The Bible

Nature and science provides some insight about God:

  • Nature shows God’s presence (Psalm 8:3-4, Romans 1:19-20).
  • We can see God’s design and creative capacity in nature.
  • Most nature is irreducibly complex, meaning organisms didn’t appear by random permutation.

God made the universe but isn’t a part of it (1 Kings 19:11-12).

We have enough evidence of something that made nature, so we have no reason to reject this Creator as existing.

However, we need Scripture or divine inspiration to understand God at all.

  • Nature allows us to see His creation and power, but not His attributes or personality.
  • To even start observing God, we must observe the philosophical realities behind those creations.
  • We’re easily deceived and distracted, so we require a guide for context, especially since God isn’t the only force at work.

The Bible is a compilation

The Bible is 66 books written across 2,000 years by 27 authors, with the Catholics having 7 more than the Protestants (see below).

The Bible is inspired by God through people, without personal or political bias (2 Peter 1:20-21).

  • Most of the biblical inconsistencies are either false extrapolations or false attribution.
  • Remarkably, even when the precise words differ between translations, it maintains the same core ideas and spirit.

The Bible has two major parts: the Hebrew Tanakh (the “Old Testament”) and the Apostles’ letters (the “New Testament”).

There is also paratext with chapters and verses to make the Bible easier to navigate:

  • Stephen Langton added chaptering to the Wycliffe English Bible in 1382.
  • A Jewish rabbi in 1448 named Nathan added verses to the Old Testament.
  • Robert Estienne, also known as Stephanus, used Nathan’s numbering and added the New Testament numbering in 1555.

Tanakh

The Torah, Nevi’im, and Ketuvim are combined to make TNK, or Tanakh.

Torah:

  • Canonized around 500 BC.
  • Gives an introduction to the Israelite people, gives the Jewish Law, and sets a covenant with them as God’s chosen people.
  • The first 5 books: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy.

Nevi’im:

  • Canonized somewhere between 400 and 350 BC.
  • Continues to admonish the Israelite people as they consistently break the Law and suffer its consequences.
  1. The Former Prophets (Joshua/Judges, Samuel, Kings, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel)
  2. The Latter 12 Minor Prophets (Hosea, Joel, Amos, Obadiah, Jonah, Micah, Nahum, Habakkuk, Zephaniah, Haggai, Zechariah, Malachi).

Ketuvim:

  • Canonized somewhere between 350 and 250 BC.
  • Continues the theme of a Messiah coming to redeem the Israelites from bondage, which persists through their exile to Babylon.
  1. Poetic Books (Psalms, Proverbs, Job)
  2. Five Scrolls (Song of Songs, Ruth, Lamentations, Ecclesiastes, Esther)
  3. Others (Daniel, Ezra/Nehemiah, Chronicles)

The Tanakh is 39 (or 46) books written in Hebrew by Jews who reproduced it immaculately across thousands of years.

  • The Hebrew Bible was translated into Greek (the Septuagint) sometime between 250 and 100 BC.

New Testament

The New Testament is made of 27 letters written in Greek (except for the book of Acts, written in Aramaic) by the early Church within the first century AD, constantly reproduced and shared across the Roman Empire.

The New Testament was unofficially canonized, with the same 27 books present within many first-century believers’ collections.

The Four Gospels:

Acts of the Apostles:

  • Luke’s account of the events immediately following Jesus’ resurrection.

Epistles:

The Apocalypse of John, or the Book of Revelation:

Apocrypha/Deuterocanon

The Apocrypha/Deuterocanon (literally, “second rule”) were mostly made between 200 B.C. and 100 A.D., declared Scripture around the 9th and 10th centuries, and included as a separate section in 1534.

  • They were added to the Old Testament, but they weren’t part of the original Hebrew Bible.
  • They’re worth academic study, but Christians debate endlessly about how much God directly inspired them.

Only a few of them have survived:

Further, the Orthodox church has a few other additional canon:

Other biblical candidates

The Orthodox Tewahedo (a subgroup of the Oriental Orthodox) also have a few more books:

  • Enoch, Jubilees, Meqabyan (thrice), Paralipomena of Baruch
  • A broader New Testament canon that includes 4 Sinodos, 2 Books of Covenant, 4 Epistles of Clement, and Didaskalia

The people who compiled the books in 325 A.D. at the Council of Nicaea presumed the Old Testament canon as the same as the Jewish leadership (the same way Jesus did) and placed 3 requirements to canonize the New Testament books:

  1. The book had to have been written by an apostle, or at least someone closely associated with an apostle.
  2. The book taught the established faith of the apostles.
  3. The book had been widely accepted in the earliest churches from the beginning.

For a host of reasons at the time, the Christian leaders of the time didn’t admit other possible candidates into the Bible’s canonization:

  • The canonized books have consistent central ideas across each other, but Christians debate endlessly about possible contradictions in other works’ core ideas.
  • Some ancient Jewish texts like Enoch and Jubilees have historical and theological significance, but have analytical and consistency issues.
  • Gnostic books (e.g., Gospel of Peter, Gospel of Judas) were written long after the apostles died.

