Is the Bible Reliable?

Every serious conversation about Christianity sooner or later comes back to one book. The faith stands or falls with what that book says about a man who died under Pontius Pilate and rose again on the third day. Paul put it as plainly as it can be put: “And if Christ be not risen, then is our preaching vain, and your faith is also vain” (1 Corinthians 15:14). If the record is false, the faith is empty. If the record is true, nothing else in a person's life is more important.

So the question of this paper is not academic. Is the Bible reliable? is really the question Can I trust what it tells me about God, about myself, and about Jesus Christ?

Why I asked it

Here is my story in my own words:

I was raised Roman Catholic but never really connected — I went through the motions, fell asleep in the pews, and faked being sick to skip Mass. College was rebellion: parties, drugs, freedom I loved and abused. Eventually I gave up and called myself an atheist. I decided to read the Bible for one reason: to disprove it, so I'd have an excuse to stop going to church for good. It did the opposite.

I came to disprove God. He met me instead — and I couldn't unsee what time it is. A person who wants to dismiss the Bible usually reaches for a handful of arguments he has heard rather than read: that the text was changed over the centuries, that no one has the originals, that archaeology has disproved it, that it is full of contradictions, that it is a collection of myths. Those arguments deserve a real answer, and the answer should be honest. That is what this paper tries to give.

What “reliable” means

The word reliable can mean three different things, and it helps to keep them apart.

• Textual reliability. Do we have, in substance and in detail, what the prophets and apostles actually wrote? Or has the text drifted so far through copying that we can no longer know?
• Historical reliability. When the Bible names a king, a governor, a city or a battle, does it describe a real world that can be checked? Or does it read like legend, set in no place and no time?
• Divine reliability. Is the Bible what it claims to be: the word of God, true in all it affirms? This is the deepest question, and evidence alone cannot settle it. But evidence bears on it, because a book that claims to come from God makes claims that can be tested: claims about its own preservation, about history, and about the future.

The first two questions are open to anyone with a library card. The third is where a person must finally decide. This paper follows that order.

How this paper works, and what it will not do

The method is simple. Scripture comes first, because the Bible makes claims about itself, and those claims are the thing being tested. Then comes the evidence: manuscripts, inscriptions, ancient historians, the work of scholars. Every factual claim that is not common knowledge carries a footnote to a real, checkable source, so you can look it up yourself.

That also means this paper will not say some things you may have heard in sermons or read in older apologetics books. It will not say that archaeology has “proved” every verse, that the text has “100% accuracy”, that there are “zero contradictions”, or that a certain number of prophecies multiply out to an impossible probability. Some of those claims are overstatements, and some are simply wrong. The Bible does not need them. A case that is true can afford to be careful. As the Lord says through Isaiah, “Come now, and let us reason together, saith the LORD” (Isaiah 1:18). The Bereans were called noble because they “searched the scriptures daily, whether those things were so” (Acts 17:11). That is the posture here.

A word about the Bible quoted here

Every verse in this paper is quoted from the King James Bible, the Authorised Version of 1611, which is the Bible of this ministry. You can read it free, in the 1611 spelling or in modern spelling, in the 1611 Reader at kylelauriano.com/library. A KJV with Strong's Concordance will let you see the Hebrew and Greek words behind the English. Where modern versions leave out or change a passage that stands in the 1611, this paper says so and points you to kylelauriano.com/library/changes, where every such place is set out.

The road ahead

• Part 1 sets out what the Bible claims about itself, because those claims are the test.
• Part 2 follows the Old Testament from the ancient scribes to the Dead Sea Scrolls.
• Part 3 follows the New Testament from the earliest papyri to the Received Text behind the 1611.
• Part 4 weighs what archaeology has, and has not, shown.
• Part 5 examines prophecy where the date of the writing is secure.
• Part 6 answers the common objections honestly.
• The Conclusion gathers the evidence and asks what you will do with it.

Before we test the Bible, we need to know what it claims. A book that claims nothing about itself cannot fail a test. The Bible claims a great deal.

The claim of inspiration

The Bible does not present itself as a collection of religious opinions. It claims to come from God.

“All scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness: That the man of God may be perfect, throughly furnished unto all good works.” (2 Timothy 3:16-17)

Peter says the same about the prophets: “For the prophecy came not in old time by the will of man: but holy men of God spake as they were moved by the Holy Ghost” (2 Peter 1:21). Jesus Himself treated the Scriptures as carrying God's authority down to the smallest detail. Arguing from a single word in a psalm, He said that “the scripture cannot be broken” (John 10:35). Against the tempter in the wilderness He answered, “It is written, Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God” (Matthew 4:4).

This is the historic Christian position, and it is the position of this ministry: the Scriptures are inspired, without error in what they affirm, and the final authority for faith and life.

The claim of preservation

The Bible claims more than that God gave His word once. It claims that He would keep it.

“The words of the LORD are pure words: as silver tried in a furnace of earth, purified seven times. Thou shalt keep them, O LORD, thou shalt preserve them from this generation for ever.” (Psalms 12:6-7)

Isaiah says, “The grass withereth, the flower fadeth: but the word of our God shall stand for ever” (Isaiah 40:8), and Peter applies that very text to the gospel preached in his day: “But the word of the Lord endureth for ever. And this is the word which by the gospel is preached unto you” (1 Peter 1:25). Jesus put His own words in the same category: “Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words shall not pass away” (Matthew 24:35). He also said, “Till heaven and earth pass, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the law, till all be fulfilled” (Matthew 5:18). The jot is the smallest Hebrew letter; the tittle is a tiny stroke of the pen.

These are bold claims. They are also testable. A God who promises to keep His words should have kept them, and the record of how the Bible was copied should show it. That is the question of Parts 2 and 3.

The Reformation churches confessed this promise in plain terms. The Westminster Confession of Faith (1647) says that the Old Testament in Hebrew and the New Testament in Greek, being immediately inspired by God, were by His singular care and providence “kept pure in all ages”.¹

The claim of eyewitness history

The Bible does not ask to be read as a book of timeless sayings floating free of history. Its central claims are about events.

“For we have not followed cunningly devised fables, when we made known unto you the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, but were eyewitnesses of his majesty.” (2 Peter 1:16)

Luke opens his Gospel by telling his reader how he worked. Many had written accounts, “Even as they delivered them unto us, which from the beginning were eyewitnesses, and ministers of the word” (Luke 1:2). He had “perfect understanding of all things from the very first”, and he wrote “That thou mightest know the certainty of those things, wherein thou hast been instructed” (Luke 1:3-4). Paul, standing before a king, said of the resurrection: “for this thing was not done in a corner” (Acts 26:26). He even listed the witnesses, including “above five hundred brethren at once; of whom the greater part remain unto this present” (1 Corinthians 15:6), which is a way of saying: go and ask them.

A book that claims to be eyewitness history invites historical testing. That is the question of Part 4.

The claim of prophecy

The Bible also claims that God speaks about the future, and it gives its own test for a prophet:

“And if thou say in thine heart, How shall we know the word which the LORD hath not spoken? When a prophet speaketh in the name of the LORD, if the thing follow not, nor come to pass, that is the thing which the LORD hath not spoken, but the prophet hath spoken it presumptuously: thou shalt not be afraid of him.” (Deuteronomy 18:21-22)

God says through Isaiah that this is one of the marks that sets Him apart from idols: “I am God, and there is none like me, Declaring the end from the beginning, and from ancient times the things that are not yet done” (Isaiah 46:9-10). That is the question of Part 5.

