[Much of the content of this message is from Foundations (Teacher’s Guide, vol. 1) by Tom Holladay & Kay Warren.]
“The Bible did not arrive by fax from heaven…. The Bible is a product of man, my dear. Not of God. The Bible did not fall magically from the clouds. Man created it as a historical record of tumultuous times, and it has evolved through countless translations, additions, and revisions. History has never had a definite version of the book.” (The Da Vinci Code, p. 231)
Obviously, the Bible didn’t “arrive by fax from heaven” or “fall magically from the clouds.” But I do believe that the Bible is a product of God, not man.
I. HOW DO WE KNOW THE BIBLE CAME FROM GOD?
A. The external evidence says the Bible is a historical book.
External evidence simple means the proofs for the reliability of the Bible that are outside the pages of the Bible itself.
1. The number of manuscript copies and the short length of time between the original manuscripts and our first copies of the New Testament
Norman Geisler writes,
For the New Testament the evidence is overwhelming. There are 5,366 manuscripts to compare and draw information from, and some of these date from the second or third centuries. To put that in perspective, there are only 643 copies of Homer’s Iliad, and that is the most famous book of ancient Greece! No one doubts the existence of Julius Caesar’s Gallic Wars, but we only have 10 copies of it and the earliest of those was made 1,000 years after it was written. To have such an abundance of copies of the New Testament from dates within 70 years after their writing is amazing (When Skeptics Ask, pp. 159-160).
Why didn’t God allow us to have the original rather than relying on a number of copies? One possibility: we would have worshiped an old document rather than reading and following His living Word.
By the way, it’s important to understand that Bibles are translated from these original copies, which were written in Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek. Dan Brown suggests that that the Bible has been passed down from language to language over the centuries, and thus may have been changed many times. That’s not true. When a Bible translation is done, the translator goes back to these early manuscripts in the original languages.
2. The extreme care with which the Scriptures were copied
The earliest Jewish scribes (Old Testament copyists) followed a strict code to insure accuracy in their copies. Here are a few of the rules they followed meticulously:
• The copyist must not copy from memory.
• They could copy only letter by letter, not word by word.
• They counted the number of times each letter of the alphabet occurred in each book, and if it came out wrong, they threw the scroll away.
• They knew the middle letter of the Pentateuch (the first five books of the Old Testament) and the middle letter of the entire Old Testament. After copying a scroll, they counted forward and backward from this middle letter. If the number of letters did not match what they knew to be correct, they destroyed the scroll and started over.
3. Confirmation of places and dates in archaeology
The Dead Sea Scrolls are one of the most famous archaeological discoveries. What’s so significant about them? Every one of the Old Testament books is found in these scrolls. Before their discovery, the earliest manuscripts we had of some of the Old Testament books were from 900 A.D.—almost a thousand years later than when these scrolls were made. Amazingly, when the Dead Sea scrolls were compared with the later manuscripts, practically no differences were found. (The differences, about 5 percent, are most in word spellings.) That’s almost no changes in 1,000 years!
Archaeology confirms that the places and people the Bible speaks about were historically accurate. Archaeologists have uncovered many of the places where the New Testament events occurred. A few examples: portions of Herod’s temple, the theater in Ephesus where Acts 19 tells us a riot occurred, the pool of Siloam where a man was healed of blindness in John 9. The book of Acts is a model of historical accuracy. “In all, Luke names thirty-two countries, fifty-four cities, and nine islands without error.” (Norman Geisler, Baker Encyclopedia of Apologetics, p. 47).
B. The internal evidence says the Bible is a unique book.
Internal evidence is the evidence that you see in the Bible itself. If you never studied archaeology or history, you could still see the reliability of the Bible just by reading it. Look with me at just two of the ways we can see from the pages of the Bible that it is trustworthy and unique.
1. The majority of the Bible is from eyewitness accounts.
We all know the value of an eyewitness. When a prosecutor can call upon someone who saw what happened, the prosecution has a much greater chance of winning a conviction.
One piece of evidence that historians look for in assessing the reliability of any document is the number of generations that passed on a story before that story was written down. In other words, is the information firsthand or secondhand? The events of the Bible were primarily recorded in the generation in which they were experienced—by those who experienced them!
