Memorable Reasons Why We Can—And Should—Trust the Bible

Is it true that the Bible is just a book of fables, fairy tales, or allegorical “stories” that were never meant to be interpreted “literally” or understood to be historically factual?  Hasn’t the Bible been translated and changed so many times that we can’t possibly know what the original writings said?  And isn’t faith in the biblical God just a blind, irrational exercise of “wishful thinking” or a “leap in the dark” that isn’t grounded in any objective evidence?

In reality, on all points, nothing could be further from the truth.  These oft-repeated cultural canards may pack a powerful rhetorical punch, but thoughtful analysis reveals them to be careless caricatures of Christianity that demonstrate striking ignorance about—and in some cases, willful denial of—both the content of Scripture itself and the many substantive reasons why multitudes of people down through the centuries have believed the Bible to be true, even to the point of giving their very lives for its truth claims. 

Far from being a “blind leap,” biblical faith—properly understood—is an evidence-based confidence grounded in eyewitness testimonies that contain a preponderance of historically verifiable facts and which are corroborated by greater and higher-quality manuscript evidence than all other major writings of antiquity combined.  In short, there are very good reasons to believe the Bible contains trustworthy information and that its words ultimately originated from the mind of God Himself.  The purpose of this article is to show you in a memorable way what some of those reasons are.  

“God does not expect us to choose to serve Him out of nothing, but based upon overwhelming evidence—and through the evidence of the centuries. . . . And so, in the New Testament, when we read the history of the Church . . . in the very first chapter of Acts, we are told that Christ showed Himself alive after His Passion for 40 days by ‘many infallible [or “convincing”] proofs.’  And so, we do not have ‘blind’ faith, which is a leap into the dark—faith without evidence.  But rather, we have faith in overwhelming and incontrovertible evidence, which has never been and can never be overturned.  And that’s what Christian faith is; it is a leap out of the dark and into the light.” —Dr. D. James Kennedy, from a sermon titled “As for Me” [emphasis mine]

 

Years ago, Christian apologist Hank Hanegraaff cleverly devised a helpful mnemonic for defending the historical reliability and divine origin of the Bible:  M-A-P-S, an acrostic that brings to mind the fact that virtually all modern Bibles are published “with maps” of the Holy Land, Jesus’ ministry travels, Paul’s missionary journeys, etc.  In an attempt to complement Hank’s original mnemonic, which covers the external evidence for the historicity and divine authorship of sacred Scripture, I came up with an acrostic for the preposition W-I-T-H to cover the internal biblical evidence for the same.  Let’s begin there.

[Note:  If you are not a Christian, you will probably want to start by examining the external evidence for the Bible’s trustworthiness, so just scroll down to the “MAPS” acrostic and begin there.  Then, after you’ve read that section, I encourage you to scroll back up and examine the internal evidence.]

Internal Evidence: The Testimony Inside Scripture

The Bible demonstrates itself to be authentic and of divine origin.

WITH

Witness of the Holy Spirit
Inexhaustible Depth and Riches of the Bible
Testimony of Jesus and the Apostles
Harmony of the Scriptures

 

Witness of the Holy Spirit

Working in conjunction with holy Scripture, the Spirit of God convinces an individual of the truthfulness of God’s written Word and convicts that person of his/her own sins and desperate need for a Savior (cf. John 16:8-13).  When one is spiritually born again by faith in Jesus Christ, the Holy Spirit permanently indwells and abides with the believer (cf. Romans 8:9, 1 Corinthians 12:13, and Ephesians 1:13-14) and opens his/her previously blinded spiritual eyes to see and comprehend the formerly veiled spiritual truths of Scripture.  According to the Bible, spiritual truths are spiritually appraised (cf. 1 Cor. 2), which means that the unregenerate (i.e., spiritually dead and lost) person cannot properly understand the written Word of God or fully obey its precepts.  Being indwelt by the Spirit of Truth, however, the Christian has a personal Helper and Teacher (cf. John 14:16-17) who provides continual assurance not only of the believer’s salvation but also that the words of Scripture are true and that they in fact emanated from the very mind of Yahweh, the one true God, rather than being the product of mere human invention (cf. Romans 8:12-16 and 2 Peter 1:16-21).

[Note:  All human beings, including non-Christians, can and do have a basic knowledge of the spiritual realm (the existence of God, in particular) as a result of God’s “common” or general grace and His general or natural revelation — that is, through the light of creation, conscience, and cognition (cf. Romans 1:18-28 & 2:1-16).  However, in order to be saved (i.e., spiritually born from above) and placed in a right relationship with God, one must receive and obey God’s special revelation, which He makes known through the 66 canonical books of the Bible and the Person of Jesus Christ.  Through special revelation, God personally discloses the specifics of His moral will as well as His salvation plan for mankind.  Thus, it is only through the written Word of God that people can learn that their sinful condition puts them at enmity with a just, holy God, and that they must repent of their sins and trust in Jesus Christ alone for the forgiveness of their sins, resulting in justification (i.e., being legally declared “righteous” in God’s supreme court of law) and reconciliation with the God we have all sinned against and from whom our sins have estranged us.  Saving knowledge of the Lord Jesus Christ, then, is made possible only by the Holy Spirit working supernaturally through the Scriptures (cf. Romans 10:17 and 2 Timothy 3:14-17).]

Keep in mind that it was by the superintending guidance of the Holy Spirit that the Bible was written in the first place, and this was divinely accomplished through ordinary men whom God specially chose to record His thoughts to us (cf. John 14:26 and 2 Peter 1:21).  The Spirit of God testifies to the believer’s spirit that the Bible is the unique, authentic, personal Self-revelation of the living God and is, therefore, completely without error in its original form. 

[Note:  Please refer to the letter ‘M’ in the M-A-P-S acrostic below to learn why we can be confident that the English Bibles we read today are faithful and trustworthy reproductions of the original biblical writings or autographa.] 

“Without the present illumination of the Holy Spirit, the Word of God must remain a dead letter to every man, no matter how intelligent or well-educated he may be. . . . “I never knew you” (Matthew 7:23), says Christ to those who have not been born through this seed of the Word being brought to life within them by the Holy Spirit.  Since a birth is only the beginning of life, the Word of God through which we are begotten becomes the necessary food that nourishes the Christian.  Even so, the Holy Spirit must continue His work within those who are born of the Spirit, illuminating and applying the Word to men’s hearts for Christian growth.” —William Law (The Power of the Spirit, 1761) [emphasis mine]

 

In sum, the Holy Spirit illuminates the Bible, enables us to understand and apply its spiritual/supernatural truths, and works the Word of God into believers’ lives to conform us to the likeness of Christ (i.e., sanctification).

For further study, see the following:

1) “The Spirit’s Internal Witness” by Dr. R.C. Sproul 

2) “Answering Critics of the Inner Witness of the Spirit” by Dr. William Lane Craig and Kevin Harris

 

Inexhaustible Depth and Riches of the Bible

Just as it is impossible for finite beings to learn all there is to know about an infinite God, it is also impossible for us to learn all there is to know about the Word of God.  Truly, the wisdom and treasures contained within the sacred pages of Scripture are inexhaustible and unlimited.

Indeed, the more we study the Bible, the more truth and insight the Holy Spirit reveals to us so that God’s written Word remains forever fresh and applicable; it never becomes outdated or irrelevant.  This is why a person can read the same passage of Scripture multiple times over many years and continue to gain new insights about and grow in his understanding and appreciation of the biblical text and the God of whom it speaks.  Because its Author is timeless and changeless, the Bible is always relevant for every person, culture, epoch, location, and generation.  It truly is “living and active”!  (See 2 Timothy 3:16-17 and Hebrews 4:12.) 

“The Scriptures . . . are a treasure of divine knowledge, which can never be exhausted. . . . The most learned, acute, and diligent student cannot, in the longest life, obtain an entire knowledge of the Bible.  The more deeply he works the mine, the richer and more abundant he finds the ore.  New light continually beams from this source of heavenly knowledge to direct the conduct and illustrate the work of God and the ways of men; and he will, at last, leave the world confessing that the more he studied the Scriptures, the fuller conviction he had of his own ignorance, and of their inestimable value.” —Thomas Scott, English clergyman, from the preface to his Commentary on the Bible, 1804 

“The [Bible] is so simple that children can understand it, and it is so profound that studies by the wisest theologians will never exhaust its riches.” —attributed to Charles Hodge, Presbyterian theologian and principal of Princeton Theological Seminary between 1851 and 1878

 

Testimony of Jesus and the Apostles

Perhaps most tellingly of all, Jesus Himself believed and taught that the Bible is the very Word of God.  He never once criticized the Tanakh (i.e., the Old Testament), nor did He ever point out any errors or contradictions in the Hebrew Scriptures or the Septuagint (the Greek translation of the Old Testament, which was used during the time of Christ and the Apostles).  On the contrary, Jesus held Scripture in the highest possible esteem, affirmed its inerrancy, and acknowledged its divine authority by frequently identifying God as its Author and by using it to correct and rebuke the Pharisees, His own disciples, and even Satan when the Scriptures were misunderstood, abused, or disobeyed (cf. Matthew 4:4, Matthew 5:17-18, Mark 7:6-13, Luke 24:18-27, John 10:34-36, and John 17:17). 

“Man shall not live on bread alone, but by every word that proceeds out of the mouth of God. . . . You do not have His [i.e., God the Father’s] word abiding in you, for you do not believe Him whom He sent.  You search the Scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life; it is these that testify about Me. . . . [Father,] sanctify them in the truth; Your word is truth.” —The Lord Jesus Christ, the Living Word of God (Matthew 4:4; John 5:38–39; John 17:17)

“The Bible was the only book Jesus ever quoted, and then never as a basis for discussion, but to decide the point at issue.” —attributed to Leon Morris, Australian New Testament Scholar (1914–2006)

The Bible of Jesus’ time was what we know as the Old Testament, and it was intimately known by Jesus’ Jewish contemporaries.  So, how did Jesus view the Scriptures?  He had complete respect for them. 

In Mark 7:6-13, Jesus argues with the pious Jews because He believed them to be acting contrary to the Scriptures.  Quoting a passage from the prophet Isaiah, He proclaims that the Jews have “invalidated the word of God.”  In this statement, Jesus both affirms the truth of the prophet and proclaims the writings to be the very Word of God.

Perhaps the best example of Jesus’ respect for the Scriptures can be seen in Luke 24:18-27.  In this wonderful scene, Jesus walks with mourning disciples on the third day after the crucifixion.  Temporarily concealing His identity from them, the Lord divulges the Old Testament references that point directly to the coming of a Savior, Jesus Christ.  In doing so, Jesus [i.e., the living Word of God], put His stamp of approval on the fact that the [Old Testament] is indeed the written Word of God.

Jesus’ affirmation of the Bible’s validity is not only limited to the Old Testament; the Gospels also clearly assert the trustworthiness of the entire Word of God.  To refute this assertion is to say that Jesus must have been mistaken.  How can a believer in Jesus Christ as the perfect, holy Son of God ever believe that He would have made a poor, uninformed, or ignorant decision?  My friend, this is simply not an option.  Therefore, we can trust the Bible as God’s Word because Jesus had this confidence Himself. —Dr. Charles Stanley, InTouch Faith Foundations Course (no longer available, sadly)

 

Furthermore, the Apostle Paul refers to the Hebrew Scriptures as “inspired by God” or “God-breathed” (2 Timothy 3:16-17) and his own writings as “the Lord’s commandment” (1 Cor. 14:37).  In addition, the Apostle Peter affirms that Paul’s letters are equally inspired (literally, “God-breathed”) as the “rest of the Scriptures,” thereby equating Paul’s writings with the Tanakh (2 Peter 3:14-16).  Beyond that, there is abundant historical evidence that the early Christian Church recognized the divine inspiration of all 27 books of the New Testament as well as the entire Old Testament. 

To learn more, see the following:

1) “Is the Bible Inspired?” by Matt Slick  

2) “Is the Bible Authoritative?” by Greg Koukl

 

Harmony of the Scriptures

The Bible comprises 66 individual books written by 40 independent authors from very diverse backgrounds (kings, peasants, philosophers, poets, prophets, military leaders, fishermen, shepherds, teachers, a cupbearer, and even a physician and a tax collector) on 3 different continents (Asia, Europe, and Africa) in 3 different languages (Hebrew, Aramaic, and Koine Greek) over the span of approximately 1,500–2,000 years, and covers hundreds of topics.  [Note:  Significantly, given these facts, it is obvious that most of the Bible’s authors had no possible means of collaborating or colluding.]  Yet despite the radical differences in time, location, language, circumstances, and perspectives that separated the authors, this extraordinary collection of writings maintains a single redemptive theme (sometimes referred to as the “scarlet thread of Christ”), and its central message and doctrines are completely consistent and harmonious from cover to cover, without any legitimate contradictions (not to be confused with paradoxes or divine mysteries—see here for more on this point). 

The Bible is literally without parallel among religious and secular works, and no intellectually honest person would ever consider it to be a mere fabrication of man.

For further study, see the following:

1) “Do the Books of the Bible Form a Unified Whole?  Is This Evidence of Its Divine Inspiration?” by AIIA Institute

2) “Paradox, Mystery, and Contradiction” by Dr. R.C. Sproul

3) The Bible: Fast Forward by Greg Koukl/Stand to Reason

[Note:  This outstanding 8-session course presents a practical and unforgettable historical overview of the entire Old Testament and powerfully demonstrates that the Old and New Testaments—that is, the entirety of Scripture—are linked together by one cohesive theme:  God’s unfolding plan of salvation.  Special attention is given to God’s various covenants with the nation of Israel, and perhaps most importantly, the course persuasively explains how the major promises, events, types/symbols, and covenants recorded in the 39 books of the Old Testament found their ultimate and perfect fulfillment in the Person and Work of Jesus of Nazareth.]

 

External Evidence: The Testimony Outside Scripture

Several extra-biblical factors also strongly support the historical reliability and supernatural nature of the Bible.

MAPS

Manuscript Evidence
Archaeological Discoveries
Prophecies Fulfilled
Scientific Facts, Societal Transformation, and Survival of the Bible

 

Manuscript Evidence

Remarkably, the Bible is corroborated by greater manuscript evidence than any other book of antiquity, including the ten best pieces of ancient literature combined.

A manuscript is a handwritten copy of an original writing (a.k.a. an autograph).  With approximately 14,000 Old Testament and 5,700 Greek New Testament manuscript fragments (and counting), not to mention over 20,000 additional manuscripts of early translations of the New Testament (e.g., Latin, Coptic, Syriac, Arabic, Armenian, etc.) at their disposal, textual critics can faithfully reconstruct the text of the original biblical writings with a high degree of certainty by painstakingly comparing and contrasting the astounding superabundance of biblical manuscripts currently available.

