What do you think: were the four gospels legendary accounts? Were they any more trustworthy than the apocryphal gospels? Did the four gospel writers know what they were talking about?
You may think it’s a matter of faith, maybe even gullibility. I have a few more questions for you then:
Are you a numbers/science/quantitative kind of person?
- Do you like statistical analysis?
- Do you like control groups in your research design?
- Do you like empirical science?
Maybe not. Maybe you’re more a humanities person:
- Do you like literature?
- Do you like linguistics?
- Are you interested in people and their names?
Maybe not… but then,
- Do you like hearing a really great story-teller at work, the kind of person who can pull all that together and make it work??
If any of those, then I am sure you’re going to like Dr. Peter Williams, giving a talk on apologetics like you’ve never heard before.
Hat tip to Greg West.
_______________
Possibly related posts (automatically generated):
Great analysis. A thorough look at an interesting angle.
Fascinating information. I dare say this is positive evidence supporting the conclusion that the Gospels can be trusted in their reporting of historical events as they actually occurred. What also follows from this evidence is the conclusion that the later “gospel” books cannot be trusted as much and that we should be more skeptical of what they report.
It’s interesting that the early church was able to come to the same conclusion without the modern conveniences of the internet or Wikipedia.
What’s been most obvious to me over the years is that the claims that the Gospels were written centuries later in far-flung places could only have been made by ignorant people centuries after that – like, in the 1700s or so. They had to be so far removed that the obvious truths could be denied.
This wasn’t posted with Greg in mind, was it?
No, BillT, I posted this because I had just seen it and I thought it was exceptionally good. I don’t mind if Greg takes a look at it, though!
Actually I probably had doctor(“logic”) in mind more than anyone else, because of the quantitative/predictive analysis in this message.
I have a great respect for people who can argue intelligently for Christianity or another position.
I was just browsing google groups and this made me remember how I used to argue with atheists for months over there. I thought I would post it for those of you who think I’m just some atheist who wants to disprove Christianity. Just to give you a background, when I was posting there 5 years ago, I was a believing Christian. So a lot of my points are from that point of view. (I’m EGreg there.)
My first post on the board, defending the truth of the Bible:
I want to discuss with intelligent atheists.
My definitive post shortly thereafter:
My position as of now — even many rabid atheists there commended me on it
Arguing for Christianity:
A rephrased question
Pascal’s wager
Consciousness and the soul
Questions for atheists
Questions for Christians
Me arguing that atheism is a belief system:
Is strong atheism a belief system?
Atheism and science
Atheism takes belief. Really, it’s ok
I try to hold them to the same standard I hold you guys:
disproving religions beliefs is much more EFFECTIVE
etc.
I think maybe you can find some good apologetic work in my earlier posts. I have learned a lot since then, and sadly it has taken me away from my original beliefs. As you can see. But I just wanted to show you that I’m not just “a guy with an agenda”.
Looking over it by the way, I find that many atheists are pretty bad-tempered (at least online).
I find this is an interesting and entertaining talk and the person is a very good storyteller. Quite charismatic.
I would point out that although the names are right, sometimes the gospel writers get things wrong. I decided to do some research after watching the video, and check out this subject a bit more. The first Gospel which others have followed (Mark) contains several geographical errors strongly suggesting the author was unfamiliar with the area around Judea. They are found in Mark 7:31 and Mark 5:13. Is this gospel really attributed to John Mark, who we see in Acts was a well traveled palestinian native?
Another difficulty with believing the accounts involve the historians of Jesus’ day never reporting on any major events associated with his life, such as Herod killing the innocents, three hours of darkness at the crucifixion, and saints strolling through towns and “appearing to many”.
Regarding Greg’s last-second, principled, “research”, which (surprise!) is intended to cast doubt on the authenticity of Mark (oh, just asking for helpful perspective. Right…):
http://www.tektonics.org/ntdocdef/markdef.html
Notice that Wilson gives a depth of evidence for the early dating and geographical proximity of the Gospel writers, and, for some reason, Greg scampers out to the internets and returns with a spurious little collection of half-baked objections. Now why did this honest seeker do that?
