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Why You Can Trust The Bible
- Apr 16, 2009 at 11:17 PM
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Amazing Evidence for the Trustworthiness of the Bible
The word Bible comes from the Greek word “biblos,” which means “book.” The Bible is unarguably an incredible book! The Bible is the best selling, most quoted, most published, most circulated, most translated, most influential book in the history of mankind. Now these are interesting facts, but do they prove that the Bible is actually true? No. Why should anybody believe that the Bible is actually true? Might not the Bible be a fraud? Might not it be an ancient book of mythology, filled with the fanciful, yet deceitful writings of men? Why should I trust the Bible?
Those are questions that intelligent, critical thinking people are asking today. Those are the questions I used to ask about the Bible. We need to, as Christians, be able to answer these questions (1 Peter 3:15). So, in our time together this evening I’d like to share with you some of the evidence that I think demonstrates that the Bible is indeed what it claims to be, the inspired, trustworthy Word of God.
I want to do that by bringing to the witness stand, if you will, ten witnesses or evidences that all testify to this truth. My prayer is that, if you are already a Christian, your faith in the Bible will be strengthened, and if you are a skeptic that you will reconsider your skepticism.
The first witness or evidence for the Bible’s trustworthiness is...
1. FULFILLED PROPHECY
Fulfilled prophecy is something that sets the Bible apart from every other religious book. There are 26 other religious books that people of faith believe are divinely inspired (the Vedas, the Bhagavad-Gita, the Mahabharata, the Upanishads, the Qur'an, the Book of Mormon, the Tripitaka, etc.). Of these twenty-six books, none of them, not a single one, contains any specific, fulfilled prophecies!
The Bible, however, is filled with hundreds of specific, detailed prophecies that were written hundreds of years before their fulfillment! In fact, an amazing 27% of the Bible (more than 1 out of every 4 verses) contains what was predictive prophecy at the time that it was written. And the authors of the Bible did not just predict some vague things like Nostradamus or Jeanne Dixon (who by the way, have proven to be wrong over and over again), they were very specific. Consider some of the more than 100 different and very specific prophecies made concerning the Messiah, who the Old Testament prophesied would come.
The Old Testament foretold, hundreds of years in advance, very specific details about: the Messiah's ancestry, that He’d be born of the seed of Abraham (Gen. 12:1-3, 22:18), of the tribe of Judah (Gen 49:10), of the house of David (2 Samuel 7:12f), etc. The city in which He would be born (Micah 5:2), that He’d come while the temple was still standing (Malachi 3:1), that He would be born of a virgin (Isaiah 7:14), that He would perform miracles (Isaiah 35:5-6), that He’d be rejected by His own people (Psalm 118:22; 1 Peter 2:7), the precise time in history when He would die (Daniel 9:24-26; 483 years after the declaration to reconstruct the city of Jerusalem in 444 B.C. This was fulfilled to the very year.), how He would die (Psalm 22:16-18, Isaiah 53; Zech 12:10), that He would rise from the dead (Psalm 16:10; Acts 2:27-32), and there are many more. All of these prophecies and hudreds others have been literally fulfilled.
The skeptic says: “Maybe Christians inserted those prophecies back into the Old Testament after Jesus lived.”
Not a chance. How do we know? There exists today hundreds of manuscript copies of the Old Testament that predate the time of Christ’s birth. These ancient copies of the Old Testament, dating back to the third century B.C., verify that these prophecies concerning the Messiah were already in place. In 1947 a shepherd boy tending his father’s sheep in Qumran, north and to the west of the Dead Sea in Israel, made an amazing discovery while looking for a lost sheep. There in Qumran, in a hillside cave that had laid untouched for nearly two thousand years, he discovered an ancient collection of hand written copies of the Old Testament. These scrolls had been hidden in caves by the Essenes, a Jewish sect living in Qumran, 2,000 years ago. These scrolls and writings (now known as the Dead Sea Scrolls) represented every book of the Old Testament except the Book of Esther, and are considered one of the greatest discoveries in modern times. It’s manuscript evidence like this Isaiah scroll that dates back to about 100 B.C. that proves, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that the Old Testament, and its many prophecies concerning the Messiah, was finished long before Jesus was even born.
