Can I trust the Bible?

Christianity is not based on “faith”. It is based on evidence.

That statement will probably surprise many of you. Isn’t religion all about faith? Don’t you just leave your brain at the door when you enter the church? And does it even matter? Isn’t Christianity just about how you live – you know, being nice to people and that kind of stuff.

Now if that’s what you are thinking, then you’re not thinking about Christianity. Because Christianity is based on historical truth. And unlike any other religion or worldview, if that historical truth can be proved wrong, then the whole thing comes crashing down.

“Christianity, if false, is of no importance, and if true, of infinite importance. The only thing it cannot be is moderately important”. (CS Lewis)

So we’re going to spend some time this morning looking at three questions:

1. Why does Christianity depend on historical evidence?

2. Can I trust the Bible? or How do I know what is written is what actually happened?

3. Did the disciples just make it up?

If Christianity doesn’t depend on historical evidence, then who cares if the Bible is accurate or not. If it’s just an idea or philosophy, then it doesn’t matter. And then we don’t need to bother about the second and third questions. But if it does, then the question “Can I trust the Bible” becomes very important.

1. Why does Christianity depend on historical evidence?

Because Christianity is based on an historical person: Jesus.

This idea seems to have been forgotten in our society, even in some of our churches. But the Bible is unashamedly Jesus-focussed. Open your Bibles to the book of Mark, chapter 1 (page 599). We’re going to read the first verse, which says this “This is the Good News about Jesus the Messiah, the Son of God”.

Well, look again at verse 1. The Good News or “gospel” (that is: the message of Christianity – those are all the same things) is about Jesus. It is about a person. An historic person (Jesus) who lived in a real place (Israel, at that time a small part of the Roman Empire) at a specific time in history (around 4BC to 30AD).

Christianity is not a religious ritual, or a collection of laws to follow. Christianity is not about what country you were born in or what your family believes. It is not about friendships, or social work, or counselling, or looking after old people, or looking after poor people, or about being kind, or nice, or polite, or working hard, or even attending church meetings.

Christianity, is about Jesus. The gospel, or Good News, of Jesus.

It is about a relationship with the living God.
If you are a Christian without Jesus, then you are not a Christian.

So Christianity is about Jesus. Jesus, the Messiah, the Son of God.

“Messiah”, by the way, is his title. Messiah is Hebrew, Christ is Greek. You may have heard “Jesus Christ”. Christ is not his surname! It’s his title, like King or Judge, and what Messiah or Christ means is he is the Saviour of the world, promised in the Jewish Scriptures, our Old Testament: he is the great Warrior, Prophet, King who would be a blessing to all nations, and fulfil all of God’s promises. He is the King of the world.

That’s who he is – and we can’t change that because he’s a real historical person. We can’t change Jesus into whatever we want, although people keep trying. Like he’s an empty jar we can fill with our own ideas – a design-your-own Jesus, like those design-your-own teddy bear things. No. He’s very clearly described, revealed to us in the Bible.

This is the Good News about Jesus the Messiah, the Son of God

This is who Christianity is about. A person. A real person who lived and breathed in history. If you had a time machine – maybe a silver deLorean that you need to get up to 88 miles per hour (anyone seen “back to the future”?) - you could travel back to AD30 and see him, hear him, touch him, and exclaim “Great Scott, Marty!”.

The Bible itself makes this very clear. There’s none of this post-modern nonsense: “you just have to have faith”.
You have to have faith, yes, but faith IN JESUS. In the historical Jesus.
Having faith is useless if what you believe in is a lie. I may have faith that I’m a brilliant footballer. But that doesn’t make me a brilliant footballer. But if I have faith that my wife loves me – I know it’s true, based on the evidence of our relationship.
And when we come to religious truth, the same rules apply. Faith doesn’t magically make a lie into truth, no matter how much you believe it. Nonsense is still nonsense, even if we are talking it about God!

And so God, in his grace, has revealed himself in a way that is based on evidence. It is not blind faith. Christianity is the only religion or worldview to open itself to evidence. It stands unique above all other religions and philosophies.

In 1 Cor 15:17-19 (page 692), The Apostle Paul says this: [I]f Christ has not been raised, then your faith is useless and you are still guilty of your sins. 18 In that case, all who have died believing in Christ are lost! 19 And if our hope in Christ is only for this life, we are more to be pitied than anyone in the world.

[I]f Christ has not been raised (historical fact), then your faith (religion, worldview) is useless.

But if Christ has been raised, ah well that changes everything. Because if he was raised from the dead, then he is who he claimed to be: the Messiah, the Son of God. He is God, the Creator of the Universe and Lord of everything – including you and me. And he demands a response.
You’ve probably heard John 3:16 For God loved the world so much that he gave his one and only Son, so that everyone who believes in him will not perish but have eternal life. But did you know it continues in v18 like this There is no judgment against anyone who believes in him. But anyone who does not believe in him has already been judged for not believing in God’s one and only Son.