Is this circular?

A skeptic may object that it is circular to quote the Bible about the Bible. It would be, if the argument were “the Bible is true because it says so”. That is not the argument. The point of this chapter is to set the terms of the test. The Bible makes four kinds of claims about itself: that it is from God, that God will keep it, that it records real history, and that it foretells real events. The last three can be checked against the world outside the Bible. If they fail, the first claim falls with them. If they hold, the first claim deserves a hearing.

A picture of preservation: Jeremiah's scroll

The Bible itself contains a story about an attempt to destroy God's word. In the days of King Jehoiakim, Jeremiah dictated the words of the Lord to his scribe, “and Baruch wrote from the mouth of Jeremiah all the words of the LORD, which he had spoken unto him, upon a roll of a book” (Jeremiah 36:4). When the scroll was read before the king, he cut it up as it was read: “he cut it with the penknife, and cast it into the fire that was on the hearth, until all the roll was consumed in the fire that was on the hearth” (Jeremiah 36:23).

The king's knife did not end the matter. The Lord said to Jeremiah, “Take thee again another roll, and write in it all the former words that were in the first roll, which Jehoiakim the king of Judah hath burned” (Jeremiah 36:28). The words were written again, “and there were added besides unto them many like words” (Jeremiah 36:32). The original scroll was ash. The words survived. That, in miniature, is the whole story of the Bible's text.

Which books?

One more question belongs here: which books are the Bible? The answer did not come from a council inventing a list. It came from recognising what God's people had already received.

For the Old Testament, Jesus spoke of “the law of Moses, and in the prophets, and in the psalms” (Luke 24:44), the three-part shape of the Hebrew Scriptures. In the first century the Jewish historian Josephus wrote that the Jews did not have countless books disagreeing with one another, as the Greeks did, but twenty-two books, justly believed to be divine. (His twenty-two count the same writings as the thirty-nine books of the Protestant Old Testament, grouped differently.) He added a sentence worth reading slowly: “during so many ages as have already passed, no one has been so bold as either to add any thing to them, to take any thing from them, or to make any change in them”.²

For the New Testament, the churches recognised the apostolic writings early, and by AD 367 Athanasius, bishop of Alexandria, could list the twenty-seven books of the New Testament exactly as they stand in the 1611. He called them “fountains of salvation” and wrote, “In these alone is proclaimed the doctrine of godliness. Let no man add to these, neither let him take ought from these.” In the same letter he named other books, such as the Wisdom of Solomon and Tobit, that might be read for instruction but were “not indeed included in the Canon”.³

The 1611 itself kept that same distinction: it printed the Apocrypha in a section of its own between the Testaments, apart from the canonical books. With the books settled, we turn to the harder question. Has their text been kept?

The Old Testament was written over many centuries, the last of its books more than four hundred years before Christ. No original manuscript survives. Every Hebrew Bible in the world is a copy of a copy. So the question is a fair one: how do we know that what we read today is what Moses, David and Isaiah wrote?

The gap that troubled the critics

Until the middle of the twentieth century, the oldest complete Hebrew Bibles anyone could hold were medieval. The Leningrad Codex, written in Egypt by the scribe Samuel ben Jacob, carries a colophon that dates it to about 1008–1009. A Cambridge scholar calls it “the earliest complete dated codex of the Hebrew Bible”, and it is the base text of the main modern scholarly editions.⁴ The Aleppo Codex, written by Masoretes in Tiberias around 930, is older but no longer complete: almost two hundred of its pages, including nearly all of the five books of Moses, went missing after anti-Jewish riots in Aleppo in 1947.⁵

That left a gap of well over a thousand years between the last prophet and the oldest full copy. A skeptic could fairly ask what had happened to the text in that millennium. Had it drifted? Had it been edited? There was no way to look behind the medieval manuscripts, until a discovery in the Judean desert changed everything.

How the scribes copied

Before we come to that discovery, it is worth knowing how the Jewish scribes regarded the text they copied. The Babylonian Talmud records that the early sages were called soferim, “those who count”, because they counted all the letters in the Torah. They knew, for instance, that the letter vav in the Hebrew word for “belly” in Leviticus 11:42 was the midpoint of the letters of a Torah scroll, and that a phrase in Leviticus 10:16 was the midpoint of its words.⁶

That is not the habit of men who felt free to rewrite. It is the habit of men who believed that every letter mattered, which is exactly what Jesus said about the jot and the tittle. The Masoretes of the early Middle Ages carried this care further. They added vowel signs and accent marks to the consonantal text, so that the traditional pronunciation would not be lost, and they filled the margins with notes, the Masorah, counting and cross-checking unusual forms. The text they handed on is called the Masoretic Text.

Care is not proof, though. A careful scribe can still copy an error he inherited. The real question is whether the Masoretic Text of the Middle Ages matches the text of a thousand years earlier. For centuries no one could answer it.

The discovery of 1947

In 1947 a young Bedouin shepherd found scrolls in a cave near the north-western shore of the Dead Sea. Over the next nine years ten more caves nearby gave up their contents. Cave 4 alone held fragments of about five hundred scrolls. In all, the finds represent more than nine hundred different texts in Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek, in tens of thousands of fragments.⁷

According to the Israel Antiquities Authority, which holds most of them, the scrolls date from the third century BC to the first century AD. About 230 of the manuscripts are copies of books of the Hebrew Bible, and every book of the Old Testament is represented except Esther.⁸ These are, in the Authority's words, “the oldest known copies of biblical works”.⁹

Overnight the gap shrank by a thousand years.

The Great Isaiah Scroll

The most famous of the finds is a complete copy of Isaiah, the Great Isaiah Scroll from Cave 1. It is a leather scroll a little over seven metres long, made of seventeen sheets sewn together, with the whole book (all sixty-six chapters) written in fifty-four columns. It is dated by its handwriting to the second half of the second century BC, roughly a century and a quarter before the birth of Christ. It is kept today in the Shrine of the Book at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem.¹⁰

For the first time, scholars could lay a copy of Isaiah from before Christ beside the Masoretic Isaiah of the Middle Ages and compare them line by line.

What the comparison showed

The Israel Antiquities Authority's own summary is careful and worth quoting. It says: “Many biblical manuscripts closely resemble the Masoretic Text,” and it calls this remarkable, because the scrolls are more than a thousand years older than the biblical manuscripts known before. It adds that the biblical scrolls found in the caves used by refugees of the Bar Kokhba revolt (AD 132–135) are equivalent to the Masoretic Text, which suggests the text was stable by the second century AD.¹¹

Honesty requires the rest of that summary too. The same source says that some of the biblical scrolls differ from standard Masoretic spelling and language, and that additions and omissions in some copies suggest certain scribes felt free to alter what they copied.¹² The caves held more than one kind of copy. Most of the differences are of spelling, the kind of thing an English reader sees between “honour” and “honor”; some are larger.

