Surviving tornadoes this weekend in Oklahoma

On By Daniel B. WallaceIn Uncategorized2 Comments

I flew into Oklahoma City last Friday morning for a 40-part taping of “The Text of the New Testament” at Credo House in Edmond. Michael Patton described what happened this weekend as we encountered several tornadoes: http://www.reclaimingthemind.org/blog/2013/05/tornado/.

The latest news report is that 51 are dead, including 20 children. Very tragic. One news station in Oklahoma City said that the tornado could be bigger than an EF5. This means that the winds were over 200 mph in the vortex.

When Michael got me to the airport, it had been evacuated and we were told to get out of there–fast! Flights were canceled (including mine), and golf-ball sized hail started hitting the airport. I got a flight out on standby. When I heard that an elementary school was leveled I was heartbroken.

Michael Patton and Credo House have canceled their normal apologetic session for tomorrow night (Tuesday, 21 May 2013) and instead will be praying for the people of Moore, OK, where the tornado was the worst. They will be helping other Christian groups get supplies, water, clothes, and other essentials to the survivors.

Pray for the people of Moore, OK. One of the worst–if not THE worst–tornadoes ever to hit Oklahoma was one that happened in 1999. And it took the same path that today’s twister did–right through Moore.

 

The Authenticity of the Gospel of Judas

On By Daniel B. WallaceIn Contemporary Issues, Early Christianity, Textual Criticsim, Theology21 Comments

Katherine Weber of the Christian Post asked me some questions this week about the recent revelation that the Gospel of Judas had been authenticated by a number of means. See http://science.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/04/08/17656331-scholars-reveal-how-they-scrambled-to-authenticate-gospel-of-judas for the news report, and http://www.christianpost.com/news/gospel-of-judas-free-of-forgeries-but-still-fake-heretical-says-new-testament-scholar-93781/ for Katherine’s article (published 11 April 2013).

Below are her questions and my responses. This will also be published in the Christian Post later this week.

1) What are your thoughts on the authenticity of the Gospel of Judas? Is ink testing and comparison, in your opinion, an adequate method of determining the validity of an ancient text?

Paleography—the discipline of analyzing, deciphering, and dating ancient manuscripts—is little known outside of specialized circles. Traditionally, scholars especially use handwriting analysis to date manuscripts. Handwriting changes over time, and ancient Greek papyri, of which there are hundreds of thousands still in existence, give us plenty of illustrations of these changes. Actual dated papyri give us concrete evidence for when a particular style of writing was used. Of course, the manuscripts do not use our modern dating system. Instead, they are indexed to the reigns of the Caesars, mention a known person in an official capacity whose dates are known, or speak of astronomical events. For example, a petition to a government official written in “the 25th year of Marcus Aurelius Severus Antoninus Caesar” was penned in AD 216. By such fixed dates on some of the papyri, scholars can fix the patterns of handwriting of other papyri to a range of dates. On such undated papyri, the range can be as short as fifty years.

But Coptic manuscripts are notoriously difficult to date because the handwriting was more stable than Greek manuscripts. Pinpointing the date to within one hundred years is difficult, if not impossible, in most cases. Ink analysis is important because of the shifts in ancient technology and methods that can be located in time. Radiocarbon dating is not usually used on ancient manuscripts because, until recently, it necessarily destroyed part of the document being analyzed. Apparently, radiocarbon dating was used on the Gospel of Judas, however. (There is a relatively new method for dating manuscripts that is non-destructive. I did not see any discussion of this in the report. Developed by Dr. Marvin Rowe of Texas A & M University and his doctoral assistant, Professor Karen Steelman, the method uses a plasma chamber that does not damage the artifact. See Marvin W. Rowe and Karen L. Steelman, “Non-destructive 14C Dating: Plasma-Chemistry and Supercritical Fluid Extraction,” March 2010, ACS National Meeting 2010. So it would indeed have been possible to get a relatively firm date on this fragment without destroying any text.) One problem with all kinds of radiocarbon dating, however, is that this too cannot give a precise date. Depending on the age of the artifact, the range can vary widely.

The recent revelations by Joseph Barabe indicate a date of “approximately A.D. 280,” but this seems to be more precise than the technology would suggest. Most likely, the confluence of ink analysis and radiocarbon dating have both legitimately authenticated this codex and fixed the date to the late third to early fourth century.

2) What criticisms do you have of the Gospel of Judas’ authenticity?

It is important to distinguish two concepts regarding its authenticity. First, there is the issue of whether this document is a modern forgery or a bona fide ancient text. The evidence seems to be quite strong that this is the latter. Second, when we hear the word ‘authentic’ regarding an early sub-Christian writing it is natural to conclude that authentic = true as regards the historicity of the Christian faith. This is not the case in this instance. All that is being claimed is that the manuscript really was produced in the late third century.

3) If it became a fact that the Gospel of Judas were real, how would this change the study of the New Testament?

Most likely, the original Gospel of Judas was written in the second half of the second century. Irenaeus, writing in about AD 180, condemned a gospel by this name as a fake, and described its contents as revealing that Judas “alone, who knew the truth as no one else did, accomplished the mystery of the betrayal” of Jesus. This fits well with the contents of the codex, in which Jesus praises Judas as the one who will set his spirit free from the bonds of his physical body. This is vintage Gnosticism, which made a hard distinction between the spiritual and material world, branding the one good and the other bad. But does this mean that there is any historical truth to the Gospel of Judas, that it actually tells us the real story about the relation of Jesus to Judas? Hardly. Not a single scholar thinks that this conversation has any historical credibility. Irenaeus was right: this is a fake gospel which promotes a heretical idea about Jesus of Nazareth. The discovery and authentication of the Judas codex does nothing to disturb that assessment.

