Can You Really Trust The Bible?

Welcome to the Awakening Church podcast.

We pray this message encourages you and provides the hope and light of Jesus Christ.

Thanks for tuning in.

It was 2003.

Newly married.

We're living in downtown Chicago.

I'm studying at Moody Bible Institute.

I'd go down to Starbucks just right across the street from Moody and study.

And one day while I was there, I got my Bible out and I got my computer out.

Um this older gentleman, uh, he's uh, what are you reading?

And I looked at it and I said, uh, well, I'm reading the Bible.

And I saw that he was reading, and we, you know, when you see regulars, like I knew him, but I didn't know him.

We noticed each other.

I'm like, what are you reading?

And he was reading uh the national bestseller just recently hit and it was going off like wildfire.

It was a book called The Da Vinci Code.

The Da Vinci Code, and he said, Yeah, I'm reading this book called The Da Vinci Code.

I'm like, oh, that's amazing.

He's like, Yeah, did you know that your Bible uh, you know, like really powerful men shaped it for political reasons?

It's like, oh, interesting.

Yeah.

Yeah, Jesus wasn't really divine and he didn't die.

Actually, uh, he was married to Mary Magdalene, and you know, there's actually uh other gospels that the powerful suppressed.

And I was like, oh wow, that's fascinating.

That's incredible.

Um it sparked a beautiful friendship.

Uh one, because I have a fast I love I love great books.

I said, Well, that seems like a great book.

Uh let me read it.

So I picked up a copy of the Da Vinci Code, devoured it.

It is a page turner, by the way, if you haven't read it.

And I said, Well, maybe we should talk more about all the things you're talking about, because that's a big deal.

If that's true, then I I can't base my life on this.

And we began a series of conversations, hour after hour, at that coffee shop, talking about is all the what the Da Vinci codes say real.

He knew it was a work of fiction, but at the same time, he's like, Dan Brown didn't just come up with that, he's drawing on something there.

The truth is the platform has changed in some ways today, but the questions still persist.

These things still come up.

It's professors in a class, it's podcasts, it's uh TikTok theologians that are saying all of these things that if I was didn't have the background that I have, the study that I have, it would have left me deeply unsettled.

And if I just read what he had read, I maybe would have come to the same conclusions.

Because the truth is, most of us, when we come across really difficult questions, especially about God or the Bible, we don't know that there are really good answers or even where to find those answers.

And I think one of the questions that we have to ask if we're gonna be, you know, intellectually credible, is this.

Rosaline Picard asked an MIT professor, AI expert, she said, is Christianity based on an objective truth, or is it just a delusion that people keep alive for some compelling reason?

Is it based on an objective truth or is it just a delusion?

Is this just like, should this be in the same category as the Da Vinci Code, or in the same category as, you know, the Lord of the Rings?

That is just mythology.

It's ancient literature, but it has no real bearing on our lives.

And so today we want to ask and wrestle with this question.

Did God really write a book?

Is this really a God book or just a, you know, fabrication of man book?

And how do we really discern?

Uh, through our time, I want to ask and hopefully wrestle with three big questions.

First is, what is the Bible?

Like, what is it?

I don't think many of us, not all of us, know what is the Bible.

Um, where did it come from, and then what do I do with it?

And and my aim, so here we go.

My aim is not to answer all of the questions about it.

I we don't have time for that.

I wrestled, oh my goodness, this week was so hard.

Not because I didn't know some of the research, it's like how do we distill this in a 30-minute presentation that is easily, you know, digestible, that you can walk away with, that you got handholds, and it's helpful.

Woo! I don't know.

We're gonna find out.

All right, so here's here's the first thing that we what is the Bible first?

The Bible is a library, not a book.

This is so important.

The Bible is a library, not just a book.

The Bible is a collection of 66 books, in fact, 39 in the Old Testament or the Hebrew Scriptures, 27 in the New Testament.

Of those 66 books, they're written by nearly 40 different authors from every walk of life.

You had kings, you had peasants, you had philosophers, you had fishermen, you had all across uh over 1,500 year span in three different languages.

