20 - New Testament - Intro
Can I Trust the Bible?
One of the most important questions that Christian apologetics can answer is to the authenticity of the New Testament.
How do we know it's authentic? How do we know it didn't change over time?
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.
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?
And second, 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 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.
The New Testament writers, with the possible exception of Luke, were all Jews and already believed that they had the one true religion.
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.
In this next section, we will talk about the Gospel writers. What makes us think it was Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, and not someone else. We will break those questions down here.
