Early church fathers’ writings are so extensive that the New Testament could be reconstructed from them, except for 11 verses—or so goes a popular Christian apologetic. In part 1 we tracked this back to the likely source, an 1832 book with a much more modest claim. Its author claimed to have found references to all but 11 verses in just the first two chapters of the gospel of John.

Reconsider the goal of the project

Now that the historical foundation for the claim has dissolved, set that aside and consider the claim afresh. Imagine attempting this project yourself. You’ve assembled the entire collection of ante-Nicene Christian writings (that is, writings before the Nicene Council in 325 CE), and you’re trying to recreate the New Testament. Some of these writings will eventually be declared canonical, and some will be declared heretical; you don’t know which. Some passages in these writings will contradict others. The New Testament itself contains contradictions, and your goal is to recreate them as well!

These writings contain direct quotes. For example, Excerpts of Theodotus has this sentence:

John says: I indeed baptize you with water, but there comes after me He that baptizes with the Spirit and fire.

This is not a direct quotation from Matthew 3:11, but it’s close:

[John said,] “I baptize you with water for repentance. But after me comes one who is more powerful than I, whose sandals I am not worthy to carry. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire.”

If this counts as a hit, our standards have dropped. We’re no longer recreating the New Testament but trying to create a paraphrase.

More common than direct quotes are examples like this one, also from Excerpts of Theodotus:

But some as head, some as eyes, some as ears, some as hands, some as breasts, some as feet, shall be set, resplendent, in the sun. Shine forth as the sun, or in the sun; since an angel high in command is in the sun.

This might have been inspired from Matthew 13:43a:

Then the righteous will shine like the sun in the kingdom of their Father.

Could you have recreated this verse with just that bit?

The author, Theodotus of Byzantium, was a late-second-century gnostic who was declared a heretic and excommunicated by the pope, and yet this is claimed to be an overlap by one scholarly source. It is an early Christian source, after all.

This example underscores the problem that heresy is in the eye of the beholder, and recreating the perfect message of God from contradictory sources is impossible.

Remember, you can’t simply find echoes of New Testament ideas in the church fathers’ writings and count each such instance as a hit. The goal is to recreate the New Testament from scratch, and starting with the New Testament is cheating. You must take off your New Testament glasses first.

Said another way, this should be a blinded experiment, with the scholars who distill down the church fathers’ corpus not knowing the New Testament. That is, they can’t sift through sentences of a second-century Christian manuscript and say, “Ooh, that’s a match—I know where that one goes!” or “Nope, I’m discarding that one because there’s no match.”

Yet another problem: what is the “New Testament”? Ordinary people decided which of the many early Christian books and letters were officially in the New Testament, and different branches of Christianity came up with different lists. (h/t commenter ThaneOfDrones).

It would indeed be an interesting project to take the church fathers’ writings and, without trying to shoehorn them into a modern view of Christianity and using all of their writings without prejudice, recreate their version of Christianity. You would surely find that Christians in Damascus were different from those in Alexandria or Rome, and Christians in 100 CE were different from those in 200 or 300.

And that underscores the futility of the original project to recreate the New Testament. Without the structure of the New Testament as a color-by-numbers template into which to drop plausible matches from the early church fathers, you have chaos. Sure, you can merge the early church fathers’ writings, but don’t expect the New Testament to pop out of the resulting mess.

Lesson 1

I’ve pulled out a few observations from this research that I think are worth highlighting.

An interview with Prof. Daniel Wallace was my first introduction to the weak standing behind the popular “all but 11 verses” apologetic. He approvingly noted that Muslim apologists had discovered the error, and it was a very thorough 2007 article at Islamic Awareness that provided much of the data I used here.

Wallace’s advice to Christians was:

Don’t be satisfied with easy answers. Probe the issues deeply and formulate your own opinions after due diligence in reading extensively. If an answer is really an easy answer, it might be a wrong answer—maybe a right answer, but just don’t be satisfied with those kinds of answers. Too often, they’re incorrect.

It doesn’t hurt to have atheists hear that caution, but in my experience, it’s mostly Christian apologists who are too quick to grab onto a pleasing data point and credulously repeat it. For example, I’ve heard Christian radio personality Greg Koukl twice take a Richard Lewontin quote out of context. I contacted his ministry (I thought: wouldn’t he like to avoid making that error again?) and was told that I would have to call in to his show. No, I guess he doesn’t much care.

