The Bible consists of the Old Testament, or Hebrew Bible, and the New Testament. The Old Testament is composed of 39 separate books, of which five books deal with law, twelve are historical books, six are poetic books, and sixteen are prophetic books. It begins with the book of Genesis and concludes with Malachi, which was composed about 430 B.C. The New Testament consists of 27 books, of which four are the Gospels, one is historical, one is prophetic and twenty-one are epistles, or letters. As we will see, the Gospel accounts were first written in book form in the 50’s A.D., within 20 years of Christ’s crucifixion. The last books of the New Testament were written in the 90’s A.D.
The Bible has many faces. It can be studied as literature and explored as a set of stories and poetic expressions, or viewed as history which tells us of the beginnings and growth of God’s people. For some it is a guide to archeology, accurately pointing the way to buried civilizations. There is a place and a purpose for each of those aspects, but at the basis of all for those who believe in it, the Bible is the Word of God. It is God’s message to a rebelling world of how it can return to Him. Is it reasonable to believe, however, that the Bible actually is the Word of God?
Instead of assuming the Bible is the Word of God, we can begin by demonstrating that the Scriptures are basically reliable and trustworthy historical documents. There’s more evidence that the Bible is a reliable source than there is for any other book from the ancient world. The Bible’s unity is unique. It is composed of sixty-six books written in different literary styles by perhaps forty different authors with diverse backgrounds over a period of fifteen hundred years, and yet the Bible amazingly unfolds one continuous drama with one central message. This lends credence to the claims of the writers that they were inspired by the divine Mind of God.
Many people, scholars and laymen alike, question the historical reliability of the Biblical texts. To Muslims, the Quran is God’s last word to the world. It states that both the Old and New Testaments are likewise divinely inspired, but have been altered by Christians and Jews. Is this true? To answer this question, the historical reliability of the Scriptures needs to be tested. These tests should use the same criteria used on all historical documents. What we are establishing here is the historical reliability of the Scripture, not its inspiration. What we will find by the end of this page is that there is no historical evidence to support Muhammad’s contentions that either the Jewish or Christian Scriptures have been corrupted.
We will consider three main lines of evidence. (1)
1. MANUSCRIPT EVIDENCE: Since we do not have the original documents, how reliable are the copies we have in regard to the number of manuscripts (MSS) and the time interval between the original and existing copies?
2. INTERNAL EVIDENCE: Is what is actually written in the Bible credible and to what extent?
3. EXTERNAL EVIDENCE: Here we will look at whether other historical materials confirm or deny the internal evidence provided by the documents themselves.
There are now more than 5,300 known Greek manuscripts of the New Testament. Add over 10,000 Latin Vulgate and at least 9,300 other early versions and we have more than 24,000 manuscript copies of portions of the New Testament in existence. No other document of antiquity even begins to approach such numbers and attestation.
In comparison, the Iliad by Homer is second with only 643 manuscripts that still survive. (2) The oldest fragments of the New Testament in existence today date from 114 A.D., or within 50 years of the originals. The oldest complete copy of the New Testament dates to 325 A.D. which is about 225 years after its original composition.
Sir Frederic G. Kenyon, who was the director and principal librarian of the British Museum, and the top expert in this field, stated:
In no other case is the interval of time between composition of the book and the date of the earliest extant [existing] manuscripts so short as in that of the New Testament. The books of the New Testament were written in the latter part of the first century; the earliest extant manuscripts (trifling scraps excepted) are of the fourth century—say from 250 to 300 years later.
