Who wrote the Bible?
How does it compare to other "sacred" books?
The Quran came from Mohammed. The Book of Mormon came from Joseph Smith. But the Bible is unique among the many sacred books in the world. One person did not write it. Rather, the Old and New Testaments were written by 40 different authors, located in Asia, Africa and Europe, over a 1600-year time span.
The Bible's writers--even over such a long period of time--all convey the same basic message: the God who created the heavens and the earth has provided a way for people to know Him in a personal way.
Also, compared to other ancient writings, the Bible has been remarkably protected, preserved over time. Compared to only seven existing manusacripts of Plato's writings, there exists over 5,000 manuscripts of the New Testament. And when the text of all these volumes are compared one to another, you find they are 99.5% consistent with each other.
Has the New Testament changed and become corrupted over time?
Some people have the idea that the New Testament has been translated "so many times" that it has become corrupted through stages of translating. Well, if the translations were being made from other translations, they would have a case. But translations are not made from translations, but from original Greek text found in ancient manuscripts.
We know the New Testament we have today is true to its original form because:
1. We have such a huge number of manuscript copies--over 5,000.
2. The words among those copies are in agreement with each other--99.5% agreement.
3. The copies were found very close to their original date of authorship--see link at end of this section.
|