The Holy Scriptures
Sacred Scripture is the inspired Word of God, the faithful textual testimony of the Gospel, and the true and accurate rendering of God's revelation to humanity. As such, Sacred Scripture is infallible and fundamental for the Church in all matters of doctrine and life. How do we know who Jesus is and what Jesus taught? How do we know if a Gospel is genuine or false? What authoritative basis exists for doctrine and life? The Bible is the inspired and infallible source for what we, according to God's will, are to know and do. (2. Timotheus 3,15-17; 2. Petrus 1,20-21; Johannes 17,17)
Testimony to Jesus
You may have seen newspaper reports of the "Jesus Seminary," a group of scholars who claim that Jesus did not say most of the things He said according to the Bible. Or you may have heard from other scholars who claim that the Bible is a collection of contradictions and myths.
Many educated people reject the Bible. Others, equally educated, consider them to be a credible chronicle of what God has done and said. If we can not trust what the Bible says about Jesus, then we have almost nothing left to know about Him.
The "Jesus Seminary" began with a preconceived notion of what Jesus would have taught. They only accepted statements that fit into this picture and rejected all that did not. In doing so, they practically created a Jesus in their own image. This is scientifically highly questionable and even many liberal scholars disagree with the "Jesus Seminary".
Do we have good reason to believe that the biblical accounts of Jesus are credible? Yes - they were written in the space of a few decades after Jesus' death, when eyewitnesses were still alive. Jewish disciples often memorized the words of their teachers; so it is very probable that Jesus' disciples also handed down the teachings of their Master with sufficient accuracy. We have no evidence that they have invented words to resolve issues in the early church, such as the circumcision issue. This suggests that their accounts faithfully reflect what Jesus taught.
We can also assume a high level of reliability in the transmission of the textual sources. We have manuscripts from the fourth century and smaller parts from the second. (The oldest surviving Virgil manuscript was written 350 years after the poet's death; Plato 1300 years later.) A comparison of the manuscripts shows that the Bible was carefully copied and that we have a highly reliable text.
Jesus: the chief witness of Scripture
In many questions, Jesus was ready to quarrel with the Pharisees, but in one, apparently, not in recognition of the revelatory nature of Scripture. He often took different views on interpretations and traditions, but apparently agreed with the Jewish priests that Scripture was the authoritative basis for faith and action.
Jesus expected every word of Scripture to be fulfilled. (Mt 5,17-18; Mk 14,49)He quoted from scripture to support his own statements (Mt 22,29; 26,24; 26,31; Joh 10,34He rebuked people for not having read the scriptures closely enough. (Mt 22,29; Lk 24,25; Joh 5,39)He spoke of Old Testament people and events without the slightest suggestion that they might not have existed.
Behind the Scripture stood the authority of God. Jesus countered Satan's temptations with: "It is written." (Mt 4,4-10)The mere fact that something was written in Scripture made it indisputably authoritative for Jesus. David's words were inspired by the Holy Spirit. (Mk 12,36); a prophecy had been given “through” Daniel (Mt 24,15), because God was their true origin.
In Matthäus 19,4-5 Jesus, the Creator, says in 1. Mose 2,24: "Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and cling to his wife, and the two shall be one flesh." However, the creation story does not attribute this word to God. Jesus could attribute it to God simply because it was in Scripture. Underlying assumption: The actual Author of Scripture is God.
All the Gospels show that Jesus considered Scripture to be reliable and trustworthy. To those who wanted to stone him, he replied: "Scripture cannot be broken." (Joh 10, 35)Jesus considered them fully valid; he even defended the validity of the commandments of the Old Covenant while the Old Covenant was still in force (Mt 8,4; 23,23).
The testimony of the apostles
Like their teacher, the apostles considered Scripture authoritative. They quoted it frequently, often to support a point of view. The words of Scripture were treated as the words of God. Scripture was even personified as the God who spoke directly to Abraham and Pharaoh. (Röm 9,17; Gal 3,8)What David, Isaiah, and Jeremiah wrote was actually spoken by God and is therefore certain (Apg 1,16; 4,25; 13,35; 28,25; Hebr 1,6-10; 10:15). The law of Moses, it is assumed, reflects the mind of God. (1Kor 9,9)The true author of Scripture is God. (1Kor 6,16; Röm 9,25).
Paul calls Scripture "what God has spoken." (Röm 3,2)According to Peter, the prophets did not speak “from human will,” but “people who were carried along by the Holy Spirit spoke in the name of God.” (2Pt 1,21)The prophets didn't come up with these words themselves – God inspired them; he is the true author of the words. They often write: "And the word of the Lord went forth..." or "Thus says the Lord..."
Paul wrote to Timothy: "All Scripture is inspired by God, and useful for teaching, for conviction, for correction, for instruction in righteousness..." (2Tim 3,16, Elberfeld Bible). However, we must not read into this our modern notions of what “God-breathed” means. We must remember that Paul meant the Septuagint translation, the Greek translation of the Hebrew Scriptures (that was the Scriptures Timothy knew from childhood - verse 15). Paul used this translation as the Word of God without implying that it was a perfect text.
