Why Trust The Bible?

The Bible as God-Breathed and Self-Attesting

So we're going to be covering a very tough question, I think. How do we know that the Bible is the Word of God? Why should we put our trust in it? Y 'all don't have to answer, but think about what you would say to somebody if they said, why should I trust in God?

Okay, I think one good thing to say is it's transformed my life, right? It's transformed me personally, the creator of the universe, condescended, took on flesh, dwelt among us, and saved me from my sin, right?

That is a powerful message because it's the gospel. The gospel has life transforming power. So I think there's a lot of ways that we can answer this question. Well, how is the Bible trustworthy? Is the New Testament, is the Old Testament, are they reliable documents?

Because what I want you to think about is two major categories. The Bible is a human book, and it's a divine book, okay? So this is what the scripture claims about itself. All scripture is, theionoustos, God breathed, and is possible for teaching, reproof, correction, and training, and righteousness, that the man of God may be equipped for every good work, complete.

And so scripture claims that it is uniquely distinct from all other writings, okay? So this is a divine book. It has self-attesting authority. So I want to talk about that in a little bit, but God also spoke within time and space.

He used men as instruments to bring about his work. So we can look at history. We can look at the tools of investigation to see how documents are reliable and trustworthy. So both are good, right? We want to explore the divine nature of scripture that it claims about itself, and we want to also be equipped with tools of studying history.

And I just want to say for a minute, do a lot of y 'all have this book? Why Trust the Bible by Greg Gilbert. They're giving this book out a lot here. I think there was a small stack. So at the end, if somebody wants this copy, I definitely want to give it to you because Greg Gilbert did a great job.

He condensed kind of the criteria of history, how we test documents and support principles. And so I'm going to talk a little bit about that. So I was pleased to see that this is being circulated. So the scripture also tells us that the scripture is a human book.

For no prophecy was ever produced by the will of man, but men spoke from God as that they were carried along by the Holy Spirit. So I'm wanting you to think, the Bible is a is a human book, and it's a self-attesting divine book.

It possesses a unique nature. So I just want to guide you. I'm going to actually flood you with a lot of information, and that's okay. If you have a question, actually I would encourage you to raise your hand, or at the end, I'm going to try to have a few minutes to answer questions.

I just want to share with you some of the remarkable things when we study the scripture, what we learn, how actually we can have the greatest degree of certainty that this has stood the test of time, how God has actually preserved his word for his people.

Messianic Prophecy in the Old Testament

So I want you to think about the Old Testament scriptures, because our Bible is made up of two testaments, the Old and New Testament. What's incredible about the Old Testament, it not only provides the foundation for the New, but it makes so many direct prophecies that could not been man-made or manipulated by man.

So there's four areas of prophecy that are remarkable in my opinion. Number one, it predicted a coming Messiah's lineage. Okay. It's pretty hard to manipulate who you were born from, right, to choose who your ancestors were and your parents are outside of us.

You would have to make up that story, right. But the Old Testament scriptures predict the Messiah's lineage. Number two, it predicted the location of his birth. The coming ruler was going to be born of Bethlehem, Ephrathah, very specific.

So not only does the Messiah have to come from a particular lineage, the Messiah has to be born in a particular location. That rules out a lot of people at the very get-go. And so the Old Testament also tells us the kind of vivid death that the Messiah, the suffering servant, would undergo.

Probably one of my favorite passages in all the scripture is Isaiah 53. Very much detailed that this suffering servant was going to be pierced on the behalf of sinners. Okay, and so when we hear things like pierced, Psalm 22 says his hands and feet were going to be pierced.

This is painting the picture of Jesus dying on the cross, and this was prophesied. And I want to get into the archaeology of how many years prior we can know that. And then number four is the timing of his death.

Okay, Daniel 9 talks about how his death would be close to the second temple. So these are these are incredible because when someone says, okay, all of these prophecies could have been made up. Okay, people said I want to invent this this crazy awesome story that's going to captivate people about Jesus Christ, so we're going to we're going to fabricate some prophecies to really sell this story.

