I started out actually uh in high school
I was a born again Christian uh I uh
accepted Christ as my Lord and Savior as
we used to say and I I became very
committed as an Evangelical Christian
and I went off to Moody Bible Institute
for college which is a a fundamentalist
Bible College after that I went to
Wheaton College which is a liberal arts
college it's Billy Grahams Alma Moder
it's an Evangelical school so I had very
solid Evangelical Christian commitments
and uh eventually uh I got a seminary
degree and I was a pastor of a Baptist
Church for for a year um but gradually
for a large number of reasons I started
to question some of the assumptions that
I had about the faith uh for a long time
I thought that the Bible was inspired
and inherent that there were no mistakes
in the Bible but as I engaged in
historical research on the Bible as I
was getting my PhD in New Testament
studies at Princeton Theological
Seminary I started finding mistakes in
the Bible and uh this this cut away at
my assumptions that the Bible was an
and then I started questioning other
parts of my faith is Jesus really Divine
uh is it really a trinity it was
difficult I mean if you're raised uh in
the Christian tradition uh this is forms
the very heart and soul of who you are
and uh and leaving it uh means leaving
friends it means uh alienating family it
means um uh losing out on all sorts of
social networks that you have and all
sorts of beliefs that you've held dear
and so it's it's very difficult and
traumatic uh emotionally but my view at
the time was that I was I was in a
search for what is true and I came to
believe it simply isn't true that the
Bible's without error and it and uh and
the idea that Jesus is God is an idea
that was developed historically over
time among Christians it wasn't
something that was original to
Christianity it's a later historical
development so to the doctrine of the
Trinity and these various ideas that I
had held on to I started to realize
where historical formulations and just
the existence of God himself I finally
came to realize that it uh for me it
simply didn't make sense anymore well
this is an interesting thing that the um
you know we think when we read the Bible
that we're we're obviously reading the
words that Matthew wrote or that Paul
wrote um but the reality is we don't
have the originals of Matthew or Paul's
letters or of any other book of the New
Testament or of the Old Testament what
we have are copies of these books that
were made uh later in many cas cases uh
many most cases many centuries later so
uh we the New Testament was originally
written in Greek and at present we have
something like 5,500 manuscripts in
Greek of the new testament which is a
lot for an ancient book it's far more
than any other ancient book The problem
is most of these copies are hundreds and
hundreds of years after the originals
and all of them have differences in them
uh so that the scribes who were copying
these manuscripts changed the text that
they were copying uh sometimes by by
accident I mean sometimes they just made
mistakes they were sleepy or incompetent
or whatever but sometimes it looks like
scribes actually thought the text should
say something other than it did and then
they so they would change the text uh
some places it looks like it's a
manipulation of the text where where the
author wants to change where where the
Scribe wants to change what the author
said I mean in many cases it may be that
the Scribe thought this is what the
author really meant and so he changed it
but uh but sometimes the the text gets
changed to say just the opposite of what
it originally said
and so uh that's that that can be a
little bit troubling yeah yeah so um the
last 12 verses of Mark are uh they're
very interesting Jesus has been dead
he's been crucified he's dead and been
buried and on the third day he uh the
third day the women go to the tomb to
see uh about anointing his body for
burial but they find the tomb's empty uh
Jesus isn't there there's a young man in
the Tomb who says that Jesus uh will go
that they're they're supposed to go tell
the disciples that Jesus will go before
them and meet them in Galilee the
disciples are supposed to go to Galilee
and the women are supposed to tell them
to go and then it says the women fled
from the tomb and didn't say anything to
anyone because they were afraid that's
the end of Mark's gospel it ends with
the women not saying anything well some
scribes read this ending and thought
well that's odd I mean the women didn't
tell anybody I mean surely the disciples
knew and so uh so some scribes added a
longer ending so the last 12 verses are
this longer ending where uh the women do
go tell the disciples they do go to
Galilee Jesus does meet them there and
this is the passage where Jesus tells
his disciples that if anyone believes in
his name they'll be able to speak in
foreign tongues they'll be able to
handle uh deadly snakes and they won't
uh and they'll be able to drink poison
and it won't harm them and so this these
are the verses that the Appalachian
snake handlers use to justify their
ritual practi uh Matthew and Luke have
many of the stories in Mark and
sometimes they have the stories actually
in the same word
as Mark and uh for hundreds and hundreds
of years since uh since the 4th Century
at least uh biblical Scholars have
recognized that the reason they have so
many of the stories in the same words is
that somebody's copying somebody else
and so the idea is usually thought that
uh Matthew and Luke actually copied some
of their stories from Mark that's why
they're they're verbatim the same uh in
so many places one of the things that
I've studied uh in a number of my books
um in including my book lost
christianities and in uh in somewhat in
my book misquoting Jesus is this
phenomenon that I call Proto Orthodox
Christianity in early Christianity there
were a variety of Christian groups that
believed a variety of things uh some of
them that would seem wild and crazy to
most Christians today but there were
battles for who would be right and who
would be wrong and who would get the
most converts and who would establish
what the what the standard view would be
the standard view is called Orthodoxy o
y the word Orthodoxy means the correct
belief so the people who ended up
winning these battles over what to
believe called themselves Orthodox
meaning they had the correct beliefs and
everyone else they called Heretics uh a
her a heresy is a Cho means Choice it's
a choice not to believe the right things
and so Proto
Orthodoxy is what people were saying
that led to Orthodoxy before it was
Orthodoxy so there's there's one so you
have a lot of different Christian group
saying a lot of different things one of
these groups wins out uh and calls
itself Orthodox but what do you call
this group before they win out I call
them Proto Orthodox because they're
they're representing the views that
eventually are going to Triumph in
Christianity well there are a lot of you
know the Proto Orthodox uh scribes are
the ones who gave us these 5,500
manuscripts we have uh if Heretics
copied the text and changed the text in
heretical way those manuscripts
apparently got destroyed and so we have
we have manuscripts that from the Proto
Orthodox and sometimes they changed the
text in significant ways I mean as one
example um there were debates in early
Christianity about who Jesus was is he
was he a human being who was chosen by
God was he was he God who only seemed to
be a human being was he both God and
human what what was he and uh scribes
who knew about these debates would
sometimes change the gospels in order to
make the gospels reflect their own
points of view and so one of the
arguments was is Jesus Jus really human
or not there's this famous passage in
the Gospel of Luke uh where Jesus before
being arrested sweat sweats great drops
as if of blood uh and it's so this is
the bloody sweat and this is where we
when people say you know he was sweating
blood that's what they're referring to
as this passage it turns out this
passage was not originally in the Gospel
of Luke uh it's not in our oldest and
best manuscripts of Luke uh and it looks
like the reason it's there now is
because there were Christians who wanted
to argue that Jesus was fully human this
was the Orthodox view Jesus really was
human