Is the Bible True? Incredible PROOF That We Can Trust the Bible (2024)
Is the New Testament Reliable?
One of the most important questions that Christian apologetics can answer is to the authenticity of the New Testament. How do we know the Bible is real?
Is the Bible real? How do we know the New Testament documents are authentic?
How do we know they haven't been changed over time? Is the Bible fiction? How do we know the Bible is true?
In this blog post, we have what is a bible study, as we will give you the reasons for why the Bible is true, or more specifically in this blog post, the New Testament.
We will explain why we can trust the Bible, and why God's word is life.
People ask all the time, "How true is the Bible?" Or, "How do we know the Bible is reliable?"
In this post, I will be proving the Bible is true. And I will be using facts that the Bible is true., and that the Bible is accurate.
Well, the New Testament documents are 27 documents, written on 27 different scrolls, by 9 different authors, over a 20-to-50 year period in the 1st century AD.
These individual writings have since been collected into one book that we call the New Testament.
Here is a Table of Contents of the blog post if you would like to skip ahead:
2 Questions to Answer
As we move forward, let me introduce you to two great apologists.
Frank Turek and Norman Geisler are two of the brightest apologists of our generation and help us answer these questions.
How do you know the Bible is true, you ask.
On the Frank Turek YouTube page, there are dozens of videos on all sorts of apologetics content, including New Testament reliability.
The late Dr. Norman Geisler, author of Chosen But Free, has been writing apologetics books for decades.
Frank Turek books AND Norman Geisler books do not disappoint!
For a FULL List of the Best Apologetics Books Ever, Check Out Our Blog "Apologetics: 50 Best Books Of All Time" Here
Now, as Dr. Frank Turek and Dr. Norman Geisler talk about in their book, I Don't Have Enough Faith to Be an Atheist, there are 2 questions that we need to answer concerning the New Testament documents.
First, do we have accurate copies of the original documents written down in the 1st century?
When we address the question, "What is inerrancy," we are not saying that God Himself wrote the scriptures with His own finger, but that he wrote it THROUGH flawed human beings.
So this should not be understood through the lens of stenographer, necessarily, writing every single thing down word-for-word, but moreso as a speaker talking at a conference, and you writing down as much as you can gather through your notepad.
The second question we have to ask is, do the original documents speak the truth?
We will seek to address both these questions in this section.
It is important to note that the New Testament writers did not gain some popularity or notoriety with their writings, as many in the world do today.
Instead of gaining power, the New Testament writers got just the opposite: submission, servitude, torture, and even death.
All scripture is inspired according to 2Timothy 3:16. This verse also tells us that all scripture is profitable.
The New Testament writers, with the possible exception of Luke, were all Jews and already believed that they had the one true religion.
The Jews prayed to "Yahweh" as their God, but who is Yahweh?
Yahweh, the God of the Israelites, is the name that was revealed to Moses as 4 Hebrew consonants (YHWH) called the tetragrammaton.
This nearly 2000-year-old religion (at the time) asserted that they the Jews were the chosen people of God.
Now why would the Jews, who converted to Christianity, risk persecution, death, and possibly eternal damnation, to start something that wasn't true, and elevated non-Jews into the exclusive relationship that they alone claimed to have with the Creator of the universe?
The New Testament writers had to have witnessed some strong evidence to turn away from the beliefs and practices that had defined them and their forbearers for such a long time.
That in itself is evidence for what we read today that God's word is true.
For a GREAT article on why the Gospels should be dated very early, check out this blog post by Frank Turek:
https://crossexamined.org/13-good-historical-reasons-for-the-early-dating-of-the-gospels/
So how do I know the Bible is true?
Move to the next section and I will break it down further for you.
Who Were the Gospel Writers?
So is the Bible fiction or nonfiction? Well let's look at the writers of the Gospels?
Who were the writers of the Gospels, and do we have any evidence that these were the actual writers? What is the TRUE bible?
Matthew and John were both part of the original 12 disciples. John was actually part of Jesus' inner circle, in addition to Peter and James.
So Matthew and John were actually eyewitnesses of these events.
Mark, the writer of what is thought to be the earliest gospel, traveled with Saint Paul for extended periods of time, but probably received most of his gospel account from Saint Peter.
