Is the Bible True? | Full Talk

In order to understand the conversation, to begin with, first off, we need to talk about what we mean when we use the word Bible. Because the Bible didn't always look like this. We have the convenience in our 21st century age to have all 66 books of the Bible in a single bound volume, but it hasn't always looked like that. And there are all sorts of things we can say about what the Bible is theologically, historically, philosophically. But one of the issues regarding the Bible is that the questions that a lot of people have have to do with the fact that the Bible didn't fall out of the sky looking like this. Because the Bible isn't one book, as much as it's 66 books. 66 books written over a period of 1600 years, on three different continents, by close to 40 different authors, in three different languages. There are two major languages, Greek and Hebrew, and one minor language, Aramaic. And so when we're talking about the Bible, we're not talking about a single book, in as much as we're talking about a multiplicity, an ancient library of books that all comes together. So what we're talking about is this: the Bible.

However, we also need to define what we're talking about when we use the word true. How are we defining the word true? And what I want to do this evening is I want to go through a couple of definitions that we would use in order to define how we would use that word and break it apart to instill confidence in us when we talk about the Bible, when we look at the Bible, when we're either doing daily devotions, or we're doing study, or even just investigating the Bible if it's not something that you necessarily do. And those three definitions that I'm going to be working with are: in accordance with fact and or reality, communicating accurately, and conveying honestly. In other words, I want to answer the question: Is this book trustworthy as history? And so that's really what we're going to focus on with this first point.

When I say in accordance with fact and or reality, what I'm talking about is, can we look at some of the things that we read about in the Bible and actually say this is talking about real places and real times and real people? And one of the ways we can do is by going to the text itself and seeing how some of the biblical authors describe what they're doing. To begin with, Luke, one of the Gospel authors, wrote a biography of Jesus that we refer to as the Gospel of Luke. And in it, he outlines his purpose statement right at the beginning. He says, "Many have undertaken to draw up an account of the things that have been fulfilled among us, just as they were handed down to us by those who from the first were eyewitnesses and servants of the word. With this in mind, since I myself have carefully investigated everything from the beginning, I too decided to write an orderly account for you, most excellent Theophilus, so that you may know the certainty of the things you have been taught." And Luke uses a word there that we translate as account or narrative to describe his book. This is a word that other ancient Greco-Roman historians use, other writers, to describe how they themselves write history. In fact, there are two very important ancient historians, Josephus and Lucian, who use this word to describe how they should write proper historical documents, specifically Lucian in his book, "How to Write History." And other Gospel writers and other biblical writers go to lengths to communicate the historical veracity of the documents that they're writing. Thanks to demonstrate that his narrative is placed within an actual time and location. In the first three verses of Luke 3, we are not only given seven historical characters that mark up the beginning of the ministry of John the Baptist, but within these three verses alone are 22 historical references to locations and people that have been verified by archaeology and ancient literary sources outside of the Bible. This places Luke's account within a historical framework, making sure his readers know he's not merely making up a story, but pinpointing when and where these events actually took place in history. And the Gospel authors do this in multiple different ways with names, locations, as well as with accurate plant and animal life related to the areas within the narratives they are describing. The Gospel authors get these types of facts right, even when other ancient writers of the time don't. And one of those ancient writers specifically was a guy named Tacitus. Tacitus, when he writes an ancient document that is outlining different ancient individuals, makes a couple of specific errors. Specifically, he writes that Christians derive their name from a man called Christus, and when he uses that term Christus, he actually mistakes that for a personal name rather than a title. But secondly, and this has to, this relates specifically to what we're referring to here in our conversation, is that he gives the wrong title to Pontius Pilate. He says that Pontius Pilate is the procurator, not, which is the wrong title for what Pontius Pilate was. Pontius Pilate was not commissioned as the procurator; he was commissioned as the governor of Judea. And we know that because we have archaeological evidence that points to that. Where Tacitus gets this wrong, we can look at something like the Pilate inscription stone, which is found in Caesarea Maritima in Israel, where it specifically says that the governor of this area, Pontius Pilate, made a dedication for this specific project. And Luke gets the right title for Pontius Pilate. So when other ancient writers often make mistakes about this specific area, the Gospel writers actually get these things right.