I think I am going to investigate christianity a little bit more offline. About halfway into Reasonable Faith. After this gonna read the case for Christ.
Greg,
It is disputable (at best) that Mark 5:13 contains a geographical error.
Mark 7:31 contains no geographical errors. Do you think it was incorrect that he went from Tyre through Sidon to the Decapolis?
Let me ask you this: why do you suppose Mark even mentioned Sidon? If he thought it was on the way to the Decapolis, why mention it? Surely there were other towns and villages on the route. Why not mention all of them, if that was the point?
More likely he mentioned it because it was not on the normal route. That’s the only reason it would have been of interest. Jesus had some reason to go through there, apparently. Mark characteristically compresses events, and here he left out details.
Or it could be this:
Now, echoing Charlie here, how strongly does that weigh in comparison to Williams’ exposition? And just how committed are you to an unbiased exploration of the facts?
Tom please for the love of this blog
Do not do this again or allow it.
I love your site and your blog and have grown to respect the comments and discussions here but you simply cannot allow someone who has proven in post after post in other threads to have a very low standard of scholarship when critiquing Christianity to come in and hijack yet another thread with his weak, obviously poorly researched assertions and make yet another discussion mainly about him and his objections.
We of course need to be open to honest debate but there is ample evidence pointed out by more than just me (and at times by you yourself) that this poster hasn’t demonstrated the highest standards in that regard.
If in fact the poster is genuine about honestly looking for the truth unbiased and we are still trusting that premise ( i am not)we are now at the point where a private discussion not public one would be far more advantageous to Him and to this community.
right now if you get into this with him then your admonishment that people can now move on from the last thread doesn’t mean anything. It s just more of the same in another thread.
On the money again Charlie
Yes highly dubious and theres a simple way to put it to the test. Make the inquiries private and not on an open blog. I am quite sure someone will rise to the challenge and engage Greg one on one without making thread after thread centered on his own objections
And by the way great video so far. I havent had the time to chew through all of it but I look forward to it along with some intelligent unslanted discussion of its merits.
Mike and all,
I agree this hijacking is making a mess of things here. I’m going to open up a thread for Greg to ask whatever questions he’s interested in asking. Whether anyone wants to answer will be up to them. If I see something like this starting up again in any other thread, I’ll move the comment there.
You’re welcome to signal me if you see it before I do.
Greg, your positive questions/contributions are always welcome to remain where they are. These are the kinds of things I’ll be watching for and will move if I see them.
1. Repetitions of discussions that have already been had (like the Flood).
2. Tangential topics, like the Flood. Or like the supposed geographical errors you said could be found in Mark’s gospel.
3. Too many topics in one comment.
I will be the judge of what stays and what moves.
Two books which are really helpful here are Craig Blomberg’s The Historical Reliability of the Gospels, 2nd Edition and Mark D. Roberts Can We Trust the Gospels?: Investigating the Reliability of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.
Craig’s book is a tome
a very comprehensive scholarly work; Mark’s is smaller, very readable, and addresses the essential issues very nicely – both are great follow-ups to Dr. Williams’ presentation.
The wise, humble, approach is to not jump to hasty conclusions based on only one side of the issue (as we are all prone to do if we are not careful and honest (Physicist Richard Feynmann commented on methodology once, “You must not try to fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool”)). Fooling yourself means uncritically accepting a conclusion without examining the strengths and weaknesses of both the premises and the reasoning by which that conclusion was reached.
Time and again secular scholars have accused the NT writers of errors in matters of fact, only to find later that the archaeologist’s spade (so to speak) turns up new data which shows that the writers were correct, after all.
F.F. Bruce’s book New Testament History is a good reference work for this.
