Greg Gilbert's Why Trust the Bible?

“Now more than ever, Christians need to know how to defend the truth

of God’s Word in the midst of an increasingly hostile world. In this book

for Christians and non-Christians alike, Gilbert sets forth compelling

arguments in support of the trustworthiness of the Bible—equipping

believers with an important tool for engaging a skeptical world.”

Josh McDowell, author and speaker

“This book ﬁlls a great need in a day when people raise all kinds of le-

gitimate questions about the Bible and its trustworthiness before they’ll

even open it to take a look. Greg Gilbert’s Why Trust the Bible? answers

that question by examining a series of issues people often raise in order to

not take a look at this greatest of books. In everyday language, he shows

why we can trust Scripture and pay attention to what it says about life.”

DarrellL. Bock, Executive Director of Cultural Engagement,

HowardG. Hendricks Center, and Senior Research Professor of

New Testament Studies, Dallas Theological Seminary

“‘Can we really trust the Bible?’ It’s an important question to consider,

especially in the face of our culture’s skepticism. Greg Gilbert takes on

this question directly, providing clear and convincing answers that will

help the reader fully trust the Scriptures. Why Trust the Bible? is a great

resource for equipping Christians to passionately defend the Bible, and

it also challenges skeptics to rethink their position. I beneﬁtted greatly

from reading this book.”

Christian Wegert, Senior Pastor, Arche Gemeinde, Hamburg,

Germany

“This outstanding book provides a magniﬁcent summary of the evidence

in support of the Bible’s historicity. It is well argued, brief, thorough,

highly readable, and compelling. I not only recommend it but will also

seek to give it to many friends—both believers and skeptics.”

William Taylor, Rector, St. Helen’s Bishopsgate, London; author,

Understanding the Times and Partnership

“Many students I meet know that they should trust the Bible, but they

don’t know why—and so they often don’t. This book tackles that ques-

tion with clarity and ease. Well researched and accessibly written, this

will be one of my new go-to resources for earnest seekers and new be-

lievers.”

J.D. Greear, Lead Pastor, The Summit Church, Durham,

North Carolina; author, Jesus, Continued ... Why the Spirit

Inside You Is Better Than Jesus Beside You

“Greg Gilbert makes for a friendly, convincing guide along one important

pathway to trusting the Bible. He lays out an amazingly simple strand

of good sense that weaves its way right through the many complex argu-

ments for Scripture’s reliability as a historical document. For those inves-

tigating the Bible—and for those who love to share it—this book lights

the way, not only to clear thinking about Scripture but also to meeting

the risen Christ.”

KathleenB. Nielson, Director of Women’s Initiatives,

The Gospel Coalition

Why Trust the Bible?

WHEATON, ILLINOIS

Why Trust the

Bible?

Greg Gilbert

Why Trust the Bible?

Published by Crossway

1300 Crescent Street

Wheaton, Illinois 60187

system, or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopy,

recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher, except as provided

for by USA copyright law.

Cover design: Matthew Wahl

First printing 2015

Printed in the United States of America

Unless otherwise indicated, Scripture quotations are from the ESV

Bible (The Holy Bible,

English Standard Version

Scripture quotations marked NASB are from The New American Standard Bible

1977, 1995. Used by permission.

Scripture references marked NIV are taken from The Holy Bible, New International

Version

, NIV

™

Used by permission.

Scripture references marked NRSV are from The New Revised Standard Version. Copyright

©1989 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of

Christ in the U.S.A. Published by Thomas Nelson, Inc. Used by permission of the National

Council of the Churches of Christ in the U.S.A.

Scripture quotations marked KJV are from the King James Version of the Bible.

All emphases in Scripture quotations have been added by the author.

Trade paperback ISBN: 978-1-4335-4346-3

ePub ISBN: 978-1-4335-4349-4

PDF ISBN: 978-1-4335-4347-0

Mobipocket ISBN: 978-1-4335-4348-7

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Gilbert, Greg, 1977–

Why trust the Bible? / Greg Gilbert.

pages cm.—(9Marks books)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-4335-4346-3 (hc)

1. Bible—Evidences, authority, etc. I. Title.

BS480.G55 2015

220.1—dc23 2015007181

Crossway is a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers.

LB 24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 15

14 13 12 11 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

To Mom and Dad.

You were the ﬁrst to teach me that the Bible—

and the Savior it reveals—

are worthy to be trusted.

Contents

1 Don’t Believe Everything You Read 11

2 Lost in Translation? 29

3 Copies of Copies of Copies of Copies? 41

4 Are These Really the Books You’re Looking For? 59

5 But Can I Trust You? 77

6 So Did It Happen? 103

7 Take It on the Word of a Resurrected Man 125

A Final Word: The Next Question 143

Appendix: Resources for Further Exploration 145

General Index 149

Scripture Index 153

About the Series 155

Don’t Believe

Everything You Read

Don’t believe everything you read. Everybody knowsthat.

Especially in our age of the Internet, only a misguided per-

son takes as absolute truth everything he or she reads. From

newspapers and magazines to tabloids and click-bait online

“news” services, one of the most valuable skills we can learn

is telling the dierence between fact and ﬁction, truth and fab-

rication. We don’t want to be dupes, and we’re right not to

wantthat.

In my own family, my wife and I are trying very hard to

teach our children exactly that—the skill of reading and listen-

ing carefully, of not accepting everything they read or hear at

face value but rather putting it to the test and seeing if it seems

trustworthy. Even with our ﬁve-year-old daughter, we’re work-

ing on trying to teach her to recognize the dierence between

things that are real and things that are “just a story.” She’s

gotten pretty good at ittoo:

• George Washington was the ﬁrst president of the United

States. “That’s real, Dad.”

12 Why Trust the Bible?

• Uncle Matt got a new job and moved to a dierent city.

“That’s real too.”

• Batman chased down the Joker and threw him in jail.

“No, that’s just a story.”

• Elsa built an ice castle with her special power of freezing

thin air. “Just a story.”

• Superman ﬂew into the air? “Story.”

• A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away...? “Story!”

But then imagine I throw her a curveball. A man named

Jesus was born to a virgin about two thousand years ago,

claimed to be God, did miracles like walking on water and

raising people from the dead, was cruciﬁed on a Roman cross,

and then rose from the dead and ascended into heaven, where

he now reigns as King of the universe.

How is she supposed to answer that one? “Um, real?”

If you’re a Christian, then I’m sure you’d answer it with a

ﬁrm “That’s real.” But let’s be honest. Most people in our cul-

ture think it very strange for normal, seemingly well-adjusted

individuals to take that story seriously. And if they had the

chance, they’d probably smile politely and ask, “Okay, but

wouldn’t it make more sense—wouldn’t it be slightly less ri-

diculous—for everyone to admit that those fantastical stories

about Jesus are just that—stories? Isn’t it just unreasonable

to think those stories are meant to be taken seriously, to be

thought of as real?”

In my experience as a Christian and pastor, it’s encourag-

ing to me to see how ﬁrmly Christians really do seem to trust

the Bible. They believe it, they stake their lives on it, and they

Don’t Believe Everything You Read 13

try to obey it. When it says something that challenges their

beliefs or behavior, they try to submit to it. In short, they allow

the Bible to function as the foundation of their lives and faith.

For all these hopeful signs, though, my experience also tells me

that a good number of Christians can’t really explain why they

trust the Bible. They justdo.

Oh, they give lots of reasons. Sometimes they’ll say that

the Holy Spirit has convinced them of it. Other times they’ll

suggest that the best evidence for the Bible’s truth is its work

in their lives or that it simply has “the ring of truth” about it.

Some will point to data about how archaeology corroborates

some of the Bible’s statements. Others, when pressed, will

throw up their hands and say, “Well, you just have to accept it

on faith.”

Now, in their own way, all these points represent legitimate

reasons for Christians to trust the Bible, but whatever else we

might say about these answers, none of them will likely go very

far in convincing someone who doesn’t yet trust the Bible to

start trusting it. Quite to the contrary, when a Christian replies

to challenges against the Bible with an answer like, “You just

have to accept it on faith,” the challenger will most likely hear

that as conﬁrming all his doubts and walk away declaring vic-

tory. Oh, he thinks, there we are. You really don’t have any

reason at all for believing the Bible. You just ... do. Because

of faith.

So if you’re a Christian, let me put it to you straight: Why

do you trust the Bible? How would you explain to someone

who doesn’t believe the Bible why you trust it? By the end of

14 Why Trust the Bible?

this book, I hope you’ll be able to give an answer to that ques-

tion, not just one that will make you feel good while the other

guy is quite sure he has won the argument but rather one that

will at least convince him that he needs to think about it a

little more. The apostle Peter wrote in 1Peter 3:15 that we as

Christians should “always [be] prepared to make a defense”

for the hope that is in us. In our day, that defense has to go all

the way to the ﬁrst question, because long before we even get

to questions like who is Jesus? or what is the gospel?, another

question vexes many people around us, a question they want to

ask but (if they’re honest) doubt we can answer: Why do you

trust the Bible in the ﬁrst place?

Turtles All the Way Down

Before we go any farther, let me admit something right up front,

something that probably won’t surprise you in the least. I am

a Christian, a sold-out, convinced, everything-your-mother-

told-you-to-watch-out-for Christian. I believe the Bible is true,

I believe the Red Sea split in half, I believe the walls of Jericho

fell down and that Jesus walked on water and healed some

people and threw demons out of others. I believe God ﬂooded

the world and saved Noah, I believe Jonah was swallowed by

a gigantic ﬁsh, and I believe Jesus was born of a virgin. And

above all, I believe Jesus died and then got up from the dead—

not in some spiritual or metaphorical sense but bodily and

historically and for real. I believe allthat.

In fact, there’s no use pretending otherwise: The main rea-

son that I believe the Bible is true is precisely because I believe

Don’t Believe Everything You Read 15

Jesus was resurrected from the dead. Now whether or not you

agree with me about the resurrection, you can probably see

why believing that would quickly and strongly lead me to trust

the Bible. If Jesus really was raised from the dead, then the

only possible, intellectually honest conclusion one can reach is

that he really is who he claimed to be. If Jesus actually got up

from the grave in the way the Bible says he did, then he really

is the Son of God, the King of kings and Lord of lords, the

Way, the Truth, the Life, and the Wisdom of God, just like he

said. And if that’s true, then it makes sense (doesn’t it?) that

he probably knows what he’s talking about, and therefore, we

ought to listen tohim.

Now, one thing that is beyond any reasonable doubt is that

Jesus believed the Bible. When it comes to the Old Testament,

the point is very straightforward; over and over in his teaching,

Jesus authenticated and endorsed it as the Word of God. And

as for the New Testament, even though it was written years

after his days on earth, it too rests ultimately on Jesus’s own

authority, and the early Christians knew it. In fact, the two

main criteria they used to recognize authoritative books were

(1)that those documents had to be authorized by one of Je-

sus’s apostles and (2)that they had to agree in every particular

with Jesus’s own teaching. We’ll talk more about all that later,

but the point is pretty clear. Once you decide that Jesus really

did rise from the dead, the truth and authority of the Bible

follow quickly, naturally, and powerfully.

Now that’s a quick and impressive case, I know, but here’s

the question: How exactly do you get it started? In other words,

16 Why Trust the Bible?

how do you get to the point of believing that Jesus really did

rise from the dead in the ﬁrst place? I mean, you can’t just say

you believe in the resurrection because the Bible says it hap-

pened, and you believe what the Bible says because Jesus rose

from the dead, and you believe Jesus rose because you believe

the Bible, and you believe the Bible because.... You probably

get the point there, right? That whole thing would become just

hopelessly and ridiculously circular. It reminds me of the little

boy whose teacher asked him why the world doesn’t just fall

into space. “Because it’s sitting on a turtle’s back,” the boy

answered.

“And why doesn’t the turtle fall?” the teacher asked.

“Because it’s standing on another turtle’s back,” the boy

insisted.

“And why doesn’t that turtle fall?” the teacher pressed.

“Well,” said the little boy thoughtfully, “obviously, it’s tur-

tles all the way down!”

Now before we go any farther, we should acknowledge that

in one way or another, it’s turtles all the way down for all of

us, no matter what you take as your ﬁnal authority for knowl-

edge. So this issue aects everyone, not just Christians. If you

ask a rationalist why he trusts reason, he’ll say, “Because it’s

reasonable.” If you ask a logician why she trusts logic, she’ll

say, “Because it’s logical.” If you ask a traditionalist why he

trusts tradition, he’ll say, “Because everyone has always trusted

tradition.” In all these cases, we’re left crying out for more;

why does one trust reason, logic, or tradition in the ﬁrst place?

Some may argue that reason is more reliable than spiritual

Don’t Believe Everything You Read 17

explanations because you can see and touch the evidence in

support of various claims. But even that argument rests on

certain presumptions about what kind of evidence is or is not

legitimate—that is, reasonable. You see? One way or another,

you end up with turtles, all the way down, for everyone. In fact,

I think that’s probably one way God reminds us that we’re

ﬁnite—written deep in the logic of what it means to be human

is an inescapable reminder that we can’t ﬁgure it allout.

Even so, that doesn’t mean we should give up all hope of

knowing anything. Even if it’s true in some philosophical,

epistemological sense that we all ultimately have to stand on

circular thinking, that doesn’t mean we can’t come to some

conﬁdent conclusions about the nature of reality. Sure, some

overzealous philosophers have at times thrown up their hands

and said, “Well, that’s it then! I guess we can’t know anything!”

But that kind of thinking tends to drop you into an episte-

mological solitary-conﬁnement cell (we can’t know anything

or anybody) that very few of us will ﬁnd either inviting or

necessary. So most of us simply start with a few presupposi-

tions—for example, reason is reasonable, logic is logical, our

senses are trustworthy, the world and we ourselves really exist

and are not just “brains in a vat”—and then we proceed from

those presuppositions to draw conﬁdent conclusions about

ourselves, about history, about the world around us, about all

sorts of things.

But hold on. The fact that we necessarily have to presup-

pose some things doesn’t mean we can presuppose anything we

want. For example, you can’t just presuppose that you’re the

18 Why Trust the Bible?

president of the United States and work from there. Nor can

you just presuppose that you’re a god and that everything you

happen to believe is therefore the case. Nor can you presup-

pose that the latest issue of the National Enquirer is the Word

of God and that it therefore gives you an accurate picture of

reality. These would be completely unwarranted presupposi-

tions, and people would mock you for believing them—and

perhaps lock you up as well! But here’s the thing: More than

a few people would say that’s exactly what Christians have

done with the Bible. We have, without any good reason what-

soever, simply presupposed that it is the Word of God, that

everything it says is therefore true, and that Jesus therefore

rose from thedead.

But what if the alleged foul is not quite that ﬂagrant? What

if there’s a way to come to a good and conﬁdent conclusion

that Jesus really did rise from the dead without simply presup-

posing that the Bible is the Word of God? If we could do this,

then we’d be able to avoid the charge of unwarranted circular-

ity. We’d be able to say that, even before concluding that the

Bible is the Word of God, we came to a conﬁdent conclusion

that Jesus did in fact rise from the dead, and then, on the basis

of that conﬁdent conclusion, we followed him in accepting the

Bible as the Word of God. This kind of belief would dier

markedly from one that simply relied on a “leap of faith.”

Not only could it be defended against skeptics’ objections; it

could also challenge skeptics in their unbelief. It would be, as

Peter wrote, a formidable “reason for the hope that is in [us]”

(1Pet. 3:15).

Don’t Believe Everything You Read 19

Christianity as History

The question, of course, is whether there really is a way to do

that. To cut right to the chase, I think there is, and I think it

is by doing history. In other words, let’s approach the docu-

ments that make up the New Testament not ﬁrst as the Word

of God but simply as historical documents, and then on that

basis, let’s see if we can arrive at a conﬁdent conclusion that

Jesus rose from the dead. Even someone who’s not a Christian

should have no objection to this. After all, to approach the

New Testament simply as a collection of historical documents

involves no special pleading, no special status, no special truth

claims. Let’s let them speak for themselves in the “court of

historical opinion,” as itwere.

Moreover, to approach the New Testament as historical

shouldn’t raise any particular objections among Christians.

After all, it’s not as if that would be to treat it as something

other than what it is. The New Testament documents them-

selves claim to be historical; their authors intended them to be

historical. Take Luke, for example. He began his Gospel by

saying that he aimed to give his reader “an orderly account”

of the life and teachings of Jesus (Luke 1:3). However you slice

that, and whatever else you think Luke was doing, he was most

certainly writing history. Of course, the method of writing

history in the ancient world diered from our own method of

doing so, but the basic idea was still the same—the authors

were writing accounts of events that they believed really hap-

pened. So given that Luke and the other authors were doing

that kind of work, surely there’s nothing inappropriate about

20 Why Trust the Bible?

letting his books, and the others, stand and speak as what they

were intended to be all along.

Even more, though, than the religions of the world, Chris-

tianity presents itself as history. It’s not primarily just a list of

ethical teachings or a body of philosophical musings or mysti-

cal “truths” or even a compendium of myths and fables. At its

very heart, Christianity is a claim that something extraordi-

nary has happened in the course of time—something concrete

and real and historical.

A Chain of Reliability

But even if that’s so, another question arises at this point, and

we’ll spend most of this book trying to answer it: Are the New

Testament documents—and especially, for our purposes, the

four Gospels—truly reliable as historical witnesses? That is to

say, can we trust them to give us good, dependable informa-

tion about the events of Jesus’s life, especially concerning his

resurrection, such that we can end up saying, “Yes, I’m pretty

conﬁdent that actually happened”? For my part, I think we

can trust the New Testament documents, but getting to that

conclusion will take some work, precisely because, as with any

historical document, we can raise many questions at many dif-

ferent points about their reliability.

To understand what I mean by that, think of it like this.

If you’re reading, say, Matthew’s Gospel about any particular

event in the life of Jesus, you can count at least three dierent

people who have put their hands on the biblical account you

are reading and have therefore aected it in some way. First,

Don’t Believe Everything You Read 21

and most obviously, the account originates with the author

who wrote it down. Second, at least one person, and likely

more, copied that original writing and thereby transmitted it,

so to speak, through the centuries into our hands. Third, some-

one (or some committee) translated that copy from its original

language into your native language so you can now read it. At

each step in that process, questions arise that bear heavily on

whether you can really trust the story you’re reading to give a

reliable account of what actually happened. So, moving back-

ward in time from yourself to the event itself, you end up with

a chain of ﬁve big questions:

1. Can we be conﬁdent that the translation of the Bible

from its original language into our language accurately

reﬂects the original, or is it saying things the original

never did?

2. Can we be conﬁdent that copyists accurately transmit-

ted the original writing to us, or did they (deliberately or

not) add, subtract, or change things so much that what we

have is no longer what was originally written?

3. Can we be conﬁdent that we’re looking at the right set of

books and that we haven’t missed or lost a set of books out

there that gives a dierent, but equally reliable and plau-

sible, perspective on Jesus? That is, can we be conﬁdent

that we’re right to be looking at these books as opposed

to those?

4. Can we be conﬁdent that the original authors were them-

selves trustworthy? That is, were they really intending

to give us an accurate account of events, or did they have

22 Why Trust the Bible?

some other aim—for example, to write ﬁction or even to

deceive?

5. And ﬁnally, if we can be conﬁdent that the authors did,

in fact, intend to give an accurate account of what hap-

pened, can we be conﬁdent that what they described re-

ally took place? In a word, can we be conﬁdent that what

they wrote is actually true? Or are there better reasons to

think that they were somehow mistaken?

Do you see? If we can respond to each of these questions—

translation? transmission? these books? trustworthy? true?—

with a ﬁrm “Check!” then we’ll have a pretty solid chain of

reliability from ourselves to the events in question. We’ll be

able to say, conﬁdently,that

1. we have good translations of the biblical manuscripts;

2. those manuscripts are accurate copies of what was origi-

nally written;

3. the books we’re looking at are indeed the right and best

books to look at;

4. the authors of those documents really did intend to tell us

accurately what happened; and

5. there’s no good reason to think they were mistaken in

what they saw and recorded.

However you look at it, these armations would establish

a pretty solid foundation for thinking that we really can accept

the Bible as historically reliable. And if we can do that, then it

This particular line of thought is an expansion of an approach I ﬁrst learned from Mark

Dever, pastor of Capitol Hill Baptist Church in Washington, DC. Other Christian authors

have also used a similar approach.

Don’t Believe Everything You Read 23

follows that we can consider the Bible’s account of the resur-

rection of Jesus and say, “Yes, I really do believe that happened.

As much as I believe that any other event in history happened,

I believe Jesus rose from the dead.”

A Few Important Thoughts

Now, let me say three more things before we start trying to

build that kind of historical case. First, keep in mind that we’re

not searching for what we might call mathematical certainty.

That kind of logical, lock-it-down certainty is possible in

mathematics and sometimes in science, but it’s never possible

when you’re dealing with history. With any historical event,

someone somewhere will always be able to concoct an alter-

native to the accepted account that has at least a bare chance

of being the case. “Maybe Caesar didn’t in fact cross the Ru-

bicon River,” someone might say. “Maybe one of his generals

dressed as Caesar and managed to fool everyone. Yes, yes, I

know there’s no good reason to think that, but it’s still barely

possible, and therefore you can’t be conﬁdent that Caesar ever

crossed the Rubicon.” Okay, but for crying out loud, come on!

If objections like that were enough to keep us from drawing

ﬁrm conclusions about history, we’d never be conﬁdent in any

knowledge about thepast.

Thankfully, though, we’re not looking here for mathemati-

cal certainty but rather for historical conﬁdence. We want to be

able to say not so much, “It is a mathematical, logical certainty

that Caesar crossed the Rubicon,” but rather, “Some people

actually did report that Caesar crossed the Rubicon. We think

24 Why Trust the Bible?

they were intending to report what actually happened (rather

than to deceive or mythologize), and there’s no good reason

to think they were mistaken in their report. Therefore, we can

be historically conﬁdent that Caesar really did cross the Ru-

bicon.” That’s the kind of “certainty” we look for in history,

and to demand anything more is to demand something from

historical study that it can never deliver.

Second, keep in mind that historical conﬁdence provides

sucient grounds for action. Occasionally I’ve run into people

who assert that they’re not going to act on anything without

ﬁrsthand experience of it. If they didn’t see it or experience it,

they say, then there’s just too much doubt to act on it in any

way. Now, at ﬁrst glance, that position seems to have a sheen of

intellectual respectability; it seems careful and thoughtful. But

look at it a moment longer, and you realize that nobody actu-

ally lives like that, not really. The fact is, we all put conﬁdence

in—and act on—things of which we ourselves have no direct

knowledge or experience all thetime.

