Lecture 7: Proving Inspiration: Seven Evidences That This Is God’s Word

The lecture, section by section

1. Beyond because my mother said so

   Patton opens with his own story: he believed the Bible was God’s word because his mother read it to him, and there came a day when he realized that many children trust many books on exactly that authority. The session’s question is whether the Bible can be known to be God’s word by someone who does not already assume it. When the class shares its own reasons, feeling, conviction, changed lives, the teachers receive them warmly and then press: those are subjective arguments, and every religion makes them. Subjective testimony is real and valid, but only an objective foundation keeps it from being a coin flip, and the two must work together.

2. Evidence one: the Scriptures claim it

   Self-attestation comes first, honestly labeled: the Bible claims inspiration in many places and many ways, thus says the Lord across the prophets, Paul’s God-breathed, Peter’s men carried by the Spirit. Standing alone this is question-begging, since any book can claim inspiration. But the claim matters: a book that never claimed to be God’s word could not be tested as God’s word. Self-attestation puts the claim on the table and invites the tests that follow.

3. Evidence two: a book like no other

   The Bible is sixty-six documents of different genres, by more than forty authors from every walk of life, fishermen and kings, physicians, shepherds, and tax collectors, written on three continents in three languages across fifteen hundred years. Think of it less like a book than a newspaper full of different writers, except that its pieces cohere into one story. Precisely this diversity sets it up for failure if it is not God’s word: a single author writing one volume would be easy to keep consistent, but forty authors across fifteen centuries could not conspire. It is the most translated, best-selling, and most attacked book in history, and the teachers welcome the attacks: a book making this claim ought to be critiqued, and it was the need to bind these writings together that drove the invention of the codex, the book itself.

4. History first: the order of the argument

   The method matters more than any single evidence: the Scriptures must be examined first as history, not first as inspiration, or the whole case begs the question. Christianity, the teachers insist, would not fall if the Bible were not inspired; it would fall if the Bible were not historical, because it rests on events, above all a resurrection presented as fact. If Christ historically rose, Christianity is true, and everything else follows. So the Bible goes into the dock like any ancient document, judged by internal evidence, what is inside it, and external evidence, what stands outside it.

5. Internal evidence: the embarrassing honesty of the Bible

   The most overlooked mark of authenticity is that the Bible tells the truth about its own heroes. The Israelites whined, David murdered, Peter denied, the apostles fled, Moses raged, Jacob deceived, Noah got drunk, Solomon served idols, Jonah ran, and at the end of the last book John himself falls down and worships an angel. Nations do not write history this way: Assyrian annals record only victories, Egypt never recorded the Exodus, and even Josephus glosses Israel’s failures. The teachers cite A. W. Pink’s old study of inspiration: a forged history would have clothed its friends with every virtue, while Scripture paints its most distinguished persons in the colors of truth. The books do not even close their own arguments: read Judges or Genesis alone and you cannot say what the embellishment would be for. Nobody makes up a story in which nobody, including the writer, comes off well.

6. Internal evidence: the irrelevant details

   Working from Gregory Boyd’s letters to his skeptical father, the teachers walk the resurrection account of John 20 line by line: while it was still dark; Mary Magdalene first, an incriminating detail, since a woman’s testimony was inadmissible; the beloved disciple’s modest self-reference; the footrace to the tomb and who won it; the low entrance; the one who would not go in; the face cloth folded up by itself. None of this advances a thesis, and in a culture where texts were written to be heard and remembered, extra detail carried real cost. Irrelevant detail is precisely what embellishment omits and honest recollection includes, and the teachers warn against the opposite error too: these details attest history, and are not each a hidden sermon waiting to be preached.

7. Internal evidence: tensions, inversions, and ambiguities

   Fabricators resolve; Scripture leaves tensions standing: predestination beside responsibility, three persons and one God, one Christ fully divine and fully human. Fabricators flatter their movement; Scripture inverts every expectation: the king born in a stable and worshiped by shepherds, life gained by losing it, abundant life that looks like martyrdom. And fabricators explain their inventions; Scripture leaves genuine ambiguities unexplained: baptism for the dead in 1 Corinthians 15, which no one in church history has decoded; the keys of the kingdom in Matthew 16; the promise of Genesis 3:15, the protoevangelium, obscure to Eve and to Moses and unveiled only in Christ. A writer inventing a text explains his inventions; a writer recording what happened writes past his readers the way we all do in real letters. Even the fourfold Gospel bears this mark: four accounts consistent enough for one story, distinct enough in perspective and detail to be independent witnesses, exactly what a courtroom trusts and colluding witnesses never produce.

