It is amazing how we are so divided on the Bible. For some the Bible is all that and a bag of chips and for others it is the strangest book ever written. It is still by far the best selling book of all time. Yet it creates immense controversy.I admit to having my struggles with the Bible. I have wondered how it could really be true and accurate, how it could be God's Word, or how it still could be God's Word after all these years with so many people messing with it. I think, or at least I hope this is normal behavior, that thinking people do not just willy nilly jump in and and say, "This book is God's Word." I would hope everyone would see the seriousness of such a claim and see the need for validating the claims the Bible makes. After all every religious book makes claims for itself.
One of the things that has help me was getting an accurate time perspective on the New Testament. So many seem to believe that the history of these books is like the game of "telephone," the game where one person whispers a message into a person's ear, and they whisper it to the next, and by the time it gets to the last person the message is gibberish. There seems to be an urban legend that the Bible is some how like this. "It is all these oral traditions handed down through generations and written down much later." My research showed me that this idea is as far from reality as possible. These books were written only 20-60 years after Jesus! They are eye-witness testimonies written during the lifetimes of those claiming to be there. This shattered any concept of it being myth or legend. Plus the thousands of manuscripts we have of parts of the New Testament verify not only how old the originals were, but also that these written records were actually not tampered with later on (After we get rid of variations among the manuscripts that are typos, word order issues and such there are only truly 40 or so variations among the thousands of texts that we have from the first few centuries and these minor variants do not affect any of our Christian beliefs. If tampering took place like some believe the number of true variants would have increased over time and been of significant effect. Sorry, no conspiracy to change the Bible here!).
This means the books of the New Testament were written in an atmosphere where people could hold the writers accountable. The people who were there could say, "Hold it, that's not true! I was there and Jesus did not claim to be God, He did not do miracles, did not raise from the dead." Paul tells us that 500 people saw Jesus at just one of His appearance after He was raised from the dead (1Corinthians 15:6). I find it inconceivable that they could write this stuff about Jesus and have this new system of belief explode in popularity like it did at the location of the events in question in an atmosphere where so many people could simply say it was all a lie. The only reasonable conclusion I have that fits the evidence is that thousands of people saw these things happen and were so passionate about preserving and communicating these wonderful things that they wrote them down right a way. How else can we explain the rise of Christianity?
This then changes the question. Not can I believe the Bible, but am I willing to believe the thousands of people who saw it happen and preserved the story so I could hear it? What is it about these eye witnesses that I tended to disbelieve them while I so readily believed many others? I believed the Titanic sank and that was even before we had under water footage showing us it was there. Why? People said it did...eye witness shared there stories. I believed Hank Aaron hit 755 home runs. I believed George Washington was the first President of the United States, and yet I was not there or at any other event in history that happened before my time. I realized that I was being biased and discriminating against the witnesses that brought me the Bible. I was not being consistant and objective. And this was not even taking into account other convincing issues that validate the Bible like fulfilled prophecy, the unique message, the cohesivness, historical accuracy, or the difference it made in so many lives. By the time I considered it all, I was overwhelmed with one conclusion, this book is the real deal!
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