Why Should I Believe the Bible Is True? (part 1)

It's a great question and one many have asked and answered for centuries.  The answer has far reaching implications.  If it's not true then Christianity is a lie and offers no hope in Jesus.  But if it's true it offers the hope of eternal life in Jesus.

One of the most often cited verses in the Bible is John 3:16 but the two verses after that are just as powerful: 

For God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him shall not perish, but have eternal life. ¹⁶

For God did not send the Son into the world to judge the world, but that the world might be saved through Him.¹⁷

He who believes in Him is not judged; he who does not believe has been judged already, because he has not believed in the name of the only begotten Son of God.¹⁸

(John 3:16-18, NASB)

Jesus was speaking to Nicodemus, who was a Jewish leader.  In many places in the New Testament (NT) Jesus makes it very clear that he is the only way to heaven.  If the NT is true then all claims contrary to that are false.  Any decisions we make about the Jesus's truth claims can have very real consequences.

That leads to two questions:

1. Has the Bible been reliably preserved from the originals?
2. Is the Bible true?

Let's look at the first question.  We don't have the originals from the authors so can we know what we have was what they wrote?  All significant ancient literature has to be reconstructed from manuscript copies not just the Bible.  The originals are reconstructed by comparing all surviving manuscripts and the closer in time the manuscripts were created in relation to the originals the better.  The number of manuscript copies is also significant because if you have more sources that agree the higher degree of certainty you can have that it reflects the original.  This is known as textual criticism.

There are about 5,700 manuscripts of the NT written in Greek.  There are over 9,000 manuscripts written in other languages for a total of over 15,000 manuscripts.  To compare this to other ancient writings Homer's the  Iliad has the second most manuscripts found at 643.  The writings of Demosthenes are 3rd most with 200 and almost all the rest of ancient writings have fewer than a dozen manuscript copies.

Once the manuscripts are compared then the original can be recreated.  There are variations amongst the manuscripts but almost all of these are spelling and grammar variants.  It's been calculated by scholars that we have over 98% of the original writings.  Not even 1 of the remaining 2% (actually just under 2%) in question affects the doctrine of the Christian faith.  So in other words the < 2% in question isn't anything that affects the  Biblical message and it's claims.  That <2% in question doesn't contradict the other 98%+ that's not in question.

So how close are the manuscripts time wise to the originals?  The earliest undisputed fragment of John's gospel is dated at about 130 AD and the original would have been written no later than 70 AD.   The earliest 9 disputed fragments are dated at 50-70 AD.  That's within 25 years of when the originals were written.  Again to compare to other ancient literature the closest manuscript copy of Iliad is 500 years after the original.  Demosthenes manuscripts were 1,400 years after the originals.  The NT manuscripts compared to other ancient literature are by far the closest to when the originals were written.  So the answer to the first question is yes.  I'll talk about the answer to the second question in a part 2 blog post.

There are many, many great resources on this subject.  Here are just a few:

Book: I Don't Have Enough Faith to Be an Atheist, by Norman L. Geisler and Frank Turek, chapter 9

Article: Is the New Testament Text Reliable, by Greg Koukl

Web: The Early Eyewitnesses of Jesus, posted on PleaseConvinceMe.Com