Greg’s comment has been moved here–Tom
Victoria:
Absolutely agreed! Neither the skeptic nor the believer should jump to conclusions based on only one side of the issue. That’s why I debate Christianity — to see if I can find out how my side of the issue is handled (with respect to my arguments). But that is not loving and I don’t want to take away anyone’s faith so since Charlie feels that I have a substantial chance of doing that I will stop. It was never my intention. My intention was merely to find the truth.
Gregory Magarshak:
I think I am going to investigate christianity a little bit more offline. About halfway into Reasonable Faith. After this gonna read the case for Christ.
Good reading and good places to further the investigation, Greg. From what you have read in WLC’s ‘Reasonable Faith’, what specific questions or objections do you find from Craig that do not resonate with you? I am asking for specific quotes from Craig that you might find ‘troublesome’ or ‘questionable’ and the contrary evidence you would use in support. I am glad to hear that you have stated you will read Lee Strobel’s ‘The Case for Christ’, next, as I believe that is a good one as well.
Greg,
With your post #16 and use of profanity, I think Tom has every right to delete your posts from this point forward.
Greg,
Let me also highly recommend Tim Keller’s Reason for God. If you email me privately with your mailing address, I will even ship you one for free (I have a whole box at home).
-Neil
Steve Drake: I have responded here . For a second there I actually thought your comment (to which I responded) was more benign than usual.
Then I refreshed this page.
nashenvi: thank you very much! How do I email you?
To be honest, I’ve been recommended so many promising books and I unfortunately haven’t had the time to go back and dig through the list.
I am afraid that if I ask people about them again it’ll take things off topic on this thread.
Right now I am reading Reasonable Faith on my iPad (I find the iPad to be great to replace physical books) and plan on reading the Case for Christ next. Currently up to the point where WLC discusses the previous arguments that the disciples were either lying or deluded, and eliminates both possibilites on the assumption that the gospel writers were eyewitnesses. If you look at my comment above you will find I definitely thought this way intuitively, even before I was aware of all the argument. However, my belief system started to fall apart when I started encountering many of the problems on this list:
http://www.talkreason.org/articles/list.cfm
Therefore I now engage with Christians and try to figure out how to reconcile this list with Christianity. I think it may be possible by some sort of combination of “Pentateuch wasn’t given to us as Jews think it was” and the christological argument. But if you wonder why I am so eager to investigate evidence that the Bible is unhistorical, and alternative explanations, the above list should explain it to you. I think you see why I search for the truth.
Debate seems to imply an adversarial approach, where each side seeks to prove that they are ‘right’
Perhaps a better model, Greg, is that of teacher/student. You want to learn (1) what Christianity really is all about, (2) the evidence that validates our faith (that it is the inference to the best explanation) and (3) how we deal with ‘problem issues’.
I’ll tell you now, that when looking at (3), we never forget (2)
Fascinating video. Thanks, Tom (and Greg West)!
I like the way Williams end his talk, with an example of an “undesigned coincidence,” how the accounts of the miracle of the feeding of the five thousand compliment one another. In other words, one account fills in details lacking in the other. Here is a good explanation of what I am talking about:
Philosophy professor Tim McGrew of Western Michigan University has done quite a bit of research into these undesigned coincidences. Apparently there are dozens of them. Here is an interview with him that is very worth listening to.
http://apologetics315.blogspot.com/2011/04/undesigned-coincidences-in-gospels-by.html
This is the way history of real space-time events behave. It is simply not credible that these coincidences are the result of legend or are fictional fabrications.
Mike Licona interview on Michael Brown’s radio show on the historicity of the Resurrection.
http://www.oneplace.com/ministries/in-the-line-of-fire/listen/dr-brown-interviews-michael-licona-on-the-resurrection-of-jesus-and-how-what-we-believe-affects-how-we-live-194609.html
There are a couple of good books that I’ve come across that are very illuminating.
1. J. J. Blunt’s Undesigned Coincidences book
see
http://www.archive.org/details/undesignedcoinci1851blun for an online e-book version
This book was written in the 19th century, and this humble scholar went painstakingly through the entire Bible and looked for these types of things, such as why Jesus asked Philip where to buy bread for the crowd (all without modern Bible software, too!). You should read his account of why Ahithophel turned against David when Absalom tried to stage a coup d’etat and remember that the author of 2 Samuel not so much as hints at why.
