Why would anyone believe the Bible?

I've recently re-written this post, because it consistently gets more hits than any of my other posts and I'm not sure I did a particularly good job the first time around. The comments below this post - at least those  posted in 2011 - relate to the original version which can still be accessed here.

For various reasons, lots of people believe the Bible. I obviously can't cover all the reasons here even if I knew what they all were. As a (pretty much) Bible-believing Christian myself though, I can give some of the reasons why I think the Bible is worth taking seriously.

To start off with, I think it's important to emphasise the fact that the Bible isn't really a single book. It actually consists of 66 separate books¹ written by a wide variety of different authors for different reasons in different places and at different times, which for various historical reasons (generally good ones in my opinion) have ended up in the collection we use today. Many people - Christian and otherwise - seem to think that if anything in the Bible is found to be imperfect or inaccurate, the whole thing is therefore thrown into question and none of it can be trusted. To my mind, this attitude does an enormous disservice to the complexity and diversity of the text. Because of this attitude, many Christians read the Bible wearing blinkers, refusing to see anything that might contradict their preconceptions, while many non-believers dismiss the Bible outright because they've read something they don't agree with or which seems contradictory or implausible in the face of logical analysis.

Unfortunately, I don't have space to cover the whole Bible in this post (I lack the knowledge to do so in any real depth anyway!), so I'm just going to focus on a couple of areas:

1.  The Gospels

The gospels are the books of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, which appear at the beginning of the New Testament (i.e. Part Two of the Christian Bible). These books were written by Jesus' early followers, in the decades immediately following his death, resurrection and ascension into heaven. They tell the story of Jesus' life and ministry, in particular the last 3 years which is when He did most of his preaching and teaching.

I personally have a lot of faith in the gospels. I don't assume though, that they are factually perfect in every detail, because they were written a little while after the events they describe, and have been re-assembled from personal and collected, written and verbal memories. We can see small differences between some of the accounts which show that in some cases events have been remembered slightly differently.

The gospels and the message they contain - which was being preached long before the gospels were written down - had an explosive effect, and the early Christian church grew at a phenomenal rate in spite of intense persecution from the Roman Empire. There is much in the gospels to provoke scepticism in an enlightened 21st century mind - for example, Jesus healing people or walking on water or rising again from the dead - but it is because of stories like these, in particular the story of Jesus' resurrection, that the Christian message had such an incredible early impact. It is possible of course, that all these stories were made up, but I find it hard to see why Jesus' early followers, who lived and travelled with him, would have committed themselves so completely to such an obvious and enormous lie, a) given that such a deception would be the antithesis of the message itself and, b) in the face of the hardships, persecution, torture and violent deaths that so many of them suffered as a result.

2.  The Torah

The Torah is the Jewish name for the first five books of the Old Testament, which Christians traditionally refer to as the Pentateuch. (The Old Testament is Part One of the Christian Bible and is known to Jews as the Tanakh - this is the Bible as it was known to Jesus and His early followers, before any of the New Testament was written).

The traditional Jewish belief is that the whole of the Torah was written by the prophet Moses (who is the central human character in books 2 to 5), but this seems unlikely for at least 2 reasons:

1. Deutoronomy - book 5 of the Torah - describes Moses' death in the past tense. (some Orthodox Jews explain this by claiming that God revealed to Moses the exact nature of his death so that he could write it all down beforehand as though it had already taken place.)


2. Even a fairly basic analysis of the text reveals a mixture of interspersed literary styles. The modern scholarly consensus is that the Torah is composed of extracts from a number of earlier sources which have been spliced and edited together into the account we have today. No-one knows exactly when this took place, although there are a number of theories, and no copies of any of the earlier sources remain.

Because the Torah was written so much longer ago than the gospels, and we know so much less about its origins, its authenticity is much more difficult to determine. In some places its contents seem to resonate with and affirm what we read in the gospels, but in some other places the God of the Torah seems stricter or more vengeful or bloodthirsty than the God that Jesus seems to represent.

For Jews, the Torah is the most important part of their scripture, and Jesus - who was born and raised a Jew - quoted from it frequently and seemed to identify His own life and mission with many of the stories that it contains. In a nutshell, and for the most part, the Torah tells the story of how God chose a group of people (the Jews) and made an agreement with them whereby He would take care of them and protect them, in return for which they would learn to live His way and be faithful to Him and obey his commands. When they kept their promise to God, God kept His promise and things went well with them but when they were rebellious or wilfully disobedient, things tended to go rather badly!

Jesus drew both on the Torah and also on the Old Testament prophets (see next section). The Torah includes God's promises to Abraham, the father of the Jewish faith, an important part of which was that through Abraham all nations would eventually be blessed. Later on, the prophets predicted that God was going to form a new agreement/relationship with His people to supercede the one He had previously made with the Jews. This relationship wouldn't just be based on a set of rules though, it would go much deeper and would be able to change people's hearts. Jesus and his followers believed that Jesus came to initiate this relationship through His life, sacrificial death and subsequent resurrection, and that this new relationship was for everyone and not just for the Jews.

Getting back to the Torah though, I find it very hard to know how much of it I should treat as historically true, but it was and remains a central part of Jewish identity,  played a central role in Jesus' own life, and because of this and because He drew so heavily from it, it is also very important to other Christians and to me. I have often found it a source of great wisdom and comfort, but at other times I wrestle with some of the confusing or contradictory things it sometimes seems to say.

A Quick Bible Summary

So far I've only covered 2 small parts of the Bible. To Christians and Jews respectively, these are the most important bits, but there is so much more to the Bible which I just don't have room to do any justice to here. As a very brief summary, the Bible also includes:

• The story of the Jews from when they first entered the land of Israel, throughout their time there, through their exile in Babylon, and their eventual repatriation in Israel about 400 years before Jesus. This whole story is about the outworking of the Torah - when things go well and when they don't go well as the Jews more or less cyclically reject and return to God.


• Various books of prophecies - the records of those who spoke on God's behalf, often urging the Jews to turn back to God and away from their wicked ways. These books often have a strong emphasis on social justice as well as on trying to repair whatever damage the Jews have done this time to their relationship with God.


• Books of wisdom and poetry.


• Letters - found in the New Testament part of the Bible - written by the early Christian leaders to various different parts of the Christian church. These give us an invaluable insight into the beliefs and practices of the early Christians, before Christianity became institutionalised and tainted by political power to the extent that we often see today.

A Religion of the Heart

If you're not a believer, I'm not sure that I'll have said much so far to convince you of the truth of the Bible, although perhaps I might have said something to make you think it a little more worthy of your consideration. In the end though, there's probably quite a lot in there that won't ever be scientifically verified. How do you prove for example, that 2,000 years ago a man was raised from the dead? (Or, for that matter, that he wasn't?).

The Christian faith isn't based entirely on the Bible though - if it was it would be a religion of the head and not of the heart. In the end, the Christian faith is based on an encounter - through Jesus - with the living God. The Bible may help to facilitate this, but unless you encounter God in some way for yourself, then debating its truth is little more than a logical exercise. It might make a difference in your head, but in the end the truth of the Bible is only really worth anything if it also succeeds in changing your heart.