The Truth About the Bible and Early Christianity: Wes Huff, Michael Kruger, Daniel Wallace

This transcript has been lightly edited from an automated transcription for clarity and readability. While we've worked to preserve each speaker's words faithfully, errors may remain.

1. 00:00

   Wes Huff

   Despite what you might hear in headlines from the Discovery Channel or from your popular conspiracy theory YouTube channel, these documents really don't have a credibility in terms of being tied directly to the actual historical Jesus.

2. 00:15

   Michael Kruger

   I don't know when Gnosticism became the darling of the academy, but if you look historically, the Gnostics were not the warm and inviting inclusive ones. They're actually very elitist and they're very exclusive. And they're very, we have the secret knowledge you don't.

3. 00:28

   Daniel Wallace

   As West pointed out, the telephone game has one line of transmission. You're whispering into the ear of the next person down the line. And when you get to the last person, it's not at all like what the first person said. We have virtually no evidence of any scriptorium where they actually read the text and people copied it out.

4. 00:48

   Wes Huff

   Joe Rogan and I have had on and off communication since then. I can tell you for a fact that he is attending a church and that that has been a consistent thing.

5. 00:58

   Michael Horton

   We don't wanna live in the Village Green at the end of the day. We can all leave and return to our houses of worship, but our goal is to encourage conversational theology in the Village Green where we can rub shoulders with Christians from different traditions and expressions.

6. 01:23

   Michael Horton

   Well, I'm really excited about the conversation we're about to have, conversation about the Bible. And I get to have it with some people I really respect on this subject who can deep-sea dive for us, but also explain things in ways perhaps we haven't heard before. How can we trust the scriptures? Hasn't the text been corrupted? And so we're going to get into a lot of these questions. And with me are Michael Kruger. First of all, he's Samuel C. Patterson Chancellor's Professor of New Testament and Early Christianity at Reformed Theological Seminary in Charlotte, North Carolina. He's the author of many books, including The Heresy of Orthodoxy, Canon Revisited, and The Question of Canon. And he obviously focuses a lot on what we're talking about, the origins of Christianity. Great to have you, Mike.

7. 02:17

   Michael Kruger

   Thanks, Mike. Great to be with you. This is—this is gonna be a fun conversation. I'm looking forward to it.

8. 02:21

   Michael Horton

   Yeah. And Daniel Wallace is Senior Research Professor of New Testament Studies Emeritus at Dallas Theological Seminary and the Executive Director of the Center for the Study of New Testament Manuscripts. He's written edited or contributed to more than three dozen books and has published many articles in New Testament studies. His Exegetical Syntax of the New Testament is the standard intermediate Greek grammar and has been translated into more than a half dozen languages. It's a real pleasure to have you on, Dan.

9. 02:52

   Daniel Wallace

   Yeah, thank you, Mike. I've been on a podcast with you once before, but not with these august fellows to join in. This is going to be great.

10. 03:00

    Michael Horton

    Yeah, I'm looking forward to it. And Wes Huff is the Central Canada Director for Apologetics Canada and has been a guest on a variety of public platforms, from the Joe Rogan Experience to numerous public dialogues, debates, and interfaith events on issues of belief and religion across North America. He's working on a PhD in New Testament at the University of Toronto's Wycliffe College. Wes, it's a pleasure to have you on.

11. 03:27

    Wes Huff

    Well, it's a pleasure to be here. I'm admitting that I am fully the novice in the room, but looking forward to it nonetheless.

12. 03:33

    Michael Horton

    Not quite. Not from what I've heard. First of all, brothers, I'd like to go at the outset to the whole issue of misconceptions that people have. What is textual criticism, and why does it matter?

13. 03:51

    Daniel Wallace

    Yeah, I'll start off with a definition. Textual criticism is related to any text where we don't have the originals anymore, and the copies that we have are going to be different in some degree. All of ancient literature requires textual criticism. In fact, this is the foundational discipline for doing historical study. We wouldn't know what Livy said, or what Tacitus said, or Plato, or Aristophanes, or Sophocles, or any author from the ancient world without textual criticism, because we have no Greco-Roman literature in the original's extant. Consequently, it's a necessary thing to do. The criticism simply means research. We're trying to—we're not trying to criticize the Bible. We're trying to, when it comes to the New Testament, ascertain what the original wording is based on the extant evidence.

