This week, we look stronger evidence for the Bible. The Bible was written using eyewitness testimony, and that testimony was recorded close to the events it describes.    Audio

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Don't use iTunes? Subscribe here.TranscriptHello, and welcome to Unapologetic; a podcast about defending, not apologizing for, our Christian convictions. This week we're going to continue on in our series about the Bible. And we're going to look at eye-witness and early evidence for the New Testament. When it comes to early evidence, we're talking about manuscripts that were written shortly after the events that they describe took place. We actually have 5,800 handwritten Greek manuscripts of the New Testament and this doesn't include the thousands of Latin and Coptic manuscripts we also have. Some of the earliest manuscripts we have were discovered between 1946 and 1956, with the discovery of the Dead See Scrolls. This was a discovery of manuscripts in the MIddle East that were remarkably preserved in caves and in jars, that contained some very early copies of some of the New Testament documents. For instance, parts of Mark, Acts, Romans, 1 Timothy, 2 Peter, and James date within 50-70 AD. That's within 20-40 years of Jesus' death. And these are copies. So the originals would have to be older than that. Closer to the original events. We also have the earliest parts of John that date between 117 and 138. (1:25) So what does this show? This shows that the things that were written about the New Testament and the copies we have of the New Testament were written very close to when the actual events happened. (1:36) Something historians use is something called a copy time gap, and that's the length of time that elapsed between when an event happened and the earliest copy we have. For the New Testament, in some places this is 25 years. Let's compare this to other ancient documents. Like Homer, which has a copy time gap of 500 years. Or Plato, which has a copy time gap of 1200 years. Now, Homer and Plato are both taught in universities today, and there isn't a lot of question that what these copies describe match the originals. But, for some reason when it comes to the New Testament, people want to say that 25 years is way to long for things to have been written down and written down accurately. But as we'll come to see, that's not a justified critique. (2:24) So, the number of copies we have is also remarkable. For the New Testament, like I said, 5,800 Greek manuscripts. For Homer, 1757. For Caesar, 210. For Plato, also 210. So we have so many more copies for the New Testament than Homer, Caesar, Plato, Pliny the Younger, many other ancient documents. And yet, people want to say that we can't know what the original said with any certainty. But they don't make this claim about Homer, Caesar, or Plato, or others. (2:57) So, the evidence we have is early for the New Testament. The things that were written down, like we said, Mark, 1 and 2 Peter, John, all of these copies we have are just a short time after the oringials were penned. This should give us great confidence that what they describe is accurate. (3:15) So that's the first E. We're going to be looking at 5 or 6 E's over the next few weeks. And the first one is early testimony. Frank Turek, who's an apologist, has come up with these E's. All of the lines of evidence that we'll look at for the New Testament are going to start with E. An easy way to remember them. (3:35) So the first one is early. The second one is eye-witness testimony. Peter says in Acts, "God has raised this Jesus to life, and we were all witnesses of this fact." Eye-witnesses, they…