The skeptic says: “How do you know that the Dead Sea Scrolls date back to before Christ?”
Teams of scholars determined the scrolls age by examining 1. The pottery that housed the manuscripts 2. The weave and pattern of the manuscript cloths 3. The form of the characters 4. The spelling of the words 5. The coins found alongside the manuscripts.
The skeptic says: “Perhaps Jesus was not the Messiah, but just accidentally or even deliberately set out to fulfill these prophecies.”
First, it’s hard to think of any person deliberately setting out to fulfill prophecies that would result in a short life and an excruciating drawn out death on a cross. Secondly, how does a man deliberately choose the lineage he is born into, the time period in which he is born, -the city in which he is born? Was the fulfillment of these prophecies an accident? Peter Stoner, a mathematician, and Professor Emeritus of Science at Westmont College, in his book Science Speaks (Moody 1963) calculated the odds of a single man fulfilling just eight of the prophecies that Jesus fulfilled as the mathematical improbability of 1 in 10 to the 17th. That is a HUGE number. One in ten to the seventeenth power. That's a one with seventeen zeros after it (100,000,000,000,000,000). If we had 100 quadrillion 1” x 1.5” tiles we could cover every square inch of dry land on planet Earth. The fact that these prophecies and hundreds of others have been fulfilled, even though they were spoken hundreds and even thousands of years before their fulfillment, is strong evidence that a God, who is all-knowing and all-powerful, orchestrated the Bible’s completion.
A great book that discusses these fulfilled prophecies is Every Prophecy of the Bible by Dr. John Walvoord. It discusses the fulfillment of nearly 1,000 of the Bible’s prophecies.
So evidence number one: fulfilled prophecy. It is an amazing testimony to the divine origin and trustworthiness of the Bible. No other religious writing is able to substantiate its claims to be divinely inspired with this kind of supernatural evidence.
Only the God of the Bible knows the end from the beginning: “I am God, and there is none like Me, declaring the end from the beginning, and from ancient times things that are not yet done" (Isaiah 46:9-10).
2. ARCHAEOLOGICAL DISCOVERIES
For the past 150 years archaeologists have been verifying the exact truthfulness of the Bible's detailed records of various events, customs, persons, cities, nations, and geographical locations. Dr. Nelson Glueck probably the greatest modern authority on Israeli archeology, has said, “No archeological discovery has ever controverted [overturned] a Biblical reference. Scores of archeological findings have been made which confirm in clear outline or in exact detail historical statements in the Bible. And, by the same token, proper evaluation of Biblical descriptions has often led to amazing discoveries.”
In every instance where the Bible can be, or has been checked out archaeologically, it has been found to be 100% accurate. The Bible has proven so accurate that archaeologists often refer to it as a reliable guide when they go to dig in new areas. In fact, even though less than 1% of the material available to excavate in the tells in Israel has been excavated, there have been more than 25,000 discoveries within the region known as the "Bible Lands” that have confirmed the truthfulness of the Bible. Entire books have been written on this topic. Allow me to give you three examples.
A. Pontius Pilate
The Bible says that he was the Roman governor of Judea and the man who issued the official order for Jesus to be sentenced to death by crucifixion (Matthew 27; Mark 15; Luke 23; John 18-19). In June of 1961 a team of Italian archaeologists, led by Dr. Antonio Frova, were excavating the Mediterranean port city of Caesarea that had at one time served as the Roman capital of Palestine. It was there in the jumbled ruins of an ancient Roman theater that they uncovered a large 2’ x 3’, 5” or so thick, limestone rock. The inscription on the rock amazed the archaeologists. It read in: “Pontius Pilate, Prefect of Judea, has presented the Tiberium to the Caesareans.” (Scholars believe that the Tiberium refers to a temple or some other kind of public structure named after the Roman emperor Tiberius, who reigned from 14–37 A.D.) This stone is on display today in the Israel Museum as a testimony to the reliability of the Bible.