Think about it. I wasn’t present when the Constitution of

the United States was ratiﬁed, but as an American, I live with

the conﬁdence that it in fact was, and I also act on that conﬁ-

dence. I don’t decline to vote because I’m not mathematically

certain that we really live under a ratiﬁed US Constitution.

Here’s another example, even closer to home: When you get

right down to it, I have no direct knowledge that my parents

really are my parents; I don’t personally remember my birth,

we’ve never had a DNA test done, and it’s always possible

some mistake was made and my birth certiﬁcate was forged!

Don’t Believe Everything You Read 25

Well, sure, that’s barely possible, but on the other hand, all

the evidence I have points to the fact that my parents really are

my parents, and so I live and act all the time with conﬁdence

that theyare.

That’s the kind of conﬁdence history can provide, and it’s

the kind of conﬁdence I hope we can reach as we think together

throughout the pages of this book—a historical conﬁdence

that would allow us, even compel us, to say, “Yes, I think the

resurrection of Jesus happened. I have no better explanation

for the facts. And now I’m going to act on that conﬁdence.”

Third, please keep in mind that this is not and wasn’t in-

tended to be an academic book. It doesn’t consider every pos-

sible variation on every argument, and it doesn’t give every

possible example or counterexample. For that reason, I hope

you won’t compare it to the many excellent books that Chris-

tians have written on all these topics over the years. If you set

this book beside those, you’ll ﬁnd that it is not as thorough as

those—or as thick. It aims simply to present a ﬂyover of the

arguments and considerations that have convinced me—and

many others over the years—of the Bible’s truth.

One more thing. In keeping the argument to that ﬂyover

level, you’ll notice that I’ve focused particularly in this book

on the New Testament—and within the New Testament, par-

ticularly on the four Gospels. That means I’m not going to

treat every nuance of text, transmission, and canon that arises

in discussions regarding the Old Testament or even regarding

every book of the New Testament. But, you ask, isn’t this book

about the whole Bible? It is. Yet keep in mind that exploring

26 Why Trust the Bible?

the evidence for the New Testament, especially the Gospels,

with the ﬁve tests above will give us a good sense of the issues

and historical evidence involved in discussions of all the other

books, too. And even more important, remember that what

we’re aiming for, ﬁnally, is historical conﬁdence that Jesus rose

from the dead. If we can arrive at that, then we wind up with

a very good reason for trusting in the reliability of the Old

Testament as well. So how do we arrive at historical conﬁdence

that Jesus was resurrected? By determining if the Gospels, in

particular, are reliable historical witnesses. That’s ouraim.

So again, while other books helpfully discuss all the minute

details of all the issues involved with the Bible’s reliability at

every point, this book presents an overview of the case that has

convinced me and countless others of the Bible’s truth—a case

that ﬁnds its capstone in the resurrection of Jesus. If this case

is helpful and, to some degree, convincing to you, I’m glad for

that. If not, I’d encourage you to continue reading those other

bigger, better books (see appendix).

A First Step

If you’re reading this book and you’re not a Christian, ﬁrst

of all, thank you for picking it up and reading even this far. If

nothing else, I hope you’ll ﬁnd some things in here that will

challenge you to think about Christians, Christianity, the Bible,

and ultimately Jesus in ways that are perhaps dierent than you

have ever thought about them before. I hope you walk away

recognizing that we Christians don’t believe what we believe

without reason. Sure, you may not buy the case I’m making

Don’t Believe Everything You Read 27

here, but I hope you’ll at least be able to say that maybe there’s

more to the Christian faith than you realized. On the other

hand, you may even be able to say more than that. Maybe you’ll

come to the conclusion that you really can trust the Bible. If

so, then you’ll be in for a truly great experience, because you’ll

be able to turn conﬁdently to thinking about what the Bible is

really all about—Jesus the Christ and who he claimed tobe.

On the other hand, if you’re already a Christian, I hope

this book will help you better understand why you trust the

Bible and then enable you to talk about it and defend it against

objections from people who do not trust it. The fact is, in the

end, despite what the world often accuses us of, Christianity

does not require people to make an irrational “leap of faith”

that leaves them believing ridiculous things without evidence.

On the contrary, our actual “leap of faith” consists in relying

on Jesus to save us from our sins, precisely because he is emi-

nently and solidly reliable.

And how do we knowthat?

Well, because the Bible tells usso.

Doesn’tit?

Lost in Translation?

Some years ago, I had the privilege of visiting Shanghai, China.

Before my trip, some friends who lived there warned me not

to assume that the English written underneath Chinese char-

acters on many signs in the city would tell me anything about

what the sign actually said. Over the years, Chinese translators

had become notorious for mistranslating signs into English,

with often misleading and sometimes even hilarious results.

I looked up some examples on the Internet before I left, and

some of the mistranslations people have found are just funny.

Take this sign hanging on the door of a restaurant: Bar is pres-

ently open because it is not closed. Or the menu that oers

Delicious Spicy Grandma for your lunch entrée. Or the sign on

a public lawn that just tugs at every heartstring you have: Lov-

able but pitiful grass is under your foot. Honestly, who knows

what the original idea was behind any of those messages!

Having seen all that, I was, of course, looking forward to

ﬁnding some amusing mistranslations myself. Sadly, I arrived

in Shanghai just after the Summer Olympics had ended, and

it turns out that the Chinese had launched a massive project

to correct mistranslations throughout the country before the

30 Why Trust the Bible?

Games started. So not even once did I get to sample any deli-

cious spicy grandma for lunch or look into the sad face of

some lovable but pitiful grass before I stepped onit!

But now, think about it for a moment. Why did China make

sure to correct its foreign-language translations? It’s simple—

as the world turned its attention to their nation for the Olym-

pics, they wanted to communicate accurately. They wanted

to say what they meant, and they wanted to mean what they

said. That’s ﬁnally what is at stake in a translation, whether

translating a sign, a menu, or the Bible. Can we be conﬁdent

that what we’re reading in our own language accurately reﬂects

what the author meant to say in his?

Is Translation Even Possible?

The task of determining if the Bible really is historically reliable

would be easier if we were native speakers of ancient Hebrew,

ancient Aramaic, and ancient Greek. Most of us, however, are

not. And that means we must not only ask whether the authors

of the Bible were trustworthy and whether the copyists trans-

mitted their writings accurately but also whether the Bibles we

have in English are accurate translations of those copies.

Probably the ﬁrst question we need to confront is whether

the process of translation is even possible. Can we really take

a language that looks likethis,

For this chapter, I have relied especially on CraigL. Blomberg, Can We Still Believe the Bible?:

An Evangelical Engagement with Contemporary Questions (Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos, 2014);

PaulD. Wegner, The Journey from Texts to Translations: The Origin and Development of the

Bible (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 1999).

Lost in Translation? 31

Μὴ θησαυρίζετε ὑμῖν θησαυροῦς ἐπὶ τῆς γῆς,

ὅπου σὴς καὶ βρῶσις ἀφανίζει, καὶ ὅπου κλέπται

διορύσσουσιν καὶ κλέπτουσιν· θησαυρίζετε δὲ ὑμιν

θησαυροὺς ἐν οὐρανῷ, ὅπου οὔτε σὴς οὔτε βρῶσις

ἀφανίζει, καὶ ὅπου κλέπται οὐ διορύσσουσιν οὐδὲ

κλέπτουσιν· ὅπου γάρ ἐστιν ὁ θησαυρός σου, ἐκεῖ

ἔσται καὶ ἡ καρδίασου,

and have any conﬁdence thatthis,

Do not lay up for yourselves treasures on earth, where

moth and rust destroy and where thieves break in and

steal,but lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where

neither moth nor rust destroys and where thieves do not

break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there your

heart will be also (Matt. 6:19–21),

means the same thing?

Well, the answer is, “Yes, but not without a lot of work.”

Any translation project requires years of eort ﬁrst in under-

standing the meaning and structure of both languages and

then in ﬁnding words and structures in the target language

that accurately capture the meaning of the original. To put it

less technically, translation is a matter of understanding the

meaning of a word or sentence and then laboring to say the

same thing in dierent words that will be understandable to a

dierent person.

Now all that may sound hopelessly dicult, but if you

think about it, even within our English language, we do this

kind of thing all the time. For example, I have two sons who are

32 Why Trust the Bible?

nearing their teenage years, and I also have a father who would

very much like to be able to communicate with his grandsons.

Sometimes, though, believe it or not, that’s signiﬁcantly more

dicult than you might imagine! It’s not as if the three of

them speak dierent languages either; they’re all native Eng-

lish speakers. But even so, as the guy in the middle, I often ﬁnd

myself having to translate betweenthem.

For example, when my son says something like, “Yo, it’s chill,

bro,” my dad will look at me as if the boy has broken out in

some ancient Egyptian or something. That’s because, with the

exception of the word it’s, my father has absolutely no idea what

any of the other words in that sentence mean. At that point,

it’s my job to start doing the work of translation—of thinking

about the meaning of each word my son said and trying to come

up with some other word or words that my dad will understand.

Now usually, I just translate the sentence all at once. “What

he means, Dad, is that everything is okay. He’s happy.” But if

I wanted to be really careful about it, I would need to explain

each word in turn, likethis:

• Yo is a customary but informal greeting in Kidspeak. Its

Boomerspeak equivalent would be something like hi or hey.

• Chill in Kidspeak does not mean “cold.” It communicates

that a situation or a person is copacetic, happy, okay. It’s

actually a modern derivative of the common Boomerspeak

word cool, as in “It’s cool; I’m cool; everything is cool.”

• Bro is a term of friendship and endearment, a shortened

form of the word brother. But that doesn’t mean a person

has to be a blood relative to be your bro. It might best be

Lost in Translation? 33

translated into Boomerspeak as friend, or more colloqui-

ally, man.

So, putting it all together, we can translate the Kidspeak

sentence “Yo, it’s chill, bro” into Boomerspeak as “Hey, it’s

all okay, man.” And hearing that, my dad’s eyes light up with

understanding, he gives my son a smile and a thumbs-up,

and they share a moment of genuine and accurate—though

translated—communication. “That’s gnarly!” my dad says.

And then we’re o to the translation races again!

I know, I know, that’s a ridiculously simplistic picture of

what the hard work of translation really requires, and those

who do that work—whether we’re talking about the Bible or

any other great literature or even the translation necessary

to make our global society work every day—they are heroes.

The point I’m trying to make, even with this slightly outland-

ish example, is not that translation is easy or simple but that

it’s possible. It really is possible for genuine, accurate, correct

communication to occur through translation.

This means no one can make a “case closed” objection

to the historical reliability of the Bible simply because we’re

reading English translations of Greek and Hebrew documents.

Scholars have been studying Greek, Hebrew, Aramaic, and

English literally for centuries, and they are able to translate

accurately and precisely between those four languages.

Why So Many Bible Versions?

If that’s true, then why are there so many dierent translations

of the Bible? Go into any Christian bookstore, and you can

34 Why Trust the Bible?

ﬁnd an entire shelf—sometimes an entire section!—of dier-

ent Bible translations. There’s the King James Version (KJV),

the New King James Version (NKJV), and the Revised Stan-

dard Version (RSV). There’s the Holman Christian Standard

Bible (HCSB) and the English Standard Version (ESV) and the

New Living Translation (NLT) and the New International Ver-

sion (NIV). And then, to top it all o, many of these have

other editions, like the military edition, the sports edition, the

men’s and women’s and teenagers’ and students’ and business-

person’s editions.Why?

Is it because the people who worked on the ESV thought the

people who worked on the NIV got the Bible largely wrong?

Or because the KJV committees translated the Bible so badly

that the RSV translators had to correct it all? For that matter,

does the book of John change when it addresses men, women,

athletes, or soldiers?

In short, the answer to all these questions is “no.” When it

comes to the dierent editions of the Bible aimed at students

or men or women or soldiers, all those are simply marketing

packages in which the actual text of the Bible remains the

same. They dier only in the additional items that accompany

the text—the introductory content, the study notes, the devo-

tional articles, and other material. There’s no reason at all to

think the presence of both a men’s study Bible and a women’s

study Bible in your local bookstore introduces any confusion

at all into the meaning of the biblicaltext.

But what about the various translations themselves? Don’t

they render the Bible so dierently from each other that we

Lost in Translation? 35

really can’t be sure at all about the original meaning? That’s

a good question, but in reality, even when dierent transla-

tions use dierent words to render the same Greek or Hebrew

phrase, that does not necessarily—or even very often at all—

leave us with any doubt about what the original was saying.

Think again about our example of the Kidspeak sentence,

“Yo, it’s chill, bro.” I could have translated that sentence to my

dad in a number ofways:

• “Hey, it’s all good, man.”

• “Listen, everything is okay, my friend.”

• “You know what? The situation is copacetic, loved one.”

The speciﬁc words dier in all these translations. But even so,

is there really any doubt about what “Yo, it’s chill, bro” is com-

municating? Whichever of these translations you use, what the

sentence means is that my son wants someone with whom he is

in a friendly relationship to be aware that he does not think his

current situation is problematic; he’s satisﬁed withit.

You can do the same sort of thing with verses in the Bible.

Let’s take one at random and look at how several translations

render it. I just asked my wife to name one of the four Gospels.

“Mark,” shesaid.

“Now pick a number between one and ﬁfteen.”

“Ten!”

“And another number between one and ﬁfty-two.”

“Fifty!”

So let’s look at Mark 10:50 and see how several English

Bibles translate that verse. Here it is in the original Greek:

36 Why Trust the Bible?

ὁ δὲ άποβαλῶν τὸ ἱμάτιον αὐτοῦ ἀναπηδήσας ἦλθεν

πρὸς τὸν Ἰησοῦν.

The English Standard Version translates it likethis:

And throwing o his cloak, he sprang up and came to

Jesus.

Here’s the New American Standard Bible:

Throwing aside his cloak, he jumped up and came to

Jesus.

The New International Version:

Throwing his cloak aside, he jumped to his feet and came

to Jesus.

The New Revised Standard Version:

So throwing o his cloak, he sprang up and came to Jesus.

And the King James Version:

And he, casting away his garment, rose, and came to

Jesus.

Crazy, isn’t it? How on earth are we ever going to get our

heads around what Mark 10:50 is really saying? I mean, sure,

everyone seems to agree that this man came to Jesus, but did

he throw his cloak or cast it? Was it even a cloak at all, or was

it a garment? And for crying out loud, how are we ever sup-

Lost in Translation? 37

posed to determine whether he sprang, jumped, or rose before

he came to Jesus?

Alright, obviously I’m being facetious here. For all the dif-

ferences between these ﬁve translations, it’s really clear what’s

going on. The man quickly takes o his outer piece of clothing,

gets up, and makes his way to Jesus. My point here is simply to

say that dierent translations do not prevent us from knowing

what the original actually meant. In fact, reading two or three

translations side-by-side can many times actually help ﬁll out

the picture of what’s happening.

Still, though, we need to go farther, because obviously not

every verse in the Bible is quite as straightforward as Mark

10:50. Certain words and phrases are indeed dicult to trans-

late, and in those cases, dierent translators will often disagree

about how to render those words or phrases. But even in those

instances, we should keep at least a handful of things ﬁrmly

inmind:

1. Scholars signiﬁcantly disagree about how to translate

only an exceedingly small percentage of words or phrases

in the Bible. These cases also represent an exceedingly

small portion of any given book (or even any chapter) in

the Bible.

2. When there is such disagreement or uncertainty, the best

translations of the Bible will acknowledge that in a foot-

note, making the reader aware of other possible transla-

tions or even noting (as the ESV puts it) that “the meaning

of the Hebrew [or Greek] is uncertain.”

The point is, no

See, for example, the ESV note on Isa. 10:27.

38 Why Trust the Bible?

one is trying to “slip anything through” without telling

us, nor—at this point in the history of English transla-

tions—would they be able to do so even if they wanted to.

3. The sheer number of scholarly translations actually helps

us identify—and avoid!—deliberately misleading trans-

lations. For example, when the New World Translation

(NWT) of the Jehovah’s Witnesses translates John 1:1 as

“and the Word was a god,” it helps to be aware that every

other major translation renders that verse “and the Word

was God.” Clearly, the NWT has done something here

that the other translations reject, and if you studied Greek

long enough to understand its use of articles (a, an, and

the), you would come to the same conclusion the other

translators obviously did—that the NWT has tailored its

“translation” of that verse to protect a particular, idiosyn-

cratic theological doctrine.

4. Once we identify and reject deliberate mistranslations

like that, we can conﬁdently say that not one major doc-

trine of orthodox Christianity rests on a disputed or un-

certain translation of the Bible’s original languages. We

know what the Bible says, and we know what it means.

But one more question arises. Why are there dierent trans-

lations of the Bible in the ﬁrst place? If the signiﬁcantly dis-

puted portions of the text are so rare and if they don’t aect

any major doctrines, then why have people gone to so much

expense and trouble to make all those translations? That’s an

For a more detailed treatment of all these points, see Blomberg, Can We Still Believe the

Bible?, 83–118; Wegner, Journey, 399–404.

Lost in Translation? 39

excellent question, and the answer comes down to recognizing

all the dierent ways people use the Bible in their lives.

Think about it. People read the Bible devotionally, they

preach from it, they use it in Bible studies, they do scholarly

work on it, they study it, they have conversations about doc-

trines from it, they defend their understanding of the faith

with it. And the fact is, for most of these activities, a strict

word-for-word translation of the original Greek or Hebrew

would not be very useful. In fact, it would be incredibly frus-

trating. Just take Mark 10:50 again. If we translated it strictly

word-for-word from the Greek, it would come out sounding

something likethis:

The but he throwing o the cloak his he jumped up he

came to the Jesus.

Sure, you can puzzle it out, and maybe that kind of strict

word-for-word translation would be useful if you’re doing very

careful scholarly work on that verse. But who wants to endure

that when you just want to read the Bible over a cup of coee

in the morning?

That’s the main reason we have dierent translations—for

dierent uses of the Bible. Sometimes a stricter, more word-

for-word translation of the original language is exactly what

you need. But at other times, you want something a bit more

readable, a bit more readily understandable, and so some

translations oer a more phrase-for-phrase (or even thought-

for-thought) approach, smoothing out word order, preferring

English syntax over Greek or Hebrew syntax, and generally

40 Why Trust the Bible?

just rendering the thoughts of the original in a form that an

English-speaking reader will better understand. To put it

slightly more technically, every translation of the Bible has to

aim, to one degree or another, at both accuracy and readability.

Some translation committees take it as their mission to heavily

privilege accuracy and (as we saw with Mark 10:50) necessarily

sacriﬁce readability to a certain degree. Other translation com-

mittees set out to produce a version that is eminently readable,

but that decision necessarily means the translators will have to

rearrange some of the original language’s word order so that

the sentences will sound “right” to an English-languageear.

I hope you can see the point in all this. Nothing in either

the theory or the reality-on-the-ground of Bible translations

introduces the slightest bit of doubt about whether we can re-

ally know what the Bible in its original languages says. In fact,

we do know what it says, and the places where some scholars

disagree are few and far between and ultimately of minor sig-

niﬁcance. The Bible can be and has been translated correctly,

over and over and over again.

Of course, in determining historical reliability, that only

gets us so far. We next have to ask the question, Are we trans-

lating what the authors originally wrote?

In other words, did the people who copied the originals

copy them correctly?

Copies of Copies

of Copies of Copies?

When I was in high school and college, I took a few foreign lan-

guage courses. My favorite by far was Spanish, and though this

won’t sound impressive to you real scholars out there, by the end

of it all I had spent four whole academic years studying that lan-

guage. Fifteen years or so removed from those classes now, I’m

not very good at Spanish anymore—reading it, speaking it, hear-

ing it, anything. In the days when I was really working hard on it,

though, I got pretty good at doing Spanish translations, both from

and to English. Part of that was because my Spanish professor

gave us translation homework every single night. Do you remem-

ber how most college classes were scheduled to meet every other

day—either Monday-Wednesday-Friday or Tuesday-Thursday?

Not Spanish. It was every day, Monday through Friday, which

meant that every night I had a particular passage of either Eng-

lish or Spanish text that I had to translate into the other language

and be ready to discuss in class the nextday.

I was good at it too. By my senior year in college I could

bang out a translation of several hundred words in just a

42 Why Trust the Bible?

couple of hours and be ready at a moment’s notice to explain

the syntax of each and every sentence. Once or twice, though,

I learned a rough, painful lesson when I arrived at class: no

matter how good my translations were, it didn’t matter if I had

looked at the wrong page and translated the wrong passage!

Sometimes people will make a similar charge about the

Bible—that even if we are able to say conﬁdently that we’re

translating accurately, there’s no way we can be conﬁdent that

we’re translating the right thing, so it’s all useless anyway. The

charge is not so much that we have the wrong documents.

It’s that because we don’t have the original documents writ-

ten by the authors’ own hands, the copies we do have must

be hopelessly corrupt, and therefore we can’t possibly know

what the authors originally wrote. And if that’s true, the ar-

gument goes, then it’s meaningless to carry on the discussion

any further.

One American magazine made this very point sharply:

No television preacher has ever read the Bible. Neither has

any evangelical politician. Neither has the pope. Neither

have I. And neither have you. At best, we’ve all read a bad

translation—a translation of translations of translations

of hand-copied copies of copies of copies of copies, and

on and on, hundreds of times.

Now, we’ve already dealt with the “bad translation” charge

in this book; it’s not true, and if that’s not clear to you, perhaps

Kurt Eichenwald, “The Bible: So Misunderstood It’s a Sin,” Newsweek, December 23, 2014,

http:// www .newsweek .com /2015 /01 /02 /thats -not -what -bible -says -294018 .html.

Copies of Copies of Copies of Copies? 43

you should go back and read chapter2 again. Moreover, it’s

also not true that we’re dealing with “a translation of transla-

tions of translations,” as if the original Greek ﬁrst went into

Chinese, which went into German, which went into Polish, and

ﬁnally we got around to putting it into English. No, we’re able

to translate directly from the original Greek and Hebrew into

English and other languages, so at worst we’re dealing with a

translation, full stop. But what should we say about that last

idea, the charge that all we have available to us are “hand-

copied copies of copies of copies of copies?”

Copypock. Er, I mean, poppycock. That’s what we

shouldsay.

We Don’t Have the Originals—So What Now?

