I appreciate you sharing your perspective honestly. You’re raising questions a lot of thoughtful people have asked about the Bible’s reliability, its transmission, and whether its claims are credible. These are fair questions, and they deserve more than dismissive answers.
I’m curious though, where are you drawing some of these conclusions from? When you say the Bible was “crudely recorded and translated by people who could write many centuries later,” what sources or scholarship are you basing that on? And the claim about “numerous people input their version of events without collaboration,” are you referring to specific books or the Bible as a whole? I ask because these are common assumptions, but they don’t actually match what we know from historical and textual scholarship.
The New Testament manuscripts, for example, are extraordinarily well-attested compared to other ancient documents. We have fragments dating within decades of the original writings and thousands of manuscripts that allow scholars to reconstruct the text with remarkable accuracy. The Gospels themselves show clear signs of eyewitness detail and were written within the lifetime of people who could have corrected false accounts if they were being invented.
For the Old Testament, the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls in 1947 was a game-changer. These scrolls included copies of biblical texts that were about a thousand years older than any manuscripts we previously had. When scholars compared them to the later manuscripts, they found the text had been preserved with stunning accuracy. This shows that the scribes who copied Scripture treated it with meticulous care, not carelessness. This isn’t crude transmission; it’s some of the most carefully preserved ancient literature we have.
The Bible wasn’t assembled haphazardly either. It was written over centuries by multiple authors, across different cultures and contexts, yet it tells a unified story pointing to Jesus Christ. That level of coherence, despite the diversity of human authorship, is one reason many find it compelling.
You’re right that the Bible contains accounts of miraculous events, things that don’t happen within the normal course of nature. But here’s the key question: If God exists and if He created the universe, would miracles be impossible? Or would they simply be God acting within His own creation? The real issue isn’t whether miracles can happen. It’s whether God exists. Christianity doesn’t ask you to believe impossible things for no reason. It centers on the resurrection of Jesus, a historical claim that can be examined. The earliest Christians were willing to die for their testimony that they saw Him alive after His crucifixion. That doesn’t prove it happened, but it does show they genuinely believed it. Hardly the behaviour of myth-makers or liars.
Every worldview requires faith in some foundational beliefs that can’t be exhaustively proven, whether that’s naturalism, materialism, or theism. Or even atheism! Christianity claims that God has revealed Himself in history, supremely in the person of Jesus Christ. The question isn’t whether the Bible contains stories (it does), but whether those stories are true. I believe they are, not because I’ve abandoned reason, but because the evidence, the internal consistency of Scripture, the transformation it brings, and the person of Jesus all point to something real and trustworthy.
I don’t expect to resolve all your doubts in a short exchange, and I respect that you’ve clearly thought about this. If you’re genuinely open to examining the evidence, books like The Reason for God by Tim Keller or Can We Trust the Gospels? by Peter J. Williams lay out the case in accessible ways.
I’m not asking you to shut off your brain or ignore your questions. Christianity invites scrutiny. Jesus Himself said, “I am the way, the truth, and the life” (John 14:6). Truth doesn’t fear honest investigation.