THIS WAY, THAT WAY, OR YAHWEH?
Why should you believe in the "Christian" God? - Part 1
If you've read the first two articles, you've followed along as I laid out the evidence for the existence of God. If you are still reading, it probably means that you have come to the inevitable conclusion that God does indeed exist. As I said in the last article, if you are truly objective, and if you set the same burden for the existence of God that you set for everything else you claim to "know" in your life, then you can only come to one conclusion; there is a God.1
But simply believing in God is not the same thing as believing in Christianity. After all, there are countless religions in this world, all of which claim to preach the "true" nature of God. How do we know that the God of the Bible is, in fact, the one and only God?
Initially, we can eliminate some of the interpretations of God that come from other religions based solely on the scientific evidence we've seen so far. For example, Buddhism denies the existence of God entirely, or else says that His existence is irrelevant. As we've already seen, God not only exists but He is extremely relevant!
A lot of New Age belief systems claim that there is no transcendent, creative, supernatural being that exists outside the universe. Instead, the universe itself, and everything in it, IS God. God is the tree you see outside your window. He's the wind that blows through your hair and the rain that soaks your hair to your head. In fact, you are God. After all, you are a part of the universe. Unfortunately, that next-door neighbor you can't stand is also God. But we've seen through the Big Bang that God does exist outside the universe. Everything you see is not God. Rather, God created everything you see. Through the fine-tuning of the universe we learned that God is an intelligent agent, not simply some mindless collection of all matter in the universe.
Finally, Mormons believe that God used to be a man on another planet. He lived a good enough life on that planet so that when he died he was given a planet of his own to rule. The god of his old world also used to be human, as was the god before him, and the one before him, ad infinitum. Mormonism requires an infinite amount of time in the past. Supposedly humans have been becoming gods forever. There never was one single creative God. But we learned in the first article that there was a beginning to time. Time in the past is not infinite. First we learned that time began at the Big Bang. Then we learned that it is impossible to traverse infinity. If time in the past were infinite, we never could have arrived at the present day. If all this has slipped from your mind, take another look at the article "Why should I believe God exists in the first place?" for a more detailed explanation. The end result is that there has to be one transcendent God "in the beginning."
So the scientific evidence alone eliminates the concept of God held by a lot of religions. But it still does not prove that the Christian description of God is correct.2 So how do we prove that we Christians have it right? That evidence comes from the Bible.
Now before you start jumping up and down, let me explain a little bit about what I am going to prove. A lot of people would say, "Wait a minute. Just because the Bible says something is true, that doesn't make it true. So you can't use the Bible as your evidence for the Christian God." If you were to make this objection, you'd be absolutely correct. I can't use the Bible as evidence until I prove that it is a reliable source of information. We need to use outside information to confirm the validity of the Bible before we accept anything it tells us. Therefore, my proof that the Christian God is the one true God will take three steps. I originally tried to convey all three steps in one article, but I quickly realized that this part of my argument was getting way too long, so I have separated it into three separate articles, one for each step.
In step 1, we will examine whether the texts of the Bible we have today are even the same as the original texts. After all, even the newest parts of the Bible were written almost 2,000 years ago. For all we know, different people could have re-written the Bible over the years, changing what it says. If it has been changed, we certainly can't trust that what we're reading today is the same thing as what was written by the original authors. For example, the apostle Paul wrote 13 books in the New Testament. Before we crack open a Bible today to see what Paul tells us about God, we need to be sure that what we are reading is what Paul actually wrote, and not the editorial updating of some guy in the 15th century who wanted to revise the Bible to fit his agenda. So how can we possibly know that what we are reading today is the same thing people read 2,000 years ago? Fortunately, archaeologists have recovered copies of the books from the Bible that date back extremely close to when they were originally written, far closer than any other historical book we have recovered. Not only that, but they have recovered far more copies of the New Testament than any other ancient document in history, giving them a plethora of examples to compare. As it turns out, these ancient texts enable us to reconstruct the original texts of the Biblical books to a staggering degree of accuracy.
