How We Got the Bible and Why We Can Trust It

INTRODUCTION

Some of you will be bored by this. But you need to either know this information or you need to know that this information exists—because your confidence in the bible is paramount in how you influence others. If you can know these things, you can speak with confidence to others about why you think the bible is trustworthy.

HERE’S WHAT THE BIBLE SAYS
OLD TESTAMENT
God revealed Himself to people in history through actions and then through spoken word. Through oral tradition, people shared the stories of what God did with each other. This oral tradition has been shown to be incredibly accurate, especially in cultures before books and the information age.


God then revealed Himself to Moses to re-adopt the people of Israel as His family. Moses was called to mediate the adoption ceremony. This is what happened when he made the covenant with Israel at Mount Sinai.

God spoke directly to Moses, and then inspired Moses to write God’s acts and words, starting from Creation. Moses’ words were God’s word. 

Genesis – Deuteronomy were written during Moses life leading God’s people (at least the first edition was). These 5 books of Moses revealed where Israel came from and who Israel was as a nation specially chosen by God to bring His kingdom to the world. These books also gave Israel wisdom and direction to live in relationship with God—through worship and obedience, seeking forgiveness and covenant renewal when they failed.


Joshua – Esther are called historical books. These books of history are theologically driven, meaning that they tell the history of Israel from their entrance into the promised land, through the time of the kings, the exile, and their return from exile. While they report selective events from Israel’s history, they emphasize the covenant relationship that Israel had with God, that Israel broke, and they set the backdrop for God’s prophets.

Isaiah – Malachi are called the Prophets. Prophets were like God’s “covenant lawyers,” confronting people with their violations of their family relationship with God, warning them of the judgment that the covenant promised would befall them for unfaithfulness, and calling them to return to God. The prophets reveal a God of extravagant grace—a God who doesn’t delight in judgment, but whose heart breaks over judgment and who takes on the judgment Himself.

Job – Song of Solomon are called the Wisdom Books. These books govern Israel’s life in the land, they explain how life is designed to work in relationship with God.  These books show that in all of life, the key to successful living (as God defines success) is through knowing, worshiping, and obeying God.

The 39 books that make up what we now call the Old Testament were collected together and were the accepted as God's Holy Scriptures at the time of Jesus. When Jesus came to earth, He made it very clear how He felt about the Old Testament:
                Every jot and tittle will not pass away—Matt 5:17-21
                It all speaks of Him—Luke 24:27; John 5:39
                It’s authoritative—Matt 5:17-21
                It’s inspired by God—Mark 10:3-9
Jesus endorsed the Old Testament. This doesn’t necessarily answer the question of the authority of the Old Testament we have today, but this is what Jesus thought of the Old Testament of His day. In His life, Jesus ministered with God’s authority. His authority was equal and even superseded the authority of the Old Testament.

NEW TESTAMENT
In the midst of his ministry, Jesus appointed 12 apostles to represent Him. Jesus gave them His authority. These 12 preached with the authority of Jesus in Acts. Then the 12 wrote with the authority of Jesus in what became the books of the New Testament. The 12 were inspired to write the words of God (2Tim 3:16-17; 2Pet 1:19-20; 2Pet 3:15). The New Testament is the written version of the God’s final word. It’s the written version of the authority that Jesus Himself gave to the apostles. The New Testament was written by the apostles. The books that aren’t named after the 12 are written by their secretaries (through dictation). Luke was Paul’s secretary, Mark was Peter’s. James was the brother of Jesus, leader of the Jewish church.

THE LIST OF NEW TESTAMENT BOOKS
The apostles writings were accepted as the written authority of Jesus.
There were false teachers who were identified as such. Tools were given to identify them as such. Initially there was no controversy over which books belonged in the approved list. Actually, there wasn’t a published list of authoritative New Testament books until after someone had published a false list. This is because there was no need for a list when no one questioned the books that were accepted as having the authority of Jesus. Marcion, in 180AD tried to steer the church away from Jesus. He believed that the God presented in the Old Testament was different from the God of the New Testament. He believed the Old Testament God was wrath, while the New Testament God was a different God, a. NT—God was love. Marcion believed that the Old Testament wasn’t for the church. More than that, he also believed that most of the New Testament books weren’t inspired by God. Marcion published a list of New Testament books that he said were the written authority of Jesus. There were 10 of them. They were the letters of Paul + Luke’s gospel.

