thoughts out !oud

a Christian’s news, views, opinions and occasional poetry …

Re-writing the Bible

Posted by Mathew | 23 February 08

“How can you believe a book based on events that happened over 2000 years ago?” “It’s a case of Chinese Whispers … there was original truth then, down through the centuries, retelling after retelling, the real truth was whittled away, the story was embellished and we now have myth.” “What about the books not included in the Bible?”

These are just some of the objections that get bandied around every time the subject of Biblical inerrancy is raised. Opponents of the Christian faith use these questions - and others like them - as tools to defend their own personal objections as to why they cannot believe in the Christian God of the Bible. They claim that Christians have a blind-faith when, ironically, they demonstrate the very thing of which they accuse, and that Christians are in essence illogical.

Authors such as Lee Strobel have taken great pains to systematically demonstrate and prove that the Christian faith is one based on reason and fact. As the story goes, Lee Strobel began as an investigative journalist, and an atheist, who set out to disapprove the facts used by Christians to justify the logic of their faith for centuries over. His book, “The Case for Christ”, was the result of his findings - and he now campaigns for Jesus on the apologetical front, using his experience to show that Christianity is indeed a logical and rational faith.

Other such works that I would recommend would be Josh McDowell’s “Evidence that Demands a Verdict”. Sorted by topic, Josh presents all the evidence in a cohesive manner that ought to challenge any reader who would still believe that Christians have a blind, subjective faith.

Following, in point form, are just some of the sound arguments in favour of the Biblical accounts of Jesus’ life, death and resurrection, and also in favour of the inerrancy of the Bible:

  • no orginal manuscripts (called autographs) for either the Old or New Testament books exist today. when scrolls began to wear out, what did the scribes do? let it rot? why no, they copied it! after all, corporate Xerox was a long way off.
  • the texts that we used as the basis for our bibles today were maintained by a group of jewish scribes called the Masoretes. it was their job to copy copy copy. very tedious job, that. they’re long docos. there’d be copious amounts of coffee involved, sugar junkets, that kind of thing.
  • of the coppy methods employed, one involved counting and recounting the words on the manuscript to be copied and then, having performed the scribing, a counting and recounting of the words on the copy was undertaken. they literally knew what the middle word(s) of each text was.
  • if by chance the count did not match, the copy was destroyed and another copy was painstakingly written out. can you say, ‘repetative strain injury’, boys and girls?
  • the number of manuscripts for our New Testament number in the thousands. about 5000 odd written in Greek with another 8000 or so written in various other languages. the letters that now form the books of the New Testament today were all written before the close of the first century, with the first appearing in wide circulation 15 years after Christ’s death
  • manuscripts for the NT far outweigh in number the manuscripts for other classic literary works. (Homer’s Iliad had around 640, and the first copy appeared after 400 years. copies of the NT were appearing after 25 to 50 years of the originals. for the record, historians credit the Iliad copies to be of very high accuracy even after such a lengthy gap.)
  • in the first and second centuries, thousands of quotated passages from the NT documents were written in articles and letters by church historians. so much was the NT quoted in their writings that you could virtually reconstruct the NT solely from them without need to go to the manuscripts in circulation
  • the process of ‘textual criticism’ performed on the NT manuscripts determined a 99.5% accuracy to the autographs (originals). the remaining .5%, known as transmission errors, consisted largely of: spelling variations; transposition of letters; haplography - writing once what should have been written twice; dittography - writing twice that should have been written once; and inclusion of marginal notes that were not the main part of the text body

    There is little doubt amongst scholarly experts today as to the accuracy of the Bible texts we now have and use. Doubt should not come into it; even less so should criticism. The skeptic is the one needing to take a good hard long look about what he’s been conditioned to believe. He is the one to investigate if his ‘truth’ and ‘facts’ stand up to the tests that the Bible has withstood time and time again.

    Share and Enjoy:
    • Digg
    • Technorati
    • del.icio.us
    • Facebook
    • StumbleUpon
    • Google
    • E-mail this story to a friend!

    Related Thoughts out !oud posts

    Tags: > > > > > > >

    Filed Under Apologetics |

    Comments