"how can you know the bible to be true?"

[mindlight]

I am a Christian posting on behalf of UnitedweStand000000 who has his doubts about the authority and reliability of scripture. Please help me to answer his questions.

"
Can I just ask you, how can you know the bible to be true? you can believe it to be true but knowing and believing are different things.

I believed the bible to be true for many years, but I can't close my mind to knowledge.

I need more than faith, I need actual evidence or proof of something before I can wholeheartedly commit myself fully to it.

Can you steer me in the right direction."

Islam is statistically a religion for losers

 

[RDKirk]

I don't believe in God because I believe the bible, I believe the bible because I believe in God, and God points me to the bible.

However, the bible is only what it claims to be: A syllabus for training in righteousness. It is not intended to be a reference manual for those things of creation that can be determined by physical observation (a la Psalm 19), but the realm of righteous unto God that can only be delivered by revelation.

 

[Steve Petersen]

True at what level?

Spiritual? - Can't prove what you can't measure

Historical? - Here there is opportunity to test truth.

 

[Papias]

True at what level?
.............
Historical? - Here there is opportunity to test truth.

I would not suggest going there. Reading one's Bible literally gives both cases of true and of false history. Examples:

True: we have confirmed that a ruler named "Pontius Pilot" did exist, as did Caesar Augustus, places like Jerusalem, Rome, Assyria, Galilee, etc. That really doesn't prove much, as even works of fiction sometimes use real place and person names (like Spiderman being set in New York, fictional movies mentioning Bill Clinton, a Tale of Two Cities with London and Paris, etc.)

False - a lot of "history" from a literally read Bible is almost certainly false. If lengendary stories like Babel or the Exodus are taken as history, actual history from historians shows them to be false. Later stories also don't match history, such as the impossibility of the gold and armies of King Solomon, or the idea of Luke's "Census/Bethlehem" story - for which there is no external evidence.

My recommendation would be to direct him to look to his Bible as a source of inspiration, and not to look to history as proof that a Bible is divine. After all, the Qu'ran also mentions real people and real places. If we use the mentioning of real people and real places as "proof" that a Bible is divine, then we confirm the Qu'ran and other books (such as the Book of Mormon) as divine too.

In Christ-

Papias

 

[BeStill&Know]

Examples:
False - a lot of "history" from a literally read Bible is almost certainly false. If lengendary stories the Exodus are taken as history, actual history from historians shows them to be false.
Papias

Hi friend, have you seen the movie/documentary
Patterns of Evidence ???It's on Netflix but also on Youtube.
Patterns of Evidence the Exodus full documentary - YouTube

 

[BeStill&Know]

I use to read BAR-Biblical Archeology Review.
Everyday for decades the spade has proven Biblical stories to be true. Much is not reported to main stream media. Other discoveries are lost through political or secular reasoning.
Whose money is used for escavations (funding) determines how the findings will be determined.
Unfortunately

 

[Anguspure]

I am a Christian posting on behalf of UnitedweStand000000 who has his doubts about the authority and reliability of scripture. Please help me to answer his questions.

"
Can I just ask you, how can you know the bible to be true? you can believe it to be true but knowing and believing are different things.

I believed the bible to be true for many years, but I can't close my mind to knowledge.

I need more than faith, I need actual evidence or proof of something before I can wholeheartedly commit myself fully to it.

Can you steer me in the right direction."

Islam is statistically a religion for losers

What sort of evidence are you looking for?

For example the truth about the existence of God can be ascertained independant of the Bible and thus confirms the Bible as true about the existence of God.

The existence of Jesus of Nazereth and his death by crucifixion can be ascertained from historical study and so we find that Jesus of Nazereth, who was crucified is a real historical person as the authors of the Bible attest.

We can also look at His ressurection and see that it is the most plausible explanation for the empty tomb, and so we see that the claims made by the Apostles and Mary are something we can plausibly trust and beleive on.