I applaud Wallace for making this point.

Lesson 2

In the sixty years after the 1841 publication of the Philips book (see Step 4 in part 1), the Dalrymple anecdote was repeated in at least 18 books and articles (see Table I here). Almost all of those have omissions. Wallace in his interview even made several mistakes in relating it. Just because something is written doesn’t mean that it will be repeated accurately or completely—the game of telephone is in effect. The lesson applies to the current project as well: just because the New Testament books are written doesn’t mean that passages will be later quoted accurately by the church fathers.

Another example is apologist William Lane Craig’s misquote of historian A. N. Sherwin-White. Sherwin-White’s point is much more powerful with Craig’s misquote, so that’s the version apologists use.

Lesson 3

I recently explored the claim that early church father Polycarp was martyred around 155 CE for refusing to honor Caesar as a god. He retorted, “For eighty and six years have I been his servant, and he has done me no wrong, and how can I blaspheme my King who saved me?”

Did Polycarp say this? The story is unreliable for many reasons, so probably not, but the particulars of Polycarp’s death don’t really matter much. No Christian doctrine relies on it. The larger lesson (and the Dalrymple story makes this point as well) is that just because a story is popular doesn’t mean that it’s well grounded in fact. We repeatedly find paltry evidence underlying Christian claims: Polycarp didn’t make that popular declaration before his martyrdom, we can’t recreate the New Testament from the writings of the early church fathers, God didn’t create the universe ex nihilo, it’s not the case that all but one of the Twelve died martyr’s deaths, Jesus wasn’t born of a virgin, and so on.

The point isn’t to dismiss every Christian claim as built on sand, but many are. Don’t take Christian claims on faith. Make your Christian antagonists defend their claims.

It turns out that the early church fathers’ writings can make some interesting contributions to scholarship. I write about that here.

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Image from Giammarco Boscaro, CC license
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Christian apologists sometimes say that the historical record for the New Testament is so robust that the New Testament could be recreated from the writings of the early church fathers alone. Does this popular claim hold up?

For example, here is Frank Turek in I Don’t Have Enough Faith to Be an Atheist, p. 228:

The early church fathers—men of the second and third centuries such as Justin Martyr, Irenaeus, Clement of Alexandria, Origen, Tertullian, and others—quoted the New Testament so much (36,289 times, to be exact) that all but eleven verses of the New Testament can be reconstructed just from their quotations.

There are 7957 verses in the New Testament, so “all but 11 verses” means that 99.9 percent could be reconstructed. Also, note the word “reconstructed.” That means to recreate the original words or at least the identical meaning. These are bold claims.

Let’s track down the evidence that supports this claim. As we do so, note the difference between repeating a claim that supports your position, even if from a well-respected source, and verifying that this claim is valid.

Step 2

Where did Turek get this information? He cites A General Introduction to the Bible (1986 edition) by Norm Geisler and William Nix, p. 431, where we find a rephrasing of the claim and a reference to Sir David Dalrymple as the source of the “all but 11 verses” quote.

Step 3

And their source? They cited Our Bible: How We Got It (1898) by Charles Leach, p. 35–6. Leach related an anecdote about Dalrymple being stumped by the question of how much of the New Testament could be recreated from Christian writings of the second and third centuries, spending two months on the problem, and concluding, “I have found [in these early church writings] the entire New Testament, except eleven verses” (italics in original).

Step 4

Though Leach doesn’t cite a source, his story is similar to an anecdote from the 1841 book, The Life, Times, And Missionary Enterprises, Of The Rev. John Campbell by Robert Philip, which claimed to document an anecdote from the late 1700s: at a gathering of literary friends, one asked, “Supposing all the New Testaments in the world had been destroyed at the end of the third century, could their contents have been recovered from the writings of the three first centuries?” Dalrymple was in attendance and was stumped along with the rest.

Two months later, he presented his conclusion to Rev. Walter Buchanan, who had been at the gathering. Buchanan remembered the meeting this way.