The Old Testament, the Hebrew scripture, is primarily written in Hebrew, though parts of it are written in Aramaic.

And then the New Testament, all of it is written in Koine Greek or the common language Greek of the ancient day.

Uh and yet, though it has three different languages, it speaks with remarkable unity and continuity from Genesis to Revelation, telling one unfolding story, God's redemption of humanity.

What is the Bible?

Well, it is a library of books.

Now, one of the questions that I get sometimes is, Ryan, do you take the Bible literally?

You know, some of those literal Bible people, what is wrong with them?

I've heard this, I don't know if you've heard that.

I think that's a great question.

But before I answer it, I think the question is, what do you mean by literal?

Because the Bible is a literary work.

And as a literary work, it doesn't just have one kind of writing, it's a collection of all kinds of different writings.

It's a collection of history, poetry, prophecy, wisdom literature, letters, parables.

And so, yes, I take it literally, but more importantly, I take it seriously and read it according to what kind of literature you're reading.

Now, for example, Jesus said, I am the gate.

I don't take it literally that Jesus is a wooden gate on hinges.

And neither do you.

You realize that he's employing metaphor to say something that is true to help us understand.

And that's all throughout the Bible in other ways that we need to begin to understand.

Oh my goodness, how do we read the Bible?

Read it as a literary work of art, read it according to its literary genres.

The Bible is a library, not a book.

And here's something amazing about the Bible.

The Bible claims to be God's very words, divinely inspired.

The Bible claims that this is not just an ordinary book, this is a God book.

Here's some examples.

Uh 2 Timothy 3.16 says, All scripture is what?

God breathed.

Inspired, useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting, and training in righteousness so the servant of God might be thoroughly equipped for every good work.

2 Peter 1.20 says this all of you must understand that no prophecy of scripture came about by the prophet's own interpretation of things.

He's not just making it up, for prophecy never had its origin in the human will, but a prophet through human spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit.

You see that God worked with humanity to produce something that is exactly what he intended to say.

Hebrews 4 says this.

Like it's not just a God book, it's a powerful book.

It's alive and act.

And it will transform you and change you, it will lead you as you read it.

And so then the question is okay, if that's what the Bible is, can we really trust the Bible?

That's his claims.

The writings in here are at least a couple thousand years old.

And older.

We have translations from the original language.

How do we know uh it's what the original authors intended?

What if the Bible we have today isn't what the was originally written?

It's a fair concern.

Uh the word that we have uh in the for this process is called transmission.

How do we know that we have the original Bible?

Transmission, how do we know that it hasn't been changed or corrupted over the years?

Transmission is the process by which the biblical text was copied, preserved, and passed down through history.

The Bible wasn't casually passed down, it was carefully preserved.

And let me give you just multiple, just we're gonna fire these off.

These are areas of in people's entire study.

So I'm sorry about that.

Oh, oh, oh, oh! Sorry, back to the Bible.

Um, that's what we're talking about the whole time.

No, you can tell I've been struggling with this one.

Like, how do I communicate all that I want to communicate?

The Bible's got a lot of hard things in it, too, right?

It's got a lot of difficult sayings, difficult stories.

What do we do with that?

And how do we study it?

Next week, um, in our Still Wondering series, Dan Kimball's gonna be here.

He's uh author of How Not to Read the Bible.

They like Jesus but not the church, among other things.

Um his book, How Not to Read the Bible, our proteges who are gonna honor at the end of this service, they read that during the theology section of their year, and this one of the highlights.

I highly encourage you to pick it up.

I can't answer all the questions, but I can point you to great resources and people.

All right, so the Bible wasn't casually passed down, it was carefully preserved.

First, it was meticulously uh scribal, there was meticulously scribal copying.

This wasn't just like, oh, you know, I kind of write this and pass it down like, oh, I got the general gist.

Scribes who copied the Bible took great care in transmitting the text.

They counted the words and even the letters to make sure that nothing was omitted.

They had specific regulations for the type of parchment it was written on, the color ink used.

Uh for the Hebrew scriptures, uh, the the scribes would dress in their full uh, you know, like garb and fresh uh clothing.

