Is the Bible Just Another Book?

Shownotes:

Why do so many churches and Christians make such a big deal of the Bible? Isn’t it just an out-dated, irrelevant piece of ancient literature? Shouldn’t we keep it on the shelf and use more modern books to teach us how to live? These are the questions we’ll explore today.

But before we examine the Bible, let’s start with some fun trivia about all those other books on the shelf…

10 notable best-selling books of all time:

• The Cat in the Hat by Dr. Seuss – 10.5 million
• The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain – 20 million
• The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins – 29 million
• To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee – 40 million
• The Very Hungry Caterpillar by Eric Carle – 43 million
• Purpose Driven Life by Rick Warren – 50 million
• The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe by CS Lewis – over 85 million
• Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone by J.K. Rowling – 120 million
• A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens – Over 200 million  
• Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes – Over 500 million

Top three best-selling books of all time:

• The Quran – Estimated 800 million copies sold and distributed.
• Quotations from the Works of Mao Tse-tung – Over 900 million copies sold.
• The Bible – Estimated 5 billion copies sold and distributed.

So, back to the question we’ll unbox today:

1. Is the Bible Just Another Book?

Think about how all of those other books were written: 

• All of those other books were the product of one or more clever minds
• They all followed a similar process:
  • Come up with the concept
  • Create a storyline, characters, etc.
  • Do some research if needed for accuracy 
  • Write and re-write
• My favorite book on the topic: “On Writing Well” by William Zinsser
  • “Simplify, simplify.”
  • “There’s no minimum length for a sentence that’s acceptable in the eyes of God.”
  • “Writers must constantly ask: what am I trying to say? Surprisingly often they don’t know.”
  • “Ultimately the product any writer has to sell is not the subject being written about, but who he or she is.”

But this is what separates the Bible from every other book: it is not the product of one person’s ideas or creativity. Nobody had to dream up the storyline or characters, and no one had to read “On Writing Well” to turn out the best chapters and verses. The Bible, Christians believe, is unique because it alone was inspired by God. Here’s how Paul explained it to Timothy:

2 Timothy 3:16 (NLT) All Scripture is inspired by God and is useful to teach us what is true and to make us realize what is wrong in our lives. It corrects us when we are wrong and teaches us to do what is right.

• See Where Did We Get the Bible?
  • “Inspired” = “God-breathed” (theopneustos)
    • Jesus himself attested that the Bible is inspired by God: Mark 12:36 (NLT) “For David himself, speaking under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, said…” Jesus then quoted Psalm 110. He believed that when David wrote that Psalm, he spoke under the Spirit’s inspiration.
  • Verbal plenary inspiration: divine inspiration extends to the very words themselves, and to all parts of the Bible and all subject matters on which the Bible speaks. 

Another passage:

2 Peter 1:20-21 (NLT) Above all, you must realize that no prophecy in Scripture ever came from the prophet’s own understanding, or from human initiative. No, those prophets were moved by the Holy Spirit, and they spoke from God.

• Not just some dude’s random thoughts or ideas

But how did this work? Inspiration means that the Holy Spirit superintended the process so that the very words written were exactly what the Spirit intended. They are both the words of the human author AND the words of God himself.

• Inspiration does not equal some kind of dictation. Authors were not like copyists or transcribers, writing down the words of someone dictating a letter. The Bible authors spoke in their own language and style, using their own words and thoughts, in response to specific situations they were dealing with. 
• While it is the Word of God, it is also the words of human authors. The two are not mutually exclusive. God spoke through human authors, through their unique personalities, experiences, language, culture and time.

This is why we can trust the Bible. It is not just the thoughts of humans, but God speaking to us, through the human authors.

One more verse on this:

1 Corinthians 2:13 (NLT) When we tell you these things, we do not use words that come from human wisdom. Instead, we speak words given to us by the Spirit, using the Spirit’s words to explain spiritual truths.

But how can we trust that the Bible is reliable in the form we have it today? After all, it was written literally thousands of years ago. Are we sure there wasn’t some sort of “telephone game” going on? 

• Explain telephone game

Here are two reasons we can trust the Bibles we have today (see Lesson 2 in The Pursuit for more):

Textual Evidence 

The Bible is the most impressive writing project in the history of the world. It contains 66 books written by 40 different authors over the course of 1500 years, and yet it tells one unified story. Think about it: Moses, a Jewish slave raised in the house of a Pharaoh, wrote the first five books. John, a fisherman-turned- revolutionary, wrote the last four books. In between were books and letters written by shepherds, kings, prophets, tax collectors, doctors, and more. And the most prolific author in the New Testament was Paul – a religious Pharisee who zealously persecuted the Jesus followers before joining them. 