The oldest, and probably most significant testimony affirming the writers of the gospels comes from Papias of Hierapolis, writing in AD125.
Papias specifically affirms that Mark "carefully and accurately records Peter's eyewitness observations".
In fact, he said Mark made no mistake, and did not include any false statement. And Papias said that Matthew preserved the teachings of Jesus as well.
What about Luke?
Well, Irenaeus of Lyons (pictured on icon below), writing in about AD180, in Adversus Haereses 3.3.4, confirms the traditional authorship of Luke.
St. Irenaeus also affirms Matthew, Mark and John as well.
Another work by Irenaeus Against Heresies, compiled in 180, is a popular work as well, where Irenaeus speaks out against Gnosticism, as well as other schools of Christian thought.
Furthermore, it is worth noting that of ALL the manuscripts we have of the gospels, none of them say that the material in John was written by someone other than John, and the same with the other writers of the gospels as well.
Luke also filled in some more of his information when he meets with Philip and his family in Caesarea, as it is recorded in Acts 21:8 that he stays with him.
After Paul's 2-year detention in Caesarea, Luke went with him to Rome, where we find him in the company, along with Mark, in about the year AD60. This is recorded in Colossians 4:14 and Philemon 1:24.
Here is a wonderful video by former Cold Case Detective, J Warner Wallace, who reveals great evidence for the reliability of the gospels.
His full blog post of this video is here:
https://coldcasechristianity.com/videos/were-the-gospel-writers-present-during-the-time-of-jesus/
IF YOU ENJOY LEARNING TO DEFEND YOUR CHRISTIAN FAITH, CLICK THE LINK TO CHECK OUT THE FIRST EVER "APOLOGETICS BOARD GAME".
Manuscripts
So what do we have with the New Testament? Do we have the original scrolls written by the original authors?
For the New Testament, we have what are called manuscripts.
What is a manuscript?
Manuscripts are simply copies of the original documents.
However, the dates of some of the New Testament manuscripts that we currently have today go back almost into the 1st century AD, when they were written, and many into the 2nd and 3rd centuries AD.
Keep in mind, this is before the days of type writers and computer documents.
When the Bible manuscripts were written, they spread quickly. These documents were copied many times, with copies being sent off to far-away Christians who could also hear the good news.
And when those Christians received this ancient manuscript, or manuscripts, they copied the good news of the documents as well, and sent them off to other churches.
Now how could this dissemination of texts, without any central control, be uniformly controlled?
It couldn't!
Yet if you examine how similar the manuscripts are to each other, it is clear that the copyists took great care in copying everything as accurately as possible, because these manuscripts, passed down over hundreds of years, are so similar to each other.
We have these copies of the New Testament commencing within a couple generations from the writing of the originals, whereas in other texts, maybe 5, 8 or 10 generations elapse between the writings of the originals and the earliest surviving copy.
The quantity of New Testament material is almost embarrassing when compared with other works of antiquity.
There are over 5,000 Greek manuscripts of the New Testament, not to mention another 24,000-plus in other languages.
Next to the New Testament, the oldest amount of manuscript testimony that we have is of Homer's Iliad, which was like the Bible of the ancient Greeks.
Yet there are fewer than 650 Greek manuscripts of the Iliad today. Homer is the author of the Iliad and Odyssey.
Again though, the Iliad book is second to the New Testament.
For Homer Iliad manuscripts became the way to get this Greek story out to the world.
HOWEVER, Homer's Illiad was composed in 800 BC, yet the earliest manuscripts that we have are not until the 2nd century AD.
Compare the 2nd most amount of manuscripts (less than 650) with the most amount of manuscripts (over 5,000 just in Greek), and there is no comparison between the New Testament and other works of antiquity.
Check out this video by Dr. Daniel Wallace for further study on manuscripts (the really GOOD stuff starts at around 2 minutes into the video):
And check out his website at The Center for the Study of New Testament Manuscripts for further detail here:
GET MORE OF THESE ARGUMENTS WITH THE FIRST EVER CHRISTIAN BOARD GAME TEACHING CHRISTIAN EDUCATION/APOLOGETICS.
