Is the Bible a myth? - Challenging our doubts - James Thackeray

We're actually starting a series today called Help My Unbelief.

We live in a kind of meme-filled, soundbite age where things can be dismissed

or raised very quickly, very easily. Everyone has a voice.

Everyone has an opinion.

And those can be very persuasive. They can lead, they'll leave no doubt.

And as Christians or those who go to church, it can be important to actually

have some answers to things.

So this new series called Help My Own Belief, we'll look at some common what

we call apologetics topics, which is kind of defenses for strongly held Christian beliefs.

Now maybe you're here today because you don't have a strongly held belief on this.

Maybe you come here, you're sceptical or you'd like to hear more or maybe hear

some answers to common questions.

That's my aim today to present the case for the Bible more rationally than just from the Bible itself.

Not that the Bible is not rational, but you can't justify something from that

thing. That's a circular argument.

Maybe you do believe, but you have struggles, you have doubts.

Well, hopefully today will equip you, will remove those doubts.

Maybe you believe fully, and hopefully this will give you encouragement and confidence to share.

Because whatever your view on the Bible, the Bible is a remarkable book.

We heard from Bashir in his testimony just how powerful reading the Bible can

be. I'll give you some statistics, five or somewhere between five and seven

billion copies have been sold.

The second most popular book is less than a billion. Harry Potter is a distant third at 500 million.

Sales of the Bible are actually on the rise in America, in the UK,

in lots of other European countries, including Sweden, which is really exciting.

The full Bible has been translated into 770 languages.

I started, I thought, can I name them? I got to like 20 and realized I definitely

can't name 700 plus languages.

There are parts of it written in over 4,000 languages.

The Bible was written by 40 authors, roughly, by priests, by kings,

by prophets, by fishermen, by doctors,

over thousands of years, with essentially one message.

People have died for the Bible. People have walked 40 kilometers barefoot to get a copy of the Bible.

It's a book that has inspired billions. It's changed the course of history.

Really dominates human history more than any other book.

Here at Grace, we believe this this verse from the Bible completely.

It says, all scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching,

rebuking, correcting, and training in righteousness, so the man of God may be

thoroughly equipped for every good work.

We believe that here. And one of the reasons we believe that is because it says so in the Bible.

But today I'm going to mainly focus on things outside the Bible. Why you believe that?

So just as a kind of maybe just so you're aware, this short series we're doing,

there'll be less kind of deep dive into the Bible and more things around it.

We will, of course, each week share what Scripture says.

So just as a quick prelude, as we heard Bashir talk about translating the Bible

into Somali, How have we got the Bible in our language?

How have I got this English Bible in our language?

Now, the original was written in some cases almost or more than 3,000 years ago.

It was written in an original language.

If it's the Old Testament, it was written in Hebrew or Aramaic.

If it was written in the New Testament, it was written in Greek.

Then copies would have been made. So those verses I made from Timothy,

People would have received that letter written by a man named Paul.

They would have made copies of it, distributed those copies around.

Later on in the second and third century, a lot of the Bible was translated into Greek.

Greek back then was a bit like English is now.

If you can speak English, you can communicate with more people than any other language.

Greek was that, certainly in the European sphere.

Greek was the language. Fourth century was translated into Latin.

And then over millennia or over a thousand years or so, it was preserved in Greek and in Latin.

So many people made many copies.

Then in the 15th century, it was mass printed.

So for the first time, a book was printed, lots of copies at once on a printing press.

Then in the 14th and 15th century, two men, one called Wycliffe,

one called Tyndale, translated it into English from the Greek and the Latin.

They were actually both killed for that. That was the cost for having the Bible

in English. People died. They would have it.

Then one of the more famous versions of the Bible came about in 1611,

the King James Version, King of England.

Got lots of people to base their work on the existing English translations,

and we had the King James Version.

Nowadays we have many different translations They all

use early manuscripts They use

modern linguistic methods More understanding of what the words mean But actually

they're not that different From the first well-known version in 1611 So there's

been a preservation that's very traceable From the very first writing that was written down Amen.

