Skeptics often claim that the Bible is comparable to ancient myths or sacred texts from other religions, but a close look at the Bible and its message reveals a uniqueness that cannot be found elsewhere.  As we continue looking at ways to make a positive case for Christianity, I want to survey the uniqueness of the Bible, because I think that if we can show that it is completely unlike any other book ever produced, we can make a compelling case for its supernatural origin.

 

The Unique, Countercultural Message of the Bible

The Bible’s message is very different from the message produced by any other society in the ancient Near East or elsewhere.  Even though the Bible was written over the course of many centuries (approximately 1,500 years, according to the estimate of most conservative scholars, but even according the estimate of liberal skeptics, at least 500 years), and by many different authors (perhaps 40), it presents a message that is not only unified, but countercultural.  That message includes the following points:

• Theology: From start to finish, the Bible depicts one God as the source of everything (including moral law), and who is both transcendent and imminent. No other ancient culture held this view of God.
• The unity of humanity. All humans are created by God and in the image of God.  There is thus a human equality that challenges the feelings of cultural superiority that were common in the ancient world.
• Universal human sinfulness. Other ancient cultures believed in divine judgments, but no other culture produced a view of universal human sinfulness in which all people are in need of God’s grace.  No other ancient work of literature was so critical of the faults of its heroes.  (In fact, this was unheard of in ancient royal chronicles).  But the Bible is consistent in pointing out the sins of even the most righteous people depicted in its pages and showing that Jesus was the only sinless person ever to walk the earth.
• Challenging human hierarchies, yet without privileging any single group: The Bible repeatedly depicts God choosing the outcast – e.g., the younger son, the barren woman, the sinner, the pagan Gentile, et al. The Bible preserves the voices of women, slaves, peasants, and children, along with kings and warriors.  This is highly unusual.
• The inversion of the hero motif: In ancient Near Eastern stories, heroes were people who struggled with the gods. In the Bible, righteous people were those who submitted to God and accepted his grace, and received covenant blessings in spite of their own foolishness and rebellion.
• Affirmation of human diversity, yet also assertion of unity within this diversity. The Bible contains a wide variety of literary genres (e.g., court poetry, love poetry, worship music, laments, proverbs, reflective wisdom literature, historical narrative, apocalyptic prophecy, parables, biography, letters, law codes, eyewitness accounts, covenant documents, and royal chronicles, among others), and it was written in three languages (Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek) by people ranging from rustic shepherds and fishermen to educated urbanites.  In calling such people to write his message, God affirmed the full range of human expression, which is what we might expect from a God who created all of humanity.  Yet the final product presented a unified message about God, humanity, and redemption.
• Finally, perhaps the most countercultural aspect of the entire Bible is its declaration that a crucified man was God in the flesh – that is, that the creator of the entire universe entered into the world as a human being and was nailed to a cross for the sins of the world.

No other sacred text or book from the ancient world presents such a countercultural, unified message in such diverse literary form.

When skeptics raise questions about alleged contradictions in the Bible, it’s important to address those questions, but in doing so, we should always make sure that we bring the conversation back to the astonishing unity and countercultural message of the Bible as a whole.  In other words, in dealing with skeptical objections to the Bible, let’s make sure that we don’t miss the forest when looking at the trees.

 

Did the Bible Borrow from Ancient Myths or Religious Practices?

One of the most common contemporary skeptical objections to the Bible is the charge that the Bible incorporated pagan myths and ancient religious practices in its religious system and presented them as the word of God.  For example, they say, New Testament church rituals were borrowed from Greco-Roman mystery cults.  The flood story comes from ancient Near Eastern myth.  The temple worship system was modeled after Bronze Age pagan worship.  Such borrowing, skeptics say, disproves the Bible’s claims to be a unique revelation of God.

How do we deal with this charge?  I think that it’s important to distinguish between the content of the Bible’s message and its form.  The content of the Bible is deeply countercultural, as I demonstrated above.  But the form of the Bible is culturally bound or culturally embedded – that is, it makes use of a lot of the cultural practices and assumptions of the people to whom the message was given.  Thus, for example, the Bible makes use of preexisting literary genres, such as wisdom literature (which was known in Egypt long before it made its way into the Bible in the time of Solomon), ancient biography (which was common among the Greeks and Romans long before the gospels were written), and the conventions of ancient letter-writing.  When Paul wrote letters to other Christians, for instance, he didn’t invent a new literary genre to convey his message; he made use of some of the standard epistolary conventions of his time and place, such as beginning the letter with his name at the top and a standard greeting.  Similarly, God used numerous other literary conventions throughout the Bible, such as the genre of suzerain-vassal treaties to present the message of his covenant with his people, poetry to convey expressions of worship and prayer, and even myth (such as the reference to “Leviathan the serpent” in Is. 27:1, which was a reference to a well known ancient Near Eastern myth).  And in prescribing worship liturgy to his people, God made use of motifs that were common in the ancient Near East, such as priests, animal sacrifices, temples, ritual circumcision, ritual cleansing with water, communal feasts, etc.  The forms were culturally specific, but the message that the forms conveyed was not.