For the second step, we need to know that the people who wrote the Bible were accurately recording events in their time and they weren't just making stuff up. After 2,000 years do we really know that Pontius Pilate was serving as Prefect in Jerusalem at the time of Jesus? How can we possibly know whether houses were really built in such a way that the roof could be opened up and a lame man lowered down inside through the ceiling? These may seem like small details, but really, after so much time has gone by, how do we know these Biblical people even existed at all? How do we know its not all just some elaborate fairy tale? If we can't trust the Bible in the small details, we certainly can't trust it when it comes to the big ones!
The answers to these questions actually come in two forms. First, there have been an enormous number of archaeological findings that have confirmed Biblical details. In fact, no archaeological finding has ever contradicted anything in the Bible. Second, there are tons of writings other than the Bible that confirm Biblical events and personalities. Even though people who were no friends to Christianity wrote these documents, they still confirm some of the most essential elements of the Bible. Clearly, the authors of the books in the Bible were carefully recording what was going on in the world around them. As a result, these are excellent historical texts.
Finally, in step 3 we need to know whether the authors of the Bible had divine help. If the Bible is nothing more than a collection of books written by a bunch of careful human historians, why should we believe anything it says about God? After all, those Bible authors would be no more qualified to describe God than you or I. But what if God Himself was the author? What if God told these human men what to write? Certainly God is qualified to tell us about Himself. In fact, you could say He is the only one qualified to teach us about His nature. This is the great claim of the Bible. Christianity does not just say that the Bible is a good reference book written by some very smart men. Rather, it is a book written by God Himself, through the various authors. Using the Holy Spirit, God directed the Biblical authors in their writing. How can Christians possibly prove this? God gave us the tools for that too. Throughout the Bible, God made a number of predictions about the future. I will show you that nobody but God Himself could possibly know the future. And yet these prophecies continue to come true with remarkable precision. If only God can predict the future, and the Bible continuously and accurately predicts the future, then the Bible was written by God.
After you take these three steps, the only conclusion you can come to is that the divine creator we learned about in the last two articles has been trying to speak to us through the Bible, and its high time we listened. So let's get to the proof.
Are we reading the same Bible today that people were reading thousands of years ago?
A professor at a major state university is a good friend with a Christian pastor. They went to high school together. Afterward, the professor went on to get his Ph.D. while the pastor went to Seminary. They kept in touch over the years, but they generally avoided the topic of religion. Finally, one day, the professor decides to look the issue squarely in the face. He walks into the office of the Christian pastor and tells his friend, "I need to ask you a question. I understand that you think that God wrote the Bible, and that everything it says is true. I even understand how your whole theology is consistent based on what the Bible says. But over the years I've always struggled with one nagging question. How is it even possible to know if the Bible you are reading is accurate? I mean, even the most recent parts were written almost 2,000 years ago. Anyone could have re-written portions of it and we would have no way of knowing. How can you possibly base your whole belief system on something so uncertain?"
The pastor very politely listens to everything the professor has to say and invites him to sit down. He offers the professor a cup of coffee and asks, "Do you have a little time to chat? I'd love to answer your questions, but there are a few things I'd like to show you. It may take a while."
The professor accepts the coffee (he asks for decaf) and takes a seat. Once the two of them catch up on old times a bit, the pastor turns to the matter at hand. This is what he says.
A lot of people have objected to the Bible because they figure that too much time has passed since it was written. There is no way to know if what we are reading today is what was originally written. But I assume you would agree with me that this wouldn't be a problem if we were reading the original scroll (in Biblical times, these "books" were actually written on long scrolls). Then let's say one copy of the original was made. Well, it's possible that a few mistakes slipped into the first copy, but it's not as likely as if we were reading a copy of a copy of a copy, etc. The point is that we have to decide where we are going to draw the line.
Ideally, if we are reading a fourth or fifth generation copy, we'd like to compare it to the original to see if there are any mistakes. Of course, if we don't have the original, that's not possible. In those situations, the best we can do is to compare our new copy to the oldest known copy that we have.
As a practical matter, we are virtually never going to find the "original" manuscript of an ancient document. They've simply been lost to time. This is true whether we're talking about a religious document or anything else. If historians refused to look at anything but original documents, we would have virtually no understanding of ancient history. We have to look at copies to see what they say. Now, this doesn't mean that we are automatically going to take everything written in a copy at face value. There are a couple of tests historians will use to determine whether the content of that copy is reliable.
First, historians will look to see how much time has passed between the original and the copy. The less time, the more likely the copy is to be accurate (because there has been less time for potential corruption). We'll look at this in more detail shortly.
