“The Bible is a man-made document. It’s shot through with holes and contradicts itself. It has been proven unreliable by archeological findings”, and the myriads of attacks against the authenticity of Scripture go on and on. In your walk through life, you have most likely encountered one of these accusations or a variation of them or stood by one of them yourself. Maybe you are someone who grew up in church believing implicitly in its reliability, but the opposing claims made you internally start to doubt its trustworthiness and embark on a fact-finding mission to prove it to yourself. Maybe you are still in that place and are undecided about where you should stand. Either way, if you are a skeptic waiting to be persuaded, or a Christian wanting more tools to help rebuff those statements, I hope this week’s post helps you in some shape or form as you navigate this topic. I have wrestled with this myself and so today I wanted to dig into all the numerous evidence for the reliability of Scripture.

The biggest proof for Scripture is Scripture itself. John Calvin writes in Volume One of his Institutes, “What wonderful confirmation ensues when, with keener study, we ponder the economy of the divine wisdom, so well ordered and disposed; the completely heavenly character of its doctrine, savoring of nothing earthly; the beautiful agreement of all the parts with one another – as well as such other qualities as can gain majesty for the writings.” (82). Simply put, the content of the Bible is such that it is wholly impossible for it to be written by men. The detailed prophecies concerning future people and events (Christ, Cyrus, Fall of Jerusalem), the life-changing power made evident in the nations throughout history who adopted it, and the way it is written testify to its divine inspiration. I can’t say it better than the men who wrote the Westminster Confession when they penned, “And the heavenliness of the matter, the efficacy of the doctrine, the majesty of the style, the consent of all the parts, the scope of the whole (which is, to give all glory to God), the full discovery it makes of the only way of man’s salvation, the many other incomparable excellencies, and the entire perfection thereof, are arguments whereby it doth abundantly evidence itself to be the Word of God:” (3)

Another example of how the Bible is undeniably the Word of God is the preservation of it throughout history. “The Bible, and the New Testament in particular, has only primary source authors who were eyewitnesses or who were alive at the time of the events. The New Testament autographs were complete and in use by the end of the first century A.D. and has surviving manuscripts and fragments dated within 25 to 150 years of the events.” (Dugan, 2016). Many historical documents have been damaged or lost but the Bible has the earliest manuscripts by far of all the famous antique writings. Just to give you a staggering statistic, the earliest manuscripts we have of Homer’s Iliad are about four hundred years after they were originally written and there are just under two thousand of them. The New Testament manuscripts are numbering more than twenty-five thousand and are as close as thirty years from their original composition (Brown, 2021). Archeological findings such as the Dead Sea Scrolls and others also showcase the incredible protection God extended to His divine revelation down through time, and “there has never been an archeological finding that has contradicted the truth of the Bible.” (Charlie Kirk).

I could keep going on this topic because it is a fascinating one and I encourage you to study it in more depth if you have the time. To end, I want to share a quote from Pastor Greg Brown, “The point of all this evidence isn’t just to win an argument – it’s to invite trust. The Bible is not a fragile relic of history; it’s a faithfully transmitted record that connects us to real people, real places and a real God who spoke into human history. The same words that were copied by candlelight in ancient scriptoria, carried across empires, hidden in caves and preserved through wars and revolutions – are the same words we hold in our hands today. That continuity is astonishing. And if the text itself has been so faithfully preserved, its message deserves the same careful attention.” (Brown, 2021).  

Below are links to the articles I cited:

Case-Making 101: How does the Bible compare to other ancient documents? – Truth, Faith and Reason

Lesson 2: The Bible Is Unique in Its Historical Reliability | Bible.org