Is the Bible really the word of God?

There is a concerted effort today to undermine our trust in the Bible. There are supposed scholars on television; there have been many popular books written about it,
but I want us to look at the evidence.
Is the Bible so old that there’s no way we have the same Bible they did 2,000 years ago?
And is the Bible is full of inaccuracies and errors?
Is there any proof that the Bible is divinely inspired?
I want to look at those questions here.

     Myth #1: The Bible is so old-there’s no way we have the same Bible they did 2,000 years ago.
   A. Skeptics charge that the Bible has been changed throughout the ages.

Quote from the DaVinci Code:

 “The Christian Scriptures evolved through countless translations, additions, and revisions. History has never had a definitive version of the book.”
   B. The Evidence: Evidence #1: The facts. No matter what you think about the Bible, everyone has to admit there it is unique:

1. It was written over a 1,500 year span-forty generations of people. 2. It was written by over 40 authors including kings, peasants, philosophers, fishermen, poets, statesmen, scholars, shepherds, doctors, tax collectors, rabbis, and generals. 3. It was written from palaces to dungeons, wildernesses to prisons. 4. It was written on three continents: Asia, Africa, and Europe. 5. It was written in three languages: Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek. 6. It talks about hundreds of controversial subjects with harmony, unity, and continuity from Genesis to Revelation-it doesn’t contradict itself. 7. Circulation of the Bible: By the year 1932 1,330,213,815 copies of the Bible were distributed. Today there are over 130 Bible Societies in the world today and they distribute about 500 million copies of the Bible in over 2,300 languages every year. That’s over 1.3 million bibles a day, or 57,077 Bibles printed and distributed each hour, or 16 Bibles each second. 8. It was first translated into another language in 250 B.C. 9. There are currently 5,256 people translating the Bible into 1,376 languages. 10. It has survived vicious attacks by its enemies to destroy it:

   a. Emperor Diocletan issued a decree in 303 A.D. to raze all churches to the ground and burn all Bibles. Within 25 years of this edict, the new Caesar-Constantine issued an edict ordering that 50 copies of the Scriptures should be prepared at the expense of the Roman Government.
   b. Voltaire, the French atheist who died in 1778 said that in one hundred years from his time Christianity would be swept from existence and passed into history. What happened? Fifty years after his death, the Geneva Bible Society bought his house and printing press and used them to print thousands and thousands of Bibles.

11. It was taken into outer space and also read from outer space by our astronauts. 12. The most amazing fact: *Most Americans have never read the Bible.

• Less than 10% of Christians in America have read the whole Bible once.
• Only half of adults interviewed nationwide could name any of the four Gospels of the New Testament.
• Just 37% of those interviewed could name all four Gospels.
• Only 42% of adults were able to name as many as five of the Ten Commandments correctly.
• Seven in ten (70%) were able to name the town where Jesus was born, but just 42% could identify him as the person who delivered the Sermon on the Mount.
• Let’s go back to our question: Is the Bible so old that we don’t have the same book that was originally written?
• Some people today are suggesting that there are a bunch of books that weren’t added to the Bible and that they are being hidden from the average person.

Question: Is there another Bible that most people have never seen????

     C. Evidence #2: The way the Bible was compiled.

1. Jewish Scholars and Rabbis compiled the Old Testament as we know it today. There were two concerns that had to be met by each book: 1. It was inspired by God. Many books were written by people in Bible times that weren’t inspired by God. >the book of Maccabees. Written by the historic person, but wasn’t inspired. 2. It was authentic. i.e. they were actually written by the person named and it comes from the time the author was alive.

• It was common for someone to write a book and attribute it to a famous biblical character so that it would be read by others.

>Tobit and Judith are second century B.C. fictional novels. There is no figure from history associated with them and they are definitely not inspired. >Baruch-supposedly the scribe of the prophet Jeremiah. It was written around the year 100 A.D. but is trying to represent itself as being written in 582 B.C. >Gospel of Thomas was written about 100 years after his death. And we know that it was written by a heretical second century cult and was universally denounced in the second century as a forgery. 2. The Old Testament has remained the same books since about 250 BC when it was translated into Greek. By then, it was mostly agreed on what was authentic and inspired. Jesus and the apostles heavily quote from almost all of the Old Testament. Question: How do we know if the Old Testament that we have today is the same that was originally written?

   C. Evidence #3: The process that the Jews used to copy the books of the Bible.
   1. Because the Jews believe (as do we) that each word in the Bible was inspired by God, so they developed elaborate and meticulous RULES for transcribing. In fact, they had 17 rules!

