This is the last of four posts on answering the questions friends pose to our faith.
Actually, this is something we can usefully work on in our church or student group. Set aside an evening, put people together in small groups of 5>8, list the objections we’ve heard, and together share ways we can respond. You’ll probably find we’ve got the raw material we need for the questions we’re asked.
These four posts have been aimed to back you up in this exercise, listing a few approaches you could use as starting-points. So then:
The Bible is full of mistakes and contradictions!
Have you really read it as an adult? What mistakes or contradictions are you actually thinking of?
Of course the Bible contains things hard for us to grasp. And so does science. (Is light made up of waves or particles? You could put it either way, says science. Is that a contradiction? No, but our understanding, and our verbal pictures, are limited.)
For centuries people have attacked the Bible. Yet what error is categorically proven? In so old and diverse a book, that is most remarkable.
It’s superficial to attack the Bible without reading it. Why not join an exploratory Bible study with a listening heart, and see how Jesus can speak to you through his Word?
(EXTRA: if we really want to understand these issues, we will need to grasp what we mean when we say, as many of our churches do, that the Bible is `completely reliable as originally given`. Obviously it has occasionally been mis-copied or mis-translated in minor ways over the years, and scholars have been sorting these issues out as increasingly reliable translations have been produced. Jesus had this issue too: `The Scripture cannot be broken`, he says (John 10:35), but the copies of the Scriptures he had, like ours, must have been ones where occasionally miscopying had occurred. Sometimes we can see this has happened where tiny numerical differences have crept in early on. But we hear Jesus affirming that what God gave was totally reliable, and choosing to have faith that this same God has protected his Word in everything that matters; and as his disciples, we exercise the same faith.
Secondly, we need to understand the conventions used by the biblical writers. We must treat biblical history as history, poetry as poetry; remembering, too, that the historical sections were written in the ancient middle east, not the contemporary west! Different cultures have their own ways of writing history; in England today, for example, if we begin a sentence “He said that….”, we can abridge or paraphrase without appearing inaccurate, more than if we use “He said” followed by quotation marks. Such conventions vary from culture to culture: if we ignore them we shall create unreal problems with non-existent ‘biblical contradictions’. The same is true of other conventions: biblical writers (like us) sometimes arrange their material by topic, rather than by chronological order; sometimes they paraphrase or quote another writer more approximately than an academic might do (although so do we, even in very serious conversations); they may report what was said even if (as with Satan’s words) it’s false, but they may not pause to say so; or they may (like us) use observational descriptions of nature (`The sun rose`). And different biblical writers from different centuries may have different ways of using round numbers; a different meaning for eg the measurement `cubit`; or a different method of dating royal reigns. Again, if we ignore these issues we shall create unreal problems with non-existent `biblical mistakes` and ‘biblical contradictions’. It is what Scripture says in its own way that God says!
For an accessible introduction to the Bible’s reliability, try Amy Orr-Ewing’s Why Trust the Bible? Excellent in-depth treatments are the two fine symposia edited by D A Carson and John Woodbridge, Scripture and Truth and also Hermeneutics, Authority and Canon; also Inerrancy edited by Norman Geisler. And for help on some specific difficult passages see the Encyclopaedia of Bible Difficulties by Gleason Archer.)
You say I need to face up to Jesus’ call on my life as my Saviour and Lord. But why should I trust the Bible’s accounts of Jesus?
Jesus was crucified in the mid-30s AD. By then what we have in the Gospels was already being committed to memory, because rabbis like Jesus taught their disciples that way. The Gospels show us how he helped that process by repeating some teachings in different contexts. (Let’s note, too, that middle eastern cultures which are not flooded by data like we are can still have retentive memories that may amaze us: many students leave Al Azhar University in Cairo today having memorized the entire Quran, which is 600+ pages in English translation.)