Another good book is John W. Haley Alleged Discrepancies of the Bible, published in 1874 – all these web sites that skeptics have?nothing new – Haley anticipated them, and answered them 150 years ago.
I really liked Dr. Williams’ discussion of the statistical analysis of word occurences in the canonical gospels (and the comparison with the later, non-canonical writings) – these are the kinds of details that I live for
It would be interesting to see the comparison with other contemporary writings that are accepted as historically reliable, as well as those that are accepted as legendary. If we see similar patterns, we gain more confidence in the reliability of the gospels.
The Telephone Game illustration is very illuminating, demonstrating that reasoning by analogy can be deceptive, and why most skeptics like to use that method – as long as one does not look too closely at the analogy and ask how well it really does model what one is trying to demonstrate, people will fall for it. Critical thinking and inference to the best explanation (of all the details), along with a healthy dose of common sense goes a long way…Proverbs really got it right, I think.
For those of you who are tired of Wikipedia and its skeptical biases…
http://www.theopedia.com/Main_Page
Here is a summary of the so called “undesigned coincidences” that occur in the gospel accounts of “The Feeding of the Five Thousand” (Matthew 14:13-21, Mark 6:31-44, Luke 9:10-17, John 6:1-15) to which Williams makes an allusion.
For example, Mark (6:39) tells us that the grass where the crowd is instructed to sit is green. If we think about it we might suspect that it is spring but otherwise Mark does not tell us what time of the year it is.
Mark also tells us (v.31) that “many people were coming and going.” Matthew and Luke tell us that crowds numbering thousands were following him. Again, his might seem incidental even trivial unless you think about it. Were thousands of people taking off work during the week just to come out and hear Jesus? This was a peasant culture. These were not the kind of people that had a lot of free time on their hands. None of the three synoptic gospels provides us an explanation why.
However, John does provide an explanation (6:4). He writes that “The Jewish Passover Festival was near.” It was indeed Spring and Passover was a holiday which everyone celebrated by taking time off work. For example hundreds of thousand of people made a pilgrimage to Jerusalem. In other words, people were indeed literally coming and going.
Another good example of an undesigned coincidence occurs in John (6:5) where we learn that “when Jesus.. Saw [the] crowd” he asked Philip, “Where shall we buy bread for these people to eat?”
Okay just another incidental detail. But, if we become curious and ask why Jesus is singling out Philip to make this inquiry we don’t find an explanation in John’s account. However, even though Philip is one of the more obscure apostles earlier in John’s account (1:44) we learn that “Philip was of Bethsaida” Now when we put this information together with what Luke tells us in his account that the “Feeding of the 5000″ took place near Bethsaida we understand why Jesus directed his question to him. In essence Jesus is saying “Philip you’re from around here, ‘where shall we buy bread for these people to eat?’”
The interesting thing about this kind of analysis is that it argues that there is good circumstantial evidence that at least one of the miracles of Jesus is indeed historically grounded. In other words, the historical details are so interwoven with miracle itself that it cannot be easily dismissed as mere legend or intentional fabrication.
Yes, I too am a total nut for this kind of statistical analysis applied to the Bible. Thanks for posting, Tom!
In the same vein, I’d like to point out that the American Scientific Affiliation just published an article investigating the numerical properties of Biblical longevities. It’s a fascinating analysis that uses the known properties of natural random numbers vs. deliberately fabricated numbers to show that the ages of patriarchs, kings, etc. recorded in the Bible are probably the former, not the latter. The actual article is behind a subscriber-only wall, unfortunately, but you can read the abstract.
Victoria wrote:
New Testament scholar Bart Ehrmanm, who uses the telephone game analogy to critique the historical accuracy and reliability of the New Testament, should know better. I think he is guilty of deliberate deception here.
