#3 Truth and History, Lesson Two: How History Helps Us Determine the Truth of the Bible

Isn’t the Bible full of errors? Hasn’t it been copied so many times nobody has any idea what the original was? HOW can history help us decide what’s true and what isn’t? Answering those questions is what this podcast is about. As I was thinking about it, I realized history is like an anchor. Just as an anchor keeps a ship from floating off in any direction, so too, history can help tie what we believe to what happened in the real world, outside the pages of a sacred text. To continue the analogy, history helps answer questions like: **When were the scriptures written? **Who wrote them? **Where were they written? These answers form a historical links in the chain of the anchor that goes from the real world to the text we have today. But how does history answer these questions? Finding the links in the chain, the answers to our questions isn’t difficult or scholarly and hard to understand. History is straightforward at its core and by looking at what was found with ancient documents in elements as simple as the pottery that the scrolls were stored in and the coins left around them, plus looking at what the scribes used as writing materials and how they wrote it’s easy to identify when they were written. For these answers and other questions relating to how history can help us determine truth—listen to the podcast. For a chart of the number of manuscripts discussed in the podcast and for more information on it, go to: http://www.bible805.com.