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If you were sitting around paying your bills 20 years after Christ’s birth, what year would you put on the check?

Let me explain how this works.  This is an excellent, excellent question!  For those people that have not heard of Jesus, we obviously use this term “A.D.”  People, obviously, didn’t use that until several hundred years after Jesus.  So, if you were writing a check, if you are writing your tithe tonight, what would you put on the check?  You would put on the check A.D. 20.  According to my math, you would have put 7^th year of the reign of Emperor Tiberius.  You always did it by regnal year.  That’s how you dated everything.  Or things were dated by the founding of Rome.  Mostly, though, they were dated by regnal year.  We even see this with the scribes, we see this with ancient papyri, we see this with ancient documents; everything is dated “in the 28^th year of Caesar Augustus”, “in the 15^th year of Claudius”, “in the 1^st year of Emperor Nero.”  It’s always dated in regnal or sovereign year.

What is meant by the term “Anno Domini” and where does that come from?

Anno Domini, obviously, means “in the year of our Lord”.  It’s a Latin term.  The current system, A.D., came about in the Middle Ages by Dionysius in the 6^th or 7^th century.  He was asked to give us a dating, dating the calendar when Jesus was born.  He goofs.  Jesus was actually born in 5 B.C.  I have news for you.  It’s actually 2016 tonight.  It’s not really 2011, based when Jesus really was born.  Jesus was born in B.C. 4 or 5.  We date that, King Herrod the Great, Josephus tells us, dies, an eclipse, Jesus is actually born before the death of Herrod the Great, Matthew 2:1, Luke 1:5 tell us, hence before March or April 4 B.C. or 5 B.C.  It means “in the year of our Lord”.  It comes about in the 6^th century.  He goofs for about 5 years, forever messing up our dating system going forward until Jesus comes back.   It is human error.

How many words are in the Greek New Testament?

They make you memorize this in Greek.  There are 5,423 used 138,137 times.  If you memorize 380 of them, you memorize 80% of the Greek word occurrences in the Greek New Testament.  There are only 5,000 words.  To put that into perspective, in a first year German class, you have to memorize 2,000 words in just an introductory German class.  So, those of you who want to learn Greek New Testament, if you can learn 380 or 20 Greek words, you can know 8 out of 10 words in the Greek New Testament.  Let me encourage you with that.  Think about all of the songs you know, think about the basketball or baseball statistics you know, think how quickly you could pick up the Greek New Testament.

Why do people say “God bless you” after someone sneezes?

It’s actually fascinating.  One of my specialties is after-life beliefs.  You know, in Egypt on the Sphinx the nose, and on the Egyptian monuments are messed up?  The noses are gone.  It goes back to Egyptian cultic after life beliefs.  They believed that when you sneezed, demons would enter your soul.  And so people, all the way back then, I don’t know if they would say “God bless you”, referring to our God, but they would pronounce a blessing on anyone when they sneezed.  So, all of those monuments that represent the afterlife for the Egyptians, they believed if you, basically, desecrated the nose, that even when the monument sneezed, the demons could not get in the after life to where they Egyptian rulers were.  It dates back before the biblical times.

My wife and I have two little girls we are raising and as they get older I want to begin teaching them apologetic truths.  I want to equip them for the culture they will grow up in.  What sort of advice do you have for the role of apologetics in raising children?

Start as early as you can and as simple as you can, teaching apologetic truths.  Start as early as you can with apologetic truth, talking to your children about, “look at this beautiful sunset.  Who do you think created all this? How did this start?  How did this come to be?”  And you immediately lay down the ground for the cosmological argument of God.   You pick up a leaf and show the intricacies of that leaf, and you explain to your child how that leaf turns sunlight into glucose that then nourishes that leaf.  You see the intricate design on that leaf and you can say to that child, this leaf had a Designer.  Who designed this leaf?  And that’s immediately an argument for the teleological argument for God; the argument for a Designer.  I think you should use the simplest of things, at the earliest age, to begin teaching your children these apologetic truths.

Why are the writings of Josephus so important?