How should a believer read that? Like this. Before 1947 the critic's charge was that the Masoretic Text might be a late, edited product of the Middle Ages. The caves answered that charge. The text the Masoretes handed down, the text behind the Old Testament of the 1611, was already there, in copy after copy, a thousand years before the Masoretes. That some copies in the same caves differ from it shows that the Masoretic tradition was not the only text a scribe could make in that age; it does not show that the Masoretic tradition was invented. If anything it shows the opposite: when a text survives alongside variant copies for a thousand years and comes out the same at the far end, it was being guarded on purpose.

Isaiah 53, before Christ

There is a second reason the Great Isaiah Scroll matters, and it bears on Part 5. Christians have always read Isaiah 53 as a portrait of the Messiah's suffering:

“But he was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities: the chastisement of our peace was upon him; and with his stripes we are healed. All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned every one to his own way; and the LORD hath laid on him the iniquity of us all.” (Isaiah 53:5-6)

A skeptic might once have suggested that Christians shaped the text of Isaiah to fit Jesus. The Great Isaiah Scroll makes that impossible. It is a Jewish copy, made by Jewish scribes, more than a century before Jesus was born, and the chapter is there.

Older still: the silver scrolls

The Dead Sea Scrolls are the oldest manuscripts of the Hebrew Bible, but they are not the oldest writing of a biblical text. In 1979, in a burial cave at Ketef Hinnom just outside Jerusalem's Old City, the archaeologist Gabriel Barkay found two tiny rolled silver amulets. When they were unrolled and read, they were found to carry a blessing in the old Hebrew script nearly identical to the priestly blessing of the Book of Numbers. They are generally dated to around 600 BC, before the Babylonian exile.¹³

“The LORD bless thee, and keep thee: The LORD make his face shine upon thee, and be gracious unto thee: The LORD lift up his countenance upon thee, and give thee peace.” (Numbers 6:24-26)

Scholars debate whether the amulets quote the Book of Numbers or a blessing already in use in worship. Either way, they show these words in a Judean's hands centuries before the oldest scroll from Qumran.

The Hebrew behind the 1611

The translators of 1611 told their readers plainly what they worked from. In their preface, “The Translators to the Reader”, they wrote: “If you ask what they had before them, truly it was the Hebrew text of the Old Testament, the Greek of the New.”¹⁴

The printed Hebrew text of the Reformation came from the press of Daniel Bomberg in Venice. David Norton, the historian of the King James text, notes that there was little variation among Hebrew texts, and that Bomberg's Rabbinic Bibles, “most notably the second edition of 1524-5, set the standard.”¹⁵ That edition carried the Masoretic Text with its Masorah, and the Masoretic tradition it printed is the Hebrew the 1611 translators rendered into English.

So the line runs like this: the prophets wrote; the scribes counted and copied; the Masoretes guarded and annotated; the printers of Venice set it in type; the translators of 1611 put it into English. And the caves of Qumran let us check that line at a point more than a thousand years before the oldest medieval copy. It held.

The New Testament poses the question differently. It was written in the first century, in Greek, and copied by hand for fourteen hundred years before the printing press. The originals, the letters in Paul's own hand, are long gone. What survives is a great river of copies. How many are there, how early are they, how much do they differ, and where does the 1611 stand among them?

How many manuscripts?

You may have seen large numbers quoted: twenty-four thousand, twenty-five thousand. Those figures usually add Latin and other translations to the Greek manuscripts, and some apologists have used them carelessly. It is better to be precise.

The official register of Greek New Testament manuscripts is the Kurzgefasste Liste, kept by the Institute for New Testament Textual Research in Münster, Germany. It sorts them into papyri, majuscules (written in capital letters), minuscules (written in a running hand) and lectionaries (books of readings for church services). The register keeps growing: in a recent count, the Institute reported 167 new numbers added since 2019 alone, and it describes its list as “far from exhaustive”.¹⁶ But a register number is not always a separate manuscript; some entries turned out to be parts of the same book. In a careful study, Jacob W. Peterson concluded that the number of distinct Greek New Testament manuscripts is about 5,100 to 5,300.¹⁷

Even on the careful count, that is a remarkable number. Many of these manuscripts are fragments; many are complete books or whole New Testaments. Besides them there are thousands of copies of early translations into Latin, Syriac, Coptic and other tongues, and the church fathers quoted the New Testament so often that much of it could be recovered from their writings alone.

How does that compare?

The comparison usually drawn is with the classical authors of Greece and Rome, whose texts no historian doubts in substance. Take the Roman historian Tacitus, our main source for the reign of Tiberius, the emperor under whom Jesus was crucified. The first six books of his Annals survive in a single manuscript, the first Medicean codex, written in Germany around AD 850 and now in Florence. Books 11 to 16 depend on one other medieval manuscript, written at Monte Cassino in the eleventh century, from which the later copies descend.¹⁸

Scholars have rightly warned that these comparisons are sometimes done badly, by counting every scrap of the New Testament but only the useful copies of a classical work. James Prothro, who trained in classics and studied the question, still grants the basic point: the New Testament has far more manuscripts than classical works, and earlier ones. He adds a fair caution, that having more manuscripts does not of itself mean we have the right text; method still matters.¹⁹ That is true, and this chapter will come to it. But the old British scholar F. F. Bruce made the comparison the centre of his classic study, and his conclusion stands: no body of ancient literature enjoys such a wealth of good textual evidence as the New Testament.²⁰

How early?

The other side of the comparison is time. The earliest surviving copies of the New Testament are papyri found in Egypt, where the dry sand preserved them. The best known is a scrap the size of a credit card in the John Rylands Library in Manchester, catalogued as P52. It carries a few lines of John 18, including part of Pilate's question to Jesus. When it was first published in 1935 it was dated to the first half of the second century, and it is still often called the oldest piece of the New Testament.

Here too honesty matters. Brent Nongbri has shown that dates assigned by handwriting alone are less precise than popular books suggest, and that a fair range for P52 must include the later second and even the early third century.²¹ Even so, the earliest New Testament papyri stand within a few generations of the apostles. The Chester Beatty papyrus of Paul's letters, P46, is generally dated to about AD 200. Codex Sinaiticus, written in the fourth century, contains the earliest complete copy of the New Testament.²² For Tacitus, the gap between author and oldest copy is about eight centuries.

A believer should notice something about the oldest manuscripts, however. Their age makes them precious, but age is not the same as purity. A copy made early in Egypt was made by someone, from something, and it could carry that scribe's mistakes into the sand where it lay for seventeen centuries. Age tells you when a copy was made. It does not tell you whether that copy was faithful. That point will matter when we come to the Received Text.

The variants: what the numbers mean

Every hand-copied book has differences between its copies. Skeptics like to quote the number of variant readings in the New Testament, and the number is large. The most careful recent estimate, made by Peter Gurry while he was a doctoral student at Cambridge, put the number of non-spelling variants in the Greek manuscripts at around half a million. His own abstract notes that this is a higher number than almost all previous estimates.²³

That sounds alarming until you understand how it is counted. A variant is counted every time any manuscript differs from another at any point, and the same difference is counted again in every place it occurs. The more copies a book has, the more variants it will have, because there are more copies to differ. A book that survives in one manuscript has no variants at all, and we would know far less about its text. Gurry himself makes the point that the number reflects how often scribes copied more than how unfaithful they were, and in an interview he noted that upwards of half the variants his estimate is based on are found in only a single manuscript.²⁴ A reading found in one late copy and nowhere else is easy to recognise as that scribe's slip.

So the large number is the shadow of a large blessing. The more witnesses there are, the more ways there are to check each one against the others.

