Welcome to the MHB Podcast. This is Michael Baun. And welcome to my seventy second episode. Tonight I want to talk about the trustworthiness of the Bible. I’ve said before that the Bible is the most sophisticated text on the planet. I stand by that. I’ve said before that the Bible is designed to help you build a set of values that allow you to perceive your environment accurately. I stand by that. It’s like an operating system that prevents pathological breakdown. I’ve said before that the Bible is the inspired Word of God and that it is flawless in its purposes. I stand by that. So how can I make all of those claims? What makes the 66 books of the Bible any different than other books written by men and all of the other supposedly sacred texts? How can you trust the Bible?
I want to start this off by suggesting that most people who dismiss the Bible as untrustworthy have never read it. Most people who dismiss the Bible are actually dismissing Bible believers – and that’s a totally different thing. I’ll say it myself: you cannot trust Bible believers any more than you can trust the rest of fallen humanity. So if you’ve never read the Bible and you’re considering taking a look at it, the first thing you should do is forget everything you think you know about it. You need to forget everything you think you know about God that is based on your observance of or interaction with people who claim to be His followers. Human beings are not flawless, human beings are the opposite of flawless. Human beings are fickle, confused, selfish, and prone to malevolence – and that includes many people who purport to be followers of Christ. But here’s the key: you’re not called to trust in people, you’re called to trust in Jesus.
Okay, so we’ve set the Christians aside for a moment and now what we have is the Bible. Are you familiar with the telephone game? People pass along a story over and over again until when it reaches the end of the line it has changed so much as to be unrecognizable. How do we know the Bible is not just some book written and rewritten by men so long after the events that none of the accounts are reliable? Well the first thing we need to do is date the original manuscripts. But that’s not enough. We need to date the original manuscripts and we also need to track their movements through history to show an unbroken line back to the originals.
So let’s consider the four gospels: Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. These documents claim to be eyewitness accounts of Jesus’ life, ministry, and resurrection. But eyewitness accounts are worthless if they’re written long after the event. Eyewitness accounts need to be documented in the same generation as when Christ Himself walked the earth. By looking at the book of Acts, which was written by Luke, we can determine that his gospel must have been written around 50 A.D. His gospel was written before Acts and Acts does not include major events like the deaths of James, Peter, and Paul. It also fails to mention the siege of Jerusalem in 67 A.D., along with the destruction of the temple by Roman General Titus in 70 A.D. The reason these events are not recorded in the book of Acts is because they had not yet happened when Luke wrote it. Which means the book of Acts must have been written in 57 A.D. Since Paul quotes Luke in his own writings composed in 53 A.D., Luke’s gospel must have preceded them – making its date approximately 50 A.D.
You can perform this historical investigation on the the other three gospels and track their dates back to the same generation as well. Some scholars believe Mark was written as early as 45 A.D.
So we know that the accounts in the New Testament are composed in the same generation that the events took place. We can also show that they were written by people who were at the correct location. In the New Testament you will find use of pronouns specific to the region; archaeologically verified descriptions of locations; as well as reports of political hierarchies which are corroborated by external contemporary records such as the Romano-Jewish historian Josephus. None of this information would be possible if our New Testament authors were not on the ground to report it.
So we have evidence to suggest that the accounts were written at the correct time and in the correct place. How do we know the accounts haven’t been changed across time? We need to establish unbroken lines from the original authors to the earliest archived manuscripts – which would be the Codex Sinaiticus and the Codex Vaticanus. It turns out we have the writings of enough individuals to make these lines for Peter, Mark, John, and Paul. I’m going to read you the names of the men who carried the accounts from the time of Jesus to the time of the Codex. Forgive me if I mispronounce some of these.
For Mark and Peter: Avilius, Anianus, Kedron, Primus, Justus, Pantaenus, Clement, Origen, Pamphilus, Eusebius. And from Eusebius to the Codex.
For John: Ignatius, Polycarp, Irenaeus, Hippolytus. And from Hippolytus to the Codex.
For Paul: Linus, Clement, Evaristus, Alexander, Sixtus, Telesphorus, Hyginus, Irenaeus, Justin Martyr, Tatian. And from Tatian to the Codex.
Okay, so you may have heard before that we can’t trust the Bible because we don’t even have a complete copy of the manuscripts until 300 years after the life of Jesus. This is what people are referring to when they say that. But what they are conveniently skipping over is that we do have the writings of all the people whom I just listed. Each of these carriers have multiple books and manuscripts that verify the integrity of the text all the back to the time of Christ.
