From Skepticism to Faith: Literary Scholars Analyze the Bible || RTTB Reasoning with God || Bible Study

Could the New Testament withstand the scrutiny of two literary scholars with atheistic backgrounds? We invite you to an intriguing exploration as Dr. C.S. Lewis and Dr. Holly Ordway share their academic voyages from skepticism to faith, offering a profound analysis of the New Testament as a historical document. Their testimonies ignite our discussion, challenging the notion that the scriptures are mere works of fiction, and instead, underscoring the distinct narrative style that sets them apart from myth or legend.

Transcript

Speaker 1 0:20

The New Testament presents itself as being an historical document, a record of historical events by eyewitnesses. The facts presented in the New Testament have a large amount of corroboration from sources outside the Bible. Many of the people in the New Testament are well-documented in secular history. Dozens of people and hundreds of historical facts mentioned in the New Testament are corroborated by secular history. Therefore, since critics can't make much progress attacking the Bible from the facts, one of the common objections to the truth of the New Testament is claiming the Bible to be historical fiction and dismissing the events and miracles outright. The critics claim the Bible is a type of novel, with some historical characters and places, but the events being fiction. Let us turn to how the Bible style of writing is evaluated, not by laymen but by literary scholars. I know of two scholars who were atheists, who were teaching literature at the university level, then became Christian when they turned their eye towards the Bible. Dr CS Lewis was a professor of literature at Oxford and Cambridge. He said the following all I am in private life is a literary critic and historian. That's my job and I am prepared to say on that basis if anyone thinks the Gospels are either legend or novels, then that person is simply showing his incompetence as a literary critic. I've read a great many novels and I know a fair amount about the legends that grew up among early people and I know perfectly well the Gospels are not that kind of stuff. The second scholar is Dr Holly Ordway, who is also an atheist, with a PhD in literature teaching at the university level, who then became a Christian partly by reading Christian literary works During her fight against Christianity, a fight that she lost and became a Christian. Dr Ordway says this myth.

Speaker 1 2:40

Ever since I was a child and I had studied these literary genres as an adult, I knew their cadences, their flavor, their rhythm. None of these stylistic fingerprints appeared in the New Testament books that I was reading. In Paul's letters I heard the strong, clear voice of a distinctive personality speaking of what he knew to be true. The Gospels had the ineffable texture of history, with all the odd clarity of detail that comes when the author is recounting something so huge that even as he tells it, he doesn't see all the implications. So when we examine the historical narratives of the New Testament, we have not only external factual corroboration of the minute details, we also have testimony of expert witnesses that tell us the accounts do not exhibit the style of fictional writing.

Speaker 1 3:33

As with anything historical, we cannot prove the New Testament narratives the same way we solve a math problem or do a tabletop empirical experiment. Instead, we look at the evidence to determine what is reasonable. The New Testament accounts show all the signs of being exactly what they claim. Eyewitness accounts of actual historical events. Lewis and Ordway demonstrate that when educated people look at the evidence with reason in mind, the conclusion is in the favor of the truth of the scriptures. We would all do well to read the Bible with these facts in mind. We at Reasoning Through the Bible invite you to see our longer verse-by-verse Bible studies. As we go through the text, we provide answers to common questions, introductions to theology and occasional apologetic topics such as this one. You can find out more about our ministry at reasoningthroughthebiblecom. Thank you for watching and listening, and may God bless you.