And it's not just the New Testament. We can look at how corroborative evidence for narrative stories in the Old Testament do this as well. Let me give you just a quick one. If you turn in your Old Testament to the book of Second Kings, in there it tells the story of King Hezekiah. And King Hezekiah, in Second Kings, is described as pushing against the king of Assyria, a guy named Sennacherib at the time. And we have this account where he describes that when King Sennacherib was going into sack Israel, he actually goes and he attacks a town called Lachish. If you go to the British Museum today, you can enter a room that includes a wall relief from Sennacherib, King of Assyria's throne room, that is 2,700 years old. The room originally included a floor-to-ceiling carving, 40 feet tall, that depicted the Assyrian conquest of Lachish. And this is the second most important city after Jerusalem. And in this, what it articulates is this sacking of Lachish and how he went into Israel and brutally besieged the city of Jerusalem. And this is described all throughout this wall relief in a similar way, confirming what we read about in Second Kings, but from the perspective of the individuals who were attacking. And specifically, it has a picture of Sennacherib, a carving of the king, he's sitting on his throne, and the people, the conquered people of Israel, are coming before him, and they're laying out the spoils of the war. And this is described in this kind of brutal pictography of the event that we read about in Second Kings. And right above Sennacherib's head, as I said before, it says, "Sennacherib, King of the Universe, King of Assyria, sits on a throne, and the spoils of Lachish are paraded before him." Another thing that was found in that throne room was what's referred to as the Taylor Prism. And among the war campaigns listed on the various sides of it, we also read about King Hezekiah, King of Judah, who was not subservient to Sennacherib and his authority and was besieged. Specifically, it says that Sennacherib shut Hezekiah up like a bird in his royal city of Jerusalem. And so we have a number of different evidences of different historical perspectives, including Second Kings and the Lachish relief and the Taylor Prism, that all work to corroborate, to intersect with this story that we read about. We're not reading about something when we read these narratives in the Bible that's made up. It's not fairy tales, it's not exaggeration. We can confirm by various sources, both from outside the Bible and within the Bible, that these stories help to put the biblical narratives that we read about on a time frame. When we look at these specific accounts, they help to articulate how we can have trust that these are telling stories that actually happened. So when we're looking at something like this and we ask the question, does it accord with fact or reality? I think by just looking at a few examples, and obviously I'm not going to exhaust all of the examples that we could give, but I do think that we can say in these instances, the Bible is telling truthful reality.

