Accuracy of the Bible

[Kevykev]

Sorry guys, this isn't meant to stir up anything, this is only for those who seek info on the bible and it's validity. It's a long but GOOD read, i recommend it!

This thread might possibly get long due to strong opinions BUT as long as you read the passage in it's entirety you've gotten the main idea! Just think of when you'll get some nice quite time, sit back and relax - read


"Amazing Evidence for the Trustworthiness of the Bible"
By Charlie H. Campbell


1. FULFILLED PROPHECY

Fulfilled prophecy is something that sets the Bible apart from every other religious book. There are 26 other religious books that people of faith believe are divinely inspired (the Vedas, the Bhagavad-Gita, the Mahabharata, the Upanishads, the Qur'an, the Book of Mormon, the Tripitaka, etc.). Of these twenty-six books, none of them, not a single one, contains any specific, fulfilled prophecies!

The Bible, however, is filled with hundreds of specific, detailed prophecies that were written hundreds of years before their fulfillment! In fact, an amazing 27% of the Bible (more than 1 out of every 4 verses) contains what was predictive prophecy at the time that it was written. And the authors of the Bible did not just predict some vague things like Nostradamus or Jeanne Dixon (who by the way, have proven to be wrong over and over again), they were very specific. Consider some of the more than 100 different and very specific prophecies made concerning the Messiah, who the Old Testament prophesied would come.

The Old Testament foretold, hundreds of years in advance, very specific details about: the Messiah's ancestry, that He'd be born of the seed of Abraham (Gen. 12:1-3, 22:18), of the tribe of Judah (Gen 49:10), of the house of David (2 Samuel 7:12f), etc. The city in which He would be born (Micah 5:2), that He'd come while the temple was still standing (Malachi 3:1), that He would be born of a virgin (Isaiah 7:14), that He would perform miracles (Isaiah 35:5-6), that He'd be rejected by His own people (Psalm 118:22; 1 Peter 2:7), the precise time in history when He would die (Daniel 9:24-26; 483 years after the declaration to reconstruct the city of Jerusalem in 444 B.C. This was fulfilled to the very year.), how He would die (Psalm 22:16-18, Isaiah 53; Zech 12:10), that He would rise from the dead (Psalm 16:10; Acts 2:27-32), and there are many more. All of these prophecies and hudreds others have been literally fulfilled.

The skeptic says: "Maybe Christians inserted those prophecies back into the Old Testament after Jesus lived."

Not a chance. How do we know? There exists today hundreds of manuscript copies of the Old Testament that predate the time of Christ's birth. These ancient copies of the Old Testament, dating back to the third century B.C., verify that these prophecies concerning the Messiah were already in place. In 1947 a shepherd boy tending his father's sheep in Qumran, north and to the west of the Dead Sea in Israel, made an amazing discovery while looking for a lost sheep. There in Qumran, in a hillside cave that had laid untouched for nearly two thousand years, he discovered an ancient collection of hand written copies of the Old Testament. These scrolls had been hidden in caves by the Essenes, a Jewish sect living in Qumran, 2,000 years ago. These scrolls and writings (now known as the Dead Sea Scrolls) represented every book of the Old Testament except the Book of Esther, and are considered one of the greatest discoveries in modern times. It's manuscript evidence like this Isaiah scroll that dates back to about 100 B.C. that proves, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that the Old Testament, and its many prophecies concerning the Messiah, was finished long before Jesus was even born.

The skeptic says: "How do you know that the Dead Sea Scrolls date back to before Christ?"

Teams of scholars determined the scrolls age by examining 1. The pottery that housed the manuscripts 2. The weave and pattern of the manuscript cloths 3. The form of the characters 4. The spelling of the words 5. The coins found alongside the manuscripts.

The skeptic says: "Perhaps Jesus was not the Messiah, but just accidentally or even deliberately set out to fulfill these prophecies."

First, it's hard to think of any person deliberately setting out to fulfill prophecies that would result in a short life and an excruciating drawn out death on a cross. Secondly, how does a man deliberately choose the lineage he is born into, the time period in which he is born, -the city in which he is born? Was the fulfillment of these prophecies an accident? Peter Stoner, a mathematician, and Professor Emeritus of Science at Westmont College, in his book Science Speaks (Moody 1963) calculated the odds of a single man fulfilling just eight of the prophecies that Jesus fulfilled as the mathematical improbability of 1 in 10 to the 17th. That is a HUGE number. One in ten to the seventeenth power. That's a one with seventeen zeros after it (100,000,000,000,000,000). If we had 100 quadrillion 1" x 1.5" tiles we could cover every square inch of dry land on planet Earth. The fact that these prophecies and hundreds of others have been fulfilled, even though they were spoken hundreds and even thousands of years before their fulfillment, is strong evidence that a God, who is all-knowing and all-powerful, orchestrated the Bible's completion.

