Can We Trust The Bible? | September 27 | Aaron Westera


If we’re ever going to follow the writing in the Bible, we need to learn to trust it as an ancient writing. We’ll be looking how manuscripts, translation, textual criticism, and ancient documents actually work. Every English Bible is already an interpretation, and the many different translations are often because of different approaches or trying to accomplish different purposes. In reading scripture we’re not called to turn our brains off, but the Bible being this way, having us work to understand it, is intentional. The existence of textual variants and translation disagreements is not the devastating problem people sometimes imagine it to be. We can have confidence in the text we possess which draws us to engage with the writings. After thousands of years of copying and translating, can we really trust that the Bible in our hands faithfully communicates what its authors wrote? Why are there so many different translations and which one is “the best”?"