They would put on new fresh clothing when they would write Yahweh's name.

There was just such a sacredness passed on through this.

Um but the truth is, even with all the meticulous copying, some errors still entered into the text.

Variants.

What about the errors?

And maybe you've heard this.

Oh, there's Bible's full of errors.

The New Testament is 99.5% textually certain.

Of that 0.5%, most of the differences are in spelling, word order, or minor variations.

For example, some don't spell John's name the same way.

They struggled with spelling just like I do, or changed the order of words.

Uh, in all of that, no essential doctrine is affected.

In fact, New Testament scholar F.F.

Bruce says the variant readings about which any doubt remains among textual critics affect no material question of historic fact or of Christian faith and practice.

You're like, wow, okay, that's pretty good.

Well, how do we know no essential doctrine is affected?

Didn't powerful men change it, Ryan?

Didn't they wield more power?

That's what the Da Vinci Code says.

That's what TikTok says.

Well, there's this thing called manuscript evidence, which is incredible.

A manuscript is an ancient handwritten copy of a text carefully preserved and passed down over generations on materials like papyrus, parchment, or vellum.

We have manuscripts not just of biblical text, but of all ancient writings.

And so I want to just show you this graph here, uh, and a couple things here.

The number of manuscript copies.

Uh you'll notice some names maybe that you're familiar with.

Pliny, it's not just a beer, it was a person.

Um, Caesar, Tacitus, Plato.

You know, you guys have heard of Plato.

Herodus, uh, Demosthenes, they were all uh Roman uh historians and politicians.

Homer, Homer's Iliad, one of the greatest works of the ancient day.

Now, what we have, what I want you to see is like Pliny the Younger, we only have approximately seven manuscripts.

Julius Caesar, 10, Tacitus, 20, Plato, only seven manuscripts.

Of the New Testament, we have 5,800 Greek manuscripts.

And if you include translations, which it was being translated very early into other languages because it was going all over the ancient world, like Coptic and other 24,000 ancient manuscripts.

We have a ton of copies, and then what you notice is the time gap in years.

So when it was originally written to our very first copy, and our very first copy is the only one that we have.

Okay, so the time gap, if you take uh Pliny the Younger, when it was first written to the very first copy, is approximately 750 years.

We don't argue that Pliny wrote that or that it wasn't his words, but we, the closest document that we have to Pliny's words is 750 years after he wrote it.

Julius Caesar, a thousand years.

Tacitus, a thousand years.

Plato, 1,200 years.

So not only do we have limited documents, we have them a thousand years after.

Homer's Iliad, 500 years after.

The New Testament, from when it was originally written to uh a thousand years or to the earliest document, is about 50 to 100 years.

Many copies help preserve the original.

This is powerful.

Yes, the New Testament is the most well-attested document in ancient history.

Uh, we don't have to guess what the New Testament said, we can compare thousands of copies and see it.

Now, how does this help us understand what the original was?

I want to give you an example, and these are things that come up, and professors will say it, you'll, or you'll see a video uh on Instagram.

What about missing verses?

I'm gonna take you to John chapter 5, verse 4.

John 5:4

And if you go into your Bible, there's no John 5, verse 4.

John 5:4

You go to King James, there's John 5, verse 4.

John 5:4

Who took it out?

Powerful men.

Your English Bible shows its homework.

It's one of the things that's so great about this, is it shows its homework.

Go to John 5, 4 if you want to, and you're gonna see a little footnote to it, and then it's gonna have like a little letter next to it, and because it and then it's gonna show you at the bottom that the earliest and most well-attested manuscripts don't have this verse in it, and it's our understanding that it was a scribal uh introduction into that.

And so they they actually make a note.

They, if you're most of ours, actually has that verse written down in the footnotes there for you so you can read it and you can see it.

They don't take it out.

Well, why didn't they just adjust the numbering?

Um, numbering, by the way, the verse, chapter and verse came about in around, you know, first chapter in 1200 AD, uh, verses and 1500 AD.

That would have messed everything up for everyone.

Like John 3.16 would be a you know, a different number.

We'd be like, oh, how do I remember?

