We live in a time when you keep hearing stuff like oh, the Bible was changed in the
Middle Ages by you know, the monks
and that we don't know what it really says and, and
you know, upon investigation I have come to the conclusion that that's not true.
The Dead Sea Scrolls -
they were in jars for like 2,000 years
in a desert someplace and then in, what was it, 1947-48
somebody discovers them, and opens them up and says, "oh,
what's this?" They are
documents of the Old Testament that have been
hidden in jars in the desert where it's dry, where they're preserved
for 2,000 years. And we can say, "oh, so what did the Bible say
2,000 years ago? Let's read it. We don't have to guess if the monks changed
it or not. Let's read it." And
you read it and it's like letter-for- letter, not word-for-word, letter-for-letter
the same as it is today, so the argument
that the Bible was changed - it, it just has to go in the garbage
instantly. We have
thousands and thousands of New Testament manuscripts
that exist that we can read and compare to other New Testament manuscripts.
We don't have that for Socrates,
we don't have that for Aristotle, we don't have that for Thucydides, we don't
have that for Herodotus, we don't, like, we don't have
those documents close to when they were written.
Like, the closest documents we have to those documents are literally a thousand
years later.
There have been just in the last like 50 years
tremendous archaeological discoveries, and this is another one of these things
like, a hundred years ago,
people could make arguments, but now we have archaeological evidence that keeps
coming up
over and over and over. I read about the New York Times. You open it up and they say oh, they found a,
a stele, talking about the house of David. You know,
they had no evidence that 3,000 years ago there actually was a
King in Israel named David. Now they have archaeological evidence.
This happens over and over and over again that oh, suddenly we realize the
Assyrians or the Hittites - they actually existed because we found something
from you know, in cuneiform writing that proves it; whereas up until now,
we thought maybe it was just made up. Archaeological evidence is pretty
compelling. It becomes an open-and-shut case. People can believe what they want
but when you start looking at that
evidence it's, it's overwhelming.
It does matter
that it's, that it's real, that it's trustworthy and you can
investigate it, and I would say it's, it's kinda fun to investigate it.
