Reaching the lost, equipping the Saints
The greatest external evidence of the truth of God word is the testimony and experience of those who have been impacted by it’s message.
With all this in view it is clear the the Bible is proven as the only source of objective truth and will be used as our source of absolute authority as we continue on our quest to find the Gospel as defined by the scriptures and consider it’s implications for our lives today.
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Contrary to the propaganda heard through the popular media, Science when used honestly always points to the truth of the bible… here is just one example
Historically, the most convincing evidence for evolution is the fossil record. Evolutionists claim that the fossil record displays a gradual evolution of animal and plant life from primitive forms to complex forms with transitional phases between major classes (e.g., between fish and amphibians, amphibians and reptiles, reptiles and birds, and so on).
But this scenario has no support. There is no evidence that complex life forms evolve from primitive life forms because no such transitional species between any of these groups of animals have ever been found in the tons of fossil-bearing rock recovered over the past one hundred thirty years.
We will cover science and the bible in a later production, in the mean time we suggest Answers In Genesis as a trustworthy resource on this subject.
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Fulfilled prophecies give clear attestation to the hand of God in human history and are some of the most important evidences for the historical reliability and truthfulness of the Old Testament. The Bible is the only religious document in existence that provides more than two thousand prophecies that validate its historical claims. These prophecies deal with Jesus Christ, the nation of Israel, other nations (e.g., Babylon, Persia, Greece, and Rome), cities (e.g., Tyre and Babylon), and even people (e.g., Nebuchadnezzar and Cyrus). Of course, some other religions make prophetic claims, however, in no other religion in the world has prophecy been fulfilled so completely and so accurately as that recorded in the Bible.
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Archaeology has proven that Israel derives its ancestry from-Mesopotamia, as the Bible teaches (Gen. 11:27–12:4).
Archaeology suggests that the world’s languages likely arose from a common origin, as Genesis 11 implies.
Jericho, and several other cities mentioned in the Old Testament, previously thought to be legendary by skeptics, have now been discovered by archaeologists.
This is just a very small sample from a large list of discoveries made in this field which corroborate the veracity of the Bible
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The original Bible manuscripts (called autographs) were written on material such as papyrus, which deteriorated quickly. Consequently, scribes were needed to copy and recopy the Old Testament books letter by letter. These copyists knew they were duplicating God’s Word, so they went to incredible lengths to prevent error from creeping into their work. The whole process of recopying the Bible was controlled by strict religious rituals, and the scribes carefully counted every line, word, syllable, and letter to ensure accuracy. As a result of their diligence, the Old Testament in our Bible today is virtually identical to the autographs.
Bible scholars have demonstrated this by comparing ancient copies of the Bible with more recent copies. For example, prior to the discovery of the Dead Sea Scroll manuscripts in 1947, the oldest existing (extant) Old Testament manuscript was the Massoretic Text, dated around a.d. 900. But with the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, fragments of almost every book in the Old Testament were found, many of them dating back to around 150 b.c., a thousand years earlier.
One of the most important manuscript discoveries was two copies of Isaiah. So far they are the oldest known copies of any complete book of the Bible. What did textual critics discover when they compared the Dead Sea manuscripts of Isaiah with the Isaiah preserved in the Massoretic Text dated a thousand years later? Old Testament scholar Gleason Archer provides the answer:
“Even though the two copies of Isaiah discovered in Qumran Cave number one near the Dead Sea in 1947 were a thousand years earlier than the oldest dated manuscript previously known (a.d. 980), they proved to be word for word identical with our standard Hebrew Bible in more than 95 percent of the text. The 5 percent of variation consisted chiefly of obvious slips of the pen and variations in spelling.”
From manuscript discoveries like the Dead Sea Scrolls, Christians have undeniable evidence that today’s Old Testament Scripture, for all practical purposes, is exactly the same as it was when originally inspired by God and recorded in the Bible.
We do not posses any of the autographs of the New Testament. Like the Old Testament, the New Testament books were originally written on materials that quickly wore out and therefore had to be copied and recopied by hand for centuries before the invention of the printing press. So we need to determine how closely the existing copies represent the autographs. That is, how do we know that the New Testament we have today is close enough to the original writings as to be equally reliable?
One of the areas of evidence has to do with the available number of New Testament manuscripts. What we discover is that there are more extant New Testament manuscripts than any other document from antiquity. More than 24,000 partial and complete copies of the New Testament are in existence today. By comparison, the ancient document second in number of available copies is the Iliad, which has only 643 surviving manuscripts. And this number is extremely high compared to other ancient documents.
In fact, there are enough quotations from the early church fathers that even if we did not have a single copy of the Bible, scholars could still reconstruct all but 11 verses of the entire New Testament from material written within 150 to 200 years from the time of Christ.
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