Ep. 237: Can We Trust the Bible? (Part 1)
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The Bible is one of the most famous books in history. It has been translated into nearly every language in the world, placed in most countries, and most people have some understanding of what is written inside. But with the long history and widespread popularity of the Bible, we need to ask the question: can we actually trust the Bible? Join this week’s guest Wesley Huff as he breaks down what the Bible is, why we can trust it, and how unchanged it has remained since its creation thousands of years ago!
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Speaker:
Welcome to the indoubt Podcast, where we explore the challenging topics that young adults often face. Each week, we talk with guests who help answer questions of faith, life, and culture, connecting them to our daily experiences, and God’s word. For more info on indoubt, visit indoubt.ca or indoubt.com.
Daniel Markin
Hey it’s Daniel, and thank you for joining us for another episode of indoubt. In today’s episode, we’ll be revisiting an interview that I had with apologist, writer and researcher Wesley Huff. The question that we’ll be discussing today is an age-old question, and it’s this: can we trust the Bible? Can we read a book that is thousands of years old, and trust it to give us guidance, advice, and an accurate history of ancient times? The short answer is yes, but how do we know that? And that’s where things get really interesting. If you’re a lifelong Christian, a skeptic, or somewhere in between, this conversation on the trustworthiness of the Bible is one that you won’t want to miss.
Daniel Markin:
Hey, welcome to indoubt, my name is Daniel Markin, and I’m joined today by a friend of mine, whose name is Wesley Huff. Wesley and I actually met recently at the Apologetics Canada conference. We actually got to see each other and meet each other in the flesh. So Wesley, good to have you joining us today.
Wesley Huff:
Pleasure to be here, Daniel.
Daniel Markin:
Why don’t you begin, just tell us a little bit about who you are, where you’re from, and what you’re doing right now with your time, as far as your ministry, but also your education?
Wesley Huff:
Yeah, so I live in Toronto, in Canada. I’m out here, I live with my wife and, and my son, he’s one years old, and we are expecting another baby girl in October, so excited about that. I also work with Power to Change, which is a student ministry, and has contact at 60 university and colleges across Canada, and I work for an Apologetics initiative of Power to Change, called Ultimate Questions. And our goal at Ultimate Questions is to provide credible answers to life’s ultimate questions, in order to point to the one who is the ultimate answer. And so, I travel , I speak, I write with them, speaking at campuses across this country, and I’m also an associate with Apologetics Canada. And so, occasionally I hop on the AC podcast, do some stuff with the guys there. And then in terms of my education, I am currently a full-time PhD student at the University of Toronto’s Wycliffe College, in the area of biblical studies. So I’m part way through that, just trekking along in order to get as much information under my belt, so that I can spread it to the masses.
Daniel Markin:
And that’s part of the reason that we want to have you on, is because you are diving right now, to an expertise level on the biblical scriptures. And so, could you just share what you’re diving right into? Because anytime you slap a PhD onto the front of your name, it means that you’re an expert in something that no one else in the world is an expert on. So could you share with us a little bit of what consumes your time, and what’s the, as fine point as you can, your PhD?
Wesley Huff:
Yeah. For all the listeners out there, PhD stands for permanent head damage, so the longer you do it, the more you’re doing to yourself. So, getting there, I routinely forget things, so I think that’s a sign of progress, right? What I’m studying is the early transmission of the New Testament texts. So basically, you go from the first century when these books that you find in your Bible, in that second half, what we call the New Testament, when they were written, and then the history of how those spread throughout the ancient world, how they were copied, and copied, and copied, and spread all over the place, across the known world in the centuries following the time when they were written, so the second, the third, the fourth centuries. And I look into the writing communities that developed these texts. So who were these individuals? Why, despite the fact that a large majority of them are the lower classes within society, they are largely illiterate communities, they’re largely on the fringes in terms of gender dynamics, power dynamics, and economic dynamics, why do they become such prolific copiers of written documents? And actually, eventually within a few decades of the original writings, start to outnumber secular writings, or non-Christian writings throughout the ancient world? So I study these writing communities within these first few centuries, and particularly how the text of what we call the Bible, was spread throughout the ancient world.