The Bible couldn’t have been man-made

The Jews, as God’s chosen people (Deuteronomy 7:6-8), have been extremely meticulous transcribing the Old Testament, even across multiple genocides and invasions.

  • One recent evidence for the Jews’ accuracy is the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls in the 1940s and 1950s.

Though the Bible’s books were written in multiple ancient empires, their ideas are consistent with one another.

All the canonized books had hundreds of identical copies.

  • The copies were spread across the known world and stayed consistent across language barriers.
  • The other works that weren’t admitted to canon, on the other hand, weren’t nearly as widespread or prevalent, and archaeologists still sporadically find them as one-off rare discoveries.

The authoritative Bibles of each language have always had few to no translation errors.

  • Every marked discrepancy between translations maintains the main idea or central concept of the original, even while they range from literal word-for-word to generalized “spirit” of the text.
  • Very few Bibles have changed their general ideas, and every time they do the Christian community at large will outright reject it (e.g., New World Translation).

The Bible has been more attacked throughout history than any other book, but continues propagating openly and unchanged.

  • The Bible has thrived in publication before and after publication with numerous copies, despite its persecution, banning, burning, and political suppression.
  • While the order of the books has sometimes changed and there have been very minor modifications, it hasn’t affected any of its narrative continuity, even across multiple languages.

Claimed contradictions usually overlook a few things

Many supposed contradictions of chronology or event order are two different events (e.g., Jesus didn’t give every speech only once).

Different accounts of the same experience (i.e., the Gospels) come from different eyewitness perspectives.

  • Since colluded lies provide the same details, they can’t have been conspiring.

Archaeological evidence consistently and frequently proves the Bible’s authenticity.

  • The Bible expresses cultural traditions and practices, even obscure or forgotten ones, that archaeology is still proving as we uncover them now.
  • The Bible captured some elements that the rest of the world forgot as early as 50 years later.

History has already proven many Bible prophecies

Hundreds of prophecies were directly fulfilled by Jesus alone.

Many passages predicted Israel’s status:

Babylon was considered impenetrable at the time, but the Bible predicted its fall (Isaiah 13:17-22, Jeremiah 51:26,43).

Isaiah predicted that Cyrus would overtake Babylon and liberate the Jews exiled at the time (Isaiah 44:28, Isaiah 45:1,13).

Jesus’ coming had hundreds more prophecies fulfilled.

Scripture wasn’t written in a dramatic setting

The people who wrote the Bible were living people in ancient societies, with their own mundane personalities, cultures, and political problems.

  • The writer always had a purpose beforehand for they were writing for, and God spoke in that purpose through those people at that moment, outward into the writing, across the lens of history to everyone.
  • The Bible was not an abstracted paranormal event, and instead came through the Holy Spirit delivering a divine spark of creative wisdom, similar to other arts that capture beauty and truth.
  • We don’t know precisely how much content those people wrote elsewhere, but whatever they wrote was likely still filled with plenty of the unique grammar and writing styles that made its way into the Bible’s original text.

The paper the Bible is written on doesn’t have any inherent divinity, nor its ancient language.

  • The Word of God is the ideas themselves as they’re interpreted in a person’s mind, delivered through the written or spoken text.

Take the Bible for what it is

To put it simply, the Bible is a long-standing collection of books written by God that preaches a message of salvation through faith in Jesus.

There are several ways to take the Bible:

  1. Literally: as stated, without justification.
  2. Allegorically: as a set of symbols and patterns for how to live well.
  3. Spiritually: as the presence of things we can’t physically see, and often where it can’t be precisely interpreted.
  4. Theologically: as a doctrinal assertion on how to live.
  5. Holistically: as a vague guidepost for how to feel through various life experiences.
  • Technically, all the views are true, since God is clever enough to use the same statement to express multiple meanings.

Adding or removing parts of the Bible is a significant transgression of God’s word (Deuteronomy 12:32, Revelation 22:18).

Many people have made dramatic modifications to the Bible, but they never gain widespread acceptance enough to affect Christianity at large.

The Bible is vague on many things, and that was God’s intent.

  • By God intentionally omitting certain information, each culture can fill in the gaps on how to implement many of His commands (even if they have conflicts with each other about how something implements).
    • God works through the Church at large just as much as through the messages contained in the Bible.
  • The Bible will answer every “what” question you could have about ethical matters, and answers many practical “how” questions, but rarely gives a direct “why” answer to an abstract concept.
  • We’ll often discover the answers to our “why” questions if we’re open-minded and meditate deeply on how God framed the Bible.

God’s primary purpose for the Bible is to reprogram our personalities to something better.

  • In a sense, the Bible is more a mold than a how-to guide, since it directs attention to the broader reasons behind our problems.
  • Many new Christians tend to treat the Bible as having inherent value on its own, but its value only comes from what it does to our hearts.