#STRask - How Would You Argue That the Unity of the Bible Is Evidence It’s from God?

Episode Date: September 10, 2026

Questions about how the unity of the Bible can be evidence it’s from God if the books could have been cherry-picked later, whether the fact that some passages in our Bibles aren’t canonical means every part of the Bible can be called into question, and why the Gospels don’t tell who wrote them.   How would you argue that the unity of the Bible is evidence it’s from God? Couldn’t a skeptic object that one could come up with any unified story given enough ancient sources and a good deal of cherry-picking? If certain passages in our Bibles are not true, canonical, or inspired, doesn’t that mean every part of the Bible can be called into question? When I’m asked why the Gospels don’t tell who wrote them, what is the best way to answer?

You're listening to Greg Kokel and Amy Hall on hashtag STR Ask, and hopefully that is not a surprise to you. Hopefully you're listening on purpose. All right. Greg, we're going to start with a question from Jay. All right. How would you sketch out the argument for biblical unity as an evidence of its being from God? Couldn't a skeptic object that one could come up with any unified story given enough ancient sources and a good deal of cherry picking? Well, just—

He says this question is mostly in reference to the Old Testament. Yeah. An important detail here is there's a difference between an assertion and an argument. So part of the challenge here from the skeptic is couldn't the same thing be done with any ancient whatever? And, okay, show me. that's I mean that would be incumbent upon them I hear so frequently the kind of question well every religion has their God that

thinks they're going to heaven they all say the same thing no they don't no they don't we've talked to the past Buddhism doesn't even have a God and the God of Hinduism isn't even like the God of Islam or Judaism or Christianity so people will make these statements excuse me and be without really any deep awareness of what it is they're talking about. Now, that's not meant to be a put-down. It's just an observation. So if you think that you can go through ancient texts and build a story that is an

argument for unity that somehow would be evidence that God is the author of it, you're welcome to try. I'd like to see it. And I think a person who says that is not looking carefully at the nature of the argument that we give. What we're saying is the Bible is 66 books. It's written by 44 or so authors. It's written over 2,000 years of time. It's written on three different continents. It is written by all kinds of different people. And yet what we get when we have an understanding of the entirety of the scripture, we look at the big picture, is we get a story that is being told that is profoundly unified. And it's not just that it's unified. By the way, you can find that in a very simplified form in the story of reality, the book, The Story of Reality, which I happen

to write, but I think the book, I'm committing that, not my writing, because it does give that overview using five words, God, man, Jesus, cross, and rest, the beginning all the way to the end, how the world began, how it ends, and everything important that happens in between. So you can see there's a unity there. And I think this is one of the compelling things about the Christian story, that if you take a 30,000-foot look, so to speak, that's what the story of reality book does. You see this connectedness that's really important. Now, that's a theological connectedness. But when you look, more, you know, come down to 10,000 feet or 5,000 feet, you're looking at the particulars,

you're going to see a, you're going to see a different kind of connectedness that isn't just the way the theology fits together, but it's the way the history unfolds in the nation of Israel as to manifest the theological details, even when the individuals who are right, about that particular time and the issues that are being dealt with don't know the whole story. Right. And that's really the key here. You have all of these disparate contributors or somewhat disparate contributors that are piecing together elements of the same story. And when you get to the end of the revelation, the writing of the story, you can see how it all comes together.

you can pull back and see everything fitting together. Now, are they their questions? Sure, always theological questions, historical questions, but the basic foundational story is in place. And one of the things that I try to accomplish, I'm not the only person who does this, but I was exposed to kind of this big theological picture, the connectedness of it throughout Scripture

when I was first a Christian. It was so helpful to me, I put together a class that we now call the Bible Fast Forward. And it's just eight sessions where I show these connect. I see the fall, and then Abraham and God's promise to Abraham is part of the plan for everything that follows. And Osage Covenant is part of that promise. The new covenant is part of that promise, and it all comes to fulfillment in different ways, in the person of Jesus of Nazareth, and after that, that message is proclaimed to all the earth. So there is this wholeness there, but no individual understood the whole thing, except for Jesus,

who has to tell his own disciples after the resurrection, see how it all fits together, rode to Emmaus, for example, but there are a couple other references, the book of Acts, to Jesus making reference to the larger story. So I guess the short answer, I gave you the long one, but just to sum up again, is that if a person claims that any story could be put together like this to make it look like God inspired it, I invite him to try. And when you look at the particulars of the claim we're making for inspiration, it is actually very unique. It isn't just that there's a unified story. If you see it all of these different people who, in a certain sense, constructed a little piece of a puzzle. And then where it was all put together, it formed this great portrait of Jesus of Nazareth.

