Peter J. Williams lectures on the historical reliability of the gospel narratives

Peter J. Williams

This is a lecture I found from British historian Dr. Peter J. Williams.

Here’s the main lecture: (54 minutes)

And here’s the Q&A: (9 minutes)

About Peter Williams:

Peter J. Williams is the Warden (CEO) of Tyndale House and a member of the Faculty of Divinity in the University of Cambridge. He received his MA, MPhil and PhD, in the study of ancient languages related to the Bible from Cambridge University. After his PhD, he was on staff in the Faculty of Divinity, Cambridge University (1997–1998), and thereafter taught Hebrew and Old Testament there as Affiliated Lecturer in Hebrew and Aramaic and as Research Fellow in Old Testament at Tyndale House, Cambridge (1998–2003). From 2003 to 2007 he was on the faculty of the University of Aberdeen, Scotland, where he became a Senior Lecturer in New Testament and Deputy Head of the School of Divinity, History and Philosophy. In July 2007 he became the youngest Warden in the history of Tyndale House. He also retains his position as an honorary Senior Lecturer in Biblical Studies at the University of Aberdeen.

Summary of the lecture:

• What if the stories about Jesus are legendary?
• were the gospels transmitted accurately?
• were the gospels written in the same place as where the events happened?
• do the gospel authors know the customs and locations where the events happened?
• do the gospels use the right names for the time and place where the events took place?
• do the gospels disambiguate people’s names depending on how common those names were?
• how do the New Testament gospels compare to the later gnostic gospels?
• how do the gospels refer to the main character? How non-Biblical sources refer to Jesus?
• how does Jesus refer to himself in the gospels? do the later Christians refer to him that way?
• how does Jesus teach? do later Christians teach the same way?
• why didn’t Jesus say anything about early conflicts in the church (the Gentiles, church services)?
• did the writers of the gospels know the places where the events took place?
• how many places are named in the gospels? how about in the later gnostic gospels?
• are the botanical details mentioned in the gospels accurate? how about the later gnostic gospels?

And here are the questions from the audience:

• how what about the discrepancies in the resurrection narratives that Bart Ehrman is obsessed with?
• what do you think of the new 2011 NIV translation (Peter is on the ESV translation committee)?
• how did untrained, ordinary men produce complex, sophisticated documents like the gospels?
• is oral tradition a strong enough bridge between the events and the writers who interviewed the eyewitnesses?
• what does the name John mean?
• why did the gospel writers wait so long before writing their gospels?
• do you think that Matthew and Luke used a hypothetical source which historians call “Q”?
• which gospel do critical historians trust the least and why?

I really enjoyed watching this lecture. He’s getting some of this material from Richard Bauckham’s awesome book “Jesus and the Eyewitnesses”, so if you aren’t familiar with it, you can get an idea of what’s in it. Peter Williams is a lot of fun to listen to – an excellent speaker.

You can read an interview with Peter Williams here on Between Two Worlds.

And you can listen to the Peter Williams vs Bart Ehrman debate. That link contains a link to the audio of the debate as well as my snarky summary. It’s very snarky.

And Apologetics 315 also posted Peter Williams’ assessment of Bart Ehrman’s “Misquoting Jesus”.

Filed under: Videos, Author, Bart Ehrman, Bible, Biography, Common, Debate, Disambiguate, Disambiguation, Errancy, Error, Errors, Eyewitness, Eyewitnesses, Geography, Gnostic, Gnostic Gospel, Gospel, Gospels, Historical, Historical Jesus, History, Holy Cross, Inerrancy, Invention, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses, Lecture, Manuscript, Michael Licona, Mike Licona, Misquoting Jesus, Mistakes, Names, Naturalism, Peter, Peter Williams, Qualify, Reliability, Reliable, Resurrection, Richard Bauckham, Texas, Text, Translated, Translation, Tyndale House, Variant, Variants, Word of God, Writer

Mike Licona explains the As, Bs, Cs, Ds and Es of New Testament reliability

Mike Licona is one of my favorite Christian apologists, and here is an excellent lecture to show you why.

In the lecture, he explains why the four biographies in the New Testament should be accepted as historically accurate: (55 minutes)

Summary:

• What a Baltimore Ravens helmet teaches us about the importance of truth
• What happens to Christians when they go off to university?
• The 2007 study on attitudes of American professors to evangelical Christians
• Authors: Who wrote the gospels?
• Bias: Did the bias of the authors cause them to distort history?
• Contradictions: What about the different descriptions of events in the gospels?
• Dating: When were the gospels written?
• Eyewitnesses: Do the gospel accounts go back to eyewitness testimony?

