It was one of those lazy spots in the middle of the afternoon. Mike found himself studying the tops of the buildings visible from his law office window instead of finishing the letter he was working on. It has been the usual busy day for a lawyer: depositions, a court appearance, a bunch of letters and phone calls. But now his mind was drifting.

It was time for a break.

Taking his coffee cup and some papers on archaeology and the Bible he wanted to photocopy, Mike headed for the snack room, which housed both the coffeepot and the copy machine.

The only other person in the room was Jerry, one of Mike's law partners. He was smoking a cigarette and thumbing through a magazine. They exchanged the usual polite acknowledgements of each other's presence while Mike started the machine on its task of clunking out the copies he needed.

"What are you copying?" Jerry asked.

"Some stuff that proves the Bible is reliable," Mike answered.

"How does it do that?"

"It shows that people like Abraham's great-great-great-grandfather and places like Jerusalem actually existed way back around 2400 B.C. when the Bible says they did."

"But," Jerry questioned, "how do you know the Bible is accurate? It sure doesn't seem like it would be. It was written by biased people who wanted to promote their faith. These guys could have made mistakes like anybody else. Besides that, it's been translated so many times, how do you know it's still the same? You know how information gets all mixed up when you pass it on from one person to the next. Haven't you ever played on of those games where you pass a message around a circle and it comes back so different you can't even recognize it?"

"I really don't know the answers to all those questions," Mike admitted.

"Then how can you believe that the Bible is accurate?" Jerry wanted to know.

"Well, for one thing," Mike answered, "I know it's accurate because it's accurate. I mean, I just showed you evidence that it is. However it got here, here it is! And it always checks out to be right. You have not proved the Bible is inaccurate just because it seems like it ought to be. The question is, 'What does the evidence say?' "

"Archaeology only covers certain specific things in the Bible," Jerry insisted. "Couldn't it still be wrong in some of the spots you can't check out?"

"Could be," Mike agreed. "But since everything we can check out shows it to be right, it would be more logical to assume the rest of it is. If we were to treat it like a civil lawsuit, we would ask, 'What does the preponderance of evidence show to be true?' "

Jerry wasn't satisfied, so he asked, "Since the Bible was translated from Hebrew to Greek to Latin to German to whatever and finally to English, don't you think we've lost something somewhere?"

"I'd think so if the English Bible was the end of a long succession of translations like that, but it's not."

"It's not? Whaddaya mean?"

"I mean, the Old Testament was written in Hebrew, except for a bit of Aramaic, and the New Testament in Greek. The English Bible I have on my desk was translated directly from those original languages, not from any other ones in between."

Jerry seemed surprised by that new information. He sat thoughtful for a minute, then asked, "You said there was lots of different evidence--what's something else?"

"Well, let's see," Mike said, taking his papers out of the copy machine. "One thing that comes to mind is its consistency and unity. It was written over a period of fifteen hundred years by about forty different people, and yet it has the same thing to say form cover to cover--and about controversial issues, too."

Then Mike got himself a cup of coffee and sat down at the table. Since Jerry seemed to be soaking in everything, Mike kept on talking. "Besides that, there's fulfilled prophecy. About one-quarter of the Bible was unfulfilled prophecy at the time it was written. And everything that it said would happen by now, has come true."

Mike paused for a minute while he sipped on his coffee, then said, "Another thing that must be considered is that the Bible claims to be inspired--"

"Objections, Your Honor!" Jerry interrupted. "That's circular reasoning. You can't use the Bible's own claims as proof of its accuracy."

"It's self-testimony, and self-testimony is valid evidence--objection overruled!"

"Even so," Jerry insisted, "how do you know that those early church councils that put the Bible together got the right books in it?"

"Those councils didn't really decide which books were going to be included," Mike explained. "They merely observed that God was using certain books and not others in the lives of believers. They put those together in one unit that we call the Bible. Actually, God Himself, using those books in the lives of people, is the One who pointed to the books that should be included."

"Even if all that is true," Mike's partner persisted, "I don't know how we could possibly tell what it means. Look at all the different denominations and cults that disagree with each other, and all of them claim to be following the Bible. How could you possibly know the right interpretation?"

