Is the Bible true? To borrow a phrase from Pontius Pilate, what is "Truth?" And what is the Bible true, or false, about?
When fundamentalists say that the Bible is true, they mean basically the same thing as the Chicago Statement on biblical inerrancy: the Bible (and specifically the creation account in Genesis) is factually accurate, free from mistakes and contradictions, and authoritative on all matters on which it speaks, including science and history. According to most evangelical Christians, you can read the Bible for a literal account of how God created the heavens and the earth in six 24-hour days about 6,000 years ago.
Incidentally, many atheists approach the Bible from the fundamentalist perspective, i.e., reading the Bible in a straightforward, literal way; although the obvious difference is that atheists believe that the Bible is not true, because its statements about science and history, when read literally, are factually inaccurate and contradictory.
On the other hand, many Christians, such as Catholics, Methodists, and Episcopalians, take a more nuanced and philosophical approach to reading the Bible. Of course, with Catholics, the dogmatic fundamentalism comes into play, not with the Bible, but with the Church's traditions, such as various doctrines about Mary's immaculate conception and perpetual virginity.
For most Christians in more traditional denominations, the Bible is true in the sense that Galileo allegedly said it was true, when he was on trial for heresy: the Bible tells you how to go to heaven; it doesn't tell you how the heavens go.
Under Galileo's view, the Bible's authors wrote about history or science only incidentally; those subjects were not their focus, and it certainly wasn't God's purpose to give us a scientific or historical textbook. The Bible's statements about history or science may, or may not be, correct; but because the purpose of the Bible is to convey spiritual truths, the truth of falsity of the Bible's statements about physical science are not material.
So is the Bible true in the literal sense meant by fundamentalist Christians (and some fundamentalist atheists)? And if not, could it be true in the more philosophical and theological sense in which it is believed by more mainstream Christians?
As I indicated in a previous post, I am a recovering fundamentalist. No, I never really read Genesis as literal history or science (at least not since early childhood), but I did believe in the literal truth of most of the New Testament, in particular the biggest miracle of them all, the resurrection of Jesus from the dead.
For me, the errors and contradictions in Genesis were simply too much to ignore. You can't even get through the creation account without running into all kinds of problems.
People say they believe that the creation account in Genesis is true. I say, "Great! Which one?"
Huh? Which creation account?
Most people read through the first two chapters of Genesis without ever noticing that they are describing two separate and mutually exclusive creation accounts. Just read Genesis 1:1 to 2:3, and make a timeline of everything that happens. Then, read Genesis 2:4 through 2:24 and make a timeline of everything that happens. Then compare your timelines.
Were humans created after the plants and animals or before? Did God create male and female humans at the same time, or did he create a man first and then a woman much later?
I have pretty much always known that Genesis could not be literally accurate, since it contains two contradictory creation accounts. However, I thought that both accounts could be read together to give a general thematic account of how humans were created by God, but rebelled spiritually against God by wanting to determine what is good and evil for themselves, rather than accepting God's sovereignty or the moral law that he imposed.
Also, I believed that at least some of the miracles in the Bible happened, more or less, as recorded. Specifically, I believed in the literal virgin birth of Jesus, as well as his crucifixion, death, and literal resurrection from the dead; and I believed that Jesus was literally going to return to bring the world to an end and institute a final judgment.
I know that many fundamentalists would not have considered me a real fundamentalist, given some of my positions on specific doctrinal issues or on the interpretation of certain biblical texts. However, the reason I use that label is that my approach was similar to theirs. I wanted to find the "Truth," and I believed that the Bible gave me everything I needed in order to ascertain the Truth concerning God, the meaning of Life, and how people ought to live.
For me, the attraction of this belief system was that it provided a safe and comfortable haven from the unpredictable storms of life. For a Christian, everything happens for a reason. Nothing happens by accident. There is no such thing as luck. God has the major parts of Life's rich pageant all figured out, and he will cause all things to work out for the best for those who trust him and follow his word (Romans 8:28).
Belief confers immense benefit psychologically. Security and safety are basic human desires, and it feels incredibly reassuring to know that God knows everything about your situation and that he has a foolproof plan to make your life into something profoundly meaningful.
