Why I believe the Bible.

Shortly after I was converted I was talking to an old lady at church. She was going on about the Great Flood that covered the earth at the time of Noah. I scoffed at her. "We don't really believe in Noah's flood these days," I said, "we know it was only a local flood that was exaggerated into a myth."

The Pastor of the church took my arm and invited me to a walk over Hengistbury Head, the site of a Roman Hill Fort and a local beauty spot. I remember the conversation as if it were yesterday.

On our walk he asked me, "How do we know anything about God?"

I answered, "Well we infer that there is a God from looking around at the world. Someone must have started the whole thing going. And then throughout history people have investigated about God and written what they have discovered down in books so that today we have the accumulated wisdom of the ages."

"And how do we know about Jesus?"

"I suppose that there must be contemporary records about him and there is a church tradition."

The Pastor thought for a minute, "There are probable brief references to Jesus in Josephus and in Pliny, but almost all that we know about Jesus is written in the Bible. Without the Bible we would know virtually nothing about him."

I protested, "But wasn't the New Testament written many years after Jesus? Isn't it just hearsay?"

"In fact, the earliest writings about Jesus date from about a decade after his death, certainly less than 20 years afterwards, and the whole of the New Testament was written within the lifetime of his disciples. Much of it was written by eyewitnesses or by someone who has taken evidence from eyewitnesses."

"OK, that's the New Testament," I conceded, "but what about the Old Testament?"

"But that's the very Bible that Jesus used. He was careful to quote from the very passages that people tend to doubt: Adam and Eve, Noah and the flood, Jonah and the whale."

I tried another tack, "Even so, we don't have the actual manuscripts do we? You know how these things happen. It's like Chinese whispers. Copying errors are bound to creep in over the centuries." Then I told him the joke about the monk who was copying an ancient manuscript. Monks weren't allowed to handle the precious originals so he was making a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy. One day he was allowed to look at the original, "Oh No!" he said, "It says celebrate not celibate!"

He laughed, "The earliest fragment of John's Gospel dates from 130 AD and is in the John Ryland Library in Manchester. The Gospel of John was probably written in 90 AD. There are many other copies of the New Testament dating from the second, third and fourth centuries. As a comparison, how many copies of Julius Caesar's Gallic Wars do we have?"

I guessed, "About a thousand?"

"Actually, there are ten and the earliest dates from 900 AD. In fact we have no manuscript copy of any of the Roman histories or Greek plays that dates before 850 AD. And as far as copying accuracy is concerned, if you compare all the ancient copies that we have of the New Testament, and we have over 10,000, only 400 words out of 200,000 are discrepant. In comparison for Homer's Iliad about 7000 of 150,000 are questioned."

I was surprised but still not convinced about the Old Testament.

"Until 1947 the oldest copies we had of the Old Testament dated from 916 AD, the so-called Masoretic text. In 1947 the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered. They comprised everything from shopping lists to Scripture, but they did include passages from every Old Testament book bar one. The manuscripts dated from 200 BC to 68 AD. The differences between the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Masoretic Test were trivial. In one scroll of Isaiah chapter 53, of 166 words, only 17 letters are in question. Ten are a matter of spelling which does not affect the sense; four more are stylistic changes involving conjunctions. The remaining three letters are the Hebrew word for 'light' which is added to verse 11. It does not affect the sense and in any case is already in the Septuagint. In over 1000 years of copying that was the only change."

He challenged me, "Take your Bible home and tear out the pages that you don't think are authentic. Then tell me on what authority you have torn out pages."

Then he gave me two books to read, "Evidence that demands a verdict" by Josh McDowell and "The Genesis Flood" by Henry Morris.

Now these aren't Holy Scripture and you don't have to believe everything that's written there, but they will certainly set you thinking.