Can the Bible be Trusted?

Can the Bible be trusted? To this very day people have made the charge that the Bible has been tainted. One of the great evidences purported to prove this point is the telephone game. Most of us remember as children playing this game. The concept is quite simple. One person starts by whispering a message into the first person’s, in a line of people’s, ear. That person is to relay the info to the next and so on down the line until the last person in the room. Inevitably the message is totally distorted by the time it makes it to the last person.

Many are persuaded that it must be this same way with the Bible. It was written thousands of years ago and it was rewritten over and over again. “Surely”, says the skeptic, “the message conveyed by the original authors of the scriptures has changed drastically over the millennia.” This seems like very logical reasoning. How is the Christian to respond to this line of thinking?

For many years believers could say things like, “I believe based on faith.” Or possibly, “God can keep his Word from being tainted.” These statements are both true and lay at the foundation of the faith. But God says in Isaiah chapter 1, “Come now and let us reason. . .” We are to have a reasonable faith.

Do we have good evidence that the Biblical message has not deteriorated through the years? Thankfully, yes. Beginning in the year 1947, a young Muslim goat herder threw a rock into a cave and heard the sound of pottery being shattered. Wandering into the cave, the young boy found ancient scrolls in shattered pots. This was the beginning of the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls.

In the dead sea scrolls archaeologists found portions of every single book in the Old Testament, excluding the book of Esther. Many of the scrolls were over 2000 years old. This means that many of these manuscripts were around before the time of Jesus!

Now we had the chance to compare our modern manuscripts with the ancient to see if the “telephone game” analogy is true in this situation. As a result of the Dead Sea Scrolls we now know that the Bible that we hold in our hands today has been virtually unchanged for thousands of years. I Peter 1:25 holds true, “But the word of the Lord endures for ever. And this is the word which by the gospel is preached unto you.” Jesus himself, said, “Heaven and earth shall pass away: but my words shall not pass away.”