Written by Pastor Jack Wellman– Chuck Colson
How can we be sure that the Bible is true? Here are 4 ways we can know for sure.
The Mountain of Manuscripts
The Bible is like no other book in all of human history. The amount of manuscript evidence is astounding. There are over 25,000 manuscripts from the New Testament alone. There are about 6,000 complete or fragmented Greek manuscripts, 10,000 Latin manuscripts and over 9,000 manuscripts in various other ancient languages. The fact is that no other ancient works in human history have such enormous documented and recorded manuscripts as does the Bible.
Word Perfect and Errorless
When the Old Testament was written, there were 70 scribes that poured over every letter and worked with such precision that their work exceeded modern day word processing spell checks and grammar checks. One scribe’s work was review by 69 other scribes and if they saw so much as one misplaced letter, jot, or tittle they would start all over again. A jot or tittle represents the smallest of punctuation marks like a period, comma or even the dot over an i. Bible scholars conclude that there was only one error for every fifteen hundred words that ever occurred and these errors were so slight that they never affected the content. It might have been something that was written such as “Jesus Christ” instead of “Christ Jesus.” We can rely on what was written in ancient times is what we have in our hands today in the Bible. God Himself declares that the Law of the Lord (same as the written word) is perfect (Psalm 19:7).
Prophecy: History Written Backwards
There are more than 700 (at least) of Jesus’ prophecies spread throughout the whole Bible that have come true. For the sake of being able to wrap your mind around the odds, let’s just take eight prophecies. Just try to imagine the actual mathematical probability that Jesus Christ could have fulfilled even eight prophecies. That would still be an incredible, mind boggling 1 in 1017 of a chance! Put another way, it’s 10 to the 157th power. That’s 1 in 100, 000, 000, 000, 000, and 000. This page would fill up with “0000” if I wrote out what the odds would look like.
Eye Witness Testimony
In a criminal case, eye witnesses are seen as a primary source of evidence that is admissible as court evidence and extends beyond the statute of limitations. Thousands upon thousands of witnesses knew Jesus by sight and knew He was the Messiah and the son of David, by lineage (Luke 1:1-…, 18:35-43). These people declared that Jesus told the truth and was from God (Luke 20:20-26, 19:28-40, 20:20-26) and there were more than 500 people that saw Him after His crucifixion (I Cor. 15:4-8, 9:1).
Conclusion
When people criticize the Bible as being written by men we know better. They say that they would rather trust what the textbooks say but I say, “Weren’t those books also written by men and after a few years don’t they have to be corrected or updated because they’ve been found to be in error?” If we compile all of the eye witnesses, the indisputable accuracy of the translations, the voluminous amounts of manuscripts, and astounding number of fulfilled prophecies, you can be absolutely certain that what you hold in your hands as the Bible is more accurate than any other book in all of human history (2 Pet 1:21; 2 Tim 3:16).
