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Podcast: 12 Quick Questions about the Reliability of the Bible (Peter Williams)

December 26, 2022 by: Crossway

This article is part of the The Crossway Podcast series.

Exploring Doubts about God's Word

In today's episode, Peter Williams answers tough questions about the reliability of the Bible, offering assurance to those who have ever felt like their trust in God's word has been shaken.

Can We Trust the Gospels?

Can We Trust the Gospels?

Peter J. Williams

Written for the skeptic, the scholar, and everyone in between, this introduction to the historical and theological reliability of the four Gospels helps readers better understand the arguments in favor of trusting them.

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Topics Addressed in This Interview:

01:47 - We don’t have access to the original manuscripts, so how can we be sure that what we’re looking at is accurate?

Matt Tully
Peter, thank you so much for joining me again on The Crossway Podcast.

Peter Williams
Pleasure to be with you.

Matt Tully
In my experience, most Christians—and I know I’ve been here before—at some point in their lives they have questions, and maybe even doubts, about the reliability of the Bible. I think we, whether from our own thinking about these questions to just hearing prominent skeptics (atheists) in the media questioning the Bible and explaining all these problems with the Bible, it’s easy for us to kind of start to wonder, Can I really trust this? You’ve spent decades studying the Bible in the original languages. You’re a well-known Bible scholar, so today we thought we’d ask you some common questions that Christians often wrestle with when it comes to the reliability of the Bible. Question number one: We don’t have access to the original manuscripts, so how can we be sure that what we’re looking at is accurate?

Peter Williams
I think when people say we don’t have access to the original manuscripts, I’d say, So what? Actually, we don’t really care about the original manuscripts.

Matt Tully
You’ve got to explain that.

Peter Williams
A manuscript is just a physical thing. God didn’t give physical things; he gave words. So what we are concerned about are the words that God has given, which were written on the physical things. But when those words are copied from one physical thing to another physical thing, they don’t lose their God-ness. There’s nothing more given by God about the the original physical copy than any subsequent copy. And I think this is where we’ve got to realize that God speaks words; he doesn’t speak papyrus or leather. So, this is where one of the problems has happened in the way people articulate things. For instance, people talk about the original text. The word text is ambiguous. It can mean the wording, or it can mean the physical thing, and we are only interested in the wording. So when people say we don’t have access to the original manuscripts, I don’t care. I want to know, Do I have access to the original wording? And the answer is, of course, I have access to the original wording, because it got copied. It’s a bit like anyone hearing this podcast is not hearing my voice; they’re hearing a copy of my voice—a copy of a copy of a copy of my voice. It’s happened so many times. Do they have access to my words? Yeah, sure they do. Are they in this room right now? No.

Matt Tully
So that maybe naturally leads into the follow up question to that: Yes, what we’re interested in are the words themselves, not the physical papyrus that the apostle Paul wrote something on. However, the reason that we’re interested in that papyrus is because we would have confidence that when Paul was inspired to write those words he was accurate in that first writing them down. How do we have confidence in the accuracy of all those copies?

Peter Williams
What I’d say is this is sort of a false dilemma people are presented with nowadays, because it’s a bit like saying, Unless I have access to the actual recording on the camera capturing the sports game, I have no access to the sports game. That’s sort of what that thing is. We don’t really care what happens to the original recording on the TV cameras themselves. Who’s going round nowadays saying, Unless I have Peter Jackson’s original camera on which this particular shot of The Lord of the Rings was caught, I have no access to this*. This is insane. We live in a culture which is surrounded by copying. The whole economy is based on copy.

Matt Tully
The Internet itself is a bunch of copies of things.

Peter Williams
The whole thing. And somehow, when it comes to the Bible, people are starting by having this angst. All of these different civilizations that have been, since the time of the Romans, have had copiers. That’s what people did. That was their job. The whole economy is based on that, and so this idea that we have no access to things because it was copied is simply insane. And so I want to call that out pretty strongly and say we should stop having anxiety about something in one area when we don’t have that anxiety in other areas.

Matt Tully
I think the response to that could be that when it comes to a sports broadcast where the copying is happening digitally, we have a sense for how that works. We have an implicit trust in the accuracy of that, generally speaking. However, I think the response of the skeptic is often on this front like the game Telephone? You have humans involved, passing a message along, and by the time you get to the end, it’s totally distorted from what it once was. So why is that not what’s going on with the Bible?

Peter Williams
Well firstly, the telephone game is a game which is an artificial game deliberately created in order to get the message corrupted. You can’t just play it with two of you or three of you; you probably need ten. Someone’s got to whisper the message, and they’re only allowed to whisper it once to one person. So in other words, you stack everything in favor of getting corruption. It’s very artificial; a very bad analogy. What I’d say is that when you say we understand about copying today, yes, we do. We don’t worry about the fact that on our cell phones and all sorts of other ways that we are communicating, there are—I don’t know how many—thirty steps between me and the person I’m talking to. I have no idea. And so I’d say, actually, we sort of don’t know, but there’s just this general confidence. What happens is somehow people start getting skeptical about scribes. A scribe’s job was to copy. Now, just as when you’re watching a sports match, we know that the tech exists that someone could CG falsify what you see. And you could be sitting in your house watching a sports match, and what you see is falsified and your neighbors might see something different. But you know that isn’t going to happen because that would cost a huge amount of money. So that’s why you’re pretty confident that’s not going on. It’s exactly the same with copying from the ancient world. If you wanted to copy a Bible, let’s say, which takes about a year to copy out. And if it’s going to be on leather, well, how many animal skins is that going to be? Is that going to be three hundred animal skins? Now, just think about the economic price of that to falsify one Bible. And people are going to tell me, Oh yes, loads and loads of Bibles being falsified the whole time, and this is what everyone’s doing. Give me a break! This is as insane as the idea that every single video of Zelensky going around Ukraine is being falsified. No, it can’t. Just the budget would blow your mind to do that. So what I’d say is you’ve got to think realistically, and we’ve just got to educate people to think about how texts arrive to us. Of course someone could falsify something, but falsifying a bit of one copy isn’t going to create a whole load of descendants of that copy, which affect everything in the world. Christianity is spread out around the place. If, let’s say, in one town in the Roman Empire people start falsifying copies, well guess what? There are all the other towns and places where things are being copied.

Matt Tully
And that’s why you guys are, as Bible scholars, are comparing these different manuscripts and fragments, and you’re able to kind of identify places more than intentional falsifying. There are just little mistakes sometimes that appear.

Peter Williams
Yeah, sure. And we also know that when you copy electronic files, there’s a small level of corruption that happens into the text into the copies over time, and we know that doesn’t affect the general integrity of electronically copied files. So, I’d want to say that, generally, literature from the ancient world, whether it’s in Chinese or Arabic or Hebrew or Greek or whatever it is, it’s generally well transmitted. This idea that one person might falsify it isn’t going to have enough effect to falsify the whole transmission.

09:59 - Doesn’t the Bible contain hundreds of internal contradictions?

Matt Tully
Alright, question number two: Doesn’t the Bible contain hundreds of internal contradictions?

Peter Williams
That’s a really interesting question. I actually give a longer answer in a chapter in my book, Can We Trust the Gospels?, on what I think are deliberate contradictions in John’s Gospel. And I think Jesus himself taught with contradictions. Good teachers can use contradiction to convey information, to get you to think more deeply. Now, I do want to say that I think Scripture is written so that if you seek God, you will find him, and if you don’t seek, you will stumble. That means that there are bits in it which are very clear to understand, and there are bits in it which are more tricky. Sometimes, when people say there are contradictions, what they’re saying is something like, The same word is used in two different ways. Well, that’s just normal. If you don’t want to have dictionaries which are too big and you don’t want to make language learning impossible, then you use words in more than one way. Other things you can have going on in the Bible is there can be changes of deal. I could paraphrase the words Old Testament and New Testament to the Old Deal and New Deal. As in, there are different arrangements that God has for different times. And so people can call that a contradiction—the fact that the arrangement has changed once Christ arrives to what’s before. Those sorts of things. So, there are plenty of opportunities for tension, and if people want to find fault in the Bible, they’re going to find plenty of reason to do so. But then the flip side is that I think Scripture is written with an amazing unity and harmony across it. And as I’ve researched it more and more, I’ve found more and more coherence and things hold together. The fact is, yes, there are puzzling bits, as there are puzzling bits in an advanced crossword or a really difficult Sudoku, and that’s okay. We are dealing with an omniscient God. He knows everything, and he set plenty of challenges there. So I think part of it is just coming to Scripture with the right attitude.

