God's Not Dead: Evidence for God in an Age of Uncertainty (22 page)

The young girl who told me she believed the Bible had been the product of aliens visiting our planet and beginning life was very sincere in her explanation. I tried to take her seriously and not burst into laughter. It was actually a fairly novel idea in terms of what I’d heard students say in the past. Usually I get the standard, “The Bible is full of contradictions,” or
Da Vinci Code
–inspired conspiracy theories,
⁹
claiming Scripture was corrupted or contrived by priests with their own agenda or by Emperor Constantine around AD 325.

I stepped back, looked at a campus worker standing by me, and thought,
What am I going to say to her?
And then it hit me like a flash of inspiration from
heaven
: “If people from outer space went to the trouble of coming all this way to leave you the Bible, don’t you think you ought to read it?”

The student was stunned at my answer and slowly nodded her head in agreement. I just conceded the UFO argument as if it were true. If she really believed the Bible had that kind of unusual origin, it should be motivation enough to at least read it.

Belief in the existence of God doesn’t depend on whether someone embraces the truth that the Scripture is God’s revelation to man. William Lane Craig, who most certainly believes the Bible is God’s Word, offered me advice on how to navigate
the debate about this vital topic. His strategy is to demonstrate the Bible as an historically reliable book that gives clear testimony that Christ lived, died, and rose again. In Craig’s opinion it is important not to get sidetracked focusing on a defense for the inerrancy of Scripture, especially if someone doesn’t believe in God. Dr. Dan Wallace agrees with this approach:

The way I approach this is to recognize the primacy of Christ as Lord of my life, as sovereign master of the universe. And, as I look at the Scriptures, they first and foremost have to be those documents that I regard as relatively trustworthy to guide us as to what Christ did and what God has done in history. On that basis, on that foundation, I begin to look at it in more ways than that.
¹⁰

In other words, the Bible gives us a reliable account of the life, death, and resurrection of Christ. His identity as the Son of God was verified by His resurrection. Our faith is first and foremost in Him, and because of His authority, we approach the Scriptures as true and trustworthy.

Some skeptics think they can dismiss the Bible as a witness for the existence of God by rejecting the possibility that God could use words to reveal Himself. It’s obvious that if you don’t believe in God, you won’t believe it’s possible that the Scripture could be divinely inspired. A typical tweet or blog post from the world of Internet atheists conveys a flippant attitude by the committed unbeliever: “Do you actually think someone could be persuaded to believe a god is real by quoting a religious book?” This question is the intellectual equivalent of a drive-by shooting. An absolutely random, irrational thought that will injure
naïve bystanders. Could I not give someone an accurate picture of the history of America or any other country by reading its history from a book to you? Of course. Certainly there is a difference in fiction and nonfiction. The Bible doesn’t begin, “Once upon a time,” or “In a galaxy far, far away.” It is rooted in history—verifiable history.

The phrase “Thus says the L
ORD
” occurs hundreds of times in the pages of the Bible. This points to the divine origin of these sacred writings. The ultimate testimony of its authority comes from Jesus Himself. As His resurrection verified His identity as the Son of God, He stated, “
Heaven
and earth will pass away, but My words will by no means pass away” (Matthew 24:35).

To help you remember some of the important aspects that make the Bible trustworthy as well as unique, you can use the acronym SHARPER, inspired by Hebrews 4:12: “For the word of God is living and powerful, and
sharper
than any two-edged sword” (emphasis mine).

S
AME

The Bible has been consistently transcribed and passed down to us for centuries. The notion that it has been corrupted to the point of obscuring what was originally said is simply not true. The
autographs
were written on perishable material and are no longer with us, but there are enough copies of those originals for us to reconstruct the original text to an accuracy of 99 percent. “Of the approximately 138,000 words in the New Testament only about 1,400 remain in doubt. The text of the New Testament is thus about 99 percent established. That means that when you pick up a (Greek) New Testament today, you can be confident that you are reading the text as it was originally written.”
¹¹
None of
these differences in words, phrases, or verses affect any Christian claim or doctrine. “The great majority are spelling differences that have no bearing on the meaning of the text.”
¹²
Likewise, the book of Isaiah was shown to be virtually unchanged through the centuries by the discovery of the
Dead Sea Scrolls
.