This may sound a considerable interval, but it is nothing to that which parts most of the great classical authors from their earliest manuscripts. We believe that we have in all essentials an accurate text of the seven extant plays of Sophocles; yet the earliest substantial manuscript upon which it is based was written more than 1400 years after the poet’s death. (3)
The interval then between the dates of original composition and the earliest extant evidence becomes so small as to be in fact negligible, and the last foundation for any doubt that the Scriptures have come down to us substantially as they were written has now been removed. Both the authenticity and the general integrity of the books of the New Testament may be regarded as finally established. (4)
There is no body of ancient literature in the world which enjoys such a wealth of good textual attestation as the New Testament. (5 ) Regarding these facts, J. Harold Greenlee states:
Since scholars accept as generally trustworthy the writings of the ancient classics even though the earliest MSS were written so long after the original writings and the number of extant MSS is in many instances so small, it is clear that the reliability of the text of the New Testament is likewise assured. (6)
(MSS = manuscripts)
*all from one copy
As you can see, its not even close!! In the entire range of ancient Greek and Latin literature, the Iliad ranks second to the New Testament regarding the greatest amount of manuscript testimony and shortest period of time between when it was originally written and earliest copies we now possess. In comparing the textual variations between the New Testament and Homer’s Iliad Geisler and Nix state:
Next to the New Testament, there are more extant manuscripts of the Iliad (643) than any other book. Both it and the Bible were considered “sacred,” and both underwent textual changes and criticism of their Greek manuscripts. (8)
Only 40 lines (or 400 words) of the New Testament are in doubt whereas 764 lines of the Iliad are questioned. This five percent textual corruption compares with one-half of one percent of similar emendations in the New Testament. (9)
Some critics have pointed out that there are 200,000 variants in the New Testament. However,
Geisler and Nix point out the ambiguity in this concept:
There is an ambiguity in saying there are some 200,000 variants in the existing manuscripts of the New Testament, since these represent only 10,000 places in the New Testament. If one single word is misspelled in 3,000 different manuscripts, this is counted as 3,000 variants or readings. (10)
It should further be noted that a careful study of the variants of the various earliest manuscripts reveals that none of them affects a single doctrine or Scripture.
The New Testament, then, has not only survived in more manuscripts than any other book from antiquity, but it has survived in a purer form than any other great book—a form that is 99.5 percent pure. Scholars are satisfied that they possess substantially the true text of the principal Greek and Roman writers, yet the New Testament is exponentially more verified than any other literature by far. Its not even close.
In the case of the Old Testament we do not have the abundance of close manuscript authority as in the New Testament. Until the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, the oldest complete extant Hebrew manuscript was around A.D. 900. This left a time gap of 1,300 years (the Hebrew Old Testament was completed about 400 B.C.).
However, it should not be surprising that older manuscripts of the Hebrew Bible have not been found. The failure to recover many of the ancient manuscripts is primarily due to the perishable materials used for the writing in those days. Keeping a manuscript written on animal skins or papyrus, as the Hebrews did, in good shape for 3,000-4,000 years is not easy and the Jews did not even try. Rather, out of respect for the sacred writings, they had a tradition that all flawed and worn-out copies were to be ceremonially buried.
Frederic Kenyon stated:
The same extreme care which was devoted to the transcription of manuscripts is also at the bottom of the disappearance of the earlier copies. When a manuscript had been copied with the exactitude prescribed by the Talmud, and had been duly verified, it was accepted as authentic and regarded as being of equal value with any other copy. If all were equally correct, age gave no advantage to a manuscript; on the contrary age was a positive disadvantage, since a manuscript was liable to become defaced or damaged in the lapse of time. A damaged or imperfect copy was at once condemned as unfit for use….The absence of very old copies of the Hebrew Bible need not, therefore, either surprise or disquiet us….the disappearance of the ancient manuscripts is adequately accounted for, and those which remain may be accepted as preserving that which alone they profess to preserve—namely, the Masoretic text. (11)
So it should not be alarming that there was a 1300 year gap between composition of the Hebrew Bible and the earliest manuscript we possess. However, the issue became academic with the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls. In this dramatic discovery, a number of Old Testament manuscripts had been found which scholars date before the time of Christ and within 200 years of the completion of the Hebrew Old Testament.