“The interval between the dates of original composition (of the New Testament) and the earliest extant evidence becomes so small as to be in fact negligible, and the last foundation for any doubt that the Scriptures have come down to us substantially as they were written has now been removed.  Both the authenticity and the general integrity of the books of the New Testament may be regarded as finally established.” —Sir Frederic Kenyon, former director and principal librarian of the British Museum and one of the foremost experts on ancient manuscripts and their authenticity (The Bible and Archaeology, pp. 288-89)

 

NOTE:  For deeper study, I have compiled an extensive list of New Testament Manuscript stats here.  Also see the following:

1) “M-A-P-S to Guide You Through Bible Reliability” by Hank Hanegraaff

2) “Manuscript Evidence”       

3) “Manuscript Evidence for Superior New Testament Reliability” by Matt Slick

4) The Center for the Study of New Testament Manuscripts

 

Archaeological Discoveries

Unlike other religions and worldviews, Christianity actually invites historical investigation, and it rests on a firm foundation of verifiable, physical, archaeological evidence that helps substantiate the many historical, cultural, geographical, topographical, and socio-political truth claims recorded in both the Old and New Testaments.

For instance, on historical grounds, the writings of Luke — that is, the Gospel of Luke and Acts — stand out as arguably the best-attested works of antiquity.  This is because Luke included in his accounts meticulous eyewitness details that can be—and which have been—empirically verified.

Classical scholar and Roman historian Colin Hemer painstakingly identified 84 facts in just the last 16 chapters of Acts that have been confirmed to a T by historical and archaeological research (see Colin J. Hemer, The Book of Acts in the Setting of Hellenistic History).  Likewise, in just the first three chapters of his Gospel account, Luke mentions the names of 11 leaders who have been historically confirmed.

Classical scholar and archaeologist Sir William Ramsay, a skeptic of the Bible, once set out to disprove Luke’s historical claims.  At the end of his investigation, however, Ramsay had no choice but to conclude, “In various details, the narrative [Acts] showed marvelous truth.”  He further remarked, “Luke’s history is unsurpassed in respect of its trustworthiness,” and “Luke is an historian of the first rank. . . . [He] should be placed along with the very greatest of historians” (see William M. Ramsay, St. Paul the Traveller and the Roman Citizen, p. 8, and F.F. Bruce, The New Testament Documents: Are They Reliable?, p. 82).

The apostle John also has been vetted and proven to be a reliable historian in his own right.  New Testament scholar Craig Blomberg performed a detailed analysis of John’s Gospel account and found more than 50 details that either have been historically confirmed or found to be historically probable (see Craig Blomberg, The Historical Reliability of John’s Gospel).

Moreover, archaeologists and ancient non-Christian writers have confirmed the historicity of at least 30 persons mentioned in the aggregate of New Testament documents (see Norman Geisler and Frank Turek, I Don’t Have Enough Faith to Be an Atheist, Table 10.1, p. 270).

“It may be stated categorically that no archeological discovery has ever controverted a single biblical reference.  Scores of archeological findings have been made which confirm in clear outline or in exact detail historical statements in the Bible.” —Nelson Glueck, Jewish Archaeologist (Rivers in the Desert: A History of the Negev, 1960, p. 31)

 

In addition to the plentiful extra-biblical attestation we have from the independent, first- and second-century writings of the early church fathers to Jesus’ historicity, several independent, non-Christian, non-biblical writers also affirmed the historicity of Jesus of Nazareth within 150 years of His life, including the basic details of His ministry and death, as well as the beginnings of the Christian Church.  Some of these secular sources, several of whom were critics and/or hostile enemies of Christianity, include the following: 

Josephus (the most important Jewish historian of the 1st century A.D.), Tacitus (the most important and arguably the best Roman/Gentile historian of the 1st and early 2nd centuries A.D.), Pliny the Younger (Roman politician of the mid-1st and early 2nd centuries A.D.), Phlegon (a 2nd-century freed slave of Roman Emperor Hadrian who wrote histories), Suetonius (Roman historian of the late 1st and early 2nd centuries A.D.), Lucian of Samosata (a 2nd-century Greek satirist who mocked Christians), Celsus (2nd-century anti-Christian Greek philosopher), and Mara Bar-Serapion (a Syrian prisoner of Rome who wrote a private letter to his son sometime between the late first and early third centuries, although most scholars date the letter to A.D. 73).  [Note:  For deeper study into the ancient non-biblical evidence for the historicity of Jesus of Nazareth, watch this video.]

Counting both Christian and non-Christian sources, Drs. Gary Habermas and Michael Licona have found that Jesus of Nazareth is referenced by at least 42 independent authors before the close of the 2nd century, nine of whom were eyewitnesses to Jesus’ life and/or contemporaries of the events recorded in the New Testament.

To put this in perspective, consider that only 10 total ancient sources reference Tiberius Caesar, the Roman emperor at the time of Christ’s death, within the same 150-year time frame. 

Furthermore, in his remarkable investigative masterpiece Person of Interest: Why Jesus Still Matters in a World That Rejects the Bible, former atheist and cold-case homicide detective J. Warner Wallace carefully and cogently demonstrates through meticulous documentation, minutely detailed hand-drawn illustrations, and copious annotations that even if there weren’t a single copy of the Bible — or even so much as a manuscript fragment of the New Testament — still in existence anywhere in the world, we could still confidently reconstruct the central details about the life, character, nature, ministry, miracles, teachings, deity, death, and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth simply by observing His absolutely unparalleled and uniquely inspiring impact on nearly every aspect of world history and the collective imagination and creative output of the human race from the time Jesus lived to the present. 

Specifically, by looking merely at Jesus’ king-sized influence in the areas of literature (obviously including the writings of Christians from ancient to modern times, but also the even more pervasive writings of secular authors, novelists, poets, playwrights, songwriters, screenwriters, biographers, researchers, editors, columnists, lexicographers, encyclopedists, etc.), science (including the founders of every branch of modern science, the vast majority of whom were Christians who rightly understood the discipline of science to be a means of worshiping and learning more about the Creator God, and many of whom wrote extensively about the Bible, Christian theology, and the person of Jesus of Nazareth), education (including the oldest libraries, monasteries, public schools, and universities throughout the world whose founding charters and buildings are replete with plaques, monuments, statues, etc., featuring quotes from the New Testament and sundry other references to Christ and the Gospel message), non-Christian religions/worldviews (i.e., the sacred texts of competing religions throughout the world and statements from their spiritual leaders give us enough information to piece together all the most important details about Jesus Christ without the need for a Bible), and every conceivable category of the Arts (e.g., architecture, painting, sculpting, graphic design, music, filmmaking, etc.), Wallace makes an undeniable case that to erase the ineradicable “evidential trail” of Jesus’ historicity from this planet would require the greatest of all miracles!   

For more information, see the following:

1) “Archaeology and the Bible“

2) “Archaeological Evidence Verifying Biblical Cities” by Matt Slick

3) “Archaeological and External Evidence“

4) “50 People in the Bible Confirmed Archaeologically” by Lawrence Mykytiuk

5) Rose Book of Bible Charts, Maps & Timelines, Volume 1 – “Archaeology & the Bible–Old Testament” (pp. 73-78) and “Archaeology & the Bible–New Testament” (pp. 113-118)

 

Prophecies Fulfilled

The Bible records over 2,000 predictive prophecies that have come to pass in world history, including more than 300 events that Jesus perfectly fulfilled several centuries after the predictions were made.  Many of these prophecies have been corroborated by secular sources and archaeological findings.

For example, Isaiah the prophet, who wrote approximately 700 years before Jesus was even born, foretold Christ’s virgin birth; the significant titles He would be called and unique roles He would fulfill; the beginning of His forerunner’s (i.e., John the Baptist) ministry, which was essential to preparing the way for Christ’s own earthly ministry; the central message Jesus would preach and the divine works He would accomplish during His ministry; and most amazingly of all, detailed and vivid descriptions of the incomparable suffering/Passion that Jesus would endure on the Cross for the sins of humanity.

Or consider the prophet Daniel, who, writing in the 500s B.C., successfully predicted the succession of the world’s four greatest empires:  the Babylonian Empire, the Medo-Persian Empire, the Grecian (Greek) Empire, and the Roman Empire. 

No less remarkable was Jesus’ own foretelling of the destruction of the Jewish Temple in Jerusalem, which He spoke some 40 years before the Romans fulfilled His prophecy.  This is one of the best-attested events in ancient history.  Manifold other examples abound of biblical prophecies being fulfilled.  To learn more, please refer to the links below.      

“Our Redeemer was foretold at the foundation of the world (Ephesians 1:3–5), affirmed at the fall of humanity (Genesis 3:15), reported by the prophets, and etched onto the very heart of Israel.  For example, God announced that the Messiah would be a fulfillment of the covenant to Abraham and would come from his line (Genesis 12:3).  And not only from Abraham—but a specific great-grandchild of Abraham, named Judah [cf. Genesis 49:10]. . . . Eventually, a monarch was born through Judah’s line—a man named David, one of Israel’s most famous kings.  But God restricted the possibilities of who Christ would be even further when He told David, “Your house and your kingdom shall endure before Me forever; your throne shall be established forever” (2 Samuel 7:16)—indicating that the Redeemer would be his [i.e., David’s] descendant.  So, the Messiah came to be known as the “Son of David” (Matthew 1:1).  One after another, the Lord God provided astounding details about who our Savior would be (Isaiah 7:14; 11:1), where the Messiah would be born (Micah 5:2), when He would appear (Daniel 9:25–26), what He would do (Isaiah 61), and even His main region of ministry (Isaiah 9:1; Matthew 4:12–17).  Thousands of these prophecies revealed the only One who could make us right with God—and that is Jesus.” —Dr. Charles Stanley, The Gift of the Cross: Embracing the Promise of the Resurrection, 2022, pp. 31–32

“The many predictions of Christ’s birth, life, and death were indisputably rendered more than a century before they occurred, as proven by the Dead Sea Scrolls of Isaiah and other prophetic books, as well as by the Septuagint translation, all dating from earlier than 100 B.C. [i.e., more than a century “Before Christ”] . . . It is statistically preposterous that any, [much less] all, of the Bible’s specific, detailed prophecies could have been fulfilled through chance, good guessing, or deliberate deceit.” —Hank Hanegraaff [emphasis mine]

 

For further study, see the following:

1) “365 Messianic Prophecies“

2) “Fulfilled Prophecy As Evidence“

3) “M-A-P-S to Guide You Through Bible Reliability” by Hank Hanegraaff

4) Rose Book of Bible Charts, Maps & Timelines, Volume 1 – “100 Prophecies Fulfilled by Jesus” (pp. 81-86)

 

Scientific Facts, Societal Transformation, and Survival of the Bible

[Note:  I modified the letter ‘S’ in M-A-P-S to represent “Scientific Facts,” “Societal Transformation,” and “Survival of the Bible” in place of the original “Statistics”]    

Scientific Facts – The Bible contains many scientific facts about biology, cosmology, geology, medicine, meteorology, physics, etc., that modern scientists were unable to confirm until recent times.  The following Web page presents 101 of these fascinating facts, which further serve to demonstrate the amazing foreknowledge and trustworthiness of the holy Scriptures:  http://www.eternal-productions.org/101science.html

Societal Transformation – The Bible is responsible for the spiritual and moral transformation of countless individuals, societies, and nations down through the ages.  This is largely because the Bible gave the world the very concepts of human dignity, human rights, and gender and ethnic equality (according to the Bible, there is only one race — the human race — and all humans are created equally in the image of the same God).  Indeed, the precepts found in the holy Scriptures have inspired men and women to work tirelessly toward the abolition of such crimes against humanity as abortion, infanticide, gladiatorial combat, and slavery.  The Bible has also revolutionized science, healthcare, education, government, the arts, literature, and countless other fields.  Question:  Is it plausible to believe that an ancient collection of mere man-made writings comprising fictitious folklore or unhistorical myths could have had such an undeniably profound, pervasive, and positive impact on world history and human flourishing?  I think not.

Survival of the Bible – Finally, despite ruthless criticism and unrelenting persecution, the Bible has endured as the most influential and bestselling Book (read: collection of 66 books) in the world for more than 3,400 years.  Moreover, the Bible has not merely survived but also triumphantly risen high above rebellious humanity’s innumerable attempts throughout history to outlaw and/or destroy it.

“The grass withers, the flower fades,
But the word of our God stands forever” (Isaiah 40:8).

“In the ancient world, the teachings of Jesus Christ elevated brutish standards of morality, halted infanticide, emancipated women, abolished slavery, inspired charities and relief organizations, created hospitals, established orphanages, and founded schools.  In medieval times, Christianity almost single-handedly kept classical literature alive through recopying manuscripts, building libraries, moderating warfare through truce days, and providing dispute arbitration.  Christians invented colleges and universities, dignified labor as a divine vocation, and extended the light of civilization to barbarians on the frontiers.  In the modern era, Christian teaching advanced science, instilled concepts of political and social and economic freedom, fostered justice, and provided the single-greatest source of inspiration for magnificent achievements in art, architecture, music, and literature.” —Alvin J. Schmidt

 

For deeper study, see the following:

1) “101 Scientific Facts & Foreknowledge” 

2) The Moody Institute of Science Video Collection 

3) Illustra Media’s “Intelligent Design” DVD Collection

4) Illustra Media’s “Design of Life” DVD Collection

5) “The Impact of Christianity“

6) How Christianity Changed the World by Alvin J. Schmidt 

7) “What Christianity Has Done for the World: 50 Key Contributions” by Rose Publishing  

8) What If the Bible Had Never Been Written by D. James Kennedy and Jerry Newcombe

9) The Indestructible Book – a 4-hour documentary on the amazing history of the origin, transmission, and translation of the Bible from Mt. Sinai to America, hosted by Dr. Ken Connolly

 

---

“The Indestructible Book” by Dr. Charles Stanley, InTouch Faith Foundations Course (no longer available, sadly)

Over the past few lessons, we’ve studied several different reasons why we can trust the Bible as God’s holy Word.  As we talk about the Bible’s impact throughout history, I want to share an important lesson with you:  God’s Word is absolutely indestructible.

I want you to think about this for a moment.  There has never been a single book in history that has been as hated as this book.  The enemies of God have done everything possible to hunt it down and destroy it.

Men have confiscated it.  They have passed laws against it.  They burned it.  They [the Roman Catholic Church] even chained the Bible to church pulpits to prevent common people from reading it for themselves.  Why did these men think it was so important to prevent the Bible from being distributed around the world?  It is because when men and women begin to read the Word of God, they become free.

