Sermon Notes, January 20, 2013
Can You Really Believe the Bible? 2 Timothy 3:14-17 (pg. 843)
This morning we’re starting a series based on Tim Keller's book The Reason for God.
We’re going to be looking at some critical issues of faith, so come to all the messages in this
series.
Every Christmas and Easter the media run programs with titles like “Who was Jesus?”
 Their advertising suggests that new scholarly discoveries transcend the natural
confines of faith and provide a greater truth devoid of the supernatural.
 Conspiracy theory books like The Da Vinci Code and articles related to the
publication of ancient Gnostic texts like the Gospel of Thomas and the Gospel of
Judas abound. (The Gospel of Judas, touted as a great discovery, was actually
rejected as heretical by Church Father Irenaeus in approximately 180 AD.)
 Skeptics claim the New Testament was cobbled together, which we’ll talk about, by
religious leaders for their own benefit. The Bible, they say, was simply one version
among many of Jesus’ life and teachings and cannot be trusted.
Postmodernists, in fact, trust no writings, believing that history is nothing but a record of
cultural prejudice, having been written by history’s victors, particularly white Anglo-Saxon
males. What’s more, any truth claim, particularly one about ultimate reality, is offensive in
this relativistic era. This has resulted in a cultural atmosphere in which to say that you
believe in the Bible is to invite derision.
So what is it about this book, the Bible, that causes people to give their lives for it,
causes oppressors to try to destroy it, and so infuriates the cultural elite today? Clearly the
Bible is unique. The reason is what the Bible claims for itself. It purports to be the Word of
God itself.
We have this Book. At first Israel and then the church became known as a people of the
Book. Paul wrote about the Book, "Every part of Scripture is God-breathed and useful one
way or another - showing us truth, exposing our rebellion, correcting our mistakes, training
us to live God's way. Through the Word we are put together and shaped up for the tasks
God has for us."
This is why this is the first message in the series, a real critical issue of faith…Can this
Book be trusted? Thoughtful people have a lot of questions.
 Has it been proved somehow by science or archeology to be unreliable?
 Does it condone practices that are culturally regressive?
 Can a modern, educated, 21st century person really take seriously the idea that
texts written millennia ago were somehow inspired by God?
This is amazing. This is what the apostle Peter wrote. Peter said, "Our dear brother
Paul…writes the same way in all his letters, speaking in them of these matters. His letters
contain some things that are hard to understand, which ignorant and unstable people
distort, as they do the other Scriptures, to their own destruction."
I'm struck by Peter's using that phrase, "some of what Paul wrote is hard to
understand." I wonder if Peter ever had a conversation with Paul about that. At the same
time, he says that people distort Paul's writings as they do other Scriptures. In other
words, Peter was already recognizing that Paul's words have about them this power—this
authority—that puts them in a different category than merely human writings.
So we're going to look at what are honest, sincere questions, reservations that thoughtful
people have about this Book that could keep them from taking it seriously or trusting it. I'll
do this in the form of reservations that folks have, yet I think underneath them can have
really good reasons for faith in this Book.
1) Some people feel that the Bible may have valuable moral insights, but it ought to
be understood as a collection of myths, fables, once-upon-a-time kind of stories.
Now what we call the Bible is really not a book. It is 66 different books written by dozens
of authors over centuries…in fact, over a thousand-year period. You imagine somebody
starting a book 500 years before Columbus and then have it finished in our day. What in
the world could hold those writing together?
The main thing that binds them together is the conviction that there is a God, and He's
not silent, and He's revealed Himself in human history, particularly in the history of
Israel. This is what made the Scriptures of Israel radically different from other ancient
sacred writings of the Sumerians or the Egyptian and so on. They took seriously the idea
that God revealed Himself in history.
But that raises the question…is it accurate? So we’ll just walk through a little bit of how
so many details in the Bible have been confirmed by external sources. That's a way of
saying the writers took history really seriously, and there's good reason for confidence in
what they wrote.
For example, for a long time people who were skeptical about Jesus cited this
Luke 3 passage as a problem. Luke mentions Lysanias. He was known to have lived 50
years earlier, to have had a different title, and to have been a ruler in a town called Calsis.
So there were people who said, "Luke cannot be trusted as a writer of history." Until the
20th century. Archeologists found an inscription written during the reign of Caesar Tiberias
(14-37 AD) that refers to Lysanias being the tetrarch of Abilene. It turns out there were
two Lysaniases and Luke got it exactly right. We didn't have that confirmed in history until
the 20th century.
Another example: In Acts 18:2 it says the Emperor Claudius gave an order for all the
Jews to leave Rome. Outside the Bible, a Roman historian named Suetonius wrote,
"Because the Jews of Rome caused continuous disturbances at the instigation of
Chrestus…" (from the Latin—a different spelling of Christ), "… Claudius expelled them
from the city."
Archeology and historical research of course cannot prove the Bible's claims about God
are true. There are a lot of questions that have not been resolved…just so you know this…
particularly about the oldest parts of the Old Testament. "But in general…" this is from a
Baylor scholar named Rodney Stark, "the major result of the many unrelenting scholarly
attacks on the historical reliability of the New Testament has been to frustrate the attackers
because again and again the Scripture has stood up to their challenges."
