Zion Lutheran Church - LCMS

  Zion Apologia:
 

              The Bible makes the claim for itself to be God’s word.  Let us look at some of the evidence that provides reasons why we can trust that the Bible is a reliable record of history.  For if the Bible proves to be false in any area that it touches on, then how can we trust any of it?  Just like in a court of law, when a witness takes the stand and testifies to something he saw, if it is proven that he is telling a lie, then the jury is under no obligation to believe anything that he says.  In the same manner, before we journey into the contents of the Bible, let us briefly examine some of the evidence to determine if the Bible’s content is trustworthy.

Textual Transmission 

              The Old Testament was written over a 1,500 year span by forty different men, during different periods of time, and in different geographical locations.  The last of the Old Testament books was written sometime around B.C. 400.  The Masoretes devised an elaborate method of transcribing the Scriptures to insure the accuracy of the text from one iteration to the next.  They had mathematical methods of insuring the accuracy of the text. Because of this, the Masoretic text has shown to be extremely faithful from one generation to the next.  In fact, the oldest copy of the Old Testament is the Masoretic text, which is dated at A.D. 1008-1009.[1]  This raises an interesting issue:  If the last book of the Old Testament is dated to B.C. 400, this would still leave a gap of some 1,400 years between the oldest text and the date the last book of the Old Testament was written.  In modern times, however, one of the greatest archeological discoveries was made.

The Dead Sea Scrolls

The Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered in 1946 by a Bedouin boy named         Muhammed edh-Dhib.  As Randall Price writes in Secrets of the Dead Sea Scrolls:

As he [Muhammed edh-Dhib] and friends were tending their goat herds, he left the group to go in search of one of his stray goats.  After roaming far from his companions, he came upon a cave with a small opening at its top.  Supposing the goat to have fallen inside, he threw stones into the opening.  Instead of hearing the sound of a startled goat, he heard the shatter of breaking pottery.  Believing that treasure might be inside, he lowered himself into the cave and found ancient clay jars.[2]

Inside these clay jars were leather scrolls.  The location of the scrolls was in the mountain caves of Qumran near the Dead Sea.  The Dead Sea Scrolls, as they came to be known, included portions of each of the thirty-nine books of the Old Testament, with the exception of the book of Esther.  The scrolls are dated to around B.C. 125, which would move back the oldest Old Testament manuscript by 1,000 years. Scholars who reviewed these biblical texts found that they are almost identical to the Masoretic texts from A.D. 1008, showing that the Old Testament has been preserved to an astounding degree of accuracy.  If this were the only discovery made, would this not have added significantly to the confidence in the preservation of the Old Testament documents?  However, in addition to the Dead Sea Scrolls, another discovery was recently made south of Jerusalem alongside the valley of Hinnom.  Two minute silver rolls, which were designed to be worn around the neck, contain the Aaronic benediction of Numbers 6:24-26.  This discovery is dated at between the seventh and sixth centuries B.C.[3]  This means the oldest discovery of part of the Old Testament has now been pushed back some 1,600 to 1,700 years from the Masoretic text, which was dated at A.D. 1008. 

The Tablet Theory

              Most of the Old Testament books were written by authors who lived contemporaneously with the events that they wrote about.  For example, the book of Joshua, which is the first book to follow the Pentateuch, is believed to have been written by Joshua to record the events of his time.  In addition, all of the Pentateuch except for the book of Genesis is believed to have been written during the lifetime of Moses.  But Genesis, the first book of the Bible, is a little different.  The reason is that the events described in Genesis happened long before Moses was ever born.  As a matter of fact, the first event recorded in this book documents God creating the heavens and the earth.  This event happened when no one was around to witness it.  So how did Moses come to know what the events of the first 2,500 years were?  Some believe these events were miraculously revealed to Moses when he began to write.  This is always a possibility.  Another belief that many Christian pastors and theologians hold to is what is known as the JEDP Documentary Hypothesis. Curt Sewell writes:

From an idea first proposed by Jean Astuc (1684-1766) they [K. H. Graf and Julius Wellhausen] developed the “JEDP Documentary Hypothesis” of higher criticism, which said that the early parts of the Old Testament couldn't have been written during the times they described.  They based this on the belief that writing had not evolved until about B.C. 1000.  Therefore they assumed wrongly that sagas, epics, poetry etc. which were later used to compile the Bible were passed down orally for millenia.[4]  

The JEDP theory, while still taught among the liberal academia, has been fraught with difficulties.  As Sewell writes:

Did Hegal, Graf, Wellhausen, etc. have any good basis for their JEDP theory?  No, there has never been any trace of the “documents” they refer to (Jehovist, Elohist, Deuteronomic, and Priestly), and even in their day there had been some good archaeological finds that contradicted the very basis of their theory--that early writing was unknown.  More recently, scholars and archaeologists have uncovered excellent proofs of the truth of the Bible's historicity.[5]

              There is another explanation that appears to be the most likely solution to this question.  This theory is called the Tablet Theory.  A man by the name of P. J. Wiseman has studied ancient clay tablets that were located in Mesopatamia and dated before the time of Abraham.  In 1936, he published a book entitled Ancient Records and the Structure of Genesis.  This book was updated by his son, a professor of Assyriology, in 1985.  In the book, Wiseman discusses how he found colophon phrases at the ends of these tablets.  These phrases identify the writer of the tablet.  Likewise, other scholars have noticed that Genesis contains similar phrases throughout.  The phrase begins “These are the generations of . . .”   The Hebrew word for generations is toledoth, which means “the story of origins.”  However, scholars had mistakenly believed that this phrase was the beginning of what was to follow.  Instead, it appears that this is actually the end of the section.  When applied in this way, Wiseman noticed that Genesis makes more sense.  Unfortunately, these toledoth phrases do not appear at the beginning of a chapter, but they are usually within a chapter, making it more difficult to understand their meaning. 

As one example, Genesis 2:4a states “This is the account of the heavens and the earth when they were created.”  Because there is no name mentioned, we might conclude that this was either written by God himself, or dictated to Adam since no one would have been present at the creation other than God.  The next one is Genesis 5:1a, which states, “This is the written account of Adam’s line.”  If we look right before this, at Genesis chapter 4, we see that it is the account of Cain and Abel, the sons of Adam.  Therefore, this phrase refers to what was written before it, from Genesis 2:4 through Genesis 5:1. 

Conclusion 

We have looked at just a few examples that validate the reliability of the Bible.  We can see that the Masoretes had an elaborate method of transcribing the Old Testament texts.  As a result, we can have confidence that these transcribing techniques successfully insured the accuracy of the texts.  In addition, we can verify parts of the Old Testament texts due to the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls.  Lastly, we can conclude that the tablet theory is the most logical explanation of how Moses would have knowledge of the events preceding his time.  The tablet theory helps us to see how various individuals who witnessed the events that took place, such as Adam, Noah, and others, were the same ones who wrote down the events on clay tablets.  Considering the length of time these men lived, around 800 to 900 years of age, we can better understand how these tablets were passed down to the next generation for safekeeping, insuring that the events were not forgotten.  As a result, Moses gained access to these tablets and was able to write them down in what has become known today as the book of Genesis.  Truly these examples give us confidence in the reliability of God’s word.

ref_startReferences:

Kaiser, Walter. The Old Testament Documents. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, USA, 2001.

Price, Randall. Secrets of the Dead Sea Scrolls. Eugene, OR: Harvest House Publishers, 1996.

Sewell, Curt. The Tablet Theory of Genesis Authorship. 2007/07/25 . Accessed July 25 2007. Online. Available from http://www.trueorigin.org/tablet.asp.

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