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This is a very good question. Unfortunately, many Christians are guilty of circular reasoning on this issue. They quote 2 Timothy 3:16 as if that settled it: “All Scripture is inspired by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, for training in righteousness.” They understand correctly that that the Apostle Paul is claiming that the Bible is more than just words about God; it is the Word of God. The word translated “inspired,” theopneustos, means literally “God-breathed,” and it is applied to the graphe, which literally means the writings—ink on parchment. Paul is claiming that the words of Scripture, even though they were written by human authors, are as good as if God had spoken them Himself. That is why we can trust them completely and why they are profitable for teaching, reproof, correction, and training in righteousness.

Christians who base their belief in the inspiration of Scripture on that verse have understood what Paul was claiming very accurately. There is only one problem: If you did not already believe the Bible was inspired, why should you believe what Paul is telling you about its inspiration? If we accepted books as inspired by God just because they claimed to be, we would have to accept the Koran and the Book of Mormon as inspired Scripture. But then we would have a number of very different, indeed, contradictory ideas about God and salvation all claiming to be from Him. That is not a logically valid way to proceed.

Fortunately, even though many Christians do make this logical mistake (the fallacy of circular reasoning or “begging the question”), the case for the inspiration and truth of the Christian Scriptures does not depend on it. There is a very good non-circular case that can be made for the inspiration of the Bible. Christians need to know about it, and non-Christians need to respond to it instead of committing their own fallacy by just refuting the weaker argument. (That would be the straw man fallacy.)

THE NON-CIRCULAR CASE FOR INSPIRATION

The non-circular case for the inspiration of the Bible has the following basic steps. This argument, unlike the circular one, is formally valid. Therefore, we will need to break each of the steps down in detail to see if they stand up. If they do, then the conclusion deserves acceptance. (I will spend a lot of time on Step II because it also gives us the opportunity to answer another pretty important question: What is the basis for our belief that Jesus was raised from the dead? You will see that it is not only supremely important in itself but the foundation for everything else.) Here are the steps:

The Gospels are historically reliable
Based on the historical evidence, Jesus rose from the dead.

If Jesus rose from the dead, then His claims to be the Son of God must be accepted.

If Jesus is the Son of God, then what He taught is true.
Jesus taught that Scripture is true down to its jots and tittles.
Therefore, we accept Scripture as inspired on the authority of Jesus established historically—not just because it claims to be inspired in 2 Tim. 3:16.

OK, let’s see how well these claims stand up.

THE GOSPELS ARE HISTORICALLY RELIABLE DOCUMENTS.

Note that we are not claiming in step one that the Gospels are inspired or inerrant. That would be to fall back into the circular argument. We are only claiming at this point that they are basically reliable historical documents. That is, they might have some minor errors or inconsistencies, but they are generally telling the truth about what happened in the First Century. They are as reliable as any other good historical account.

How can we know that the Gospels are basically trustworthy? There are five well established criteria used by historians to evaluate historical testimony in documents and by lawyers to evaluate legal testimony in court. They are used because they have been found by much practical experience over many years of use to be reliable tools for discerning when witnesses are telling the truth. In each case, the Gospels meet the criteria. They pass the test with flying colors.

The first criterion is proximity to the event. Were you there? Were you physically placed where you could see the event you are testifying about? I.e., did you actually see the cars as they crashed into each other, or did you just look up when you heard the bang? If it is the latter, then your testimony is really worthless in trying to determine whose fault the accident was. In the case of a historical document, did its author even live in a time when he could have been there at the event he records? If not, the testimony is only hearsay. O.K., how does this apply to the Gospels? In the case of the Gospels, three of them were written by eyewitnesses, and the other one (Luke) by a person who did research and interviewed several people who were eyewitnesses. And they were all written within one generation of the life of Christ.[1] The traditional attributions of the Gospels to Apostles and their associates goes back to within a generation or so of the writers themselves and were never seriously questioned until a skeptical age began to look at the documents with an anti-supernatural bias.

