Can We Trust the Bible?
Making the Case for Scripture
By Aaron Ophaug
There's something that happens to me every time I walk into Starbucks with my Bible. I feel a knot in my stomach. The quiet anxiety that someone is going to walk over and challenge me with hard philosophical questions I won't know how to answer, or simply look at me like I'm strange for reading it.
That feeling makes sense. Reading the Bible isn't exactly trending. Schools have sidelined it, professors dismiss it, and even many Christians feel confused or uncertain about it. At the center of all this controversy is one foundational question: Is this book actually trustworthy?
Is the Bible a sacred, reliable revelation from God or is it just a collection of ancient myths on the same shelf as any other piece of fiction? That question matters more than almost anything else, because how you answer it shapes how you live.
Why I Never Used to Ask These Questions
I grew up in a Christian home. My family read and studied the Bible, so I never questioned it. I took it at face value until I got to college and sat in my first theology class.
My professor, a former football player who went by "The Lion," made this material come alive for me. I remember walking across campus with my dad after one of those lectures, telling him about what I'd just learned, specifically, how the books of the Bible were selected. I was completely astonished. The process those early councils of men went through to carefully examine and determine what belonged in Scripture changed my perspective forever.
I wonder if your story isn't similar. Maybe you grew up with the Bible nearby but never really thought deeply about where it came from or why it should be trusted. Or maybe you're a skeptic who questions everything. Or maybe you came to faith later in life and the Bible still feels like a mystery.
Wherever you're coming from, these questions are worth taking seriously.
Why the Bible Matters: It's About Revelation
Before we get to the evidence, we need to understand why the Bible is considered important in the first place. The answer comes down to one word: revelation.
The Bible matters because it claims to reveal the person of God to us. That's not a popular idea today, because if it's true, then people are accountable to what it says. So many people work hard to discredit it.
But here's what we need to understand about God: He is not hiding from us. He is not some distant deity who created the world and then stepped back. At the very core of who God is, He wants to be known and to have an intimate relationship with His creation. And so He has gone out of His way to reveal Himself to us.
God Reveals Himself Through Creation
Psalm 19:1-4 describes how the heavens declare the glory of God. “Day after day, night after night” the universe itself speaks of its Creator. Romans 1:18-20 goes further, saying that God's eternal power and divine nature have been clearly seen through what He has made, leaving humanity without excuse.
When you look at the stars, the mountains, the intricacy of a tiny flower, or the raw power of the ocean, you are looking at a fingerprint of God. Creation tells us He is orderly, powerful, eternal, and wild. I sat with a dying man once during my time as a hospital chaplain, a retired principal, not a Christian, who told me, "I can look out at the trees and see that there is a God out there." He hadn't read the Bible. He just looked at the world.
God Reveals Himself Through Jesus Christ
Colossians 1:15 calls Jesus "the image of the invisible God," and Colossians 2:9 says that in Him "all the fullness of Deity dwells in bodily form." Jesus perfectly revealed who God is — through His miracles, His teachings, His death, and His resurrection.
When His disciples asked Him to show them the Father, Jesus answered plainly: "He who has seen Me has seen the Father" (John 14:9). If you want to know what God is like, look at Jesus.
God Reveals Himself Through Scripture
Finally, God reveals Himself through the written Word. It's in Scripture that we learn about creation, salvation, forgiveness, how to honor God, and who He is. To understand Scripture more clearly is to see God more clearly — which is why it matters so much to study it honestly and teach it carefully.
What the Bible Says About Itself
This might feel like circular reasoning, but it's still worth starting here: the Bible itself claims to be a revelation from God.
2 Timothy 3:16 says: "All Scripture is inspired by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, for training in righteousness, so that the man of God may be adequate, equipped for every good work."
The word "inspired" literally means "God-breathed." The claim is that through the Holy Spirit, God moved human authors — David, Moses, Paul, Peter, and others — to write down what He wanted to communicate, expressed through their unique personalities and circumstances.
This is what theologians call inspiration. It doesn't necessarily mean God dictated every word like a secretary. It means that through the movement of God's Spirit, these men received clearly what they were to write, and what they wrote carries divine authority.
How Were the Books of the Bible Chosen?
This is a question that changed my life when I first encountered it. The process is more rigorous than most people realize.
Before there was a written Bible, there was oral history. The disciples of Jesus passed on what they had witnessed. As documents and letters began to circulate, councils of early church leaders — men who were themselves disciples of the apostles — carefully tested each document against several criteria:
Apostolic connection: Was it written by an apostle, or someone directly linked to one?
Theological consistency: Did its content align with the oral history passed down from eyewitnesses?
Internal coherence: Was it consistent with the other accepted documents?
Spiritual fruit: Was it used by the Holy Spirit to lead people toward Christ and godliness?
Documents that failed these tests were rejected. The Bible we have today is the result of that rigorous process — and it traces directly back to the men who knew Jesus personally.
Can We Trust the Gospels? Examining the Evidence
Now we get to the questions that matter most to skeptics. Can the accounts of Jesus' life actually be trusted?
1. The Authors Had Credibility
Matthew and John were Jesus' own disciples. Mark was closely associated with Peter, the leader of the disciples. Luke was a close companion of the apostle Paul. These aren't random names! They are men with direct, firsthand connections to the events they describe.
