Seven Great Lies of Organized Religion

Q & A Session

Q & A Session (27 minutes) (9 meg MP3)

History of the gospel accounts; written history from a pre-literate culture; politics and religion in the 21st century; the motivation behind the series

Question:  Hi, you brought up supplemental stories you used centered on the New Testament so you are opened up for this question.

A learned Unitarian friend of mine said when discussing the New Testament; let's leave out the book of Luke for these purposes, that Jesus spoke in Aramaic. But the New Testament that we have is in Greek. A couple of the disciples, one was a fisherman that probably spoke Aramaic. How did the Bible get to Greek? One was a tax collector, etc.

So does this lead us to think that the book of Matthew was really written by the Matthew community under Matthew's direction and the book of Mark was written by the Mark community under Mark's direction? By that someone who knew classical Greek was able to take the verbal descriptions and put it into the Bible?

Perry:    Well, there are two parts to that question. First of all, is there anybody here that knows all of the fine points of the Greek and Aramaic question? Do you? If you would come to the microphone and address that specifically. Meanwhile I want to make a comment to part of your question.

Question:  Now what are you asking me to answer?

Perry:    What was written in Aramaic and what was written in Greek?

Question:  Actually I came up here because I'm selling Amway.  (Laughter)

Actually my response is going to be that the New Testament was actually written in what is called Koine Greek. I think you mentioned Classic Greek so I don't know if I'm stealing your answer?

Perry:    No, you're not stealing. I'm going to go in another direction so go ahead.

Answer:      As far as the Aramaic versus the Greek and what Jesus spoke I'm not too familiar with, but the Koine Greek was the common language of the people. So, what you've got in the New Testament was written in the common language of the people, the street language. I'm not sure why you were leaving Luke out but I just wanted to clarify that.

Question:  Luke was known to be educated in New Greek so there is no question there that he could write Greek. But when you have a fisherman and the fisherman is writing in Greek, that's the problem.

Answer:      Right. Greek was the common language because Alexander the Great had spread the Greek culture and the Greek language throughout the region. So it wasn't that they just suddenly decided to write in Greek. It was a fairly common language. I just wanted to add that. I'm not going to sell you any of my products. (Laughter again)

Perry:    If you read what early church fathers wrote about those books, what you learn is that the book of Mark comes from Mark following Peter around for a number of years and writing a history which according to some of the church fathers was personally authorized and checked by Peter. They also tend to say that Luke is derived from Mary's telling of the events.

Now, I think one thing that comes up in this question is? Well two things. First of all a lot of people are skeptical of oral traditions and oral cultures because the Gospels were written somewhere between 60 and 90 A.D. most scholars agree. They go, "Well that was 30 years later and this would have all gotten changed around. All of the stories would have been changed."

You have to remember something about preliterate cultures. In those cultures, if you can't read or write you have to have a good memory of what you've been told. We don't have to. I don't even try to remember stuff anymore because I'll just Google it. We are very sloppy about what somebody said to us and how they said it to us.

But if all your business contracts and all your business transactions and everything were verbal you would get really good at remembering exactly what people said. So if you go look at ancient cultures you see that they are very good at remembering things.

Now, the second thing. There is a book by Paul Tibbets, the pilot of the Enola Gay. That was the bomber that dropped the bomb on Hiroshima. He tells this whole story and the book was written in 1998. He died a couple of years later. Now, so you've got the bomb dropped in 1945. Then 50 plus years later he writes a story.

Now the first question is, does anybody seriously doubt that he remembers what happened? Not really. He was a young man when he dropped the bomb. He was an old man when he wrote the book. Nobody is going to really seriously question that he's telling what really happened.

Question:  Especially the big parts.

Perry:    Yeah, especially the big stuff because there are people alive that were there and saw it. Now at the beginning of the book he explains why he wrote the book.

Why did he write the book?

He says, "I wrote this book because there is all kinds of revisionist history going around. People are saying stuff like we really shouldn't have bombed the Japanese. They were very nice people. We should have negotiated with them. There would have been a better way. We did all this harm to all these people in Hiroshima and we shouldn't have done this."

His purpose in writing the book was saying, "No, they were totally unstoppable. They quietly killed 20 million people in World War II while we were paying attention to the Germans. They wreaked havoc all across Asia and they were going to come after us, too. This was the only way to stop them. It was the kindest thing we could have done."

Now I'm not trying to get into a debate about just war or something. What I'm saying is at the end of his life he said, "I've got to set the record straight. I've got to tell them what really happened."  It's fascinating, you know? Flying the plane, dropping the bomb, going into a 135 degree bank, the brilliant flash of flight, the shaking of the airplane with the shockwave. It's a fascinating story.

But he had to set the record straight. So finally before he died he did it.

I would submit to you that what you see in the Gospels is not all that much different. These guys were perfectly capable of remembering what happened. I would even go a step further and say that what happened at the Council of Nicaea in 325 was a little bit like that too. All of the church fathers from the different churches in the Middle East got together.

They converged and they said, "You know there are all kinds of rumors flying around and we're going to draft a statement." The vote was 314 to 2. The two that disagreed did not disagree that Jesus was the Son of God. They just disagreed about what exactly it meant.