Let’s think about the question of transmission—that is, can we

be conﬁdent that the original text of the Bible was transmitted

accurately to us through the centuries? As we consider this

question, right o the bat we should acknowledge the gigantic

glittering elephant standing in the room: we don’t have the

originals.

Whatever pieces of paper Luke, John, and Paul used to

write the Gospel of Luke, the Gospel of John, and the epistle

to the Romans have been lost to history, and it’s highly unlikely

that we will ever ﬁnd a biblical manuscript about which we can

say, “We are 100 percent certain that this is the original piece of

For this chapter, I have relied especially on CraigL. Blomberg, Can We Still Believe the Bible?

An Evangelical Engagement with Contemporary Questions (Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos, 2014);

PaulD. Wegner, The Journey from Texts to Translations: The Origin and Development of the

Bible (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 1999).

44 Why Trust the Bible?

paper on which the author wrote.”

But before we throw our

hands up and drop into despair, let’s think about that point for

a minute. How important is it, really, that we have the original

piece of paper? I mean, it would deﬁnitely be neat. When I

visited London a few years ago, I attended the exhibition Trea-

sures of the British Library, which displayed some of the most

valuable cultural and historical artifacts in the world, the most

treasured and sacred relics that the curators could dig out of

the hallowed archives of the British Library. It was an amazing

collection. Right there displayed before me were Magna Carta;

Gutenberg’s Bible of 1455; Handel’s Messiah written in his

own hand; Codex Sinaiticus, the earliest known complete copy

of the New Testament; Leonardo da Vinci’s notebook; and

(silence please) the original lyrics to the Beatles song “Help!”

as John Lennon scratched them onto a piece of scrap paper.

Ladies and gentlemen, I’m very pleased to announce that

we know, beyond a shadow of doubt, the original lyrics to

“Help!” as the Beatles wrote them. We can see them on the

napkin. And in its way, I admit that’s very cool. I’m not sure it

reaches the Treasures of the British Library level of cool, but

it’s cool nonetheless.

But here’s the thing. Is possessing the original piece of

paper the only way we can have any conﬁdence that what we

do have is in fact what the authors themselves wrote? I mean,

are we forever doomed to say that we don’t really have any idea

what Homer or Plato wrote because we don’t have the pieces

Ancient writers didn’t actually write on paper but rather on papyrus or vellum or even, later,

parchment. But as a shorthand for this book, paper will suce.

Copies of Copies of Copies of Copies? 45

of paper on which they wrote The Odyssey or The Republic? Is

“Help!” the only Beatles song we’ll ever really know the lyrics

to? Certainly not! And to say so would be ridiculously pedan-

tic. So what about the documents of the Bible? Are we really

left simply to give up and admit that we only possess a bunch

of useless copies of copies of copies of copies and that we’ll

never have any conﬁdence that the remaining copies accurately

reﬂect what the authors actually wrote?

Well, no, we’re not left to that despairing conclusion. In

fact, even though we don’t have the Bible’s original pieces of

paper, we can in fact be highly conﬁdent that we know what

those original pieces of paper said. Now how can thatbe?

The key to answering that question lies in the fact that even

though we don’t have the originals, we do have thousands of

other pieces of paper (that is, papyrus, vellum, and parch-

ment) that contain original-language text from each book of

the Bible—about 5,400 distinct pieces when it comes to the

New Testament. We’re not even talking here about pieces of

paper from modern printing presses; we’re talking about an-

cient manuscripts from before the invention of the printing

press, many of which go back to the third, second, and even

(perhaps?) ﬁrst centuries. Some of those manuscripts contain

whole copies of biblical books; others have been partially de-

stroyed so that only portions of books remain. Still others are

literally mere fragments of what were once much larger manu-

scripts. Again, none of these documents are the originals of the

Bible; they’re all copies of something older. But we’ve found

them scattered all over what used to be the Roman Empire,

46 Why Trust the Bible?

hidden in caves, buried in ancient ruins, or even—believe it or

not—deposited in the ancient trash heaps of an abandoned

Egyptian city! Moreover, once experts dated these fragments

of text, we discovered that they hail from the ﬁrst three or four

centuries of Christian history.

Now what makes all these manuscripts and fragments in-

teresting—or problematic, depending on how you look at it—

is that at certain places they dier from each other, even when

they’re supposed to be copies of the same exact portion of the

Bible. So, for example, one manuscript of Matthew’s Gospel

quotes Pontius Pilate as saying, “I am innocent of this man’s

blood” (Matt. 27:24), while a fragment of the same book from

another place or from a later century quotes Pilate as saying,

“I am innocent of this righteous blood,” while still another

quotes him as saying, “I am innocent of this righteous man’s

blood.”

So what gives? Obviously, at least once and perhaps

more than once, someone inaccurately copied the original

words that Matthew wrote.

Some people look at all this—the 5,400 manuscripts or

fragments with all their variations—and say, “No way. There’s

no way we can know what the originals said. The surviving

copies are too far removed and too corrupted for us to have

any conﬁdence at all that we know what the authors originally

wrote.” That conclusion, though, just goes way too far. Here’s

why. For one thing, the problems that skeptics often cite as

arising from all this—that the manuscripts we have are too far

For detailed information on extant New Testament manuscripts, see, for example, Wegner,

Journey, 235–42.

See the ESV textual note on Matt. 27:24.

Copies of Copies of Copies of Copies? 47

removed in time from the originals and that they’re absolutely

riddled with variations—are not nearly so bad as some people

make them out to be. And for another thing, it turns out that

it’s precisely the existence of those thousands of copies, from

all over the empire and with all their variations, that allows

us to reconstruct with a huge degree of conﬁdence what the

originalssaid.

Let me try to explain all that, one step at atime.

Mind the Gap!

First of all, the charge is often made that the documents we

have are so hopelessly removed in time from the originals that

we might as well give up trying to ﬁgure out what the origi-

nals said. After all, the New Testament originals were all writ-

ten in the mid-to-late ﬁrst century, and the earliest copies of

them that we have are from about AD 125, 150, and 200. That

means a gap of some forty-ﬁve to seventy-ﬁve years separates

the earliest copies we have from the originals. Now that sounds

fairly problematic to most of us because, for some reason, we

imagine that seventy-ﬁve years is a lot of time—enough time in

fact for copies of copies of copies to be made and subsequently

lost so that we have no idea what the originals actually looked

like. But that’s not a fair assumption at all, especially when

you realize that books in general were far more valuable to an-

cient people than they are to us today and that they, therefore,

probably kept better care of them than we do. Even now, when

we’re able to print books every year by the millions, you can

walk into just about any used bookstore and ﬁnd books that

48 Why Trust the Bible?

are one or two or even three hundred years old. People make

their books last! And that was even more the case in ancient

times, when literally weeks of labor would go into copying a

book. Scholars have learned from looking in old libraries that

people regularly used books for 100–150 years before making

a new copy and discarding theold.

We see one fascinating example of this practice in what we

call the Codex Vaticanus, a copy of the New Testament that

was originally made in the fourth century but that scribes re-

inked in the tenth century so it could continue to be used. Do

you see what that means? Codex Vaticanus was still in use six

hundred years after it was originally made! Here’s the point:

when books were regularly kept in use for literally hundreds of

years, a gap of forty-ﬁve to seventy-ﬁve years between the origi-

nal New Testament documents and our earliest extant (extant

means surviving or existent) copies is just not that long. In

fact, it’s more than a little likely that the originals, penned by

the authors themselves, would have been preserved and used

to make countless new copies over decades or even centuries

before they were lost. Therefore the claim that all we have are

“copies of copies of copies of copies” of the originals is far

overwrought. Indeed, it’s very well within the realm of pos-

sibility that we have in our own museums today copies of the

originals, fullstop.

Also, when you consider the gap that exists between the

originals and the earliest extant copies of other ancient works,

you can see very quickly just how small the “gap” for the New

Testament really is. For example, for Thucydides’s History of

Copies of Copies of Copies of Copies? 49

the Peloponnesian War, we have exactly eight extant manu-

scripts, the earliest of which is thirteen hundred years removed

from the original! For Julius Caesar’s Gallic Wars, we have a

total of nine or ten readable copies (depending on your sense

of what’s “readable”), the earliest of which dates nine hun-

dred years later than the original. For Tacitus’s Histories and

Annals, written in the ﬁrst century, two manuscripts survive,

one dating from the ninth century and the other from the elev-

enth—eight hundred and one thousand years, respectively,

later than the extant copies. You can easily see the point here:

No one screams, “Mind the gap!” when it comes to other an-

cient literature. Only the New Testament receives that kind of

treatment.

Four Hundred Thousand Differences?

On to the second charge, that the manuscripts we do have are

so riddled with dierences, or variants, that it’s hopeless to

think we can ever have any conﬁdence at all about what the

originals said. One scholar has asserted that the New Testa-

ment manuscripts available to us contain, astonishingly, up to

four hundred thousand variants! (The reason we have to say

“up to,” of course, is because nobody has sat down to count.

So even this particular scholar resorts to saying that “some say

there are 200,000 variants known, some say 300,000, some say

400,000 or more!”)

At any rate, we should note several things

about this charge:

BartD. Ehrman, Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why (San

Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2005), 89.

50 Why Trust the Bible?

1. The manuscripts are not in fact riddled with variants, and

that four hundred thousand number is not nearly as scary

as it seems at ﬁrst, if it’s even accurate. That’s because the

scholar who used that number looked not just at the ﬁve

thousand extant original-Greek manuscripts that predate

the printing press but also at ten thousand other manu-

scripts in other languages, and then on top of that, at an-

other ten thousand or so instances where people quoted

the New Testament during the ﬁrst six hundred years of

church history! Put all that together, and you’re really

talking about four hundred thousand variants (perhaps,

or maybe it’s three hundred thousand or two hundred

thousand...) spread out over some twenty-ﬁve thousand

manuscripts and quotations covering six hundred years,

which at the far upper end comes out to only about six-

teen variants per manuscript. To put it nicely, that’s really

not very many.

2. Keep in mind that “four hundred thousand variants”

here doesn’t mean four hundred thousand unique read-

ings. What it means is that if one manuscript says, “I

am innocent of this man’s blood” and ten others say,

“I am innocent of this righteous blood,” then you get to

count all eleven as “variants.” Factor that in, and that

scary four hundred thousand number becomes near

meaningless.

3. Finally, it’s not as if the variants in all those twenty-ﬁve

thousand manuscripts just show up randomly every-

where; rather, they tend to cluster around the same few

places in the text over and over again, which means that

Copies of Copies of Copies of Copies? 51

the number of actual places in the New Testament text

that are really at issue is surprisingly small.

The point is that when you think about it beyond the sound

bites, you don’t get a picture of a mountain of copies with so

many variants that we can’t make heads or tails of it. Not even

close. On the contrary, you get a picture of a remarkably stable

transmission (that is, copy-making) history for the vast ma-

jority of the New Testament and a few isolated places where

some genuine doubt about the original text has given rise to a

relatively large number of variations.

In short, the scribes did a remarkably goodjob.

Like Solving a Logic Puzzle

But we need to discuss one more critically important thing

here: in the places of the New Testament where we are faced

with variants, believe it or not, it is precisely the existence of

those variants that allows us to piece together what the original

document most likely said. Let me show you what Imean.

Using variants to ﬁgure out what the original said is a lot like

solving a logic puzzle. And the whole thing rests on the notion

that when variants appear in the copies, we can usually identify

not only that a scribe introduced a variation into his copy but

also why he did so. Scribes introduced variants for all kinds of

reasons. Sometimes it was purely accidental. For example, 1et-

ters that looked similar miqht be switcheb out for each other;

one word might be substituted for another won that sounded the

For a more detailed treatment of these points, see Blomberg, Can We Still Believe the

Bible?, 13–28.

52 Why Trust the Bible?

same when read; words might skipped; words or letters might

be be doubled; even whole sections might be skipped when the

same word was used a few lines apart. (Go ahead, read that

sentence again ... there be Easter eggs hidden there!)

At other times, the changes introduced were very deliber-

ate. So a scribe might decide that a word or name was mis-

spelled and “correct” it; he might change something in one

passage so that it would agree with another passage or even

“ﬁx” a word or two to clear up “problems” he perceived; or he

might add something to the text in order to “clarify” what the

reader should take fromit.

Now here’s where the fun starts, because once you can iden-

tify why a scribe made a certain change as he copied, you can

get a very good idea of what the original said before he changed

it. Here’s a very simple example: Imagine that all you have is a

fragment of a copy of a lost manuscript that reads, “Roses are

read, violets are blue.” It’s not that hard to see what happened

as the original was copied, is it? If we can give the original au-

thor the beneﬁt of the doubt that he didn’t write the nonsense

phrase “Roses are read,” then we can pretty conﬁdently say that

the scribe who made the copy simply misspelled the word red

and that the original said, “Roses are red, violets are blue.”

Here’s a slightly more complicated example. Let’s say you

have two fragments, both copies of a long-lost original. One

of those copies (we’ll call it fragment A) reads:

Now we are engaged in a great civil war. We have come to

dedicate a portion of that ﬁeld, as a ﬁnal resting place for

those who here gave their lives that that nation mightlive.

Copies of Copies of Copies of Copies? 53

The other copy (fragment B) reads:

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether

that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated,

can long endure. We are met on a great battle-ﬁeld of that

war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that ﬁeld, as

a ﬁnal resting place for those who here gave their lives so

that the nation of which we speak mightlive.

Alright. Go ahead and take a minute or two to ﬁgure out

the variations at issue here. There are two of them. Then

readon.

Okay, did you see them? Most noticeably, fragment A is

signiﬁcantly shorter. It leaves out the entire segment “testing

whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedi-

cated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-ﬁeld of

that war.” Also, the two fragments disagree about the last sen-

tence. Did the original speak of those who gave their lives “so

that that nation might live” or “so that the nation of which we

speak might live”?

Let’s start with the ﬁrst variation, the omitted phrase about

meeting on “a great battle-ﬁeld” of the war. Is there any good

reason to think that a copyist would add all those words to an

original that didn’t include them? Not really; at least I can’t

think of any. So if not, is there anything that might explain

why he would omit them? Yes. See how the word war shows

up twice in fragment B? In fact, those two occurrences kind of

bracket the words that were omitted in fragment A. If the word

war occurred twice in the original as well (especially if both

54 Why Trust the Bible?

times it appeared, say, at the end or beginning of a line), then

that would provide a natural and easy place for the copyist’s

eye to “skip” accidentally from one occurrence to the other,

and that would explain why he would have inadvertently omit-

ted the words between them. Given that logic, we can pretty

conﬁdently say that the longer reading, in fragment B, more

likely reﬂects the original.

What about the second variation? Is there any good reason

why a copyist would amend an original that said “that the na-

tion of which we speak might live” to “that that nation might

live”? Probably not. After all, the phrase “that that nation” is

just awkward. Therefore it’s more likely that a copyist would

“correct” the “that that” phrasing to something less grating on

the ear. For that reason, we should probably conclude that the

harder reading in fragment A reﬂects the original.

Given all this, we can come to solid conclusions that frag-

ment B probably reﬂects the original on the ﬁrst variation

(because the copyist’s eye skipped from “war” to “war”) and

that fragment A reﬂects the original on the second variation

(because a copyist wouldn’t “correct” the original to say “that

that.”) Therefore, we should reconstruct the original likethis:

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether

that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated,

can long endure. We are met on a great battle-ﬁeld of that

war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that ﬁeld, as a

ﬁnal resting place for those who here gave their lives that

that nation mightlive.

Copies of Copies of Copies of Copies? 55

Do you see? Just by reasoning through why copyists might

make certain changes, we’re able to arrive at a conﬁdent con-

clusion about what the original document actually said, even

though our ﬁnal version is not entirely reﬂected in either of the

fragments we actually have. Neat,huh?

Well, that’s exactly the kind of work scholars have done

for centuries on the fragments and manuscripts of the New

Testament available to us. Many of the puzzles they face, of

course, are far more complicated than these simple examples,

but you get the idea. By comparing the surviving ancient cop-

ies and thinking carefully about why copyists might have made

certain changes or errors, scholars can reach highly conﬁdent

conclusions about what the original documents actually said.

It’s not a matter of guesswork or magic, much less of assump-

tion or simply “making things up,” but rather of careful deduc-

tive reasoning.

An actual example from the New Testament might help

make the point. Existing manuscripts dier as to whether Mat-

thew 5:22 originallyread,

But I say to you that everyone who is angry with his

brother will be liable to judgment.

But I say to you that everyone who is angry with his

brother without cause will be liable to judgment.

The variation is clear, and so is the solution. What scribe would

delete the words “without cause” when those words actually

56 Why Trust the Bible?

make this teaching of Jesus so much more palatable? Probably

not many. Far more likely is that a scribe choked intellectually

on the bare idea that someone who is angry with his brother

would be liable to judgment and decided to “help Jesus out”

by “clarifying” his teaching with the phrase “without cause.”

Because it’s the harder reading, therefore, the ﬁrst option most

likely reﬂects the original. And for that reason, almost all the

major translations leave out the phrase “without cause,” sim-

ply putting it in a footnote at the bottom of thepage.

We Know What They Wrote

Before we conclude this issue, we should make another point

or two. First, it’s worth noting that the vast majority of the

textual variants in the manuscript copies we have are just ut-

terly uninteresting and undramatic. They have to do with plu-

ral versus singular pronouns, inverted word order, subjunctive

versus indicative mood, aorist versus perfect tense, and on and

on and on. Booooring! The vast majority don’t actually include

anything that aects how we ultimately understand the mean-

ing of the Bible.

Second, Christian scholars have been exceedingly careful

to document—in actual books that you can buy, if you’re will-

ing to shell out the money—the most signiﬁcant variants along

with an analysis of each one like the kind we’ve done here in this

chapter. Of course you’re free to disagree with any of their con-

clusions; Christians have fun arguing about this kind of thing

all the time, believe it or not. But the point is that, again, there’s

no conspiracy to pull the wool over anyone’s eyes. Where vari-

Copies of Copies of Copies of Copies? 57

ants need to be reckoned with, Christians are wide open about

them, precisely because we believe that those variants—and the

reasons behind why they exist in the ﬁrst place—can help us

determine to a remarkably high degree of probability what the

original documents of the New Testament actuallysaid.

Finally, as with the issue of translation, it turns out that not

a single doctrine of orthodox Christianity depends solely on a

questioned portion of the biblical text. Either the questioned

portions don’t involve anything truly interesting, or if they do,

the very same doctrines expressed in those locations are taught

elsewhere in unquestioned portions of the Bible.

Do you see the point? The charge that we cannot know

what the originals said is patently and utterly false. The gap

between the originals and our earliest extant copies of them

is—in the grand scheme of things—not that long at all. And

far from diminishing our ability to identify what the originals

said, the vast number of existing copies actually allows us to

reason out deductively, to a very high degree of historical con-

ﬁdence, what John, Luke, Paul, and the other writers of the

New Testament actually wrote.

Where We’ve Come So Far

So here’s where we’ve come so far in our investigation of

whether the New Testament documents are historically reli-

able. First, we can indeed be conﬁdent that our translations of

the documents are accurate and correct. Second, we can also be

conﬁdent that we know what the authors of those documents

originally wrote.

58 Why Trust the Bible?

Translation? Check.

Transmission? Check.

But we’re not done yet. Even if we can be conﬁdent that our

translations are accurate and even if we can know to a high

degree of certainty what the authors actually wrote, are we

sure that we’re looking at the right collection of documents?

In other words, why are we so convinced that we should be

looking at these documents, and not those?

Are These Really

the Books You’re

Looking For?

I read The Da Vinci Code. I enjoyed reading The Da Vinci

Code. As a page-turner of an action novel, it was a lot of fun.

I stayed up late following the heroes as they traced clue after

clue, puzzling out ancient riddles and traveling all over Europe.

As of the writing of this book, Google tells me that The Da

Vinci Code has sold over eighty million copies since its publica-

tion. Part of that success, I imagine, stems from Dan Brown’s

aptitude for storytelling, but that can’t fully explain it. Nor can

we point to the soaring literary quality of the book; that’s not

what sold it either. No, what sold The Da Vinci Code is what

every author dreams will happen to one of his or her books—it

ignited a worldwide controversy.

Most of the sensational story that Brown weaves was never

taken seriously by most people. After all, The Da Vinci Code

says right on its front page, “All the characters and events in

this book are ﬁctitious, and any resemblance to actual per-

sons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.” But the massive

60 Why Trust the Bible?

popularity of the book drove some of its claims deep into our

collective understanding, even including those of us who are

Christians. One of those claims is that the Bible as we know

it is a purely artiﬁcial collection of books, perhaps even one

tainted by conspiracy and power plays and evil scheming.

Here’s how one passage of The Da Vinci Code reveals theplot:

“Who chose which gospels to include?” Sophie asked.

“Aha!” Teabing burst in with enthusiasm. “The fun-

damental irony of Christianity! The Bible, as we know it

today, was collated by the pagan Roman emperor Con-

stantine the Great.”

That’s a pretty ham-handed way of putting it, but the story

Brown is peddling here has a long pedigree among scholars who

are skeptical of the Bible. The picture that emerges is that for

the ﬁrst three centuries or so of the church’s existence, a mas-

sive array of documents vied for attention and authority all

over the Roman Empire. Each community of believers, so the

story goes, had their own set of documents that they regarded

as reﬂecting the true teaching of Jesus, and Christianity was a

roiling, boiling, frothing cauldron of beautiful diversity and the

glorious clash of ideas! Then, one dark day in the middle of the

fourth century, a powerful cabal of sour-faced bishops gathered

together in a small beach-resort town called Nicaea (typical,

isn’t it?), and with the backing of their rich patron, the pagan

emperor Constantine, put a swift stop to it all. Publishing a

list of the documents they liked best, these bishops forbade the

Dan Brown, The Da Vinci Code: A Novel (New York: Doubleday, 2003), 231.

Are These Really the Books You’re Looking For? 61

use of any others and began a program of systematically wip-

ing out any dissent and destroying any documents that would

dare provide a perspective on Jesus that diered from their own.

Thus the “canon” of the New Testament was closed—like the

door of a prison—and the world was plunged into darkness.

I may have added an embellishment or two there for dra-

ma’s sake, but I think that’s a pretty good description of the

“movie” that plays in many people’s heads when you raise the

question of the biblical canon and what really belongs in it. At

the very least, most Christians I know would have a hard time

giving a conﬁdent answer to the question, “Are you sure you’re

looking at the right books?”

