Is The Bible Trustworthy: Part 2

How much of the Bible must a believer believe? There are some Christians who think that you don’t need to accept the Bible as 100% true. Believing in the trustworthiness of the Bible and believing in Jesus are two mutually exclusive things. A retired pastor reiterated this sentiment in a USA Today opinion piece, saying, “to watch good people (and the Church are full of them) buy into the sincere but misguided notion that being a faithful Christian means accepting everything the Bible teaches…The Hebrew and Christian Scriptures did not float down from heaven perfect and without error. They were written by men, and those men made mistakes.”[1] His words, however, are a false understanding of Christianity. You cannot follow Jesus and only believe in certain sections of the Bible.[2]

The famed atheist Christopher Hitchens understood this concept when conversing with a female Unitarian pastor. The pastor proudly explained that she was a Christian who did not believe in the Bible and the resurrection. Thinking the atheist would complement her, instead answered, “You’re really not in any meaningful sense a Christian.”[3] 

When looking back at the early Church, they believed in the Old Testament writings. The apostle Paul affirmed this in Acts 24:14 “But this I confess to you, that according to the Way, which they call a sect, I worship the God of our fathers, believing everything laid down by the Law and written in the Prophets.” Again in 2 Peter 1:21 it says “For no prophecy was ever produced by the will of man, but men spoke from God last they were carried along by the Holy Spirit." Before the close of the 1st century, Christians viewed the Old Testament and New Testament writings as both divinely inspired and trustworthy.[4] 

In Timothy Paul Jones's book Why Should I Trust the Bible, he writes, “Some portions of the Bible may be awkward, and others may be downright weird, but the earliest generations of Christians knew they did not have the opinion of picking and choosing which parts to believe. Early Christians did not seek to make the claims of Scripture—in the words of John Updlike—‘less monstrous for our own convenience.”[5] The Bible is only difficult to understand when we try to make the text do things it wasn’t supposed to do.  

In this article, I will answer whether the Bible is trustworthy and support it by discussing the literary issues of ancient and modern writings, variants in Biblical text, and the Bible compared to other religious texts.

Literary Issues of Ancient and Modern Writings 

The Bible is literature, but not in a final sense. The Bible is, first and foremost, a divinely inspired collection of writings. Each book or writing is unique in composition, utilizing an array of literary devices such as metaphor, narrative, poetry, prophecy, and so forth. Furthermore, it has been meticulously arranged to express particular theological views, and the precision of its wording varies depending on the context. For example, the star of Bethlehem was most likely a comet, and the formation of the world was more likely in billions of years than in a 24-hour day cycle.[6] These types of illustrations are typical for literary works whether ancient or modern.

The issue which arises is when people attempt to hold the Bible to a modern standard of writing. Let's be honest, the Bible is not an academic paper with scientific details. Still, it is precise in the sense that what it claims is true. It is erroneous to expect the Bible to be more accurate than what it claims. [7] Textual precision is a modern concept. Writers of the ancient world exercised far greater freedom in the composition of their works than what people of the modern era actually believe. Only when we put aside our modernistic prejudices can we truly appreciate the Bible for what it is in its own context. 

Variants in Biblical Text

Bart Ehrman, a New Testament Scholar, and former Christian claims, “There are more differences among our manuscripts than there are words in the New Testament.” Surprisingly, Ehrman’s claim is not entirely wrong, but at the same time, it is also misleading. Ehrman’s argument refers to the 500,000 copying variants that exceed the 138,000 words in the Greek New Testament. So, in this sense, he is correct. However, there is one piece of information that Ehrman does not address is that these a half-million variants are found throughout 5,000+ Greek New Testament fragments and manuscripts totaling to millions and millions of words. The 500,000 copying variants contribute to only a small percentage of the total words found in all the manuscripts. 

Thus, the majority of these copying variants do not impact the text's integrity. Most of these textual variations are a result of the scribe attempting to smooth out grammatical word structures, definite articles, and other similar issues.[8] These variants have little to no effect on the translation of the text.[9] 

Another area of contention is the issue of the Bible’s original manuscripts, also known as autographs. Ehrman claims “We have only error-ridden copies [of the New Testament], and the vast majority of these are centuries removed from the originals and different from them . . . in thousands of ways.”[10] For those unaware, the Bible’s original manuscripts “disintegrated into dust long ago”[11] due to the writing material's inability to withstand the duration of time. The last mention of these autographs was in 200 A.D. by Tertullian of Carthage. He claimed that the churches of Corinth, Philippi, Thessalonica, Ephesus, and Rome still retained Paul’s original letters. As of today, we only have copies of the original manuscripts. 

Ehrman’s argument is based on the estimated 400,000 variants found in the New Testament texts. Likewise, Jones counters Ehrman by explaining that “Most these 400,000 variations stem from differences in spelling, word order, or the relationship between nouns and definite articles.”[12] An example of this can be seen in the Greek word “we”(hēmeis) and the plural “you” (hymeis). These two words can be easily confused. A copyist may write “you . . . are children of the promise” or “we . . . are children of promise” (Galatians 4:28). Either translation of “we” or “you” does not impact the meaning of the text.[13] Another example of textural variation is John 3:3. When translated literally it reads “Answered, the Jesus and said to him.” The issue with this translation is that in other manuscripts, the Greek definite article “the” is absent. In languages such as Greek, the definite article may come before proper and common nouns. However, despite the missing definite article, when the text is rendered into English, it reads “Jesus answered and said to him” or “Jesus answered him.”[14] These examples are the types of variants that are most commonly found in the New Testament manuscripts. 

