Tag Archives: Biblical reliability

Does Modern Archaeology Disprove the Bible?

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“Archaeology” by Karoly Ferenczy, 1896.

It was the trip of a lifetime.

We had enjoyed a gorgeous yet brutally hot day in Jerusalem and were now in the City of David located to the south of what is known as the Old City and the Temple Mount. Just to my right were the Kidron Valley and the Mount of Olives which sits to the east of the city. The Upper Room where Jesus and the disciples ate the Last Supper was a few hundred yards away up the hill to my left.

After leaving supper, Jesus’s group would have traveled from there to the Garden of Gethsemane, which is located somewhere on the Mount of Olives. Therefore, the most direct route would have taken them down the steep and rocky slope into the Kidron Valley just across from where I was standing. Only a hundred or so feet away, I saw some old stairs uncovered during the excavation of the City of David. These stairs were roughly dated to around the time of Christ and could have been used by the group to travel from the Upper Room to the garden on the night Jesus was betrayed.

The intersection of archeology and the Bible was the most fascinating and encouraging aspect of my trip to Israel – the land where the Bible comes alive. Our group visited many amazing sites while we were there. This site was underwhelming compared to many other locations; however, I was overwhelmed by the knowledge that Jesus may have walked those well-worn stairs. While there was nothing special about the ground or those stone steps, this place is where God and man came together—the natural and mundane met the supernatural.

Continue reading Does Modern Archaeology Disprove the Bible? →

Apologetics Leads to a Resilient Faith

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Illustration from FEMA 277, the 1996 report on the OKC bombing

On April 19, 1995, a truck bomb was detonated in front of the Alfred P Murrah federal building in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. While it was an incredibly powerful bomb that did extensive damage to hundreds of buildings in a 16-block radius, there is one primary reason for the devastating partial collapse of the Murrah building. The front of the building, where the bomb was detonated, used what’s called transfer girders on the 3rd floor to support the columns for the upper six floors. They worked great for creating a more open entrance with ground-floor columns spaced at twice the distance of the columns on the 8 stories above, but they also decreased the number of load paths available for supporting the weight of the floors above. Therefore, when the truck bomb was detonated right next to a ground-floor column, shattering it and shearing through the columns on each side of it, 8 of the 10 bays of the building’s north facade were now unsupported. From the 3rd floor up, taking away that much support would’ve required eliminating 7 columns, but at the first 2 levels, it only took the destruction of 3 columns. This was a painful reminder that part of making a resilient building that can survive disasters is having redundancy, the ability to safely redistribute loads through alternate paths in the event of the loss of one load path. It’s what a lot of us engineers like to call a “belt and suspenders” design. As a Christian engineer, I have to ask, is my belief in God such that one crisis of doubt will destroy it, or is it more robust than that? I think you know the answer, but let’s work through that today.

In reading atheists’ stories of their deconversions from the Christian faith they had grown up espousing, I am struck by how precarious their trust (or faith) seems to have been. Atheists like Bart Ehrman, Dan Barker, and Matt Dillahunty have told of surprisingly small things making shipwreck of their souls. Whether it’s built on a particular emotional experience, or the teachings of a particular church or pastor, or some very shallow understanding of the Bible, they seem to often have a belief structure resembling a house of cards. Frustration with the hiddenness of God, a personal encounter with suffering, inability to fathom their omniscient Creator’s reasons – and the cards come tumbling down. Yet Christianity is anything but a house of cards. The basic belief in God is not built on one make-or-break proposition. Rather, we have a strong cumulative case based on multiple lines of reasoning. Most well-known among these are the Cosmological Argument, the Design Argument, the Moral Argument, and the Ontological Argument, although arguments from consciousness, miracles, religious experiences, beauty, and reason [1], just to name a few, have also been developed over the years in support of the existence of God. Different people often find particular lines of reasoning among these especially persuasive, and others not so much, hence my use of the term “argument” rather than “proof”. Proof can be very subjective, as anyone that’s ever had to sit through jury deliberations can confirm. But what’s fascinating is how many different supports there are for rational belief in God. Of course, like the many columns in a building, no single argument supports the entire “structure” of belief in God, but all of these different lines of reasoning, taken together, interlock well to provide a formidable framework highly resistant to collapse. While skeptics often seem to enjoy sniping at the views of others, the significant challenge for the skeptic is formulating a worldview of their own that explains so much of the world around us as well as Christianity does.

“But”, one might say, “you’re doing a bait-and-switch between the case for generic theism and the case for Christianity! Christianity has all its eggs in one basket – the Bible. So much for your redundancy!” Here’s the thing: while the Bible is conveniently bound in a single volume now, the writings contained therein were the result of multiple witnesses writing independently at different times and places. Though all inspired by God, they are separate historical records. And everything described in the Bible that has ever been able to be compared against archaeological findings has confirmed the truthfulness of the Bible. In particular, Luke, Paul’s companion and the author of the gospel according to Luke and the Acts of the Apostles, has been proven to be a historian accurate in even the most trivial details. So Christianity encompasses the general case for theism, with its strong philosophical support along several independent lines, as well as having strong historical attestation and archaeological support. In fact, I would say Christianity is the only system that answers so many questions coherently and is so well-grounded.