14. 04:49

    Michael Horton

    So not criticizing what the canon says, but critically analyzing what is in the canon.

15. 04:56

    Daniel Wallace

    Exactly. Yeah. And in fact, criticism is often translated as research, like the Institut für Neu-Testamentliche Textforschung can be either the Institute for New Testament Textual Criticism or Textual Research, the standard institute in Germany that is the granddaddy of all New Testament textual critical institutes. So the goal of all ancient literature is to try to get back to that original wording. In some recent years, recent decades, New Testament scholars have kind of changed the goal. Many of them have, not all. Their goal is to try to get back to the earliest available or accessible text. The problem with that as a goal is that it cuts out the author. And what I mean by that is textual criticism using all available evidence, including the external evidence, the hard evidence, manuscripts, ancient translations of a document, quotations by church fathers, other hard evidence. That's the external evidence. But there's also internal evidence, and that is going to look at two different things. What would a scribe be likely to have done in terms of changing the text? And what is the author likely to have written originally? Now, we can determine what an author would be likely to have written originally based on places where we just don't have variants and where all the manuscripts agree. So we can tell what that author is likely to have done. When you do textual criticism without trying to look at the authorial meaning, you're cutting out one of the four legs of textual criticism. Other ancient literature is still, for the most part, trying to get back to the original wording, but this has been a change in many scholars' thinking about New Testament textual criticism, where the real goal should be, as has been for up until the last three or four decades for most scholars, to ascertain the wording of the original. In fact, all of exegetical literature, every single commentary that's ever been done on any book of the Bible, is assuming that they have the original wording to try to get back to. Otherwise, how can you tell if you're writing about, well, Luke meant this—well, if you don't care about the original wording, you can't say those things.

16. 07:22

    Michael Horton

    So one of the things that we hear on the—from the person sitting next to us on the plane is it's so far back. There are so many copies and so many distortions, and we can't really get back to Jesus and the apostles. What do you say to that? It's sort of like the telephone game. You know, one person tells another person, they tell another person, they tell… so many copies. This is what people hear often from skeptics. How do we answer that?

17. 07:59

    Wes Huff

    Yeah. So I recently actually did a talk at Liberty University where I played a clip of stand-up comedian David Cross where he used that exact illustration. He talked about popes and kings and scribes throughout history who have altered the text, and how do you know that you have what the original author wrote when you just have such a span of time in between? And I kind of retorted at the end of playing this clip of him that if you get your history from a comedian, don't be surprised when it turns out to be a joke. But, you know, we hear these narratives, and I think what they miss is just the complexity that happens in what Dr. Wallace was just describing. The telephone game assumes a single line of transmission, right? You whisper into one person's ear. There are rules. You have to say it once. You can't say it very loudly. Whereas if you look at the history of the transmission, the copies and the dissemination of something like the New Testament text, it's spread out all around. And we even have, you know, multiple translations that we can use as kind of comparative analysis other than the Greek. And so it's not one line of transmission as much as it's multiple lines of transmission. Spread over a long period of time with scribes in different locations writing to different audiences who the audiences themselves are at different locations. So there are ways to vet this process via what Dr. Wallace just described in the methodologies of textual criticism that really cut out the telephone game assumption. And really, when you talk to people who use the telephone game analogy, Often what they have in mind is not necessarily transmission in a text being disseminated throughout the ancient world, but translation. They kind of assume that the Greek is being translated into Latin, and then the Greek copies are destroyed, and then the Latin is being translated into German, and then the Latin copies are destroyed, and the Germans translate into Old French, into Old English, and eventually we get our modern English translation. And so you have this long span of time of translations of translations of translations. And sometimes when people accuse me of having a translation of a translation of a translation, I pull, you know, my Nessie Lon texts out of my backpack and say, well, I've translated this multiple times over and over and over, but I don't think that's what you mean, right? What they mean is something that is actually not representative of how we go from ancient papyrus to modern-day print, and how we go from the Hebrew and Greek directly into modern English translations. So, while you can understand someone's ignorance in using an analogy like the telephone game, it really is that. It's an ignorance of both the translation process of the New Testament and the Old Testament likewise, and how we go from ancient papyrus and parchment into modern-day print for any ancient document.