This is basic training for Christians. They ought to show this lecture whenever new people show up, because pastors should not quote the Bible until everyone listening has this information straight.

Filed under: Videos, Acts, Apologetics, Author, Authorship, Bart Ehrman, Bias, Bible, Biography, Christian Apologetics, Contradiction, Contradictions, Date, Dating, Eyewitness, Eyewitnesses, Gospels, History, Inerrancy, Jesus, Jesus Christ, John, Luke, Mark, Matthew, Mike Licona, New Testament, Paul, Peter

Seven stories about Mitt Romney that you won’t hear from the liberal media

Mr. Hawkins wrote a column entitled “7 Incredible Personal Stories About Mitt Romney That You May Not Know“.

Here’s my favorite:

2) Mitt Romney gave milk to a V.A. hospital: This is the kind of thing Mitt Romney has done for people in need who cross his path.

He shared a story of a V.A. hospital in Boston that Mitt Romney stopped at while on the campaign trail running against Ted Kennedy. Ted Kennedy had made a thirty minute stop at the same location a couple of weeks prior.After touring the V.A. hospital, Mitt asked to look at their books. After he spent forty minutes going through their books, he told them, “You run a very good place, very tight. Very good.” Romney asked to go on another tour of the hospital, and after spending an hour and forty minutes there, the last question he asked was, “So what… what do you — what are you lacking? What do you need help with?”

The response? “Milk.”

Since the press was around, snapping photos and asking questions, Glenn explained that Romney did a really awkward joke where he said, “maybe we should teach everyone here how to milk a cow.”

Of course, that’s all the press cared to hear and ran with a story that claims “Mitt Romney says veterans should have to milk cows.”

“This is where it gets good,” Glenn started. “Romney calls him up the next morning.”

Romney first apologizes to the man who runs the hospital for any problems the attention from the press jumping on his words brought to the hospital. He next offers to help with the milk situation.

“Friday comes, and the milkman comes,” Glenn continues. “This is what the vets needed – they needed 7,000 pints of milk a week. Milkman shows up, 7,000 pints. The head of the V.A. hospital asks, ‘Where did all this come from?’ He [the milkman] said ‘an anonymous donor.’ Now, the guy didn’t put it together.”

Glenn explains that when the next week rolled around, the milkman shows up again, and continued to show up every week for two years. After two years of delivering 7,000 pints of milk a week to the hospital, as the milkman is retiring, the man finally gets him to reveal the anonymous donor.

It’s Mitt Romney.

“Mitt Romney was writing a personal check and didn’t want anybody to know for two years and provided the vets with all of their milk in Boston,” Glenn explained to listeners this morning.

When Romney became governor, he sent a bill through to help the V.A. hospital – it was down to the dollar.

Read the other six.

Meanwhile, taxpayers spent $1.4 billion on Barack Obama and his family.

Mr. Hawkins and I share the view that Romney was not the most conservative candidate in the Republican primary. I wanted Michele Bachmann first, then Rick Santorum when she dropped out. John wanted Newt Gingrich. But we would both rather have Romney, than Obama. At least now we know that there are some good things about Mitt Romney as a man, even if I don’t agree with him on policy.

Filed under: News, Bio, Biography, Charity, Community, Mitt Romney, Personal Charity, Sharing

Tea Party conservatives and social conservatives endorse Ted Cruz in Texas primary

Republican Senate candidate Ted Cruz

There is a Republican primary on Tuesday for Kay Bailey Hutchinson’s Senate seat, and my candidate is Ted Cruz. Tea Party leader Sarah Palin recently endorsed him.

Excerpt:

Sarah Palin told a cheering crowd late Friday that America needs to get back to its “clinging to God and guns” roots, as the tea pea party’s biggest names made a series of last-minute, high-profile appearances around Texas to support insurgent conservative U.S. Senate candidate Ted Cruz.

The former Alaska governor and 2008 GOP vice presidential candidate spoke to more than 1,000 boisterous and sweating Cruz supporters gathered under a mercilessly early-evening sun on a grassy knoll in The Woodlands, a well-to-do Houston suburb. She told them that “to make America great, we don’t need a fundamental transformation, we need a fundamental restoration.”

“Fighters like Ted Cruz can lead the charge for us,” Palin said.