Second, historians will look at the circumstances under which the copies were made, as best as they can tell, to see if precautions were taken to ensure the copies were made accurately. This can be done in a couple of ways. Sometimes, we may know why the copies were made, and that may give us an idea of the importance the scribes placed on accuracy. Other times we can actually compare different ancient copies (if we have more than one) to see if, in practice, the scribes succeeded in their intention to transcribe the text the same.
Fortunately, we know precisely why multiple copies were made of the Biblical books. Let's use the New Testament writings of the apostle Paul as an example. The early Christian Church was spreading rapidly throughout the land surrounding the Mediterranean Sea. Paul was continuously traveling amongst these churches and trying to preach the gospel to anyone who would listen. Now what would happen if Paul wanted to tell something to the church in the city of Colosse, but he was stuck in prison in Rome? Well, Paul would just write a letter to the church and send it to Colosse with a messenger. The Church leaders would read that letter to everyone in the church. Not only that, but if the church felt that the message should be read to people in the surrounding area too, they would make copies of Paul's letter and send the copies to other churches in the region.
The importance of these letters to the early Christian church cannot be understated. Paul was one of the leading authorities on Christianity. People based their entire theology on what he said.3 For this reason, scribes were extremely careful to mark every letter and every syllable correctly. This care continued as the church grew over the years. Later Christians based their theology on these letters just like the early church. So as long as the copies were being made by hand, the scribes took more care in the transcription than anything else they could possibly do. After all, you have to bear in mind that from the Christian perspective, these scribes weren't just copying the words of Paul. Rather, they were copying the Word of God. Nobody wants to mess up God's word.
Are there differences in the earliest manuscripts? Yes, there are. But the vast majority of those discrepancies are obvious "typographical errors", like leaving off a number, or accidentally reversing two digits. None of the "errors" affect any Christian doctrine. Typical errors are the following:
Fission: Improperly dividing one word into two (such as "nowhere" into "now here").
Fusion: Combining two words into one.
Metathesis: Inadvertently switching the order of letters in a word.
Dittography: Repeating something that only should have been written once (such as "latter" instead of "later").
Haplography: The exact opposite of dittography. Writing once what should have been written twice.
Homophony: Writing a word that sounds the same as the original, but is spelled differently and has a different meaning (such as "heel" and "heal").
Technically, you could call all of these "discrepancies", but in reality it is usually pretty simple in context to realize that a mistake has been made and what the original text said.4
In addition to the relatively minor nature of most of the so-called differences, the sheer number of ancient manuscripts provides scholars with an enormoous "pool" of resources to pull from. There are over 5,000 known manuscripts of the New Testament in the original Greek (to say nothing of the number of manuscripts in other languages which are more than four times that amount). The closest "runner up" is Homer's Iliad, which has fewer than 650 Greek manuscripts. Its not even a close race. Using this vast number of texts, scholars can determine with far more accuracy than any other ancient text which readings are accurate and which crept in through copyist error. They simply compare the various copies and see how often a particular reading occurs, and often may be able to create a "copyist family tree" of sorts. For example, if one copyist makes a single error, it may not seem like much. But then other copies are made from that copy, and still others from them. And so on and so on. In the end it may appear that many errors have been made. But in reality it was only one error, repeated over and over again. The overwhelming number of copies available helps scholars determine when this has occurred and figure out which reading is correct.
Of course, this doesn't prove much if the "earliest" manuscripts are only from 200 years ago. After all, the fact that our current books are so similar to the composite of the earliest manuscripts only shows that the text was not irretrievably corrupted during the period of time from that earliest copy to the present. What about the time between when the original was written and that earliest copy?
This is when historians go into the amount of time that has elapsed from the original writing to our earliest copy. Eventually, you may have to draw a line and just say, "Enough is enough, there is no way I can trust this scroll; too much time has passed." So where do historians draw that line? Let me give you some non-Biblical examples.
I'd be willing to bet that most people reading this article have heard of Plato, Aristotle and Homer. Plato and Aristotle are famous philosophers, while Homer is the Author of The Iliad (and The Odyssey). Their writings are routinely taught in high schools and colleges all over the country. Yet no one ever questions if we should be teaching these texts because we cannot trust their earliest manuscripts. So exactly how much time elapsed between when these authors originally produced their works and the date of our earliest copies?