Daniel Markin:
And what made you decide to study that specific aspect? What was it that made you super interested in that?
Wesley Huff:
Yeah, you know what? When I really started to journey in my faith, when I started to ask the questions of why I believed what I believed, I started to come into a question about some of these origin narratives of the Bible, and once I started to solidify those for myself, and interact with people of other worldview perspectives, I found that that was a common narrative. It didn’t matter who I was talking to, whether they were Muslim, or Mormon, or atheist, agnostic, Jehovah’s Witness, time and time again, it seemed to come back to the fact that they would say, “You know what, Wes? That sounds great in terms of your apologetic, your defense, your answer for the Christian worldview that you hold, but you’re basing all of that on this book, the Bible, on the Christian scriptures, and you can’t trust them. All you have is a translation, of a translation, of a translation. All you have are error-ridden copies. You can’t even know that what you have is what the original authors wrote, and even then, it’s full of all these contradictions.” And so, I took that objection seriously, and I said, “You know what? If true, yes, that is a major problem for Christianity, because I find my foundation in this guy, Jesus, and that guy, Jesus, His central story’s found in the Bible.” And so, maybe you could argue that I jumped a little too far down that rabbit hole, but that is what really started to interest me. And the more I studied, the more I just was fascinated with the origins of how these communities started to copy and spread these texts throughout the ancient world.
Daniel Markin:
Now, a lot of these discussions you had with Muslim friends and things, did part of that have to do with your upbringing? And I know this, because I know you weren’t born in Canada, and I know that you’re a missionary kid.
Wesley Huff:
Yeah. I was actually, I was born at a very young age. I don’t know if the listeners can hear that in my voice, but I was in fact, born at a very young age, and like most people, my story starts in Pakistan. So I was born in Multan, Pakistan, my parents were missionaries there. I also spent a portion of my childhood in the Middle East, in the country of Jordan. And so yeah, to a large degree, that that did impact how I went about this journey. If for no other reason than having this background in living in majority Muslim countries, gave me an experience to be able to dialogue specifically with Muslims, to be able to interact, I think in a way that was unique to the worldview conversations that I was having, because I had that background in understanding not only what Islam was, but firsthand experience with being a minority religious position, in a setting like that. So that did play a big part into it to some degree, but at the exact same time, these were questions that I, as someone who was raised in the Christian faith, truly had, and was also curious about.
Daniel Markin:
Right. Well, why don’t we jump in, and I’m going to start you off with a… Here’s a softball question for you, all right? What is the Bible?
Wesley Huff:
Yeah. As much as that’s a softball question, I think it’s a fascinating question, because it’s a common question, and if you go to… We all know that the main arbiter of truth is Google, there’s an organization that tracks some of the questions that people ask on Google, and in 2019, according to this poll, the second most common theological question asked was, “What is the Bible?” In fact, according to the study, that question was asked a staggering 1.8 million times per month, in 2019. “What is the Bible?” And so, as much as yeah, it’s a softball question, Daniel, a lot of people are asking that question, and when we interact with people and maybe they raise objections to the Christian faith and they say, “You can trust the Bible,” if we press into those questions, we find out they’re not entirely sure what the Bible is, because a lot of us aren’t entirely sure what the Bible is. What we’re talking about, when we talk about the Bible, is not one book, as much as it’s 66 books written over a period of about 1,500 years, across three different continents, by close to 40 different authors, in three different languages. So there are two major languages, Greek and Hebrew, and then there’s one minor language, Aramaic. There are about 12 chapters in whole throughout the Bible, that are in that language, Aramaic. And so, even though we have our Bible in a very tidy form today, I can look over to my bookshelf and see a number of Bibles, some of them have thumb indexing on the pages, and have nice leather-bound covers, the Bible didn’t fall out of the sky like that. It has a history, and a long progression as to what it is and how it came together, those 66 books. And so, it spans genres, it spans ideas and concepts. You have poetry, you have history, you have narrative, you have philosophy, and biography. There’s all sorts of components too.
