(3 minute 29 second read)
You can't prove George Washington was President
That sounds like a weird statement — but it’s true.
None of us alive today were alive when George Washington was inaugurated as the POTUS, so we can never with 100% certainty say he was the President.
But we are incredibly confident he was the President because the evidence suggests he was. There’s accurate, eye-witness accounts of his life, and what he did, and the impact he made to the world. In other words, he’s reliable.
We trust the sources, just as much as we trust the sources from other works from antiquity.
Aristotle
Homer’s “The Iliad”
Herodotus’ “History”
These are all people from antiquity whose works we are familiar with, and some have studied.
But the same people who take works like these as reliable, will often argue against The Bible, more specifically, the New Testament, as not being reliable — that it’s been changed over time, and there’s not enough data etc.
But there’s 1 area that scholars and archeologists, have given thousands and thousands of hours to that shows us just how reliable The Bible is, especially compared to the other works from its time.
There are more than 14,000 existing Old Testament manuscripts and fragments copied throughout the Middle East, Mediterranean and European regions that agree dramatically with each other.
But that doesn’t mean much unless you know how many manuscripts we have of these other ancient works:
Caesar's "The Gallic Wars" (10 manuscripts remain, with the earliest one dating to 1,000 years after the original autograph);
Pliny the Younger's "History" (7 manuscripts; 750 years elapsed);
Thucydides' "History" (8 manuscripts; 1,300 years elapsed);
Herodotus' "History" (8 manuscripts; 1,300 years elapsed);
Sophocles (193 manuscripts; 1,400 years);
Euripides (9 manuscripts; 1,500 years); and Aristotle (49 manuscripts; 1,400 years).
That’s not a lot of manuscripts… Especially compared to the New Testament.
The manuscript evidence supporting the New Testament impressively features more than 5,300 known copies and fragments in the original Greek, nearly 800 of which were produced before 1000 AD.
Several of these manuscripts originate from the early second and third centuries, demonstrating an exceptionally brief span of just 60 years between the original writings and the oldest surviving copies.
The New Testament is one of, (if not the most, at least in antiquity) the most documented works in history.
It can be trusted.
This is just the manuscript evidence. This doesn’t even include the prophecy, or the internal consistency.
It’s safe to say, the evidence for the Bible being reliable is pretty stellar.
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