These days, many Christians, especially college-age students, face having their faith in God and the Bible questioned if not downright assaulted. Dr. Jonathan Morrow teaches Christian students how to defend their faith at the Impact 360 Institute in Pine Mountain, Georgia. He knows how tough it is for Christians at secular institutions.
“Sometimes they’re going to have a professor that’s going to outright challenge why they believe what they believe and say, ‘Look, what you believe is actually a fairytale,'” Morrow said. But Morrow and two more of the world’s top biblical experts told CBN News there’s good reason for believers to have faith in your faith.
Dr. Darrell Bock teaches at the Dallas Theological Seminary and co-wrote Truth Matters. “The faith is very, very defendable,” Bock said. “That’s why it’s lasted 2,000 years.”
Josh McDowell wrote one of the most authoritative defenses of the Bible with Evidence That Demands a Verdict and its sequel The New Evidence That Demands a Verdict. He pointed to how even respected “non-believers” wrote about Jesus. “There are 16 total historians apart from Scripture that reference Christ,” he said. “Almost everything about Christ we can find without ever going to the New Testament.”
Morrow points out in his book Questioning the Bible there’s more evidence that Jesus lived than Julius Caesar, yet no one doubts Caesar existed. “When you’re doing history, you want early and you want eyewitnesses. And the gospel writers give you both,” Morrow explained.
One supposition of scholars is the closer in time a writer was to events, the more likely his account is accurate. Morrow pointed out respected biblical writers Paul and Luke interviewed the apostles and knew many others who witnessed Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection. And the writers Peter, John, and James actually lived with Jesus.
“John said, ‘What our eyes have seen, what our ears have heard, what our hands have handled is what we’re declaring to you,'” McDowell said. “In other words, ‘We’re eyewitnesses.'”
McDowell explained another understanding among scholars. “The closer the manuscript to the original, the less chance of error or miscopy,” he said. Current surviving Bible manuscripts get closer to the original work than any other manuscripts from the ancient world.
“We’ve got manuscripts and fragments that show up within 35 or 40 years of the time when they were written,” Morrow said of these biblical survivors. But doubters scoff at those while readily accepting manuscripts of Greek and Roman histories that were created hundreds of years after the originals.
“When you look at Greek and Roman historians like Herodotus and Tacitus and Livy, those (oldest surviving manuscripts) are hundreds of years later – 500, 600, 700 years after the fact,” Morrow said.
McDowell pointed out a second rule among scholars of ancient works. “The more manuscripts you have, the easier it is to reconstruct the original,” he said. When it comes to the Bible, the surviving ancient copies or pieces of it way outnumber all other ancient works. McDowell said there are “66,420 some manuscripts and scrolls” for the Bible. Second place goes to Homer’s The Illiad, with just 1,827. Most ancient works have far few intact remnants.
“We do trust Homer. How much more should we trust the New Testament documents?” Morrow asked.
Another reason to trust the Bible: archaeology and related research have time and again shown the Bible is true and the skeptics to be wrong. “Archaeology has probably cleared up already over half of all what appeared to be alleged discrepancies in the Scriptures,” McDowell said. Skeptics used say there’s no record of a Nazareth, so the New Testament can’t be true. They’d point out there was no proof of the oft-mentioned Hittites, so the Old Testament can’t be true. Archaeology and associated research have since shown both existed.
“Now you can go to Harvard or anywhere else and study the Hittite language,” McDowell said.
Finally, Bock asked what better proof the earliest disciples weren’t making it all up than the fact they almost all were martyred for it?
“You don’t die knowingly for something that you know you made up,” he said.