I can’t begin to tell you how many skeptics and non-Christians have told me that we can’t trust the Bible. Over the years, I’ve had several individuals tell me that no historian believes that the Bible is reliable, or that its original message has been preserved.
If I had a dollar for every time I’ve heard: the Bible is like the telephone game—the message has been changed over time, I would be driving a new car and living in a new house. I’ve also been told numerous times that the Gospels were written hundreds of years after the actual events took place, and therefore they cannot provide us with an accurate summary of what happened.
I Had No Idea
A long time ago, I had no idea how to answer these objections to my faith, and I had no idea what the scholars and experts said about it. These skeptical individuals sounded like they knew what they were talking about. Afterall, they were intelligent people and respected among their peers, and I just assumed they had taken the time to study this. Boy, was I wrong.
So, I didn’t really challenge what they said; rather, I just thought to myself, “well, God promised to preserve it, so I believe it.” And that is true, however, due to my lack of knowledge, I couldn’t challenge their claims nor engage any further apart from my “Bible tells me so” approach. This prevented further discussion.
However, after looking into what the experts had to say, I quickly discovered that what those individuals told me was literally Fake News! To my surprise, I learned the exact opposite—the Bible had been accurately preserved and over time history had proven it. I was even more surprised to see that it wasn’t just Christian scholars saying this (which is still valid regardless of their beliefs); but rather, it was atheist and non-Christian scholars saying this as well!
Let me briefly cover what the experts are saying when it comes to the reliability of the Bible. So, the next time someone tells you that the Bible can’t be trusted, just remember what some of this article said and share it with that person.
Old Testament Reliability
The Bible is a collection of 66 books–39 in the Old Testament and 27 in the New Testament. It is unlike any other holy book in the world. Old Testament Scholar, Walter Kaiser notes,
“The whole Bible presents some forty authors writing over a period of some 1,500 years, and representing countries found on three continents such as the Middle East, Africa, and Europe, yet they all form one single continuous story, plan, and purpose.”[1]
Let’s first take a look at the Old Testament (OT or Hebrew Scriptures). The OT was written nearly 3,500 years ago. It is important to understand that a theological component is directly linked to our considerations here which ensure that we have God’s revealed Word (Bible).
And just because there is a divine element involved, it does not entail that the content of the information is untrue. Some of the most profound truths concerning the condition of humanity are recorded in the Hebrew Scriptures, not to mention various prophetic events that we have observed to become true over time, i.e., birth, life, and death of Jesus of Nazareth.
God communicated to Abraham, Moses, the Jewish prophets, and others, who then preserved these messages in oral tradition, inscriptions, and writings.
2 Peter 1:21 says, “For the prophecy came not in old time by the will of man: but holy men of God spake as they were moved by the Holy Ghost.”
Hebrews 1:1 says, “God, who at sundry times and in divers manners spake in time past unto the fathers by the prophets.”
2 Timothy 3:16 says, “All scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness.”
The small portions of God’s Word that were preserved in oral tradition were also written down and would not be difficult for people in the ancient Near East to commit to memory.
They didn’t have electronic devices that stored all their information, nor did many of them know how to write, and so they relied on their memory. Many people today can barely remember a telephone number. This is because our brains have adapted to technology and become reliant upon other devices to store information.
For example, in ancient Greece, it was not uncommon for individuals to have Homer’s The Iliad and Odyssey committed to memory. I have the book on my shelf, and believe me, that is a lot of information–approximately 27,803 verses! There are many Muslims who have the entire Quran memorized which is around 6,236 verses.
The Hebrew Scriptures (Old Testament) has around 23,145 verses. These verses were distributed by God over the centuries and not all at one time, meaning that not all of the verses had to be memorized. Rather, the various portions that were given were memorized and/or inscribed on stone and clay tablets, and later, animal skin and papyrus. These would be passed on throughout the generations to come.
Later down the road, Jewish scribes meticulously copied this information over the centuries to preserve the sacred traditions of their religion and nation.
Distinguished professor of Old Testament, Paul Wegner, explains that a group of Jewish scribes called the Amoraim were required to do the following while copying Scripture (Bible): they could only use parchments from clean animals; a precise amount of lines of wording consisting of thirty letters; no words/letters written from memory; required washing of the body and clean Jewish attire before copying; and he could not write God’s name, Yahweh, with a newly dipped brush.[2]
As you can see, they were extremely serious and cautious when copying and preserving this information. The Masoretes who inherited the tradition, were another group of scribes that were also very detailed and careful in their preservation of the Hebrew Scriptures (OT).
Dead Sea Scrolls
One classic example of the reliability and preservation of the Old Testament may be seen from the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls. In 1947, some shepherds discovered a collection of ancient scrolls near Qumran, not too far from the Dead Sea. In this collection of scrolls there were several biblical texts, one being a scroll of the book of Isaiah dating approximately 125 BC.