Of course, such belief can also have immense psychological costs. What if there is no plan? What if the world doesn't operate according to the principles that are set forth in the Bible as absolutes? What if, as Forest Gump put it, shit happens? Your obstinate refusal to entertain certain questions or to admit certain realities can cause tremendous cognitive dissonance. To avoid unpleasant truths, you sometimes have to deny your own very genuine thoughts and feelings, as well as force your experience of the world to fit within the boundaries of your orthodox expectations. In doing that, you disown your truest and most authentic self.
For me, I wound up realizing that even though I seemed to always know what I "should" do or "had to" do, I no longer knew what I wanted to do. I felt like I should be happy and content, but I wasn't. I I was believing the right things and doing the right things, yet I was miserable and terribly distressed.
Let's say I saw a sign that said, "No Jesus, no peace; know Jesus, know peace." Let's say that someone pointed it out to me in passing. I would, out of a sense of obligation, say, "Amen." I would force a smile. Why? Because I knew I should agree with it. Because by faith, I knew the formula worked. Except that it wasn't working for me. I knew Jesus, but I didn't have peace. But surely that was due to some fault of mine. Not praying enough. Not enough faith. Pride. I must have too much pride, or something. I certainly couldn't entertain any doubt about the formula.
I eventually reached a point in my life where the evidence became too overwhelming to ignore: the formulas were not working. And all the "biblical" advice I was getting from my fellow Christians only added to my confusion, because none of that was working either. Worst of all was the so-called Christian counseling and Christian therapy.
Even though I did not believe that the Bible was absolutely, unquestionably true about the physical world, I still believed the Bible to be absolutely and unquestionably true concerning our inner spiritual and emotional life. I knew that modern science had disproved many of the explanations and predictions of natural phenomena that medieval Christians had made based on the Bible; however, I thought that science had left the Bible's statements about our inner human nature more or less intact. Therefore, I deferred to the Bible and to Christian "authorities" when it came to matters of mental health. This was a big and very costly mistake.
Let me digress for a moment about Christian "counseling." This stuff is total horseshit. Actually, it's much worse that horseshit. At least with horseshit, you're not likely to mistake it for being the cure for a very real illness.
American Christianity's pseudo-answer to modern psychiatric medicine is a bunch of dark-ages nonsense. Imagine a faith healer telling a cancer patient not to do chemotherapy anymore, because secular medicine is not biblical. When it comes to mental and emotional health, that's basically where "Christian" therapy is at.
For Christians with mood disorders and other mental health issues, the charismatic churches offer the Inner Healing Movement, which goes by various names like "Sozo" and "Theophostic Prayer Ministry" or "TPM." The operative principles of these inner healing programs is derived from repressed memory therapy (guided by the Holy Spirit, purportedly). That's right. Repressed memory therapy. Something that secular medicine tried and REJECTED as completely UNRELIABLE several DECADES ago. Supposedly, the Holy Spirit helps you dredge up your repressed memory of the first time you felt afraid or abandoned or what not; and then you look for Jesus in that memory, so he can heal it. Best of all, it is absolutely guaranteed not to give you any false or unreliable memories, because it's all done in Jesus's name!
Christians "counselors" are using therapy based on 1950s-era junk science, but because Jesus is involved, there's no possibility of it harming anyone. I'm amazed by the level of presumptuousness people are willing to take with mental health, that they absolutely, positively would not take in other areas of life, no matter how super-spiritual it sounded. No megachurch pastor would fly on an airplane being piloted by someone with zero flying experience, no matter how "led by the spirit" that person claimed to be. We're skeptical when it comes to physical safety, but not when someone makes an unscientific claim about mental and emotional health..
Sorry for the digression. I suppose you could infer that my own journey with mental health and my struggle with depression and anxiety had a lot to do with my realization that I did NOT have the answers, because the answers thought I had were definitely NOT working. Moreover, I was reading and hearing people share their own experiences and insights in secular contexts, and it seemed to me that the secular wisdom was at least showing real results.