8. Extraordinary claims and the absence of motive

   When the Bible claims miracles it names times, places, and witnesses, in public, where the claims could be tested and disproven, unlike the secret or faraway wonders of other religious books. And there is no motive for fabrication: the men who wrote the Gospels gained nothing but persecution, and death stared at them every time they preached. The teachers tell of Simon Greenleaf, the great Harvard authority on legal evidence, challenged by a student to apply his own science to the resurrection: his study concluded that no unbiased jury, weighing the evidence, could find that it did not happen. To read the documents as fabrications, the teachers argue, is not to follow the historical evidence but to be led by an anti-supernaturalistic bias, and that bias should at least be named as the faith commitment it is.

9. External evidence: spades, historians, and a hostile world

   Outside the text, the witness converges. Archaeology has repeatedly overturned the skeptics: the Hittites were dismissed as legend until they were dug up; the census objection collapsed when the governor of Syria proved to have served twice; the late dating of John burned up in the light of the Rylands papyrus; and an inscription naming the house of David finally surfaced in the 1990s. The teachers cite the archaeologist Nelson Glueck’s judgment that no archaeological discovery has ever controverted a biblical reference. More than thirty-nine extra-biblical sources attest over a hundred facts about Jesus: Josephus’s notice of the wise man and wonder-worker, read honestly with its likely Christian insertions bracketed; Pliny the Younger on Christians singing to Christ as to a god and binding themselves against fraud and adultery; Suetonius on the expulsion from Rome over Chrestus; Tacitus on Christus executed under Pontius Pilate in the reign of Tiberius; Thallus, preserved in a later writer, disputing whether the darkness at the crucifixion was an eclipse, an argument that presupposes the darkness. And the story survived in a hostile environment where opponents had every motive to refute it and never produced the refutation, unlike official accounts that do not fit the facts, which, as the Kennedy assassination shows, stay contested forever.

10. The case study: the resurrection

    All the criteria converge on the central claim. Honesty: the disciples abandoned Christ, disbelieved the first reports, and let women stand as first witnesses. Harmony: four perspectives, differing in details like the count of angels, agreeing in the event, which is how independent testimony behaves; a minor tension does not overturn a historical fact. Extraordinary claims: public, named, datable, testable. Motive: none, for the apostles died not for something taught to them, as modern martyrs do, but for something they claimed to have seen, and men do not die for what they know they invented. Externally: no one, then or since, has produced a body. The alternatives fail one by one: liars who die for a known lie; eyewitnesses of three years who forget a face; body thieves with no motive who cannot explain the appearances; and the swoon theory’s shredded, pierced survivor convincing anyone he was the risen Lord of life. Historically, the teachers conclude, the resurrection stands unless a prior bias forbids it.

11. The prophetic element: God’s standing challenge

    The Bible is the only religious book that foretells the future in detail and then invites its readers to test it by the results. In Isaiah 46 God issues what the teachers call his standing apologetic challenge: present your argument, produce your evidence; declare the things to come, that we may know you are gods. Hundreds of prophecies answer that challenge, and above them all Isaiah 53: the despised man of sorrows, pierced for our transgressions, silent before his shearers, assigned a grave with the wicked yet with a rich man in his death, written seven centuries before Christ and preserved in a Dead Sea manuscript a century and a half before him, so no one can claim it was written after the fact. Patton tells of opening that chapter for a committed atheist who stared at the page in silence for ten minutes and then asked whether there was anything else in the Bible like it. There is: some six hundred prophecies concerning Christ, direct and indirect.

12. The last three evidences, and the comparison

    The remaining evidences complete the seven. The testimony of Christ: following the apologist Gary Habermas, prove the resurrection historically and everything else falls like dominoes, for the risen Christ’s authority confirms the Old Testament he affirmed and commissions the apostles whose signs validated the New, their martyrdoms sealing the testimony. The life-changing ability of Scripture: the word that Hebrews 4 calls living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, judging the thoughts and intentions of the heart, has demonstrably done so in millions of lives. And the testimony of the Holy Spirit: the sheep hear the Shepherd’s voice, the subjective seal the book itself predicts. Set any rival on the same chart and the difference is stark: one author, one place, a few decades, untestable wonders, and, for the final proof, a prayer for a burning in the bosom. Only the last two evidences, the subjective ones, can be claimed by every book; the first five belong to the Bible alone, and that is exactly what one would expect of the word of God.

1. Patton describes moving from because my mother said so to a faith he had tested. Where did your own confidence in Scripture come from, and which of the seven evidences would you now put first if a thoughtful skeptic asked you why you believe?

2. The teachers argue that the apostles died for what they claimed to have seen, not for what they had been taught, and that this distinguishes them from every modern martyr. How does that distinction change the way you weigh their testimony, and how would you explain it to someone who says all religions have martyrs?

3. God’s challenge in Isaiah 46 is to produce evidence, and Isaiah 53 silenced an atheist for ten minutes. Read Isaiah 53 aloud this week as if for the first time: what in it can you not explain apart from divine inspiration, and who in your life needs to sit with that chapter?