So, people throughout history have done their best to destroy it.  They have done everything possible to convince people that the Bible isn’t true; that it isn’t important.  But their arguments proved to be completely false.

One example is Voltaire, a famous French scholar who died in 1778.  He proclaimed that within a hundred years of his death, the Bible would be a forgotten book.  Ironically, just 25 years after Voltaire died, the old publishing house that had printed his atheistic philosophies was used by a Bible society to publish the Word of God.  [How’s that for poetic justice!]

Another example is the story of William Tyndale.  He was the first person to use the printing press to produce a complete New Testament for widespread distribution.  The leaders of that time were so enraged that Tyndale was exiled from England.  When he finally returned, they caught him, strangled him to death, and then burned his body.  Why?  Because he attempted to make the Word of God available to all people.

Just before Tyndale died, he uttered a prayer to God to open the eyes of the king so that the Bible could be produced.  One year later, the king affirmed the printing of the Bible, and it was distributed among the people.

This Book we hold in our hands has cost a lot of people their very lives.  All of your possessions combined cannot even come close to the value of one single copy of the Word of God.  It is powerful, it is without error, and my friend, it is completely indestructible.

“Century follows century—there it stands.  Empires rise and fall—there it stands.  Dynasty succeeds dynasty—there it stands.  Kings are crowned and uncrowned—there it stands.  Emperors decree its extermination—there it stands.  Despised and torn to pieces—there it stands.  Storms of hate swirl about it—there it stands.  Atheists rail against it—there it stands.  Agnostics smile cynically—there it stands.  Profane, prayerless punsters caricature it—there it stands.  Unbelief abandons it—there it stands.  Higher critics deny its inspiration—there it stands.  Thunderbolts of wrath smite it—there it stands.  An anvil that has broken a million hammers—there it stands.” —Dr. A.Z. Conrad on the indestructibility and perpetual survival of the Bible

---

 

Knowing what the Bible teaches is imperative, but knowing the reasons why the Bible is true, reliable, and divinely inspired — and being able to demonstrate that — is just as vital.  Thus, the next time someone challenges you to explain why you believe what the Bible says or when doubts enter your mind causing you to question the authenticity or accuracy of Scripture, try to remember that Bibles come WITH MAPS, and recall this acrostic:

Witness of the Holy Spirit
Inexhaustible Depth and Riches of the Bible
Testimony of Jesus and the Apostles
Harmony of the Scriptures

Manuscript Evidence
Archaeological Discoveries
Prophecies Fulfilled
Scientific Facts, Societal Transformation, and Survival of the Bible

I hope this mnemonic and the related resources help equip you to be “ready to make a defense to everyone who asks you to give an account for the hope that is in you” (1 Peter 3:15) and to “contend earnestly for the faith which was once for all handed down to the saints” (Jude, v. 3).  

New Testament Manuscript Stats

Originally published on 4-07-15
Last revised on 4-26-24

Glossary of Select Terms Used in This Document

autographs / autographa – the original, God-breathed, inerrant New Testament writings penned by the Apostles or close associates of the Apostles, most or all of which were composed between A.D. 40 and A.D. 70, and certainly no later than A.D. 100; these are no longer available to us, most likely due to the extremely perishable nature of the primitive material on which they were written (namely, papyrus)

canon –

1. a measuring stick, standard, or rule of faith and truth
2. the 66 books of Scripture (39 Old Testament books; 27 New Testament books) recognized by the Church as being the divinely inspired (God-breathed), authoritative Word of God

canonicity – the character of a biblical book that marks it as a part of the canon of Scripture

codex (plural form = codices) – a manuscript in book form — that is, with sheets bound together rather than rolled up like a scroll

extant – existing or surviving

manuscript – a handwritten copy

MSS – manuscripts

NT – New Testament

OT – Old Testament

papyrus (plural form = papyri) – a kind of ancient paper or writing material made from the pith of a plant by that name, which grew in the marshes of the Nile River in Egypt

Septuagint (or LXX) – Greek translation of the Old Testament; LXX is the Roman numeral for “70” and refers to the 70 or so Jewish scribes who purportedly translated the OT into Greek ca. 250 B.C.  The Septuagint was in use during the time of Jesus and the Apostles, and they even quoted from it.

variant – any difference in wording from a standard or base text, including spelling, punctuation, grammar, word order (syntax), omission, addition, duplication, substitution, or a total rewrite of the text

---

A note about canonicity and the dating of the New Testament autographs:

A book is not the Word of God because it is accepted by the people of God.  Rather, it was accepted by the people of God because it is the Word of God.  That is, God gives the book its divine authority, not the people of God.  They merely recognize the divine authority which God gives to it. . . . Precisely speaking, canonicity is determined by God.  In other words, the reason there are only sixty-six books in the canon is that God inspired only that many.  Only sixty-six books were found to have the stamp of divine authority, because God only stamped that many, or invested that number with authority for faith and practice. —Norman Geisler and William Nix, A General Introduction to the Bible [emphasis mine]

 

Biblical and extra-biblical evidence strongly suggest that all 27 of the original New Testament documents (a.k.a. autographs or the autographa), which were composed by nine, independent eyewitnesses or close associates of eyewitnesses to the persons, places, and events written about, were completed no later than the end of the 1st century A.D.  Moreover, many scholars believe that at least 24 of the 27 NT books were composed prior to the Romans’ destruction of the Temple and the city of Jerusalem in A.D. 70.

Until fairly recently, John’s five writings (i.e., the Gospel of John; 1, 2, and 3 John; and Revelation, respectively) were long believed to have been written in the ’80s or ’90s A.D., or later.  However, a  number of renowned liberal (e.g., John A.T. Robinson) and conservative NT scholars now believe that all NT books, with the possible exception of Revelation, were composed before A.D. 70, primarily because not a single New Testament writing makes even a passing reference to the extremely significant Roman destruction of the city of Jerusalem and the sacred Temple.  This was also something Jesus Himself predicted would happen (cf. Matthew 24:2, Luke 21:6, and Luke 23:27–31), so it’s highly unlikely that His followers would have neglected to mention the fulfillment of this momentous event.  What’s more, whenever the Temple is mentioned in the NT, it is spoken about as if it were still standing.  Very telling.        

For more info on the dating of the books of the New Testament, see the following:

1) “When Were the Gospels Written and by Whom?” by Matt Slick 

2) “Wasn’t the New Testament Written Hundreds of Years After Christ?” by Matt Slick 

Key Question:  Regardless of the number of variants (i.e., differences in wording) between existing NT manuscripts, can we recover the original reading of the NT with a high degree of confidence?

Answer:  Yes, we most certainly can.

Scholars and historians achieve this through the academic science of textual criticism, which the Holman Illustrated Bible Dictionary defines as follows:

Textual criticism is the art and science of reconstructing the text of a work that no longer exists in its original form.  We should note that the word criticism is not a negative term.  Rather, it refers to methods of careful study and analysis.  When applied to the New Testament, the ultimate purpose [of textual criticism] is to determine the original text of each book with the greatest possible degree of detail and accuracy through the careful study and comparison of all extant manuscripts.

“Far from being a haphazard effort based on guesses and religious faith, textual criticism is a careful, analytical process allowing an alert critic to determine the extent of possible corruption of any ancient document (not just religious writings) and, given certain conditions, to reconstruct the original text [i.e., the autographs] from existing copies [i.e., manuscripts] with a high degree of certainty.” —Greg Koukl (Solid Ground newsletter, Sept./Oct. 2010,2)

 

Gordon Fee explains, “The goal of textual criticism is to determine which reading at any point of variation is most likely the original text, and which readings are the errors” (New Testament Exegesis, 61).

[Note:  The slightest discrepancy in the wording of a manuscript is counted as a “variant” or an “error.”  This is one of the points Bart Ehrman and other skeptics conveniently fail to mention to their audiences when attacking the reliability of the Bible.]

To sum up, the primary goal of all textual criticism is to recover the exact wording of the original autographic text—that is, exactly what the document said in its final form before it left the control of the author who wrote it.  They do this by following one fundamental principle:  Choose the reading that best explains the rise of the other readings.

In order to know whether the original reading of any ancient text (not just the Bible) can be faithfully reconstructed from surviving copies, historians need to know the answer to three pivotal questions:  

1) How many manuscripts exist?

2) How old are the manuscripts?

3) What is the exact nature of the differences (or variants) between/among the manuscripts?

Historians call this process the Bibliographical Test.

Important:  If the number of manuscripts available for comparison is high, and if there is a short historical distance/gap of time between the date the original autograph was written and the date the oldest extant manuscripts (copies) were written, then the easier it will be to reconstruct the original and, likewise, the greater our confidence should be that the copies we have today are faithful and accurate reproductions of the original compositions.

Put simply, what we want is a large quantity of manuscripts and a small time gap between the originals and the earliest existing copies.  And with the New Testament manuscripts, that’s exactly what we find.

“There are three times more NT manuscripts within the first 200 years [of the original writings] than the average Greco-Roman author has in 2,000 years.”
—Dr. Daniel Wallace [emphasis his]

 

[Note:  Having a large number of copies of a document and distributing those copies over a wide geographical area is important because it increases the chances of preserving/protecting the original text from physical destruction and editorial changes.  Think about it:  If zero copies had been made of the original NT documents (i.e., the autographs penned by the Apostles or their close associates), the New Testament almost certainly would have been lost over time due to the relatively rapid decay rate of papyri, the ancient material on which the original books and epistles of the New Testament were likely composed.  However, for sake of argument, let’s suppose that the NT autographs could have survived intact for 2,000 years.  Even if this were possible, how could anyone determine whether or not those writings still contained the precise wording of the original text after such a long lapse of time and with no checks and balances along the way?  Without replicas of those original documents being made rather quickly and disseminated rather broadly, it would be impossible to know whether or not the inspired authors’ actual words had been tampered with.  Thankfully, given the staggering preponderance of largely identical copies available to us of the New Testament documents from over a wide area of distribution, we can know beyond a reasonable doubt what the original NT writings said.]

[Sources:  Bruce Metzger, Daniel Wallace, James White, Craig Evans, Greg Koukl, Hank Hanegraaff, Clay Jones, Timothy Paul Jones, Josh McDowell, Norman Geisler, and Frank Turek]

• In toto, the New Testament is supported by an astonishing 25,000 (and counting) existing MSS, and new MSS continue to be discovered.  (Homer’s Iliad has the most impressive manuscript evidence for any secular work, with nearly 1,800 existing MSS, as of writing, but this obviously puts The Iliad in a very distant second place behind the New Testament.)
  

• More than 5,700 Greek NT manuscripts have been discovered and catalogued. 

[Note:  The New Testament was originally written in Koine Greek, the common language of Greek-speaking people living in the Mediterranean world from the close of the Classical period to the Byzantine era.]

• Over 20,000 additional NT manuscripts were translated early on into different languages, such as Latin (over 10,000, and the average length of these manuscripts is 450 pages), Arabic, Armenian, Coptic, Ethiopic, Gothic, Hebrew, and Syriac.   

• Keep in mind that the majority of NT manuscripts are incomplete fragments, and only about 50 manuscripts contain all 27 books of the NT in their entirety.  “Even so,” says Greg Koukl, “the textual evidence is exceedingly rich, especially when compared to other ancient works” (Solid Ground newsletter, Sept./Oct. 2010, 3).
  

  “The accumulation of fragments is now so large that one can piece together most of the New Testament from fragments that are dated [to] within two centuries of Christ’s death and resurrection.” —Hank Hanegraaff, The Bible Under Siege, 27  

• The earliest New Testament MSS are called majuscule (or “uncial”) manuscripts.  Majuscules are capital letters, so majuscule manuscripts were written in all-caps and do not contain any punctuation or spaces/separation between words.  Currently, there are more than 300 NT majuscule MSS in existence, several of which have been dated to as early as the 3rd century.  The most important majuscule MSS are the parchment Codices Sinaiticus and Vaticanus, which will be discussed in more detail later in this document. 

[Note: The earliest NT manuscripts are all of the “Alexandrian” text-type, meaning that they were discovered in or near the area of Alexandria, Egypt.  The “Critical” or “Eclectic” New Testament Greek base text, which serves as the foundation of nearly all English Bible translations post-1945, beginning with the RSV (first published in 1946), makes use not only of the most reliable Alexandrian majuscule papyri MSS and codices (i.e., Vaticanus, Sinaiticus, and Alexandrinus) but also the “Western,” “Caesarean,” and “Byzantine” text-types of manuscripts.  Older English Bibles, such as the beloved King James Version (1611), did not have access to these invaluable MSS and were based exclusively on a dozen or less of the much later Byzantine-type New Testament MSS, which are dated between 1100 and 1300 A.D.  (Incredibly, the translators of the New King James Version, which was released in 1982, had access to these magnificent and much earlier MSS, but they chose instead to follow the outdated Textus Receptus Greek base text.  Still, the textual differences between the various Greek New Testaments that translators use today are mostly insignificant and doctrinally inconsequential, as explained in greater detail later in this document.)]

• The majority of NT manuscripts are known as minuscules.  Minuscule is essentially a cursive style of writing that emerged circa A.D. 800.  Currently, there are close to 3,000 NT minuscule MSS.  These later manuscripts are typically of the “Byzantine” text-type, meaning that they were discovered in or near the area of the ancient Greek city of Byzantium (modern Istanbul).  The Byzantine minuscule MSS form the basis of all the “Elizabethan” English Bibles published in the 16th and 17th centuries—namely, William Tyndale’s translation, the Coverdale Bible, the Matthews Bible, the Great Bible, the Geneva Bible, the Bishops Bible, and the King James Bible.  One major disadvantage of these vintage translations of God’s Word is that the translators did not have access to the amazing Dead Sea Scrolls, which were discovered at Qumran between 1947 and 1956 and which contain the oldest-known copies of portions of the Old Testament (dated between 100 B.C. and A.D. 100), including a stunning scroll containing the entirety of the book of Isaiah that is 1,000 years older than any MSS available prior to this time.  The reason these older English Bibles used only a smattering of very late Byzantine-type Greek New Testament MSS and much later Hebrew Old Testament MSS is very simple:  These were the only manuscripts available to the translators at the time.  (In other words, they used what they had!)    

• According to the late Dr. Bruce Metzger, who was an eminent biblical scholar, translator, and textual critic, also counted among the NT Greek MSS are “lectionaries, which contain New Testament Scripture in the sequence it was to be read in the early churches at appropriate times during the year” (Hanegraaff, The Bible Under Siege, 49).  More than 2,400 of these Greek lectionaries containing sizable citations of the NT text have been catalogued.  