"The main issue," said Mike, "is whether you want to follow what the Bible says or use it to prove what you already think ought to be true. Cults are groups following something other then the Bible--like some special leader or some new 'revelation.' With denominations, it's a little different. Within nearly every denomination you have those who believe the Bible is literally God's Word and those who don't. Those who don't are really using themselves as an authority. But those who believe it is literally God's Word use pretty much the same principles of interpretation."

"What do you mean by 'literal'?" Jerry asked. "Do you mean to tell me you believe there are four corners on the earth?"

"No more than I believe Jesus is a piece of wood hanging on hinges because He said He was the 'door,' " Mike answered. "Those are figures of speech. By literal I mean plain, ordinary, normal, regular, just reading the Bible the way you'd read any literature. You and I use the term 'sunrise' all the time. The sun doesn't actually rise; the earth rotates. But we know exactly what we mean without quibbling over precise astronomical terms."

Let us break away from Mike and Jerry for a few minutes. They continued to talk the rest of the afternoon about all kinds of Bible-related topics. But it might be helpful to fill in some details of the seven areas they have already touched on. They are:

Archaeology has become one of the most helpful areas of study for demonstrating the Bible's reliability. The point is simply that the people, places, and events mentioned in the Bible do coincide with what we know archaeologically about those same people, places, and events. Nelson Glueck, a Jewish archaeologist, in his book Rivers in the Desert: History of Neteg put it this way: "It may be stated categorically that no archaeological discovery has ever controverted a biblical reference."¹

An example of one such discovery is the one Mike mentioned. It was made by two Italian scientists at Ebla In Northern Syria. A Time magazine article reported, "Their discovery does more than provide documentary evidence of a little-known kingdom that existed between 2400 and 2250 B.C.; it also provides the best evidence to date that some of the people described in the Old Testament actually existed."²

A trip to any Christian bookstore can provide several volumes of archaeological materials that show the Bible is in agreement with history.

A second area deals with the trustworthiness of the manuscripts from which we et our English Bible. There is a common misconception that our English Bible sits at the end of a long chain of translations and retranslations of the original. That's just not so.

How did we get our Bible? Well, let us look at the origin of the New Testament. After it was written, it was copied by professionally-trained men. Then those copies were copied and so on until the introduction of the printing press around 1500. Today we still have about five thousand of those early copies. Some are just fragments, others are very complete, but none of them are translations from one language into another. They are copies made in the same language--Greek. In addition, there are around nine thousand others that were made in different languages (mostly Latin). All the copies can be compared to reproduce an accurate Greek New Testament. The English translations we use come directly from the Greek--the same language in which the New Testament was written.

A third very awesome fact that Mike pointed out is the Bible's consistency. It was written over a period of fifteen hundred years in sixty-six different volumes by about forty different authors using three different languages (Hebrew, Greek, and a little Aramaic) writing on three different continents (Europe, Asia, and North Africa), and yet each part has the same things to say about life's most controversial issues.

Also, the authors came from widely varied backgrounds. Moses was a well-educated political leader. Joshua was a general. Solomon was a king. Daniel was a prime minister. Nehemiah was a cupbearer. Amos was a herdsman. Peter was a fisherman. Matthew was a tax collector. Paul was a teacher--a rabbi. It is completely unlikely that those men would have the same things to say unless one and the same God inspired them to write down each word without any errors.

I offer consistency as evidence for the reliability of the Bible because people just do not agree that easily. Even in more objective subjects like physics, chemistry, medicine, or dentistry, people do not agree! Try comparing medical books written over fifteen hundred years to determine how to cure a stomachache. The chemistry books from which I learned "facts" in high school are full of things we "know" are not true today. No doubt if we ask any two people--in the same profession in the same office who know each other--to write on the same subject, we would not numerous areas of disagreement.

Actually, if we could sit down with all the writers of the Bible and talk with them, we would probably find differing opinions and ideas just like any other group. Therefore it is unlikely that the writers wrote the Bible on their own. But! When they picked up their pens to write the material we have in the Bible, using their own very different personalities, they still wrote things in complete accord with one another. The most likely explanation is the one the apostle Peter gave when he wrote, "Men moved by the Holy Spirit spoke from God" (2 Peter 1:21).