A lot of today's talk will be a little bit geeky like this, so I do apologize.

If geekiness is not for you, then I'll try and throw a few jokes in there to

keep it interesting. If it is for you, then you're going to love this.

I want to share today five reasons we can have confidence in the accuracy of the Bible.

Maybe Simon, if you could bring up that slide.

I have no animations, but I'll go through them.

So the first reason we can be confident in the Bible is the huge number of early manuscripts.

By early manuscripts, I mean either, I mean sort of early ancient,

not necessarily originals, but copies of originals.

So we're not talking about, sorry, we're not just talking about things that

are written down hundreds or thousands of years later. We talk about copies

that were done very near the time that they were written.

We have 6,000 ancient manuscripts.

We have 10,000 Latin copies and 9,000 in other languages.

So there are 25,000 actual pieces of manuscript with copies or fragments of the Bible on it.

If you think about that that's quite a significant thing there's

not just one really old version there's lots

and lots and lots and lots different and they

say the same thing because that's our second point there's a high degree of

what's called textual agreement of course if you if you had these 25 000 fragments

and they sort of said kind of similar things but there were lots of differences,

then you wouldn't know which ones are true.

You know, some of them said that Jesus was the son of God, and some said Jesus

was just a good teacher or a good man, and some said he didn't even exist, or we'd have no truth.

But these 25,000 early manuscripts say the same thing. On a word-by-word basis,

apparently they're 99.5% in agreement.

And the difference is just minor grammatical things. They're like a slight copying difference.

There aren't variations from that central truth.

And this used to be one of the real strengths of the Bible. And then in the

1940s and the 1950s, they found something called the Dead Sea Scrolls. People heard of these?

A few nods, a few hands. They basically found a whole load of manuscripts in

an area in two caves around the Dead Sea.

And some of these were 1,000 years older than previous copies that they had.

Now, this was a really exciting thing.

These copies from a thousand years later were virtually identical to the earlier ones.

The words written two and a half thousand years ago, the copies we found in

the Dead Sea Scrolls said the same thing as copies made a thousand years later.

Now, pause for a moment to think of the significance of that.

If you have got the same level of accuracy over a thousand years,

you can be fairly confident that those really old manuscripts in the Dead Sea Scrolls were accurate.

They haven't changed in a thousand years. So why would they have changed in

that first hundred years?

If anything, you'd expect to be more accurate the nearer the time that the copies were made.

So we have all of these manuscripts found, and it was a real treasure trope.

People read through them. They found full copies of Isaiah.

They looked and said, wait a minute. This is exactly, word for word,

identical to something a thousand years later.

That tells you people are really serious about the need for accuracy.

There's nothing like it. There's nothing like it in the world.

You might have seen trailers for a film coming out this summer, Homer's Odyssey.

Homer was an author from ancient times. And there are quite a few existing copies

of early copies of Homer's works.

But it's around 1700 or 1800, and it's kind of from one fixed period.

The Bible's got 25,000 manuscripts with very little variation.

And whenever new copies have been found, they say exactly the same thing. There's no drift.

There's no insertion of legends or tales.

So a high level of agreement in different manuscripts is thought of as being

a very compelling reason for the accuracy.

The third compelling reason is the short time gap between the original writings

and the earliest manuscripts.

So some of the earliest copies that we have, they're within 30 years of the original.

So they're within somebody's lifetime.

So there's much less chance of corruption of deviation of of legends or myths or fables.

Developing i'm just going to pause for a moment try and try and give you an

example i first i first ran an ultra 12 years ago now don't worry i'm not going

to give you an account of my ultra.

But if I did give you the account, I heard that, Steve. If I did give you the account.

You'd probably believe it. You'd probably think, well, he's not going to make it up.

It's an eyewitness account. It was me doing it.

And it was only 12 years ago. But you might think maybe I've forgotten some details.

Well, I once did a church event where I

did a bit of a talk about running and faith

and i gave an account of my ultra this was

about eight years ago and if

you really wanted you could probably find a recording of that i also would you

believe i talked about running a lot i did a blog at the time so i was trying

to raise money for charity and i was blogging about my training and straight

after the event i did a blog about my ultra.