18. 10:47

    Daniel Wallace

    That was great. I should listen to you more, Wes.

19. 10:50

    Michael Horton

    Mike, do you want to chime in there?

20. 10:52

    Michael Kruger

    Well, yeah, I mean, my friends here have laid out the standard case, right, for the reliability of the New Testament text. One of the things that's disappointing for us as scholars is it doesn't actually take that much work to go and find out what the transmission process is really like. And when you do, you realize it's remarkably reliable and consistent. You know, one of the things that's come up in all this is what I would call scribal infrastructure, which is, did the early Christians have the right mechanism, the right uniformity, the right sort of unification around what the scribes are doing to think that this could have been done reliably? And I think there's massive evidence for that. There's the corrections in the text, No one's mentioned yet the nature of the scribal hand, which is more of a book hand than a documentary hand, and they've shown that it's much better than they used to think it was, the more manuscripts we find. There's the use of the Codex Anomina Sacra, which I think also speaks to scribal uniformity. So there's just so much encouraging news here.

21. 11:44

    Daniel Wallace

    In December 2014, Kurt Eichenwald wrote an article for Newsweek, which is purportedly an accurate magazine on politics and other issues. The article was titled, The Bible: So Misunderstood It's a Sin. Now here's—he compares the transmission of the Bible, particularly the New Testament, to the telephone game. And he makes this statement that fits right into what Wes has said. No television preacher has ever read the Bible. Neither has any evangelical politician, neither has the Pope, and neither have I. So far, he may be right. But then he goes on and says, and neither have you. At best, we've all read a bad translation. Now get this, a translation of translations of translations. So three generations of translations where the previous ones apparently were all destroyed of hand-copied copies of copies of copies of copies, and on and on hundreds of times. Now, what that sounds like very much is, if that's the case, the New Testament would be very much like the telephone game. As Wes pointed out, the telephone game has one line of transmission. Let me just kind of lay out the rules of the game. When you play this, you're whispering into the ear of the next person down the line. You don't get to say it twice. Somebody doesn't hear exactly what you said, they're going to make stuff up, fill stuff in. And it goes down the line. And when you get to the last person, it's not at all like what the first person said. That's the point of the game. With the copying of the New Testament, the point is to make an accurate copy each time. And it's a written copy, not an oral copy. It was handed down from manuscript to manuscript. We have virtually no evidence of any scriptorium where the lecturer read the text and people copied it out. That used to be the idea, but it's been demonstrated that almost all of our copies have been done by somebody seeing a manuscript in front of them and copying that manuscript. So we have that kind of a thing going on, accurate written transmission. And then you have what's called a diorthotes. That's a person who is kind of like the corrector of a manuscript before it leaves the scriptorium to the church or the person who has purchased the manuscript. The diorthotes checks that manuscript against what they copied to make sure it's accurate. Now, I was a professor for 40 years. If somebody turned in a quiz and I marked off several questions and they got a 75 on it, and they complain, no, I got this right. I say, you know, you didn't understand the Greek here and here. Who are you gonna think is gonna be more accurate? The student's 75, where he got all of it right, or did I correct those and I was more accurate? That was the role of the diorthotes. There have been some who said that the early copies of the scribes, they were not professional scribes. Like Bart Ehrman said, the early copyists were not professional scribes, so they just added all sorts of things. The problem with that is that what we have evidence for is so many of our early papyri and even some of our parchment manuscripts that came a little bit later, these scribes, although not professionally trained as scribes, were professionally trained as accountants. And C.H. Roberts argued this in 1977 in his Schweik Lectures at Oxford University, where he said he only found one manuscript outside of New Testament copies where they did something that only accountants did when they were writing out the text. And that is that accountants, instead of writing out the word for a number like 167, they'd put 167 in Greek. They'd have to use letters that represented that, and they'd put a line over it, say, Don't read this as these letters, but read it as a word. And Roberts only found one manuscript, one literary manuscript that did that. But he found lots of the New Testament manuscripts that did that. What this means is these early copyists were not the kind of people to come up with wild imaginations and add to the text from whatever they want to get it from. Their accuracy had to do with copying down as exactly and carefully as they could. I like to use the illustration that the kinds of mistakes that these early scribes for the most part committed are the kinds that are the most easily detectable. If you saw a handwritten manuscript to say the Constitution and you were reading the preamble, it starts out, “We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect onion.” If you saw that, you say, oh, that's stupid. It's supposed to be “union.” The guy wrote an O instead of a U. That's the kind of mistake these early scribes make. What we found is, in fact, a very, very important—I think our second most important manuscript, Papyrus Number 75. The scribe copied one or two letters at a time. And so you've got this kind of careful copying. Now, back to the telephone game. We don't just interview the last person in line. We get to interview all sorts of scribes all the way up the line as close to the original. And it's not just one line, but several lines of transmission.