At some point, I really started to question the insistence of Christian leaders on staying within the Christian culture when it came to mental health issues. For example, when I shared with one leader that I was going to see a therapist through a employee assistance program offered by my employer, the leader asked only, "Is she a Christian?" Not, "Is she qualified? Does she know her stuff? Is she licensed? Have her techniques been scientifically tested?" Nope. None of that mattered. All that mattered was whether she was a Christian.
I realized something in that moment. I believed this particular person meant well when he cautioned me about using a non-Christian therapist. But it struck me that he probably would not have stressed the issue of the therapist's religious affiliation if I had mentioned that I was seeing a physical therapist while recovering from a leg injury. And the more I thought about it, the more I realized that these fundamentalist leaders and teachers were very selective in their orthodoxy.
Eventually, the dam broke for me. I reached a point where I had to be honest with myself. The biblical explanations and predictions about human nature were just as wrong and counterproductive as the ones about astronomy or biology. As I read and exposed myself to the ideas and findings of modern neuroscience, I had to admit that modern science did a better job of explaining human nature than the Bible and theologians did.
As Sam Harris explains in his fantastic book Waking Up, the religions of the East may make some bizarre and unnecessary metaphysical claims about the Universe, but they also provide some genuine, important, and empirically verifiable insights about consciousness and experience. However, the Abrahamic religions of the West, including Christianity, do not merely provide useless conceptions of the Self and human awareness, they make positively harmful and misleading claims that can be difficult to overcome, even though the evidence of modern science almost uniformly contradicts these claims.
I finally reached a point where I was able to admit to myself that I did not believe much of the Bible's claims about Human Nature, but I still believed that The Bible was true in an important sense. The New Testament, at least, recorded supernatural events that really happened, right? These were eyewitnesses to the ministry and miracles of Jesus, right? Maybe the New Testament writers were not qualified to speak on matters of mental health or the laws of nature, such that they wrote a fallible account of what Jesus did and said, but at least I could be sure that Jesus really did and said those things, even if the New Testament writers misinterpreted it or got some of the specifics wrong or out of order. Right?
Then I listened to The Historical Jesus by Bart Ehrman. The Historical Jesus is a 12-hour series of lectures by New Testament scholar Bart Ehrman of the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, in which professor Ehrman approaches the surviving documents about Jesus' life and teachings, including the four canonical gospels, using standard criteria for evaluating historical evidence. The course answers the question, what can we know about who Jesus was and what Jesus taught, based on the historical evidence?
Remember the Matrix, when Neo is offered a red pill and a blue pill? The red pill would dispel Neo's comfortable illusions about his most basic beliefs about the world and about himself. Well, The Historical Jesus was like taking the red pill.
As it turns out, none of the New Testament gospels were written by eyewitnesses. They were written decades after the fact by educated Greek-speaking Christians, not by Jesus's uneducated Aramaic-speaking disciples. The gospels are full of contradictions, some minor, but some touching on core tenets of the Christian faith.
Moreover, an historical analysis of the New Testament indicates that Jesus was an apocalyptic Jewish preacher who preached about an imminent end of the world, for which the proper response was abandonment of worldly concerns like career, possessions, family, etc. That's what the earliest gospel, Mark, indicates, as do the undisputed letters of the Apostle Paul. It is not until the later New Testament writings, such as the Gospel of John or the letters forged in Paul's name, that Jesus emerges as a transcendent "image of the invisible God" who is "one in being with the Father" and who was "begotten not made." During the intervening decades, Jesus was transformed from the apocalyptic Jewish preacher of Mark's Gospel to the transcendent God of the Gospel of John.
I do want to mention a caveat regarding the Apostle Paul: he really did believe that Jesus had been raised from the dead and that Jesus was coming back, soon, as the apocalyptic Son of Man (from the book of Daniel). The indisputably Pauline epistles include categorical statements from Paul about seeing the risen Christ, and a historical analysis of the New Testament indicates that Paul was originally a fierce adversary and persecutor of the church, but that he subsequently had what he believed to be a bona fide vision of Jesus, and that this experience convinced him that Jesus was the Messiah. Moreover, as a result of this experience, Paul appears to have completely given his life to spreading this "good news" about Jesus. The great weight of the evidence calls many of the New Testament's claims about Jesus into question, but Paul's convictions indicate that at least some of these doctrines do go back to the early decades of Christianity.
