You're entering Outer Brightness. When you went through your faith transition, were you were you tempted to jettison the Bible too? And if you were tempted by that, why do you think you ultimately didn't reject the Bible or the concept of a word of God? Like how did you just there's just too much in the world, just too much evidence of God's existence.
I can't deny that. So I was like, OK, well, then what's my foundation? What am I going to what am I going to rely on? And I've kind of always considered the Bible as like, I don't know, it's strange because, you know, as a Latter-day Saint, it's not like I doubted the church in a sense, but it was always like, OK, if if this doesn't work out, you know, like I have a parachute, I have like a plan B, a safety plan where it's like at least I know that Jesus lives. You know, I may change my views about Jesus, but I just feel like there's just this part of my being that felt imperfect and I needed a savior. And so I was like, well, you know, I need Jesus and my savior. And the only way we can really know about Jesus is from the Bible. You know, so I kind of I kind of saw that as like my parachute in case I fell off a building or a cliff.
That would be my safety plan. So I could at least rely on that and figure things out from there. And I don't think it was like based on purely logic.
I think it was just like in my soul. I just kind of felt like this scripture spoke to me that, you know, that that I had to have a foundation of God speaking to us, because if we don't have objective revelation, then anything goes, really. You can kind of just make up any religion you want.
So we need some kind of objective standard. And maybe it was also due to like on my mission or elsewhere where Protestants or evangelicals planted seeds in me to kind of maybe germinated over time and kind of led to that conclusion. But no, there was never a time where I seriously was like, OK, I'm going to ditch the Bible and then had to gain that faith back. I was always just kind of like, OK, I'll start reading this.
I'll see where it takes me. That was kind of the mentality that I had. All right. Good. Michael.
Right. So by the time I my shelf broke, I had already fallen in love with the Bible just because of the way that God worked with me. You know, I, I came to really value a doctrine, a specific doctrine, which is imputation, and the Bible was very much responsible for opening my eyes to that doctrine. And I actually got to a point where I valued that the gospel, the true gospel, more than I was valuing the church. And I was like, I was really excited about it. And by the time the shelf broke, I was definitely thinking for a little bit like, hey, maybe, you know, maybe atheism is the way to go because I'm just sick and tired of being told when to go to church and what calling to have and just just everything and just all the control in my life from a man-made religion.
And I'm like, I can be I can be free. You know, I think that's how I was viewing it for a minute. And so I was I was considering, you know, jettisoning a belief in God. But I don't think the thought to to get rid of the Bible ever entered my mind. And so I don't think I would have lasted very long as an atheist if I had gone down that route. But then, you know, I started just thinking about experiences that I'd had much earlier on.
I mean, 15 years before the shelf breaking, where I'm convinced that that Jesus reached out to me and and made himself known to me in small ways. And I just realized I can I couldn't I couldn't betray God and know this was his fault. And and if I went down that that road, there wasn't freedom there. It was just going to be more spiraling into chaos and less control of my life and not having anything firm to stand on.
And, you know, I just I just couldn't go down that road. And, you know, the Bible was was definitely just something for me to hold on to. And especially with all the crazy stuff going on in my life, I mean, I was about to go through a divorce and and lose my house and have to move and all this other crazy stuff. And it just was something that I needed in my life at that point was to be able to be stable in some way. And really, the gospel and the Bible was was all I had. So, yeah, it just didn't really cross my mind for too long. Yeah, that's that's good.
Thank you both for for what you said there. It did cross my mind briefly. So it's interesting, you know, I mentioned earlier that it was like 2001 when I kind of had reached the conclusion that that the Book of Mormon wasn't a historical text. But then I continued to, you know, remain active in the LDS church and serve in callings and try to figure out how I fit there. You know, if I don't hold the belief that the Book of Mormon is historical, if I believe that it's, you know, some type of scriptural production that that is still in some sense inspired by God, then what does that look like? And, you know, then then got into, you know, it's kind of interesting that the various levels of study that you can kind of go through and as you're making your exit, you know, you move from Book of Mormon and historicity to studying Mormon history and more deeply on Joseph Smith.
And so, you know, it's probably like 2007 I concluded my really intensive study of Mormon history and doctrine. And I can place it there because it like coincides with the birth of our youngest daughter. Angela had complications with previous pregnancies. We'd had some miscarriages.
And so, you know, her OBGYN was very cautious any time there was something kind of pointing to a complication with a pregnancy. And so there was one time that we'd been sent to the hospital and Angela was sleeping and I was sitting there reading Rough Stone Rolling by Richard Bushman, you know, the biography, the major biography of Joseph Smith. And in actually in April of that year, he had come to give a presentation at a fireside in our LDS stake. And I had gone to that and gotten him to sign my book. And I told him, you know, that it was because of him and Eugene England that I was still in the LDS church.