The problem before the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls was the question of the accuracy of the copies of the text we possessed compared to those before the time of Christ. The Scrolls answered that question emphatically. One of the scrolls found was a complete manuscript of the Book of Isaiah. It is dated around 125 B.C. This is more than 1000 years older than any manuscript we previously possessed. One of the main impacts of this discovery is in the exactness of the Isaiah scroll as compared to the previously oldest manuscript (900 A.D.). Regarding this, Geisler and Nix wrote:
Of the 166 words in Isaiah 53, there are only seventeen letters in question. Ten of these letters are simply a matter of spelling, which does not affect the sense. Four more letters are minor stylistic changes… The remaining three letters comprise the word “light” which is added in verse 11, and does not affect the meaning greatly… Thus, in one chapter of 166 words, there is only one word (three letters) in question after 1000 years of transmission—and this word does not significantly change the meaning of the passage. (12)
Commenting on the significance of the Dead Sea Scrolls in demonstrating that errors or variants in transmission of the text do not affect God’s revelation, Gleason Archer wrote:
A careful study of the variants [different readings] of the various earliest manuscripts reveals that none of them affects a single doctrine of Scripture. The system of spiritual truth contained in the standard Hebrew text of the Old Testament is not in the slightest altered or compromised by any of the variant readings found in the Hebrew manuscripts of earlier date found in the Dead Sea caves or anywhere else. All that is needed to verify this is to check the register of well-attested variants in Rudolf Kittel’s edition of the Hebrew Bible. It is very evident that the vast majority of them are so inconsequential as to leave the meaning of each clause doctrinally unaffected. (13)
So, the Dead Sea Scrolls manuscripts are highly significant because they confirm the accuracy of other manuscripts dated much later. Their discovery pushed back the history of our Hebrew manuscript collection by a thousand years and therefore very close to the time of its completion. Their discovery also demonstrated that during the long period of copying the Old Testament text by hand, there was a remarkable, even miraculous degree of preservation of the text. One scholar observed that the two copies of Isaiah found in the Qumran caves, proved to be word for word identical with our standard Hebrew Bible in more than 95 percent of the text. The 5 percent of variation consisted chiefly of obvious slips of the pen and variations in spelling. (14)
The main reason for all of this consistency is that the scribes who made the copies had a profound reverence for the text. Jewish traditions laid out every aspect of copying texts as if it were law, from the kind of materials to be used to how many columns and lines were to be on a page. Nothing was to be written from memory. There was even a religious ceremony to perform each time the name of God was written. Any copy with just one mistake in it was destroyed. This guarantees us that there has been no substantial change in the text of the Old Testament in the last 2,000 years, and indicates that it is extremely likely there was very little change before that.
It becomes clear that, as with the New Testament, the Hebrew Bible we possess is remarkably accurate as compared to the original writings, contrary to the claims of Muhammad..
Now lets move on to the internal evidence, in which we see if the actual writing in the Old and New Testament are credible, and to what extent.
The manuscript evidence has determined only that the text we have now is essentially what was originally recorded. We still have to determine whether that written record is credible and free of contradictions, and to what extent.
At this point it is important to note that in analyzing any literary document, the critic should follow Aristotle’s dictum: “The benefit of the doubt is to be given to the document itself, and not arrogated by the critic to himself.” (15) In other words one must listen to the claims of the document under analysis, and not assume fraud or error unless the author disqualified himself by contradiction or known factual inaccuracies. That is how all other documents are analyzed by experts and the same method should apply to the analysis of the Bible.
Dr. Gleason Archer learned over thirty languages, most of them languages of Old Testament times in the Middle Eastern world. He taught for over thirty years at the graduate seminary level in the field of biblical criticism. He stated:
As I have dealt with one apparent discrepancy after another and have studied the alleged contradictions between the biblical record and the evidence of linguistics, archaeology, or science, my confidence in the trustworthiness of Scripture has been repeatedly verified and strengthened by the discovery that almost every problem in Scripture that has ever been discovered by man, from ancient times until now, has been dealt with in a completely satisfactory manner by the biblical text itself—or else by objective archaeological information.…no properly trained evangelical scholar has anything to fear from the hostile arguments and challenges of humanistic rationalists or detractors of any and every persuasion.…There is a good and sufficient answer in Scripture itself to refute every charge that has ever been leveled against it. (16)
The allegations of error in the Bible are usually based on a failure to recognize basic principles of interpreting ancient literature. Dr. Louis Gottschalk, former professor of history at the University of Chicago, states that the ability of the writer or the witness to tell the truth is helpful to the historian to determine credibility. (17)
This “ability to tell the truth” is closely related to the witness’s nearness both geographically and chronologically to the events recorded. The New Testament accounts of the life and teaching of Jesus were recorded by men who had been either eyewitnesses themselves or who related the accounts of eyewitnesses of the actual events or teaching of Jesus.
The Dating of the Gospels
The Gospels consist of the first four books of the New Testament and give four accounts of the life and teachings of Jesus. The New Testament accounts of Jesus began to be circulated within the lifetimes of those alive at the time of His life. These people could certainly confirm or deny the accuracy of the accounts.