That's a very different kind of thing. And that's what we see in the scriptures. Part of the problem here is they might not understand what the Bible is. I think a lot of people are confused about that or they think it's just sayings or laws or whatever it is. but they're thinking of it like putting together an outfit. So let's say you've got 10 people and they all have a piece of clothing and some of them fit together and some don't. So I go back and I pick the ones that go together and then we all, you know, over time and then we end up with something that all fits together. I think that's how they're thinking of it.

But that's not what it is. As you noted, it would be more like saying I want to create Lord of the Rings. So I'm going to go find different little paragraphs people wrote over history, and I'm going to put it all together, and it's going to make Lord of the Rings. It's a totally different thing. You cannot do that. As you said, they didn't know where this was heading. They didn't know that the climax of all of history would be the cross. And yet you can look back and you see an Abraham story, and you see in the prophecies, and you see in the Psalms.

How did those people back then know to keep those things? in order to create a unified story. How did they know that those things with Abraham and those prophecies were leading towards what was going to happen? There's no way they could have known. There's no way they could have put that together as they were going and known what to keep. So it just doesn't make sense. All right, let's go to a question from Charles. recently you spoke of certain passages in the Bible as not being true or canonical, the woman caught in adultery, the extended ending of Mark, etc. Do you mean these aren't inspired?

If they aren't true, canonical, or inspired, doesn't that mean every part of the Bible can be called into question? Their only reason that these pieces are called into question is it's obvious to the textual critics who examined this that they were inserted at a different time. when it comes to the woman caught in adultery, I think I explained that my own personal conviction is that that actually happened. And the reason is, is because of the nature of the interaction. Jesus was very clever. He was extremely shrewd.

And we see this in the canonical material. We see all kinds of ways that Jesus defeated the rhetorical. machinations of the Jews, the Jewish leadership. And they couldn't trap him, and they could never get him. And what's interesting is they asked him where his authority comes from. And he said, I'll ask you, I'll answer if you ask me, where about John. And then he gives them a question that they would have been stuck either way if they answered. So they said, we don't know.

And he said, well, I'm going to have to tell you either. And then he tells a parable, which answers the question. you know, so he's very, very clever. And in the circumstance with the woman caught in adultery, there's a cleverness there that a lot of people don't see. I've almost never seen anybody characterize that occasion accurately. A lot of people from the outside, as it were, will take from it a lesson that Jesus was soft on extramarital sex and he was non-judgmental, etc, et cetera, et cetera. So when you look at that occasion, Jesus makes a statement, this woman was caught in adultery in the very act, they said. Okay, where's the guy? Well, he's not there. So this is entrapment. And it's meant not only entrapment of the woman, but entrapment for Jesus. Incidentally, they're trapping this woman in a crime that is a capital crime. They're arranging for her to commit a crime. She would be guilty, of course, but they facilitate a time that she could be executed for.

In any event, Jesus sees what's up and how, what they're trying to do. So he says, let he use without sin cast the first stone. Well, that's not good theology. But it was interesting because right after that, he started writing in the sand. Now, we don't know what he wrote from the text, but I saw a movie once that kind of characterized it. And what he's writing was the sins of the people. Jacob, adultery, blah, blah, blah, murder.

You know, he's righted in the sand of the people who are accusing the woman. And notice how what the text says is that they started to turn away, the eldest first, until there was no one there except for Jesus and the woman and maybe the crowd, but all the accusers are gone. And Jesus asked this question, this is very important. Is there anyone here to accuse you? No. He said, then neither do I accuse you. Why?