22. 17:10

    Michael Kruger

    I think the thing to take note of is the fact that these are well-known facts. These aren't hidden. It's not like we just found these out five years ago. It's the standard fare. Dan mentioned Kurt Eichenwald's article. When that came out, I actually wrote a two-part review of it on my website, lengthily rebutting much of his misconceptions. And it was full of misconceptions about the way the New Testament was transmitted. It's actually one of those examples of something that we really even shouldn't be talking about much anymore. I wish we would kind of move on to other topics because it's so well established that for people to still sort of complain about it just shows that you really don't understand the way documents worked in the ancient world, because everybody's in the same boat, and Christianity actually emerges in a much stronger place than even comparable texts in the ancient world.

23. 17:52

    Michael Horton

    Can you touch on that, Mike? Compare for us the textual tradition of the New Testament and Plato's works or Herodotus or Virgil?

24. 18:09

    Michael Kruger

    Yeah, well, what people don't realize is that if you have a document that was somewhere written near the 1st century, and here we are living in roughly 2,000 years later, you know, what—how many copies of such a document written in the 1st century would we expect to have? You know, people don't even know the answer to that question. And what is a normal amount of copies you would have from a document written in the first century? And, you know, I would say the average is probably somewhere around 10 copies would be great. We have some ancient documents with one. You look at some of the works of Josephus, you have maybe around 50. I think Tacitus sits around 10. And these numbers change because we find new ones from time to time. Some of these copies are very fragmentary. Some of these are more full. But to have handwritten copies like the New Testament, that well over 5,500, now 5,700, now depending on how you count the duplicates, is just a stunning number. And that's just in Greek. That's not even talking about our versional manuscripts. It's not even talking about patristic citations of the New Testament. It's just simply talking about Greek manuscripts. Now, yes, many of those are late and medieval. Okay, fair enough. But that's true for the way we count any documents. Some of our best copies of Josephus's work are 10th century. And so the idea that once you get into the Middle Ages, we don't pay attention anymore, is simply not true. We don't do that for other texts, because other texts, you hardly have anything before the 10th century. So the fact that we have so many thousands of copies, many of which go back to the second, third, or fourth century—I just wrote an article for a forthcoming volume on second century Christianity, and I was tasked with documenting all what you would call possible New Testament manuscripts that are dated to the second century. And it depends what you define as possible, of course. But I highlighted 12 manuscripts that I think are reliably and at least reasonably possibly dated to the second century that I think cover a significant portion of the New Testament text. So as Dan was saying, if you have a line of people in a communication train, you don't go talk to the last person. If you can go back to the second century, you can almost talk to the first person. If you count the first person as first century, you're pretty darn close to it, and better than almost any comparable document in the ancient world. So that's what I mean. I mean, if someone's going to complain about Christian history, you've got to really complain about all of human history.

25. 20:15

    Daniel Wallace

    The best thing I can come up with is the Empire State Building. The Empire State Building is about 1,454 feet tall with the radio antennas. And when you count the Greek New Testament manuscripts and the translations, it comes to well over 1 mile high. It's 4.5 Empire State Buildings compared to a podium. And in terms of the date, our earliest copies come within decades. We're not waiting 1,000 years. By 1,000 years after the completion of the New Testament, we have 1,800 copies. Within 900 years, it really picked up after that, because by the end of the 10th century, 900 years after Revelation was written, we have 900 copies. And you go through the early centuries, as Mike has said, we've got so many good copies on those early centuries. One of the things I think that's really interesting here is, again, going back to the telephone game, we can compare For example, P75 and Codex Vaticanus. P75 has most of Luke and John in it, and it's a third century papyrus. Vaticanus, which I think is our most important New Testament manuscript, a fourth century parchment that had the whole Bible in it originally. When you compare Codex Vaticanus with P75, they have more agreement with each other than any two manuscripts in the first eight centuries of Christianity. And where they differ, many times what Vaticanus does is has a better reading, one that we would say, that's original. P75 is later, or it's not original, which means that although they come from a similar stream, Vaticanus is not a copy of P75. It's a copy of an ancestor of P75. So this is where you do these comparisons and you say, gee, the telephone game. Kurt Eichenwald actually plays the telephone game when he's trying to represent what the telephone game is. He's, he's trying to say what scholars said, but no scholar has ever made the kind of nonsense that he has said in the paragraph that I read or what Mike has done in his website.

