Is the Bible Real

Can we trust the Bible? Is it a collection of lies, a gathering of legends gone wildly out of control - or a series of eyewitness accounts? How can we know scribes didn't flagrantly edit the texts? Check out these short clips from past Veritas Forums or read the transcripts below!

Craig Blomberg on the debate surrounding what books made it into the New Testament.
Gary Habermas addresses the numerous variant readings in the surviving copies of the New Testament.

Craig Blomberg is professor of New Testament at Denver Theological Seminary. In this short clip, he runs us through the debate surrounding the books of the New Testament.

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"If you'd like to see every known list from the first three centuries of Christian debate about what books should be included in the New Testament, track down the fairly recent (I think it's 2002) volume by Lee McDonald and James Sanders, called "The Canon Debate," published by Hendrickson in Peabody, Massachusetts. And in a series of appendices you can see the lists. There was discussion. There was disagreement. There was not instant, unanimous consensus concerning what went into the New Testament.

But a remarkable observation is that of the seven books that eventually "made it in," if we use that language, that DID have some debate surrounding them, six of them were letters, and one was the Book of Revelation. The six letters were Hebrews, because there was no initial name attached to the book and so there were debates about who wrote it; James, because there seems to be a a very different spirit in at least one key text about the role of faith and works as over against the Apostle Paul; 2nd Peter, because it appears to be written in a totally different style than 1st Peter; Jude, 2nd John, and 3rd John 'cause they're all short little one chapter books so that some people could say "Is this really that significant?" And then the Book of Revelation, because people already then as now were debating: How in the world do you interpret this?

But there is no known debate - Could there have been? Of course there could have been! Could be lost! But there is no record of anyone ever disputing Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, Acts, or the thirteen letters that have Paul's name on them in those early discussions of the canonical collection of New Testament documents.

There are also other letters (and again they are all letters) attributed to such people as Barnabas, though written a hundred years too late to been from him; one called the Shepherd of Hermas; and a couple more that periodically were put forward but ultimately rejected. But there is no known list, no known text, from any point of view, Christian, Pagan, half-and-half, that proposed any other Gospel besides the four that we have in the New Testament." - Craig Blomberg


Gary Habermas is an American historican and philosopher of religion. In this clip, he tells us how many variant readings of the New Testament there are (hint: a lot!), but why it doesn't really bother people in the know.


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"Let's compare the New Testament to ancient classical manuscripts. Okay, let's begin with that. If I want to know what the text says, I've got to have some good copies, because are going to be variant readings. Let me begin with the bad news. We have so many Greek manuscripts, in the neighborhood of 55, maybe more right now, maybe 58 hundred, Greek manuscripts, we have so many copies that there are just plain a lot of variant readings. There are a lot of variant readings. I'm going to surprise some of you when I say this, and this figure is old, but the last figure I saw, a couple decades ago is about two hundred thousand variant readings in the New Testament text. Two hundred thousand variant readings. Ugh. Two hundred thousand! How we ever going to get to the bottom of this? How we ever going to find out what the text says?

Well, there's a little epistemic thing here, for you philosophers. You know how we know there's two hundred thousand variant readings? 'Cause you can count 'em. And when you can count 'em, you can work on 'em. See, when you can count them - Counting them means you know where they are.

How many have ever seen the red plastic New Testaments that are put out in Greek that are the chief critical Greek text that you could study in any university? If you're going to study Greek, you get this red, plastic New Testament. How many of you know what I'm talking about? It's about this size. Some of you? Does anybody know what is the bottom of every one of those pages? When you open up these Greek New Testaments that Greek students study, whether you're in a private school, state university, wherever. When you study the Greek text, about half the page will be the Greek text and there'll be something at the bottom. There'll be a line. Below that line — on every page there's something there. Anyone know what that is? Those who raised their hands? You know what's at the bottom of the page? It's called 'critical apparatus.' Every major variant reading is listed at the bottom of the page. So if you know Greek, and you get to be really good at this...

The bad news is that there's two hundred thousand variants; the good news is, you could put your finger on 'em, you know what they say, and you can evaluate them. The two hundred thousand variations bothers nobody. Everybody knows they're there. They're usually not aware that there are that many.

It bothers nobody, because you can compare texts and the New Testament is very, very wealthy in texts. Let me give you some examples. If you have ten copies or partial copies of ancient historical texts like Tacitus, Pliny, Suetonius, if you have ten, you are doing well. You are doing well. If you have twenty - There are only a very, very, very few classical texts with more than twenty copies. Homer. Homer's "Iliad" in an example. There are over six hundred copies of Homer's "Iliad." That's fantastic!

So let's take the number one competitor to the New Testament. Okay? Number one competitor. Final score. Let's make this an athletic contest. Final score: fifty-five hundred to six hundred and fifty. First of all, you say, for classical texts, six hundred and fifty is fantastic - but don't look now - you just got killed! Well, you say, 'well come on, it's not that straight a deal, it's not a numbers game, like a basketball game.' No, really, again we could pursue this in the Q&A if you want to. But... for the most part, more texts make a more accurate reading." - Gary Habermas

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