Thanks for the link, DRDS! Some points from the review:
The episode began with a brief mention of the Dead Sea Scrolls, along with a sweeping accusation that there are “thousands” of discrepancies between them and the previously oldest surviving manuscripts that we have, the Masoretic texts. While many Christians will deny this claim completely, I do think it is fair to acknowledge that there are quite a few differences between the texts. But both parties must accurately represent the nature of these differences: The vast majority of textual variants are spelling and punctuation errors
IIRC, Josh McDowell went into this in his original - i.e. first edition, published in 1972 by Campus Crusade -
Evidence That Demands a Verdict, that there are numerous differences, and that the vast majority of those differences are the hand-written equivalent of typos.
Evidence being what it was at the time - tidied up lecture notes - McDowell was repeating (with sources footnoted) what was then well-known among scholars who had worked with the Dead Sea Scrolls. IOW, there was no excuse for the the History Channel's "experts" to bring up this "objection"
without noting that the differences were almost entirely superficial. Either the "experts" lied, or were ignorant; as for the History Channel, their business is infotainment, so absent proof they knew their program misrepresented the Dead Sea Scrolls, I'm satisfied with ignorance as a sufficient explanation for that misrepresentation (I'm a generous fellow).
As is to be expected with this type of documentary, Bible Secrets Revealed does not spend much time on each topic, nor does it offer evidence for its claims. It simply whisks the viewer on to the next topic before he or she has time to reflect on what has been stated.
There are two sides to this coin. It lets the program cover lots of topics in a relatively brief time; it precludes depth in covering any topic, it imposes limits on POVs given on topics, and it hinders viewers from thinking on any topic (thinking that could show holes in theories presented or notice one-sidedness). On one hand, as I noted above, infotainment is the History Channel's business. OTOH, I have a hard time believing that, in choosing "experts" for the program, the History Channel's producers were utterly ignorant of corresponding, theologically conservative and Biblically faithful "experts". So I think the History Channel's producers were both making the most of limited time and were aware of what they were doing (maybe a 70%-30% mix).
Dr. Robert Mullins, for example, opens up by challenging the Genesis narrative.
“Adam,” he says, “Is a common noun meaning the entire human race, not a single individual.”
The comment is then backed up by a graphic of the Genesis text being altered to read “Human Race” instead of “Adam.”
All the best lies are mixed with a little truth. While the name Adam does mean “man,” it is abundantly clear from the Genesis text that the name refers to an individual. Let’s use the replacement trick on other verses that feature Adam:
The review devastates this "objection", but I won't spoil it by posting part of it. The author of the review amply shows how absurd this "objection" is.
... we hear Rabbi David Wolpe say, “Whatever part of God is in there, some human being is in there, too.”
Yes, and the Bible wouldn’t deny this fact. 1 Peter 1:21 says that “men moved by the Holy Spirit spoke from God.” Jews have always referred to the Pentateuch as the “Books of Moses.” Most of the New Testament writers signed their names and often discussed their personal lives. Despite what many in the history of Bible interpretation might argue, the Bible does not come close to setting itself up as a magical book that descended straight from heaven without any human involvement.
Whatever the context of Rabbi Wolpe's comment, as used (evidently) by the History Channel, this "objection" is a straw man argument. Even after the homogenization almost inevitable in the process of translation, different writers' styles are obvious, and as the review points out, the Bible text often explicitly includes (and uses, in Paul's case) references to the individual writers and their lives.
It’s an extreme and shameful leap in logic to say, “None of these authors actually met Jesus,” as Dr. Candida Moss claims on the show.
Not only are the numbers very favorable for the traditional view of authorship, but there is no evidence to suggest otherwise. A bold claim such as that which the History Channel is promoting should be supported by evidence. Yet, the show is strangely silent.
My emphasis. I made a point last evening of saying that bold claims tend to be made on the authority of the "experts" themselves, rather than actual evidence. So the lack of supporting evidence is neither surprising nor strange to me.
Equally as puzzling is Dr. Elaine Pagels’ charge, “We had Christianity for 300 years before we had a New Testament.”
Pagels' claim is semantic rather than substantial. As the review points out, the texts of NT books were written by people who knew Jesus or were Jesus' contemporaries. But the word game Pagels is playing is that she's saying that the
canon of the NT was not recognized until the 4th Century. Plus or minus some
informal lists in the writings of church fathers, this is true, but Pagels' statement is misleading (intentionally, IMO): it gives less well-informed hearers the impression that the
content of the NT was written in the 4th Century.
