From an outside perspective, Christians are claiming that this book should be held in higher regard than any other piece of literature in this world, and "you just need to have faith in it". A reasonable person will reject that notion, because it's unwise or even dangerous to base your entire philosophy of life on a collection of ideas based on blind faith.
Faith is important for an earth-bound human who has such a limited perspective of the rest of the universe, BUT it doesn't have to be "blind faith". God gives us enough evidence to see the Truth if we're sincere. He's actually spent a LOT of time and different methods to reach humans over the last few thousand years. But before we go there, I want to lay out:
- Why the Bible is not a bunch of fairy tales
- Why we can trust and depend on it
- What the Bible claims about itself (next post, because this one is already long!)
There are three areas that I can think of (I'm sure there are others) which we can draw on to prove that the Bible is the real deal:
- Fulfilled prophecies
- The number of surviving manuscripts compared to other literature, and supernatural accuracy of these manuscripts
- Geological/archeological evidence
People who don't believe in the Bible claim that the prophecies in the Bible were written in hindsight, after the fact, and not actually accurately predicting the future. Well, none of us were around to be eyewitnesses over 2,000 years ago. But we can verify that the earliest manuscripts of the New Testament date to less than 100 years after they were written, and in the last 2,000 years a LOT of Bible prophecies have come true with amazing accuracy. In fact, some prophecies are coming true right now, during our time.
Bible scholars say that there are around 2,500 prophecies in the Bible, and so far in the history of the world, over 2,000 of them have been fulfilled, and again, with incredible accuracy. When Jesus was born, the Jews had the Old Testament as their Bible, and He fulfilled around 300 messianic prophecies during His birth, life, death, resurrection, and ascension!
I use the words "around" or "approximately" because different scholars claim different numbers, but 280 or 320 prophecies being fulfilled hundreds of years after the prediction both have astronomically thin odds, let alone 2,000 fulfilled prophecies about events in the world. Maybe in a future post I can go into some of those fulfilled prophecies, because they are just fascinating!
The next area we could look at is surviving manuscripts. Why do we call them manuscripts? Because they're not the original paper that John wrote the book of Revelation on, they're copies. The same holds true for non-biblical/secular works of literature, and what we can put our hands on today are copies, not the original. But take a look at this table comparing the Greek New Testament with other literary works:
First of all, if you include manuscripts in other languages (not just Greek) then we're talking more like 24,000 copies. Where it gets really interesting is that when the 5,600 Greek manuscripts are compared, they are 99.5% accurate with each other. The 0.05% differences are related to spelling and sentence structure, and don't change the meaning. That level of accuracy in that many hand written copies (long before the printing press) is supernatural! I believe that God was guiding the preservation of these books which make up the Bible we have today.
Books included - While it's true that the Early Christian Church officialized the "Canon" (collection of books to be included in the Bible) in the 4th century AD, these were the same books that the earliest followers of Jesus held to. They had the same writings we have in our Bibles. Other writings like the Gospels of Judas and Thomas, and the Book of Enoch were not included because they were not in harmony with the rest, or were recognized as written long after their namesakes died. Again, I personally believe God guided this process so that the books He wanted to be included ended up in the Bible. We can doubt that, but God's power and wisdom is far beyond ours.
Eyewitnesses? - For historians, the the closer the writer is to the event, the more reliable they are. Someone writing hundreds of years after an event wouldn't be considered as reliable as someone who lived during the time the same event happened. So it's worth considering that Matthew, John, Peter, Paul, James, and Jude were with Jesus and have written first hand accounts, while John Mark and Luke heard what they wrote from first hand witnesses.
Moses wrote the first five books of the Bible, and he obviously lived after Noah's global flood, so he wasn't a first hand witness to the events in Genesis, and wrote from oral tradition passed down to him through generations and from divine inspiration. But the Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, most of Deuteronomy could be considered first hand accounts because Moses lived through these events. Historical books like 1 & 2 Kings and 1 & 2 Chronicles can be corroborated with historical writings or archeological finds from other civilizations, but there is dispute about exactly how long after the events they were written.
Another thing to consider is that Jesus had more than 12 disciples. Paul wrote in 1 Corinthians 15:6 that 500 of Jesus' followers saw Him alive during the forty days after His crucifixion before He ascended to Heaven. Jesus' disciples who wrote New Testament books, like those listed above, saw these things with their own eyes:
- Traveled with Jesus for over three years
- Saw all of His teaching and miracles
- Saw Him crucified, and then alive just days later
- Saw Him ascend into the clouds
- Felt the power of the Holy Spirit at Pentacost
- Experienced the ability to speak in languages they didn’t know, & perform miracles with God’s power
Believability - There's another element when we consider the believability of historical events in the Bible. If an earthly king is commissioning the history of his kingdom and his deeds to be recorded, it's done in such a way to show himself and his kingdom in the best possible light. Lots of embellished heroic acts, but none of the failures.