Well, this is where archaeology comes in and says, well, actually that's not the case. That's not how it happened. Has anybody heard of the Dead Sea Scrolls by chance? Okay, this was remarkable in the early 1900s because in the Valley of Qumran, they found every book of the Hebrew scriptures minus Esther, and archaeologists concluded that these existed at least in 250 BC.

Now the Hebrew scriptures that before that were called the Masoretic Texts that existed in 900 AD, around the time that all the copies of New Testament manuscripts were being circulated. And so now we have found these ancient manuscripts so many hundreds and hundreds of years before the ministry of Jesus.

Okay, and so that's incredible because it couldn't have just been made up. The secular world has to look at this evidence and say, okay, something's up. This was prophesied at least 250 years before the person of Jesus.

What's even more remarkable is we look at these complete documents. We know that in order for them to have been preserved, it actually points to a much later date. So like if we zone in on the prophet Isaiah, he actually existed 700 years before the Messiah came.

So I'm wanting you to understand that the Old Testament is so foundational to Christianity, and I want to say all these other alleged holy books have nothing like our Bible. We have these strong prophecies that no one could have gotten right or manipulated by us doing ourselves because there's no way that all these things could have happened with the person of Jesus, especially with those four categories of prophecy.

And so the prophet Isaiah predicted that this coming Messiah would be born of a virgin, he was going to be mighty God and the Prince of Peace, and he was going to be the suffering servant who was pierced for our transgressions.

So I want us to now think in terms of the New Testament that perfectly fulfills that, that this child born of a virgin who suffered and died on the cross is Almighty God himself who took on flesh and dwelt among us.

The Gospels, Apostolic Authority, and the Rejection of Gnostic Texts

So in the New Testament, we have 27 books, and so I want to focus just for a little bit on the four Gospels. Can we really trust that these have been accurately preserved and communicated to us truth?

And so yes, I believe we can, and we're talking on this human level, right? Remember the Bible is a divine book, but it's also a human book, so we can use the principles and tools of historicity, what historians use to see how manuscripts are reliable.

So I want to talk about the Gospels origin, and then I want to talk about that manuscript transmission. I want us to talk about the copies of those manuscripts. So when we're talking about the Gospels origin, we're talking about the when question, right?

So Matthew, Mark, and Luke are the earliest Gospels. Now, this is incredible because you have a lot of man-made Gospels, the Gnostic Gospels, you have the Apocrypha Gospels. Why do we trust the four Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke?

They're the only ones that come from the first century. All of these other Gospels come up at a later date. So as historians, we say, okay, we want the the Gospels that actually come from eyewitnesses.

We want manuscripts that date really early to the actual event. And so when we're looking at the four Gospels, these are the only ones that pass that type of criteria. They are the earliest. Matthew, Mark, and Luke have always been the Gospels that Christians have held on to.

And so if you're taking notes, I'm going to just have believe a few points here with the Gospels origin. Number one, Matthew, Mark, and Luke are the earliest Gospels we have, and now we ask the who question.

Well, who actually wrote these? One, you maybe could say God wrote, right? The Holy Spirit inspired me and carried them along. But we can also ask the question, who were the men that God used? And I think as historians, we can actually answer this question.

The Bible tells us oftentimes which human authors God used. And so we want to look to the Apostles. The canonical Gospels have an incredible connection to apostolic authority. So if you want to write, make a note of that.

The reason why the Apostles are important is because if you were going to write a paper about Abraham Lincoln for a moment, and you went into the bookstore and you said, okay, here's a biography on Abraham Lincoln written by an anonymous author.

Okay, you're like, okay, that's one option. And then you have this biography on Abraham Lincoln written by his best friend. Which one of the two would you choose if you wanted the most accurate information?

Every single one of us would say, I want to go to the best friend. Because probably he lived life with Abraham Lincoln, and it's probably going to be explaining the stories, the experiences that he had with his best friend.

