Is The Bible Reliable? May 21, 2006
1 John 1
1That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked at and our hands have touched—this we proclaim concerning the Word of life. 2The life appeared; we have seen it and testify to it, and we proclaim to you the eternal life, which was with the Father and has appeared to us. 3We proclaim to you what we have seen and heard, so that you also may have fellowship with us. And our fellowship is with the Father and with his Son, Jesus Christ. 4We write this to make our joy complete.
The movie, “The Da Vinci Code” opened in theatres this weekend. How many of you have seen it or read the book? How many have read an article or a book or watched a show “debunking” The Da Vinci Code? There are many Christians who are upset about some of the strange ideas that Dan Brown puts forward as factual history to fit into his page turning book. Dan Brown’s book is a work of fiction, and even the things that look like fact are fiction. Even before the prologue of the book he has this statement that says “All descriptions of artwork, architecture, documents, and secret rituals in this novel are accurate.” I actually think that the statement is a bit of a joke that Dan Brown is sharing with the readers since it is not just historic Christianity that he gets wrong, but art history, architecture and geography. He is not one to let the facts get in the way of a good story. To get your ideas of history and Christianity from Dan Brown’s book is like getting your ideas of space travel from watching the Jetsons.
The two ideas that Dan Brown puts forward in his book that upset Christians the most is that there was a conspiracy to keep certain writings out of Scripture, and that there is also a conspiracy to hide the marriage of Jesus to Mary Magdalene and to hide the knowledge of their offspring and thus also squash the worship of the sacred feminine. I think that dealing with the first issue will counter the second. So, today I’d like to deal with the question “Is Scripture Reliable?”
I don’t think that there are too many people that, upon investigation, will adopt Dan Brown’s conspiracy theories. The difficulty is that not many people will investigate them. And although they may have heard that the theories are suspect, the seeds of doubt get planted, and people start to say things like, “Oh, how can we really know that the Bible is true?” “What about all the stuff they changed?” “How can we know who Jesus really was?” They might not even try to find the answers top the questions, because it is good enough to have the doubt so that you can continue your life without God.
I think that it is good to have the beginning of some answers so that we can help people get over barriers to faith, and so that our own faith can be built on solid ground.
If you have a question at any time, just ask. I’ll try to answer it to the best of my abilities, or I’ll let you know where the answer might be found.
What is the New Testament?
The New Testament is a collection of 27 writings that we usually call “books.” There are 9 authors. The first 4 books are accounts of Jesus’ life, ministry, teaching, suffering, death and resurrection. They center on the three or so years of Jesus ministry and give a good deal of ink to Jesus’ last week. Acts is an account of the first years of the Christian church. After that come letters to churches and individuals. They deal with specific issues of theology and practice in the churches that they were written to. The last book is a genre called “Apocalyptic:” it is a prophetic description of the way things are (or were) and what will come.
The New Testament was written in common Greek, The Gospel of Matthew may have been originally written in Aramaic, and translated into the common language of Greek.
Christians believe that the New Testament and the Old Testament are the inspired word of God through the hands of people.
How where the writings distributed?
You may remember that Christianity started in Jerusalem, and it grew from there to have Christians throughout the known world within the first generation.
The scriptures that were first used was what we call the Old Testament, or the Hebrew Scriptures. So when Paul writes to Timothy, “All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness, so that all God’s people may be thoroughly equipped for every good work.” - 2 Timothy 3:16-17 he is talking about the Old Testament! We also apply this verse to the NT.
Early on, writings by the apostles are regarded as on par with scripture. Peter writes in his letter:
“…Our dear brother Paul also wrote you with the wisdom that God gave him. 16He writes the same way in all his letters, speaking in them of these matters. His 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 3:15-16
You can see how Peter calls Paul’s writings “scripture.”
The first books of our New Testament that were written were Paul’s Letters; the first one most likely being Galatians. Paul would visit a town, preach, draw people to Christ, plant a church and after they had a good grounding, or when he got run out of town, he would leave. He would write back to them to teach and train them in regards to the issues that they were dealing with. The churches would not keep these letters to themselves, but they would pass them on to churches in other cities, so that the Christians there could be blessed by them.
Sharing of scripture was a little like file sharing without napster. You would receive a letter, the resident scribe would copy it, and then send it on to the next community. They would have been copied on scrolls, not in bound books like we have. After a while Paul’s letters were all bound together, often including the letter to the Hebrews, which wasn’t written by Paul.
The Gospels and other letters were written later – likely closer to the end of the Apostle’s life times. Maybe they were concerned that their eye-witness accounts be written down in a more permanent form so that future generations (like us) could have them. The last book that was written was Revelations.
The 4 Gospels soon became bound together, along with Acts.