That’s an important question too, because if our aim is to

arrive at a conﬁdent conclusion that the Bible is historically

reliable, we naturally have to be conﬁdent that we’re looking at

the right documents. If someone really did squelch, crush, de-

stroy, burn, or otherwise suppress other books that tell a dier-

ent but equally reliable story about Jesus, then our conﬁdence

that the Bible gives us a historically accurate story necessarily

weakens considerably.

So that’s the question we need to address in this chapter:

Are these the right documents to be looking at in the ﬁrst

place? In other words, are there (or perhaps were there) other

“Gospels” out there that we ought to be looking at as well—or

even instead? How can we have any conﬁdence that these are

the right documents to be looking at and that others are not?

For this chapter, I have relied especially on CraigL. Blomberg, Can We Still Believe the Bible?

An Evangelical Engagement with Contemporary Questions (Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos, 2014);

F.F. Bruce, The Canon of Scripture (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 1988); C.E. Hill, Who

62 Why Trust the Bible?

What Is a Canon?

When we talk about the biblical canon, what we mean is the list

of books that are accepted by Christians as, among other things,

authoritative sources of information about Jesus. The word

canon actually comes from the Greek language, where it refers

to a rule or standard. You can see why Christians would come to

use that word to refer to their collection of authoritative books;

these are the documents that together and exclusively represent

the standard by which the life and doctrine of Christians are to

be measured, shaped, evaluated, and, if necessary, corrected.

The question, of course, is how exactly that canon—that list

of authoritative books—came about. Did that process give us

conﬁdence to rely on these books to give us accurate information

about what really happened?

Because our initial aim is to arrive at historical conﬁdence

about the resurrection of Jesus, we don’t need to spend much

time now describing and defending the canon of the Old Tes-

tament.

We’ll return to that question in chapter7. For now,

it suces to say that by the time of Jesus, the Old Testament

canon enjoyed near universal agreement, and both Jesus and

his early followers accepted that canon without question.

For our purposes, the real issue is how the New Testament

canon came to be. Much is at stake because these events bear

strongly on how much historical conﬁdence we can have in

Chose the Gospels? Probing the Great Gospel Conspiracy (Oxford: Oxford University Press,

2010); PaulD. Wegner, The Journey from Texts to Translations: The Origin and Development

of the Bible (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 1999).

For a detailed treatment of the canon of the Old Testament and particularly the debate over

the Apocrypha, see Wegner, Journey, 101–30; F.F. Bruce, “Old Testament,” part 2 in The

Canon of Scripture.

Are These Really the Books You’re Looking For? 63

these documents. Here’s why. If the New Testament canon re-

sulted from a nasty conspiracy by powerful people who sup-

pressed other books that had an equal claim to accuracy, then

it would be very hard to conclude that the New Testament as

it stands is historically reliable. Also, if they recognized these

particular books on purely arbitrary grounds—that is, if they

had no good reasons for it—then it would be similarly dicult

to say that these books give us an accurate, reliable picture of

Jesus. Finally, the same could be said if the process was essen-

tially mystical. That is, if there are no historically accessible

reasons for privileging these books and not others except, say,

a personal “feeling” about their truthfulness, then we won’t

be able to have much historical conﬁdence in them. To put it

simply, if we’re going to have historical conﬁdence in what the

New Testament documents tell us, then we have to ask, “Are

our reasons for looking at these books, as opposed to others,

sound?”

To cut to the chase, yes, they are sound. Getting to that

conclusion, though, will take some work. We really need to

do two things. First, we need to dispense with the idea that

so many people adopted in the wake of The Da Vinci Code—

that the New Testament canon was created by a conspiracy of

powerful bishops who acted nastily and unfairly to suppress a

bunch of equally noteworthy documents. And second, we need

to ask if the early Christians had good reasons for privileging

the documents they ﬁnally did. If there was no conspiracy to

suppress other documents and if the early Christians had good

reasons to privilege the documents they did, then we’ll be able

64 Why Trust the Bible?

to say with good conﬁdence that we are, in fact, looking at the

right books.

A Whole Sea of Gospels?

Let’s start by considering whether there was a conspiracy to

suppress other documents. Slice it however you want, that idea

is nothing but arrant nonsense, and there are at least a couple

of reasons for thinkingso.

First of all, it’s just not true that the early church was awash

in a sea of books displaying a rainbowlike diversity of belief

and that they responded (as some colorfully put it) by clearing

a forest of perfectly good books in order to leave only their

favorites standing. Early Christians simply didn’t hold a vast

diversity of beliefs. In fact, the only Christian writings that

have been conﬁdently dated to the ﬁrst century are the very

ones that ﬁnally made up the New Testament. Not only that,

but the next oldest books—dated to the ﬁrst half of the second

century—were written by a group of teachers we’ve come to

call the apostolic fathers, and all those guys were overwhelm-

ingly in doctrinal agreement with the books that eventually

made up the New Testament. Only in the latter part of the

second century—a hundred years after most of the books that

ﬁnally made up the New Testament were written—did docu-

ments start showing up that departed signiﬁcantly from the

teaching of these earliest books. And even then, those later

works show an awareness of the earlier books, which marks

them out as mere challengers to a strong, accepted tradition.

So what’s the point here? The idea that there was a roiling,

Are These Really the Books You’re Looking For? 65

boiling sea of “Gospels” and other documents to choose from

in the ﬁrst two centuries of Christian history is simply untrue.

There were the books of the New Testament, and then—a

century later—there were the books that emerged trying to

challengethem.

Second, the conspiracy theories all depend on this roil-

ing, boiling sea persisting for several centuries before fourth-

century bishops shut it down, but the church seems to have

recognized the books of our New Testament as authoritative

much earlier than any conspiracy theory’s timeline allows.

Usually, skeptics claim that no canon existed until some coun-

cil or bishop codiﬁed it in the fourth century. But actually, the

evidence shows that, although the church debated the author-

ity of a handful of New Testament books into the fourth cen-

tury, Christians widely recognized the vast majority of what we

know as our New Testament as authoritative no later than the

end of the second century. In fact, they widely recognized most

of these books (including most of Paul’s writings) as having

such authority by the end of the ﬁrst century.

When it comes to the four Gospels themselves—Matthew,

Mark, Luke, and John—we have good reasons to think that

the church had identiﬁed them as exclusively authoritative

very early on, much earlier than the fourth century. One very

interesting witness to this discussion is the bishop Irenaeus

of Lyons, who wrote in about AD 180 that it was ﬁtting for

God to give the church four Gospels because there are four

corners of the earth and four winds. Now, over the years,

some people have had no end of fun mocking Irenaeus on this

66 Why Trust the Bible?

point; what sort of moron, they say, makes the claim, “There

are four winds, so of course there must be four Gospels”?

How does he expect that to convince anyone? But come on.

Irenaeus isn’t trying to make a logical argument here. He’s

not mainly trying to convince skeptics with this reasoning.

No, what he’s doing is making an aesthetic point about how

beautiful and ﬁtting and right it is that Christians have four

Gospels, a point that would resonate primarily with people

who were already convinced and needed only to be conﬁrmed

in that conviction. And therein lies the historical point. That

Irenaeus would make that kind of argument—not so much

trying to persuade skeptics as rejoicing with and arming

already-true believers—shows a widespread recognition, all

the way back in AD 180, that there were indeed four Gospels

and only four Gospels.

But the thread doesn’t end there. Going back even further,

the apologist Justin Martyr (writing in about AD 150) seems

to have accepted four authoritative Gospels, as did a fellow

named Papias writing as early as AD 110. And to top it o,

there’s even some intriguing evidence that Papias cited the

apostle John himself as accepting the three other Gospels as

well as writing one of his own.

Here’s the point. The commonly accepted picture of early

Christianity as a frothy hotbed of diverse gospel writers and

epistle writers, all vying equally for acceptance until a bunch

of fourth-century bishops and their pagan emperor shut them

down and wiped them out, is just sell-a-book nonsense. The

For this argument, see Hill, Who Chose the Gospels?, 207–25.

Are These Really the Books You’re Looking For? 67

historical reality is that the vast majority of the New Testa-

ment documents, especially the four Gospels, were identi-

ﬁed and recognized as authoritative extremely early on, and

writings claiming to “challenge” that general consensus only

started showing up a century or so later. Now if that’s true,

then we’ve taken an important step toward establishing his-

torical conﬁdence in the New Testament canon: there simply

was no conspiracy to privilege those books and suppress other

“equally plausible but embarrassing”ones.

They Didn’t Choose—They Received

Even so, another question remains. Even if the New Testa-

ment documents weren’t canonized under false or malevolent

pretenses, we have to ask if the early Christians ultimately had

plausible, historically valid reasons for choosing the docu-

ments they did for canonization.

But hold up. I just badly misspoke in the previous para-

graph. The early Christians would actually never have talked

about themselves “choosing” which books should be in-

cluded in the canon. You might as well ask them, “Why did

you choose the parents you did?” as “Why did you choose the

books youdid?”

The fact is, those early Christians simply didn’t think of

it like that at all. Over and over again when they wrote about

which books were included in the canon and which were not,

they used language such as “we received” and “these books

were handed down.” Their understanding of their role in the

68 Why Trust the Bible?

process was not that of a judging, pointing, choosing ﬁnger but

rather that of an upturned, open, receivinghand.

Look, this isn’t just a semantic point either, or even a spiri-

tual one (yet). It’s a historical one, and it bears heavily on our

mental picture of how the process of canonization happened.

The idea that the early church “chose” which books to canon-

ize implies that they started with a blank slate and a group of

undierentiated books and then began a process of evaluating

those books and deciding which ones they should privilege. But

it never happened like that, not for a single one of the early

Christians. In fact, every one of them—indeed, every genera-

tion—began not with a blank slate but rather with a group of

authoritative books that they had inherited from the previous

generation and which that generation in turn had inherited from

the generation before them and so on and so on all the way back

to the apostles themselves. True, occasionally someone would

challenge that inherited set of books in one way or another, and

the Christians would have to deal with that. But the fact remains

that they simply didn’t talk about choosing or deciding but only

about receiving what was handed down. Theirs was a funda-

mentally humble posture. They received; they did not choose.

They Had Good Reasons

Still, we can ask how those early Christians could remain so

conﬁdent that the writings they recognized as authoritative

were indeed the right ones. When challenges to the inherited

tradition arose—some saying that this or that book didn’t be-

long, others insisting that this or that book did belong—how

Are These Really the Books You’re Looking For? 69

did they answer? Did the early Christians have any solid criteria

for saying, “Yes, we’re actually very conﬁdent this received book

belongs, and here’s why,” or, “No, we’re quite sure that book

does not belong, and here’s why it fails”? In other words, did

they just blindly receive what was handed down to them, or did

they have good, plausible reasons for accepting those books?

The answer is that they did, in fact, have such reasons—

such criteria—and four of them seem to have become their pri-

mary tests: apostolicity, antiquity, orthodoxy, and universality.

If we had time and space, we would simply canvass all the

early sources in which Christians discussed why the church

should or should not receive certain books as authoritative,

and through that study we would see these four criteria (and

others) emerge. We don’t, however, have that time or space—

this is a short book after all! Fortunately, one early document

exhibits at least three of these four criteria being used in one

place. That document, called the Muratorian Canon (or

Muratorian Fragment), is a seventh- or eighth-century Latin

translation of a document that was written originally in Greek

probably in the late second century. You can see the full text

of it in any good, comprehensive book on the canon (see the

appendix), but here it will be enough to quote a few sentences

that illustrate how it put our criteria to use. Let’s start with the

most important: apostolicity.

Reason 1: Apostolicity

Apostolicity is a complicated word with a simple meaning.

Quite straightforwardly, it points to a document’s having been

70 Why Trust the Bible?

written either by an apostle of Jesus or by a close companion

of an apostle of Jesus. Over and over again, the author of the

Muratorian Canon relies on that test in particular to defend

canonical books. So he says, for example, “The fourth of the

Gospels was written by John, one of the disciples.” Of the

Gospel of Luke, he says that it was written “on Paul’s author-

ity by Luke,” and similarly he says of Paul’s letters that “the

blessed apostle Paul himself ... writes ... by name to seven

churches.”

Apostolicity was by far the most important criterion the

early church used to identify and defend canonicity. The idea

was profoundly simple and powerful: Not just anyone could

write a book about Jesus and expect the church to recognize it

as holy Scripture. No, that level of authority was reserved for

those whom Jesus himself had speciﬁcally appointed apostles

and for a select few close companions of the apostles.

One interesting thing to notice here is how so many would-

be Scripture authors in the second through sixth centuries tried

to fool the church by slapping the names of apostles and other

ﬁrst-century followers of Jesus onto their documents! Why

did they do that? Simple: they knew they didn’t have a chance

in the world of being recognized as authoritative unless they

could pass o their books as originating with an apostle or an

apostolic companion.

Quoted in Wegner, Journey, 147, and in J.Stevenson, ed., A New Eusebius: Documents Il-

lustrating the History of the Church to AD 337, 3rd ed., rev. W.H.C. Frend (Grand Rapids,

MI: Baker Academic, 2013), 137–38.

Are These Really the Books You’re Looking For? 71

Reason 2: Antiquity

The criterion of antiquity was closely related to that of apos-

tolicity and, in fact, was probably used primarily to help deter-

mine whether a book was indeed apostolic. To put it simply, in

order for a book to have an apostle’s authority, it would have to

be old, dating to the ﬁrst century. Books written more recently

than that simply didn’t qualify because the apostles were all

dead by the turn of the second century. Antiquity, therefore,

didn’t assure canonicity, but a lack of antiquity immediately

preventedit.

This is exactly what we see in the Muratorian Canon, which

rejects a book called The Shepherd of Hermas because it “was

written quite lately in our times in the city of Rome by Hermas

... and therefore ... it cannot to the end of time be publicly

read in the church to the people, either among the prophets,

who are complete in number, or among the Apostles.”

New-

bies, the early Christians said, need not apply!

Reason 3: Orthodoxy

The third criterion of canonization was that a book had to be

in agreement with the standard of truth reﬂected in the doctri-

nal tradition handed down from Jesus himself. At ﬁrst, much

of that tradition was oral, passed down through the years by

word of mouth. But as time passed and various Gospels and

epistles were written and subsequently received as authorita-

tive, the canon itself became the standard against which other

books were measured. Thus, if a book showed up teaching

Quoted in Wegner, Journey, 148; Stevenson, New Eusebius, 138.

72 Why Trust the Bible?

something contrary to the already-recognized authoritative

books, it was rejected. So the author of the Muratorian Canon

says of the four Gospels, “Though various ideas are taught in

the several books of the Gospels, it makes no dierence to the

faith of believers, since by one sovereign Spirit all things are

declared in all of them concerning the Nativity, the Passion,

the Resurrection, the conversation with his disciples, [and] his

two comings.”

Not only were the four Gospels apostolic and

old; they were also consistent with the standard of truth and

therefore to be received as authoritative without hesitation.

Reason 4: Universality

One more criterion proved important in the early church’s de-

fense of its received canon: universality. This idea held that the

only books recognized as authoritative were those that Chris-

tians in every part of the known world used and valued. If a

book rose out of a speciﬁc sect or was only used in one par-

ticular part of the world, that book was rejected. On the other

hand, a book that was questioned for some reason could ﬁnd

its case greatly strengthened if it was being used by Christians

all over the world. Indeed, the widespread use of both Hebrews

and Revelation contributed to both these books ﬁnally being

recognized as canonical.

So . . . Do We Have the Right Books?

Okay, so where does all this leave us? Well, it leaves us ﬁrst of

all with the ﬁrm conclusion that the New Testament canon

Quoted in Wegner, Journey, 147; Stevenson, New Eusebius, 137.

Are These Really the Books You’re Looking For? 73

resulted not from some nefarious, late-in-the-day conspiracy

to privilege one set of books and suppress others that would

have given us “a dierent perspective” on Jesus. The fact is,

there weren’t any such “others,” not until much later, and only

then as a reactive challenge to an established and increasingly

strong tradition. It also leaves us with good conﬁdence that the

early Christians didn’t simply appeal to mysticism or random-

ness or a vague feeling of truthiness, as we say today, to defend

their canon. On the contrary, they had good, plausible, even

historically meaningful reasons for explaining why these books

as opposed to any others were the best ones for preserving the

life and teachings of Jesus: they were apostolic (and therefore

ancient as well), they stood in agreement with the truth as it had

been handed down for generations, and Christians the world

over valued them and recognized them as authoritative.

So when it comes to the question, “Do we have the right

books?” think of it like this: not one of the documents that

make up our New Testament ultimately failed any of these

very reasonable tests. Sure, a handful of our books took a

while longer to satisfy the tests than others, but in the end,

the church recognized each and every one of them as having

fully and completely satisﬁed the criteria for authoritativeness.

That means, signiﬁcantly, that no book in our New Testament

canon shouldn’t be there, according to reasonable criteria.

They are all ancient, all apostolic, all in agreement with the in-

herited standard of truth, and all widely recognized. They are,

in a word, reliable witnesses to the life and teachings of Jesus.

Moreover—and perhaps more importantly—no document

74 Why Trust the Bible?

has existed in the entire history of the world that belongs in

the canon but is not in it. Sure, some books raised eyebrows

in the early centuries of the church, but in the end, each and

every one of them was judged not to have been ancient, apos-

tolic, orthodox, or widely recognized—or some combination of

those. We’ve already seen, for example, that The Shepherd of

Hermas failed at the point of antiquity and therefore also apos-

tolicity. Because it was written by Hermas and not an apostle

or a close companion of an apostle, the early Christians said,

it couldn’t be part of the authoritative canon. The Gospel of

Peter, along with several other books, failed at two points: (1)it

purported to reveal things that Jesus taught “in secret”—things

that contradicted what everyone knew about what Jesus had

taught quite publicly—thus failing the test of orthodoxy; and

(2)it was used only in isolated and scattered parts of the church,

thus failing the test of universality. And perhaps most famously,

The Gospel of Thomas was ﬁnally rejected as authoritative not

only because it was not likely written in its ﬁnal form until well

into the second century (which means it wasn’t written by the

apostle Thomas, who was truly dead by then) but also because it

contained teachings that everyone knew were foreign, and even

contrary, to Jesus’s already well-known public teachings.

Let me put the point like this: What if you had a blank slate,

an opportunity to build your own New Testament canon? How

would you go about deﬁning a list of ancient documents that

should be trusted, as opposed to those that shouldn’t? Do you

really think you could come up with any better criteria than

something like, “In order to be trusted, abook

Are These Really the Books You’re Looking For? 75

1. needs to be written or authorized by those who were clos-

est to Jesus (antiquity and apostolicity);

2. needs to not depart jarringly from what we’ve always

known to be Jesus’s teaching (orthodoxy); and

3. needs to not be sectarian or provincial but rather used

widely among broad swaths of Christians (universality)”?

Frankly, I think coming up with something better than that

would be exceedingly dicult.

To press the point, exactly which books in our current New

Testament would you exclude from your new canon of “books

to be trusted,” and how much dierence would that make to

the body of Christian doctrine? Even more, which other books

would you insist must be included? Would you push for The

Shepherd of Hermas, even though most early Christians knew

that it was written by a random guy over a century after Jesus’s

death? Would you insist on The Gospel of Peter, which wasn’t

written by Peter and is an obvious attempt to slip in “secret”

teachings of Jesus that no one had ever heard of before (wink,

wink, trust me, he really did say this)? Or how about The Gos-

pel of Thomas, which wasn’t written by Thomas and would

require you to canonize passages likethis:

Simon Peter said to them, “Let Mary leave us, for women

are not worthy of Life.”

Jesus said, “I myself shall lead her in order to make

her male, so that she too may become a living spirit resem-

76 Why Trust the Bible?

bling you males. For every woman who will make herself

male will enter the Kingdom of Heaven.”

(Yes, it really says that.) You see the point? If we’re honest in

light of all this, I doubt any of us would ﬁnally come up with

a better collection of to-be-trusted documents than the early

churchdid.

In fact, when you think about it, the early Christians seem

to have done a pretty good job identifying which documents

should be considered trustworthy guides to what Jesus actually

said and did. On the one hand, it doesn’t at all seem that they

engaged in some power-play conspiracy to suppress perfectly

good other documents. And on the other hand, the documents

they did defend as authoritative seem to have pretty solid rea-

sons arguing in their favor.

If all that’s the case, then we don’t need to fear that we’ve

somehow got the wrong documents—that is, that there are

actually others out there somewhere that would give us a better

picture of who Jesus is and what he did than the New Testa-

ment. In fact, we can have a great deal of conﬁdence that the

books we have are indeed the best ones—the most ancient, the

most trustworthy, the most, in a word, reliable.

Of course, that only matters for our purposes if the writ-

ers of these documents really were trying to convey accurate

information.

But what if they weren’t?

The Gospel of Thomas, saying 114; English translation quoted in Blomberg, Can We Still

Believe the Bible?, 73.

But Can I Trust You?

“Streets are all jammed. Noise in crowds like New

Year’s Eve in city. Wait a minute ... Enemy now in sight

above the Palisades. Five—ﬁve great machines. First one

is crossing river. I can see it from here ... A bulletin’s

handed me ... Martian cylinders are falling all over the

country. One outside Bualo, one in Chicago, St. Louis

... seem to be timed and spaced ... Now the ﬁrst ma-

chine reaches the shore. He stands watching, looking

over the city ... He waits for the others. They rise like a

line of new towers on the city’s west side ... Now they’re

lifting their metal hands. This is the end now. Smoke

comes out ... black smoke, drifting over the city. People

in the streets see it now! They’re running towards the

East River ... thousands of them, dropping in like rats!

Now the smoke’s spreading faster. It’s reached Times

Square. People trying to run away from it, but it’s no use.

They’re falling like ﬂies! Now the smoke’s crossing Sixth

Avenue ... Fifth Avenue ... one hundred yards away ...

it’s ﬁfty feet...”

78 Why Trust the Bible?

[Then the sound of choking, then a struggle, then si-

lence. And then this, crackling over the airwaves:] “2X2L

calling CQ ... 2X2L calling CQ ... New York? Isn’t there

anyone on the air? Isn’t there anyone on the air? Isn’t there

anyone...”

On Sunday, October 30, 1938, at about 8:15 in the evening,

that’s the news broadcast that people all over the country

heard as they tuned into the Columbia Broadcasting System

(CBS). Within minutes, the station’s New York–based pro-

ducer was on the phone with an irate Midwestern mayor de-

manding that the station cease its broadcast because mobs

had begun crowding the streets of his town. Soon after that,

reporters from other news outlets poured into CBS’s head-

quarters, demanding answers. Here’s how the producer de-

scribed the scene:

The following hours were a nightmare. The building

was suddenly full of people and dark-blue uniforms....