I think these things are very comparable to the guy that wrote the Hiroshima book. There is a whole trail of evidence surrounding early Christianity. Every 20 years you go forward there are more and more documents and they all tell a pretty coherent story.

Paul:       Since the previous person used the mike and decided that he wouldn't really use it as a shameful plug to sell something, this might seem a little bit akin to that. If you are interested in reading some more of the writings of the so called early church fathers they actually are quite available. I'm told it's not the best translation but Christian Book Distributors will sell you literally a 30 volume set.

It's about that big because I actually ordered it once. I have it. About $300 I think it is and you can see what Polycarp wrote or somebody else. It's there. There is more stuff that wasn't included, etc., etc., so it's not at all complete. It's probably $10 a volume and I suppose that's pretty reasonable.

Perry:    Now along the same line I've got a book that's kind of similar. It's one book instead of 30 in case anybody is interested in that approach. It's called Faith of the Early Fathers by Jurgens. It's eye opening.

This has letters written to churches in 70 to 80 A.D., 85, 110, 120 and 150. There is actually a second volume and a third volume. If you put all three together you've got major church father writings all the way into 300, 400, 500 A.D.

But when you read the first volume, if you've ever felt like, "Well gee is there anything outside the New Testament? Do we just have Matthew, Mark, Luke and John and that's it, or what?"

Go get the Faith of the Early Fathers and you get a very distinct flavor of what early Christianity is like. Frankly it's not much different than modern Christianity today. Really fascinating.

Another one in case you guys are interested in like stuff totally outside of the New Testament that talks about Jesus and is by secular historians.

There is a book by Van Voorst called Jesus Outside of the New Testament. In exhaustive detail he talks about other documents from ancient historians such as Josephus and all these guys. There are some that most people have never heard of that reference Jesus. Van Voorst talks about it.

It's a very fairly written book, too. It's not like he is trying to bang you over the head with his point of view.

Question:  If you wonder why you can't buy those I inquired about that when the DaVinci Code was going around. Why is there not more stuff about church history? It's because none of us buy it there. So, if you would like to see more of that stuff go and ask and request it and maybe they will start carrying it.

Perry:    Or you get it on Amazon. Yes?

Woman:      You were talking about the influence of the printing press.

Perry:    Yes.

Woman:      I was thinking how you would compare that to today and also I was thinking about the printing press. Whoever owns the press is controlling the flow of information to a certain extent. On the Web today, you know big search engines or smaller people who do e-mail advertising have such great influence. Yet it's kind of the same situation as the printing press. How is Christianity affected by the Web?

Perry:    Well, I think that's a great question. Let's go back to the old, old, old days. If you wanted to write something you had to write it on a scroll. Okay? You had to do it by hand and nobody knew any different. If something was going to get written down it had to be pretty important.

Now compare that to somebody's blog where they say, "My menstrual period started today andÉ" You know this kind of stuff, right? People post their whole life's details and the most irrelevant stuff. You pick any topic and the Web is full of garbage, right? I mean silly opinions, stuff that's not researched, heresay.

I mean how many of you still got the e-mail sometime in the last month that says, "If you forward this to 256 friends, Microsoft will send you five dollars for every one of them." Right? I mean it's still going around. So in some ways the Web has made lies able to travel faster than ever before.

Between then and now you sort of have a progression. It's not all good. I think there is some goodness to the fact that we don't have a huge number of documents from the ancient world but the ones we do have were considered pretty important. It seems to me that first of all the greatest need for modern people is discernment. It's never been in demand like it is right now.

If you want to know what's going on and you're surfing the Web and you are going to the library and reading books, there is so much information out there. You have to be very discerning to figure out what's accurate and what's not. You really have to do your homework.

Question:  When I go to the Web I have a tendency to believe everything I read and then later on find out the opposite. I make that first call.

Perry:    Right. Well the expedience of it encourages that. It's like you want to get a fast answer but there are no editors. How does Google work? Google works on popularity, not editors. So if something is popular it may be true, it may not be true. But if it's popular a lot of people like to go to that Web site.

If a lot of people link to that Web site it turns up number one. Well, that creates a whole environment for what people consider to be true which is not necessarily what is true. I think the message for Christians is if you know this stuff then you need to get on the Web and you need to publish it. If you don't know something then you should keep your mouth shut. That's my opinion. Is that helpful?

Question:  I'm concerned about the world today. There are a lot of politicians and very rich, important people who claim to be such very good Christians. They are destroying this country. I'm wondering if you as Christian people in this church are aware of the lies that some of them are spouting and the way they are destroying the working people of this country. Are you marching?

Are you saying anything against Mobile Exxon? Against all these CEO's making all these hundreds of millions of dollars and firing all of the good, hard working people of this country? Are you churches speaking out against things like that because they profess to be such very good Christian politicians? They are fooling a lot of people?

This is what I see around me. I'm old enough to understand this since the Vietnam War, since Kennedy, since Martin Luther King and all these assassinations. I'm not that stupid. I can put two and two together. I'm wondering if people are awakened or are they thinking for themselves or just being led down this path?

