‘Fragments of Truth’ Now Free to Watch Online

Craig Evans shares word that his Fragments of Truth documentary on the text of the New Testament is now free to watch on YouTube. He’s also uploaded a few extras, including the video below with the late great Larry Hurtado dispensing uncommon wisdom on P52. The documentary has some fantastic footage of early NT papyri and (most of) the interviews are with genuine experts on the subject. It’s worth watching. You can read my review here.

The Gospel of Mark Movie in Koine Greek

From the folks at KoineGreek.com and the Lumo Project comes a high production quality movie of Mark’s Gospel completely in Koine Greek. Here’s the announcement, with the video of Mark 1 posted below. (I note they got Mark 1.1 correct.)

I first made contact with the LUMO project and Faith Comes by Hearing last fall about the possibility of doing a Koine Greek narration for the excellent Gospel films that LUMO has produced. After many months of work, I am now pleased to finally announce the release of—as far as I know—the first full-length Gospel film in the original language in a restored Koine pronunciation. This first release (of chapter one) is viewable via the KoineGreek.com YouTube channel. I will try to release one chapter of it per week over the next several months. This first release is chapter one. I am making Greek captions/subtitles for each portion as well so that with each release you will also be able to follow along by reading the text as it is narrated. Click on the captions button to turn Greek captions on/off.

Review of ‘Fragments of Truth’

The folks at Faithlife kindly sent me a review version of their new documentary Fragments of Truth that comes out two weeks from today. The movie itself lasts 115 minutes followed by about 30 minutes of Q&A with Craig Evans and others. Evans also serves as tour guide (think Mary Beard style) and the rest of the narration is filled in by John Rhys-Davies, better known as the amazing Gimli in Lord of the Rings.

The basic point of the movie is to show that the text of the New Testament is reliable and that the variants that do exist pose no threat to Christian confidence in the New Testament. The closing words go further in saying that when you read your Bible, you “really are reading the Word of God.” Many Christians won’t even notice the leap from “textually reliable” to “inspired by God,” but skeptics probably won’t miss it.

Evans takes us on a tour to locations across Europe that hold some of our most famous Greek New Testament manuscripts in places like Cambridge, Dublin, Vatican City, and Oxford. One nice feature about this is that they interview the curators at most of these stops. I like this because curators often get overlooked. But not here.