The Bible and prayer
Can I trust the Bible?
Christians believe you can, and they give reasons. The New Testament rests on eyewitness testimony, its text has been preserved with great care, and its message holds together across many authors and centuries.
Written close to the events
The New Testament was written in the first century, within the lifetime of people who had known Jesus. Its writers say plainly that they are reporting what they saw or what they learned from those who did. Luke begins his Gospel like this:
It seemed good to me also, having traced the course of all things accurately from the first, to write to you in order, most excellent Theophilus; that you might know the certainty concerning the things in which you were instructed.
And Peter wrote:
For we did not follow cunningly devised fables, when we made known to you the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, but we were eyewitnesses of his majesty.
Has it been changed over time?
People often suppose that the Bible has been copied and recopied until the original was lost, like a message passed down a line of whisperers. The evidence points the other way. More than five thousand handwritten Greek copies of all or part of the New Testament survive, far more than for any other ancient book, and some are very early. One of the oldest, a fragment of John’s Gospel usually dated to the second century, is kept at the John Rylands Library in Manchester.
Because there are so many copies from so many places, scholars can compare them and see where a copyist slipped. The differences are mostly spellings and word order, and none of them affects any central Christian belief.
For the Old Testament, the Dead Sea Scrolls found from 1947 onwards included copies about a thousand years older than those previously known. They showed how faithfully the text had been handed down.
Is it a translation of a translation?
No. Modern English Bibles are translated directly from the Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek in which the books were first written, by teams of scholars working from the oldest manuscripts.
What about contradictions?
The four Gospels tell the same story from different angles, as independent witnesses do. They differ in detail and emphasis and agree on the substance. The Bible is also strikingly honest about its heroes. The disciples are shown as slow, frightened and sometimes faithless, which is not how people write when they are making things up.
What about the miracles?
If there is no God, miracles are impossible and the Bible must be wrong. If there is a God who made the world, there is nothing unreasonable about his acting within it. The question is not really whether miracles can happen but whether God is there.
More than a human book
Christians believe the Bible is reliable history, and more than that: God himself speaks through it.
Every Scripture is God-breathed and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for instruction in righteousness.
The grass withers, the flower fades; but the word of our God stands forever.
Test it for yourself
The best way to decide is to read it. Take one Gospel, read it as you would any serious account, and ask whether it rings true.
These are written, that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that believing you may have life in his name.