More POWERFUL Evidence The BIBLE Is Historically Accurate

yeah you got to just keep Whispering the secret down the line and by the end of the line it's a totally different sentence right that made me never want to like check out the Bible anymore yeah the Bible was uh they think they it was an oral tradition for hundreds if not a thousand years before they ever wrote it down there have been so few good representatives of Christianity and in particular of the intellectual component of the Christian faith the historical component of the Christian faith and in fact there have been a lot of people

spreading pseudo science and sort of pseudo history around the topic of the Bible the formation of the Bible and so on and so I have to say for myself personally it was very refreshing to have someone like Wes Huff come on and actually give a historic Deep dive into the reliability of the Bible and the veracity of the message of Christianity from a historic sort of academic perspective so in this video we're going to feature one portion of this conversation where Wes brilliantly chef's kiss uses the power of a gift to explain an idea an

intellectual gift of the reliability of the Bible let's watch this clip then I'm going to show you guys a conversation that I recently had with Peter J Williams on this very same topic of Cambridge University where he is showing other examples of how the Bible actually told us about a character or a place and the skep skeptical World said no that's not real that's mythology that's fiction but then archaeology came along and gave us something that supported what the Bible previously said let's get into this we we get that in history too whereas we have

these kind of what we think are established conventions and all of a sudden we discover something and like completely overthrows the ideas that we have like first yeah or go backe actually good good segue that's the best one right so yeah I made one I made something for you o so I make papy fax similes oh my description is a little bit wonky here you fix that so you were talking about like what is our oldest manuscript evidence so this guy is p52 John ryland's 45 so that is so that's a genuine Egyptian papy that

I I made I cut it out for you and then I transcribed the text on that manuscript so when we're talking about what is potentially our oldest evidence for the New Testament this manuscript that most likely comes from Ox rinkus Egypt um is the one that usually is universally accepted as our oldest one and uh that contains John 18 where Jesus is on trial before Pilate and yeah so that's the one is in the John Ryland library in Manchester England so this is a copy of that exactly this is exactly what it looks like yeah

so I I cut that out on out on the papy uh with a with a scalpel and then I transcribed the text on you did a great job dude and this is you nerd it out I know I'm for real nerded out this is a real nerding out of so that's actually yeah so that's someone else's faimily which is not as good as the one I made you not as good um yours is better and where uh where Jesus is on trial before Pilate and Jesus says everyone who follows uh the truth who who's is

following the truth follows me and on the back has the words of pilate saying what is truth wow but so part of my research so the reason I bring this up is because before this was discovered by CH Roberts in the 1940s the convention was because of a guy named um CH bow that the Gospel of John was 2 century and so he had this he was a student of Hegel have you ever heard of hegelian dialectic so you have like thesis synthesis and antithesis yes so so Hegel had this philosophical Theory and his student

Bower takes that and he incorporates this into history and he says you know the earliest gospel Mark has this very uh this very Jewish Jesus and then um the later gospels have a very uh like the last of what are called the synoptic gospels Matthew Mark and Luke Luke has a very kind of more Divine Jesus and so he says based on this John is the last last written one and it combines these two where you get a very human and a very Divine Jesus together and So based on this he says that John has

to be second century well we discover this guy CH Roberts is you know literally going through these piles of manuscripts in these drawers that are being like stashed away and he finds this guy and he sees that it's written on both sides which is almost exclusively a Christian convention because in the ancient world they use Scrolls m and the Christians for reasons were not entirely clear on they start to make codices books and so they write on both sides and so he says okay this is written on both sides it's probably a Christian manuscript so

he sends it off to the leading uh paleographers or guys who date manuscripts and they all say this is the beginning of the the second century and so there's still debate about the dating of this but the unanimous consensus is that it's comfortably Century second century potentially the beginning of the second century which means that this is found in Egypt John is probably writing his gospel in Ephesus so it has to be written by John spread around find its way to Egypt be copied and then end up in this manuscript which means that at minimum

you've already pushed the Gospel of John back into the first century comfortably and potentially even like most likely into the lifetime of the eyewitnesses of these events and so all of the L up until that point from the scholarly consensus about the dating of the Gospel of John gets totally Rewritten this archaeological Discovery supports what Christians have said for a long time but it took some time for this to come out there are a lot of other examples of this by the way I'm going to now show you guys a portion of a conversation that

I recently had with Peter J Williams of Cambridge University where he's going to go through a number of other examples where the Bible First told us about a historical person or a historical place the skeptical secular World said no that's not really real there was not really any King David for example and then VOA archaeology discovers something that the Bible told us about first that's a very odd thing for mythology to be doing here's Peter J Williams I'm going to let him take it away and this is a really key thing with um the Bible

one really helpful exercise you can do is imagine yourself before archaeology so archaeology sort of begins you could say Thomas Jefferson begins it in the new world Napoleon in the old World um where people let's say early 19th century start doing things systematically digging out the ground and that means you're in the 18th century there is no archaeology um and then you read in the Bible and it gives you a sort of story of um God having these people Israel and they got different enemies and at first it's the amorites then after that it's the

