Fifth article in the series “With Good Reason”
by Keith Bassham
John Piper of Bethlehem Baptist Church in Minneapolis quotes from a letter sent to his local newspaper. It is fairly representative of the attitude a skeptic might have if he or she has given some thought to the Bible’s credibility.
One of the few worthwhile statements in the Bible is, “You shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free.” …Knowledge of the Bible is hindered by the informal censorship imposed by religious leaders who would rather their followers didn’t know what’s in it — the innumerable contradictions, historical errors, plagiarism, absurdities, meaningless prophecies, myths presented as historical fact, and countless instances of divinely ordered or approved atrocities… It is true that the Bible has some worthwhile material, including entertaining stories, inspirational sentiments and astute observations about human behavior. However, these worthwhile parts could probably be contained in a pamphlet.
When people make such statements, I try to find the question behind the question. For instance, I don’t know the context of the letter, whether it was prompted by a political issue, a public statement, or some local debate on a religious matter. Perhaps the author’s own religious experience left a bad taste in his or her mouth. Whatever the prompting, the letter has cleverly packaged a series of questions Christians need to answer. Let’s see if we can unpack the bags.
First, is it true that religious leaders have actively censored the Bible, hoping that believers will not know what is in it?
This one makes me smile. For well over 100 years, skeptics have been making the claim that religious people in the past have been tinkering with the Bible to deal with “inaccuracies” and “embarrassing facts.” One well-known group known as the Jesus Seminar concluded in the 1990s that only a very small part of the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John accurately presented what Jesus actually did and said. The rest, they said, was added for one reason or another.
My question here is this — if people had been tinkering with the Bible anyway, why didn’t they do a good job of it, take out the potentially embarrassing material, and reconcile the so-called inaccuracies and contradictions? Why not add in a sentence or two that tells us where Cain got his wife, expunge the record of David and Bathsheba, or make God a little less fierce toward the Canaanites? No, Jesus had some “hard sayings,” (John 6) and Peter says Paul wrote “some things hard to be understood” (2 Peter 3:16), and all those things are still in the Bible. So if people had been tinkering around with it, they missed a lot of opportunities for “censorship.”
Try this sometime when someone says there are many contradictions and inaccuracies. Reply by saying, “Show me an example.” If a skeptic has done enough reading to actually identify one or even several, rest assured that others on both sides of the issue have seen them. You can also be sure that believers have dealt with the apparent contradiction or inaccuracy, and there are answers to the problems. Most of the apologetics resources I have pointed to in these articles will have the information you need. CARM (Christian Apologetics and Resource Ministry — www.carm.org) has a section devoted to Bible difficulties.
One apologetics scholar, Norman Geisler, says most of the so-called mistakes are based on errors of the skeptics themselves. In When Critics Ask, he says the skeptics’ mistakes fall into these categories:
• Assuming that the unexplained is not explainable
• Presuming the Bible guilty until proven innocent
• Confusing our fallible interpretations with God’s infallible revelation
• Failing to understand the context of the passage
• Neglecting to interpret difficult passages in the light of clear ones
• Basing a teaching on an obscure passage
• Assuming that a partial report is a false report
• Demanding that NT citations of the OT always be exact quotations
• Assuming that divergent accounts are false ones
• Presuming that the Bible approves of all its records
• Forgetting that the Bible uses non-technical, everyday language
• Assuming that round numbers are false
• Neglecting to note that the Bible uses different literary devices
• Forgetting that only the original text, not every copy of scripture, is without error
• Confusing general statements with universal ones
• Forgetting that latter revelation supersedes previous revelation
But what about the other part of this question? Are the Jesus Seminar people, and people like them, correct? In other words, the next question to unpack here is:
Assuming no one consciously tinkered with the text, how can we be sure the Bible we have today was transmitted, copied, and translated accurately over many hundreds of years?
A full answer to this would fill a book, so let’s just take a look at what we know about the Gospels, the first books of the New Testament. First of all, though we do not have any original manuscripts (that is, all manuscripts of the Bible are copies and copies of copies), more than 5,600 Greek manuscripts and fragments have been recovered and studied. In contrast, in the study of Jewish, Greek, and Roman literature, if historians have more than a few dozen manuscripts, they are delighted. Also, among most ancient works of literature, several centuries elapse between the original compositions and their earliest existing copies. This is not true for the Gospels. At least some portions of the Gospels we have date to the early second century, whole books of the New Testament can be dated to the second century, and one codex containing nearly all the Bible is dated to between the years 325-350.
