Vineyard Church of Knox County
The Reliability of the Bible
Sermon Audio from Sunday, May 21, 2006 — Imagine you find yourself in a conversation with someone who has come to your door or with someone at work, or better yet maybe you read a book that makes the claim that the Bible you believe in and read, the Bible we feed on each week in church is actually a lie and he, the author, can prove it. He says that the Gospels were written not in the first century by Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, but was written centuries after Jesus died and the real Bible that told of the origins of Christianity were burned by Constantine in the 325 A.D. in a grand cover-up. What's more, these documents that tell of the real Jesus show that he was not divine, but was just a mortal prophet. Furthermore, some of these documents survived Constantine's efforts and have been found, documents that include the Gospel of Mary, the Gospel of Thomas, the Gospel of Phillip, and the Gospel of Judas.
You would then have to decide how to respond, right? We could do the fake faith response. You know that one, right? It goes like this, "Well, I just have faith that the Bible is God's Word and I don't need anything else than that." Of course, we need faith to approach the Bible properly, but that response is simply an excuse not to actually think through your beliefs. Another possible response is this, "Boy that's interesting, let me research my faith a bit and get back to you on that." Is the Bible reliable as we know it? How did it come to be, and why can we trust it and not other gospels? We'll look at these questions in the first part of a three-part look at questions arising from The Da Vinci Code.
