EXTERNAL CONFIRMATIONS OF SCRIPTURE

 

The thousands of ancient Greek manuscripts provide a formidable foundation for textual certainty of the New Testament. However, this is only one kind of external confirmation for the Bible.

Is the Bible’s reliability and historicity supported by evidence external to the Bible?

This is a huge question, which calls upon every area of human inquiry to pass judgment. Do the fields of history, archeology, geology, psychology, linguistics, astronomy, sociology, and physics validate or invalidate the biblical accounts?

More specifically, “Does the composite NT Greek text, derived from the almost 6000 ancient Greek manuscripts and fragments closely approximate what the original writings must have looked like?”  New Testament scholars, historians, and archeologists give high grades to the composite New Testament Greek text. Based upon the textual evidence, even the agnostic New Testament Critic, Bart Ehrman, confessed:

·       The oldest and best sources we have for knowing about the life of Jesus…are the four Gospels of the NT…This is not simply the view of Christian historians who have a high opinion of the NT and in its historical worth; it is the view of all serious historians of antiquity…it is the conclusion that has been reached by every one of the hundreds (thousands, even) of scholars. (Truth and Fiction in the DaVinci Code, 102)

Ehrman, who likes to impugn the many NT texts, had been asked:

·       Bruce Metzger [the leading textual credit of his day] your mentor in textual criticism to whom this book [“Misquoting Jesus”] is dedicated, has said that there is nothing in these variants of Scripture that challenges any essential Christian beliefs…Why do you believe these core tenants of Christian orthodoxy to be in jeopardy based on the scribal errors you discovered in the biblical manuscripts? (Ehrman, Misquoting Jesus)

Ehrman answered:

·       Even though we may disagree on important religious questions – he is a formally committed Christian and I am not – we are in complete agreement on a number of very important historical and textual questions. If he and I were put in a room and asked to hammer out a consensus statement on what we think the original text of the New Testament probably looked like, there would be very few points of disagreement…The position I argue for in Misquoting Jesus does not actually stand at odds with Prof. Metzger’s position that the essential Christian beliefs are not affected by the textual variants in the manuscript tradition of the New Testament. (252)

Metzger had claimed the text of the NT to be “99.5 free from textual discrepancies.” Ehrman, ordinarily the strongest disparaging voice regarding the certainty of the Biblical text, also admitted:

·       The more manuscripts one discovers, the more the variant readings; but also the more the likelihood that somewhere among those variants readings one will be able to uncover the original text. Therefore, the thirty thousand variants uncovered by [critic John] Mill do not detract from the integrity of the New Testament; they simply provide the data scholars need to work on to establish the text, a text that is more amply documented than any other in the ancient world. (87)

There is a strong consensus among NT textual critics that from the almost 6,000 ancient Greek manuscripts and fragments, the original text can be very closely approximated. In Misquoting Truth, Timothy Paul Jones adds:

·       Sir Frederic Kenyon, former director of the British Museum, once commented concerning the Gospels, “The interval between the dates of the original compositions and the earliest extant [existing manuscripts] evidence [is] so small as to be negligible, and the last foundation for any doubt that the Scriptures have come down to us substantially as they were written has now been removed.” (50)

NT scholar William Warren concurs:

• I would say that our [present composite NT] text almost certainly represents a form that is almost identical to the original documents. (Bart Ehrman and Daniel Wallace in Dialogue: The Reliability of the NT, 122)

Another NT scholar, Craig Evans, affirms the same thing:

• Given the evidence, we have every reason to have confidence in the text of Scripture. This does not mean that we possess 100% certainty that we have the exact wording in every case, but we have good reason to believe that what we have preserved in the several hundred manuscripts of the first millennium is the text that the writers of Scripture penned.