After considering Dr. Ehrman's lectures about the historical Jesus, as well as several of his books about the New Testament and church history, such as Jesus: Apocalyptic Prophet of the New Millenium and Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why, I believe that it is possible to believe in Jesus as Messiah based on the New Testament, but that this belief would need to be somewhat sophisticated and nuanced in order to be logically sound, given what we know about the New Testament, the ancient world, and the history of the church.
If God intended for us to take a literal, fundamentalist view of The Bible, then I believe he would have done more (1) to make the Bible internally consistent and (2) to safeguard the earliest writings of the apostles, so that we could be reasonably confident that we know that the original manuscripts of the New Testament actually said. As Dr. Ehrman put it, how can we be certain that God preserved the original manuscripts from error, when he did not preserve the actual manuscripts themselves? What we do have are copies of copies of copies, the earliest of which date from centuries after the books were purportedly written. And the books were originally written decades after the events and speeches that they purportedly document. Given The Bible that we actually do have, it is clear that God did not give us a book that is without error.
While I believe the Bible can support a nuanced and sophisticated faith in God, I also believe that there are other issues that undermine, or at the very least complicate, the question of whether the Bible is true.
Such issues include the problem of extreme suffering, such occurred en masse during the Holocaust or American slavery. How could an all-loving and all-powerful and all-knowing God allow for such suffering, especially of young and helpless children?
I do not pretend to have an answer to these questions. Maybe they are unanswerable (at least for those of us with merely "human" experiences and understandings of the world). I think problems arise when people, who are not satisfied with not knowing, want to go make unwarranted claims about God and humanity and then demand that those claims be swallowed unquestioningly by Christians based on some kind of biblical faith.
Below is a video of a debate between Dr. Bart Ehrman and Dr. William Lane Craig, a Christian philosopher, about the historical reliability of the Bible, specifically with regards to the resurrection of Jesus.
Below is a video of a debate between Dr. William Lane Craig and Dr. Sam Harris concerning morality. Dr. Craig argues that God is a necessary and sufficient basis for morality. Although Dr. Craig is a Christian apologist, he does not specifically argue for a Christian conception of God, although it may be the case that he implicitly makes use of Christian concepts. Dr. Harris argues specifically against Christianity and the Bible being a source of moral Truth.
So is the Bible true? It depends in what sense you are asking the question. Is the Bible literally, factually, historically, and scientifically true? It's highly unlikely.
But does the Bible contain true and important insights about the spiritual dimension of our universe and ourselves? That is a question that you have to answer for yourself. Fortunately, there are many good resources available to help you, such as Bart Ehrman's books and Great Courses lectures. But ultimately, you have to make the call.
Please note that this article contains some affiliate links. If you purchase a product or course through these links, this site may receive a small commission from the sale, at no additional cost to you. Your support in this manner is greatly appreciated, as it helps defray the cost of operating this site.
Is the Bible True? Please let me know your thoughts in the comments section below. And if you enjoyed this article, you may enjoy other articles or blog posts on this site on subjects such as mindfulness and how to define "success." You may also enjoy reading David Hume's essay On Miracles (https://www.finding-meaning-in-life.com/p/introducing-david-humes-skeptical.html).
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| Is the Bible true? |
When We Ask Whether the Bible Is True, What Do We Mean by "Truth?"
Incidentally, many atheists approach the Bible from the fundamentalist perspective, i.e., reading the Bible in a straightforward, literal way; although the obvious difference is that atheists believe that the Bible is not true, because its statements about science and history, when read literally, are factually inaccurate and contradictory.
On the other hand, many Christians, such as Catholics, Methodists, and Episcopalians, take a more nuanced and philosophical approach to reading the Bible. Of course, with Catholics, the dogmatic fundamentalism comes into play, not with the Bible, but with the Church's traditions, such as various doctrines about Mary's immaculate conception and perpetual virginity.
For most Christians in more traditional denominations, the Bible is true in the sense that Galileo allegedly said it was true, when he was on trial for heresy: the Bible tells you how to go to heaven; it doesn't tell you how the heavens go.