Before this discovery, our oldest manuscript (copy) of Isaiah was dated 1,000 years later. Upon comparing the documents, they were nearly identical in their wording except for a few minor spelling variations or an added/omitted word in different sections. However, none of these differences affected the meaning of the text in any way. This is just one incredible example of the reliability and preservation of the Bible.
Archaeology
Archaeology has also been a wonderful tool in demonstrating the reliability of the Old Testament. Although it’s a recent discipline from the 19th century, there have been hundreds of discoveries relating to descriptions within the OT.
In fact, due to the reliability of the Bible, Archaeologists have used it as their primary source for surveying in the regions that the Bible references. Over the decades, more and more cities, civilizations, and artifacts have been discovered and confirmed by using the Bible as a reference tool and guide.
It may surprise you to know that historians once thought that King David was nothing more than a mythological figure, much like King Arthur and Camelot. However, this all suddenly changed after a discovery was made in 1993 confirming David as a historical figure. Just one discovery flattened all of the skeptic’s claims concerning King David’s existence.
Kaiser lists a few more individuals who were also discovered in ancient material outside of the Bible, confirming their historical existence, that many formerly believed never existed: King Sargon, King Belshazzar, King Jehoiachin now in Babylon, Sanballat the governor of Samaria, Tobiah, governor of Ammon, Geshem the Arab, Balaam the prophet, David, Ahab, Jehu, Hezekiah, Menahem, and several more.[3]
Again, only a small portion of the regions referenced in the Bible have been searched for, so who knows how many other persons or things will be found. Regarding the reliability of the OT, renowned Egyptologist Kenneth Kitchens says,
“In terms of general reliability…The Old Testament comes out remarkably well, so long as its writings and writers are treated fairly and evenhandedly, in line with independent data, open to all.”[4]
In other words, if liberal scholars and secularists give the evidence found in the Bible a fair assessment as they do with other ancient history, there is no doubt that the Old Testament is reliable and accurate.
Divine Preservation
Finally, we must remember that God promised to preserve His Word forever (Is. 40:8; Matt. 24:35). Jesus also confirmed the OT for us and frequently quoted from it. If Jesus believed that the Hebrew Scriptures were reliable and preserved, and Jesus is God which means He cannot be wrong, then we should obviously believe they are reliable and preserved as well.
New Testament Reliability
Now, let’s take a look at the New Testament (NT). The NT was written approximately between AD 50 – AD 100 and contains a creed (statement of faith about an event) in Paul’s letter to the Corinthians (1 Cor. 15:3-8) which scholars date to within 2 months – 2 years of the crucifixion. [5]
That is super-duper early. This creed mentions that various groups of people at different times and places saw Jesus alive again after his crucifixion. And because it was so early, this could not have been a legendary story because there wasn’t enough time for a legend to develop!
Moreover, the NT documents record events that can be analyzed just like any other reliable historical document. We can measure the reliability of the text by evaluating the content and contrast it with other historical writings and artifacts outside of the Bible during that period. Oxford scholar and expert in early Christian history, David Wenham, notes,
“The picture provided by the New Testament fits again and again with what is known from other historical sources.”[6]
Over the years, scholars have made several new discoveries of ancient works that were written by non-Christian people outside of the Bible, but who reference the same people inside of the Bible that Christians have always taught as real historical figures.
For example: Jewish historian Josephus, Roman historian Tacitus, Roman historian Suetonius, Roman senator Pliny the Younger, Roman Thallus, Lucian of Samosata, Syrian philosopher Mara Bar Sarapion, and Jewish Rabbinic writings are examples of sources outside of the Bible that reference the dating, location, and activity of various people inside of the New Testament.[7]
These individuals have nothing to do with the Bible, yet they are telling us about people within the Bible. The NT also matches what we know from ancient history during that time frame. For example, Josephus writes of a prophet named, Jesus son of Hananiah, who was angry with the Jews and who lived about a generation after Jesus of Nazareth.
Josephus tells us that the high priests arrested and beat this prophet, and then gave him over to the governor Albinus (62-64 AD). Historian and non-Christian Richard Horsley explains that
“this provides a parallel to the Gospel accounts that the high priests were involved in the arrest of Jesus and handed him over to the Roman governor. Josephus’s account of Jesus son of Hananiah also suggests that the Gospel accounts of Jesus’s hearing before Pilate have at least general historical verisimilitude.”[8]
In other words, we know that the Gospel writers are recording events that align with a specific setting of ancient Rome. They weren’t writing hundreds of years later in a land far away, otherwise, they would not have been able to provide the proper and native names, dates, locations, rulers, coins, landscapes, and other details of events that we know to be true of those particular geographic regions from that specific time frame. They didn’t have Google and couldn’t research this information. They had to be eyewitnesses living in that vicinity while writing.