Now, this is the thing. If I gave an account now and you looked at my interview

from eight years ago and you read my blog from the day after the race,

they would all say the same thing.

And if you looked at those and said, well, they all say the same thing,

you'd probably think, yeah, it's probably true there.

And if then I added to that that there were other people who did the race with

me and they also had an account, and if I could show you records saying,

yeah, I actually did that.

And there were people I talked to at the time that they knew I did that.

And there was nobody writing something saying, no, he didn't do that.

I saw him stop after 20 kilometers.

That would give you more confidence.

On a much, much bigger scale, this is what we have with the Bible.

We have lots and lots of different manuscripts all saying the same thing.

I'm not comparing me running ultras with the Bible All those things I said at

the start They apply to me,

But this is why we have such confidence You have this whole array of manuscripts,

of texts Saying the same thing But there's a little bit more,

The fourth thing we see is agreement from non-Christian sources and from archaeology.

We see things talked about in the Bible where there are other records from the

time that talk about these events happening.

I won't go into the list because there's a lot of information I'm already throwing

at you, but there's also been archaeological discoveries where there's something

talked about in the Bible.

They see no evidence of it because it's thousands of years ago,

and then they dig something up.

And it's exactly as referred to in the Bible.

And more compellingly even, nothing's been dug up that contradicts this.

So that's the fourth reason I think we can have confidence. And the fifth one

is the eyewitness proximity and how these were transmitted in the early days.

So a lot of these manuscripts we have were written in the first century.

They were written within the time that any eyewitnesses who could go,

wait a minute, I was there.

That definitely didn't happen. They were still alive.

If we had 25,000 manuscripts saying Jesus was the son of God,

Jesus came to earth, Jesus died on the cross, but we had another 25,000 from

the same time saying, no, he didn't.

I saw him get rescued. I saw him get, they sneaked him away. He was dead.

They killed the guards and stole the body.

If you had a load of contradictory things, it would be hard to have confidence.

But there are no manuscripts from the time written in the lifespan saying,

ah, no, I'm an eyewitness. That didn't happen.

A bit like my example with the Ultra.

If someone else had done a blog talking about how this bald guy with a beard

dropped out after 50K, you might doubt my story a little bit.

There are not reliable accounts from the time of Jesus that say anything different.

I think perhaps for me as a Christian, probably the single biggest affirmation

of the accuracy of the Bible is that at the heart of the Bible is this figure, Jesus Christ.

He's the most historically reliable character in the Bible.

There are four eyewitness accounts that all talk about him.

The letters written afterwards all refer back to him.

And if you read the Old Testament, knowing about Jesus, you see that the whole

of it points forward to him.

And Jesus himself affirms scripture.

Jesus himself quoted scripture, taught about the importance of it,

spoke of it without a shadow of doubt that it was true.

So for me, those are five plus one bonus reason why we should have every confidence

in the truth and the accuracy of the Bible.

But of course, there are objections, and it's very easy to stand up here and only say the case for.

So what are some of the objections that people have? against the Bible.

The first one, which kind of seems quite an important thing to address,

is the objection, well, yeah, but couldn't it all have just been made up?

Let's imagine that the early disciples, those who were with Jesus,

let's imagine that actually they had decided they wanted to start a breakaway religion from the Jews.

And Peter and John and then later Paul, they thought, yeah, we actually want

to start our own religion.

We want to be in charge. We can figure out what we're going to call it.

We're just going to make something up.

And the whole New Testament is made up by Peter and John and Paul.

Is that plausible?

Well, I think there's quite a few things against that view. Firstly, what is in it for them?

If you know the history of what happened to those guys, they were all martyred. They were all killed.

There's nothing in the Bible that suggests that they made anything.

From this. Paul had a really successful career as a very zealous Jew,

and afterwards he was persecuted. He was in prison.

So unless they made it up and then somehow it went very badly raw,

that's not very convincing.

There's a guy called Chuck Colser, who was one of the people involved in the

Watergate scandal in the 70s.