The Bible is full of eyewitness accounts. Moses was there when the Red Sea split. Joshua saw with his own eyes the wall of Jericho falling. The disciples stood in the Upper Room and saw and heard the resurrection Jesus.
2. The amazing agreement and consistency throughout the Bible.
Josh McDowell writes,
The Bible was written over a period of about 1,500 years in various places stretching all the way from Babylon to Rome. The human authors included over 40 persons from various stations of life: kings, peasants, poets, herdsmen, fishermen, scientists, farmers, priests, pastors, tentmakers and governors. It was written in a wilderness, a dungeon, inside palaces and prisons, on lonely islands and in military battles. Yet it speaks with agreement and reliability on hundreds of controversial subjects. Yet it tells one story from beginning to end, God’s salvation of man through Jesus Christ. NO PERSON could have possibly conceived of or written such a work! (Evidence That Demands a Verdict, pp. 19-20)
C. The personal evidence says the Bible is a powerful book.
The Bible is the world’s best-selling book. Most people know that it was the first major book to be printed on a press (the Gutenberg Bible). The Bible, in whole or in part, has been translated into more than 1,300 languages.
Millions of lives have been changed through the truth in the Bible!
Remember, personal testimony is just one of the four proofs that the Bible is God’s book. People talk about how the book of Mormon has changed their life, or how the Koran has made a difference. This, too, is personal testimony. It’s subjective, meaning it is the account of one person’s experience that has no objective proof.
The good news is, the Bible is shown to be reliable by both objective proof and subjective experience. You can see in the facts of archaeology and history that the Bible is a trustworthy book. And you can see in the personal experience of millions that the Bible is a book that changes lives.
“…the New Testament is false testimony.” (The Da Vinci Code, p. 342)
“All Scripture is God-breathed [inspired]….” (2 Tim. 3:16).
II. WHAT DOES IT MEAN WHEN WE SAY THE BIBLE IS INSPIRED?
“Inspiration does not mean that the writer felt enthusiastic, like Handel composing “The Messiah.” Nor does it mean that the writings are necessarily inspiring, like an uplifting poem. As a process, it refers to the writers and the writings being controlled by God. As a product, it refers to the writings only, as documents that are God’s message” (Norman Geisler, When Skeptics Ask, p. 145).
A. Inspiration means God wrote the Bible through people.
“Prophecy never had its origin in the will of man, but men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit” (2 Peter 1:21).
The details of how God inspired the Bible are a matter of great debate and conjecture. One thing is obvious as you read the Bible: God didn’t use people as robots. You can clearly see people’s personalities and passions in what they wrote. God created a perfect Bible through real people. He moved them internally to create a Word that will last eternally.
For those of you who doubt whether God could create something perfect through a fallible human being, I’d remind you that Jesus was born into this world through a faith-filled but imperfect woman named Mary. And Jesus was perfect.
B. Inspiration means that the Holy Spirit is the author.
“The Scripture had to be fulfilled which the Holy Spirit spoke long ago through the mouth of David….” (Acts 1:16).
“The Holy Spirit spoke the truth to your forefathers when he said through Isaiah the prophet….” (Acts 28:25).
“Then the Spirit of the Lord came upon me, and he told me to say….” (Eze. 11:5).
Who wrote the Bible? God did! He worked through people, but ultimately He is the author. The fact that God created a perfect book through so many imperfect people is one of His greatest miracles.
We have to be careful, of course, to see that the authority is in God’s words and not in our opinions about His Word. God always has a way of humbling us when we try to speak for Him rather than allowing Him to speak for Himself. A church bishop of a century ago pronounced from his pulpit and in the periodical he edited that heavier-than-air flight was both impossible and contrary to the will of God. His name was Bishop Wright…. You’ve probably guessed that his two sons were named Orville and Wilber!
Two important words to understand:
Verbal: God inspired the words, not just the ideas (Matt. 5:18; 22:43-44—Jesus based His argument on the single word “Lord”).
Plenary: God inspired all, not just part (2 Tim. 3:16).