Edit addition: The church council(s) that codified the canon did not create scripture, nor did they capriciously pick and choose the books that formed the canon. One very significant criterion - a criterion that basically contradicts Pagels - for recognizing a book as Scripture was that it had been widely recognized and used as such by churches for centuries. Another criterion that basically contradicts Pagels is that the book must have Apostolic origin - either written
by an Apostle, or by one who ministered along side an Apostle (Mark, Luke & Acts, and, possibly, James and Jude) -
in other words, a book that had been written and come into use in the First Century. My opinion is that Pagels knows all this, but dishonestly ignores it because it doesn't fit her fantasy image of how things must have been.
Pagels has written a number of things that are historically problematic. One of her contentions - one that she shares with the Historian Gibbons - is that the infamous persecutions of Christians was almost entirely made up, false. Various historic sources falsify her (and Gibbons') claim. The history written by Tacitus (and that of Suetonius, too, IIRC) mention's Nero's horrifically cruel persecution. We have Pliny the Younger's correspondence with the Emperor Trajan. Eusebius was probably in his 30s during Diocletian's persecution of Christian, of which Eusebius wrote in his Ecclesiastical History. Pagels has also claimed that Paul's "Prison Epistles" are pseudonymous, written to respond to gnosticism under the aegis of the Apostle Paul. Interesting theory, unsupported by evidence (as usual), and anachronistic by about a century (gnosticism was a mid-late Second Century movement). That Pagels would be cited as an "expert" rather than as a curious outlier is informative as to the History Channel's selection of "experts".
In the next section, an expert says, “Christians claim that Jesus was born of a virgin. And this claim comes from a prophetic text in the book of Isaiah.”
But the claim isn’t based on the Isaiah text. The claim is based on the gospel text. There is no misunderstanding the story of an angel telling Mary that she will have a child, Mary being confused because she hasn’t slept with Joseph yet, the gospels explaining that the virgin birth was a fulfillment of the Isaiah prophecy, and Luke’s specific clarification that Mary and Joseph didn’t have relations until after Jesus was born.
This is a semi-straw man. Yes, Christians, starting with Matthew 1:23, have cited Isaiah 7:14 for about 2000 years. But this Isaiah passage is not the sole source for this Christian teaching, as can be seen in Luke chapter 1. One thing this review could have added is that, while the (original) Hebrew text for Isaiah uses a word whose primary meaning is "young woman", that word can mean virgin, and the Septuagint - translated by Jewish scholars well before the birth of Jesus - uses the Greek word whose meaning is, specifically, "virgin". And again, this is not some new discovery, being a matter of contention from at least the time of the publication of the RSV NT in 1946 (and probably much earlier). That the History Channel producers would be ignorant of this, I can believe, but I cannot bring myself to believe that their "expert" is similarly ignorant.
Following this, the show “reveals” that the gospel of Mark ends at 16:8. This is no secret. Every Bible I own has a footnote, or brackets, or marginal separation here, along with an explanation that the oldest manuscripts do not have the last few verses.
The show attempts to say that this somehow implies that the resurrection story was a later addition (even though the resurrection is brought up before verse 8 and is attested to in great detail in the three other gospels, as well as the earlier-written Biblical books mentioned previously).
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The issue of the ending of the Gospel of Mark was news maybe a century and a half ago. Bringing it up as some sort of "objection" to the Resurrection is fatuous: the Resurrection is attested, in some detail, by the other three Gospels; if the the original text of Mark ended with the annunciation of the Resurrection (Mark 16:4-8, whose genuineness is not disputed, and ignoring the TR vs. W & H dispute), this shows that Matthew and Luke were not derivative embellishments (one theory popular in theologically liberal circles) of Mark. The ending of Mark issue being so old, I have a hard time believing the History Channel's producers are so incredibly ignorant as to think it is some sort of new revelation.
The History Channel could have given its viewers an incredible - even compelling - service, by giving a survey of what the various books are about, some balanced introductions to some of the issues relevant to those books, and the history of the Biblical texts and translations. It sounds like they chose, instead, to make the series a sort of pseudo-expose'. I'm not a theologian, and I've barely set foot on the campus of a Christian college, but none of these "issues" are news to me, or troubling. Like B.W., I've heard pretty much (or entirely) all of this before, and long ago. If I've heard it all before ...