B. Caiaphas
Caiaphas, the Bible tells us, was the Jewish high priest at the time of Jesus crucifixion. Was he a make believe character? Some thought so, that is until 1990, when the Caiaphas family tomb was accidentally discovered by workers constructing a water park just south of Jerusalem. Archaeologists were hastily called to the scene. When they examined the tomb they found 12 ossuaries (limestone bone boxes) containing the remains of 63 individuals. On the outside of the most beautifully decorated of the ossuaries was inscribed the words: “Joseph son of Caiaphas.” What’s incredible is that Josephus (that Jewish historian of the first century A.D.) in his writings (Antiquities 18: 2, 2; 4, 3) documents that that was actually the full name of the high priest who arrested Jesus, “Joseph son of Caiaphas.” (Saying “son of” was a way of referring to the family name). Inside the ossuary archaeologists found the remains of a someone approximately 60-years-old at the time of his death...the actual bones of Caiaphas, the high priest mentioned in the Bible. Today Caiaphas’ ossuary is also on display in the Israel Museum as a testimony of the Bible’s trustworthiness!
C. David
David of course was the most loved of all of Israel’s kings. Some liberal scholars though had denied that King David was a historical figure because there was no mention of him outside of the Bible. Their skepticism changed in 1993. It was then, at an excavation at Tel-Dan in N. Israel they found a now famous stone with an inscription (in Aramaic) referring to the House of David. In 1994 two more fragments of the same stone inscription were discovered, again mentioning the House of David. In 1995 Time Magazine did a story on this discovery and stated, This writing—dated to the 9th century B.C., only a century after David’s reign—described a victory by a neighboring king over the Israelites…The skeptics’ claim that King David never existed is now hard to defend" (Time, December 18, 1995). It’s because of discoveries like this that men like Millar Burrows, (former Professor at Yale University) stated, “…archaeological work has unquestionably strengthened confidence in the reliability of the Scriptural record. More than one archaeologist has found his respect for the Bible increased by the experience of excavation in Palestine" (Burrows, Millar. What Mean These Stones? New Haven: American Schools of Oriental Research. 1941, p. 1.). Like I said, there are literally thousands of these archaeological discoveries that point to the Bible being an accurate and trustworthy historical document.
Archaeology has not proven so helpful for other religious writings. Consider the Book of Mormon. “Not one piece of evidence has ever been found to support the Book of Mormon -- not a trace of the large cities it names, no ruins, no coins, no letters or documents or monuments, nothing in writing. Not even one of the rivers or mountains or any of the topography it mentions has ever been identified.” (Dave Hunt, p.156, In Defense of the Faith; also see p. 107 in The Case for Christ, by Lee Strobel). Nothing which demonstrates that the Book of Mormon is anything other than an early nineteeth century piece of American fiction, invented by Joseph Smith has ever been found.
The National Geographic Society stated on August 12, 1998, “Archaeologists and other scholars have long probed the hemisphere's past, and the Society does not know of anything found so far that has substantiated the Book of Mormon.” The Smithsonian Institute in Washington D.C. has also verified this utter lack of evidence saying in 1996 when they said, “The Smithsonian Institution has never used the Book of Mormon in any way as a scientific guide. Smithsonian Archaeologists see no connection between the archaeology of the New World and the subject matter of the Book.”
3. THE BIBLE’S INTERNAL CONSISTENCY
What do I mean, when I speak of the Bible’s internal consistency? I am talking about the Bible’s internal harmony. From the first book of the Bible, Genesis, to the last book, Revelation, the Bible is absolutely consistent.
The skeptic says: “Why is that an evidence of divine origin? There are plenty of books that are internally consistent.”
I agree, but let me share with you seven factors that make the consistency of the Bible an amazing evidence of its divine origin.
A. The Bible addresses life’s most controversial questions. How did the universe come into existence? Does God exist? And if so, what is He like? Why does man exist? What is our purpose for being here? Why is there evil and suffering in the world? What happens to me after I die?
B. The Bible is a collection of 66 different documents. It might be easy to have harmony of thought in a single book like the Qur’an, that contains the teachings of a single man. But the Bible is not a single book. It a compilation of books: 39 books in the Old Testament and 27 books in the New Testament.