Now, for the Christian, our trust in Christ isn’t simply a matter of intellectual assent, but also a relationship with our living Creator. The Bible tells us that the Holy Spirit, the third person of the Trinity, dwells in each Christian, and testifies with our spirit that we are children of God [Ro 8:16]. This should be the single biggest contributor to an unshakeable faith, but we humans are often fickle creatures, prone to worry and doubt, falling far short of what God intends for us. To make matters worse, false religions have claimed similar certainty, such as the Mormon “burning in the bosom” that they genuinely believe to be authentic. Even though the existence of a counterfeit does nothing to refute the  existence of the true original, it can still cause us to doubt the Spirit’s testimony in our own hearts. But this is where knowing that these different lines of reasoning all converge on the God of the Bible is helpful. While we typically use these apologetics tools to demonstrate to non-Christians the reasonableness of belief in God and trust in Christ alone, they can also help us to remember the truth ourselves in times of doubtful struggle (or encourage a struggling Christian brother or sister). That gives us multiple supports to lean on when we are weakened by attacks, whether from circumstances without or doubts within. Hence, apologetics helps us to build a resilient faith [2].

[1] See The Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology (Blackwell, 1st edition, 2012) for several of these. See C.S. Lewis, Miracles (Macmillan, 2nd edition, 1960), for his argument from miracles, as well as Craig Keener’s massive 2-volume work on the subject. Also see Chapter 4 of Lewis’ Miracles for his argument from reason, and Ch. 6 in Blackwell for Victor Reppert’s detailed defense of Lewis’ argument from reason and response to objections. Pascal’s “anthropological argument“, presented in chapter 10 of Christian Apologetics, by Doug Groothuis, is another contribution with significant explanatory power.
[2] Though not specifically quoted, much of this last paragraph is inspired by the ever-insightful William Lane Craig, and his excellent book Reasonable Faith, 3rd Ed. (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2008), pp. 43-51 .

Objection!

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Perry Mason questioning the witness

Have you ever watched a movie where one lawyer objects to every question the other lawyer asks a witness? The multitude of objections doesn’t mean they’re valid, though, as evidenced by the judge’s response of “overruled” on many (or all) of them. You can run into a similar situation in discussions about God with skeptics. I’ll give you an example I’ve run into in the past. I’ve been on the receiving end of what I call “shotgun skepticism”, where the skeptic fires off a barrage of objections to try to overwhelm their opponent and end the discussion before it’s even started. You’ll see things like “400 contradictions in the Bible”, or “50 reasons why Christianity is obviously false.” What do you do when you get confronted by something like that? Let’s work through that today.

It can be intimidating when you are presented with what appears to be a wall of objections for why you are wrong, but you have to remember that someone’s objection doesn’t necessarily mean there’s a good reason behind the objection. Like the judge in court, you have to simply examine each objection one by one, and judge them on their own merit, not on the total quantity. And here’s the thing: when you actually start examining these mass quantity type objections, you’ll find that many of them are non-issues. Below are 3 types of objections that turn out to be more bark than bite.

  1. The false objection. Some objections are just plain wrong. I remember getting one from a friend years ago that claimed to be hundreds of contradictions in the Bible. However, when I started looking through them, some of the references simply didn’t say what the objection claimed. The objection looked intimidating at face value, until I started examining the individual parts of it, where it started to fall apart. Were there ones that were fair questions? Sure, but several of the hundreds of alleged biblical errors were themselves errors. Most of the rest fell into the next two categories.
  2. The irrelevant objection. These are statements that raise an issue unrelated to the matter at hand. It may be a legitimate question to seek answers for, but it’s not a reason to reject the particular issue being discussed.  For instance, an objection to God’s existence because “Christians are hypocrites” is simply irrelevant to the question of whether God exists. Every Christian on the planet could be a lying, thieving, murderous hypocrite, and that would only demonstrate our failure as humans, not God’s nonexistence. Likewise, claiming we can safely ignore the Bible because of apparent contradictions in it may call into question the inerrancy of the Bible, but not the truthfulness of the individual claims made in it. For instance, the Bible affirming two truly contradictory statements might  show it to have genuine errors (due to the law of non-contradiction), but as long as the statements that all humans are sinners [Ro 3:10,23] and God will judge us [Ec 12:14, 2Co 5:10] are both true, then the skeptic has a serious problem to deal with, regardless of what else is true or false. In fact, he’d better hope that John 3:16 is also true so there is a solution to that major problem. You see, all the rest of the Bible could be wrong, but if those statements are true, then there is a critical problem the skeptic needs to recognize, and an amazing solution he needs to accept in order to survive.
  3. The misunderstood objection. Among the several lists of alleged inconsistencies and contradictions I was given by my friend a while back were things like “God asked Adam where he was… but God is omnipresent.” OK… God’s omnipresence doesn’t mean He can’t ask someone where they are. As most parents are aware, you can still ask a question of your guilty kids already knowing full-well what happened. The question isn’t for your enlightenment, but rather for the child to have an opportunity to do the right thing and confess to the wrongdoing. The person raising objections like this has misinterpreted the passage objected to, either innocently or deliberately. If innocently done, the response may be as simple as clarifying the passage for them. If done maliciously, there are likely some difficult underlying issues driving the person to try to interpret passages in the worst possible manner to bolster their rejection of God. Be patient, and speak the truth in love, methodically dismantling the barricades they’ve erected between them and God.

Oftentimes, skeptics take the approach that the best defense is a good offense, and try to overwhelm you with quantity of objections; but remember that when it comes to logic and clear thinking, quality really does beat quantity. In fact, ask the skeptic to pick their single best objection to discuss. Sometimes you’ll find that they didn’t actually look through their list they forwarded or copied and pasted into a reply to you! Those are good opportunities to teach them the importance of examining their own beliefs rather than just parroting a Dawkins or Hitchens (or whatever internet site they could find in under a minute that supported their view). Make them pick one objection that they are prepared to defend. Remember that if they make make a positive claim, then they do bear a burden of proof. Despite the constant attempts to say the Christian bears the full burden of defending themselves, that’s actually not how it works. If they refuse to pick a claim to defend, you can always stop there. If they are willing to make statements but unwilling to back them up, then they’re likely not really interested in seeking the truth. But of course, we go the extra mile for those we love, and the skeptic is a person in desperate need of salvation, just as much as I or any other Christian was. So if they only want to continue talking if you engage their hundreds of fallacious objections, then I recommend picking off the easy ones that are actually misstatements first, then deflect the ones that don’t apply to the topic at hand, and focus on clarifying the remaining misunderstandings, giving them the benefit of the doubt that they are sincere misunderstandings. It can be a long trying process working with people that are peppering you with blasts of shotgun skepticism while you try to help them, but these are people that Christ died for [Jn 3:16], who may yet be used by God in bigger ways than I can ever imagine when I’m talking to them. And that’s worth working through a few (hundred) objections.