Under Galileo's view, the Bible's authors wrote about history or science only incidentally; those subjects were not their focus, and it certainly wasn't God's purpose to give us a scientific or historical textbook. The Bible's statements about history or science may, or may not be, correct; but because the purpose of the Bible is to convey spiritual truths, the truth of falsity of the Bible's statements about physical science are not material.
So is the Bible true in the literal sense meant by fundamentalist Christians (and some fundamentalist atheists)? And if not, could it be true in the more philosophical and theological sense in which it is believed by more mainstream Christians?
My Journey As a Recovering Fundamentalist, and What I Learned...
For me, the errors and contradictions in Genesis were simply too much to ignore. You can't even get through the creation account without running into all kinds of problems.
Creationism: Literal Fundamentalism or Figurative Imagery?
Huh? Which creation account?
Most people read through the first two chapters of Genesis without ever noticing that they are describing two separate and mutually exclusive creation accounts. Just read Genesis 1:1 to 2:3, and make a timeline of everything that happens. Then, read Genesis 2:4 through 2:24 and make a timeline of everything that happens. Then compare your timelines.
Were humans created after the plants and animals or before? Did God create male and female humans at the same time, or did he create a man first and then a woman much later?
I have pretty much always known that Genesis could not be literally accurate, since it contains two contradictory creation accounts. However, I thought that both accounts could be read together to give a general thematic account of how humans were created by God, but rebelled spiritually against God by wanting to determine what is good and evil for themselves, rather than accepting God's sovereignty or the moral law that he imposed.
Also, I believed that at least some of the miracles in the Bible happened, more or less, as recorded. Specifically, I believed in the literal virgin birth of Jesus, as well as his crucifixion, death, and literal resurrection from the dead; and I believed that Jesus was literally going to return to bring the world to an end and institute a final judgment.
I know that many fundamentalists would not have considered me a real fundamentalist, given some of my positions on specific doctrinal issues or on the interpretation of certain biblical texts. However, the reason I use that label is that my approach was similar to theirs. I wanted to find the "Truth," and I believed that the Bible gave me everything I needed in order to ascertain the Truth concerning God, the meaning of Life, and how people ought to live.
Psychological Reasons for Believing in the Truth of The Bible
Belief confers immense benefit psychologically. Security and safety are basic human desires, and it feels incredibly reassuring to know that God knows everything about your situation and that he has a foolproof plan to make your life into something profoundly meaningful.
Of course, such belief can also have immense psychological costs. What if there is no plan? What if the world doesn't operate according to the principles that are set forth in the Bible as absolutes? What if, as Forest Gump put it, shit happens? Your obstinate refusal to entertain certain questions or to admit certain realities can cause tremendous cognitive dissonance. To avoid unpleasant truths, you sometimes have to deny your own very genuine thoughts and feelings, as well as force your experience of the world to fit within the boundaries of your orthodox expectations. In doing that, you disown your truest and most authentic self.
Cognitive Dissonance Arising from Believing The Bible to Be Absolutely and Unquestionably True
Let's say I saw a sign that said, "No Jesus, no peace; know Jesus, know peace." Let's say that someone pointed it out to me in passing. I would, out of a sense of obligation, say, "Amen." I would force a smile. Why? Because I knew I should agree with it. Because by faith, I knew the formula worked. Except that it wasn't working for me. I knew Jesus, but I didn't have peace. But surely that was due to some fault of mine. Not praying enough. Not enough faith. Pride. I must have too much pride, or something. I certainly couldn't entertain any doubt about the formula.
I eventually reached a point in my life where the evidence became too overwhelming to ignore: the formulas were not working. And all the "biblical" advice I was getting from my fellow Christians only added to my confusion, because none of that was working either. Worst of all was the so-called Christian counseling and Christian therapy.
Is the Bible True about Mental Health? A Digression on Christian "Counseling"
Let me digress for a moment about Christian "counseling." This stuff is total horseshit. Actually, it's much worse that horseshit. At least with horseshit, you're not likely to mistake it for being the cure for a very real illness.
American Christianity's pseudo-answer to modern psychiatric medicine is a bunch of dark-ages nonsense. Imagine a faith healer telling a cancer patient not to do chemotherapy anymore, because secular medicine is not biblical. When it comes to mental and emotional health, that's basically where "Christian" therapy is at.