Chester Beatty Biblical Papyri
The most significant manuscript to come to light was the "Chester Beatty Biblical Papyri", discovered about 1930.
Of these Beatty biblical papyri, #1 contains portions of the 4 gospels, as well as Acts and dates to the 3rd century AD. Papyrus #2 contains large portions of the letters of Paul and the book of Hebrews, and dates to about AD200.
And papyrus #3 has a sizable portion of the book of Revelation, and dates to about the 3rd century AD.
For more information, you can again check out Dr. Wallace's site on this find:
http://www.csntm.org/About/Projects/Chester-Beatty-Library
Rylands Papyrus P52
Then, in 1934, C.H. Roberts of St. John's college, Oxford, was sorting through the papyri at the John Rylands Library, in Manchester, England.
He immediately recognized this as a preserving portion of John's gospel.
He was able to date it from the style of the script. He concluded that it originated between AD100 and AD150.
Many other prominent paleographers, including Sir Frederich Kenyon, Sir Harold Bill, Adolf Diessman, and others have agreed with this assessment.
Early Church Fathers
Evidence is often required before someone can ask, "What verse is the Lord's prayer?" (Matthew 6:9-13 by the way) and give their lives to Jesus.
So that is what we are trying to break down in this blog post.
Now let's take a look at some of the early Christian writings, outside of the Bible, to see if they confirm what the Bible that we are holding today says.
Interestingly, the early church fathers, men of the 2nd and 3rd centuries AD, men like Justin Martyr, Clement of Alexandria, Clement of Rome, Irenaeus, Origen, Tertullian, Polycarp, etc. quoted from the New Testament document that we have today 36,289 times.
Why is this important?
This shuts down the skeptic's assertion that the canon of our New Testament, the books we have today, were just added in hundreds of years later by some religious council.
It also proves that these books that we now have, the New Testament, were written early, if the early Christians who lived in the 2nd and 3rd centuries were already quoting them.
St. Clement of Rome (or Pope Clement I) writing from Rome in AD95, quotes from Matthew, Mark, Luke, Romans, 1 Corinthians, Ephesians, 1 Timothy, Titus, Hebrews, James and 1 Peter.
St. Ignatius of Antioch wrote letters from Smyrna in Asia Minor in AD107.
Ignatius quotes from 24 of the 27 books that we currently have in our New Testament today.
Even with all the evidence in the world, it still requires us to make a leap of faith; an act of our own will in accepting the truth.
The 'what is faith bible verse' in Hebrews 11:1 tells us that "faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.
Keep that in mind as you delve further into these evidences for the reliability of scripture.
St. Polycarp, the disciple of John, lived from AD69-155.
Polycarp of Smyrna wrote a letter from Smyrna in Asia Minor in AD110, and quotes from 18 of the 27 books that we currently have in our New Testament.
Polycarp and his disciple, Irenaeus, collectively quote from 23 of the 27 books that we currently have in our New Testament today.
I think you get the point.
These church fathers were quoting from these books because these books were first of all already written, and secondly, because they were authoritative.
Since Clement was in Rome, and Ignatius and Polycarp were hundreds of miles away in Smyrna, this shows that the New Testament documents that they were referring to, must have been written much earlier.
Otherwise, they could not have been circulated across the ancient world at that time.
The devil, who is Lucifer in the Bible (also who is Satan) is trying to steal the truth from our generation.
The love of God, revealed to us in the Bible (through Jesus), is the strongest love (AGAPE love) that can be expressed.
Quick question as we close: what is the shortest bible verse?
Answer: "Jesus wept" in John 11:35, and it still breaks His heart when we do not return to Him in love.
He has shown us and continues to show us every day that His word is true, and that He loves us so much.
When Jesus made His, It is Finished bible verse, He truly meant that He has now set us free.
'Is the New Testament Reliable?' video
So what is God's word? What does that mean? Hopefully you have a clearer picture now, but the video below should help as well.
Here is a video we put together that goes over some more information on the reliability of the New Testament.
Now we want to hear from YOU!
Which evidence for the New Testament's accuracy most surprised you? Was it the amount of manuscripts we have, or the evidence from the early church fathers? Let us know in the comments section below.
