Ancient scribal culture inevitably produced copies of documents rather than originals, which necessitates textual criticism to trace the original text through internal and external factors.

“So like there's a field called textual criticism which looks at the text of particular documents because in the ancient world we don't have any originals. Everything is a copy no matter what it is.”

Consensus in the field of biblical scholarship is not used as evidence itself, but rather as a threshold for the burden of proof.

“It's not important as evidence. See, that's the first thing to say. And no, no, no really good scholar ever uses it as evidence. In other words, the fact that everybody says so doesn't make it so.”