10/40 Window Reach Out Series
Why the Bible Can Be Trusted
— Evidence for the Most Attacked Book in History
By Missionary John | missionaryjohn.online | 10/40 Window Reach Out Series
The Book That Refuses to Die
There is a book that has been banned by emperors, burned by governments, buried by philosophers, and dismantled by scholars — and it is still the most widely distributed, most translated, most read document in the history of the human race. In the third century, the Roman Emperor Diocletian issued an edict ordering every copy of the Christian scriptures destroyed. He had a column erected declaring that the name Christian had been wiped from the earth. Twenty-five years later, the Emperor Constantine was ordering fifty copies to be made at government expense.
Every generation has produced people who were certain they had finally disproved it, buried it, or outgrown it. And every generation has watched the book outlast them. That is not proof of divine origin — but it is a remarkable place to begin.
For billions of people in the 10/40 Window — many of whom have grown up hearing that the Bible is a corrupted, unreliable Western document — this question is not academic. If the Bible is not trustworthy, then the gospel built on it is not trustworthy. But if the evidence for its reliability is as strong as historians, archaeologists, and scholars have found it to be, then dismissing it without investigation is not intellectual honesty. It is intellectual laziness dressed up as wisdom.
Here is the evidence. Weigh it for yourself.
Argument One: The Manuscript Evidence Is Overwhelming
When historians evaluate the reliability of any ancient document, they ask two questions: how many manuscript copies exist, and how close in time are the earliest copies to the original writing? By these standards, the New Testament is not just reliable — it is the most verified ancient document in existence.
The works of Julius Caesar — which no serious historian doubts — survive in around ten manuscript copies, the earliest made about 1,000 years after his death. The works of Plato survive in about 210 copies. Homer’s Iliad survives in about 1,800 copies.
The New Testament survives in more than 5,800 Greek manuscript copies, plus over 10,000 Latin manuscripts, plus another 9,000 in other languages. The earliest fragments date to within decades of the original writing. No ancient document comes close. If you accept Caesar and Plato as historically reliable — and every educated person does — intellectual consistency requires applying the same standard to the New Testament.
The New Testament is not preserved less well than other ancient documents. It is preserved more thoroughly than any other document in history.
Argument Two: Archaeology Has Consistently Confirmed It
For much of the nineteenth century, critics argued that many people, places, and events in the Bible were legendary. The Hittite nation, mentioned repeatedly in the Old Testament, was said to be a myth because no archaeological evidence existed. Critics called the Bible a book of fairy tales.
Then, in 1876, archaeologists began uncovering the remains of the Hittite empire in modern Turkey — one of the great ancient civilisations, exactly as described. The same pattern has repeated itself dozens of times: the Pool of Siloam mentioned in John 9, excavated in 2004. The existence of Pontius Pilate, once doubted, confirmed by a stone inscription found in 1961 in Caesarea Maritima. The city of Jericho, confirmed by multiple archaeological teams.
Archaeologist Nelson Glueck — not a Christian, but one of the greatest biblical archaeologists of the twentieth century — wrote that no archaeological discovery has ever controverted a biblical reference. That statement remains substantially accurate today.
Argument Three: Fulfilled Prophecy Has No Natural Explanation
The most unusual feature of the Bible — the one that separates it from every other ancient religious text — is its record of specific, detailed prophecy written centuries before the predicted events occurred.
The prophet Micah, writing around 700 BC, named the specific town — Bethlehem — where the Messiah would be born. The prophet Daniel, writing in the sixth century BC, described the sequence of world empires — Babylon, Persia, Greece, Rome — with a precision that caused critics to insist the book must have been written after the events, until Dead Sea Scroll discoveries confirmed its pre-event dating. Isaiah, writing seven centuries before Christ, described the suffering servant of God in language so specific to the crucifixion of Jesus that entire scholarly debates have been written about it.
The mathematical probability of one person fulfilling even eight of the specific Messianic prophecies in the Old Testament by chance has been calculated at one in ten to the seventeenth power. Jesus fulfilled dozens. Not by coincidence. By identity.
“I am the LORD: that is my name… Behold, the former things are come to pass, and new things do I declare.” — Isaiah 42:8–9 (KJV)
Argument Four: The Internal Consistency Is Remarkable
The Bible was written by approximately 40 different authors, across roughly 1,500 years, in three different languages, on three different continents, from wildly different social positions — kings, fishermen, shepherds, doctors, tax collectors, priests, and prisoners. And yet the book tells one coherent story from beginning to end: the story of a God who creates, humanity that falls, and a Saviour who restores.
The themes introduced in Genesis — the garden, the tree, the serpent, the promised one who will crush the serpent’s head — are resolved in Revelation. The sacrificial system of Leviticus is explained by the cross of Christ in the New Testament letters. The suffering servant of Isaiah 53 is identified in the Gospels. No editorial committee sat down to align these connections. They emerged across fifteen centuries, through dozens of writers who had never met each other.
The Bible was written by 40 people over 1,500 years. It reads like one person wrote it with a single plan from beginning to end. That demands an explanation.
What This Means for You
If the Bible is what the evidence suggests — historically reliable, archaeologically confirmed, prophetically verified, coherent across fifteen centuries — then its claims about God, about humanity, about sin, and about Jesus Christ deserve to be taken seriously. Not as religious sentiment. As evidence-based truth.
The gospel is not asking you to take a leap in the dark. It is asking you to follow the evidence where it leads — honestly, without the prejudice of what you have been told to believe or disbelieve about it. Read it. Investigate it. Ask hard questions of it. It has survived two thousand years of that treatment. It will survive yours.
Lord, I come to this book with honest questions. I am willing to look at the evidence. If You are real and this book is Your word, open my eyes to see it clearly. And if what I find leads me to Jesus — give me the courage to follow. Amen.
Where to Begin
- Start with the Gospel of John — read it as history, not religion. Ask: does this read like legend, or like the account of a witness?
- Read Isaiah 53 in the Old Testament — written 700 years before Jesus. Then read the crucifixion account in Mark 15. Compare them side by side.
- Visit missionaryjohn.online for the full 10/40 Window Reach Out Series.
The evidence is there. The question is whether you are willing to look at it.
— Missionary John