How Can I Trust the Bible?

WELCOME

Pastor Chris Paavola:

Love baptism days. We could all go home at this point. And I just see it’s why we do what we do. It’s days like this excite me. So yeah, if you have any questions about your baptism, if you haven’t been baptized or you have a loved one that hasn’t been baptized or you yourself, you can go to our website and at the very bottom of a website it just says baptism requests. Fill that out and we’ll get in touch with you and we’ll make it happen. We’d love to make the magic happen with you as well. But yeah, my name is Chris Paavola. It’s good to be with you guys. This is the first Sunday in February where it hasn’t snowed and I am looking at this incredible attendance at Element O clock. I’m like, look at all these beautiful people. So good to see you guys.

And yeah, we are thankful for technology that lets us be together, but I was talking to a family just before the service and it’s like eating fast food. It works in a pinch livestream works in a pinch, but it shouldn’t be our regular diet, you know what I mean? And so anyway, so glad that you guys are here to be with us as we wrap up our series. The Reason for God, we’ve been doing this for eight weeks, you guys, and we have had some amazing conversations on faith and doubt. We have talked about different religions, heaven in Hell, the idea of sin and suffering. Last week, dinosaurs, that was rousing and you pour 11 o’clock people, I told you that you could leave, but I had some more things to say and nobody left and I just felt so bad. But thank you guys for being a part of this.

It’s been an awesome series. I can just tell you by the views, by the attendance, like people are leaning in because these are the kind of questions that we have. And then we wrap it up today with how can I trust the Bible? And if you aren’t asking this question, someone in your life is asking this question, how can I trust the Bible? And just I’ll come out right away and say, this is not going to be a normal sermon. Because usually we open the Bible and then we talk about it. But I can’t prove the Bible is trustworthy because the Bible says it’s trustworthy. That’s circular reasoning. The Bible’s trustworthy because the Bible says it’s trustworthy.

We have to go elsewhere to find that kind of information to be able to answer this question. So, we’re really ironically going to be answering this question about the Bible without opening the Bible for a very long time. In the sermon it’ll be different, but I promise we’ll get there. So just a little bit of patience. This is not what a normal sermon will sound like, but you’ve asked this question because we have in our minds kind of this idea that there was a long time ago something happened, and in our minds when we think about the Bible, we have something like a game of telephone in our heads where someone said something and then they whispered it to a friend who whispered it to a friend, who whispered it to a friend. And then the Bible is written down copies of copies of copies of copies later.

And what we have is so different from the original source. It’s been transformed over the years. Or we see the Da Vinci Code. You guys remember that from a couple of decades ago. That was the thing for a while, this idea of some kind of other copy of a gospel that was the forgotten gospel, the forbidden gospel or something. And so, people in positions of power, men in positions of power manipulated, which books got in and out and all that kind of stuff, or we think, okay, well Jesus was this guy. But then hundreds of years later, people wrote something down and it’s like Paul bunion. It’s just like a legend that grew. And all of this is raising the question of how can I trust the Bible? Now, all of those questions or what ifs or yeah, butts or alternative theories, they actually really developed in this era called the Age of Enlightenment.

THE AGE OF REASON

So French Revolution, age of Enlightenments, the Age of Reason. That’s when people really started to question authority and demand reason and elevate reason above other experience and demand empirical evidence, and all of those things are fine, but what that also included was the Bible. The Bible at this point was now readily accessible. And so, people were questioning this thing going, wait, how do we know this is true? What’s the empirical evidence that proves this thing is true? And they started digging around and going, wait, how old is the book that we have and what’s the earliest copy that we have? And it just didn’t hold up to scrutiny. For instance, Thomas Jefferson at the end of the age of Enlightenment was so fed up with the Bible that he, in his Bible, the Thomas Jefferson Bible, Thomas Jefferson, you can go to the Smithsonian, still see it today.

He cut out all the miracles and all the suggestions of divinity of Jesus out of his Bible and just tried to focus on the moral teachings of Jesus because he was just, there’s no evidence for this kind of stuff. Now, for lack of a better way of saying it, in defense of the people during the age of Enlightenment and this age of reason, when they looked at things, it really wasn’t that convincing.

