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Mar
08

Defending Your Faith

I just finished the book Defending Your Faith by R.C. Sproul which is a crash course in apologetics (the intellectual defense of God, the bible and Christianity). I spent a lot of time believing that God was real and that the Bible was true and basing these truths in my life to my feelings about them. I found, in time, that although this may be enough for me, it’s not the most relateable answer for someone questioning my faith. When someone asks you how you know that God is the actual creator of the universe, or how you know that Jesus actually came to die as a substitutionary atonement for your sins, they want more than the answer that I was always caught giving: “I know it because I just feel it. I just… know it.”

This is a cop-out answer and I urge any believing Christian to do their homework to be able to answer intelligibly, not ignorantly. God makes sense and his relationship with man, biblically, is one of reason and understanding. If the biblical doctrine that God wants to enter into a relationship with man is true, then the way that God interacts with man cannot be above reason and logic, which is the way that man relates. What I’m trying to say is that God makes sense through logic and words to explain himself to people, so there’s no excuse for us to not be able to do so as well.

One of the first places to start, and the last place that R.C. Sproul touches in his book, is the defense of the Bible and it’s authenticity. If you can establish that the bible is authentic and legitimate then you also open the door to the fact that the bible’s claims are authentic and legitimate.

Sure, the bible makes claims to authenticate itself as the word of God that is “breathed out,” by God himself (2 Timothy 3:16), but this shouldn’t be the only answer you give. What you’re saying if you do, in essence, is that “The Bible and it’s claims are true because it says it’s true.” This circular reasoning to illogical and silly. A legitimate defense would require a more external source of authenticity.

Jumping to the idea that the Bible as a book is completely true and it’s claims are correct is quite a big leap. A person aspiring to answer whether or not this is true may start with a more basic question: “Do I have reason to believe that the Bible is even a historic text that accurately portrays events in history?”

To answer this, it’s important to look at what we define as other historic texts. The works of Plato, Herodotus, Aristotle, Sophocles, and Homer are all considered historic texts. We study and analyze them and do not question their authenticity as works produced by “great minds” and thinkers of the ancient world. Here’s something that not everyone knows:

Author: First Written: Time between original and first manuscript copies: Number of original manuscript copies:
Plato 427-347 B.C. 1,200 years 7
Herodotus 480-425 B.C. 1,300 years 8
Aristotle 384-322 B.C. 1,400 years 49
Sophocles 496-406 B.C. 1,400 years 193
Homer 900 B.C. 500 years 643
New Testament 50-100A.D. Less Than 100 years 5,600

Taken from here.

The numbersĀ  speak boldly for themselves. Note that with the exception of Homer, we don’t have copies of the original manuscripts of the other authors until 1,000+ years after they were written! During that time period, we have only 7 copies of Plato’s work, 8 of Herodotus’, etc.

We didn’t even touch on the authenticity of Shakespeare’s work which today stands more legitimately than the bible as a historic text. But here’s another little known fact about his work: “Many people are unaware that there are no surviving manuscripts of any of William Shakespeare’s 37 plays (written in the 1600′s), and scholars have been forced to fill some gaps in his works,” says this commentator.

The New Testament is a different case. Within 100 years of the original writing we have 5,600 copies of the original work found all over Europe and Western Asia.

“We must remember that the Bible was hand-copied for hundreds of years before the invention of the first printing press. Nevertheless, the text is exceedingly well preserved. Again, I pondered this — of the approximately 20,000 lines that make up the entire New Testament, only 40 lines are in question. These 40 lines represent one quarter of one percent of the entire text and do not in any way affect the teaching and doctrine of the New Testament. I again compared this with Homer’s Iliad. Of the approximately 15,600 lines that make up Homer’s classic, 764 lines are in question. These 764 lines represent over 5% of the entire text, and yet nobody seems to question the general integrity of that ancient work. “

I found this fascinating and quite comforting. Although this is by no means the complete and exhaustive reason for believing in the authenticity of the bible, or the wholeness of an apologetic stance on the claims of the bible, it’s a step in that direction. Hopefully this is able to give you more reason to believe in the bible besides just a feeling. Although this isn’t necessarily a bad thing, relating to God by pure feeling can isolate you from being able to share the Gospel with others. This, my friends, is a bad thing.

Regardless of being able to communicate the Christian belief to others, having external evidence in defense of God’s existence sure is encouraging in our crazy full-life devotion to Him.

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