Pointing to a table covered with papers, [Dalrymple] said, “There have I been busy for these two months, searching for chapters, half chapters, and sentences of the New Testament, and have marked down what I have found, and where I have found it; so that any person may examine and see for themselves. I have actually discovered the whole New Testament from those writings, except seven or eleven verses, (I forget which,) which satisfies me that I could discover them also.”

Dalrymple was saying, not only that he was able to recreate all but eleven verses (let’s assume it was eleven, not seven) but that he was confident of there being passages to recreate those last few as well.

Let’s let this remarkable claim sit unchallenged for a moment while we consider how tenuous the anecdote itself is. We aren’t reading Dalrymple’s own words. Instead, this anecdote about Dalrymple comes from Buchanan, and that was retold by Rev. John Campbell, and Robert Philip finally documented that in his 1841 book. And Campbell was recollecting a story he’d heard fifty years earlier.

We do have Dalrymple’s notes, and he was indeed working on this problem, though not for two months as in the anecdote above but for at least four years (1780 – 1784). He never published his work, but collecting the lists from his notes, he had found matches for 3620 verses out of the 7956 verses in the New Testament, or 46 percent. That’s very different than “all but 11 verses.”

Step 5

There’s one final link in this chain. Though Dalrymple was working on this problem in the 1780s, the book about his conclusion wasn’t published until 1841. A collection of sermons by Rev. Edward Burton published in 1832 has a different version of the project:

If we could suppose all the copies of the New Testament by some sudden catastrophe to be destroyed, I have little doubt that nearly the whole of it might be recovered by gathering together these numerous quotations [from early church fathers]; and I say this with more confidence, because, upon referring to two only of the fathers, Tertullian and Origen, who lived in the former part of the third century, and taking as a specimen the two first chapters of St. John’s Gospel, I find that, with the exception of eleven verses, the whole of them is to be found in those two authors only.

This claim is much narrower: It has the “all but 11 verses” claim, but it’s talking about recreating just chapters 1–2 of John using the writings of just two early church fathers. Since Dalrymple’s own notes don’t make anything like the “all but 11 verses” claim but Burton’s book does, it’s likely that the Dalrymple anecdote published in 1841 is a conflation of this 1832 claim. Perhaps we’ve finally found the source.

Remember the Frank Turek claim that we started with: “The early church fathers . . . quoted the New Testament so much . . . that all but eleven verses of the New Testament can be reconstructed just from their quotations.” This remarkable claim should’ve provoked skepticism—or has Christianity broken Turek’s skepticism meter? Maybe vivid claims are more important to him than accuracy.

There’s more to be said, and that will be covered in part 2.

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Image from Darran Shen, CC license
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Let’s conclude our ten principles for evaluating the Bible. This list is in response to a Christian version by Jim Wallace, “Ten Principles When Considering Alleged Bible Contradictions,” critiqued here. Part 1 of my skeptical list is introduced here.

Let’s continue.

6. Missed opportunities count

God could’ve given us soap or told us that the earth is a sphere. Jesus could’ve eliminated all disease—and poverty, war, and famine while he was at it. But they didn’t.

What does that tell you? Apologists will say that the Bible isn’t a science textbook (though many will then take the Creation story literally). They’ll say that it simply wasn’t part of the plan for God to make life easy or even make the Bible message obvious so that there would be no need for the thousands of denominations of Christianity.

Even though the Bible doesn’t tell us anything that wasn’t already known to people of that time and place, that doesn’t prove that God doesn’t exist. But what can we learn from the fact that the Bible is ambiguous and contradictory, that life on earth sucks for many people, and that the “God” character has no more knowledge or wisdom than the primitive people who wrote his story? This world and all the problems in it do not look like they were created by an all-loving and omnipotent deity.

7. If it looks like a book written by a primitive people, it almost certainly is

The best explanation for the Bible is that primitive people of the time wrote the story and that the Bible is just the blog of an early Iron Age desert tribe. We can’t ignore the many examples of mythology from other ancient cultures, and the Bible looks like just one more.

We need an enormous amount of evidence to conclude that Babylonian Enuma Elish or the Hindu Vedas are mythology, but the Bible, which looks so similar, is actually history.

8. Natural evidence provides poor support for a supernatural conclusion

Many Christians “just believe,” but to get there by an intellectual route takes much evidence. On one hand, we can suppose that an omniscient god who wanted to convince us that he existed would be able to reach the most skeptical atheist. For example, God could reveal himself to everyone on the same day so that we would have everyone else’s verification that our senses are reliable.

