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People sometimes say the Bible contradicts itself – the first thing to ask is, where? The gospels (the life stories about Jesus) often have different ways of telling the story; sometimes different numbers of people involved. Judges actually say this shows the reliability of the Bible! When different people witness the same event, they focus on different things, see different matters as being important, and so the stories differ even though the main events they tell are the same. Judges tell us, if the stories tally in every respect, then there has been collusion and the witnesses become viewed as unreliable. The gospels tell the same events Jesus life, death and resurrection from the viewpoints of different witnesses. The same – but different angles of sight.

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Luke opens his gospel story emphasising how he has tracked down eye-witnesses of all the events and carefully recorded them – he is an historian. There is the story of a man in the 19th century who set out to disprove the Bible by showing how false Luke’s gospel, and the follow up – Acts – was. In his researches he actually found what a reliable historian Luke was, and that man became a Christian.

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The first manuscripts we have of the New Testament are from a very short period after they were first written down. Some from the early 2nd century, and more and more in the 3rd century, and many hundreds from the 4th. That is thousands of copies of the original by the 300’s A.D. The first manuscripts of Julius Caesar’s wars written by him are about 600 years after the events.