Biblical Reliability
Notes
Transcript
Intro: How can we know the Bible is a historically reliable book?
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”.
2 Tim 3:16 - 17
All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work.
For we did not follow cleverly devised myths when we made known to you the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, but we were eyewitnesses of his majesty. For when he received honor and glory from God the Father, and the voice was borne to him by the Majestic Glory, “This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased,” we ourselves heard this very voice borne from heaven, for we were with him on the holy mountain. And we have the prophetic word more fully confirmed, to which you will do well to pay attention as to a lamp shining in a dark place, until the day dawns and the morning star rises in your hearts, knowing this first of all, that no prophecy of Scripture comes from someone’s own interpretation. For no prophecy was ever produced by the will of man, but men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit.
Listen to the points Peter is making in his writing:
1. We are not following made up stories and there are some good ones out there, Greek gods, Roman gods, we do not follow some thing made up.
2. We follow a person and truth is found in the person of Jesus Christ.
3. We were eyewitnesses of the person of Jesus Christ, not only of the person but majesty, honor and glory of this person, Jesus Christ.
4. Jesus recieved honor and glory form the Father. Why is this important?
I am the Lord; that is my name;
my glory I give to no other,
nor my praise to carved idols.
This places Jesus on the same level as the Father, Jesus is the Lord.
5. In Christ we have the prophetic word “more fully confirmed”. Jesus accepted the Old Testament as God’s word, we know this because he uses the term the law, the prophets and the writings/Psalms Luke 24:44
Then he said to them, “These are my words that I spoke to you while I was still with you, that everything written about me in the Law of Moses and the Prophets and the Psalms must be fulfilled.”
Jesus quoted from 14 of the Old Testament books. Jesus also accepted as history, Old Testament persons and events. Like Abraham, David, Moses Jonah being swallowed by a fish, Noah and the flood, the creation of humanity.
6. Pay attention to God’s words.
7. Accepting and understanding truth is an illumination of the heart and mind issue. It doesn’t matter if Jesus himself were here giving the evidences of the truth, unless the Holy Spirit illumines the mind and heart, people will not believe.
And he said, ‘No, father Abraham, but if someone goes to them from the dead, they will repent.’ He said to him, ‘If they do not hear Moses and the Prophets, neither will they be convinced if someone should rise from the dead.’ ”
For the mind that is set on the flesh is hostile to God, for it does not submit to God’s law; indeed, it cannot. Those who are in the flesh cannot please God.
Now we have received not the spirit of the world, but the Spirit who is from God, that we might understand the things freely given us by God. And we impart this in words not taught by human wisdom but taught by the Spirit, interpreting spiritual truths to those who are spiritual.
The natural person does not accept the things of the Spirit of God, for they are folly to him, and he is not able to understand them because they are spiritually discerned.
8. The Spirit of God used people to write the Scriptures and speak for Him and the Bible you have is the word of God. 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 the word of God, if it is inspired by God, then it must be reliable.
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 developed 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 the events in this book happened to real people in history, in real places our world.
Use M-A-P-S to guide you through Bible reliability:
Manuscripts
Archaeology
Prophecy
Statistics
Using this simple acronym can help you remember and have a quick tool to start a conversation about the reliability of the Scriptures. This will give you a place to start. You can go to Amzon.com and find books upon books on this subject and it could be overwhelming. Where among the dozens of impressive, comprehensive apologetics books should you start?
Fortunately, while there is a wealth of information available to support the reliability of Scripture, you don’t have to stay up all night to read them all. This will give you a tool to be ready to give answer, but at the same time, just because you know this information given to you in these classes, doesn’t mean you know it all. I will encourage you to continue learning and add to your knowledge in each of the areas we are going to talk about today.
Bible Reliability-Manuscripts
We do not have in our possession any of these original manuscripts, we have copies. Through the process of textual criticism, we can recover the original wording of the manuscripts with a high degree of certainty. A textual critic wants to know how many manuscripts do we have, so we 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?”
