This skepticism is based on the ideas of the philosopher David Hume (1711-1776). What is the cause of this disbelief? Is the person assuming a framework in which miracles are a logical impossibility? Has this individual closed their mind to the possibility of miracles and supernatural occurrences? Do they believe only in the natural world and things which are scientifically provable? One possible reason for disbelieving the content of the Gospels and the rest of the Bible is its recording of powerful miraculous events. However, skepticism about these things does still exist in some portions of the population, and it is important for us to deal with the underlying reasons for this. It is probably true to say that our postmodern society is much more open to the possibility of a supernatural realm than was the Enlightenment modernist worldview of previous generations. The first issue has to do with our approach to the supernatural world. There are a number of questions tied up here. Aren’t the Gospels on the same kind of level-aren’t they just mythological, with true moral value but very little historical reality? Surely accounts involving people walking on water and water turning into wine weren’t meant to be taken as historically true-it’s all mythology, isn’t it? These questions are all very important, and it is true that the Christian must not assume that an unbeliever will accept the content of the biblical text as true simply because the manuscripts themselves have proved to be so trustworthy. The manuscripts of his writings may be reasonably intact, but that does not make what he was writing about reliable or accurate historical material. Indeed, it is true that no one argues for the historicity of Homer’s mythology, for example. However, the next question is invariably: “Just because the manuscripts are reliable, that doesn’t make the content of them true.” The breadth and age of the existing ancient manuscripts tell a very different story. There is a widespread belief that much of the Bible was written centuries after the events it records and that it has been changed and tampered with on the whim of different scribes or interested parties. It may well come as a shock to some that the manuscript tradition of the Old and New Testaments stands up to rigorous scrutiny.

Original bible manuscripts