“As for God, his way is perfect; the word of the Lord is flawless. He is a shield for all who take refuge in him” (Ps. 18:30).
So when you hear someone say we believe in the “verbal, plenary inspiration of God’s Word,” now you know what they mean.
Some books and portions of the Bible will be more inspiring to you than others, but that doesn’t change the fact that the entire Bible is inspired. Augustine gave us a clear warning of the danger of our deciding which parts of the Bible are inspired: “If you believe what you like in the Gospel, and reject what you don’t like, it is not the Gospel you believe, but yourself.”
C. Inspiration means God’s Word is to be our final authority.
1. Understanding inspiration increases my confidence in the Bible.
2. The truth behind inspiration is that I can trust the Bible above my feelings, values, opinions, and culture.
Whenever there is a conflict between what the Bible says and the way I feel or what I’ve been taught or the opinions of others or what seems reasonable to me—whenever I have a difference of opinion with the Bible for any reason—the Bible is always right! That means Dan Brown is wrong and the Bible is right.
Sometimes you’ll hear a person say that it is closed-minded to accept the Bible as authoritative truth. Belief in the authority of the Bible is not being closed-minded; it is being right-minded. It is not closed-minded to say that on a compass there is only one true north, or that on a map there is only one geographical location for your destination. Since God inspired the Bible, it is not closed-minded to say that it has the final say in our lives.
“The Bible, as we know it today, was collated by the pagan Roman emperor Constantine the Great.” (The Da Vinci Code, p. 231).
“More than eighty gospels were considered for the New Testament, and yet only a relative few were chosen for inclusion—Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John among them.” (The Da Vinci Code, p. 231).
Brown bases his claims about Christ and Mary Magdalene on two passages: one from the Gospel of Philip and one from the Gospel of Mary Magdalene—both Gnostic gospels. As we saw last week, these “gospels” are not reliable.
The most famous Gnostic gospel, the Gospel of Thomas (which was not written by the Thomas of the New Testament), ends with the following absurd statement: “Simon Peter said to them: “Let Mary go away from us, for women are not worthy of life.” Jesus said: “Lo, I shall lead her, so that I may make her a male, that she too may become a living spirit, resembling you males. For every woman who makes herself a male will enter the kingdom of heaven.”
“The Gnostic writings were not written by the apostles, but by men in the second century (and later) pretending to use apostolic authority to advance their own teachings. Today we call this fraud and forgery” (Geisler, When Skeptics Ask, p. 156).
“Constantine commissioned and financed a new Bible, which omitted those gospels that spoke of Christ’s human traits and embellished those gospels that made Him godlike. The earlier gospels were outlawed, gathered up, and burned.” (The Da Vinci Code, p. 234).
“Some of the gospels that Constantine attempted to eradicate managed to survive. The Dead Sea Scrolls were found in the 1950s hidden in a cave near Qumran in the Judean desert. And, or course, the Coptic Scrolls in 1945 at Nag Hammadi.” (The Da Vinci Code, p. 234)
“The scrolls highlight glaring discrepancies and fabrications, clearly confirming that the modern Bible was compiled and edited by men who possessed a political agenda—to promote the divinity of the man Jesus Christ and use His influence to solidify their own power base.” (The Da Vinci Code, p. 234).
[Video]
[Picture of Constantine]
The Council of Nicaea was held in A.D. 325. This is when Constantine supposedly put together the Bible. But many years prior to the council, Origen (A.D. 185-254) wrote, “Nevertheless, among all these we have approved solely what the church has recognized, which is that only the four gospels should be accepted.”
III. HOW DO WE KNOW WE HAVE THE RIGHT BOOKS?
“The canon of Scripture is the list of all the books that belong in the Bible” (Wayne Grudem, Systematic Theology, p. 54).
A common misconception is that the books that are included in the Bible were chosen by a committee of men who could have easily left out some books. Let’s clear that up and look at the truth. The bottom line is that if God wrote the books, He is certainly powerful enough to make sure those books are included in His Word. Here are three reasons we know that we have the right books.
