📖 Apologetics — Unit 5: The Reliability of Scripture

Text: 2 Timothy 3:16

Can We Trust the Book?

We turn now to the third trail, the reliability of the documents. The skeptic raises an objection that sounds devastating until you examine it. "Your Bible," he says, "has been copied and recopied for two thousand years, translated and retranslated, edited by monks and councils with agendas of their own. By now it is a game of telephone — whatever Jesus said at the start, you cannot possibly have it now." It is a fair-sounding charge, and many a believer has gone quiet before it. But it happens to be one of the easiest charges in all of apologetics to answer, because here the evidence is not a matter of philosophy at all. It is a matter of counting, and the counting is not close.

The Bibliographical Test

Historians have a standard test for any ancient writing, and it asks two questions. First, how many copies of the document survive? The more copies, the more we can compare them and catch any error that crept into one. Second, how small is the gap between the original and our earliest copy? The shorter the gap, the less time legend or corruption had to creep in. Apply that test to the famous writings of the ancient world. Caesar's Gallic Wars survives in only a handful of copies, and the earliest is about nine hundred years after Caesar wrote. Homer's Iliad does better, with a few hundred copies. No classical scholar doubts these works, and no one calls Caesar a legend. Now apply the very same test to the New Testament.

The Mountain of Manuscripts

Of the New Testament we possess more than five thousand eight hundred manuscripts in the original Greek, and many thousands more in other ancient languages. No other writing of antiquity comes within a thousand miles of that number. And the gap is not nine hundred years; we have fragments within a generation or two of the events, and complete books within a couple of centuries. Indeed, the evidence is so abundant that even if every Greek manuscript were somehow lost, the entire New Testament could be very nearly reconstructed from the thousands of quotations the early church writers scattered through their letters and sermons. Stand the two side by side. For Caesar, a handful of copies and a thousand-year gap, and the world believes it without a murmur. For the New Testament, a mountain of copies and a gap so short the eyewitnesses' own children could have read it, and the world calls it doubtful. The honest conclusion is plain: if we throw out the New Testament as unreliable, we must throw out every other book of ancient history along with it, and burn the libraries down. The New Testament is not the weakest-attested book of antiquity; it is by far the strongest.

The Telephone Game Answered

"But copying breeds error," says the skeptic, "and error breeds more error." Here he misunderstands what happened. The transmission of Scripture was not one man whispering to one man down a line of a hundred, where the message drifts and no one can check it. It was more like a thousand photocopies made from the original and scattered across the world, so that when a slip of the pen appears in one, the other nine hundred and ninety-nine expose it instantly. With so many manuscripts to compare, the scholars can reconstruct the original text with extraordinary confidence. And what of the differences among the copies? The vast bulk of them are matters of spelling and word order, the kind of thing that never changes the sense. Not one teaching of the Christian faith hangs in doubt because of a copyist's variant. The wonder is not that the manuscripts differ here and there; the wonder is how astonishingly they agree.

Ramsay in the Dirt

Let me tell you about a man who set out to bury the Bible and ended by trusting it. Sir William Ramsay was a brilliant archaeologist trained in the German critical school, which taught with great confidence that the book of Acts was a fiction written long after the events by someone who knew nothing of the first century. Ramsay believed it, and he sailed to Asia Minor with his spade and his maps to prove it — to show that Luke's geography was wrong, his customs invented, his political titles impossible. But the dirt would not cooperate with his theory. Everywhere he dug, Luke turned out to be right. The borders were where Luke said. The local customs matched. Even the strange, shifting political titles — the very places where a forger writing later would surely have blundered — were exactly correct for the exact decade Luke described. Ramsay, an honest man, followed the evidence against his own wishes, and he came at last to call Luke a historian of the first rank and to trust the book he had come to destroy. He learned what every honest skeptic learns: that truth is often found by getting down into the dirt.

Greenleaf in the Court

Now let me tell you about a lawyer. Simon Greenleaf was the Royall Professor of Law at Harvard and one of the great legal minds America has produced; he wrote the standard work of his age on how testimony is to be weighed in a court of law. A skeptic challenged him to apply his own rules of evidence to the four Gospels — to put the evangelists in the witness box and cross-examine them as he would any witness. Greenleaf took up the challenge expecting, perhaps, to expose them. He examined their consistency, their character, the circumstances under which they testified, and whether they had anything to gain by lying. And the master of evidence reached a verdict that surprised him: that if the testimony of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John were presented in any honest court of law, a jury would be compelled by the rules of evidence to accept it as true. Faith, he concluded, is not the abandonment of reason. It is the verdict a fair-minded judge returns when he has weighed the witnesses.

The Ring of Truth

There is one more mark of honesty in these documents, and once you see it you cannot unsee it. Forgers flatter themselves and their heroes; honest witnesses tell the truth even when it costs them. Now look at the Gospels. The disciples — the very men who wrote or stood behind these books — come off looking slow, cowardly, and quarrelsome. Peter denies his Lord with curses. They all run away at the cross. And who does the risen Christ appear to first? Not to the apostles, not to the men, but to women — whose testimony, in that culture, was not even accepted in a court. No inventor building a religion to impress the ancient world would have written the story that way. They wrote it that way for one reason: because that is how it happened. The very details that embarrass the writers are the fingerprints of the truth.

The Church Did Not Make the Book

A word about how we got the canon, the list of books we call Scripture. It is sometimes said that the church created the Bible, voting books in and out as it pleased. That is backward. The church did not create the canon; it recognized it. God gave His Word, and the church, over time, received what bore the marks of God's own breathing and set aside what did not. As Paul says, "All Scripture is given by inspiration of God" — literally, God-breathed — and Peter adds that holy men of old "spoke as they were moved by the Holy Spirit." The Word is divine in its origin and human in its writing, the same God-and-man pattern we find in the incarnation itself: God's truth carried perfectly through the pens of men.

The Book That Outlasts Its Pallbearers

So the documents stand, and they stand on ground no other ancient book can claim. Men have buried this book a hundred times — burned it, banned it, mocked it, pronounced it dead and dancing on its grave — and every time, the grave would not hold it. "Heaven and earth will pass away," said the One it proclaims, "but My words will by no means pass away." Yet remember once more what reliability can and cannot do. To prove the documents trustworthy is to establish that the Witnesses are credible; it is to bring the jury to the brink of its verdict. But a credible witness still asks to be believed. The reliability of Scripture carries us to the door. Whether we will walk through it and trust the One to whom every page bears witness — that is the question still waiting on the other side.

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