In advocating their case for the gospel, the apostles had appealed (even when confronting their most severe opponents) to common knowledge concerning Jesus. They not only said, “Look, we saw this”; or “We heard that”; but in addition they turned the tables around and right in front of critics said, “You also know about these things…You saw them; you yourselves know about it.” As Josh McDowell wrote:
One had better be careful when he says to his opposition, “You know this also,” because if he isn’t right in the details, it will be shoved right back down his throat. (18)
Originally, there were not four Gospels, only the one gospel or good news about Jesus Christ. As the four Gospel accounts came to be seen as distinctively authoritative, Christians still recognized only one gospel, stated by four separate evangelists.
The culture into which Jesus was born did use literary documents, but it was primarily an oral-tradition-based culture. For us, reading and writing are two such automatic operations that we can scarcely imagine how some societies have managed to do without them. To learn by heart and recite were the two normal operations for the transmission of a text.
We must imagine that the gospel was treated in the same fashion. What the apostles stored up in their memory, they taught infallibly to their own disciples, who in turn would repeat it to their hearts. The dissemination of material about Jesus was not haphazardly entrusted to unknowledgeable Christians who could distort the message. When a successor was needed for Judas Iscariot, the one qualification accepted by the apostles was that the successor be an eyewitness of the entire ministry of Jesus.
The disciples followed the practice of their Jewish communities in choosing special people, comparable in many respects to the rabbis, to be responsible for preserving and passing along the “holy” tradition. The task consumed enough time that these people devoted full time “to prayer and to the ministry of the word” (19)
For hundreds of years the Jews were able to preserve volumes of oral tradition. When you think for a moment that every one of the eyewitnesses to Jesus’ life had a least some of the childhood training as the Hebrew scribes (illustrated below in the section on Internal Evidence for the Old Testament), it is almost ludicrous to think that they would have allowed error to creep into the words of Jesus which they wanted to preserve.
The Formative Period
The formative period has been designated as that period of time between the crucifixion and the writing of the Gospels. Critics have assumed that the New Testament Scriptures were not written until late in the second century A.D. However, by the end of the nineteenth century, archaeological discoveries had confirmed the accuracy of the New Testament manuscripts and closed the gap. Discoveries of early papyri manuscripts bridged the gap between the time of Christ and existing manuscripts from a later date.
In 1955, Dr. William F. Albright, recognized as one of the world’s outstanding biblical archaeologists, wrote:
We can already say emphatically that there is no longer any solid basis for dating any book of the New Testament after circa A.D. 80, two full generations before the date between 130 and 150 given by the more radical New Testament critics of today. (20)
Eight years later he stated in an interview that the completion date for all the books in the New Testament was “probably sometime between circa A.D. 50 and 75..(21) That is between 17 and 42 years after the crucifixion.
Dr. John A. T. Robinson, lecturer at Trinity College in Cambridge, has been for years one of England’s more distinguished critics of the New Testament. Robinson accepted the consensus typified by German criticism that the New Testament was written many years after the time of Christ. But, as “little more than a theological joke,” he decided to investigate the arguments of this late dating of all the New Testament books.
The results stunned him. He said that owing to scholarly “sloth,” the “tyranny of unexamined assumptions” and “almost willful blindness” by previous authors, much of the past reasoning was untenable. He concluded that the New Testament is the work of the apostles themselves or of contemporaries who worked with them and that all the New Testament books, including John, had to have been written before A.D. 64. Robinson challenged his colleagues to try to prove him wrong, but none could. (22)
With the arrival of Robinson’s Redating the New Testament (1976) which pays great attention to historical evidence, the date has been pushed back to as early as circa A.D. 40 for a possible first draft of Matthew. There is, then, strong evidence that the formative period was no more than seventeen to twenty years in length, possibly as little as seven to ten years for an Aramaic or Hebrew version of Matthew, spoken of by Papias, who was an early church leader in the first half of the 2nd century A.D. This is a period of time which, Albright writes, is:
…too slight to permit any appreciable corruption of the essential center and even of the specific wording of the sayings of Jesus. (23)
This conclusion is corroborated by several pieces of converging evidence. First, it is evident that the Book of Acts was written in approximately A.D. 62. It does not mention the fall of Jerusalem in A.D. 70, an event which would have been impossible to omit since Jerusalem is central to much of the Book of Acts. Nothing is mentioned of Nero’s persecution of A.D. 64. The book ends with Paul in Rome under the confinement of Nero. Neither does Acts mention the martyrdoms of three central figures of the book: James (A.D. 62), Paul (A.D. 64), and Peter (A.D. 64). Why aren’t their deaths mentioned when Acts does record the deaths of Stephen and James, the brother of John? So Acts must have been completed by A.D. 62.
