moment, and who calls you to Himself.
• 21:45
  SPEAKER_00: So let's return to the question: can I trust the Bible?
• 21:48
  SPEAKER_00: I don't think the answer is just have faith.
• 21:51
  SPEAKER_00: Nor do I think Christianity asks you to switch off your intelligence.
• 21:55
  SPEAKER_00: Quite the opposite.
• 21:56
  SPEAKER_00: Ask the questions.
• 21:58
  SPEAKER_00: Examine the manuscripts.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_00: Look at the archaeology.
• 22:01
  SPEAKER_00: Investigate the history.
• 22:03
  SPEAKER_00: Study the Jewish world of Jesus.
• 22:05
  SPEAKER_00: Ask when the resurrection was first proclaimed.
• 22:08
  SPEAKER_00: Ask who claimed to have witnessed it.
• 22:10
  SPEAKER_00: Examine alternative explanations.
• 22:13
  SPEAKER_00: Because once you start doing that, the sweeping assertion that you can't trust the Bible begins to dissolve into a series of specific historical questions.
• 22:23
  SPEAKER_00: And specific questions can be investigated.
• 22:26
  SPEAKER_00: The evidence doesn't force you to believe, God doesn't compel love, but it does make casual dismissal increasingly difficult.
• 22:35
  SPEAKER_00: And perhaps eventually the question begins to change.
• 22:39
  SPEAKER_00: Because if these texts really do preserve trustworthy testimony about Jesus, if they really are deeply rooted in the time and place they claim to describe, if the conviction that Jesus Christ rose bodily from the dead really does take us back to the very beginning of Christianity, then we're no longer dealing merely with an interesting ancient book.
• 23:02
  SPEAKER_00: We're confronting the possibility that God has really spoken, that the Creator has entered his creation, that the strange longing within the human heart has an object, that good and evil are real, that your life has a purpose, that suffering is not meaningless, that your mistakes and sins need not have the final word, that you are loved, that you were made for something infinitely greater than pleasure, possessions, or success, and that death is not the end.
• 23:34
  SPEAKER_00: Which means that perhaps the most important question isn't simply, can I trust the Bible?
• 23:40
  SPEAKER_00: It is what if it's true?
• 23:42
  SPEAKER_00: And if it's true, what am I going to do about it?