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Atheist Tuesday: Is the Bible Reliable?

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“The Bible has been changed and translated so many times over the last 2,000 years it’s impossible to know what it originally said. Everyone knows that.”

How can we know that the Bible and what Jesus said in the New Testament is true? Is it one gigantic leap of faith? Atheists and other unbelievers will say so. Greg Koukl answers these questions in his article below, while this video gives a great overview of why Christians believe the Bible to be true.

“Misquoting” Jesus? Answering Bart Ehrman!”
By Greg Koukl

In “Misquoting Jesus”, the New York Times bestseller subtitled “The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why,” author Bart Ehrman fires a shot meant to sink the ship of any Christian who thinks the New Testament documents can be trusted. Here it is:

What good is it to say that the autographs (i.e., the originals) were inspired? We don’t have the originals! We have only error-ridden copies, and the vast majority of these are centuries removed from the originals and different from them, evidently, in thousands of ways….There are more variations among our manuscripts than there are words in the New Testament.

Ehrman is right on the facts, as far as they go. There are 130,000 words in the New Testament, yet the surviving manuscripts (the handwritten copies) reveal something like 400,000 individual times the wording disagrees between them. Indeed, Ehrman points out, the manuscripts “differ from one another in so many places that we don’t even know how many differences there are.”

Further, Bart Ehrman is an accomplished scholar with impeccable bona fides. He co-authored The Text of the New Testament (4th Edition) — an academic standard in the field — with Bruce Metzger, arguably the greatest New Testament manuscript scholar alive at the time.

The Washington Post says Misquoting Jesus “casts doubt on any number of New Testament episodes that most Christians take as, well gospel.” Publishers Weekly promises that Ehrman’s arguments “ensure that readers might never read the gospels or Paul’s letters the same way again.” Read the rest of the article by clicking here.

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