A young family were witnesses to a car accident, and the police asked each member of the family to give a statement explaining what had happened. The dad was a bit of a petrolhead so knew the make and model of each car involved. The mum recalled how many people were in the cars. The little boy didn’t know anything about cars. All he could remember was the puppy that ran out in the road that caused the cars to swerve. His sister saw a toy get thrown through the open car window.
Each witness gave a different statement. Each person’s version of events was slightly different, according to their perspective. Not only of the angle they saw things from, but according to what interested them, what made them stop and look in the first place. Even though they all had different accounts, they were still each telling the truth,.
In the same way, the NT gives us four accounts of the life and ministry of Jesus – the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. Each document tells us the same basic narrative of Jesus’ life, but one might focus on the parables Jesus told, whilst another may skip over these to focus on the nature and character of Jesus. When we put all four accounts together, we get a much fuller and richer portrait of the life and work of Jesus.
But is it that simple?
In this Post-Modern age, one of the biggest challenges we face as Christians is what is truth. People will say, how can we claim to know the truth. Truth is relative, or as the German writer Bertolt Brecht said “truth is a black cat in a windowless room at midnight”. People will argue that if you something is true for you then that’s your truth, but that’s not universal. Similarly, there is no ultimate meaning in words, only the meaning that individuals give to them. So people can take the words of the Bible and make them mean what they want to. Any attempt to assign words a particular objective meaning is to use force and assert power over others.
So when it comes to the Bible, the argument goes that we should be suspicious of the writers who are exercising power over us and even more suspicious of anyone who might try to help us interpret what the Bible means. Any attempt at preaching from or explaining the Bible is just a sinister attempt to gain power over someone else.
Postmodern culture throws up all kinds of questions about the possibility of tests or words having any meaning. However, there’s an interesting failure to recognize the inconsistency of thought here. After all, how can anyone tell us this? If words have no meaning, surely those who believe this can’t use words to explain this to us?
As Christians, we can often fall into the trap of using the Bible as evidence for our beliefs assuming that everyone thinks the Bible is authoritative. We point to the Bible as evidence to support our doctrines but if we’re talking to a non-believer, that in itself isn’t going to hold any weight. We need to be able to also explain why the Bible is so important and how we believe it is genuine. These are not easy questions to grapple with, and Christians can often feel uncomfortable asking questions about the reliability of the Bible.
The integrity of any ancient document can be tested by how many documented manuscripts or fragments of manuscripts still exist. These can be compared to work out how accurate the copies are. Today, there are less than 10 copies of the ancient manuscripts of Plato. The oldest of these is about 1400 years after the original document was written. Despite this, the text is respected in the present day.
Compare this to the NT. There are 5,300 known Greek manuscripts, 10,000 Latin manuscripts and 9,300 early portions of the New Testament, giving 24,000 manuscript copies. No other historical document comes close. The nearest is Homer’s Iliad with 634 manuscripts.
o Books include History of the Jewish War & Antiquities of the Jewish People.
o Mentions The Herods, Pilate, High Priestly families of Annas, Caiaphas and Ananias, Judas the Galiliean who led an uprising (Acts 5:37) and “James, the brother of the so-called Christ”
o Crucifixion (read p52 Why Trust the Bible)
Also Thallus, Tacitus, Suetonius, Pliny the Younger
As we saw from the quiz earlier, Luke gives his reasons for writing his Gospel. (Luke 1:1-4). He wants to give Theolphillus evidence for believing the things he’d heard about Jesus. John also gives a reason for writing his book – John 20:30-31.
If we look at authors’ intentions, there are three questions we can ask:
Intentional deception?
I’ve only scratched the surface looking at the reliability of the Bible. But of course the Bible is much more than just a historically sound record of events. The main point of the Bible is to show us how we can have a relationship with God, through Jesus.
John 5:39-40
A former Bishop of Rochester (Dr Christopher Chavasse) said this:
“The Bible is the portrait of our Lord Jesus Christ. The Gospels are the figure itself in the portrait. The OT is the background leading up to the divine figure, pointing towards it and absolutely necessary to the composition as a whole. The Epistles [letters] serve as the dress and accoutrements of the figure, explaining and describing it. Then while by our Bible reading we study the portrait as a great whole, the miracle happens, the figure comes to life and stepping down from the canvas of the written word, the everlasting Christ of the Emmaus story becomes himself our Bible teacher, to interpret to us in all the Scriptures the things concerning himself.”
Its no good studying the Bible if we never accept Jesus as our Lord and Saviour. If we don’t meet with Him as we read it. The writer to the Hebrews says when quoting the Old Testament “As the Holy Spirit says…” (Heb 3:7). The HS spoke in the past when He inspired the authors of the Bible, but He also speaks to us today through what He spoke then.
Martin Luther “The Bible is alive, it speaks to me; it has feet, it runs after me; it has hands, it lays hold on me”
The Bishop of Oxford, John Pritchard at the start of his sermons prays “May my spoken word be faithful to the written word, and point us to the Living Word, Jesus Christ.”
We need to read the Bible and feast of the word of God, but we also have to open the book and through the power of the Holy Spirit see beyond the words on the page to hear what He is telling us.
Resources
“Why trust the Bible?” (Amy Orr-Ewing)
“A question of life” (Nicky Gumbel)