Daniel Markin:
And if I can add to that too, Wesley, a lot of these components, my understanding is in the secular world, it’s viewed as a very profound book of poetry, it’s viewed as a very profound narrative, it’s viewed as quite a profound book of wisdom as well. This isn’t just some sort of lightweight book. A lot of secular scholars will look at this thing and say, “This is quite a piece of work. It’s quite formidable as an ancient document.”
Wesley Huff:
Yeah, and I mean, that’s a good point, because if you look at the history, particularly of the modern Western world, its foundational document is the biblical New Testament. I mean, you can read… There’s a secular historian, Tom Holland, last year, he came out with this great book called, Dominion, and what he does, even as someone who’s not a believer, is he tracks through how the Christian worldview, and the Bible being a large component of that, has influenced our modern world. He looks at things like human value, like law, like just some of the things we presuppose about our judicial system, about human rights and freedoms, about the way that we operate within the Western world. In fact, he uses this illustration of when Chernobyl, when that nuclear reactor exploded, for weeks afterwards, people were walking around and breathing in all of this radioactive material, and they didn’t even know it, for weeks on end. And he says, “We’re breathing in the impact of the Judeo-Christian worldview and the influence of the Bible, and we often don’t even know that that’s what it’s doing.” So the Bible is a profound, like you said, book in terms of the way that it impacts the world around us.
Daniel Markin:
Right. So I guess, here’s my question. We’ve basically said, the Bible is 66 different books, many different authors over a long period of time. Here’s my devil’s advocate, right? Okay, great, but that was 2,000 years ago that that Jesus existed, and then you explained that a lot of those writings were accumulated over 1,500 years, right? So this is an old, old document. To what extent can we actually trust this Bible, and then to what extent is the Bible just also kind of made up, right? Is this 100% percent trustworthiness, or is it like 50%? Some of it’s actual historical stuff, right? You can find Goliath’s town, things like that, you can find his town of Gath, but can we trust this Bible?
Wesley Huff:
Yeah. So I think it depends on what we mean when we use the word trust. And so, a formal definition of trust, is simply a firm belief in the reliability, truth, ability, or strength of someone or something. And so, if we back up and we look at how do we establish a firm belief in the reliability, the truthfulness, and the confidence that we have within a scripture, and I’m going to be using those two words interchangeably. The word Bible isn’t necessarily a biblical word, as much as the word scripture is a scriptural word, if that makes any sense, but what I mean when I talk about the Bible or scripture, is the 66 books of what we hold as the Bible. So one of the ways that we can answer this question is by asking, “How do we know that what we have is what the original authors wrote?” Because like you said, we have a long span of time, 2,000 years in between us today, and what the original authors wrote. And so, how do we have confidence that what we have is what guys like Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, Peter, Paul, Jude, James, how do we know that this, in my modern day English translation, is what was written thousands of years ago in Greek, Hebrew, Aramaic, whatever? Well, I think one of the profound ways that we can know that, is because of exactly what my area of expertise focuses on, is the transmission of these documents. So very quickly and early on, Christians copied these books, these documents, and spread them throughout the ancient world because they wanted that message to get out, and there were two side effects of that. First, Christianity went everywhere really quickly, and second, what that meant is that you had copies of say, the Gospel of John, or the Epistle to the Romans, or the Letter of Jude, in North Africa and in Asia and in parts of Europe, as far as Britain, within decades. And so, not only did that create converts to Christianity all over the ancient world, but what it meant is that copies started to pop up all over the place.
Daniel Markin:
And we take that for granted too, Wesley, because we just think, well, nowadays you just post a tweet, right? Everyone could see it around the world. You can post an article, everyone sees it instantaneously, but in the ancient world, people are walking everywhere. So to make that trek, for some people to go all the way to England, if you’re sharing that message, there’s a good chance you’re not coming back because of the type of journey it is.
