Can You Trust the Bible?
My Mailbag Ministry
Glorious Day My Precious Fellow Traveler -
I love writing these posts. But they take a great of time and toil because God demands and deserves our best efforts.
My prayer for 2026 is that I can stop having to do other, less fulfilling things and instead support this page fulltime. I’ll be able to do that only with the support of Paid Subscribers, but I’m surrendering the entire matter to God.
From the bottom of my heart, thank you to my Paid Subscribers from 48 states and 35 nations for supporting my ministry, which is committed to speaking truth with love … to a world sorely in need of both.
To God alone be the glory!
Amen.
Can You Trust the Bible?
This question came to me from a young man:
Good evening, I pray all is well. I just finished your book “Believing is Seeing” and I’ve learned a lot. It’s a great book. But I do have a question - just one - and I hope you can shine some light to it.
Just to start off, I do question everything, even my worldview, all the time, in search for some loose threads that can be pulled. One of them regards the missing Bible verses. Such as the verse John 8:11, where Jesus tells the woman caught in adultery, “Go and sin no more.” This is not found in the earliest manuscript of the Gospel of John, which leads scholars to believe it was an addition to the texts centuries later.
The question is this: How can we continue to believe in the credibility of the Bible when many Bible verses in the New Testament were never there?
My Dear Fellow Traveler -
Thank you for reading Believing Is Seeing and for your excellent question.
Communicating by any method - be it smoke signals, images, sign language, speech, written words, you name it - inevitably comes with uncertainties.
So the universal question we all face is this: How can we ever be 100% certain that any message we receive from anyone, any time, using any method, is trustworthy?
The short answer is, never.
So, what’s a person to do? What’s the most reasonable way to cope with this fundamental uncertainty in life? What’s the most reasonable way to live?
Some people choose to live with extreme skepticism. Rene Descartes, the 17th-century French philosopher and co-author of the modern scientific method, chose to question even his very own existence. He wondered: “How can I be 100% sure that I exist?”
In the end Descartes resolved his extreme skepticism by deciding that his very skepticism – his very act of questioning his existence - proved that he existed! Cogito, ergo sum.
But even that conclusion didn’t solve another favorite conundrum of the extreme skeptic: How can I be 100% certain that everything else, besides myself, actually exists? Perhaps everything other than myself exists solely in my imagination.
Not a great way to live, in my opinion. Nor is it the way science sees reality.
Enter the necessity of faith.
We, for example, have zero direct evidence that Socrates ever existed. We have only indirect evidence of his existence, primarily from his pupil Plato and ancient Greek philosopher Xenophon. Which means it requires faith for us to believe that Socrates was a real person and not a figment of Plato’s fertile imagination.
The same critique can be made concerning many historical figures from antiquity for whose existence we have little or no direct evidence: Euclid, Alexander the Great, Homer, Lao Tzu, Pythagoras, to name a few.
Also, you’ve never met me, nor spoken to me. Yet you have enough faith that I exist and wrote a book called Believing Is Seeing that you reached out to me via social media – having faith, furthermore, that social media was trustworthy enough to deliver your message to me – and, furthermore, having some measure of faith that I might see your message and respond to it, and on and on.
I trust you understand my point: Our choice in this world is not between leading a life with faith or leading a life without faith. Being alive, leading any semblance of a functional life, requires faith. The only wild card is what you choose to have faith in.
Which brings us to your one question: How can I be 100% certain the Bible is trustworthy? After all, there’s this pesky Bible verse that doesn’t appear in the earliest versions of the Gospel of John.