The Bible stands at the heart of the Christian faith. But why should we trust the Bible? Christians need to be able to articulate why they trust Scripture when it comes to understanding who God is, who we are, and how we’re supposed to live.

Bible Gateway interviewed Greg Gilbert (@greggilbert) about his book, Why Trust the Bible? (Crossway, 2015).

You write, “Don’t believe everything you read.” How should people be discerning of what they read, especially in light of the misinformation on the Internet?

Greg Gilbert: The Internet is an incredible phenomenon, isn’t it? We have more information available at the click of a button than any generation in the history of the world. But as Yogi Berra once said, the trouble is that so much of what we think we know just ain’t so! Whether you’re talking about politics or world events or even looking something up on Wikipedia, you can’t just take everything you read at face value. Instead, you have to read widely and deeply, compare and contrast, and most importantly, think. “Information” may be easily available to us, but that doesn’t necessarily mean knowledge is. You still have to work for that.

How do we know that Jesus believed the Bible?

Greg Gilbert: The New Testament is full of instances where Jesus made it clear he believed the Old Testament, from start to finish, was true. In fact, he believed that every word of it was the Word of God himself. He cited it, quoted it, and even used phrases like, “He who created said.” If you read the New Testament, you can’t get around it: Jesus believed the Bible.

You say a person can believe that Jesus rose from the dead before believing that the Bible is the Word of God. Explain what you mean.

Greg Gilbert: What I mean is that the resurrection of Jesus is not just a religious claim. It’s a historical claim. When Christians say Jesus rose from the dead, we don’t mean that he rose spiritually or metaphorically or allegorically. We mean that he did so really and historically—as much as we believe really and historically that Julius Caesar was emperor of Rome or that the signing of the Declaration of Independence happened. So that means we don’t just presuppose somehow that Jesus rose from the dead; we believe it because there is good, solid, historical evidence for it happening. So that’s what I mean: Even if you don’t start with the belief that the documents of the New Testament are the Word of God, you can still look at them as historical documents. You can bring to them the same questions and rigor you would bring to any historical document, and you can come to a good, solid, historical conclusion that, yes, there’s solid reasons to believe that Jesus really did rise from the dead.

What is the “chain of reliability” you speak of?

Greg Gilbert: Any time you’re considering a historical document, there are several questions that immediately spring to mind: If it’s been translated, then is the translation correct? If it’s been copied, then were the copies made accurately? Even if so, can we really trust that the author of this document wasn’t lying or deluded? Can we trust that he really was trying to convey what actually happened? If you can give solid answers to all those questions—yes, the translation is correct; yes, they were copied accurately; yes, the authors are trustworthy—that set of conclusions creates a “chain of reliability” from you (the reader) back to the original author. You can say with good confidence, “The translation is reliable, the copy-work is reliable, and the author himself is reliable,” and it leads you to be able to say, “I can trust that I’m really reading what the author meant to say, and I can trust that the author intended to tell me the truth.”

What’s the difference between mathematical certainty and historical confidence, and what does it have to do with the Bible?

Greg Gilbert: When you’re dealing with historical events, you’re never looking for mathematical, lock-it-down certainty—the kind you get, for example, in an equation like 2+2=4. The fact is, history simply doesn’t have the ability to give that kind of certainty, because someone will always be able to come up with a different story that has a bare chance of being the case. “Maybe the Declaration of Independence was never signed,” someone might say. “Maybe it’s all a giant hoax, and the document in Washington, DC, is a forgery from the 1970s. And since you can’t give logical, mathematical proof that it isn’t, you can’t say for sure that the Declaration was ever signed.” Well okay, maybe that conspiracy story has the barest chance of being true, but if that’s the level of certainty we’re going to require before we can say with confidence that something really did happen, then we’ll never be able to conclude anything about the past!

No, what history looks for is not mathematical certainty, but historical confidence. If our sources seem reliable, and if what they’re telling us seems plausible, we can have strong confidence that what they’re saying happened…really happened. That’s important when we start to consider the Bible because people will often say, “Well, you can’t prove, with mathematical certainty, that Jesus rose from the dead, and therefore I’m not going to believe it.” But that’s the point—of course we can’t do that, any more than we can prove with mathematical certainty that any other historical event happened. But by carefully considering the historical documents that record Jesus’s resurrection, and by coming to some solid conclusions about their historical reliability, we can come to arrive at the highest degree of historical confidence—as high a level as we have for any event in history—that Jesus did in fact rise from the dead.

We take for granted the idea of translating one language into another, but how difficult is it really, especially with the Bible?