• For the majority of ancient secular Classical Greek documents, only a small number of manuscripts exist (see next bullet point for more on this); and the time gap between the author’s original writing and the earliest surviving copies of most ancient secular works is a substantial 400 – 1,500 years or more, compared to an historical distance of only 40 – 250 years for the New Testament MSS!  Nonetheless, most textual critics and historians are confident that they have accurately reconstructed the original readings from the vastly inferior secular manuscripts and do not question their reliability.  In fact, virtually all of our knowledge of ancient history depends on documents such as these.  

• The NT has substantially stronger manuscript support — superior both in quantity, quality, and external corroboration — than any other text of antiquity, including the works of Homer (1,800 MSS for The Iliad), Caesar (251 MSS for Gallic Wars), Plato (210 MSS for Tetralogies), Tacitus (33 MSS for Annals), and Aristotle (5 MSS for Poetics).  Indeed, the ten best pieces of ancient literature combined can’t hold a candle to either the quantity of NT manuscripts or the brief lapse of time between the original compositions and the earliest extant copies.  In sum, we have, on average, more than a thousand times as many manuscripts for the NT than we do for the average classical Greco-Roman author.  
  

[Note:  A nifty table comparing NT and ancient secular MSS can be found midway through this article.]

• The average classical Greek writer has fewer than 20 total copies/manuscripts of his works still in existence.  According to renowned textual critic and NT scholar Dr. Daniel Wallace, if one were to stack manuscript evidence for the average classical Greek writer and the NT side by side, the stack of MSS for secular Greek writings of antiquity, the reliability of which no credentialed scholar questions, would stand about four feet high, while the stack of MSS for the NT would stand approximately one mile high!
  

• The average NT manuscript is over 475 pages long, and over 43% of all NT verses are found in the earliest surviving papyri MSS, which date to within 100 to 125 years of the originals.  Most of these MSS are of the four Gospels (i.e., Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John).  In contrast, within 125 years of the completion of almost all classical literature, 0% of the authors’ writings are available.
  

• The earliest undisputed manuscript fragment dates to within 100 years of Christ’s death and resurrection.  The stunning John Rylands Papyrus, a.k.a. p52, includes portions of the 18th chapter of John and is dated between A.D. 110 and 150; and it may be even earlier.  Significantly, if one accepts a late date for John’s Gospel (e.g., the ’90s A.D.), p52 could very well be a first-generation copy of the Apostle John’s original writing.

• Even earlier than p52 are nine disputed fragments believed to be part of six NT books (Mark, Acts, Romans, 1 Timothy, 2 Peter, and James) that were discovered with the Dead Sea Scrolls.  Some scholars date these copies from A.D. 50 to 70, when many of the Apostles and other eyewitnesses to Christ were still alive.  Also, if they are correct, this means that at least Mark’s original Gospel account was likely written in the ’40s or possibly even the ’30s A.D.  (Bear in mind that Jesus died in either A.D. 30 or A.D. 33.)
  

•  Three early Apostolic church fathers (so named because they were either personal disciples of, or otherwise had direct contact with, the Apostles of Christ) quoted passages from 25 of the 27 NT books between A.D. 95 and 110.  These men are Clement of Rome, Ignatius of Antioch, and Polycarp. 

[Note:  Clement of Rome, who was the fourth bishop of the church in Rome, is believed to have been a disciple of the Apostle Peter, and he may have been the same Clement the Apostle Paul refers to as a “fellow worker” in Philippians 4:3.  And according to early church fathers such as Irenaeus of Lyons, who was a pupil of Polycarp, both Ignatius of Antioch and Polycarp were students of the Apostle John.] 

• Clement of Rome, writing from Rome around A.D. 95 when the Apostle John was plausibly still living, confirmed the synoptic Gospels (Matthew, Mark, and Luke), as well as five Pauline epistles (Romans, 1 Corinthians, Ephesians, 1 Timothy, and Titus) and three general letters (i.e., the occasionally disputed books of Hebrews, James, and 1 Peter).  

Moreover, Ignatius of Antioch, writing from Smyrna around A.D. 107, referenced all four Gospels, along with the book of Acts, 12 of Paul’s 13 epistles (i.e., all except 2 Thessalonians), and the remaining books of the NT, with the exceptions of 2 John and Jude. 

[Note:  Concerning the point above, Drs. Norman Geisler and Frank Turek note that “Jude had [certainly] written his short letter by this time [i.e., prior to the close of the first century] because, being Jesus’ half brother, he was almost certainly dead by A.D. 100; and 2 John had also been written because it [logically predated] 3 John, [the latter of] which was one of the 25 books quoted.”  They also observe that “since Clement was in Rome, and Ignatius and Polycarp were hundreds of miles away in Smyrna, the original New Testament documents had to have been written significantly earlier; otherwise, they could not have circulated across the ancient world by that time.  Therefore, it’s safe to say that all of the New Testament was written by A.D. 100, and at least the [writings confirmed by Clement were written] several years before A.D. 95.”]

And Polycarp, writing from Smyrna around A.D. 110, recognized 2 Thessalonians and several other NT books already confirmed by Clement and Ignatius. 

Such remarkably early external attestation—which, by the way, is absolutely extraordinary for writings from the ancient world—goes a long way toward substantiating the transmissional accuracy and historical reliability of the original New Testament documents, as well as their early dating and authorship.  Significantly, it also demonstrates that the early Christians recognized and accepted only four Gospel accounts (i.e., Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John) and that the apostolic authorship or divine authority of the 13 epistles of Paul and the books of Acts and 1 John (at least) were never questioned or contested.  And of course, Athanasius’ well-known “Easter letter” (i.e., his Thirty-Ninth Festal Epistle) shows that all 27 books found in the New Testament of modern Bibles were definitely recognized throughout Christendom as being canonical/authoritative by the year A.D. 367.

• Further, the Fragment of Muratori (c. A.D. 150–220, Milan) references or alludes to 20 NT books (all but Matthew, Mark, Hebrews, James, 1 and 2 Peter, and one of John’s epistles, although it’s not clear which one, as two of his three epistles were acknowledged but not with specificity).  Being a fragment, however, the Muratorian manuscript is an incomplete document, and some scholars believe that the remaining 7 NT books were probably mentioned in the portions that have been lost to us.
  

• The Chester Beatty Papyri (c. A.D. 250) contains the bulk of the NT (i.e., 30 leaves/pages of the Gospels and Acts, another 10 leaves of the Pauline epistles, and 10 leaves of Revelation), and the Bodmer Papyri II collection of fragments (c. A.D. 200 or earlier) includes most of the first 14 chapters of John’s Gospel and much of the last 7 chapters, as well as significant portions of Luke’s Gospel.

• The earliest copies of the NT in codex (i.e., bound-book) form include the famous codices Codex Vaticanus (c. A.D. 325-350), Codex Sinaiticus (c. A.D. 350), and Codex Alexandrinus (c. A.D. 425-450).  Vaticanus contains most of the Greek OT (Septuagint) and most of the NT.  Sinaiticus contains approximately half of the Septuagint and virtually all of the NT.  Alexandrinus contains the whole Septuagint and a nearly complete NT.  

[Note:  Remarkably, Daniel Wallace believes that whenever Codices Sinaiticus and Vaticanus agree about a textual reading, that particular reading probably dates back deep into the 2nd century, at the latest, and is probably the original reading of the New Testament autographs.]

• “Patristic quotations” — thousands of citations made by early church fathers — include substantial portions of the New Testament.  For years, it was believed that all but 11 verses from the New Testament could be recovered from these writings alone.  Recently, however, some NT scholars announced that it’s more likely the case that approximately 46% of the New Testament could be reconstructed from patristic quotations.  Regardless of whether this is true, the fact remains that even if we didn’t have a single NT manuscript or copy of the Bible available anywhere in the world, we could still reconstruct nearly half of the entire New Testament — and certainly the teachings about Christ that are essential to one’s salvation — from sermons, catechisms, lectionaries, and other writings of the 2nd- and 3rd-century church fathers who frequently quoted the NT.
  

• The New Testament is approximately 95% to 99.5% textually pure, meaning that, of the thousands of New Testament MSS in existence, their wording agrees about 95 – 99.5% of the time.  This is absolutely astonishing.
  

• Approximately 400,000 differences (i.e., “variants”) in wording exist among the NT manuscripts currently available.  The reason there are so many variants is simple:  We have a massive number of NT manuscripts!  As Dr. Daniel Wallace points out, however, whether it is one manuscript or 2,000 that all contain a particular variant—for example, hypothetically, the word “beginning” written as “inning” in John 1:1 in 2,000 different manuscripts—that particular textual variant still counts as only one total variant, not 2,000 variants.  (In other words, when counting textual variants, textual critics don’t multiply a variant by the number of manuscripts that contain that same variant.  This point is frequently misunderstood by even the brightest and most devout Christian pastors, scholars, and apologists, not to mention critics of Christianity.)

• Less than 1% (i.e., 1,500 – 2,000) of the total NT manuscript variants are both “meaningful” (i.e., potentially affecting the meaning of the NT author’s original wording) and “viable” (i.e., having a sufficient pedigree potentially to represent the authentic wording of the original autograph).  When put in proper perspective, 1,500 to 2,000 meaningful and viable variants spread over 3.5 million pages total of hand-copied text spanning approximately 1,500 years (prior to the invention of the printing press) is an amazingly small percentage of the text, demonstrating an amazingly accurate history of NT textual transmission.  In other words, over such an immense span of time and with 5,700 handwritten copies, one would expect there to be hundreds of millions of meaningful and viable NT manuscript variants!
  

[Note:  An example of a variant that is both meaningful and viable is Philippians 1:14, which reads, “. . . and that most of the brethren, trusting in the Lord because of my imprisonment, have far more courage to speak the word of God without fear” (NASB).  The words between “speak” and “without fear” appear as simply “the word” in several manuscripts, as “the word of God” in several others (i.e., the Alexandrian manuscripts, which are the earliest and often considered the best-quality NT copies because they were copied by scholarly specialists in the prestigious academic city of Alexandria, Egypt, and were more carefully controlled than other NT “text-types”/manuscript families), and as “the word of the Lord” in still others.  Given the context of the passage, however, it seems clear that the Apostle Paul was referring to the Gospel message, which is variously referred to as “the word of God,” “the word of the Lord,” and “the word of Christ.”  What other “word” would these newly emboldened believers have been speaking fearlessly, to Paul’s great delight?)]

• The vast majority of NT manuscript variants (i.e., 99%), including the earliest papyri manuscripts, many of which were copied by scribes who weren’t professionally trained (however, these early scribes were often meticulous “bean counters,” accountants, etc., who were trained to be very attentive to detail, which means they were actually less likely to make intentional changes or “corrections” to the text, and these “unprofessional” scribes also often painstakingly copied words one letter at a time), consist of theologically inconsequential grammatical disparities and other common, unintentional scribal errors that are easy to detect, such as spelling mistakes (more than half — yes, well over 200,000 of the total variants!), changes in word order/syntax (e.g., one manuscript may read “Christ Jesus,” while another reads “Jesus Christ”), the transposition of characters (i.e., inadvertently switching around the order of letters, words, or phrases), the addition or omission of letters or words (e.g., one manuscript may read “The Lord Jesus said” instead of “Jesus said,” or “the James,” while another simply reads “James,” without the preceding definite article), the repetition or duplication of words or lines (e.g., “John was was baptizing”), the substitution of a synonym (e.g., one manuscript may read “above,” while another reads “over” in the same place), accidentally skipping lines, etc.
  

• Some textual alterations, however, most of which are found in the later and longer (i.e., expanded or “fuller”) Byzantine text-type of manuscripts, were intentional in nature and are clearly the result of “pious” theological motivation on the part of well-meaning scribes who were eager to protect the deity of Christ and other essential Christian doctrines.  One example of this “expansion of piety,” as some scholars describe it, would be when a scribe expanded a verse whose source manuscript simply read “Christ” to read more reverently as “the Lord Jesus Christ.”  A more noteworthy example of this phenomenon can be seen in the KJV’s (and NKJV’s) notorious rendering of 1 John 5:7, a.k.a. the Comma Johanneum, which forces the doctrine of the Trinity into John’s text without warrant (i.e., because there are ample other places in Scripture that teach that God is one in essence and three in person).

[Note:  Significantly, outside of the 3rd edition (1522) of Catholic priest Desiderius Erasmus’ Greek New Testament, which eventually (i.e., 1633) came to be dubbed the “Received Text” (or Textus Receptus in Latin) and which serves as one of the fundamental base texts behind the King James translation, the Trinitarian formula (i.e., “For there are three that bear witness in heaven: the Father, the Word, and the Holy Spirit [or Ghost]”) is not found in any early Greek MSS of John’s first epistle or in any ancient versions of the Bible, with the exception of Jerome’s Latin translation of Scripture (i.e., the Vulgate).  In fact, the Comma Johanneum is found only in 9 very late Greek MSS, and the earliest one containing this particular reading in the text of 1 John 5:7 is dated to the 14th century.  Also, in half of those MSS, the phrase is relegated to a marginal note.  With such inadequate and/or dubious manuscript support, it is little wonder why Erasmus chose not to include the reading in the first two editions of his Greek NT.  Remarkably, the reading is also not mentioned in any of the vitally important early ecumenical church councils that affirmed and clarified the essential Christian doctrine of the Trinity.  If that particular rendering of 1 John 5:7, which emphatically teaches Trinitarianism, had been available to those early Christians, it stands to reason that someone surely would have appealed to it at some point as scriptural support for the Tri-Unity of God, but there’s no record of this, which is a good indication that 1 John 5:7 never read that way originally and was, therefore, a later addition to the text.]

• A complete Greek New Testament (i.e., in this example, the Nestle-Aland/United Bible Society’s text, which is the primary Greek base text underlying most modern English Bible translations) contains approximately 138,000 words.

• Of the 200,000 lines of text in a Greek NT, only 40 lines (approx. 400 words) are in doubt; and, again, not a single one of these variants affects any significant Christian doctrine.  (To help put this in proper perspective, this means that we can be confident that roughly 137,600 of the 138,000 words of a complete Greek New Testament are the very words that God revealed to the NT writers!)  Therefore, it does not matter that there are more textual variants than there are words in the New Testament, as popular atheist Bart Ehrman loves to point out, because none of those variants change the meaning of any important Christian teaching or truth claim.

Textual critic and Christian apologist Dr. James R. White observes, “The reality is that the amount of variation between [even] the two most extremely different manuscripts of the New Testament [i.e., the two NT manuscripts that are the most unalike in their wording] would not fundamentally alter the message of the Scriptures!”  He continues:  “The simple fact of the matter is that no textual variants in either the Old or New Testament in any way, shape, or form materially disrupt or destroy any essential doctrine of the Christian faith” (The King James Only Controversy, 40).

