The Bible:
A Relic or Reliable Revelation?
(This is the first part of The Bible: A Relic or Reliable Revelation? I've broken the whole talk up into smaller sections, the rest of which can be found through the links on the Bible Section page. For online reading I recommend reading the shorter sections successively. To view the document with the whole talk in it Click Here. To view the rest of the parts of the talk Click Here. It does not contain numbered endnotes but you can find a list of references used at the end of the whole talk.)
Introduction: The Nature of Revelation and Inspiration
General Revelation
Elsewhere, I have talked about God being the ultimate source of absolute truth and the absolute standard of morality. But how does He communicate what those truths and morals are? How do we even find out what God, Himself, is like and how to relate to Him? Fortunately, is not all that difficult because God has taken the initiative to communicate with us. One way is through a category of communication theologians call General Revelation. God has revealed some truths in a general way so that everyone can see them. We can learn quite a bit about what God is like by just looking at nature and thinking logically.
For example, we look at nature and reason that there must be a Creator who is self-existent, eternal, transcendent (meaning not part of His creation), all powerful, and infinite. These are what are known as God's non-personal attributes. Paul sums it up in Romans 1:20 when he writes,
For since the creation of the world God's invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse.
God's personal attributes can also be discovered by studying nature and thinking carefully about the implications. For example, it is obvious to us that our Creator has to be intelligent. The amazing amount of intelligent design in nature can only be explained as coming from an Intelligent Designer. Intelligence is a personal attribute. Only a personal being who is intelligent can design something. An impersonal force can not. A personal being also has emotions and values. We all have an innate knowledge that there has to be an ultimate source of personal attributes like perfect love, goodness, mercy, grace and justice that exist outside of ourselves and our cultures. Again, all of this is known as General Revelation.
Special Revelation
Nature and our powers of reasoning are limited, however, in their abilities to teach us about God, His truths and moral standards. So God revealed more precise and personal information about Himself and His plans. This second body of revelation is known as Special Revelation. It is information that God communicated in special ways through special circumstances and special people. God revealed Himself and what He is like to real people through real events and relationships. In the process, He revealed a lot about His true answers to the ultimate questions of life, as well as His standards for moral and ethical behavior. All this occurred over a span of 40 generations covering 1500 years, which was from the time of Moses, around 1440 BC to the elder years of the apostle John, around 90 AD. Those people preserved the records of God's revelations through the spoken word as well as the written word in three different languages: Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek. Approximately 40 different authors came from all walks of life including kings, peasants, philosophers, fisherman, poets, statesmen and scholars. They carefully recorded this body of literature on three different continents. They wrote in a variety of literary genres including history, poetry, law, biography, prophecy and personal correspondence.
This collection that we call the Bible is a truly unique phenomenon. One of the qualities that makes it unique is that it carries one theme and one message consistently from the beginning to the end on a variety of subjects. Now, what if we compiled the works of 40 authors from North Carolina concerning just one subject? They would come from different literary genres, time periods and walks of life. They would be written by explorers, slaves, aristocratic plantation owners, fishermen, Indians, college students and so on. They would be written in the various languages and dialects of those people in different geographical and economic contexts over the past 300 years. What do you think are the chances that they would all agree on much of anything? By contrast, the biblical authors agree on everything. They wrote with consistency of theology and without real contradictions. When we look into the alleged contradictions in the Bible we discover that most of them are easily reconciled and relatively few important ones are left open to debate. And there are good theories to reconcile those few as well. I'll go into more detail about this in a few minutes. The uniqueness of the Bible alone speaks loudly for its authenticity as God's Special Revelation of truth to mankind.
The Nature of Inspiration
Now, that revelation had to be communicated by God in some way to those who received it. We say the authors were "inspired" as they wrote it down. The word inspiration literally means "to breathe into." The Bible claims for itself a special kind of inspiration. Timothy used this word to describe the divine inspiration of Scripture when he wrote, "All Scripture is God-breathed." (2 Tim 3:16) I'm going to give you a concise definition of the biblical doctrine of inspiration I learned in seminary:
- God superintended human authors so that
- using their own individual personalities
- they composed and recorded without error His revelation to man
- in the words of the orinigal autographs.
Let's unpack this so we know what it means and what it doesn't mean.
First, God didn't take the author's hand and make it write like a puppet or robotic hand. God didn't move the pen directly. Neither were the human authors secretaries who listened to God's voice and dictated every word. Very few times did God tell someone to take dictation.
Second, the human author was given truth by God, and he wrote it in his own words using his own writing style, language, educational background, vocabulary, figures of speech, customs and cultural understandings.
Even thought the whole project was very much a human process this process was supernaturally superintended by God to make sure that the human author communicated what God wanted. Liberal scholars tend to downplay the supernatural source and activity of God in this process and over emphasize the human aspects of the process. Overly conservative Christian scholars tend to downplay the human aspects too much while focusing on the supernatural aspects. These extremes are both wrong. We must see the equal importance of both the divine and human sources of the Bible. They were both understood and held in balance by the authors themselves. We must follow their example.
