Christianity is based upon the Bible, that it is the word of God and therefore is true. We accept that fact by faith, but is there logical evidence as to the truthfulness of the Bible. As it happens there are several logical reasons of the truthfulness of the Bible. We will begin by looking at the Bible as a great literary work and apply the rules to it as we would any piece of literature. First, we see the miracle of biblical unity. The Bible was written over a period of 1500 years by 40 different authors, these authors came from many different walks of life; they were prophets, kings, scholars, fishermen, shepherds, statesmen, some were highly educated and others were not. Yet, over all these years and with this variety of authors we see that the Bible retains the same theme of redemption from beginning to end. Our Lord Jesus Christ is throughout the Bible and the Old Testament fits into the New Testament or as it has been said, the New is in the Old concealed while the Old is in the New revealed. The Bible is linear, it has a beginning and an end, even though it was written in the Eastern culture which is circular in its reasoning. The Bible views its characters without bias, warts and all and the life of our Lord Jesus was lived and recorded out in the open for all to see and be recorded in secular history as well.
One of the key areas of the Bible is that of fulfilled prophecy. There are at least 2,000 predictive prophecies in the Old Testament that have been fulfilled with 100% accuracy. They were not generalities, which is common among other so-called prophets, but had to do specifically with dozens of nations contiguous with or near to Israel and with major cities associated with those nations. Jean Dixon was known as a prophet and she prophesied concerning the elections held in 1952, 1956, and 1960 and failed to get any of the winners correct. She made 61 prophecies that were to take place in the following 6 months and did not get a single one correct. In the writings of Buddha, Confucius and Lao-tse you will not find a single predictive prophecy and in the Koran there is one prophecy, Mohammad predicted that he would return to Mecca, which he did. Quite different from the Lord Jesus who predicted that He would rise from the dead after 3 days and He did. The most well known of fulfilled prophecies concern the rise and fall of the four major empires found in the book of Daniel, that of Babylon, Persia, Greece and Rome. The destruction of the city of Tyre, a prophecy made by Ezekiel, was fulfilled by Alexander the Great, 250 years later. There are many prophecies made concerning our Lord Jesus that were fulfilled, including the city of His birth, that He was born of a virgin, the exact day He would enter Jerusalem on a donkey, His death by crucifixion and His resurrection among just a few. We might ask, so what? Simply stated, it means that the Bible says what it means and means what it says, if you believe on Him, you have everlasting life and if you do not believe then you do not have life. One day He will return and execute His righteous judgment upon all unrighteousness, a 100% fulfillment of prophecy.
One of the first arguments made by Muslims is that our modern Bibles are not reliable. There is a great deal that can be said about the Quran but that can wait. Others have made the same claim, so how can we respond? The problem we have with our Old Testament is that the Jews did not keep the manuscripts, when a manuscript became worn they would ceremonially bury it. The best manuscripts that we have of the Old Testament is the Greek translation known as the Septuagint. We have manuscripts from Syria, Palestine and Egypt and then from the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Qumran caves. These all are within 95% agreement with the modern Hebrew text that we have. The New Testament has far more manuscripts from within 70 years from when they were written. There are 5,366 manuscripts to compare and draw information from and they are within 99.5% agreement of one another. To put this in perspective, there are only 643 copies of Homer’s Iliad, the most famous of Greek ancient literature. There are only 10 copies of Julius Caesar’s Gallic Wars. We see quotes from Socrates and yet there are no manuscripts of his writings, he is quoted by his student Plato and yet nobody denies the existence of Socrates. There are modern and postmodern critics who like to fret over the variants found in the manuscripts. These represent less than 5% of the texts and none of these so-called variants have anything to do with the doctrine of our faith. In other words when you read in your Bible, “You must be born again” then it is a fact that you must be born again.
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