26. 22:29

    Michael Horton

    You've debated Bart Ehrman where he has, he has made this claim and we've heard it. It's like, you know, every Christmas and Easter on the History Channel, this sort of thing comes out—that the telephone game has been played for so long that we really don't have any access to what an original Gospel of Luke would have said. And I forget the number. What number does he give of all of the contradictions or the discrepancies?

27. 23:02

    Daniel Wallace

    He said it's between 300,000 and 400,000.

28. 23:05

    Michael Horton

    And what did you say to that?

29. 23:07

    Daniel Wallace

    First of all, it's funny, Bart elsewhere has said we actually do have very early copies of Mark. They are Matthew and Luke, in that Matthew and Luke used Mark to write their gospels, and 600 of Mark's 660 verses appear in Matthew, although they're modified to some degree. But he had elsewhere said that those are copies of Mark with an author changing in light of what he knew or what he thought. So Ehrman kind of contradicts himself on that. But when it comes to the number of variants, that figure was actually low. It was about 300,000 or 400,000, he said. He's often said we have more variants in the manuscripts than we have words in the New Testament. And that is actually an understatement as well. We have approximately 138,162 words in the Greek New Testament, give or take a dozen. But we have The number of variants—Peter Gurry actually was the first person to do more than just a guess out in the wild. He compared places where exhaustive research has been done on certain books or chapters of the New Testament and was able to extrapolate how many variants we have. Now, he published this in New Testament Studies. Peter was an intern of mine, and he worked at CSNTM for some time. He's now a professor at Midwestern Baptist Seminary. And Peter said he excluded spelling differences and nonsense readings, which happen to be the majority of the readings. About 2/3 of all our variances are either spelling or nonsense. But he came up with a number factually based on the evidence he found of about half a million variants. Now, if you look at the spelling and nonsense variants, my estimate is we have about 1.5 million differences among our manuscripts today, just our Greek manuscripts. That sounds terribly frightening and discouraging, but here's a way to think about it. Put this into four different categories. All of our variants fit into one of four categories, and I'm taking The quadrant from two things: viable and meaningful. A meaningful variant, it changes the meaning of the text to some degree, like Jesus versus Lord Jesus, or Jesus versus Christ. It changes the meaning of the text in terms of translation. Now, obviously, you don't have manuscripts that have Jesus, or some have Peter. That's not going to happen. But it does change it, and it affects translation. In fact, there's some that can change the meaning of the text without affecting translation. So those are meaningful. Viable means it has a good shot at going back to the original wording. Now, I'm being very generous in what I would consider to be a viable variant, and very generous in what I'm considering to be a meaningful variant. The categories then are not meaningful and not viable, which is our largest category of variants. The more manuscripts we find, they—each new manuscript adds approximately, on average, 20 new variances, wording differences that we've not seen in any other manuscript. Every single time we discover another manuscript, and the average size of all of our manuscripts overall is over 400 pages, that's pretty significant. So you get these variants that come down the pike, but say it's an 11th century manuscript, none of it's going to go back to the original. So it just adds to the number of differences, but it doesn't challenge what we think the original is. So you look at all this, and those that are not meaningful and not viable, that's by far the largest category. Then you've got those that are viable but not meaningful, and this is going to be things that they may go back to the original wording, but it doesn't affect anything. And so spelling differences are one of those things, word order differences that affects emphasis but doesn't really affect the meaning. Then you've got those that are Meaningful but not viable. And those are going to be the ones that are interesting. But if it's found in one late manuscript, nobody thinks it goes back to the original. The smallest category of our approximately 1.5 million differences in our manuscripts are those readings that are both meaningful and viable. And the best estimate is that it's approximately 1/10 of 1% of all these variants are both meaningful and viable. And yet even quite a few of them don't change even in translation. It's massive. Bart Ehrman at one point says, we could go on speaking forever about the differences in the manuscripts. They're not just in the hundreds, they're in the thousands. Well, they're in the hundreds of thousands. But I did a little experiment a few years ago. 12 years ago, I was teaching a seminar for a week on textual criticism in Oklahoma. And I looked at just the statement, John loves Mary. How many ways can you say John loves Mary in Greek using the same verb, agapaō? You know, we get agape from it, for your listeners, some who don't know Greek. How many ways can you say John loves Mary in Greek? Not Mary is loved by John, not John loved Mary, but John loves Mary, present tense. And I spent eight hours writing out the different ways you could say it. Both John and Mary have different spellings. The word order can be different in Greek. It doesn't matter. Both can occur with the article. Like, it could be the John loves the Mary, but we don't translate that, and it doesn't affect any doctrine in those places. I came up with more than 1,000 ways you could say John loves Mary in Greek. If there's more than 1,000 ways to translate the Greek into John loves Mary, then it doesn't matter if we have hundreds of thousands of variants. What matters is, what are the ones that are meaningful and viable? And those are the only ones that scholars ever really talk about.

30. 29:21

    Michael Kruger

    Mike, one story I tell my students all the time is I tell them about the story about the archaeological dig going on at Oxyrhynchus, Egypt, which is one of the longest-running archaeological digs we have when it pertains to ancient manuscripts. Started in the late 1800s, still going on today, probably well over 120 years active dig. And my students don't realize that we continue to find more manuscripts of the New Testament periodically, and they never hear about them. And one of the most common questions I get is, Why don't we ever hear about these new manuscripts that are discovered? You know, if we get a new copy of Luke or Romans or what have you. And I tell them, I say, largely the reason you never hear about it is because it pretty much is like the Luke you already know, and pretty much like the Romans you already know. And I said, do you think if there's a really different version of Luke that was discovered, you think you'd hear about that on the news? And the answer is yes. And so part of the story of textual criticism, as I was saying in my earlier comment, is it's sort of a non-story. I mean, the funny part about it is we keep talking about it, and I get it, people don't understand it, and it's complicated. But at the end of the day, the fact that we don't actually even hear about these manuscripts at the popular level shows you that there's no real meaningful change to the text that ever really derives from them. And for the most part, the text has been really, really stable for a really long period of time.

31. 31:29

    Michael Horton

    Wes, we often hear in popular discourse, podcasting, journalism, History Channel, so forth, that the Gnostics in particular, they had all these gospels. And ironically, a lot of the scholars who publish these tomes saying that there was no Christian canon early on, publish these Gnostic Gospels as the Gnostic Gospels or the Gnostic Scriptures when they wouldn't give that credit to the New Testament. Help us out here to see that the, you know, Gospel of Judas and the Gospel of Mary and so forth aren't sifted out of a biblical canon. They didn't belong to it in the first place.

32. 32:20

    Wes Huff

    Yeah, well, Dr. Kruger has some excellent work published on this particular topic, and a couple of summers ago I had the privilege to go to a few key locations in Egypt, chief amongst which was Oxyrhynchus. I actually went to Oxyrhynchus and saw some of the work that was being done there currently. But I also went out to Nag Hammadi, and I went to the approximate location that the Nag Hammadi Library was discovered, which revealed documents like the Gospel of Thomas and the Gospel of Philip. And so actually, in the series that we did at Apologetics Canada, in the first episode, “Can We Trust the Bible?”episode one, We talked about the canon of Scripture, and we filmed that actually at Nag Hammadi, and we talked about this discovery and then went to the Coptic Museum in Cairo and looked at the actual few pages that are on there on display of the Gospel of Thomas. And then we went to this little village called Al-Qasr out in the desert where the Bedouin who had discovered the Gospel of Thomas actually brought it back to where it was famously thrown into a courtyard where some goats supposedly ate pages of it, and other pages were—of the Nag Hammadi Library were burnt to cook bread, unfortunately. So what these kind of discoveries—that was in 1945 when that was discovered by an individual named Muhammad Ali, probably not the Muhammad Ali that the listener is thinking of. Muhammad Ali—this Muhammad Ali had nothing to do with boxing. He probably wore a headscarf and hung out with goats more often than he did in a ring with boxing gloves. But those types of discoveries made waves in, in the theory of this kind of theological quagmire that was supposed by individuals like Bauer back in this German New Testament scholarship, which kind of proposed that there wasn't any one thing called Christianity, but rather Christianities, and that you had groups like the Gnostics and the Ebionites and the Docetics They were all kind of vying for their own theological perspective. And I think what we've kind of developed and discovered now is that, you know, the Gnostics weren't one group as much as they were an umbrella group, and there were multiple different variations of what we call Gnosticism. But despite the kind of the variation that existed within the religious or theological perspectives in those religious ideologies was that they produced these documents. that are tied to individuals like Thomas and Philip and Peter and Mary and Judas, names that we would recognize from the Bible. But like, I sometimes like to say that what's happening there is that those groups which are writing in later subsequent decades and centuries are appropriating these individuals. They're written in timeframes when we know that Peter and Mary and Thomas and Judas were long dead, and they're appropriating those names, and chiefly Jesus, appropriating the name of Jesus and writing their own theologies and ideologies back on his lips. And there are multiple ways that we can identify their unreliability in terms of going back to first century Roman-occupied Judea. Whereas when we evaluate the biblical Gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, what do we find? We find actually that they mention places and people and names and locations and details. That we should expect if they were written in those places at that time. Whereas if you evaluate some of these others, we actually find both in the internal evidence of the names and peoples and places and locations, and then the external evidence in terms of where they start to pop up, some of the clues in, in their inception as being a written document, that they weren't written in first century Judea. They were written in places like third and fourth century Egypt. And so despite what you might hear in headlines from the Discovery Channel or from your, you know, a popular conspiracy theory YouTube channel, these documents really don't have a credibility in terms of being tied directly to the actual historical Jesus. And the only documents that do are the ones that, unsurprisingly, you would find at the beginning of your New Testament that we call Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.

33. 36:39

    Michael Horton

    Yeah, that's a great summary. I also think one thing cutting across all of these so-called Gnostic Gospels is their defiance of the Old Testament God, whereas the Christians had adopted the Old Testament en bloc, just the whole thing. And also saying, well, it's not “As Peter said,” they're a joke. Abraham is a joke. Moses is a joke. Not exactly comparable to what you find in the New Testament. But then also, the first commentary on John, if I'm not mistaken, was written by one of the Gnostic leader's associates, Heraclion. And it's striking that the first commentary on the Gospel of John is not written by an Orthodox Christian, but written by a Gnostic because he knows it's canonical. So none of the Christians referred to the Gnostic Gospels as canonical. In fact, they said that they were apostate. But Gnostics were quoting the canonical scriptures, and that seems to make the case, doesn't it, that Orthodoxy came before heresy.

34. 37:57

    Michael Kruger

    Absolutely. Yeah I mean, Wes mentioned a person by the name of Walter Bauer a minute ago, and his influence here is massive. And people don't actually recognize how influential he is. When he published his original book, Heresy and Orthodoxy in Earliest Christianity, it was in 1934 in Germany. It got kind of lost in the obvious shuffle of World War II. It wasn't until 1971 when it was translated into English that it kind of had its impact. And here's the essence of what Bauer argued. It's what Wes said. Hey, there was no early Christianity. There were only early Christianities, multiple versions of the faith fighting it out for the claim to be original. But here's the next part of the story Bauer said, is that each of these groups has their books, and they claim that their books are the right books. And then why do you have the books in your canon that you have today? Well, because that group won. And if another group had won, you may not be reading Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. You may be reading Philip, Thomas, and Peter. And so here's the payoff of Bauer's view, and it's very postmodern. Basically, the argument is no gospel is any better any more meritorious, any more authentic than any other. The only reason we have one set of Gospels as opposed to another set of Gospels is just, it's the accident of history. If someone else had won, then you'd be reading another set of Gospels. So there's a whole movement in our modern scholarship discussions to never say one Gospel is better than another, or one is more right, or one is orthodox, one is correct, one is true. And so now we have scholars saying you can't use terms like apocryphal and canonical. You can't use terms like heresy and orthodoxy. All Gospels are by definition equal, and none should be prejudicially elevated above another. Believe it or not, that is the narrative of our modern universities in our modern scholarly scenario, and it only works as long as you don't look at the historical data. And when you start looking at the historical data, you realize, but wait a second, I'm supposed to say that all Gospels are the same, but they're factually not the same. And as you mentioned, Mike, the Gospels that represent a much more full version of Gnosticism are obviously downstream from Orthodoxy because they're a second century phenomenon. We know that Gnosticism didn't even reach full bloom until really the Valentinian version of it in the middle of the second century. And so all the arrows suggest that actually it wasn't that way. There were Gospels that seem to have predated the larger movement. And when we ask which ones, it's always the same. It's Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, because people don't realize that they're actually still the only Gospels that are dated to the first century. Even by secular scholars. You just let that sink in.