DATING THE OLD TESTAMENT

So, for instance, the Old Testament, the oldest copy of the Old Testament we have is this book called the Codex Leningrad. And it’s just named after the museum that it’s housed at, but it’s the Codex Len grad, and it’s the oldest Old Testament that we have, meaning it’s all the books put together and it dates 1000 ad. So just over 1200 years ago, they compiled all of these books together and called it the Old Testament.

The earliest copy we have is 1018. If you know anything about Judaism, it like thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands of years ago, it was first written and then thousands and thousands of years later, we have it. And that’s a big old gap. A lot of stuff could have gotten added in this game of telephone or stuff could have been omitted. Did the Red Sea really parts really are we sure? Isn’t this just like legend that developed over time? And you know what? It’s a fair question given how much of a gap there really is. But then in 1947, a boy named Muhammad was walking through the valley of this region called Kuran just in southern Israel, and he’s a shepherd and he’s walking with this herd of goats and one of his goats goes running off and climbs up that cliff face there and runs inside of that cave.

And the Muhammad, he’s like, wants to go get his goat. So he leaves the rest of the herd down there and the valley scales up that wall as much as he can and grabs a rock because it’s really hard to get to and throws it into the cave to try to scare the goat out. So he throws this rock into the cave and instead of hearing the sound of the goat, whatever, what does the goat say Anyway? So instead of hearing the sound of a goat, he hears the sound of pottery breaking. He’s like, what? And he goes and climbs into this cave and he finds dozens of pottery jars. And inside those pottery jars is scroll after scroll after scroll of the Old Testament, the entire book of Isaiah, the entire book of Jeremiah Genesis. And then they start looking at other caves in the region nearby and they find more and more of these hidden scrolls.

It’s the entire Old Testament, and it’s called today the Dead Sea Scrolls because Kuran is right next to the Dead Sea. And the reason these documents have been preserved is because there’s no humidity in the air. It’s the Dead Sea, right? Because there’s no humidity, there’s not much decay in these documents. It’s almost like God had this planned from the get-go when he was deciding where to put his book. So it’s all preserved in these caves in the Dead Sea. And this shatters our understanding of the age of the Old Testament because when we took the Dead Sea Scrolls and compared them with the Codex Leningrad, there is minuscule difference between them there. There is almost no variance. It is negligible. And we’re going, oh wow. This isn’t like thousands because the date of the Dead Sea Scrolls is about 300 BC, 300 years before Jesus.

These scrolls were hidden in these caves in Kuran, awesome. But it’s not just the Old Testament, it’s the New Testament. So, in the 1890s to the 1950s, there was this explosion of discovery of sections of the New Testament. And again, all of this is way after the French Revolution and the Age of Enlightenment. And this happened like 1890 to 1950 because there was this new market of people coming from Germany or from England, archeologists coming down to Egypt to buy goods from antiquity dealers. And before this was regulated, you would have these antiquity, dealers would go raid tombs, tomb Raiders and Graves and pyramids and caves all around Egypt and whatever they found they would sell in the marketplace. This is before it was regulated. And so in 19, I got to get my date right here, 1934, a British archeologist goes down to Cairo, goes up to an antiquities dealer, and he sees this bundle of parchment and he buys it for a couple hundred bucks.

And in this bundle of parchment is this little guy right here, it’s called Papyrus 52, P 52. And what’s amazing about Papyrus 52 is, well, first of all, it’s talking about that little section. It’s from the Book of John where Jesus is on trial with Pontius Pilate. What’s remarkable about P 52 is this is the oldest fragment of the New Testament that we have. When you analyze the writing styles, the ink that was used, the parchment type that was used, and then you do different dating techniques on it, it’s from around 75 to 1 25 ad this little guy was written. When people who it’s talking about we’re still alive.

And what’s wild is it’s not just P 52. Again, this is 18 19, 19 50, dozens and dozens of fragments have been found dozens, and the dates that we have of them are remarkable. So, P 52 is the oldest, here’s the 10 oldest that we have going all the way to 175 ad first century kind of stuff. And what’s is, yeah, P 52 has John 18 mentioned there, right? Some of them are like these tiny little sections, but then you have entire chapters or entire books. And what’s crazy is if you take P 52 with John 18 31 to 33 and P 66, which is basically the book of John or P 75, which is the book of John, and you compare those johns with each other, they match up. There’s almost no variation between them. I have here, this is so hard to explain how remarkable this is, but again, it shatters our understanding of dating of things in the composition of the New Testament because no longer can you say this was written hundreds of years later.