There are tests used by the textual critic to determine the reliability of the manuscript copies of the original documents penned by the Scripture writers, since we do not possess these originals. In determining manuscript reliability, we deal with the question: How can we test to see that the text we possess in the manuscript copies is an accurate rendition of the original? There are three main tests: the Bibliographic, Eyewitness, and External (a second acronym — BEE — will help you remember these).
The bibliographic test considers the quantity of manuscripts and manuscript fragments, and also the time span between the original documents and our earliest copies. The more copies, the better able we are to work back to the original. The closer the time span between the copies and the original, the less likely it is that serious textual error would creep in. The Bible has stronger bibliographic support than any classical literature — including Homer, Tacitus, Pliny, and Aristotle.
We have more than 14,000 manuscripts and fragments of the Old Testament of three main types: (a) approximately 10,000 from the Cairo Geniza (storeroom) find of 1897, dating back as far as about AD. 800; (b) about 190 from the Dead Sea Scrolls find of 1947-1955, the oldest dating back to 250-200 B.C.; and (c) at least 4,314 assorted other copies. The short time between the original Old Testament manuscripts (completed around 400 B.C.) and the first extensive copies (about 250 B.C.) — coupled with the more than 14,000 copies that have been discovered — ensures the trustworthiness of the Old Testament text. The earliest quoted verses (Num. 6:24-26) date from 800-700 B.C.
he Dead Sea Scrolls play a crucial role in assessing the accurate preservation of the Old Testament. With its hundreds of manuscripts from every book except Esther, detailed comparisons can be made with more recent texts.
The Old Testament that we use today is translated from what is called the Masoretic Text. The Masoretes were Jewish scholars who between A.D. 500 and 950 gave the Old Testament the form that we use today. Until the Dead Sea Scrolls were found in 1947, the oldest Hebrew text of the Old Testament was the Masoretic Aleppo Codex which dates to A.D. 935.{5}
With the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, we now had manuscripts that predated the Masoretic Text by about one thousand years. Scholars were anxious to see how the Dead Sea documents would match up with the Masoretic Text. If a significant amount of differences were found, we could conclude that our Old Testament Text had not been well preserved. Critics, along with religious groups such as Muslims and Mormons, often make the claim that the present day Old Testament has been corrupted and is not well preserved. According to these religious groups, this would explain the contradictions between the Old Testament and their religious teachings.
After years of careful study, it has been concluded that the Dead Sea Scrolls give substantial confirmation that our Old Testament has been accurately preserved. The scrolls were found to be almost identical with the Masoretic text. Hebrew Scholar Millar Burrows writes, “It is a matter of wonder that through something like one thousand years the text underwent so little alteration. As I said in my first article on the scroll, ‘Herein lies its chief importance, supporting the fidelity of the Masoretic tradition.'”{6}
A significant comparison study was conducted with the Isaiah Scroll written around 100 B.C. that was found among the Dead Sea documents and the book of Isaiah found in the Masoretic text. After much research, scholars found that the two texts were practically identical. Most variants were minor spelling differences, and none affected the meaning of the text.
One of the most respected Old Testament scholars, the late Gleason Archer, examined the two Isaiah scrolls found in Cave 1 and wrote, “Even though the two copies of Isaiah discovered in Qumran Cave 1 near the Dead Sea in 1947 were a thousand years earlier than the oldest dated manuscript previously known (A.D. 980), they proved to be word for word identical with our standard Hebrew Bible in more than 95 percent of the text. The five percent of variation consisted chiefly of obvious slips of the pen and variations in spelling.”{7}
Despite the thousand year gap, scholars found the Masoretic Text and Dead Sea Scrolls to be nearly identical. The Dead Sea Scrolls provide valuable evidence that the Old Testament had been accurately and carefully preserved.
The same is true of the New Testament text. The abundance of textual witnesses is amazing. We possess over 5,300 manuscripts or portions of the (Greek) New Testament — almost 800 copied before A.D. 1000. The time between the original composition and our earliest copies is an unbelievably short 60 years or so. The overwhelming bibliographic reliability of the Bible is clearly evident.
