Page 42 - Advanced Apologetics and World Views Revised

Chapter 6: Questions about the Bible

Connect …

A person who wants to deny the existence of God will generally discredit the Bible as being God’s Word
to man. He will tell you that it has a lot of contradictions in it or that it has been changed over the years
and is unreliable. Most of the time, if you ask them to prove their statements, they cannot. If you ask
them if they have ever read the Bible, most will say, No! So, what do you say to someone who attacks
the veracity of the Bible? What do you say if they show you an apparent contradiction? We will learn
today that there is a defense against those who want to discredit the Bible.

Objectives …

1. The student will be able to demonstrate that the Bible written long ago is the same Bible as we have
today.

2. The student will be able to validate the Bible by the vast number of copies we have and how close
they date back to the original writings.

3. The student should be able to demonstrate that life emerging from non-life by random change is no
within the realms of probability.

The Lesson …

Can the Bible be trusted? Is it full of errors? Doesn’t the Bible contradict itself?

The Bible is an ancient book written from 3500 years to 1950 years ago. If we consider other historical
works of that age, not only is the Bible reliable, but it is also more reliable than any other comparable
writings. Obviously, the original documents have not survived the ages, so what we have today is copies
of copies of copies. So, reliability is a question of truthful and accurate copying. Reliability requires
faithful preservation. The Bible is unique among ancient manuscripts in several ways.

The New Testament has been preserved in more manuscripts than any
other ancient work of literature, with over 5,600 complete or fragmented
Greek manuscripts catalogued 10,000 Latin manuscripts and
9,300 manuscripts in various other ancient languages including Syriac,
Slavic, Gothic, Ethiopic, Coptic, and Armenian. Of all the manuscripts or
nd
parts of manuscripts we have of the Bible, some back to the 2 Century,
99.5% of all of them agree 100%. That means that the copyists were careful not to change the text

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