I have a friend who would love to believe in Jesus, but faith has eluded him because of a scientific, rationalist predisposition. He simply can’t bring himself to believe the Bible is true. No doubt, you have a friend like that too.

Of course, it’s impossible to verify the accuracy of what the Bible says about God scientifically. On the other hand, archaeologists have verified a preponderance of details about the physical world the Bible describes. And thanks to the science of “textual criticism,” all doubt has been removed that our Bibles accurately reflect what the original authors actually wrote. That may not be enough to produce faith, but it’s huge step in the right direction. 

The purpose of textual criticism is to apply scientific principles to reconstruct a reliable text of a document. Text critics pour over copies of ancient texts (not just the Bible) looking for “variants.” Then they prepare a “critical apparatus” that identifies all the variants. 

Located at the bottom of a page, the critical apparatus gives a complete history of any variants in the text gathered from different copies of a manuscript. Again, the point is that there’s nothing even slightly mysterious that remains about even the punctuation marks of the Bible. The Bible is the most scrutinized, scientifically authenticated document in the world by an exponential factor. 

Bottom line: Without respect to whether its contents are true, no serious scholar doubts that we have a correct, critically established document with all variants accounted for. And importantly, there are no variants that bring any major doctrine into dispute. 

Again, believing what the Bible says is true is a different matter, but none of us need doubt that we’re looking at an accurate representation of what was originally written. It’s indisputable.

Until every church disciples every man…

Pat