So, we have many copies to compare and some quite early so we can see if changes have occurred. With so many copies, and with those copies all written by hand, it is inevitable that small differences would occur from one manuscript to the other. However, with so many copies to compare, and knowing that errors would be spread out among them, it is relatively easy to be certain (from purely a technical and not a faith standpoint) of about 97 to 98 percent of the wording of the New Testament. Of that two or three percent left, about half are related to word endings, articles such as “a” or “the,” and none have any effect on actual teaching. In fact, the great Greek scholar A. T. Robertson (1863-1934) noted that only about a “thousandth part of the entire text” of the New Testament is of concern to textual critics.
The conclusion is, for the Gospels at least, that apart from very minor differences among the manuscripts, the text was “set” within a couple of hundred years from the original writings. Even if some person or persons were to try to “poison” the text by introducing changes, there were enough true copies to set everything straight. Again, I stress, I am speaking here from a purely technical view. God surely has some interest in the preservation of His Word, as stated in the Bible in several places.
What about the question that the Bible contains historical errors or presents myth as historical fact?
Again, I have to smile when I read something like this. The Bible is a large book, so I turn once more to the Gospels and let them stand for the whole in this brief article. Though it was popular during the 18th and 19th centuries for some philosophers to question whether Jesus ever existed or not, hardly any question the point today. Perhaps that is because, as Craig Blomberg (The Historical Reliability of the Gospels), whom we have quoted already in this series, says, “A dozen or so non-Christian writers or texts confirm a remarkable number of details in the Gospels about Jesus’ life — that he was a Jew living in the first third of the first century, born out of wedlock, a self-styled teacher who became very popular, selected certain men as his inner core of disciples, disregarded Jewish dietary laws and ate with the despised, enraged certain Jewish leaders, even though believed to be the Messiah by others, was crucified by Pontius Pilate but believed to have been raised from the dead by some of his followers who began a fledgling religion that never died out.”
Archeology has confirmed many of the details given in the Gospels (and the Bible generally), many of which were doubted at some point, especially beginning in the Enlightenment Age. Some recent discoveries include items concerning Pontius Pilate, Caiaphas, James (the brother of Jesus), and fishing boats in Galilee. And then there are the many other contemporary figures whose existence and whereabouts are easily placed within the Gospel narrative. See, for instance, F. F. Bruce’s Jesus and Christian Origins Outside the New Testament for references to the Roman emperors, Judean rulers, and high priests. Everyone is where he or she should be, and place names are accurately used in the Gospels.
A friend recently reminded me that one of the key points in apologetics regarding history and archeology is that if the Bible record can be validated in points where we can check it out, we should also assume that the record is trustworthy where we cannot do such a check. And over the years, so many Bible facts were brought into question (the existence of Hittites, the ability of Moses to write, and so on), but later research has often shown the Bible was right.
The letter we mentioned at the beginning of the article also used the phrase “meaningless prophesies” as one of the less worthwhile parts of the Bible. On the contrary, fulfilled prophecy is one of the greatest confirmations of the Bible’s trustworthiness.
Does the Bible really show prophecies being fulfilled?
Yes. Though there are prophetic sections throughout the Bible, and more than a few are susceptible to different interpretations, many are clear and unambiguous. J. Barton Payne, in the Encyclopedia of Biblical Prophecies, lists nearly 200 prophecies literally fulfilled in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Here is a small sample:
Place of birth (Micah 5:2)
Time of birth (Daniel 9:25)
Manner of birth (Isaiah 7:14)
Sold for 30 pieces of silver (Zechariah 11:12)
Manner of death (Psalm 22:16)
People’s reactions (mocking, spitting, staring, etc.) (Psalm 22:7, 8, 17)
His side pierced (Zechariah 12:10)
Burial in a rich man’s tomb (Isaiah 53:9)
Having spent some time in a recent article dealing with probability and math, I’ll not do the same here, but can you imagine the odds of only these eight prophecies being fulfilled as they were in one man in one event? Can you extrapolate that to 191 prophecies being accurately and literally fulfilled in the same way. It is beyond belief.
Or, is it that God wants us to have belief, and He has confirmed the truthfulness of the Bible to help us firm up that belief? We can believe the Bible with good reason.