Also, here’s a quick tip: when someone tries saying that you can’t trust the New Testament because it was written by Christians (which I’ve also heard multiple times), this does absolutely nothing to discount the credibility of the information.
If we applied that same overly skeptical reasoning to other historical sources written by religious groups, then that would be like saying we couldn’t trust historical information from the diaries of Jewish holocaust victims because they were biased against the Germans Nazis. Nonsense!
Concerning Matthew, Mark, and Luke (Synoptic Gospels), Prominent New Testament scholar Craig Blomberg says,
“Our best efforts and reconstructing the processes that went into the formation of the Synoptic Gospels, taking seriously the ancient external evidence as well as the internal evidence for their authorship and dating, give us optimism about the historical reliability of the information the gospels present.”[9]
Cambridge historian Richard Bauckham argues that we should evaluate the Gospels as eyewitness testimony and understood as such are
“entirely appropriate means of access to the historical reality of Jesus.”[10]
Historians Gary Habermas and Michael Licona note,
“The Bible has never been controverted by solid historical data. Therefore, the benefit of the doubt should go to the Bible in places where it cannot be verified, when there is no evidence to the contrary, and when it seems clear that the author intended for us to understand the event as historical.”[11]
Tons of Copies
New Testament scholars Köstenberger, Bock and Chatraw explain that the NT is considered, by far, to be the best-attested book in antiquity with the smallest amount of time between the surviving manuscripts and the originals; we have around 5,800 copies and portions of these manuscripts today.[12]
The life of Jesus was written within the first generation while the eyewitnesses were still alive. Good evidence does not become bad evidence over time. There is no question that we can know details about events happening in ancient history, and this is especially true when you have good evidence for it, which is precisely what we have in the Gospels.
New Testament manuscript expert Peter Williams has pointed out that the Gospels have been dated early, and “within the time limits of reliable memory” by mainstream scholars who do NOT believe that Jesus was the Messiah or God.[13] For those who hold that Jesus was truly the Son of God, those scholars date the Gospels much earlier.
Because there are thousands of copies of the NT dating extremely close to the actual events, textual critics have been able to identify an accurate reading of the text with great confidence. Another NT manuscript expert, Dan Wallace, notes,
“The New Testament is far and away the best-attested work of Greek or Latin literature from the ancient world. Precisely because we have hundreds of thousands of variants and hundreds of early manuscripts, we are in excellent position for recovering the wording of the original.”[14]
Nearly all of these differences are minor and have no significant impact on the text, nor does it change any doctrines that Christians hold. They primarily consist of spelling errors. And the only two “big” differences that scholars have debated come from 12 verses following Mark 16:8 and 12 verses in John 7:53-8:11.
Concerning these two passages in Mark and John, Williams points out,
“They show that Gospel manuscripts vary, and therefore there has been no successful attempt by rulers or scribes to make them all agree or to cover up debate.”[15]
Think about it, if you had multiple manuscripts that were word-for-word perfect, then you would have a group of people conspiring and manipulating the text to say what they want it to say, forging the similarities. This is another favorite line of the skeptic. Many falsely believe that Christians got together and made the whole story up at some big meeting or something.
And even if these weren’t supposed to be in the Bible, it would have zero impact on the meaning of the surrounding texts nor would it effect any kind of Christian doctrine. Wenham states,
“Although there are occasional uncertainties about wording, we can be confident that we have a reliable text of the New Testament, so that when we are reading Mark’s Gospel or Paul’s letters we are reading what the authors wrote (or dictated). There is no evidence indicating significant tampering with the texts.”[16]
This is exactly why it is a good thing to have multiple copies of a document, because it allows you to have confidence in what has been originally communicated. You do NOT want just one single “perfect” manuscript (like the Quran or Book of Mormon which make this claim), because someone could make a massive change in it during the copying process, and you would have no way of comparing it with other manuscripts to ensure its accuracy.
However, there is evidence that the Quran and Book of Mormon have each been significantly tampered with over the years. It is unbelievable when you compare the New Testament with other ancient literature.
Written Early
For example, NT scholars Köstenberger, Kellum and Quarles show that Homer’s The Iliad has around 2,200 copies; Julius Caesar’s Gallic Wars has 10 copies and the earliest dates 1,000 years after it was written; there are only 3 manuscripts from Roman historian Tacitus and the earliest dates around 800 years after it was written; we have a few fragments of Plato showing up around 600 years later; the earliest of Josephus’s Jewish War dates nearly 900 years after the original; several more examples could be given.[17]
All historians of ancient history consider these individuals to be reliable sources of information from their era, and historians consider the NT writers as reliable as well. After comparing the other ancient literature, it is amazing that the NT began to be written only a couple decades after the events!