For example: 1. Number of words per page. They decreed that when a person was making a new text, he had to copy the original page with such exactness that the number of words on a page could not be changed. If the original page had 288 words, then the page being copied had to have the same 288 words. 2. Number of words per line. Each line on a new page had to be the exact same as the line on the old page. If the first line on the original page had nine words, the first line on the copy page had to have nine words. 3. Letters per page were counted. After a page was copied, the number of letters on that page was counted and compared with the original. 4. Letter for letter copy. The scribes were not allowed to copy sentence for sentence or even word for word. They had to copy letter for letter. 5. Three people checked each page. After a page was copied and checked by another, still a third person would check to see what the middle word was on the page. Then, when the whole book was finished, another would count the phrases. 6. Compared number of letters per book. When they were through copying a book like Isaiah, they would total up the number of letters. Then they would find the middle letter of the book. If it was not the same, they made a new copy.

  D. Evidence #4: The Qumran Scrolls. Our oldest copy of the book of Isaiah comes from about 900 A.D. In 1947, the Qumran scrolls were found and among them an intact book of Isaiah from the second century B.C. There were 1,100 years between the two manuscripts. When the scholars looked at it and examined it for differences, what was the difference between the two manuscripts?

Seventeen letters.

Question: What about the New Testament. How do we know if it has changed in the last 2,000 years.

• Let’s look at the evidence.

   E. Evidence #5: How the New Testament was compiled.

• The rule used for a book to be included in the New Testament was:

   1. Apostolic authorship or written under the direction of an apostle.
   2. Inspired by God.
   3. Authentic.

The New Testament books were in wide circulation from the very time they were written and read in all the churches.

• In the second and third century, false doctrines and cults (namely Gnosticism) were writing books and attributing them to apostles, so from that time on, we see a concerted effort by church leaders to say which gospels are inspired and authentic.

>Irenaeus, the disciple of Polycarp (the disciple of John), wrote in 180 which books were inspired and authentic because of the abundance of fictitious books being written by the Gnostics. >There are many second and third century forgeries. The Gospel of Thomas (found in 1945-with 12 other manuscripts. They are known now as the Nag Hammadi Gnostic texts)-used by many of the fiction books written today to discredit Jesus and Christianity. We know that it was written around 140 AD at least 80 years after the death of Thomas!

Question: How do we know that the New Testament that we have is the same one as the one that was written 2,000 years ago? 1. The Christians were as exact and detailed in their copying as the Jews because they believed that the Scriptures were inspired by God.

• Let’s ask a different question. Is it possible to determine the accuracy of any ancient text? Historians and scholars say yes!

   F. Evidence #6: The tests historians use.

• Historians have three major tests that they use to measure authenticity and reliability of ancient documents:

1. The number of manuscripts. 2. The amount of time that has passed between the time of writing and the earliest manuscript. 3. The amount of discrepancies between manuscripts. 1. The number of manuscripts. The more manuscripts there are means that they are more reliable. 2. The amount of time that has passed between the time of writing and the earliest manuscript. Let’s look at some examples: >Tacitus, the Roman historian, wrote his Annals of Imperial Rome in about A.D. 116. Only one manuscript of his work remains. It was copied about 850 A.D. –that’s 734 years after it was written. And no one doubts the authenticity of the manuscript.

• The closer our earliest manuscript is to the date it was actually written makes it more reliable.

> Josephus, a Jewish historian, wrote The Jewish War shortly after 70 A.D. There are nine manuscripts in Greek which date from 1000-1200 A.D. that’s 1000 years after he wrote it. >Caesar composed the Gallic Wars about 50 B.C. There are 10 manuscripts of it, the earliest copy we have is from around 900 A.D. 1,000 years after it was written. >Plato’s Tetralogies were written around 400 B.C. There are seven manuscripts, the earliest copy is from 900 AD-1,200 years later. >Sophocles lived from 496-406 BC. We have 193 different manuscripts of his works in the whole world. The earliest copy dates from 1000 AD-1,400 years later. >Aristotle lived from 384-322 B.C. We have 49 manuscripts of his works. The earliest dates from 1100- AD-1400 years later. How does the New Testament compare? 1. We have 24,633 copies of the New Testament manuscript. 2. We also have a fragment of the Gospel of John found only 25 years after it was written. 3. We have manuscripts with major portions of the New Testament from 175-250 AD.-100-150 years from it writing. 4. We have whole copies of the New Testament from about 325-50 AD (CodexVaticanus and Codex Sinaiticus), that’s between 250-300 years after it was written. 5. The early church fathers (97-180 AD) quoted the New Testament so much that if we were to lose all our manuscripts of the New Testament, we could reconstruct it all except for 11 verses just from the quotes of the early church fathers. Who are they?