The printed Greek text and the 1611

How did the hand-copied Greek become the printed Bible of the Reformation? The story begins with Erasmus of Rotterdam, who in 1516 published the first Greek New Testament to reach the market, printed by Johann Froben in Basel. Norton notes that Erasmus worked quickly, mainly from two twelfth-century manuscripts compared with a few others.²⁵ Over the following decades his text was refined by others: by the Paris printer Robert Estienne (Stephanus), whose edition of 1550 recorded variant readings from more than fifteen manuscripts in its margins, and by Theodore Beza of Geneva, whose editions the King James translators used, especially those of 1588–89 and 1598.²⁶

In 1633 the Elzevir press in Leiden advertised its edition to readers with a Latin phrase meaning, as Norton translates it, “you have the text received by everybody”.²⁷ From that line the whole tradition took its name: the Textus Receptus, the Received Text.

What kind of text is it? Norton, who does not share this ministry's view of it, describes it fairly. He writes that the Received Text “represents the general form of the text found in the majority of the manuscripts, the Byzantine text”, the text associated with the Greek-speaking church of Constantinople, and that majority attestation and traditional use have given it special status, because “It represents what most Christians have understood the truth of the NT to be.”²⁸

How the translators worked

The 1611 was not the work of one man. About fifty names of the translators have come down to us, working in six companies, two each at Westminster, Oxford and Cambridge, under rules drawn up for the work. Those rules survive. The first said that the ordinary Bible read in the churches, the Bishops' Bible, was “to be followed, and as little altered as the Truth of the original will permit.” Every man in a company was to translate the same chapters by himself before they met to agree what would stand. Each book was then sent to the other companies to be considered “seriously and judiciously”. Where a place was especially obscure, letters could go out to any learned man in the land for his judgment. Marginal notes were allowed only to explain Hebrew or Greek words that could not be put briefly into the text.²⁹

In their preface the translators described their aim: “we never thought from the beginning, that we should need to make a new Translation, nor yet to make of a bad one a good one ... but to make a good one better, or out of many good ones, one principal good one, not justly to be excepted against; that hath been our endeavor, that our mark.”³⁰

In 1881 the Cambridge scholar F. H. A. Scrivener published an edition of the Greek text that the translators of 1611 followed, taking Beza's edition of 1598 as his base and marking where the translators departed from it.³¹ That edition lets anyone see, word by word, the Greek behind the English of the King James Bible.

Where the 1611 stands

In the nineteenth century a different approach to the text took hold. It gave the greatest weight to a small number of the oldest manuscripts, above all Codex Sinaiticus and Codex Vaticanus, and in 1881 it produced the Revised Version. Nearly every modern translation since has followed that approach, usually called the Critical Text.

That is why modern versions differ from the 1611 in a number of places, some of them well known. They bracket or remove the last twelve verses of Mark, which begin, “Now when Jesus was risen early the first day of the week, he appeared first to Mary Magdalene, out of whom he had cast seven devils” (Mark 16:9). They bracket the account of the woman taken in adultery, which begins with the line “And every man went unto his own house” (John 7:53). They omit Philip's words to the Ethiopian, “If thou believest with all thine heart, thou mayest” (Acts 8:37), and the eunuch's confession that follows. They omit “For there are three that bear record in heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Holy Ghost: and these three are one” (1 John 5:7).

Every one of those passages stands in the 1611. This ministry reads the 1611, and where the 1611 and the Critical Text part ways, you can see each place side by side at kylelauriano.com/library/changes and judge for yourself.

Why the Received Text

The case for the Received Text has been made by serious scholars. In 1883 John William Burgon, Dean of Chichester, published The Revision Revised, a sustained critique of the Greek text behind the Revised Version and of the theory on which it was built, and a defence of what he called the Traditional Text.³² In the twentieth century Edward F. Hills, trained at Westminster Theological Seminary and Harvard, carried the argument further in The King James Version Defended.

Hills's argument begins where Part 1 of this paper began: with the promise. If God inspired the Scriptures, he reasoned, He did not leave their survival to chance. He preserved them, and He preserved them not in secret but in the use of His people. In Hills's words, God “must have preserved them not secretly in holes and caves but in a public way in the usage of His Church.”³³ The text that the church actually read, copied and loved through the centuries, found in the great majority of the Greek manuscripts, is on this view the providentially preserved text; and God's care did not stop when printing began.

Hills did not pretend that the Received Text fell from heaven in print. He freely acknowledged the human side of its history. In a handful of places the Received Text follows readings that are not found in most Greek manuscripts but that the Latin-speaking churches had kept, and Hills defended those readings on the ground of that long usage. He wrote openly, for instance, about how 1 John 5:7 entered Erasmus's third edition of 1522, and he argued that it was not trickery but the usage of the Latin-speaking church that kept it there.³⁴ One may weigh his argument and differ. But it is an argument, made in the open, by a trained textual critic.

This ministry stands with the Received Text and the 1611. The reason is not that old things are always best, nor that the scholars of 1611 were infallible men. They would have been the first to deny it. The reason is the promise. God said He would keep His words, and the text He has kept in the hands and mouths of His people for centuries, the text the Reformation churches received, translated, preached and died for, is the text we read.

A note on the 1611 itself

One more honest note. The King James Bible you buy today is not a word-for-word facsimile of the first printing. Early printings had misprints, and spelling in English was not yet fixed. Over the following century and a half, printers and editors corrected errors and modernised spelling, culminating in the Cambridge edition of F. S. Parris in 1762 and the Oxford edition of Benjamin Blayney in 1769, which became the standard form of the text.³⁵ These were corrections of printing and spelling, not a new translation from a different Greek or Hebrew text. The 1611 Reader at kylelauriano.com/library lets you read the 1611 spelling and the modern spelling side by side.

The translators themselves expected their work to be read with that kind of understanding. In their preface they insisted that a faithful translation of the Scriptures “containeth the word of God, nay, is the word of God,” just as “the King's speech, which he uttereth in Parliament, being translated into French, Dutch, Italian, and Latin, is still the King's speech”.³⁶ When you read the 1611, you are reading God's word in English.

A text can be faithfully copied and still be fiction. The question of this chapter is the second kind of reliability: does the Bible describe a real world? When it names kings, governors, cities and campaigns, does the ground and the record of the nations agree?

What archaeology can and cannot do

It helps to be clear first about what archaeology can do. It can show whether a writer knew the world he wrote about: the names of rulers, their titles, the order of events, the shape of cities. It cannot prove that God spoke to Moses or that Jesus rose from the dead. Those are claims of another kind.

Archaeology also has limits. Most ancient sites have never been dug. Most of what was written in the ancient world was written on materials that rotted. So silence in the ground is weak evidence. When a person or event the Bible mentions has not yet turned up in an inscription, that tells us only that it has not yet turned up. Some things have been doubted for exactly that reason, until a spade struck stone.

There are honest open questions too. Scholars still argue about how to date and read the evidence for the earliest periods of Israel's history: the patriarchs, the Exodus and the conquest of Canaan. A believer need not pretend those debates are settled in his favour; he can say that the absence of an Egyptian inscription about Israel's escape is no surprise, since kings did not carve their defeats in stone, and that the debates are about interpreting scanty evidence, not about evidence that contradicts the Bible. The firmest ground is where the written records of the nations around Israel are fullest, and that is where we will spend most of our time.