You know, both of them are kind of more liberal thinking Latter-day Saints. And, you know, he told me all that he had known Eugene England personally and then he thought, you know, that my having said that would have pleased him. But in any case, you know, there I was in a hospital observation room reading Rough Stone Rolling and, you know, praying for the well-being of my wife and soon to be born daughter. And at some point during my reading that day, it kind of hit me that I no longer believed Joseph Smith.
I didn't view him as reliable and I was left with the kind of, you know, what now question. And while I continued to read Rough Stone Rolling, it took me probably half a year or more. I started reading Mormon and evangelical conversation books like How Wide the Divide by Craig Blomberg and Steven Robinson and then Bridging the Divide by Robert Millet and Greg Johnson and Claiming Christ by Robert Millet and Gerald McDermott, you know, where these authors would, you know, one LDS, one evangelical would have a kind of a conversation. And I think How Wide the Divide was like transcripts of presentations that Blomberg and Robinson or maybe it's Bridging the Divide was transcripts that Millet and Greg Johnson would do kind of on the road at Christian churches. But, you know, those books, you know, quote unquote, you know, Mormon and evangelical dialogue type books really helped me to understand at a popular level the differences between how evangelicals and Latter-day Saints approach scripture. But it was still a question in my mind whether the Bible was a trustworthy source of truth. I think some of that stems from, you know, what we talked about earlier, where you kind of you kind of set up this hierarchy in your mind, right, that the Bible is flawed. So the LDS scriptures are more trustworthy, more reliable sources of doctrine for you as a believing Latter-day Saint. And so with that in mind, when the LDS scriptures go, you know, you already kind of have in your mind, well, the Bible's flawed.
So I remember sitting and thinking one day, you know, is the Bible just an older lie, you know, and really had to wrestle with that question in my mind. And, you know, Half Price Books became like my favorite bookstore, and I picked up several books there that were kind of important to me in informing, you know, my understanding of Christianity's sacred literature in contrast to that of Mormonism. One that I want to talk about a little bit is the Oxford Illustrated History of the Bible. I bought that and started reading through it towards the end of my time in the LDS church, you know, and it covers the writing, transmission, translation and canonization of the text of the Bible throughout its history.
And I learned a lot through that book. And again, you know, what really stood out to me is that the Bible could be studied as a historical text. There's a there's a manuscript to the tradition. There's textual criticism. You know, it can be studied. And of course, it can be studied in a critical and an unbelieving way. But those tools, those scholarly tools can be applied to it effectively because it has a history. And it struck me as I was reading through that book, especially that, you know, the Book of Mormon doesn't have that textual history and you can't really effectively apply those scholarly tools to it, though the Maxwell Institute is trying now. You just can't. You can't go you can't turn anywhere to find, you know, a manuscript in the original language that you could look to see, you know, what what Nephi really meant by X.
It's not there. So that that really kind of informed my understanding of of Christian scholarship around the Bible. And it really fascinated me. So that just brought to mind something I wanted to mention is that BYU, I do I don't know if you remember the author's name.
Maybe I should just Google it. But Deseret Book is now selling a new translation of the New Testament. I haven't read it myself. OK, it's called the New Testament, a translation for Latter Day Saints. And it's by Thomas Wayman.
And I think, yeah, it's a religious studies center, I think, at BYU. And I haven't read it personally. But Dr. White, Dr. James White is a Christian apologist.
He talked about it on his program one time and he said he hadn't gone through it extensively. You know, he reads fluently. He reads, speaks, well, you know, biblical, Greek, biblical Hebrew. And he went through and he says he found no problems with it, with this translation in terms of comparing that to the original text. So it seems like this New Testament from Thomas Wayman and sold by the church, it goes back to the biblical scholarship.
You know what? What Christians have been saying forever. You got to go back to the biblical texts, to the manuscript evidence.
And it seems like that's what they're doing now. But when you compare that to LDS doctrine and the changes that Joseph Smith made in his translation, it's like, you know, totally different things. You know, you read John one, he talked about it read John one on air.
And it sounds like you're just reading, you know, the English Standard Version or something. So I don't understand this new direction that's going on because it sounds like it's just going opposite to what the church has done before and in a direction where it's like it would lead Latter Day Saints out of the church. So is the Bible reliable? And how did you come to that conclusion?
