The Reliability of the Bible: The Historicity Of Sacred Scripture

Before we ask whether Jesus is truly God, we must answer a more fundamental question: can the Bible be trusted at all? The entire Christian faith rests on the historicity of Jesus Christ, which is preserved through Sacred Scripture. If the foundation is weak, every argument built upon it collapses. But if the Bible is historically reliable, archaeologically supported, and internally consistent, then it stands as a credible witness to truth — not only about history, but about eternity.

The Bible is not a single book. It is a collection of 73 books written over 1,600 years, on three continents, by nearly 40 different authors in three languages: Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek. Time and again, skeptics have tried to dismiss it as myth, legend, or propaganda written long after the fact. The evidence points decisively in the opposite direction.

The Manuscript Evidence

The New Testament has over 5,800 Greek manuscripts, with fragments dating to the early second century — such as the John Rylands Fragment (P52), written within a few decades of the original. Compare that to Caesar's Gallic Wars, which survives in roughly ten manuscripts written 900 years after the fact, or Plato's works, with about seven manuscripts produced 1,200 years later. No ancient document has better preservation or earlier copies than the New Testament. In total, we have over 20,000 manuscripts of the New Testament across all languages, along with more than 36,000 patristic quotations — enough to reconstruct nearly the entire text from the Church Fathers alone even if every manuscript were lost.

By any standard applied to ancient documents, the New Testament passes with distinction. The question is never whether we can trust ancient texts in general — we do, constantly, for Caesar and Plato and Thucydides — but whether we are willing to apply that same standard consistently when the document in question makes claims we find uncomfortable.

Is the Bible Composed of Stolen Myths?

A popular claim in recent decades holds that the Bible — and Christianity in particular — is nothing more than a copy of older pagan myths. Jesus, the theory goes, is just another "dying and rising god," and the stories of the Old and New Testaments are borrowed from Egyptian, Greek, Persian, or Babylonian legends.

When subjected to serious scrutiny, this claim collapses.

Most of the supposed "parallels" are exaggerated, fabricated, or post-Christian. There is no evidence that Mithras was born of a virgin or resurrected — he emerged from a rock, fully grown. The supposed resurrection was added in later Roman reinterpretations, not found in the original Persian sources. Dionysus did not turn water into wine at a specific historical wedding among named witnesses — his myth involved miraculous vines and fountains, a mythical motif with no resemblance to the event at Cana in John 2. One is a literary device; the other is a recorded historical event with cultural, theological, and personal detail.

Even when similarities exist, they are broad and vague — the kind of common human themes found in virtually every storytelling tradition. Good versus evil, life and death, divine intervention: these are not evidence of copying. They are evidence of a shared human experience reaching toward a truth that Christianity claims to have received definitively.

The earliest Christians were devout Jews, and Jewish belief strictly and absolutely forbade blending pagan elements into worship. These men would sooner die — and many did — than adopt foreign mythology into their faith. Paul, Peter, James, and John were not borrowing from Zeus or Horus. They were rooted in Jewish Scripture, prophecy, and covenant theology.

The scholarly consensus is unambiguous. Agnostic historian Dr. Bart Ehrman, no friend of orthodox Christianity, has stated plainly that the idea Jesus was modeled on dying-rising gods of the ancient world is a fringe theory that scholars do not accept. Claims that Christianity stole from pagan myths thrive in pop culture precisely because they do not survive contact with actual scholarship.

Was the Bible Written After the Fact?

A related objection holds that the Bible's authors created or reshaped their narratives to align with known historical events — effectively reverse-engineering prophecy and crafting mythology long after the supposed events occurred. The historical evidence tells a different story.

Most of the New Testament was composed between AD 50 and AD 70, only 20 to 40 years after the death and resurrection of Jesus. Some of Paul's letters — 1 Thessalonians and Galatians — are widely dated to around AD 50, a mere two decades after Calvary. This is not the gap required for legend to develop and displace historical memory. These documents were written within the living memory of eyewitnesses, in communities that included people who had personally known Jesus, and in a context where opponents could and did challenge the disciples' claims publicly.

The Bible also speaks with the specificity of history, not the vagueness of myth. It names real kings: Nebuchadnezzar, Cyrus, Herod, Pontius Pilate. It names real cities: Jerusalem, Babylon, Nineveh, Rome. It ties events to specific reigns, wars, and empires. Luke 3:1 opens the account of John the Baptist's ministry by listing seven independent historical markers: "In the fifteenth year of the reign of Tiberius Caesar, when Pontius Pilate was governor of Judea..." That is not how myth speaks. That is how history is recorded.

The Old Testament Predictions

The Bible's critics claim it was crafted to fit older myths, but the Old Testament was already predicting a coming Messiah centuries before Christ — and long before any supposed pagan parallels. The Septuagint, a Greek translation of the Hebrew Old Testament, was completed in the third century BC, predating Jesus by over 250 years. Isaiah 53, written around 700 BC, describes a suffering servant pierced for the sins of others. Micah 5:2 foretells a ruler born in Bethlehem. Psalm 22 describes imagery consistent with crucifixion — before crucifixion as a method of execution had been invented.

These prophecies are documented in the Dead Sea Scrolls, which predate the life of Christ and were not under Christian influence. They are not retrojections. They are predictions that were made, written down, copied, and preserved — and then fulfilled.

If the Bible is not myth, it deserves to be taken seriously — not just as a book of faith, but as a truthful witness to reality.