“Just One More Thing…”

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The always inquisitive Detective Columbo.

Do you remember Detective Columbo, the character Peter Falk played so well over the course of more than 30 years? Disarming but shrewd, his persistent questioning of suspects often involved some variation of starting to leave, apparently satisfied with the suspect’s explanation, only to stop, turn, and ask “Just one more thing…” Columbo’s thoughtful and relentless questions are usually a good example of persistence, thoroughness, critical thinking, and following the evidence wherever it leads – all good traits. But there is a time when continued questioning is not good. What do I mean? Let’s work through that today.

What I’m thinking of is the hyper-skepticism that can’t stop questioning. No answer can ever satisfy this mindset. The “question everything” mantra of this universal doubt sounds at first like a rigorous and impartial search for truth, but ends up being a self-destructive endeavor that only undercuts any truth it finds. How this often plays out in discussions of the existence of God or the reliability of the Bible is that there is always “one more thing” the skeptic objects to, one more justification for not believing the Bible. But these “reasons” tend to be reasons based on ignorance rather than positive knowledge. What I mean is that they are based on what we don’t know rather than what we do know. And that is not a good model to follow in any area of life. My own field of structural engineering is largely concerned with designing structures to resist loads caused in one way or another by gravity, but I couldn’t tell you whether gravity is a particle or a wave (although experiments in recent years appear to support the latter). And yet the most magnificent structures are built on the positive knowledge we do have about gravity and its effects, in spite of the details we don’t know. Likewise, we may not be able to verify everything in the Bible in our lifetimes. Some details may simply be impossible to confirm through archeology or other means after the millennia since it was written, but we are responsible for the knowledge we do have. We shouldn’t say that even though a witness has proven reliable in many other instances, we will discard all he has to say because of some statements we can’t prove. Yes, we are putting our trust in the person at that point, but it is an earned trust based on a consistent track record, and it is a reasonable position to take.

A question came up recently about the Massacre of the Innocents and the Resurrection of the Saints, two events recounted only in the Gospel of Matthew. In Matthew 2:1-18, he records King Herod’s jealousy of this prophesied King of the Jews, Jesus. In Herod’s paranoia about rivals (which is attested to outside the Bible), he tries to “nip this one in the bud” by having all the children under the age of two killed in the town of Bethlehem, Jesus’ birthplace. Then in Matthew 27:51-54, he records Jesus’ death on the cross, and the signs that followed, such as a great earthquake, graves being unblocked, and holy ones who had died coming back to life and coming out of the newly-opened graves to appear to people in Jerusalem. No other contemporary biblical or secular writer confirms these events or even mentions them, as far as we know (so far). Does that absence of independent corroborating testimony invalidate Matthew’s testimony? Of course not. There very well might’ve been other accounts lost to the ravages of time, but because of the importance of the subject matter Matthew was primarily focusing on (The life of Jesus Christ, the Savior of the world), this lone account of those two secondary events survived as well.

Now, we may never find anything to corroborate these two stories in Matthew. On the other hand, someone 100 years from now may unearth another source contemporary with Matthew that confirms his account and fills in all the missing details. Who knows? But either way, there are a lot of things we do know and have to deal with. Rather than get stuck on secondary issues, I would encourage the skeptic to work through the primary issues first. A lot of the objections I hear from atheists about alleged Bible contradictions are things that could be ignored without affecting the central message of the Bible in the least. And that message is that God created this universe, we broke it by rebelling against Him, and yet He provided a solution to the mess we’re in that we never could get out of on our own, that solution is Jesus Christ, and we only have this life to decide our eternal destiny. While questions of what we are to do with unclear passages of Scripture are good and interesting exercises, and I have personally grown in my knowledge of Scripture and its interpretation by doing in-depth research to try to answer a skeptic’s question, the critically important question for the skeptic is what will you do with the clear message of the Gospel? To focus on many of objections I read or hear, and ignore the central message of rebellion and redemption, is akin to a person fretting about an ingrown fingernail when their leg is gangrenous. Their priorities are a bit misplaced, to say the least. Whatever your pet objection might be, might I suggest placing a higher priority on the atoning death and resurrection of Jesus and what that gift means for you? For if Christ was resurrected, then that is the single most important event in all of human history.

In closing, let me be clear that I don’t consider asking questions to be bad. But the purpose of asking honest questions is to find truthful answers. And when you get to the truth of a matter, there’s no more need for questions; they have served their purpose. Yet there is a mindset now that asks questions to undercut knowledge rather than to gain knowledge, as a means to protect cherished presuppositions, and that is what concerns me. If you’ve been “burned” before, and are skeptical in a merely cautious sense, by all means ask questions! Not every Christian out there may be able to answer your questions, but know that our ignorance on a specific issue doesn’t mean there isn’t an answer. And know that we care about you and want you to find the truth, “for the truth shall set you free” [John 8:32].