First, let me be abundantly clear that we do not have the "original" writings of any of these great authors. Now, taking them in turn, Plato lived from 427 to 347 B.C., so obviously he had to write during this period. The earliest manuscript we have from Plato dates to about 900 A.D. This is a period of over 1,200 years. Aristotle wrote between 384 and 322 B.C., but his earliest copy is from 1100 A.D., a difference of about 1,400 years. Finally, The Iliad was written in about 900 B.C., but it's earliest copy is from 400 B.C., a difference of 500 years.
How does this compare to the books of the Bible? The answer to this question lies in two parts. After all, the Bible is divided up into two parts, the Old Testament and the New Testament.
For the longest time, the oldest copy we had of any of the "prophetic books"5 of the Old Testament dated to about 895 A.D. Now, let's compare that to the original writing of the book of Isaiah, one of the most significant prophetic books in the Bible. Isaiah was written sometime around 701 B.C. (although some later parts of the book may have been written sometime after the earlier chapters, but before 681 B.C. when Isaiah died). This would leave a gap of about 1,600 years between the original writing and the earliest copy. While that gap is not totally out of proportion to the timelines for Plato, Aristotle and Homer, it is the longest of the bunch.
But all that changed in 1947 when the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered. A young Bedouin goatherd found some ancient scrolls in a cave near the Dead Sea. Over the next several years, hundreds of scrolls and scroll fragments were discovered in similar caves. Included amongst the complete scrolls was the book of Isaiah. This scroll dated back to approximately 100 B.C., and it matched our current versions almost completely.
All of a sudden, the gap for our earliest copy of Isaiah was cut from 1,600 years to a mere 600 years, easily comparable with other historic texts, and dramatically shorter than either Plato or Aristotle. Now some of you may be jumping up and down saying, "Notice that he's only telling us about the book of Isaiah, not the other Old Testament books, because Isaiah is the only Old Testament book that has been historically validated by the Dead Sea scrolls." Well, you'd be wrong. I've only brought up Isaiah because if I were to mention every single book we'd be here forever (and frankly it's also because Isaiah is one of the most important books of the Old Testament for establishing the validity of Christianity, as we'll see later in this and subsequent articles). Copies of every single Old Testament book, except Esther, were found by the Dead Sea, all dating between 250 B.C. and 68 A.D. The textual validity of the Old Testament has been established as much as, if not better than, every other ancient text we rely upon.
But what about the New Testament? After all, the New Testament is the "heart and soul" of Christianity. Millions of modern day Jews believe everything in the Old Testament, but they still aren't Christians. Without the textual validity of the New Testament, Christianity still falls apart.
If you were hoping to attack Christianity on this ground, I'm sorry to disappoint you. But the gap in time between original writings and the earliest copies is even shorter for the New Testament than it is for the Old Testament. Let's look at the four gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.
Scholars disagree about exactly when each of these books was written, but we can place them into a general range as follows:
Matthew 50-70 A.D.
Mark 50-70 A.D.
Luke 59-80 A.D.
John 50-96 A.D.
The earliest fragment we have found of any of these gospels is a portion of the gospel of John that includes John 18:31-33 and 37-38. This fragment was written in approximately 125 A.D. (only 29-75 years after the original was written).6 We also have other portions of John as well as Matthew dating to approximately 200 A.D. The earliest complete manuscripts of the gospels are from the third century (about 150-250 years after the originals were written).7 These are the manuscripts that scholars most heavily rely upon in reconstructing the original text of the Bible. In fact, different scholars have given estimates of the textual integrity of our current copies of the Bible ranging from 98.5% for the Old Testament to 99.99% for the New Testament, meaning we can be overwhelmingly certain that what we are currently reading is the same as what was originally written.