All other claims made in the Bible may similarly be assesed but are subordinate to the above, nevertheless it may be seen that those who bray about apparent errors have always been knocked back by the force of the evidence.
The books of the Bible are well attested.

I have just dicovered this resource that might be of interest to you: InspiringPhilosophy
Check out the Supposed Biblical Error series.

This is also a very good resource in Christian Apologetics: ReasonableFaith.org – Defend Biblical Christianity, Apologetics, Bible Questions | Reasonable Faith

 

[Papias]

Hi friend, have you seen the movie/documentary
Patterns of Evidence ???...

Yes. I wouldn't call it a "documentary". It's a money-making project by a former rock musician, whose ideas are unsupported by evidence and have been rejected by the actual historians and archeologists. There has been plenty of work by actual archeologists in that area. Thanks for mentioning it though.

(from earlier) The Archeologists, Historians and Biblical archeologists agree - the whole exodus story never happened. How did the Jews get to Israel? They always were there. The evidence (including DNA evidence) shows that they are simply a Canaanite population that has a culturally different identity based on it's own internal stories. They were a Canaanite group that became distinct over time, never leaving its homeland.

There were plenty of expectations a century ago that archeology would confirm the stories in the first books of the Bibles, but as the evidence piled up, it soon became clear that it didn't happen as described in the Bibles. Some basic and well supported facts we now know:

• The Jews were never enslaved in Egypt - instead, they developed from earlier Canaanites, and never had to "conquer" the land they always had.
• There is no evidence that Moses ever existed outside of legend, like Hercules.
• No Egyptian records support the enslavement of the Hebrews, or any other Biblical story - and the Egyptians have good records.
• No Egyptian records support the drowning of their army in the red sea, or any other Biblical story - and the Egyptians have good records.
• Jericho has been studied extensively with massive digs and archeological testing - the Biblical story does not appear to have happened. In fact, the famed walls of Jericho were destroyed by the Egyptian army centuries before the Hebrew mythology was supposed to have happened.

and so on.

This is the consensus view of Biblical archeological historians. Some examples:

• Here is a book by a well known biblical archeological historian, who points out that the stories never actually happened. Read page 6 here: Exodus
• Even the Conservative Jews have accepted reality here - just the first few paragraphs of this article should make that clear: New Torah For Modern Minds
• Here is a good video describing this, by the top Archeologist at Israel's Tel Aviv University. You might notice that he's introduced by Rabbi Wine, who was one of the most respected Rabbis before his recent death.

The other videos by Dr. Finkelstein in that same series are also useful.​

I think in today's era of fake news and rampant hoaxes, it's more important than ever to look at what the actual experts say, instead just looking for someone - anyone - saying things that we want to be true. That's the very definition of wishful thinking, after all.

In Christ-

Papias

 

[Steve Petersen]

I use to read BAR-Biblical Archeology Review.
Everyday for decades the spade has proven Biblical stories to be true. Much is not reported to main stream media. Other discoveries are lost through political or secular reasoning.
Whose money is used for escavations (funding) determines how the findings will be determined.
Unfortunately

Not technically true. There is not much before the 10th century BC that can be confirmed with the spade and Bible method.

 

[Anguspure]

• The Jews were never enslaved in Egypt - instead, they developed from earlier Canaanites, and never had to "conquer" the land they always had.
• There is no evidence that Moses ever existed outside of legend, like Hercules.
• No Egyptian records support the enslavement of the Hebrews, or any other Biblical story - and the Egyptians have good records.
• No Egyptian records support the drowning of their army in the red sea, or any other Biblical story - and the Egyptians have good records.
• Jericho has been studied extensively with massive digs and archeological testing - the Biblical story does not appear to have happened. In fact, the famed walls of Jericho were destroyed by the Egyptian army centuries before the Hebrew mythology was supposed to have happened.