Cruz, the former Texas Solicitor General, is locked in a fierce and increasingly nasty battle with the mainstream Texas GOP choice, Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst, for the Republican nomination to replace retiring U.S. Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison. The pair face a runoff Tuesday because neither won a majority in a nine-Republican senatorial field during the state’s May 29 primary.

The conservative Club For Growth is backing Ted Cruz:

And social conservative leader James Dobson likes Ted Cruz, too.

Excerpt:

Today, we are excited to announce that national pro-life, family values leader Dr. James Dobson is endorsing our Senate campaign.

In his endorsement announcement, Dr. Dobson said: “I’m pleased to endorse Ted Cruz for U.S. Senate because he’s exactly the kind of candidate we need to turn this country around. Religious freedom is under assault every day. We need leaders with the courage to stand strong for conservative values in this battle. Ted Cruz is such a leader—one who will not only vote his convictions in the Senate, but will also lead the fight to defend life, traditional marriage, and religious liberty.”

Dr. Dobson added: “Ted Cruz stands out among conservative leaders across the country today. He has a consistent record of standing up for faith, family, and freedom, and winning values battles on a national level….I urge all Texans who love life, family, faith, and freedom to not only vote for Ted Cruz, but to work hard for his campaign.”

Even moderate conservative George Will thinks that Republican candidate Ted Cruz is the man to replace Kay Bailey Hutchison in Texas.

Excerpt:

For a conservative Texan seeking national office, it could hardly get better than this: In a recent 48-hour span, Ted Cruz, a candidate for next year’s Republican Senate nomination for the seat being vacated by Republican Kay Bailey Hutchison, was endorsed by the Club for Growth PAC, FreedomWorks PAC, talk-radio host Mark Levin and Erick Erickson of RedState.com.

For conservatives seeking reinforcements for Washington’s too-limited number of limited-government constitutionalists, it can hardly get better than this: Before he earned a Harvard law degree magna cum laude (and helped found the Harvard Latino Law Review) and clerked for Chief Justice William Rehnquist, Cruz’s senior thesis at Princeton — his thesis adviser was professor Robert George, one of contemporary conservatism’s intellectual pinups — was on the Constitution’s Ninth and 10th amendments. Then as now, Cruz argued that these amendments, properly construed, would buttress the principle that powers not enumerated are not possessed by the federal government.

[...]At age 14, Cruz’s father fought with rebels (including Fidel Castro) against Cuba’s dictator, Fulgencio Batista. Captured and tortured, at 18 he escaped to America with $100 sewn in his underwear. He graduated from the University of Texas and met his wife — like him, a mathematician — with whom he founded a small business processing seismic data for the oil industry.

By the time Ted Cruz was 13, he was winning speech contests sponsored by a Houston free-enterprise group that gave contestants assigned readings by Frederic Bastiat, Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises. In his early teens he traveled around Texas and out of state giving speeches. At Princeton, he finished first in the 1992 U.S. National Debate Championship and North American Debate Championship.

As Texas’s solicitor general from 2003 to 2008, Cruz submitted 70 briefs to the U.S. Supreme Court, and he has, so far, argued nine cases there. He favors school choice and personal investment accounts for a portion of individuals’ Social Security taxes. He supports the latter idea with a bow to the late Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who said such accounts enable the doorman to build wealth the way the people in the penthouse do.

Regarding immigration, Cruz, 40, demands secure borders and opposes amnesty for illegal immigrants but echoes Ronald Reagan’s praise of legal immigrants as “Americans by choice,” people who are “crazy enough” to risk everything in the fundamentally entrepreneurial act of immigrating.

You can find out more about Ted Cruz on his positions page. I was interested in his stance on social issues, in particular.

Excerpt:

Ted Cruz has fought to protect innocent human life. He played a leading role in several important cases, including defense of the partial-birth abortion ban, parental consent laws, and prohibiting state funds from going to abortion. These cases have all been part of the ongoing effort to ensure that every child in America  receives the protection and respect he or she deserves.

• Authored an amicus brief for 13 states, successfully defending the federal Partial Birth Abortion Ban Act. The ban was upheld 5-4 before the U.S. Supreme Court;
• Authored an amicus brief for 18 states, successfully defending the New Hampshire parental notification law. The law was upheld 9-0 before the U.S. Supreme Court [note: this brief was awarded the Best Brief Award from the National Association of Attorneys General for U.S. Supreme Court briefs written in 2005-06];
• Successfully defended Texas’s Rider 8, which prohibits state funds for groups that provide abortions, winning unanimously before the Fifth Circuit court of appeals.