A better analogy than the telephone game would be a competition between groups of students to see who would, by hand, copy then recopy etc, etc. the Gettysburg Address with the goal of making highly accurate copies. Furthermore. the rules would allow the students to check each others work and suggest corrections. One wonders how much degradation would occur in such a contest. I suspect it would be far, far less than the game of telephone.
JAD – I agree.
As Williams points out, the rules of the telephone game are designed, it seems, to maximize the probable error rate. It seems that Bart has never heard of Claude Shannon’s work on information theory and how it has been applied to all forms of communication. He showed that a reliable form of communication needs error detection and error correction mechanisms to minimize the probable error rates. Modern computer technology and the Internet would not be possible without the application of Shannon’s mathematics.
The first Christians would have a vested interest in ensuring that they faithfully and accurately preserved the teachings of the apostles. It defies common sense to suggest that they would use a noisy, lossy transmission method. Shannon did not discover something new, he came up with a mathematical, quantifiable description of what people have been doing since the dawn of recorded history.
If textual analysis of the 5000+ NT manuscripts and partials tells us anything, the Christian church has done a remarkable job of accurate, albeit not 100% perfect, copying of the NT. People will talk about the some 400,000 variants discovered over the years as contradicting that.
Let’s do some order of magnitude estimates:
There are ~138,000 (and change) words in the standard Greek NT – if we assume that 5000+ number of sources averages out to 1/2 of the complete NT (2500 complete texts), that is still 3.45 x 10^8 (345 million total words), of which 400,000 variants represents a 0.12% error rate; even if the number of complete texts drops to 250, that works out to an error rate of ~1% – that isn’t so bad. Of course, it’s not enough to just look at the total numbers, one must look at the types of variants and how they are distributed. See http://www.theopedia.com/New_Testament_Textual_Criticism and follow the references therein.
It seems that the outlook is not at all as bleak for the NT as its skeptical critics want us to think.
BillR says:
Yeah, but they have also published articles that suggest the ages of the Patriarchs in Genesis follow a contrived pattern
http://www.asa3.org/ASA/PSCF/2003/PSCF12-03Hill.pdf
You don’t have to be a member to read that.
Even if the ages do follow a numerical formula, mathematically, that does not contradict natural randomness – it just changes the shape of the distribution function.
I suppose we should take away from this analysis the idea that it presents interesting ways of looking at the data – but we should be careful about drawing firm conclusions
Speaking of variants, I found out that the count includes duplicates across sources. The situation looks even better, then, if we talk only about the number of distinct variants.
Makes me wonder if skeptics and critics have axes to grind….
Here’s another variation on the telephone game. It involves a classroom of students. The first student in line is required to complete this sentence: “Earlier today in class we… ” with a true predicate. The last student in line is expected to say whether she/he believes what she/he heard.
This would be a worst-possible case analogy to the oral transmission that led toward the writing of the NT documents. I don’t mean to imply that it is a true analogy. It is unrealistic in all the worst ways, actually. But it has the virtue of being at least slightly more realistic than the original telephone game, because it’s dealing with facts that are known to all participants. The “line of transmission” for the Christian message would have included people for several decades who also knew the facts.
This telephone game could go in a number of directions. If everyone in line were interested in keeping to the truth, the odds of the message remaining the same as it started would be rather high; for there would be an error correction process: “I think he said said either x or maybe y; but I know that earlier we didn’t do y, we did x…”
If someone along the way were inclined to monkey up the process, some confusion would be produced, at the very least. But suppose the second-to-last person were the one who decided to change the story. This person could change it to some other true statement z, at which point the last person would not know something had been changed along the way, but this person would still receive the truth and pronounce that she/he believes it.
Or the second-to-last person could say “Earlier in class to day we did y,” where y was something they did not do. The last person in line would say, “I don’t believe it.”
These are but a few of the possible scenarios. All of them are trivial, because in the end the last person will always have the truth available for comparison, and the chain of whispers will have no influence on this person’s knowledge of the truth. The chain could be a five-person seminar or a 500-person lecture, and either way the last person knows the truth and will be able accurately say whether the message received was true or not.
