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I made this because it keeps coming up in debates about the Bible's credibility, saying things like that it was written decades after the fact (at least they've stopped saying centuries). What they fail to consider, though, is how ancient documents are checked for accuracy and what that entails for our knowledge of the past.

For comparison's sake, there's a solid historical case based on various clues (see J. Warner Wallace for the uncontested best breakdown of this I've ever read) that the Gospels were written less than seventy years after the death of Jesus. Now, sixty years is arguably a pretty big gap by modern standards, but that was still within the lifetimes of eyewitnesses who could have easily debunked any falsehoods in the text - especially with the text specifically implying one should seek out the witnesses to settle any doubts. Also, the idea that the Bible was a game of telephone is debunked by the plethora of copies available to compare to one another. We have 5,000 Greek manuscripts and fragments of the New Testament, and 9,000 manuscripts of ancient translations! 14,000, people. That's staggering. Just getting that many copies printed of any book today would have the writer popping champagne like there was no tomorrow. And that's just the copies that survived the ravages of time and censorship, and have been found so far!

Now, compare that to some of the records of ancient Rome. For some of these documents, archaeologists have to settle for a measly ten copies, written as far after the fact as 900 years. Call me crazy, but I don't think those had any eyewitnesses available to fact-check. Yet we have no problem with these documents. We take them as (pardon the pun) gospel truth and would gladly cite them in textbooks and college courses.

Then let's talk variations. Of the 20,000 lines in the New Testament, only 40 give translators any difficulty, and none of them are essential to understanding the meaning of the text. In other words, we have one five-hundredth of a 1% margin of error in our understanding of the New Testament, and it's not even in any major area(s)! Taking a look at the Old Testament, when the Dead Sea Scrolls were opened, archaeologists compared a 24-foot scroll of the Book of Isaiah to the other copies available. You'd expect some changes over the thousand-year time gap between it and the previously oldest-known copies. Skeptics would expect a new "prophecy" or two added of events in the intervening centuries. And yet, the only changes AT ALL were three words spelled differently. Three. Changes. In. Spelling.

The Bible is the same yesterday, today, and forever. If we cannot trust the Bible, we cannot trust anything. If we trust anything at all from antiquity, logic demands we trust the Bible.

Description
I made this because it keeps coming up in debates about the Bible's credibility, saying things like that it was written decades after the fact (at least they've stopped saying centuries). What they fail to consider, though, is how ancient documents are checked for accuracy and what that entails for our knowledge of the past.

For comparison's sake, there's a solid historical case based on various clues (see J. Warner Wallace for the uncontested best breakdown of this I've ever read) that the Gospels were written less than seventy years after the death of Jesus. Now, sixty years is arguably a pretty big gap by modern standards, but that was still within the lifetimes of eyewitnesses who could have easily debunked any falsehoods in the text - especially with the text specifically implying one should seek out the witnesses to settle any doubts. Also, the idea that the Bible was a game of telephone is debunked by the plethora of copies available to compare to one another. We have 5,000 Greek manuscripts and fragments of the New Testament, and 9,000 manuscripts of ancient translations! 14,000, people. That's staggering. Just getting that many copies printed of any book today would have the writer popping champagne like there was no tomorrow. And that's just the copies that survived the ravages of time and censorship, and have been found so far!

Now, compare that to some of the records of ancient Rome. For some of these documents, archaeologists have to settle for a measly ten copies, written as far after the fact as 900 years. Call me crazy, but I don't think those had any eyewitnesses available to fact-check. Yet we have no problem with these documents. We take them as (pardon the pun) gospel truth and would gladly cite them in textbooks and college courses.

Then let's talk variations. Of the 20,000 lines in the New Testament, only 40 give translators any difficulty, and none of them are essential to understanding the meaning of the text. In other words, we have one five-hundredth of a 1% margin of error in our understanding of the New Testament, and it's not even in any major area(s)! Taking a look at the Old Testament, when the Dead Sea Scrolls were opened, archaeologists compared a 24-foot scroll of the Book of Isaiah to the other copies available. You'd expect some changes over the thousand-year time gap between it and the previously oldest-known copies. Skeptics would expect a new "prophecy" or two added of events in the intervening centuries. And yet, the only changes AT ALL were three words spelled differently. Three. Changes. In. Spelling.

The Bible is the same yesterday, today, and forever. If we cannot trust the Bible, we cannot trust anything. If we trust anything at all from antiquity, logic demands we trust the Bible.