Because he was not a witness to the crime. He could not accuse her, and all the accusers were gone. That means she is let off, but she's still sinning, and Jesus addresses that. Go and sin no more. Now, that is classic Jesus. That is just, it fits his character's style everything. It's not like some of the things you hear in the Gnostic Gospels or something that don't sound like, yeah. He's making birds out of clay and they fly around and whatever.

No, this is just, or some of these other things that these Jesus calling or whatever, you know, these kinds of devotionals were allegedly Jesus talking. And if you read the Gospels, you say, it didn't sound like that, just saying. But this sounds like Jesus. He's so clever because you have to have two or three witnesses to accuse someone. Now, he knew she was guilty, but he wasn't from what, clearly what it took place, but he wasn't a witness. So he upholds the law.

but he foils the attempt, and an attempt against him and the attempt against the girl to use him, to use her against him. That's just brilliant. This is why I think it's veritical, and I think it really happened, but it didn't show up in the earliest gospels. And in fact, when it did show up much later, it shows up in different places and in different gospels, as I understand it, not just in John, maybe Luke, or whatever. So it just kind of has a history of traveling around. And then it got embedded, and so now it's a standard part of the Gospels.

But any good Bible, like the one I have in the marginal reference, it says these verses are not in the older manuscripts, just like the long, too long endings of Mark. What happened to that? I don't know. God didn't see fit to give us that. Then somebody else added some more stuff at the end, and it doesn't have the same voices, Mark, anyway. So we know that the textual evidence, et cetera, mean that these are not part of the inspired gospel, which ought to give us a tremendous amount of comfort. We have the ability through the tools of the discipline of textual criticism to be able to figure out

which is our textual glosses, scribal glosses, quote-unquote improvements that scribes might have made, and in which things are added that don't belong. But it turns out all of those pieces that we've discovered don't belong, or maybe sentences or particular phrases, don't affect anything at all. They change nothing at all about the person of Christ, the work of Christ, the grand scheme of things. And so they're not to worry about. So it doesn't, in any way, those pieces, those parts, as part of it, as part of the, Erwin would say those verses that are not found in the Bible, not actually in your Bible, they don't undermine the integrity of the text we do have one bit. In fact, they increase the integrity

because what it demonstrates is we have the tools, the materials, the skills to find the mistakes where they're made. Mm-hmm. That was exactly where my mind went, Greg, that we, we, we can see when things were added. I've seen a bunch of Paul's letters from, I think it was AD 200. There are fragments from, they're very old fragments. We've got these old manuscripts. We can look back and see when things appeared. So it's not just randomly, now everything's in question, because we can look back and we can see these old texts and we can see that they were there, that they weren't added later. And as you also mentioned, we can. And as you also mentioned, we can

can also see that they all, that they fit, that they're, let's see, there's not parts of there that are, that sound like a completely different voice that are shoved in there. So, thankfully, we do have textual criticism, and we don't have time to get into how all that works, but I recommend you look that up because we, even on our website, STR.org. Well, there's a piece that I wrote a while back in response about Urban, and he wrote a book called Jesus, what was it, taken out of kind? Misunderstood or misquoted? Misquoting Jesus.

And I wrote a piece with the same title, but with a question mark, misquoting Jesus. And then I went through all of his challenges, and I offered my critique of that that some folks may find helpful. And at the very end, I made the reference to these verses that he has in the end of the book. you know, these are the verses you thought were in the Bible but aren't. And it's very interesting because there was nothing there that surprised me. Anybody who knows anything about this understands about Long ending Mark and also that passage in John was six and seven. But it's, or maybe a seven and eight. In any event, there's, he, Bart Ehrman takes a lot of liberty

with his popular pieces that he does not take in his academic pieces because he knows other academics are looking over his shoulder, but nevertheless, maybe that article will help. Let's go to a question from Danny. When I'm asked why the Gospels don't tell who wrote them, what is the best way to answer? It was not characteristic of authors to have a byline. That's what that's called, by. It wasn't a letter. It wasn't, they weren't letters. No, they were. They They were characterizations of the life of Jesus. Except for Luke. Luke was written to somebody.