A method worth borrowing

The Egyptologist K. A. Kitchen, in On the Reliability of the Old Testament, worked in exactly this way: he began with the periods for which the outside evidence is richest, the divided monarchy and the exile, and worked backward to the earlier periods, weighing the evidence for and against at each stage.³⁷ Another scholar, Lawrence Mykytiuk of Purdue University, asked a narrow question: how many people named in the Hebrew Bible can be identified, with confidence, in inscriptions written during or near their own lifetimes? He set strict criteria. A name alone was not enough; the inscription had to match the biblical person in several identifying marks (such as title, father's name, or place) and fit the time and place. By his count, at least fifty-three people of the Old Testament meet that standard.³⁸

Here are some of them, in the Bible's own order.

Israel in Egypt's records

The oldest mention of Israel outside the Bible is Egyptian. On a victory stele of the Pharaoh Merneptah, set up around 1207 BC and found by Flinders Petrie at Thebes in 1896, the king boasts of a campaign in Canaan and lists, among the peoples he claims to have crushed, a people called Israel. The stele is now in the Egyptian Museum in Cairo, and its scribe marked Israel with the sign for a people rather than a place.³⁹ It does not tell us much about Israel. It tells us one thing that matters: by the late thirteenth century BC, Israel was a people in Canaan, known by name to the court of Egypt.

Shishak's campaign

The Bible says that “in the fifth year of king Rehoboam, that Shishak king of Egypt came up against Jerusalem” (1 Kings 14:25). The Pharaoh Shoshenq I recorded a campaign into Palestine on the walls of the temple of Karnak, and a fragment of his victory stele has been found at Megiddo in the land of Israel itself.⁴⁰

Omri, Ahab, Mesha and Jehu

The Book of Kings tells of the northern kingdom's ruling house founded by Omri, who “bought the hill Samaria of Shemer for two talents of silver” (1 Kings 16:24), and of his son Ahab. It also tells of a vassal king to the east: “And Mesha king of Moab was a sheepmaster, and rendered unto the king of Israel an hundred thousand lambs, and an hundred thousand rams, with the wool. But it came to pass, when Ahab was dead, that the king of Moab rebelled against the king of Israel.” (2 Kings 3:4-5)

In 1868 a Prussian missionary, F. A. Klein, came upon an inscribed stone at Dibon, in modern Jordan. It was Mesha's own victory monument, in which the king of Moab boasts of throwing off the rule of Israel and names Omri as king of Israel. Before it could be acquired, local Bedouin smashed it; but a squeeze (a paper impression) had been made by the French scholar Charles Clermont-Ganneau, and with its help the inscription was read. The stele is now in the Louvre in Paris.⁴¹ Mykytiuk counts Mesha, Omri and Ahab among his confirmed figures.⁴² The Assyrians, meanwhile, recorded Ahab by name: the Kurkh Monolith of Shalmaneser III lists “Ahab the Israelite” among the kings who fought at the battle of Qarqar.

A few years later the same Assyrian king received tribute from Jehu, the army commander whom the prophet Elisha's messenger anointed king (2 Kings 9:2). On the Black Obelisk of Shalmaneser III, found by Austen Henry Layard at Nimrud (ancient Kalah) in 1846 and now in the British Museum, a relief panel shows Israel's tribute being brought to the Assyrian king, and the caption calls it the tribute of “Jehu, son of Omri”: the Assyrians named Israel by the dynasty they knew, even though Jehu had overthrown it.⁴³⁴⁴

The house of David

For many years some scholars argued that King David was a figure of legend, a national hero invented long after the fact. In 1993, excavators at Tel Dan in northern Israel found a fragment of an Aramaic victory stele from the ninth century BC, in which a king of Aram boasts of defeating the king of Israel and the king of “the house of David”.⁴⁵ The phrase is the ordinary ancient way of naming a kingdom by the founder of its royal line. Within about a century and a half of David's time, his enemies knew Judah as David's house. Mykytiuk also notes a likely mention of David in the Mesha stele.⁴⁶

Hezekiah and Sennacherib

The Assyrian invasion of Judah in 701 BC is one of the best-documented events of the ancient world, and the Bible is one of the documents.

“Now in the fourteenth year of king Hezekiah did Sennacherib king of Assyria come up against all the fenced cities of Judah, and took them. And Hezekiah king of Judah sent to the king of Assyria to Lachish, saying, I have offended; return from me: that which thou puttest on me will I bear. And the king of Assyria appointed unto Hezekiah king of Judah three hundred talents of silver and thirty talents of gold.” (2 Kings 18:13-14)

Sennacherib told the same campaign from his side. His own inscriptions name “Hezekiah the Judahite”, and his palace at Nineveh was decorated with a great series of stone reliefs showing the siege and capture of Lachish, the very city where, according to Kings, Hezekiah's messengers found him.⁴⁷ Those reliefs were excavated by Austen Henry Layard and Hormuzd Rassam between 1847 and 1851 and are now in the British Museum.⁴⁸ The Bible and the Assyrian annals agree on the invasion, the fall of Judah's fortified cities and the heavy tribute. Neither claims that Sennacherib took Jerusalem.

In 2015, archaeologists of the Hebrew University excavating the Ophel, just south of the Temple Mount, announced a small clay seal impression found in a refuse dump from Hezekiah's time. It reads, in ancient Hebrew script, “Belonging to Hezekiah [son of] Ahaz king of Judah”. Impressions of Hezekiah's seal had been known before from the antiquities market; this was the first found in a scientific excavation.⁴⁹

Jehoiachin's rations

The Book of Kings ends with an odd, quiet detail. Thirty-seven years into his captivity, the exiled king of Judah, Jehoiachin, was released from prison by the new king of Babylon, “And his allowance was a continual allowance given him of the king, a daily rate for every day, all the days of his life” (2 Kings 25:30). Excavations in Babylon turned up administrative tablets recording oil rations issued to captive royalty, and four of them name Jehoiachin, king of Judah, among those receiving them.⁵⁰ It is hard to imagine a less legendary sort of evidence than a palace ration list.

Belshazzar

For a long time Daniel 5 was held up as an error. The Babylonian king lists named Nabonidus as the last king of Babylon, and no one had found a king called Belshazzar. Then Babylonian documents were found that name Belshazzar as the son of Nabonidus and the crown prince, who ruled in Babylon while his father was away.⁵¹ That fits a detail in Daniel's own account that is easy to read past. When Daniel read the writing on the wall, Belshazzar “made a proclamation concerning him, that he should be the third ruler in the kingdom” (Daniel 5:29). Why third? Because the man making the offer was himself only the second.

Cyrus

Finally, the Persian king who ended the exile. Ezra records that “in the first year of Cyrus king of Persia ... the LORD stirred up the spirit of Cyrus king of Persia, that he made a proclamation throughout all his kingdom” to rebuild the house of the Lord at Jerusalem (Ezra 1:1). Cyrus is known from many inscriptions, including his own clay cylinder, found at Babylon in 1879 and now in the British Museum, in which he says of the gods of conquered cities, “I brought back to their places”.⁵²⁵³ We will meet Cyrus again in Part 5.

