Letter Three: Why Trust an Ancient Book?

Letters to an Honest Skeptic

Dear friend,

In my last letter, I asked you to treat the God question as a claim of fact and to check the label against the contents. Fair enough, you might say, but the label you keep pointing me to is a book that is thousands of years old, written by men, copied by hand for centuries, and translated who knows how many times. Why would a reasonable person trust it?

That is a reasonable question, and I intend to answer it like one. But first, let me concede something, because you would catch it anyway. I cannot prove the Bible by quoting the Bible. “The Bible says it is God’s Word” is a label, and labels are not self-verifying. Therefore, in this letter I will treat the Bible as what it undeniably is, whatever else it may be: a collection of ancient documents that make checkable claims. Then we will check them. Three checks.

Check one: it announces the future

Here is a test you can respect, because the Bible proposes it against itself. The God of the Bible stakes His identity on one ability: “declaring the end from the beginning, and from ancient times things which have not been done.” He even taunts the idols of the nations: predict anything, and we will know you are gods. The logic is sound. A being inside of time can guess. Only a Being outside of time can write history in advance.

So does the book deliver? Isaiah names Cyrus, the specific ruler who would release the Jewish exiles, by name, roughly a hundred and fifty years before Cyrus was born. Micah names the little town of Bethlehem as the Messiah’s birthplace seven centuries before it happened. Psalm 22 describes pierced hands and feet, a mocking crowd, and soldiers gambling for the victim’s clothing, written centuries before crucifixion had been invented as a method of execution. Isaiah 53 describes the whole scene, a man despised, silent before his accusers, pierced through for the wrongdoing of others, assigned a grave with the wicked and buried with the rich, seven hundred years early.

Now, your natural objection, and it is the right one to raise: “Those were obviously written after the fact.” That door has been closed, and not by preachers. In 1947, shepherds found the Dead Sea Scrolls, and among them is a complete scroll of Isaiah that has been physically dated to more than a century before Jesus was born. The predictions were demonstrably on the shelf before the events. That is not a sermon. That is a fact, a piece of evidence. You can look at it.

Check two: the copies

The next objection is the one I hear most: “It has been copied and translated so many times, like the telephone game, that nobody knows what it originally said.”

The facts run in the other direction, and they are not religious facts, they are library facts. The New Testament survives in thousands of ancient Greek manuscripts. The ordinary works of the ancient world, the histories and speeches that no one doubts, typically survive in a handful of copies made centuries after their authors died. Measured by the ordinary standards of ancient documents, nothing else is even close.

And that Isaiah scroll performs a second service here. It is roughly a thousand years older than the oldest Hebrew copy scholars previously possessed. A thousand years of hand copying stood between the two. When they were laid side by side, they matched in everything that matters. The copyists were faithful, and now that faithfulness is measurable.

One more correction, because somebody probably told you otherwise. A modern Bible is not a translation of a translation of a translation. The translators worked in one step, directly from the ancient Hebrew and Greek into English, and their work is checked by rival scholars who would love nothing better than to catch them. There is no chain of whispers.

Check three: the consistency

The third check is one you can run against your own experience of books, and I will introduce it with my wife.

My wife is an avid reader. For entertainment she reads fiction, mysteries and dramas mostly, and she regularly reports to me how often authors contradict themselves. One author described a character’s vast property and had the driver explain to arriving guests that they had been driving across the owner’s sprawling forty acres for the past several miles. Unless that forty acres contained a mountain and miles of switchbacks, the author simply had no idea what an acre is. I recently watched an old John Wayne Western in which a handcuffed man hid his hands in his hat, knocked on a door, and walked through it, and when the camera picked him up inside, the handcuffs had vanished. A professional film crew employs a person whose entire job is continuity, and it still slipped through.

I am not mocking these mistakes. I make more of them than any novelist. The point is that this is the human baseline. One professional author, one book, one lifetime, paid editors, and the forty acres still will not stay consistent. We are human, and we err. It is what we do.

Therefore, weigh what the Bible is. Sixty-six separate documents. Roughly forty authors: shepherds, kings, fishermen, a tax collector, a physician, a tentmaker. Three languages, different continents and cultures, spread across some fifteen hundred years, most of the writers never meeting one another. And the result is one consistent storyline, one unfolding plan of rescue, one central figure, with a promise made in the opening pages and kept in the closing ones. The thing a single author cannot manage across three hundred pages, forty authors managed across fifteen centuries. On human terms, it makes no sense. The book itself offers the only explanation I have found adequate: “men moved by the Holy Spirit spoke from God.” Many pens. One Author.

The question this time

Three checks. Predictions sealed in datable scrolls before their fulfillments. A manuscript record without rival in the ancient world. A consistency that human authorship cannot account for. I am not asking you to conclude tonight that the Bible is God’s Word. I am submitting that the claim has passed the checks a reasonable person would run, and that “written by men, corrupted by copying” is a slogan the evidence does not support.

So here is my question this time, and it may be the most practical one I ever ask you: have you actually read it? As an adult, I mean. Not verses on protest signs, not quotes in arguments, the book itself. In my experience, most people who dismiss the Bible have never read the Bible, and I will make you an honest offer. Start with one document, the Gospel of Luke, written by the physician. It opens with the author explaining his method: careful investigation, eyewitness sources, an orderly account. It runs about the length of a magazine’s worth of reading. Read it as skeptically as you like. The next letter will examine whether accounts like his can be trusted as history, so you may as well have the exhibit in front of you.

Check the label for yourself. That is all this letter asks.

Your friend, Mark

Letters to an Honest Skeptic is written alongside a study our church walked through together. You’re welcome any Sunday, questions and all. Walshville Christian Church, Walshville, Illinois.