There is no serious historical dispute that these men wrote the Gospels. As early as AD 125, a Christian leader named Papias confirmed that Mark had written his Gospel. By AD 180, the church father Irenaeus had documented all four Gospels and their authors by name.
Interestingly, if someone were fabricating authorship, they would have chosen the most famous apostles — people like Peter. Instead, the Gospels are attributed to a mix of well-known and lesser-known figures, which actually lends them more credibility, not less.
2. The Time Gap Is Not a Problem
The Gospels were written roughly 40 to 60 years after Jesus' death (around AD 60–90). Some people assume this gap undermines their reliability. But consider this: the biographies of Alexander the Great were written 400 years after his death, and historians still consider them reliable.
More importantly, the Gospels were written within a single human lifetime of the events. That means eyewitnesses were still alive when they were written — people who could confirm or challenge what was recorded. And there is good evidence that some accounts were written even earlier than the commonly cited dates.
3. The Authors Intended Accuracy
Luke opens his Gospel by stating plainly that he "carefully investigated everything from the beginning" in order to write "an orderly account" so that readers could "know the certainty of the things" they had been taught (Luke 1:1-4). These authors weren't spinning legends but were making a deliberate effort to record what happened.
4. Oral Culture Preserved the Details
We live in a text-heavy culture, so it's easy to underestimate the power of oral tradition. In the ancient world, memory was trained and disciplined in ways we rarely practice today. Some rabbis memorized the entire Old Testament. Stories were passed down carefully, checked and rechecked against the testimony of eyewitnesses.
As for the "telephone game" concern, - that stories get distorted as they're passed along — oral cultures had built-in correction mechanisms. The living eyewitnesses served as ongoing fact-checkers. If an account drifted from the truth, there were people still alive who could correct it.
5. Minor Differences Confirm Authenticity
Yes, there are small differences between the four Gospels. But this is actually a mark of authenticity, not a problem. Ancient biographies allowed for paraphrase, abridgment, and selective emphasis. If all four Gospels were word-for-word identical, that would be suspicious it would suggest the authors coordinated their stories. The natural variation we see is exactly what you'd expect from four independent witnesses describing the same events.
6. The Authors Had Nothing to Gain
The disciples had no earthly incentive to fabricate the story of Jesus. They were rejected by their communities, driven out of their homes, and ten of the twelve apostles were executed for their beliefs. People don't die for something they know to be a lie. The willingness of these men to suffer and die for their testimony is one of the most compelling arguments for its truthfulness.
What the Manuscripts Tell Us
We don't have the original handwritten documents of the Gospels. But that's true of virtually every ancient text. What matters is the number and age of the copies we do have.
For most ancient texts like the Annals of Imperial Rome (written AD 116, oldest copy from AD 850) or the works of the historian Josephus (1st century, oldest copies from the 10th century), historians work with a small handful of copies that are hundreds of years removed from the original.
For the New Testament, we have over 5,000 manuscript copies — more than any other ancient text. The second-place text, Homer's Iliad, has only about 650 copies, and the best of those come from 200-300 years after the original. For Scripture, we have manuscripts from multiple geographic regions that agree with one another, and some copies date to within decades of the originals.
The oldest known New Testament manuscript is a fragment of John's Gospel dated to around AD 100-150. John's Gospel is believed to have been written around AD 90. That's a gap of perhaps 10 to 60 years which is remarkably close for an ancient document and it comes from Egypt, showing that the Gospels spread and were copied quickly across a wide area.
What Non-Christian Sources Say About Jesus
Perhaps the most surprising evidence comes from outside the Bible. Josephus, a first-century Jewish historian with no Christian agenda, wrote about Jesus in his historical account of the Jewish people:
"About this time there lived Jesus, a wise man... For he was one who wrought surprising feats and was a teacher of such people as accept the truth gladly. He won over many Jews and many of the Greeks. When Pilate, upon hearing him accused by men of the highest standing amongst us, had condemned him to be crucified, those who had in the first place come to love him did not give up their affection for him... And the tribe of the Christians, so called after him, has still to this day not disappeared."
A secular historian, writing independently of the Gospels, confirms the core facts: Jesus existed, performed remarkable deeds, was crucified under Pilate, and sparked a movement that outlasted His death. This is powerful external confirmation of what Scripture records.
So What Do We Do With All This?
The evidence is genuinely compelling. The authors of the Gospels were credible, closely connected to the events they described. The manuscripts we have are more numerous and closer to their originals than virtually any other ancient document. Outside sources confirm the historical existence of Jesus. And the internal testimony of Scripture itself claims divine origin.
None of this proves faith for you. Evidence can inform a decision, but it can't make it for you. At the end of the day, the central question is: If Scripture reliably reveals God to us, what will we do with what it says?
Maybe you're reading this and feeling newly confident and ready to engage with the skeptics in your life. Take this and run with it.
Or maybe you still have questions and doubts. That's okay too. Doubt isn't the enemy of faith, it's often the beginning of a deeper one. The invitation is simply to keep asking, keep seeking, and keep studying.
Our faith is not built on wishful thinking or fairy tales. It rests on real historical events, real documents, and real people who gave everything for what they had witnessed. That is something worth taking seriously.
For further reading, I recommend The Case for Christ by Lee Strobel and The Reason for God by Timothy Keller.
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