A New Kind of Apologetics: Christian Renaissance

On By Daniel B. WallaceIn Contemporary Issues, New Testament Studies, Theology5 Comments

News on the Christian Renaissance Apologia Conference coming up on April 12–13:

I’ve mentioned this apologetics conference a couple of times on this site, but I thought I’d give a lot more information on it this go-around.

First, a word about Christian Renaissance. This is a new concept in apologetics. In fact, it’s much more than apologetics. In odd-numbered years, the Christian Renaissance will be hosting an apologetics conference (called Apologia); in even-numbered years CR will be hosting a right-brain creativity conference/session/get-away/whatever. That’s called Poiema.

What makes Christian Renaissance new are two things.

First, it’s apologetics geared toward the postmodern world. Without sacrificing the important content that modernist apologetics has contributed, CR wants to build on thats but also go in a slightly different direction. CR recognizes that we are firmly entrenched (as much as can be) in a postmodern world. This means that the  worldviews of people in Europe and America especially focus on authenticity more than truth, a holistic view of humanity as opposed to a view that elevates the mind above all else, a strong desire for community including community service, social justice more than proclamation of truth, a relativistic view of truth, ambiguity and uncertainty over neatly packaged and dogmatic claims. There is much in postmodernism that should resonate with Christians; there are some things that should not. Postmoderns seek community but tend to have little clue how to accomplish it. Postmoderns tend to view all truth as relative. And although evangelicals cannot hold to this, we should recognize that even absolute truth is not always accessible absolutely. This means that a measure of humility (rather than triumphalism) will be a key characteristic of these conferences. Christian Renaissance: Apologia is intended to showcase top-notch scholars, front-line thinkers in their fields, who also know how to communicate well. They are not the sorts of people who shy away from the tough questions, but recognize that evangelical Christianity has some answers, but by no means has all the answers. They are not dogmatic where dogma is not warranted. And they recognize that the question people are asking about the Christian faith today is not so much, Is it true? as much as Does it work?

Second, Christian Renaissance has a non-apologetics component known as Poiema. Poiema is the Greek word for poem or creation (with the accent on the truly imaginative aspects of creation). Christian Renaissance: Poiema, the even-yeared conference/symposium/??, focuses on the right-brain thinkers, the artisans, artists, actors, writers, littérateurs, creative problem-solvers, musicians, and the like. Those who will launch the inaugural event in 2014 have been given a tabula rasa: they can do anything that they see as that which helps to bring prominence back to those who are right-brainers, those who have been slowly disenfranchised in the American evangelical church. These two branches of Christian Renaissance unite the left-brain and right-brain thinkers in a way that has not been done in a long, long time. Stay tuned!

Now, back to the inaugural Christian Renaissance: Apologia Conference. The speakers are well-respected scholars (not just apologists) who are doing cutting-edge work in their respective disciplines. All of them have published extensively in academic spheres. Their work is peer-reviewed by the best scholars in their guild. And they all are excellent speakers who know how to communicate with people who have little to no theological training.

The theme of this inaugural conference is “Skeptics and the Savior: Did the Word Really Become Flesh?” The evidence for the person of Jesus Christ, accenting his divine nature, will be examined from Qumran to Constantine. The lectures and lecturers are as follows:

Darrell Bock: The Gospels: Recording before There Was Recording

Craig Evans: The Dead Sea Scrolls and Christology

Gary Habermas: A Resurrection Time-Line: Linking our Earliest Sources to the Earliest Witnesses

Daniel B. Wallace: Did Constantine Invent the Deity of Christ?

The conference kicks off at 7 PM on Friday, April 12, at the Hope Center (2001 West Plano Parkway) in Plano, Texas. Wallace will give the opening lecture, with time for Q&A afterwards. Snacks will be provided that evening. There will be TWO book-signings. Saturday morning a continental breakfast will be served, and the conference will begin at 9 AM. A delicious catered lunch will be provided, too. The conference on Saturday will include the other three speakers, with Q&A for each of them. Michael Patton of Credo House will be the emcee. Throughout the conference, attendees will be able to send in their questions (probably by cell phone text), and a panel discussion in which these questions are aired will conclude the conference. It gets over at 4 PM on Saturday.

But that’s not all! There will be a special and spectacular dinner with the scholars Saturday evening for those who wish to rub shoulders with them in a more intimate setting. We will be meeting at Chamberlain’s Steak House in Dallas–one of the finest steak houses in the Metroplex. I can’t tell you all that will be involved in this, but I can tell you that it will be well worth it. The meal is partially subsidized.

What does all this cost? And when do you need to sign up? For the conference proper, the tickets are $55 for an adult and $40 for students. The dinner on Saturday night is separate. That’s $100, and worth it! Room for only 60 people. Visit http://www.renaissanceconference.com for more info and to buy tickets. Tickets will be on sale through Wednesday, April 10. Because the caterers need to know how many meals to prepare, it’s best to sign up early. Seating is limited (especially at the Scholars Dinner), so reserve your place now and be a part of this historic event!