Of Vague Apologetic Interest

First, I listened to this on the way up to Pampa for Christmas. The speaker, Richard Baukham, wrote a a book a year or two ago that’s supposed to be one of the best to date on the historicity of the gospels. I haven’t read it, but it’s on my Amazon wish list. Anyway, he made a couple of points in the lecture about the gnostic gospels that I hadn’t heard before.

Second, my sister and I gave our dad The War for Christmas. This documentary is chock full of WWII footage and sound effects. As I was watching the first DVD with my dad last night, I realized something. Most of the footage shown was only representative of what was being narrated. If the narrator talked about a specific plane being shot down, the plane shown (along with the sound effects) was almost certainly not the exact plane in question. And yet, we would still say that this documentary is accurate. Or, supposing that Ken Burns is a crackpot and the whole thing is filled with nothing but half-truths and revisionist history, we could nonetheless agree that this conclusion should not be based on his use of stock footage and sound effects. It is the nature of war documentaries to rely on this kind of footage. Being familiar with the genre, we implicitly understand this, and we take it in stride.

Surely you see the point I’m driving toward. The four gospels occasionally disagree about the details of certain occurrences in Jesus’ ministry. Compare, for example, the chronological order of the temptations of Jesus in Matthew and Luke.

Article XIII of The Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy speaks to some of these apparent discrepancies.

Article XIII

We affirm the propriety of using inerrancy as a theological term with reference to the complete truthfulness of Scripture.

We deny that it is proper to evaluate Scripture according to standards of truth and error that are alien to its usage or purpose. We further deny that inerrancy is negated by Biblical phenomena such as a lack of modern technical precision, irregularities of grammar or spelling, observational descriptions of nature, the reporting of falsehoods, the use of hyperbole and round numbers, the topical arrangement of material, variant selections of material in parallel accounts, or the use of free citations.

Anyway, my purpose here is obviously not to share a thought that’s completely new to me or to anyone else. I’m just offering a modern-day case in point that’s interesting and helpful to me.