Matthew, you go first. Well, I kind of looked at it in a combined presuppositional and apologetic, evidential kind of way. I kind of mentioned how just in a personal level, you know, if there is a God, it just made sense to me that you can't know anything unless God is a reliable source of information. And if God is a truthful God. And it just seemed to me that we have to have an objective standard of truth, of revelation from God, because otherwise we couldn't know anything about God. And maybe that goes back to my LDS upbringing, because that was one point that in the lectures on faith that was really driven home, it says that we can't know God without revelation.
And I still agree with that. We can't know God if there's no revelation. We're completely cut off from God and we don't know him at all. So presuppositionally, I kind of believe, like, OK, we have to have a standard. And then evidentially, you brushed on the textual evidence, the manuscript transmission. As a Latter-day Saint, I was kind of we had this idea and this is also something that Bart Ehrman kind of teaches in some of his talks, which is completely fallacious. It's this idea of, OK, imagine in your mind the original copies of the Bible written down. Well, they copied them and gave them to someone else. And then they copied it and gave them to someone else. And then they copied and gave it to someone else. And so all we have is earliest copies of copies of copies. We don't have the originals.
And so you kind of have in this mind like, yeah, it's like the game of telephone where you can't really trust it because, you know, once you get to the fourth or fifth person, who knows if that's what the original was. And it surprises me now that Bart Ehrman kind of still uses that argument because we know that it was not a controlled line of transmission. It was something that was copied and sent out everywhere. So it wasn't like one person made a copy and then that person made a copy and got rid of the original copy. It was like one person made several copies and gave it to other people and they made several copies and gave it to other people. And it went all throughout the Roman Empire that indeed was the original.
The entire region. So just understanding textual criticism and textual transmission, transmission being the copying and passing down of manuscripts through families. So you can kind of see like the genealogy of the manuscripts going back, just realizing that and understanding that and saying, okay, yeah, it doesn't make sense that they would get rid of the earlier copies.
And why would you have a single transmission line? You know, there was no such thing, anything close to like you would see with the pope in Roman Catholicism today. There wasn't that like strict control of the word of God. It was given out everywhere.
That along with, sorry, I had a thought and I lost it. Just the fact that we have texts that go all the way back to at the earliest, the early second century, P52. I think currently P52 is the oldest one. It dates back to about 125 AD. That doesn't sound too remarkable, but when you consider the fact that it's of the Gospel of John and where most scholars probably predict that the Gospel of John was written around or sometime after the fall of the temple in Jerusalem. So that was 70 AD. It's within about 50, 60 years of the Gospel of John being written.
We have this papyrus fragment of John chapter 18. And when you compare that, it doesn't sound you're like, well, 50 years, anybody could change that, right? But the thing is, is when you compare it to other works of antiquity, sometimes there are hundreds of years before we have any copies of that writing, any of the Iliad, any of these great ancient works of literature. There's hundreds of years that pass by. So some of those copies, they date back to the sixth or seventh century. And they were written in the first century or earlier.
And we might have 100, 200, 300 copies of certain works. Whereas with scripture, with the New Testament, you have close to about 5,700 in Greek alone. And in other translations, you've got Latin. You've got the Syriac.
You've got the Boheric, I think. You've got all these different languages. And that amounts to over 15,000, 20,000 copies that you can date back. And textual critics and scholars are looking back and seeing how they all connect to each other.
There's a new method called the CBGM, Coherence-Based Genealogical Method, where they're using computer methods to kind of tie in and see how each text relates to the other. We just have, as Daniel Wallace says, he's a scholar in textual criticism. He says, we have an embarrassment of riches. We just have so, it's just a mountain of evidence for the New Testament.
It's just incredible. I saw a video where they were saying, here's, they were comparing a text or a manuscript to a coffee bean. And they were saying, well, you know, in this old ancient text, we've got 20 or 30. And this one, we've got 100. And when he piled on that huge mound of coffee beans for the New Testament, it was just mind blowing.
I just remember seeing that and just, I couldn't believe it. So we just have so much evidence, that and everything else in that. And we also have early church fathers, quotations from them, where we can tie that into our manuscript evidence and we can, there's still some textual variant issues, but they're very minor.
We have a huge agreement. Most of the errors you can, are spelling changes or, you know, maybe a letter was swapped with another one. That's over 90% of the changes are in between manuscripts as just minor errors that are easily tracked. So when you just tie all this together, it's just like, the Bible is just so reliable. And last thing I want to mention is while Bart Ehrman has made a career on trying to place doubt in the Bible. What's interesting is in his book, Misquoting Jesus, where he makes that kind of telephone argument, like we don't even have the original copies. We don't have copies of copies.
