Wait…Is The Bible Reliable?

The short answer is No. It’s not reliable.

Today J. Warner Wallace is going to take us through his Top 3 reasons why the Bible is reliable and I am here to debunk these reasons. These three areas are definitely something you should consider but the evidence isn’t on his side about the reliability of the Bible.

1. Early Writing

His first question is whether the Gospels were written early enough to be considered reliable eyewitness testimony. He of course agrees they were but in fact they were not. Mark was the first Gospel written 40 years after the events and he borrowed from Paul. Paul wrote in the 50’s and is the first actual source for Jesus. He vehemently says he never got his information from humans and only from God through revelation and scripture. So we don’t have anyone in the first century that was an actual eyewitness.

2. Corroborating the Gospels

His second question is about corroborating the Gospel accounts. He thinks that sources like Suetonius, Thallus, and Tacitus actually verify the Gospels. In fact all those sources aren’t independent sources at all. They all come after the Christian narrative was well established in society. They got their information from the Gospels and cannot be used to validate the Gospels. This is circular reasoning.

3. Gospel Changes

We have 2 centuries of changes to the bible that we have no idea what was changed. Since the 3rd century we have thousands of changes that pop up. A famous change that we know of is the ending of Mark. The original ending of Mark ends at Mark 16:8. During the second century, someone added to the end of Mark in order to have it corroborate post resurrection appearances of Jesus. The fact that Mark didn’t include this was embarassing to them so they changed it. This is just one major Change we know about, what else could have changed that is simply lost to time.

Conclusion

So we can’t know what the original Gospels actually said. The gospels weren’t written while any eyewitnesses were alive. There is definitely no corroborating evidence for stuff in the bible. The earliest evidence for a Gospel or even Jesus himself is Paul and he never actually saw Jesus on earth. He only had visions of him and read about him in the scriptures, i.e. the Septuagint.

If you want to know more about early Christian history, check out C.H.R.E.S.T.U.S.