But what about communicating accurately? Well, communicating accurately is a little bit different than having it correspond with fact and or reality. With the specific question of the internal and external accuracy, what do I mean by that? With when I talk about internal accuracy, we're asking the question as to whether the stories we find in the Bible, whether they're talking not just about a time, but have evidence of actually indicating eyewitness testimony. Were these actual events from people who were there? Not just getting some grand historical narratives right, but are they actually describing things from people who were there? Or were the authors communicating with people who were from these places, who saw these events? In terms of external accuracy, I want to look at a little bit of a different angle into answer the question: Is what we have now what the original authors wrote? So because we're 2,000 years from even the last book written in the Bible, can we say and have confirmation that what we have now doesn't just reflect internal accuracy of true eyewitness testimony, but actually reflects that we have the words that were written centuries and millennia ago? You know, this is a question about the written documents. This is what I study in my PhD work. Now, don't let people with PhDs intimidate you. That just stands for "permanent head damage." You go to school for long enough, and they say, "Hey man, he's he's been here way too long. Grade 28, what is he still doing here?" But when we're talking about ancient inscriptions, it's interesting that the first inscriptions, written inscriptions, were tablets. They would inscribe things on tablets, and the tablets were replaced by scrolls, and scrolls were eventually replaced by the codex, or what we call the book. Now, nowadays, we scroll through books on a tablet. Are we going back in time? Are we going forward in time? I don't even know. And I'm trying to research this stuff. That aside, let me just say, and this might not be something you'd ever thought about before, but when we're looking at the biblical documents, there are some things that we, when we're just reading through the Bible, skip over because we often don't realize how important they are. Things that actually give internal reliability to the text itself. And what's really key to this are the names that we find in the Bible. Names in the Bible are actually really key when it comes to placing specifically the biblical gospels, although not limited to the biblical gospels, within a window of the living memory of the eyewitnesses. A series of scholarly studies has shown that though Jews were located in many places across the Roman Empire, people's names often tended to be geographically located. By observing literary and archaeological artifacts, a list of common names can be clearly identified by narrowing down the most popular names in places that Jesus lived, traveled, and ministered. And by comparing these to the list from the studies, an interesting correlation can be seen. Just as we see today with popular names, a qualifier or nickname is often used. For example, notice that when Matthew lists the disciples in his gospel, certain names have a qualifier or nickname, and others do not. "Simon called Peter, and Andrew his brother, and James the son of Zebedee, and John his brother, Philip and Bartholomew, Thomas and Matthew the tax collector, James the son of Alphaeus, and thus Simon the Zealot, and Judas Iscariot, who also betrayed him." As we would expect, the most popular names are those that have an added description. When we compare the most popular names in Judea and Galilee during the first century with the names we see listed in places like the biblical gospels, we find that all of the names with qualifiers match with what we assume if they were actually written in the time and place they claimed to be narrating. In contrast, the Gospel of Judas only has two names that would fit Jesus and Judas, but contains a host of other characters whose names match not with first-century Galilee and Judea like biblical gospels, but with names that were popular in Egypt during the second and third centuries. Consider how difficult it would be for someone living outside of the locations and times that these events took place to get the right names with the right qualifiers. We have four biblical gospels with four different named authors, and yet each gets this test of naming frequency and attribution right every time. A test and standard that the apocryphal and Gnostic Gospels simply do not pass.

And we don't have to just look at the internal evidence. We can look at actually when some of these other gospels with names like Peter and Judas and Philip and Mary that were attached to them, when they were actually composed, when they were written. And we know from both the internal evidences, from things like names that place the certain writings in specific decades and centuries, and we can look at when these individuals are writing these documents, and we know that the Gospel of Judas, the Gospel of Peter, the Gospel of Mary, were written when those individuals were long dead. But we don't just have this within the New Testament. It's really interesting that if you go to the Old Testament, the names actually give us a lot of internal accuracy as well. I don't know if you've ever thought about this, but Moses is not actually a Hebrew name. Moses is an Egyptian name. And we actually have pharaohs like Thutmose or Ahmose. These are dynastic Egyptian names. And the fact that Moses is named Moses places that story, that narrative, within a specific time frame that ties it directly to Egypt. Esther is also not a native Hebrew name. It is a Persian name, and it specifically ties that story to fifth-century BC in the world of ancient Persia. These are what are referred to as linguistic loanwords, and the different books can tie different time frames to the accounts that they're actually talking about. And so when we're reading accounts like The Exodus, we find linguistic loanwords, not just in names, but in other words that are used, that tie it to Egypt during that specific dynastic period. And the same thing with Esther and ancient Persia. And in regards to internal accuracy, the correspondence of these names and things like linguistic loanwords, this gives us a picture that the stories we find in the Bible contain evidence of being descriptions from individuals who were actually there, either the authors being there themselves or drawing from material or witnesses who were there. This gives us internal accuracy to say, "Okay, at minimum, we're dealing with stories that come from a specific time frame by individuals who were most likely there and get these details like names that tie them to specific time frames right."