Matt Tully
Have there been situations or seeming contradictions that puzzled you maybe for a while, but then at some point as you looked more closely at them and spent more time studying, something opened up and you thought, Actually, that doesn’t really bother me anymore?

Peter Williams
I think, certainly, there have. I think a lot of it is where you realize that you’ve accepted some assumption about something, and that’s given you problems later on. So I think that’s what happens.

12:43 - Doesn’t the writing style of various books change throughout those books?

Matt Tully
All right, question number three: Doesn’t the writing style of various books change throughout those books, suggesting that the book was compiled by maybe multiple people over the course of many different years, sometimes when the book itself seems to say that it was written by Moses?

Peter Williams
I think the writing style can change within a book. You just have to think of some of Tolkein’s things, like The Hobbit, where there is a different style in the songs and the poems than there is in the prose. So, the fact that there’s a change of style doesn’t mean that it’s by different authors. In fact, you can take someone like J. K. Rowling, a famous author, who’s written kid’s books, teenage books, and adult books. And guess what? They have really different styles. And when she writes in magazines and essays, it’s a different style again. So, the problem for anyone saying, Because there are two styles here, they can’t be by the same author is that I want to know what are your parameters? What are your criteria for deciding two styles equals two authors? I’ve got different styles of handwriting I can use in different settings. I’ve got different styles of writing. When I write an academic article, it’s got a different writing style from my emails, a different writing style from my thank you letters.

Matt Tully
I’m struck that in this example, and maybe even going back to the the issue of the transmission of Scripture through the centuries, do you ever feel like when people come to the Bible, there’s kind of a different set of rules in how they assess, Is this trustworthy? What are the rules of the road for how we hold the Bible to certain standards?

Peter Williams
I think often people are starting with a sort of It’s guilty until proven innocent. They’re starting with a hermeneutic of suspicion, you could call it. And often, it’s a case of junk in junk and out. If people start with that skepticism, they will find all sorts of evidence to back that up. At the end of the day, the Scripture books come to us as coherent wholes. Take something like Genesis as an example. People have found different sources in Genesis, but there’s a tremendous unity running through that. And so I’d want to say that’s the most prominent thing that, as I read those fifty chapters of Genesis, it’s the fact that there are themes of blessing going through, there are characters that run through, there are plot lines that run through. And if people want to say there’s a bit of a change of style here and there, often it’s that they haven’t set their gauge right. You’ve got to have a sufficiently broad sense of what can be one style. The other thing is, of course, as a Christian, we don’t have to think that there’s only one human author that contributes to a book. God has different ways of getting Scripture written. So there’s also no objection to some of these books having been written by more than one person. Many books in the Old Testament are not named. I would just say though that you can’t really know, if there were sources, where one source ends and the other begins. And I don’t think it’s a very fruitful thing to spend a lot of energy on because you are not going to know.

16:03 - How can we treat the Bible as reliable when we don’t know who actually wrote most of the books?

Matt Tully
That actually leads into my next question: How can we treat the Bible as reliable when we don’t know who actually wrote most of the books? There’s an intuitive sense of if I find some newspaper article purporting to claim some true fact about something that’s happened but there’s no author named there and I don’t know who wrote it, we would naturally be pretty skeptical and say, Why would I trust them then?

Peter Williams
I think often the lead articles in newspapers (the front pages) don’t have an author on them, and we tend to treat them as generally liable if they’re in a newspaper that we like. So I think this idea that I need to know who wrote it in order to have confidence is a bit odd. So I’d say with, for example, the books of Samuel and Kings, they are very interesting, and particularly the books of Kings because they report about kings and you can check them archeologically at all sorts of points. But also, one thing very clear is the authors who wrote those books were not in the pay of the kings.