The writings of Josephus are extremely important because they give us all those delicious details that sometimes the New Testament writers “left out,” we say.  The New Testament is not a biography.  The New Testament was written to evangelize.  It’s written to be power-packed.  It’s written to be quick-hitting.  Josephus, as I said, gives us 28 times the length of any Gospel.  It’s about the size of seven modern day books; that’s Josephus’ Annals.  If you translate them, that’s how long they are.  He tells us about Jerusalem, he tells us about Jesus’ brother.  He tells us about Macairus where John the Baptist was beheaded.  He gives us all kinds of details about John the Baptist.  He gives us details about Pontius Pilate, Sadducees, Samaritans.  He’s one of the few first century sources that tells us about the Sadducees.  I talk about the Sadducees in my dissertation because, remember, they had no after-life beliefs, because they only followed the Torah, which speaks about nothing but Sheol.  Anyway, Josephus is fascinating.  We’ll talk about him in the weeks ahead.  He’s born four years after the Crucifixion, he dies in A.D. 97, and he fills in incredible first century details.

What is meant by “New Atheism?”

In my opinion, new atheism is distinct in two areas.  First, it’s really not new.  The first way I’d distinguish it, is it’s not new.  It’s old, in that it repackages old arguments.  It’s just recycling the same old arguments, and we’re just hearing about them again.  But paradoxically, think about this.  New atheism is so powerful and popular today because of how much belief there is.  If nobody was believing in God, there would be no reason to have best selling books that were anti-God.  There would be no reason to have this rise in new atheism.  It’s new in this sense, though; it’s new in its rhetoric.  It’s new in its aggressiveness.  It’s new in its utter divisiveness and dismissiveness of religious people.  It doesn’t want to hear you, it wants to interrupt you, it knows that its claims are not necessarily anything new because it’s just a repackaged old.  Its just saying much louder, much more intensely, its “I think you’re stupid if you’re a religious person, I’m out to make a fool of you.”  I’m going to do a whole night dedicated to this on March 23.  One of the greatest ways to combat this is to be gracious, to do what 1 Peter 3:15 says, to literally be the antiphysis of what they talk about, to be gracious in your response, to be gracious in your return.  I think it’s fascinating that all these anti-God books have come out after 9/11.  9/11 showed us that there was all kinds of religious belief.  Not just in our God, but religious belief in Allah, fanatical religious belief.  And so we have the appearance and proliferation of incredible amounts of these anti-God books after 9/11.

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Q & A February 23, 2011

Why is Bible translation important?
Think about it. The Bible, originally, is in three languages. The Old Testament is in two languages, Hebrew and Aramaic. The New Testament is in Aramaic and Greek. And those languages would eventually die out with the incredible domination of the Roman Empire and so it is appropriate, as those languages became dead languages. Nobody walks around and speaks Koinonia Greek, believe you me, I wish they did so we could all get our pronunciations right. You can tell that Dr. Foster & I pronounce different words in different ways. As Latin came to be as Syriac came to be, Coptic, which is Egytian with Greek lettering, those new Bible translations had to come about so those people could read the Bible. That’s why it’s important.

What is the difference between transliteration and translation?
Really, the question should be asked, “what’s the difference between translation and transmission.” How the Bible is transmitted is the process and scriptoriums, the copying. So when we transmit the Bible, if all of you were my scribes, I would be up here, I would take my Greek text if I was in a Greek scriptorium and I would begin reading. You would be listening. If anyone made a mistake, you would raise your hand someone would come and they would write in the colophon, oh darn it I made a mistake, if you made three, literally you were gone for the day. Somebody would write “this is really boring.” We actually have on Codex Sinaiticus, “I’m really hungry, when is this going to be over” in Greek, next to the Gospel of Matthew. It’s really amazing. I would be reading. That’s the process called transmission. The next word is transliteration. I said the better word is translation. We have different Bible translations, and that’s just the process that we have. We take the process of the original text of the Bible – Greek in the New Testament, Hebrew in the Old Testament, we translate that to the lengua franca, the common tounge of the day. That’s Bible translation. There are different ways we do that, but our job is to translate the Bible so that people can read it in their own language.

How important are the Dead Sea Scrolls to Christianity?
Huge importance! I was with Adolfo Roitman, protector of the Dead Sea Scrolls, curator of the Israel Museum last May and he told me some incredible information about them. Get this, there is more security on the Dead Sea Scrolls than anything else in Israel. If there was a nuclear attack on Israel, the Dead Sea Scrolls would, probably, be the only thing that survives. It is amazing, the security they have on those things. The Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered in 1947. They are 40,000 fragments representing 400 different books. It is essentially the library of the Qumran community. When Rome destroyed the temple in A.D. 70, they were wise enough to put all of their scrolls, at the time, in different clay jars. A Bedouin in 1946 is going after a lamb, he throws a rock after it, he’s mad and hears something break. Next thing we know, we have 40,000 scrolls. The only Old Testament book that’s not in the library of the Essenes is the book of Esther. Hugely important for this reason; think about Charles Spurgeon and these guys who Pastor Jerry always quotes in his sermons. What Old Testament text was their Bible based on? It was based on the Masoretic Text. What year is the Masoretic Text? A.D. 900. They are later than the New Testament texts. The Dead Sea Scrolls are from 200 B.C. to 100 A.D., a 1,000 years earlier. There wasn’t one difference with the Isaiah scroll from the Masoretic Text to the Dead Sea Scroll text. The Dead Sea Scrolls showing that there is an accurate transmission process.