“The purity of text is of such a substantial nature that nothing we believe to be true, and nothing we are commanded to do, is in any way jeopardized by the variants.”
—Dr. D.A. Carson, Research Professor of New Testament, The King James Version Debate, 56

Incredibly—and ironically—none other than Bart Ehrman, himself a textual critic, actually admitted this fact in the appendix of the paperback version of his bestselling (and greatly misleading) book Misquoting Jesus (emphasis mine): 

“Essential Christian beliefs are not affected by textual variants in the manuscript tradition of the New Testament.” 

The Bottom Line:  As of writing, we can be confident that we have the original wording of 95 to 99% of the 27 New Testament books, and that includes what those books say about ALL of the most important teachings of Christianity.  But here’s even better news:  As time goes on and as more NT manuscript copies continue to be unearthed — and despite the fact that this also logically means that the number of textual variants (wording differences) will increase, for the reasons explained above — we are nevertheless getting closer and closer to reconstructing 100% of the original text/reading/wording of the God-breathed New Testament autographs.

Is What We Have Today Really the Word of God?

Can we be confident that the Bibles we read today still contain the words God wants every human to read, understand, and obey?  Concerning this paramount question, which is really the crux of any discussion about the transmission and translation of the Bible down through the centuries, an article from the Holman Illustrated Bible Dictionary stresses the following:

It is important to remember that prior to the printing press [which was invented by Johannes Gutenberg around the 1450s], every copy of Scripture was made [painstakingly] by hand, and all hand-copied documents of substantial length of the same document [naturally] differ from one another.  No two handwritten NT manuscripts of any NT book or group of books are identical.  But we have every reason to believe that every original reading has survived in some manuscripts.  That is why textual critics study as many manuscripts as possible. [emphasis mine]

 

Please don’t miss that last point.  The fact that the original, God-breathed reading/wording of the New Testament has survived and been divinely preserved down through the ages in the superabundance of ancient NT manuscripts available to us, in spite of the fact that we no longer have the original material documents (i.e., papyri) on which the Apostles and their close associates originally penned the New Testament, is absolutely imperative for all Christians and Bible readers to understand.  Dr. James R. White explains this well (emphasis his):

The whole point of the “tenacity” of the New Testament text, however, is that the original readings still exist, faithfully preserved in the New Testament manuscript tradition. . . . [Some critics ridicule] the idea that we can determine what words Paul [for example] wrote originally, and [they object to this idea] solely on the basis that with a small percentage of those words, we have textual variation, ignoring the entire fact of the [predominant] purity of the New Testament text, and the fact that in the vast majority of the writings of Paul (or any other writer of Scripture), we can determine exactly what was originally written [and why is that?] because there are NO textual variants to hinder us from doing so [in most cases]!  One example of this:  At Colossians 2:9, Paul wrote that all the fullness of “deity” dwells in Jesus Christ in bodily form. . . . There are no textual variants regarding this passage.  [What this means is that] we can be certain that when Paul wrote to the Colossians, he used this very term [i.e., the Greek term for “deity”]. —The King James Only Controversy, 124–125

Conclusion:  At the end of the day, if we’re going to doubt the reliability of the New Testament, then, to be consistent and fair, we ought to doubt everything we think we know about ancient history; and if we’re going to repudiate the textual authenticity of the NT, then we ought also to reject every piece of historical information for which the original source writings (i.e., autographs) are no longer available.  

 

Recommended Resources

1) The New Testament Documents: Are They Reliable? by F.F. Bruce

2) The King James Only Controversy by Dr. James R. White

3) Textual Criticism by Dr. Daniel Wallace

[Note:  This highly recommended 35-lecture course is often made available for free in digital video format by the generous folks at Credo House.  Subscribe to their e-mails, and they’ll notify you when these course files (and many others) are available for free download.  The only major point of disagreement I have with Dr. Wallace is with regard to his perplexing recommendations for modern English Bibles.  (FYI, he heavily promotes the NET Bible because he was one of its principal translators, and he criticizes some of the best Bibles available because he thinks they are “slavishly literal,” and this is because he prefers a translation methodology that results in a “more readable” text.)  Just ignore that particular lecture in the series and follow this advice instead:

For serious Bible study that will help you get as close as possible to the wording of the original God-breathed autographs, I strongly recommend using a combination of the 1995 (or 1977) New American Standard Bible (NASB) and/or the Legacy Standard Bible (LSB), which are the most literal and accurate word-for-word English translations of the Bible currently in print, along with the New King James Version (NKJV), the original Holman Christian Standard Bible (HCSB), and the English Standard Version (ESV), and then supplement those with the 1984 or 1978 New International Version (NIV) and the New Living Translation (NLT).  You honestly cannot go wrong with that approach! 

That said, if you only have the time or desk space to compare two different Bibles, then my advice would be to use the 1995 New American Standard Bible (note:  make sure you get a copy that contains the complete translators’ notes in the margins instead of the abridged notes) and the New King James Version.  Textually speaking, this will give you the best of “both worlds,“ meaning that you will be able to compare the most literal and readable English translation based upon the earliest Old and New Testament manuscripts yet discovered (e.g., the Alexandrian text-type of NT manuscripts, most of which date before A.D. 300) and the most literal and readable English translation based upon the much later Byzantine text-type of NT manuscripts (i.e., dated between A.D. 1100 – 1300).  This will give you a very good idea of the major variant readings that exist among/between the different manuscript textual families, and you will be amazed at how few disagreements there actually are and also how inconsequential those discrepancies are in terms of Christian doctrine!]

4) I Don’t Have Enough Faith to Be an Atheist by Drs. Norman Geisler and Frank Turek

5) Various Apologetics Videos on the Bible’s Reliability and More by Dr. Josh McDowell

The Historical Evidence for the Resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth That Even Non-Christian Scholars Believe

[Author’s Note:  If you have any non-Christian or skeptical relatives or friends, I strongly encourage you to share this info with them—especially at Easter time.  God bless you!]

Last revised on 3-31-24

 

“This Jesus God raised up again, to which we are all witnesses.” —Peter, the Apostle (Acts 2:32)

“For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received:  that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, and that He was buried, and that He was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures, and that He appeared to Cephas [Peter], then to the Twelve.  After that, He appeared to more than 500 brethren at one time, most of whom remain until now [in other words, “If you don’t believe me, there are hundreds of other living eyewitnesses still available whom you can interview; be my guest!”], but some have fallen asleep.  Then, He appeared to James; then, to all the apostles . . . and last of all, as to one untimely born, He appeared to me also.

“For I am the least of the apostles and not fit to be called an apostle, because I persecuted the church of God.  But by the grace of God, I am what I am, and His grace toward me did not prove vain.  But I labored even more than all of them—yet not I, but the grace of God with me.  Whether, then, it was I or they, so we preach, and so you believed.” —Paul, the Apostle (1 Corinthians 15:3–11)

 

Prologue

The Resurrection of Jesus Christ is THE central doctrine of Christianity—the very foundation and heart of the Gospel message. 

If Jesus of Nazareth did not rise physically from the dead, then He is not God, His words cannot be trusted, everything He claimed and taught is ultimately meaningless, and humanity has no hope of salvation from evil, suffering, death, and the deserved wrath of an absolutely just and holy God on Judgment Day.  

On the other hand, if Jesus did rise physically from the dead, then He is God, He is the single most trustworthy person of all time, everything He claimed and taught is true and of supreme significance for all mankind, and He is humanity’s only hope of salvation from evil, suffering, death, and the deserved wrath of an absolutely just and holy God on Judgment Day.  

That is how much is at stake here, so there better be good reasons to believe Jesus’ resurrection actually occurred in history.  But is there any historical evidence for the Resurrection?

It may surprise you to learn that the vast majority of reputable and credentialed New Testament critical scholars and historians today, from across the ideological and theological spectrum — that is, from very conservative Christians to radically liberal skeptics (i.e., atheists, agnostics, and so forth) — agree upon more than 20 historical facts concerning the person of Jesus of Nazareth and the evidences for His resurrection. 

For your consideration, 13 of these historical facts are presented in this article.  I invite you to examine this data thoughtfully and with an open mind (i.e., don’t rule out the existence of God, the reliability of the Bible, or the possibility of miracles in advance), as well as with a sincere commitment to follow the evidence wherever it leads.

 

A Brief Word on Why Skeptics Should Give the 4 Gospel Testimonies the Benefit of the Doubt

In this age of hyper skepticism and general incredulity toward religion, especially Christianity, the default position of many thinkers today is to dismiss the Gospel accounts — which, important to note, comprise the best historical data available to us about the person known as Jesus of Nazareth — as untrustworthy, a priori (i.e., prior to examining them), which is something they would never do with the writings of secular historians. 

One of the reasons usually given for this knee-jerk cynicism is that the Gospels were, in fact, written by Christians and must, therefore, be automatically rejected as unreliable due to the personal biases of the Gospel authors in favor of Christ.  [Note:  What’s often overlooked here is an historical criterion known as the “principle of embarrassment,” which is to say that the Gospel authors also reported many facts about Jesus that appear to cast Him and themselves in a negative light — that is, details which are embarrassing, awkward, controversial, and otherwise disadvantageous and/or self-damaging to the authors as well as to Jesus’ other followers, which further lends credence to the honesty and transparency of the Gospel writers’ testimonies.] 

Another reason for distrusting the Gospels is that all four books contain reports of miracles, and that fact alone is enough to chase away most readers whose worldview will not permit the possibility of divine “interference” with the laws of nature.  Apparently, it never occurs to such prejudiced minds that a devoted and faithful pupil and servant of Jesus might, naturally, have greater motivation than anyone else to record the facts about his beloved Master as accurately as possible — and all the more so when the writer in question had nothing to gain and everything to lose by reporting the exact truthfulness of what he witnessed or what he gleaned from interviews with eyewitnesses, as was assuredly the situation with the New Testament authors (continue reading to discover why this is true).  That factor would seem to elevate the credibility of the four Gospel testimonies even higher.

Neither does it ever seem to occur to skeptics that Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John describe the miraculous signs and wonders of Jesus with the same simple, straightforward, “matter-of-fact” language they employ when commenting, for example, that Pontius Pilate was governor of Judea or that Herod Antipas was tetrarch of Galilee during the reign of Tiberius Caesar.  The Gospels are replete with social, cultural, geographical, and political truth claims that have been externally corroborated by historical and archaeological research, and none which have ever been disproved.  Furthermore, virtually all the writings of ancient Greek and Roman historians also contain reports of miracles, prophecies, and other supernatural elements, yet most scholars accept the basic historical reliability of these considerably lesser-attested works, without reservation.  Why not give the Gospels the same benefit of the doubt?

Having said that, I’m now going to defer respectfully and gratefully to the immensely superior knowledge of the eminent Simon Greenleaf.  If you’re not familiar with that name, I think you should be.  Dr. Greenleaf stands as one of the most preeminent legal scholars of all time.  In addition to being one of the founders of Harvard Law School, where he served as Professor of Law from 1833 to 1848, and to serving as an associate of Justice Joseph Story for 14 years, Greenleaf also published a three-volume work on the rules of legal evidence titled A Treatise on the Law of Evidence, which came to be received as an authoritative text in all English and American tribunals. 

Of greater interest to me and the topic at hand, however, is another of Greenleaf’s most respected publications:  The Testimony of the Evangelists: The Gospels Examined by the Rules of Evidence.  As the book’s title suggests, Greenleaf, who began his investigation as an unbeliever, subjects the data reported in the four canonical Gospel accounts to rigorous cross-examination, applying the same rules of evidence administered in courts of justice to ascertain both the personal integrity of the Gospel writers as well as the historical trustworthiness of their statements.  In so doing, he persuasively demonstrates that the independent, eyewitness testimonies of separate historians Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John — including the information they report about the Resurrection — would, unquestionably, be admissible in a modern court of law as credible, factual evidence.  [Note:  Nancy Kippenhan of the Liberty University School of Law has shown here that Greenleaf’s arguments remain true even in 21st-century courts of law.]  More than that, the initially skeptical Dr. Greenleaf himself concluded that Christ’s resurrection from the dead was indeed an historical fact.

In this same book, Dr. Greenleaf reasonably requests that skeptics give the Gospel witnesses the same “fair hearing” that they would readily give the works of other ancient writers.  To any readers who have misgivings or suspicions regarding the Gospel records, I exhort you to heed his words carefully (emphasis mine):  

“In the absence of circumstances which generate suspicion, every witness is to be presumed credible, until the contrary is shown; the burden of impeaching his credibility lying on the objector.”

This rule serves to show the injustice with which the writers of the Gospels have ever been treated by infidels—an injustice silently acquiesced in even by Christians—in requiring the Christian affirmatively, and by positive evidence, to establish the credibility of his witnesses above all others before their testimony is entitled to be considered, and in permitting the testimony of a single profane [i.e., secular] writer — alone and uncorroborated — to outweigh that of any single Christian. . . . But the Christian writer seems, by the usual course of the argument, to have been deprived of the common presumption of charity in his favor; and reversing the ordinary rule of administering justice in human tribunals, [the Christian’s] testimony is unjustly presumed to be false, until it is proved to be true.  [Note:  This is completely backwards!] 

This treatment, moreover, has been applied to them all [i.e., to Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John] in a body; and, without due regard to the fact that — being independent historians, writing at different periods, they are entitled to the support of each other — they have been treated, in the argument, almost as if the New Testament were the entire production, at once, of a body of men, conspiring by a joint fabrication to impose a false religion upon the world.  It is time that this injustice should cease; that [1] the testimony of the evangelists [i.e., the distinct historical biographies/narratives authored by contemporaries Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John] should be admitted to be true until it can be disproved by those who would impugn it; that [2] the silence of one sacred writer on any point [e.g., Luke did not write about Jesus’ changing water to wine at Cana of Galilee, but John the Apostle did; and John did not mention that Jesus perspired drops of blood at Gethsemane (a rare but established medical phenomenon known as hematidrosis), but Luke the physician did] should no more detract from his own veracity OR that of the other historians, than the like circumstance is permitted to do among profane [secular] writers; and that [3] the Four Evangelists should be admitted in corroboration of each other, as readily as Josephus and Tacitus, or Polybius and Livy.          

