The Absolute Truth of the Bible, pt 3

A reminder of where we left off:

God wants us to be sure that His word really tells us about Him—to be so confident about His perfect book that we dare to put into action all that it teaches us.  So it makes sense that he gave us a book that can stand up to the same important questions we can ask about any other book in the world:

a)     Do the facts inside the book add up?  (discussed in part 1)

b)     Was the book passed down without mistakes?  (discussed in part 2)

c)      Do facts from outside the book back it up?

C.  Backed Up By Outside Facts

My pastor, Chad Mantooth, recently said that most old writings are considered to be true until proven false; however, the world reverses this when it comes to the Bible, saying it is false until proven true.  God provides that proof! 

Some people have claimed that the Bible is full of mistakes because it doesn’t match facts from history, geography, or science.  These critics are proved wrong time after time.  For example:

*People said Moses couldn’t have written the first 5 books of the Bible because writing didn’t exist back then—until scholars discovered that writing was invented at least 2,000 years before Moses.

*People said that there was no such person as Pontius Pilate, the Roman governor who sentenced Jesus to die on the cross—until archaeologists found writings listing his name.

Facts from outside the Bible say it is trustworthy.  We have these facts from rocks (archaeology) and writings.

Here is just a little bit of the huge pile of archaeological evidence for the truth of the Bible:

 * The most documented Biblical event is the world-wide flood described in Genesis 6-9. A number of Babylonian documents have been discovered which describe the same flood. The Sumerian King List, for example, lists kings who reigned for long periods of time. Then a great flood came. Following the flood, Sumerian kings ruled for much shorter periods of time. This is the same pattern found in the Bible. Men had long life spans before the flood and shorter life spans after the flood. The 11th tablet of the Gilgamesh Epic speaks of an ark, animals taken on the ark, birds sent out during the course of the flood, the ark landing on a mountain, and a sacrifice offered after the ark landed.

*Sodom and Gomorrah. The Bible says that the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah were destroyed by fire and burning sulfur (Genesis 19). Excavations at the sites of these cities show that layers of earth were hurled high into the air, causing hot rock to rain down.

*Jericho. Joshua 6 says that the Israelites marched around the city of Jericho until its walls fell down. Archaeologists say that the walls fell outward so completely that the attackers could have climbed up and over their ruins into the city, which is exactly what Joshua 6:20^a describes.

*David. An astonishing clay tablet from nine centuries before Christ talks about both the "House of David" and the "King of Israel." It proves not only that David was real, but also that he ruled over an important kingdom.

* Campaign into Israel by Pharaoh Shishak (1 Kings 14:25-26^b), recorded on the walls of the Temple of Amun in Thebes, Egypt.
 

* Fall of Samaria (2 Kings 17:3-6, 24; 18:9-11^c) to Sargon II, king of Assyria, as recorded on his palace walls.
 

* Defeat of Ashdod by Sargon II (Isaiah 20:1^d), as recorded on his palace walls.

*Luke. Much of what we know about the birth of Jesus comes from Luke 2: 1-3^e. Luke's facts all check out, such as the Romans having a census every 14 years and making everyone return to his or her family's home to be counted.

While some puzzles of the Bible remain to be solved, researchers still haven't found any archaeological fact that proves the Bible is wrong. That's amazing!

Reading the Writings

The rocks shout that the facts of the Bible are true. And so do the works of writers living closer to Bible times. These authorities knew all about the events of the New Testament and the claims set forth in Scripture. Three big examples are:

Josephus, who was a famous Jewish historian born just after Christ died. A passage he wrote in AD 93 confirms that Jesus was a real person recognized by many as the Messiah.

Thallus, who wrote in AD 52 that earthquakes and a fearful darkness followed the crucifixion of Christ, just as Luke 23:44-45^f describes.

Pliny the Younger, a Roman author, who in a letter to the Emperor Trajan in about AD 112 talked about many early Christian beliefs. Pliny's letter gives solid evidence that Christians worshiped Jesus as God and followed the practice of eating together as reported in Acts 2:42 and 46^g.

If you were to pull together everything known about Jesus from ancient non-Christian writings, you would uncover even more facts-including the key facts that Jesus came from Nazareth, lived an extraordinary life, died under Pilate, and was believed to have been raised from the dead. And all of this information comes from outside the Bible. This is astonishing stuff!  God really wanted to be sure that the world understands that His Son and everything in His Word is real.

One last thing about the reliability of translations backed up by archaeological findings: Between 1947 and 1956, great discoveries were made in a series of 11 caves around the Dead Sea.  Scrolls of Biblical and non-Biblical writings were found preserved in clay jars.  Based on various dating methods, including carbon 14, paleographic and scribal, the Dead Sea Scrolls were written during the period from about 200 B.C. to 68 A.D. Until these discoveries, the oldest manuscripts of the Hebrew Scriptures were copies from the 9th and 10th centuries AD by a group of Jewish scribes called the Massoretes. Now we have manuscripts around a thousand years older than those. The amazing truth is that these manuscripts are almost identical to the scrolls! The minor differences are mainly spelling (comparable to the difference between spelling Saviour and Savior).

If you go to Josh McDowell’s site (link at the right), and click on “Can I Trust the Bible?”, you will find a series of videos that explain even more about the Bible.  I encourage you to view them. 