Perry:    Well, sometimes thinking for yourself might have a lot to do with figuring out what news sources to read and what to ignore. I kept thinking as you were saying this, "Yep, there is like nothing new under the sun." Politicians were corrupt then. Politicians are corrupt now.

When Pilate crucified Jesus what was that? That was a complete inversion of the justice system. Then what's he going to do? Wash his hands of it? Okay, he was like any politician pretending to be innocent, pronouncing himself innocent and all the while shedding innocent blood.

I don't think the answer is in politics but I will say this. Remember what I said about if you can read it and it's available to you, then you're responsible and accountable for it? Well, think about this. Before there was such a thing as democracy who was accountable before God for what the government did? The king and his advisors were accountable.

Were the peasants accountable for what the king did? I don't think so. How about in a democracy though?

Well if there are 300 million people in America and we all get to vote who is responsible for what politicians we have? We are. If we've got corrupt politicians it's our fault and we are accountable before God if we don't get rid of them. It's on our shoulders.

Question:  What about when it's a limited pool of candidates?

Perry:    Somebody has got to stand up and run for office. I don't know if it's going to be the most pleasant thing. Different people have different ways of attacking the world's problems. I'm not a very political person. I'm not very involved in the political process. I'm rather cynical about it.

My take is if I teach people about Jesus it fixes the culture from the ground up. I'm not personally involved in a whole lot of political stuff. I have other friends who are very involved in trying to correct political problems and I applaud them for it.

I think every single one of us has a limited amount of time, resources, money, everything. We can only focus on so many things but we've all got do what we know how to do. We all need to address injustice in some way, shape or form. We can't sit and drink our Budweiser and eat our bag of Ruffles and watch Monday night TV.

If good people are being responsible then bad politicians will tend to recede. That's my take. Yes sir?

Question:  Hi Perry. Thanks for your good presentation tonight.

Perry:    Thank you.

Question:  And also for being vulnerable. What it showed me is there is heart behind the process of what you showed tonight.  Can you talk to that a little bit because my experience is that's part of the journey of coming to grips with these lies? It's just not a thinking process. There is also a heartbeat to it.

Perry:    Boy, what a great question. I'm not sure where to start but I guess where I'll start is Laura and me having this thing of trying to visit poor people, to visit poor countries and stuff like that.

A long time ago when we were having a lot of financial struggles and everything we made a commitment to each other. We committed that if we ever got to a point where we could afford to do things like that that we would. We wouldn't just take the Disney vacation but that we would also go see how the other half lives.

The first time I ever did that I went to Sao Paulo, Brazil in 1999. Well Sao Paulo is a city that's one half the size of the metro Chicago area with three times as many people. There are 17 million people in Sao Paulo. Five hundred thousand street kids sniff glue and steal for a living. Every now and then the street kids get out of hand and then the policemen go out and shoot them.

I was walking by an Alpha Graphics copy shop in downtown Sao Paulo and across the street there was a homeless boy laying in a doorway sleeping with his dog.

I'll tell you what, when you go see places like that and you come home you don't go [in whiny voice], "My latte is too foamy."

I came home from that trip. I never liked Bill Clinton just for what it's worth. But that day I was like, "Bill Clinton is a great president and we have no environmental problems. We have no poor people. This is a great country." That's how I felt after spending a week in Sao Paulo, Brazil.

We had a guy take us to the favelas, the slums. We spent a day touring the slums with a guy who I trusted to know how to make sure that we didn't get shot. I think that there is always a part in the Christian life where you have to be pushing the edges of your comfort zones. It's one of our obligations. If you're too comfortable you are not pushing yourself.

Now, I don't know this for a fact. It's just my little theory but my little theory that I have is that if you push your comfort zones and you go into uncomfortable places and you stretch your envelope maybe God doesn't have to. You get lazy, you get complacent and sometimes God's got to throw you a curve ball to wake us up. We all have this lazy streak that just wants to lie on the couch.

Look, there are too many problems in the world. Going to places like Africa, if the people of the world had the will to solve these problems they would be solved so fast. You can't blame God for the fact that Africa is a mess.

You know why Africa is a mess? Because they've got corrupt leaders. You know where all of that foreign aid goes? It goes into Swiss bank accounts. That's where it goes. You know what happens when they drop food out of airplanes? People with machine guns surround the food and sell it to poor people for a lot of money.

You can't solve Africa's problems dropping food out of airplanes. You can't solve it by sending aid. The big epiphany was when I was in Mozambique watching these wonderful people minister to these poor people in Africa with all these problems. Africa's problems are not going to get solved by anybody dropping anything out of the sky. They only get solved when people roll up their sleeves and go there and live.

Everybody's got to go somewhere and live with the problems and try to solve the problems. When we do that the church becomes credible.

Other Presentations:

Perry's 5-Day Email Course "Where Did The Universe Come From?"

Perry's talk "If You Can Read This, I can prove God Exists"

Dr. Scot McKnight's discussion of The DaVinci Code

©2007 Perry S. Marshall