My Summas, Part 3: The Bible

 - James

In my last post, I showed some evidence that supported the idea of an intelligent Creator, namely, God. 'Course, all (or most, in any case) religions base their faith on this belief. If I'm trying to prove the truth of Christianity, though, we want to take this a step further: The Bible. There are numerous proofs that support the Bible as accurate. Here are a few:

• Prophecies: The Bible is full of prophecies, especially the Old Testament, and most, if not all of these prophecies have happened as prohesied. An example, of course, is Jesus. As many as 300 Old Testament prophecies were fulfilled by Jesus. The OT said that the Messiah would work miracles, and Jesus did that, numerous times, in front of thousands of witnesses. It also gave many descriptions of the Messiah's death, saying He would be peirced through the hands and feet, He would be betrayed to His death by a friend, and His legs would not be broken (something that was commonly done during crucifixions to speed up the victim's death, if you didn't know that already), among others, all of which happened to Jesus. Last, and maybe most importantly, it was prophesied that the Messiah would rise from the dead, which Jesus did, and appeared to as many as 500 people, after having most definitely died.
  
• Another example of Biblical prophecy fulfilled is (or "was", actually) the great country of Edom. It was an immensly powerful country, but also very evil. Numerous prophecies were made about it's eventual destruction, and between 400-500 B.C. (about a century after the last prophecy about it had been made), it was taken over by other Arab groups, who, in turn, were overthrown by people called the Nabataeans, who were overthrown by the Romans, and this tedious chain of let's-nab-Edom-and-lose-it-again events continued until about the 12th century A.D., when the Crusaders built a castle there. After they left, Edom was pretty much dead, until it was rediscovered by a Swiss traveler in 1812.
• Textual evidence: Lotsanlotsanlots of manuscripts documenting both the Old and New Testaments exist. These manuscripts were written by people of numerous different races, cultures, and languages, yet they all seem to be in agreement. Some do disagree on minor details, such as spelling of names, or numbers of things (such as the amount of soldiers in an army), but nothing of significance. The New Testament alone is documented by over 20,000 manuscripts, making it the most reliable "document of antiquity", that is, a document written before the invention of the printing press.
  
• Early Christians were, as we all know, persecuted for their faith, mainly by Romans and some of the Jews. If the New Testament writings were false, you can bet that these two groups would have dug up a lot of evidence against it to bring the spread of Christianity to a grinding halt. No such proof exists, though.