To Err Is Human

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Typesetting (photo by Willi Heidelbach)

As I prepare for a trip to Honduras this week, I just wanted to leave y’all with something to think about when you hear skeptics criticize the accuracy of the transmission and translation of the Bible. I was reading a blog from Sean McDowell recently where he was pointing out some of the more comical errors introduced into Bible translations over the centuries, and why these still didn’t hurt the reliability of the Bible. In the article he points out something I’d like to highlight here: while the printing press could eliminate the manuscript variations attributed to scribal copying errors,  it didn’t eliminate errors entirely. Rather, it changed the scope of them. An error could now be mass-produced so that the printed output was extremely consistent compared to the hand-copied manuscripts, but consistently wrong. This reminded me of something I’m familiar with from engineering: errata.

An errata is simply a list of errors and their corrections on a separate sheet of paper (or electronic file) that is published to correct errors discovered in books already published. Most publishers make their errata freely available as it is the result of their original mistake. As building codes and standards have grown in size and complexity, and there has been the drive to publish new versions on a regular basis (whether needed or not, and whether ready to publish or not), the significance of errata has grown. These standards often go through a long process of drafts, rewrites, public comment periods, and sometimes a roller coaster ride of last-minute changes before publication. Mistakes creep in, and leaving out the word “not” in a paragraph, or leaving out an exponent in a formula that runs the full width of the page can be difficult mistakes to find in proofreading. Nevertheless, they can also have serious consequences for designs based on those simple typos, so I’ve learned the importance of always checking for the latest errata on each publisher’s website. Some of my reference books need an errata published for each print run of each edition because more errors are found, or because new errors were introduced. And then there was the time I bought AISC’s first printing of the first edition of their seismic design manual back in 2005. Finding a definite error in a particular formula, I went looking for the errata at their site, but there wasn’t one. When I asked them about it, they informed me that that printing had so many errors, that they had recalled the book rather than essentially republish it as a huge errata! Somehow I’d missed the notification of the recall. But engineering is focused first and foremost on public safety, so mistakes in the formulas we use or the rules we apply can be deadly if not detected. Hence the importance of errata in engineering books.

It’s true that hand-copied manuscripts might have a lot of variations from one copy to the next, where they necessarily differ from the “autograph” (the original text) at one point or another. But while it’s easy to think of our advanced printing technology now and look down on those ancient scribes with their old tired eyes and shaky hands and dim lighting, it’s good to remember that each generation is susceptible to their own types of errors that are often not as obvious to them as the mistakes of past generations. This is what C.S. Lewis meant when he warned about developing “chronological snobbery”. Ironically though, the manuscript variants may be less of an issue than our current printing practices that ensure that every single copy of a printing has the exact same error. There’s no way to compare copies in a run and reconstruct what the original text was because they all have the same errors. We start to regain some of that comparative reconstructability with multiple printings of a text, but most of my engineering books are doing good if they see a third or fourth printing. We’re not exactly gunning for the New York Times bestseller list… ever. That means that out of the tens of thousands of copies of that book, there might only be 3 or 4 different texts to compare. Even though we don’t have the original text of any of the books of the Bible, we have such a rich store of manuscripts – far exceeding the number of copies we have from any secular author from that time – that we can compare and isolate errors and have a high degree of confidence that our Bible is translated from the original languages using text approaching the original. And that is only improving as we continue to accumulate more and more manuscripts and papyri to compare against. So I’d like to submit to you that the extensive hand-copying of the biblical manuscripts, even as error-prone as hand-copying may be,  was actually part of God’s long-term plan for preserving His words to us.

Sean’s blog – http://seanmcdowell.org/blog/humorous-bible-translation-errors-and-what-they-mean-for-biblical-reliability

Why We Don’t Clean Up the Bible

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A Depiction of Jesus and the Woman Taken in Adultery, by Vasily Polenov, 1888

Ever had junk accumulate around your house until you finally got so sick of seeing it every day that you did some major purging? Sell it, give it away, throw it away -who cares, as long as the mess goes away? What about the Bible? Is there accumulated junk in the Bible? And if there were, shouldn’t it be eliminated?

Well, there actually are some cases of questionable material in the Bible. That may come as a shock for some Christians, while some skeptics might be saying, “Tell me something I don’t know.” But not so fast. While skeptics like Bart Ehrman make much of the textual variants between different manuscripts, like copying errors, and scribal additions and deletions, the vast majority of these variants are typos and spelling differences.  Also, the enormous quantity (and quality) of manuscripts from different times and places  allows us to trace the development of these differences and have a high degree of confidence in what the originals said. For more on the fascinating field of textual criticism, I’d encourage you to check out Dr. Daniel Wallace’s work.[1] But what about cases like the Pericope Adulterae, the story of the woman caught in adultery found in John 7:53-8:12? This is a favorite story of many Christians, but the evidence weighs heavily against it being an authentic part of John’s gospel.  If that’s the case, and we really are concerned about truth – especially in our Holy Scriptures – why does it remain in the Bible?

