"How do we know the guys who wrote the Bible didn't just make all that stuff up?" is a question that most people have asked, or at least wondered about. Such questions about the Bible's accuracy and trustworthiness should be answered honestly and clearly.
The method for determining whether the Bible is historically accurate is the same as for evaluating any other historical book. To determine the validity of historical texts and whether reported testimony is factual, the legal/forensic method and its principles are used. Within the forensic method, historians use three primary tests:
The first is a bibliographical examination. This investigates the accuracy of the available manuscripts as well as the amount of time that passed between the occurrences in question and their recording. When it comes to the New Testament, no other ancient text comes close. The New Testament contains tens of thousands of ancient manuscripts that can be compared extensively; additionally, the manuscripts have the earliest dating to recorded events of any historical book. To put it another way, the New Testament books were written very soon after the events they recount, leaving no room for legend. In fact, Paul cites over 500 eyewitnesses to the risen Christ, "the majority of whom are still living," implying that his readers were free to verify the truth for themselves.
The writings of early Christian leaders such as Clement (c. AD 95), Ignatius (c. AD 107), Polycarp (c. AD 110), Justin Martyr (c. AD 133), and others provide further evidence of the New Testament's early dating. With the exception of 27 verses from 3 John, historians have determined that the entire New Testament can be reconstructed entirely from citations from early church fathers.
The internal evidence test is the second method used by historians to assess the accuracy of ancient texts, including the Bible. This test looks for multiple accounts of the events in question, as well as whether those accounts are free of contradictions (i.e., do they match?). Multiple eyewitness accounts exist in the New Testament, all of which tell the same story. When it comes to biblical contradictions or manuscript variants, the vast majority of them are minor, consisting of spelling and numerical differences, sentence word order changes, and so on. "Practically all of the variations found among the manuscripts do not affect our present text," says scholar Neil Lightfoot. Although there are a few textual issues, they are explained in the footnotes of the most recent translations" (How We Got the Bible, Baker, 2003, p. 104).
The external evidence test, which asks if evidence from outside the document in question corroborates the text, is the third and final historiographical test for accuracy. Numerous archaeological discoveries have confirmed the Bible's historicity in both the Old and New Testaments. Furthermore, works like Robert Van Voorst's Jesus Outside the New Testament document what non-biblical authors had to say about Jesus.
To summarize, no other ancient text comes close to matching the Bible's reliability and accuracy using historians' three key tests from the forensic/legal method for validating the trustworthiness of an ancient text.
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