Similarly, NT textual critic Silvie Raquel writes:

• I also have studied New Testament textual criticism and, by contrast with Ehrman, have found confirmation about the validity of the text…by defective reasoning, misuse of the evidence, and a misconception of inerrancy, Ehrman fails to build a case for the unreliability of the New Testament text as a sacred and inspired text. (173, 185)

Daniel Wallace concluded:

·       “On the contrary, it [scholarship] has built it [my faith]. I’ve asked questions all my life, I’ve dug into the text, I’ve studied this thoroughly, and today I know with confidence that my trust in Jesus has been well placed…very well placed.”

Greek scholar D.A. Carson sums up the evidence this way:

·       "The purity of text is of such a substantial nature that nothing we believe to be true, and nothing we are commanded to do, is in any way jeopardized by the variants."

And what about the historical accuracy of the Gospels? About Luke, New Testament scholar, F.F.Bruce, has written:

·       “A man whose accuracy can be demonstrated in matters where we are able to test it is likely to be accurate even where means of testing aren’t available. Accuracy is a habit of mind…Luke’s record entitles him to be regarded as a writer of habitual accuracy.”

Archeologist John McRay adds:

·       “One prominent archeologist carefully examined Luke’s references to 32 countries, 54 cities, and 9 Islands w/o finding a single mistake.” (Lee Strobel,  Case For Christ)

About the Gospel of John, McRay claims:

·       “It [the Pool of Bethesda] lies maybe 40 feet below ground – and sure enough, there are five porticoes…exactly as John had described. And you have other discoveries – the Pool of Siloam from John 9:7, Jacob’s Well from John 4:12, the probable location of the Stone Pavement near the Jaffa gate where Jesus appeared before Pontius Pilate in John 19:13, even Pilate’s own identity – all of which have lent credibility to John’s Gospel.” (Strobel)

·       “Archeology has not produced anything that is unequivocally a contradiction to the Bible. On the contrary, as we’ve seen, there have been many opinions of skeptical scholars that have become codified into ‘fact’ over the years, but that archeology has shown to be wrong.”

In fact, the textual evidence along with other forms of historical evidence are so compelling that even skeptics acknowledge that the Apostles had been convinced that they had encountered the resurrected Jesus, as I have detailed in the chapter on the Resurrection.

Even the atheist Ludemann had conceded:

·        “It may be taken as historically certain that Peter and the disciples had experiences after Jesus’ death in which Jesus appeared to them as the risen Christ.” (Strobel)

Jewish NT scholar Paula Fredriksen also conceded:

·       “The Disciples’ conviction that they had seen the risen Christ…is historical bedrock, facts known past doubting.” (Strobel)

NT scholar James Dunn went a step further:

·       “It is an undoubted fact that the conviction that God had raised Jesus from the dead and had exalted Jesus to his right hand transformed Jesus’ first disciples and their beliefs about Jesus.” (Christian Research Journal, Vol.39, No.2, 14)

All the above represent affirmations of the Christian faith based historical and textual evidences. However, there are many other forms of external confirmations.

         

Do scientific findings confirm the Bible? Atheist Sam Harris denies that it does:

·       [The Bible] does not contain a single sentence that could not have been written by a man or a woman living in the first century. (“Reply to a Christian”)

On the contrary, it seems that the Bible had anticipated many of the findings of modern science:

1.    TIME IS NOT ETERNAL: who has saved us and called us to a holy life--not because of anything we have done but because of his own purpose and grace. This grace was given us in Christ Jesus before the beginning of time,  (2 Tim. 1:9)

2.    THE UNIVERSE HAD A BEGINNING: “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” (Contra the steady-state theory that had ruled science). (Genesis 1:1).

3.    THE BUILDING BLOCKS OF THE PHYSICAL WORD AREN’T VISIBLE: By faith we understand that the universe was formed at God's command, so that what is seen was not made out of what was visible. (Hebrews 11:3)

4.    ONE LAND MASS: And God said, “Let the waters under the heavens be gathered together into one place, and let the dry land appear.” And it was so. (This conforms to the present theory that the continents had drifted apart.) (Genesis 1:9 )

5.    GENETICS SHOW THAT WE ALL CAME FROM A SINGLE SET OF PARENTS: “And he made from one man every nation of mankind to live on all the face of the earth, having determined allotted periods and the boundaries of their dwelling place.”( Acts 17:26)

