Judging the Bible Without Reading it

In the late 1990s, I was asked by a professor at a local community college to teach a class on Christianity in their Religion 101 course. I agreed and spent nearly an hour explaining the reliability of the Bible, the claims and some of the evidences regarding Jesus, His life, death, and physical resurrection. Of course, it was just an overview. Only so much can be done in an hour. Before we finished, I invited questions. An adventurous student raised his hand, certain he was going to stump me with something I had never heard. He asserted, “You can‘t trust the Bible. It has been translated over and over, and it is full of mistakes.” I thanked him for expressing his concerns and proceeded to hand him my Bible, asking him to provide us with a few examples of the errors. He was caught off guard a bit and sheepishly responded that he hadn’t actually read the Bible. I asked how it was, then, that he was so sure it was full of mistakes? He replied that he had heard that was the case. I pressed a bit more for the source of his knowledge on this topic. He didn’t know. I followed up, wondering who he had heard it from. Again, he had no recollection. I then posed a different question.

“Doesn’t it concern you that you are gambling your eternal destiny based on information that you picked up from a source you can’t recall, and from someone who may or may not be reliable? Doesn’t that bother you even a little bit?”

—Don Veinot (Bible Teacher, co-founder and president of Midwest Christian Outreach, Inc., a mission to cults and non-Christian religions)