The eyewitness document test (“E”), sometimes referred to as the internal test, focuses on the eyewitness credentials of the authors. The Old and New Testament authors were eyewitnesses of — or interviewed eyewitnesses of — the majority of the events they described. Moses participated in and was an eyewitness of the remarkable events of the Egyptian captivity, the Exodus, the forty years in the desert, and Israel’s final encampment before entering the Promised Land. These events he chronicled in the first five books of the Old Testament.
The New Testament writers had the same eyewitness authenticity. Luke, who wrote the Books of Luke and Acts, says that he gathered eyewitness testimony and “carefully investigated everything” Luke 1:1-3
Inasmuch as many have undertaken to compile a narrative of the things that have been accomplished among us, just as those who from the beginning were eyewitnesses and ministers of the word have delivered them to us, it seemed good to me also, having followed all things closely for some time past, to write an orderly account for you, most excellent Theophilus,
Peter reminded his readers that the disciples “were eyewitnesses of [Jesus’] majesty” and “did not follow cleverly invented stories” (2 Pet. 1:16). Truly, the Bible affirms the eyewitness credibility of its writers.
The external evidence test looks outside the texts themselves to ascertain the historical reliability of the historical events, geographical locations, and cultural consistency of the biblical texts. Unlike writings from other world religions which make no historical references or which fabricate histories, the Bible refers to historical events and assumes its historical accuracy. The Bible is not only the inspired Word of God, it is also a history book — and the historical assertions it makes have been proven time and again.
Many of the events, people, places, and customs in the New Testament are confirmed by secular historians who were almost contemporaries with New Testament writers. Secular historians like the Jewish Josephus (before A.D. 100), the Roman Tacitus (around A.D. 120), the Roman Suetonius (A.D. 110), and the Roman governor Pliny Secundus (A.D. 100-110) make direct reference to Jesus or affirm one or more historical New Testament references. Early church leaders such as Irenaeus, Tertullian, Julius Africanus, and Clement of Rome — all writing before A.D. 250 — shed light on New Testament historical accuracy. Even skeptical historians agree that the New Testament is a remarkable historical document. Hence, it is clear that there is strong external evidence to support the Bible’s manuscript reliability.
Bible Reliability-Archaeology
Returning to our MAPS acronym, we have established ,the first principle, manuscript reliability. Let us consider our second principle, archaeological evidence. Over and over again, comprehensive field work (archaeology) and careful biblical interpretation affirms the reliability of the Bible. It is telling when a secular scholar must revise his biblical criticism in light of solid archaeological evidence.
For years critics dismissed the Book of Daniel, partly because there was no evidence that a king named Belshazzar ruled in Babylon during that time period. However, later archaeological research confirmed that the reigning monarch, Nabonidus, appointed Belshazzar as his co-regent while he was away from Babylon.
The Existence of the Hittites Was Once Questioned
The Existence of the Hittites Was Once Questioned
An ancient people, known as the Hittites, are mentioned some fifty times in the Old Testament. For example, we read the following in the Book of Exodus:
For My Angel will go before you and bring you in to the Amorites and the Hittites and the Perizzites and the Canaanites and the Hivites and the Jebusites; and I will cut them off. (Exodus 23:23 NKJV)
For a long time, they were considered to be fabricated by the Bible. Critics said this because the only evidence of the Hittites’ existence came from the Old Testament and nowhere else. Liberal scholars assumed the biblical references to the Hittites were historically worthless.
Archaeologist A. H. Sayce was the first scholar to identify the Hittite people from a non-biblical source. In 1876 he released his information from his study of the ancient monuments and revolutionized critical theories concerning the Hittites.
In the twentieth century, much more information about the Hittites came to light. In 1906, their capital was discovered in what is today the country of Turkey. Tens of thousands of clay tablets were discovered. This discovery confirmed the historical accuracy of the Old Testament in its mention of the Hittites. The fact of their existence is beyond all doubt.
One of the most well-known New Testament examples concerns the Books of Luke and Acts. A biblical skeptic, Sir William Ramsay, trained as an archaeologist and then set out to disprove the historical reliability of this portion of the New Testament. However, through his painstaking Mediterranean archaeological trips, he became converted as — one after another — of the historical statements of Luke were proved accurate. Archaeological evidence thus confirms the trustworthiness of the Bible.