​

Until a wee while ago there was no evidence for Ninevah either and similarly the x - spirts confused absence of evidence with evidence of absence and declared the Bible writers to be poor dumb fools and the Bible was a pack of lies......larf a minute these guys.

 

[BeStill&Know]

Not technically true. There is not much before the 10th century BC that can be confirmed with the spade and Bible method.

I understand the history of the Bible is about 6,000 years old. Not older.

 

[Steve Petersen]

I understand the history of the Bible is about 6,000 years old. Not older.

Tenth CENTURY, not tenth MILLENNIUM.

 

[Steve Petersen]

​

Until a wee while ago there was no evidence for Ninevah either and similarly the x - spirts confused absence of evidence with evidence of absence and declared the Bible writers to be poor dumb fools and the Bible was a pack of lies......larf a minute these guys.

I think you exaggerate. Show me a source in the archaeological community that denied the existence of Nineveh. I think you will find them to have said,
'We have no evidence for its existence.'

 

[BeStill&Know]

It's a money-making project by a former rock musician, whose ideas are unsupported by evidence and have been rejected by the actual historians and archeologists.

Money making? I actually questioning this >
Do historians, scientist, archeologist work for free??? What about Rabbi's and professors???
if you watch this film, their are those who differ with your views.

The evidence (including DNA evidence) shows that they are simply a Canaanite population that has a culturally different identity based on it's own internal stories.

I have found in my old age that most intellectual persons who do these kind of studies, have little common sense.
It is know that since recorded history and through archeology of course, that their have been traders on all continents. Moving on trade routes from 1 population, culture to the next.
Some buying and selling slaves as well as other goods.
We would have to be very naive to believe their was no sexual contact with these other cultures , baring offspring and also mass populations of such cultures dying in plagues from these traders, who may or may not had the ability of written language to record these events. Easily would explain DNA.

• The Jews were never enslaved in Egypt - instead, they developed from earlier Canaanites, and never had to "conquer" the land they always had.
• There is no evidence that Moses ever existed outside of legend, like Hercules.
• No Egyptian records support the enslavement of the Hebrews, or any other Biblical story - and the Egyptians have good records.
• No Egyptian records support the drowning of their army in the red sea, or any other Biblical story - and the Egyptians have good records.
• Jericho has been studied extensively with massive digs and archeological testing - the Biblical story does not appear to have happened. In fact, the famed walls of Jericho were destroyed by the Egyptian army centuries before the Hebrew mythology was supposed to have happened.

and so on.

Most if not all comments are answered.
Before I accept truth I look into the person beliefs who is expounding their truth which filters all other factors in their lives. ex. An atheist will distort findings if they are the archeologist or the financial backer of a project.
You see this clearly in this movie. They are blind to the obvious.

I think in today's era of fake news and rampant hoaxes, it's more important than ever to look at what the actual experts say, instead just looking for someone - anyone - saying things that we want to be true. That's the very definition of wishful thinking, after all.

Yes their is much fake news and hoaxes both by those on any side. Unfortunately!

I saw the program on the canannites. it was speculation IMO.

This is the consensus view of Biblical archeological historians. Some examples:

• Here is a book by a well known biblical archeological historian, who points out that the stories never actually happened. Read page 6 here: Exodus
• Even the Conservative Jews have accepted reality here - just the first few paragraphs of this article should make that clear: New Torah For Modern Minds
• Here is a good video describing this, by the top Archeologist at Israel's Tel Aviv University. You might notice that he's introduced by Rabbi Wine, who was one of the most respected Rabbis before his recent death.

(((Before I read these do any of them have the mind of Yeshua??? or are they man's opinions???)))

The other videos by Dr. Finkelstein in that same series are also useful.​

Papias[/QUOTE]

 

[BeStill&Know]

Tenth CENTURY, not tenth MILLENNIUM.

got it Thanks

 

[Sultan Of Swing]

I am a Christian posting on behalf of UnitedweStand000000 who has his doubts about the authority and reliability of scripture. Please help me to answer his questions.

