Is The Bible Reliable?

Is the Bible reliable?

Yes.

There are many ways in which the “reliability” of the Bible can be understood. For example, is it historically reliable in what it reports as events that occurred? Is it morally reliable as regard to the difference between right and wrong? Is it textually reliable – do the manuscripts that we have accurately reflect what was originally written down? Is it canonically reliable – were the right books chosen to be in the Bible and the wrong ones excluded?

It is impossible in a 30-minute sermon to go down all these rabbit trails. So I will pick a few and not even pretend that I am giving a comprehensive answer to an impossibly big question. I will cherry-pick. And I am going to be addressing, as it were, my 18-year-old self, stressing things that I think would have been helpful to me that I did not at that time have the tools to address. I will arrange this under 5 headings.

(1) We have an accurate representation of original manuscripts.

We don’t have any of the original texts of the Bible – the first handwritten manuscripts that prophets and apostles wrote down. What we have are copies of copies. And there are some differences between those copies, what are called textual variants. This provokes the question, how do we know what it originally said? This one turns out to be very easy, and really not much of an issue at all.

The fact is, there is no such thing as an original paper or vellum text of any ancient document. All you ever have are copies of copies, manuscripts written by hand before Gutenberg invented the printing press around 1450 and stabilized the process. For example, Julius Caesar’s Gallic Wars. We have 10 manuscripts. The earliest of these is dated to 1000 years after the original writing. Pliny the Younger, 7 copies of his epistles, the earliest dated to 750 years after the original. Herodotus, Greek historian of the 5th century BC. We have 9 copies of his works, the earliest dated to 1400 years after the original. Typically, with all ancient literature, we have single-digit extant copies of full manuscripts, and more than 500 years of time between the original writing and the earliest known copies that we can hold in our hands. This is true of Plato, Aristotle, Sophocles, Euripides, Thucydides, etc.

For the Greek New Testament we have 5800 manuscripts, and the earliest of those, in terms of fragments, is dated to within 50 years of the original writing. It has rightly been called an embarrassment of riches. There are textual variants, but the vast majority of those are things like spelling differences, or obvious typos where the scribe accidentally left out a word, but we can see from comparing with other texts what that word was. In comparing these texts one with another, we have well over a 99% accuracy confidence rating. The few straggling leftovers are things like, did Jesus say “prayer and fasting” or just “prayer”? Is the mark of beast "666," or, as a couple early manuscripts have it, "616"? There are a handful of tough calls here and there, but they are always about very minor things, and even atheist textual critic Bart Ehrman has stated repeatedly that no Christian doctrine depends on any doubtful reading of any text. The effect of the massive amount of early texts that we have combined with straightforward scholarly detective work leave us with an extremely high degree of confidence that we do have the original wording even if we don’t have the original pages or scrolls. The textual reliability is off the charts, and need not keep anyone awake at night wondering what the apostles really wrote. We know what they wrote.

(2) Casual indications of stunning historical accuracy.

For this I want to zero in on some details in the book of Acts. Acts is the second volume of a two-volume set written by Luke: the Gospel of Luke, which is about Jesus, and the Acts of the Apostles, which is about the acts of the Apostles, or early church. These are big books, and together, by word-count, constitute over 25% of the New Testament.

In the mid 1800s some German scholars led by F. C. Bauer decided to apply their philosophy to the early history of the church without bothering to do any actual research. They decided that the book of Acts would have been written in the second half of the second century, maybe AD 160 or 170, by some guy claiming to be Luke, but it was really just a guy sitting at a desk 100 years later and making it up.

