I just returned from a weekend in beautiful San Juan Capistrano, California. I spoke at The Case for the Real Jesus conference, which was centered on Lee Strobel’s recent book by the same title. Reclaiming the Mind Ministries colleague Dan Wallace was there, and we enjoyed some great late-evening dinnertime conversation together. Dan spoke on the reliability of the New Testament text. As he did at the recent Greer-Heard Forum at which we both presented, he pointed out the startling contrast in textual scholar Bart Ehrman’s approaches to popular-level audiences, on the one hand, and to scholarly audiences on the other. Ehrman is misleading when writing to popular audiences, but more sober-minded and conservative to the scholarly. To the former, he suggests that Christian doctrines such as the Trinity and Incarnation are affected by variant textual readings and that the fact that there are more textual variants than there are words in the New Testament should lead us to skepticism regarding its reliability. To the latter, however, he has (in his work with his esteemed late mentor at Princeton, Bruce Metzger) argued that the New Testament’s textual reliability is sound. In fact, in his paperback (i.e., post-hardcover) edition of Misquoting Jesus, he had to qualify his popular-level skepticism by inserting that essential Christian beliefs are not affected by textual variants in the manuscript tradition of the New Testament and that this position doesn’t stand at odds with Metzger’s. By the way, Lee Strobel had interviewed Metzger for The Case for Christ, where Metzger clearly stated that his Christian faith had been strengthened—not weakened—through the abundant and reliable New Testament manuscripts available to us. (If you want to read further, see Dan Wallace’s article on this Ehrman: http://www.bible.org/page.php?page_id=3452.)

Sean McDowell, who also helped organize the conference, did a great job addressing the topic of Christianity’s allegedly being a “copycat religion” of Mediterranean mystery cults. If anything, it was the Christian faith that had an influence on these other religions! (In addition to Lee’s Real Jesus book, see Ronald Nash’s Gospel and the Greeks for a thorough refutation.) According to New Testament historian N.T. Wright, efforts to find parallels between Christianity and these mystery religions “have failed, as virtually all Pauline scholars now recognize,” and to do so “is an attempt to turn the clock back in a way now forbidden by the most massive and learned studies on the subject (What Saint Paul Really Said, 172, 173). Continue Reading »

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When the history books are written, I suppose that people will begin to recognize the degree to which our culture has changed in its thinking over the last few years. When all is said and done, I believe that the internet will be seen as the catalyst to postmodernism in the same way the printing press was to modernism.

I sympathize with the confusion in our world today. I am not riding the boat, but I do understand why people are floating upstream.

I was on campus at the University of Oklahoma today. I had lunch with a young Christian student. We began talking about relativism, skepticism, tolerance and the like. Being a Christian raised in a very conservative home, this young man expressed disgust at the attitude of the postmoderns on campus. “Your truth is your truth. My truth is my truth.” Isn’t this what they all say? I asked him if he sympathized with such a statement. Of course, the right Christian answer is “no.” Wait, it is “*%ll NO!”

I do. Continue Reading »

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