I came into your site because I was interested in what you had to say about reincarnation. I got to looking around and first I do whish to say that it is a wonderful site. I do have some problems with it though. I have been baptized a Baptist. Of course. I used to believe as you do. I have done alot of study on the Bible and other religions. I still believe in Jesus and that he died for my sins. I love the lord with all my heart and soul. But I do not believe that my father would send me to a place of fire and torment. I have the gift of discernment of the spirit. This has been accepted by several churches in my area. I can tell you all about a person after a short time with them and I see spirits, ghosts demons whatever you wish to call them. I can also see into the future somewhat. I do not try to do any of this, it just happens when it happens. This is a gift the lord gave me. Yet you people tell me I am going to hell for it.

I have found several contradictions in the bible myself, a book that I would at one time have died for. I spent a long time asking God to show me the truth. I believe he did. And still is.

I never picked up a bible till I was 24 years old. I went to church when I was younger, but never payed a whole lot of attention, because I did not feel they were teaching the true word of God. I was 6 years old when I realized this. I am very happy that you love the lord so very much. But even Jesus stated that the Bible would be Tampered with and those that did it would be punished. So why is it so hard to believe that it has happened? You are so ready to believe all the others things that have come true so why not this? Alot of God’s word was not even put in the Bible. Do some research yourself on reincarnation and the old church, the older christian belief, and you will find the lost words of Jesus. Did you know that they destroyed the original Bible when they wrote the new King James Version, and then told everybody that it was the original? I believe that you have to worry about being decieved also. Just like the rest of us we must learn the truth for ourselves and stop depending on everyone but God. He says do not trust man, but only him.

Hello _____,

Although (as you yourself realize) we would disagree about the issue of reincarnation, it seems that the more fundamental issue about which we would differ is the Bible — particularly whether or not it is a trustworthy message from God.

You said you found some contradictions in the Bible, but you didn’t say what they were. Have you ever attempted to see if there might be good explanations for such alleged Bible difficulties? If not, and if you’re interested in exploring this issue, please allow me to recommend the following site: www.tektonics.org. This site has explanations for hundreds of alleged Bible difficulties.

You also said that the Bible was destroyed at the time of the King James translation. I’m afraid your information is incorrect on this point. For instance, we have thousands of New Testament manuscripts going all the way back to the early second century. The King James translation wasn’t done until 1611 — hundreds of years after our earliest manuscripts (which we still have). So it’s simply not true to say that the Bible was destroyed at this time. If you would like to explore this issue further, please visit Bible.org at http://www.bible.org/topic.asp?topic_id=5. Here you will find dozens of articles about the Bible by very competent and capable Christian scholars.

Hope these resources prove helpful. Thanks again for writing and God bless you!

Michael Gleghorn
Probe Ministries

© 2006 Probe Ministries

You Bible-thumping Christians are so deluded and stupid. The Bible has been so changed and translated and mistranslated over time that it can’t be trusted. Didn’t you play the telephone game when you were a kid? Whatever the first person whispered to the second person, is going to be very different from what the last person hears. Stop acting as if you have all the answers–your Bible is a book of myths.

You’re in good company; a lot of people think that way because they simply don’t know the facts about how trustworthy the Bible really is. When you find out the truth about how the Bible has been handed down from one generation to the next, your charge will have as much significance as proclaiming that courts have no basis for determining the constitutionality of issues since the Constitution was written so long ago we can’t know what it originally said.

But we can go back to the original Constitution and check, right?

We don’t have the original biblical documents, but we have the next best thing: thousands of copies of the original New Testament manuscripts, by which we can determine what was originally said. The Center for the Study of New Testament Manuscripts (www.csntm.org) tells me that the current number is about 5500 copies of just the Greek New Testament, and when we combine the Greek with all translations in the various languages before the printing press was invented, there are a staggering 15,000 copies of NT manuscripts in existence, with more being found every day!

Greg Koukl of Stand to Reason (www.str.org) helps illustrate how Bible scientists (the discipline of textual criticism) can assure us of the Bible’s accuracy:

RECONSTRUCTING AUNT SALLY’S LETTER

Pretend your Aunt Sally learns in a dream the recipe for an elixir that preserves her youth. When she wakes up, she scribbles the directions on a scrap of paper, then runs to the kitchen to make up her first glass. In a few days Aunt Sally is transformed into a picture of radiant youth because of her daily dose of “Sally’s Secret Sauce.”

Aunt Sally is so excited she sends detailed, hand-written instructions on how to make the sauce to her three bridge partners (Aunt Sally is still in the technological dark ages–no photocopier or email). They, in turn, make copies for ten of their own friends.

All goes well until one day Aunt Sally’s pet schnauzer eats the original copy of the recipe. In a panic she contacts her three friends who have mysteriously suffered similar mishaps, so the alarm goes out to the others in attempt to recover the original wording.

Sally rounds up all the surviving hand-written copies, twenty-six in all. When she spreads them out on the kitchen table, she immediately notices some differences. Twenty-three of the copies are exactly the same. Of the remaining three, however, one has misspelled words, another has two phrases inverted (“mix then chop” instead of “chop then mix”) and one includes an ingredient none of the others has on its list.

Do you think Aunt Sally can accurately reconstruct her original recipe from this evidence? Of course she can. The misspellings are obvious errors. The single inverted phrase stands out and can easily be repaired. Sally would then strike the extra ingredient, reasoning it’s more plausible one person would add an item in error than 25 people would accidentally omit it.

Even if the variations were more numerous or more diverse, the original could still be reconstructed with a high level of confidence if Sally had enough copies.

This, in simplified form, is how scholars do “textual criticism,” an academic method used to test all documents of antiquity, not just religious texts. It’s not a haphazard effort based on hopes and guesses; it’s a careful linguistic process allowing an alert critic to determine the extent of possible corruption of any work.{1}

When the thousands of copies of manuscripts (far more than for any other document of antiquity) are compared, we can know that the New Testament is 99.5% textually pure. In the entire text of 20,000 lines, only 40 lines are in doubt (about 400 words), and none affects any significant doctrine.{2}

Even if all the manuscripts in the whole world were to disappear, the New Testament is so comprehensively quoted by early church letters, essays and other extra-biblical sources that we could still reconstruct almost the entire testament.

We have a much fuller explanation of this in our article “Are the Biblical Documents Reliable?” at www.probe.org/are-the-biblical-documents-reliable

The historical evidence for the reliability of the biblical documents is so great that we can rest assured that the Bible we read today is the same Bible that God intended for us to have from the very beginning.

Wishing you well,

Sue Bohlin

Probe Ministries

Notes

1. Greg Koukl, Solid Ground, Jan/Feb 2005, Stand to Reason.

2. Norman Geisler and William Nix, The Text of the New Testament (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968), p. 475.