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Christianity, Fiction, Faith Or Fact

For well over two thousand years the validity of the Bible and the stories it contains have been a subject of extensive debate. At some point in all of our lives, we are faced with the question, who do we say Jesus is? A prophet? A moral teacher? A heretic? The Son of God? Who is Jesus? This is a question I have been researching for almost 2 decades. There are several different angles that we can look at this that we will be discussing.

The first area is one we see is looking back through the history of Christianity. The first instance of this happened to the apostle Paul on the road to Damascus which is one of the most famous of all stories. Paul was a highly trained Pharisee, one of the most knowledged of them was totally dedicated to the following of the Torah and pharisaical law. Paul comes into the picture about twenty years after the crucifixion of Christ. He felt that anyone that would challenge his beliefs was of the devil and had to be dealt with. Christ, the disciples, and their followers were directly challenging some of the laws that the apostle Paul felt so strongly about. Therefore he made it his mission to incarcerate and kill Christians in an effort to save “the faith”. On the road to Damascus God appeared to him and told him to change his ways and preach God’s salvation. The apostle was well-known of and there are lots of writings about this radical change from both before and after this episode by both Christ believers and pagans. The same can be said about the miracles performed by God and His disciples from throughout the Roman Empire.

No other religion, to my knowledge, has demonstrated the thousands and thousands of cases where there has been a complete change in personality and somebody that has accepted Christ as their Savior. Every single incident has been a change for the better. There are also thousands of cases of individuals who have been diagnosed with terminal illnesses after extensive testing by trained physicians and surgeons have mysteriously disappeared after prayer. One of them I know of personally where an individual was diagnosed with stage IV, possibly stage V uterine cancer. That prior to surgery she is given extensive pre-operative testing that confirmed the condition beyond a shadow of a doubt along with the fact that the cancer was metastasizing at a rapid rate. After coming home from the testing she received prayer for healing by the Lord. The following day the doctors started the surgery and there is not even a trace of cancer of any form. Even some of the surgeons that were non-Christian stated it was a miracle.

Another area that indicates the validity of the story, is all the writings about the crucifixion and everything that happened around that time. There are lots of writings by historians that did not even believe in Christ including writings by Pontius Pilate himself who gave the order to crucify Christ.

Christ’s death on the cross was witnessed by lots of believers and nonbelievers. Also after His resurrection Christ was seen by over 500 individuals who again were both believers and nonbelievers and the instances were documented. Also 100 percent of all the prophecies made about Christ in the Old Testament have come to pass exactly as therefore told to every detail.

It is widely accepted that the Gospel of Mark was written first, sometime between 60 and 75 A.D., that Matthew and Luke were written between 60 and 85 A.D., and that John was written last sometime between 65 and 95 A.D. These dates are all within 30 to 65 years of Jesus’s death and resurrection. (Compare this to other religions–whose books were “discovered” a few hundred years or more after the fact…).

Furthermore, the letters from Paul to the early churches were written even before the gospels, in the late 40s to 50s. That’s only 20 years after Jesus’s death and resurrection, And the creeds Paul mentions in his letters would have been formulated by the early church even before then–as early as the first couple of years after Jesus’ death and resurrection–certainly not enough time for a small group of Jewish people to make up a crazy story and get away with it!

One last category I will get into is the hundreds of archaeological finds that since the mid 1980’s are coming to the surface all the time. These include the confirm the finding of Noah’s Ark, the exact location of the crossing of the Exodus where actual chariot parts and animal bones have been found, just to mention a few. Also the famous discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls written long before the time of Christ that confirm the accuracy of the writings of the Bible a lot of them down to almost a word by word accuracy. The most famous one is the book of Isaiah of which there are several different manuscripts found that are 99.9 percent accurate to the current version we read today.

These are only a small fraction of the different foods we have as the accuracy of the Bible. My first book “The Mysteries of the Bible, the Seal of God”, the first of four books I have written, is scheduled to be released this coming fall or winter. The entire book is dedicated to proof of the Bible and its contents. Statisticians placed the odds of the Bible just being a story to probabilities I couldn’t even publish just the probability on over thirty pages. (I.E. 1:100,000,000,000,000,000…).