But how would you rule out very intelligent aliens? Imagine if you went back just 200 years in time with today’s modern technology—antibiotics, telephones, CGI movies and Photoshopped photos, airplanes, weapons, and so on. It would be easy to convince many people that you were a god.

Now imagine how we’d respond to someone from a technology 200 years more advanced than us. Now make it two million years. If they wanted to convince us that they were the creator of the universe, how would we know any different? (More.)

Consider from a more abstract level the problem of finding proof for the supernatural. Using natural evidence to prove the existence of the supernatural may be like Flatlanders using evidence in their 2D world to prove that there is a 3D world out there. (More.)

9. Don’t read in your own desires

Was God wrong to demand genocide or not? Did God demand human sacrifice or not? Did God approve of slavery and polygamy or not?

Christians are often quick to come to God’s rescue to find counter-verses to argue that God shares our modern sensibilities on these matters. (One wonders why God can’t make things clear himself, but never mind.) These apologists are certain that they and God are on the right side of these moral matters despite what a plain reading of the Bible indicates.

And while they’re at it, they’ll find support for their own particular views on homosexuality, abortion, and other social issues—either pro or con, it doesn’t matter because the Bible can be mined to find support for just about anything..

The honest critic lets the Bible speak for itself. If it seems to contradict itself, that may be explained by the many books of the Bible coming from many authors from different cultures and with different ideas of God.

10. Don’t presuppose God

The Christian set of 10 principles ended with this one: “Remember who’s boss.” That is, don’t forget that God is in charge and that we aren’t empowered to judge him. Whether the problem is ambiguity or contradictions in the Bible or evil in the world, we can’t even understand the situation enough to convict him.

But of course this simply starts with the conclusion. We can’t start by assuming that God exists and the Bible is his word any more than we’d start a critique of Islam, Mormonism, or Scientology with an assumption that they were correct. We’re not trying to judge God but simply decide if the Bible is anything more than what it looks like, an ancient myth.

Bonus: #11. Don’t abdicate your role as judge

There is no objective authority to lean on. As a Christian, you might rely on a pastor, televangelist, or biblical scholar. You can read the Bible, trying to resolve its various interpretations applied by its various partisans. And still the problem remains—you take their input, but the buck stops with you.

You ain’t much, but you’re all you’ve got.

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(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 3/16/15.)

Image from Martin Thomas, CC license
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I recently analyzed “Ten Principles When Considering Alleged Bible Contradictions” (here) from Christian blogger Jim Wallace. I didn’t think much of them.

I’d like to offer my own version. Here are ten skeptical principles for evaluating the Bible that I think are more honest than Wallace’s.

1. Don’t confuse genres

Wallace is a murder investigator, and he tries to find parallels between the analysis done by the legal system and the study of evidence in the Bible. He finds this parallel with Bible contradictions:

It’s my job, as the investigator, to determine why the eyewitnesses appear to contradict one another, even though there is no doubt the event occurred and the witnesses were telling the truth.

A murder that you’re sure happened because you’ve read the coroner’s report and seen the body at the crime scene is quite different from a resurrection that is only a poorly evidenced story told 2000 years ago within a credulous prescientific culture.

In the case of the Bible, we don’t begin our study certain that a single word is true. It might be no more factual than the story of Gilgamesh. We have stories far removed from whatever actual events triggered them, while in a murder investigation we start with the fact of the dead body.

2. Never begin with the assumption that the Bible must be right

Making sense of the Bible isn’t easy—there are 45,000 denominations of Christianity based on different interpretations of God’s plan. The hypothesis that the Bible is wrong at a particular place needs to be one of the candidates since it sometimes makes the most sense of the evidence.

For example, consider the simplicity of the Documentary Hypothesis (that the early books of the Bible are an amalgam from four primary sources). Many facts are explained by few assumptions, the mark of a good theory.

If your religion demands that you begin with the conclusion that the Bible is right, you’re no longer following the evidence.

3. Science wins

For learning about reality, science has an excellent track record, while Christianity has taught us nothing. Science isn’t perfect, but it’s the best that we’ve got, and when the Bible says something that contradicts the science, what can we do but go with the discipline that delivers?