When we see God’s use of culturally specific motifs, we should be reminded that God has entered into our world in order to communicate with us.  The form in which God revealed his message was culturally specific at times because God has reached out to his people where they are.  Just as God communicated with Jacob through a dream about sheep breeding (Gen. 31:10) and with Peter by showing him the power of God over the fish of the sea (Lk. 5:1-11), so God has used culturally specific forms of revelation to communicate to his people throughout biblical history.  Jesus did this in his parables, in fact.

This points to God’s imminence and ultimately, to the incarnation, so we should view it as evidence of God’s desire to communicate with us, not a reason to doubt the Bible’s divine origin.  But if it does cause us to question whether the Bible is really of supernatural origin, we need to remember the countercultural content of the message.  If the form of the message was culturally specific, the message itself transcends the culture in which it was created.

 

What about Alleged Contradictions in the Bible?

The charge that some verses in the Bible contradict other verses has been circulating for centuries.  How should we deal with this allegation?

While there are a few apparent discrepancies that perhaps cannot be easily harmonized or explained, most alleged contradictions in the Bible can be resolved by asking the following questions:

• What was the audience and intended purpose of the passages? For example, the audience for the Old Testament law code was different than the audience for the New Testament, so if we find discrepancies between, say, a command in Deuteronomy and a verse in Colossians, we should not be surprised.
• What was the literary genre of the passage(s) and what were the expectations for that genre? For instance, many alleged contradictions between the different gospel narratives can be resolved by considering the expectations of the genre of historical writing in the ancient world.  No one in the ancient world expected historical writing to report the exact wording of speeches, nor did people necessarily expect a chronologically organized account when a thematic arrangement better suited an author’s purposes.
• Is it possible to harmonize the alleged discrepancies in a way that doesn’t distort the text? Would the original author or audience have seen the contradiction that we allege?  (For instance, some people who allege a contradiction between Genesis 1 and 2 have ignored the rather obvious question of why the author or compiler of Genesis did not see this contradiction himself.  If the author or compiler of Genesis did not consider the first two chapters of Genesis contradictory, why should we?)  If we see an apparent contradiction – but wonder why the original author did not – perhaps we can ask what the author’s original purpose for this material might have been.

In most cases, an honest attempt to answer each of these questions will resolve the contradictions that we might imagine we see.  And in the few cases where the alleged discrepancies cannot easily be resolved, we need to recognize our own limitations in interpreting the biblical text, while also reminding ourselves of the astonishing unity of the Bible and the other evidences of its supernatural origin.  If I were dialoguing with a Christian about these matters, I would encourage the Christian to trust God in those areas where we may not have enough information to resolve an alleged contradiction.  And if I were dialoguing with a skeptic about this subject, I might need to remind the skeptic that even if it could be proven conclusively that there are contradictions in the Bible, that affects only the claim of scriptural inerrancy; it certainly does not negate the claims of Jesus, let alone the existence of God.  And while the doctrine of scriptural inerrancy might be important, it’s not the ultimate foundation for our faith.  The truth claims of Christianity do not depend on our ability to resolve every alleged contradiction in scripture.

 

The Trustworthiness of the Biblical Manuscripts

A skeptic might also ask why we should trust a book that was handwritten nearly two millennia ago and copied numerous times.  We don’t have the original text of the Bible, so how can we be sure that the message has been copied accurately?  Furthermore, how do we know that people remembered the words of Jesus accurately long enough to write them down?  Bart Ehrman is a widely read contemporary skeptic (and New Testament scholar) who has popularized these skeptical questions, so many people may be familiar with these charges against the accuracy of the biblical text.

In answering these objections, we should remember that we shouldn’t view the Bible in the same way that Muslims view the Quran.  The Bible’s words are “God-breathed” and they are a record of what God said, but they are not the mechanically dictated words of God.  The message can be accurately transmitted even when the wording varies.  So, while we should strive for 100% accuracy when translating the Bible and engaging in textual reconstruction of the Hebrew or Greek text, we should never assume that the transmission of God’s word is dependent on achieving 100% accuracy.

