What Is the Bible, and Can We Trust It?

   By Matt Knobloch

Watch the 60-Second Theology video on this topic!

What is the Bible?

The Bible isn’t a book. It’s more like a library.

Sixty-six documents, more than forty authors, roughly fifteen hundred years. It was written in Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek, across the Middle East, North Africa, and Europe. Kings, shepherds, prophets, fishermen, and others wrote it. Some of them wrote from palaces, and some wrote from prison. It contains multiple genres, including history, poetry, song lyrics, and genealogy. 

All of these factors SHOULD have made it incredibly hard to tell ONE story with any coherence, but somehow it does. 

The ONE story is this: God creates a people for himself; we decide we know what’s best for us and rebel; God pursues and provides a rescue in Jesus. It starts in a garden and ends in a restored earth and creation. 

Here’s the question: How does a library containing several genres, written across fifteen centuries by people who never met, end up telling a single story?

Can We Trust the Bible?

As I mentioned above, the Bible contains important historical information. Historical claims can always be examined. 

Let’s take a look at two examples.

Recorded Close to the Events

One reason the Bible deserves serious consideration is how close its accounts were written to the events they describe.

The resurrection of Jesus wasn’t a legend that surfaced long after his death. In 1 Corinthians 15, Paul gives a summary he says he received from others, and scholars widely recognize it as material that was already circulating before he wrote it, close to within a few years of the crucifixion.

There’s a real difference between a public claim made while witnesses are still alive and one that takes shape after they’re gone, especially when the claims occur in the same city (Jerusalem) where Jesus had been crucified and buried.

This doesn’t necessarily prove the resurrection happened, but it does rule out the easiest explanation: that the story grew slowly over time and became legend. 

Wrong Types of Witnesses

Here is the part I find hardest to explain away. If you were fabricating a movement worth dying for, you would not use the men who became the loudest witnesses of Jesus’ death and resurrection. 

Mark explains why plainly: “Then they all deserted him and ran away” (14:50). Peter, who had sworn hours earlier that he would die first, denied knowing Jesus three times in a courtyard (14:66-72). Thomas refused to accept the report even from his closest friends (John 20:24-25). On Friday, these men were behind a locked door with the lights out. They were failures, and they knew it.

And then, within weeks, those same men were standing in public in Jerusalem, the one city on earth where the body could have been produced, announcing that he was alive. Not in some far away place where nobody could verify what they were saying, but in the city that had killed Jesus, addressing the crowd that had watched it happen (Acts 2:22-36). They were hauled before the authorities and ordered to stop, but they said that they could not stop speaking about what they had seen (Acts 4:19-20).

They could have simply stopped speaking, but instead they suffered (and many of them died horrific deaths) for what they knew to be true. 

The most unlikely witnesses became the loudest voices for the miracle of the resurrection.  

What Accounts for This?

A resurrection claim dated to within a couple of years of the event. 

An empty tomb in the city where a dead body would have destroyed Christianity before it started. 

A group of cowards who reverted to bold preachers under threat of death. 

And the conversion of people who had every reason NOT to convert. 

The resurrection of Jesus is not the only conceivable account, but it is the one that explains the most while assuming the least. 

So Why Trust the Bible?

The Bible never asks for blind faith. John opens his letter by insisting on what was heard, seen, and handled with hands (1 John 1:1). He ends his Gospel by stating plainly why he wrote it, so that you may believe (John 20:31). 

Paul appealed to living witnesses. 

Luke appealed to his research. 

The Bereans were commended for examining the Scriptures (Acts 17:11).

 

So examine it. Start with the Gospel of John. 

Read what Jesus said and watch what he did. Look at his life, death, the empty tomb. 

The question was never really whether this ancient library is reliable. 

The question is: what will you do with the man at the center of it?