Apologists like William Lane Craig admit the value of science when he cites the Big Bang. He wants a beginning to the universe, and the Big Bang gives him that. It has the backing of famous scientists that he can quote (he likes quotes from famous scientists). Unfortunately, evolution steps on his theological toes, so he rejects it.

This nonscientist imagines himself the Judge of All Science, able to sift out the good stuff (Big Bang) from the nonsense (evolution), but with this ridiculous and ill-informed position, he has lost any standing as a commenter of science.

Laypeople like Craig and me have no option but to accept the scientific consensus where it exists. It’s not perfect, but we have nothing better.

Apologists often praise science where they can but fall back on handwaving when the evidence is inconvenient. Beware.

4. Be consistent: use the same standard to evaluate all truth claims.

Whenever you reject a pseudoscientific claim like astrology or a supernatural worldview like Islam, check to see if your reasoning would also reject Christianity. And whenever you accept a Christian claim (the Resurrection, a Jesus miracle, the Bible’s creation story), see if your criteria would also accept similar stories from other religions. Don’t demand tough standards for the other guy but give your cherished beliefs a pass.

Prophecy is a good example. Don’t laugh at people impressed by Nostradamus or who find clues in the Bible Code or who got caught up on Harold Camping’s hysteria about the end of the world if you apply the same poor thinking to the Bible’s claims of prophecy. We all know what a good prophecy is, but Christians seem to forget that when it’s their own claims in the spotlight.

(I’ve explored prophecy claims in Psalm 22, Isaiah 53, the virgin birth, and Daniel.)

5. Don’t judge competing interpretations based on your agenda. Let the Bible speak for itself.

What if the Bible seems to contradict itself? For example,

• The Bible says that faith alone is required for salvation (Romans 3:28) but also that works are sufficient to earn eternal life (Matthew 25:31–46).
• Jesus had a physical body after the resurrection (Luke 24:37–43). Or did he (Luke 24:31, 36)?
• The Bible’s six-day creation story conflicts with the Garden of Eden story.

The context should be the whole Bible.

Apologists pick their way through the minefield of verses, highlighting the ones that make their case and ignoring those that don’t. I suppose they depend on their readers’ ignorance (or complicity).

Don’t make the Bible into a sock puppet that says whatever you need it to. If the Bible says contradictory things, let it speak for itself. Don’t apologize for it.

Maybe (remember rule 2) the Bible is simply wrong.

To be concluded in part 2.

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(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 3/12/15.)

Image credit: Olga Berrios, flickr, CC
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Let’s wrap up our critique of Jim Wallace’s article, “Ten Principles When Considering Alleged Bible Contradictions.” (Part 1 here.)

Principle #8: Description is Different Than Approval.

“Remember, just because a Biblical author writes about something, this does not mean God condones it or supports it.”

Wallace wrestles with the problem of polygamy in the Bible. Many patriarchs are shown with multiple wives, and wise king Solomon in particular had a large harem. Does this make clear that God is fine with polygamy? Apparently not, as Wallace assures us that “from the very beginning, anyone who had more than one wife was in sin and was living in opposition to God’s will.”

His evidence is the vague clue that overseers should have one wife and the demand that kings should have few wives—hardly evidence that God hates polygamy. Wallace must ignore polygamy practiced by most of the patriarchs without a peep of protest against polygamy by God. God even told David that he had blessed him with many wives and would’ve been happy to give him more (2 Samuel 12:8).

Why do you think God dislikes polygamy? Just because you do? This is an unusually blatant example of our Christian apologist playing God like a sock puppet by reading into the Bible his own views on a social issue.

Principle #9: Don’t Fret Copyist Variants.

True, there are variants in the thousands of Bible manuscripts, but none challenge anything important. And it’s not like these variants are an embarrassing secret—they’re acknowledged in the footnotes of just about every Bible.

The example this time is of conflicting accounts of a battle. In one account (2 Samuel 8:3–4), David captured 700 horsemen, while in another account of the same battle (1 Chronicles 18:3–4), he captured 7000.

Wallace notes that this isn’t especially important, and I agree. Note, though, that Wallace is again discarding biblical inerrancy. The Bible isn’t magically protected against error, so even he must accept the Bible being occasionally wrong.

