Topic
Where the Bible Came From
Claims about how the Bible was written, copied, and collected, checked against the manuscripts and the historical record.
Claims
- “A great apostasy made restoration necessary”The New Testament warns of apostasy but promises the gospel will endure, and the apostles' message was preached without a break from the first century on.Read the answer
- “Constantine changed the Bible”The four Gospels were received long before Constantine, and the records of Nicaea show no vote on the Bible's contents and no removal of books.Read the answer
- “God's Kingdom began ruling in 1914”The 1914 date needs links the Bible does not supply, and Jesus warned against hidden comings and against fixing times the Father keeps to himself.Read the answer
- “John did not write the Gospel of John”Disputed authorship is not the same as unreliability. John's Gospel claims eyewitness roots, circulated early, and its view of Jesus appears in earlier sources.Read the answer
- “Muhammad was foretold in the Bible”Read in context, Moses' promised prophet comes from Israel, and the Advocate Jesus promised is the Holy Spirit, sent to his own disciples soon after Jesus left them.Read the answer
- “Only the 144,000 are born again”Jesus makes being born again the way into God's Kingdom for anyone, and the New Testament describes one body with one hope, not two classes of Christians.Read the answer
- “Priesthood authority was restored”Hebrews says Christ holds his Melchizedek priesthood forever, without successors, and the Aaronic priesthood was set aside, so access to God rests on him.Read the answer
- “Reincarnation was removed from the Bible”No manuscript or council record shows reincarnation removed from the Bible. Christians rejected it openly before Constantine, and old manuscripts read like ours.Read the answer
- “The Bible is corrupted”The manuscripts differ in small ways, but the Gospel Christians held in Muhammad's day, which the Qur'an tells them to judge by, survives and can be read today.Read the answer
- “The Bible lost plain and precious truths”The manuscripts show small, documented copying changes, not an early removal of doctrine, and the Bible already teaches what the Book of Mormon calls plain and precious.Read the answer
- “The Book of Mormon is another testament of Jesus Christ”An inward witness cannot settle whether a book is scripture. The Bible's test is whether a message matches the apostles' gospel, even when an angel brings it.Read the answer
- “The New Testament misuses the Hebrew Bible”Some citations fail as predictions. Read as the pattern-reading Jewish interpreters also practiced, they make a different claim, one you can test against the Hebrew.Read the answer
- “The New World Translation restores the truth”Judged by its own standard of following the text, the New World Translation bends the verses about Jesus' identity in one direction, while much of it reads fairly.Read the answer
- “The Qur'an is inimitable”The Qur'an's eloquence is real, but beauty is judged by taste and language, not truth. The Christian claim rests instead on a public event open to historical inquiry.Read the answer
- “The Watch Tower organization must be trusted”Scripture commends testing every teacher by God's word, and an organization that calls itself fallible cannot make questioning its teaching a test of loyalty.Read the answer
Reasons
- Public revelation and prophetic testsThe Torah and the apostles give public tests for anyone who claims to speak for God: agreement with earlier revelation, loyalty to the one God, and predictions that come true.
- The apostolic gospel is finalPaul and Jude describe the apostles' message as a trust to guard. So any later revelation can be tested by one question: does it preach the same gospel?
- The reliability of the BibleVariants in the manuscripts are real and openly catalogued. They show a text copied many times in many places, which is why its earliest wording can be recovered.