C. The Bible was written by approximately 40 different authors.
D. Many of the Bible’s authors came from different educational and cultural backgrounds. Peter was a fisherman. Paul was a scholar. Daniel was a prime minister. Asaph was a musician. Matthew was a tax collector. David was a shepherd then a king. Luke was a historian and medical doctor. The Bible’s consistency gets even more amazing when you consider fourthly that…
E. The Bible was written over a period of approximately 1500+ years, covering some 60+ generations. Not only were the authors separated from each other by hundreds of years in time, but...
F. Many of the authors were separated by hundreds of miles geographically. Many people don’t realize this, but the Bible was written in a variety of places on three different continents. a. Africa (Egypt) b. Asia c. Europe (Rome for instance). Paul wrote four letters imprisoned in Rome, located in Italy. The apostle John, wrote while a prisoner banished to the Isle of Patmos in the Mediterranean Sea. The prophet Ezekiel wrote his work while held captive in Babylon. Jeremiah was in a dungeon. Luke wrote while traveling. Daniel wrote from a hillside and in a palace.
G. The Bible was written in three different languages (Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek).
Now, in spite of all of these different factors we find the Bible to be a consistent, harmonious, perfectly unified account of how God is seeking to reconcile sinners back to Himself through the person of His Son, Jesus Christ. This is an amazing evidence of its divine origin. If you’re not convinced, go through your neighborhood and ask just 10 of your neighbors, what their beliefs are on the nature of the universe, the meaning of life, the origin of evil, the way of salvation, etc. and you’ll immediately see how likely it is to have a variety of contradicting opinions!
4. EXTERNAL VERIFICATION
Many people don’t know this but there are dozens of writings outside of the Bible that verify the historical accuracy of many of the names of people, places, and events mentioned in the Bible. In fact, external sources verify that at least 80 persons were actual historical figures, 50 people from the Old Testament and 30 people from the New Testament (see list of names and sources on p. 270 in I Don’t Have Enough Faith To Be An Atheist by Norman Geisler and Frank Turek). Because of engravings and statues, etc., we even know what 18 (12 from the OT and 6 from the NT) of them looked like!
External verification of what the Bible says has led to a radical change of view among liberal scholars regarding the person of Jesus. Some had at one time put forth the false idea that Jesus never even existed; that He was merely a mythological character! But, today the existence of Jesus is hardly even debated within informed scholarly circles. The reason why? There are over 39 sources outside of the Bible that attest to more than 100 facts regarding Jesus’ life, teachings, crucifixion, and resurrection. One of those external sources, was the 1st century Roman historian Flavius Josephus. In his writings Josephus verifies that Herod the Great, Herod Antipas, Caiaphas, Pontius Pilate, John the Baptist, James “the brother of Jesus,” Felix, Festus, and even Jesus, were all historical figures. Listen to one of Josephus’ statements about Jesus of Nazareth. I have purposely taken this from the Arabic text, of Josephus’ writings called Antiquities, chapter 18:63-64, a text that is unchallenged by most critics of the Bible.
Josephus wrote: “At this time there was a wise man who was called Jesus. And his conduct was good, and (He) was known to be virtuous. And many people from among the Jews and the other nations became his disciples. Pilate condemned Him to be crucified to die. And those who had become his disciples did not abandon his discipleship. They reported that He had appeared to them three days after his crucifixion and that He was alive." These are not the words of the Bible or a Christian, but a Roman historian writing outside of the pages of Scripture. Josephus wasn’t the lone voice. There were others as well:
A. Cornelius Tacitus (ca. A.D. 55 –120) a Roman Historian by who wrote around A.D. 115. Although he was not a Christian but he did verify that Jesus lived, that He was from Judea, that He lived during the reign of Tiberius (A.D. 14-37), and was executed by Pontius Pilate, who governed the province of Judea from A.D. 26-36.).
B. Gaius Suetonius (the chief secretary of Emperor Hadrian (A.D. 117 –138)
A great book for those of interested on reading more about external verification of the life of Jesus, is The Historical Jesus: Ancient Evidence for the Life of Christ by Gary R. Habermas. This book is available in our online store.
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