Finally the Press was let loose upon us, ravening for hor-

ror. How many deaths had weheard of? (Implying they

knew of thousands.) What didweknow of the fatal stam-

pede in a Jersey hall? (Implying it was one of many.) What

trac deaths? (The ditches must be choked with corpses.)

The suicides? (Haven’t you heard about the one on River-

side Drive?) It is all quite vague in my memory and quite

terrible.

“The War of the Worlds,” Internet Sacred Text Archive, accessed May 26, 2015, http:// www

.sacred -texts .com /ufo /mars /wow .htm.

John Houseman, Run Through: A Memoir (New York:Simon & Schuster, 1972), 404.

But Can I Trust You? 79

It turns out that, thank goodness, there weren’t actually any

deaths at all that night—either from stampedes, or trac, or

suicide. Nor were there any at the hands of Martians. That’s be-

cause the “news broadcast” that reportedly sent so many people

into a panic that day was actually just a radio show, a dramatic

production of H.G. Wells’s novel The War of the Worlds.

People have always wondered what led folks to panic over

a radio show. I mean, they had heard ﬁctionalized dramas be-

fore; indeed, “The War of the Worlds” was part of a series

called The Mercury Theatre on Air. But in this case, several

factors—fears about looming war with Germany, the fact that

commercial breaks were spaced farther apart in this show than

usual, several listeners missing the opening because a popular

program on another channel ran long—created a perfect storm

that made a good number of people really think that Martians

were invading New YorkCity!

It’s fascinating to compare that episode with the accounts

of Jesus’s life in the Bible. What if, like many of the people who

listened to CBS’s broadcast of “The War of the Worlds,” we’re

simply misunderstanding the biblical writers’ purpose? What

if they weren’t really trying to tell us what was actually hap-

pening but rather doing something else—perhaps writing ﬁc-

tion, creating legend, or even trying to deceive? In other words,

given that we can now be very conﬁdent

1. that our translations of the biblical manuscripts are

reliable,

2. that our biblical manuscripts accurately reﬂect what the

originals said, and

80 Why Trust the Bible?

3. that we are, in fact, looking at the right and best docu-

ments for getting information,

the next question is, can we be conﬁdent that the people who

wrote the biblical documents were themselves trustworthy?

Were they actually intending to tell us accurately what they

believed had happened?

Searching for Clues

The interesting thing about the “War of the Worlds” ﬁasco

is that over and over throughout the program, the broadcast-

ers gave clues that what you were listening to was not a real

news report but a ﬁctionalized drama. They weren’t subtle

clues either. For example, the very ﬁrst words that came over

the airwaves were, “The Columbia Broadcasting System and

its aliated stations present Orson Welles and the Mercury

Theatre on the Air in The War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells.”

Also, the very next words after the guy choked on the Mar-

tian gas were, “You are listening to a CBS presentation of

Orson Welles and The Mercury Theatre on the Air in an orig-

inal dramatization of The War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells.

The performance will continue after a brief intermission.”

The program broke for commercials four times during the

broadcast. Even so, CBS was obliged to make an announce-

ment three more times that evening over its entire nationwide

network that Mars had not actually attacked!

For this chapter, I have relied especially on CraigL. Blomberg, The Historical Reliability of

the Gospels, 2nd ed. (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2007).

“War of the Worlds.”

Ibid.

But Can I Trust You? 81

For those listeners who tuned in to Orson Welles’s “Mer-

cury Theatre on the Air” broadcast from 8 to 9 p.m. East-

ern Standard Time tonight and did not realize that the

program was merely a modernized adaptation of H.G.

Wells’s famous novelWar of the Worlds, we are repeating

the fact which was made clear four times on the program,

that, while the names of some American cities were used,

as in all novels and dramatizations, the entire story and

all of its incidents were ﬁctitious.

For crying out loud—and this was CBS’s point in that snarky

last announcement—people should have heard the clues! They

should have picked up on the indications in the program itself

that it wasn’t actually intending to report real events. Everything

was right there in frontthem.

Alright, so to return to our question, we need to ask now

whether the Bible gives any clues like that. Does it give any

indication that we should read the whole thing not as an at-

tempt at history but rather as ﬁction or legend or myth or

something else? Well, the Bible does indeed give some clues,

but they actually point in the other direction. They all point to

the conclusion that the biblical writers were in fact intending

to report events accurately as they sawthem.

What Were They Doing?

Here’s the thing. If you want to assert that the biblical writ-

ers had a dierent intent than accurate reporting, intellectual

Hadley Cantril, Hazel Gaudet, and Herta Herzog, The Invasion from Mars: A Study in

the Psychology of Panic, with the Complete Script of the Famous Orson Welles Broadcast

(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1940), 43–44.

82 Why Trust the Bible?

honesty demands not that you just assert such a claim but that

you propose a plausible alternative. If they weren’t trying to

report events accurately, then what exactly were they doing?

Let’s think aboutit:

1. The biblical authors might have had a nonhistorical pur-

pose in writing. Perhaps they, like H.G. Wells, were just

writing a novel of sorts, which they knew wasn’t true and

which they never intended anyone else to take as true

either. Similarly, perhaps they were constructing a leg-

end—that is, taking a set of fairly unremarkable events

and embellishing them with extraordinary details. True,

people who develop legends very often believe that their

stories can say something—however cryptically—about

reality or their people’s origins, even as they also know

that the outlandish details of the story are made up. Of

course, the trouble is that subsequent listeners and read-

ers don’t always make the distinction and just think the

whole story is true. So maybe what we have in the Bible is

ﬁction or legend, not reporting, and Christians just aren’t

getting the gag.

2. The biblical authors might have had a deceitful purpose.

Perhaps they, like so many people before and after them,

were intentionally trying to pull the wool over everyone’s

eyes and get them to believe something that never really

happened. Maybe it was all a giant hoax, a power play,

or ambition run amok.

3. The biblical authors themselves might have been deceived.

You wouldn’t have to think that someone deliberately de-

ceived them to say that. Perhaps their own minds deceived

But Can I Trust You? 83

them, or perhaps the traditions they heard from other

Christians had been corrupted. Whatever it was, maybe

the authors unwittingly passed the deception on to us.

4. Finally, it might not matter much what the biblical authors

purposed to do, because even if they were trying to give us

accurate descriptions of what happened, their accounts are

so hopelessly confused, contradictory, and error ridden

that we ﬁnally can’t trust anything about them.

Maybe one of these scenarios actually captures reality.

But what if we could be conﬁdent that none of them does?

If it becomes probable that the authors were not intending to

write ﬁction or legend, that they were not trying to deceive,

that they were not deluded or deceived themselves, and that

their writings are not error ridden as some have charged, then

we could conclude with a high degree of conﬁdence that the

authors indeed intended to give us accurate information, at

which point we could conﬁdently say, “Those documents are

historically reliable.” Now that’s not to say yet that we can be

conﬁdent they ﬁnally got it right; that’s a question for the next

chapter. But it still gets us a long way, because it’s no small

thing to be able to say with conﬁdence, “The biblical authors

weren’t writing ﬁction, they weren’t perpetrating a hoax, they

weren’t deluded, and they weren’t hopelessly confused. They

really believed all this happened.”

Writers of Fiction?

Let’s start thinking through this matter by considering the

ﬁrst possibility, that the biblical authors might have had a

84 Why Trust the Bible?

nonhistorical purpose and that they didn’t intend for us actu-

ally to believe what they were saying. The ﬁrst question to ask

here is whether the authors perhaps told us straight-out some-

where that they were writing ﬁction, kind of like CBS telling

their listeners that they were listening to a drama. The answer is

no. The Bible contains nothing at all like this. In fact, over and

over again the biblical authors quite plainly state the opposite.

They tell us, as clearly as words will allow, that they really do

believe what they’re saying, and they want us to believe ittoo.

Here, for example, is how Luke begins his account of

Jesus’s life:

Inasmuch as many have undertaken to compile a narra-

tive of the things that have been accomplished among

us, just as those who from the beginning were eyewit-

nesses and ministers of the word have delivered them to

us, it seemed good to me also, having followed all things

closely for some time past, to write an orderly account

for you, most excellent Theophilus, that you may have

certainty concerning the things you have been taught.

(Luke 1:1–4)

How could he be any clearer about his intention? Luke has

“followed all things closely for some time,” and now he is writ-

ing “an orderly account” of those things so that this fellow

Theophilus “may have certainty concerning the things” he

has been taught about Jesus. Whatever Luke is doing, he’s not

writing a story just for our enjoyment; he wants us to believe

his account with certainty.

But Can I Trust You? 85

John too tells us his intention for writing an account of

Jesus’slife:

Now Jesus did many other signs in the presence of the

disciples, which are not written in this book;but these are

written so that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ,

the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life

in his name. (John 20:30–31)

See? Again, he’s not writing ﬁction; he really wants people

to believe that Jesus is the Christ, which means that he wants

us to believe that the things he wrote in his book really

happened.

In another place too, John tells us his intention for writing:

That which wasfrom the beginning, which we have heard,

which we have seen with our eyes, which we looked upon

and have touched with our hands ... that which we have

seen and heard we proclaim also to you. (1John 1:1,3)

Do you see? The last thing John intends for anyone to say in

response to his books is, “Oh, that John, what a good story-

teller. He really should get a book contract!” No, he wants us

to know that he actually and truly and really saw some things,

heard them, even touched them and experienced them, and

now he’s proclaiming them to us. At least as far as his stated

intention, John isn’t writing ﬁction or legend; he really wants

us to believe what he’s saying.

Beyond these obvious statements of intention, the bibli-

cal authors give other indications that they want us to believe

86 Why Trust the Bible?

what they’re writing. For example, think about how often the

authors refer to speciﬁc, veriﬁable historical events and circum-

stances. Such allusions pepper the New Testament, but one

example ought to make the point. Look at this short passage

from Luke’s Gospel:

In the ﬁfteenth year of the reign of Tiberius Caesar, Pon-

tius Pilate being governor of Judea, and Herod being

tetrarch of Galilee, and his brother Philip tetrarch of

the region of Ituraea and Trachonitis, and Lysanias tet-

rarch of Abilene, during the high priesthood of Annas

and Caiaphas, the word of God came to John the son of

Zechariah in the wilderness. (3:1–2)

One author has pointed out that in the space of just two

verses here, Luke packs no fewer than twenty-one references

to historical people, places, and circumstances, each and every

one of which is (and would have been as soon as Luke wrote

them) testable and veriﬁable—or falsiﬁable if Luke got them

wrong!

We ﬁnd Luke’s same attention to detail in his sec-

ond book, Acts, and the other authors of the New Testament

likewise include contemporary, veriﬁable references in their

writings. Here’s the point again: Luke and the other biblical

authors weren’t writing ﬁction or legend; rather, they were

careful to weave their stories into the veriﬁable, detailed tapes-

try of real, historical life. They genuinely wanted us to believe

what they wrote.

Nathan Busenitz, Reasons We Believe: 50 Lines of Evidence That Conﬁrm the Christian

Faith (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2008), 127.

But Can I Trust You? 87

But what if they just genuinely wanted us to believe the lies

they were telling?

With Deceitful Intent?

That brings us to the second possibility, that the biblical authors

might have had a deceitful purpose. Couldn’t it be that they

were just perpetrating a hoax on the world, trying to get us to

believe things that didn’t actually happen? Isn’t it possible that,

while they repeatedly insisted they were telling the truth—even

throwing in historical facts for good measure—they were really

just reeling us in to dupe us and make us believe a bunch oflies?

Well, sure. Anything’s possible. But our goal here isn’t to

identify something that’s barely possible. It’s to try to come

to some kind of conﬁdence about what is probable. And the

fact is, when you think about the situation carefully, the prob-

ability that the biblical authors were trying to deceive us drops

to about as close to absolute zero as we can possibly get. Let’s

think about a few points.

First of all, pulling o a gigantic hoax of this kind would

have been exceedingly dicult, if not impossible. For one

thing, all twenty-seven books of the New Testament were writ-

ten within just a few decades of Jesus’s life. That means that as

those books were beginning to circulate, literally hundreds—

and probably even thousands—of people were still alive who

had seen Jesus and what he did with their own eyes. So if Luke,

for example, was just making things up or even embellishing

them, plenty of people around could have said, “Hold up.

That didn’t happen. You’re fabricating your story, Luke.” We

88 Why Trust the Bible?

have no record of anyone ever saying that. This point becomes

even stronger when you realize that even the people who had

the biggest stake in putting an end to Christianity didn’t deny

that Jesus really did and said the things the biblical authors

claimed he did. They simply accused him of being a liar or

being wrong. If there had been any reason to think that he

hadn’t said them—that the biblical authors had simply made it

all up—you can bet the opponents of Christianity would have

wasted no time pointing thatout.

Second, not only would pulling o a deception of that

magnitude in the presence of so many eyewitnesses have been

exceedingly dicult, but if anyone was trying to do that, the

guys they settled on as their primary spokesmen were not very

obvious choices. Think about it. Did you know that two of the

four authors of the Gospels—Luke and Mark—were not apos-

tles of Jesus, nor did either of them ever lay eyes on him? Luke

was a close friend and travel companion of Paul, but he was

far from a prominent leader in the church and had no inherent

claim to any authority. John Mark was a friend and compan-

ion of both Peter and Paul, but he is actually best known for

abandoning Paul in Pamphylia and then having Paul reject him

in a “sharp disagreement” when he wanted to rejoin the work

(Acts 13:13; 15:37–41)! Even Matthew, though he was indeed

one of the apostles, had been a turncoat tax collector for the

Romans. Now if you were trying to deceive the world with a

hoax, it’s hard to imagine that your ﬁrst draft picks would

be a relative nobody, a divisive deserter, and a tax man. That

wouldn’t exactly set you up for success.

But Can I Trust You? 89

This brings us to a third point. If the writers of the New

Testament were trying to deceive the world or pull o a hoax,

what plausible motive could they possibly have had? To make a

name for themselves? To get rich? To become powerful leaders

in a powerful church? If that was their plan, then we have to say

that they failed spectacularly. Most of the apostles wound up

being killed, whether by having their heads chopped o, being

cruciﬁed, or enduring other gruesome methods of execution.

On top of that, if their motive was in some way to make

themselves look good—or even to lie or exaggerate in order

to make Christianity look good—then they sabotaged them-

selves by including way too many embarrassing details, includ-

ing things that make the heroes of the story look, well, less

than heroic. If you’re trying to pull o a hoax to make your

new religion attractive, why would you keep pointing out how

your future leaders were as dense as rocks when it came to

understanding what Jesus was saying? Why would you include

the story about Peter misunderstanding Jesus so badly that he

cut o a guy’s ear, only to get scolded like an errant child? For

that matter, why would you tell strange stories about Jesus

(this omniscient God-man you’re trying to invent), not know-

ing who it was that touched his cloak or crying with a couple

of women in front of a tomb or peevishly cursing a ﬁg tree to

death because it didn’t have anything for him toeat?

Yes, I know that Christians say all those stories ultimately

have a profound meaning behind them (and they do), but any

Christian preacher will admit that it takes some work to get

there—that meaning is not right on the surface. And therein

90 Why Trust the Bible?

lies the point: If you were concocting a hoax with the motive

of making your new religion, its founder, and its leaders look

good, those are not the kinds of stories you would invent. And

you certainly wouldn’t air out your dirty laundry by telling the

story of how Mark deserted Paul, Paul rejected Mark when he

returned, and the whole thing caused a gigantic falling out.

The only reason you tell those stories and air all that dirty

laundry is not to make the whole thing look good but to tell it

like it happened.

Of course, you can always go all Manchurian Candidate

on us and say that all those embarrassing details were just put

there to knock us o the trail, to make us think they were tell-

ing it like it was, when actually they were lying to us. But at

that point you would be several layers deep into a conspiracy

theory, and it would be fair to wonder if your aim was really to

arrive at the truth or just defend your presuppositions.

Anyway, let me make one more point here, one that applies

to everything we’ve said so far in this chapter. Nobody dies

for a ﬁction, and nobody dies for a hoax. If your goal in writ-

ing something was simply to write a novel or to perpetrate a

deception, you don’t stick to the story once the jig is up and

your head is about to come o. The only way you stick to the

story under those circumstances is if you really believe that

what you wrote actually happened. And that’s exactly what

we have in the people who wrote the New Testament. Even

as they wrote and taught, they knew they could be killed for

what they were saying. And yet through all the threats and all

the promises, even up to the moment of their own deaths, they

But Can I Trust You? 91

kept on saying it. Slice it however you like. These guys were not

writing ﬁction, and they were not lying. They believed what

they wrote, and they wanted us to believe ittoo.

Simply Duped?

But there’s another possibility, isn’t there? What if the biblical

authors were not so much deceivers as deceived themselves?

That theory has been suggested in several dierent forms

through the centuries, but it never really ends up holding much

water. One famous version of it, for example, accuses all the

disciples of having a mass hallucination of a risen Jesus and

then going back and writing legends to ﬁll in a backstory. But

it doesn’t take much thought to realize how unlikely that is.

“Mass hallucination” is a nonsensical idea to begin with. By

deﬁnition, hallucinations are internal, personal, and individ-

ual. They happen in an individual person’s mind, and unless

you want to posit some kind of ESP or paranormal mental con-

nection between humans, they are therefore not contagious.

Besides, given how many dierent groups of people reported

seeing Jesus, how many dierent times, and over how many

weeks, the notion of a sustained, contagious mass hallucina-

tion begins to border on the ridiculous.

Another more sophisticated version of this theory holds

that Jesus’s disciples were suering from a kind of pathologi-

cal wishful thinking. Unable to accept the reality of Jesus’s

death, the argument goes, they lived in a fantasy world of be-

lieving and claiming that he was actually alive and then wrote

legends to create a backstory. Despite its more sophisticated

92 Why Trust the Bible?

packaging, the idea that the disciples were suering from path-

ological wishful thinking is about as plausible as mass halluci-

nation. That’s because, regardless of anything else, there’s no

way the disciples would have been wishing for Jesus to be res-

urrected. Even if they were broken up, unable to come to terms

with his death, and casting about for some way to continue

thinking he was still alive, they would never have lit upon the

idea of resurrection to comfort themselves. Why not? Because

to the ﬁrst-century Jews, resurrection was a theological con-

cept with a very speciﬁc meaning: it was an event that would

happen only at the end of time when all the dead would be

raised together, some to be condemned by God and others to

be gloriﬁed. Nothing in all the history of thought and religion

would have planted in the disciples’ minds an idea that one

man might experience that resurrection and gloriﬁcation early.

Really, this “wishful thinking” charge would make much more

sense if the disciples had claimed that Jesus was simply spiritu-

ally alive or that he had not truly died or even that he had been

resuscitated from death (like Lazarus). But what they actually

claimed—that Jesus had gone through death and come out the

other side alive—was something new and completely unprec-

edented. That kind of idea—one that requires you to recali-

brate your entire worldview—doesn’t just pop into your mind

as a result of wishing; it grows slowly and takes root when the

things you’ve seen and experienced have rendered every other

explanation utterly implausible.

Besides that, a gullible, naïve, wishful-thinking-like will-

ingness to believe that Jesus was alive is pretty much exactly

But Can I Trust You? 93

the opposite of how the biblical writers describe the disciples.

Matthew reports that “some doubted” (Matt. 28:17), and Luke

says that when the women came to tell them that Jesus was

alive, “these words seemed to them an idle tale, and they did

not believe them” (Luke 24:11). Even when Jesus appeared to

the disciples, Luke says, “they were startled and frightened

and thought they saw a spirit” (Luke 24:37). And then there’s

Thomas, who refused to believe until he could place his ﬁnger

into the mark of the nails and his hand in Jesus’s side (John

20:24–25).

None of this skepticism (to anticipate a counterargument)

is held out in the Bible as a virtue, as if the authors were saying,

“Look at these strong-minded, not-gullible-at-all men. Surely

they of all people wouldn’t have believed Jesus was alive un-

less it really happened!” On the contrary, the Bible portrays

the disciples’ unbelief as a signiﬁcant embarrassment. Jesus

more than once rebukes them for it, and he even tells Thomas,

essentially, “You have believed because you have seen me. But

blessed are those who believe without seeing!” Do you see the

point? By highlighting the disciples’ failure to believe, the Bible

isn’t holding them up as exemplars of hard-nosed, evidence-

driven skepticism. It’s telling us what happened, even if it’s

embarrassing, and what happened was emphatically not a case

of pathological wishful thinking.

One ﬁnal version of this self-deceived argument is that

the oral tradition on which the biblical authors sometimes re-

lied to write their books must have gotten corrupted through

the years. After all, Jesus died in AD 33 and the earliest New

94 Why Trust the Bible?

Testament Gospel wasn’t written until around AD 60. Are

we really supposed to think that the teachings of and stories

about Jesus could survive intact, uncorrupted, and without ad-

dition or subtraction, through twenty-seven whole years of

being transmitted solely by word of mouth? Again, we must

mention a few things here. First of all, though all the New

Testament writers seem to have used oral traditions to some

degree, you have to remember that most of them—Matthew,

John, Peter, James, and Jude—were eyewitnesses to the whole

thing. If the oral tradition had been corrupted, they would

have known it. Not only that, but when you combine Jesus’s

claim that his teaching held as much authority as the Old Tes-

tament prophets with the fact that a huge portion of his teach-

ing was preserved in pithy, easy-to-remember forms, it’s not

surprising at all that the early Christians would be both able

and determined to remember and recite it word-for-word for

a very longtime.

On top of all that, when it comes to oral transmission, you

just have to realize that twenty-seven years is simply not very

long at all for a tradition to remain intact. Let’s do an experi-

ment. Recite the nursery rhyme “Jack and Jill.” I’m serious. Go

ahead; do it. It doesn’t have to be out loud, but at least in your

mind, run through all the words of “Jack and Jill.” Now, my

guess is that you probably said something likethis:

Jack and Jill

Went up the hill

To fetch a pail of water;

Jack fell down

But Can I Trust You? 95

And broke his crown,

And Jill came tumbling after.

Do you know when “Jack and Jill” was written? No, you

don’t. Nobody does, though there is still considerable debate

about that question! As far as we know, the earliest surviving

publication of the rhyme comes from a book called Mother

Goose’s Melody: or, Sonnets for the Cradle, printed in Lon-

don in 1791, well over two hundred years ago.