Greg Gilbert: Well, it certainly takes a ton of work—years and years of painstaking study of the original language and how it lines up with the target language. But Christians have been studying Greek, Hebrew, and Aramaic for millennia. We know how those languages work, and we know how they interface with modern languages. So although not many of us could sit down all by ourselves and translate the New Testament from Greek to English, there’s absolutely no reason not to have the utmost confidence in the translations we have.

Why should the Bible be taken seriously if its original manuscripts are not available?

Greg Gilbert: Because we don’t have the original manuscripts for most historical documents! If we’re relying on The Original Pieces of Paper, then we can’t take seriously any of Homer’s writings, Tacitus’s, Plato’s, Julius Caesar’s, etc. We can’t believe that there’s such a thing as Magna Carta, and we should turn up our noses, too, at much of what claims to be the Western literary canon.

But the reason we don’t do that is because we don’t need The Original Pieces of Paper to be able to have a solid confidence that we really do know what the originals said. How? Well, there’s more detail in Why Trust the Bible?, but it has to do with comparing the copies we do have from various times and places throughout history. Once you do the detective work required, you can say, “Yea, we may not have the originals, but we know—beyond any intellectually honest shadow of doubt—what the originals said.”

How and when were the individual books of the New Testament chosen to be included?

Greg Gilbert: The most important thing to realize is that the individual books were never chosen by anyone. They were received by each successive generation of Christians. An apostle would write a letter to a church (in Thessalonia, for instance), and those Christians would receive that letter as authoritative and then pass it along to their children as authoritative. As time passed, the various apostolic letters were compiled into collections of authoritative writings. So there was never a time when a group of Christians sat down with a table full of books in order to choose which ones were best. Instead, each generation received from the previous generation a set of books which was understood to be authoritative, so that the vast majority of what we now call the New Testament was widely recognized by the middle of the 2nd century.

Now, that doesn’t mean that received tradition was never challenged. It was. Sometimes a group would insist that their book should be included, and other times a group would insist that a book already in the tradition should be excluded. So the early Christians had a set of tests, or questions, they would ask of the books, to determine if they should remain in the canon (when challenged) or be included in it (when presented for inclusion). Suffice it to say here that there was no grand conspiracy to choose the books most favorable to some cabal of bishops, and the early Christians had very good reasons for identifying the books they did as being the authoritative record of the life and teaching of Jesus.

What’s the logical conclusion to make if the Bible is reliable?

Greg Gilbert: If the Bible is reliable, then the logical conclusion to draw is that what the authors are saying really is true—above all, that they witnessed Jesus being crucified and then raised from the dead. And once you grant that, “Yes, it really is highly likely that Jesus rose from the dead—not just religiously or metaphorically, but historically”—then everything changes. All of a sudden, you realize that the deeper question, the one that the Bible has been pointing to all along, is really “Is Jesus reliable?” Is he really who he said he is? Does he really do what he says he came to do? Once you arrive at a trust in the Bible, you walk into a whole new world of learning about the man who stands at its heart and center—Jesus, who is called Christ.

What do you hope will be the result for people who read Why Trust the Bible??

Greg Gilbert: I have several hopes for the book. Most directly, it’s written to people who are already Christians in order to help them understand better not just that they believe the Bible, but why they do. We live in a world where belief in God, belief in Jesus, and belief in the Bible do not stand unchallenged. And that means that if we’re going to do the work of proclaiming the gospel of Jesus to a skeptical, unbelieving world, we’re going to have to know why we believe it ourselves—and be able to explain that and even press it on others.

Besides that, I also hope people will use Why Trust the Bible? as a conversation-starter with non-Christian friends. So many of the non-Christians I talk with start with the assumption that belief in the Bible (and therefore Jesus) is fundamentally irrational, that if you’re going to believe all this stuff, you’re just going to have to take a “leap of faith” and believe it for no good reason. But that’s not the nature of Christian faith at all. We believe in Jesus because there is solid reason to believe in him. And what’s more, those aren’t reasons that are convincing only to the already-convinced. They’re reasons that can be pressed on people, used to challenge people, deployed to—as Peter put it in one of his letters—”make a case for the hope that is in you.”

What are your thoughts about Bible Gateway and the Bible Gateway App?

Greg Gilbert: It’s an excellent, excellent resource! My wife and I both use it as our go-to Bible app. The interface is beautiful and user-friendly, and the tools are super useful in learning quickly and efficiently.

Bio: Greg Gilbert (MDiv, The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary) is senior pastor at Third Avenue Baptist Church in Louisville, Kentucky. He’s the author of What Is the Gospel?, Who Is Jesus?, and James: A 12-Week Study, and is the co-author (with Kevin DeYoung) of What Is the Mission of the Church?.