Can I
Trust the
Bible?

Somebody is going to ask you. At the sale barn, at the kitchen table, in the truck on the way to a funeral. “How can you believe that book? It’s been changed a hundred times.” Most of us do one of two things when that happens. We get quiet, or we get loud. Peter says do neither.

He wrote to Christians who were getting run down for their faith, and he did not tell them to hide and he did not tell them to fight. He told them to worship Christ as Lord of their life first, and then to always be ready to explain their hope to anybody who asks. Always. Not when you feel sharp. Not after you have read three more books. Always.

Then he tells you how, and this is the part we skip. Gentle. Respectful. With a clear conscience. The answer and the manner are one thing. A right answer delivered like a punch in the mouth is a wrong answer. The goal was never to win the argument. The goal is the man across the table.

“The Bible has been rewritten and changed over time.” That is the first thing they throw, and here is what you say back. In 1947 a shepherd boy chasing a stray goat pitched a rock into a cave above the Dead Sea and heard pottery break. Inside were scrolls. Before that day, the oldest copy of the Hebrew Scriptures we owned was from about 935 AD. In that cave was a nearly complete copy of Isaiah from around 125 BC. A thousand years older.

So they laid the two side by side, a thousand years of copying between them. Besides some spelling and a handful of single words, they matched. A thousand years of scribes, and the Book did not drift. That is because a scribe’s whole job was to copy exactly. They counted letters. They counted the middle letter of the page. A page with a mistake got buried, not sold.

And the New Testament? We have more copies of it than any book in the ancient world, over five thousand in Greek alone. Yes, there are differences between the copies, and the skeptics love to say so. But the best-known skeptic scholar in America, Bart Ehrman, wrote it down himself: most of them are “completely unimportant and insignificant,” and not one core belief of the faith hangs on any of them. When the man arguing against you concedes the point in print, you can rest.

“The Council of Nicea decided what was in the Bible.” A whole lot of folks believe that, mostly because they read it in a novel. Here is the real question under it: who gets to say what is Scripture? And the answer is, the men who wrote it were already saying so, while the ink was wet.

Paul, writing to Timothy, quotes a line from Luke’s Gospel, “those who work deserve their pay,” and calls it Scripture. Peter says folks were twisting Paul’s letters “just as they do with other parts of Scripture.” Peter is putting Paul’s mail on the same shelf as Moses. No council did that. The apostles did, in the first century.

And long before any council met, the church already had the list. A document from around 180 AD names twenty-two of our twenty-seven New Testament books as Scripture, all four Gospels and every letter of Paul among them. That is a hundred and forty-five years before Nicea ever sat down, and Nicea never took up the question anyway. The list was not decided. It was recognized. God’s people knew his voice when they heard it.

“The Bible is full of contradictions.” Ask the man for one. Nine times out of ten he cannot name it, and the tenth time it is one that has been chewed on for two thousand years and the message never moved. The Gospel writers sometimes put stories in a different order to make a point. One leaves out what another puts in. Leaving out a story is not a contradiction. It is what every witness does.

Any cop will tell you: real eyewitnesses never tell it exactly the same. Four men who agree on every detail have been in a room together getting their story straight. Four men who agree on the story and differ on the details are telling you what they saw. That is what you have in Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.

Two more things you can hang your hat on. The names in the Gospels match the real names people carried in first-century Israel, right down to which ones were common, and nobody making up a legend a hundred years later somewhere else could fake that. And nobody lies to make himself look bad. The disciples wrote themselves as cowards who ran, Peter as the one who denied him, and women as the first witnesses of the empty tomb in a world where a woman’s word did not count in court. You do not invent that. You report it.

Put the three back to back. Changed over the years? More copies than any book in the ancient world, and the top skeptic admits the core never moved. Made by a council? The list was already there a hundred and fifty years before. Full of contradictions? We know every one of them, and nothing has changed. You can trust the Book.

But hear me, because this is the whole reason we spent a week on it. Nobody gets to heaven by trusting a book. The Book is a trail, and every trail goes somewhere. This one goes to a Man. Every page of it, from the garden to the empty tomb, is pointing at Jesus, and Jesus said the plainest thing anybody has ever said: I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.

So when the man at the sale barn asks you how you can trust that book, you have your answer now. But do not stop there. The Book is not the point. Jesus is. Give the answer, gentle and respectful, and then tell him about the Man the Book is about.