 

A Brief Word on the Significance of Early Christian Creeds

Paul’s core Gospel summary in the 15th chapter of First Corinthians (a.k.a. “The Resurrection Chapter”) is truly amazing, because it contains an ancient creed, or confessional statement, that even theologically liberal (i.e., non-Christian) New Testament critical scholars (e.g., atheists Gerd Lüdemann and Bart Ehrman) date to within one to three years of Jesus’ death.  In fact, some scholars (e.g., James D.G. Dunn and Walter Kasper) believe the data in the first seven verses of this particular passage can be dated to within a few months of Jesus’ crucifixion, while at least one New Testament scholar (i.e., skeptic Larry W. Hurtado of the infamous “Jesus Seminar”) dates it even earlier still to within days of Jesus’ death!

Early Christian creeds (from the Latin word credo, meaning “I believe”) such as this one are concise, catchy, memorable statements of belief or “sermon summaries” that were transmitted orally, often in song or hymn form, until they became standardized.  In a predominantly illiterate culture, as the ancient Near East was, creeds could be recited by heart even by people who couldn’t write their own name. 

[Note:  Every person reading this can remember songs you learned before you could read and write, as well as innumerable popular songs and church hymns you learned by ear/heart without ever actually seeing the lyrics.  One that immediately comes to my mind is “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star,” or “The Alphabet Song,” both of which use the same tune or melody.  In full disclosure, to this day, I still recall “The Alphabet Song” and sing it in my mind every single time I alphabetize anything!  Obviously, setting words to catchy, memorable melodies is a powerfully effective way of transmitting and internalizing ideas.  The ancient Jewish people understood this better than most, and they mastered the art.] 

The Bible is actually filled with dozens of these incredible creedal statements, and they are extremely important in substantiating the authenticity, early dating, and historical reliability of the New Testament.  The reason is that these creeds were originally formulated some 20 years before a single page of the New Testament was written, which means that the doctrinal beliefs they codify date all the way back to the months, weeks, and days following Jesus’ death and resurrection.

As Dr. Gary Habermas has written:

“Paul probably received this report [i.e., the creedal data he relays in 1 Corinthians 15:3–7] from Peter and James while visiting Jerusalem within a few years of his conversion.  [Note:  Cf. Galatians 1:13–24, where Saul of Tarsus/Paul spent 15 days with the Apostles Peter and James, the latter of whom is Jesus’ half brother].  The vast majority of critical scholars who answer the question place Paul’s reception of this material in the mid-30s A.D.  [Note:  This means the material originated even earlier than that.]  Even more skeptical scholars generally agree.  German theologian Walter Kasper even asserts that, ‘We have here, therefore, an ancient text, perhaps in use by the end of 30 A.D. …’  Ulrich Wilckens declares that the material ‘indubitably goes back to the oldest phase of all in the history of primitive Christianity.’”  [Source: “Resurrection Research from 1975 to the Present: What Are Critical Scholars Saying?”]

 

What this tells us, specifically with regard to the 1 Corinthians 15 passage, is that the apostles and other Christians unquestionably began proclaiming the deity, atoning death by crucifixion, and bodily resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth — the three most crucial components of the Gospel message — right from the outset in the early ’30s A.D.  Therefore, no one can credibly claim that these key Christian doctrines were legends or myths about Jesus that people invented many decades or centuries after His life.  That option is simply not tenable anymore, if it ever was in the first place.

With all that said, let’s now examine the historical-critical evidence for Jesus’ resurrection.

 

The Resurrection Evidence

According to the well-established findings of world-class scholars Dr. Gary Habermas (distinguished research professor with a Ph.D. in History and Philosophy of Religion from Michigan State University and the Chair of the Department of Philosophy and Theology at Liberty University), who is inarguably the premier expert on the historical evidence for the resurrection of Jesus Christ (note:  Gary is currently working on a 5,000-plus-page magnum opus on this subject), and renowned philosopher and debater Dr. William Lane Craig, who himself is also an expert in the historicity of Jesus’ resurrection, the vast majority of reputable and credentialed New Testament critical scholars and historians today, from across the ideological and theological spectrum — that is, from very conservative Christians to radically liberal skeptics (i.e., atheists, agnostics, and so forth, including E.P. Sanders, Bart Ehrman, and John Dominic Crossan of the notorious “Jesus Seminar”) — accept as historically true (with a few exceptions, noted below) the following facts from the first century concerning the person of Jesus of Nazareth:

Fact #1:  Jesus of Nazareth was a real person of history.

This fact is a “no-brainer” and, with very few exceptions, is only disputed by unscholarly and intellectually dishonest conspiracy theorists who have not been specially trained in either New Testament studies or ancient Greco-Roman or Jewish history.  Most of these individuals, who make a lot of empty noise on the Internet/social media, also have a militant pre-commitment to atheism and philosophical naturalism and are biased against all things supernatural, miraculous, and theistic.  Legitimate scholars, including ones who identify as atheists or agnostics, don’t take these people seriously.  In fact, Dr. Bart Ehrman, a well-known atheist and credentialed historian who specializes in New Testament textual criticism and the historical Jesus — and who basically makes a living trying to discredit biblical Christianity — actually wrote a book in which he vigorously defends the historicity of Jesus; and in it, he strongly reprimands the extreme skeptics and mythicists who deny Jesus’ historical existence.

In addition to the plentiful extra-biblical attestation we have from the independent, first- and second-century writings of the early church fathers to Jesus’ historicity, several independent, non-Christian, non-biblical writers also affirmed the historicity of Jesus of Nazareth within 150 years of His life, including the basic details of His ministry and death, as well as the beginnings of the Christian Church.  Some of these secular sources, several of whom were critics and/or hostile enemies of Christianity, include the following:

Josephus (the most important Jewish historian of the 1st century A.D.), Tacitus (the most important and arguably the best Roman/Gentile historian of the 1st and early 2nd centuries A.D.), Pliny the Younger (Roman politician of the mid-1st and early 2nd centuries A.D.), Phlegon (a 2nd-century freed slave of Roman Emperor Hadrian who wrote histories), Suetonius (Roman historian of the late 1st and early 2nd centuries A.D.), Lucian of Samosata (a 2nd-century Greek satirist who mocked Christians), Celsus (2nd-century anti-Christian Greek philosopher), and Mara Bar-Serapion (a Syrian prisoner of Rome who wrote a private letter to his son sometime between the late first and early third centuries, although most scholars date the letter to A.D. 73).

[Note:  For deeper study into the ancient non-biblical evidence for the historicity of Jesus of Nazareth, watch this video.]

Counting both Christian and non-Christian sources, Drs. Gary Habermas and Michael Licona found that Jesus of Nazareth is referenced by at least 42 independent authors before the close of the 2nd century, nine of whom were eyewitnesses to Jesus’ life and/or contemporaries of the events recorded in the New Testament.  

To put this in perspective, consider that only 10 total ancient sources reference Tiberius Caesar, the Roman emperor at the time of Christ’s death, within the same 150-year time frame.

Moreover, as author and historian John Dickson, who holds a Ph.D. in Ancient History, informs readers in his article “Most Australians May Doubt That Jesus Existed, but Historians Don’t,” whatever popular cultural opinion may be, the idea that Jesus of Nazareth never existed is, itself, practically mythical within the circles of professional secular historical scholarship.  He points out that the most trusted reference works found in the personal libraries of all classicists and serious scholars of ancient history — such as the Oxford Classical Dictionary, Cambridge Ancient History, and Cambridge History of Judaism — all feature voluminous information establishing the historical authenticity of the person, teachings, and works of Christ, as well as many additional claims of the New Testament writers.  “There is a reason for this consensus,” Dickson explains.  “When you apply the normal rules of history to Jesus of Nazareth, this figure is plainly a historical one, not a mythical one.  The early and diverse sources we have put his existence (and much more) beyond reasonable doubt.  Perhaps only 49 percent of Australians [according to one survey] reckon ‘Jesus was a real person,’ but I wager that 99 percent of professional ancient historians — atheist, Christian, Jewish, or whatever — would agree with this minority view [i.e., that Jesus was a real person of history].”    

Furthermore, in his remarkable investigative masterpiece Person of Interest: Why Jesus Still Matters in a World That Rejects the Bible, former atheist and cold-case homicide detective J. Warner Wallace carefully and cogently demonstrates through meticulous documentation, minutely detailed hand-drawn illustrations, and copious annotations that even if there weren’t a single copy of the Bible — or even so much as a manuscript fragment of the New Testament — still in existence anywhere in the world, we could still confidently reconstruct the central details about the life, character, nature, ministry, miracles, teachings, deity, death, and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth simply by observing His absolutely unparalleled and uniquely inspiring impact on nearly every aspect of world history and the collective imagination and creative output of the human race from the time Jesus lived to the present. 

Specifically, by looking merely at Jesus’ towering influence in the areas of literature (obviously including the writings of Christians from ancient to modern times but also the even more pervasive writings of secular authors, novelists, poets, playwrights, songwriters, screenwriters, biographers, researchers, editors, columnists, lexicographers, encyclopedists, etc.), science (including the founders of every branch of modern science, the vast majority of whom were Christians who rightly understood the discipline of science to be a means of worshiping and learning more about the Creator God, and many of whom wrote extensively about the Bible, Christian theology, and the person of Jesus of Nazareth), education (including the oldest libraries, monasteries, public schools, and universities throughout the world whose founding charters and buildings are replete with plaques, monuments, statues, etc., featuring quotes from the New Testament and sundry other references to Christ and the Gospel message), non-Christian religions/worldviews (i.e., the sacred texts of competing religions throughout the world and statements from their spiritual leaders give us enough information to piece together all of the most important details about Jesus Christ without the need for a Bible), and every conceivable category of the Arts (e.g., architecture, painting, sculpting, graphic design, music, filmmaking, etc.), Wallace makes an undeniable case that to erase the ineradicable “evidential trail” of Jesus’ historicity from this planet would itself require a miracle greater than any other!   

“There can be no other answer:  [Jesus of Nazareth] is easily the dominant figure in history. . . . [The four Gospels] agree in giving us a picture of a very definite personality; they carry a conviction of reality.  To assume that he never lived, that the accounts of his life are inventions, is more difficult and raises more problems in the path of the historian than to accept the essential elements of the Gospel stories as fact. . . . So, the historian, disregarding the theological significance of his life, writes the name of Jesus of Nazareth at the top of the list of the world’s greatest characters.  For the historian’s test of greatness is not, ‘What did he accumulate for himself?’ or, ‘What did he build up, to tumble down at his death?’  Not that at all, but this:  ‘Was the world different because he lived?  Did he start men to thinking along fresh lines with a vigor and vitality that persisted after him?’  By this test, Jesus stands first.” —Herbert George Wells, acclaimed English writer and historian who was definitely not a Christian, responding to interviewer Bruce Barton in the article “H.G. Wells Picks out the Six Greatest Men in History,” The American Magazine, Vol. 94, July 1922, pp. 13–14  

“[N]o pagans and Jews [i.e., writing in ancient times] who opposed Christianity denied Jesus’ historicity or even questioned it.” —Robert Van Voorst, Jesus Outside the New Testament: An Introduction to the Ancient Evidence, 2000, p. 15

“Despite the enormous range of opinion, there are several points on which virtually all scholars of antiquity agree:  Jesus was a Jewish man, known to be a preacher and teacher, who was crucified (a Roman form of execution) in Jerusalem during the reign of the Roman emperor Tiberius, when Pontius Pilate was the governor of Judea. . . . [Granted, it is also true] that no Greek or Roman author [writing in] the first century mentions Jesus.  It would be very convenient for us if they did, but alas, they do not.  [Note:  On this point, Tacitus and Suetonius are two examples of Roman authors who lived in the first century but who apparently didn’t write about Jesus until the early second century.]  At the same time, the fact is again a bit irrelevant since these same sources do not mention many millions of people who actually did live.  Jesus stands here with the vast majority of living, breathing human beings of earlier ages. . . . If an important Roman aristocratic ruler of a major province [i.e., Pontius Pilate] is not mentioned any more than that in the Greek and Roman writings, what are the chances that a lower-class Jewish teacher (which Jesus must have been, as everyone who thinks he lived agrees) would be mentioned in them?  Almost none. . . . It is fair to say that mythicists as a group, and as individuals, are not taken seriously by the vast majority of scholars in the field[s] of New Testament, early Christianity, ancient history, and theology. . . . The idea that Jesus did not exist is a modern notion.  It has no ancient precedents; it was made up in the eighteenth century.  One might as well call it a modern myth — the myth of the mythical Jesus.” —Dr. Bart Ehrman, Did Jesus Exist?: The Historical Argument for Jesus of Nazareth, 2013, pp. 12, 20, 43, 45, and 96 (emphasis mine); quoted by Dr. Sean McDowell in a blog post titled “Bart Ehrman on the Existence of Jesus – Great Quotes,” dated August 11, 2015

 

Fact #2:  Jesus died by crucifixion in Jerusalem.    

This fact, considered virtually unanimously to be the most well-attested fact of the ancient world, obviously presupposes that Jesus of Nazareth truly existed in space-time history.  (After all, one must first exist before one can die, right?!) 

In fact, according to the four canonical Gospel eyewitness accounts (i.e., Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John), which comprise the best and primary-source historical evidence available concerning the person of Jesus of Nazareth and which ought to be respected as such, Jesus was crucified on a Friday between the hours of 9 a.m. and 3 p.m., during the same week when the annual Jewish religious festival of Passover/Feast of Unleavened Bread was being observed, and His body was removed from the Cross and then buried before the Sabbath (i.e., Saturday) officially began that same evening at sundown.  Contextually, these events had to have taken place sometime between the years A.D. 26 and A.D. 37, because it was during this period that Pontius Pilate ruled as governor of Judea. 

[Note:  According to the predominant Hebrew reckoning of time, which the Sadducees and Judeans typically followed, the start of a new day did not begin until sunset, or approximately 6 p.m. in the evening.  The Apostle John appears to have employed this sunset-to-sunset system of dating when reporting the events of Passion Week (or, arguably, he simply followed the Roman system of telling time), whereas Matthew, Mark, and Luke followed the alternative sunrise-to-sunrise system of dating, which was how the Pharisees and Galileans typically measured time and which also appears to have been the primary way that Jesus and His disciples ordinarily reckoned time.  According to the sunrise-to-sunrise system, a new day started at approximately 6 a.m. in the morning.  This would explain why the synoptists (Matthew, Mark, and Luke) view Jesus’ crucifixion as having happened on Passover Day (i.e., Friday, Nisan the 15th, according to the sunrise-to-sunrise perspective), whereas John’s account views Jesus’ death as having happened technically on the Eve of Passover (i.e., Friday, Nisan the 14th, according to the sunset-to-sunset perspective).  In short, although it can get confusing, the four Gospel writers do not contradict one another on the day or timing of Christ’s death by crucifixion; rather, they merely view it from two different perspectives of reckoning time.  All four agree that Jesus was crucified on the same day, Friday of Passover Week, between the hours of 9 a.m. and 3 p.m.  The calendar date differs by one number only because of the alternative systems of measuring the start of a new day.  Also keep in mind that the term “Passover” was commonly used to refer to any aspect of the seven-day Feast of Unleavened Bread and also that numerous meals were eaten throughout that holy festival week.]   

