POSSIBLE OBJECTIONS
After you have shared the gospel, your friend might say things like:
     What you've said is not true, because I don't believe the Bible is true.
     People have changed the Bible over the years
     Everyone interprets the Bible in a different way
     The Bible can't be true, because the creation account conflicts with evolution

INSPIRATION. The Bible describes itself in 2 Timothy 3:16 as “inspired by God.”  The word “inspired” here is a translation of the Greek word “God-breathed,” so it indicates that God is the source of the Bible.  2 Peter 1:21 explains that the prophets who wrote scripture were “moved by the Holy Spirit.”  Since we can’t expect that one who is not yet a believer would accept these claims, this page shows that person why it is reasonable to take the Bible seriously.  You do not need to feel under pressure, because God can bring the person to faith through the power of the gospel message even before the person accepts the Bible as true.

RELIABILITY
CARE IN COPYING. Comparing later with earlier hand-written copies shows the care with which the Bible was copied over the centuries.  There are some differences, but none that affect basic meaning.

NUMBERS OF COPIES. We have hundreds more hand-written copies of the Bible than we do of any other ancient manuscript, yet we do not reject those manuscripts.  Is it reasonable to single out the Bible as the only ancient manuscript to be rejected?

THE TRUTH OF THE BIBLE
ARCHAEOLOGY. The number of archeological finds that undergird the reality of the places mentioned in the Bible has been increasing as time goes by.

PROPHECIES. The vast number of fulfilled prophecies is a concrete reason to accept the Bible as true.

BAD BEHAVIOR. The fact that the Bible events portray negative behavior of leaders makes it less likely that the stories were made up, because if the leaders were making up the Bible, they would not want to reveal bad things about themselves.  Here are some examples: King David, from 1000 BC, is a heroic king, but his evil actions are not covered up.  Peter was an early leader of the church, but the Bible stories reveal his early lack of understanding and his denial of Jesus when under pressure. 

WOMEN. In the first century, the testimony of women was not given high credibility, so the fact that the Bible presents women as the first witnesses to the resurrection is an indication that it really happened that way – if the story was being made up, the writers would not have selected women as the witnesses.

CRITICAL APPROACH. In recent centuries, those taking an academic approach to the Bible have called into question whether the events happened as written. See the background of this Critical Method on the Modern/Postmodern page.

THE SELECTION OF THE BIBLE BOOKS
The Jewish people realized that God had ceased giving them inspired books around 400 BC.  These 39 books that make up the Old Testament were formally declared by Jewish leaders around 100 AD.  The Christian church accepted their conclusions.  When the New Testament quotes from “the scriptures,” it means those 39 books.

Jewish writings after 400 were not regarded by them as scripture, but are printed in some Bibles and are called ”the apocrypha.”

The 27 books of the New Testament were written during the first century AD.  2 Peter 3:16 shows that New Testament writings were looked upon as scripture.  Additional books that appeared during the next couple centuries that claimed to come from Biblical authors were recognized as promoting a different message and therefore were not added to the 27.  Most of the 27 are noted and quoted by Christian writers from the end of the first century on, and all 27 are specified in a meeting of 360 AD.

CREATION
See separate section on science and faith.

Return to list of specific objections