As an example: Archeologists have discovered the Sennacherib Cylinder on which the Assyrian king had inscribed an account about taking nearly all the cities in Judah, and it names Hezekiah, the king of Judah in the Bible account. However, the night that 185,000 Assyrian warriors died and the king went home without capturing Jerusalem (2 Kings 19) is absent in the Assyrian account. But it's interesting that the Assyrian account mentions the capture of other cities in Judah, and that the Assyrians surrounded Jerusalem. End of story. Sennacherib almost captured the capital city of the country he invaded, and then what? Nothing?
In contrast, the Bible shows the flaws, mistakes, backsliding, and even wickedness of God's chosen people over and over, which goes in the opposite direction. It doesn't try to gloss over all the unfavorable details or mistakes of people God worked with, because God can even work with imperfect, stumbling humans. This makes the Bible more convincing to scholars because fiction or even history (from a worldly perspective) just isn't done like that.
"For Jews request a sign, and Greeks seek after wisdom; but we preach Christ crucified, to the Jews a stumbling block and to the Greeks foolishness, but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God." 1 Corinthians 1:22-24
Paul hit the nail on the head. If you're trying to convince everyone that your god is the King of Kings, a crucified Messiah is a really odd way to do that! Jesus won (conquered sin and death) by losing (being captured, tortured, ridiculed, and crucified), and that's just not how the world does things.
Like the Sennacherib Cylinder I just mentioned, there are many documents outside the Bible which agree on the historical events. These are included in these two areas which confirm the Bible:
- Archeological evidence (cultural finds)
- Geological evidence (observable evidence that this world was not always like it is now)
The site believed to be where the ancient city of Sodom was located still has sulfur balls all over the place, which are really hard to explain given the geology of the region. You can still set them on fire and they burn with an intensely hot blue flame. I've seen people doing this get instantly burned by unwisely getting too close.
I frequently see evidence that the world was covered by water at one point and suffered a drastic, global, apocalyptic event. There's so many features in the landscape here in the United States that look like a massive amount of water washed through at some point, and I'm not talking regional flash floods. I'm talking about wash lines that cross large portions of arid desert states when viewed from 35,000 feet in an airliner. Why is it that we find sea creature fossils on high mountains? Why do many civilizations around the world have a flood story in their "mythology"?
Just last summer I visited Coos Bay, Oregon on a family trip, and I was surprised to find lava beds along the coast. No volcanoes around for many miles. And the lava must have hardened very quickly because there were large chunks of rocks and petrified tree trunks half submerged in the lava, like they dropped in from above as the lava quickly cooled and hardened. Here's a photo I took:
"on that day all the fountains of the great deep were broken up, and the windows of heaven were opened. And the rain was on the earth forty days and forty nights." Genesis 7:11-12
"The fountains of the deep and the windows of heaven were also stopped, and the rain from heaven was restrained." Genesis 8:2
There used to be vast water reserves inside the earth, and they exploded as water blew up to the surface. At the same time, the protective vapor barrier in the atmosphere dropped as torrential rain onto the earth. We have polar ice caps and harsh environments now because of the damage this cataclysmic event caused to the planet.
I've heard people ask, "If the flood covered the whole world, where did all the water go?" Did you know that 71% (nearly three quarters) of our planet is covered by water? That's why it's called the Blue Planet, but it used to be the Green Planet. After the flood, a lot of the water receded back to the ocean depths - depths that used to be covered by land.
Take a look at a topographical map of the west coasts of North and South America. The Andes mountain range was created during the eruptions in what is now the Pacific Ocean, and the Amazon River basin was carved by flood water runoff into the Atlantic Ocean, where other massive eruptions happened. Why the God who created this world would do this with His creation is a subject we'll get into in future posts, and it's not what most people think.
The evidence is everywhere if you want to see it, but as many do, you can choose to ignore it, write it off, and disbelieve. I usually only quote the Bible, but a 16th century Japanese sword master said it very well:
"Truth is not what you want it to be; it is what it is. And you must bend to its power or live a lie." Miyamoto Musashi
Musashi was probably a Shinto/Buddhist adherent, but he was right about that. We don't get to choose whatever we want the truth to be, and it's objective, not subjective. What we can choose is whether to believe and follow the truth when we see it.
Think about this: If I decide that I believe I can fly, and I step off a cliff, and I somehow survive to try that a thousand times, every single time I'm going straight down - no exceptions. What I think or feel or believe doesn't change gravity. God created that natural law to keep us from floating out into space, but He gave us the freedom to decide whether we jump off the cliff or not. If I jump and don't survive, is it God's fault for creating gravity, or my fault for doing something insane?
Whatever happened in the past actually happened whether we believe it or not. But since we weren't there 4,000-plus years ago to observe it directly, we need faith. God gives more than enough evidence for belief, but there are things we can't see or understand yet. It won't always be this way, and Jesus' soon coming will change everything.
In the next post we'll look at what the Bible says about the Bible.
No comments:
Post a Comment