Bible Reliability-Prophecy
The third principle of Bible reliability is Prophecy, or predictive ability. The Bible records predictions of events that could not be known or predicted by chance or common sense. Surprisingly, the predictive nature of many Bible passages was once a popular argument (by liberals) against the reliability of the Bible. Critics argued that the prophecies actually were written after the events and that editors had merely dressed up the Bible text to look like they contained predictions made before the events. Nothing could be further from the truth, however. The many predictions of Christ’s birth, life and death (see below) were indisputably rendered more than a century before they occurred as proven by the Dead Sea Scrolls of Isaiah and other prophetic books as well as by the Septuagint translation, all dating from earlier than 100 B.C.
Old Testament prophecies concerning the Phoenician city of Tyre were fulfilled in ancient times, including prophecies that the city would be opposed by many nations (Ezek. 26:3); its walls would be destroyed and towers broken down (26:4); and its stones, timbers, and debris would be thrown into the water (26:12). Similar prophecies were fulfilled concerning Sidon (Ezek. 28:23; Isa. 23; Jer. 27:3-6; 47:4) and Babylon (Jer. 50:13, 39; 51:26, 42-43, 58; Isa. 13:20-21).
Since Christ is the culminating theme of the Old Testament and the Living Word of the New Testament, it should not surprise us that prophecies regarding Him outnumber any others. Many of these prophecies would have been impossible for Jesus to deliberately conspire to fulfill — such as His descent from Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob (Gen. 12:3; 17:19; Num. 24:21-24); His birth in Bethlehem (Mic. 5:2); His crucifixion with criminals (Isa. 53:12); the piercing of His hands and feet at the crucifixion (Ps. 22:16); the soldiers’ gambling for His clothes (Ps. 22:18); the piercing of His side and the fact that His bones were not broken at His death (Zech. 12:10; Ps. 34:20); and His burial among the rich (Isa. 53:9). Jesus also predicted His own death and resurrection (John 2:19-22). Predictive Prophecy is a principle of Bible reliability that often reaches even the hard-boiled skeptic!
Bible Reliability-Statistics
Our fourth MAPS principle works well with predictive prophecy, because it is Statistically preposterous that any or all of the Bible’s very specific, detailed prophecies could have been fulfilled through chance, good guessing, or deliberate deceit. When you look at some of the improbable prophecies of the Old and New Testaments, it seems incredible that skeptics — knowing the authenticity and historicity of the texts — could reject the statistical verdict: the Bible is the Word of God, and Jesus Christ is the Son of God, just as Scripture predicted many times and in many ways.
The Bible was written over a span of 1500 years by forty different human authors in three different languages (Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek), on hundreds of subjects. And yet there is one consistent, noncontradictory theme that runs through it all: God’s redemption of humankind. Clearly, Statistical probability is a powerful indicator of the trustworthiness of Scripture.
The Bible is full of prophecies, either events that have happened or events that will happen in the future. In Science Speaks, Dr. Stoner looks at the probability that one man, Jesus Christ, could have fulfilled even 8 of the 300 prophecies that pertain to Him in the Bible. Let's look at these eight prophecies from the Old Testament pertaining to Christ, their fulfillment by Christ in the New Testament, the probability of one man fulfilling each prophecy, and the sum of one man fulfilling all eight prophecies. Keep in mind, the time span between the prophecies of the Old Testament and the New Testament fulfillment is hundreds, even thousands of years.
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To answer the question what is the probability of one man fulfilling all eight prophecies, the principal of probability is applied. Therefore, multiplying all eight probabilities together (1 times 2.8 x 105 x 103 x 102 x 103 x 103 x 105 x 103 x 104) gives us 2.8 x 1028, or for simplicity sake 1 x 1028 or 1 in 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000.
The next time someone denies the reliability of Scripture, just remember the acronym MAPS, and you will be equipped to give an answer and a reason for the hope that lies within you (1 Pet. 3:15). Manuscripts, Archaeology, Prophecy, and Statistics not only chart a secure course on the turnpikes of skepticism but also demonstrate definitively that the Bible is indeed divine rather than human in origin.