So the authors of the four gospels—especially the first three, which were written before 70 AD—would have had access to people who knew the truth. If they wrote falsehoods, it would have had to have been on purpose, not as a result of noisy transmission lines.
Just another way to think of the telephone game, and how inappropriate an analogy it is for the oral tradition leading to the written gospels.
I don’t think we have to rely on game analogies. I very much doubt that the 1st century Christians thought of this as a game, considering they were persecuted, scattered and executed for holding fast to the truth.
Even Paul was serious about faithfully passing on what was received (as part of the Christian community’s oral and written traditions) – see
1 Corinthians 15:1-8.
Wow. Just watched this video and was amazed. I skimmed Baukham’s book and got some of this, but there was a lot more here. Does anyone have any idea how a skeptic would respond to arguments like this? They seem incredibly powerful to me, all the more so for being cumulative.
-Neil
Victoria, the point of my game analogy was to show how lame they are. Maybe it didn’t work too well
.
Neil, I wonder about that. It is a new argument. I’d love to hear from Bart Ehrman on it. I have a feeling it would be entertaining. Or Dan Brown!
Tom,
Ehrman and Wilson did a segment together on Unbelievable, the UK Christian radio show Unbelievable here. Unfortuantely, the main point of discussion was textual criticism, which is Ehrman’s specialty, not the reliability of the gospels themselves. It was interesting and Williams did a good job, but because of the topic, he didn’t make any positive assertions himself. I’d love to hear how Ehrman would handle the kind of evidence Williams presents here.
Interestingly, I took a class on the origins of the NT in college well before I became a Christian, and we primarily used Ehrman’s textbook. Ironically, in retrospect, I think the perspective I got from that class has substantially strengthened my faith. It has also been invaluable in talking to atheists and skeptics, because I can understand where they are coming from. The Lord, Liar, Lunatic argument is still the key for me. I think even skeptics like Ehrman would agree that the “Legend” alternative is just utterly implausible.
-Neil
What amazes me (and infuriates me) is that Erhman should know better, given that he is after all, a New Testament scholar. Surely he must know that the early Christian church, like most cultures throughout human history, had a well-developed methodology for passing on the teachings (of the apostles), both oral and written, to ensure accurate transmission, vis-a-vis error detection and correction and communication patterns – see
http://www.skypoint.com/members/waltzmn/OralTrans.html
for example, or that book by Mark Roberts I referenced in a previous post.
What does it say about skeptics and critics that they are willing to use such tactics? An axe to grind?
Victoria,
How could anything Erhman does bother you at all. He may have a big name but that’s all he’s got. He gave up any credibility years ago. And, of course, he does know better. He studied at Princeton under Bruce Metzger. However, being a big fish in a small pond was more to his liking than being a serious scholar.
Hi BillT
Years ago I was at a public debate between a Christian colleague of mine (a prof in the Sociology Department at the university where we were both faculty members – Physics Dept for me) and an atheist philosopher. At one point during the exchange, the AP threw a red herring into the mix by claiming that God told Joseph about Mary becoming pregnant before He told Mary about it, and then proceeded to ‘commit adultery’ with her. It was absolutely outrageous the way he put it – what was even more outrageous was the response of a biblically illiterate audience shouting their agreement with him. He based the claim on the fact that Joseph’s story appears in Matthew, and Mary’s appears in Luke’s, and since Matthew is the first gospel, Joseph’s encounter must have happened before Mary’s.
Yeah
He admitted to me afterwards (we had taken him out for a faculty dinner) that he knew perfectly well that what he said was false, but he just wanted to put that seed of suspicion and doubt in the minds of the audience members. I recall a very unlady-like snort of derision and a disparaging comment about his tactics, and all he said was something about ‘anything to win audience points in a debate’
Victoria says:
Thanks, Victoria, for the link. Actually, the author of the article I linked to (Makous) offers an in-depth critique of Hill’s article (to which you linked). While affirming some of Hill’s contributions to the issue, Makous identifies several errors in Hill’s analysis that significantly weaken the conclusion that the numbers are contrived for the purpose of conveying a numerological or symbolic significance.