Uh so they just made those edits to show you.

The question isn't who took it out, but because we have the manuscript evidence, we can see when and where it got placed in.

So we can have confidence.

Another example is if you go to the end of Mark, Mark chapter 16, the very ending of Mark, it will still have it in there, but it will give you a footnote that our earliest manuscripts, the most well-attested writings, don't have this included.

Mark 16 · chapter mention

So that you can have confidence.

Anywhere there's a question, actually, the Bible doesn't hide it, and the scholars that put this together don't hide it.

They put it right there so you can know and you can have confidence that what you have is the word of God.

Okay.

Manuscript evidence.

Oh, I gotta go a lot faster.

Good grief.

You can do it.

I don't know that I can.

Uh, archaeology affirms the Bible.

Let me just give you two.

I had more.

The Hittites, for years people group, seemed to be a biblical fabrication.

The Hittites, recent archaeology, archaeological digs found hundreds of references to the Hittite people.

They lived over a 1200-year period in the Middle East.

Isaiah, for example, scholars argued parts of it must have been written later because of his specific prophecies.

But then the Dead Sea scrolls were discovered, pushing our earliest copy of Isaiah back over a thousand years.

And showing the prophecies not only were already there, but also highlights and confirm that the text had been remarkably preserved.

William F.

Albright, he's one of the most respected, influential archaeologists of the 20th century, said there can be no doubt that archaeology has confirmed the substantial historicity of the Old Testament traditions.

Okay, Ryan.

Well, what about the Gospels?

That's what we're really concerned about.

Can we be confident that we have what it tells us about Jesus?

The Gospels.

Can we trust the Bible, what the Bible says about Jesus?

The Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John give us the most reliable historical accounts of the life and teaching of Jesus, period.

First, the Gospels were written within the lifetime of eyewitnesses.

In fact, this is incredible because there's scholars that really wanted to say, especially the Gospel of John was written about 160, maybe 200 A.D.

The Ryland Library papyrus, known as P52, is a fragment of the Gospel of John discovered in Egypt.

So John was written in Asia Minor and then it's discovered in Egypt around A.D.

125.

It's dated until around A.D.

125, making it one of the earliest known pieces of the New Testament.

This early date shows that John's Gospel was already being copulated and circulated widely within a generation of its writings, strongly supporting its historical reliability.

Unbelievable.

Now, if you want to explore, maybe you heard, well, what about the suppression of other gospels like the Gospel of Thomas, the Gospel of Judas, the Gospel of Mary?

I would love one to talk more after church or another time with you.

But I want to point you to a great scholar that's online all over the place, a Canadian scholar named Wesley Huff.

He's doing excellent work.

He just uh released a video series, a YouTube series, Can I Trust the Bible?

And he dives into understanding where those came from.

All of those are dated in the second and third century.

So they're years way after the life of Christ, way after the eyewitness account.

Anyways, they're not earlier accounts that were left out, they're later reinterpretations that show how quickly the message of Jesus could be reshaped.

First, the gospel was written with The lifetime of Jesus.

Secondly, they're historically grounded.

Luke, he's a historian and a doctor, frequently cites cities, Roman provinces, political figures, making his writer, uh writing vulnerable to historical examination.

For example, critics scoffed his reference to Lysanius as the Tetriarch of Albin.

A.D.

14 to 29.

It's historically grounded.

The Gospels are embarrassingly honest.

Historians often point to what's called as the criterion of embarrassment.

The idea is simple.

If a source includes details that are awkward, unflattering, or culturally inconvenient, it's less likely to be invented.

If you were going to make it up, you would make yourself look better.

Peter denied Jesus, Thomas doubted Jesus, disciples were constantly confused.

The first witnesses of the resurrection were women.

In that day, not a reliable, credible witness.

There's so much in there.

It's embarrassingly honest.

It was preserved and quoted very, very early.

The New Testament wasn't just written early, it was recognized, preserved, and quoted very early.

It was deemed authoritative.

Comment of Rome, AD595, quotes multiple New Testament writings.