But it gets even better than that. Between 1946 and 1956 a deposit of writings were discovered in the Qumran Caves near Ein Feshkha on the northern shore of the Dead Sea. These writings contained 225 copies of biblical books dating from 300 years before Christ to the 1st century A.D. These scrolls verified every book in the Old Testament apart from Esther and Nehemiah. Included among these writings was a complete copy of the book of Isaiah. When you pair the historical chain of custody of the New Testament to the Codex with the Dead Sea Scrolls, you have more evidence to prove the integrity of the Bible than any other ancient text on planet earth.
And then there’s this to think about: all of Jesus’ disciples abandoned him when He was arrested and crucified. All of them. They were terrified of being associated with Him because they couldn’t understand how He could be captured and killed if He is who He says He is. So, when the Romans and the Sanhedrin came for Him, all of Christ’s disciples fled. Now, compare that behavior to their behavior after seeing Jesus resurrected and in full form. All of them did a complete 180 degree turn. These men went from not even wanting to be seen with him for fear of being arrested to willingly walking into persecution and horrible deaths.
Paul’s case is particularly astounding here. Paul was a member of the Jewish elite. He was highly educated; he occupied a position of power; he was important in society; and he was given authority to chase down and persecute Christians. Then, on the road to Damascus, Paul encountered the risen Christ – and it changed him completely. He renounced his position as a member of the religious elite and he went on to write most of the New Testament. Paul was a man who had everything he could want – and he gave it all up as a consequence of one moment of exposure to God Incarnate. Paul was beaten, imprisoned, and hunted down for the rest of his life because of his commitment to tell the world what he saw that day on the road to Damascus.
Peter and Paul were martyred in Rome in 66 A.D. Paul was beheaded. Peter was crucified upside down. Andrew was crucified in what was known as the “land of the man-eaters.” Thomas was pierced through by the spears of four soldiers east of Syria. Philip converted the wife of a Roman proconsul in Asia Minor – which earned him plenty of torture followed by an upside down crucifixion. Matthew was likely stabbed to death in Ethiopia. The historian Josephus records that James was stoned and then clubbed to death. Simon was likely killed in Persia after refusing to sacrifice to the sun god. Matthias, who replaced Judas, went to Syria where he was burned alive.
There was nothing to gain by preaching Christ in this ancient world. All of these men lived in poverty and survived on the gifts of others. They were relentlessly persecuted. Ask yourself what they must have witnessed to change them from deserting Jesus to spending the rest of their lives trying to tell the world what they saw. And then when they were captured and threatened with cruelty and death, they refused to change their story. What did these men see?
So we know that the manuscripts of the New Testament can be traced back to the time of Jesus. We can follow this line of history from the events of the Bible to the Codex Vaticanus and the Codex Sinaiticus. That gives us evidence of the integrity of Scripture from the third century all the way back to the time of Christ. We can also see from the persecution and deaths of Christ’s followers that there was no earthly reason why they would be going around telling people what they saw. So we’ve ruled out any possibility of the telephone game effect as well as any possibility of collusion or deception.
Now, let’s consider the fact that the Bible is loaded with concrete, falsifiable details that have never been falsified. No writings have ever been scrutinized more than the Bible. People have been reading it with a critical eye for 2,000 years. And yet, the Bible has proven accurate in all of its specific claims regarding locations, structures, political hierarchies, and all the rest. People have literally been trying to excavate evidence out of the ground to disprove the Bible for the majority of human history. And no prize is more sought after than the body of Jesus Christ Himself. You see, if Jesus was just a huckster, He would have told everyone that He was going to be resurrected spiritually after His death. Because how can you disprove such a thing? But that’s not what He said. He said He was going to be resurrected bodily. He gave the world a grand opportunity to falsify the entire Christian religion if only they could find His body. By making this claim, Christ sealed the entire corpus of Scripture and made it the only worldview that is entirely falsifiable. All they would have to do was recover His body.
Additionally, there are more surviving manuscripts of the New Testament than any other ancient writing we have. And the margin of difference is massive. Livy has 27; Tacitus (the Roman historian) has 3; Suetonius has 200; Thucydides has 20; Herodotus has 75; Caesar has 10; and Plato has 7. Guess how many manuscripts the New Testament has: 24,633. The second closest to that number of manuscripts is Homer’s Iliad, which has 643. That’s a difference of 24,000. And consider this: the earliest manuscripts of Pliny the Younger, Caesar, and Plato’s Tetralogies are about 1,000 years after these men lived. The first biography we have of Alexander the Great is 400 years after his life. The New Testament is just 50 years after Christ was born. So you can dispense with Scripture as unreliable, but if you do that, you have to dispense with most of what we know about ancient history as well.
So we know that the Scriptures are in fact reliable. We have evidence that nullifies the idea that the Bible was written by men who lived long after the events – there was no telephone game effect. We know that the integrity of the New Testament is stronger than nearly every document we have from ancient history. There’s not a credible historian on the planet who would tell you that Jesus Christ did not exist. And Jesus Christ separated Christianity from every other worldview and religion by claiming to be resurrected bodily from the dead. This made the entire thing falsifiable. But His body was never found.
