Why Trust the Bible? (Part 2)

A couple of years ago I gave a presentation at the University of Toronto on the topic of the Bible. The title of the talk was, “Good News or Fake News: can you trust the Bible?” After the presentation, a student came up to me and simply said, “I think you showed pretty persuasively that the Bible isn’t ‘fake news,’ but that doesn’t mean it’s by default “good news.”

Up until this point, I hope you have seen that the history of the text of the Bible gives us a great deal of confidence that what we have now is what the original author’s wrote all those millennia ago. However, that doesn’t necessarily mean what they wrote was true. We could hypothetically have the most widely attested, most accurately transmitted, most textually verified document in all of antiquity — and it could all be a lie. What if we do have what the original authors wrote and those same authors simply made it all up? How do go from a trustworthy text to a truthful message?

The answer to that question lies in the details of the Bible itself.

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