35. 40:23

    Michael Horton

    Yeah. Interesting, too, that Bauer himself was fascinated with Gnosticism, and Elaine Pagels and so many of the contemporary scholars of early Christianity and Gnosticism are as well. And these are the professors at Harvard and Stanford and you name it, making basically a pitch for the Gnostics. And so it's not unprejudiced.

36. 40:52

    Michael Kruger

    It's fascinating. I tell my students, I said, I don't know when Gnosticism became the darling of the academy, but for really since the 1970s, there's been this sense that Gnosticism is really the version of Christianity we wish had won. And it's the warm version, it's the inviting version, it's the inclusive version, and the so-called Orthodox Christianity that prevailed is the one we wish hadn't won. The problem is, again, that's a great narrative, but it's not true historically. If you look historically, the Gnostics were not the warm and inviting and inclusive ones. They were actually very elitist, and they're very exclusive, and they're very, we have the secret knowledge, you don't. Ignatius makes numerous comments about how the Gnostics were known for being very unloving and very uninterested in the orphan and the widow. So the idea that Gnosticism is the great religion that Christianity could have been, again, that sounds really good in a modern scenario where you're supposed to say all religions are the same. But when you look at it historically, it wasn't the religion it was painted to be.

37. 41:51

    Wes Huff

    You know, it's an interesting fact to point out, Dr. Kruger, because I find in not just in the halls of academia, but in the kind of popular culture, there's a preoccupation with Gnosticism as well. New Age philosophy is ingrained and saturated With a preoccupation with the Gnostic Gospels or the Ebionites or these different groups who, like you said, if you were to hop in a time machine and go back in time and actually see what these people were like, they wouldn't be the inclusive group that would jive with a modern New Age person.

38. 42:25

    Michael Horton

    They didn't even want to be a part of what they called the Great Church or the soulish or fleshly church. They didn't. They didn't want to be included.

39. 42:37

    Wes Huff

    Yeah, and, and I think it's interesting. I think it's a bit of kind of the symptomatic nature of our subjective society that groups like New Agers who want to piecemeal Christianity and Islam and Buddhism also want to do it to ancient philosophies and religions as well. Because if they actually were respectful to any one of these groups, whether it was Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, or ancient Gnosticism, then they would realize that these are all mutually exclusive, that the secretive nature of the gnosis, of the knowledge that was communicated by the Jesus of, you know, pick your Gnostic gospel, although even some of the Gnostic gospels contradict each other, that that wouldn't really be what a lot of people who I talk to who are the quote-unquote spiritual but not religious would actually want to associate themselves with.

40. 43:27

    Michael Horton

    That reminds me of a lecture, a series of lectures that I attended at Oxford with a professor who filled the largest auditorium. And what he did was—and he was a former evangelical, InterVarsity guy, but he had moved in a liberal direction— he each week put up another circle of his Venn diagram of a world religion. And then by the time he finished, and we kind of saw where this was going, all of the overlapping circles at the center were the mystical parts of that religion, and they all unite there. And he actually did have an ecumenical effect on a number of us who, you know, from different religions, who went out afterwards for a pint and talked about how condescending it was for a middle-class white European to decide for all the rest of us what our religion really was.

41. 44:26

    Michael Kruger

    And how, how all those religions have been wrong. What he basically will say that all you, you know, Christianity is wrong to be exclusive. Islam's wrong to be exclusive. Let me tell you how religion really works.

42. 44:35

    Michael Horton

    Yeah. And as if that's not exclusive.

43. 44:36

    Michael Kruger

    Yeah, exactly.