That view held a lot of influence for many years, but no real scholar believes it anymore because Luke is so scarily accurate in matters that we can verify that we know beyond any doubt that this was written by someone who was widely traveled around the Mediterranean world in the mid first century. Textual considerations indicate that we have an eyewitness to a number of the events that he covered. He refers to things that happened in places as diverse as Jerusalem, Thessalonica, Rome, Ephesus, Malta, Cyprus, Antioch - modern day Israel, Italy, Greece, Turkey, Syria, etc. One of the challenges that modern translators have is finding good equivalent terms for the Greek words that Luke uses for describing public officials in these various regions. In English, depending on your version of the Bible, you will see terms like “magistrate,” “town clerk,” “proconsul,” “city authority,” “chief official” “police,” or at a higher level, “governor” and “tetrarch.” These are all different words in Greek, and they vary from region to region. The amazing thing about Luke is that he gets the term right every time. It would not be possible for a later writer to be that accurate.

To put this in perspective with an analogy, I don’t know the difference between alderman and city councilman. Maybe they’re the same. Maybe you use one term in Chicago and a different one in Miami. I don’t know. But Luke knows. My favorite example of this is in Acts 17:6 where Luke uses the term politarchas (“city officials”) for some individuals in Thessalonica. This term is not found elsewhere in extant literature but has been confirmed by archaeological digs in Thessalonica itself. Luke was a painstaking journalist of the first order.

One more thing about Luke concerns the dating of his works. Luke records the main events of early church history from Jerusalem to Rome, but he does not record the destruction of Jerusalem in AD 70, the martyrdom of Peter and Paul in the mid 60s, or the burning of Rome and the great persecution of Christians that followed in AD 64. Why? Because those things hadn’t happened yet. Luke ends the book of Acts with Paul still alive in Rome, and that is in the early 60s. Now remember that Acts is a big book – it took some time to research it and write it, and it is the second volume of a two-volume series. So the first volume, the Gospel of Luke, is earlier than that – maybe the 50s. And beyond that, the Gospel of Luke incorporates a huge portion of the Gospel of Mark. Luke had the Gospel of Mark in front of him, whether in written or oral form, when he wrote his gospel. That means that Mark is even earlier. Maybe 40s, early 50s. The point I am trying to make is that these New Testament documents that demonstrate a stunning degree of historical accuracy in matters that we can verify, were written early, within living memory of the eyewitnesses. Jesus was crucified in AD 33. And we have detailed documents written about him only a couple decades later.

(3) The Significance of Irrelevant Details.

In the Bible you have instances of a phenomenon that never appears in fiction until the 1800s. And that is the sudden intrusion of a detail that doesn’t go anywhere, an extraneous bit of narrative that has no connection to the story. You have that in non-fiction all the time. But as a literary device for tall-tale fiction it did not exist back then. It is a recent development.

C. S. Lewis calls attention to one such incident in John 8. He writes, In the story of the woman taken in adultery we are told Christ bent down and scribbled in the dust with his finger. Nothing comes of this. No one has ever based any doctrine on it. And the art of inventing little irrelevant details to make an imaginary scene more convincing is a purely modern art. Surely the only explanation of this passage is that the thing really happened? The author put it in simply because he had seen it.

So in a modern novel – by “modern” I mean the past 200 years, you can have a scene where two characters are talking to one another and one interrupts to say, “Can I get you some coffee?” and the other says, “Sure. Light cream, no sugar.” He does that and they continue their dialogue. We know how to write scenes like that. But you don’t see that in Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, Cervantes, Bunyan, or Swift. It is a technique in fiction that we employ and they did not. But if John did that in his gospel, if he was making it up, then he was a literacy genius with no precedent in the history of literature and no successors for 1800 years. That strains credibility. The fact is, we’re looking at eyewitness accounts.

An example I like to refer to comes in 1 Timothy 5:23. I will read that quickly in context with the two verses before and after it. Paul writes to Timothy, In the presence of God and of Christ Jesus and of the elect angels I charge you to keep these rules without prejudging, doing nothing from partiality. 22 Do not be hasty in the laying on of hands, nor take part in the sins of others; keep yourself pure. 23 (No longer drink only water, but use a little wine for the sake of your stomach and your frequent ailments.) 24 The sins of some people are conspicuous, going before them to judgment, but the sins of others appear later. 25 So also good works are conspicuous, and even those that are not cannot remain hidden.