DATING THE NEW TESTAMENT

These are copies that are written within decades of Jesus. And the earliest New Testament, complete New Testament we have is after Constantine declared Christianity, the official religion of Rome around 311 AD then you have compositions of the New Testament. But prior to that, now we have copies of, I mean dozens, hundreds of copies of the New Testament. This right here is the Greek New Testament, and you can come up here and look at this afterwards if you want to. It’s just the Bible written in Greek. And when I was in college, in seminary, I had to take eight years of Greek and eight years of Hebrew to be able to read the Bible in its original language. And when you are reading it, so you have all of these, I wouldn’t recommend, it’s not for the faint of heart learning a dead language is not fun. But anyway, when you’re reading along, and then when you have a section where there’s a variance, you have a little footnote next to the word, and then it takes you to the bottom, and then it tells you what are the variance. So this book gives preference to the oldest copies first that would be most reliable. And then if there’s a variance on it, it’s listed in the footnote and it tells you which or which parchment or which codex has that variation. And at no point is a variation like Jesus is riding a hippopotamus.

At no point is Jesus not rising from the dead. At no point Jesus doing a miracle like turning a wooden bird into a living bird. It just doesn’t happen. The variance that we’re talking about, you guys are like the word of or the word, the whenever or when because or since negligible variance. It’s remarkable. And then you start to consider the timeline of all of this. So it’s hard to, archeologists were just wowed by all of this kind of stuff, and it was rocking the archeological world and the average person were just like, okay, so why does that matter? To kind of put this in perspective, Homer’s Iliad, the Iliad that you had to read in English class, Homer’s Iliad was written in 800 BC. That’s when Homer lived. 400 years later is our earliest copy of the Iliad that we have 400 years. It’s the earliest copy that we have and we have about actually 643 copies of it.

ANTIQUITY

And in the ancient world, that’s number one. That is the big guy. Nothing else comes close to home resilient. But to give you an idea of what this looks like in other writings from antiquity, take a look. This is Plato’s Republic Plato written in 400 BC. The earliest copy we have is 980 a gap of 1300 years, and we only have seven copies of Plato’s Republic or Sealers Caesar’s Gaelic Wars written sometime around the birth of Christ just before the birth of Christ. The earliest copy we have is 900 AD meaning a gap of a thousand years, and we have 10 copies of it. And then speaking of Caesar and Roman stuff, the history of Rome written by Livy written at the time of Christ. The earliest copy we have is 1100 AD a gap of a thousand years, and we have 19 copies.

That’s the standard in antiquity except for the New Testament in just the New Testament written in 50 to 100 AD with the gap of less than a hundred years. We have 5,366 copies of the New Testament, 5,366 before 311 ad this is like an instant message in the ancient world. It is without parallel. There’s nothing like it in the ancient world. And why is there 5,366 of them?

Because people were not risking their lives for the history of Rome. It’s supply and demand.

EXTRA BIBLICAL EVIDENCE

My friends, there’s thousands of copies because there were tens of thousands of house churches meeting all over the Roman empire willing to do whatever it took to get their own copy of the New Testaments, and they would travel perilous journeys and dare to copy the Bible and bring it back to their friends.

There’s nothing like it in the ancient world. And the more you look at evidence like this, you guys, we’ve got to put to bed this silly idea that the Bible came about in some elaborate game of telephone where details were added or omitted over time. It’s just silly. It just doesn’t hold up to scrutiny. If you want to talk about empirical evidence, there it is. A better example would be the copy of a math test that circulated through the halls of my dorm in college. People sought that thing out, and when they got their hands on a copy, they copied it with meticulous attention to detail, just copying the answer, not me. I would never do something like this. Other people we’re copying these answers. That’s what we’re talking about here. And at the end of the day, my friends, you can question the Bible’s assertions, but you can’t question the Bible’s accuracy.