If the book of Acts was written by Luke in A.D. 62, then the Gospel of Luke must be dated earlier, probably in the late 50s. The early church fathers affirm that Matthew wrote his account first. Many modern critics say Mark wrote his first. In either case almost everyone agrees that they both wrote before Luke, which puts their dates of composition no later than the late 50s. This is less than 30 years after Jesus’ death.
Luke The Historian
As an example of New Testament reliability, it is helpful to look at the incredible accuracy of Luke. Luke’s reliability as an historian is unquestionable. Unger tells us that archaeology has authenticated the Gospel accounts, especially Luke. In Unger’s words:
The Acts of the Apostles is now generally agreed in scholarly circles to be the work of Luke, to belong to the first century and to involve the labors of a careful historian who was substantially accurate in his use of sources. (24)
Concerning Luke’s ability as a historian, Sir William Ramsay concluded after thirty years of study that:
Luke is a historian of the first rank; not merely are his statements of fact trustworthy…this author should be placed along with the very greatest of historians. (25)
Thanks to many archaeological finds, most of the ancient cities mentioned in the Book of Acts have been identified. Geisler writes:
In all, Luke names thirty-two countries, fifty-four cities and nine islands without an error. (26)
Roman historian A.N. Sherwin-White agrees:
For Acts the confirmation of historicity is overwhelming…Any attempt to reject its basic historicity must now appear absurd. Roman historians have long taken it for granted. (27)
E.M. Blaiklock, professor of classics in Auckland University, concludes that:
Luke is a consummate historian, to be ranked in his own right with the great writers of the Greeks. (28)
To sum up the evidence, researcher Howard Vos states:
From the standpoint of literary evidence the only logical conclusion is that the case for the reliability of the New Testament is infinitely stronger than that for any other record of antiquity. (29)
There is much evidence I could present demonstrating the internal reliability of the Old Testament. But I really need go no further than the story or Dr. Robert Dick Wilson. Wilson’s scholarship, in many ways still unsurpassed, gave the world compelling evidence that the Old Testament is an accurate and trustworthy document. Robert Dick Wilson was born in 1856 in Pennsylvania. In 1886 Wilson received the Doctor’s degree. He continued his training at Western Theological Seminary in Pittsburgh, followed by two years in Germany at the University of Berlin.
Upon his arrival in Germany, Professor Wilson made a decision to dedicate his life to the study of the Old Testament. As a student in seminary he would read the New Testament in nine different languages, including a Hebrew translation which he had memorized syllable for syllable !! Wilson also memorized large portions of the Old Testament in the original Hebrew. He mastered forty-five languages and dialects. Dr. John Walvoord, President of Dallas Theological Seminary, called Dr. Wilson “probably the outstanding authority on ancient languages in the Middle East.” (30)
Dr. Wilson commented on his scholastic achievements and related why he devoted himself to such a monumental task:
Most of our students used to go to Germany, and they heard professors give lectures which were the results of their own labors. The students took everything because the professor said it. I went there to study so that there would be no professor on earth that could lay down the law for me, or say anything without my being able to investigate the evidence on which he said it.
Now I consider that what was necessary in order to investigate the evidence was, first of all, to know the languages in which the evidence is given. So I…determined that I would learn all the languages that throw light upon the Hebrew, and also the languages into which the Bible had been translated down to 600 A.D., so that I could investigate the text myself.
Having done this I claim to be an expert. I defy any man to make an attack upon the Old Testament on the ground of evidence that I cannot investigate. I can get at the facts if they are linguistic. If you know any language that I do not know, I will learn it. (31)
For forty-six years Wilson had devoted himself to the task of studying the Old Testament and carefully investigating the evidence that had a bearing upon its historical reliability. Based upon his credentials he was in a better position to speak as an expert than any other man. His findings drove him to these firm convictions:
…in the Old Testament we have a true historical account of the history of the Israelite people.