It’s worth repeating that the Bible is a collection of sixty-six books written by forty different authors over a period of sixteen hundred years. In spite of the diversity of authors and contexts of each book, the theme of redemption or salvation is consistent. From Genesis to Revelation this is true. The different strands weave together into a beautiful tapestry representing God’s redemptive story in history. Though many issues are covered in the Bible, an overarching consistent theme unfolds to reveal the ultimate salvation found in Jesus Christ.

H
ISTORICALLY
A
CCURATE

The names and places mentioned are real. Skeptics often claim that the New Testament is full of myths and misrepresentations of both Jesus’ teaching and His ministry. They argue that Jesus’ followers were so dismayed by His untimely death that they deluded themselves into believing that He rose from the dead. Naturally, such a scenario would result in their perceptions of Jesus after His death being radically different from the Jesus of history. However, as argued in the previous chapter, Jesus actually did rise from death. Why else would his followers have boldly proclaimed Jesus’ resurrection at Pentecost and eventually die as martyrs defending their claims? Therefore, we know with confidence that Jesus’ disciples carefully guarded His teaching and the stories about His ministry. Moreover, they regularly repeated them for decades to large numbers of early
believers. Those who were taught by the disciples then retold the stories in other communities countless times. In fact, studies of oral traditions indicate that the similarities and differences between the Gospels match what would be expected if the core information were true.
¹³

The
Gospels
and the book of Acts also present a consistent picture with each other and the writings of the apostle Paul of Jesus’ life, ministry, and teaching. For instance, Luke and Matthew both use the gospel of Mark as a source and possibly another common source called
Q
. By comparing those three gospels, we can tell that both authors used their sources faithfully. Minor differences do exist between parallel accounts, but these tensions are usually explained in terms of the flexibility ancient authors had in rearranging material, paraphrasing teachings, and contextualizing stories for particular audiences.
¹⁴
Some differences are more challenging to harmonize, such as the accounts of Judas’s death (Matthew 27:5; Acts 1:18). However, none of these tensions affect our understanding of the core message or events, and no unbiased historian would consider these differences as evidence that the books were fabrications.

Even more striking, descriptions of events in one gospel “interlock” with parallel descriptions in other gospels. For instance, Jesus asked Philip where they could buy food in John’s account of a miraculous feeding (6:5), but no explanation is given as to why Philip was asked. In Luke we learn that this miracle occurred near Bethsaida (9:10), which was Philip’s hometown (John 12:21). Jesus asking Philip, as described in John, makes sense with the additional information from Luke. These connections show that the gospel stories must have been based on real historical events.
¹⁵

A
RCHAEOLOGICALLY
V
ERIFIED

Archaeology
has verified the historicity of the Bible. The view that the New Testament authors were intimately involved in the stories they described is supported by numerous archaeological confirmations. For instance, the famed archaeologist William Ramsay confirmed that countless details in the book of Acts are correct. He originally expected his studies to disprove the book’s reliability, but his work proved his theory wrong.

The more I have studied the narrative of the Acts, and the more I have learned year after year about Graeco-Roman society and thoughts and fashions, and organization in those provinces, the more I admire and the better I understand. I set out to look for truth on the borderland where
Greece
and Asia meet, and found it [in the Book of Acts]. You may press the words of Luke in a degree beyond any other historian’s, and they stand the keenest scrutiny and the hardest treatment, provided always that the critic knows the subject and does not go beyond the limits of science and of justice.
¹⁶

More recent scholars have likewise confirmed the extraordinary reliability of Luke as a historian.
¹⁷

Archaeologists have also confirmed countless details in the
Gospels
from the description of the pool at Bethesda (John 5:2) to details about the coin mentioned when Jesus was questioned about paying taxes to Caesar (Mark 12:13–17). Since many such details in the Gospels and Acts were not widely known outside the original locales, the authors must have been drawing from firsthand experience.
¹⁸

The historical reliability of the
Old Testament
is a much more complex question since many of the recorded events take place in the distant past. Many of the details that were challenged by skeptics have been confirmed by recent archaeological evidence. In summary, the Old Testament has fared quite well where compared to other ancient documents.
¹⁹
Any remaining historical difficulties in no way threaten the Bible’s reliability.