Wesley Huff:
Yeah, that’s correct. Yeah. And so, you have these documents spread all over the place, and the side effects of that, is that between the first and fourth centuries, you have hundreds, if not thousands of copies of the Bible spread over the ancient world, and this number only grows as Christianity is decriminalized at the beginning of the fourth century. But what that means, is that no single person or group could’ve ever controlled the text at any one single point in time, because it was too spread out. So any accusation of this guy, or this group, or the shadow agency inserting doctrines into the Bible, and adding the divinity of Christ, or taking out pantheism or something like that from the Bible, is impossible because you had copies of these books in North Africa, and you had copies in parts of Asia, and you had copies throughout the Middle East and Europe. And so, that disallowed any one single group or person to control the text.
Daniel Markin:
Yeah, you’d have to track down every single copy and make sure it’s destroyed or changed, which-
Wesley Huff:
Yeah.
Daniel Markin:
… yeah, you’re right. That would be an impossible task.
Wesley Huff:
Yeah, and then the second side effect of that is that now you have a whole lot of copies. And so, what we are able to do now, is we are able to look at all of those copies and compare them, because here’s the reality of any handwritten anything: anytime you handwrite and copy something, you’re going to make a mistake. It’s just going to happen. Especially when you’re copying whole books. Now, we type things now, and so some of that sort of copyist error is lost, but even typing. I mean, I try to record quotes all the time, and sometimes I make typist errors. I’m notorious for writing the as T-E-H, or writing form instead of from. I do those things just naturally. Those are typist errors, and that’s even worse when you’re hand copying things. And so, what happens is that no two manuscripts agree exactly in every letter, just because you make mistakes. Now, the benefit of having more, is that you can compare them, and the more you compare, the easier it is to see where the mistakes creep in, especially if you have copies from a long period of time. And we’re talking the second century to the 16th century, with the invention of the printing press. We have handwritten copies of the Bible, thousands, tens of thousands of them. And so, because of that, although that’s a common accusation against scripture, well, you have all these error-ridden copies. Ironically, for individuals like myself who study this academically, the more error-ridden copies you have, the better it is, because if you have only one copy, then you have to trust that whoever made that copy, got it right, and you have nothing to compare it to. But if you have two copies, okay, well now, you can compare and contrast, or if you have three copies, more, and more, and more. If we’re talking tens of thousands, we can see where certain readings creep into the text, where mistakes are made honestly, or intentionally, and it allows us to really be able to, with pinpoint accuracy, to trace the original text back.
Daniel Markin:
Interesting. So as they’re doing this then, why didn’t they just go back and correct a mistake right away, if they knew there was a mistake?
Wesley Huff:
So a lot of the time, they didn’t know there was a mistake. So let me give you a couple of examples of these, because there are all sorts of different types of what are called textual variances, so differences within the manuscript tradition, and a lot of these are done… They’re very honest mistakes. A simple explanation of one would be spelling differences. There was no standardization of spelling in Greek, up until a certain point in time. In fact, that was true for English for a long time. There was no standardization, until you had documents like dictionaries that started to come out. And so, you could spell, say the word, problem, with two B’s, or two M’s or one M, or what have you, but at the end of the day that that word is problem, if you read it, even if it has two B’s or one B. If you’re a native English speaker, you can figure that out. But then there are other ones that are a little bit different. So there’s one that you can actually find by looking at different English translations, because if you open to 1 John 3:1 in a King James Version of the Bible, it will say this: “Behold, what manner of love the Father hath bestowed upon us, that we should be called the sons of God: therefore, the world knoweth us not, because it knew him not.” Now, if you open a modern New International Version, an NIV, at that exact same passage, it will say this: “See how great a love the Father has bestowed on us, that we would be called children of God: and such we are. For this reason, the world does not know us, because it did not know him.” Now, there’s a difference between those two. It’s subtle, you may not even have picked up on it, but it is the phrase, “And such we are.” Now, the reason that this is in the King James Version, is because the King James was translated between 1603 and 1611, and the available manuscript evidence that they have, the available additions of