In addition, Makous offers the following three pieces of evidence in support of the hypothesis that the biblical longevities have a natural origin, and not an artificial one:
1) As you noted, Makous shows that, after the first ten or so patriarchs, the ages recorded in the Bible undergo an exponential decrease. This, by itself, is not enough to prove that they have a natural origin, but it would have been extremely advanced for a Jewish scribe to have known how to produce an exponential decay like that.
2) Furthermore, the residuals (differences between the data and the exponential fit) are normally distributed. Normal distributions happen when data are the result of many uncorrelated factors (that’s why they occur everywhere in nature), so it is unlikely that a single scribe working alone could have generated a normally distributed error. This observation, however, does not completely rule out the possibility of many scribes collaborating over the course of time.
3) The real kicker, though, is when Makous compares the biblical longevities to a control dataset, in which students were instructed to artificially generate random-looking numbers. The control experiment exposed a flawed human assumption about random numbers — namely, that in the first digit of a random number, all values 1-9 are equally likely to occur. Counterintuitively, in actual random numbers, the first digit conforms to Benford’s Law, which states that 1 is the most likely value, followed by 2, etc. Makous shows that the biblical data deviate, to a statistically significant degree, from the naive human assumption of uniform likelihood for all values, and instead conform to Benford’s Law. There is no way for any human or group of humans to fake this result without knowing about Benford’s Law (which was discovered in the 1800s).
The last point, for me, is really the conclusive piece of evidence that the biblical longevities are reports of naturally occurring numbers, and not deliberately contrived numbers designed to convey numerological meaning or to appear random. I agree that we should be cautious in drawing firm conclusions, but this result seems about as convincing to me as Williams’ analysis of the frequency of names in the Gospels.
Here’s another very good talk. This is Craig Evans on the longevity and number of autographs, as well as the accuracy of the scribes.
http://www.sebc.edu/pcast/media/2010-11-15_biblicalmanuscripts.mp3
I greatly appreciate the interest my videos have gotten as a result of your sharing.
All credit should go to Mark Lanier for his Lanier Theological Library’s Lecture Series offering a free resource for all visitors in the Houston TX area. He started this last fall and the lectures are free to attend but signing up is essential. Sometimes the interest has exceeded accommodations.
Mark has graciously given permission for me to upload these to YouTube to reach a wider audience.
I hope you find more videos worthy of mention.
Thanks Again
PS your personal contact was not working again
Thank you, fleetwd1.
I’m curious about my personal contact not working. First, I appreciate your letting me know something’s not right. I did receive several messages from you through that means. I think what might be failing is the part of the system that lets you know the messages went through. I’ll look into that.
You were right, of course—there was a real problem with the contact form. I’ve replaced the plug-in that powered it, and it should be fine now. Thanks again for letting me know.
I wondered if you might get any of those. I tried multiple times each time I tried. It acts like it did not go through and it wants you to captcha over and over. It also says sorry it did not go through or something to that effect.
I am glad you like my videos. I have tried raising the bar a bit. Although I am finding others doing the same. I am fortunate to have some wonderful friends that want me to share their videos on the YouTube format.
I am not that web savvy. My energies are spent on learning the YouTube format.
In thanking several of you on blogs I have gotten several subscription requests. I am not sure i would have the time for that. I have quite a few regular video events weekly, biweekly monthly and bimonthly that keep me busy downloading editing if necessary and uploading.
I really do appreciate you folks helping get attention to these videos. Peter’s Lecture jumped about 6000 views in a week. Great exposure. Mark Lanier who has a new theological library was thrilled when I let him know about all your blog sphere’s help. He got word a worker repairing a church office in CA accepted Christ as Saviour after having watched the video playing while he worked. I have had reports like this on several other videos from my channel. I try to have a variety from several friends who are outstanding in their own ways.
Thanks again
I hope my info helps on your personal contact.