To answer that, let me provide a more contemporary example. Four of the states I’m licensed in fall under new design provisions for tsunamis that are being introduced for the first time in the US later this year. In the course of researching the new provisions, I came across an interesting article on the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s  website regarding their investigation and compilation of historical weather data [2].  While tsunamis and hurricanes can both generate large amounts of flooding, they have fundamentally different causes. Hurricanes are atmospheric events, while tsunamis are ground events (typically earthquake-induced, but also possible from landslides, like a 600′ high tsunami in Alaska in 2015 [3]). As it stands now, only the western coast of the US and Hawaii are considered in the new tsunami risk maps, due to two fault lines of the type that can cause tsunamis. But if a tsunami had been recorded on the east coast or gulf coast, then there would be obvious precedent for requiring us engineers to consider that risk in our designs in those areas as well. Well, there was a particular case in 1909 of a reported “tidal wave” sweeping over Grand Isle, Louisiana after a hurricane, killing hundreds. Was this tragic event tied to the hurricane, or was there an earthquake along an unmapped fault line in the gulf? Further investigation and computer simulation of the storm revealed the “tidal wave” to be part of the hurricane storm surge. While no less tragic for the families of those killed, establishing the true cause of past events like this helps us to design for them correctly and save lives in the future. Now, did NOAA delete this entry out of their Tsunami database? No, and here’s their reasoning:

So how does NOAA handle a spurious data record like this one? Do we delete the record? Oddly enough, we leave it in! We include notations that “debunk” the original tsunami designation, set the validity field to 0 (not a tsunami), and indicate that this event is of meteorological origin. If we removed the record entirely, it is likely that it would show up again in some future book or Web site, unopposed by the facts. Someone would email NOAA and say, “I found this great info about a tsunami in Louisiana in 1909. Why isn’t it listed it in your database?”

Can you see the application to biblical manuscripts? When copying manuscripts and confronted with questionable source material, scribes down through the centuries would typically err on the side of including the questionable material, just like NOAA did when they included the 1909 tidal wave in their database in 2002. But the scribes, like NOAA, would also add marginalia – margin notes and symbols – to denote concerns with the text of a passage. Now, if you’ve read almost any modern translation of the Bible, you’ve seen notes in the margin telling you things like, “Some early manuscripts do not contain this sentence”, or in the case of the adulterous woman passage, “The earliest manuscripts and many other ancient witnesses do not have John 7:53-8:12.” You’ll find similar statements at John 5:3, Mark 16:9-20, and 1 John 5:7-8. The idea is that it’s better to include questionable data, duly noted as such, than to possibly eliminate divinely inspired teaching. Then, later, as more and more manuscripts are discovered and catalogued, if the passage is confirmed to be authentic, it hasn’t been lost due to overzealous “cleaning.” And if it’s confirmed as not genuine, then it is noted as such in each translation, so nobody has to be fooled by an appeal to some “shocking, scandalous, newly discovered Bible verses, hidden for centuries.” Like NOAA, we want to be able to oppose any future challenges with the facts.

Indeed, Bible translations are remarkable in their transparency, noting suspect passages, textual variants, and alternate translations quite openly rather than trying to hide them. But that’s because integrity to God’s Word is of utmost importance to the Christian, and most especially to the translator with the sacred duty of making God’s Word known to people in their own language. Despite the skeptic’s cynicism, we Christians understand that we are accountable before God for how we handle His Word [2 Tim 2:15].  And woe to the one who tries to corrupt it [Rev 22:18-19]. That’s one reason why we don’t translate from previous translations, as some uninformed skeptics like to think. Rather, we go back to the original languages (Greek, Hebrew, and Aramaic), and retranslate them into the current vernacular of English, Spanish, German, and so on. And contrary to skeptics’ claims of Bible translation being like the “telephone game”, as we find more (and earlier) manuscripts, our translations become more authentic, not less. In fact, check out Daniel Wallace’s site [4] to see their extremely high-resolution (50 megapixel) photographs of many of the world’s surviving Greek manuscripts (350,000 images and counting). You simply can’t beat that kind of transparency: you can judge the translators’ interpretation of the source material for yourself. So stop blindly accepting the allegations of skeptics about the Bible and start reading all those margin notes yourself! Study up, take Dr. Wallace’s Credo House course on textual criticism like I did, learn some Greek or Hebrew, look at ancient manuscripts – dig deep!  If you do, you’ll find the Bible to be reliable in both its transmission and its content. But then the question remains: what are you gonna do with that discovery? Our Creator, who gave us the message that is the Bible, doesn’t want to be your hobby, and He tells us as much in there. There’s something to think on next time you open up a Bible.

[1] http://www.credocourses.com/product/textual-criticism/
[2] https://celebrating200years.noaa.gov/magazine/tsunami_database/or_stormsurge.html
[3] https://www.adn.com/alaska-life/we-alaskans/2016/09/11/collapsing-alaska-mountains-southeast-alaska-landslides-and-tsunamis-on-the-rise/
[4] The Center for the Study of New Testament Manuscripts

Manuscript Errors

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An erasure in the Codex Sinaiticus manuscript

In preparing to write about Nicolas Copernicus recently, I bought a 2-volume set of his complete works, translated into English (a big help since I am only beginning my study of Latin). However, I wasn’t expecting a translation of a Christian astronomer’s theories in the 1500’s to help me better understand how we can be confident in the integrity of biblical manuscripts from a thousand years earlier. How so? Let’s “sharpen our pencils,” as we say in engineering, and work through this problem.

The translator’s notes on the Commentariolus, Copernicus’ first draft of his geokinetic theory[1],  caught my eye for several reasons. First, we don’t have any surviving copies of the original treatise that Copernicus had dispatched to a few close friends. Second, Copernicus never put any title or claim of authorship on it. We owe that to Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe years later. These are such common objections from skeptics regarding surviving Gospel manuscripts and their lack of direct claim of authorship, and yet in other historical investigations, those circumstances aren’t deal-breakers.  But third, and most significant to me, was how the original content could be rebuilt from copies with errors.

