Understanding the 40 Parables of Jesus Christ: Learn from the greatest teacher Jesus Christ. The gospel taught in stories.

Reliability of the Bible

The Bible is the most reliable collection of writings in human history. There is no other document that even comes close to the plethora of ancient copies that the Bible has supporting it. Both the Old and New Testaments have a ridiculous amount of evidence supporting their reliability compared to other ancient historical documents.

Determining Reliability of Ancient Documents

When determining the reliability of an ancient document, histories ask a few important questions:

Dating of the Text: How close to the original date of authorship are the available copies?

Number of Copies: How many ancient copies do we have? How accurate are they compared to each other?

Outside Sources: Can the ancient text be validated from outside sources that quoted the manuscript?

Reliability of the Bible: Old Testament

In the 1940's when the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered, it included multiple copies of the virtually every Old Testament book of the Bible, all dated prior to the beginning of Christianity.

This discovery answered an important question that had been asked by both the non-religious and religious: Is the current Bible the same as the ancient Bible?

What was discovered was that the Christian Church had preserved the Old Testament with basically perfect accuracy. Minor misspellings in the ancient text, or omission of non-essential words, were the only minor differences. Over 95% of the entire text was exactly the same with the other 5% being misspellings, differences in word order, and minor omissions of insignificant words, etc.

However, in terms of copies and quotations from outside sources, the New Testament has even more evidence supporting its reliability than the Old Testament.

Reliability of the Bible: New Testament

The New Testament has thousands of ancient copies in multiple languages that support its reliability.

Not only that, but the New Testament was quoted by so many early Christian writers that it could easily be reconstructed simply from the quotations. The primary issue with the New Testament has never been reliability. Even the existence of Jesus Christ is not a matter of question. His existence is confirmed in the texts of non-biblical historians.

The real question is not whether the New Testament is reliable, or whether Jesus existed. The real question is whether it is true about what it says regarding Jesus Christ.

The New Testament is a collection of numerous authors who collectively make very bold claims about God, Jesus Christ, and other religious subjects such as salvation.

The real question that needs to be considered: Is what the Bible says about Jesus true?

Further readings from outside sources: