I thought I’d respond to Stanley Rosenthal’s (SR) request that Reck prove that the bible contains God’s words and that He even exists.  SR, I hope you don’t mind if someone other than Reck responds.  This could be a 12 week series but I’ll make it as brief as possible.  I may have to do this in 2-3 segments but we’ll see how it goes. 

Let me first clarify that I am no bible scholar by any stretch of the imagination.  I’m merely a layperson who happens to love the study of Christian apologetics.  I don’t always have the answers but I try to research the best I can. 

Proving God’s existence requires two things: verifiable information and faith.  Why faith?  Well, I believe that Christopher Columbus existed even though I never met him (He lived too far away).  I don’t doubt that Plato or Socrates lived.  I don’t doubt that astronauts landed on the moon.  I never met any of those guys and I certainly wasn’t with the Apollo 11 crew (although there was a period in the 70’s…well, that’s another story).  I simply rely on reliable sources as well as faith in those sources.  Many people will believe that these people existed even though they never met them but they want to discount God’s existence.  Nonetheless, I will try to answer your request satisfactorily SR. 

Your first request is to prove that the bible contains God’s own words.  Perhaps another question you might ask would be, “Just how reliable is the bible? I mean, it was written by men and not God Himself, right?”  You ask such great questions.  You certainly deserve good answers. 

Let’s start with the reliability of the bible.  The bible was written by roughly 40 men over a 1600-year period.  I say “roughly” because we don’t know for certain who wrote some of them, i.e. the book of Hebrews.  These men wrote as they were “inspired” by God.  In 2 Timothy 3:16-17, Paul writes: “¹⁶ All Scripture is inspired by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, for training in righteousness; ¹⁷ that the man of God may be adequate, equipped for every good work.” The Greek word for inspired used here literally means “God-breathed.”  Now that’s interesting because that implies that the scriptures are from God’s own mouth.  In 2 Peter 1:21, Peter wrote, “for no prophecy was ever made by an act of human will, but men moved by the Holy Spirit spoke from God.”

When we say that the bible is the inspired word of God, we mean that it is inspired in its original writings.  Do we have the originals today?  No we do not. We have copies.  In fact we have copies of copies of copies, etc.  Also, there are errors in the copies we have today.  “Aha!” you say.  Not so fast o ye of little knowledge.  First of all, when someone points out an apparent contradiction, they’ve either failed to understand the context or they’ve come across a copyist error.  It’s these copyist errors that account for most of the so-called contradictions.  Remember, the bible is inerrant in its original writings, not the copies. 

When copies are/were made, great care is/was taken in being accurate.  Nonetheless, copy errors were bound to happen.  “Well, if God is all-powerful, couldn’t He see to it that even the copies were accurate?”  Yes, He could have if He wanted to.  Keep in mind that the authors of the bible had tremendously close relationships with God and that some, most, or even all of the copyists may not have been so close.  Let’s take an agnostic.  He/she could set out to hand-write the entire bible word-for-word (although I’m not sure why they would).  If they misspelled a word, would that then make the entire bible unreliable?  To give you an example on how meticulous the copyists were, the bible as a whole, both the OT and the NT, are 98.5% textually pure.  The 1.5% that is in question is a result of misspelled words and/or words that were left out, i.e. “but,” “the,” etc.  None of these errors changed the context of what was written.

Let me give you some examples of how errors can be made in any writing:

Haplography – Writing something once that should’ve been written twice.
“later” instead of “latter”

Dittography - Writing something twice that should’ve been written once.
“latter” instead of “later”

Fusion - Combining the last letter of one word with the first letter of the next word.
“It is there in the closet.”  VS  “It is therein the closet.”

Fission – Improperly dividing one word into two words.
“nowhere”  VS  “no where”

Metathesis – Writing down letters in the wrong order.
Instead of writing “mast,” someone writes “mats,” or “cast” instead of “cats.”

In addition, if I was a copyists and the copy of the copy that I was copying off of had a copy error, my copy would also be in error.  Do ya copy? 

The Dead Sea Scrolls (DSS) found in the 1940’s were an extremely significant find because up until that point, the oldest copies that we had were the Masoretic Text (MT) dated somewhere around 900 AD.  Among the writings found in the DSS was a complete copy of the book of Isaiah written in 125 BC.  The time period between the MT and that copy of Isaiah was nearly 1000 years.  This find would give us a great chance to see whether or not the copies of the MT were accurate because it would be easy to see where errors might have occurred.  The result was that the copies of Isaiah that we had in the MT were 95% the same as the copy of Isaiah in the DSS.  The 5% that was different were mainly misspelled words and there was nothing different in content. 

I’ll wind down here for today and I’ll address your requests directly in my next comment.  I wanted to prove the reliability of the bible as a starting point and I pray that you give it proper consideration SR. Let me end with this.  If you compare the accuracy of the bible to existing copies of other ancient documents, you’ll see just how reliable the bible really is; i.e. the writings of Pliny the Elder, Plato, Aristophanes, Aristotle, Homer’s Iliad, etc.

Now Father, in the name of Jesus I ask that You lift the scales from his eyes.  Amen!