The God Effect: Chapter 8 – Evidence Outside of the Bible
The question of whether or not the Bible is God’s communication to mankind is not just a matter of one group’s opinion over another group. That sounds pretty bold, but as I hinted at earlier, the Bible itself doesn’t leave us much choice. If it read like other religious books or its authors didn’t make the fantastic claims they do, there would be no problem. Everyone could just choose their favorite one and go on with their religious life.
But what do you do with a Bible that claims to record miracle after miracle or is the only book to teach that the only way to have the answers to life and death or to ever know God is through only one person in all of history: Jesus Christ who claimed to be God Himself? In the end, if the Bible cannot be trusted or the Spirit of God is not allowed to use it, Christianity kind of becomes pointless.
For that reason, this chapter and the next one are going to check out how reliable the Bible is. After all, if it is not reliable, it is not telling the truth and truth is the one thing that God will not compromise. In all of this, it will be worth remembering that if the Bible is a spiritual work, even with all the evidence to come, only God can make it “come alive” for each person.
Archaeology
The Bible is a history book as much as it is a book of teachings and commands. As a matter of fact, all of its teachings come out of the situations that were happening at the times they were written. It stands to reason, then, that solid evidence has to be found for any mention of places, people, or events. That’s where archaeology comes in.
The Old Testament, the first big section of the Bible, was a popular place for many years for sceptics to reject some of the most well-known people and events. Things have changed. Thanks to the discovery of some scrolls hidden in caves, we now have copies of the Old Testament that go back to 125 BC. Not only that, but the accuracy compared to modern Bibles is amazing. For example, the book of Isaiah has 266 words in it. Those old manuscripts have only 3 letters that are different from the Isaiah we have now. It used to be said that people that lived at the time of Moses were too primitive to have writing (1400BC) – until written laws from an older king were found from almost 1800BC.
The New Testament history is just as good. The Bible’s record of the political situation at the time of Jesus’ birth, such as the massive migration of the Jews back to their ancestral homes that included Joseph and Mary, was attacked as having mistakes in it that proved it to be fiction. Newly discovered finds have now proven that mentions of kings, governors, events, and lost sites in Jerusalem are exactly right. The history in the book of Acts is so reliable that it is hardly questioned at all and even used for reference by scholars.
Preservation
The way the Bible has been preserved over thousands of years is a spectacular witness to just how deeply treasured it has always been. It is a demonstration of the belief that God had spoken in it and that it had to be preserved at all costs. The Bible itself claims that it (“The Word”) will never be lost, even, as Jesus said, down to the smallest letters.
From the earliest days of the church and going on into present day dictatorships, different times of persecution have included efforts to stamp out the contents of the Bible. At times rulers, sometimes including corrupt church leadership, have used raw power and law against it. Some of the early Roman Emperors were ruthless, but even during the late 1400’s through the 1600’s suppression and persecution rose because of a movement to let the common person have the Bible in their own language and in their own hands.
Yet the Bible stands and is now the most published book of all time because it has been faithfully transmitted through the ages. The practices used to carry the Bible through 20 centuries is amazing especially when we realize that before the invention of the printing press, every single manuscript of the Bible had to be copied by hand. The rules for the Jewish copiers of the Old Testament were strict. Every page in the copy had to have exactly the same number of columns with no less than 48 lines and no more than 60 lines per page. No word or letter could be written from memory and every letter had to have exactly the same space between them. They even counted the number of letters!
The New Testament was different because the copyists were from different places and backgrounds. Their mission was to spread the word to Christians all over the known world. But in spite of the lack of formal rules, the record is amazing. As of 2019, we have about 5,856 complete and partial copies with the earliest partial one being from only 30 years after the last apostle John died. Also, there are so many quotes of Bible passages from early church leaders, about 36,000, that even if we had no copies, we could recompose the whole Bible. Men who have spent their lives tracing these things say that the copies we now have are anywhere from 99.75% to 99.9% accurate with almost all the differences coming from things like misspelled or missing words.
Influence
There is one other thing worth mentioning – the humanly unexplainable influence of the Bible. There are about 100 million Bibles printed each year and it is estimated that there are about 6 billion Bibles currently in print. Those include translations into a total of over 3,600 languages of either the whole Bible or parts of it. Even the most skeptical historian has to admit that our entire western civilization developed on a Judeo-Christian foundation.
This is only one part of whether or not the Bible is reliable enough to read and accept as communication from God. But it is an important part. It points to the idea that God’s love, power, wisdom, goodness, and graciousness would not be hidden or neglected in some little-known set of writings. He would not behave in any way in which the whole world would not be able to read His message of wanting to save people from the evils around or even in them.