R
ELIABLE
M
ANUSCRIPTS

The number of early manuscripts of the New Testament far exceeds any other ancient documents’. For instance, manuscripts of the early Greek writer
Homer
’s
Iliad
are more than a half millennium later, with less than two thousand discovered. But there are more than five thousand copies of the New Testament, and more than one hundred were written within the first four centuries.

Let me repeat: the majority of the differences between manuscripts simply consist of differences in spelling, different synonyms, and summaries of sections. Very few differences represent significantly different understandings of the text, and none in any way alter any foundational Christian teaching.

The discovery of the
Dead Sea Scrolls
revealed startling evidence for the reliability and integrity of the Old Testament books. Claims that the manuscripts were somehow corrupted over the centuries by the hands of the rabbis and priests who copied them were shown to be spurious. If the scribes copying the Scripture in medieval times made even one error in a manuscript, it was destroyed immediately. The integrity and reverence of the Bible transcription is astounding and unparalleled.

P
ROPHETIC

Another startling dimension of the supernatural nature of the Scripture is the prediction of future events known as
prophecy
. Naturally, skeptical scholars have attempted to redate the prophetic books to years after the prophecies were fulfilled. However, internal evidence such as the vocabulary and languages used in the books suggest they were each written during the times of the claimed authors.

Numerous predictions made throughout the Bible were fulfilled in history. For instance, Isaiah predicted a century in advance that King Cyrus of Persia would enable
Israel
to return to their land and rebuild the temple (Isaiah 44:28). The prophet Ezekiel predicted several details about the falls of Tyre (Ezekiel 26) and Sidon (Ezekiel 28:22–23). Likewise, the prophet Daniel predicted the rise of the next three empires and the general timeframe for the coming of Jesus (Daniel 9:24–27).

Equally striking, dozens of prophecies were fulfilled by Jesus Christ Himself. The Old Testament authors predicted Jesus’ birth in Bethlehem (Micah 5:2), ministry in Galilee (Isaiah 9:1–2), descent from King David (Isaiah 11:1), and triumphal entry into
Jerusalem
(Zechariah 9:9). Such predictions are divine fingerprints throughout Scripture.

One challenge to prophecy does need to be addressed. As mentioned, many Old Testament scriptures clearly point to Jesus, but some references by New Testament authors are more complex. In particular, gospel writers at times seem to take Old Testament scriptures out of their original context. For instance, Matthew references Jeremiah 31:15 in connection with Herod’s slaughter of male
children
in Bethlehem while Jeremiah seems to be referring to the Jewish exile. While such tensions might
appear problematic to modern readers, they vanish when the theological framework of the New Testament writers is fully understood. The authors did not simply see a scattering of Old Testament scriptures pointing to Christ. Instead, they saw Jesus as the fulfillment of Israel’s entire history and divine calling. As such they often connected Old Testament scriptures, which related to events in the original author’s timeframe, to Jesus since He in even greater fashion fulfilled their fuller meaning.

E
XTRAORDINARY
I
MPACT

The Scripture has powerfully altered the lives of individuals and entire nations. Moral law is given specific clarity through the pages of the Bible. The
Ten Commandments
stand as the unsurpassed benchmark for civil law. The two great commands of Jesus to love God and love your neighbor are summaries of the Ten Commandments. To love God is to have a specific expression, and to love your neighbor is demonstrated not merely in a feeling or emotion but in our actions. If we love our neighbors, we won’t lie to them or steal from them. As entire communities have embraced the teaching of Scripture, such transformation has spread throughout cities and even to entire nations. Examples of such cultural change are presented in
chapter
9
. In terms of personal impact, the Bible’s teaching has empowered its readers to overcome addictions, restore families, experience peace and joy, and even forgive bitter enemies. Specific testimonies of such evidence of divine power are presented in
chapter 10
.