FIVE REASONS YOU CAN TRUST THE BIBLE-- Why I believe in a system that is grounded in the authority of an ancient document

1ST REASON – THE NEW TESTAMENT WAS WRITTEN VERY EARLY.

When testing the reliability of eyewitnesses in a court case, the first test is simple: were the witnesses present when this event occurred?  We can test the Gospel writers in the same way. If the New Testament documents were first penned in the 2^nd, 3d or 4^th century, you could not really trust them as eyewitness accounts. They might contain reliable history but you could not say they were written by people who actually lived at the time that Jesus was doing His ministry, had seen what Jesus did and heard what He said.

They would not have been written early enough for anyone to refute any false claims by saying: “Hey, that’s not true, this guy did not do any of these things!! He did not live there at that time!”     In that case, the question is: “Did these writers live at the period that these things happened and were they present in that region at the time of the facts?” And there is good reason to believe that it is the case.

There is internal evidence that Luke’s documents have been circulated quite early. In the 1^st verse of Luke’s Gospel, Luke describes himself as an investigator interviewing every witness who knew Jesus and his family. He mentioned that he is writing a careful orderly account because there is another account that predates his gospel, the Gospel of Mark, that is accurate but not in chronological order. Most scholars therefore put Mark before Luke because some of Mark’s Gospel is quoted in Luke’s document.

In the book of Acts, written also by Luke, there are no records of the Jewish-Roman war which started in 67 AD, neither of the siege of Jerusalem and the destruction of the Temple, in 70 AD. There is also no mention of the deaths of James, Peter and Paul, prominent leaders of the early Church, which took place between 61 and 65 AD.

These facts were missing because they had not occurred yet, proving that these documents were written early in the history of the Church and witnesses were still alive.

According to scholars, the Gospel of Mark was written around 45-50 AD, the Gospel of Luke around 50-53 AD and the Book of Acts around 57-60 AD.

The reason I trust the gospels is because they were written early enough to be validated by people who knew if they were truth or lies.

(To be followed)