Brad Alles

In the previous blogs we saw how the Bible is the inspired Word of God, and has been reliably copied for centuries.  The Bible is also inerrant, or without contradiction.  Read it cover to cover and you will see for yourself. People have been trying to find contradictions for over 2000 years and haven’t been successful.

The only thing that you will find is located in little footnotes at the bottom of the page, which describe variations in manuscripts. These are essentially copyist’s errors. As careful as these men were, they were still imperfect people and made slight mistakes, the vast majority of which being spelling or word changes. Remember the book of Isaiah from the Dead Sea Scroll we discussed earlier? It was more than 95 percent the same as the modern Hebrew version of today. The 5 percent variation was mainly slips of the pen and spelling changes. Here’s some examples. In Isaiah 15:9, “Dimon’s waters are full of blood, but I will bring still more upon Dimon, ” the Dead Sea Scroll has “Dibon” instead of “Dimon.” In Isaiah 19:18, “One of them will be called the City of Destruction.” The Dead Sea Scroll has “City of the Sun” instead of “City of Destruction.” That’s the extent of the kind of changes you will find if you read the footnotes—your Bible editors haven’t hidden anything from you, since there’s nothing earth-shattering to cover up!

If you read every footnote at the bottom of your Bible where it reads, “Some manuscripts say…,” you’ll find that almost all are spelling or word changes, but absolutely no doctrine changes or contradictions will be found. That is incredibly comforting to know, especially when people are asserting that the Bible is full of contradictions. It simply isn’t. If it were, people would have found them by now. It’s not like unbelievers haven’t tried.

Dr. Gleason Archer, seminary professor of biblical criticism, writing in the forward to his Encyclopedia of Bible Difficulties, said it best: “As I have dealt with one apparent discrepancy after another and have studied the alleged contradictions between the biblical record and the evidence of linguistics, archaeology, or science, my confidence in the trustworthiness of Scripture has been repeatedly verified and strengthened by the discovery that almost every problem in Scripture that has ever been discovered by man, from ancient times until now, has been dealt with in a completely satisfactory manner by the biblical text itself—or else by objective archaeological information…no properly trained evangelical scholar has anything to fear from the hostile arguments and challenges of humanistic rationalists or detractors of any and every persuasion.”

At the start of this series of blogs we saw that about one-third of Americans believe that the Bible is the word of God and is to be taken literally. How sad. That is why apologetics and defending the faith is so necessary—people need to know the truth. More people need to know that the Bible is inspired from God, reliably copied, and without contradictions.