Atheist Arguments: Who Can Believe The Bible?

Without realizing it, I’ve been answering, from time to time, the various arguments atheists make against Christianity, against God. For example, I wrote “The Early Church and Problems” back in July. Before that I wrote “Deductive Reasoning” back in May. A month earlier I wrote “Daniel’s Prophecies—Evidence That The Bible Is True..”

Without much difficulty, I can turn these posts into a series. So today is the first official post in the series, Atheist Arguments.

The common atheist argument is to say that Christians have no evidence that God exists. When someone says, sure we have evidence: take a look at the Bible, what follows is a litany of reasons we should not believe the Bible.

In a comment to another post, a regular visitor here, an atheist, brought up one of these many reasons: he claims the Bible has too many inaccuracies, too many controversial interpretations.

I’d like to examine these points.

First, inaccuracies. According to Biblical scholar Dr. Daniel B. Wallace, a professor at Dallas Theological Seminary, there are about 400,000 textual differences among the existing New Testament manuscripts. On the surface, that number seems to legitimize the atheist claim. But one reason for so many variations is that so many copies of the New Testament exist—more that 5,800 in Greek alone. “But the New Testament was translated into various languages early on—languages such as Latin, Syric, Coptic, Georgian, Gothic, Armenian, and Arabic.”

True, not each of these copies is complete. Some are mere fragments, but the average size is 400 pages long. In other words, we have lots of manuscripts we can compare to one another.

It works like this. If there were ten news accounts of the last Dodger game, and nine said Manny Machado hit a three-run home run, but one said Max Muncy hit a three-run home run, it is a pretty fair deduction that the nine are accurate and the lone Muncy claimant is wrong. So too with Scripture.

Obviously, the more manuscripts you have to compare, the easier it is to spot the inaccuracies. But there’s more.

This one, I had never heard before, but Dr. Wallace included it in an article about the New Testament, in the newly released third edition of Seeking Allah, Finding Jesus by Nabeel Qureshi. Apart from all the early copies of the New Testament in existence, scholars also have extra-Biblical sources that quoted the Bible.

Kind of like I do from time to time on this blog. Apparently early Church scholars wrote “homilies, commentaries, and theological treatises” that include more than a million quotes from the New Testament. “Virtually the entire New Testament could be reproduced many times over just from the quotations of these fathers.”

But what about all these inaccuracies? A better word actually is variations. More than 70 percent are spelling differences. You know, the same kind of spelling differences we have in English between America and Britain: color vs. colour and the like.

Some of the variations have to do with Greek syntax and can’t be translated into English; some with synonyms such as Christ or Jesus. The meaning’s the same.

Yet there are some variations that are significant. This is where the number of copies available to study comes into play. “Because of the poor pedigree of the manuscripts they are found in (usually few, or very late manuscripts), no plausible case can be given for them reflecting the wording of the original.”

When we pare all those away, we’re left with 1% of the variations actually being significant and realistically plausible. Of these differences none impacts the central doctrines of the faith. In many cases, scholars have a good idea which verse or two have been added because “they do not fit with the author’s known syntax, vocabulary, or style.”

In modern English translations, there are two passages I’m aware of that have footnotes stating that those particular verses come from later manuscripts and likely are additions. In a couple other places, questionable verses have been included in the footnotes and identified as probable late-date additions.

In short, what comes from this type of careful scholarship is the verification of the accuracy of the Bible, that in spite of human fallibility, God has preserved and protected His word. We can, in fact, trust that the Scripture we have today is true to the original inspired by the Holy Spirit.

It certainly makes sense. I mean, God who is so powerful as to breath His very words into the writings of a man, certainly is also powerful enough to preserve and protect those words down through the ages.

We can and we should have every confidence in the reliability, the authority, the accuracy of the Bible.