1. Is the Bible the Word of God?
The Bible Claims to be God’s Word.
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2. Is the Bible God’s Completed and Final Revelation?
ALL HAS BEEN REVEALED
NOTHING MORE IS NEEDED
NOTHING WOULD BE LOST
NOTHING SHOULD BE CHANGED
NOTHING WILL BE REPLACED
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3. Is the Bible the Word of God?
The Bible Claims to be God’s Word.
The Bible Supports Those Claims.
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4. Claims of the Mormons
Articles 8 & 9 of Joseph Smith’s Articles of Faith: “We believe the Bible to be the word of God as far as it is translated correctly; we also believe the Book of Mormon to be the word of God.”
The book of Mormon claims that the Catholic church took away from the gospel “many parts which are plan and most precious; and also many covenants of the Lord have they taken away” (1 Nephi 13:26)
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5. DO WE STILL HAVE GOD’S INSPIRED WORD TODAY?

6. The Facts HAS ANYTHING BEEN LOST? The “autographs” have not survived
We have copies
These copies have been translated into English
HAS ANYTHING BEEN LOST?

7. THE BIBLE CLAIMS TO BE THE IMPERISHABLE WORD OF GOD
Jehovah spoke of the abiding nature of His word. (Isaiah 55:10-11)
The Old Testament still has a purpose today. (Romans 15:4; 1 Corinthians 10:6,11)
The Old Testament declares God’s word imperishable. (Isaiah 40:8)
Jesus’ attitude toward the Old Testament confirms it was imperishable. (Luke 24:25)
Jesus taught that the Law would be fulfilled. (Matthew 5:17-18)
Jesus declared that His words would not pass away. (Matthew 24:35)
The apostles declared that God’s word is imperishable. (1 Peter 1:23-25)
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8. THE IMPERISHABLE WORD OF GOD
This doesn’t mean that the original autographs still exist
We do not have the original autographs, but the NT has not been lost, because we do have copies of the autographs and/or copies of copies
This doesn’t mean that we have every word that every inspired writer ever wrote.
Acts 15:22-29; Col. 4:16; 1 Cor. 5:9
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9. THE IMPERISHABLE WORD OF GOD
All of God’s teachings, all that we need to know, concerning life and godliness.
2 Peter 1:3— seeing that His adivine power has granted to us everything pertaining to life and godliness, through the true bknowledge of Him who ccalled us 1by His own glory and 2excellence.
2 Timothy 3:16-17— All Scripture is 1inspired by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, for 2training in righteousness; 17 so that athe man of God may be adequate, bequipped for every good work.
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10. REASON SUPPORTS THE BIBLE’S DECLARATION THAT NOTHING HAS BEEN LOST.
If the God who made the world wanted to preserve His revelation to man then He could have. (Genesis 18:14; Job 42:2; Jeremiah 32:17; Matthew 19:26)
If God wanted to preserve all of His truth, then that is what would happen. (Romans 16:25-27)
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11. Three Tests
Chauncey Sanders: “The evidence upon which we must rely in attempting to solve problems of authenticity and attribution may be classified as external, internal, and bibliographical.” (An Introduction to Research in English Literary History, p. 143)

12. Bibliographical Test:
“Are the Gospels we possess faithful reproductions of the originals?”
“Do the copies we have accurately reflect the original documents?”
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13. Kenneth Chumbley: “...so long as we possess accurate copies (manuscripts) of the autographs, the absence of the autographs is irrelevant. No one alive today has ever seen the original Romeo and Juliet. Nor has anyone today ever seen the autograph of Plato’s Republic or Plutarch’s Lives. But because it can be shown that the copies we possess are reliable reproductions of the originals, no serious scholar doubts that we can reproduce today what Shakespeare, Plato, or Plutarch originally composed.” (The Gospel Argument For God, p. 18)
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14. When evaluating historical documents:
Kenneth Chumbley: “The bibliographical test determines whether a manuscript is an accurate copy. It doesn’t matter that the copy wasn’t made until 1300 years after the autograph was written (as in the case with the History of Herodotus). And it doesn’t even matter that only a few copies of an ancient work are yet in existence. (No more than fifty reliable manuscripts exist for any Latin or Greek writer from antiquity.) Despite the enormous time interval between the autographs and the earliest copies, and despite the relative paucity of extant manuscripts, historians are able, using standard bibliographical criteria, to ascertain whether a manuscript has accurately preserved the contents of the original.” (The Gospel Argument For God, p. 24)
When evaluating historical documents:
Historians do not consider the absence of the original document a serious handicap
A large interval of time between the autographs and the earliest copies is not a major problem
Only a handful of copies are needed to determine what actually was written.
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15. Comparing the Time Interval:
Sir Fredric Kenyon: “In no other case is the interval of time between the composition of the book and the date of the earliest extant manuscripts so short as in that of the New Testament: (Handbook to the Textual Criticism of the New Testament, page 5)
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16. Comparing Time Interval
Ceasar’s Gallic War, written between BC. The oldest extant copy is 900 years later than the autograph.
Tacitus’ Histories, written 100 AD, the oldest known copy dates 800 years later.
Thucydides History, written between BC, the oldest manuscript copies (except for a few papyrus scraps) dates to around 900 AD, i.e., 1300 years after Thucydides wrote.
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17. John Rylands Fragment Text: John 18:31-33, 37ff. Date: 117-138 AD.
Copies of the Gospel of John were circulated within 40 years of composition.
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18. Time Interval (Earliest MSS to Autograph)
Ancient Author
Time Interval
Caesar (Gallic Wars)
1000 years
Livy
Plato (Tetralogies)
1200 years
Tacitus (Annals)
Pliny the Younger (History)
750 years
Thucydides (History)
1300 years
Suetonius (De Vita Caesarun)
800 years
Herodotus (History)
Horace
900 years

