If the Bible Was Written by Humans, Is It Reliable?

How the Bible Was Formed Q+R (E5) — What is the relationship between the written word of the Bible and Jesus as the Word at the beginning of creation? How do we reconcile the Bible’s editing process with Scriptures that forbid adding or taking away from God’s word? And what should we do with other writings that closely followed the New Testament? In this episode, Tim and Jon respond to your questions from our How the Bible Was Formed series. Thank you to our audience for your thoughtful contributions to this episode!

Timestamps:
Intro (0:00-1:16)
Do you have any new learnings or discoveries since the Making of the Bible series? (1:16-7:45)
Does the Bible being written by humans, but inspired by God, change its reliability? (7:45-17:07)
What is the relationship between the written word of the Bible and Jesus as the Word at creation? (17:07-31:00)
How do you reconcile humans editing the Bible during its development with Scriptures that command not to add to or take away from God's Word? (31:00-42:18)
What should we do with other writings that closely followed the New Testament? (42:18-1:00:46)
Outro (1:00:46-1:02:52)

Referenced Resources:
The first question references the Making of the Bible series from Tim’s podcast Exploring My Strange Bible.
The Journey from Texts to Translations: The Origin and Development of the Bible by Paul D. Wegner
The Apostolic Fathers in English by Michael W. Holmes
New Testament Apocrypha, vol. 1: More Noncanonical Scriptures, edited by Tony Burke
The Apocryphal New Testament, edited by J. K. Elliott
Check out our newly released video series, The Deuterocanon / Apocrypha.
You can view annotations for this episode—plus our entire library of videos, podcasts, articles, and classes—in the BibleProject app, available for Android and iOS.

Show Music:
BibleProject theme song by TENTS

Show Credits:
Production of today’s episode is by Lindsey Ponder, producer, and Cooper Peltz, managing producer. Tyler Bailey is our supervising engineer, who edited today’s episode and also provided the sound design and mix. JB Witty does our show notes, and Hannah Woo provides the annotations for our app. Our host and creative director is Jon Collins, and our lead scholar is Tim Mackie.