The church responded to Marcion’s list, not by determining which books were supposed to be in and which books were supposed to be out. Instead, the church responded to Marcion’s list by re-affirming the books that were already accepted by the church. It was the 27 books that we have now.


So roughly 2000 years ago, there was an accepted Old Testament and New Testament.

But that was 2000 years ago. We still need to ask and answer the question:  Do we have now what they had then?

TODAY:  THE OLD TESTAMENT WE HAVE
For the longest time the earliest copy of the Old Testament that we had was from 1054AD. That’s about 1500 years after the last book of the Old Testament was written. That's a big gap.

Scholars would defend the accuracy of this copy of the Old Testament by appealing to the painstaking process that copyists went through:  how exact they were, the strides they went through to check and recheck the copies, how they would burn the copies that had even one error. It’s actually very impressive. But still... come on—1500 years of the written telephone game? There’s no way 1500 years could yield anything that we could trust.

Then, in 1947, a shepherd was throwing rocks into a cave. He found what became known as the Dead Sea Scrolls. This collection of scrolls had approximately 1000 documents—including copies of portions of the Old Testament from 200BC. That’s 200 only years after the last book of the Old Testament was written.

When these copies were compared with the copies from 1054AD, there was almost zero difference!

From https://www.probe.org/the-dead-sea-scrolls/  After years of careful study, it has been concluded that the Dead Sea Scrolls give substantial confirmation that our Old Testament has been accurately preserved. The scrolls were found to be almost identical with the Masoretic text (the copy from 1054AD). Hebrew Scholar Millar Burrows writes, “It is a matter of wonder that through something like one thousand years the text underwent so little alteration. As I said in my first article on the scroll, ‘Herein lies its chief importance, supporting the fidelity of the Masoretic tradition.'”{6} 

A significant comparison study was conducted with the Isaiah Scroll written around 100 B.C. that was found among the Dead Sea documents and the book of Isaiah found in the Masoretic text. After much research, scholars found that the two texts were practically identical. Most variants were minor spelling differences, and none affected the meaning of the text.

One of the most respected Old Testament scholars, the late Gleason Archer, examined the two Isaiah scrolls found in Cave 1 and wrote, “Even though the two copies of Isaiah discovered in Qumran Cave 1 near the Dead Sea in 1947 were a thousand years earlier than the oldest dated manuscript previously known (A.D. 980), they proved to be word for word identical with our standard Hebrew Bible in more than 95 percent of the text. The five percent of variation consisted chiefly of obvious slips of the pen and variations in spelling.”{7}

Despite the thousand year gap, scholars found the Masoretic Text and Dead Sea Scrolls to be nearly identical. The Dead Sea Scrolls provide valuable evidence that the Old Testament had been accurately and carefully preserved.

3. Gleason Archer, A Survey of Old Testament Introduction (Chicago, IL.: Moody Press, 1985), 513-517. 
6. Millar Burrows, The Dead Sea Scrolls (New York: Viking Press, 1955), 304, quoted in Norman Geisler and William Nix, General Introduction to the Bible(Chicago: Moody Press, 1986), 367.
7. Archer, 25. 

This means that Old Testament that we have today is an incredibly reliable copy of the original Old Testament.

TODAY:  THE NEW TESTAMENT WE HAVE
There is remarkable manuscript evidence. Thousands of manuscripts of the NT documents. We have more copies of the New Testament than any other historical book from the ancient world combined. It's not even close. If we are sure of anything we learn from ancient writings, we can be sure that the new Testament we have today is what was written by the followers of Jesus.

Plus, we don’t simply have an overwhelming number of copies of the New Testament, but we also have quotes of almost the whole New Testament in the literature that was written about the New Testament.

This means that the translations that we have today—they aren’t translations of translations of translations. Today we translate the OT directly from the Hebrew bible that Jesus affirmed. We translate the NT directly from the Greek in which it was written.

Seminaries teach Hebrew and Greek—so when I preach, I can translate the Hebrew and the Greek myself. I don’t mention this a lot in my sermons, but that’s because the English versions we use are fantastic translations.

The conclusion of all this is that the scientific data shows that Christians can trust the text of the Bible. The scientific data also shows that non-Christians should wrestle with its claims. It represents the authority of God on earth. Jesus believed the Old Testament came from God and represented His own authority through the New Testament. We all should humble ourselves and follow His authority.