For Christians with mood disorders and other mental health issues, the charismatic churches offer the Inner Healing Movement, which goes by various names like "Sozo" and "Theophostic Prayer Ministry" or "TPM." The operative principles of these inner healing programs is derived from repressed memory therapy (guided by the Holy Spirit, purportedly). That's right. Repressed memory therapy. Something that secular medicine tried and REJECTED as completely UNRELIABLE several DECADES ago. Supposedly, the Holy Spirit helps you dredge up your repressed memory of the first time you felt afraid or abandoned or what not; and then you look for Jesus in that memory, so he can heal it. Best of all, it is absolutely guaranteed not to give you any false or unreliable memories, because it's all done in Jesus's name!
Christians "counselors" are using therapy based on 1950s-era junk science, but because Jesus is involved, there's no possibility of it harming anyone. I'm amazed by the level of presumptuousness people are willing to take with mental health, that they absolutely, positively would not take in other areas of life, no matter how super-spiritual it sounded. No megachurch pastor would fly on an airplane being piloted by someone with zero flying experience, no matter how "led by the spirit" that person claimed to be. We're skeptical when it comes to physical safety, but not when someone makes an unscientific claim about mental and emotional health..
Sorry for the digression. I suppose you could infer that my own journey with mental health and my struggle with depression and anxiety had a lot to do with my realization that I did NOT have the answers, because the answers thought I had were definitely NOT working. Moreover, I was reading and hearing people share their own experiences and insights in secular contexts, and it seemed to me that the secular wisdom was at least showing real results.
At some point, I really started to question the insistence of Christian leaders on staying within the Christian culture when it came to mental health issues. For example, when I shared with one leader that I was going to see a therapist through a employee assistance program offered by my employer, the leader asked only, "Is she a Christian?" Not, "Is she qualified? Does she know her stuff? Is she licensed? Have her techniques been scientifically tested?" Nope. None of that mattered. All that mattered was whether she was a Christian.
I realized something in that moment. I believed this particular person meant well when he cautioned me about using a non-Christian therapist. But it struck me that he probably would not have stressed the issue of the therapist's religious affiliation if I had mentioned that I was seeing a physical therapist while recovering from a leg injury. And the more I thought about it, the more I realized that these fundamentalist leaders and teachers were very selective in their orthodoxy.
I Do Not Believe That The Bible Provides Helpful Insights about Human Nature
As Sam Harris explains in his fantastic book Waking Up, the religions of the East may make some bizarre and unnecessary metaphysical claims about the Universe, but they also provide some genuine, important, and empirically verifiable insights about consciousness and experience. However, the Abrahamic religions of the West, including Christianity, do not merely provide useless conceptions of the Self and human awareness, they make positively harmful and misleading claims that can be difficult to overcome, even though the evidence of modern science almost uniformly contradicts these claims.
Is The Bible True? The Straw that Broke the Camel's Back for Me...
Then I listened to The Historical Jesus by Bart Ehrman. The Historical Jesus is a 12-hour series of lectures by New Testament scholar Bart Ehrman of the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, in which professor Ehrman approaches the surviving documents about Jesus' life and teachings, including the four canonical gospels, using standard criteria for evaluating historical evidence. The course answers the question, what can we know about who Jesus was and what Jesus taught, based on the historical evidence?
Remember the Matrix, when Neo is offered a red pill and a blue pill? The red pill would dispel Neo's comfortable illusions about his most basic beliefs about the world and about himself. Well, The Historical Jesus was like taking the red pill.
As it turns out, none of the New Testament gospels were written by eyewitnesses. They were written decades after the fact by educated Greek-speaking Christians, not by Jesus's uneducated Aramaic-speaking disciples. The gospels are full of contradictions, some minor, but some touching on core tenets of the Christian faith.
Moreover, an historical analysis of the New Testament indicates that Jesus was an apocalyptic Jewish preacher who preached about an imminent end of the world, for which the proper response was abandonment of worldly concerns like career, possessions, family, etc. That's what the earliest gospel, Mark, indicates, as do the undisputed letters of the Apostle Paul. It is not until the later New Testament writings, such as the Gospel of John or the letters forged in Paul's name, that Jesus emerges as a transcendent "image of the invisible God" who is "one in being with the Father" and who was "begotten not made." During the intervening decades, Jesus was transformed from the apocalyptic Jewish preacher of Mark's Gospel to the transcendent God of the Gospel of John.
