Assaults on Scripture continue and in many cases become increasingly sophisticated, and because so few are personally equipped in things like textual criticism and ancient history, the need for specialists is real. Dr. Craig Blomberg (distinguished professor of New Testament at Denver Seminary) has helpfully entered the discussion in that capacity, and in his Can We Still Believe the Bible? An Evangelical Engagement with Contemporary Questions he has done the church a great service in addressing some very contemporary questions. Textual Criticism, Canon, Bible Translation, Inerrancy, Literary Genres, and Miracles are topics he engages. These issues are “hot” again, and so we were happy to see his contribution, and we are glad he could speak to our readers about his work.
Books At a Glance (Fred Zaspel):
Thanks so much for your good work. You clearly have an extensive acquaintance with critical and unbelieving scholarship, and you also mention that your studies have only led you to a greater confidence in the Scriptures. Has that trajectory been gradual, or have there been “Aha!” moments along the way that helped solidify your trust in God’s Word? Can you characterize that growing confidence for us?
Blomberg:
Both. A lot has been very gradual over the years but now and then I discover an approach to a text or a topic that proves really helpful. In this book, I tackled a few Old Testament issues along with New Testament material that I teach every year and have to keep up on. So in revisiting some Old Testament problems that I hadn’t looked at in several years I found several helpful new studies that I hadn’t previously been aware of.
Books At a Glance:
After reading so much from “the other side,” are there any broad characterizations you can give us regarding unbelieving scholarship? Are there common mistakes, tendencies, presuppositions, or other considerations that show up often as contributing factors in their arguments or conclusions?
Blomberg:
One would certainly be what has been called a “hermeneutics of suspicion.” If there is the slightest discrepancy between two bits of data, some scholars rush to shout “contradiction.” Some resist any form of harmonization of accounts by adding information from both accounts together to create a longer, fuller narrative, even though ancient historians routinely utilize this practice as do modern journalists. It used to be that you could count on more unbelievers to be antisupernaturalists and write off miracles from the outset. You still find those people, but more and more folks are willing to accept at least healings and exorcisms. If they reject certain other miracles it may often be because they think they look too much like other ancient legends or myths. One of the things that has struck me is that on closer inspection a lot of these supposed parallels don’t appear very similar at all.
Books At a Glance:
Is there one issue or biblical “problem” that you have found most troubling for Christians today regarding the reliability of Scripture? And can you summarize your response to it?
Blomberg:
No, at least not in my personal experience. There is a “cocktail” of issues out there and some people are troubled by certain kinds of problems and not by others, while for different people the reverse may be true. But something that does seem to have changed in recent years is that a lot of Christians seem to be quite gullible. The latest news report about some apparent discovery that seems to call some aspect of Christianity into question seems to threaten way too large a segment of the Christian populace. Many times the news isn’t even accurately reported at first, frequently scholars change their minds at least once as to what the discovery even means, and never does a single find, even if genuine, affect more than one very small portion of Christian faith. One wonders how insecure some people’s faith must be if every new internet claim can send them reeling!
Books At a Glance:
It is becoming increasingly common to hear that there are some 400,000 textual variants in readings in the Greek New Testament. Tell us about this number. How is it good news, misleading, or bad news for believers? How serious is this problem? And just how reliable is our New Testament in this respect?
Blomberg:
It’s a number that has to be divided by the roughly 25,000 ancient copies of part or all of the New Testament copied by hand in Greek and other foreign languages into which the text was translated in the early centuries. That means an average of 16 unique variants per manuscript. A large percentage of these are variant spellings of words. The next largest group are the inclusion or omission of a conjunction or an article or the inversion of word order where meaning is virtually unaffected. Only about 1400 make their way into the footnotes of the United Bible Societies’ Greek New Testament, a scholarly edition of the text that is widely used in Bible colleges and seminaries. The 300-400 of the most important of these can be found in many English translations in their footnotes, so any careful reader of the text can see what is and what isn’t affected. Only a couple dozen affect an entire verse or more and only two affect more than two verse. Not a single Christian doctrine or ethical practice depends solely on some disputed text. So at the end of the day our New Testament has been copied more often and more carefully than any other work known to humans produced prior to the invention of the printing press.
Books At a Glance:
You mention three tests of canonicity: apostolicity (apostolically endorsed), catholicity (universally accepted), and orthodoxy (consistency in apostolic teaching). Please explain for us how these three considerations relate. If a writing is considered apostolic, doesn’t that end the discussion?
Blomberg:
The question students often like to raise in this regard is what if the letter Paul talks about having written the Corinthians prior to the letter we call 1 Corinthians were to be discovered (1 Cor. 5:9)? Would it merit inclusion in the canon? It would be apostolic. We could presume it would be orthodox and match Paul’s teachings in his known letters. But it could never pass the test of catholicity. The very fact that God allowed it to remain unpreserved and undiscovered for nearly twenty centuries would all by itself suggest that it was not inspired the way certain other documents were. Simply to affirm that the biblical documents we have from a particular writer are inspired in no way commits us to believing that anything else that person might have written must also have been inspired.
Books At a Glance:
The Bible records many miracles performed by Jesus and others. And yet the prevailing mindset today is thoroughly naturalistic, in which case miracles are impossible. How can we best approach the question of biblical miracles with our friends and others who may inquire?
Blomberg:
As I noted above, many people today are more open to miracles than they were even a generation ago. Polls suggest that well over half of all Americans believe not only in some kind of God but in angels and miraculous events of various kinds. But for those who are not open I think it’s important to point out at least two things: first science by definition studies that which is repeatable, testable, especially under laboratory conditions. Miracles by definition are unusual actions that can’t be predicted, can’t be scientifically explained and may or may not be repeatable. So science has in no way disproved the miraculous; it simply can’t adjudicate in that arena at all. Second, literally millions of people in our world today have witnessed or know someone who has witnessed an instantaneous physical healing after concerted, public Christian prayer. Science has no explanation for these events; until it does the naturalistic world view requires at least as much faith (if not more faith!) than Christian belief.
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Can We Still Believe The Bible? An Evangelical Engagement With Contemporary Questions