The New Testament world

The New Testament is set in a world we know well from Roman and Jewish sources, and its writers place their story in that world on purpose. Luke dates the beginning of John the Baptist's ministry with a careful roll of rulers:

“Now in the fifteenth year of the reign of Tiberius Caesar, Pontius Pilate being governor of Judaea, and Herod being tetrarch of Galilee, and his brother Philip tetrarch of Ituraea and of the region of Trachonitis, and Lysanias the tetrarch of Abilene, Annas and Caiaphas being the high priests, the word of God came unto John the son of Zacharias in the wilderness.” (Luke 3:1-2)

A writer inventing a legend does not usually hand his readers the means to check him.

Pontius Pilate

In 1961 Italian archaeologists excavating the theatre at Caesarea Maritima found a limestone block that had been reused as building stone. On it was part of a Latin dedication by Pontius Pilate, giving his title as prefect of Judaea. It is now in the Israel Museum.⁵⁴ The Roman historian Tacitus independently records that Christus, from whom the Christians took their name, “suffered the extreme penalty during the reign of Tiberius at the hands of one of our procurators, Pontius Pilatus”.⁵⁵ So does the Jewish historian Josephus, who tells of Pilate's arrival as governor in succession to Valerius Gratus.⁵⁶

Caiaphas

The Gospels name the high priest at Jesus' trial: “the palace of the high priest, who was called Caiaphas” (Matthew 26:3). Josephus names him too, as “Joseph Caiaphas”, appointed by Gratus, and later as “Joseph, who was also called Caiaphas”, removed from office by the governor Vitellius.⁵⁷ In 1990 a burial cave was found in south Jerusalem containing an ornate ossuary, a limestone bone box, inscribed with the name Joseph son of Caiaphas. Many scholars believe it held the bones of the high priest himself; others are more cautious. Either way, it puts the family of Caiaphas in the ground of first-century Jerusalem.⁵⁸

Gallio

Luke says that Paul was brought to trial in Corinth “when Gallio was the deputy of Achaia” (Acts 18:12). An inscription found at Delphi preserves a letter of the emperor Claudius that names Gallio as proconsul and can be dated by the emperor's titles. It is one of the anchors by which historians date Paul's stay in Corinth, to about AD 51–52.⁵⁹

The pool of Siloam

John records that Jesus anointed a blind man's eyes and “said unto him, Go, wash in the pool of Siloam, (which is by interpretation, Sent.) He went his way therefore, and washed, and came seeing” (John 9:7). In 2004, during work to repair a large water pipe south of the Temple Mount, ancient steps came to light. The archaeologists Ronny Reich and Eli Shukron recognised them as part of a large stepped pool from the late Second Temple period, the time of Jesus, and excavated it.⁶⁰

Luke the historian

One scholar's story sums up this chapter. Sir William Ramsay was a classical archaeologist who spent years travelling through Asia Minor, the region where much of the Book of Acts is set. He began his studies when the leading critical school held that Acts was written in the second half of the second century by an author who cared little for the real geography and history of Paul's day; Ramsay records that this school had once been his own guide in criticism.⁶¹ His years of work on the ground changed his mind. In 1915 he wrote that the purpose of one of his books had been “to show that Luke is a historian of the first rank; not merely are his statements of fact trustworthy; he is possessed of the true historic sense”, and that “this author should be placed along with the very greatest of historians.”⁶²

Ramsay wrote more than a century ago, and archaeology has moved on since. But later scholarship confirmed his basic finding. Colin Hemer's detailed study, The Book of Acts in the Setting of Hellenistic History, set Luke's narrative against what is known of the cities, officials, titles, travel routes and customs of the first-century world, and argued at length for the historical reliability of Acts.⁶³

What this proves, and what it does not

None of this proves that Jesus rose from the dead. What it shows is that the men who told us He did were not writing in a fog. They named rulers who really ruled, cities that really stood, pools that really held water. They wrote history, and they wrote it in a way that invited checking. When you meet a witness who has been right about everything you can check, you have reason to listen when he tells you something you cannot.

The Bible claims that God declares “the end from the beginning” (Isaiah 46:10). No other test bears so directly on its claim to be from God. A text can be preserved by careful men and can describe its own world accurately without being divine. But a text that tells the future, before the future happens, is speaking with a voice no human author has.

Why this paper does not count to three hundred

You may have heard that the Old Testament contains three hundred or more prophecies about the Messiah, all fulfilled in Jesus, and that the odds of one man fulfilling even a few of them by chance are astronomically small. That way of arguing does more harm than good. The lists usually mix clear predictions with passages that the New Testament applies to Christ as types and patterns, which is a different thing; and they treat each item as an independent coin toss, which it is not. A skeptic who finds one weak link in such a list feels free to throw out the whole chain.

It is better to take a few prophecies and look at them carefully, asking two questions of each. Can we be sure the prophecy was written before the event? And could the fulfilment have been arranged by the people who wanted it fulfilled?

The suffering servant

Begin with Isaiah 53, the passage we met in Part 2. Its servant is despised and rejected, “a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief” (Isaiah 53:3). He suffers for the sins of others: “he was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities” (Isaiah 53:5). He dies a criminal's death, yet is buried in honour: “And he made his grave with the wicked, and with the rich in his death; because he had done no violence, neither was any deceit in his mouth” (Isaiah 53:9).

The first question is answered by the Great Isaiah Scroll. Whatever date a critic assigns to the writing of Isaiah, a Jewish scribe copied this chapter more than a century before Jesus was born.

The second question is answered by the shape of the events. Jesus did not choose the manner of His death; Roman soldiers and a Roman governor did. He did not arrange His own burial; a rich man did. Matthew records that “there came a rich man of Arimathaea, named Joseph, who also himself was Jesus’ disciple” (Matthew 27:57), who laid the body in his own new tomb. And the meaning Isaiah gives the servant's death, that the Lord “hath laid on him the iniquity of us all” (Isaiah 53:6), is exactly the meaning the apostles gave the cross: “Who his own self bare our sins in his own body on the tree, that we, being dead to sins, should live unto righteousness: by whose stripes ye were healed” (1 Peter 2:24).

Garments and lots

In Psalm 22, a psalm of David, the sufferer cries out in words that Jesus took on His lips from the cross. Later the psalm says, “They part my garments among them, and cast lots upon my vesture” (Psalms 22:18). John records that the soldiers at the cross divided Jesus' clothes into four parts, but His coat was woven without seam, so they said, “Let us not rend it, but cast lots for it, whose it shall be: that the scripture might be fulfilled, which saith, They parted my raiment among them, and for my vesture they did cast lots” (John 19:24).

The psalm is a song of Israel, sung for centuries before Christ. The men who fulfilled it were Roman soldiers who had never read it and were doing what soldiers did at an execution. No disciple arranged it.

Bethlehem

The prophet Micah, in the eighth century BC, spoke of a ruler to come from a small town:

“But thou, Bethlehem Ephratah, though thou be little among the thousands of Judah, yet out of thee shall he come forth unto me that is to be ruler in Israel; whose goings forth have been from of old, from everlasting.” (Micah 5:2)

What makes this text striking is not only that Jesus was born in Bethlehem, but who read it that way first. When Herod asked the chief priests and scribes where the Christ should be born, they did not wait for the church to tell them. “And they said unto him, In Bethlehem of Judaea: for thus it is written by the prophet” (Matthew 2:5). The Jewish teachers of the day understood Micah to name the Messiah's birthplace before Jesus had done anything at all. And the One who would come forth was one whose goings forth were “from everlasting”, an extraordinary thing to say of a man born in a village.