Skeptical views of the Gospels require there to have been a long process of evolution whereby the supposedly simple Jesus of history was gradually transformed into the supernatural Jesus of legend, with the Gospels as we have them representing a late stage in that process. But in reality, that process never had time to take place. For example, Acts is Luke volume two, and it ends with Paul still under house arrest in Rome, no later than about AD 64. That places Luke’s Gospel even earlier, around, say, AD 60. That was only thirty years after the crucifixion and resurrection of Christ. There were still too many people around who would have remembered what had actually happened for Luke to have gotten away with fabricating a supernatural Christ out of the supposedly simple Jesus of history. There is not one shred of physical evidence of an earlier source giving us a different Jesus from the one in the Gospels. Furthermore, all four of the canonical Gospels (and no others) were already being quoted as Scripture by the Apostolic Fathers before the end of the First Century. The Apostolic Fathers were the first generation of church leaders after the Apostles themselves, many of whom had actually known Apostles. They assume without argument that their readers will accept those documents as Scripture, which means they had to have already been in circulation for some time. The notion of a gradual evolution of the simple historical Jesus into the divine Christ just does not fit the historical facts.

This does not by itself prove that the men who wrote the Gospels were telling the truth. We need the other criteria to establish that. But it means they could have been telling the truth, and because they were there, we have to take their testimony seriously. It is the first step in establishing their reliability.

The second criterion is multiple attestation. You want eyewitness accounts, and you want more than one of them so their testimony can be compared and thus corroborated. Here we have an excellent sample of witnesses to evaluate: the four Gospel writers themselves, the Apostles Paul, Peter, and James in their epistles, and the multiple witnesses interviewed by Luke in the research he did for his account. That is more direct testimony than practically any other event in ancient history can boast!

Skeptics often complain that all of these sources come from Christians and argue that we should therefore discount them. But surely that is an unfair expectation. Who else would have been motivated to write about these events? Those in direct personal contact with them would either have become followers of Christ motivated to share the facts about Him or enemies of Christ wanting to suppress them. It is hardly shocking that Christians were the ones who wanted to talk about what had happened. Many events of ancient history are attested by only one source. The life of Christ is the best attested event of ancient history.

The third criterion is maybe the most important: consistency—and it has to be the right kind of consistency. You want multiple accounts that are consistent but not identical. Why? If the witnesses contradict each other, then obviously that is a problem. Only one of them at most can be telling the truth, and which one? But if they all say exactly the same thing, that is just as big a problem. Two people observing the same event from different angles are going to see the same thing but see it a little differently. If all of your witnesses say exactly the same thing, you suspect them of having gotten together to fix their testimony. And their motive for doing that is probably that they are colluding and have some agenda other than simply telling the truth as each of them saw it. You suspect they are trying to hide something. So you want their testimony to be consistent, but not identical. That is, you want there to be discrepancies, but not contradictions.

Discrepancies but not contradictions? That is exactly what the Gospels give us! Skeptical scholars always emphasize the discrepancies as if they were contradictions. We must not be intimidated by that tactic. For example, take the question of how many angels were present at the tomb after the resurrection. Luke and John have two; Matthew and Mark only mention one. Well, if there were two angels, there was one. You cannot have two without having one! If Matthew or Mark had said that there was one and only one, we would have a problem; one version of the story at least would be wrong. But the discrepancy is not a contradiction; it leaves the two accounts compatible though not identical. The fact that two of the witnesses only mention one of the angels—the one who spoke—actually increases the credibility of all four accounts rather than diminishing it, for anyone who understands how legal and historical evidence actually works. It shows we have independent testimony that is ultimately compatible rather than people just repeating the same account.

A fourth criterion is that testimony that is embarrassing to the witness gains credibility. These last two criteria depend on well-established truths of human psychology. People like to make themselves look better; they hate to make themselves look bad. So if they are going to doctor their story, it is almost always in ways that are to their own advantage. Nobody goes out of his way to change his story to his own disadvantage. Well, how do the disciples come across in the Gospel narratives? They portray themselves as clueless cowards. The first witnesses to the resurrection are women—people whom that society did not trust and whose testimony was not even accepted in court. Nobody who was making the story up would ever have written it that way. Normally the only reason for including such embarrassing details is that they are actually true. Testimony that is embarrassing to the witness is therefore usually believable.

Finally, we tend to believe testimony from hostile witnesses because the witness has no conceivable motive other than truthfulness for giving it. If my best friend gives me an alibi, it is less impressive than if my worst enemy has to admit that I have one. Well, the New-Testament accounts were all written by Christians, but several of them were written by men who used to be as hostile as they could be to the claims of Christ. That very change of perspective is one of the curious things that have to be explained. Paul was the most zealous persecutor of Christians ever. How did he end up as their most zealous spokesman? James the half-brother of Jesus had not believed in Jesus as the Messiah during Jesus’ earthly ministry. Now he shows up writing an epistle as a leader of the early church. Thomas said he would not believe in the resurrection unless he could personally examine the wounds from the crucifixion in Jesus’ body. None of the clueless disciples was actually expecting Him to rise from the dead. What changed their minds? That is a question to which skeptics ought to give a great deal more attention.

