You can have great confidence in the truths and teachings of the Bible. In fact, the validity and transmission of the New Testament has no equal in the world of “textual criticism,” evaluating texts.
How it is Translated
Some faiths today say that the Bible is a translation of a translation of a translation. This could not be further from the truth and no scholar, atheist or Christian believes otherwise.
It’s so absurd that you can literally take a Greek class and translate the Bible for yourself, because the manuscripts used for translation are online. Here.
Bible translators use the oldest manuscripts available and translate directly from those Scriptures.
Manuscript evidence.
Scholars call the number of evidential manuscripts for the New Testament an “embarrassment of riches.”
* We have manuscripts within decades of the original (P51, P46).
* We have 5500 Greek NT mss.
* By end of 2nd century in Latin. Since Latin was so popular 10,000 Latin mss
And let’s imagine for a minute that every single Biblical Greek manuscript was burned up in a fire. We would still be good. Because we can reconstruct the entirety of the New Testament many times over because there are over 1,000,000+ quotations by the early church pastors, elders, theologians and leaders. It would be like today if Bibles were banned, we could still reconstruct the Bible from the commentaries, sermons, books, etc…
Compare this to ancient Greek classical writers.
* Avg classical Gk writer has less than 15 copies of their works still in existence
* Stack them and they’re 4 feet high
Number of NT MSS
* Equivalent of 4 1/2 NYC empire state building
Well-known Greco-Roman Historians / Biographers. And yet the first manuscript evidence dates hundred of years and sometimes a millennium away from the original.
* Pliny the Elder: 700 years
* Plutarch: 800 years
* Josephus: 1200 years
* Pausanias: 1400 years
* Herodutus’ Histories: 1500 years
* Xeonphon’s Hellenica: 1800 years
The New Testament has about 1000x more evidential manuscripts than the average classical author, and comes as much as 1000 years earlier than the avg classical author.
There is substantial, and I mean substantial evidence to believe in the reliability of the New Testament Scriptures.
But I want to challenge you to read the New Testament. Not through Mormon glasses but as if you were a child and no one had told you what to believe.
3) Substantial Archaeological Validation
The Bible is THE book for archeologists in Israel and the surrounding areas. The peoples mentioned, the battles, the locations, etc… match with what is found. One barely has to dig into Israeli soil to find such artifacts.
Thousands of discoveries are still being made and they are still validating the Bible.
The same is true with the botany, the metals used, the animals, the plants, etc…. All affirm the validity of the Scripture.
4) Fulfilled Prophecy
The Bible makes stunning prophecies by the hundreds that came to be fulfilled. The most important are those about Jesus. These are very specific prophecies—where he would be born, how he would die, that he would raise again. These are powerful in showing that the Bible is true and can be trusted.