Now I want to tell you something even more impressive. Do you remember when I said that a fully intact copy of the book of Isaiah was found in the Qumran Caves by the Dead Sea? This copy dates back to 300 B.C. In August of 2018 archaeologists found the seals of Isaiah and king Hezekiah at the foot of the Temple Mount in Jerusalem as part of the Ophel excavations. We know that these two men lived 700 years before Christ was born. So we know that the words of the prophet Isaiah date back to 700 B.C. I want you to listen to these words written 700 years before Jesus was born. This is Isaiah 52:13-15 and 53:1-12:
13 Behold, my servant shall act wisely;[b]
he shall be high and lifted up,
and shall be exalted.
14 As many were astonished at you—
his appearance was so marred, beyond human semblance,
and his form beyond that of the children of mankind—
15 so shall he sprinkle[c] many nations.
Kings shall shut their mouths because of him,
for that which has not been told them they see,
and that which they have not heard they understand.
53 Who has believed what he has heard from us?[d]
And to whom has the arm of the Lord been revealed?
2 For he grew up before him like a young plant,
and like a root out of dry ground;
he had no form or majesty that we should look at him,
and no beauty that we should desire him.
3 He was despised and rejected[e] by men,
a man of sorrows[f] and acquainted with[g] grief;[h]
and as one from whom men hide their faces[i]
he was despised, and we esteemed him not.
4 Surely he has borne our griefs
and carried our sorrows;
yet we esteemed him stricken,
smitten by God, and afflicted.
5 But he was pierced for our transgressions;
he was crushed for our iniquities;
upon him was the chastisement that brought us peace,
and with his wounds we are healed.
6 All we like sheep have gone astray;
we have turned—every one—to his own way;
and the Lord has laid on him
the iniquity of us all.
7 He was oppressed, and he was afflicted,
yet he opened not his mouth;
like a lamb that is led to the slaughter,
and like a sheep that before its shearers is silent,
so he opened not his mouth.
8 By oppression and judgment he was taken away;
and as for his generation, who considered
that he was cut off out of the land of the living,
stricken for the transgression of my people?
9 And they made his grave with the wicked
and with a rich man in his death,
although he had done no violence,
and there was no deceit in his mouth.
10 Yet it was the will of the Lord to crush him;
he has put him to grief;[j]
when his soul makes[k] an offering for guilt,
he shall see his offspring; he shall prolong his days;
the will of the Lord shall prosper in his hand.
11 Out of the anguish of his soul he shall see[l] and be satisfied;
by his knowledge shall the righteous one, my servant,
make many to be accounted righteous,
and he shall bear their iniquities.
12 Therefore I will divide him a portion with the many,[m]
and he shall divide the spoil with the strong,[n]
because he poured out his soul to death
and was numbered with the transgressors;
yet he bore the sin of many,
and makes intercession for the transgressors.
Who does that sound like to you? Who is being described in those verses? How could a man write such things without being inspired by God Himself? There has only been one Being in all of history who fits those verses – and the Old Testament is full of passages like this one that point straight to Jesus Christ. Long before he ever walked the earth. There are passages so clear in their prophecies that critics have to think of some way that the text was written or altered after the events. Did aliens sneak into the caves and secretly alter the Scripture? Was there some sort of massive collusion effort among thousands of unrelated people that has never come to light? If you want to call the Bible unreliable, you have to make an argument that requires far more blind faith than to admit that it is reliable.
So why do people do that? Well, it turns out to be much easier to organize a cult if you work with what’s already there. Many people who attack the reliability of Scripture are trying to convince others that there is space to add their own Scripture to it. Basically, these cult leaders claim to be the only ones who have the true reading of how the events actually took place. And if you take a look at most cults and plagiarized monotheistic religions – you’ll see that all of them garner power for their adherents and bring punishment down on apostates. Not Christianity. Christianity emphasizes giving up your power in a sacrifice of humility and the protection of individual freedom. Don’t fall for the hucksters and for the ideas of men. Do the research yourself. If at the end of it you still think the Bible is untrustworthy, it’s simply because you don’t want to trust it. Or more to the point, you don’t want to trust the One whom it points to. The evidence won’t lead you to any other conclusion. Your relationship with God is between yourself and God. He loves you, and He assembled the Scriptures so that you might know Him and come to love Him and love your neighbor as well.
If you find this content valuable, feel free to share it and to use it in your own studies. If you’d like to support this podcast, you can do so at http://www.patreon.com/michaelhbaun. There is a link in the description. Your generosity goes a long way to promoting the growth of this enterprise and the cause of free speech. Thank you all for joining me this evening, and I will see you in the next episode.
The MHB Podcast 