Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!wuarchive!cs.utexas.edu!rutgers!aramis.rutgers.edu!athos.rutgers.edu!christian From: hedrick@geneva.rutgers.edu Newsgroups: soc.religion.christian Subject: Re: Is the Bible God's Word? Message-ID:Date: 27 Sep 89 08:56:53 GMT Sender: hedrick@athos.rutgers.edu Lines: 87 Approved: christian@aramis.rutgers.edu You'll get different answers from different people on this. First, just an issue of fact. The Bible was almost certainly written before 100 A.D. There are fragments of a manuscript of John from around 125, i.e. still existing physical pieces. That is almost certainly one of the later books. Other Gospels were quoted or referred to by non-Biblical writers around 100, as were Paul's letters. Not that this is a big deal: legends can grow quite quickly. But you talk about the "first few centuries", so I thought I'd clear that up. As for how one assesses its truth. First, I don't think anyone believes that it was all simply made up. It's sort of hard to explain the Church in that case. There's no non-Christian verification of the events in the NT, but the fact that the Church suddenly appeared is pretty obvious. You have to have a sort of paranoid view of history to assume that this group of people who claim to follow Jesus made him up out of whole cloth. I don't know of even non-Christian scholars who claim this, nor do I know of any serious doubt about the authorship of at least the core of Paul's letters. Normally the issue isn't whether the whole thing was made up, but whether some basic memories of Jesus got mixed in with legends in such a way that important parts of the story (like the fact that he rose from the dead) can't be relied on. We do after all have other writings from roughly 100 and later. They support the idea that the Bible is consistent with what the Church believed as far back as we can trace it. The Catholics have a slightly different slant on things, so they should probably speak for themselves. But I think for Protestants it comes down to: (1) what kind of impression the NT writers make on you. (2) what kind of impression Jesus himself makes on you. (3) your assessment of the religion itself. The earliest witness is really Paul's letters. Here we have pretty direct testimony -- not that he actually saw Jesus himself (at least not during Jesus' life on earth). But he wasn't much later, and he did talk to the original witnesses. We have enough of his writings to give you a pretty good basis to judge his character and believability. In some sense Peter would be even better, because he worked directly with Jesus. But there isn't quite as much writing from him, so you may find him harder to judge. Also, there are at least some scholars who question authorship of Peter's letters (though I don't see any serious reason to doubt at least I Peter). Second, we have what the NT claims that Jesus said and did. I think Protestants most commonly believe in the Bible because they find Jesus as portrayed in it worthy of being followed. They also find that when they accept the picture of him given in the NT, the resulting religion "works", in some rather ill-defined sense. I.e. it seems to have spiritual (and for some, even physical) power; it helps them make sense of life and deal with problems in their lives, etc. As I've said in the past, in some sense I think the Bible is almost an axiom. I'm not sure this is the best of logical arguments. But in fact people buy into Christianity because it seems to be right, when they look at themselves and the world. The Bible is the axiom on which it is based. Quantum mechanics is kind of wierd. We accept the assumptions on which it is based because the structure built on them works as a scientific theory. That isn't to say that rational assessment is unimportant. If we found good external evidence against it, that would be a serious problem. Similarly, you can try to make various consistency checks on the documents themselves. But ultimately I don't see any way you can prove that they are right. The business about being literally the word of God is something that I think follows later. The first decision to make it seems to me is the basic assessment of Jesus as found in the Bible and Christianty as a whole. For that you don't really need for the Bible to have any status other than that of a historical document that you are investigating. The business about being the word of God isn't something that I think can be proven prior to making the basic decision. For many of us, the Bible as word of God simply means that we hear God speaking through it. Accepting this idea isn't really different from deciding to follow the Christ that is described in it. I belong to a branch of Christianity that is very well aware that the authors of the Bible are fallible. Our own Biblical scholarship is based on that premise. I suggest that you read some basic works of Biblical criticism to see just how hard we are on it ourselves. There are other groups who find grounds for giving the Bible a special status as incapable of any error. I'm not a good one to argue that case, since I don't believe it. But my impression is that it comes after the basic decision to follow Christ, as you begin to consider what that means. I don't see that anybody should expect to convince you from some sort of external evidence that the Bible is inerrant, and only then have you start to look at what it says.