There is no neutral ground with Jesus. You either stand with him – or against him. And if you stand against him, you – you personally are already judged guilty and you will face the anger of God at your rebellion.

So, well done for coming today. For you understand that this question “Is the Bible true?” is vitally important to answer, not just in an abstract philosophical way – but in a deeply personal this-will-change-my-entire-life kind of way.

So, did Jesus really die and come back to life? Did he really do all those miracles? Is it true, or just made up?

2. Can I trust the Bible

Is what is written what actually happened?

Well, the people writing the Bible certainly thought so. They are very clear that what they are writing is historical, eye-witness facts. In 1 John 1:1 the Apostle John (apostle means a close friend and follower of Jesus), writes We proclaim to you the one who existed from the beginning, whom we have heard and seen. We saw him with our own eyes and touched him with our own hands. He [Jesus] is the Word of life.

In the gospel of Luke, Luke writes to his sponsor, Theophilus “Many people have set out to write accounts about the events that have been fulfilled among us. 2 They used the eyewitness reports circulating among us from the early disciples. 3 Having carefully investigated everything from the beginning, I also have decided to write a careful account for you, most honourable Theophilus, 4 so you can be certain of the truth of everything you were taught.”

Now you might just dismiss that and say “well, they’re believers, we can’t take their testimony seriously. That’s not evidence.”

Well, historians do. They account for bias, of course, but no historian disregards the Bible. To quote the historian Dr. John Dickson “Professional scholars approach the New Testament as they would any other first century text. They do not treat it as the word of God, of course…but they do regard [it] as the earliest, most plentiful, and most reliable source of information about the Jesus of history.”

That doesn’t mean they all believe it, of course. But this nonsense about Jesus never existing, or being a fairy tale made up by someone in later centuries is exactly that: nonsense. We can know with pretty great certainty that what we have translated in our Bibles is what was written by Luke, Mark, John, Paul, and others in the first century.

Also no scholar believes in the “broken telephone” argument either (that it’s been changed so much, so who can know what was written). We have ways of matching independent textual fragments together from totally different parts of the world, which, if they match, tell us exactly what the original said.
Like if I sent two identical letters, one to Rjukan and one to Kongsberg, and asked people to copy it out and then pass it on each day for a month. After one month we could take one of the letters from Kongsberg and compare it to an independently copied letter from Rjukan – and when we compare the two we get a pretty accurate idea of the original. If we find another, we have even more accuracy, and so on.
We have MANY independent copies of the New Testament documents.

Now, that’s not to say that the Bible is without errors. You may have heard scholars say that there are many errors in the Bible texts. And that’s true. But also know that these scholars define as “errors” things like full stops being left out, or a word substituted (like “cap” instead of “hat”). Where there are real doubts about what was originally written, your Bible will tell you (for example the end of Mark’s gospel is not found in the earliest manuscripts, and you’ll find a note in your Bible telling you this).

So, what we have here is pretty much what they wrote down about 2000 years ago.

Now you may still be thinking “but what if they just made it all up”. After all, they’re believers. Can I really trust the Christian sources?

And the answer is – yes. Because the non-Christian sources, most of them very anti-Christian, confirm the major facts that we find in the gospels.

Just from non-Christian source, we know this:

The name Jesus. His mother’s name, Mary. That he ministered in Palestine sometime in AD26-36 when Pontus Pilate was governor and Tiberius was Emperor in Rome. We know he had a brother called James, that his birth was unusual, that he was a famous teacher, and a famous miracle-worker, that some called him the Messiah or Christ, and also a king;
we know that he was executed by crucifixion during Passover by the Roman and Jewish leadership together, that at the time of his death, there was an eclipse (darkness) of the sun;
we know that his followers claimed that he had risen from the dead, that they worshiped him as God (not a god, but God, singular),
and that his followers grew very rapidly in number extremely quickly, and the church (or as Tacitus the Roman historian calls it: the “deadly superstition”) had spread “even to Rome”.

This is the Good News about Jesus the Messiah, the Son of God. (Mark 1:1) based on our eye-witness accounts. This is reportage, interviews with those who were there, just like you would read about those lived and fought in World War 2.

Think about that. That happened here, right outside these walls, less than 70 years ago. People here from Notodden died to defend this country from the Nazis. I read about it in Telen a few months ago. As hard as it is to believe now, with the sun shining, and the lake glistening and us at peace what has to be one of the most beautiful towns in one of the most beautiful countries in the world – there was war here 70 years ago.
And in Judea, in Palestine, 2000 years ago, there was a man who claimed to be God, and proved it publically with mighty works, a predicted death, and a dramatic resurrection from the dead.

