Can We Trust the Bible?

I have always been taught along with millions of believers, that the Bible is inerrant, which means it is divinely given and written.   God doesn’t make mistakes, does He?  This was taken from an interesting article that gave me considerable thought.

There are many, including myself, who believe that each and every writer was inspired to write the words that were either given to him or else handed down from a previous source which God intended to be used as His way of telling mankind about Himself and His desires for creation.  He himself came in human form to save His very creation.

But what about all those various details of events in both the Old and the New Testaments? There are various kings, peoples, cultures, dates, etc that seem to conflict with either themselves or with archeological data.  Actually, much of scripture proves that these events really happened, despite being out of sequence….. but does that matter?  The Jewish scribes were intent upon giving us information although perhaps not always in the way we expect.

Some theologians and historians, view many of the stories as metaphors which have a deeper layer of meaning.  Does the crossing of the Red Sea and leading the people into the Promised Land, somehow give us another dimension?  Do the death of Jesus and His resurrection lead us as believers into the promise of everlasting life………a type of Promised Land?   This is only one example.

Let’s look at the details of the resurrection.  Although I think there are good reasons to believe in an inerrant Bible, inerrancy is an unnecessarily high standard by which to establish the central event in Christianity.  It would be a true event even if the Bible were never written!  This single event in history is the central belief of all believers.  How did the thousands of people in the 1^st century world come to faith in a Messiah of the Jews without the written word?  It was by telling the story.  They had very few actual written documents.  Even Paul’s letters could only reach a small minority.

We don’t need inerrant sources to establish that the resurrection actually happened. When reading a report of a football game some commentators like to focus one part of the game while another report focuses on a different aspect.  But it is still the same football game.    Then why do some people mistakenly want to confine the scripture accounts so that all the writers are saying the same thing?

Perhaps they are confusing the fact of the resurrection with the reports of the resurrection.  Conflicting reports of a historical event are evidence that the event actually occurred. Even if one were to find an error of disagreement between the multiple accounts of the resurrection story, the very fact that there are several eyewitness stories shows that something dramatic actually happened in history.

Christianity isn’t true just because the Bible says it is true.  Christianity is true because an event occurred which changed the thinking of millions of people.  We wouldn’t know much about this event now without reading about it……but the resurrection preceded the reports written about it.

Contrary to what some skeptics may think the New Testament writers didn’t create the resurrection.  The resurrection accounts are the reason the writers of the New Testament put this story in written form.   Therefore the foundational beliefs of the Messiah and His teachings, His death and resurrection are true, even if the reports have some errors.  Getting the details wrong in reporting the resurrection doesn’t change the larger point that the resurrection actually happened.  In fact, if all the accounts agreed on every detail, we’d rightly assume they colluded.  Actually eyewitnesses never describe the same historical event in the same way.  Ask those who have witnessed an accident.

The historical documents we’ve collected and put into one binding we call the New Testament are just what the name implies.  The scriptures are documents or testaments of reports of what honorable people witness and had no motive to invent.

I believe the Bible can be trusted but we don’t need to go that far to show that Christianity is true.