Yeah, in that case, right. But, well, they all had a kind of audience in mind. But nevertheless, it was not characteristic of that time, but people have bylines. And especially when it comes to this group of people that wrote, they, I mean, I don't know if I can verify this. I can't give you a bib source for it, but my understanding is their style was they did not want to draw attention to themselves. It was the early church fathers who wrote about these people who wrote these gospels so that we know in more detail about it. So it was others, and this is one characteristic of pseudipigraph of false writings, is that they have authors' names. that, you know, they try to draw attention to themselves when they write these things.

They self-identify. And the reason that there's the self-identification, like Thomas or some of the others or Judas, whatever, is because they're trying to trade on the name to get acceptance, where the earliest documents didn't need to do that because the Christian community understood where they came from. And Papius, for example, talks about Mark writing, under the influence of Peter. Peter was his mentor, and so what Mark did is he recorded Peter's recollections as a first-hand, first-person witness kind of thing. So, but this is one of the things that we have that helps us understand who are the ones the author. No, some have said that

the disciple whom Jesus loved wasn't John, and there's an argument for that. I don't, I don't I don't know. I don't get into that kind of stuff so much. The key thing, though, is not so much whose name is properly applied to the gospel, but what the gospels say and whether they're well attested. We know that the early church would not give credence to anything that did not have apostolic authority. was the absolute number one requirement for a book to be canonical, apostolic authority, that the apostle was responsible or somebody that was very close to the apostle, like Luke, traveling with Paul. Now, that was the number one thing. And there was very early on,

all four gospels were accepted without any reluctance as being authoritative. So even if we don't, I'm just thinking there's some talk about Shakespeare. Did she, that guy, William Shakespeare, didn't write all Shakespeare's works. Well, let's say it's not William Shaker. Maybe it's Fred Stiakowitz or something like that who wrote, but all of the, all of those works attributed to Shakespeare actually written by French Stierachovitz still are wonderful things. They are what they are.

And nothing has taken away from them if it wasn't Shakespeare that wrote them. In the same way, these documents stand on their own as eyewitness testimony. You have as written during that period of time by people who are deeply familiar with the details and were familiar with the events that took place from people who were reliable testifiers. And you and I both read this wonderful small book by PJ Williams from Cambridge called Can We Trust the G. The Gospels, yeah. It's just fabulous. And he does this thorough analysis assessment to show that there's no way any of these things could have been written late in other countries by other people who weren't thoroughly familiar with all the details of the Gospels. Also, if I remember right, I don't think there's any competing name out there for any of these Gospels. Like there's, if it were, if the name had been changed at some point, it seems like there would have been some sort of competing. name or some argument over who had written it, but there's none of that.

Interesting. They were always connected with the same people as far back as we know, and they were accepted, and I think they were, it may even be the case that they were always together. There may have been sometimes we found things apart, but they were all, like in lists and things, they were always considered together and they did not have any competing name attached to them. The earliest lists—my memory—doesn't serve me well at this point, but I wrote about this in New Testament, canon, which books, and why.

So that was about two years ago, and it's on our website. But, yes, the Gospels were part of—you know, the earliest lists as things authoritative about the life of Jesus. And we know also later when the nonsense came out, there were—church fathers saw this right way, and they broadcast it. You know, when we finally found, it was at the Gospel of Judas, they actually found copies a number of years ago. I have a representation in a book on it in my library.

It wasn't news to Christians because the early fathers talked about this book. We didn't have an extant copy, but they said, yeah, this is nonsense. This is crazy stuff. This is blah, blah, blah. So the people at the time could see right through the pseudipagraphic, you know, and the pseudapigrapha, which is the false writings. I said it right the first time a little while ago. I didn't want to spit on you, Amy.

Well, thank you, Greg. I appreciate that. And thank you, Jay and Charles and Danny. We love hearing from you. And if you have a question, send it to us on X with the hashtag SDR Ask. Or you can always just go to our website at STR.org and leave your question there. All right. Thank you so much. Thank you for listening.

This is Amy Hall and Greg Kokel for Stand to Reason.