Is the Bible Reliable? Part 1.

II Timothy 3:14-17

Woodbury Presbyterian Church

May 29-30, 2004

NASTY RUMORS

There are some nasty rumors floating around out there; rumors that besmear a stellar reputation. Rumors which, if collaborated, could be disastrous. You’ve probably heard some of this gossip yourself. You may have even wondered if any of it’s true.

The rumors are about the Bible.

One rumor is that the Bible was put together by a group of unscrupulous bishops who only chose the books that would build their own power base. Time and again we hear about “lost books of the Bible” being found. The innuendo is that these books should have been included in the Bible, but power-hungry prelates censored them. They suppressed the seditious truth because it threatened their self-interests.

A second slice of slander is that the Bible has been copied so many times that it has changed dramatically over the centuries. The word on the street is that we have no idea what the Bible originally said. Which version is right? It’s hopeless even to try to find out

A similar tidbit is that since the Bible has been translated over and over again, and since something is always “lost in translation,” we can never know what the Bible really said.

Here’s another juicy accusation. The Bible is just one of many holy books. It has some great stories and some wonderful teachings, but so do the Iliad, the Koran and the Bhagavad-Gita. Like the scriptures of all religions, the Bible is a collection of human ideas about God and the universe. When Christians refer to the Bible as “the Word of God” we’re either exaggerating or bragging. “My book’s better than your book.” That attitude isn’t even nice!

And have you heard this one? Some people say that the Bible was written so long ago, in cultures so different from ours, that it can’t possibly say anything meaningful or helpful to us today. It’s just an irrelevant relic.

Others say that if you interpret and apply the Bible literally, you end up with some ridiculous ideas and practices. For example, no one nowadays believes that the stars are really embedded in the “firmament” of heaven, like decorations stuck in a plaster ceiling (Genesis 1:6, 14-18 KJV), or that the sun really runs daily like a champion across the sky. (Psalm 19:4-6) And even the most devout Christians never think twice about wearing a garment made of two kinds of material, though Leviticus 19:19 tells us not to do that. On the other hand, if we interpret the Bible too figuratively, we can make it say anything we want it to say. In that case, we make it say nothing at all.

A CRUCIAL QUESTION

Have you heard any of these rumors? Have you wondered if they’re true?

We sing the children’s song, “Jesus loves me, this I know for the Bible tells me so.” Very sweet. But do we really mean that? Oh, most of us believe Jesus loves us, but is the reason we believe the fact that the Bible says so? Can serious minded grown ups like you and me trust what the Bible says? In other words, is the Bible reliable?

That’s a crucial question. If the Bible is reliable, we have God-given guidance for our faith and practice. If the Bible is reliable we have a lamp for our feet and a light for our path. But if these rumors are true then we’re ships without rudders, being carried by the currents of moral fad or intellectual fashion. If the rumors are true then we’re left to grope our way through the dark, grabbing on to any thing that feels like it might be solid or stable.

Or to put it in more practical terms, if the Bible is reliable, then we have a way to teach our children right from wrong. If the Bible is reliable we can get to know what God is like. We can find out who we are and what our purpose in life is. We can love God the way God wants to be loved and experience the joy of living according to His will. But if those rumors are true, then your ideas about God are as good as mine.

So for the next few weeks we’re going to look into these rumors, one by one. Are they totally true? Are they malicious lies? Most rumors grow out of a misunderstanding of the truth. There’s often a grain of truth behind a rumor, but it has been grossly distorted and blown way out of proportion. Is that what we will find here?

THE BIBLE’S ANSWER

II Timothy 3:16 responds directly to all these rumors. It says, “All Scripture is God-breathed, and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness.” But what help is that? That answer comes from the Bible. And if the Bible isn’t reliable, then that answer is no help at all. It’s kind of like the used car salesman saying, “Hey, you can trust me.” It’s like a defendant pleading not guilty before the evidence is presented.

I’m reminded of the guy who told his friend that he had buried his mother-in-law at sea. “Oh my, I didn’t know your mother-in-law was dead,” the friend said sympathetically.

“Well,” the first man replied, “she insisted she wasn’t, but you know how she could lie.”

The Bible claims to be reliable, but that only helps if you’re already inclined to believe the Bible in the first place.

However, if we unpack the words of this verse carefully and think about what they really mean, I believe we will find an answer to our question.

WAS THE BIBLE A “BACK-ROOM DEAL?”

So let’s start with the phrase, “All Scripture.” What does that mean? What books are considered scripture and why? And who decided what books made it and what books were left out?

This brings us to our first rumor: that the Bible was a back-room deal brokered by ambitious bishops.

    How many of you have read Dan Brown’s best selling novel, The Da Vinci Code? That book has recently spread this rumor like wildfire. About half way through the story, professor Teabing says to Sophie, “The Bible did not arrive by fax from heaven.” Well, that much the author got right. But the rest of what he suggests about the Bible and how it came to be is pure fiction and doesn’t fit the facts.

In the novel, Professor Teabing spins a yarn that the emperor Constantine, wanting to shore up the power of the Roman Empire, turned to Christianity as a means of unifying the Empire. Though in the novel Constantine himself never became a Christian, he elevated Christianity to the level of the official state religion because he thought it would give him more complete control over his subjects.

In order to solidify this power he called all the bishops to convene in Nicea in the year 325 and told them to declare that Jesus was the Son of God – allegedly a novel idea at the time. With a religion whose founder is said to be divine, no one could oppose what that religion said, and if the emperor controlled the Church, the emperor’s power would be absolute.

Further the emperor told the bishops to write a creed, which would establish the divinity of Jesus: the Nicene Creed. Then, Teabing says, “Constantine commissioned and financed a new Bible, which omitted those gospels that spoke of Christ’s human traits and embellished those gospels that made him godlike. The earlier gospels were outlawed, gathered up, and burned.”

A WORK OF FICTION

As I said, The Da Vinci Code is fiction, and in this case the author even made up the history on which his plot is based. Unfortunately I’m afraid that many people think that Brown was as careful a researcher as James Mitchner. Many people think that this recasting of history bears any resemblance to what really happened.

But think about it for a moment. Why would Constantine adopt Christianity to strengthen his own power? Because he could claim that Jesus was a god? That would have been a stupid strategy in ancient Rome because, since the time of Augustus Cesar, the emperors had all claimed that they were gods. The religious policy of the Roman Empire had always been that Roman subjects could worship any god or gods they wanted, so long as they worshiped Cesar too. That’s why Christians were persecuted. They wouldn’t play along. They wouldn’t acknowledge Cesar as divine. So they were thrown into prison and burned at the stake and fed to the lions. Further, the worst persecutor of all the emperor’s was Constantine’s immediate predecessor, Diocletian. If Constantine had simply wanted to strengthen the power of the state he would never have done so by declaring that Jesus is Lord. He would have declared that “Cesar is Lord,” just as all the other emperors had done. Why should he surrender his power to Jesus?

Further, the portrait this novel paints of the bishops at Nicea is all wrong. We picture the bishops as power hungry politicians out to enhance their own positions. We envision wealthy prelates in rich robes and velvet finery. We think, perhaps of Cardinal Richelieu from The Three Musketeers. But these were the very bishops who had suffered for their faith under Diocletian. They had been tortured and beaten and jailed and abused. Many of them came to Nicea crippled and mangled for their faith. They came with eyes gouged out. They came limping and maimed. They came mourning their colleagues, their brothers and sisters who had been killed in the persecution. They were the walking wounded. And they had been persecuted precisely because they refused to deny that Jesus is Lord. The Council of Nicea didn’t invent the divinity of Jesus. The bishops who were there had believed that so strongly that they sacrificed their bodies and their families for that great, saving truth.

Finally, I can’t find any historical record that says that the bishops at Nicea even talked about which books should be in the Bible. And even if they did that wasn’t the final word, because about seventy years later the councils of Hippo and Carthage published lists of books that were accepted in all the churches.

