Can We Trust the Bible?

Last chapter ended on the one door Article 8 leaves open: the Bible is the word of God, as far as it is translated correctly. I promised not to dodge that clause, so let me start by making it as sharp as I can — because I think it hides two very different worries inside one sentence, and only one of them is the real question.

The first worry is about translation — whether the King James men turned Hebrew and Greek into English accurately. That’s fair to ask, but it’s a small thing, and it’s checkable: we have the Hebrew and the Greek, scholars compare them to the English regularly, and where a rendering is debatable your own Church’s footnotes usually tell you so. Translation is not where the danger lives.

The second worry is the one that actually keeps people up at night, and it’s about transmission — whether the text got corrupted along the way. The fear is that somewhere between the prophet’s pen and the printing press, monks and scribes lost verses, changed doctrines, and slowly rewrote the Bible into something its authors would not recognize. If that happened, no honest translation could save it, because you’d be faithfully translating a book that had already drifted from the original.

So that’s the real question. Not “did they translate it well?” but “did the underlying text survive?” And here’s why I’m glad Article 8 phrased it as it did: that is an empirical claim. It can be tested. We don’t have to guess whether the Bible was corrupted in transmission — we can go look at the copies and see. Let me show you what happens when you do.

A thousand years, and the same book

For most of history you couldn’t run this test, because the oldest Hebrew copies were medieval — around AD 1000. If scribes had been reshaping the text, a thousand years of medieval copies couldn’t reveal it, because there was nothing older to check them against.

Then, in 1947, a shepherd threw a rock into a cave near the Dead Sea and the picture changed. Among the scrolls was a nearly complete Isaiah — the Great Isaiah Scroll — dating from about 125 BCE, roughly a thousand years older than the oldest Hebrew copy before. Here was the test no one thought they’d get to run: take a text, jump back a thousand years of copying, and compare.

The result is why I’m writing this chapter. Scholars who lined the scroll against the medieval text counted more than 2,600 differences — and I want to be honest with you about that number. But when you look at what those differences are, nearly every one is a variant spelling, a swapped word order, a plural where the later copy has a singular. The kind of thing you’d produce yourself hand-copying a page. Not one of them changes the message of Isaiah. A thousand years of copying, and the book you’d read is the same book.

Take the verse your own missionaries love, the one about the suffering servant: Isaiah 53:5. That passage sat in a jar by the Dead Sea for two thousand years, and when it came out it said what your King James Bible says. The text was not corrupted in transmission. We can see that it wasn’t, because we can hold both ends of the thousand years in our hands.

More copies than any book from the ancient world

The New Testament lets us run the same test from the other direction — not with age, but with sheer number of witnesses. The more independent copies of a text you have, the more easily you can spot and correct any error, because a slip in one copy shows up against all the others.

By that measure the New Testament is in a class of its own. The official catalog of Greek manuscripts now stands at nearly 6,000 — the textual scholar Daniel Wallace puts the last count at 5,999, and estimates the real figure near 5,800 — with thousands more in Latin, Syriac, Coptic, and other languages on top of that. Set that beside almost any other work from antiquity, which typically survives in a few dozen copies, and the contrast is not close.

Now, all those copies do disagree in thousands of small places — and critics will tell you so. But they’ll also confirm: the overwhelming mass of differences are spelling and word order, and no cardinal doctrine hangs on any disputed reading. The abundance of copies lets us reconstruct the text with confidence. We have too much evidence, not too little.

So on transmission — the real worry inside Article 8 — the Bible passes. The text you hold was not rewritten on its way to you.

Named in the dirt

There’s a second way to test a book: not just whether it was copied faithfully, but whether the world it describes was real. And here the Bible keeps turning up in the ground.

For a long time skeptics doubted King David had ever existed — a legend, they said, like King Arthur. Then in 1993 archaeologists at Tel Dan pulled out a ninth-century-BC stone inscription bearing the phrase “House of David” — an enemy king boasting of his war against David’s dynasty, carved within living memory of the kingdom itself. Pontius Pilate, the governor who condemned Jesus, was likewise dismissed as barely documented — until a limestone block was dug up at Caesarea in 1961 naming “Pontius Pilatus, prefect of Judaea,” now sitting in the Israel Museum. And the tunnel King Hezekiah cut through solid rock to bring water inside Jerusalem’s walls, described in 2 Kings 20:20? You can walk through it today, and near its mouth was found the Siloam inscription, carved around 700 BC, the workmen’s own record of digging from both ends until they met in the middle.

Named people, named places, confirmed in dirt and stone. This is not proof that the Bible is inspired — a book can be historically accurate and still be an ordinary book. But it means the Bible is not writing about a world that never was. It keeps its feet on real ground.

And now I have to say the harder thing, and I want to say it gently, because it gives me no pleasure. When I look for the same kind of confirmation for the Book of Mormon — a city, a coin, an inscription, a battlefield that scholars can positively tie to the Nephites or Lamanites — I can’t find one that the wider field of archaeology accepts. That’s not my accusation to make; it’s the Smithsonian’s own longstanding position, and I’ll quote it from an LDS apologist’s own site so you know I’m not inventing it. Jeff Lindsay, a faithful LDS scholar, reproduces it on his LDSFAQ site in order to engage with it:

The Smithsonian Institution has never used the Book of Mormon in any way as a scientific guide. Smithsonian archeologists see no direct connection between the archeology of the New World and the subject matter of the book.

— Smithsonian Institution (1996 statement), as reproduced by LDS apologist Jeff Lindsay, jefflindsay.com — LDSFAQ

I’m not putting that in front of you to wound you. But notice the difference: for the Bible, the argument is over which discoveries confirm it; for the Book of Mormon, after nearly two centuries, the leading LDS geographers still can’t agree on which continent, let alone which site. I raise it because you deserve to see both books held to the very same test, and told the truth about how each one does.

The evidence that invites your scrutiny

Let me close where the whole thing finally lands. The Christian faith doesn’t rest on a warm feeling; it rests on a claim about something that happened in history — that Jesus of Nazareth was crucified and rose again — and it has always invited you to investigate it.

Historians who study this, believers and skeptics alike, tend to grant a small core of facts: that Jesus died by crucifixion, that soon after his followers were utterly convinced they had seen him alive, and that a man named Saul who had been hunting Christians was so undone by what he believed was an encounter with the risen Jesus that he switched sides and died for it. Gary Habermas has spent a career cataloging how broadly scholars accept these, and the striking thing is how early the testimony is. Paul hands his readers a report he says he received — that Christ died for our sins, was buried, rose, and appeared to Peter, to the Twelve, and to more than five hundred people at once, most of whom were still alive to be questioned (1 Corinthians 15:3-6). That’s not a legend that grew over centuries. That’s a witness list, offered to people who could check it.

You don’t have to settle every question about the resurrection tonight. I only want you to see that Christianity asks to be examined, and hands you the evidence to do it — which is the same posture this whole letter is trying to keep with you.

The Bible passes the test Article 8 sets for it. Hold that — the next two chapters depend on it.

Your friend, Brock