The Reliability of the Truth of the Bible

Introduction

So as I was thinking about what I would speak about this morning I had a friend text me about his brother. My friends brother has left behind believing the Bible. He says that we cannot trust the Bible and that there is no such thing as a historical Jesus. This is something that is obviously troubling my friend and for good reason. He has turned away from God, like in the parable of the soils he is in the rocky soil where he sprung up but had no strong roots. I hope that you all will make it a point to have a strong foundation in what you believe so that when difficult times come you can stand firm in your beliefs instead of buckling.

So today I want to give you more of a history lesson than a devotion but it is for good reason, it says in 1 Peter 3.15

1 Peter 3:15 ESV

but in your hearts honor Christ the Lord as holy, always being prepared to make a defense to anyone who asks you for a reason for the hope that is in you; yet do it with gentleness and respect,

Knowing the truth of the Bible does more than strengthen us, it helps us to defend the faith when people come and try to lead us away from it. This happens all the time and mostly on social media, knowing the truth can help you to not fall for their lies.

So with this I want to give you the history of the Bible and how it went from the authors to our hands.

The Convention of Writing

To start our thoughts about how the Bible made it all of the way to us we need to first think about the convention of writing. We take for granted the idea that we can all read and write. Based on archaeological evidence the first alphabet was not much time before Moses. At the time of Moses ,who wrote the first five books of the Bible called the Pentateuch, there was not only not much in regards to a alphabet there was also a high rate of illiteracy. Not many people could read or write. This is amazing because we have writings preserved from them even when it was not a common thing in their time.

This remains true for the whole Bible, all of the biblical times had low literacy rates. Yet the words of scripture were still written and passed down.

Language

Before we get to how they were passed down I think it would be helpful to think about language. We know that the Bible was not written in modern English, Paul did not say here I’m going to write to Galatia in ESV. Does anyone know the languages that the Bible was written in?

The two predominant languages were Greek and Hebrew. The Old Testament was written in Hebrew with a few chapters of Aramaic and the New Testament was written in Greek. The shift in language was a result of who was in charge at the time, Israel was run by the Roman Empire during the time of Jesus and after, this is why guys like Cesar Augustus are important in Jesus’s life.

Here I have brought a Greek New Testament and a Hebrew Old Testament for you to look and see what these languages look like.

Before I pass around the Greek I will read a few lines so you can hear what it may have sounded like, we are unsure of their exact pronunciation system but this is probably close.

Passing Down of the Scriptures

So we know that they wrote down what the Bible says and we know the languages it was in originally but then the question arises, how was it passed down?

So the Bible was passed down by manually copying the text. The earliest of these copies were made on papyrus which is a plant and is what you probably imagine it looking like. It then began to be copied on different materials. Originally it was all on scrolls and Christians were some of the first to use both sides of scrolls to write on. Christians were also some of the first proponents of a thing called a codex, this is basically a book. Another interesting thing about the early copying of scripture was that it was written in what is referred to as magiscule, this basically means all caps with no space. As you can imagine that is a bit difficult to make out.

There are a few different ways that scribes would copy down scripture. The first is where they would copy it identically word for word. The second it where they would be a little more free in their writing and try to correct anything they thought was wrong or make their own notes throughout. The last is just sloppy copying, sometimes this is done by people who didn’t even know the language.

The best manuscripts to find are obviously the kinds that were copied identically. It is not always easy to tell but often there is notes in the margins that help you to find this out. The discipline of doing this is called textual criticism.

As you can imagine there are mistakes that occur throughout the text but we now have such a large number of text that whenever there is a mistake we can tell because it is the only one and it is something like a misspelled word or a repeated line.

We have today from the early years thousands of manuscripts. Some are just a few lines and some are complete books. There are no complete new testaments though. The Old Testament is much easier to see because it was the nation that was protecting that text so the text was preserved a little better but there are not as many manuscripts. What we do have though is really good.

One interesting thing in regards to this are the dead sea scrolls. These dated 1000 years older than the oldest thing that we had when they were discovered. The amazing part is that they were word for word the same as what we had as the oldest thing before their discovery.

After moving into history a little further we have complete Bibles, they are not as old but we can use the older stuff that we do have to check them and see their accuracy. Some notable ones are codex Vaticanus and codex Sinaticus. A predominant athiest that you may have seen online has been going around saying that Jesus was not crucified in the Sinai Bible which is codex Sinaticus. This is completely false, that Bible says the same things that ours do.

Why we have the books we have

So quickly I want to talk about why we have the books that we have. Some will say that these books were chosen by some king at some council. Now these were real kings and the councils did happen but what we see more of is people in the church recognizing which books were scriptures. The biggest thing for the new testament was a connection to the apostles. If there was no connection the the apostles then it was not scripture.

In the Old Testament we look at what Israel recognized as the scriptures and what Jesus affirmed during his life. He affirmed the scriptures that the priest had and those are the ones that we have today. There is a group of books called the apocrypha that some do have in their Bible today. I have a copy in my office. This is writings from biblical times in the location of the Bible but it is not scripture and it was never regarded as scripture until later in the church.

Now to the English

So we have this group of books that is attested to as the word of God and is in Hebrew and Greek and we have a lot of manuscripts to back it up. The question is how does this get to whatever translation that you read.

We do not have enough time to get into the history of translations but it is important to know that all modern translations come from the original languages. They might look at other translations to see how they chose to translate it but they are based on the originals. There are different styles of doing this and that is what results in all of our translations but there is a reason that when you compare translations they are saying the same thing just in slightly different ways.

The thing with this is to see that nothing was lost, we do not have translations of translations.

Conclusion

The history of the Bible is fascinating and the fact that we have it as pure as it is can only be an act of God. The Iliad which is a book by Homer that is very well known and very old only has two manuscripts and everyone accepts it like its nothing. The Bible has thousands that date back to the times right after it was written. We can trust that the Bible is a reliable source of truth.

There is so much more that can be said about this topic but that is all the time that we have here this morning. Is there any questions?