And he realized during that time,

Because there were a lot of people lied about what happened.

And he was right at the heart of it.

And he realized pretty quickly, it's very hard to keep a liar.

It's very hard. Let's say I never ran an ultra in my life.

It's very hard to keep talking about running as much as I do if it's not true.

It's very hard to keep the lie about Watergate going.

Everyone who wrote the books, particularly in the New Testament,

if it was a lie, they didn't just keep it up for a few weeks,

they kept it up for their entire life, during which they were persecuted and tortured.

Nobody dies for a lie. When it gets down to it,

When the rubber hits the road, when it's crunch time, do people die for a lie?

People might die for something they believe is true that is not true.

But these people were there.

They were there witnessing it.

And if it didn't happen, I don't think they would have said it happened through

their whole life while they were tortured.

I think the second objection could have been made up if you were going to make something up,

you'd probably make something more plausible you'd make something more easy

to believe then this person came to earth died on a cross,

and then rose again again if you wanted to invent a religion to make you the

leader you would just say Jesus died and as he died he said,

it's over to John, it's over to Peter.

This is not the best fabrication to convince people.

I think another thing, if it was all made up, I don't think we'd have so many

human elements in there.

If the New Testament was purely set out to create a splinter religion,

You probably wouldn't have Paul kind of rebuking Peter a little bit,

and you wouldn't have Peter saying, Paul's a bit complicated, isn't he?

I'm not sure you'd have John telling how he outran Peter.

Some say it's the earliest diss when John says, the other disciple got there

first, and that just happened to be him.

There wouldn't be these human elements in there.

I think the fourth thing if you're going to invent a gospel who's Mark?

Does anyone know who Mark is?

I mean, you can find out who Mark is, but he wasn't particularly well-known.

If you're going to make up a gospel, you'd call it the gospel of Peter,

or you'd call it the gospel of James, or the gospel of Jesus.

Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John were not. You've maybe got one of the big three

in there, but they're not the sort of famous ones.

Why would you make up a story and name it after somebody who's not so famous?

I actually think you almost need more faith to say the Bible's made up than

to believe it is true, because it's so illogical and implausible that it's all made up.

Second common objection people come up with is that it's full of contradictions,

both of itself and of science.

I think it's the first one.

Firstly, it's not full of contradictions. It's an unbelievably cohesive story.

It spans thousands of years, and yet it all fits.

The Old Testament looks forward to the New Testament.

The New Testament explains the Old Testament in the light of Jesus.

If it was made up, there's no way it would stand together as well as it does.

And yet you could, I'm sure you could Google, there'd be a lovely website saying

there are 10 contradictions in the Bible.

And most typically, these are either just a different account or often it's

a lack of understanding of the nuances.

There's an example at the end of Luke. Luke gives some very specific words that

Jesus says before he dies.

Matthew records slightly different words, but then says Jesus gave a shout and then he died.

People will highlight that as a contradiction but actually they've just reported

the events slightly differently,

Matthew's reported some slightly earlier words, sorry, Luke's reported some

slightly earlier words, but Matthew didn't.

But they're not saying, ah, he said that, he didn't say that.

If I asked four of you to give a summary of what I've said today,

you would highlight different things.

This is what the Gospels do. They highlight different things.

If I asked my wife, Fiona, to give an account of my first ever ultra,

she would definitely highlight different things than I would,

but that doesn't mean they're contradictions.

They're just different accounts.

And then just very quickly, often the contradictions to science,

it's exactly the same things that we use in everyday life. It's rather pedantic nitpicking.

The Bible is not a scientific textbook. People will seize on specific words.

I could do the same with us. If somebody says, oh, did you see the sunrise?

I could say, well, actually, the sun doesn't rise. The earth travels round the sun.

And actually, they're all traveling. That's not a contradiction with science.

And sometimes the Bible uses poetic terms, which we use today in everyday conversations,

but people go, aha, it's a contradiction.

I could stand here safely and say there are no contradictions in the Bible that

are not easily explained by common sense and understanding the context.