But there's even more to the story. Another problem for skeptics lies in where the scrolls were found. For example, the fragment from John that dates back to 125 A.D. was found in Egypt. This means that the gospels had already been widely copied and circulated into Egypt by that time. Other copies have been found all around the Mediterranean. Yet these copies are still remarkably similar (for the most part with only the minor, inconsequential copyist errors noted above). In order to "change" what the Bible says someone would have had to hunt down all these copies from all different parts of the world and change them all. You may object and say, "Well, they didn't really need to change them all, just enough to do irreparable harm to Christian theology." But if that were the case, we would find vastly different versions of the Biblical books in different places around the world. But we don't. Instead, the copies are so similar that we can reconstruct the original text to about 99% certainty! Any large scale corruption of the type necessary to seriously call into question any Christian doctrine would require that virtually all the copies had been hunted down and altered. People weren't exactly living in an era of modern technology and transportation at the turn of the second century. It would have been virtually impossible to find and change this many copies.
Would anything I've said prove to 100% certainty that all our current copies weren't derived from the same corrupted source (in other words, a long time ago someone made one horribly bad copy, and all the later copies came from this same bad version, not the original)? Of course not. But like I said in the last article, if you want 100% proof, you will never "know" anything in your life. The simple truth is that there are tons of historical texts that society considers to be reliable enough to teach in our schools despite the fact that they have dramatically fewer indicators of reliability than the Bible. People don't question those texts, but they want to question the Bible.
Now let's turn back to our pastor and the professor. After explaining all these details, the pastor turns to the professor and asks, "You teach philosophy, don't you?"
The professor reluctantly replies, "Yes, I do."
"How would you like to be out of a job?"
"I'm not sure I follow."
The pastor explains. "Well, you walked into my office today asking how I can believe that my current Bible accurately represents what the authors originally wrote. The argument basically says that if I don't know that my current copies of the Bible are accurate then they can't be trusted and there certainly is no point in trying to learn anything from them. I just want to make sure you understand the full implications of what you are saying. If we can't trust our copies of the Bible, then we can't trust our copies of Plato or Aristotle either. If we have no way of knowing what Plato and Aristotle actually said, then I'm afraid you're out of a job my friend. After all, if we can't trust our current copies, there's no point in trying to learn anything from them, or teach from them for that matter."
The professor got the point and acknowledged that a double standard is often set up when people talk about Biblical accuracy.8 The simple truth is that there is no document in history that has as much evidence for its textual validity as the Bible, especially the New Testament. We can walk with confidence that what we read today is the same as what people were reading thousands of years ago.
That concludes the first step in this three-part argument for the Christian conception of God. The next step is to find out if the authors of the Bible accurately recorded the events of their time. That will be the topic of the next article.
Footnotes
1 If you haven't yet come to this conclusion, I still encourage you to keep reading. The arguments in the next three articles also provide further evidence for God's existence even though that is not how I primarily use this evidence. The argument would basically be that the Bible itself is evidence for God. Specifically, the amazing fulfilled prophecies, etc., cannot be explained "naturally" and require divine intervention.
2 Although the scientific evidence certainly is consistent with the Christian description of God.
3 Admittedly, many people didn't follow what Paul taught, and got taken in by false teachers, the subject of many of Paul's letters.
4 There are other portions of texts often found in modern Bibles that are not found in the earliest manuscripts, such as the ending of Mark or the story of the woman caught in adultery in chapter 8 of John. But most modern Bibles will include notes telling the reader that these texts were not in the oldest manuscripts. Keep in mind that according to Chrisian theology, it is the originals, not the copies, that are divinely inspired. We use the copies to try to discern, as best we can, what the originals said.
5 For those of you who are new to Biblical studies, there are five different "sections" to the Old Testament, often referred to as: (1) the Law (Genesis - Deuteronomy), (2) History (Joshua - Esther), (3) Wisdom Literature or Poetry (Job - Song of Songs/Solomon), (4) Major Prophets (Isaiah - Daniel), and (5) Minor Prophets (Hosea - Malachi).
6 In the interest of space I am not going into a detailed discussion of precisely how scientists determine the date a scroll was written, such as carbon dating, literary style, etc. (the particular fragment discussed here was dated through a literary style technique plus by examining the content of the book of John itself). Suffice it to say that these methodologies and the dates they produce are not generally in dispute, and I invite anyone interested to do further research on the topic. Simple Internet searches should turn up plenty of information.
7 We also have copies of several of the writings of Paul, written between 50 and 68 A.D. (Paul was executed by the emperor Nero, who only ruled until 68 A.D., so Paul must have finished his writings before that date). These copies are from approximately 200 A.D., at most 150 years after they were written.
8 The pastor and the professor are fictional characters, and any resemblance to real people, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
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