The Authority and Reliability of the Bible with Dr. Michael Kruger
On today’s episode of the Journeywomen podcast, we’re discussing the authority, reliability, and development of the Bible with Dr. Michael Kruger. If you’ve ever had questions about the reliability of the scriptures, how they came to be, or whether or not they stand up to scrutiny, this episode is for you. Dr. Kruger is one of the leading scholars in the study of the origins of the New Testament, particularly the development of the New Testament canon and the transmission of the New Testament text. Dr. Kruger serves as the President and Samuel C. Patterson Professor of New Testament and Early Christianity at Reformed Theological Seminary, in Charlotte, NC.
He is the author of numerous books, most recently Christianity at the Crossroads: How the Second Century Shaped the Future of the Church (SPCK, 2017; IVP Academic, 2018). Other publications include The Gospel of the Savior (Brill, 2005), The Heresy of Orthodoxy (Crossway, 2010, with Andreas Köstenberger), Canon Revisited (Crossway, 2012), and The Question of Canon (IVP, 2013). He is also the editor of and contributor to A Biblical-Theological Introduction to the New Testament (Crossway, 2016) and co-editor of The Early Text of the New Testament (Oxford, 2012) and Gospel Fragments (Oxford, 2009). In addition, Dr. Kruger served as president of the Evangelical Theological Society (2019), and is on the editorial board of the Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society and The Bulletin for Biblical Research.
INTERVIEW QUESTIONS
What claims does the Bible make about itself? Is there sufficient evidence to support those claims?
What are some common arguments that attempt to portray the Bible as unreliable and therefore irrelevant? Do these challenges stand up to scrutiny?
How long did it take for the Old Testament to be compiled? Is there pushback to the reliability of the Old Testament texts?
Moving towards the New Testament, can we trust the historical reliability of the Gospels?
Who were the authors of the Gospels, and where did they get their material?
When was the NT canon formed and how were those books picked?
What do we do with “other” Gospels like the Gospel of Thomas?
What do we do with passages in the Gospels that seem to contradict themselves?
How would you encourage someone who is struggling to believe the Bible really is true and reliable?
What are the implications of trusting that the Bible really is true and reliable? How will this change our lives?
NOTEWORTHY QUOTES
“The Old Testament canon was in place by the time Jesus came on the scene. This is important to recognize.”
“You could make the argument that the four Gospels are the most critiqued books within the Bible. There’s probably no books that have received more scrutiny, more careful examination, more attention in the whole history of the world than Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.”
“Time and time again the gospels have proved themselves to be trustworthy.”
“Scholars have written extensively on and shown that the gospels are incredibly aware of first-century realities, so much so that almost certainly they have been penned by someone who was there as an eyewitness, who saw these things. So when you look at evidence like that it shows that the gospels are quite trustworthy in terms of what they are telling us about Jesus and about the first century.”
“The fact that our gospel writers consistently get it right is really really impressive.”
“We as believers ought to try to go deeper into understanding why we believe what we believe, and I want to remind people that there’s nothing to be afraid of here. It’s like, you just don’t want to know, but I think you DO want to know whether these books can be trusted, and I think you’ll find that the deeper you go the more reasons you have to trust them.”
“It doesn’t mean there’s not hard things, there are. That doesn't mean there’s not complex questions that you have to wrestle with. But I think that just makes your faith all the more rich and full-orbed, and I think we all want to be people who believe with our eyes wide open, and not believe pretending or wishing things were a certain way with no reason to know that they are that way.”
“Categories of objection:
1. Historical origins: where the book came from and who wrote it. When did these books get collected into a canon, who are these authors, and can I trust them?
2. Have the texts been faithfully copied/transmitted? Has it been copied and changed so many times that it can no longer be trusted?
3. Objections over content: someone reading the gospels and not liking what they see.”
“Almost all objections now from the average person are moral in nature.”
“Whatever the objections happen to be, we need to be ready for them.”
“A really good way to respond is to ask the person who’s making the objection where their moral norms come from.”
“People really like throwing out moral objections, but what they rarely get is someone challenging them to account for their own moral standards.”
“Everybody who wrote a gospel is either a direct apostle [of Jesus] or an apostolic companion. And why that matters is because it positions them in a place where they could know these things.”
“The authors who wrote these books were actually commissioned by Jesus to tell his story.”
“Apostles were people sent out by Jesus, empowered by the Spirit to truthfully tell his story. Once you realize that, it’s not just an eyewitness biography, but it’s an authorized eyewitness biography. It’s one that Jesus commissioned himself. So when you add all that up you actually have multiple layers of why these gospels are so unique and why they can be trusted.”
“Every telling of a story is going to be different by virtue of all the circumstances that surround it. So we should expect that our gospels would be different. Now notice the work ‘different’ is not ‘contradictory.’ Differences are not contradictions, they’re just that, they’re differences. And I think this actually speaks to the reliability. What it shows is that they were not in collusion with each other… they independently told the story… but they’re all giving the same big picture.”
“The core of the canon was recognized very early. By the middle of the second century the church had agreed upon 22 out of the 27 New Testament books. That’s a stunning amount of unanimity.”
“The way books circulated around the first century was that there were copies made of them.”
“We already know [based on the Old Testament] that culturally [the Jews] had built into their own theology this idea that you don’t mess around with God’s Word in a way that alters it.”
“In the manuscripts that were left behind we can see that the scribes were very careful in their copying.”
“The Bible was not lowered to earth on golden tablets… We think God delivered the Bible through what we would call ‘normal historical channels.’ It will have inevitable historical things that happened to it. Some books get lost, some get burned, some are copied well, some are copied poorly, and over time you’ll have some textual variations that seep in.”
“Sometimes we have this impression when we doubt or struggle that we’re the only one who doubts and struggles and therefore we’re a bad Christian or not a very good believer or something’s wrong. But it’s very normal for Christians to ask these questions, and you should be free to ask these questions without any sense of guilt or frustration over that.”
“Churches need to cultivate a culture of asking hard questions and welcoming hard questions.”
“The Bible provides guidance on all parts of our lives.”
“Being able to trust the Bible as God’s Word really does affect everything.”
“If you're mentoring a Christian and they have tough questions that you can’t answer, or if you’re talking to a non-Christian who has tough questions that you can’t answer. The first step is to just admit that you can’t answer them. Then invite them to search for the answer together, walk through it side by side to find out the answers with each other.”
“Just not having an answer is not the same thing as there not being an answer.”
RESOURCES
Surviving Religion 101: Letters to a Christian Student on Keeping the Faith in College by Dr. Michael Kruger (forthcoming 2021)
SCRIPTURE REFERENCES
DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
How does understanding the authority and reliability of the Bible change how you will read and study it? How does it change how you view God?
How can you encourage someone in your life in their belief of the authority and reliability of Scripture?
What are the implications of trusting that the Bible really is true and reliable? How will this change your life?
What practical steps can you take to grow your understanding of the authority and reliability of the Bible?
What are you going to do or implement as a result of what you’ve learned this week?
IMPORTANT NOTE
Journeywomen interviews are intended to serve as a springboard for continued study in the context of your local church. While we carefully select guests each week, interviews do not imply Journeywomen's endorsement of all writings and positions of the interviewee or any other resources mentioned.
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