Cyrus, named in advance

The Book of Isaiah does something that has troubled its critics for two centuries: it names a foreign king who would rebuild Jerusalem.

“That saith of Cyrus, He is my shepherd, and shall perform all my pleasure: even saying to Jerusalem, Thou shalt be built; and to the temple, Thy foundation shall be laid.” (Isaiah 44:28)

Cyrus the Persian did exactly that, as Ezra records and as his own cylinder confirms in general terms (Part 4). Many modern scholars hold that these chapters of Isaiah were written by a later author living in the exile, after Cyrus had appeared. It is worth seeing why. The usual reason is not a manuscript or an inscription. It is the conviction that a prophet cannot name a king before he is born. That is a starting assumption, not a discovery. The Bible presents the book as the vision of Isaiah, and the Great Isaiah Scroll from Qumran carries all sixty-six chapters as a single book. A reader who allows that God can declare the end from the beginning has no reason to divide it.

The temple, not one stone upon another

The last example comes from the lips of Jesus. As His disciples admired the great buildings of Herod's temple, He said:

“See ye not all these things? verily I say unto you, There shall not be left here one stone upon another, that shall not be thrown down.” (Matthew 24:2)

As He approached Jerusalem He wept over it and said, “For the days shall come upon thee, that thine enemies shall cast a trench about thee, and compass thee round, and keep thee in on every side, And shall lay thee even with the ground, and thy children within thee; and they shall not leave in thee one stone upon another” (Luke 19:43-44). He even gave His followers a sign: “And when ye shall see Jerusalem compassed with armies, then know that the desolation thereof is nigh” (Luke 21:20).

In AD 70 the Roman army under Titus besieged and took Jerusalem. Josephus, who was there with the Romans, recorded the order that followed: Caesar commanded that they “should now demolish the entire city and temple”, leaving only three towers and part of the western wall, and the rest “was so thoroughly laid even with the ground by those that dug it up to the foundation, that there was left nothing to make those that came thither believe it had ever been inhabited.”⁶⁴

A skeptic will say that the Gospels were written after AD 70 and that the prophecy was written to fit. The dating of the Gospels is debated, and this is not the place to settle it. But notice two things. First, the Gospels record the warning as a word spoken in the hearing of disciples who were alive to remember it, and it is woven into the fabric of the story, not added at its edge. Second, Josephus, who was not a Christian and had no interest in making Jesus look like a prophet, describes the destruction in almost the very terms Jesus used: laid even with the ground.

What prophecy shows

Not every prophecy in Scripture can be dated or tested as these can, and the believer does not need them to be. The point is that where the test can be run (where the prophecy is securely written down before the event, and where the fulfilment was outside the control of those who wanted it), the Bible passes. The God of the Bible staked His name on telling the future. “Remember the former things of old: for I am God, and there is none else” (Isaiah 46:9).

Most people who doubt the Bible have not studied manuscripts or inscriptions. They have heard a few short objections, often repeated with confidence. Each deserves a straight answer.

“The Bible has been changed over time.”

This is the most common objection, and the evidence of Parts 2 and 3 answers it. To say a text has been changed, you need to know what it said before. For the Old Testament, the Dead Sea Scrolls take us back more than a thousand years before the medieval Masoretic manuscripts, and many of the biblical scrolls closely resemble the Masoretic Text. For the New Testament, thousands of manuscripts from many regions and centuries let each copy be checked against the others. A change made in one place would have had to be made in all of them, in every land, at once, for no one to notice. No such moment exists in history.

What the evidence shows instead is the kind of variation that every hand-copied book has, recorded in the open, studied for centuries, and visible to anyone who cares to look. The Bible's own picture is Jeremiah's scroll: a king can burn a roll, but he cannot burn the word.

“We don't have the originals.”

True. We do not have the original manuscript of any ancient book: not of Plato, not of Caesar, not of Tacitus. Papyrus and leather wear out. The question is never whether we have the originals but whether the copies let us know what the originals said. On that question, the Bible stands better than any other book of the ancient world.

There is a deeper point for the believer. God never promised to preserve a particular sheet of papyrus. He promised to preserve His words: “Heaven and earth shall pass away: but my words shall not pass away” (Mark 13:31). The original roll of Jeremiah was burned within days of its writing, yet the words were not lost. The promise was always about the words.

“The Bible is full of contradictions.”

Here is the right way to approach a difficulty, set out sixteen centuries ago by Augustine in a letter to Jerome. Augustine wrote that he gave this honour only to the canonical books of Scripture, “of these alone do I most firmly believe that the authors were completely free from error. And if in these writings I am perplexed by anything which appears to me opposed to truth, I do not hesitate to suppose that either the manuscript is faulty, or the translator has not caught the meaning of what was said, or I myself have failed to understand it.”⁶⁵

That is not evasion; it is how a careful reader treats any trusted witness. Most alleged contradictions dissolve when you read them slowly. Some examples:

How did Judas die?

Matthew says that Judas “cast down the pieces of silver in the temple, and departed, and went and hanged himself” (Matthew 27:5). Luke, in Acts, says that “falling headlong, he burst asunder in the midst, and all his bowels gushed out” (Acts 1:18). Are these two different stories? Not necessarily. A man who hangs himself and is not taken down may fall. Matthew tells how he died; Luke tells what became of the body. Two accounts that describe different moments of the same event are not a contradiction.

One man or two?

Matthew says that in the country of the Gergesenes “there met him two possessed with devils, coming out of the tombs” (Matthew 8:28). Mark says that “there met him out of the tombs a man with an unclean spirit” (Mark 5:2), and Luke likewise speaks of “a certain man, which had devils long time” (Luke 8:27). Mark and Luke do not say there was only one. They focus on the one who became the centre of the story, the man who afterward begged to go with Jesus and was sent home to tell what had happened. If two men met you and one of them did all the talking, you might well tell the story about him.

Who came to Jesus?

Matthew says that in Capernaum “there came unto him a centurion, beseeching him” (Matthew 8:5). Luke says the centurion “sent unto him the elders of the Jews, beseeching him that he would come and heal his servant” (Luke 7:3). In ordinary speech, then as now, what a man does through his messengers he does himself. A newspaper may say that the president told Congress something when his secretary delivered the message. Matthew tells the story in brief; Luke gives the detail.

What did the sign on the cross say?

Matthew gives it as “THIS IS JESUS THE KING OF THE JEWS” (Matthew 27:37). Mark has “THE KING OF THE JEWS” (Mark 15:26). Luke has “THIS IS THE KING OF THE JEWS” (Luke 23:38). John has “JESUS OF NAZARETH THE KING OF THE JEWS” (John 19:19). John also tells us something the others do not: the title “was written in Hebrew, and Greek, and Latin” (John 19:20). A notice in three languages need not read word for word the same in each, and each writer gives its substance: the charge, “the King of the Jews”, is in all four.

What these examples teach

Differences like these are exactly what we should expect from independent witnesses. If four accounts of the same event matched word for word in every detail, a judge would suspect collusion. Real witnesses tell the truth from where they stood. The Gospels read like that.

