The Reliability of Scripture

Daniel Hames, Systematic Theology Lecture 5b, Doctrine of Scripture 1, Union School of Theology

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ALIVE – June 21, 2023, by Timothy Montgomery

Timothy Montgomery walks through the whys and hows of presenting the Bible as reliable – he wants his listeners to walk away knowing why they believe the Bible.

note: 50 minutes in he talks about manuscripts

Making Sense of Manuscripts | James White

James White seeks to explain what manuscripts are, how we use them in Bible translation, and some difficulties that arise when translating them.

Charles Haddon Spurgeon (The Bible, on applebooks)

“It may be most accurate to interpret this passage as relating both to the Word of God incarnate, and the Word of God inspired. Weave the two into one thought, for God hath joined them together, and you will then see fresh lights and new meanings in the text. The Word of God, namely, this revelation of Himself in Holy Scripture, is all it is here described to be, because Jesus, the incarnate Word of God, is in it. He doth, as it were, incarnate Himself as the divine truth in this visible and manifest revelation—and thus it becomes living and powerful, dividing and discerning. As the Christ reveals God, so this Book reveals Christ, and therefore it partakes, as the Word of God, in all the attributes of the Incarnate Word. And we may say many of the same things of the written Word as of the embodied Word; in fact, they are now so linked together that it would be impossible to divide them.”

Why I Choose to Believe the Bible, by Voddie Baucham

This is one of the best talks about why the Bible is reliable and believable.

Can We Know the Exact Words of Scripture – Peter Williams

Peter Williams considers how reliably we know each word of the Bible, as well as discussing various other topics on the trustworthiness of Scripture.

How We Got Our Bible | James White

James White explains how we got our Bible, different translations, and how translating Scripture developed throughout time.

Foundations 6: Bible, by Peter Mead

Peter Mead preaches to his congregation about what the Bible is, what the Bible is for, who the Bible points to, and why it is trustworthy.

Various comments from Daniel B. Wallace from JAS – KJV only Debate (1995)

Translations need to change to make sure that we maintain the faith so that people can understand the word of God. If you have a 1611 translation, where we don’t even use those words the same anymore, you actually have a changing tradition; yours is changing far more than ours is. We’re trying to get back to the original with every generation.

The fundamental principle of modern texture criticism is this: choose the reading which best explains the rise of the others. Now that involves at least two things. It involves looking at the external data; The external data, of course, includes the Greek manuscripts, the non-Greek manuscripts, the Latin, the Coptic, the Ethiopic, all the rest, and it also involves looking at Church fathers, what these ancient commentators had to say about the Greek New Testament. That’s external evidence. By choosing the best reading on external evidence, the earlier manuscripts would be preferred over the later ones. And so we want to look at the earliest manuscripts, because you’re going to have less time for copying between the time of the original until you get to those early copies. Where they agree, we have no collusion – it’s very difficult to prove collusion because they disagree so often – and that would suggest that it goes back to the original.

You also have geographical distribution – very important principle. If I have the same wording in manuscripts in Italy, and in Carthage, and in Antioch – all in the second century, one in a church writer, one in a Greek manuscript, etc., and they all agree on the wording, it’s very difficult for us to say “Gee, somehow these guys got together and put this together by collusion.” More than likely it goes back to a more common ancestor, namely, the original text. And so you’ve got geographical distribution in the early centuries, that’s the key.

You’ve also got internal evidence. And this involves two elements: what is the Scribe most likely to have done? Scribes do things unintentionally, scribes do things intentionally. And one of the things we need to understand about these manuscripts is this: these were not done off of a typesetter, they were not done off of xerox machine, they were not done with computers; all these manuscripts are handwritten. And consequently a scribe comes along, and he sees a manuscript in front of him, here’s a marginal note, and it says “the angel of the Lord went down stirred up the waters” (John 5:4). Is this part of the original text, or was this a comment on it? How does he know? He always takes the safest route, and he includes it in the text the next time around. And that’s how John 5:4 got into the Bible, for example. And so the text has grown with time, but these scribes, we have to look at what is the Scribe most likely to do: they’re more likely to add than to omit. There’s other reasons that why they do that as well.

Finally, you look at authorial usage. What is the author likely to have done? What is his context, what is his style, this kind of a thing. And you look at the text in light of that.

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