6.    WATER CYCLE: "He draws up the drops of water, which distill as rain to the streams.” (Job 36:27. Also Amos 9:6)

7.    THE EXISTENCE OF DINOSAURS: It was you who crushed the heads of Leviathan and gave him as food to the creatures of the desert. (Psalm 74:14)

8.    STARS AS GUIDES TO SEASONS AND GEOGRAPHIC POSITIONS: “lights in the expanse of the sky… [would] serve as signs to mark seasons and days and years.” (Genesis 1:14)

9.    GOD WORKS THROUGH FIXED LAWS: Jeremiah 33:25 states that God accomplishes His purposes through “fixed laws of heaven and earth.”  (Although science demonstrated that phenomena operated according to laws, the Bible long before posited the operation of the God’s laws.) (Also Job 38:33)

10. COUNTLESS STARS:  “I will make the descendants of David my servant and the Levites who minister before me as countless as the stars of the sky and as measureless as the sand on the seashore. " (Jeremiah 33:22. Also Job 11:7-8; 22:12)

11. ROUND EARTH, EXPANDING UNIVERSE: “He sits enthroned above the circle of the earth, and its people are like grasshoppers. He stretches out the heavens like a canopy, and spreads them out like a tent to live in” (Isaiah 40:22; 42:5).

12. THE EARTH DOES NOT SIT ON A PEDESTAL AS ANE COSMOLOGY HAS IT: “He spreads out the northern skies over empty space; he suspends the earth over nothing.” (Job 26:7)

13. STRESS NEGATIVELY IMPACTS HEALTH: “A cheerful heart is good medicine, but a crushed spirit dries up the bones.” (Proverbs 17:22)

14. UNHEALTHY QUALITY OF EXCREMENT: “Designate a place outside the camp where you can go to relieve yourself. As part of your equipment have something to dig with, and when you relieve yourself, dig a hole and cover up your excrement.” (Deut. 23:12-13)

15. FOSSIL FINDS IN THE MOUNTAINS: “…the waters stood above the mountains.” (Even Everest)(Psalm 104:6)

Don’t be too impressed with this kind of evidence. Why not? It is only impressive in light of the findings of modern-day science, which seem to be in constant flux. However, this evidence serves as a powerful rebuttal to Bible-detractors who argue that the Bible fails to accord with our present-day scientific consensus and is therefore wrong. Generally, as science begins to uncover the increasing complexity and marvel of creation, the Biblical doctrine of Intelligent Design is further validated, while naturalistic theories have been debunked. Consequently, no one is talking about vestigial organs (leftovers from primate “ancestors”) or junk DNA. Why not? We have found that all of these have their function, supporting the design hypothesis.

In fact, we observe evidences of design wherever we look.  Nobel Prize winner in Physics, Arno Penzias, observed:

• “Astronomy leads us to a unique event, a universe which was created out of nothing, one with the very delicate balance needed to provide exactly the conditions required to permit life, and one which has an underlying (one might say ‘supernatural’) plan.”

We can even point to psychology for confirmation of the Biblical worldview. Psychologists now recognize the very same elements needed for human thriving that the Bible has taught too two thousand years ago – other-centeredness, love, forgiveness, confession, truth, gratitude, living according to our conscience, and even trust in a benign Higher Power. Consequently, surveys have shown that Christians tend to be healthier both psychologically and physically.

I have just touched upon a small sample of the various ways that the Bible receives external confirmation from the surrounding physical world. Along with science, history, and textual studies, psychology, sociology, philosophy, and ethics can also be consulted in this regard.

Consequently, we can spend more than an entire lifetime exploring this almost limitless subject. However, we have to be careful that our estimation of Scripture doesn’t rise and fall according to the most recent touted theories of these various disciplines. Instead, the Bible requires that all forms of knowledge must be judged by the Scriptures (2 Corinthians 10:4-5; Isaiah 8:19-20; 1 Corinthians 4:6-7; 1 Peter 4:11).