I do want to mention a caveat regarding the Apostle Paul: he really did believe that Jesus had been raised from the dead and that Jesus was coming back, soon, as the apocalyptic Son of Man (from the book of Daniel). The indisputably Pauline epistles include categorical statements from Paul about seeing the risen Christ, and a historical analysis of the New Testament indicates that Paul was originally a fierce adversary and persecutor of the church, but that he subsequently had what he believed to be a bona fide vision of Jesus, and that this experience convinced him that Jesus was the Messiah. Moreover, as a result of this experience, Paul appears to have completely given his life to spreading this "good news" about Jesus. The great weight of the evidence calls many of the New Testament's claims about Jesus into question, but Paul's convictions indicate that at least some of these doctrines do go back to the early decades of Christianity.
After considering Dr. Ehrman's lectures about the historical Jesus, as well as several of his books about the New Testament and church history, such as Jesus: Apocalyptic Prophet of the New Millenium and Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why, I believe that it is possible to believe in Jesus as Messiah based on the New Testament, but that this belief would need to be somewhat sophisticated and nuanced in order to be logically sound, given what we know about the New Testament, the ancient world, and the history of the church.
If God intended for us to take a literal, fundamentalist view of The Bible, then I believe he would have done more (1) to make the Bible internally consistent and (2) to safeguard the earliest writings of the apostles, so that we could be reasonably confident that we know that the original manuscripts of the New Testament actually said. As Dr. Ehrman put it, how can we be certain that God preserved the original manuscripts from error, when he did not preserve the actual manuscripts themselves? What we do have are copies of copies of copies, the earliest of which date from centuries after the books were purportedly written. And the books were originally written decades after the events and speeches that they purportedly document. Given The Bible that we actually do have, it is clear that God did not give us a book that is without error.
Further Considerations on Whether The Bible Is True
Such issues include the problem of extreme suffering, such occurred en masse during the Holocaust or American slavery. How could an all-loving and all-powerful and all-knowing God allow for such suffering, especially of young and helpless children?
I do not pretend to have an answer to these questions. Maybe they are unanswerable (at least for those of us with merely "human" experiences and understandings of the world). I think problems arise when people, who are not satisfied with not knowing, want to go make unwarranted claims about God and humanity and then demand that those claims be swallowed unquestioningly by Christians based on some kind of biblical faith.
Is The Bible True? Some Debates . . .
Below is a video of a debate between Dr. Bart Ehrman and Dr. William Lane Craig, a Christian philosopher, about the historical reliability of the Bible, specifically with regards to the resurrection of Jesus.
Below is a video of a debate between Dr. William Lane Craig and Dr. Sam Harris concerning morality. Dr. Craig argues that God is a necessary and sufficient basis for morality. Although Dr. Craig is a Christian apologist, he does not specifically argue for a Christian conception of God, although it may be the case that he implicitly makes use of Christian concepts. Dr. Harris argues specifically against Christianity and the Bible being a source of moral Truth.
So Is the Bible True?
So is the Bible true? It depends in what sense you are asking the question. Is the Bible literally, factually, historically, and scientifically true? It's highly unlikely.
But does the Bible contain true and important insights about the spiritual dimension of our universe and ourselves? That is a question that you have to answer for yourself. Fortunately, there are many good resources available to help you, such as Bart Ehrman's books and Great Courses lectures. But ultimately, you have to make the call.
Please note that this article contains some affiliate links. If you purchase a product or course through these links, this site may receive a small commission from the sale, at no additional cost to you. Your support in this manner is greatly appreciated, as it helps defray the cost of operating this site.
Is the Bible True? Please let me know your thoughts in the comments section below. And if you enjoyed this article, you may enjoy other articles or blog posts on this site on subjects such as mindfulness and how to define "success." You may also enjoy reading David Hume's essay On Miracles (https://www.finding-meaning-in-life.com/p/introducing-david-humes-skeptical.html).
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