There are scholars who have made the claim, with no good evidence, that 1 Timothy is a forgery. “Paul didn’t write this letter to Timothy. It’s a made-up document by someone who is pushing for a church order that included elders and deacons that we think were a later development in church history." In response we can say, there are such things as forgeries. The Gnostic cults produced a bunch of them a hundred or more years later. These were documents that were reputedly written in the name of an apostle, but they are transparently Gnostic propaganda. They are comparable to inane quotes today like “Hang in there! Keep on truckin’!” being attributed to Albert Einstein. Or “Remember: Keep it real” to Abraham Lincoln.

Among the many reasons we know that 1 Timothy is not a forgery is this out-of-blue extraneous detail where Paul is discussing the nature of sin and keeping oneself pure and the extent to which one’s true character can be hidden for a while but will eventually be revealed – and right in the middle Paul plops down the line: “Take some wine for your stomach ailments.” That is an authentic line to a young man who suffered from stomach problems. I won’t belabor the point, except to say that legends, fictions and forgeries of that era lacked the sophistication to throw in irrelevant details like that just to make you think that you were reading something real.

(4) The Irrelevance of Nickel-and-Dime Cheap Shots.

Here I may ruffle the feathers of some devout brothers and sisters in Christ. But it needs to be said, and I think it is something I needed to have heard about 40 years ago.

Countless attacks on the reliability of Scripture and countless defenses of the reliability of Scripture revolve around alleged discrepancies. For example, the healing of the blind man of Jericho. Mark 10:45 says that it happened as Jesus was leaving Jericho. Luke 18:35 says it happened as Jesus was approaching Jericho. So which is it? Did Jesus heal the blind man while he was going into Jericho or coming out of it?

Oh, the ink that has been spilled on this and related matters! There are many proposals to reconcile these two texts. I have seen it claimed that Jesus was leaving Old Jericho and entering New Jericho. Or maybe the blind man followed him as he walked all the way through Jericho and Jesus didn’t heal him until he was about to leave. Or Matthew mentions two blind men, maybe one was at the entrance and one at the exit.

May I humbly suggest that such efforts are a huge waste of time, and a ridiculous distraction? I don’t get my undies in a bunch over the precise location in Jericho of the healing of the blind man. The important thing is that Jesus healed a blind man! That’s the lede that should concern us. Or take for example whether Jesus liberated a man from demons near the town of Gerasa (according to Mark) or Gadara (according to Matthew). As far as I’m concerned, who cares? Someone might say, “Well, you should care, if you believe the Bible to be true and perfectly reliable.” I do believe the Bible to be true and reliable. That doesn’t mean I have to nickel-and-dime every obscure picky detail that comes my way.

The reason I refuse to nickel-and-dime the text like that is because the text refuses to nickel-and-dime itself. Let me explain what I mean.

In 1 Corinthians 1:14-15 Paul says, “I thank God that I did not baptize any of you except Crispus and Gaius, so no one can say that you were baptized in my name.” Question: how many people did Paul baptize in Corinth? Two. Crispus and Gaius. Is the Bible true? Is the Bible reliable? Yes. Therefore Paul baptized two and only two people in Corinth. But in the very next verse Paul says, “Yes, I also baptized the household of Stephanas; beyond that, I don’t remember if I baptized anyone else.”

It is not hard to imagine that as Paul dictated this letter to his amanuensis, his scribe, Sosthenes, that when Paul said he only baptized Crispus and Gaius that Sosthenes laid down his quill and said, “Paul, didn’t you baptize Stephanus and his family too?” And Paul says, “Oh yes, that’s right, I did baptize them too. Put that in there.” As far as I’m concerned, the correction in verse 16 to the minor negligible unimportant error in verse 14 is not a threat to biblical reliability and should not be regarded as such. In exactly the same way, as Matthew reads over the gospel of Mark (the first gospel written), and sees that Mark placed a demonic expulsion near Gerasa, Matthew can do a “Sosthenes” and say, “No, I was there. That was actually closer to Gadara a few miles away. When I write my gospel I’m making it Gadara.”