That person is going to give you the accurate information. And so that's the exact roles of the Apostles that we see in the historical life of Jesus Christ. So some people can say, how do we know that John wrote the Gospel of John?

Well, we would go to the earliest generation right after the Apostles. So you have men like Polycarp, who was a direct disciple of John himself. And he told us clearly that John wrote this. You have Irenaeus that comes later, who was a disciple of Polycarp.

And once again, that message was preserved. So we're looking to the early Christians. We're looking to the Apostles to tell us what Jesus wrote. And so the Gospels were written by the immediate followers of Jesus.

Even in the case of Mark and Luke, they were close companions to the Apostles. So a lot of times people say the Gospel of Mark really is the Gospel of Peter. They were close together. Mark also traveled with Paul.

Luke was Paul's traveling physician. He was a historian also. And so he traveled with all the Apostles. And so we can trust that these are accurate information as a human, from a human perspective. But once again, the Bible is both human and divine.

And so when we look at the Apostles, how they live life with Jesus, we understand that the four Gospels are authoritative eyewitness testimonies. So that is very important. And so when someone says, well, couldn't the Gospels been lying, like all the other Gnostic Gospels that come later?

Well, the Gnostic Gospels fraudulently attach their names to some of the famous Christians and so you have Gnostic Gospels like the Gospel of Thomas, the Gospel of Philip, and the Gospel of Mary. Now I've already touched on this point.

These come second century, third century, they come way later. The early church would have said, oh, we can tell this is fake. We're going to talk a little bit about the content here in a second. But because of their date, these four Gospels were already so close to the time of Jesus that it was being circulated.

So when you had fake ones pop up, it was actually easy to tell. So just briefly, these Gnostic Gospels, when you look at the content, they carry what's called legendary embellishments. Okay, what do I mean by that?

When you look at the Gospel account, there's a lot of things that aren't very specific. We don't have a ton of details like the childhood of Jesus. It's mentioned a little bit, but there's not a lot of details involved there.

So what are Gnostics going to do? They're really going to go into the places where there's not a lot of things talked about, and they're going to embellish on those things that weren't already written in the Gospel account.

So one way that you can easily tell the difference between Gnostic Gospels and the canonical Gospels is by simply reading them for yourself. You can see the qualitative difference between the two. So the Gospel of Thomas, I just want to let you hear this.

It talks about the infancy of Jesus, okay? And one story in the Gospel of Thomas was Jesus was a young boy, and he wasn't getting his way, and he zapped another kid from existence, right? You can just already tell that's not the Jesus that's contained in the four Gospels who the Apostle Paul writes about later.

So by simply just reading it, you can understand, man, this thing is fake. And you can hang your hat on this. They came way later after the first century. So the canonical Gospels were recognized as authoritative from a very early date.

Michael Kruger is a New Testament scholar. He had a really good point talking about the early Christians. All were in agreement that these four Gospels were authoritative. He said it's kind of like this.

If you want to go to a Christian back in the second century and stick a microphone in their face and say, hey, why did you choose these four Gospels? They would look at you like, what are you talking about?

These are the ones, we didn't have a vote. These are just the ones that had been given to us. And Michael Kruger goes on to say, it'd be like asking somebody, why did you choose your parents? They would say, I don't know.

They've just been there as far as I can remember. So if you were to interview somebody from the early church and ask them, why did they choose? They'd be like, no, no, this is what simply has been given to us.

And that was unified. The early church understood that these Gospels, Matthew, Mark, and Luke, testified to the person and life of Jesus. And so another question we could ask is, what about these hidden apocryphal Gospels?

Were they read widely? Now, this is where we're about to transition into the manuscript copies of the New Testament because you could say, well, one thing you can compare is, you could ask the question, how many manuscripts do we have of these apocryphal Gospels?

So there is, I mentioned the Gospel of Thomas earlier. This leads the way in all the Gnostic apocryphal material with a whopping three manuscripts. Now, why is that important? Well, if something was being circulated and people were believing in it as true, you would expect way more copies than just three.