Ted Cruz has worked hard in defense of traditional marriage, including his intervention in a case protecting Texas marriage laws. In addition, he has fought on the federal level to defend marriage between one man and one woman as the fundamental building block of society.

• When a Beaumont state court granted a divorce to two homosexual men who had gotten a civil union in Vermont, Cruz, under the leadership of Attorney General Greg Abbott, intervened in defense of the marriage laws of the State of Texas, which successfully led to the court judgment being vacated;
• Worked with Attorney General Abbott to send a letter to Congress in support of the federal Defense of Marriage Act.

He has a solid recordconservative policies on that page: energy production, voter fraud prevention, border security, legal firearm ownership – you name it, this guy has been fighting for conservative principles. Like Michele Bachmann, he has actually tried to do pro-life and pro-marriage things. We don’t just have to take his word for it, he has the actions to prove his words.

Filed under: Commentary, Abortion, Armed Forces, Biography, Border Security, Capitalism, Conservative, Cuba, Cuban-American, Economic Growth, Energy, Energy Independence, Fence, Free Market, George Will, Gun Rights, Illegal Immigration, Issues, Mark Levin, Military, Pro-Life, Pro-Marriage, Profile, Property Rights, Redistricting, Religious Liberty, Republican, Sarah Palin, Senate, Spending, Taxes, Tea Party, Ted Cruz, Texas, Tort Reform, Voting Record

Can a Christian marry an atheist or a Jew or a Muslim or a Hindu?

I think that the best way to answer the question, “should I marry a non-Christian?”, is to ask whether it makes any difference if your spouse is on board with your plans for your ministry and with your marriage. So let’s take a look at a case where someone famous who chose a Christian wife, and we’ll see how much that decision affected his ministry and his marriage.

I want to draw your attention to a talk on “Vision in Life” given by Dr. William Lane Craig. Dr. Craig is the ablest defender of the Christian faith operating today. He has done formal academic debates with all of the best known atheists on major university campuses in front of thousands of university students. This list of atheists and agnostics includes people like Christopher Hitchens and Victor Stenger. The Hitchens debate took place in an auditorium filled with 5000 students, and many thousands more were watching at churches all over the world. How did Dr. Craig get these opportunities to evangelize on secular university campuses?

Well, he owes a lot of his success to his amazing wife Jan, as we shall see in the summary of his talk on that topic.

The MP3 file is here. (32 minutes)

This talk was Dr. Craig’s chapel address to Biola University students, and he is introduced by his son, John, a Biola University grad.

In the talk, it becomes clear that Bill’s wife Jan plays an enormous role in his success. Indeed, you will see that if it were not for her, he never would have gotten either of his doctorates, or even his second Masters degree. Why was she so supportive of his plans? Because she had the same broad goal of evangelism through scholarship. Let’s see how she encouraged him.

Here is a quotation that occurs about 11 minutes into the talk, as Bill describes the completion of his Bachelor’s degree at Wheaton:

And it was at Wheaton that my vision began to focus on presenting the gospel in the context of giving an intellectual defense of the faith, to appeal not only to the heart but also to the head, as well. And so I determined that I would go on to seminary for further training.

But, my senior year, in chapel, we heard a speaker who challenged us, before going on to further education, to take a couple of years out, and to wring out the sponge, so to speak, that had been soaking up all that knowledge, and to work with university students while we were still about the same age.

And so I joined the staff of Campus Crusade for Christ for 2 years, and was assigned to Northern Illinois University. And that was where I met my wife Jan. She was a graduate of the University of North Dakota where she had come to faith in Christ. And she had a similar vision for her life of evangelism and discipleship.

And as we worked at NIU together, she with gals and I with the guys, leading students to Christ and discipling them to walk with the Lord, we fell in love. And we decided that we would be more effective if we joined forces and became a team.

It is at this point in the talk where Bill begins to explain just how Jan molded him into the lean, mean debating machine that travels the world striking terror into the hearts of atheists.

Bill’s first story about Jan occurs early after their marriage while he is working on his first Masters degree at Trinity:

And it was also at that time that I began to see what an invaluable asset the Lord had given me in Jan. I remember I came home from classes one day, and found her at the kitchen table with all the catalogs and schedules and papers spread out in front of her and she said, “look! I’ve figured out how you can get two Masters degrees at the same time that it would normally take to get one! All you have to do is take overloads every semester, go to all full-time summer school and do all these other things, and you can do two MAs in the time it takes to do one!”