2. ARCHAEOLOGICAL DISCOVERIES

For the past 150 years archaeologists have been verifying the exact truthfulness of the Bible's detailed records of various events, customs, persons, cities, nations, and geographical locations. Dr. Nelson Glueck probably the greatest modern authority on Israeli archeology, has said, "No archeological discovery has ever controverted [overturned] a Biblical reference. Scores of archeological findings have been made which confirm in clear outline or in exact detail historical statements in the Bible. And, by the same token, proper evaluation of Biblical descriptions has often led to amazing discoveries."

In every instance where the Bible can be, or has been checked out archaeologically, it has been found to be 100% accurate. The Bible has proven so accurate that archaeologists often refer to it as a reliable guide when they go to dig in new areas. In fact, even though less than 1% of the material available to excavate in the tells in Israel has been excavated, there have been more than 25,000 discoveries within the region known as the "Bible Lands" that have confirmed the truthfulness of the Bible. Entire books have been written on this topic. Allow me to give you three examples.

A. Pontius Pilate

The Bible says that he was the Roman governor of Judea and the man who issued the official order for Jesus to be sentenced to death by crucifixion (Matthew 27; Mark 15; Luke 23; John 18-19). In June of 1961 a team of Italian archaeologists, led by Dr. Antonio Frova, were excavating the Mediterranean port city of Caesarea that had at one time served as the Roman capital of Palestine. It was there in the jumbled ruins of an ancient Roman theater that they uncovered a large 2' x 3', 5" or so thick, limestone rock. The inscription on the rock amazed the archaeologists. It read in: "Pontius Pilate, Prefect of Judea, has presented the Tiberium to the Caesareans." (Scholars believe that the Tiberium refers to a temple or some other kind of public structure named after the Roman emperor Tiberius, who reigned from 14–37 A.D.) This stone is on display today in the Israel Museum as a testimony to the reliability of the Bible.

B. Caiaphas

Caiaphas, the Bible tells us, was the Jewish high priest at the time of Jesus crucifixion. Was he a make believe character? Some thought so, that is until 1990, when the Caiaphas family tomb was accidentally discovered by workers constructing a water park just south of Jerusalem. Archaeologists were hastily called to the scene. When they examined the tomb they found 12 ossuaries (limestone bone boxes) containing the remains of 63 individuals. On the outside of the most beautifully decorated of the ossuaries was inscribed the words: "Joseph son of Caiaphas." What's incredible is that Josephus (that Jewish historian of the first century A.D.) in his writings (Antiquities 18: 2, 2; 4, 3) documents that that was actually the full name of the high priest who arrested Jesus, "Joseph son of Caiaphas." (Saying "son of" was a way of referring to the family name). Inside the ossuary archaeologists found the remains of a someone approximately 60-years-old at the time of his death...the actual bones of Caiaphas, the high priest mentioned in the Bible. Today Caiaphas' ossuary is also on display in the Israel Museum as a testimony of the Bible's trustworthiness!

C. David

David of course was the most loved of all of Israel's kings. Some liberal scholars though had denied that King David was a historical figure because there was no mention of him outside of the Bible. Their skepticism changed in 1993. It was then, at an excavation at Tel-Dan in N. Israel they found a now famous stone with an inscription (in Aramaic) referring to the House of David. In 1994 two more fragments of the same stone inscription were discovered, again mentioning the House of David. In 1995 Time Magazine did a story on this discovery and stated, This writing—dated to the 9th century B.C., only a century after David's reign—described a victory by a neighboring king over the Israelites…The skeptics' claim that King David never existed is now hard to defend" (Time, December 18, 1995). It's because of discoveries like this that men like Millar Burrows, (former Professor at Yale University) stated, "…archaeological work has unquestionably strengthened confidence in the reliability of the Scriptural record. More than one archaeologist has found his respect for the Bible increased by the experience of excavation in Palestine" (Burrows, Millar. What Mean These Stones? New Haven: American Schools of Oriental Research. 1941, p. 1.). Like I said, there are literally thousands of these archaeological discoveries that point to the Bible being an accurate and trustworthy historical document.

Archaeology has not proven so helpful for other religious writings. Consider the Book of Mormon. "Not one piece of evidence has ever been found to support the Book of Mormon -- not a trace of the large cities it names, no ruins, no coins, no letters or documents or monuments, nothing in writing. Not even one of the rivers or mountains or any of the topography it mentions has ever been identified." (Dave Hunt, p.156, In Defense of the Faith; also see p. 107 in The Case for Christ, by Lee Strobel). Nothing which demonstrates that the Book of Mormon is anything other than an early nineteeth century piece of American fiction, invented by Joseph Smith has ever been found.

The National Geographic Society stated on August 12, 1998, "Archaeologists and other scholars have long probed the hemisphere's past, and the Society does not know of anything found so far that has substantiated the Book of Mormon." The Smithsonian Institute in Washington D.C. has also verified this utter lack of evidence saying in 1996 when they said, "The Smithsonian Institution has never used the Book of Mormon in any way as a scientific guide. Smithsonian Archaeologists see no connection between the archaeology of the New World and the subject matter of the Book."