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Why trust the Bible?
On the basis of these three tests, the New Testament Gospels are overwhelmingly more trustworthy than any other ancient manuscript-ancient manuscripts that we had always accepted as undeniably accurate. To recreate the texts by Plato, Aristotle, Julius Caesar, and others that I had read in college, scholars often had only tens of existing manuscripts to refer to. Yet for the New Testament we have over five thousand manuscripts in Greek plus an equal number in various translations-not to mention all the quotations of it in letters and other writings from the first centuries after Christ. Additionally, the earliest New Testament manuscripts we have were written within decades of Jesus' ministry-close enough to the actual events that the possibility of fabrications having crept into them was statistically insignificant.There is a big difference between the Bible, particularly the New Testament, and the Quran. The earliest New Testament texts were written within the lifetime of the apostles, to record permanently the apostles witness that Christ had indeed risen from the dead. Mohammed never left a definitive book before he died, The Quran was gathered together by tales handed down orally. It is far beyond the scope of this little web site to present all this information, but the following links are helpful:
Truth Unchanged, Texts Unchanging? A comparison of the history of the Quran and the New Testament. |