We can’t blame Don Brown. The Da Vinci Code is a work of fiction, so he did what fiction writers do. He made things up. But we should know that the idea that an ambitious body of bishops put together a Bible that would suit their purposes is simply false and doesn’t fit the facts.

HOW THE BIBLE CAME TOGETHER

So, if the Bible wasn’t faxed down from heaven, and if Constantine didn’t commission corrupt clergy to fashion a tool of domination, how did the Bible come to be?

    Let’s start by admitting that there really are “lost books,” some of which have never been found. The Bible itself tells us so several times. For example in the books of First and Second Kings, we come across many verses like I Kings 22:39 As for the other events of Ahab's reign, including all he did, the palace he built and inlaid with ivory, and the cities he fortified, are they not written in the book of the annals of the kings of Israel? Or II Kings 20:20 As for the other events of Hezekiah's reign, all his achievements and how he made the pool and the tunnel by which he brought water into the city, are they not written in the book of the annals of the kings of Judah?

Now we no longer have The Annals of the Kings of Israel or The Annals of the Kings of Judah. They’re lost. Too bad. They would probably be interesting to read, and they might even shed light on the events recorded in the Bible. But they’re lost. The question, however, is why are they lost?

Similarly, we know that there were a number of false prophets in the days of Jeremiah. Jeremiah 23:16 says, This is what the LORD Almighty says: “Do not listen to what the prophets are prophesying to you; they fill you with false hopes. They speak visions from their own minds, not from the mouth of the LORD”. Did any of those prophets record their sayings as Jeremiah did? We don’t know because, if they did write books, no body bothered to preserve them.

First and Second Kings helped the people of God understand how the Lord was working in their situation, so those books were cherished and protected and shared. The Annals of the Kings may have been interesting, but the people didn’t hear the Word of God in them.

Likewise, the prophecies of Jeremiah proved to be true. They not only “came true,” they revealed the truth about God and His purposes and His plans. So the people clung to the book of Jeremiah while other writings were neglected and ignored.

By the time of the apostles, the 39 books that we know as the Old Testament or the Hebrew Scriptures were widely revered as God’s Word by Christians and Jews.

We find a similar situation in the New Testament. Some books are lost. In I Corinthians 5:9 the Apostle Paul writes I have written you in my letter not to associate with sexually immoral people. Now of course the point of the verse is about sexual morality in the church. But it also gives us a clue about how the New Testament came together. We don’t have the letter where Paul wrote this. It’s lost. We don’t have any idea what else it said (though, of course, scholars have speculated). But the point I want to make is that Paul says he wrote a letter to the Corinthians before the letter we call First Corinthians. We could call that letter Former Corinthians. And it is one of the lost books.

But the plot thickens. In II Corinthians 7:8 we read, Even if I caused you sorrow by my letter, I do not regret it. Though I did regret it--I see that my letter hurt you, but only for a little while. As we read the surrounding verses, we realize that this doesn’t sound like a description of I Corinthians. So it looks like Paul wrote yet another letter to the Corinthians between the books we call First and Second Corinthians. It’s referred to as “the tearful letter.” And where is that letter? There are some very complex theories about that, but the best answer is simply that it’s lost. No one bothered to save it.

One more. Now look at Colossians 4:16 After this letter has been read to you, see that it is also read in the church of the Laodiceans and that you in turn read the letter from Laodicea. Paul wrote a letter to the Laodecians. But it’s lost. We don’t have it anymore.

Why are these letters missing? Because no one bothered to preserve them. They didn’t “live” in the church. They didn’t thrive in the church. They didn’t help people understand what it means to be the people of God. People read First and Second Corinthians, people read Colossians, and they said, “Wow, this letter is a keeper!” They copied these letters. They shared them with their friends in other churches. “You gotta read this.” In these letters, people heard the Word of God, so these letters were treasured.