What does the word “Bible” mean or where did it come from?
It means “biblos” in Greek. It means “library.” It’s not a Christian term, just means library in Greek.

What is the Vulgate Bible?
The Vulgate Bible is the Bible of a thousand years. It’s the common accepted language. Jerome, who translates the Vulgate Bible, is being financed by a very wealthy woman in Rome. He’s at the Church of the Nativity because she basically said, “where do you want to do the Bible at?” He said I want to do it in the church that is over where Jesus was birthed. It’s finished in 405. Can you imagine the Greek text that Jerome had in the 4th century to go off of to make the latin bible? Everyone spoke Latin for a 1,000 years and he gives us the Bible of 1,000 years. Jerome is a very important commentator as well. He tells us that the apocrypha is important, but it’s not sacred. It’s encouraging to read, but it’s not on the same level as the canonical words.

Before the printing press, how long would it take a scribe to reproduce one copy of the Bible?
We would be here for 10 months. That’s how long if we wanted to do one copy of the Bible each. If this were a scriptorium tonight, we’d be running for our lives because it was illegal, we could get killed. It would take us 10 months each to do one copy. This is before the printing press. That’s how committed they were to accuracy. A lot of these bibles were illuminated, which just means they were pictured, beautifully colored, etcetera. These would weigh 30 or 40 pounds. They are amazing.

True or False? In the 15th century, the mere fact of owning and reading the Bible in English was evidence of heresy and punishable by death.
Absolutely, it was punishable by death. William Tyndale was burned at the stake, John Wycliffe saves himself, because he was so prominent in Oxford by hiding in the spire. Mary is so upset by him that they literally exhume his body and burn his bones and throw him the river Isis for translating the Bible into English. William Tyndale’s very good friend sold him out in Belgium, he’s burned at the stake and asked God to open the King of England’s eyes. Anne Boleyn supported him, interestingly enough. It’s a very important history then.

Why is William Tyndale so important in Bible translation?
John Wycliffe gives us the first English Bible, but it’s based on the Latin vulgate. William Tyndale gives us the first New Testament based on the Greek texts that were available. He gives us the great sayings, “let the be light” “in the beginning there was God,” these phrases we still use today are Tyndale phrases that he translated from the Greek.

Do you have an estimate on how many people groups there are today who do not have a Bible translated in their own language?
We did a seminar on this in Oxford. It’s around 3,000 people groups that don’t have a completed Bible in their own language, as of 2000 or 2005.

Can you, please, help me in forming a response to my friend who thinks she does not have to go to church, that she could just read her Bible on her own and be OK?
I can understand why people would be frustrated with churches in general and would not want to participate in some churches. I understand how you can get frustrated and disillusioned with religion as a general thing. But, you need to know that in Christianity, there has been no one through out Christian history became an island that was greatly used by God or in touch by God. All of the great early church fathers, all the great churchwomen were part of an “ecclesia.” Hebrews 10:35 commands us not to forsake assembling together as some are in the manner of doing so. I would consider it a sin, I hate to use that kind of term but I will, to not be involved in the local ecclesia because the scriptures tell us to be involved in the local church. That’s, also, kind of dangerous to be on your own and think I’m just going to read the Bible myself. That’s also how a lot of cults get started. You get off on a tangent, you read the Bible you don’t know how to interpret it. I don’t know how to interpret every single verse. I’m still learning. We learn together. Let me tell you this about the church. The church is a communal belief. I don’t believe on my own. I believe with everyone here. My faith grows as everyone else’s faith grows. As we all take steps of faith, we take steps of faith together. We grow in Christ together. When one is weak, all is weak. When one grows strong, all grows strong. This thing of joining a covenant, we do it together and by which we are all strengthened together. I would encourage you to find great church, wherever you are and get involved in that covenant body. It will strengthen you. You will get washed up in and you will be strengthened through it.

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