But by tossing out this trivial example, Wallace may hope to camouflage an important issue. Here’s where it gets interesting. We agree that copies of Bible books can contain errors, and we agree that very, very few of the original copies from the first couple of centuries have survived. Scholars have thousands of cases of two or more variants of a single passage where we have manuscripts documenting those variants. The famous long ending of Mark is an example. Wallace will point to modern Bibles that show the most reliable version and footnote the alternative version. So where’s the problem?

Here it is: imagine a fork in the historical road, with two different manuscript traditions of a single verse, for which we have copies from only one tradition. Do we have the accurate version now? We wouldn’t even know to ask the question! Only with copies of both traditions can we distinguish verses that have been changed from those that have been copied flawlessly from the original (more here, here).

Who knows what we’d discover if we could access every single manuscript copy. Maybe our Bible would have a thousand significant changes or maybe zero—we simply don’t know.

Principle #10: Remember Who’s Boss.

“Sometimes the God of the Old Testament can seem pretty harsh. . . . But we need to read the Scriptures carefully and remember God alone is God. . . . He gets to make decisions over life and death, even when we don’t understand all the details.”

The example he gives is a tough one, God’s demand of genocide for the Amalekites (I discuss this here). Wallace’s response is a bit like what God says to Job as he justifies his might-makes-right position, which I paraphrase as: “You talking to me, bitch? Uh yeah, get back to me after you’ve created a universe.”

Wallace’s argument is a popular response to this Problem of Evil. First, we assume objective morality. Second, work God in: “Objective, transcendent standards require an objective, transcendent standard giver.” Finally, declare that the Problem of Evil assumes objective morality; otherwise, “there can be no apparent injustice.”

See how that works? Atheists bring up the Problem of Evil, but this assumes objective morality, which in turn demands God as the objective morality source, and the atheists have shot themselves in the foot!

Let’s consider the problems with each step. First, he gives no support for his claim to objective morality, and I’ve never seen any. What we see around us are shared (and sometimes deeply held) moral beliefs, but that doesn’t make them objective moral truths.

Second, evolution nicely explains human morality. Evolution selects for altruistic traits in social animals like humans and other primates. We’re all the same species, which is why your moral sense is pretty much the same as everyone else’s.

Finally, morality works just fine without being objective (grounded outside of humanity). Look it up: morality and the ideas behind it such as good and bad are defined in the dictionary with no reliance on objective grounding.

Things get a bit embarrassing as Wallace justifies God’s murderous rampages as documented in the Old Testament: “If you create a piece of art, you have the right to destroy it, even though I do not. After all, it is your creation and, therefore, it is your property.”

We’re not talking about art, we’re talking about things that feel. A rock is different from a rabbit, and you can’t treat them the same.

The property argument also doesn’t work. If you create a building or a bridge, you’re not the boss once you sell or give it away. It’s not yours anymore. The same is true for a donated kidney or unit of blood that’s now in someone else. An artist can’t destroy their art once it’s in a museum or private collection. And if God gave life to an animal, it’s no longer his life to take back (h/t commenters Kodie and Greg G.).

In our eyes, humans are immoral when they kill a living creature just for the hell of it. In the same way, God doesn’t get a pass when he kills people with no reason besides “because he can.”

And why must Wallace defend God’s “perfect plan”? Why doesn’t God come down himself and give us his perfect justification? Omniscient gods shouldn’t need apologists.

Wallace’s goal here was to give fair rules for evaluating the Bible, but his bias is apparent as he concludes:

Am I going to stand as [the Bible’s] critic, or am I going to allow the Bible stand as a critic over me? Either I am going to decide what’s true or false in the Bible, or the Bible is going to decide what is true or false in me.

No one would yield to the sovereignty of a god before thoroughly and skeptically evaluating claims for that god, which is exactly what this article was supposed to help us do. But apparently an honest evaluation of the Bible doesn’t give him the advantage that he needs, so Wallace wants to first assume God and then the Bible’s supernatural claims. This is the Hypothetical God fallacy. It’s also circular logic.

No, we don’t assume God first. Honest adults start with the null hypothesis, which is that Christian supernatural belief is no more accurate than that of any other religion. They follow the evidence where it leads, regardless of whether they like it or not.

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(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 3/10/15.)

Image from Dean McCoy, CC license

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