   3. Let’s look at discrepancies between manuscripts. Misspellings, words different or missing when comparing different manuscripts of the same book. 

1. Compare the Annals of Tacitus, the great Roman historian. Of his sixteen books, only 10 survive in just one manuscript. Thus, we cannot compare it to see if those are actually his words or not. 2. Take Homer’s Illiad. There are 643 manuscripts; comparing each of them for variations we find that in the 15,600 lines that there are variations in 764 lines (5%). 3. Take the Hindu scriptures-250,000 lines of which there is textual corruption in 26,000 lines. 4. Compare this even to William Shakespeare, who wrote in the 1500’s. In each his thirty-seven plays, there are large, textual disputes! 5. Compare this to the New Testament. Because there are so many manuscripts, you would statistically have the greatest chance of variation in manuscripts. Yet comparing the 24, 633 manuscripts, there is variation in only 40 lines-just 400 words are different in all 24,633 manuscripts!

• Scholars are unanimous that the Bible we have today is virtually word for word the Bible that was written thousands of years ago.

Myth #1: The Bible is so old-there’s no way we have the same Bible they did 2,000 years ago. Busted!!! III. Myth #2: The Bible is full of inaccuracies and errors.

   A. Evidence #1: Quotes from famous archaeologists.

• "Nowhere has archeological discovery refuted the Bible as history." John Elder,
• "Near Eastern archeology has demonstrated the historical and geographical reliability of the Bible in many important areas… It is now known, for instance, that, along with the Hittites, Hebrew scribes were the best historians in the entire ancient Near East, E. M. Blalklock, editor's preface, New International Dictionary of Biblical Archeology
• William F. Albright, one of the world's foremost archeologists, stated: "There can be no doubt that archeology has confirmed the substantial historicity of The Old Testament."
• Nelson Glueck, world renowned archeologist, concurs: "As a matter of fact, however, it maybe clearly stated categorically that no archeological discovery has ever controverted a single biblical reference. Scores of archeological findings have been made which confirm in clear outline or exact detail historical statements in the Bible."

   B. Evidence #2: Excavations from archaeology.

>Ebla: Discovered in 1975, Ebla was a prominent city during the time of Abraham. Archaeologists have uncovered 17,000 clay tablets from their royal library.

 In it we see:

-the place name Canaan was once considered incorrect by critics of the Bible, but Canaan was referenced in the Ebla text. -That Ebla had commerce with the cities of Sodom & Gomorrah before they were destroyed by God. Until this discovery, all critics of the Bible assumed those cities were “fictional.” In addition, the tablets refer to the five cities of the plains multiple times and they are listed in the same order as they are given in Genesis 14:2. Sodom, Gomorrah, Admah, Zeboiim, and Zoar. -Names such as Abraham, Saul, Israel, and David have been recognized in the tablets, which date to around 2300 BC. They also contain the oldest reference to Jerusalem. >Pool of Bethesda. It is a pool of water described in the book of John surrounded by five covered colonnades. The only problem: Until the 19th century, there was no evidence outside of John’s Gospel for the existence of this pool. Scholars argued that the gospel was written later, probably by someone without first-hand knowledge of the city of Jerusalem, and that the ‘pool’ had only a metaphorical meaning, rather than historical, significance. Then in the 19th century, archaeologists discovered the remains of a pool exactly matching the description in John’s Gospel, thus confirming the historical accuracy of John’s account. >Erastus, Treasurer of Corinth. In Romans 16:23 Erastus, who is the city’s director of public works, and our brother Quartus send you their greetings. Archaeologists have discovered in Corinth a block of marble in a paved square near the theater, with the Latin inscription “Erastus, commissioner of public works, laid this pavement at his own expense.”

• I could go on all day about the archaeological proof that shows that the Bible is accurate.

Myth #2: The Bible is full of inaccuracies and errors- Busted!

The Real Question: Why has God put so much effort into guarding the Bible over the centuries? Answer: Because in it God has recorded the most important words for our life-the key to eternal life. Deuteronomy 32:46-47 “Take to heart all the words I have solemnly declared to you this day, so that you may command your children to obey carefully all the words of this law. They are not just idle words for you—they are your life. John 6:68 Simon Peter answered him, “Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life.