But then we come to external accuracy. Because we could have certain facts throughout the Old and New Testament, but how do we have confidence that we know what the original authors wrote? How can we say and answer the question: Is what we have now what the original authors wrote back then? Well, there are a few different ways we can do it. And one of them is examining the manuscripts themselves. When we look back at how we actually go from ancient papyrus to modern-day print, the history of the Bible is not some sort of layered web of translations. In reality, what we find ourselves with is a single step going from the original Hebrew and Greek directly into our Bibles today. The translation of the Bible takes into consideration an amazing collection of archaeological evidence from discoveries in Israel like the Dead Sea Scrolls, to papyri dug up in places like Oxyrhynchus. Over time, as we've uncovered more of these fragments and manuscripts, they haven't complicated our understanding of the Bible, but clarified it. The documents that sit behind the history of the Bible and the way that we translate them today gives us confidence in their reliability to go from the original languages into our own. Even though we're almost 2,000 years removed from the last book of the Bible that was written, as discoveries are made, we are not getting further away from the text, but getting closer. This evidence confirms and gives us good reason to trust that our Bibles have been faithfully and accurately copied, and that what we have now is what the original authors wrote.

And let me just zero down for a second on what I said there, that we're not getting farther away from the original text as time goes on, we're actually getting closer. Let me give you a specific example by picking on the King James Bible. The King James Bible was translated between 1603 and 1611, and they didn't use manuscripts to translate as much as they used printed editions of the Greek New Testament and Old Testament. But when we're talking about the Greek New Testament that they used, the printed edition that was their primary work that they translated from was based on approximately 31 manuscripts that were available at that time, the oldest of which goes back to the 11th century. Now, if you skip ahead to 2024 today, we have over 5,000 manuscripts, the oldest of which go back to the second century. Now, this isn't me casting doubt on the King James Bible. The fact is that the manuscripts that they had at that time were incredibly reliable. And when we find these ancient papyri in places like ancient Oxyrhynchus, that just helps to confirm the textual history and the recording and copying process over the decades and centuries and millennia. But what we're dealing with is this amazing plethora and pile of manuscripts. We have discovered manuscripts that go back to the second century. And what's on the screen for you is a copy of a late second-century, early third-century copy of the Gospel of John. It's called P66, and that's because scholars are very imaginative, and it's made out of papyrus, so they said, "Well, let's call it P." And how many do we have before this? We have 65. P66. It takes, it takes doctoral-level work to figure that kind of stuff out. But what's really interesting about P66 is that if we're dealing with a book with a codex, the front and back are very vulnerable to time, to wear and tear, to worms, to all sorts of things. And so we don't actually have, we have a lot of middles of books, but we don't have a lot of, if it's a single book, the beginning and end are always the most vulnerable. P66 preserves for us the beginning of the Gospel of John. And if you read with me along on the screen, it says, or I'll make it easier for you, we can, we can go. You, sir. You know, it's really interesting. If you look at P66 and you translate through it, what it says is something that sounds probably pretty familiar: "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things were made through him, and without him was not anything made that was made." That sound familiar to you? Christians in the late second century, early third century, were reading exactly what you are reading, basically. And specifically for the Gospel of John, at the beginning of P66, there aren't even any spelling differences or different differences in the notations. It's exactly what you're reading. We can have confidence when we look at the manuscripts, and it corroborates the word of God that has been living and active for 2,000 years.

Now, the caveat to this is that in one very specific way, your Bible has been changed, specifically your English Bible. What do I mean by that? Well, the English Bible has been updated, and that's a good thing. If you were living in the 9th century, Psalm 23 would read like this: "God's one and he hath on F land and fed me by water." You know, sometimes you just read a scriptural verse, and it just really hits you right here. No, there's a reason why when you open up your Bible, Psalm 23 says, "The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want." It's because the Bible does change, but it doesn't change for the sake of corruption. It changes for the sake of clarity because language updates, language develops, and this is a good thing. Updates to the English Bible are a good thing because they allow us to be able to both understand, comprehend, and apply the word of God to our lives. However, it could be that what we have is what the original authors wrote, but they simply were not necessarily communicating truthfully. But I think we can look at the evidence and say, "No, that's not true." When we look at it, we can say that the scripture is in accordance with fact and or reality, and that it does in fact communicate accurately.