Ignatius of Antioch, Polycarp of Smyrna, Justin the Martyr, Justin Martyr, not the martyr, and Tertullian.

By the end of the second century, think about this.

Just a hundred years after Christ, by the end of the second century, 25 of the 27 books of the New Testament were already being widely quoted and treated as authoritative.

Here's what's remarkable.

Even if we didn't have all those manuscripts, you could reconstruct almost the entire New Testament just from the quotations of the early church fathers.

Well, Ryan, what about contradictions?

Maybe someone, I mean, I remember having a friend come up to me and he's just like, so, like, this is back in the college, young adults' days, he's like, someone talked to me, there's all these contradictions, and one of them was like, How Judas dies.

I said, Oh, really?

A contradiction.

By the way, differences don't mean contradictions.

In Matthew 27, the author of Judas, uh, not the author of Judas, the author tells us that Judas hung himself.

But in Acts 1, Luke tells us uh that he fell headlong, burst open in the middle, and all his intestines gushed out.

Yeah, pretty gory.

Got it.

Well, those are pretty different accounts of how Judas died, right?

Not really.

Judas hung himself in the valley of Hinnan, which is a valley with many rocky ledges surrounding the valley.

What he most likely did was go to the edge of a cliff, hang himself on a tree, swing there for a period of time.

I know this is gruesome.

At some point the branch broke and he fell to the valley below, landing on jagged rocks that rise as high as 25 feet in the air.

No doubt his body burst open at that point.

One passage describes what Jesus is tempted to do, and the other how he was found.

Michael Kruger, a New Testament scholar, renowned scholar, says this people have studied these books for 2,000 years.

I think it's reassuring to know that they've been stood the test of time.

When you look at the details, when you look at the historical work and you carefully uh and you're careful with the text, you'll quickly discover that what looks like apparent contradictions actually have answers, and they've had answers for a very long time.

Okay.

So what do people, not just people, what do historians say about Jesus?

This is critical because everything we believe actually doesn't hinge on a book.

It hinges on the person of Jesus and the historical event with whether he rose from the dead.

Because if he did rise from the dead, then all that he said is true and trustworthy.

And if he did not, this is a waste of time, and you can do a number of other things with your Sundays.

So, what do historians actually agree about Jesus?

First, that he was a historical person.

Bart Ehrman, New Testament scholar, he self-describes himself as an agnostic atheist.

I didn't put that in there.

That's how he defines himself.

He writes, he's one of the preeminent uh scholars, even though he's an atheist.

I do not think there are any historian who doubts the existence of Jesus.

We have more evidence for Jesus than we have for almost anybody from this time period.

Jesus is one of the best attested figures in ancient history outside the Bible, not just inside the Bible.

Jesus was executed by Roman crucifixion.

Tacitus, Roman historian, writes this about Jesus.

Christus, the founder of the name, had undergone the death penalty in the reign of Tiberius by sentence of the procurator, procurator, sorry, Pontius Pilate, and the pernicious superstition was checked for a moment, only to break out once more, not merely in Judea, the home of the disease, but in Rome itself, where all things horrible and shameful in the world collect and become fashionable.

He's got a good view of Rome.

So Jesus, a historical person, he was executed by Rome.

Extra biblical ancient historians in that day corroborate.

Jesus' followers believed he rose from the dead.

Jared Ludemann, German New Testament scholar, atheist, does not believe Jesus actually rose from the dead, writes this it may be taken as historically certain that Peter and the disciples had experiences after Jesus' death in which Jesus led them as the risen Christ.

Like his followers truly believed they saw the risen Lord.

And Jesus' followers worshiped him as God.

You know, the DaVinci Code said, oh, that came way later.

That was invented.

Pliny the Younger, who we're talking about, he wrote, they, speaking of the Christians, were in the habit of meeting on a fixed day before dawn.

Should we start doing our worship services before dawn?

Maybe, maybe.

And singing a hymn to Christ as to a God.

Notice that both the early Gospels and letters, the early church fathers, and other ancient witnesses all describe that Jesus was worshipped as a God and claim to be God.

Okay.

Back to Rosaline Picard's question.

Is Christianity based on objective truth?