Matt Tully
They’re criticizing them all the time.

Peter Williams
They’re criticizing them all the time So you can compare that with a typical Egyptian monument, and the ones put up by Ramses are going tell you how good Ramses is. And the ones put up by Amenhotep are going to tell you how good Amenhotep is. And it’s the same with other kings of the surrounding nations. And there’s no national literature that critiques the people from which it comes as much as the Old Testament does with the Israelites. So I’d want to say there’s a good sign of trustworthiness, and I don’t need to know exactly who wrote it. There are all sorts of anonymous reports that we get in official contexts. Nowadays, you don’t know who wrote this particular thing. I don’t think that means we can’t see trustworthiness. I think trustworthiness is something that can be seen in all sorts of ways

17:56 - The biblical writers had a premodern, unscientific view of the world, so how can we trust them to accurately record what actually happened?

Matt Tully
Question number five: The biblical writers had a premodern, unscientific view of the world, so how can we trust them to accurately record what actually happened?

Peter Williams
That’s an interesting statement. I would want to say that when you say unscientific I’d maybe choose non-scientific. They weren’t thinking in our sort of modern, scientific way, but that doesn’t mean that they weren’t thinking in terms of measuring things and the reality of things. When you get a description of the temple in 1 Kings and it describes how many cubits this wall is, that seems to be—

Matt Tully
It’s pretty precise.

Peter Williams
It overlaps with the genre that we might have today of architectural plans. So it’s not that there’s a complete discontinuity. And I’d want to say you can you can test the Bible at many points and see it’s reasonable nature. And then I’d also want to say that we need to recognize that cultures can be very scientifically advanced in some ways and pretty immoral. The Nazi scientists in the 1930s were technically advanced in many ways and yet very immoral. Science can’t tell you even that science is valuable. Science can’t give you values, and so you need values in order to do science. That’s where actually Scripture arguably feeds into the scientific project because it gives you a reason to seek meaning in the universe and seek to find out things.

Matt Tully
And a lot of Christians will claim that the Christian worldview really gave rise to the scientific method and science as we know it today because of that.

Peter Williams
There’s a lot in that.

19:44 - Doesn’t the Old Testament in particular borrow many of the pagan myths of the ancient Near East?

Matt Tully
Alright, another question: Doesn’t the Old Testament in particular borrow many of the pagan myths of the ancient Near East, the most famous perhaps being the story of the flood? And so that would kind of call into question then that is this authentic Scripture from God revelation from God, or were these ancient people just kind of borrowing and tweaking what other pagans around them were saying?

Peter Williams
So what I’d say is when people say X has borrowed Y, they need to demonstrate it. Clearly, there are links between Mesopotamian flood stories and the one in the Bible. One of the clearest parts of that is when it talks about birds being sent out, both in the Mesopotamian flood story and in the biblical one. But what I’d want to say is when people say the biblical one is borrowed, often what they’re doing is they’re saying because our physical copy of the Mesopotamian one is older than our physical copy of the biblical one (the biblical manuscripts are later), therefore, one has borrowed from the other. But that’s confusing the age of the medium on which something is transmitted with the age of the wording itself. And this can lead you to wrong conclusions. Actually, there’s a guy called Irving Finkel who discovered an old Babylonian flood tablet, and he was absolutely amazed when he was reading this text from 1600 BC or thereabouts when he suddenly saw in that text talk about animals going into the boat two by two. And he said, Oh, that comes in the Bible. And suddenly, he was prepared to accept that that phrase from the Bible was a thousand years earlier than he thought it was. That’s where people get into trouble because they tend to put artificial maximum ages on the Bible stuff. They think, Oh, it can’t be any older than that. Well, let’s face it. The copies we have of the Old Testament in Hebrew are generally from the year 1000 onwards, or from the 900s
and onwards.

Matt Tully
1,000 BC.

