Can We Trust The Bible?

Without question the Bible is the best-selling and most influential book of all time; with countless millions of people from every corner of the globe and from all walks of life basing their world-view and charting their life’s course on the basis of its teachings.

It says of itself that it is divinely inspired, literally God-breathed, and able to delineate the difference between right and wrong, good and evil; promising abundant life to its adherents and warning of catastrophic death for those who ignore it.

Detractors insist that the Bible is simply another ancient book of myths and moral tales with no more authority over our lives than Homer’s Odyssey or Aesop’s Fables.

Obviously, both assertions cannot be true. So who’s right? Clearly, if the Bible actually is the inspired word of the Creator God with the power to impart eternal life, we would want to take its teachings very seriously indeed.

Likewise, if it is merely another collection of fables and fairy tales, we would want to free ourselves from its moral strictures and choose for ourselves how best to order our lives. After all, we would think a person genuinely crazy who patterned their whole life on Catcher in the Rye or Harry Potter, right?

It is a sad truth that many, if not most people hold their current opinion about the Bible on the basis of blind faith or sheer conjecture. Either they carelessly accept it as true, or reject it as false having never closely examined the available evidence for its veracity.

What about you? Are you courageous enough to examine your beliefs in light of the evidence? If you are not, shouldn’t you doubt the strength of your position since you admit by your fear that you don’t think it will hold up to close scrutiny?

If you are, then I commend you on your choice to pursue the truth, and encourage you to both read on and watch the embedded video. Of course, I also happen to know that many an avowed atheist and confirmed skeptic have become Christians as a result of seeking evidence that the Bible is not true, notably C.S. Lewis, G.K. Chesterton, and Lee Strobel.

When we talk about the Bible, what are we talking about?

The Bible is not just one book written in the Bronze Age; rather it is a collection of 66 books written over a period of 1500 years, on three continents, in three languages, by 40 different authors from different socio-economic backgrounds and levels of education.

One of the most amazing facts about the Bible is that, although it is compiled from so many disparate sources over so long a time, it is absolutely coherent in its teaching, without substantive contradiction. This is a key evidence of its veracity and divine origin as in all of history, as the mere machinations of man have never produced its equal.

I think it is also important to note that in spite of repeated and even violent attempts to wipe the Bible out of existence, it has not only survived, but thrived to become the most widely translated and distributed book in the history of books.

Since the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, scholars have examined the fragments of extremely early copies of the Bible against modern copies using the latest technology such as infrared scanning and DNA testing to ensure the accuracy of the matches. The result? The Bible we possess today is textually accurate, word-for-word the same as the books written just a few short years after the events they report, more than 95 percent identical.

Moreover, where there are slight variations in the text, they are largely minor spelling differences in the same words such as we have today with the British spelling of colour versus the American color. The vast majority of scholars affirm that none of the variations effect a single Christian doctrine.

That speaks to the accuracy of Bible translation, but what about its accuracy in describing people, customs and places? In this respect, modern scholarship has strongly confirmed the Bible’s reliability.

Expert Charlotte Allen notes that archaeological excavations in the Holy Land have “tended to support the historical value of the Gospels, at least as sources of information about the conditions of their times.” As Nelson Glueck states, on the one hand “It may be stated categorically that no archaeological discovery has ever contraverted a biblical reference”, whereas on the other “Scores of archaeological findings have been made which confirm in clear outline or exact detail historical statements in the Bible.”

A witness in a court trial is considered credible when their testimony matches available evidence. If a witness, however, gets names and places wrong in their account, it tends to diminish the force of their testimony.

In this sense the Bible is an unimpeachably credible witness. The more scholars test it’s testimony against archaeological evidence and independent historical sources, the more it proves to be utterly reliable. For more exhaustive information on this, click on the following scholarly article: http://www.bethinking.org/is-the-bible-reliable/archaeology-and-the-historical-reliability-of-the-new-testament

Another line of evidence of the Bible’s divine origin is its highly specific and staggeringly accurate prophecies about things that would happen hundreds and even thousands of years after they were written. The book of Daniel predates the Medo-Persian, Greek, and Roman Empires by hundreds of years, and yet accurately describes both their character and succession.

The book of Isaiah, along with many of the Minor Prophets, so accurately describe the life Jesus hundreds of years before his birth, that you could re-construct most of His contemporarily documented life and works from their pages alone.

There are 300-350 specific Messianic prophecies recorded in the Bible. Each one amazingly fulfilled in the person of Jesus Christ. Scholars have crunched the numbers and determined that the odds of just eight of these prophecies being fulfilled is 1 in 1,000,000,000,000,000,000. And that is only eight. Calculating the likelihood of all 350 predictions being fulfilled lowers the odds to a staggering 1 in 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000.

That’s pretty abstract. To give an illustration of these astronomical odds, let’s look at it this way. Suppose we took an atheistic professor, blindfolded him and covered the state of Texas two feet deep with silver dollars. Then we put a check on one of those silver dollars and mixed them up. The odds of one person fulfilling just eight of these prophecies would be the same as this atheistic professor selecting the silver dollar upon which we have placed a check, in his first try.

When it comes to predicting the future, mankind has a pretty poor batting average. Probably the most notable contemporary predictor of things yet future is Nostradamus. If you have read any of his predictions, however, you will notice that he speaks in extremely vague terms so that they can be liberally re-interpreted in light of unfolding events to look as if he had predicted them.

If you allow his writings this extremely generous treatment, he may be said to have been, at best, 50 percent accurate. The odds of Nostradamus being right? 50/50. In other words, about as good as flipping a coin.

For a more thorough examination of the accuracy of Bible prophecy, click on the following links: http://www.bibleevidences.com/prophecy.htm

http://www.bereanpublishers.com/the-odds-of-eight-messianic-prophecies-coming-true/

Clearly, this blog is not an exhaustive examination of the veracity of the Bible. I have, however, tried to trace a few of the major lines of evidence that point to its divine origin. Among these we have touched on its miraculous internal consistency despite its disparate writers, amazing preservation despite repeated attempts to destroy it, its unerring historical accuracy, and its unique power to accurately predict future events.

Any one of these evidences is highly suggestive on its own. Taken together, they form a compelling cumulative case that the Bible is the true Word of God.

If, after reading this, you are persuaded that the Bible is true, I urge you to begin to earnestly search its pages and follow its teachings. If you are not, I encourage you to continue to search the matter out for yourself.

Ultimately, we are all betting our lives on what we believe is true. I hope and pray that you will diligently seek and find the truth, and hold on to it for dear life.