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Session Notes

Reliability of the Bible

Apologetics – Sessions 4&5

General Revelation

• General Revelation = God’s revelation of Himself through creation and the conscience
• God has revealed His existence and aspects of His nature to all people by means of His creation.
  • Psalm 19:1
  • Romans 1:18-32
  • Romans 2:15 –
• General Revelation is sufficient to condemn, but cannot save.
• Logic is an aspect of General Revelation.

Special Revelation

• God’s revelation of Himself by His word, or His mighty deeds to specific people, in specific places, at specific times.
• Types of Special Revelation

• • All scripture is special revelation, but not all special revelation is scripture.
  • What does special revelation reveal?
    • Name and identity of God
    • Love of God and what that means
    • The Triune nature of God
    • Plan of Salvation through Christ

What is the relationship between Apologetics and Scripture?

• Defense of the Christian faith requires defense of Scripture.
• Christian Apologetics may include more than defense of Scripture, but it cannot include

Historical Reliability of the Bible

The most common “hard” question to answer is typically as follows: How can you believe that the Bible is completely true when it is so old and was transmitted like a giant game of telephone?

This question is actually comprised of a series of mini-questions, each of which we ought to address. Here are the various topics being covered in this question:

1. How does the age of a document affect its validity?
2. How is an ancient document validated and how does the Bible fare in comparison to other texts of antiquity?
3. Does the transmission of documents affect the document’s validity and if so, how?

There are also other topics that are helpful to address when considering an apologetic of the Reliability of the Bible:

4. What do we know about the validity of the Old Testament?
5. How did we get the books of the New Testament? (Canonization)
6. How does Scripture validate its own claim of divine authorship?
   1. Prophecy Fulfillment
   2. 2 Peter 1:16-21, 2 Timothy 3:15-17, Hebrews 4:12-13

1. How does the age of a document affect its validity?

• A common presupposition that we must expose is that the age of a document does not affect its validity.
   

2. How is an ancient document validated and how does the Bible fare in comparison to other texts of antiquity? 

• If the Bible is not valid then the rest of our works of antiquity are not valid either.
  • The way works of antiquity are validated is by three categories:
    • Time Gap between the events and when they were written,
    • the number of manuscripts,
    • and the agreement between the manuscripts.
  • Time Gap
    • The Bible has the closest time gap between the events and when the manuscripts were written (in the case of the Gospels it is around 20-70 years). The NT was written within the 1^st generation while the eyewitnesses were still alive.  The next closest is Homer’s Iliad which has a gap of 500 years.
  • Number of Manuscripts
    • The Bible has more manuscripts than any other work of antiquity, with 24,000 manuscripts (not full texts) in many different languages (Greek, Latin, Sahidic, and Coptic).
  • Agreement between the Manuscripts
    • The Bible also has the highest text to text agreement with 99.5% agreement.

Reliability of the NT text.

• Here’s the worst case scenario: If we take all of the handwritten NT texts before the invention of the printing press (~ 1600 yrs of texts) we have ~ 400,000 variants (text to text differences).
  • There are 138,162 words in the NT so that would mean we would have nearly 3 variants per word. So we would have 2 other options for every word…how can we trust the NT?
  • Well, 99% of all variants do not impact the meaning of the text. They are common spelling errors or differences in word order. 
  • Remaining 1% of 400,000 variants = 4,000 meaningful variants out of 138,162 words.
    • Only half of these are viable (feesable) because many are scribal errors.
      • What I mean is, the not viable ones are often the author copying the text in a hurry to get it back to their city. Often the scribal error is a mistaken ending similar to the English “ing’, “es”, or “ed” in the wrong place or tense.
    • There are only 1500 - 2000 meaningful variants.
      • The more manuscripts you have the more variants you have. If we only had 10 manuscripts and have this many variants that would be more of a problem.
        • We have ~5780 manuscripts which at an average of 200 pages each = 1.3 million pages of hand written text. This means we have about 0.0013 meaningful variants per page.

END SESSION 4

3. Does the transmission of documents affect the document’s validity and if so, how?

• The “telephone game”
  • All Bibles are originally translated from the Greek and Hebrew texts.
    • “We have plenty of different “versions” (CSB, ESV, NASB, KJV, etc.) but each of those versions are seeking to be a faithful translation of the Greek and Hebrew manuscripts into English, utilizing either a word-by-word or phrase-by-phrase methodology for translation. The Bible did not transmit like this. We have access to the manuscripts and they can be read.
  • The initial NT wasn’t all compiled into 1 work. The gospels were written mostly for local distribution and the epistles were letters sent to a location.  Then the copies of these were made and sent elsewhere.
    • Because the Bible didn’t follow one single stream, if you wanted to change it, you would have had to round up every single manuscript and change them. This is impossible and even if it were possible, all we would need to do is discover one manuscript that is older than all of the changed ones and it would be obvious that changes were made. As older manuscripts have been found they have only said the same thing as the rest.