Peter Williams
No, no, no, AD. There are some Greek copies of things earlier. There’s the Dead Sea Scrolls that are bit earlier which have bits of Genesis, but clearly the content comes from a long, long time before that. And I think it’s foolish to try and put maximum ages on that. So I think this idea that the Bible, when it parallels stuff from Mesopotamia, has to have borrowed it, I think it needs to be questioned.

22:14 - Doesn’t the Bible approve of outrageous cruelty and injustice?

Matt Tully
Question number seven: Doesn’t the Bible, especially the Old Testament, approve of, to quote one humanist website, "outrageous cruelty and injustice"? And that can be something that in our day and age makes it hard to accept as reliable.

Peter Williams
I would say no, it doesn’t. And the way I’d say that is you’ve got to read it like Jesus read it. In Matthew 19 Jesus was asked about divorce, and people said to him, Look, Moses allowed divorce. Moses said to write a certificate of divorce. And Jesus said, You’’ve got to start at the beginning. In the beginning of the Bible, he made them male and female, and so what God has joined you don’t separate. And he has this method of reading the Bible—it’s a really obvious method—which is you start at the beginning. Now, read the stuff in the Old Testament and you get violence, you get slavery, you get polygamy. But is any of that at the beginning as God made it? No. God made it, and it wasn’t like that. What you read from that point onwards, after humans fall, is you read how things shouldn’t be. Let’s say in the Old Testament you get lots of polygamy. Well, when do you get polygamy? Well, let’s say with Abraham when he doubts God’s promise and therefore takes a second wife. You get it with Jacob because he’s tricked his blind father that he’s the older brother, and so he gets his comeuppance where his father-in-law tricks him in the blindness of night, that the older sister is the younger sister (that’s what happens). So he gets his comeuppance and he ends up polygamous, married to Leah and Rachel, and guess what? It’s awful. There’s a family dispute and Joseph brothers are trying to kill him and then sell him.

Matt Tully
These stories are, when you summarize them like this, they’re just incredibly crazy.

Peter Williams
They tell you polygamy is a bad idea. Look at David’s life. His kids rape, murder—it’s awful. So the Bible is showing you this is bad. Then you look at the destruction of the Canaanites in the Old Testament.

Matt Tully
That’s probably one that people would point to, and that’s a case where the Bible doesn’t just record that this happened, but it records God commanding his people to go slaughter all kinds of women and children.

Peter Williams
So then you’ve got to look at it in the whole context. I’ve got a whole talk on this where I look at twenty or so different factors to consider. I don’t have time to do that on the podcast, but what I would want to say is, firstly, you’ve got to read it in the light of the whole Bible. In the beginning of the Bible, God makes humans in the first place. He doesn’t need to make any, but he makes them because he is the living God, and he always prefers giving life to taking it away. And so I would want to define goodness in an objective way. To be good is to be someone who always prefers the giving of life to taking it. And there is nothing in the Old Testament narrative which undermines that idea for God. Even in these points of judgment, God’s reluctant on that. You’ve got to look at the narrative. Canaanites are killing their own children; when you get to the book of Joshua, the camera, as it were, goes into slow motion with the very first Canaanite woman that you meet—this woman, Rahab, who’s a prostitute, who is seeking after God. And guess what? The narrative will show how she gets rescued and her entire family. And it will also show how before the Canaanites are judged, there are two remarkable miracles. One is the drying up of the Red Sea, and the other one is the drying up of the Jordan. What it says is when they meet Rahab in Joshua 2, she says, We—that’s not just her, but others around her—have heard what God’s done drying up the Red Sea. And then she recognizes that God is the God in heaven above and earth beneath, that she needs to follow him. You get exactly the same Joshua, where the Canaanites have heard of the drying up of the Jordan. Guess what they decide to do? They decide to lock their gates and shut God out. And so what you see is they’re given this opportunity to repent and decide not to. So I’d want to say that these are just some factors you’ve got to consider in the narrative, that the narrative shows you how Rahab the Canaanite turns to Israel’s side and is rescued. Acan, the Israelite, turns to Canaan’s side and is destroyed. So in other words, it is showing you what could have happened as well if other people had chosen. So that’s just one of many factors where, again, you are getting this sense of God’s heart. God is a God who always likes to give life.