Anyway the four gospels were all in their final form, probably by AD 70, certainly by 95. Among our reasons to be sure of that is that the fall and massacre of Jerusalem and destruction of the Temple and the Jewish state in AD70 would have been great to use in argument that Jesus’ crucifixion was a catastrophic mistake on the Jews’ part; but they are not described in any of the Gospels, which therefore were obviously completed earlier. As we read them, therefore, it’s important (and sometimes obvious) to remember that we are reading eye-witness accounts. But also the intense persecution of the early Christians would have ensured that people who knew they might die unpleasantly (their families too) for what the Gospels contained would be very sure to check their accuracy!
The four Gospels were certainly not selected by Roman imperial power at the Council of Nicaea 300 years after Christ, as for example the nonsensical Da Vinci Code suggests. Quite apart from anything else, that council did not represent the Christians outside the Roman empire, eg in Parthia (who would have had no reason to take notice of decisions engineered by the emperor of a rival state); nor the Christians within the Roman Empire who were already being persecuted as church authority became institutionalized. Yet these farflung churches affirmed the same four Gospels. Much earlier, as early as about AD 180, Irenaeus could write that the four-ness of the gospels was an established and recognized fact as obvious as the four points of the compass or the four winds.
Eventually heretical sects did emerge, and wrote their own gospels (compare today’s Mormons and their Book of Mormon), but these are mostly obviously fictional. Read them yourself and see (eg in The Nag Hammadi Library, ed. J M Robinson). Interestingly, their Jesus tends to be more superhuman and less human than the real one – eg he doesn’t leave footprints. The most plausible of these productions is probably the Gospel of Thomas; but unlike the biblical Gospels (where the first resurrection witnesses are women) this is very anti-female (among other problems); anyway it is clearly far later than the biblical Gospels. Tom Wright argues that it was produced around 175AD. But the important point is that no one was discussing this or any of the Nag Hammadi gospels in the first half of the 2nd century; clearly they hadn’t yet appeared.
As for the other new testament books, the only ones about which there was any uncertainty after the middle of the second century were a few at the NT’s end – Hebrews, 2 Peter, 2 and 3 John, James and Jude, and (in the east – the west were fine with it) Revelation: the other books were accepted by all, says Origen. Eusebius, about a hundred years later, lists the same books as accepted by most, and Hebrews and Revelation by everybody.
The non-biblical ones that may still have been possible candidates for inclusion were the Epistle of Barnabas, the Shepherd of Hermas, the Didache, the Gospel to the Hebrews (apparently a version of our Matthew), and the Apocalypse of Peter. Also 1 and 2 Clement and the second-century Acts of Paul are included in some early manuscripts alongside the Bible books, so it is possible they were respected highly as well, although we don’t know. Most of these still exist and we can read them for ourselves. But about the four Gospels – which is what matters for evangelism and for learning about Jesus – we have clarity.
(See Paul Barnett’s Gospel Truth, answering the “new atheists”, and his earlier and excellent Is the New Testament History?; Prof F F Bruce’s classic The New Testament Documents; and C E Hill’s brilliant Who Chose the Gospels? Or for something at a more academic level, Jesus Under Fire ed. Michael Wilkins and J P Moreland.)
Well, following Jesus sounds OK for you, but I’m fine without it!
If there really is a God, to try and make our life work without him is like attempting a jigsaw puzzle after throwing the central piece away! Some bits will work, but as a whole it won’t make sense.
This life on earth is just the tiniest fraction of our total existence. Since God is our Maker, to ignore his purposes is to miss the whole point of the millions of years you will exist.
One day we must face God, and account to him for how we used the life he gave us, and how we responded to the salvation he died in agony to offer us.
Jesus told us there is a heaven (being totally with God, the source of all love, and joy, and peace), and a hell (being without God, experiencing none of these). In this life we can still know joy even while moving away from God: we’re like an electric fire that’s been disconnected from the power source, but hasn’t yet gone dark and cold. But if we live without God now, then logically we’ll be separated from him in eternity. To be separate from God then will mean total separation from all love, and joy, and peace; drifting into the darkness forever. That is what Jesus calls hell. You see why we’re strongly motivated to share all this, why it’s the most loving and vital thing to do for anyone we care about!
(Ch5 of Tim Keller’s brilliant The Reason for God is especially good on the questions to do with hell; so is C S Lewis’ The Great Divorce.)