A. The Testimony of the Bible
1. Jesus recognized the Old Testament canon.
Jesus said, “This is what I told you while I was still with you: Everything must be fulfilled that is written about me in the Law of Moses, the Prophets and the Psalms” (Luke 24:44). When Jesus mentions the Law, the Prophets, and the Psalms in Luke 24, He is affirming all three major divisions of the Old Testament.
2. Peter recognized part of the New Testament canon.
Peter wrote, “[Paul’s] letters contain some things that are hard to understand, which ignorant and unstable people distort, as they do the other Scriptures, to their own destruction” (2 Peter 3:16). Circle the words “the other Scriptures.” These letters of Paul had just been written, and they were already being recognized as Scripture by the church.
3. Paul recognized the equal inspiration of the Old and New Testaments in a single verse.
“For the Scripture says, ‘Do not muzzle the ox while it is treading out the grain,” and “The worker deserves his wages’” (1 Tim. 5:18). This is an amazing verse. In it Paul quotes from Deuteronomy 25:4 in the Old Testament and from Luke 10:7 in the New Testament, and calls them both Scripture!
Students of Bible history believe that Luke’s gospel was written in 60 A.D. and that the book of First Timothy was written in 63 A.D. This means that the Gospel of Luke was being recognized as Holy Scripture within only three years of its writing.
B. The History of the Church
When you look at how books actually came to be included in the Bible, you realize that it was not the result of one vote taken at a single meeting. Books were included in the New Testament on the basis of three things:
1. The Authority of an Apostle
The New Testament stands on the foundation of the apostles, men who intimately knew Jesus. God decided to use those who were closest to Jesus to tell the story of His life and to show us how to live as Jesus lived.
The New Testament has eyewitness authority. Take the writers of the Gospels, for instance, Matthew was an apostle, Mark wrote down Peter’s remembrances, Luke was a friend of Paul, and John was an apostle.
2. The Teaching of the Truth
The first people to read the New Testament books saw the light of God’s truth in them. The clear ring of truth in the words caused them to see these books as something entirely different from other religious writings of that day.
As more and more people read these books, a third affirmation resulted:
3. The Confirmation of the Church
Many people think that the New Testament books were chosen by a council of a few people. That is not true. A council did recognize the books of the New Testament, but that was after the church had been using these books for 300 years. The council formally recognized the books in response to false teachers who were trying to add books to the Bible.
The misconception is that what gives these books authority is the fact that they were “voted in.” The opposite is true. What caused these books to be recognized as God’s Word is the fact that these books had the authority of God behind them.
C. The Power of God
“The grass withers and the flowers fall, but the word of God stands forever” (Isa. 40:8).
Our assurance that we have the right books is a matter of faith. God would not have allowed any part of what He had chosen to stand forever to be left out.
You can erase from your mind the thought that someday they’ll discover in some cave a book of the Bible that should have gotten in—a “lost” book of the Bible. Do you think God would let that happen? Of course not!
“A book is not the Word of God because it was accepted by the people of God. Rather, it was accepted by the people of God because it is the Word of God. That is, God gives the book its divine authority, not the people of God. They merely recognize the divine authority which God gives to it.” (Geisler, A General Introduction to the Bible, 210)
“I can’t make this point too strongly: The various books were not accepted or rejected by a council or a committee. The process was not what The Da Vinci Code describes as a power grab. Councils only ratified what the church had already done; no council or pope imposed upon the churches books that the people of God had not already accepted.” (Erwin Lutzer, The Da Vinci Deception, p. 96)
“People often err by thinking that the canon was set by church councils. Such was not the case, for the various church councils that pronounced upon the subject of the canon of the New Testament were merely stating publicly…what had been widely accepted by the consciousness of the church for some time.” (Earle E. Cairns, Christianity through the Centuries, p. 118)
Resources used:
Cracking Da Vinci’s Code by James L. Garlow & Peter Jones
Foundations (Teacher’s Guide, vol. 1) by Tom Holladay & Kay Warren
Josh McDowell’s personal Da Vinci Code research notes (offered on SermonCentral.com)
Systematic Theology by Wayne Grudem
The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown
The Da Vinci Deception by Erwin W. Lutzer
“The Da Vinci Intrigue” in Outreach magazine, March/April 2006
The Gospel Code by Ben Witherington III