Despite the translation discrepancies, it is God-breathed and useful "for training in righteousness" and can cause "the man of God to be perfect, fitted unto every good work" (verses 16-17).
miscommunication
The original Word of God is perfect, and God is quite capable of making people put it in the right words, keep it right, and (to complete the communication) understand it right. But God did not do this completely and without gaps. Our copies have grammatical errors, typographical errors, and (far more importantly) there are errors in receiving the message. In a way, "noise" prevents us from hearing the word he typed properly. Yet God uses Scripture to speak to us today.
Despite the "noise", despite the human errors that come between us and God, Scripture fulfills its purpose: to tell us about salvation and about right behavior. God accomplishes what He wanted through Scripture: He brings His Word before us with sufficient clarity that we may obtain salvation and that we may experience what He requires of us.
The script fulfills this purpose, even in translated form. However, we failed, we expected more from her than it is God's purpose. It is not a textbook of astronomy and science. The numbers of the font are not always mathematically exact by today's standards. We must go after the great purpose of the Scriptures and not cling to trifles.
An example: In Apostelgeschichte 21,11 Agabus is prompted to say that the Jews would bind Paul and hand him over to the Gentiles. Some might assume that Agabus specified who would bind Paul and what they would do to him. But as it turns out, Paul was rescued by the Gentiles and bound by the Gentiles (vv. 30-33).
Is this a contradiction? Technically yes. The prophecy was true in principle, but not in the details. Of course, when he wrote this down, Luke could easily have faked the prophecy to fit the result, but he did not seek to cover up the differences. He did not expect readers to expect precision in such details. This should warn us against expecting accuracy in every detail of Scripture.
We need to focus on the main point of the message. Similarly, Paul made a mistake when he did 1. Korinther 1,14 wrote - a mistake he corrected in verse 16. The inspired scriptures contain both the error and the correction.
Some people compare Scripture with Jesus. One is the Word of God in human language; the other is the Incarnate Word of God. Jesus was perfect in the sense that he was sinless, but that does not mean that he never made mistakes. As a child, even as an adult, he might have made grammatical mistakes and carpenter mistakes, but such mistakes were not sins. They did not stop Jesus from fulfilling his purpose of being a sinless sacrifice for our sins. Likewise, grammatical errors and other trivialities are not detrimental to the meaning of the Bible: to lead us to the salvation of Christ.
Evidence for the Bible
Nobody can prove that the entire content of the Bible is true. You may be able to prove that a certain prophecy has arrived, but you can not prove that the entire Bible has the same validity. It is more a question of faith. We see the historical evidence that Jesus and the apostles considered the Old Testament to be the Word of God. The biblical Jesus is the only one we have; other ideas are based on assumptions, not new evidence. We accept the teaching of Jesus that the Holy Spirit will lead the disciples to new truth. We accept Paul's claim to write with divine authority. We accept that the Bible reveals to us who God is and how we can have fellowship with him.
We accept the testimony of church history that through the centuries Christians have found the Bible useful for faith and life. This book tells us who God is, what He has done for us, and how we should respond. Tradition also tells us which books belong to the biblical canon. We rely on God's directing the canonization process so that the result was his will.
Our own experience speaks for the truth of Scripture. This book does not mince words and shows us our sinfulness; but it also offers us grace and a purified conscience. It does not give us moral power through rules and orders, but in an unexpected way - through grace and through the ignominious death of our Lord.
The Bible bears witness to the love, joy, and peace we can have through faith - feelings that, just as the Bible says, transcend our ability to verbalize them. This book gives us meaning and purpose in life, telling us about divine creation and salvation. These aspects of biblical authority can not be proven to skeptics, but they do help to validate Scripture, which tells us of things we experience.
The Bible does not beautify its heroes; This also helps us to accept them as reliable. It tells of the human weaknesses of Abraham, Moses, David, the people of Israel, the disciples. The Bible is a word that testifies to a more authoritative Word, the Incarnate Word, and the good news of the grace of God.
The Bible is not simplistic; she does not make it easy. On the one hand, the New Testament continues the old covenant and on the other hand breaks with it. It would be easier to do without one or the other altogether, but it is more demanding to have both. Similarly, Jesus is portrayed as a man and a god at the same time, a combination that does not want to fit well into either Hebrew, Greek or modern thought. This complexity was not created by ignorance of philosophical problems, but in defiance of them.
The Bible is a challenging book, it can hardly have been written by uneducated desert dwellers who wanted to make a fake or give hallucinations sense. Jesus' resurrection adds weight to the book that announces such a phenomenal event. It gives added weight to the disciples' testimony of who Jesus was - and the unexpected logic of victory over death through the death of the Son of God.
Repeatedly the Bible challenges our thinking about God, about ourselves, about life, about right and wrong. It commands respect because it teaches us truths that we cannot obtain elsewhere. In addition to all theoretical considerations, the Bible "justifies" itself above all in its application to our lives.
The testimony of Scripture, Tradition, Personal Experience, and Reason in general supports the authority of the Bible. The fact that she speaks across cultural boundaries, that she addresses situations that did not exist at the time of writing - that, too, testifies to her abiding authority. The best biblical proof for the believer, however, is that the Holy Spirit, with their help, can bring about a change of heart and fundamentally change life.
Michael Morrison