Matt Tully
But you have to hold in tension with that the fact that he’s just and that he will judge the wicked.

Peter Williams
Absolutely.

27:21 - Doesn’t the Old Testament portrayal of God differ significantly from the way the New Testament portrays God?

Matt Tully
Alright, another question, and this kind of relates more broadly to what we just talked about: Doesn’t the Old Testament portrayal of God differ significantly from the way the New Testament portrays God?

Peter Williams
I would say no. People will sometimes just say there’s more judgment and so on.

Matt Tully
God seems angry in the Old Testament, and then Jesus comes and he’s all about love.

Peter Williams
Well, I’d say read the book of Revelation and the judgment there and recognize that no one spoke about the judgment of Gehena more than Jesus himself. And I’d also want to point out that in some ways, if God was short-tempered, the Old Testament would be really quick. You get to Genesis 3, they take the fruit, and God said, That’s it. I’ve had enough. Goodbye.

Matt Tully
Couldn’t someone say the flood is an example of that though?

Peter Williams
Well, what I think you’ve got in the Bible is you’ve got in the Old Testament a number of foils where is destroying humans going to get rid of sin? No. Is confusing their language at Babel going to get rid of sin? No. Is choosing one person, Abraham, and privileging him going to get rid of sin? Is choosing and privileging a nation, Israel, going to get rid of sin? Is giving them a law from Sinai, rescuing them from Israel going to get rid of sin? Is giving them small government, in the book of Judges, going to get rid of sin? Is giving them big government, in Samuel and King’s, going to get rid of sin? Is sending them to exile going to get rid of sin? No, none of that is going to get rid of sin, so God says, I’m going to come in and sort this out myself. And that’s how he comes in in Christ. And I think that’s how the Old Testament is a series of demonstrations of what will not get rid of sin.

Matt Tully
So it wasn’t like God was actually trying those things and then surprised they didn’t work. You’re not saying that.

Peter Williams
He demonstrates to us that they don’t work. When I was saying the Old Testament could be an awful lot shorter, you just get to Genesis 3 and then God just blots everyone and zaps them. A book like Jeremiah is another case where it’s almost like those parents who say, Don’t do that or I’ll punish you to their child, and then the child does it and they say, Well, don’t do it or I will punish you. They keep on threatening punishment and never actually do it. Isn’t the book of Jeremiah in some ways a bit like that? Why is the book of Jeremiah so long?

Matt Tully
All the people in Bible reading plans know that’s a long book.

Peter Williams
He keeps on saying, Do that and I’m going to judge you and yet, because of his love and his compassion and his long suffering, he doesn’t do it instantly. And that’s really the big theme in the Old Testament. God is saying he’s going to punish, and he delays and delays and delays four centuries. That’s why it’s so long, and that’s why you hear so much about judgment, just as you would with any parent who keeps on repeating to their child saying, Don’t do that or there will be consequences.

30:04 - How do we know that the authors of the Gospels didn’t embellish the original stories about Jesus?

Matt Tully
Let’s move fully into the New Testament. Here’s another question: How do we know that the authors of the Gospels didn’t embellish the original stories about Jesus to make him fit into a Messianic narrative that they were trying to push about him?

Peter Williams
We can test them at various points. We can at least test whether or not they were capable of telling correct stories and if they were close enough to the time. If you say they embellished them, are you saying all four Gospel writers embellished them independently? Is that the way it works? There are some things that won’t work. For instance, even from the Talmud, the Jewish source, Jesus is executed on the eve of Passover. So he is executed just at the time of the greatest Jewish festival, when Jews are remembering their greatest delivery from Egypt and they’re sacrificing the Passover lamb—that’s when it happens.

Matt Tully
So that’s recorded in the Talmud?