You may question what the Bible claims. You may question the assertions of the Bible, but you can’t, can’t question its accuracy that’s off the table. And then you think about that’s all the evidence from archeology and stuff. But then you think about the people, the people who not only it’s well documented, the people who wrote Matthew and Mark and Luke and John, they were all martyred for daring to tell the story and refusing to stop talking about it. And they lost their lives. But it was just as risky for the people who dared to make copies. Christianity was outlawed in Rome. To be a Christian was a dangerous occupation. If you were a Christian, you could be fed to lions, you could go in prison, you could be crucified yourself. You could be turned into a human torch. It was a dangerous ordeal to be a Christian at the risk of your own life. And so, to make copies of something to be found with contraband, that’s dangerous. Now, would you really go ahead and risk your life to copy something and then risk your life to smuggle it across borders and be careless with what you transcribed? Of course not. Of course not. That’s silly.

And in fact, we know who these kind of people are. They’re still alive today. In China, there is an official religion of China, a sanctioned Bible. It’s a hundred stories and it’s much like, it’s a lot like Jefferson’s Bible. It cuts out all the miracles, all the claims of divinity, and it’s just the teachings and it’s a hundred stories. And the sanctioned church worships using this book, this very limited book, but the underground church in China is the fastest growing church in the world. There are millions of Christians daring to meet in the cover of secrecy and the cover of darkness and worship Jesus and the Bible is illegal in China. If you’re caught with one, it’s imprisonment. You’re blacklisted. It means future unemployment or worse.

And in 2012, there’s a group of brave Christians that decided to smuggle in two suitcases full of Bibles into their house church, and someone happens to have a camera rolling. Take a look, grab that Bible in front of you. It’s the black book in front of you. If you have one and you brought it today, please keep on bringing it, but just hold it in your hands. What you hold in your hands, my friends, is a miraculous, remarkable treasure that we should never treat with the stain at the end of his biography of Jesus. John writes these words, the Apostle John writes these words, and it’s a perfect summary of this book that you hold in your hands. John ends his letter by saying these words are written.

31 But these are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name.

John 20:31-31

The words you hold in your hand are written, the words you hold in your hand were smuggled. The words you hold in your hands, people lost their lives and their livelihood, that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the son of God, and that by believing what you hold in your hands by believing you may have life in His name, the people who dared to smuggle the Bible into China or smuggle the Bible into jars and hide it in caves and Kuran, they did so because they believed that we are perishing without it and they were willing to perish for it with the Bible in your hand.

PRAYER

Will you guys pray with me as we close things out today? Heavenly Father, for this book in our hands, we first of all confess that we have treated this priceless treasure too flippantly.

It is remarkable. It’s a treasure and people have given their lives that we can hold it in our hands so freely forgive us for treating it as anything other than the gift that it is. And Lord, I pray for anyone in our community who has yet to clinging to the word of God and believe in it for anyone who has yet to believe that Jesus Christ is the son of God, that the word of God would go to them Lord. And that like you say in your word, faith would come by hearing and teach us all God to treasure it for what it is, to feast on it as the bread of life and to just hold it as dearly as we ought. And so your name, we pray these things King Jesus. Amen.

QUESTIONS

So, every week during this series, we have ended this, our sermons with a chance for you to text in your questions about the topic we’ve been talking about. And today is no different. I want to get to your questions that you’re asking about the Bible and let me get started here.

Q: Yeah. So this first one is asking about translations and the different translations of the Bible. What do we do with that?

A: So, when you go to a bookstore, you see the KJV and the NIV and the NASV and the ESV and the NLT and the NIRV, and you’re just like, which one do I choose? And how does that fit into all of this conversation about the accuracy of the Bible? It’s a good question.

There is a spectrum of translation. There is thought for thought and word for word. And every translation of the Bible that you see on a bookshelf falls somewhere on that line. It’s the difficulty of trying to translate something written in another language by another author for another audience and then translating it to our own. And do you go word for word? And that would be like the NASB Bible or the ESV are very, and they’re very wooden though when you read them, they require a 12th grade or higher reading level because they’re very difficult to read. On the other end of the spectrum is thought for thought that would be the message or the new living translation or stuff like that. And that’s just trying to get the idea of just like what is the general thing they’re saying, but they’re less concerned about the accuracy, they’re more concerned with the idea.