Now here’s

the thing: Have you ever seen that book? Did you learn “Jack

and Jill” by reading it in the 1791 edition of Mother Goose’s

Melody? I bet you didn’t; in fact, I bet you didn’t look it up in

any book at all. I bet someone just taught you to recite it at

some point. Moreover, I bet the person who taught you “Jack

and Jill” didn’t look it up in the 1791 book or any other book

either. Someone likely taught it to him or her, and that some-

one was taught by someone else, who was taught by someone

else, who was taught by yet someone else, for a very long time.

That’s an oral tradition. So, how much do you imagine the past

two hundred-plus years of largely oral transmission has acted

to corrupt and change “Jack and Jill”? How much would you

guess our modern version diers from the one published in

1791? Take alook:

Jack and Gill

Went up the hill,

A facsimile of the 1791 edition of Mother Goose’s Melody can be found in Colonel W.F.

Prideaux, ed., Mother Goose’s Melody: A Facsimile Reproduction of the Earliest Known

Edition, with an Introduction and Notes (London: A.H. Bullen, 1904), available online at

Internet Archive, accessed May 26, 2015, https:// archive .org /stream /mother gooses melo 00

pridiala #page /n27 /mode /2up.

96 Why Trust the Bible?

To fetch a pail of water;

Jack fell down

And broke his crown,

And Gill came tumbling after.

That’s it. That’s how it was printed, complete with italics,

in 1791! With the exception of spelling “Gill” with a J now, the

way we recite the poem “Jack and Jill” is the same today as it

was over two hundred years ago. So let me say it again: hold-

ing things intact through a mere twenty-seven years of oral

transmission just wouldn’t be all thathard.

Look, the point here isn’t that “Jack and Jill” is precisely

parallel to the New Testament oral tradition; it’s not, and you

can probably identify many dierences between the two. The

point is simply that maintaining an oral tradition over even a

very long time is not as dicult as it might seem to us, much

less impossible.

So here’s where we are: none of the various versions of the

“deceived authors” theory ﬁnally hold any water. The charge

that the disciples experienced a mass hallucination isn’t plau-

sible and doesn’t make any sense anyway. Nor do the disciples

seem to have been suering a pathological case of wishful

thinking. And ﬁnally, as eyewitnesses themselves of the actual

events, they certainly weren’t the unwitting victims of a cor-

rupted oral tradition only twenty-seven yearsold.

Prideaux, Mother Goose’s Melody, 37, https:// archive .org /stream /mother gooses melo 00

pridiala #page /37 /mode /2up.

But Can I Trust You? 97

Utterly Confused?

The authors of the New Testament documents were not writ-

ing ﬁction, they were not trying to deceive, and they were not

themselves deluded or deceived. One ﬁnal possibility remains,

though, and that is that the writers’ purpose ultimately does

not matter. And the reason it doesn’t matter is because, even

if they were trying to give us accurate descriptions of what

happened, their books are so hopelessly confused, contra-

dictory, and error ridden that we ﬁnally can’t trust anything

aboutthem.

Perhaps the most important thing to say in response to this

charge is that it’s a misconception held by many who haven’t

looked at the evidence and by almost none who have. That’s

because, even though the Bible has been subjected to scorching

and detailed assault by skeptics for more than two hundred

years, it’s reasonable to say that every alleged contradiction, in-

consistency, and error has been met with at least one plausible

resolution and often more. I realize that’s a sweeping and gi-

gantic assertion, and the best way to prove it would be to spend

hundreds of pages creating a compendium of alleged “problem

points” and then analyzing them to see if there are plausible

resolutions. We’re actually not going to do that kind of gritty,

exhaustive work here, though, because other books have done

it many times over. Therefore, if some particular place in the

Bible has stumped you, I would encourage you to seek out one

of those books, look up the problem, and read about it (see

appendix). With patient study and careful understanding, even

the most intractable problems will giveway.

98 Why Trust the Bible?

On the other hand, if you’re a person who actually makes

this charge against the Bible, then I’ll put it to you as straight

as I can: I think you have an intellectual responsibility either to

stop making that charge or actually to read Christian scholars’

good-faith eorts to bring plausible—usually even probable—

resolutions to the inconsistencies and errors that skeptics have

alleged. All that work may not ﬁnally and fully convince you,

I know. You may walk away still scratching your head or even

crowing about a few passages, and that’s ﬁne. I can assure you,

though, that if you do that work, you’ll walk away with more

convincing answers than unconvincing ones. What you simply

can’t do, though—not with any intellectual integrity, at least—

is just go on insisting that the Bible is hopelessly contradictory

and error ridden but at the same time refuse to do the work

necessary to test that assertion. So check it out. You might be

surprised at what youﬁnd.

The fact is, a whole lot of the inconsistencies alleged by

skeptics turn out not to be problematic at all when you read

them a little more carefully. Despite two centuries of nit-

picking, scholars have proposed plausible resolutions to every

single one of the alleged inconsistencies. You just need sucient

intellectual integrity to take the time to look them up in abook.

But let’s say you’re unconvinced by any of the explana-

tions, even after you study them carefully. You still have to ask

yourself, “Do the apparent discrepancies in the accounts suf-

ﬁciently prove that nothing happened or that we can’t know

anything about what happened?” I mean, how much sense

would it make, really, to say, “Wow, Matthew says there were

But Can I Trust You? 99

two women at the empty tomb of Jesus, while Luke says there

were three or more women at his empty tomb. Clearly, we can’t

know anything at all about what happened on that Sunday

morning.” Of course you wouldn’t say that! Pointing out a

few apparent discrepancies of detail in the accounts of eyewit-

nesses might mean a lot of things, but it certainly doesn’t mean

that nothing happened—nor does it mean that we can’t know

anything about what happened.

While we’re at it, this very question—about how many

women were at the tomb—provides a good example of how

we can easily harmonize apparent inconsistencies. Matthew

doesn’t claim that only two women went; he simply mentions

only two women by name (Matt. 28:1). And Luke doesn’t say

anything about how many women went to the tomb but rather

says that three women whom he names, as well as some “other

women,” told the apostles about what happened at the tomb

(Luke 24:10). So what’s going on here? Are Matthew and Luke

contradicting one another? No, if you just think about it a

bit, there are a number of possible resolutions. Perhaps Luke

simply oers a more comprehensive picture of the number

of women who went to the tomb than Matthew does, while

Matthew only names two particular women out of the larger

group. Or it’s also possible that indeed only two women went

to the tomb, but when they returned they told other women,

and then the whole lot of them reported the story to the disci-

ples. Either way, you get the point: we can rehearse many plau-

sible resolutions to apparent inconsistencies, and we shouldn’t

be too quick to cry, “Contradiction!”

100 Why Trust the Bible?

Even beyond that, historically speaking, the fact that the

narratives haven’t had all their apparent discrepancies cor-

rected and brought into line actually speaks well of their reli-

ability. As one scholar putsit,

The stories exhibit ... exactly that surface tension which

we associate, not with tales artfully told by people eager

to sustain a ﬁction and therefore anxious to make every-

thing look right, but with the hurried, puzzled accounts of

those who have seen with their own eyes something which

took them by surprise and with which they have not yet

fully come to terms.

In the end, it’s perfectly reasonable to conclude that the

biblical documents are not nearly as contradictory, confused,

and error ridden as uninformed people assume. And even

where the details of particular stories don’t immediately line

up, that evidence hardly forces us to throw up our hands and

declare that nothing happened. In fact, it gives the accounts of

Jesus’s life exactly the kind of character we would expect them

to have if several witnesses to an extraordinary set of events

sat down, not to tell ﬁction, not to deceive, not to perpetrate a

hoax, but simply to say what they believed happened.

A Big Moment

Okay, this is an important moment. So take a deep breath and

reengage! At this point in the argument, we can draw an im-

N.T. Wright, The Resurrection of the Son of God, vol.3 of Christian Origins and the Ques-

tion of God (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2003), 612.

But Can I Trust You? 101

mensely signiﬁcant conclusion. We can say with a very high

degree of conﬁdence that ... wait for it ...

The Bible is historically reliable.

Do you remember how we got here? Moving from ourselves

as readers back through time toward the events recorded, we’ve

determined that we can be very conﬁdentthat

1. our translations of the biblical manuscripts are accurate;

2. our biblical manuscripts accurately reﬂect what the origi-

nals said;

3. we are, in fact, looking at the right and best documents

for getting information; and

4. the authors of the biblical documents were not writing ﬁc-

tion, were not deceiving, and were not themselves deluded

or deceived, but were actually writing to tell us what they

believed happened.

If those four statements really are reasonable conclusions, then

we can trust the Bible to tell us what the writers actually be-

lieved had happened.

Of course, that leaves us with one ﬁnal question: Can we

have any conﬁdence that what the writers believed happened

... really did happen?

So Did It Happen?

I probably don’t have to convince you that people can some-

times be very sure about something, and yet at the same time

be absolutely wrong. I can’t tell you how many times in my life

I’ve been absolutely sure that I saw something happen, only

to ﬁnd out later that what I thought I saw wasn’t really what

happened atall.

This is the ﬁnal issue we need to confront as we consider the

reliability of the Bible. Is it possible that the biblical authors

were intending to tell us what really happened, that they them-

selves even believed that the things they recorded really hap-

pened, and yet that they were just wrong about it? I don’t mean

that they were deluded or trying to pull o a hoax or writing

ﬁction but—as we’ve all experienced from time to time—just

ﬂat wrong? To put the question more sharply, can we in any

way know for certain that the biblical authors were in fact

right in what they recorded—that is, that what they thought

happened and what they said happened really did happen?

For this chapter, I have relied especially on CraigL. Blomberg, Can We Still Believe the Bible?

An Evangelical Engagement with Contemporary Questions (Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos, 2014);

N.T. Wright, The Resurrection of the Son of God, vol.3 of Christian Origins and the Ques-

tion of God (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2003).

104 Why Trust the Bible?

Well, no, there’s no way to know for certain if what you’re

talking about is mathematical certainty. But we have to re-

member that we’re never able to reach mathematical certainty

about historical events. Between you and every event in history

that you didn’t experience ﬁrsthand lies a gap that no amount

of logic, reasoning, equation running, or evidence gathering

will ever be able to close entirely. It will always be possible—

barely possible, but possible nonetheless—that we are all just

wrong about everything. Someone once referred to that cer-

tainty gap as a “broad and ugly ditch.”

And a few people,

staring into that ditch, have simply thrown up their hands and

declared that we should never really trust any historical claim.

But that extreme position would throw us into a dark, histori-

cal nihilism, and surely none of us wants to live like that—or

even has the ability to do so consistently. No, we all know that

even if we can’t arrive at mathematical certainty about events

in history, we can in fact arrive at historical conﬁdence about

them—a high enough degree of conﬁdence to say, “Yes, I’m

very sure that happened,” and then even to live by, rely on, and

act on those events.

History, then, doesn’t trade in mathematical certainties. In

fact, it doesn’t even look for certainties. Instead, it looks for

probabilities, which ultimately translate into conﬁdence that

something actually happened. So for any given event, history

ﬁrst asks whether the source who reported it seems reliable,

using exactly the kinds of questions we’ve been asking of the

Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, “On the Proof of the Spirit and of Power,” in Philosophical

and Theological Writings, ed. H.B. Nisbet, Cambridge Texts in the History of Philosophy

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 87.

So Did It Happen? 105

Bible. Then, once it determines that the source does seem re-

liable, it asks, “Okay, is it plausible to think that what this

reliable source has reported actually happened as an event in

history?” Usually, that question can be very quickly answered

with a “Yes, of course it’s plausible.” If a reliable source says

that such and such an army crossed such and such a river, if

there’s nothing inherently implausible about that crossing, and

if no other evidence causes us to think that maybe the army

didn’t cross the river, then we generally say, “Yes, such and such

an army did indeed cross the river.” That’s not mathematical

certainty, but it is strong historical conﬁdence.

The Problem of Miracles

Here’s the problem, though, when it comes to the Bible. Sure,

it tells stories of armies crossing rivers—but only after God

splits the river in half so the army can walk on dry land! It also

tells of a man instantly turning water into wine and walking on

the surface of the sea and healing people with a word and even

rising from the dead three days after he is killed. So what gives

with all that? Well, let’s be honest. When a historical source—

even one we’ve determined to be genuinely reliable—starts re-

porting things like that, we don’t greet those reports with the

same yawn and “yeah, yeah” that we would give a report that

an army crossed a river. We tend to greet them with, “Come

on. You can’t be serious!”

Why do we respond like that? Well, probably a few things

factor into our natural skepticism of miracle stories, but the

most obvious one is also, I think, the most important. People

106 Why Trust the Bible?

who are naturally skeptical of miracles are people who haven’t

experienced them. There’s nothing surprising about that; we

all naturally ﬁnd it hard to believe things that lie completely

outside our experience.

Here’s one often-used example: Imagine a man who lived

all his life—a long time ago, before electricity or any modern

technology—on a tropical island near the equator. One day, a

ship shows up, and the sailors tell him they’re from a country

far away in the north. Then they begin to talk about this fan-

tastic substance called ice, which is like water turning into a

rock when it gets very cold. Now our friend on the equatorial

island has absolutely no experience of ice, nor even (likely) of

the kind of cold required to make it. So probably, he’s going to

have a very hard time believing that this “water turning into

a very cold rock” has ever actually happened. He may even

declare it to be impossible and the sailors to be dupes or liars.

Ice lies utterly and completely outside his experience, and he

doesn’t believe init.

And yet ice exists.

When it comes to miracles, I think many of us are like that

tropical guy with the ice. We’ve never experienced anyone

walking on water or turning water into wine or rising from

the dead, so we begin with an assumption that those things

don’t—indeed, can’t—happen. But just because we’ve never

experienced them doesn’t mean they don’t exist, just as it’s

ridiculous to say that ice doesn’t exist because the island man

has never seen any. In fact, for someone who has experienced

miracles—and millions of people in the world say they have—

So Did It Happen? 107

this whole question of whether miracles are plausible (much

less possible) seems pretty silly. “Of course they’re plausible,”

those people say; “I’ve seen them.” Sure, you can be like the

islander and insist that all those people are dupes or liars, but

they’ll just shake their heads, smile, and say, “Someday, my

friend, I hope you have the pleasure of experiencing ice cream.”

You see? All that is to say that you can’t just declare

miracles—and therefore the Bible—to be implausible simply on

the strength of your own experience or lack thereof. Other people

have had dierent experiences than yours, and to say that every

experience at odds with your own is necessarily ﬂawed would

be the height of arrogance. Therefore, if you’re going to declare

miracles to be inherently implausible, you’re going to need a rea-

son to doso.

Arguments against Miracles—

The Scientific Objection

Over the centuries, people have oered two main arguments

for declaring miracles—including the ones reported by the bib-

lical authors—to be hopelessly implausible or even impossible.

Let’s take a moment to think about each of those.

First, some have oered a scientiﬁc objection to miracles

of any kind. That objection says essentially that the advances

in science particularly over the past two centuries have proven

that miracles are impossible. People only believed in miracles

in the ﬁrst place, it’s said, because they didn’t understand how

the world works and were therefore unduly inclined toward

believing in the supernatural. They had gaps in their under-

108 Why Trust the Bible?

standing of biology and astronomy and chemistry and ecol-

ogy, and they ﬁlled them in by appealing to miracles. Today,

though, because science has ﬁlled in so many of the gaps that

miracles used to bridge, we can safely conclude that miracles

are unnecessary and therefore that they do not really happen.

Is it really that simple, though? I mean, even the very

ﬁrst premise—that people only believed in miracles because

they didn’t understand how the world works as well as we

do—doesn’t really apply very well to most of the miracles in

the Bible. After all, even the most ancient people knew very

well that two people are required to make a baby, that if you

try to walk on water you sink, and that dead people do not

rise again! And yet the biblical writers said, “Those things

happened. We saw them happen.” On top of this, for all our

newfound knowledge, we still can’t explain the things they

witnessed any better than they could. I mean, it’s not as if we

can now say to the biblical writers, “Hey, you simpleminded

people, don’t you realize that it actually wasn’t a miracle at

all for a man to walk on water? Had you known, as we do

now, about the laws of quantum physics and the theory of

relativity, you would have understood that walking on water

is a completely natural phenomenon and nothing at all to get

excited about. And neither, by the way, is a baby being born

of a virgin, a man calming a storm or healing the sick with

a word, or a man rising from the dead. Science can explain

those too.” No, the fact is, science hasn’t made those events

any less astonishing for us than they were forthem.

You see my point? The trouble with saying that science

So Did It Happen? 109

has advanced to the point that we can now explain miracles

naturalistically—including the ones in the Bible—is that sci-

ence hasn’t, in fact, explained the miracles recorded in the

Bible. And it can’t. So why on earth should we believe the much

larger claim that science has somehow proved that such things

can’t ever happen at all, no way, nohow?

The answer is that we shouldn’t. To put it bluntly, this ob-

jection outruns its own jogging shorts. It’s just not the case

that science has proven that the supernatural does not and can-

not happen. Plenty of things happen in the universe—and in

human experience—that science cannot explain. Don’t misun-

derstand me. I’m not saying that anything science can’t explain

must be supernatural. No, science will advance, and it will

answer many questions in the future that it cannot answer now.

But no scientist truly in tune with the promise and the limits

of science—especially with the latest advances in ﬁelds like

quantum physics, astronomy, even biology—would ever say

anything like, “The universe is and evermore shall be utterly

explicable.” In fact, such a scientist would probably say some-

thing more like, “You know, the more we discover, the more we

realize how much we really do not understand and indeed how

much may be ﬁnally beyond understanding.”

Besides, the whole question of whether miracles are pos-

sible ultimately comes down to whether there is a God, right?

If there is, then miracles are possible, full stop. But everyone

agrees that science completely lacks the ability to test whether

God exists. It will never prove that there’s no God, and there-

fore it will never prove that miracles are impossible. In that

110 Why Trust the Bible?

light, the ﬂippant, smug declaration I’ve heard so many fresh-

man science majors make that “science has proven that super-

natural things absolutely, positively cannot happen” begins to

sound just embarrassingly ﬂimsy.

Arguments against Miracles—

The Philosophical Objection

A second objection lodged against the plausibility of miracles

is a philosophical one. It says that, even if science can’t prove

the impossibility of miracles (a signiﬁcant concession, let’s no-

tice!), we should still say that the probability of a miraculous

event actually happening is vanishingly small, and therefore we

should never believe it. For example, we should never believe

that Jesus actually walked on water because if X stands for ev-

eryone who’s ever tried to walk on water and sunk (to be safe,

let’s just put that number at ten billion, a rough estimate of

everyone who’s ever lived on the planet), then the probability

of Jesus having actually walked on water is about one in ten

billion. Not veryhigh.

But come on. This objection ends up proving way too

much. You can’t just run probabilities on everything like that

to determine if you’re going to believe it or not. If you did,

you’d have to doubt everything that’s unusual or uncommon,

much less unique. There are about seven billion people in the

world today, but as far as we know, only one has run the 100-

meter dash in 9.58 seconds. Even so, it would be absurd and

arrogant of me to say, “Humph. Do you realize the probability

of Usain Bolt having run the 100-meter in 9.58 seconds is one

So Did It Happen? 111

in seven billion? It would be stupid for me to believe it.” In

the same way, just because it’s astonishing to think of Jesus

walking on water doesn’t mean it didn’t happen. After all, the

disciples themselves were pretty astonished at it too, which was

precisely why they wrote itdown.

So there we are. Naturally, skeptics formulate lots of dier-

ent variations on these two arguments, but none of them ulti-

mately ends up doing any better than these two at excluding

miracles or the supernatural from the realm of human reality.

Science hasn’t oered an explanation of the things the bibli-

cal writers tell us they saw, and it certainly hasn’t proven that

such things are impossible. Moreover, it simply doesn’t make

any sense to decide what’s plausible based on probabilities. The

fact is, if you’re going to assert that the supernatural doesn’t

happen (ever, at all), you’re going to have to do just that—assert

it, without evidence, for really no good reason. In other words,

you’re going to have to believe it on the worst kind of blind faith.

Are the Biblical Miracles Plausible?

So the biblical writers said they saw extraordinary things hap-

pen, and we have no logical reason to say that those things

are inherently impossible or even hopelessly implausible. But

there’s still one other question that comes up here. Lots of peo-

ple have told lots of stories about “miraculous” things happen-

ing. The Babylonians did. The Greeks did. So did the Romans.

And nobody says we ought to believe their miracle stories. So

why is the Bible any dierent? What makes its stories any more

plausible than theirs? Well, the answer is that the character of

112 Why Trust the Bible?

the biblical writings just utterly diers from the character of

those other ancient writings in ways that make them eminently

more plausible.

Let me explain what I mean. In other ancient miracle sto-

ries, we’re obviously not dealing with eyewitness accounts of

historical events; they don’t even claim to be that. Rather, we’re

quite clearly dealing with either (1)legends or myths that have

arisen and been repeatedly augmented—like barnacles grow-

ing on a ship—over the course of several centuries, or (2)origi-

nally unremarkable historical stories that were subsequently

embellished with supernatural bits that, while truly amazing,

are still more or less gratuitous. By that I mean that the super-

natural events in those stories don’t seem in any way essential

to the story itself; the story would make perfect sense without

the supernatural parts, which suggests that those bits were

added later for eect. The point is that in both cases, histori-

ans can look at those ancient stories and conclude very conﬁ-

dently that the miraculous details are not historical. They’re

either myths and legends that have been built up over time, or

they’re superﬂuous embellishments added for eect. But they

are decidedly not eyewitness accounts of events without which

the entire story makes no sense.

That, however, is precisely the character of the miracle ac-

counts in the Bible. They are neither myths nor legends. They

have not been built up over centuries. They are the result of

some person saying, “I saw this, and I saw it not so very long

ago.” Not only that but the miracles recorded in the Bible are

essential to the stories around them. Jesus’s miracles, for in-

So Did It Happen? 113

stance, are not just amazing things that happened. When you

study them, you realize that right down to their very core,

they’re connected to the message Jesus was proclaiming.

That’s why Jesus heals people rather than just pulling a rabbit

out of a hat; he’s illustrating that he can heal people from the

disease of sin. It’s why he raises people from the dead instead

of making a coin disappear down his sleeve; he’s showing how

his work brings spiritual life out of spiritual death. Even his

walking on the water wasn’t just a parlor trick; his disciples

recognized that it conﬁrmed his claim to be the great “I ,”

the One who brings the ocean—the ancient realm of chaos

and evil—into submission, the One who, as the psalm puts it,

is “mightier than the waves of the sea” (Ps. 93:4). The miracle

stories of other religions and cultures are nothing likethat.