4. What do we know about the validity of the Old Testament?

Read excerpt from “How We Got the Bible” by Dr. Timothy Paul Jones (p.39-40

Dead Sea Scrolls video – “Why are the Dead Sea Scrolls So Important?” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xUwLDzs91CI

5. How did we get the books of the New Testament? (Canonization)

Canonization

• By 100 AD all 27 books of the NT were in circulation and all but Hebrews, Peter, James, 2 & 3 John, and Revelation were universally accepted.
• 170-175 AD Tatian created a harmony of the 4 Gospels known as Diatessaron.
• 170-200 AD the Muratorian Canon is written. It is the oldest known orthodox list of the NT and it contains 23 of the 27 NT books omitting Hebrews, 1&2 Peter, and 3 John.
• 325 AD Council of Nicea.
• 363 AD Council of Laodicea stated that only the OT and the 27 books of the NT were to be read and used in churches as canon.
• 367 AD Athanasius of Alexandria declares the list of authoritative books as the OT and the 27 books of the NT.
• 393 AD Synod of Hippo and 397 Council of Carthage ruled on the list of “inspired writings” affirming the 27 books of the NT as canon.
• Councils used the following to determine if a NT book was inspired by the Holy Spirit.
  1. The author had to be an original apostle or have a direct connection to an apostle (such as Luke or Mark). Eyewitness testimony was important.

Eyewitnesses

The NT was written by eyewitnesses or associates of the eyewitnesses in the 1^st generation after the events while the eyewitnesses were still alive and could be consulted or could correct if the account was not accurate. 

• Luke 1:1-4
• John 1:14
• 1 John 1:1-3
• 1 Corinthians 15:1-8

Canonization continued (repeat #1)

1. The author had to be an original apostle or have a direct connection to an apostle. Eyewitness testimony was important.
   2. The book had to be accepted by the body of Christ at large.
   3. The book had to contain consistency of doctrine and orthodox teaching.
   4. The book had to bear evidence of high moral and scriptural values that would reflect a work of the Holy Spirit.
       
2. How does Scripture validate its own claim of Divine Authorship?

Prophecy Fulfillment

The Bible is full or prophecy and the fulfillment of prophecy.  This shows that God wrote it (which we will touch on more next week) because only God knows the future.  The fact that these prophecies are given and then sometimes hundreds of years later are fulfilled exactly shows that the scriptures are solid and that they have Divine Authorship

• Prophecy: Genesis 15:18-21
• Fulfillment: Joshua 21:43-45
• Prophecy: Daniel 5:24-31
• Fulfillment: Daniel 5:30
• Isaiah 53, Psalm 22 are prophecies foretelling the crucifixion of Jesus.
  • Isaiah 53: (v.3) He was despised and rejected by men. (v.4) he has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows. (v.10) it was the will of the Lord to crush him. (v.12) he bore the sins of many.
  • Psalm 22: (v.1) my God, my God, why have you forsaken me? [Matthew 27:46] (v.16) dogs encompass me a company of evildoers encircle me; they have pierced my hands and feet. (v.18) they divide my garments among them and for my clothing they cast lots. [John 19:23-24]
• Matthew 24:1-2, Mark 13:1-2, Luke 21:5-6: Destruction of the 2^nd Temple
  • This was fulfilled in 70 AD when Rome destroyed the temple.

Scriptural Testimony concerning Divine Authorship

• 2 Peter 1:16-21,
• 2 Timothy 3:15-17
• Hebrews 4:12-13

Conclusion

It is rational to believe that the Bible, both Old and New Testaments, are reliable documents of antiquity. We can be very confident that the message of the manuscripts we have for the Old and New Testament is a reliable copy of the original autographs and has been translated faithfully from the Greek and Hebrew texts into English and other languages.

Additionally, all that Scripture records accurately concerning fulfilled prophecies, especially concerning the person and work of Jesus Christ and His resurrection, and Scripture’s own appeal to Divine Authorship puts the individual at a fork in the road where they must either accept the strong plausibility that the Scripture is indeed the Word of God or reject the faithful and reliable argument presented, despite its accuracy.

Ultimately, however, we recognize that the reason the Bible is rejected and misinformation is spread about its reliability is due to the reality of the depraved nature of mankind that rejects the truth about God. This brings us full circle back to our discussion of General and Special Revelation. Though we believe that Romans 1 teaches that all humanity has a knowledge of God’s existence and limited knowledge of His character, that knowledge is only sufficient to condemn and cause the sinful heart to respond in rebellion.

Christians understand that for someone to believe that the Bible is indeed God’s very word occurs experientially when God gives us new life in Christ. Apart from the work of God Himself, we would not have faith.

Romans 10:17  

Luke 16:19-31

By Alex Berger