MortiBlog

A friend of mine made a point on her journal that one cannot claim to know for sure about the truth of certain spiritual matters, knowing I’m a Christian and since I’d just made a comment based on Biblical truth I decided this was a fine time for me to discuss why the Bible (at least, the New Testament) is a reliable and believable set of books. I wrote this reply to her, which I’ve decided to share with anyone here who may be interested.

Well knowledge in an interesting thing. One could argue that we don’t really know anything and we just make our “best guess” based on the evidence available. Nothing is hard proof while there are alternative explanations, no matter how insane. One could argue that Shakespeare never actually wrote any plays and the books we have were actually written at a different time by a huge group of people acting under the name “Will Shakespeare”. Of course, we are pretty confident this isn’t the case so we calim to “know” that Shakespeare was real and wrote Macbeth. This is quite reasonable, we have enough historical evidence to say the most plausible explanation is the simple one, that he done it. Similarly we believe Caesar’s writings about the Gallic war and we take much of our current “knowledge” about Roman history from Livy.

The interesting thing about those last two examples is how we determine reliability of historical texts. They are rated for reliability on the amount of time between it was supposedly written and our earliest discovered copies and how many of those early copies we have (if they’re in multiple languages, all the better).

Caesar’s Gallic War was written in 58-50 BC, but we have only found (last time I looked) about 10 copies which were from AD 900. That’s a full 950 year lapse with only about 10 copies. Similarly Livy’s Roman History was written between 59 BC and AD 17, we have 20 copies going as far back as AD 900. Both these books are considered to be historically accurate and the writings are accepted as true by the general populus and historians.

The New Testament was written between AD 40 and AD 100, and some of the scripts we’ve found are from AD 130 (with complete manuscripts available from AD 350, a 310 year lapse max). From this time, we have 5000 copies in Greek, 10,000 in Latin and 9300 in other languages. So the New Testament is, in fact, the most historically reliable set of books we have from the early AD years and is far more reliable (by the normal method of rating reliability of old books) than things which we just accept as true.

Besides which, there is extra-Biblical evidence confirming Jesus’ miracles, archaelogical evidence is about as well as I understand and despite it being so widely disputed, nobody has been able to disprove the claims of the gospels. You would have thought there would be some reasonable evidence to say a man called Jesus didn’t come back from the dead but, as far as I know, there isn’t.

So, putting aside my personal spiritual experience that confirm what the Bible says (church meetings that look rather a lot like church meetings in Acts, miracles of healing etc), it is logically reasonable to believe that the New Testament scriptures are true. These, in turn, back up the Old Testament but that’s another discussion altogether. 

If anyone wants to open up a little discussion here, please feel free. Is the New Testament a reliable source of information for the events it claims occurred?