Or is it just a delusion?

That keep people from com for some keep people that could degree from struggling.

That people keep alive for some compelling reason.

Well, what should you do with the Bible?

One, read it for yourself.

We didn't always have it in this text.

In fact, there's many believers around the world that don't.

In the persecuted areas of the world where it is illegal to be a follower of Jesus, you get parts of the Bible.

You hold on to it and it's precious to you.

You memorize it in case it's taken from you.

And yet, so often it just collects dust.

We have it on our phones, even.

We have access like never before.

At some point, this has to stop being a history question and a personal one.

Because if it's true, if this really is the word of God, it's not just information, it's an invitation.

The Bible is the best-selling book of all time, not the Da Vinci Code.

We should probably read it.

There's a group in our church, a group of women that are doing the Bible recap.

They're reading the Bible in a year, and about every month or so, they're getting together and just discussing it.

It's awesome.

Rosalind Picard, she says this.

I started reading the Bible, and it started to change me.

It's powerful.

She was an atheist, brilliant mind.

And a family that she babysat and invited her to church.

She would come up with all sorts of excuses of why, stomach, ache, feel don't feel good, all these sort of things.

Eventually ran out of excuses.

They asked if she had ever read the Bible, and she said no.

Now, well, we'll start with the Proverbs.

And so she did.

It took time, she writes, because I did not want to believe in God and I resisted.

But as I read the Bible, I felt God talking to me.

I eventually went to church, and the pastor challenged us to consider inviting Jesus to be Lord of our life.

That sounded a little wacky to me.

But I decided to run it as a scientific experiment.

If it's really stupid, it won't make any difference.

It doesn't really matter.

And if it makes a difference, wouldn't it be better to have the mind of the whole universe who knows everything as Lord of my life?

So I took that step.

It made an enormous difference.

The load was lifted.

I felt amazing peace.

I once thought I was too smart to believe in God.

Now I know I was an arrogant fool who snubbed the greatest mind in the cosmos, the author of all science, mathematics, art, and everything else there is to know.

Would you just start reading it?

If you don't know where to start, you can start in Proverbs.

Start in the gospels, get to know Jesus.

What do we do with the Bible?

Read it secondly.

Take Jesus seriously.

Would you just take him seriously?

If Jesus is who he says he is, I've said it so many times, but I'll I'll probably die saying this.

He is not just a good man, and he doesn't just have good thoughts, and he's not just a place where you get good advice.

He is God in flesh, and he is savior of the world, and he came and suffered at the hands of his own creation that you might have life.

And then he said this: Go and make disciples.

Go tell the world that the greatest event in history has happened.

Because the greatest person on the planet showed up.

Teaching them to obey everything I've commanded.

Taking Jesus seriously means taking what he said seriously.

Whoever wants to follow me must deny themselves, pick up their cross.

Follow me.

The first will be last.

Love your enemy and pray for those who persecute you.

A community that says he is our Lord, he is our savior, he is our rescuer, he is our leader, and he is the author of life.

And so I'm going to trust him with my life.

And I'm going to trust the way he understands the world, the way he understands reality, and the way he says life is meant to be lived, and it is counterintuitive to everything that our world says, and go, you know what, I'm just going to begin to follow him and walk after him and know him.

Because nothing else matters.

We take ourselves too seriously and we take Jesus too lightly.

So may we become a people with a book.

Not because the Bible tells me so, but because it's historically found, it is reliable.

It gives us the best early written information about the life of Jesus.

We follow a person.

His name is Jesus.

And if you're questioning him, I invite you to investigate through God's word, through historical reality, did he really rise from the dead?

And come to your own conclusion.

I double dare you.

Check it out.

Jesus, thanks for today.

Thanks for your grace.

Thanks for even like I'm a little scattered because I had so much content.

I just, Holy Spirit, I just asked.

Yeah, for my each person that as we what we heard, that you would build a deep confidence.

That you don't have to throw your brains in the trash to follow you.

And a deep reverence.

That we might come to an awe and a wonder of you, Jesus.

In your name.

Amen.

We hope you are blessed by this message.

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