Why Trust the Bible? (9Marks) by Greg Gilbert

Author:Greg Gilbert
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Commentaries, Bible Study, Bible Study & Reference, Theology, Religion & Spirituality, Christian Books & Bibles
Publisher: Crossway Books
Published: 2015-10-30T00:00:00+00:00

The biblical authors might have had a nonhistorical purpose in writing. Perhaps they, like H. G. Wells, were just writing a novel of sorts, which they knew wasn’t true and which they never intended anyone else to take as true either. Similarly, perhaps they were constructing a legend—that is, taking a set of fairly unremarkable events and embellishing them with extraordinary details. True, people who develop legends very often believe that their stories can say something—however cryptically—about reality or their people’s origins, even as they also know that the outlandish details of the story are made up. Of course, the trouble is that subsequent listeners and readers don’t always make the distinction and just think the whole story is true. So maybe what we have in the Bible is fiction or legend, not reporting, and Christians just aren’t getting the gag.

The biblical authors might have had a deceitful purpose. Perhaps they, like so many people before and after them, were intentionally trying to pull the wool over everyone’s eyes and get them to believe something that never really happened. Maybe it was all a giant hoax, a power play, or ambition run amok.

The biblical authors themselves might have been deceived. You wouldn’t have to think that someone deliberately deceived them to say that. Perhaps their own minds deceived them, or perhaps the traditions they heard from other Christians had been corrupted. Whatever it was, maybe the authors unwittingly passed the deception on to us.

Finally, it might not matter much what the biblical authors purposed to do, because even if they were trying to give us accurate descriptions of what happened, their accounts are so hopelessly confused, contradictory, and error ridden that we finally can’t trust anything about them.

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