Our conclusion: The Gospels are pretty reliable historical documents. They meet all the criteria and cover all the bases: proximity to the event, multiple attestation, the right kind of consistency, embarrassing testimony, testimony from hostile witnesses. We have to take seriously their version of the events and we should generally believe what they tell us unless we have a very good reason not to. What then do they tell us?

BASED ON THE HISTORICAL EVIDENCE, JESUS ROSE FROM THE DEAD.

Virtually all reputable historians, including secular and skeptical historians, accept and must explain four facts. We are talking about historians with PhDs from accredited universities, not the kind of conspiracy theorists one sees on the History Channel. Not all qualified historians believe in the resurrection, of course, but hardly any trained historian denies the following facts:

Jesus lived and was crucified by the Roman governor, Pontius Pilate;
He was buried in a borrowed tomb;
Three days later the tomb was empty;
Almost immediately his followers were claiming that He had risen and that they had seen him.

Now, if you are playing the game of historical research according to the rules, you have to accept these facts as facts, and then you have to explain them. The simplest explanation is that God raised Jesus from the dead. But of course, that takes a lot of believing, so secular historians have come up with other explanations that do not involve a miracle. But do any of those other explanations actually succeed in accounting for this rather strange collection of stubborn facts?

All of the secular theories trying to account for these facts have fatal flaws. For example, maybe the women got confused in the early morning light and went to the wrong tomb. When it was empty, they falsely assumed that Jesus had risen from the dead, and that is how the rumor got started. There is only one glaring problem with that explanation. If the women had gone to the wrong tomb, then Jesus’ body would still be in the right one. All the Jewish leaders had to do was produce it, and the Christian movement they hated would have been squelched at the outset. Somehow, that never happened.

OK, some people say, maybe Jesus didn’t actually die on the Cross. He was only “mostly dead,” and so was mistakenly buried, but then He revived in the cool of the tomb, let Himself out, and freaked out the guards. The problem with this explanation is its complete ignorance of two pretty pertinent facts: the physiology of crucifixion and the details of First-Century tomb construction. Crucifixion was one of the most brutal deaths ever devised by the perversity of human depravity. Jesus was beat to within an inch of his life beforehand. The whole reason Simon of Cyrene was drafted to help carry the cross was that the soldiers in charge were afraid Jesus would not even make to the execution site. Then He had spikes driven through his wrists and ankles and was hanged that way bleeding for hours. The professional executioners certified Him as dead by puncturing his side with a spear. “Blood and water” flowed out—i.e., blood which had separated into its constituent parts, a clinical sign of death. Even if by some miracle Jesus had survived all of this, He would have been in no condition to extricate Himself from the tomb. (Oh, wait, I thought we were trying to get rid of miracles!) It was sealed by a stone that took four strong men (with places to grip) to remove from the outside. Jesus is supposed to stand up on those shattered ankles and push it away with those shattered wrists from the inside? It takes less faith to believe in the resurrection itself.

OK, what if the disciples wanted to believe in the resurrection so badly that they hallucinated it? In the first place, they were not expecting any such thing. It surprised them when it happened. And in the second place, one of them might have had a hallucination, but all of them? A common hallucination experienced by a group that size just has no credibility at all. That is not the way hallucinations work. But that is what you need to explain all the appearances. Well, what about the story the Jews circulated: that the disciples stole the body? But they were scattered and in hiding after the crucifixion and hardly capable of pulling such a caper off. And if they had, they would have known they were lying. Would all of them have suffered persecution, torture, exile, or death for something they knew was a lie? Maybe one might, but all of them?

The resurrection ends up being the only theory that actually accounts for the facts. History is not capable of giving you an absolute proof, but people who believe that Jesus rose from the dead are making a reasonable conclusion from very solid evidence. The evidence, as such, supports them. You must trust your philosophical bias about what could or could not have happened over the actual evidence in order to reject the resurrection. (See chapters 6-7.) If you want to do that, you can, but you cannot then claim that the Christians are the ones who don’t care about what the evidence says! You cannot claim that you are the only one who cares about the evidence and they just believe in fairy tales. OK, if you accept the evidence, what follows from it?

IF JESUS ROSE FROM THE DEAD, THEN HIS CLAIMS TO BE THE SON OF GOD MUST BE ACCEPTED.