Philistines in my language I say Philistines but there we are um and then after that it's the syrians or arameans then it's the Assyrians then it's the Babylonians and it's the Persians and the interesting thing is archaeology comes along and basically all of those people turn up in that order and you know the amorites are really big in the second Millennium uh BC like in the Old Testament and they're not big after that uh likewise Philistines turning up around the time of David uh and not a lot um not so much after that it it

just works or you find you know people say with um The Exodus you know there's no direct evidence no of course there's no Pharaoh that ever says they were defeated or anything like that but just remember we've only got three to four historiographical texts from all of ancient Egypt so you got loads and loads of writing temples covered with spells and the glories of different Kings we do know that Kings were very happy to erase each other we know that's that's part of what they used to do to each other uh they would damn each

other's memory that's why you can get pharaohs lost and you know something like to and Carmon turn up again um but also um what we can say is what's stunning is you've got this Semitic uh uh grouping in the Eastern Delta in the middle of the second millennium BC at about the time that you would expect that from the Old Testament now I'm not saying that is exactly the same population but it's just that's a really interesting thing um because in a sense the Bible said something before archaeology began and then you know archaeology happens

and that fits or you can look at the naming patterns names like Abraham Isaac and Jacob are really early names um and uh that's an interesting thing they're early in the Bible but also their names are showing up uh commonly in other cultures in the early part of the biblical period and not later so there are those sorts of things and I would say the because the old testament's longer there's actually a massive data to analyze where you can say again I I I see it hard to falsify to explain this as as as falsification

even a country saying that they used to be slaves in another country I mean whoever does that and it's it's not true I mean that that just know uh it doesn't that that's unusual uh there's no National literature that says as much negative about the people group from which it originates as the Old Testament does as Israel's National literature um you know that the books of Kings were not commissioned by the Kings as Royal propaganda so whereas you know you look at your Egyptian temples and you know go down to Abu simol and Ramsey thei

is telling you how great Ramsey thei is um you you know that Ahab didn't commission the book of Kings to tell you glories he doesn't come out that well in it so all of these sort of things are um interesting and I think you can make a big case in the Old Testament I mean the other thing is what literature are we comparing this with so what we have with Mesopotamian literature Babylonian Assyrian Sumerian fairly short stuff um and it's not all joined up uh what you have with Greek the earlier stuff um that's trying

to tell you a story is something like homo ilad and the Odyssey um and again they're not giving you a whole history they're just giving you a particular Focus moment Herodotus slightly later in Greece begins you with historyteller and it and it his Story begins well some men went and raided some women from over there you know and and that's not really giving you the comprehensive sweep of history that you get from Genesis through to second Kings so I'd want to say just at the sort of literary level the Old Testament is doing something bigger

grander than you will find in any ancient literature uh and that's already should make you sit up and then you you look at how uh none of the protagonists are coming out particularly well so it's doesn't seem to be propaganda um that's that's all interesting it's it's got incredible interconnection and then starts connecting with the New Testament so I I think you start making a case for uh yes it's it is part of the ancient world and its literature but for it being really something different that humans should sit up and listen to you know

along along similar lines when I I had the opportunity to go to the holy land with a prominent Jewish thought leader and so because I was with him they rolled out the red carpet for us and we got a chance to go into the actual house of King David and they showed us the little seller where all the um the the signant ring would have would have pressed the wax into the envelope where all the letters were sent out and they you know it it was and they and they said you know this is the

vantage point where he would have been able to look down at the valley and across the way where probably B Sheba was one of those houses right over there and just those details uh physical archaeological details that come to light being in in Jerusalem I I found that to be something where it was harder for me to to um my head around the idea that people think it's basically just all mythology where it's like I mean the even the Temple Mount there we know that that's Solomon's Temple and I mean there's like a thousand things

if you go to Jerusalem where there's a physical marker of a of a cited named biblical thing uh event or location Etc yeah so I mean a very clear case there is is King David King David first known from the Bible and then I think it's 1993 1995 inscriptions come out the ground uh which are mentioning him and that's a really interesting thing it's called the T Dan inscription um and you can look that up and since there other mention ancient mentions outside the Bible of David have been have been found and it's it's or

identified so I think it's a really interesting thing that yes um you first learned about him from the Bible similarly you could go to the L in Paris Museum there and you find all about King mesha who's me mentioned in second Kings chapter 3 first know from the Bible then out of the ground in 1868 uh Comes This Monument put up by this King so um if it's fiction it shouldn't be your first source of information um that that it shouldn't be playing that role in culture which it is regular uh so you know num

numbers vary but at least 60 characters from the Bible first known from the Bible then found in archaeology that's huge I I did not know that by the way this whole podcast is coming out on Saturday so if you guys like this portion of the conversation if you guys like this topic of the reliability of the Bible and how it is historically supported and corroborated then you'll definitely like that podcast