3. Did the disciples make it up?

So, we know that Christianity is based on historical evidence because it is founded on an historical person: Jesus of Nazareth, the Messiah, the Son of God.

We know that the Bible we have today is what was actually written down by the original authors. And that what they wrote down was, in their own words, eye-witness accounts, first-hand experiences of this man Jesus.

But how do we know they didn’t just make it all up? What if Mark and Luke and the others are just the first century’s version of JK Rowling. You know, the Harry Potter author.

In Harry Potter, there’s ordinary London – and then this other fantastical world of magic seamlessly woven into ordinary life. Couldn’t the stories about Jesus be like Harry Potter?

Sounds reasonable enough – except for the fact that the modern way of writing believeable stories, with real historical detail mixed in with fiction, made-up stuff, that way of writing hadn’t been developed yet. It was totally unknown. Myths were myths and written like myths. History was history and written like history. No-one would ever, or had even thought of, writing myth like history.

CS Lewis, in his capacity as Cambridge professor of Mediaeval and Renaissance Literature, says this: “I have been reading …myths and legends all my life. I know what they are like. And I know none of them are like…these gospel texts…The reader who doesn't see this simply hasn't learned how to read."

There’s also the problem of motivation. We human beings, we tend to do things only if we’re going to gain by it. Haha, you might think, look how powerful the church is. It’s all about money. Like the Catholic Bishop who spent 14 million euros on his house, or the TV evangelists who preach about God wanting you to be rich – and they get rich, while their listeners get poor.

But you’re reading today’s reality back into history. For the disciples, the gospel of Jesus was a death sentence, not a pathway to riches. They were arrested, tried, beaten, left for dead, stoned, mocked, ridiculed, spat at, caused riots, wherever they went. Early Christians lost their homes, their jobs. They were marginalised from society, and even thrown to the lions for entertainment in Rome. This went on for 300 years. And in many parts of the world, still goes on today.

They were convinced that Jesus is the Christ, the Messiah – and that to know him is to know Almighty God himself.

So, they didn’t have the skills to write modern fiction. They had no motivation to make up a story – all they gained was suffering and hardship. And, in their stories, they look like complete idiots.

If you were going to make up a story of a new religion, would you write one where you get everything wrong, act like a coward, and deny your God? No, you’d write one where you look good.

But as you read through the gospels, you see the then church leaders making complete fools of themselves. Not the way to win standing and influence and power, is it.

And, the critical point of Christianity: the resurrection – they don’t even believe it. The women go to Jesus’ tomb on the Sunday morning with burial spices for his corpse. Burial spices! Not a six-pack of beer, party balloons, and a big banner saying “Welcome back Jesus”. They didn’t believe him when he said “I’ll be back”. Who would?

Jesus meets two other disciples on the road outside Jerusalem, and they don’t even recognise him – while telling him about his death and that his tomb is now empty and no-one knows what happened to his body. They didn’t believe. They weren’t gullible, easily swayed. They were just like you and me. But they believed when they met the risen Lord Jesus. When they spoke to, saw, touched, the man who they had seen die – and was now alive, just as he had said. No wonder they fell to their knees and said “My Lord and my God!”

You know, these central truths of Christianity are hard to believe. One God in control of everything, the resurrection, God taking our punishment, swapping places with us (grace)). And our culture is familiar with these truths – over a 1000 years they have been with us. But to the Romans and the Greeks in the 1^st century: they were laughable. Completely idiotic. This was no popular religion, no internet meme that swept the world because of the right fertile cultural soil. No. It clashed with the culture – and yet still spread like wildfire. Why? Because it was, and is, the truth.

The church grew massively, not by the sword, like some other religions, but in the face of the sword. Because it’s truth.

1 Cor 15:3-7 3 I passed on to you what was most important and what had also been passed on to me. Christ died for our sins, just as the Scriptures (Old Testament) said. 4 He was buried, and he was raised from the dead on the third day, just as the Scriptures said. 5 He was seen by Peter and then by the Twelve. 6 After that, he was seen by more than 500 of the brothers at one time, most of whom are still alive, though some have died. 7 Then he was seen by James and later by all the apostles. 8 Last of all, as though I had been born at the wrong time, I also saw him.

Christianity is the only religion or worldview to depend totally on historical evidence. Because it is founded on an historical person: Jesus of Nazareth, the Messiah, the Son of God.

We know that the Bible we have today is what was actually written down by the original authors. And that what they wrote was truth, true truth, about this amazing man Jesus, who revealed himself to be God.

These events did not happen off in corner, like in a magic show where you can’t see behind the curtain. But in full view of everybody. This happened. Jesus lived, ministered, died, rose again.

So what are you going to do with Jesus?

What are you going to do with Jesus?