"
Can I just ask you, how can you know the bible to be true? you can believe it to be true but knowing and believing are different things.

I believed the bible to be true for many years, but I can't close my mind to knowledge.

I need more than faith, I need actual evidence or proof of something before I can wholeheartedly commit myself fully to it.

Can you steer me in the right direction."

Islam is statistically a religion for losers

Often we start to lose faith in the Bible when we stop reading it.

This isn't to say there is no historical evidence, there's plenty, but often that isn't the root problem.

Getting into the evidence, I first recommend reading the Gospel of John, again if you have to.

1 Corinthians 15 is also great, with the majority view agreeing the creed in 1 Corinthians 15 dates back to within 5 years of Jesus' death. This means the Apostles who knew Jesus closely truly believed that He had risen from the dead, and not only that but 500 other people had witnessed Him, and Paul says many are still alive at the time, almost as though he is challenging the Corinthians to go out and ask them! One can then argue, "Okay, but maybe the Apostles were lying." And yet we then see that the Apostles live dangerously for the Gospel, without care for themselves, without financial or material gain, and most of them ending up dying for their witness!

 

[Greg J.]

I am a Christian posting on behalf of UnitedweStand000000 who has his doubts about the authority and reliability of scripture. Please help me to answer his questions.

"
Can I just ask you, how can you know the bible to be true? you can believe it to be true but knowing and believing are different things.

I believed the bible to be true for many years, but I can't close my mind to knowledge.

I need more than faith, I need actual evidence or proof of something before I can wholeheartedly commit myself fully to it.

Can you steer me in the right direction."

Islam is statistically a religion for losers

It depends what he means by know. There is a sense in which no one knows, if by know he means "can repeatedly demonstrate." To avoid ambiguity, a lot of people instead say, "have sufficient evidence to believe."

Evidence is available in many forms such as archeological evidence and the results of textual criticism of ancient fragments of the Bible (and others).

A problem a lot of people have is to not be willing to accept what someone else says, and I'm not just talking about the testimony of a Christian about experiencing God. A person that doesn't want to accept the general consensus from archeologists or textual criticists may not be able to get enough evidence to satisfy them. This is a level of faith that is often not discussed, but if you can't have faith in the work of tens of thousands of people (which is available for you to examine, but would take more time than you have in your whole life), how are you ever going to have faith in things that you can't examine with your own eyes?

People, Christians in particular, like to compare the level of evidence someone is demanding to believe in God or the Bible with how little evidence they have needed to believe other things. It is to point out the illogical bias that people have.

Sometimes the unbelieving one is trying to argue logically (and has a "superior" attitude about their logic), even though it is still a mish-mash of neurons like feelings or intuition are. The difference is that sound logic produces a sense of satisfaction in us that feelings do not. But what it takes to cause that satisfaction is affected by how they were raised and their culture just like everything else about them.

Decartes' famous assertion (I think therefore I am.) has a depth of meaning that isn't obvious. It was the consequence of acknowledging that we can't prove anything definitively and that we must build upon assumptions (faith). If you dissect human assumptions/logic/presumption, they boil down to: we must accept (without being able to prove) that we exist, because all our other reasoning and logic builds on that. We accept it as true because everything else that makes sense to us requires it to be true.

I wrote all that to say: There is a sense in which you can't "know" anything (e.g., The Matrix argument). What we must do is identify what you consider as sufficient evidence to believe. If you do that, then it will be easier to focus on the evidence you are having trouble believing, and to have realistic expectations for when you will "know" God is real, and the Bible is inspired by him down to the least stroke of the pen (used to write down single alphabetic character) and the choice of a verb tense—both examples Jesus used of how accurate Scripture is.