The general correctness of the Hebrew text that has been transmitted to us is established beyond just grounds of controversy….The chronological and geographical statements are more accurate and reliable than those afforded by any other ancient documents; and the biographical and other historical narratives harmonize marvelously with evidence afforded by extra-Biblical documents.” (32)
The third test of historicity is that of external evidence—whether other historical materials confirm or deny the internal testimony of the documents themselves. In other words, what sources are there, apart from the literature under analysis, to substantiate its accuracy, reliability, and authenticity? Conformity or agreement with other known historical scientific facts is often the decisive test of evidence, whether of one or more witnesses.
The primary sources for the life of Christ are the four Gospels. However there are considerable reports from non-Christian sources that supplement and confirm the Gospel accounts. These largely come from Greek, Roman, Jewish and Samaritan sources of the first century. They include Tacitus, the first-century Roman who is considered one of the more accurate historians of the ancient world; Suetonius, who was chief secretary to Emperor Hadrian; Pliny the Younger, a Roman author and administrator; Lucian of Samosata, a second-century Greek writer; and Josephus, who was a Pharisee of the priestly line and a Jewish historian, though he worked under Roman authority.
Josephus, for example, made many statements that verify, either generally or in specific detail, the historical nature of both the Old and New Testaments of the Bible. Josephus confirms the New Testament reports that Jesus was a real person in the first century, that he was identified by others as the Christ, and that he had a brother named James who was martyred at the hands of the high priest, Albinus, and his Sanhedrin. He also confirmed the existence and martyrdom of John the Baptist.
In his book, The Verdict of History, Gary Habermas details a total of thirty-nine ancient sources documenting the life of Jesus, from which he enumerates more than one hundred reported facts concerning Jesus’ life, teachings, crucifixion, and resurrection. (33) What’s more, twenty-four of the sources cited by Habermas, including seven secular sources and several of the earliest creeds of the church, specifically concern the divine nature of Jesus. The historicity of Jesus is beyond dispute.
As we will see in detail on the following page, archaeology has also provided extremely powerful external evidence for the reliability of the Old and New Testaments. As archaeologist Joseph Free writes:
Archaeology has confirmed countless passages which have been rejected by critics as unhistorical or contradictory to known facts. (34)
Scores of archaeological findings have been made which confirm, in clear outline or exact detail, historical statements in the Bible. Reformed Jewish scholar Nelson Glueck stated:
It is worth emphasizing that in all this work no archaeological discovery has ever controverted a single, properly understood Biblical statement. (35)
Again, more detail will be provided in the archaeology page. Suffice to say that the external evidence for the reliability of the New Testament is vast and undeniable.
As mentioned above, Dr. Robert Dick Wilson was one of the greatest of all Old Testament scholars. His book, A Scientific Investigation of the Old Testament, provides many external evidences confirming the reliability of the Old Testament. Some examples are listed below.
The Hebrew Scriptures contain the names of 26 or more foreign kings whose names have been found on documents contemporary with the kings. The names of many of the kings of Judah and Israel are found on the Assyrian contemporary documents with the same spelling as that which we find in the present Hebrew text. (36) The evidence shows that for 2300 to 3900 years the text of the proper names in the Hebrew Bible has been transmitted with the most minute accuracy. (37)
Out of 56 kings of Egypt, and out of the numerous kings of Assyria, Babylon, Persia, Tyre, Damascus, Moab, Israel, and Judah, that ruled from 2000 to 400 B.C., the writers of the Old Testament have put the names of 40 or more that were mentioned in records of two or more of the nations, in their proper absolute and relative order of time and in their proper place. Any expert mathematician will tell you that to do such a thing is practically impossible without knowledge of the facts such as could be drawn alone from contemporary and reliable records. (38)
The proper names and laws and customs of the time of Abraham are seen in the extra-biblical records from the time of Hammurabi, of whom Abraham, according to Genesis 14, was a contemporary. (39) These are just a few examples of external verification of the Old Testament.
In addition to this external evidence provided by other literary sources, there is an abundant amount of archaeological evidence that fully supports the reliability of the Old Testament. Refer to the next page on archaeology for more information.
Conclusion
After reviewing the information on this page, I think it has become abundantly clear that the Bible itself is a reliable historical document. The manuscript evidence, the internal consistency and reliability, and the evidence from external sources all support the historicity of the Old and New Testaments. There is absolutely no reason to believe, as the Qur'an and other religious sects purports, that the Old and New Testaments have been corrupted in any way.
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