That tells you that the early church would say, no, this is fake, right? So I'm wanting us to think a little bit like historians to do some of these investigative questions. So just a brief recap. Let me check the time real quick too.

We got about maybe 15 minutes. I think we're doing good. When we're asking the question, if you could create the ideal Gospel, what would it look like? So this is something a historian would ask. You would probably want to write as close to the time of Jesus as you can.

And then you would also say, well, the early Christians, they only had one set of Gospels. And that one set of Gospels was closely written to his closest companions. And you'd certainly want to be one of the earliest Christians that would know far more about these things than us.

So we're looking to the apostles. We're looking to that first generations that come right after the apostles. So today, there is certainly only one set of Gospels that does this. So when someone says, which Gospels should I read if I want to know about Jesus?

It's the same answer that's been around for the past almost 2000 years. You would look to Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. So that was a lot about the Gospels origin, okay? And so now I want to talk about the manuscript transmission.

Manuscript Transmission and the Reliability of New Testament Copies

Now I may floss through this because I want to get some of y 'all's thoughts and questions. And so when we look at their manuscript transmission, we ask questions like, can we be confident that these thousands of copies of manuscripts accurately represent the originals?

You may ask it this way. How do we know that the Gospels and the rest of the New Testament hasn't been changed or corrupted? I want to talk about three features. And like I said, we may just have to flop through this.

But number one is the quantity of manuscripts. Number two is the date of biblical manuscripts. And number three is the quality of those manuscripts. And so when we look at number one, the quantity of manuscripts, you may say, okay, what does a whole lot of manuscripts matter?

Well, it matters a whole lot because if people are believing these things to be true, this accurately represents what actually happened during those early times. Let me see here for a moment. In the copying process, this is really important because the more manuscripts that we have, we can compare them to one another and see if something was sliding into the text that shouldn't be there, okay?

Does that kind of make sense? And if someone was going to invent something, we could look at these vast number of copies and be like, wait, that actually is not matching up with these so many vast number.

And I want to give you this number real quick. There are roughly 5 ,700 manuscripts that we have of the New Testament. That is an amazing number because roughly in the 2 ,000 years ago, you would only have about 10 to 50 copies of any manuscripts.

And we're saying the New Testament has over 5 ,000, okay? It's almost embarrassing to say that because it's incredible. To doubt the New Testament's accuracy is to literally doubt everything else that has ever existed and come out of history.

We don't doubt things like George Washington was president and these other things that we've seen in history, right? We have so much overwhelming textual manuscript evidence that Jesus existed. And this is the kicker because you really can't deny that the person Jesus existed.

But you know what else is a guarantee? That he was risen from the dead. That's where people are like, I don't know about all that. But if you look at all of the evidence, it points directly to that that is fact.

But people are obviously going to fuck against that. So let's move on to number two. The date of biblical manuscripts. So a historian's dream is not to just have a ton of manuscripts, but they want to have early manuscripts that are really close to the time and the events of a particular event.

And so just to suffice to say is we have really early manuscripts that date. So for one example is P52. This is an early papyrus fragment of... What does the Baptist finger mean, Preston? How much time do we have left?

One minute, okay. Well, you just have to take my word on that. I do want to wrap up and say, I definitely want to plug this book. Mr. Gilbert, he goes into four principles of how we can trust the New Testament, which are apostolic authority, which we've already kind of covered a lot here already.

Apostolic authority. He talks about how all these manuscripts come from antiquity, which means that they're really old and they're trustworthy and they come from the apostles. The New Testament, obviously with the Gospels, were universally accepted by the church.

And number four, there has always been a strong unity of orthodoxy. And so he goes into great depth on that. And so I want to just highly recommend that book because they might want this book. I already have a copy, so I'd love to give it away right here.

I'll get you another copy. I don't know, can you take it? No, no, no, this is yours. So before we go, we looked at a super...