Peter Williams
That is, yeah, and also the fact that he’s basically executed in Jerusalem. That’s there in the Jewish sources. I think the fact that it happens under Pontius Pilate—there are certain things you can do where actually you can say there are some uncanny things about what happens, which you can’t just make up. And then you take something like Jesus being born in Jerusalem. Could that be invented by Matthew or Luke in order to just fit with the prophecy? Then you ask, Well, when would it be invented? If Jesus dies in the year 30 or 33, something like that, when does someone invent that? Do they invent that in the year 40? Okay, so quite early on. Then you have a thing that well, Jesus’s family—his brothers—are still alive. A brother like James is still leading in the church. So is he in on that? And if you start going through it and think, Okay, they invented it in the year 50 or the year 60 or the year 70—the later you get on, the harder it is to invent it because Christianity is spreading far and fast. Are you going to start telling all the Christians who are now spread across Turkey and Italy and so on, You know how you’ve been worshiping Jesus and we’ve been telling you that he was born in Nazareth? Actually, he was born in Bethlehem. Or were they not telling anyone where he was born and no one was remotely interested? I mean, really? Does that explain how Christianity was spread? No one’s even bothered to know where their leader was born and they’re putting their safety on the line for that? I mean, it doesn’t really explain a lot.

Matt Tully
Sometimes I think there’s this vague sense that—again, this is kind of what we hear from the critics—that early on a bunch of Christians (maybe the apostles or some of the disciples of Jesus) got together after his death and then kind of had this conspiracy that they built up. And then through that it got pushed out, and the ignorant masses just sort of accepted it as true, and then it spread from there.

Peter Williams
There are still things that are not explained. Why, when they do this, would they have themselves written up so badly? I mean, it’s not as if the disciples come out very favorably.

Matt Tully
None of them. None of the other characters in the New Testament, I would say, are—

Peter Williams
The only people who come out favorably are the women. Are you going to have them as the conspirators, and they just managed to pull a fast one on the blokes? I think you start just getting into trouble the moment you start thinking of concrete scenarios.

Matt Tully
How did this actually happen?

Peter Williams
The best thing is, if you are going to have a message where you can present Jesus’s triumph of the world, not to let him get arrested and killed in the first place. And if he is arrested and killed, you don’t have long to come up with a message. And there are certain bits of it that, again, you can’t really fix. So for instance, how does Jesus die? Well, he dies being crucified by the Romans. Well, that gives you as your climactic scene in the Gospels, Jesus on a tree. And that’s the opening seen in the Bible, where they take fruit from the tree and as a result, death comes into the world. So that’s quite nice book-ending of a story, given that the Christians couldn’t control the first bit of the Bible. That was already written before their time in the Jewish scriptures So, are you really going to say that’s just accident, that you get this nice story structure? It just like pops out. Wow! That’s amazing if you could get that.

34:40 - Don’t the New Testament writers reinterpret the Old Testament, ignoring the original meaning?

Matt Tully
And there’s lots of examples like that. So maybe another related question here, and it’s something that we often hear: Don’t the New Testament writers reinterpret the Old Testament, often in ways that maybe ignore the original meaning, to make it fit with Jesus’s life, death, and resurrection?

Peter Williams
So I'd say that the New Testament writers use the Old Testament very intelligently, and I think they’re doing something which the Old Testament itself does, which is use it somewhat typologically. So for instance, in the Old Testament you’ve got the Exodus of Israel from Egypt. But it’s not just that you’ve got that. You’ve actually got a repeat of the Exodus at the time of the Babylonian exile, which is described in Exodus terms. And if you go back to Genesis 12 and Abraham’s life, you’ve got a prequel. Yeah, there’s a prequel there where he goes down into Egypt, and Pharaoh gets plagued.

Matt Tully
Right, because he takes Abraham’s wife as his wife.

Peter Williams
So you’ve got all of this sort of going on. And then I would say that Christ’s own death is described as an exodus in Luke’s Gospel. So you can have more than one exodus. And what the New Testament is doing is simply pointing out that same sort of structure that you have in the Bible, that one thing can set up a pattern for another. I would say that the New Testament is using the Old Testament in a perfectly legitimate and correct way. That’s what’s happening, basically, at the beginning of Matthew’s Gospel, where Matthew 1 is a genealogy of Jesus like the genealogy of Genesis 5. Matthew 2 is him coming out of Egypt—going down to Egypt and coming out of Egypt just like Israel does. Matthew 3 is him fulfilling all righteousness in being baptized. Again, his baptism is pointing forward and is fulfilling a pattern which already Israel had. In Matthew 5 he’s up a mountain giving the law like Moses did. So I’d want to say Jesus’s life follows the pattern of Old Testament stuff.