And I thought, whoa! Are you sure you really want to make the commitment it takes to do this kind of thing? And she said, “Yeah! Go for it!” And it was then I began to see that God had given me a very special woman who was my supporter – my cheerleader – and who really believed in me. And as long as she believed in me, that gave me the confidence to dream bigger dreams, and to take on challenges that I had never thought of before.

In an article on his web site, he talks about how Jan encouraged him to do his first Ph.D:

As graduation from Trinity neared, Jan and I were sitting one evening at the supper table in our little campus apartment, talking about what to do after graduation. Neither of us had any clear leading or inclination of what we should do next.

So Jan said to me, “Well, if money were no object, what would you really like to do next?”

I replied, “If money were no object, what I’d really like to do is go to England and do a doctorate under John Hick.”

“Who’s he?” she asked.

“Oh, he’s this famous British philosopher who’s written extensively on arguments for the existence of God,” I explained. “If I could study with him, I could develop a cosmological argument for God’s existence.”

But it hardly seemed a realistic idea.

The next evening at supper Jan handed me a slip of paper with John Hick’s address on it. “I went to the library today and found out that he’s at the University of Birmingham in England,” she said. “Why don’t you write him a letter and ask him if you can do a doctoral thesis under him on the cosmological argument?”

What a woman! So I did, and to our amazement and delight Professor Hick wrote back saying he’d be very pleased to supervise my doctoral work on that subject. So it was an open door!

And in the same article, he explains how Jan encouraged him to get his second Ph.D:

As Jan and I neared the completion of my doctoral studies in Birmingham, our future path was again unclear to us. I had sent out a number of applications for teaching positions in philosophy at American universities but had received no bites. We didn’t know what to do.

I remember it like yesterday. We were sitting at the supper table in our little house outside Birmingham, and Jan suddenly said to me, “Well, if money were no object, what would you really like to do next?”

I laughed because I remembered how the Lord had used her question to guide us in the past. I had no trouble answering the question. “If money were no object, what I’d really like to do is go to Germany and study under Wolfhart Pannenberg.”

“Who’s he?”

“Oh, he’s this famous German theologian who’s defended the resurrection of Christ historically,” I explained. “If I could study with him, I could develop a historical apologetic for the resurrection of Jesus.”

Our conversation drifted to other subjects, but Jan later told me that my remark had just lit a fire under her. The next day while I was at the university, she slipped away to the library and began to research grants-in-aid for study at German universities. Most of the leads proved to be defunct or otherwise inapplicable to our situation. But there were two grants she found that were possibilities. You can imagine how surprised I was when she sprung them on me!

Both of these Ph.D experiences are also described in the talk. And the talk concludes as follows:

I am so thankful to be married to a woman who is tremendously resourceful, tremendously talented and energetic, who could have pursued an independent career in any number of areas, but instead, she has chose to wed her aspirations to mine, and to make it her goal to make me the most effective person I can be, for Christ. And she has been like my right arm in ministry over these many years. And it is a tremendous privilege to be a team with a person like that.

And you young men, I would encourage you, if you marry, to find a gal who shares your vision, not some independent vision, but who is interested in aligning herself with you, and pursuing together a common vision and goal that will draw you [together], so that you will avoid the growing separateness that so often creeps into marriages.

And now you know the rest of Bill’s story. The person you marry will have an enormous influence on the impact you will have for Christ and his Kingdom. It is up to you to decide whether that influence is going to be positive or negative, by deciding if you will marry, and if you do marry, by deciding whom you will marry. If you marry a non-Christian, you cannot expect to achieve the same things for God as you can with someone who accepts your core convictions and is willing to sacrifice their happiness so that God can be made happier.

You may also be interested in this talk given by William Lane Craig, entitled “Healthy Relationships” (National Faculty Leadership Conf. 2008) (audio here) In that talk, he offers advice to Christians who want to have a marriage that is consistent with their Christian faith.

Filed under: Podcasts, Biography, Chastity, Christian Living, Christianity, Courtship, Dating, Family, Feminism, Helper, Husband, Jan Craig, Love, Marriage, Purpose, Quest, Relationships, Romance, Scholarship, Unequal Yoking, Unequally Yoked, Vision, Vocation, Wife, William Lane Craig