Warner Wallace gives a list of criteria he used in his investigations to determine if someone was a reliable eyewitness. In his book Cold-Case Christianity, former homicide detective J. 25 years is nothing for those kinds of impactful events. Imagine all the things that the eyewitnesses of the actual events could still recall to this day. And that’s me – 3000 miles away from the event only seeing it on TV. Enough that I could write a few pages about it. I still remember the details of that day pretty well. That was 20 years ago as of this writing. So, a 25-year time gap is nothing compared to the gaps we have for some of our most famous ancient historical figures.Īs another comparison let’s take one of the most tragic events to happen in US history in the past several decades – 9/11. The sources for Tiberius Caesar – 80 to 180 years after his death. Plutarch’s writings on Alexander the Great came 400 years after Alexander’s death. There are competing theories as to which gospel was written first, but the prevailing theory is that it was Mark between 50-55 A.D.Ģ5 years between when an event occurred and when it was documented seems like a big gap. Based on the criteria above, scholars have dated the manuscripts of the New Testament from 40-45 A.D. Textual critics use several factors including the language used, the absence of events, the inclusion of events, and other narrative clues to determine when a text was first written Historians agree that Jesus most likely died in either 30 or 33. With those things in mind, let’s now go through the external evidence for why the Bible is trustworthy 1. And, finally, we have Herodotus – the “father of history” who, in his work Histor ies, gives us a detailed account of the Greco-Persian War. Theucydides gave us his great work on the Peloponesian War between Athens and Sparta. We know about ancient Greek culture and politics through the orations of a politician named Demosthenes. And, we also have a historian named Tacitus wrote a biography for Tiberius Caesar – the emperor on the throne when Jesus was executed. Another historian from whom we get much of our knowledge regarding the 1st century Greco-Romain world is Livy (59 BC – 17 AD). We get these from a Roman historian named Suetoneus. Next, we have the biographies of twelve Caesars starting with Julius Caesar and going to Domitian. This information comes primarily from two authors – Arrian and Plutarch We know a lot about his life, his military conquests, and many of the other things he did. When trying to determine if the Bible is a reliable source of information, it is important to see how it stacks up next to some of the other works that we get our ancient history from.įirst, let’s look at the life of Alexander The Great. 6 reasons we can trust that what we have today is an accurate telling of the teachings and events of the life of Jesus of Nazareth and his followers. What I wanted to do in this article is share with you some of the evidence outside of the Bible I found on why we can trust it. But, the more I dug into the Bible, the more I learned about its place in history and the place of other ancient writing in history What I discovered is that no other book has more evidence for the way it has been transmitted, the way it was created, and – more importantly – the things it says. See, I had all of the above hangups in my mind. I had a major roadblock in my way and that was the Bible. It doesn’t sound very trustworthy.īefore I was a follower of Christ, that’s where I was. We don’t even have the copies of the copies. Why is that? Well, for starters, it was completed over 2000 years ago. Hard to say how many were printed before that.ĭespite all of this, it remains one of the most scrutinized, critiqued, and attacked works ever created. It’s been translated to 349 languages, and the Bible Society estimates that 2.5 billion copies were printed between 18. It’s estimated that over 100 million copies are bought or given away every year. The Bible is the most popular book ever printed.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |