Understanding the Christian faith: the Bible

Coming off my article last week, I feel it is necessary to explain why I believe God is the only one who is worth living for, why only He will ever completely fulfill your life.  

To do so, I am going to attempt to explain the validity of the Christian faith.  

Over the next few weeks, I plan on talking about our positions as humans, the reality and deity of Jesus Christ, and why only Christ saves.  Today, though, I want to explain the validity of the Bible.

First, I want you all to know I am no scholar.  I have done research on this subject and have listened to some people who are much smarter than I am explain this subject.  That said, let's jump in.

It's important to start by comparing the manuscript evidence of the Bible with other ancient writings.  

The Bible, both Old and New Testaments, has over 20,000 ancient pieces of manuscript, in many different languages.

Granted, some of these are fragments or parts of writings, but many are books of the Bible in their entirety.

For example, the Dead Sea Scrolls contain the entire account of Isaiah.   This is especially noteworthy because of the prophecies of Isaiah about Christ.

Considering texts like "The Iliad" and writings from famous Greek philosophers like Aristotle and Plato have fewer than 1,000 manuscripts to back up their reliability, it seems to me that the Bible has the greatest potential to be as close to its original form than any other ancient writing.  

This means that the Bible is hard to tamper with, and it makes it difficult for people to add or detract from it without being caught.

Having established that the Bible has great historical reliability, it's important to look at how it is divinely inspired.

The Bible was written by forty different men over a span of 1,600 years, and yet it maintains a single theme. That theme is that a perfect God came to save a fallen creation.

You might say the Bible is rife with contradictions, but I would say this is untrue.

However, if you do believe the Bible has mistakes and contradictions, I invite you to make those known.

There has been much debate over this issue, and it would be good for us to investigate these things together.

However, considering the fact that many different men, from different times and different stations of life, were able to compile a text with a single, consistent message, you can't tell me there was not some higher power overlooking the transcription.

I realize this may not seem like a strong argument.  I realize a 500-word article is not enough to conclusively prove the validity of a text that has been debated for so long.  

My main point of writing this article is to get people thinking.  This is a matter of eternity, not just the here and now.  

Don't let something that will change your life go uninvestigated.

Kurtz is a sophomore education major of Little Rock.