It’s amazing that these 27 books written by 9 different authors over approximately 50 years have so much continuity and agreement!
Is what we have what the authors wrote?
Since the documents were copied by hand, could it not be that mistakes were made, the scribe got drowsy and left pieces out? Or the scribe had a particular bent and changed things to suit his own belief? What about the old broken telephone game where one person whispers one thing in another’s ear and it gets passed on until the message is completely different than what the original was?
The scribes took their work very seriously – they trusted these documents, as they were regarded as scripture, and “God-breathed,” they wanted to convey them accurately. If you make the copies of the scripture into a genealogy chart, if changes were being made, you would expect a great deal of variation in all the “grandchildren” So as copies are found, there would be some similarity to each other, but some great differences. This is not the case. By and large, the ancient copies that we have are the same, there is not even a hint of large changes made.
There are blips an burps – differences in grammar, spelling, small additions, like Christ after Jesus’ name, or fasting after prayer. Most of these variants are inconsequential to the theology and practice of the church and Christians today. There is a science called “textual criticism” that follows rules to figure out which is most likely the original text. Where it isn’t obvious which variant should be chosen, your modern translation will have a footnote that says “some manuscripts say this…” If you like, I have a Greek New Testament that has all the variants marked, and I have books that explain the science of textual criticism.
There is a way that historians test old documents to determine how if they are true copies of the original. The ask how soon after the date of writing was the copy made, and how any copies do we have that match each other? Nicky Gumbel, from the Alpha course made a chart that compares other ancient writings that historians accept as accurate to the documents of the New Testament.
Work When Written Earliest Copy Time Span in years Number of ancient manuscripts
Herodotus 488-428 BC AD 900 1,300 8
Thucydidies c. 460-400 BC c.AD 900 1,300 8
Tacitus AD 100 AD 1100 1,000 20
Caesar’s Gallic War 58-50 BC AD 900 950 9 or 10
Livy’s Roman History 59 BC-AD 17 AD 900 900 20
New Testament AD 40-100 AD 130 (full manusscripts AD 350) 300 5,000+ Greek10,000 Latin9,300 others
F.F. Bruce summarises the evidence by Quoting Sir Frederic Kenyon, a leading scholar in this area:
“The interval then between the dates of original composition and the earliest extant evidence becomes so small as to be in fact negligible, and the last foundation for any doubt that the scriptures have come down to us substantially as they were written has now been removed. Both the authenticity and the general integrity of the books of the New Testament may be regarded as finally established.”
F.F. Bruce comments that it is a funny thing that secular historians are much more willing to accept the New Testament documents as reliable than some theologians are!
Buy all methods of history, archeology and science, we can be sure that what we have in translation is what the Apostles wrote back in the first century AD.
“How were the books that we have recognized as scripture while others were not?
We have other writings from the time of the early church some that fit with the practice and theology of the NT and some that obviously don’t. Why is that we call what we have scripture, and call the other things just ancient documents?
The first reason is that the Early church considered what we have as scripture.
The Early Church – the community of believers, not some hierarchy, had good criteria for recognizing these writings as scripture while setting others aside.
The criteria follow much of what John wrote at the beginning of his letter:
1 John 1
1That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked at and our hands have touched—this we proclaim concerning the Word of life. 2The life appeared; we have seen it and testify to it, and we proclaim to you the eternal life, which was with the Father and has appeared to us. 3We proclaim to you what we have seen and heard, so that you also may have fellowship with us. And our fellowship is with the Father and with his Son, Jesus Christ. 4We write this to make our joy complete.
Apostolic Authority
Was the book written by an Apostle, or by someone closely associated with an apostle and using their authority. Matthew and John are Apostles, Mark is writing under Peter and Luke is writing under Paul. The apostles are all eye witnesses of Jesus life and ministry.
Age
Does the book come from the first generation of the church? Revelation, the youngest book, was written by the Apostle John in his old age. The Gnostic Gospels including the latest find of the Gospel according to Judas were all written in the 3rd or 4th century after Jesus. When people say that these documents are the earliest picture of Christianity, they are talking about documents that are at least 100 more recent than the NT. They are not early Christianity, they are later heresy!
Orthodoxy
Do the documents match what Jesus and the Apostles taught? The Gnostic gospels are not a new twist on Jesus’ teaching, they are a completely different faith. That is why they were never received into the church, not as scripture or as Sunday-school material.
Universality
Is the book accepted by all Christians everywhere as scripture? This shows that the Christian community recognized the new testament as scripture. The books were not chosen by a group of Hollywood’s worst versions of bishops!
Inspiration
This is likely the most important test – the test of the Holy Spirit. Was the church agreed that the writings were inspired by the Holy Spirit as scripture? It is obvious that Paul wrote more letters than we have, but only some are scripture. The others were not wrong, they would have been good and helpful for the churches for a time, but not deemed scripture by the discernment of the Christians as they were led by the Spirit. If you are a Christian, you have the same witness within you, that says “yes, these are words breathed by God!”
