Is Today's Bible Authentic?

Is the Bible reliable? Eric Metaxas explores some of the ways we can know that today's version of the Bible is authentic.

Questions for Discussion and Personal Reflection

  1. Are you surprised to hear that there is historical evidence to support the Bible?
  2. What impact do Eric's statements have on your views of the Bible?

We live in a time when you keep hearing stuff like, "Oh, the Bible was changed in the Middle Ages by the, you know, the monks and that we don't know what it really says" and, and you know, upon investigation I have come to the conclusion that that's not true. The Dead Sea Scrolls: they were in jars for like 2,000 years in a desert someplace and then in, what was it, 1947-48 somebody discovers them, and opens them up and says, "Oh, what's this?" They are documents of the Old Testament that have been hidden in jars in the desert where it's dry, where they're preserved for 2,000 years. And we can say, "Oh, so what did the Bible say 2,000 years ago? Let's read it. We don't have to guess if the monks changed it or not. Let's read it." And you read it and it's like letter-for-letter, not word-for-word, letter-for-letter the same as it is today, so, you, the argument that the Bible was changed, it, it just has to go in the garbage instantly. We have thousands and thousands of, of New Testament manuscripts that exist that we can read and compare to other New Testament manuscripts. We don't have that for Socrates, we don't have that for Aristotle, we don't have that for Thucydides, we don't have that for Herodotus, we don't— like, we don't have those documents close to when they were written. Like, the closest documents we have to those documents are literally a thousand years later. There have been, uh, just in the last, like, 50 years tremendous archaeological discoveries, and this is another one of these things, like, a hundred years ago, people could make arguments, but, like, now we have archaeological evidence that keeps coming up over and over and over. I read about it in the New York Times. You open it up and they say "Oh, they found a, a steal," talking about the house of David. You know, they, no, they had no evidence that 3,000 years ago there actually was a King in Israel named David. Now they have archaeological evidence. This, this happens over and over and over again that oh, suddenly we realize the Assyrians or the Hittites, they actually existed because we found something from you know, in cuneiform writing that proves it, whereas up until now, we thought maybe it was just made up. Um, archaeological evidence is pretty compelling. It becomes an open-and-shut case. People can believe what they want, but when you start looking at that, uh, evidence it's, it's overwhelming. It does matter that it's, that it's real, that it's trustworthy and you can investigate it, and I would say it's, it's kind of fun to investigate it.