Posted by Lisa Laree to Beer Lahai Roi
This sorta - weekly skim through a book of the Bible has brought us to Acts...the only history book in the New Testament. The folks who had followed Jesus were figuring out how to follow the leading of Holy Spirit, how to follow Jesus' instructions.
I thought I knew what verse I would pick before I started reading, but right off the bat I got slapped with something else.
Isn't that always what happens, lol? That'll preach on it's own...anytime I think I know what God is going to say/ lead/ whatever...we go a different direction.
After his suffering , he showed himself to these men [the apostles he had chosen; v. 2] and gave many convincing proofs that he was alive. He appeared to them over a period of forty days and spoke about the kingdom of God. - Acts 1:3
Maybe it's because I was teaching a class this week about the validity of the scripture, but the immediacy of this...that Luke had likely spoken to a number of these disciples, the ones who had spent time with Jesus, as he researched the events he wrote about...suddenly hit me.
I think I have mentioned this before; but, in archaelogical terms, the New Testament is yesterday's newspaper, full of eyewitness accounts. No other manuscript from antiquity can even come close.
Two of the tests given to ancient texts to validate them are 1) how much time passed between the original manuscript and the oldest existing copy and 2) how many ancient copies or fragments of copies do we have in order to cross - reference the text. Obviously, the lesser amount of time that has passed between the original writing of a manuscript and the making of the copy that still exists will make it more likely to be accurate, while the larger the number of documents we have to compare to one another the more confident we can be that it has been accurately perserved.
I'm not going to get into the specifics of this here...if you want all the numbers and such you can find them in Josh McDowell's Evidence that Demands a Verdict, in which he goes into all the details of these kinds of studies, but I will say that the New Testament completely blows all the other ancient documents out of the water. Writings of Aristotle, Pliny the Younger, Caesar, Homer...have hundreds of years between the writing of them and the oldest extant copies. We also only have a very few...less than 10 for some...ancient copies of the manuscripts.
The oldest fragment of the New Testament is 50 years away from the original source, and we have over 5, 000 ancient documents...over 25,000 if you count all the tiny fragments...that reproduce the text.
We have a very, very high level of confidence that what we have in our Bibles today is what was written.
And what was written was written by those who saw, who experienced or, as in the case of Luke, who were closely acquainted with those who were witnesses of the life and resurrection of Jesus and the power that his name had in the years following his ministry. The concept is repeated in Acts.... phrases like 'we have seen' and 'we were witnesses' appear several times in the text. The original writings were floating around while the folks who lived the events were still walking around on the planet.
...many convincing proofs that he was alive
Yes, it is a fantastic story...bizzarre, even. Hard to wrap one's head around.
Maybe that's why Romans says we must believe in the heart...
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