The Bible Proven Blog
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How do we know the early church chose the right books to be in the Bible? Let's look at the New Testament. We have twenty seven books of the New Testament that comprise the canon, that is, books believed to be divinely inspired by the Holy Spirit of God. But how did they come to be chosen and collected? Did a group of church leaders sit down and just arbitrarily pick out books they liked and declare them canonical? What criterion was used to include a certain book as part of the Bible? The need to define the canon became more important in the second century, when many heresies and false...
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It's the Easter season, and at this time of year, we always see the usual articles calling into question the resurrection of Christ. Most times these articles cite contradictions in the resurrection accounts. Did Jesus appear in Galilee (Matthew's and Mark's Gospel ) or Jerusalem (Luke's and John's gospels) ? One angel or two? Angel outside the tomb or inside? Can all the appearances be harmonized, or are they hopelessly contradictory? What you have here are four writers with different perspectives and emphases.•Matthew (Matt. 28:16 ) records only an appearance to disciples in Galilee-but...
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The Resurrection appearances were not hallucinations or visions because: The disciples’ experiences happened in public places, at many different times and locations to many different people.The people who saw Jesus were from all kinds of backgrounds and temperaments. To say they all had the same “hallucinations” at the same time is ludicrous. It would be amazing even if two people had the same hallucination simultaneously.The disciples were mostly skeptical at first and were not expecting a resurrection (see Luke 24:11). History shows that hallucinations don’t transform people as the disciples...
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The fact that the disciples believed that they had experienced the risen Christ is one of the surest facts of history: The claims that Jesus appeared to them are documented by nine separate sources including:The testimony of former church persecutor Paul. Paul's testimony was a first-hand experience, not something someone told him about., Oral traditions which scholars identify from their incorporation into the book of Acts and Paul's letters, including creeds and sermon summaries. A very important example of a creed in this regard is found in 1Corinthians 15:3-8, regarded by scholars...
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I was at a conference several years ago and heard a well-known author and scholar speaking on the book of John. This speaker said John’s accounts were written from political and spiritual motivations and that John or whoever the author was invented the details to fit his “motif.”He pointed out that, in the Gospel of John, Andrew introduces Peter to Jesus. In the other Gospels the disciples are called from their fishermen’s nets by Jesus, and they immediately go off with Him. He also cited the two different accounts of Jesus cleansing the temple. “See,” he said, “so many contradictions!”...
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Here's a classic "contradiction" in the New Testament. It involves the healing of the Roman centurion's servant. In Matthew 8:5-13 the centurion himself is portrayed as coming to Jesus to ask for his servant's healing, but in Luke's version (Lk 7:1-10), the centurion sends the Jewish elders to make the request. How do we reconcile this?There are several observations to be made here. First, Matthew tends to simplify and summarize-this seems to be his style. And it is quite acceptable and still accurate to say that the centurion made the request, even though he sent the Jewish elders to...
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We hear a lot about Bible "contradictions" from people these days. Many say that because of these discrepancies the reliability of the Bible cannot be trusted. Especially brought up are the four gospels, since they have many parallel accounts that have surface disagreements with one another. But let me give you six different ways you can explain these supposedly fatal contradictions:1.They used “paraphrase”: Saying the same thing in different words. In first century culture, it was permissible to vary the exact wording when you quoted someone, as long as the meaning of the quote...
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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...
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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...
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A remarkable prophecy pinpoints the time of the Messiah:Daniel 9:25-26: “Know therefore and understand, that from the going forth of the commandment to restore and to build Jerusalem unto the Messiah the Prince shall be seven weeks, and threescore and two weeks: . . . And after threescore and two weeks shall Messiah be cut off, but not for himself.”The starting point of this prophecy is the decree to rebuild Jerusalem. The only decree that fits is in Nehemiah 2:1, where King Artaxerxes Longimanus grants the request of Nehemiah to have the city rebuilt. The time period is given in verse 1: “In...
© 2026 Vince Latorre, The Bible Can Be Proven