Scriptures are quoted from the New International Version, ©2011

a.   Joshua 6:20  “When the trumpets sounded, the army shouted, and at the sound of the trumpet, when the men gave a loud shout, the wall collapsed; so everyone charged straight in, and they took the city.”

b.   1 Kings 14:25-26  “In the fifth year of King Rehoboam, Shishak king of Egypt attacked Jerusalem. ²⁶ He carried off the treasures of the temple of the LORD and the treasures of the royal palace. He took everything, including all the gold shields Solomon had made.”

c.    2 Kings 17:3-6, 24; 18:9-11  “Shalmaneser king of Assyria came up to attack Hoshea, who had been Shalmaneser’s vassal and had paid him tribute. ⁴ But the king of Assyria discovered that Hoshea was a traitor, for he had sent envoys to So king of Egypt, and he no longer paid tribute to the king of Assyria, as he had done year by year. Therefore Shalmaneser seized him and put him in prison. ⁵ The king of Assyria invaded the entire land, marched against Samaria and laid siege to it for three years. ⁶ In the ninth year of Hoshea, the king of Assyria captured Samaria and deported the Israelites to Assyria. He settled them in Halah, in Gozan on the Habor River and in the towns of the Medes.   ²⁴ The king of Assyria brought people from Babylon, Kuthah, Avva, Hamath and Sepharvaim and settled them in the towns of Samaria to replace the Israelites. They took over Samaria and lived in its towns.  ^18:9In King Hezekiah’s fourth year, which was the seventh year of Hoshea son of Elah king of Israel, Shalmaneser king of Assyria marched against Samaria and laid siege to it. ¹⁰ At the end of three years the Assyrians took it. So Samaria was captured in Hezekiah’s sixth year, which was the ninth year of Hoshea king of Israel. ¹¹ The king of Assyria deported Israel to Assyria and settled them in Halah, in Gozan on the Habor River and in towns of the Medes.”

d.   Isaiah 20:1  “In the year that the supreme commander, sent by Sargon king of Assyria, came to Ashdod and attacked and captured it.”

e.   Luke 2:1-3  “In those days Caesar Augustus issued a decree that a census should be taken of the entire Roman world. (This was the first census that took place while Quirinius was governor of Syria.)  And everyone went to their own town to register.”

f.    Luke 23:44-45   “It was now about noon, and darkness came over the whole land until three in the afternoon, for the sun stopped shining. And the curtain of the temple was torn in two.”

g.    Acts 2:42, 46  “They devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and to fellowship, to the breaking of bread and to prayer.  Every day they continued to meet together in the temple courts. They broke bread in their homes and ate together with glad and sincere hearts,”

The Absolute Truth of the Bible, pt 2

A reminder of where we left off:

God wants us to be sure that His word really tells us about Him—to be so confident about His perfect book that we dare to put into action all that it teaches us.  So it makes sense that he gave us a book that can stand up to the same important questions we can ask about any other book in the world:

a)     Do the facts inside the book add up?  (discussed in part 1)

b)     Was the book passed down without mistakes?

c)      Do facts from outside the book back it up?

B. Passed down without mistakes.

You know how stories change as they are told (remember playing gossip?).  One person tells another person something, and that person tells someone else, and so on and before you know it, the story is wildly different from the original. 

Even the newest books of the Bible were written almost 2,000 years ago—way before printing presses or computers.  Copies then had to be written by hand.  Over time, the ink faded and the books wore out, so new copies had to be made—or the book would be lost forever.   They wrote on clay tablets, sheepskin, paper made from tall weeds, and calfskin.  These were carefully protected in clay pots, caves, and churches so they would last a long time—hundreds and thousands of years!  God promised that the word would last forever (1 Peter 1:25^a), but it seems like all this copying and recopying could lead to a lot of mistakes.  Words left out, new ideas added, etc.  So how can we be sure?  You can’t look back at the originals because they aren’t around anymore.  However, there are two tests that can be used to see if any old book has been copied without getting messed up.  These are:

1)      How many copies of the book are there?

2)      How much time has passed between when the book was first written and the earliest copy that exists?

The more copies you have of a book—and the older those copies are—the more you can be sure that you are getting the real story.  After all, if you had several copies of a book and they all had glaring differences, you would have a hard time determining which one was true to the original without the original in front of you. 

There are many old copies of the Bible—almost 25,000 ancient copies of the New Testament alone!  Some are only small pieces of Bible books, but most contain pieces from all 27 books of the New Testament.  This is truly a sign that God watched over His Word, because there are far more old copies of the Bible than of any other ancient book.  For example, there are only 643 early copies of Homer’s Iliad, and just 10 old copies of Julius Caesar’s famous book, Gallic Wars.

 Even more amazing, the copies we have of the New Testament are really old.  We have pieces of the book of John that are only 50 years older than John’s very first copy!  We have thousands of copies of the whole New Testament that were made only 200 years after they were written.

That seems like a long time, but the oldest copies of the Iliad are 400 years older than the first writing, and the oldest copies of Gallic Wars are more than 1,000 years older.

What about the Old Testament?  The people who copied the Old Testament (scribes) followed very special rules.  Before they started, they washed their whole body and put on special clothes.  When they began writing the name of God, they could not stop until the entire name had been written—even if a king entered the room.  They wrote in columns exactly 30 letters wide, putting a space the size of a thread between every letter.  They couldn’t copy anything from memory, not even the shortest word.  Everything had to be copied letter by letter. When a scribe finished copying a book, he had to count how many times each letter of the alphabet appeared to see if it matched the original.  If the new copy had even one mistake, the scribe had to throw it away!  Because we have copies of the Old Testament made over a span of 2,000 years, we can check the work of these special scribes—they did a great job!

Next time, we'll look at the third test: Do facts from outside the book back it up?

Scriptures are quoted from the New International Version, ©2011

a. 1 Peter 1:25  “but the word of the Lord endures forever.”

quoted by the Apostle Peter from Isaiah 40:8b 

Some of the references I’ve used include Josh’s “The New Evidence That Demands A Verdict” and “Beyond Belief to Convictions” (he references many others in these books), as well as “The Apologetics Study Bible”—an excellent resource with articles from many noted apologists.