It is also worth noting that copyists also dealt with scriptio continua or text that does not include punctuation, spaces, and upper and lowercase letters. An example of an English rendering of scriptio continua is Lastnightisawabundanceonthetable. Thousands of years would past before verses, chapters, and textual divisions would be introduced to the Bible.[15]

However, to circle back to Ehrman's argument. The main issue with Ehrman's line of thinking is that he is basing the trustworthiness of the Bible on a word-for-word agreement. The Bible is not dependent on a word-for-word agreement. In fact, this type of literary standard is a modern development. Nevertheless, regardless of this new procedure, the message of the Bible holds its integrity because the inerrancy of the Bible is not based on precision but is based on the truthfulness of its message. 

The Bible Compared To Other Religious Texts

When comparing the Bible to other religious texts, the Bible is unique in its authorship and composition. The Scriptures state that the Holy Spirit is the ultimate author of God’s word (2 Peter 1:21). In history past, the Holy Spirit used 40+ authors to write the 66 books of the Bible. Many of its authors hailed from diverse geographical locations and vocations, with some being kings and simple country farmers. Additionally, the Bible stands out from other religious texts because it incorporates diverse writing styles and prose into its composition, such as poetry, metaphor, prophecy, narrative, testimony, history, etc. These elements, when combined together, unite and point to a single person and that is Jesus Christ.[16] No other religious text does that.

Secondly, the Bible is unique from other religious texts because of its message. The Bible teaches that God reaches out to mankind and gifts them with salvation. Whereas other religious texts require man to complete a list of good deeds that do not guarantee their god's response and salvation. The Bible is the only religious book that presents God coming down as man to die for our sins and save us through his death. Even more so, no other book claims the resurrection of its central leader and has prophecies that have literally come true!

Third, the Bible is unique because of its thousands of copies. This is evident in the Bible's 5,300 Greek New Testament manuscripts, 10,000 Latin manuscripts, and 9,000 miscellaneous copies. These numbers do not even include the copies of the Old Testament. When compared with Aristotle’s Poetics, it only has five copies preserved. The Quran has relatively few manuscripts due to their practice of burning copies with variants. The Hindu Vedas were orally transmitted for a thousand years before being manually transcribed. 

Lastly, the Bible is unique from other religious texts because it changes lives. Innumerable testimonies are evidence of the Bible’s life-transforming work. People who were addicted to drugs and living destructive lifestyles were changed by their faith in Jesus Christ. Equally true is the Bible’s presentation that only through Jesus Christ can a person be saved. No other religious books claim that or can compare to its message of salvation—that God became man and died so that man would be saved. What is even more astonishing is that not only did Jesus die, but he rose from the grave and reigns from Heaven with God the Father.[17] 

So, to answer the second part of our lesson, “Is the bible trustworthy?” The answer is an astounding YES! The Bible has faced intense scrutiny, with skeptics zooming in at each letter of its text. Still, the Bible has proved all its opponents wrong and will continue to do so. The Bible reigns as the best-selling book of all time with over 5 billion copies sold worldwide.[18] The Bible's words will continue into eternity because it is the Word of God, and the Word of God became flesh in Jesus Christ. Amen. 

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Footnotes:

[1] Timothy Paul Jones, Why Should I Trust the Bible (Fearn: Christian Focus, 2019), 144.

[2] Jones, Why Should I Trust the Bible, 145.

[3] Jones, Why Should I Trust the Bible, 145-146.

[4] Jones, Why Should I Trust the Bible, 146.

[5] Jones, Why Should I Trust the Bible, 147.

[6] Jones, Why Should I Trust the Bible, 156.

[7] Jones, Why Should I Trust the Bible, 157.

[8] Jones, Why Should I Trust the Bible, 184.

[9] Jones, Why Should I Trust the Bible, 195.

[10] Timothy Paul Jones, Misquoting Truth: A Guide to the Fallacies of Bart Ehrman’s Misquoting Jesus (Downer Grove: IVP Books, 2007), 29.

[11] Jones, Misquoting Truth, 31.

[12] Jones, Misquoting Truth, 43. There is a numerical discrepancy between Timothy Paul Jones books Why Should I Trust the Bible and Misquoting Truth. In Why Should I Trust the Bible, Jones writes that there are 500,000 variants but in Misquoting Truth, he writes there are 400,000 variants. I don't know if this a editing error and an update of information but I just wanted the reader to be aware that I'm only citing the information that I have been provided.

[13] Jones, Misquoting Truth, 43.

[14] Jones, Why Should I Trust the Bible, 185.

[15] Jones, Misquoting Truth, 42.

[16] Got Questions, “How is the Bible unique?” accessed November 20, 2023, https://www.gotquestions.org/Bible-unique.html.

[17] Got Questions, “How is the Bible unique?”

[18] Guinness World Records, “Best Selling Book,” accessed November 20, 2023, https://www.guinnessworldrecords.com/world-records/best-selling-book-of-non-fiction.

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References:

Got Questions. “How is the Bible unique?” Accessed November 20, 2023. https://www.gotquestions.org/Bible-unique.html

Guinness World Records. “Best Selling Book.” Accessed November 20, 2023. https://www.guinnessworldrecords.com/world-records/best-selling-book-of-non-fiction.

Jones, Timothy Paul. Misquoting Truth: A Guide to the Fallacies of Bart Ehrman’s Misquoting Jesus. Downer Grove: IVP Books, 2007.

Jones, Timothy Paul. Why Should I Trust the Bible. Fearn: Christian Focus, 2019.

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Bao Vang is a wife and mom of two amazing daughters. When Bao's not serving her local church, she likes to write and spend time with her family. Bao received her MA in Theological Studies from The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary and she is currently working on a PhD in Bible Exposition at John W. Rawlings School of Divinity at Liberty University. Bao is also a member of the Evangelical Theological Society and the Society of Biblical Literature.