Most of these authors never met each other, and many of them were unaware of the other books and letters that would eventually be included in the Bible. Their writings spanned different cultures and languages over the course of 15 centuries, and yet the Bible amazingly reads as one story. From beginning to end it’s about Jesus, and the fulfilled prophecy is the glue that holds it together. Let’s take just a few examples: 

• Of the 12 tribes of Israel, Judah was surprisingly predicted to be the one through which Jesus would come – which is exactly what happened. Genesis 49:10, Matthew 1:1-3
• It was prophesied that Jesus would be born in Bethlehem, and that’s how it happened – even though his mother didn’t even live there. Micah 5:2, Luke 2:1,4
• Prophets wrote with shocking accuracy about the torture and death of Jesus hundreds of years before it happened – exactly as predicted. Psalm 22, Isaiah 53

It was because of these kinds of prophecies that Jesus spoke these words to the religious leaders of his day:

John 5:39 You search the Scriptures because you think they give you eternal life. But the Scriptures point to me!

The Bible amazingly tells one story, centered on Jesus, because it was ultimately inspired by the God of human history.

Historical Evidence 

Ancient manuscripts and archeological digs have stacked up in favor of biblical reliability. The Bible was written thousands of years ago, long before printing presses and modern technology. Manuscript fragments of the biblical text have endured wars and weather throughout the ages, and the scraps that remain represent just a fraction of the originals. Are those remnants enough to provide a reliable testimony for modern-day readers? And how can we be sure that the message hasn’t been corrupted over the millennia? The good news is that the God who inspired the scriptures was also powerful enough to preserve those writings through the ages. 

Consider the manuscript evidence. Manuscript copies in the ancient world were painstakingly hand-written, and not all of them survived the ravages of time. Reliability of ancient writings is determined by the number of copies (or partial copies) of the work in existence. So how does the Bible stack up? See for yourself:

• Today we have only 49 copies of Aristotle’s writings.
• Homer’s “The Iliad” does a little better, with 643 copies in existence.
• The New Testament wins by a landslide, with almost 5700 Greek copies and over 19,000 copies in other languages!

The New Testament clearly has more manuscript evidence than any other ancient work. 

But how do we know that those manuscript copies are faithful to the originals? What if human authors changed the message, intentionally or otherwise? Modern archeology helps us answer this question, thanks to the Dead Sea Scrolls. In 1947 a shepherd boy discovered some ancient scrolls hidden away in remote caves in the Middle East. This led to even more discoveries in the area, and in the end almost 1000 manuscripts were recovered. Parts of almost every book of the Old Testament were found, and some of those fragments proved to be almost 1000 years older than the oldest manuscripts known at the time. 

This offers a perfect test for the reliability of our modern translations. The book of Isaiah provides the most compelling example, since the Dead Sea Scrolls contained a complete copy of the prophet’s writings. When compared to the Masoretic Text (the oldest copy previously known, dating back to about 800 AD), the Isaiah manuscript from the Dead Sea Scrolls was 95% identical! And the only differences were minor, often just variations in spelling.

So the historical evidence stacks up in favor of the reliability of the Bible. But there’s more:

One more question:

1. But how can we trust that it’s translated correctly?

Think about it: The Bible comes to us through translation. It was not originally written in English, but in Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek. The Bible has been translated into many languages throughout the world, and continues to be. Many translations are available today that are clear, readable, understandable,and true to the original.

• English language translations follow two approaches: formal equivalence (word for word) and dynamic equivalence (thought for thought). Word for word translations often fail to capture the meaning of idioms. 
• If you translate an idiom word for word it completely loses its meaning. For example, Matthew 9:15 (NLT) says, “Do wedding guests mourn while celebrating with the groom?” The phrase “wedding guests” is literally: “sons of the wedding hall”. If this was translated word for word, the meaning of the original text would be obscured. Yet thought for thought translations can introduce more of the translator’s interpretation into the text. 
• Interpretation is always a factor in the process of translation from one language to another, no matter which approach is preferred, because no two languages have exact correspondence of vocabulary or grammar. But the translator’s goal is to minimize the interpretations added in the process.  

We don’t believe that translations are inspired by God. Only the originals are without error, as spoken by God himself through the human author. But even though the original manuscripts are no longer available, God has preserved the biblical text to a remarkable level. We can trust the Bibles we read today.

And here’s why: any translation you pick up is based on the large collection of existing manuscripts we talked about earlier. When translators (experts, by the way, not random volunteers and hobbyists) draw on the witness of these existing manuscripts, it creates confidence that our Bible translations have not been tampered with.

• Contrast with a paraphrase: when someone takes an existing translation and re-writes it in his own words.

Close: 

So let’s answer the question for today:

1. Is the Bible Just Another Book?

The answer is NO! The Bible is different from every other book in history, and not just because it blows away the competition in the “Best Selling” category. It’s different because it is God-breathed, written by human authors but superintended by the Holy Spirit. So read it! You can trust it, and it can change your life. 

Hebrews 4:12 (NLT) For the word of God is alive and powerful. It is sharper than the sharpest two-edged sword, cutting between soul and spirit, between joint and marrow. It exposes our innermost thoughts and desires.