Welcome to Part 4 of 10 our Frequently Asked Questions series. These are the top ten questions I receive As a pastor.
Question: Hey Pastor, the Bible was written thousands of years ago and copied over and over. How do we know it hasn't been changed, and why should I trust it?
Answer: Great question! Let's get into it.
This question matters more than almost any other, because everything we teach at church rests on one book. If the Bible isn't reliable, we're all just sharing nice opinions. So let's look at the evidence. I think you'll be encouraged.
Isn't it just a giant game of telephone?
You remember the telephone game. One person whispers a sentence, it gets passed down the line, and by the end it's completely garbled. A lot of people assume that's what happened to the Bible.
But that's not how the Bible was copied. In telephone, there's one line and nobody can check the original. The New Testament was copied in many places at once, by many different people, in many different regions. That means scholars can compare thousands of copies side by side and spot where a scribe made a mistake.
And we have a lot of copies. We have over 5,000 ancient Greek manuscripts of the New Testament, plus thousands more in other early languages. Compare that to other ancient works. We have fewer than 2,000 copies of Homer's Iliad, and for many famous Roman histories we have only a handful, often copied many centuries after the originals. Nobody doubts that we know what Julius Caesar wrote. By that same standard, the New Testament is the best-attested book of the ancient world.
The Old Testament has its own amazing story. Before 1947, our oldest complete Hebrew copy of Isaiah dated to around AD 1000. Then a shepherd found the Dead Sea Scrolls, including a copy of Isaiah about a thousand years older. When scholars compared them, the text was remarkably the same. The differences were mostly spelling and small details, with no change to the message.
Written by eyewitnesses
The Gospels aren't fairy tales written centuries later. They were written within the lifetime of people who saw Jesus. Luke opens his Gospel like a careful historian, saying he "carefully investigated everything from the beginning" (Luke 1:3). Peter wrote, "We did not follow cleverly devised stories when we told you about the coming and power of our Lord Jesus Christ, but we were eyewitnesses of his majesty" (2 Peter 1:16).
C.S. Lewis was one of the great literary scholars of the twentieth century. He spent his career studying ancient myths and legends. So when skeptics said the Gospels were just legends, he pushed back:
"I have been reading poems, romances, vision-literature, legends, myths all my life. I know what they are like. I know that not one of them is like this."
Lewis noticed that the Gospels read like eyewitness reports. They include strange, unflattering details that no legend-maker would invent, like the disciples arguing, doubting, and running away.
The shovel keeps confirming it
Archaeology has repeatedly backed up the Bible. For years critics said there was no evidence King David existed. Then in 1993 archaeologists found an inscription mentioning the "House of David." Others doubted Pontius Pilate was real until a stone bearing his name was discovered in Caesarea in 1961. The Pool of Bethesda, described in John 5, was once dismissed as fiction. Then it was dug up, porches and all.
The Bible doesn't ask you to ignore history. It invites you to examine it.
What about contradictions?
You'll sometimes hear that the Bible is full of contradictions. When you dig in, most of them turn out to be different details from different witnesses. If four people saw a car accident and all told the story in identical words, you'd suspect they got together and rehearsed it. The Gospels read like four honest witnesses telling the same story from different angles. Their differences actually make them more believable, not less.
More than a history book
All of this matters. But ultimately, we trust the Bible because Jesus trusted it. He quoted it constantly, called it the Word of God, and said, "Scripture cannot be set aside" (John 10:35). If He rose from the dead, His view of Scripture carries a lot of weight.
Paul tells us, "All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness, so that the servant of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work" (2 Timothy 3:16-17). Empires have risen and fallen, critics have come and gone, and this book is still here. "The grass withers and the flowers fall, but the word of our God endures forever" (Isaiah 40:8).
So here's my challenge. Don't just read about the Bible. Read the Bible. Hebrews 4:12 says it is "alive and active." Open it with an honest heart, and you'll discover it reads you as much as you read it.
