Is The Bible a Historically Reliable Document?

Intro: How can we know the Bible is a historically reliable book?

Christians believe the Bible is inspired by God. Which means that God supernaturally used human authors to pen the scriptures, the word the New Testament uses in Timothy literally means “God breathed”. God revealed his message in such a way that the men were writing what God wants his people to know. If you go the Fellowship Bible Church website you will read

God has, by His Spirit, graciously disclosed Himself through men in human words. We believe He has inspired the words preserved in the Scriptures, the sixty-six books of the Old and New Testaments, which both record and reveal His saving work in the world.

If the Bible is not reliable, then can it be inspired by God?

Fortunately there is a wealth of information to prove the Bible we have today is a dependable and reliable document, that we can trust. Let me just wet your appetite with a little bit information about the Bible. Hank Hanegraaff devolped an acronym, MAPS which I like to use when talking about this subject because it is simple, memorable and in the back of many Bibles you will find maps, which reminds us that these events in this book happened to real people in history, in real places our world.

The M stands for the Manuscripts, we will come back to this in a second. The A refers to the archeological evidence which confirms the trustworthiness of the Bible. The P stands for Prophecy or predictive ability, prophecy which was written hundreds of years before the events and were fulfilled, even events that would have been impossible to deliberately fulfill. The S stands for the statistical probability for all these elements to fall in line.

Manuscripts

Manuscript evidence deals with a discipline known as textual criticism, a textual critic puts manuscripts to discover what we have is reliable to the original text. They do this by performing different test like an eyewitness test, is the document written by an eyewitness to the events, the external evidence test, is there evidence outside the text which refer to the historical events, geographical locations and cultural consistency of the Bible, and the bibliographic test, which is what I want to focus on right now.

We do not have any surviving original documents of the Old or New Testaments, therefore a textual critic wants to know how many manuscripts do we have, so they can compare them and they want to know the date of the manuscripts, the closer the date to the events, the more reliable they will be. This may alarm you, or make you nervous, or cause you to think “then do we really have what God intended for us to have?”

I would say, absolutely, yes. You may think, “how do you know?” I am glad you asked. Here is a list of ancient texts, written around the time the Bible was being written (show slide)

As you can see we have 7 copies of Plato’s writing, we have 10 copies of Julius Caesar’s writing, Homer’s the Iliad, we have 643 copies. Now we do not sit and think, Did Plato really say that? How do we know this is actually Julius Caesar’s words? How do we know Homer wrote the Iliad and it wasn’t Homer Simpson? There is no one who doubts these ancient texts, but I just want you to see how the New Testament compares to the ancient texts. How many manuscripts, copies of the the originals do you think we have of the New Testament?

In the Greek language we have 5826 fragmented or complete portions of the NT. 5826, which surpasses any ancient text by far. Not only that, the earliest manuscript we have is called P52 and it is dated AD 130, less than 100 years after the events they record But when it comes to the NT we sit and questions if it is trustworthy. When you move outside the Greek language, there are more than 18,130 copies whole or fragmented of the NT text in other languages. When you compare these manuscripts there are no major errors that impact any essential doctrines of the Christian faith. What you have is maybe misspelled word, a word with a missing letter, but because they have so many copies, they can compare and contrast and discover the authors original intent.

The evidence is overwhelming when it comes to the trustworthiness and reliability of the Bible.