II Peter 3:15-16 shows us that even in the lifetime of the apostles, some of Paul’s writings were already treasured as scripture. Peter says, Bear in mind that our Lord's patience means salvation, just as our dear brother Paul also wrote you with the wisdom that God gave him. ¹⁶He writes the same way in all his letters, speaking in them of these matters. His letters contain some things that are hard to understand, which ignorant and unstable people distort, as they do the other Scriptures, to their own destruction.

Laodiceans, on the other hand, was apparently a looser. So it was lost. The people didn’t hear God’s universal Word there, or in “Former Corinthians” or “the tearful letter.” So these books didn’t make the cut.

Now look at Luke 1:1-4 Many have undertaken to draw up an account of the things that have been fulfilled among us, ²just as they were handed down to us by those who from the first were eyewitnesses and servants of the word. ³Therefore, since I myself have carefully investigated everything from the beginning, it seemed good also to me to write an orderly account for you, most excellent Theophilus, ⁴so that you may know the certainty of the things you have been taught.

Luke tells us that many people had written things about the life and teachings of Jesus. But again most of these writings didn’t thrive in the Church. They didn’t help people encounter the risen, living Christ. So they were dropped by the wayside.

Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, these books were beloved by believers. These books helped people grow in their faith. So they were saved and shared and circulated. So they became the four gospels of our Bible.

By the way, we hear a good deal these days about “The Gospel of Thomas” and “The Gospel of Mary Magdalene.” In fact some people want to suggest that these books were suppressed. But it’s pretty clear from their style and from the ideas we find in them that these weren’t even written until a hundred years or more after the accepted New Testament books.

The Gospel of Thomas only has 114 verses, the last one of which says, “Simon Peter said to them: Let Mary go forth from among us, for women are not worthy of the life. Jesus said: Behold, I shall lead her, that I may make her male, in order that she also may become a living spirit like you males. For every woman who makes herself male shall enter into the kingdom of heaven.”

Parts of the Gospel According to Mary Magdalene are missing, and we only have about 52 verses of that bit of writing.

You can find these on line and read them for yourselves. See if you think they’re on a par with Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.

    After the age of the apostles, the New Testament continued to take shape for two or three centuries. Christians would ask their friends what books were good. Or, as people still do today, they would ask their pastors or bishops which books were recommended. And pastors would talk to each other about it.

This process was pretty fluid. Many of the books were universally recognized by Christians everywhere, but others we’re more iffy. Books like “The Shepherd of Hermas” and “The Epistle of Barnabas” were very popular and well received, but were finally passed by. Other books, like James, Hebrews and Revelation were often in question.

We have a list of accepted books from around the year 180. It’s called the Muratorian Canon. (The word canon comes from the Greek word for ruler, as in a measuring device. Bible scholars use the word canon to refer to a list of accepted or authoritative writings.) The Muratorian Canon includes most of the New Testament as we know it, but it’s missing Hebrews, James, II Peter and III John. It recommends The Shepherd of Hermas to be read, but not as scripture.

[NOTE: The very beginning of the Muratorian Canon is missing. It starts by referring to Luke as the “Third Gospel.” However, there is ample evidence that the Gospels had already been collected and circulated in the order Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.]

For a more detailed but fascinating account of how the New Testament came to be, I’d encourage you to read chapter 3 of F.F. Bruce’s book, The New Testament Documents: Are They Reliable? In that chapter he says this:

“One thing must be emphatically stated. The New Testament books did not become authoritative for the Church because they were formally included in a canonical list; on the contrary, the Church included them in her canon because she already regarded them as divinely inspired.”

So now we have the big picture of how the Bible came together. Certain writings were recognized over time as the Word of God because they strengthened the faith of believers. They spoke with authority, and so their authority was received. That’s why we have these books and not others.

But what about the details? What about the small picture? How can we know that the versions we have of these precious books are accurate? How can we know the books themselves haven’t been changed? That’s a question we’ll have to take up next week.

    For now we can know that these are the books in which the people of God heard the Word of God. And if you and I listen as we read, we will hear it, too.