The God of all creation and boundless love has a message for us. He wants us to know Him, meet with Him, even abide in Him, and choose to love Him back. He gave us information, motivation, encouragement, guidance, and wisdom through normal people who diligently and prayerfully captured His words. Some of these people had special gifts of prophecy, great faith, and divine wisdom. However, some were shepherds, a tax collector, two fishermen, and a tent maker. The point here is that God used ordinary people to convey His message. One man was not only a man but God in human form—Jesus Christ of Nazareth.
Is it reasonable to believe that the Creator of the universe sent His message through unreliable sources? Did He entrust this special assignment in an unguided, careless manner? The only answer that makes any sense to this question is no. He has a message, and He ensured the message comes to us loud and clear.
All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness, so that the servant of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work (2 Timothy 3:16–17). For prophecy never had its origin in the human will, but prophets, though human, spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit (2 Peter 1:21).
Dr. Bart Erhman, a New Testament scholar, has made it abundantly clear that he believes the copies we have of the biblical manuscripts are riddled with errors and variations amongst the copies which, to him, clearly indicate that God hasn’t preserved the Scriptures for His people and that if He was unable to preserve the message, then perhaps He never performed the miracle of divinely inspiring the passages after all. This is quite the claim and may seem reasonable at first.
However, Dr. Erhman seems to expect God to work around humanity to preserve his words, so that textual criticism wouldn’t even be necessary.
“The pattern throughout the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures reveals a different pattern-the pattern of a God who works through humanity. Given God’s penchant for revealing his glory through failure-prone implements of flesh and blood in the first place, who’s to say that a process such as textual criticism might not be precisely the pathway that God has chosen to preserve and to restore the words of Scripture?” (Jones, 2007, p. 48)
According to Timothy Jones in his book Misquoting Truth2, Ehrman believed that Scripture was divine in such a way that no place remained for the human aspects of the Bible’s creation, conservation and canonization (p. 143-144).
New Testament scholar Robert Gundry put it this way:
“Ehrman has so hardened the categories of humanity and divinity that since the Bible is “a very human book,” for him it can’t also be divinely inspired. The human authors’ writing out of their “needs, beliefs, worldviews, opinions, loves, hates, longings, desires, situations, problems” somehow excludes the Holy Spirit’s using those needs, beliefs, worldviews, and so on to convey divine revelation. As though God could have communicated in a vacuum, apart from such concomitants!” 3
Timothy Jones ends his book in his Concluding Reflections with the following:
At some point where the horizons of faith and history ever so gingerly embrace one another, I still find myself unable to escape this conviction: The tomb was empty because what appeared to be the end of the story was actually the birth of a new beginning, because death turned into life, because what was least probable of all became possible and real and true. What’s more, I believe the New Testament includes testimony from the women and men who first witnessed the results of this reversal. Nothing less can account for the evidence I find not only in Scripture but also beyond the Scriptures, in the testimony of the church’s first four centuries (p. 146).
We have several articles on the reliability of the Scriptures, and you can find them here:
1. Did the Story of Jesus change by the time the Gospels were written?
2. Are the Catholic Epistles of Peter, James, and John forged?
3. Were the Gospels written by actual eyewitnesses?
4. Is the New Testament reliable? Parts 1 and 2
And here’s a video, if you’d like:
To sum it up; when people say that the Bible is inspired by God, they mean that God used His divine Power to influence the human authors of the Scriptures to ensure that what they wrote was exactly what God wanted them to write—the very Word of God Himself.
References:
1. Bart D. Ehrman, Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why, p. 11. New York: HarperCollins, 2005.
2. Timothy Paul Jones, Misquoting Truth: A Guide to the Fallacies of Bart Ehrman’s Misquoting Jesus, Nachdr. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2007.
3. Robert H. Gundry, ‘Post-Mortem | Books and Culture’, Book Reviews, Books & Culture, 2006, https://www.booksandculture.com/articles/2006/sepoct/3.8.html
