How can we be assured that this is the scripture, and how did the church get here?

Well, without stealing too much content from my talk tomorrow, so like I said, in Jesus' day, when Paul writes, all Scripture is God-breathed, he's not necessarily talking about what we would view as the encompassing of the New Testament, in so much as he has a perception of what Scripture is, and that it is profitable for teaching and reproof and training in righteousness.

And that would be what we consider the Old Testament.

And we can parse out what that would have looked like, because it wasn't always in a single bound volume like we have it today.

It's very convenient to have it in this form, but they existed in scrolls and later in codices, what we call books.

And so we can look at statements like Jesus saying that the law, the prophets, and the Psalms speak about him.

And so in one sense, there's this sort of threefold witness, the law, the prophets, and the Psalms.

Yeah, well, and ironically, it's the

Magisterial authority versus a ministerial authority.

Yeah, so the magisterial authority has the authority to speak down to the individual in terms of what they ought to believe.

Whereas in the ministerial understanding of Scripture as to what it is, the church is below Scripture in and of itself.

It is not the infallible source that communicates what Scripture is and how to read it and how to operate within the methodology of Scripture.

faith and practice, but faith and practice are dictated by Scripture, and the church becomes the shepherd that guides that in its actual authority.

So the role of the elder, the pastor, that is below Scripture.

The role of the church in its ability to do things like discipline, that is below Scripture.

So, that happens, but then, you know, time would pass, and those people would die, and the prophets and apostles would disappear, and then you would have tradition, oral traditions, that would obviously vary from place to place, unless you had a canon, a written canon of eyewitness reports that were written before the beginning of the second century.

is

better.

And where Jesus is on trial before Pilate, and Jesus says, everyone who follows Pilate the truth who is following the truth follows me and on the back has the words of Pilate saying what is truth and But so part of my research, so the reason I bring this up is because before this was discovered by C.H. Roberts in the 1940s, the convention was because of a guy named Bauer that the Gospel of John was second century.

And so he had this, he was a student of Hegel.

Have you ever heard of Hegelian dialectic? So you have like a thesis, synthesis, and antithesis.

So Hegel is... had this philosophical theory, and his student Bauer takes that and he incorporates this into history, and he says, you know, the earliest gospel, Mark, has this very Jewish Jesus, and then the later gospels have a very, like, the last of what I call the synoptic gospels, Matthew, Mark, and Luke.

Luke has a very kind of more divine Jesus.

And

Do you want to just explain for those who aren't familiar with it, how your own journey, which involved quite a miraculous kind of healing in your younger life, led on to you kind of wanting to make the case for

faith yourself? Yeah, so I grew up a missionary kid.

My parents were missionaries both in Pakistan and then in the Middle Eastern country of Jordan.

So I was a pastor's kid.

I was a missionary kid.

And then when we, I was still relatively young when we came back to Canada and experienced a crisis.

Very rare neurological condition that affected me and left me paralyzed from the waist down.

How do you tend to approach this

Hmm.

Or- [laughs] ... is it the opposite, right? That he's clearly, you know, born in Bethlehem, growing up in Nazareth, uh, wandering around Galilee, that i- in this Jewish saturated Hebraic world, and then later people are like, "Let's make him into a little bit more of a, like a pagan philosopher." I think that's what's going on, right? Yeah.

But you have, uh, documents, even early documents, something like the Gospel of Thomas, 114 sayings.

Um, it's one of the more famous ones because in 1945 it was discovered in the Nag Hammadi desert, what's known as the Nag Hammadi Library.

Also contains other documents like, uh, the Secret Gospel of John and the Gospel of Philip.

But the Gospel of Thomas is one of the more kind of famous, well-known ones.

It's not a gospel in the formal sense of like a birth, life, death, and resurrection.

That's funny

Ancient and modern people don't always follow the evidence.

The conversation too.

I also think people rarely make decisions on evidence alone.

And one of the things that I always think about is I had a very close friend growing up whose father was a chain smoker and eventually got cancer in his mouth and they had to remove his tongue.

And they took a, they removed his physical tongue.

They took a piece of his thigh and they basically recreated him a new tongue out of the meat of his leg in order for him to simply do things like speak properly.

Well, years later, that particular friend and his brother picked up smoking.

What would you say is, taken all together, intellectual, emotional, social, whatever, the most compelling thing about Christianity?