We even have evidence of fragments of the Gospel of John dating within 20-30 years from the original–compare that to the hundreds of years from the other ancient writings–Amazing!
Archaeology
Archaeology, which is a relatively recent discipline, has also confirmed the reliability of the New Testament. There is not enough room to reference all the persons, cities, towns, artifacts, pottery, coin, structures, and so forth that Archaeologists have discovered from the NT.
For example, the very bones of Caiaphas, the high priest of the Sanhedrin who sentenced Jesus to death, were accidentally discovered in Jerusalem during an excavation in 1990. Pontius Pilate, the Roman governor who permitted Jesus’ death, was also confirmed to exist.[18] There are 60 historical facts that have been confirmed in the Gospel of John and over 80 in the book of Acts.
There’s an inscription in Greece dating to AD 52 referring to the proconsul (governor) of Achaia during the reign of Claudius, and this is the same Gallio mentioned in the book of Acts where it mentions Paul being brought before him; thereby, enabling us to know when Paul visited certain cities.[19]
No Fairy Tales Here
Nope. The New Testament is not a mere collection of fairy tales like I’ve been told, but rather, it is based on real historical accounts. This is why historians have classified the Gospels as ancient biographies and not Greco-Roman mythology.
Former atheist and Oxford/Cambridge professor C. S. Lewis, who was an expert on folklore and mythology, once remarked that he had been studying myths all his life, but when he read the Gospels, he knew very well that these were certainly not myths. Over the years, more and more historians have come to agree with him.
So, now you know what just a few of the experts are saying about the reliability of the Bible, and now you have an idea of what to say to the next person who tells you that we can’t trust it. Thanks for reading!
Blessings,
Andrew Drinkard
[1] Walter C. Kaiser Jr., “Is the Old Testament Historically Reliable?” Ed, Cowan and Wilder. In Defense of the Bible, 202.
[2] Paul D. Wegner, “Has the Old Testament Text Been Hopelessly Corrupted?” Ed, Cowan and Wilder. In Defense of the Bible, 125-126.
[3] Kaiser, “Is the Old Testament Historically Reliable?” 220.
[4] K. A. Kitchens, On the Reliability of the Old Testament (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2003), 500.
[5] Creedal evidence is referring to a creed; a creed is a statement of faith that holds general consensus from a group of experts pertaining to a particular religion. This ensures their traditions and teachings remain uncorrupted. See N. T. Wright, Resurrection Son of God V3: Christian Origins and the Question of God (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2003), 319.
[6] David Wenham, Did St Paul Get Jesus Right?: The Gospel According to Paul (Oxford: Lion Hudson Publishing, 2010), 17.
[7] See Darrell L. Bock, Studying the Historical Jesus: A Guide to Sources and Methods (Grand Rapids: Baker Publishing, 2002), 48-57; Wenham, Did St Paul Get Jesus Right?, 17-20.
[8] Richard A. Horsley, Jesus and the Politics of Roman Palestine (University of South Carolina Press, 2013), 159.
[9] Craig L. Blomberg, The Historical Reliability of the New Testament: Countering the Challenges to Evangelical Christian Beliefs (Nashville, TN: B&H Publishing Group, 2016), 49.
[10] Richard Bauckham, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses: The Gospels as Eyewitness Testimony, 2nd edition (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans Publishing, 2017), 5.
[11] Gary R. Habermas and Michael R. Licona, The Case for the Resurrection of Jesus (Grand Rapids: Kregel Publications, 2004), 31.
[12] Andreas J. Köstenberger, Darrell L. Bock, and Josh D. Chatraw, Truth in a Culture of Doubt: Engaging Skeptical Challenges to the Bible (Nashville: B & H Publishing Group, 2014), 84.
[13] Peter J. Williams, Can We Trust the Gospels? (Wheaton: Crossway Publishing, 2018), 41-42. Kindle.
[14] Daniel B. Wallace, “Has the New Testament Text Been Hopelessly Corrupted?” Ed, Cowan and Wilder. In Defense of the Bible, 151.
[15] Williams, Can We Trust the Gospels?, 101. Kindle.
[16] Wenham, Did St Paul Get Jesus Right?, 23.
[17] Andreas J. Köstenberger, L. Scott Kellum, and Charles L. Quarles, The Cradle, the Cross, and the Crown: An Introduction to the New Testament, Second Edition (Nashville: B&H Publishing Group, 2016), 37.
[18] Titus Kennedy, Unearthing the Bible: 101 Archaeological Discoveries that Bring the Bible to Life (Eugene: Harvest House Publishers, 2020), 190-191.
[19] See Wenham, Did St Paul Get Jesus Right, 19.
