Bill Pratt | December 27, 2010
Post Author: Bill Pratt Although the author did not record his name within the text itself (a common practice in the ancient world), the first book found in the New Testament (NT) has historically been attributed to the writing of Matthew, a tax collector and one of the twelve disciples of Jesus. Although some NT [...]
Bill Pratt | January 6, 2010
Post Author: Bill Pratt In part 1 of this post, we discussed Simon Greenleaf’s conclusion that the Gospel writers’ testimony about Jesus Christ should be considered true, based on the canons of legal evidence, an area in which he was an undisputed expert. Some skeptics, however, have argued that the standards for judging the credibility [...]
Bill Pratt | January 4, 2010
Post Author: Bill Pratt I recently read a short book entitled The Testimony of the Evangelists by Simon Greenleaf. Greenleaf was one of the most respected American jurists of the nineteenth century. He taught law at Harvard University and wrote a judicial classic, Treatise on the Law of Evidence. This work was used as a [...]
Bill Pratt | August 12, 2009
Post Author: Bill Pratt Textual critics are the scholars who study the manuscript evidence for the New Testament and determine which readings among the various manuscripts are likely to be the original (see previous post for background). Although the vast majority of the variants are simple spelling or word order errors made by copyists, there [...]
Bill Pratt | August 3, 2009
Post Author: Bill Pratt I have been having an interesting discussion with a gentleman on the issue of the empty tomb. We’ve touched on some of the evidence, but I decided to present a brief synopsis of William Lane Craig’s arguments for the empty tomb (from Jesus Under Fire). Here goes! The historical credibility of [...]
Bill Pratt | July 30, 2009
Post Author: Bill Pratt I just finished reading a wonderful book by New Testament scholar Craig Blomberg, called The Historical Reliability of the Gospels. In his chapter where he discusses the miracles recorded in the Gospels, he had this to say about the scientific objection to miracles. In short, the scientific objection to the credibility [...]
Bill Pratt | July 15, 2009
Post Author: Bill Pratt Only if the skeptic is open to the existence of a God who can intervene in the affairs of the world. I have discussed the historical reliability of the New Testament with many skeptics over the years. The skeptics I typically speak to inevitably dismiss or downplay much of the historical [...]
Bill Pratt | March 2, 2009
Post Author: Bill Pratt In this series of posts, we have shown that the NT writers claimed to be eyewitnesses or associates of eyewitnesses; we have shown that we have multiple witnesses, and we have shown that the eyewitnesses were trustworthy. How? They included embarrassing details about themselves and difficult details about their subject of [...]
Bill Pratt | February 28, 2009
Recently, one of the commenters on our blog alleged that the documents of the New Testament simply repeat common themes, ideas, and facts that were widely circulated in the ancient world. Perhaps you have heard others make this claim, such as the folks who created the Zeitgeist video. One of the most popular arguments is [...]
Bill Pratt | February 27, 2009
Post Author: Bill Pratt Continuing from part 6, we will examine more evidence for the trustworthiness of the NT writers. A fourth question about the NT writers’ integrity: are any of the historical facts they mention corroborated by other sources? Here the NT writers really shine. During the first and second centuries, there were many historians [...]