So, uh, is that a risk that some of the things that have been transmuted via God into this book in front of me are prone to Chinese whispers and/or just, like, a lack of understanding about the nature of the world, like the resurrection, for example?

Yeah.

So this is, uh, this is in my field referred to as mythological drift.

So how do we factor inMaking sure that mythological drift doesn't happen.

I think there are a couple things related to what you said.

First off, I think I would be careful in trying to ascribe the ancient world as being pre-scientific and therefore largely, say, ignorant.

I mean, even when the angel comes to Mary in the gospel story and says, "You're gonna be with child," Mary's objection to the angel is a scientific one.

Where do you think we came from? Like, where do you think I came from or my ancestors came from? Do you think they were put on Earth as humans? Do you believe in the Adam and Eve story? Do you think there was some kind of evolution? And when do you think this happened?

... of playing it out every day, and as a Christian?

Mm.

Yeah, I mean, I think there's probably two components to that question.

One is a, a, a very, you know, I think, honest assessment of what's typically called the problem of evil.

Um, and I think that totally makes sense.

And I think if you don't feel those things, you're probably not living your life in the real world, in that we see that this world is beautiful, yet it's profoundly broken.

And that's the, that's the testimony of Scripture, ultimately, is that God created the world to be good, but something took place.

What is that?

Mm-hmm.

...

so I can't speak to whether any one particular nation or group right now has fulfilled some sort of criteria for just war in the very recent past.

That's, I think, for others to say.

But what I can speak to, Piers, are the ways that the Bible and Christian heritage that I share in, uh, have considered this very complicated topic over the centuries, because it would be somewhat foolhardy to forget that the heavy reality of war that I don't think we should ever speak lightly of, you know, as Jesus himself said, "Those who live by the sword will die by the sword." So, we see throughout Christian scripture in places like Ephesians chapter 6 and 2 Corinthians 10 the topic of waging war with preaching and words and persuasion, rather than weapons, and so I think we should aim to persuade people if we can, but the reality of broken humanity that even, you know, the conversations that we've all been having, you personally have been having even just now, is that not all people can be persuaded.

And so theory and philosophizing about what should happen in an ideal, ideal world often get muddy when the rubber hits the road of this beautiful yet broken world that we live in.

So, you know-

Mm-hmm.

(laughs)

... for this conversation.

And also, you have to account for all of the manuscripts of the Bible that predate the 6th century and would not have been known at that time, because we have copies of, say, the Gospel of John, uh, the Gospel of Matthew, uh, certainly all of the Pauline epistles, that were buried in places like Egypt and Syria hundreds of years before the Council of Constantinople ever happened.

So if we're pulling out a doctrine, we really have to ascribe some sort of almost omnipotent ability for the individuals at this time to go find these manuscripts, alter them, put them back in the sand for us to find, you know, in the 19th century, and date them to that time, and do this systematically throughout all of the ancient world.

And I think this brings up an interesting point, Michael.

These types of accusations, you know, reincarnation not being compatible with historical Christianity or ancient Judaism aside, um, what this assumes is impossible because we know from the dissemination of how the Christian documents were copied and then spread throughout the ancient world, that it negated any one group or one person controlling the text of those documents at any one point in time for this exact reason, because the early Christians were very eager to get these documents in the hands of people.

And so with only a couple hundred years, you have copies up into the British Isles, you have copies of these books all over North Africa, the Middle East, into Asia and Europe.

So it couldn't really be written by Enoch?

To which people say, "Well, I, ugh, if even not all his disciples believe this, why on earth should we?"

we?"Yeah, I think there are a few things going on there.

In terms of the historical method and how we actually evaluate things, we only have witness testimony.

You know, you do have, um, something, uh, that's very different than a courtroom in, um, a modern legal setting, right? Uh, even something like hearsay, um, well, all of ancient history in one sense is hearsay, but that doesn't apply when we, when we apply it to the historiographical method.

We need to use the same standards that when we would look at something like, say, uh, the biographies of Tiberius with, uh, Velleius Paterculus, um, Tacitus, Suetonius, and Cassiodio.

When we have multiple instances of reporting on someone's life, we look at both the things that they agree on and the things maybe where they have a differentiation in detail, and then we try to the best of our ability explain some of the different instances that are going on.

Now, I, I would say, you know, to the accusation, well, these are just, uh, ancient, uh, illiterate people, um, that's what C.S. Lewis referred to as chronological snobbery.

And why do you think, Wesley, it could be a lot earlier than the assumed scholarly consensus?