We have 2 surviving copies made from one of the originals by professional scribes hired by Brahe. These are known as the “S” and “V” manuscripts for Stockholm and Vienna, where they eventually came to reside, respectively. A third manuscript, known as “A” for Aberdeen, was made by a student copying the text of Commentariolus into the margins of his copy of Copernicus’ Revolutions in an abbreviated fashion. One scribe, it seems, was copying the original text by sight, and got off a line. He saw the same word (“orbis”) he’d just written used 6 words later, and proceeded from that point, skipping those intervening words, and garbling the sentence. The other scribe did not make the same mistake there, so that portion could be reconstructed from his copy. He did make his share of mistakes in other places, though. One in particular, was the writing of the words “ac si” for the word “axi”, a mistake that only made sense if he were taking dictation. The two sound similar, so he wrote what he thought he heard. Even if he were to read it back to the one dictating, it would sound correct. Since the first scribe was seeing the original words, he was not liable to that type of auditory error, but he was susceptible to visual errors like skipping a line. Now with only two formal copies of a text, we are able to be quite comfortable that we have the message of the autograph (the original manuscript) intact. Even the “A” manuscript, not attempting to be a word-for-word formal copy,  has still proven useful for corroborating some differences between the 2 formal copies, which were made by copyists likely not trained in astronomy. That’s because the “A” copy was made by another scholar who was  able to spot some of the copying errors in the manuscript he was reading (based on a non-surviving sister copy of the “S” manuscript) and correct them, thus bringing his copy into agreement with manuscript “V” which he never saw. The point, is the more copies we have of a manuscript, even partial copies, the more confidently we can reconstruct the original message.[2]

This is the same tactic used in data backup with RAID storage. RAID is an acronym for Redundant Array of Independent Drives. There are different levels of redundancy with RAID 0, RAID 1, all the way up to RAID 6 (currently). But the basic idea is that different hard drives will not all crash at the same time, and will not all get corrupted at the same data location. This means that if one drive crashes, the data on it can be reconstructed from the remaining drives in the array. Or if a particular file goes “bad” and won’t open anymore, the system can rebuild that file from the information in the other drives.

Now, consider how we have reconstructed an original amount of data from 2 copies of a manuscript, or from several computer drives. Do you see why objections that we don’t have any original biblical manuscripts fall flat? Or why the comparisons of the Bible to the “telephone game” don’t really pose a problem? We have thousands of manuscripts, and we keep finding more and more of them. Are they all complete? No, many are only fragments, but they overlap with other copies to provide better redundancy than any other ancient manuscript. Do some have copying errors? Sure. Do some have additions? Yes. But witness the genius of God, in that He basically set up a geographically-distributed redundant array of data stores for His Word from which we can reasonably reconstruct the original. Just as some of Copernicus’ manuscripts that only had one surviving copy were destroyed in different wars throughout Europe, one original manuscript of the Bible would be a very fragile thing. But a worldwide network of copies could never be taken out by floods, or earthquakes, or wars, or vandalism. The absence of an original manuscript isn’t a liability, it’s actually evidence of brilliant planning. But that’s the kind of God we serve.

[1] Commonly called the “heliocentric” theory, Copernicus technically theorized that the sun was near the center of the known universe of the time, not necessarily at the center. His primary postulate was that the earth moved, so “geokinetic” is more technically correct.
[2] Nicholas Copernicus – Complete Works, Volume 2: Minor Works, translation & commentary by Edward Rosen & Erna Hilfstein (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Paperbacks, 1992), pp. 75-80.

Communications from the Creator

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engineering-plans Today I want to offer a modest proposal: that God acting in human history is a reasonable possibility. What I offer here is by no means a “proof”, in even the loosest sense of the word, of the existence of the personal, relational, God of Christianity. But it is, I hope, something that opens the door to possibilities you might have dismissed out of hand in the past.

I’ve heard some very intelligent people through the years say they could agree to the need for a Creator or Supreme Being to “get things started”, but the idea of a personal, interacting God as Christianity describes is a bridge too far for them. This conviction may be due to the fine-tuning of the universe or the amazingly precise information management system of our DNA, or from the recognition of the implications of the law of causality and the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics. This idea that God is a distant “Watchmaker” who wound up the universe and and walked away is typically known as deism, but this is not what the Bible advocates. In fact, the author of the letter to the Hebrews writes “And without faith it is impossible to please Him {God}, for he who comes to God must believe that He is and that He is a rewarder of those who seek Him.”[1] There are two requirements listed here: 1) accept the fact that God does indeed exist, and 2) accept that God will respond to our seeking. In other words, God is not the uninterested, detached god of deism, but rather one who interacts in human history.

We see so much apparent design in our natural world, that we have to ask if there was a designer. And if there was, would that designer leave any kind of message to convey intent regarding his “product”? You can review some of the reasons for believing in a Creator/Designer based on the Teleological Argument (or the argument from design) here, but this really doesn’t take us past the the idea of basic theism, that some god exists. It may be one or more gods; it may be a god who did indeed get the universe started, but who no longer exists for some reason; or it may be that deadbeat god of deism who gets things started and walks away.

Seeing design aspects in nature, I tend to think of God’s designs in terms of engineering. As an engineer, when I design a building, I invest myself in that design. I care about what happens to it. And so I write instructions pertaining to various stages of its lifecycle. A project will typically have sheets of “general notes” on our drawings, and sometimes hundreds or thousands of pages of project specifications.  All of this is to detail what’s acceptable and what’s not in terms of construction materials, building loads and uses, acceptable substitutions, and so on. I don’t just say, “Make it work,” and leave the contractor to guess how to meet the building requirements without any instructions. I’m not going to design a mezzanine and tell the client, “Here’s a mezzanine design for your warehouse, but I’m not going to tell you if it’s rated for a 300 psf load capacity or only 50 psf. Don’t worry – you’ll figure it out pretty quickly once you start stacking boxes on it. If it starts sagging, you’ve exceeded my design.” That would be crazy. When we go to the effort to design something, we try to leave instructions regarding our intent for its proper use. The more complex the design, the more important the instructions are. It seems reasonable to me that if God exists, and put so much incredible planning into this universe, this world, and us as humans, He would provide some “documentation,” so to speak. Now, we have a collection of documents – the Bible – that does, in fact, claim to be a message from this Creator, addressed to His creation.