There are many sources of evidence; perhaps someone will list some. I will speak of the most reliable one, which is to get to know enough people who testify to interactions they've had with God to know that they don't make up stories to deceive people and aren't mentally damaged. Note the difference between what people say they believe about God vs. what they say they have experienced. The Bible is not full of what people believed about God, it is full of people's experiences and recounting of experiences. In practice the easiest way to get to know these people is to consider yourself a Seeker and start attending a church where miracles occur regularly (or from their perspective, are claimed to be happening regularly). Note that what you find to be true about the people in one church has nothing to do with what you would find about other people in another church. Christian individuals come in as many varieties as can be found in any other large group of people.

The Bible "works"—all the supernatural claims it makes still happen today. But only those who have fully committed to, and given themselves over to, Jesus Christ are going to experience them (or believe in them).

People who have been completely devoted to Jesus and been obedient for several decades are the ones that have been transformed the most into Jesus' likeness, and in fact, you don't need even need to get to know them all that well to start to find it uncomfortable to be around them. Fear, pain, and rejection are typical internal responses of those with less faith in God to those with more faith in God (even between two believers). Genuine faith is built up over the decades through experiencing God keeping his Biblical promises thousands of times. I would be impressed with any unbeliever who was able to continue to draw closer to such a person. I've never heard of anyone able to stick with it (without coming to believe in Jesus, too). The unbeliever would start to find the person unreasonable, but without having enough evidence to explain it. That's what happens when unbelief encounters significant evidence (Luke 16:31). (An article I didn't read all of seems to describe this in a lot of detail.)

Those who obey his commands live in him, and he in them. And this is how we know that he lives in us: We know it by the Spirit he gave us. (1 John 3:24, 1984 NIV)

 

[Anguspure]

I think you exaggerate. Show me a source in the archaeological community that denied the existence of Nineveh. I think you will find them to have said,
'We have no evidence for its existence.'

As above for Israel in Egypt. Uniquely when referring to Biblical history the term "we have no evidence for" is often used as equivalence for "it never happened" and reveals a unique standard of thinking in the minds of certain x-spirts on the subject.

It is clear that throughout the ancient world the absence of corroborating evidence for a significant event, people group or place is at least as easily due to the wishes of a competing people group or ruler to completely remove all traces of the memory of that event, people group or place from the face of the earth, as we currently see ISIS currently working on in the Middle East.

We see the same sort of thinking currently evident with the Temple Mount dispute where Jewish people are treated in a similiar way to the Book.

 

[mindlight]

I don't believe in God because I believe the bible, I believe the bible because I believe in God, and God points me to the bible.

However, the bible is only what it claims to be: A syllabus for training in righteousness. It is not intended to be a reference manual for those things of creation that can be determined by physical observation (a la Psalm 19), but the realm of righteous unto God that can only be delivered by revelation.

Not true the bible says things which sets limits to what can be said empirically and it speaks in a literal historical style in various places about definite events and people.

For instance:

1) There was a beginning to creation
2) There was a global flood
3) Moses existed
4) There was an Exodus by the Jewish people from Egypt.

 

[TagliatelliMonster]

For example the truth about the existence of God can be ascertained independant of the Bible and thus confirms the Bible as true about the existence of God.

How, exactly?

The existence of Jesus of Nazereth and his death by crucifixion can be ascertained from historical study and so we find that Jesus of Nazereth, who was crucified is a real historical person as the authors of the Bible attest.

Same question... without using the bible, how do you demonstrate that this dude really existed?

We can also look at His ressurection and see that it is the most plausible explanation for the empty tomb

What empty tomb? It seems to me that this tomb in Jeruzalem hasn't been opened at all... coverstone upon coverstone has it sealed of.

Also, I don't see how an empty tomb would be proper justification for "and therefor, this dude came back from the dead". Perhaps there never was a body in it. Perhaps it was taken out. Either of those 2 seems incredibly more likely then the dude having himself resurected through supernatural shenannigans.

, and so we see that the claims made by the Apostles and Mary are something we can plausibly trust and beleive on.

I don't see how.