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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
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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.