One of the reasons why the case for the resurrection is so convincing is that we are talking about Jesus. A resurrection from the dead takes a lot of believing. But this is not some random dude in some miscellaneous place that we are saying rose from the dead. This is a man whose coming had been prepared by Providence and predicted by prophecy for two thousand years. This is a man whose friends kept asking themselves, “What manner of man is this?” and being compelled to answer that question in theistic terms. This is the reassertion of a life that had already shown itself to be sovereign over life and death. If ever there was a man about whom we could believe such a thing, it is this man: It is Jesus of Nazareth.

The resurrection then is not just a weird happening. It is the high point of God’s testimony to the human race about Jesus. It begins in the prophets who predicted His coming, rises to a climax in the Gospels which narrate it, and continues in the Epistles which explain it: “This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased. Listen to Him!” (Mat. 17:5). The resurrection is the keystone of that testimony. It seals and nails down the truth about who Jesus was: “Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God.” It is the ultimate vindication of Jesus’ own claim that “I and the Father are one.” It assures us that Jesus was indeed nothing less than what He claimed to be: God manifested in human flesh.

IF JESUS IS THE SON OF GOD, THEN WHAT HE TAUGHT IS TRUE.

The resurrection proves that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of the living God. It proves that He is the Way, the truth, and the Life. Therefore, if we accept the conclusion that the resurrection happened, we must accept everything that Jesus taught as true.

JESUS TAUGHT THAT SCRIPTURE IS TRUE DOWN TO ITS JOTS AND TITTLES.

One of the consistent points that Jesus made, attested in multiple statements from multiple sources, is that the Bible is the Word of God, that it is true, and that it should be trusted completely. Because of the Bible’s ultimate Source (God), there is a metaphysical necessity of its statements proving true. The universal explanation of why important things in Christ’s life happened is “But this has happened that the Scriptures might be fulfilled” (Mark 14:49). This necessity reaches all the way down to the “jots and tittles”—Hebrew diacritical markings analogous to our English dotting of the i and crossing of the t. “Not the smallest letter or stroke shall pass away from the Law until all is fulfilled” (Mat. 5:18). And in case you missed it, “The Scriptures cannot be broken” (John 10:35b).

Now, Jesus was of course speaking about the Old Testament. The New Testament had not yet been written when He said those things. But He commissioned His Apostles to speak for Him, and their writings were understood as completing the Old Testament by having the same kind of inspiration it did (See chapter 2). Jesus promised the disciples that the Holy Spirit would teach them all things and help them remember what had happened accurately (John 14:26). Peter counts Paul’s letters as being on the same level as the Old-Testament Scriptures (2 Pet. 3:16) and affirms that the Apostles did not follow cleverly devised tales but were eyewitnesses of Christ’s majesty, and that God used this to “make the prophetic word more sure” (2 Pet. 1:16-21). The New Testament then brings the Old to completion and confirms its message. Having the completed Bible makes us even more sure about the inspiration and truth of each part. Ultimately, we accept it as true because Jesus did, and we trust Jesus.

THEREFORE, WE ACCEPT SCRIPTURE AS INSPIRED ON THE AUTHORITY OF JESUS ESTABLISHED HISTORICALLY—NOT JUST BECAUSE IT CLAIMS TO BE INSPIRED IN 2 TIM. 3:16.

Christians accept the Bible as the Word of God, not just because it claims to be the Word of God, but because Jesus taught us that it is. Aren’t those words of Jesus in the Bible themselves? Yes. But we do not accept them as true because we had already assumed that the Bible is perfectly true. We used the normal criteria of historical research to realize that the Bible is a basically reliable historical document that gives us a believable portrait of Jesus and account of His words. This gives us a compelling basis for accepting His authority. And then from His words we learn that the Bible is more than just a good historical document: It is the inspired and inerrant Word of God. The inspiration of the Bible, the written Word of God, depends on the authority of Jesus, the living Word of God. Indeed. For Christians who understand their faith, everything depends on Jesus. For He is the Christ, the Son of the living God.

[1] If you want to see a more thorough sampling of the evidence that the canonical Gospels were written by eyewitnesses within one generation of the events, see books like F. F. Bruce, The New Testament Documents: Are they Reliable? (Downers Grove, IL: 1960) and Richard Bauckham, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses: The Gospels as Eyewitness Testimony (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, & Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Pr., 2006).

About the Author

Donald T. Williams is a Lecturer at Summit Ministries, Professor at Francis Schaeffer Studies.org, and Past President at the International Society of Christian Apologetics – ISCA