(Transcript of the video, edited for readability)
Do we have any evidence that the Bible's basically reliable in what it teaches? Not infallible, not inerrant, not inspired, but just as other human documents from the past go, how does the Bible stack up?
Well, let me jump ahead of myself here, friends, and just say to you, that there is no book from the ancient world, no literary source from the ancient world, that has been subjected to the most rigorous, scientific scrutiny and analysis as the New Testament and the Old Testament have been exposed. In fact, there is no work from the ancient world that is within one ten-thousandth of careful research as the New Testament has been. And efforts to validate scientifically the historical reports of ancient writers is not an easy task.
For example, if Luke says to us that an angel appeared to Zacharias in the temple in Jerusalem, how is archaeological science, for example, going to verify or falsify that claim? Unless you dug up petrified angel wings, it'd be pretty tough to show one way or the other. Well, that's not how historical verification proceeds in science, but rather through the science, for example, of archaeology… We reconstruct the geography, the customs, and so on of ancient people and ancient cities, and we test that knowledge against what is reported by the other historians through what is verified indubitably through the spade or the shovel of archaeology. For example, in a simple way, if Luke says that so-and-so was the ethnarch of such-and-such-a-place at such-and-such-a-time in history, and then next week we dig up documents from that town and then indicate that the very person that Luke named was, in fact, they called the ethnarch at that time in history, we have at least verified conclusively that Luke was right on that minor historical detail. Do you see what I'm saying? If, however, we turn over the spade and the spade says that he wasn't an ethnarch, he was a sextarch, and that his name was something else, and that, you know, then Luke's in trouble as a historian, do you see?
There is no historian from the ancient world that comes anywhere close to the scientific validation of historical accuracy as, for example, the author of the Gospel of Luke. Ladies and gentlemen, secular, unreligious people have concluded that Luke is the finest historian of the ancient world. I'm laboring that point for a reason. I think it'd be utterly irresponsible to say, in light of the evidence of history and of science, that as history, the New Testament is basically unreliable.