36:49 - How can the Bible truly be God’s inerrant, authoritative word when Christians so often disagree on what it means?

Matt Tully
Question number eleven: How can the Bible truly be God’s inerrant, authoritative word when Christians so often disagree on what it means? Wouldn’t God have chosen a more reliable, objective method for revealing his will?

Peter Williams
Well, I think we’ve got to recognize that humans disagree about just about everything. They disagree about pandemics, they disagree about politics, they disagree about just all sorts of things. So please don’t tell me because people disagree about something, therefore there’s no truth. This is not going to get us anywhere.

Matt Tully
So the problem is humans, not necessarily the Bible.

Peter Williams
That is a huge part of it. Humans are capable of making something that is perfectly clear, unclear. We do it quite a lot. So I’d want to say that Scripture is given in a morally structured way. So if you seek, you find; if you don’t seek, you stumble. God actually isn’t trying to be maximally clear. That’s important, because God is revealing himself and hiding himself at the same time. That’s what happens at the cross.

Matt Tully
So why would he do that? A Christian might just be wondering very practically, Why would God want to do that?

Peter Williams
In Genesis 3, when humans sin, they are cast out of God’s presence. God doesn’t show himself as clearly as he did before, and that’s his prerogative. But also he’s doing that so that people will seek him. So I think God’s clearest self-revelation is at the cross, where he is showing his love. But this is the thing: you could stand underneath the cross, looking up and thinking, Wow! This is really good evidence that the Romans are in charge. That guy on the cross is a loser. And so just at the moment when—

Matt Tully
Many people actually had that exact response.

Peter Williams
Exactly. He saved others, let him save himself. So in other words, God, at the point when he is revealing himself most clearly, people can take exactly the wrong thing from that. That is, again, because evidence is morally structured. God in Scripture gives evidence for Scripture. He also gives you evidence against Scripture. That is, he is giving grounds, which if someone is not going to seek him, they could use to say, I shouldn’t seek him.

Matt Tully
You hear that mirrored even in comments about Jesus. I think 1 Peter where Jesus is described as the cornerstone for those who believe and also as a stumbling block for those who don’t believe.

Peter Williams
Exactly. When Jesus comes to earth, he doesn’t come showing all of God’s glory in the fullest way. John’s Gospel will say he revealed his glory, but it’s not that like he had a dazzling, glittering face the whole time so that people say, Aha! Look! So that’s where we need to recognize that God has chosen to reveal himself such that we should seek after him.

39:46 - What should I do if I still have doubts about the reliability of the Bible?

Matt Tully
That’s so helpful. Question number twelve: What should I do if I still have doubts about the reliability of the Bible?

Peter Williams
I would say keep reading Scripture, keep praying, and talk to people about them. It may well be that some people have doubts because their expectations are unrealistic. They’ve been set up to think that Scripture needs to be unproblematic. Scripture all needs to be able to be understood on my first reading and there are going to be no difficulties in it. Well, if you are set up with false expectations, guess what? You’re going to be disappointed. But I think if you accept that Scripture can be full of puzzles and that’s actually a nice challenge that God’s given us so that we seek after him, that’s much more helpful. So I do think there can be a problem with apologetics. Apologetics can sometimes be more like hard sales, where people are trying to push people to get on board and accept something.

Matt Tully
Do you ever feel like it over promises stuff, perhaps at times?

Peter Williams
Yeah, absolutely. I think there are problems with that sort of approach to apologetics, and people need to see it’s rather that we just need to tell it how it is and present God as he’s presented himself.

Matt Tully
Peter, thank you so much for helping us to think through some of these common questions that I’m sure many of us have wrestled with ourselves. We appreciate it.

Peter Williams
It’s a real pleasure.

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