All we have is copies of copies of copies. He actually wrote in an appendix in a later printing. He said that, yeah, basically what we have today, that's what the New Testament was. That's what they originally wrote. And he said in a debate, he said the New Testament is the most reliable text of antiquity, bar none, like no comparison, nothing else compares. And just hearing him say that when he's so quoted so often by LDS and others to try to put doubt on the New Testament, he says, no, it's the most reliable text period of antiquity.
That's just mind blowing. You're listening to Outer Brightness, a podcast for post Mormons who are drawn by God to walk with Jesus rather than turn away. Outer Brightness. Outer Brightness.
Outer Brightness. There's no weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth here, except when Michael's Hangry that is. Hangry that is.
Hangry that is. We were all born and raised in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, headquartered in Salt Lake City, Utah, more commonly referred to as the Mormon faith. All of us have left that religion and have been drawn to faith in Jesus Christ based on biblical teachings. The name of our podcast, Outer Brightness, reflects John 1 9, which calls Jesus the true light, which gives light to everyone. We have found life beyond Mormonism to be brighter than we were told it would be. And the light we have is not our own. It comes to us from without.
Thus, Outer Brightness. Our purpose is to share our journeys of faith and what God has done in drawing us to his son. We have conversations about all aspects of that transition, the fears, challenges, joys, and everything in between. We're glad you found us, and we hope you'll stick around. Yeah, he's an interesting scholar. You and I have studied through a lot of the same things, it sounds like, that have helped us to have a trust in the Bible as reliable.
When I was first out of the LDS Church, I was in, I don't remember if it was the Mormon Stories Facebook, but it was probably the Mormon Stories Facebook group. And I became acquainted with this LDS scholar who had studied under Bart Ehrman. Ehrman was his PhD advisor, and had studied New Testament at the University of North Carolina, where Ehrman at least taught at the time.
I think he's still there. But at that time, I started reading some Ehrman books, because this LDS scholar was kind of an influence on me, and I was trying to understand at the time, is the Bible reliable? And then I started studying through some of the other kind of faithful Christian text critical scholars, and realized that some of the arguments that Ehrman makes, as you mentioned, he kind of walks back from them in the footnotes. So I started to pay close attention to what he was saying, not just in the body of the text, but in the footnotes and endnotes to his books.
But I'll just kind of cover my answer to this question, and Michael, then we'll go to you. So is the Bible reliable? How did I come to that conclusion?
I reached the conclusion that yes, it is, but I didn't come to that conclusion kind of in a strictly doctrinal way. I came in through the side door, as I mentioned earlier. So in early 2008, I was finishing up my last semester of a business degree at a small Roman Catholic college near where I live. And one of the requirements was to take a religion class to qualify for graduation, because it was a Catholic school. So I took an introduction to the New Testament course, because the course description indicated that it would be a study of the New Testament by application of the historical method. And knowing where, if you guys know where, as I've said, where I was in regard to the Book of Mormon at the time, that really kind of interested me. And then the studying that I'd done through the Oxford history of the Bible and our illustrated history of the Bible. And so as part of that course, we were required to read the New Testament. And also, the course textbook was by Vincent P. Brannock, Understanding the New Testament. And he touched on some things that I'd heard of before from like LDS Institute manuals on the New Testament, but I'd largely brushed over them because the New Testament wasn't at that time in my mind the keystone text of my faith tradition. And as I was preparing for this, I thought about, just imagine that, right? There I was claiming to be a Mormon, yes, but not just a Mormon, a Christian. And I didn't hold in my mind the New Testament as the foundational text of my faith.
That just kind of struck me as I was preparing for this. But Brannock's text kind of covered the historical background and commentary for each book of the New Testament. He covered topics like authorship questions, the synoptic problem, the Q source theory, and other text-critical approaches to the New Testament. And as you noted, Matthew, with Ehrman, some of those topics can cause Christians to doubt. But for me, they had the opposite effect because of where I was coming from out of a faith tradition that basically required you to have just a base-fideistic approach to the Book of Mormon, right? There's no textual or manuscript evidence for the Book of Mormon. The plates aren't extant.
They were returned to heaven by an angel. So you can't study them. You can't study the original languages. All you have is this book that was put forth to the world in 1830. And so coming to a study of the New Testament that really looked at it from a critical scholarly perspective and realizing again, as I had in other studies as well, that you can study the Bible from a historical standpoint and it holds up. It really allowed me to kind of come in that side door to the Bible is reliable, as Sproul says, the Bible is reliable. It's a reliable witness of Jesus as the Son of God. Jesus has a high view of the Bible. Therefore, Jesus is God and God is infallible. Therefore, the Bible is infallible into that kind of classical approach to that logical syllogism. So that's kind of how I came to the view that the Bible is reliable.