A fourth piece of evidence is biblical prophecy. The Old Testament gives scores of predictions of what would happen to certain nations, cities, and people, all of which happened or are happening just the way the Bible said. Babylon, Persian, Greece, and Rome all rose and fell the way the book of Daniel said they would. The city of Tyre was destroyed just as Ezekiel 26 predicted. The book of Genesis records God's promise to Abraham that his descendants would never be wiped out; today the Jews and Arabs, descendants of Abraham's first two children, Isaac and Ishmael, are still with us--as distinct peoples. There are no Babylonians today. There are no Medes or Persians, no Amorites or Canaanites. God told Abraham:

And I will make you a great nation,
And I will bless you.
And make your name great;
And so you shall be a blessing;
And I will bless those who bless you,
And the one who curses you I will curse.

Genesis 12:2-3

The most casual look at history shows that those nations who have "cursed" the Jewish people no longer exist, all the way from the ancient Assyrians to the modern Third Reich of Adolf Hitler. Yet the Jews continue.

There are several hundred prophecies pointing to the coming of the Messiah that were perfectly fulfilled in Jesus Christ. Some of those are: the place of His birth (Micah 5:2 and Matthew 2:1), that he was to be born of one called a virgin (Isaiah 7:14 and Matthew 1:23), His life-style as a suffering servant (Isaiah 53), His triumphal entry into Jerusalem on the colt of a donkey (Zechariah 9:9 and Matthew 21:4-11), the betrayal for thirty pieces of silver (Zechariah 11:12 and Matthew 26:15), His humble attitude at His trial (Isaiah 53:7 and Matthew 27:11-14), the piercing of His hands and His feet (Psalm 22:16 and Matthew 27:35), His being beaten and spit upon (Isaiah 50:6 and Matthew 26:67), the gall and vinegar they gave Him to drink while on the cross (Psalm 69:21 and Matthew 27:34), the casting of lots for His clothing at the crucifixion (Psalm 22:18 and Matthew 27:35), the burial (Isaiah 53:9 and John 20:28), and that He was to be called God (Isaiah 9:6 and John 4:25-26).

Jerry, you recall, objected to circular reasoning--using the Bible to prove the Bible. But we are talking about evidence, not proof; and because, after all, the Bible is on trial in a question like this, we should hear what it says about itself. Self-testimony is valid evidence.

The Old Testament authors often make statements like "And the Lord spoke to me, saying," or, "the word of the Lord came unto me saying." Henry Morris in his book Many Infallible Proofs claims there are 2,600 such claims of inspiration in the Old Testament.³

The New Testament is no less specific in claiming an every-word accuracy for both itself and the Old Testament. Jesus said, "For truly I say to you, until heaven and earth pass away, not the smallest letter or stroke shall pass away from the Law, until all is accomplished" (Matthew 5:18). While quoting what, humanly speaking, Moses wrote in the Old Testament, Jesus called it what "God said" (Matthew 15:4). Peter equated the apostle Paul's writings with "the rest of the Scriptures" in 2 Peter 3:16, and he wrote, "For no prophecy was ever made by an act of human will, but men moved by the Holy Spirit spoke from God" (2 Peter 1:21). And in 2 Timothy 3:16, Paul told Timothy, "All Scripture is inspired by God."

So the authors of the Bible claimed not only that they were speaking form God, but that the other biblical writers were, too. In other words, if we conclude that the Bible is not inspired by God word-for-word, then we are saying that Moses, David, Peter, Paul, and Jesus Christ were wrong--and that we know more about the Bible than they did.

What if those church councils left some out or included some wrong books? The main point here is that the church councils did not determine what books should be in the Bible. God did that by using certain writings in the lives of His people. Athanasius in A.D. 367 listed the twenty-seven books now in our New Testament as the ones God was obviously using.⁴ A little later Jerome and Augustine did the same.⁵ Church councils only recognized what God was already doing. Cairns, in his book Christianity Through the Centuries, says, "Later councils, such as that at Chalcedon in 451, merely approved and gave uniform expression to what was already an accomplished fact generally accepted by the Church for a long period of time."⁶ But notice--that was done after God had already preserved those books over three hundred years.