Which brings me to my third point: conveying honesty. What do I mean by this? Well, if you study world religions and you look at the Bible, you find something very different about the Bible compared to other religious documents. And that is the fact that one of the most striking things about the Bible that really sets it apart from other religious texts is the honesty it conveys concerning its heroes. A primary theme of scripture is that the greatest individuals spoken about in and through its pages are broken and flawed. Abraham was the father of nations, but he was a liar. Jacob was a patriarch of Israel, but he stole his brother's birthright. Moses led the Jews out of captivity, but he was a murderer. David was the greatest king of God's people, but he was a serial adulterer. These people are broken, and yet God uses them despite themselves. But this may, this does make people uncomfortable. Other religious texts don't portray the honesty about the brokenness and the flawed characters of even the greatest individuals throughout scripture. And that's because the point is not to point to them; the point is to point to the one who can heal. It's not about these heroes of the faith, about the prophets, about the kings. It's about Jesus. But there's something brutally honest and attractive about a book that conveys humanity as it is, that we can look at this and look at this and say, "You know, there's hope for me, even though I'm broken, even though I am flawed." This is a book I want to align myself with because it's honest about my brokenness. It's not trying to gloss it over. Even the authors don't really try to gloss over the fact that their kings, their leaders, their prophets, did make mistakes, were inherently broken. And that's because the point is not about them; the point is about the Creator who created us with purpose and meaning and intention. And that same Creator stepped out of eternity, in the second person of the Trinity, into humanity, took on our depravity, and died for us on a cross. The Bible is brutally honest about these facts about our brokenness, but it's also brutally honest about how that is solved. And it's not on the basis of us trying to pull ourselves up by our bootstraps. It's on the basis of a God who creates us personally and intimately and loves us.

So what can we say about the truth of the Bible? Well, obviously, I can't. I didn't and will not exhaust all of the aspects or all of the skepticism regarding how the Bible is or isn't true. But I think what we can say is that when we're looking at its reality of being in accordance with fact and or reality, communicating accurately, and conveying honestly, we can say that there is more than enough evidence to put our confidence in this ancient collection of books. An ancient collection of books, as I said before, written over 1600 years, on three different continents, by close to 40 different authors, in three different languages, and yet has this singular message that despite our brokenness, there is hope, there is redemption, and there is restoration. And yet, all of that story, I would argue, comes down to a single question that Jesus asks his disciples, and that when we read scripture, we should be asking ourselves as well. And that is the question right in the middle of Mark's gospel, when he writes his biography of Jesus's life, and he records Jesus turning to his disciples and saying, "Who do you say that I am?" That's the question of scripture. Who do you say that I am? Because here's the reality: if you walked out of this room tonight and you walked out with confidence that the Bible is what the original authors wrote, that it communicates things that were accurate in terms of its historical information, that it has evidence of eyewitness testimony, and that it's brutally honest about the facts of humanity, if those were the things that you walked away with, then I think my job would have been inadequate. Why? Because the Bible is no less than all of those things, but boy, is the Bible more than that. Because the Bible comes down to this question that Jesus asks. He asks this question, and this is the question we need to ask ourselves when we read the Bible. C.S. Lewis, the author and thinker, said that Christianity, if false, is of no importance, and of true, of infinite importance. The only thing it cannot be is moderately important. Friends, I hope today, tonight, that I have given you even a little bit of confidence that when you hold the Bible, when you read your Bible, that there is evidence that it is true. But more than that, I hope that I have given you confidence that this is not just a collection of generally historically reliable books, but this is the word of God that is living and active, sharper than a double-edged sword, and that it has been preserved miraculously for us today, going from ancient papyrus to modern-day print, and that we can, in fact, put our trust in it as something that is true historically, but is also true for reality.