Third, they composed and recorded "without error." Just because God used imperfect humans to record His revelation to mankind doesn't mean they might have misunderstood or used the wrong word or introduced error in some other way. God made sure it was exactly what He wanted to communicate.
Fourth, they were without error "in the words of the original autographs." By autographs we mean the original manuscripts penned by the authors themselves. Unfortunately (at least from a human perspective), we don't have those originals. They are probably dust or ashes somewhere. So does that mean the copies we possess now aren't reliable reproductions? Not necessarily. And the rest of my talk this morning is about how we can be sure God's revelation was reliably transmitted to us today. I need to say one more thing about the claim "without errors in the original autographs." The original wording in the Hebrew or Greek documents is what was inspired. The English or other translation is not inspired. Something is always lost in the translation. Am I saying that you have to become a Hebrew and Greek scholar in order to understand the Bible? No. That's not what I'm saying. We can get, for most practical purposes, an adequate amount of the meaning through carefully studying the English translations; however, if you want to discover the richest treasures, you'll have to dig deep into the best copies we have in the Hebrew and Greek languages.
What is so exciting about the doctrine of inspiration as it applies to us is that we know that when we read Scripture we are reading what God intended to communicate to us. Timothy went on to write that Scripture has a purpose for us. It is "useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness so that the man of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work." (2 Tim. 3:16-17)
Do you want to know what God's will is? Do you want to know the best way to live? Do you want to be ready for life's greatest challenges? Then study the Bible. It is God's revelation to you and me.
Is the Bible a reliable transmission of God's revelation to us?
Let's move on to our claim that the Bible is a reliable transmission of God's revelation to us. You will hear teachers, professors, friends, family members and even some pastors say the Bible may be a book full of wise sayings, but it is full of errors, contradictions, inaccuracies, myths and legends. Therefore, we can't use it to get an accurate picture about what really happened. They will site the game "telephone." Who here has played the game "telephone?" How does it go? You put a group of people in a line. You say something to the first person and they are supposed to tell it to the second person who tells it to the third and so on down the line until it gets to the last person. And, of course, you remember what happens. By the time it gets to the last person it winds up being garbled gibberish that doesn't bear any resemblance to the original. In other words, the message is no longer genuine, authentic or accurate. The method used to transmit the message is not reliable.
Unfortunately, many people think this is how the Bible came about and is therefore unreliable, too. For example, they say, "Jesus was just a man, a very talented teacher who stepped on the toes of the authorities and was crucified for it. Then the followers of Jesus started telling others about Jesus' life and teachings, who then told others about Jesus' life and teachings and they went on to tell others and so on. And this oral tradition was passed on for a long time until it was finally written down. And then once it was written down it was then copied over and over. Of course, along the way people took the liberty, as in the telephone game, of changing what they heard to suit their purposes before passing it along. Perhaps they heard or read something that didn't sound very clear so they embellished it a little to try to make it more understandable for the next person. Or in an attempt to persuade, they even lied and said Jesus performed great miracles of healing people, raising them from the dead, and even rising from the dead himself. The bottom line is when we read the Bible 2000 years later we can't know what really happened. Therefore, we can only place the Bible on the same level of importance as the Hindu or Buddhist scriptures, the Koran, the Native American folk tales and The National Enquirer magazine.
But is this really how we got our Bible? Is it really just another book full of wise teachings from legendary figures? Today I will argue that we have every good reason to believe that the Bible is genuinely authentic, historically accurate and gives us an accurate picture, especially of who Jesus is. And finally, we'll talk about why it is even important. Right now, I only have time to talk about the New Testament of the Bible and I'll spend most of my time on the Gospels because they are the biographies of Jesus. But if we would apply the same principles to the rest of the Bible including the Old Testament we would see that all of the books of the Bible are accurate records of what really happened in human history even if it was a long time ago. I just want to mention one qualification. The Bible is composed of several genre's, or types, of literature, so it is vitally important to follow the rules of interpretation for each of those genre's to get the right meaning. For example, we shouldn't take the figures of speech in the Psalms literally because they weren't meant to be taken literally.
As I said, today we are going to focus on the Gospels because all of Christianity stands or falls on the accuracy of their reports about Jesus' death and resurrection. Let's find out if the Gospels are historically accurate. In other words, can and do they contain historically accurate information? To answer this question we are going to look, step by step, at the process by which we got our English Bibles. Right now I'll just summarize those steps. First, the news of the events and the teachings of Jesus were shared by word of mouth. This is called the Oral Tradition. Then, people wrote the information down to preserve it. The New Testament was written in Greek. Next, copies of the Greek manuscripts were made to disseminate that information. Finally, those copies were translated into various languages including English. In fact, it has been the most copied and translated book in the world. Now let's unpack that process and determine if each step was done reliably.
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Copyright 2005. Gary C. Burger and New Media Ministries. This article may be reproduced and distributed freely as long as it is done so in its entirety. If quoted it must be properly cited as a reference.