the 1 John that they had, did not have this phrase, “And such we are,” at 1 John 3:1. But when we started to, as time went on, between 1611 and 2020, we’ve dug up far more and earlier copies of these documents. And so, we can see that in our earliest manuscripts, this phrase, “And such we are,” is there. Now how did it get eliminated? Well, the phrase, “And such we are,” is the Greek phrase, kai esmen. Well, a word immediately before, and not to get too geeky, but the word immediately before that phrase is klethomen. Now, they both end in M-E-N, and in Greek, it looks like M-E-N. And so, if you were the scribe and you were reading, and you got to the end of the sentence and it said, klethomen, and you saw that M-E-N, and then you wrote that down, and then you came back to the manuscript and you saw the M-E-N of kai esmen, instead of the M-E-N of klethomen, you could just continue on after there, and completely eliminate that phrase. This is what’s referred to as homeoteleuton, which is just a big, long, Latin word that means similar endings. And we do this all the time when we copy things, whether we know that it’s called homeoteleuton or not, because I’ve done this, where I’m copying something, and I see at the end of a sentence, and then I go back and the next sentence also ends with the, and so I pick up from there and effectively, eliminate that sentence. So that’s what’s going on in 1 John 3:1. A manuscript was copied where the scribes saw the M-E-N of klethomen, went back, mistakenly saw the M-E-N of kai esmen, and then continued on in the sentence. And that manuscript was copied, and copied, and copied, and copied, and ended up in what’s referred to as the Majority Text, the majority of manuscripts, which means that for a strain of copies, it effectively eliminated that phrase, “And such we are.” Now, there’s no grand conspiracy by, say, the King James translators of trying to eliminate the idea of sonship of God, or confidence in that, by taking out the phrase, “And such we are.” It’s a completely understandable mistake, by looking at what’s going on, we can see that mistake. You don’t miss any major doctrine or teaching within scripture by not having a phrase in there. But what it does, is it shows us how we can figure out where these mistakes happen, and how and when they happen, and how we can remedy that. So, but it’s by seeing and being able to compare all of these copies, that we’re able to do these types of things, whether it’s spelling differences, or whether it’s homeoteleuton, or what have you.
Daniel Markin:
So Wesley, here’s my question then. Do you feel… I think it’s a loaded question, because yes, you do, but throw a percentage on how certain you are that these original manuscripts are as good as the manuscripts that we have today, that the translations are so similar, so close. Are you satisfied with how close those are?
Wesley Huff:
Yeah. So here, I’ll give you the answer that even the most skeptical of scholars will give you. Even the most skeptical of scholars will say, we are able to trace the text of the Bible back to 99% accuracy of what the original was. And that 1% that we don’t know about, it’s not a matter of this is completely a mystery, it’s we have no idea what could’ve been here. It’s always a matter of one reading over another reading. And actually, if you look in your modern English translations, and you look at the bottom of the page in an NIV, or an ESV, or a New King James Version, or a NASB, or an NET, you’re going to see citation notes at the bottom of the page, which will explain that 1% to you. Nothing is hidden. We can have incredible confidence, unmatchable confidence, if we’re talking about written documents from the ancient world. Unmatchable confidence that what we have now, is what the original authors wrote back then, up until 99% of accuracy to what guys like Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, Peter, Paul, Jude, James, what they wrote, and like I said, that 1% isn’t totally up in the air. It’s a matter of one thing or another thing, and we’re not hiding anything. If you’re interested in those things, go to the bottom of the page, read where there may be a variation here or there, and how the translators of your modern English translation explain it.
Daniel Markin:
Well, that’s fantastic. And Wesley, we could definitely keep going on for this, we’re definitely going to have to do another episode. So that’s all the time we have for today. Thank you for being a part of the program, and we look forward to being able to speak with you again.
Wesley Huff:
Awesome. Thank you so much for having me.
Speaker:
Thanks so much for listening. If you want to hear more, subscribe on iTunes or Spotify, or visit us online at indoubt.ca, or in doubt.com. We’re also on social media, so make sure to follow us on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter.
Daniel Markin:
indoubt is a ministry that exists to engage young people with biblical truth and provide answers for many of today’s questions of life, faith, and culture. Through audio programs, articles, and blogs indoubt reaches out to encourage, strengthen, and disciple young adults.
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