When we say that scripture is inspired we are not using that word like we might used it to say “that song was so inspired!” nor are we meaning that God dictated the words to the writers and they wrote them down. We believe that God used the author’s personality, writing style, understanding and context to communicate his Word with us.
In my own mind, I also know the NT is scripture, because it is not easy – it pushes me, it cuts me too the quick. If we read it with humility and a desire to meet God, it does not allow all the abuses of the church that some would say it backs up!
It doesn’t paint the apostles – the leaders of the church and the authors in as great light. If I was Peter telling the stories for Mark to write down, I would have left the whole denial thing out. If I were Paul telling Luke the stories, I would have left the fight with Barnabas out. Paul’s letters to the early church show that there were problems, dissention and sin in the churches – not the greatest press release for a new religion!
Brown says that the Roman Emperor Constantine re-wrote the NT as spin to create a new religion that would prop up his empire. If that is what happened, then Constantine was the worst spin-doctor in history! It appears Brown never read the New Testament, because it is not good spin! One of the reasons the Bible is so believable to me is exactly because it is not good spin.
There was a time – a dark time in the church’s history when people were not allowed to read the Bible. One of the reasons that Luther was rejected by the Church’s hierarchy was that he translated the Bible into his people’s native tongue – German. The reason that the Bible was kept from the common people was fort fear that they would read it and be liberated from the oppressive spirituality of the Church and State. The Bible is not repressive it is liberating. The Bible does not prop up empires, it knocks them down! In the movie, “Luther,” one of Luther’s detractors says to him in condescension, “The Bible is so complex, that most priests cannot even understand it, how are the common people going to understand it?” William Tyndale was burned at the stake because he translated the Bible into English. Our own Tommy Douglas was arrested for sedition for printing and distributing Mary’s song found in Luke 1:46-55 unedited and without comment!
Don’t read this powerful book, it might free you!
Faith
In the end, whether we accept the Bible as the word of God is a step of faith. You can believe in the reliability of the Bible without accepting it, or without accepting Jesus who it proclaims. To do that takes faith. But it is not unreasonable faith – it is not faith in a religion that is based on lies. It is reasonable faith in Jesus Christ who is attested to in this beautiful collection of books called the Bible.
If you are a Christian, what you believe is not unfounded, it is based in historical truth, not made up myth, or deception.
What to do
Read your Bible!
Christian can spend a great deal of energy convincing ourselves that the Bible is true, and that we are “Biblical people”, without spending a great deal of time reading it. What a great privilege we have of having the scriptures available to us, in translations that we can understand and are free to read! So read it! Use whatever translation you can understand the best, but read it! Read it in Joy – John says that he wrote these things so that his joy would be made full – it isn’t that clear whose joy is to be made full, so he also wrote it so that our joy can be made full! Bible reading brings joy!
Live your Bible!
The Bible was not written for decoration on your shelf, or for decoration of you mind – it was written to be applied. Remember what Paul wrote to Timothy: “All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness, so that all God’s people may be thoroughly equipped for every good work.” - 2 Timothy 3:16-17 - Scripture is inspired (God-breathed) by God to equip us to do good works!
I go back to the sad fact that there are many people out there who will accept what Dan Brown and others say about the Bible without any investigation and without reading the Bible themselves.
Someone once said that you are the only Bible that many people will read. Peter says it differently, he says “Live such good lives among the pagans that, though they accuse you of doing wrong, they may see your good deeds and glorify God on the day he visits us.” 1 Peter 2:12
He says later
“But in your hearts set apart Christ as Lord. Always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have. But do this with gentleness and respect, keeping a clear conscience, so that those who speak maliciously against your good behavior in Christ may be ashamed of their slander.” - 1 Peter 3:15-16
You may have opportunity that this strange myth that Brown asserts about Christianity and the Bible is wrong, but you will have the opportunity to show the truth as it has affected your life!
Resources
Paul Barnett, Is The New Testament Reliable? IVP ISBN 0-8308-2768-4
F.F. Bruce, The New Testament Documents: Are They Reliable? IVP
ISBN 0-8308-2736-6
F.F. Bruce, The Canon of Scripture IVP, 1988
N.T. Wright, Decoding The Da Vinci Code: The Challenge of Historic Christianity to Post-Modern Fantasy A message given in Seattle, text on the web.
Go to www.ntwrightpage.com and find the link to this message
Ben Witherington III, Why the ’Lost Gospels’ Lost Out
Recent gadfly theories about church council conspiracies that manipulated the New Testament into existence are bad—really bad–history.
www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2004/006/7.26.html