Fortunately, astronomical calculations have helped scholars narrow down the year and season of Jesus’ crucifixion to two possibilities within that range of years:  either the spring of A.D. 30 or the spring of A.D. 33.  (Specifically, during the aforementioned time frame of A.D. 26 to A.D. 37, John’s date of Nisan 14 for Jesus’ crucifixion, which coincided with the slaughter of the Passover lambs, fell on a Friday only in the years 30 and 33.)  For a compelling cumulative case for an April 7, A.D. 30 date for Christ’s death, see Robert Thomas and Stanley Gundry’s excellent A Harmony of the Gospels (particularly essays 10 and 11 in the appendices).  And for a powerful argument in favor of the competing date of April 3, A.D. 33, which is largely based on Oxford scientists Humphreys and Waddington’s careful analysis of lunar eclipse data from the first century, see here.  

Archaeological evidence verifying the fact that crucifixion was indeed the official method of capital punishment in first-century Rome is available here.  This evidence also confirms that the New Testament Gospel writers’ descriptions of this brutal form of execution, as well as the vicious scourging/flogging practice that usually preceded crucifixions, are entirely accurate. 

Additionally, in March/April 1986, the Journal of the American Medical Association published an extensively researched and graphically illustrated forensic medical analysis of Jesus’ physical suffering and death in which they concluded that He was assuredly dead before He was removed from the Cross — indeed, even before the spear was thrust through His side.  The authors deduced that “the actual cause of Jesus’ death, like that of other crucified victims, may have been multifactorial and related primarily to hypovolemic shock, exhaustion asphyxia, and perhaps acute heart failure.”  The full article is available for viewing and for download in PDF format here. 

Needless to say, the once popular skeptical theory that supposed that Jesus merely fainted or “swooned” on the Cross, only to be revived later by the coolness or dampness of the tomb (i.e., the “Swoon Theory”), after which He single-handedly removed the extremely large and heavy stone (which may have weighed up to 2,000 pounds) and evidently overpowered the armed soldiers guarding the tomb while He was suffering from catastrophic blood loss and traumatic wounds (not the least of which included a punctured lung and heart!), may safely be rejected as sheer nonsense.     

“Jesus’ death by crucifixion under Pontius Pilate is as sure as anything historical can ever be.” —John Dominic Crossan, radical skeptic and biblical revisionist who reportedly rejects 80% of the New Testament sayings attributed to Jesus of Nazareth, Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography, 1995, p. 145  

“Jesus’ death as a consequence of crucifixion is indisputable.” —Gerd Lüdemann, German atheist and New Testament scholar, The Resurrection of Jesus: History, Experience, Theology, 1994, p. 50; quoted by Jeff Pallansch in an article titled “The Historical Basis for Jesus’ Death by Crucifixion,” dated March 22, 2022

“Clearly, the weight of historical and medical evidence indicates that Jesus was dead before the wound to his side was inflicted and supports the traditional view that the spear, thrust between his right ribs, probably perforated not only the right lung but also the pericardium and heart, and thereby ensured his death.  Accordingly, interpretations based on the assumption that Jesus did not die on the cross appear to be at odds with modern medical knowledge.” —William D. Edwards, MD; Wesley J. Gabel, MDiv; Floyd E. Hosmer, MS, AMI; JAMA, March 21, 1986, Vol. 255, No. 11

 

Fact #3:  As a result of Jesus’ death, His disciples were grief-stricken and in a state of deep despair and hopelessness.

This fact demonstrates that none of Jesus’ followers were expecting Him to be raised from the dead.  Indeed, all of them lacked faith.  They were also forlorn and emotionally devastated.  The reason this is noteworthy is that it seems to preclude the possibility that the disciples were suffering from grief hallucination (see notes under fact #6 below to learn other reasons why the “Hallucination Theory” doesn’t work), seeing as how hallucinations generally result from significant expectation, emotional excitement, and a strong desire to see or experience someone or something.

In contrast, the disciples had personally witnessed their leader be brutally executed via crucifixion, pierced through the heart with a Roman spear to ensure He was dead, tightly bound in a hundred pounds of linen wrappings and spices, and sealed in a tomb.  They were utterly convinced that Jesus was dead and that His death was final, as they had not understood anything He had told them concerning His resurrection (cf. Luke 18:31–34).  Moreover, they refused to believe the initial reports of His resurrection (cf. Mark 16:11 and John 20:24–29), and some of them remained doubtful even after personally experiencing the risen Christ (cf. Matthew 28:16–17)!  Hence, far from waiting around in eager anticipation for the Lord to come back to life after His death, the disciples instead promptly locked themselves in their homes, where they remained overcome with bereavement and paralyzing fear of the political and religious authorities.

 

Fact #4:  After Jesus’ death on the Cross, He was buried by a man named Joseph of Arimathea in his (Joseph’s) personal tomb in Jerusalem.

On this point, some of the more incredulous skeptics, such as Ehrman and Crossan, prefer to say that Jesus’ body was unceremoniously disposed of in a “common grave.”  (Without warrant, Crossan even conjectures that Jesus’ body was eaten by dogs!)  This notion, however, is purely speculative and now appears to be held by only a small minority of scholars.  Why?  There are no competing burial traditions from the first century or even later, apparently, that dispute the multiply-attested, independent eyewitness burial accounts that appear in all four Gospels, the book of Acts, and the super-early creedal tradition in 1 Corinthians 15:3–7. 

Besides, even if Jesus’ body had been buried somewhere other than a rock-hewn tomb, that would not rule out His resurrection.  In other words, He could have returned from the dead regardless of where His body was placed.  Finally, the other accepted historical facts — namely, the many reported post-death appearances and life transformations of those who claimed to witness Jesus alive from the dead — would still have to be explained.

“Crossan must disregard all the evidence we find in the Gospels to make this claim, and he can adduce no countervailing evidence to the contrary besides the custom of the day.  Jesus was certainly no common criminal, and the best records available to us claim He was buried in a special grave by Joseph of Arimathea.  Accordingly, Crossan’s controversial claim may be dismissed.” —Douglas Groothius, Christian philosopher and apologist, Christian Apologetics: A Comprehensive Case for Biblical Faith 

“What of the empty tomb?  Again, the credibility gap seems to me to rule out deliberate deceit by the disciples, or that the women went to the wrong tomb and no one bothered to check, or that Jesus never really died, or that his body was not buried but thrown into a lime-pit (the burial is one of the earliest and best-attested facts about Jesus, being recorded in 1 Corinthians as well as in all four Gospels and, for what it is worth, in the Acts kerygma [i.e., “proclamation”]).” —John A.T. Robinson, English liberal theologian and NT scholar who rejected the supernatural elements of the Bible and who held heretical views about basically every major Christian doctrine, The Human Face of God, 1973, pp. 131 (emphasis mine)

 

Fact #5:  The tomb in which Jesus was buried was found empty shortly after His burial.

This fact is clearly the most contested by the more skeptical scholars, such as Ehrman and Crossan.  However, Dr. Habermas’ extensive research on this subject has determined that 66 to 75% of modern New Testament critical scholars currently believe in the empty tomb because there are now 23 arguments supporting it versus 14 opposing it. 

Regardless, the fact remains that no one, either in the first century or later, was ever able to produce the body or bones of Jesus of Nazareth after His well-attested death and burial.  Indeed, the Jewish and Roman authorities had the means, the motive, and the opportunity to disprove the empty tomb claims, but they did not because they could not.  As a result, their only recourse was to persecute the disciples of Christ and do everything in their power to silence the reports of Jesus’ resurrection, but this also they utterly failed to do.   

“If the empty tomb story had really been created subsequently to convince doubters, the church could surely have made a better job of it.  It rested it entirely on the testimony of women (which, in Jewish law, was not binding and whose visions do not even rate inclusion in the the Pauline list [in 1 Cor. 15:3–8 of the risen Christ’s appearances]), and it did not involve the apostles. . . . The evidence suggests indeed that [the empty tomb report] was very early tradition.  It is, after all, squarely in Mark, and shows no sign of being his creation but rather ‘tradition with a long history behind it.’  Moreover, Paul’s words in 1 Cor. 15:4 that Jesus ‘was buried’ and that ‘He was raised to life on the third day’ seem to presuppose some connection between a resurrection and the tomb (and not merely the appearances) as part of what [Paul] received at his first instruction as a Christian and of what was universally believed by the apostles.” —John A.T. Robinson, English liberal theologian and NT scholar who rejected the supernatural elements of the Bible and who held heretical views about basically every major Christian doctrine, The Human Face of God, 1973, pp. 132–133

 

Fact #6:  Jesus’ disciples had visual experiences after His death and burial in which they believed they witnessed actual, physical appearances of the risen Jesus.

The more skeptical scholars aren’t ready to concede that Jesus actually rose from the dead, of course, but they do at least admit that hundreds of Jesus’ followers sincerely believed they experienced Jesus alive from the dead.

Also bear in mind that the post-mortem appearances of Jesus occurred on at least 12 separate occasions, over a period of 40 days (approximately 1 month and 10 days), in a variety of locations (e.g., Jerusalem; Emmaus, which was 7 miles from Jerusalem; the Sea of Tiberias, which was approximately 70 miles from Jerusalem; and Galilee, which was at least 60 miles from Jerusalem), environments (indoors and outdoors), and times (daytime and nighttime) to individuals, small groups, and large crowds, including one incident in which at least 500 people reportedly saw Him simultaneously.  [Note:  There may have been many more than 500 “brethren,” as Paul called them, if women and children were not counted in that figure.]  During that lengthy span of time (i.e., 40 days), these numerous eyewitnesses, who were spread across a distance of 70 miles or more, claimed that they saw with their eyes, heard with their ears, touched with their hands, walked with, conversed with, and/or ate a meal with the risen Lord.  The witnesses’ clear and repeated emphases on the physical senses strongly lowers the probability that the figure they thought was the resurrected Jesus of Nazareth was really nothing more than a figment of their imagination (e.g., an illusion) or an immaterial spirit (e.g., an apparition or ghost).

Moreover, to surmise, as many skeptics have done over the years, that all of these purported witnesses of the risen Christ must have been suffering from a mass or collective group hallucination strains credulity beyond the breaking point.  Noteworthily, clinical psychologists have confirmed in peer-reviewed studies that simultaneous group hallucinations in which more than one person in a group experienced an identical hallucination have never been clinically documented in medical or psychological literature.  This is because a hallucination, by definition, is a very private, purely subjective (i.e., mind-dependent) visual or auditory experience that does not occur outside the mind of the hallucinating individual.  In other words, what the hallucinating person thinks he sees or hears occurs only in that person’s mind/imagination; there is no external referent (unlike an illusion or a mirage).  Thus, multiple people cannot share the exact same hallucination any more than they can co-experience the exact same dream or nightmare. 

[Note:  Non-simultaneous collective “visionary experiences” do occur, but they are rare, and they differ from true hallucinations.  Moreover, even these require a “heightened sense of group expectation, not everyone in the group [even] experiences a hallucination, those that do see something have different [not identical] hallucinations from one to another, and the apparitions [i.e., the object or figure the people in the group believe they saw] do not carry on conversations.”  These qualities are in clear contrast to what the New Testament records about the characteristics of the groups who believed they encountered Jesus of Nazareth after His death.  None of those people were expecting to see Jesus (or any other dead person) come back to life (refer back to Fact #3 for more on this point), they all described witnessing one and the same person (i.e., Jesus of Nazareth), and some of them reported simultaneously conversing with Him and hearing Him speak.]

Keep in mind also that people in the first century only had access to primitive and very slow modes of communication (by today’s standards, especially).  In other words, no one was spreading the news about Jesus’ alleged resurrection within hours or minutes via telegraph, telephone, radio, television, fax machines, computers, or “smartphones.”  And certainly, no one living in Judea was instantaneously sharing “viral” photos or videos of the risen Christ on Instagram or Facebook so that all their “friends” and “followers” over in Galilee could get all worked up in a frenzy and start hoping that they too might get to see Jesus alive from the dead!  The point is, nobody living in Judea, Samaria, Galilee, or elsewhere in the Roman world in the days following Jesus of Nazareth’s death had any reason to expect or desire to see a man who supposedly came back from the dead (especially in the physical sense).       

Furthermore, despite being absurdly implausible (if not impossible), the “Hallucination Theory” also fails to account for the empty tomb (i.e., Jesus’ body was still absent from the grave—where was it?) as well as the seismic life transformation of the hundreds of people who claimed to see Him alive after His death (see fact #7 below), especially those of skeptics and enemies of Jesus, such as Orthodox Jewish priests and James (Jesus’ brother) and Saul of Tarsus (see facts #11, #12, and #13 below).  For what reason or motivation would an unbeliever or an opponent of Christ imagine that Jesus had risen from the dead?  And if they (or any of the other witnesses) had been hallucinating about the Resurrection, how hard do you think it might have been to talk them out of their hallucination, given the severely detrimental personal ramifications of maintaining that scandalous claim?  Such persons surely weren’t expecting, much less desiring, to see Jesus come back to life!  And why on earth would they, of all people, risk their lives to advance the resurrection claim and to serve and glorify a man whom they had heretofore despised and whose teachings they had vehemently rejected up to that point IF they were not absolutely certain that they truly had empirically witnessed Him alive in the flesh after His death?  That just doesn’t fly.

 

Fact #7:  After having these experiences, Jesus’ disciples were rapidly transformed from despondent cowards hiding out for fear of the authorities, into bold, relentless proclaimers and defenders of Jesus’ resurrection, even to the point of martyrdom.

Because they were eyewitnesses and the authors of the resurrection message, Jesus’ followers were in a position to know whether He truly rose from the dead or whether they just made the whole thing up.  They were also well aware that continuing to proclaim His resurrection would result in their own violent persecution and death, yet they were willing to proceed anyway.

Question:  Would you be motivated to tell a lie if you knew the consequences would be any of the following:  ostracism from family and friends, excommunication from the religion/synagogue that had given your life identity and meaning, imprisonment (understand that first-century Roman jails/dungeons were nothing like the cozy, humane penitentiaries of modern America!), severe beatings, brutal scourging, vicious stoning, beheading, and/or some other gruesome, excruciating means of death, such as crucifixion or being burned alive or eaten by lions?