Having said that, we can also be grateful that, in fact, the biblical text that we have today is extremely close to the original, as far as can be determined.  We have far more ancient manuscripts of the New Testament than we do for any other ancient book, which means that scholars’ ability to compare these manuscripts and reconstruct the original text is much greater for the Bible than it is for any other ancient work of literature.  We have 5,800 complete or fragmented Greek manuscripts of the New Testament, along with 10,000 manuscript copies of Latin translations of the New Testament, and 9,300 manuscript of other translations (such as Coptic and Syriac translations, for instance).  By comparison, there is no ancient work of literature for which we have even 2,000 manuscript copies.  Some of the New Testament manuscript fragments date back to the 2^nd century, and we have complete manuscripts dating back to the early 4^th century.  These manuscripts come from various geographic regions and scribal traditions.  When the manuscripts agree in their rendering of a passage, it offers strong reason to believe that the original text has been preserved, since it’s highly unlikely that a variation would have replaced the original reading in all of the thousands of manuscripts that we possess.  And in those cases where the text does not agree, scholars can look at the history and origins of the various manuscripts to reconstruct when variations might have entered the manuscript tradition, and they can use that knowledge to figure out which set of manuscripts might have preserved the original reading of a passage.  By using this technique, we can be nearly certain that we have the original reading of almost every verse in the New Testament.  There are only two major passages whose authenticity is in significant doubt: Mark 16:9-20 and John 7:53-8:11.  The textual questions about those two passages are noted in the margins of most modern English translations.  There are a handful of other verses about which some doubt exists, and those, too, are generally noted.  But most textual variations in the New Testament are extremely minor (e.g., some manuscripts might say “Christ Jesus” in a particular passage, while other manuscripts render the phrase “Jesus Christ”) and do not affect the meaning at all.

There is a lot more that could be said about manuscript transmission, but probably the best thing to do when a skeptic brings up this issue is to challenge them to look at the evidence and then ask if they can give good reasons for doubting that we have a reasonably good idea of what the New Testament books originally said.

Finally, some people (such as Bart Ehrman) have raised the question of how we can know that Jesus’s words, which were delivered in oral form, were preserved in the gospels, which were not written until perhaps forty years after Jesus’s crucifixion.  This is a large and complex topic, and this brief response may not suffice to answer every objection, but here are some points to keep in mind:

• In an oral culture, disciples of a teacher were used to memorizing large amounts of information verbatim. Presumably, Jesus’s disciples would have done this.
• The form of Jesus’s teaching made it easy for people to remember it. For example, much of Jesus’s teaching in the Synoptic gospels consists of short sayings that could easily be remembered (e.g., “A house divided against itself cannot stand”) or parables (the gist of which could also be easily remembered).
• It is also possible that Jesus’s disciples wrote down some of Jesus’s sayings long before the gospels were written. Luke, for example, suggests that several books about Jesus were already circulating long before all of the Synoptics were complete (Lk. 1:1-2).
• A case for the authenticity of Jesus’s sayings can be made by noting the preservation of Aramaic in some of Jesus’s statements (e.g., Mk. 5:41, 7:34, and 15:34). Because Jesus apparently spoke Aramaic most of the time, his disciples would have remembered his statements in Aramaic.  The New Testament books were written in Greek, but when they preserve Aramaic statements of Jesus, we can get a pretty good idea that those sayings were accurately transmitted from the Galilean society of which Jesus was a part to the gospel writers.

But finally, if I were talking to a Christian who had these questions, I would point out the power of the Holy Spirit to accurately preserve God’s word and the power of God to communicate in many different languages and in many different ways.  Many of the New Testament writers, for instance, used the Septuagint translation of the Old Testament, which, by most measures, was not a particularly accurate translation of the Old Testament Hebrew text.  It may not have been a very literal translation, but it was sufficient for God’s purposes in the New Testament era.  I think that the English Bible that we have today is a far more accurate translation of the original text than the Septuagint was.  But ultimately, the transmission of the gospel does not depend on getting a perfect rendition of the original text.  We should try to get as accurate a rendition as possible, but in the end, God’s message can be preserved even with a very loose translation or significant discrepancies with the original autographs.

A fair evaluation of the evidence, I think, should lead to the conclusion that the Bible’s text has been transmitted with a high degree of accuracy, which gives us confidence that we are reading something very close to the original text when we read a good modern translation.  With this confidence in the Bible’s text, we can then consider the message of the Bible, which is truly unique.  The Bible not only transcends its own culture but speaks to people of every culture in every time period.  It is unlike any other book ever written.