2) The Bible is full of contradictions that undermine its own authority.
Real important concern I want to spend a little time on. Give you an example of the
kind of thing that's often discussed. In Matthew 8, Matthew tells about a centurion who
comes to Jesus and asks Jesus to heal his servant. Now Luke tells the same story in Luke
7, only in Luke's version the centurion sends a few elders, and they're the ones who put the
question to Jesus. So there are certain kinds of writers or thinkers, who will say, "See this
proves the Bible cannot be the Word of God because it contradicts itself."
This gets us into the nature of what kind of book the Bible is. And given this, I don't
think that's a right way of looking at it. In the first place, even in our day, different people
summarize stories in different ways. A reporter might say, "The President announced today,"
when the words were actually written by a speechwriter & pronounced by a press secretary.
There are different ways of telling the story. It doesn't mean the story didn't happen.
Beyond that, there is a kind of gritty detail that I believe makes the gospel accounts so
compelling. Here's what I mean: If you want to believe the resurrection did not happen,
then you pretty much have to believe at some point the writers of Matthew, Mark, Luke,
and John involved a number of people, got them together & made up something.
Now if the gospels really were the product of a group of guys in the early church
getting together and cooking something up, what we have is exactly the kind of thing they
would not have done. They would have airbrushed all the details out, anything that differed,
in the Gospels to make everything look perfectly smooth and identical.
For example, the gospels say the first resurrection witnesses were women. Now back
in the first century in Israel, women were not allowed to give legal testimony. Their
testimony was not recognized in courts.
If you were making the story up to deliver it to first century Israelites, you never would
make up in the story that the resurrection was witnessed by women. It's very clear that the
writers of the gospels and then the early church in preserving them were scrupulous about
preserving the actual account of eyewitnesses. All of the eyewitnesses agree on what
matters most, which is Jesus rose from the dead!
Now look at this taking any historical account, anything in our day…for example,
tragedies or accidents. When you get eyewitnesses together to describe an accident, they
will differ on little details because they're looking at it from a different perspective,
different frame of reference, giving attention to different things.
It doesn't mean they're not reliable or the event didn't happen. In fact, it's precisely when
every detail given by every person is identical that investigators get suspicious because
that's when they know people have gotten together to cook it up.
The gospel accounts have exactly that kind of attention to detail, and that gritty different
perspective from different eyewitnesses that all see the same lead…Dead guy rises from
the tomb…that just smacks of historicity.
3) We no longer have the original copies of the manuscripts of the Bible; therefore,
all kinds of errors or legends may have gotten written into the copies we have.
You all know in the ancient world, there were no printing presses. Books copied on scrolls
could be 20 or 30 feet long. How do we know we have accurate copies? By way of
comparison, look at the number of earliest manuscripts of ancient texts we have that we
still consider reliable.
 Julius Caesar's The Gaelic Wars. We have ten relatively ancient manuscripts extant.
The earliest of them, there's a thousand year gap between when Caesar died and
when that manuscript was copied.
 Pliny the Younger's Natural History. We have seven manuscripts. Earliest one,
750 years after he died.
 Herodotus' History, eight manuscripts. Earliest one, 1,350 years after he died.
 Tacitus' The Annals, we have 20 ancient manuscripts. Oldest one, 1,000 years after
he died.
 When it comes to the New Testament texts, the late Bruce Metzger, was like the
dean of this stuff, great Princeton scholar notes, "We have 5,664 Greek manuscripts
going way back within decades of the life of Jesus. Add to that another eight to ten
thousand Latin Vulgate manuscripts, another eight or so thousand Ethiopian,
Slavic, Armenian. Over 24,000 ancient manuscripts in existence.”
And then, in addition to manuscripts, there are quotations from the New Testament in very
early writers outside the New Testament. For example, in the Didache and The Epistle of
Barnabas and Clement’s letter to the Corinthians were produced around 100 AD, and
quote extensively from the New Testament writings. The letters of Polycarp and Ignatius,
bishop of Antioch, from about 120 AD contain many quotes from both Gospels and letters.
Okay, that's New Testament.
Old Testament; kind of interesting. A century ago the earliest Old Testament
manuscript we had was from about 900 AD, almost a millennia after the NT was written.
Then came a big, big finding in the mid-twentieth century. The discovery of the Dead Sea
Scrolls. Biggest significance of the finding of the Dead Sea Scrolls, any scholar would
tell you this, was the extraordinary similarity between the texts in the Dead Sea Scrolls,
like the book of Isaiah, and the copies that had been written 900 years later. They were
amazingly and astonishingly accurate.
All of this is to say there is simply no document from antiquity in the same
category as the Scriptures when it comes to manuscript evidence and support. The Bible is
clearly unique. Through this book God speaks, giving us an understanding of reality that
transcends anything that can be envisioned by the human mind alone. The Bible gives us
God’s eternal perspective on the world—truth not bound by any time or place (2 Timothy
3:16-17).
This is why Christians defend the Bible with their very lives. And since the Bible calls
followers to an allegiance higher than the state, tyrants seek to destroy it. But as Christians,
we find that the Bible’s authority, its textual integrity, its historical accuracy, and
transformative power absolutely attests to its distinctive and unique status as God’s Word.