In the middle is what I like is the NIV, and that’s the one that we have here. And the black Bible in front of you, if you’re buying a Bible, I would suggest an NIV. It’s the one I like the most because it’s a good balance of thought for thought and word for word, and it just kind of toes the line well and calls out, especially if you have one with commentaries calls out when it kind of leans one way or the other on an issue. But I’ll remind you though, that at no point does Jesus ride a hippopotamus. At no point does he not rise from the dead. When you look at these translations, they’re all drawing from the same source material of the Greek New Testament. So they’re all drawing from P 52 or P 66 or P 94. They’re all drawing from the same source material trying to capture that. And so you’re okay, whatever you have, if you have one, you’re fine. If you want to go shopping for a new one, any of ’em that you find on the shelf is going to be okay.

Q: Okay. This is a question that’s a little bit off topic. I’m going to stay on topic of the Bible itself. Just a second. How come there are no new books added to the Bible?

A: Very good question. Yeah. Yep. Okay, I’ll get to that. I I’ll do two more questions here. Come. There are no new books added to the Bible. So, when things were being compiled in the New Testament, everything in the Bible is written in the Old Testament, is written, pointing forward to Jesus. Everything written after him is pointing back to Jesus. It’s like a bow tie, right? So everything points forward to him or points back to him. And so what was circulated in the early church was the eyewitnesses accounts and the people who were apostleship the writings of the apostles, people who walked with Jesus and saw him and talked with him, or people who had an authority that was granted to him.

Even the apostle Paul had an encounter with Jesus on his road to Damascus. And so that’s not happening anymore. And so even John and his revelation of writing about what is to come, everything points to Jesus. And so that’s why there’s no more new books because there’s no other people who were eyewitnesses or original apostles. There just aren’t. That’s why we talk about the apostolic church. Now, there are other Christians who can write some great things. I could write something, you could write something, but we’re not going to put it in the Bible because the Bible is a contained book for its time. There are some verses I could cite and quote and all that kind of stuff. But it’s the process of putting that together. After Constantine declares Christianity, the official religion of Rome, we’ve got a bunch of people looking around going, wait, what is this religion that we have to now be purveyors of?

What is this thing? And that’s where they take, and they looked back at writings of Christen Stone, the did or other early church leaders, and what books were they citing, what writings were being circulated? And then they looked at, well, what is the preponderance of evidence? We’ve got 600 copies of Matthew, 300 copies of Luke and two of the Gospel of Thomas, and these look really old. This one looks like it was just written with modern language, and it was obvious which ones were forgeries, which ones were trying to inject a new heresy or a new way of thinking into what was widely circulated and widely accepted by the church. And so it wasn’t as nefarious as the DaVinci code makes it. There was no assassinations happening trying to keep power with a certain group of people or anything like that. They were just looking at the evidence.

How many books do we have? Who is cited by the early church fathers? People after the Apostles? Those are the books that we’re going to hold to. And that’s called the Canonization. You can read about the canonization of texts and stuff, but it all happens around three 50 ad. And then the last question is kind of the same thing. What about the Bible is so accurate? What about some of the questions that we have today, like gender, sexual orientation, world’s, leaders, wars, stuff like that? Okay, so the Bible is contained. It is written, it’s done. And you won’t see the word iPad anywhere in the Bible. But that doesn’t mean that God doesn’t talk to us about not letting things have mastery over us. And we can talk about addiction to screen time or something like that. Or the Bible doesn’t say anything about mowing your lawn, but it does say things about loving your neighbor.

And so, we can do a lot of extrapolations to modern issues using the word of God for what it is. And that would be kind of my quick answer on that. You guys, thank you so much for this series, just leaning in like you have and just caring about it as much as you have and sharing this with your friends. I know you guys are sharing this with your friends who’ve been watching online. We can tell by the viewership, and I think that’s because we’re talking about things that are the things that they’re asking. So just thank you. This has been a gauntlet. I’m going to tell you more research for this series. I kind of just want to talk about grace or love or something like shoot from the hip for a while because I am tired of doing research, man. But thank you guys for leaning in. Pastor Jack, will you lead us in convening please?