Page 37 - Apologetics Student Textbook (3 Credits)

Study Section 5: The Questions about the Bible

5.1 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.

5.2 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.

5.3 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, it is 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 throughout the ages of time. Also, there
are really only 400 variants that affected the sense of the passage, and only 50 of these have doctrinal
significance.

Almost all biblical scholars agree that the New Testament documents were all written before the close
of the First Century. If Jesus was crucified in A.D. 30, then that means the entire New Testament was
completed within 70 years. This is important because it means there were plenty of people around

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