As an example of what we are saying, let us suppose we took the Bible apart into its individual books and scattered those volumes around a bookstore. Further suppose that we erased from everyone's memory the fact that they ever were, or ever should be, inspired by God or bound together as God's Word. Twenty years from now, most of the books on the shelves would be different; but those sixty-six would still be there. Publishers would keep reprinting them because people would keep buying them. And the reason they would keep buying them is because God would be using them in a special way in their lives. After a hundred years, they would still be there. And probably even before the three or four hundred years it took the early church to put them together, some publisher would get the idea of bunching those obviously used-of-God books into one volume.

There was another criterion used in double-checking to be sure any particular book should be included in the New Testament. It had to be written or sanctioned by an apostle--one of those twelve (minus Judas, plus Paul) to whom Jesus had spoken directly. Christ Himself told them, "I have many more things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now. But when He, the Spirit of truth, comes, He will guide you into all the truth" (John 16:12-13). Because lots of false teachers arose in the early church, all writings not following the obvious teaching of the twelve apostles were not considered.

The fact that every group today seems to have its own view, and they all differ, causes confusion.

The answer here is actually quite simple. For the most part, those differing groups are not trying to interpret the Bible at all. Instead, they are promoting a set of views connected to the life-style they are living. In order to gain acceptance for that life-style, they attempt to show that the Bible teaches what they already believe. Words and phrases can be lifted out of the Bible and plugged into your own context to sound like you are following the Bible. The same can be done with any book, of course. If Poor Richard's Almanac were as popular a source of authority as the Bible, no doubt most groups would use that to prove their ideas. The only reason they use the Bible is that the Bible is already so widely accepted.

There are people within nearly every denomination, however, who do want to learn what the Bible has to say, and as a whole they will share the same basic interpretation of the Bible. Even in the few areas of disagreement, they all agree that there must be only one right view.

Here are two principles to be followed by people who want to find out what the Bible says: First, interpret each phrase within its context. Ask what the particular author is talking about. To do that, the reader must consider the historical background surrounding the writing of the book. What was the situation that the author was addressing? Were his readers at war? Were they suffering? Was there apostasy? Then, after something of the historical situation is known, ask what the particular chapter, paragraph, or sentence being interpreted says about the author's general theme and purpose.

The second principle is: take everything at fact value. In other words, do not spiritualize the passage until you have first understood its most obvious intent. I call that taking it literally. What I mean by that is taking it in a plain, ordinary, normal way, the same way you would read a newspaper. A man once asked me how I would interpret him if he said, "My heart bleeds." We had been discussing this subject, and he was looking for a way to prove that I really could not tell what he meant. If I said he had an emotional problem, he would say he meant that he had a physical one. If I said he had a physical problem, he would say he meant that he had an emotional one. So I told him it depended on what else he said. "If you wrote a letter to me," I answered, "and told me you just flunked your final exams at college, your girlfriend left you, you just lost your job, and your heart bleeds, I'd assume you had an emotional problem. But if you wrote that you just had open-heart surgery, had fallen out of bed and rolled down the stairs, were coughing blood, and your heart bleeds, I'd assume you have a physical problem."

Taking things at face value requires knowing what kind of literature you are dealing with. A factual description must be understood differently from a figure of speech. The Bible contains poetry, prophecy, parables, and visions as well as narratives and history. It is important not to take metaphors, similes, and the picturesque language of poetry as a description of history (such as the "four corners of the earth"). But it is also important not to take historical events surrounding Adam and Eve or Noah and the Flood as just myths or stories.

Mike and Jerry talked for several hours that afternoon. They locked up the office and went down the elevator still talking about the Bible. Before they parted to go home, Mike asked Jerry to receive Jesus Christ as his personal Savior. But Jerry said he was not ready. At the time of this writing, the conversations are still going on in that law office. Although Mike tells me he feels that Jerry is getting closer, he has not yet accepted Christ.

^[1.]  Nelson Glueck, Rivers in the Desert: History of Neteg (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Soc. Of Amer. 1969), p. 31.

^[2.]  Hedley Donovan, ed., "A New 'Third World,' " Time, 18 October 1976, p. 63.

^[3.]  Henry Morris, Many Infallible Proofs (San Diego: Creation Life, 1974), pp. 156-57.

^[4.]  Earle E. Cairns, Christianity Through the Centuries (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1954), p. 128.

^[5.]  Ibid., pp. 155-61.

^[6.]  Ibid., p. 128.