19. Time Interval (Earliest MSS to Autograph)
Ancient Author
Time Interval
Sophocles
1400 years
Lucretius
1100 years
Catullus
1600 years
Euripedes
1500 years
Demosthenes
1300 years
Aristotle
Aristophanes
1200 years
NT Books
years
(Josh McDowell, Evidence That Demands A Verdict, 1972, 48)

20. The Time Interval
Sir Frederic Kenyon [Former Director and Principal Librarian of the British Museum]: “In no other case is the interval of time between the composition of the book and the date of the earliest extant manuscripts so short as in that of the New Testament.” (Handbook to the Textual Criticism of the New Testament, p. 5)

21. Number of MSS Copies
“F.E. Peters states that “on the basis of manuscript tradition alone, the works that made up the Christians’ New Testament were the most frequently copied and widely circulated books of antiquity.” (Josh McDowell, The New Evidence that Demands a Verdict, page 34)
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22. Number Of Manuscripts Ancient Author Number Of MSS
Caesar (Gallic Wars) 10
Livy 20
Plato (Tetralogies) 7
Tacitus (Annals)
Pliny the Younger (History)
Thucydides (History) 8
Suetonius (De Vita Caesarun)
Herodotus (History)
Horace

23. (Josh McDowell, Evidence That Demands A Verdict, 1972, 48)
Number Of Manuscripts
Ancient Author
Number Of MSS
Sophocles
100
Lucretius 2
Catullus 3
Euripedes 9
Demosthenes
200
Aristotle 5
Aristophanes 10
NT Books
5656
(Josh McDowell, Evidence That Demands A Verdict, 1972, 48)

24. Number of Manuscripts:
Extant Greek Manuscripts:
Uncials 307
Minuscules 2,860
Lectionaries 2,410
Papyri 109
SUBTOTAL: 5,686
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25. Number of Manuscripts:
Latin Vulgate 10,000+
Ethiopic 2,000+
Slavic 4,101
Armenian 2,587
Syriac Pashetta
Bohairic
Arabic 75
Old Latin 50
Anglo Saxon 7
Gothic 6
Sogdian 3
Old Syriac 2
Persian 2
Frankish 1
SUBTOTAL 19,284+
TOTAL ALL MSS 24,970+
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26. Comparison Of Ancient Texts
Ancient Author
Date Written
Earliest Copy
Number of Copies
Accuracy of Copies
Caesar
1st cen. BC
AD 90 10
Livy 20
Tacitus
AD 110
Thucydides
5th cen. BC
AD 900 8
Herodotus
Demosthenes
4th cen. BC
AD 1100
200
Mahabharata
90%
Homer
9th cen. BC
643
95% NT
1st cen. AD
2nd cen AD
(ca. AD 130)
5,000
99+%
Copies of the NT are more abundant, more ancient, and more accurate than copies of any other ancient work

27. Josh McDowell
“The importance of the sheer number of manuscript copies cannot be overstated. As with other documents of ancient literature, there are no known extant (currently existing) original manuscripts of the Bible. Fortunately, however, the abundance of manuscript copies makes it possible to reconstruct the original with virtually complete accuracy.” (New Evidence that Demands a Verdict, page 35)
“John Warwick Montgomery says that “to be skeptical of the resultant text of the New Testament books to allow all of classical antiquity to slip into obscurity, for no documents of the ancient period are as well attested bibliographically as the New Testament.” (New Evidence that Demands a Verdict, page 35)

28. Consistency Of The Copies
Henry C. Thiessen: “It is sometimes asked, to what extent we may trust the present critical text to be the true text. From the reading of these pages on textual criticism the student may easily get an exaggerated impression of the proportion of the text that is still in doubt. It should be emphasized therefore, that concerning the great bulk of the words in the New Testament there is complete agreement among textual critics.” (Introduction to the New Testament, 1943, p. 77)