In a seminary class I took years ago, the professor tried to reconcile a statement in Stephen’s farewell sermon, just before he was martyred, where he said in Acts 7:14 that the patriarch Joseph “sent for his father Jacob and his whole family, seventy-five in all.” Note: Seventy-five. But Genesis 46:27 says that the number of people in Jacob’s family who went to Egypt were 70 in all. Oh no, we have a discrepancy! Was it 70 or 75? Well you can imagine all kinds of ways to reconcile the texts if you are creative. Maybe 5 people were invited but didn’t make the trip. Maybe 5 died on the way.

I raised my hand in class and provoked some oohs and ahhs when I said, Why should we think there’s a discrepancy? Maybe Stephen said 75, and Luke carefully and accurately recorded that he said 75, but he happened to get the number wrong. This is an impromptu sermon where he didn’t have his notes and people were waiting to stone him to death. Again, I can picture one of the Pharisees, just like Sosthenes, putting down his rock for a moment, and saying, “Stephen? You said 75? I think you mean 70, right?” and Stephen saying, “Was it 70? My bad. Thanks. 70 then. As I was saying…” And then he finishes his sermon and they pelt him with rocks.

The Gospel of John says in chapter 3:22 that Jesus baptized. Is that true? Is it reliable? Here is what it says: “After this, Jesus and his disciples went out into the Judean countryside, where he spent some time with them, and baptized.”

But the very next chapter gives an important correction. John 4:1-2: “Now Jesus learned that the Pharisees had heard that he was gaining and baptizing more disciples than John— 2 although in fact it was not Jesus who baptized, but his disciples.”

Did Jesus baptize people? John 3:22 says he did. But then John 4:2 says, “To be more precise, it was Jesus’ disciples who did the baptizing.” That is a perfect example of what I mean by saying that the Bible does not nickel-and-dime itself about picky little details. It can give these little auto-corrections without saying, “Oh no! I misstated that detail earlier – I guess I must not be inspired after all and I had better stop writing this Gospel.” My simple point is that nickel-and-diming obscure details is not a wise or biblical thing to do. I believe that many sincere Christians make a categorical mistake when bend over backwards to reconcile picky little discrepancies that were not a concern to the writers themselves and certainly not a threat to their overall reliability.

(5) Pay Attention to Genre. (Genre means type of literature.)

Here is a provocative question. Are there fables in the Bible? Stories that were just made up to make some point or elicit some behavior? Yes, absolutely. They’re called parables. Jesus told a bunch of them. The Good Samaritan, the Prodigal Son. No one ever seems to ask, “Did the Good Samaritan exist in real life?” Well, he may have. As far as we know that could be a true story. But I think most people regard it as fiction – but fiction told with the important point of explaining the best answer to the question, “Who is my neighbor whom I must love as myself?”

Are there fables in the Old Testament? Absolutely. Here is what Jotham says in Judges chapter 9. He said, “Listen to me, citizens of Shechem, so that God may listen to you. 8 One day the trees went out to anoint a king for themselves. They said to the olive tree, ‘Be our king.’ 9 “But the olive tree answered, ‘Should I give up my oil, by which both gods and humans are honored, to hold sway over the trees?’ 10 “Next, the trees said to the fig tree, ‘Come and be our king.’” And it continues like that.

Do trees talk? Do trees anoint kings? Of course not. Everybody knows that’s a fable. Anyone who cannot see that instantly doesn’t understand the nature of human discourse. Jotham knew it was a fable, his audience knew it, and we know it.

Now I’ve got a tougher question. Is it always easy to tell whether we are reading a fable, or a straightforward historical narrative, or a historical narrative with some fabulous elements? Do we have an infallible algorithm, a set of rigid protocols that unerringly make those distinctions?

I humbly suggest that making distinctions between the symbolic and the concrete, the historical and the fabulous can be harder than It looks, and will require us to be grownups who think and reason, and study and pray and sometimes suspend judgment until we have cause to be more certain.