What about you, Michael? I actually came to the view that the Bible was reliable when I was on my mission. And that was just from talking to an evangelical guy who debated me and my companion for three hours. And he just continually used the Bible and just his passion just caught me on fire. And, you know, it planted a seed in me that just continued to grow up until my faith crisis. And it just, you know, caused me not to really doubt the Bible. But once I kind of reached the conclusion that Mormonism was not true, you know, I came to this conclusion kind of different from you because I went from the inside out, just based on the content, on the doctrine in the Bible.
You know, I was already convinced that it was completely reliable. For instance, you know, I would look at the Book of Mormon and in the Book of Mormon, it says that it was an abomination to the Lord that David had all these wives and concubines but then in the doctrine and covenants, it talks about the exact same instant and it says, you know, well, these were given to him by me and, you know, it's totally fine. And it's like, okay, you're talking about the exact same, you know, instant, you know, the same thing, but you've got a complete contradictory statement here. But in the Bible, what I found was just a symphony, like a perfect harmony. Once I started to really understand it, you know, as a Latter-day Saint, I thought that it had a lot of different contradictory statements in there, especially when it came to faith and works. But then once I learned about double imputation and how Christ exchanges his righteousness for our sin, and then how sanctification plays into that, I realized that there really is no contradiction in the Bible at all, that it's all telling the same story and you can see that story woven throughout the entire Bible from different authors talking about different things that's still there. Like one of the big texts that I used to throw at Christians all the time was in James chapter 2 where it says, Abraham was justified when he offered his son upon the altar, right? So it is our works that justify us and I was just looking at this the other day and the next verse says, thus it was fulfilled. You know, the scripture which says Abraham believed God and it was imputed to him for righteousness. And so, you know, you go back and you look at that verse all the way back in Genesis. This is before Isaac is even born and Abraham is counted righteous without sacrificing his son on the altar. And so what I realize is that Abraham's justification or Abraham's salvation was not justified by his obedience, but his obedience was justified by his salvation.
And I see that all over the place. Another spot in James 2, not in chapter 2, but in James it says, you'll probably remember this verse, it says if you convince the sinner of the error of his ways, you'll save a soul from death and you will cover a multitude of sins. And when I was a Latter-day Saint, I kind of viewed that as like, oh, I'm going to cover my own sin, like God's going to forgive me for some of the bad things I've done.
You know, he's going to look the other way because I saved somebody. But, you know, understanding the gospel, it's like, okay, like God has actually covered my sins with the robe of righteousness and he's going to do the same thing for a sinner that accepts him. And it's just, this is woven throughout all the scriptures. So I came to the conclusion that the Bible is reliable because the message is harmonious throughout the entire book. From the Old Testament all the way to the New Testament, it's one gospel. You don't have contradictions all over the place.
But then I'm able to see like what you guys are talking about. You know, I'll see it all the time on Facebook, like, oh, this city was discovered that was talked about, you know, in the Old Testament. And here's the tomb of this king that the Bible talks about. And there's lots of evidence and you see it. And I just don't think the same way as you do, Paul, where the evidence is what kind of makes me accept it. But it's kind of a side note for me, like, okay, like, that's great. I do like knowing that the evidence is there.
You know, I would feel very flustered if it wasn't there because it would just trigger me and it would remind me of Mormonism. But yeah, that's basically how I came to believe that the Bible was reliable. And that's how I came to believe that the Bible was reliable.
But yeah, that's basically how I came to believe that the Bible was reliable. Music for the Outer Brightness podcast is graciously provided by the talented Brianna Flournoy and by Adams Road. Learn more about Adams Road by visiting their ministry page at adamsroadministry.com. Stay bright, Flyer Flies. The word made fresh, the risen Son. Heaven and earth will pass away, but the word of the Lord endures forever. How this world is in decay, but the word of our God through ages remains. Lord, you promised that we, as your church, would remain upon this rock and the gates of hell will not prevail against us, cause you have power to keep your word unspoiled in purity. Heaven and earth will pass away, but the word of the Lord endures forever. How this world is in decay, but the word of our God through ages remains. As the rain falls down from heaven, and waters he heard, bringing it light. So the word that goes out from your mouth will not return empty, but does what you desire. Lord, we hear your word, and believe in you. Heaven and earth will pass away, but the word of the Lord endures forever. How this world is in decay, but the word of our God through ages remains.
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