Over the next few months I am going to write a few articles defending the Christian faith. Today, I would like to write in defense of the Bible’s reliability. I had a professor at Western Michigan University who scoffed at the Bible saying it was full of editing through the years to support what Christians wanted it to say. Since my Western World Civilization course some interesting things happened in archeology to support the reliability of the Bible:

First, the Dead Sea Scrolls were uncovered in 1947. One of the scrolls discovered was an ancient copy of Isaiah. This scroll, dating to approximately 100 B.C. was found to be identical to the Modern Hebrew Bible in over ninety-five percent of the text. The remaining five percent consisted chiefly of obvious slips of the pen or variations in spelling. This is just one example of many that shows how wrong my professor was. In the wake of the Dead Sea Scrolls discovery, William F. Albright, one of the world's most renowned archaeologists, stated:

The excessive skepticism shown toward the Bible by important historical schools of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, certain phrases of which still appear periodically, has been progressively discredited. Discovery after discovery has established the accuracy of innumerable details, and has brought increased recognition to the value of the Bible as a source of history.

Second, I remember my Western World Civilization professor mocking the fact that the Bible got history wrong. He stated that there was no historical evidence for a people named the “Hittites” that were mentioned over 50 times in the Bible. Well my professor was wrong again. Archaeologists have now identified many extra biblical references to the Hittite civilization. But the real jackpot is the discovery and excavation of the ancient Hittite capital city of Hattusa (modern day Boðazköy in northern Turkey). The rediscovery of this ancient civilization has vindicated the Biblical record.