29. Consistency Of The Copies
B.F. Westcott & F.J.A. Hort: “If comparative trivialities, such as changes of order, the insertion or omission of the article with proper names, and the like, are set aside, the words in our opinion still subject to doubt can hardly amount to more than a thousandth part of the whole New Testament.” (The New Testament In The Original Greek, 1911, p. 565)

30. Consistency Of The Copies
Only 12.5% of the NT text contains variants
Only 1.7% of the NT text contains variants other than orthographic differences
Only .1% of the NT text contains variants that substantially affect meaning
No Biblical doctrine rests solely upon a disputed reading (Martin Pickup)

31. Ira M. Price
“Only 400 or so of the 150,000 variants materially affect the sense, and of these perhaps 50 are of real significance. But no essential teaching of the New Testament is greatly affected by them.” (The Ancestry Of Our English Bible, 1956, p. 222)

32. Consistency of the Copies
John Warwick Montgomery: “To express skepticism concerning the resultant text of the New Testament books ... is to allow all of classical antiquity to slip into obscurity, for no documents of the ancient period are as well attested bibliographically as is the New Testament.” (Where Is History Going?, p. 46, quoted in Kenneth Chumbley, The Gospel Argument For God, p. 26)
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33. Internal Evidence
THE GOSPELS WERE WRITTEN IN A TIME WHEN SOME OF THE GREATEST OF ALL HISTORICAL WRITINGS WERE COMPOSED.
GOSPELS ARE PRIMARY SOURCE DOCUMENTS.
THE BURDEN OF IMPEACHING THE INTERNAL TESTIMONY OF THE GOSPEL LIES WITH THE CRITIC.
BY DEFINITION, A CONTRADICTION EXISTS ONLY WHEN THERE IS ABSOULETY NO WAY TO RECONCILE TWO STATEMENTS.
THE ALLEGED DISCREPANCIES IN THE GOSPELS HAVE BEEN IDENTIFIED FOR CENTURIES AND HAVE BEEN EFFECTIVELY ANSWERED IN A VARIETY OF WAYS.
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34. Leander S. Keyser: “Most of them have been successfully explained
Leander S. Keyser: “Most of them have been successfully explained. The trouble is, the skeptics and liberalistic critics pay no attention to scholarly defenses of the Bible, but go on repeating their stock objections over and over again. The same contradictions that Driver, Cheyne, Bade and others herald forth can be found in Paine’s The Age of Reason, in the works of the deists and of Voltaire and other infidels of past ages. The more, however, we know of the Hebrew and cognate languages, of archaeology, history and geography in ancient times, the more these difficulties disappear.” (A System of Christian Evidence, p. 241, quoted in Kenneth Chumbley, The Gospel Argument For God, p. 29)
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35. Internal Evidence GOSPELS ARE PRIMARY SOURCE DOCUMENTS.
THE BURDEN OF IMPEACHING THE INTERNAL TESTIMONY OF THE GOSPEL LIES WITH THE CRITIC.
BY DEFINITION, A CONTRADICTION EXISTS ONLY WHEN THERE IS ABSOULETY NO WAY TO RECONCILE TWO STATEMENTS.
THE ALLEGED DISCREPANCIES IN THE GOSPELS HAVE BEEN IDENTIFIED FOR CENTURIES AND HAVE BEEN EFFECTIVELY ANSWERED IN A VARIETY OF WAYS.
FROM A LEGAL STANDPOINT, THE VARIATIONS THAT ARE FOUND IN THE GOSPELS IMMEASURABLY STRENGTHEN THEIR CREDIBILITY
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36. External Evidence
NOT A SINGLE, EXTRABIBLICAL FINDING HAS EVER DISPROVEN A SINGLE BIBLICAL STATEMENT.
AFTER YEARS OF THE CLOSEST AND MOST CRITICAL SCRUTINY, THE GOSPELS STAND COMPLETELY TRUSTWORTHY, UNIMPEACHABLY ACCURATE DOCUMENTS OF THE HIGHEST HISTORICAL VALUE.
THEREFORE THE GOSPELS SHOULD AT THE VERY LEAST BE ACCEPTED AS RELIABLE, PRIMARY SOURCE RECORDS FOR THE LIFE AND TEACHINGS OF JESUS.
FINALLY, SINCE THE GOSPELS CAN BE DEMONSTRATED TO BE HISTORICALLY ACCURATE, “ALL WE NEED DO IS ASCERTAIN WHAT THE GOSPELS SAY, TO DETERMINE WHETHER OR NOT THE CHRIST THERE PORTRAYED IS INDEED A SUPERNATURAL PERSON.
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