Honesty also requires saying that a few difficulties in Scripture have no answer everyone agrees on. Some involve numbers in Kings and Chronicles, where copying of figures was especially prone to slips, or questions of chronology where we lack outside information. The right response is Augustine's: the problem lies with our understanding or our knowledge, not with God's word. “The secret things belong unto the LORD our God: but those things which are revealed belong unto us and to our children for ever” (Deuteronomy 29:29). Many “errors” confidently announced in one century, such as Belshazzar, have been quietly withdrawn in the next.

“It's just mythology.”

Myths are set “once upon a time”, in no place in particular. The Bible names its kings, dates its events by the reigns of Roman emperors and the terms of governors, and lists its witnesses. Peter's words could hardly be plainer: “For we have not followed cunningly devised fables, when we made known unto you the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, but were eyewitnesses of his majesty” (2 Peter 1:16).

C. S. Lewis, who taught medieval and Renaissance literature at Oxford and Cambridge and had been an atheist before he became a Christian, made the point as a literary scholar. Responding to critics who treated the Gospels as legend, he wrote, “I have been reading poems, romances, vision-literature, legends, myths all my life. I know what they are like.” His conclusion was that the Gospels are not like them.⁶⁶ They have the flat, unadorned, sometimes awkward detail of reportage, the kind that legends do not bother with.

And myths do not usually come with a list of five hundred living witnesses (1 Corinthians 15:6). Nor do myths grow up within the lifetime of the people who could have refuted them, in the very city where the events were said to have happened, under the eyes of hostile authorities who had every reason to produce a body. The apostles preached the resurrection in Jerusalem.

“There are so many versions. How can you know which is right?”

This is a fair question, and it is one reason this ministry reads one Bible. Modern translations differ from one another for two reasons: they follow different methods of translation, and many of them follow a different Greek text from the one behind the 1611, the Critical Text described in Part 3. The places where that Greek text leaves out or changes words that stand in the 1611 are not hidden; you can see each one at kylelauriano.com/library/changes and weigh it for yourself.

The King James Bible was translated by a large company of scholars working under careful rules, from the Hebrew of the Masoretic tradition and the Greek of the Received Text. It has been read, preached and tested by the English-speaking church for more than four hundred years. Its translators were honest about difficulty: where a Hebrew or Greek word allowed more than one rendering, they said so in the margin rather than hiding it. That is the Bible quoted in this paper, and the one we put in your hands.

“Isn't faith just believing without evidence?”

Not in the Bible's sense. Biblical faith is trust in a God who has shown Himself trustworthy. John wrote his Gospel so that its readers would have grounds for faith: “But these are written, that ye might believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God; and that believing ye might have life through his name” (John 20:31). Paul told the Thessalonians to “Prove all things; hold fast that which is good” (1 Thessalonians 5:21).

But faith is not merely the conclusion of an argument either. Evidence can clear away objections and show that the Bible deserves a hearing. It cannot make a person bow. Paul says that “the natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God: for they are foolishness unto him” (1 Corinthians 2:14). In the end the Bible must be read, not only read about, and the Spirit of God uses the word itself: “So then faith cometh by hearing, and hearing by the word of God” (Romans 10:17).

We began with a question: can a book copied by hand for thousands of years still be trusted? Here is what the evidence, honestly read, shows.

| Question | What the evidence shows | | --- | --- | | Has the Old Testament text been kept? | The Dead Sea Scrolls, a thousand years older than the medieval copies, show that the Masoretic text behind the 1611 was already there before Christ. | | Has the New Testament text been kept? | About five thousand Greek manuscripts, early papyri and a printed tradition, the Received Text, that the church read for centuries. Every place modern versions depart from it is open to view. | | Does the Bible describe a real world? | Dozens of Old Testament figures appear in contemporary inscriptions; Pilate, Caiaphas and Gallio are attested outside Scripture; Luke writes with a historian's precision. | | Does it foretell the future? | Where the date of the writing is secure and the fulfilment was out of human hands (Isaiah 53, Micah 5:2, Psalm 22, the fall of the temple), it passes the test it sets itself. | | Does it contradict itself? | Most alleged contradictions are differences of viewpoint between honest witnesses; the few hard places are problems of our knowledge, not proof of error. |

None of that forces anyone to believe. But it does remove the excuses. A person who rejects the Bible today cannot honestly say that it was corrupted beyond recovery, or that it is a book of myths set in no real time and place, or that archaeology has buried it. The evidence points the other way.

The test that remains

There is one more test the Bible offers, and no paper can run it for you. Jesus said, “If any man will do his will, he shall know of the doctrine, whether it be of God, or whether I speak of myself” (John 7:17). The Bible is not only a book to be examined. It is a book that examines its reader: “For the word of God is quick, and powerful, and sharper than any twoedged sword, piercing even to the dividing asunder of soul and spirit, and of the joints and marrow, and is a discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart” (Hebrews 4:12).

That is what happened to me. In my own words again:

It did the opposite. Genesis gripped me. In Matthew I read Jesus' own words and felt the weight of my own sin for the first time. I wept at worship music I'd never have been caught listening to. Then one day I got on my knees and prayed: "Jesus, if you are real, show me — and I'll serve you." A warmth ran from the top of my head to the soles of my feet. Peace I'd never known, and it didn't leave. I came to faith in 2022, and my wife came to faith a month later.

That is my story, and I share it as my testimony. You do not have to take my experience as proof of anything. But I am not the only skeptic who has walked this road.

Michael Ray Lewis told his story on The King Is Coming Show (TKIC #48): an atheist who mocked Christians, until, in his telling, one question undid him. Watch it in his own words: youtube.com/watch?v=Rd-RdSqeQDk Michael's account of what happened to him, shared as his testimony — weigh it for yourself.

Sy Garte told his story on The King Is Coming Show (TKIC #47): three generations of atheists, and then, in his telling, a vision on a PA highway. Watch it in his own words: youtube.com/watch?v=h-a_uZBKgDk Sy's account of what happened to him, shared as his testimony — weigh it for yourself.

What the book is for

The Bible was not given so that we could win arguments. It was given so that we could know God. It tells us the truth about ourselves: that “All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned every one to his own way” (Isaiah 53:6). And it tells us the truth about Him: that Christ died for our sins and rose again, and that salvation is His gift. “For by grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God: Not of works, lest any man should boast” (Ephesians 2:8-9). The apostles preached “repentance toward God, and faith toward our Lord Jesus Christ” (Acts 20:21), and on the day the church began Peter told those who asked what they must do, “Repent, and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ for the remission of sins, and ye shall receive the gift of the Holy Ghost” (Acts 2:38).

If you have read this far as a skeptic, I am not asking you to take my word, or any scholar's word, for anything. I am asking you to do what I did: open the book and read it for yourself. Start with the Gospel of John. Read it slowly. Ask God, if He is there, to show you whether it is true. The promise is His, not mine: “And ye shall seek me, and find me, when ye shall search for me with all your heart” (Jeremiah 29:13).

The 1611 is free to read at kylelauriano.com/library. A KJV with Strong's Concordance will let you trace any word back to its Hebrew or Greek. And if you want to see exactly where the 1611 and the modern versions part ways, it is all set out at kylelauriano.com/library/changes.

When many walked away from Jesus, He asked the twelve whether they would go too. Peter's answer is still the right one: “Lord, to whom shall we go? thou hast the words of eternal life” (John 6:68).