Tuesday, March 8, 2016

This week on 10 Minutes with God, we are exploring the reliability of the Bible. How do I know that the Bible can be trusted?

Consider these facts about the world’s best-selling, most widely distributed book.

§  It contains 66 books.

§  There are 40 different authors.

§  It was written on 3 continents (Africa, Asia, and Europe).

§  It was written in 3 different languages (Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek).

§  It was written over a span of 1,500 years.

§  It tells one cohesive, continuous story.

Let your mind ponder those facts for a moment.

§  Forty generations of authors from every walk of life contributed to the writing including: kings, peasants, philosophers, fishermen, poets, statesmen, scholars, soldiers, and military leaders.

§  It was written in different places: Moses in the wilderness, Jeremiah in a dungeon, Daniel on the hillside and in a palace, Paul inside prison walls, Luke while traveling, John while exiled on the island of Patmos, and others while in the midst of military campaigns.

§  These forty people came from every conceivable walk of life: from rich to poor, from influential to obscure.

§  It was written at different times and during different moods: from the heights of joy to the depths of despair.

It’s remarkable! There is nothing else like the Bible. This alone, whether or not you believe the Scriptures to be the inspired Word of God, makes it utterly unique in human history.

Today we are going to consider the manuscript evidence for the Bible. When you’re examining a historical document, historians look at three things: the number of copies, the earliest copy to the date of the original, and the time span between them. All of this is used to determine the historical reliability of a document.

For instance, if there is one very early copy, it passes the second test of a copy close to the date of the original. However, it fails the first test of the number of copies. It may be only one person’s interpretation of the historical event and therefore quite biased and unreliable.

If there are a multitude of copies with a late date, it passes the first test but fails the third test; there is too large of a gap between copies. Events could have been added, changed, or misconstrued over time.

Let’s put some ancient writings to the test—writings for which very few people would argue against the authenticity or historicity—in compassion to the New Testament. Examine the chart below. (Click to expand the size.)

Notice that we have over 6,000 manuscripts (whole or portions of) the New Testament. The next closest ancient historical document is Homer’s Illiad at 200 copies with a span of 500 years between the original and the copy. You will notice that Socrates is missing from this list. The reason: all we know about Socrates comes from the writing of Plato. The earliest scrap of Plato’s writings that have been discovered are dated 1200 years after they were written, and there are only seven copies. When we put these widely accepted and rarely disputed ancient documents to the test, we find there is no comparison between the manuscript evidence that prove their reliability and that which proves the reliability of the New Testament when held to the same test.

Now 6,000 copies of the New Testament may not be impressive to you because one argument used against the authenticity of the Bible is that we do not have the originals. But what we have are copies dated back 2-4 decades from the time they were written. These copies are historically reliable documents written by eyewitnesses during the lifetime of other eyewitnesses. The massive number of copies is significant because it allows us to use what is called “bibliographic textual comparison” and actually get back to the original text content. In the manuscript/archaeology world, this is called textual transmission.

To explain textual transmission, consider this example. If there were 12 copies of an original document and each is copied by a different person, the likelihood is that each of those 12 would have an error or two at least: either a grammatical error (such as punctuation) or a larger error, but it would be very rare for all of them to have the same error. They would make different errors.

When there is a massive sample size (6,000 copies in the case of the New Testament), there are errors: grammatical, translation/language, etc. But when there is a large sample size, you discover the errors are not the same. So by comparison (textual transmission), you can get very close to what the original author actually said. That is why they are reliable.

As believers, we contribute this to the work of the Holy Spirit who preserves, protects, hands down, and passes on God’s Word to us. Second Timothy 3:16-17 reads, “All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work.”

Come back tomorrow as we consider the archaeological evidence for the reliability of the Bible.

Pastor Jeff Frazier