Two cases in point. The story Jesus told a story in Luke 16 of a rich man and Lazarus. Is it a parable or a history? A poor miserable man named Lazarus lives outside the gates of a rich man who ignores him. They both die, the rich man goes to hell and the poor man goes to heaven. But they can see each other in their respective states, and the rich man carries on a conversation with the poor man’s protector, Abraham. Is that a made-up story like the Good Samaritan or the Prodigal Son? Is it a true history in all its details? And if so, can departed souls in heaven and hell see other and carry on conversations across a chasm that, though deep, must be awfully narrow if they can talk across it? Or is it a partially true story with fabulous elements? I think that if I had to bet, that is where my money might go. That is, that there really was a poor man named Lazarus, and a rich neighbor who was mean to him, and they died and went to different eternal destinies. And my suspicion is that Jesus used that reality to express in parabolic form truths about obedience and repentance and pride and responding to the truth that we have before us. I could be wrong. But I don’t think I’m wrong about my conviction that it is a tough-to-resolve question.

John Calvin was unable to resolve in his own mind the historicity of Job. John Calvin was no liberal, and he was certainly no dummy. The man’s knowledge of the Scriptures was breathtaking. He left it as an open question whether Job existed. Maybe he did. Or maybe this is a 42-chapter epic poem/parable on the nature of suffering and the sovereignty of God. If it is simply historical, I still think it is ok to ask the question: Can Satan really pay a visit to heaven, and he and God have a conversation where God brags to him about one of us and Satan says, “Let me tear him apart” – is that actually the way it happened in reality, or is that the way it can best be communicated to us?

I don’t mean to muddy the waters to the point where it is impossible to be certain about the proper way to understand anything in the Bible. There are many things presented as unmistakably historical, and the writers go out of their way to tell us that. In 2 Peter 1:18 Peter writes, “We did not follow cleverly devised stories when we told you about the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ in power, but we were eyewitnesses of his majesty.” And John opens his first epistle with the words, “That 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.” There you could not be more explicit about the concrete historical nature of what Peter and John were presenting about Jesus. There was no parable or poetic license there.

But over the years I have seen that many attacks on the Bible along with many well-intentioned but simplistic defenses of the Bible have crucially depended on misreading poetry and parable as history and narrative. That’s a categorical mistake that has led despisers of the Bible to be contemptuous, and zealous defenders of the Bible to look foolish. Yes the Bible is reliable, but that fact does not allow you to be simplistic and naive, and to ignore complex and thoughtful issues about literary genre.

I close with this. King David, in real history, committed adultery and murder. He slept with the wife of a friend, Uriah, while Uriah was away at war. The woman, Bathsheba, got pregnant, and David orchestrated Uriah’s death. When Nathan the prophet confronted David with his sin, he did so with a story. He told him the story of a rich man and a poor man. The rich man had many flocks, and the poor man had one ewe lamb that was dear to him and that the family treated like a pet. When the rich man had a visitor, instead of slaughtering one of his own lambs for supper he stole the poor man’s pet and slaughtered it. David said, “That man must die!” And Nathan said, “You are that man!” David knew that to be true, and he repented.

Question: How was David “that man”? Was Nathan’s story true? Did it really happen? Was it “reliable”? Well, some of the details line up with David’s sin, but not all of them. A wealthy man with plenty takes advantage of a poor man. But in the one case it’s a lamb and in the other case a woman. The woman is slept with, but the lamb is killed and eaten. The poor man isn’t murdered, but Uriah was. If you’re looking at it as simple history, the story is not true. If it is a mere fable, the story does not really convict. If it is meant to be a perfect analogy, then, as we have shown, it breaks down at several points because the correspondences are so inexact. You know what the story is? It’s true in a way that makes David say instantly. “That’s right. I see it. I am that man. I am the guilty one.”

The Bible is utterly reliable in that rightly understood, it makes us see that we are that man, that woman - desperately sinful, guilty as hell, and in urgent need of grace for repentance, forgiveness, and restoration to God.