Do you see the point? The miracles of the Bible are not in

any way superﬂuous or extraneous to the stories in which we

ﬁnd them; on the contrary, they are essential to them, woven

like DNA into their very meaning. Moreover, rather than leg-

ends or myths built up over time, they are eyewitness accounts

of what real people said they saw with their own eyes. However

you slice it, the biblical miracle accounts dier utterly from a

Greek or Babylonian myth, and they require a whole dierent

kind of reckoning.

All this leaves us with a pretty signiﬁcant conclusion about

the miracles recorded in the Bible: they cannot be kicked out

of court as being logically impossible, and they are far more

plausible than other “miracle” stories out there. Still, I wonder

if we can go even farther. Can we get to a level of conﬁdence

114 Why Trust the Bible?

that would allow us to say not just that it’s plausible that what

the biblical authors are saying actually happened but that it’s

actually historically probable that theydid?

I think wecan.

Everything Rests on the Resurrection

Now at this point, we have a couple choices about how we could

proceed. We could begin an exhaustive study of the dozens of

miracles that Jesus did throughout his ministry and see what

we can say about each of them. Many books, in fact, have done

just that, and their conclusions are often insightful and convinc-

ing (see appendix). Or we could go straight to the one miracle

that underlies and indeed launched the entire Christian faith, the

one on which the whole superstructure of Christian history, be-

lief, and practice ultimately rests—indeed, the one on which the

Christian belief that the Bible is the Word of God ﬁnally rests.

That’s the resurrection of Jesus.

Here’s what you really can’t get around: If the resurrection

happened, then the rest of the fundamental superstructure of

Christianity comes together like clockwork—including the au-

thority of the Bible, both New Testament and Old. If it didn’t

happen, then never mind any of it, because if our reliable bib-

lical writers turn out to have been wrong about the resurrec-

tion—the most important thing—then it’s unlikely that they

were right about much of anything. And besides, it wouldn’t

matter whether or not they were right about the rest, because

the very point of everything—the miracles, the teaching, the

claims—was to demonstrate the identity of Jesus as the Christ,

So Did It Happen? 115

and if he’s still dead, then he’s not the Christ, and therefore the

rest of it doesn’t matter, full stop. The whole of Christianity

rises or falls on the question of whether Jesus historically—

not religiously or spiritually but historically—was resurrected

from thedead.

The biblical writers thought he was. They weren’t deluded,

they weren’t trying to pull o a hoax, and they weren’t writing

a legend. They were telling it like they saw it, heard it, touched

it, and experienced it, and they genuinely wanted their read-

ers to believe it too. All well and good. But can we have any

conﬁdence that they were right aboutit?

Yes, we can. Buthow?

Why They Believed Jesus Was Resurrected

Let’s start by asking the obvious question. In their own tell-

ing, what made the biblical writers—and the early Christians

more broadly—believe that Jesus had been resurrected in the

ﬁrst place? According to their own testimony, that belief really

emerged from two things: (1)their discovery on Sunday morn-

ing that the tomb where Jesus’s body had been laid after his

death was empty, and (2)their experience of Jesus appearing to

them after his death multiple times in physicalform.

Now it’s important to realize a few things about these ex-

periences. For one, the authors are dead set on denying that

what they saw when Jesus appeared to them was something

incorporeal (that is, without a physical body), like a ghost or

a spirit or something. So Luke is careful to point out that the

ﬁrst time Jesus appeared to the disciples, they actually thought

116 Why Trust the Bible?

he was a ghost until Jesus invited them to touch him—“a spirit

does not have ﬂesh and bones as you see that I have,” he said—

and then ate a piece of broiled ﬁsh just to prove the point (Luke

24:39, 42–43). (It’s interesting that the account mentions that

the ﬁsh was broiled, isn’t it? What does the fact that the ﬁsh

was broiled, rather than baked or grilled or sautéed, have to

do with anything? Nothing. It’s just one of those details that

a legend probably wouldn’t include and that therefore subtly

suggests that this is real eyewitness testimony from someone

who was there.)

Not only that, but the disciples are also at pains to make

the point that this person who appeared to them was the same

Jesus who died on the cross, not someone else. “Put your ﬁnger

here, and see my hands; and put out your hand, and place it in

my side,” Jesus told Thomas (John 20:27). He wasn’t a ghost;

he wasn’t somebody else. The apostles insisted that the Jesus

they saw was the same Jesus who had been cruciﬁed.

It’s also important to understand that neither the empty

tomb nor the appearances alone would have created the kind

of certainty about the resurrection that the apostles ultimately

displayed. If all they had was the empty tomb, they would have

gone away scratching their heads for sure, but it’s doubtful

they would have concluded that Jesus had come back to life.

Too many alternatives could have explained it: grave robbers,

some further humiliation by the Romans, a mistake in locating

the tomb, something!

At the same time, simply seeing Jesus wouldn’t have done

it either. Again, there were just too many other explanations:

So Did It Happen? 117

a ghost, an apparition, an impostor, anything! So long as a de-

composing corpse could be produced from the tomb, certainly

no one could call this whole thing a resurrection.

But put the two together—an empty tomb and the appear-

ances of Jesus—and it was enough to create a nuclear explo-

sion in the disciples’ reality. The tomb was empty because Jesus

was alive. “He is not here,” the angel said, “for he has risen”

(Matt. 28:6). That’s their testimony. That’s the reason they be-

lieved, and that’s the reason they ultimately died for the belief

that Jesus really did rise from the grave. Now you can say you

don’t believe them; you can say that whatever happened on that

Sunday morning, it wasn’t that. But if you’re going to do that,

then you have to oer some alternative. If not the resurrection,

then what did happen?

Nothing Else Explains It

Look, the one thing you can’t do (not with any intellectual

honesty, anyway) is pretend that nothing happened. Clearly

something did, because it has created shockwaves around the

world and throughout history for two thousand years. Even

just in the lives of those disciples, whatever it was that hap-

pened caused them to rearrange the very structure of their

worldview. They began to believe that this cruciﬁed Jesus was

the long-awaited Messiah of Jewish hope, that he was the Son

of God, the vindicated, sin-bearing Lamb of God, the ﬁrst-

fruits of a new creation that would begin in his own redeemed

people, the King of kings who would one day save his people

ﬁnally and forever and remake the world in a new birth re-

118 Why Trust the Bible?

ﬂective of and ﬂowing from his own resurrection life. Because

they believed these things, they rearranged their lives so that

they could proclaim their beliefs—abandoning careers, leav-

ing homes, and ultimately refusing to back away from those

beliefs even as (according to tradition) they were, one by one,

beheaded, cruciﬁed, impaled with spears, ﬂayed, and stoned.

Something happened to cause allthat.

And either it was that Jesus really was resurrected from the

dead, or it was something else that would have been powerful

enough to cause the disciples—all at once—to embrace those

beliefs and rearrange their lives to proclaim them, even in the

face of gruesome martyrdoms. So that’s really the last ques-

tion: Has anyone ever suggested any other alternative that has

the power to explain all that? Certainly, a lot of people have

made a lot of attempts.

Maybe the women went to the wrong tomb and just got

everyone excited over a mistake. Perhaps. But then, when a be-

lief that this Jesus had been resurrected was spreading through

the city like wildﬁre, why didn’t the authorities just produce

a corpse from the right tomb? Surely they knew where it was,

given that the Roman guard placed a seal on it. And besides, as

we’ve already said, the mere report that the tomb was empty

wouldn’t have created a belief that Jesus had been resurrected.

Jesus also appeared to the disciples, alive! That’s what they

(reliably) told us. If you’re going to say they were wrong, ﬁne.

But what—if not that—did happen?

Okay, maybe Jesus didn’t really die but only almost died,

eventually escaped from the tomb, and made his way back to

So Did It Happen? 119

where his disciples were hiding. Perhaps. But then why ...

actually, no, not perhaps. That’s absurd! Are we really to think

that Jesus—somehow managing to survive his cruciﬁxion—

staggered wounded, cruciﬁed, spear-stabbed, and now de-

hydrated and starving into the presence of his disciples and

convinced them, frightened and skeptical though they were,

that he was the Lord of life and the Conqueror of death? Not

highly likely, I’d say. They wouldn’t have gone out to preach at

that point; they would have gotten him a doctor!

Alright, well, maybe the disciples stole the body and then

claimed that Jesus was raised from the dead; maybe it was the

most successful hoax in the history of the world. But no, like

we said before, nothing about this has the character of a hoax,

and above all, nobody dies for a hoax. If you’re just trying to

pull one over on the world, when the jig is up and the axe is

about to fall—or the nails are about to pierce your wrists, or

they’re about to drop you in the boiling oil or throw you o the

top of the temple—you don’t keep on saying, “I tell you, the

man is alive!” The only way you stick by the story under those

circumstances is if you really believe it’strue.

Well, maybe the disciples were the victims of mass hallu-

cination. No, we’ve already discussed that suggestion at some

length. Given how many dierent groups of people reported

seeing Jesus, how many dierent times, and over how many

weeks, the notion of a sustained, contagious mass hallucina-

tion is vanishingly unlikely. And of course, the idea of a “mass

hallucination” is absurd in itself.

Perhaps, then, they were overwhelmed by a dream, a vi-

120 Why Trust the Bible?

sion, a mystical experience, or even a profound and heavenly

feeling of forgiveness and new spiritual life. Maybe that’s what

they meant by using the term resurrection and not this grossly

literal idea that Jesus actually got up from the grave. In other

words, maybe all the stories in the New Testament are just one

big metaphor for spiritual truths, not meant to be taken liter-

ally and physically.

No, the fact is, ﬁrst of all, that the accounts of the resur-

rection simply don’t have the character of spiritual metaphors.

They have the character of eyewitness testimony to events that

physically happened in history, and it would take a great deal

of blurring the eyes to get past that. Also, the ﬁrst-century

Jewish world was not unfamiliar with dreams or visions or

ecstatic religious experiences, nor was it unfamiliar with

would-be messiahs whom the authorities killed o. Given that

background, it’s just unthinkable that a mere dream, vision, or

mystical experience, much less a feeling—even if it was con-

nected to an executed “messiah”—could have given rise to the

kind of enduring, worldview-altering belief in Jesus’s resurrec-

tion that marked the ﬁrst Christians and drove their martyr’s

resolve. Most of all, though, no ﬁrst-century Jew would ever

have used the word resurrection to describe a dream, vision,

or mystical experience, much less a “feeling” of whatever kind

or strength. That’s because resurrection had a very speciﬁc

meaning. It meant the literal, physical coming-back-to-life of

the body, and it would emphatically not be used to refer to

anything short of that. Yet that’s exactly the word the early

Christians used to describe what happened to Jesus.

So Did It Happen? 121

Okay, so maybe they were all victims of a severe case of

wishful thinking. Maybe they just wanted so badly for Jesus not

to have died that they fooled themselves into believing he had

been resurrected. Again, no. Even if the disciples were search-

ing for comfort in the wake of Jesus’s death, they wouldn’t

have reached for the idea of resurrection. It’s far more likely

that they would have comforted themselves by claiming he was

“spiritually” alive or something. But it’s just implausible in the

extreme to think that they would have lit upon the worldview-

reshaping idea that Jesus had been resurrected and gloriﬁed be-

fore the end of time. The only way they would have arrived at

that conclusion is if the things they had seen and experienced

left them with no other choice. Do you see the point? The early

Christians didn’t claim that Jesus had been resurrected because

of a wish. They made that claim because there was no other

explanation for what they saw. It wasn’t wishful thinking that

led them to that conclusion; it was their own eyes.

On top of that, the accounts we have just don’t present the

disciples as in any way intellectually prepared to believe that

Jesus had risen from the dead. To the contrary, long before they

believed, they disbelieved in a big way, to the point that the

resurrected Jesus had to rebuke them for it. No, the disciples

were not in any way psychologically, religiously, or culturally

prepared for the resurrection of one man before the end of

time. That such a thing might actually have happened quite

truly exploded into their consciousness and left them strug-

gling to explain what it all meant.

122 Why Trust the Bible?

So like I said, something happened that Sunday morning.

There’s simply no denyingthat.

And now I’m asking you, what was it? It was not a mistake,

not a near death, not a hoax or deception, not a mass halluci-

nation, not a dream or vision or mystical feeling of forgiveness,

not wishful thinking—none of these things. So if not these,

then what wasit?

Look, when you come right down to it, the evidence before

us—the early Christians’ conﬁdent insistence that the tomb

was empty and that they saw the risen Jesus, the life-altering

beliefs that ﬂowed from those experiences, their resolute em-

bracing of their faith even in the face of death—this evidence

is explained by only one possibility:

Jesus was really, truly, bodily, historically resurrected

from thedead.

Implications of a Resurrected Jesus

It’s hardly worth saying it, but all this isn’t something we can

simply rush past, is it? It’s all of enormous, even eternal, im-

portance. So as we close this chapter, let me cede the page to

one particularly well-known scholar, N.T. Wright, who puts

the conclusion of the matter very helpfully. Read it slowly, read

it carefully, and think it all through one moretime:

[That Jesus was resurrected] remains, of course, unprovable

in logical or mathematical terms. The historian is never in

a position to do what Pythagoras did.... With history it is

not like that. Almost nothing is ever ruled out absolutely;

So Did It Happen? 123

history, after all, is mostly the study of the unusual and unre-

peatable. What we are after is high probability; and this is to

be attained by examining all the possibilities, all the sugges-

tions, and asking how well they explain the phenomena. It is

always possible that in discussing the resurrection someone

will come up with the skeptical critic’s dream: an explana-

tion which provides a sucient condition for the rise of early

Christian faith but which, by ﬁtting into post-Enlightenment

epistemological and ontological categories, or even simply

mainstream pagan ones, causes no ﬂuttering in the critical

dovecotes. It is worthy of note that, despite the somewhat

desperate attempts of many scholars over the last two hun-

dred years (not to mention critics since at least Celsus), no

such explanation has been found. The early Christians did

not invent the empty tomb and the “meetings” or “sightings”

of the risen Jesus in order to explain a faith they already

had. They developed that faith because of the occurrence,

and convergence, of these two phenomena. Nobody was ex-

pecting this kind of thing; no kind of conversion-experience

would have generated such ideas; nobody would have in-

vented it, no matter how guilty (or how forgiven) they felt, no

matter how many hours they pored over the scriptures. To

suggest otherwise is to stop doing history and to enter into

a fantasy world of our own, a new cognitive dissonance in

which the relentless modernist, desperately worried that the

post-Enlightenment worldview seems in imminent danger of

collapse, devises strategies for shoring it up nevertheless. In

terms of the kind of proof which historians normally accept,

the case we have presented, that the tomb-plus-appearances

124 Why Trust the Bible?

combination is what generated early Christian belief, is as

watertight as one is likely to ﬁnd.

We’ve come a long way in our consideration of whether we

really can trust the Bible, haven’t we? Despite the fact that we

face questions at every turn, we’ve been able to come to a high

degree of historical conﬁdence that the Bible really is reliable.

Here’s what we’ve seen: Our translations are correct; the cop-

ies we have are faithful reproductions of the originals (or, at

the very least, they allow us to reconstruct the originals); the

documents we’re looking at are the best and correct ones; the

authors themselves weren’t dupes or deceitful or writers of ﬁc-

tion (they were telling us what they really believed happened);

and ﬁnally, we have very good reason to believe that what they

thought happened and what they said happened really did in

fact happen. The miracles they recount can’t be ruled out in

principle, and their plausibility far surpasses any other histori-

cal accounts of supernatural happenings. Above all, when it

comes to the most important miracle of all—the resurrection

of Jesus—no explanation really makes sense of all the evidence

other than that it happened.

But here’s the last step in our argument. If the resurrection

happened, then our trust of the Bible is actually catapulted to

a whole new level of conﬁdence, far beyond the mere histori-

calkind.

If Jesus was really resurrected from the dead, then the Bible

is the Word ofGod.

Wright, The Resurrection of the Son of God, 706–7.

Take It on the Word of

a Resurrected Man

In some ways, I really wish this book could have ended with

the previous chapter.

I wish the weight of the whole thing could rest on what

we just discussed, because I believe that’s the most important

truth claim in human history: that we can best explain the evi-

dence before us if Jesus really did rise bodily from the grave.

So even though I hope you’ll read the rest of the book, I also

hope you’ll be most captured and most fascinated by thinking

about that conclusion and its implications. What does it mean

for you if Jesus was, in fact, resurrected? What would you need

to do to respond to that reality?

But since this book is titled Why Trust the Bible? and not

Why Trust That Jesus Rose from the Dead?, we should press

that question to its conclusion. Throughout this book, we have

been thinking and talking about the biblical documents—

especially the New Testament and even more so the four

Gospels—as historical documents. In doing so, we have not

presupposed that they are divine or from God in any way. We

126 Why Trust the Bible?

haven’t presupposed that they are the Word of God, and we

haven’t presupposed that they’re without error or always true.

In fact, just as we would do for any other document we might

ﬁnd buried in the ruins of an ancient village, we have allowed

for every possibility that the biblical documents might be un-

reliable as historical witnesses. But at every turn, we’ve also

concluded with a high degree of historical conﬁdence that they

do in fact seem reliable—from our translations, to the trans-

mission of the original documents through history by copyists,

to the reception of these documents as opposed to any others

as authoritative, to the trustworthiness of the authors them-

selves, to the very truth of what they wrote about. From start

to ﬁnish, we’ve created a strong chain of conﬁdence that the

Bible is reliable as a witness to history.

But when we as Christians say we trust the Bible, we don’t

mean that we have a strong historical conﬁdence in it. We

mean much more than that. We mean that we believe it is the

Word of God, inspired by the Creator of the universe so that

it is absolutely, unfailingly true in everything it says. Here, for

example, is how my church’s “Statement of Faith” putsit:

We believe that the Bible, speciﬁcally the 39 books of the

Old Testament and the 27 books of the New Testament,

is the written Word of God; that it was written by men

divinely inspired, and is a perfect treasure of heavenly

instruction; that it has God for its author, salvation for

its end, and truth without any mixture of error for its

matter; that it reveals the principles by which God will

judge us; and therefore is, and shall remain to the end

Take It on the Word of a Resurrected Man 127

of the world, the true center of Christian union, and the

only sucient, certain and authoritative rule of all saving

knowledge, faith, and obedience.

Everyone who is a member of our church believes that

the Bible—New Testament and Old—is “the written Word

of God,” that it was written by men who were “divinely in-

spired,” that it is a “perfect treasure of heavenly instruction,”

that it “has God for its author,” and even that it is by nature

“truth without any mixture of error.” Obviously, that all goes

way past historical conﬁdence!

We don’t have time or space here to think carefully about

everything Christians mean when they say these things. Topics

like inspiration and inerrancy have demanded books all their

own (see appendix). What’s important for our purposes is

that we understand why Christians say all these exalted things

about the Bible in the ﬁrst place. And to put it simply, it’s

because Jesus rose from the dead. Because of Jesus’s resur-

rection, we believe what Jesus said, and since Jesus himself

endorsed the entire Old Testament and authorized the en-

tire New, we believe they are reliable and true. That’s pretty

muchit.

The Messiah Will Rise from the Dead

To Christians, the resurrection means many important things.

It means that those of us who are united to Jesus by faith will

be resurrected just like he was. It means that God fully accepted

“What We Believe,” Third Avenue Baptist Church, Louisville, KY, accessed February 25,

2015, http:// www .third avenue .org /What -We -Believe.

128 Why Trust the Bible?

the sacriﬁce for sins that Jesus oered on the cross and that it

was inﬁnitely more than sucient to pay our moral debt. It

means that Jesus now lives to lead, rule, protect, intercede for,

and do good for his people who are still alive on earth. And it

also means that God ratiﬁed, endorsed, vindicated, and con-

ﬁrmed all of Jesus’s claims about who he was and what kind

of authority he possessed.

That’s not a dicult point to grasp. Like all the other mir-

acles, Jesus’s resurrection was no superﬂuous addition to the

story, just a ﬂourish needed to ensure a good ending. When

Jesus talked about it, he always tightly connected it to his

claims about his identity. Matthew, for instance, tells us that

Jesus predicted his death and resurrection three times near the

end of his ministry, and each time, he presented it as the neces-

sary and conﬁrming culmination of his identity as the Christ.

Let’s look at those three predictions.

First, Jesus once asked his disciples who they thought he

was, and Peter responded, “You are the Christ, the Son of the

living God” (Matt. 16:16). Now that phrase holds a world of

meaning, but essentially Peter was arming that Jesus was

the long-promised, long-prophesied, long-awaited Messiah

(meaning “anointed one” and therefore King) of Israel and

that he was also the Son of God (which is to say that he was

God). Hearing this, Jesus rejoiced and told Peter that he was

blessed to have had this knowledge revealed to him by God the

Father. Then Jesus began to act as the King that Peter had just

acknowledged him to be. He established his church—his royal

embassy in the world—and promised that he would protect it

Take It on the Word of a Resurrected Man 129

and empower it in its mission. He gave that embassy authority

to speak in his name, and then, crucially, he began to teach the

disciples what it actually meant that he was in fact the King,

the Messiah, the Christ. So Matthew (remember, he was there!)

tells us the following:

From that time Jesus began to show his disciples that he

must go to Jerusalem and suer many things from the

elders and chief priests and scribes, and be killed, and on

the third day be raised. (Matt. 16:21)

Notice ﬁrst the way Matthew puts this: “From that time

Jesus began to show his disciples.” Apparently this was not

a one-time, ﬁve-minute conversation, but a staple of Jesus’s

teaching from that point on. Also, notice the word “must.”

He “must” go to Jerusalem and suer and be killed, and he

“must” be raised from the dead on the third day. Now notice

the word “show.” What does it mean that he began to “show”

them that all this must happen? Show them from what? Logic?

Reason? No, it means that he showed them from the Scrip-

tures, from the Old Testament. Okay, do you see the point?

The role, the mission, and therefore the destiny of the Messiah

was not something “to be determined”; it was all well deﬁned

in the Old Testament, Jesus explained, and one of the things

the true Messiah would do is be resurrected. “The Messiah

will rise from the dead,” Jesus was saying. “So if I don’t rise

from the dead, then I’m not the Messiah. But I will. And there-

fore...”—you get the point.

