In this modern skeptical age, many people have been totally mis-informed about the Bible. Attacks on the Bible as God's Word are everywhere, and myths about the Bible abound in today's culture. Here are five common myths about the Bible you may have heard, and the startling truth you need to know about them:
Myth #1: The Bible has been copied so many times, it's like the telephone game, all we have are copies full of errors and so we don't have the original.
The Truth: If there is any text we can be sure we have reliable copies of, it's the Bible. The reliability of copies of an ancient...
As is acknowledged by biblical scholars across the board, there have been copying errors during the transmission of the New Testament. These errors resulted in many variants between the manuscripts.
So the question is this: don’t some Bible scholars such as Dr. Bart Ehrman point out that the Bible contains hundreds of thousands of variant readings and that this means we have error-filled copies and nothing close to the originals?
Dr. Bart Ehrman in his book Misquoting Jesus does indeed say the Bible has up to 400,000 variants and therefore we have more variants than there are words...
In Part one of this series on the last 12 verses of Mark, I gave some reasons why the last 12 verses in the Gospel of Mark may be part of the Bible after all. In this article, I want to present some exciting evidence discovered by Russian scholar Ivan Panin about the last 12 verses of Mark.
Ivan Panin devoted a whole book just to the last twelve verses of Mark.[2] I have included a detailed description of his findings on this passage which will serve as an example to illustrate the extent and consistency of numerical patterns Panin had also found in many other parts of the whole Bible.
Panin...
Does your Bible have a note in it saying that in the Gospel of Mark, the last twelve verses (Mk. 16:9-20) are not in the earliest manuscripts of the New Testament?
Let’s consider that the last twelve verses of Mark―a passage that many textual critics say does not belong in the Bible, may nevertheless be inspired text. Now, it turns out that if these verses are left out of the Bible, no essential doctrines of the Christian faith are affected whatsoever. But I am going to take a minority position here, and I will defend it with some facts that need to be brought out. There has been...
Skeptics often charge that the Old Testament was tampered with and changed over all the centuries since it was written. Can we prove otherwise?Before the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered, the oldest Old Testament copies were manuscripts from the ninth and tenth centuries C.E. With such a gap in time between these and the originals, there was a possibility transmission mistakes had been made despite the carefulness of the scribes. When the text of the Dead Sea Scrolls was examined, it demonstrated that in fact the text of the Old Testament had been copied and transmitted with amazing and unparalleled...
So how close are we to having the original New Testament?In the original Greek language, we have over 5,800 manuscripts. No other ancient document comes close to having this many. The nearest one, Homer’s Iliad, has 643 manuscripts. And the New Testament also has, in addition to the Greek manuscripts, at least 15,000 to 20,000 copies that are in other languages, called “versions.”Many scholars say that with this many copies of the New Testament it is possible to reconstruct the original with almost complete accuracy. One of the leading authorities on textual criticism today, Dr. Daniel...
You all have heard about the legendary great memory capacity of elephants. But we might ask ourselves, what does an elephant really have to remember? Your local zoo elephant certainly won't be called on to write down an account of what went on at the zoo 25 or 30 years ago. But how about the gospel writers? If the gospels were written down 25 to 30 years after the events, how do we know they are accurate history? Couldn't the writers have forgotten important details? And why did they wait so long to write them down?
One of the main reasons we don't see written accounts immediately...
When we read the four gospels, often we find that the words of Jesus are different across the gospels even when they are reporting the same event. How can this be, if the Bible is God's Word?
Does divine inspiration mean that all the sayings of Jesus are reproduced by each author in exactly the same wording? As we look at the Synoptic Gospels ( Matthew, Mark, and Luke), we see that many times the words of Jesus are different for the same event or parable.
First of all, in that time period the use of paraphrase, even for memorization of sayings, was considered acceptable in recounting...