But how could one know if such a book really is what it says it is? There are a couple of ways. One is to check the accuracy of statements made in it that we can confirm historically and archeologically. If we find its record of history confirmed independently, through other sources, then we are warranted in trusting it to some degree.  In this, the Bible has been confirmed repeatedly. Many things mentioned in the Bible aren’t recorded elsewhere, though. Or if they were, those corroborating sources have been destroyed or are yet to be found. However, when we find archeological evidence for the truth of the biblical records,  in the absence of outside sources, that is a powerful piece of evidence in favor of the Bible. For while we might say that biblical authors were simply copying from their contemporary authors (and so of course they matched up), finding an actual town or a monument to a king or ruler that no other sources besides the Bible ever mentioned is very hard to refute. This has also been been the case with the Bible on multiple occasions. So we have a collection of writings from multiple authors spanning well over a millennium that presents a coherent, historically accurate, archeologically-verified record of events. But it also claims that all of this is due to the divine inspiration of its writers by the all-knowing Creator of the universe, and that He used them to convey His message to humanity. That would explain the historical reliability of it in its accounts of natural history. So could it be telling the truth in its record of supernatural history as well? When Luke records the minutest details about people and places visited, and these are repeatedly confirmed, should we not at least entertain the possibility that he may be telling us the truth when he records miracles as well?

Secondly, there is the issue of prophecy. Anyone who has ever watched the weather forecast knows that it is extremely difficult for us humans to predict events even a few days in advance. Yet the Bible contains prophecies that were made hundreds of years in advance of their fulfillment. While some prophecies might be vague enough to be rationalized, I want to point out one I’ve always found particularly interesting in its specificity. Isaiah 44 and 45 record a prophecy that a specific king named Cyrus would set the captives free, restore Jerusalem, and rebuild the Temple there, without asking for payment or reward. This was fulfilled 150 years later when Cyrus, King of Medo-Persia, allowed the Jewish captives to return to Israel and rebuild their city and the Temple, and even provided them with money to purchase building materials. Predicting the name of a future foreign ruler generations in advance is beyond any natural human abilities and does speak to the supernatural inspiration of the Bible.

In summary, I think the corroborating historical records and archeological evidence, combined with fulfilled prophecy, point to the legitimacy of the Bible’s claim of divine inspiration. And if it is divine communication, then this is truly the most important message ever put into human language, and it is incumbent on all of us to study it relentlessly. For in so doing, we learn not only of a God powerful enough to create a perfectly-planned, finely-tuned universe out of nothing, but also of a God who loves each of us more than we can ever understand, enough that He entered into human history to offer reconciliation and redemption to a rebellious and ungrateful humanity. And that, my friend, is the God I serve.

[1] Hebrews 11:6.
[2] Isaiah 44:24-28 & 45:1-13.

Permanence

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churchAs an engineer, most of the states I’m licensed in require that I take continuing education courses to keep up with new technology, new laws and codes, new analysis methods, and so forth. A recent email advertised a webinar on “Design Considerations for Wood Frame Construction for Permanence.” I admit, I work primarily with steel, and live in a part of the US with high humidity and termites, so I tend to not associate the words “wood” and “permanence”. But the picture in the email caught my eye because it was something I’ve had the opportunity to see for myself: a Norwegian Stave Church. These are wooden church buildings built in Norway in the Middle Ages, with the oldest surviving one being almost 900 years old. That’s about as permanent as you can get with wood construction! They are beautiful buildings to walk through, and a real testament to the craftsmanship of those early builders.

That reminder of permanence made me think of a project I played a small part in recently, at the opposite end of the spectrum, where I did some steel connection design for a new multipurpose community center being built in a nearby city. What was surprising about that project was that this new building was being built over an old airport. In fact, the swimming pool was going to be practically in the middle of where the runway had been. Now, an airport is usually a big infrastructure investment for a city. Yet that airport was being demolished to build a community athletic center. Soon there will be no evidence left of this significant land use other than a few oddly aviation-related street names, and a listing in outdated maps that will get replaced shortly. Eventually, streets will be renamed and/or rerouted, and there will be no physical evidence left that there was ever an airport there. So it is with much of what we design and build. Even when we design for an indefinite service life, most of our finished projects will likely be demolished at some point because their location is more valuable for some future enterprise than the building we invested so much time in designing.

What will archaeologists 1000 years from now find to tell them about our culture? With our culture’s emphasis on updating, recycling, “planned obsolescence”, and designing for defined product lifecycles instead of indefinite use, would future people be able to ascertain any specific details of our civilization? Especially in our digital age, there is surprisingly little durable evidence of much of what we do. That’s something to keep in mind when approaching the Bible. We don’t have physical evidence for everything described in the Bible, but it’s actually pretty amazing that we have any evidence from so long ago.  And what we have found matches up well with what the Bible describes. Rather than look at the absence of confirming evidence as a strike against the Bible as so many have, look at how much is confirmed. As the archeologist Sir William Ramsey found when he went to Asia Minor in the late 1800’s to investigate the historicity of the biblical book of Acts, the evidence speaks for itself. In fact, he tells us that “I may fairly claim to have entered on this investigation without any prejudice in favour of the conclusion which I shall now attempt to justify to the reader. On the contrary, I began with a mind unfavourable to it, …. It was gradually borne in upon me that in various details the narrative showed marvelous truth.”[1] You see, Ramsey approached the case regarding the authorship of Acts from the then-currently espoused view that Acts was written by an anonymous Christian centuries after the events described, motivated more by pushing an agenda than telling the truth. But he was open to other possibilities and willing to follow the evidence wherever it led him. And it led him to the conviction that Luke was the author of Acts and was an eyewitness and was, in fact, a historian of impeccable quality. In the 100+ years since Ramsay investigated the claims of the Bible, even more corroborating evidence has been discovered to support the book of Acts and many other accounts in the Bible (read more here).