Jesus predicted his death a second time a few days later, and

130 Why Trust the Bible?

this time he connected it with another Old Testament proph-

ecy of the Messiah. Here’s how Matthew tellsit:

As they were gathering in Galilee, Jesus said to them,

“The Son of Man is about to be delivered into the hands

of men, and they will kill him, and he will be raised on the

third day.” And they were greatly distressed. (Matt. 17:22)

Son of Man was apparently Jesus’s favorite way to talk

about his identity, but it doesn’t just mean “a man’s son.” That

would describe quite a lot of us. Rather, he took the title from

the Old Testament prophet Daniel, who had a vision of what

he called “one like a son of man.” Now that means, simply,

that the one Daniel saw looked like a human. But notice what

Daniel says that “one like a son of man”did:

I saw in the night visions,

and behold, with the clouds of heaven

there came one like a son of man,

and he came to the Ancient of Days

and was presented before him.

And to him was given dominion

and glory and a kingdom,

that all peoples, nations, and languages

should serve him;

his dominion is an everlasting dominion,

which shall not pass away,

and his kingdom one

that shall not be destroyed. (Dan. 7:13–14)

Take It on the Word of a Resurrected Man 131

That’s what Jesus was referring to when he called himself

Son of Man. This massively signiﬁcant title pointed not only

to royal authority but to divinity itself. Most important for our

purposes, though, notice again how Jesus connected all these

allusions speciﬁcally to the resurrection in Matthew 17:22

above. No, he doesn’t use the word must here, but the eect is

the same. He means, “Just like the Old Testament prophesied,

the Son of Man is about to be killed and raised again on the

third day. If that doesn’t happen, then I’m not the Son of Man.

But I am the Son of Man, so all this is about to take place.”

The third time Jesus predicted his resurrection in Mat-

thew’s Gospel was right before he went into Jerusalem just

days prior to his cruciﬁxion. Here’s how Matthew records

what hesaid:

And as Jesus was going up to Jerusalem, he took the

twelve disciples aside, and on the way he said to them,

“See, we are going up to Jerusalem. And the Son of Man

will be delivered over to the chief priests and scribes, and

they will condemn him to death and deliver him over to

the Gentiles to be mocked and ﬂogged and cruciﬁed, and

he will be raised on the third day. (Matt. 20:17–19)

There’s really not much new here. Jesus makes the same point

that he made in the previous prediction: “Because I’m the Son

of Man, this is about to happen.”

Do you see? Jesus always connected his resurrection with

his identity. If it happened, then he was the Messiah, the

Christ, the King, the Son of Man. If not—well, then, never

132 Why Trust the Bible?

mind. After the resurrection, the apostles did the same thing.

Peter’s sermon in Acts 2 is crystal clear in this regard. Here’s

what hesaid:

Men of Israel, hear these words: Jesus of Nazareth, a man

attested to you by God with mighty works and wonders

and signs that God did through him in your midst, as you

yourselves know—this Jesus, delivered up according to the

deﬁnite plan and foreknowledge of God, you cruciﬁed and

killed by the hands of lawless men. God raised him up,

loosing the pangs of death, because it was not possible for

him to be held by it. For David says concerninghim,

“I saw the Lord always before me,

for he is at my right hand that I may not be

shaken;

therefore my heart was glad, and my tongue

rejoiced;

my ﬂesh also will dwell in hope.

For you will not abandon my soul to Hades,

or let your Holy One see corruption.

You have made known to me the paths of life;

you will make me full of gladness with your

presence.”

Brothers, I may say to you with conﬁdence about the

patriarch David that he both died and was buried, and

his tomb is with us to this day. Being therefore a prophet,

and knowing that God had sworn with an oath to him

that he would set one of his descendants on his throne, he

Take It on the Word of a Resurrected Man 133

foresaw and spoke about the resurrection of the Christ,

that he was not abandoned to Hades, nor did his ﬂesh see

corruption. This Jesus God raised up, and of that we all

are witnesses. Being therefore exalted at the right hand of

God, and having received from the Father the promise of

the Holy Spirit, he has poured out this that you yourselves

are seeing and hearing. For David did not ascend into the

heavens, but he himselfsays,

“The Lord said to my Lord,

‘Sit at my right hand,

until I make your enemies your footstool.’”

Let all the house of Israel therefore know for certain

that God has made him both Lord and Christ, this Jesus

whom you cruciﬁed. (Acts 2:22–36)

Do you see what he’s saying? Here’s the gist: “You guys

put Jesus to death, but God raised him to life again because it

was impossible for death to hold him. Why? Because as David

said, God would not let the Messiah see the decay of death.

Now David couldn’t have been talking about himself being

the Messiah, because he died and was buried and we know

where his tomb is to this day. So he must have been talking

about a future Messiah. Well, guess what? God raised up this

Jesus—we are all eyewitnesses of that fact. Therefore, because

the Messiah would be raised, and because Jesus was raised, let

all the house of Israel know for certain that God has made this

Jesus—whom you cruciﬁed—both Lord and Christ.”

134 Why Trust the Bible?

Peter couldn’t be any clearer. Jesus had been resurrected,

and therefore Jesus was the Christ, just as hesaid.

What Does the Resurrection Mean

for the Old Testament?

What, though, do Jesus’s resurrection and self-identiﬁcation

as the Christ have to do with the Bible? Everything. The Old

Testament taught that the authority of the Messiah would be

all-encompassing, multifaceted, universal, and absolute. He

would hold sway in every area of life and existence. But one

particular area in which he would have authority was in speak-

ing for God the Father. In other words, he would be a prophet

par excellence. God even said that he would send a prophet like

Moses and promised, “I will put my words in his mouth, and

he shall speak to them all that I command him” (Deut. 18:18).

That’s why Jesus could say something as audacious as, “Truly,

truly, I say to you, the Son can do nothing of his own accord,

but only what he sees the Father doing. For whatever the Father

does, that the Son does likewise” (John 5:19). And it’s why

John would say of Jesus, “For he whom God has sent utters the

words of God” (John 3:34). The Christ was also the Prophet,

the One who reveals perfectly who God is and what Godsays.

Understanding that, it’s remarkable to see how Jesus—the

Christ, the Prophet, the One who would hold perfect authority

to speak for God—treated the Old Testament throughout his

ministry. Take, for instance, Luke’s account of what Jesus said

to his disciples after his resurrection:

Take It on the Word of a Resurrected Man 135

Then he said to them, “These are my words that I spoke

to you while I was still with you, that everything written

about me in the Law of Moses and the Prophets and the

Psalms must be fulﬁlled.” (Luke 24:44)

Now the Jews often used a shorthand to refer to the books of

their Old Testament, either “the Law, the Prophets, and the

Writings” or, more simply, “the Law and the Prophets.” So

when Jesus said that “the Law of Moses and the Prophets and

the Psalms” (the book of Psalms representing the Writings as

the largest book in that collection) must be fulﬁlled, he was en-

dorsing and ratifying the authority of the entire Old Testament

from start to ﬁnish. (Incidentally, he was also clearly deﬁning

the scope of the Old Testament canon to be the thirty-nine

books traditionally recognized by the Jews.)

But Jesus’s testimony about the Old Testament runs even

deeper. He not only thought it was authoritative; he said it

was the very Word of God. Look at this passage from Mat-

thew19:

And Pharisees came up to him and tested him by ask-

ing, “Is it lawful to divorce one’s wife for any cause?”

He answered, “Have you not read that he who created

them from the beginning made them male and female,

and said, ‘Therefore a man shall leave his father and his

mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall be-

come one ﬂesh’? So they are no longer two but one ﬂesh.

What therefore God has joined together, let not man

separate.” (vv.3–6)

136 Why Trust the Bible?

The story here is that some of Israel’s leaders were ques-

tioning Jesus about his understanding of Scripture. Clearly,

they were less interested in what he had to say than in trap-

ping and discrediting him. How the exchange went down is

fascinating in itself, but what I want you to see is that Jesus

identiﬁed the One who said, “Therefore a man shall leave his

father and his mother,” as “he who created them [husband and

wife].” The interesting thing, though, is that if you take a look

back at Genesis, you’ll notice that this sentence is not attrib-

uted to God at all. Rather, it’s a commentary on the situation

by the human author of Genesis. But therein lies the point:

Jesus understood even the parts of the Old Testament where

God wasn’t actually speaking as the words ofGod.

You can see the same thing in Mark 12:36 where Jesus

quotes a psalm written by David, but introduces it by saying,

“David himself, in the Holy Spirit, declared ...” You see? From

start to ﬁnish, Jesus the Messiah endorsed and conﬁrmed that

every word of the Old Testament was the Word of God and

therefore true from start to ﬁnish. That was the case for its

teaching about God, and according to Jesus, it was also the

case for its historical claims. At some point in the four Gospels,

Jesus talks about and treats as historically accurate all kinds of

people and stories from the Old Testament—Adam and Eve,

Cain and Abel, Noah, Abraham, Sodom and Gomorrah, Isaac,

Jacob, Moses, the manna falling in the wilderness, the bronze

serpent, David and Solomon, the Queen of Sheba, Elijah and

Elisha, the widow of Zarephath, Naaman, Isaiah, Jeremiah,

Zechariah, and even Jonah getting swallowed by the giant ﬁsh.

Take It on the Word of a Resurrected Man 137

He believed it all in every detail. And that matters because he

was the Christ.

Now sometimes people will trip at this point and say, “But

didn’t Jesus actually correct some places of the Old Testament?

Didn’t he think some places of it were wrong or inadequate

and tell his followers to believe something dierent?” Well, no.

There were certainly times when Jesus said things like, “You

have heard that it was said ... but I say to you ...” We don’t

have time to consider these occasions in detail (you can ﬁnd

thorough explanations in any good Bible commentary), but

the thing to realize is that at each of these points, Jesus wasn’t

correcting the Old Testament. He was correcting wrong, dis-

ingenuous, and even malicious attempts by the Pharisees to

dodge the true meaning of the Old Testament or carve out

ridiculous exceptions for themselves. That means that far from

correcting the Old Testament, Jesus was actually exercising

his kingly, prophetic authority to say what the Old Testament

really meant in the ﬁrst place—that is, to reassert its power,

authority, and truth in the lives of the Israelites. Thus he ex-

plained before he began to do just that in his famous Sermon

on the Mount, “Do not think that I have come to abolish the

Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to

fulﬁll them” (Matt. 5:17).

Do you see the point? Of course there are still going to

be questions about hermeneutics and interpretation, how we

should understand this and how that ﬁts into the Christian

life, covenants and dispensations and all the rest. Moreover,

the Old Testament presents its own unique issues regarding

138 Why Trust the Bible?

transmission, canonization, and authorship, and you can read

large books by Christian scholars about all these topics (see

appendix). But here’s the important thing. Here’s why all those

large books will begin with the belief that the Old Testament

is the Word of God: because Jesus, the resurrected Messiah,

said it was. And therefore we believeit.

What Does the Resurrection Mean

for the New Testament?

So now what about the New Testament? Frankly, things are not

quite as straightforward when it comes to the New Testament.

After all, when Jesus was on earth and could have verbally

conﬁrmed the authority of the New Testament as he did with

the Old, the New Testament hadn’t yet been written.

Even so, Christians’ belief that the New Testament is the

Word of God also goes back to the authority of Jesus as the

resurrected Messiah, just in a slightly dierent way. Do you

remember how, in chapter4 of this book, we said that the early

Christians always talked about authoritative, canonical books

being handed down to them and that the main and primary

criterion they used to defend those books was that they had

apostolic authority? At that point, we simply noted the rea-

sonability of that assertion as a historical matter; of course it

makes sense to have the most conﬁdence in books that came

with a stamp of approval from eyewitnesses.

But that’s not the only—or even primary—reason that

apostolicity was the early church’s main criterion for conﬁrm-

ing the exclusive authority of those received books. The pri-

Take It on the Word of a Resurrected Man 139

mary reason goes back, again, to the authority of Jesus. You

see, in John 16, when Jesus was giving ﬁnal instructions to his

apostles, he promised that after his resurrection and ascension

into heaven, he would send the Holy Spirit to relay to them

further teaching that he wanted them to have. It’s really an

extraordinary passage:

[Jesus said,] “I still have many things to say to you, but

you cannot bear them now. When the Spirit of truth

comes, he will guide you into all the truth, for he will

not speak on his own authority, but whatever he hears

he will speak, and he will declare to you the things that

are to come. He will glorify me, for he will take what is

mine and declare it to you. All that the Father has is mine;

therefore I said that he will take what is mine and declare

it to you.” (vv.12–15)

That’s an amazing chain of authority Jesus constructs,

isn’t it? Everything he has to say is from the Father (there’s

that prophetic authority again), and he will give all that comes

from the Father to the Holy Spirit, who will in turn declare it

to the apostles. Do you see? Jesus is here telling his apostles

that more teaching will come and that it will come to them in

particular. It’s interesting to see how the apostles themselves,

in their writings, seem to have realized that they were writing

with that kind of Spirit-inspired, Scripture-making authority.

One passage is especially important. In 2Peter 3, the apostle

Peter is encouraging his readers to stand ﬁrm until the end.

Then hesays:

140 Why Trust the Bible?

And count the patience of our Lord as salvation, just as

our beloved brother Paul also wrote to you according to

the wisdom given him, as he does in all his letters when

he speaks in them of these matters. There are some things

in them that are hard to understand, which the ignorant

and unstable twist to their own destruction, as they do the

other Scriptures. (vv.15–16)

It’s amusing to note that Peter thought Paul’s writings were

“hard to understand.” Not a few other Christians have had the

same feeling themselves sometimes! But Peter also says that

Paul wrote “according to the wisdom given to him, as he does

in all his letters.” That’s not just regular wisdom he’s talking

about; it’s a throwback to Jesus’s promise to the apostles that

he would send the Holy Spirit to lead them into all truth. Then

at the end, Peter says that “ignorant and unstable” people will

sometimes twist Paul’s words to their own ends just like they

do the other Scriptures! Clearly, Peter was putting Paul’s writ-

ings on the same rareﬁed level of authority as the Old Testa-

ment Scriptures. They were a fulﬁllment of exactly what Jesus

had promised to do through the Holy Spirit.

This chain of authority explains why the early Christians

emphasized so strongly the need to trace a canonical document

back to the apostles. It wasn’t just that those men were eyewit-

nesses; it was that they had been particularly and speciﬁcally

authorized by the King to teach the church the rest of what he

wanted taught.

Now in chapter4 we concluded that we can have a great

deal of conﬁdence that the books of our New Testament are

Take It on the Word of a Resurrected Man 141

in fact the books that carry this kind of authority. If you need

to go back and read that chapter again, do it. There’s plenty

of historical evidence that we do in fact have the right books.

But it’s worth pointing out that, as Christians, our conﬁdence

that the New Testament represents precisely what Jesus meant

for us to have isn’t based merely on historical evidence; it’s

based on the understanding that part of the Holy Spirit’s job

of “guid[ing] you into all the truth” (John 16:13), would have

included guiding the process of canonization too. I mean,

once you come to the conclusion that Jesus was resurrected

from death and therefore that he’s the King of the universe,

it’s a really short hop to the conclusion that he’s well and truly

capable of making sure the “all truth” he promised was pulled

together correctly.

So there you have it. If Jesus was resurrected, then he is the

long-awaited Messiah, Christ, King, Son of God, and Prophet

par excellence. And if that’s true, then we’d better pay atten-

tion to him, including his endorsement of the entire Old Tes-

tament as the Word of God. Not only that, but we have every

reason to trust that he did precisely what he promised he would

do—send the Holy Spirit to guide his apostles into all the truth

he wanted to reveal to them for the good of the church—and

then to trust the Spirit’s work of guiding the church in recog-

nizing that truth.

In the end, therefore, the answer a Christian will give to the

question, “Why do you trust the Bible?” is, “Because King Jesus

the Resurrected endorsed the Old Testament and authorized

the New.” That’s not a presupposition. It’s not an unthinking,

142 Why Trust the Bible?

close-your-eyes-and-jump leap of faith. It’s a considered con-

clusion built from a careful argumentthat

1. the Bible is historically reliable;

2. Jesus was resurrected from the dead; and

3. the whole of the Bible therefore rests on Jesus’s authority.

That’s why we believeit.

That’s why we trustit.

A Final Word

The Next Question

Like I said at the beginning of this book, if you’re not a

Christian, I truly hope this discussion has challenged you

to think about Christians and the Bible in some ways that

may differ a bit from how you’ve thought about them in the

past. I hope you’ve realized that we Christians don’t believe

what we do without any reasons or simply on the basis of

unwarranted presuppositions. I hope you can say now, at

least, “Perhaps there’s more to the Christian faith than I

initially thought.”

But I also hope you don’t end your exploration of Chris-

tianity here. Even if your reading of this book has increased

your estimation of the Bible’s reliability only marginally, I

hope you’ll take the time to move on to the next and even more

important question, the one that the Bible itself holds out re-

peatedly and preeminently: Who, exactly, is Jesus?

Who did he say he was? And why does it matter? In the end,

coming to the conclusion that the Bible is reliable is really just

a means to another end, the end of coming to know that Jesus

is reliable. The apostle John, I think, says itbest:

144 Why Trust the Bible?

these are written so that you may believe

that Jesus is the Christ,

the Son of God,

and that by believing

you may have life in his name.

John 20:31

Appendix

Resources for

Further Exploration

In this book, I have relied especially on Craig Blomberg’s two

excellent books, The Historical Reliability of the Gospels and

Can We Still Believe the Bible? An Evangelical Engagement

with Contemporary Questions. Both are superb resources for

engaging these matters in more depth. In addition, if you’d like

to further explore the issues discussed in this book, I recom-

mend beginning with the following helpful resources:

Bible Translation

Blomberg, CraigL. Can We Still Believe the Bible? An Evangeli-

cal Engagement with Contemporary Questions. Grand Rapids,

MI: Brazos, 2014.

Fee, GordonD. and MarkL. Strauss. How to Choose a Bible Trans-

lation for All Its Worth: A Guide to Understanding and Using

Bible Versions. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2007.

Wegner, PaulD. The Journey from Texts to Translations: The Ori-

gin and Development of the Bible. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker

Academic, 1999.

146 Resources for Further Exploration

Transmission of Biblical Manuscripts

Blomberg, CraigL. Can We Still Believe the Bible? An Evangeli-

cal Engagement with Contemporary Questions. Grand Rapids,

MI: Brazos, 2014.

Metzger, BruceM. A Textual Commentary on the Greek New Tes-

tament. 2nd ed. Stuttgart: United Bible Societies, 2012.

Wallace, DanielB. Revisiting the Corruption of the New Testa-

ment: Manuscript, Patristic, and Apocryphal Evidence. Grand

Rapids, MI: Kregel, 2011.

Wegner, PaulD. The Journey from Texts to Translations: The Ori-

gin and Development of the Bible. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker

Academic, 1999.

Canonization

Blomberg, CraigL. Can We Still Believe the Bible? An Evangeli-

cal Engagement with Contemporary Questions. Grand Rapids,

MI: Brazos, 2014.

Bruce, F.F. The Canon of Scripture. Downers Grove, IL: IVP Aca-

demic, 1988.

Hill, C.E. Who Chose the Gospels? Probing the Great Gospel Con-

spiracy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010.

Kruger, MichaelJ. Canon Revisited: Establishing the Origins and

Authority of the New Testament Books. Wheaton, IL: Cross-

way, 2012 .

Wegner, PaulD. The Journey from Texts to Translations: The Ori-

gin and Development of the Bible. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker

Academic, 1999.

The Reliability of Biblical Authors

Blomberg, CraigL. Can We Still Believe the Bible? An Evangeli-

cal Engagement with Contemporary Questions. Grand Rapids,

MI: Brazos, 2014.

Resources for Further Exploration 147

. The Historical Reliability of the Gospels. 2nd ed. Downers

Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2007.

Bruce, F.F. The New Testament Documents: Are They Reliable?

6th ed. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerd mans / Downers Grove, IL:

InterVarsity Press, 2003.

Homeier, JamesK., and DennisR. Magary, eds. Do Historical

Matters Matter to Faith?: A Critical Appraisal of Modern and

Postmodern Approaches to Scripture. Wheaton, IL: Crossway,

2012.

The Miracles of Jesus

Blomberg, CraigL. Can We Still Believe the Bible? An Evangeli-

cal Engagement with Contemporary Questions. Grand Rapids,

MI: Brazos, 2014.

Keener, CraigS. Miracles: The Credibility of the New Testament

Accounts. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2011.

The Resurrection of Jesus

Habermas, GaryR., and MichaelR. Licona. The Case for the Res-

urrection of Jesus. Grand Rapids, MI: Kregel, 2004.

Strobel, Lee. The Case for the Resurrection: A First-Century Re-

porter Investigates the Story of the Cross. Grand Rapids, MI:

Zondervan, 2009.

Wright, N.T. The Resurrection of the Son of God. Vol.3 of Chris-

tian Origins and the Question of God. Minneapolis: Fortress,

2003.

Old Testament Issues

Homeier, JamesK., and DennisR. Magary, eds. Do Historical

Matters Matter to Faith?: A Critical Appraisal of Modern and

Postmodern Approaches to Scripture. Wheaton, IL: Crossway,

2012.

148 Resources for Further Exploration

Longman, Tremper, III, and RaymondB. Dillard. An Introduction

to the Old Testament. 2nd ed. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan,

2006.

Wegner, PaulD. The Journey from Texts to Translations: The Ori-

gin and Development of the Bible. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker

Academic, 1999.

Inspiration and Inerrancy

DeYoung, Kevin. Taking God at His Word: Why the Bible Is Know-

able, Necessary, and Enough, and What That Means for You

and Me. Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2014.

Kaiser, Walter C., Jr., Peter H. Davids, F.F. Bruce, and Manfred

T. Brauch. Hard Sayings of the Bible. Downers Grove, IL:

InterVarsity Press, 2010.

MacArthur, John, ed. The Scripture Cannot Be Broken: Twentieth

Century Writings on the Doctrine of Inerrancy. Wheaton, IL:

Crossway, 2015.

Packer, J.I. “Fundamentalism” and the Word of God: Some Evan-

gelical Principles

. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerd mans, 1958.

Sproul, R.C. Can I Trust the Bible? Crucial Questions Series 2. Lake

Mary, FL: Reformation Trust, 2009.

Annals (Tacitus), 49

Bible, the: as historically reliable,

101, 142; inerrancy of, 127;

inspiration of, 127; as resting

on Jesus’s authority, 134–42.