That idea simply isn’t reasonable.  If the disciples fabricated the resurrection of Jesus, they truly had nothing to gain (e.g., power, profit/prosperity, pleasure, popularity, or protection) and everything to lose (i.e., their reputation, relationships, livelihood, physical well-being, and even their souls if their previous religion, Judaism, turned out to be true instead of Christianity).  Moreover, it isn’t conceivable that anyone could have gotten away with such a grandiose ruse in the very city where Jesus was publicly executed and buried (see notes under fact #9 below for more on this point).  

Furthermore, even if the “Fraud Theory” were plausible (i.e., that the disciples simply lied about Jesus’ resurrection), it still would not explain the vacant grave of Jesus (where was His body?) or Jesus’ post-death appearances to hundreds of other eyewitnesses, not to mention the dramatic transformations those people also underwent in both belief and behavior, especially the skeptics and enemies of Jesus (Paul, in particular) who didn’t believe in Him to begin with and, consequently, definitely had no motivation to lie about His resurrection.

“The apostles surely would have cracked to save themselves.  Peter had already denied Jesus three times before the Resurrection in order to ‘save his skin’!  He surely would have denied Him after the Resurrection if the story had turned out to be a hoax.” —Drs. Norman Geisler and Frank Turek, I Don’t Have Enough Faith to Be an Atheist, p. 293 (emphasis mine)

 

Fact #8:  The Resurrection of Jesus was the central message His disciples preached, and they preached the Resurrection shortly after Jesus’ death.  Furthermore, the Resurrection was the central proclamation of the early Church, and it remains the central doctrine of Christianity today.

As explained at the beginning of this article, the well-attested early creedal tradition that Paul recorded in his first letter to the church in Corinth, Greece (i.e., 1 Corinthians 15:3–7) proves that the apostles and other believers unquestionably began proclaiming Jesus’ resurrection (as well as His deity, His atoning death by crucifixion, His burial, and His post-resurrection appearances) in the early ’30s A.D.  Even the most skeptical scholars (e.g., atheists Gerd Lüdemann and Bart Ehrman) affirm this point and date this creedal information to within a few years of Jesus’ death, while other scholars (e.g., James D.G. Dunn and Walter Kasper) believe the data was more likely compiled within months of Jesus’ crucifixion.  Logically, if the creed was formulated that early, then the beliefs/doctrines summarized in the creed, which obviously included the Resurrection (“and that He was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures”), had to have been believed and taught even earlier than the formulation date. 

What’s more, even aside from this incredibly early church creedal confession, the consensus among both liberal and conservative New Testament scholars is that Paul composed his first letter to the Corinthians in the early to mid-’50s (between 53 and 56) A.D., a mere 20–26 years after Jesus was crucified, when the majority of apostles and other eyewitnesses to the risen Jesus were still alive.  

Additionally, in Acts 2:14–36, the Apostle Peter preached the earliest recorded Christian sermon to a crowd of thousands in the very city where Jesus died and was buried, and the crux of his homily was the resurrection of Christ.  Significantly, the book in which this sermon appears, the Acts of the Apostles, is arguably the best-attested book of antiquity (cf. here and here for more), and was most likely composed no later than A.D. 62 when, once again, the majority of apostles and eyewitnesses to the recorded events were still living. 

“For Acts, the confirmation of historicity is overwhelming. . . . [A]ny attempt to reject its basic historicity, even in matters of detail, must now appear absurd.  Roman historians have long taken it for granted.” —A.N. Sherwin-White, British historian of antiquity who specialized in Roman studies, Roman Society and Roman Law in the New Testament, 1963, p. 189

 

For evidence of what the Apostolic church fathers — that is, Clement of Rome, Ignatius of Antioch, Polycarp, and others who were direct disciples/students of the original Apostles, such as Peter, John, and Paul — of the late first and early second centuries believed about Jesus’ resurrection, see here.

The centrality of Christ’s resurrection to Christianity is also beyond debate.  The Apostle Paul, who’s been called the “darling of the skeptics” for his historical reliability and overall integrity as a writer, explained this fact better than anyone when he wrote the following:

“If Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is vain, [and] your faith also is vain.  Moreover, we are even found to be false witnesses of God, because we testified against God that He raised Christ, whom He did not raise, if in fact the dead are not raised.  For if the dead are not raised, not even Christ has been raised.  And if Christ has not been raised, your faith is worthless; you are still in your sins.  Then those also who have fallen asleep in Christ have perished.  If we have hoped in Christ in this life only, we are of all men most to be pitied” (1 Corinthians 15:14–19).

 

Fact #9:  The disciples preached the message of Jesus’ resurrection in Jerusalem, which is the same city in which Jesus died and was buried.

Jerusalem is the last place on the planet a person would have wanted to make up a tale about Jesus rising from the dead, especially if doing so were illegal and punishable by death.  Why?  Both the Roman and Jewish authorities, along with myriad other eyewitnesses, saw Jesus die and watched Him be buried and sealed in a specific tomb in Jerusalem.  Thus, a fabricated resurrection story would’ve been easily and readily falsified, since all anyone had to do to silence the pesky Christians once for all was simply open the tomb in which Jesus was buried and parade His corpse around town.  Christianity would have ended right then and there, and no one would have been more pleased to see it end than the power-hungry Sanhedrin or the Romans, who viewed Christ and His followers as a seditious threat to Caesar. 

Of course, this never happened, because Jesus’ tomb was EMPTY, and His body was nowhere to be found.  Indeed, the Jewish authorities knew and unwittingly admitted this fact, seeing as how they were the first to concoct and spread the “Stolen Body Theory” — that is, that His sneaky disciples stealthily rolled away the stone during the night and stole Jesus’ cadaver without managing to awaken the allegedly “sleeping” Roman soldiers whose job was to guard Jesus’ grave — a most serious dereliction of duty, mind you, that would have resulted in the execution of those guards (cf. Matthew 28:11–15)!

 

Fact #10:  Soon after Jesus’ death, the Christian Church / Christianity was born, grew, and spread rapidly and widely.

Question:  How could Christianity have originated and exploded in a location swarming with hostile religious and political authorities and eyewitnesses to Jesus’ public execution and burial IF Jesus’ body were still in the grave? 

Why were so many skeptics and enemies of Jesus converted and the Roman Empire turned upside down (actually, right side up!) if He remained deceased? 

What else besides the actual bodily resurrection of this man called Jesus would inspire so many people willingly to leave their families, friends, careers, and all the comforts of home to embark on arduous and dangerous missionary journeys to faraway places and willingly endure the most perilous conditions and life-threatening circumstances just so they could share the news of the risen Christ with the rest of the world?

 

Fact #11:  Orthodox Jews, including strict, Torah-abiding Pharisaical priests (cf. Acts 6:7), came to believe in Jesus as Messiah and changed the Sabbath—their primary day of worship—from Saturday to Sunday in celebration of Jesus’ resurrection.

This change would have been considered blasphemous and absolutely unthinkable within Judaism.  In fact, not to observe the Sabbath in accord with Mosaic Law was a crime punishable by death (cf. Exodus 31:14).  Also keep in mind that the Jews, including Jesus’ core disciples, as well as skeptics James and Paul, had no prior concept of a dying Messiah figure, much less one who would rise from the dead bodily before the general resurrection at the end of the world.  In fact, they were expecting the Messiah to be a political conqueror who would overthrow the oppressive Romans and promptly restore the kingdom of Israel to its former glory.  They also believed that anyone who was hung to death on a tree, as Jesus was, was under the curse of God (cf. Deuteronomy 21:23 and Galatians 3:13–14). 

Furthermore, in choosing to follow Jesus as the Christ, Hebrew priests set aside the Levitical/Aaronic priesthood and gave up their sacred system of animal sacrifices.  In Judaism, to abandon these more than 1,500-year-old social and theological institutions was to endanger one’s soul of being condemned to hell for all eternity.  What, other than compelling reasons/proofs for Jesus’ resurrection, could have convinced scores of devout Jewish clergymen and “laity” to change their minds about these eternally imperative issues?

 

Fact #12:  James, one of the unbelieving siblings of Jesus (cf. Matthew 12:46–50, Matthew 13:55, Mark 3:20–21, and John 7:1–5), remained skeptical until some time after Jesus’ death when he had an experience that he believed to be an appearance of the risen Jesus.  After this event, James became a committed follower and apostle of Jesus and went on to pastor the main Christian church in Jerusalem.  

Question:  If your brother claimed to be God, what would it take to convince you that he actually is?  He would have to do something really extraordinary, right?  A feat that only God is capable of pulling off, no doubt?  Yep! 

By the way, according to multiple authors from antiquity, including first-century Jewish historian Flavius Josephus, James was ultimately stoned to death for his faith in Jesus, ca. A.D. 62.  That underscores how dramatic his conversion was from hardened skeptic to unwavering believer in his brother as resurrected Lord and God Incarnate.

 

Fact #13:  Saul of Tarsus, better known as the Apostle Paul, a zealous Pharisee who had viciously persecuted Christians and who was determined to silence the message they were spreading about the risen Redeemer, abruptly became a devout follower of and missionary for Christ (the great “Apostle to the Gentiles,” in fact) after having an experience in which he believed he encountered the risen Jesus on the road to Damascus, Syria (a.k.a. Aram), which probably occurred within 1 to 3 years after Jesus’ death.

Question:  Why would Christianity’s greatest adversary suddenly become its greatest advocate — even to the point of death (note:  Paul is believed to have been executed by beheading sometime toward the end of Roman Emperor Nero’s bloody reign, circa A.D. 64–68) — if, in fact, Jesus, the man whom Paul had detested and considered to be a blaspheming false messiah and phony prophet, had remained dead and buried?  What would it take to change such a man’s mind so thoroughly and comprehensively about his enemy that he would write these words: 

“But whatever things were gain to me, those things I have counted as loss for the sake of Christ.  More than that, I count all things to be loss in view of the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus, my Lord, for whom I have suffered the loss of all things and count them but rubbish so that I may gain Christ and may be found in Him, not having a righteousness of my own derived from the Law, but that which is through faith in Christ, the righteousness which comes from God on the basis of faith, that I may know Him and the power of His resurrection and the fellowship of His sufferings, being conformed to His death, in order that I may attain to the resurrection from the dead.” —Philippians 3:7–11 (emphasis mine) 

 

One More Thing . . .

In Galatians 2:1–10, Paul notes that he, along with his ministry companions Barnabas and Titus, returned to Jerusalem 14 years after (i.e., somewhere between A.D. 50 and A.D. 53) his original meeting with Peter and James (i.e., the half-brother of Jesus, not to be confused with James the Son of Zebedee), which had occurred in the ‘30s, to meet with them a second time for the purpose of ensuring that the Gospel message he had been preaching to the Gentiles in the intervening years since that first meeting was the same central message all the other apostles were preaching.  Significantly, in this second meeting, the Apostle John, another of Jesus’ three closest disciples, was also in attendance.  Thus, the four apostolic pillars of early Christianity were assembled together in the same place, at the same time.  I like to refer to them as the Christian Beatles:  John, Paul, James, and Petros (okay, okay . . . Peter)!  What a monumental, dream-team “pastor’s conference” that must have been!

Bottom line:  One could hardly imagine a better group of sources from whom to learn the hard facts about Jesus of Nazareth’s ministry, personal character, teachings, miracles, suffering, death by crucifixion, burial, and—yes—His bodily resurrection.  (Incidentally, in case you don’t know “the rest of the story,” the three other highly respected apostles did, in fact, give Paul and his colleagues their blessing and the right hand of fellowship.) 

“The encouraging news about Paul’s writings, particularly 1 Corinthians and Galatians, is that he is a universally attested ancient authority on the historical Jesus of Nazareth, who was at the right place, at the right time, and with the right people — that is, three leaders of the early New Testament Church who were also eyewitnesses to Christ’s life, death, and resurrection — and he passes down to us their personal testimony.  This is powerful historical evidence.  Thus, one of the reasons we can be confident that Jesus rose from the dead is that we have Paul’s well-authenticated data confirming the event as historical fact — very early data, mind you, that he received shortly after Jesus’ death from no less an authority than the Apostles Peter, John, and James.  Wow!” —Dr. Gary Habermas

 

Now, What’s YOUR Verdict?

This remarkable list of historical facts about Jesus that even non-Christian and non-religious experts on the New Testament acknowledge as true reveals two major takeaways.

First, it bears witness to the historical reliability of the New Testament writings — namely, for the sake of this discussion, the four Gospels (which, again, are the primary-source historical documents regarding the life of Jesus of Nazareth), the historically well-validated book of Acts, and the Pauline epistles of 1 Corinthians and Galatians, which are two of the seven writings of Paul that skeptical scholars greatly admire for their authenticity.  (FYI, the others are Romans, 2 Corinthians, Philippians, 1 Thessalonians, and Philemon.)

Second, these combined facts require — nay, demand — an explanation that is adequate to make sense of their extraordinary, life-altering, world-changing significance.  Thus, the key question here for everyone is this:

If your mind is open to the possibility that God exists, which in turn would mean that miracles or supernatural occurrences are, at the very least, possible, what is the BEST explanation for all of the aforementioned facts?

I invite my skeptical friends to think very, very carefully and seriously about that question.  Please keep in mind, though, that it is not enough simply to speculate about alternative theories or naturalistic explanations for these facts.  Anyone can say, “Maybe this happened” or “Maybe that happened” until the cows come home, but those are not arguments.  An argument must be supported by actual evidence, and in this case, to disprove the Resurrection, one must posit counter-evidence from the first century that is not only plausible but that also better explains all of the above-mentioned facts (and some others that are not mentioned here) than the Resurrection does.    

The historical evidence for Christ’s resurrection is there, it is extremely well-attested, and — in light of the enormous gravity of the claims that Jesus of Nazareth made about Himself, humanity, the afterlife, and the coming judgment of God — we all have to deal with these facts. 

As Josh McDowell once said, this evidence “demands a verdict.”

So, what’s yours?

 

Recommended Resources

1) “The Historical Evidence for the Resurrection Even the Skeptics Believe” – Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5 – by Drs. Gary Habermas and John Ankerberg

2) “Did Jesus Literally Rise from the Dead?” – Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5 – by Drs. Gary Habermas and John Ankerberg

3) “The Evidence for Jesus’ Resurrection“ by Dr. William Lane Craig

4) The Case for the Resurrection of Jesus by Drs. Gary Habermas and Michael Licona

5) The Resurrection of Jesus: A New Historiographical Approach by Dr. Michael Licona

6) The Resurrection of the Son of God by Dr. N.T. Wright

7) I Don’t Have Enough Faith to Be an Atheist, Chapter 12, “Did Jesus Really Rise from the Dead?” by Drs. Norman Geisler and Frank Turek 

8) Memorable Reasons Why We Can—And Should—Trust the Bible

9) New Testament Manuscript Stats