OK, seriously. I believe that the Bible is the Word of God. This, of course, is an article of faith. However, I base my faith on the Bible's predictive ability, its continuity, that we have an accurate copy of the Bible (New Testament especially), that the Bible records eye-witness testimony, and that the New Testament was written closely following the actual events. I have no a priori reason to outright deny the Bible's claims, and, from my point of view, the Bible makes a cumulative case for itself. But in the final analysis, either you will affirm or you will deny. I came to affirm only after I had experienced the spiritual reality of Jesus Christ. And only after then did I become interested in studying the works of New Testament scholars to verify that the New Testament accurately records the events of Jesus Christ's life.
I've found that if you apply the same level of criticism to the New Testament as some around here do to all of ancient history, then we have no warrant for even holding that Tiberius Caesar even existed!! There are ten separate non-Christian sources who mention Jesus within the first two centuries. Over the same time period we only have nine that mention Tiberius Caesar, the emperor of Rome!! If we take Christian sources, the ratio becomes 43 to 10 in favor of Jesus!! People who say that we don't have evidence for even the existence of Jesus are flat-out unfamiliar with the evidence.
,We have more manuscripts of the New Testament than of any other ancient book. 57,000 hand written Greek manuscripts. 9000 in other languages. 15,000 of these are entire Bibles. The next closest work in the Iliad, with a paltry 643 manuscripts. Most other ancient works survive on fewer than a dozen, yet few historians doubt their historicity!!
Christians have early, eyewitness testimony from multiple, independent sources who were willing to suffer and die for their testimony of what they witnessed. If the apostles wanted to make a hoax, they easily could have said that Jesus had "spiritually" resurrected, making an unfalsifiable claim. But, no, that's not what happened. They proclaimed the bodily resurrection in the very city that crucified him. To thwart it would have been easy: produce the body of Christ then and there and parade it around the city. Quite simple!! But the tomb was empty, and the Pharisees had to concoct a lie: that the apostles stole it. This is incredulous when we see that these very people were willing to suffer and die for their claim to the bodily resurrection of Jesus. And not them only, but thousands of Jews, even former Pharisees!! In the very city he was crucified!! Don't you see??
Dont' you get it?? If there's one place in all history where a fairy tale fantasy couldn't have taken place it's first century, Roman- occupied, Pharisee- controlled Jerusalem. A small sect of men came on the scene and turned the place upside down!! How on earth could this have happened...unless, of course, it was the will of God himself.
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