We live in a constantly changing world where permanence is a very relative term. “Here today, gone tomorrow”, as the saying goes. Knowing that, a lack of evidence for historical events shouldn’t surprise us. Many ancient events took place in oral cultures where little was written down. Even when they were recorded, those records have often been lost forever due to wars, political purges, floods, fires, earthquakes, and other destructive events. But when we have a record like the Bible that continues to be confirmed over and over again,  we have to set aside whatever skepticism we approached it with, and be willing to admit when we’ve gone beyond “reasonable” doubt. As Ramsay would say, “We must face the facts boldly.”[2] When we do, we find that they lead straight to God.

[1] William Ramsay,  St Paul the Traveler and the Roman Citizen (Illustrated), Kindle Edition, Kindle Locations 304-309.
[2] ibid., Location 390.

The Engineer’s Faith

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Leonhard_Euler - portrait by Jakob Emanuel Handmann, 1753.
Leonhard_Euler – portrait by Jakob Emanuel Handmann, 1753.

Engineering and faith might not be two words you normally associate, but faith is nevertheless an integral part of our profession. What tends to obscure this relationship for many today is the rather antagonistic definition of faith promoted by atheists as “belief in spite of the evidence.” Certainly, that is the last characteristic you’d want in the engineer designing your new home/office/hospital/school/etc. But as I’ve written extensively on this site (here especially), that is not the biblical definition of faith. Biblical faith is rather a warranted trust, or looking at the Greek root for the word, a divine persuasion. Let’s look at a scenario that exemplifies the correlation between biblical faith and “engineering faith”.

Suppose I told a client that an existing column in a building being renovated would need to be reinforced or replaced, at significant cost, or else it would fail under the new loads the owner wanted to add. Now suppose the owner didn’t like this and wanted to argue about whether this was really necessary (yes, this does happen). He could ask whether I’d ever actually seen a column that big fail. Or, supposing that part of the issue was tied to increased seismic loads on the existing structure caused by this new addition, he might ask if I’d ever experienced an earthquake, because he had, and it wasn’t that bad… In both cases, I’d have to answer “no”. So what is my basis for saying he needs to perhaps double the cost of his renovation? My trusted engineering books. Here’s why:

  • I trust the authors. While I’ve never personally seen a large column fail, I don’t have to have personally seen it to know it can truly happen. Various people over the years have performed tests, witnessed the results, and applied reason and logic to sift through the noise and ascertain the essence of different phenomena. Then they distilled all of that down into some of the elegantly simple theories we still use today. They have demonstrated themselves to be trustworthy with their meticulous attention to detail, their investigative diligence, and their relentless pursuit of the truth about how structures behave.
  • I trust their records. These early pioneers and those coming after them have written down very detailed accounts of these tests, their results, and their reasoning for how far their theories can be expected to be applicable to similar conditions. These have been preserved (or at least copies have been) for future generations of inquisitive engineers like myself. Names like Euler and Timoshenko still cast their shadows on much of our work long after they died.
  • I trust the transmittal of their works. Our engineering textbooks and reference books faithfully transmit these principles to my generation of engineers, even though we are far removed from the original authors, and may not have the resources to reproduce their findings. Their theories are also reproduced in a variety of books. If one publisher made an error in Euler’s column buckling formula, for instance, it could be readily verified by comparing it against other reference books on the same topic.

So then, even though I have never personally witnessed a W14x90 column fail in an earthquake, I can trust that my various books have reliably passed down to me the true results of research by trustworthy men indicating that would be the outcome in my example. The end result being that I can put some amount of faith – or trust – in what I’ve learned and apply it to the current project. Of course, men are still fallible, and their theories might be mistaken, but these basic principles are have stood the test of time sufficiently to persuade me to trust them.

Now, how does that relate to my Christian faith?

  • I can trust the biblical authors. God used a unique mix of people to write the Bible. Just looking at the New Testament, the first apostles were simple fishermen, who brought a simple, down-to-earth, eyewitness testimony to their records. Theirs was a record that said, “whether you believe me or not, I cannot tell otherwise, for this is what I saw, and heard, and felt – no more, no less.” Luke was a doctor who sought to record “a more orderly account” of the life of Christ. His account is an extremely detailed, first-rate history that has proven itself accurate over and over again. Paul was a Pharisee, a teacher of the Jewish religious law, himself taught by one of the leading teachers of his day. He explained the deep richness of the simple gospel message, connecting it to the whole backstory of the Old Testament. But in each case, these men have shown themselves to be trustworthy instruments of the infallible God.
  • I can trust their findings. Luke’s geography and description of various cultures of the time are born out by archeology. When Paul describes the fallen nature of mankind, he describes the world I observe; the results of his examination match reality. But moreover, he holds up a mirror to my own heart. I need look no further than my own life to recognize the soundness of his words.
  • I can trust the transmission of their records to me. They wrote early after the events they described, these writings were copied carefully, and on a massive scale far exceeding any other historical manuscripts, such that the integrity of their writings are adequately preserved by comparison of the variances between dispersed copies.

We all place our faith (or trust) in people and things that may prove all too fallible: the pilot of the plane you’re about to board, the engineer who designed the school you send your kids to, the political leader that promised you the moon, or objects as simple as the new tires on your car that you trust to not have a blowout.  But there’s really only One who warrants our complete trust. Have you studied His textbook, the Bible?