Gosh, I don't normally go on quite so long. I must be enjoying this.

My apologies. I'll hurry things up.

Another common objection to the Bible is people say the Bible condones violence.

It condones slavery. It condones oppression.

A couple of important points.

Just because somebody does something in the Bible, that doesn't mean it's automatically condemned.

We talk in the Bible about how certain people are good examples and great examples,

but that doesn't mean every single thing they do, especially when it's clearly condemned elsewhere.

The easiest example is King David. He committed adultery. He had his friend murdered.

Those things are clearly condemned in the Bible.

And in fact, those very acts themselves were condemned by a priest of Israel straight away.

Slavery is often brought up as an attempt to completely disregard the Bible.

I don't believe the Bible ever says slavery is a good thing.

I think the Bible gives guidelines and advice of how to behave correctly in

a culture that has slavery, which of course it was written in one that does or that did,

but the Bible doesn't say slavery is okay in fact one of the letters written

by Paul urges Philemon to release his slave from slavery.

Just because the Bible gives advice of how to live correctly in a certain culture,

doesn't mean it's condoning that culture.

Now don't get me wrong, the Bible has been twisted to justify many horrific

acts, but that's not the fault of the Bible, that's the fault of those who twist it,

those who misunderstand the broad arc of redemption, of liberty that is in the Bible.

I'm going to skip over one. Well, very quickly, sometimes people say the Bible

was written by King James I.

That's a little confusion because the first well-known Bible was called the New King James.

Hopefully those points we talked about at the start show it wasn't.

And if it was a made-up thing, he'd have had to somehow correct every other

manuscript ever written.

But one of the more popular objections to the Bible is people say,

they are, but there were lots. What about the other gospels?

What about all the other books?

And we'll try and imply that what we have now was kept for kind of political

reasons or for power reasons.

They'll say, what about all the other stuff?

Well, very quickly, there was a process called the canon of scripture.

So this started off basically a recognition of inspired texts.

So by the time of Jesus, the Old Testament as we have it now was pretty much

like everyone was in agreement. That was the Bible.

Then in the first sort of four centuries after Jesus, again,

it was widely accepted that the Gospels,

the letters from Paul and others, Acts and Revelation, everyone kind of accepted

that this was the New Testament. And there were a few reasons.

They all had a clear connection to jesus or

people who had seen jesus again in my silly example of ultras if if i wrote

it it's pretty compelling my friend rowan could probably relate it so i'm sure

i've shared every step of the way with him but if it was somebody who knew somebody

who knew somebody who knew somebody who knew somebody who knew me.

It's a bit less convincing. All the books in the New Testament had a connection

to Jesus or someone who had seen Jesus.

The second test was truthfulness. Did they say the same thing?

Did it align with what had been passed down?

The third thing was widespread usage. Were people everywhere going,

yes, this is the word of God?

And the fourth thing, was it rooted in Christ? Yes.

As we conclude then, I mean, so what?

Maybe this is academically interesting. Maybe you've drifted off. But so what?

What is the impact of it? Maybe you came here today and you thought one of those

five reasons I gave you, you thought that was really key.

And now you think, oh, actually, fair enough. I do believe that the Bible is true.

Hopefully you are in that position now but that's not enough that's not enough

fantastic if you do believe that the bible is true that's a great point to start

but it's not a good point to finish,

so i've mentioned this story this narrative that runs through the whole bible,

that is tied together from Old Testament to new.

I've spoken quite long enough, so I've got a video queued up that just shares

the gospel, shares the whole story of the Bible in four minutes.

So we're just going to listen to this and then I'll very shortly close.

That is what the Bible says, basically. The Bible says that we need Jesus.

It says we need to repent. We need to ask for forgiveness. We need to trust that Jesus can save.

That's why people have died that we can have the Bible.

That's why people have walked for a whole day to get a copy.

That's why people will change their life just from reading it for the first time.

It is only through Jesus we can be right with God.

We hope that this sermon has encouraged you. If you'd like to learn more about

us, visit us online at gracechurch.se.

Thanks for listening.