Ten Minute Bible Talks Devotional Bible Study - Can We Trust the Bible? | The Gospels | John 5:1-15

Episode Date: June 25, 2026

Can the Bible be trusted historically? What happens when archaeology and Scripture appear to disagree? Should Christians be concerned when evidence hasn't yet been found? In today's episode, Patrick shares how John 5:1-15 provides compelling reasons to trust the eyewitness accounts recorded in the Bible. Read the Bible with us! This year, we’re exploring the Gospels—Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John—and it's never too late to join! Download your reading plan now. Your support makes TMBT possible. Ten Minute Bible Talks is a crowd-funded project. Join the TMBTeam to reach more people with the Bible. Give now. Like this content? Make sure to leave us a rating and share it so that others can find it, too. Use #asktmbt to connect with us, ask questions, and suggest topics. We'd love to hear from you! To learn more, visit our website and follow us on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter @TenMinuteBibleTalks. Don't forget to subscribe to the TMBT Newsletter here. Passage: John 5:1-15

Welcome to 10-minute Bible Talks, where we connect the Bible to your life. In the time it takes to get to work. I'm Patrick Miller. On a crisp fall day, I walked to my university student union with a friend after our postmodern literature class. We were discussing the poetry of Charles Olson. And yes, this is the sort of thing you do as an English undergrad. We'd become friends because I was an anomaly in her life. I came to college and found Jesus.

She came to college and left Jesus. behind. Most of our classmates fell into her camp, not mine. And so as we watched, she abruptly changed the subject to a topic I'd never deeply considered. She asked me, should people trust the Bible historically? She'd recently finished Dan Brown's bestseller, The Da Vinci Code, which posited that the New Testament was full of textual corruption. It was a long-failed telephone game and the original works were lost to time that served the interest of clandestine church hierarchies. She wondered aloud, what if Dan Brown is right? I didn't know how to respond, so I mustered a half-considered thought.

Isn't that fiction? Well, of course it was fiction, but she wasn't impressed by my response. My friend was far from the last person to ask me such questions, and I think she was wise to do so. If you can't trust the text of the Bible, much less it's historicity, then isn't this whole Bible-reading enterprise and effort and futility? You yourself may have asked such questions, perhaps in different words. And if you have, you are probably the sort of person who values intellectual honesty. Let the facts lead where they may.

Our job is to respond accordingly. Now, as you can imagine, a 10-minute podcast isn't nearly enough time to answer such a difficult question. But as I read John 5 this morning, I was reminded of that conversation, and I was reminded of her question for one simple reason. John 5 is a passage that scholars used for over a century to debunk the trustworthiness of the scripture. Let's read the first nine verses together. Sometime later, Jesus went up to Jerusalem for one of the Jewish festivals. Now, there is in Jerusalem near the sheep gate a pool, which an Aramaic is called Bethesda,

and which is surrounded by five covered colonnades. Here, a great number of disabled people used to lie, the blind, the lame, the paralyzed. One who was there had been invalid for 38 years. When Jesus saw him lying there and learned that he had been in this condition for a long time, he asked him, do you want to get well, sir, the invalid replied. I have no one to help me into the pool when the water is stirred while I am trying to get in someone else always goes down ahead of me. Then Jesus said to him, get up, pick up your mat and walk. At once the man was cured, he picked up his mat and walked. So you might assume that this passage caused alarm because it involves

the story of a pool that apparently healed diseases, or perhaps because Jesus miraculously caused a paralyzed man to walk again. Now, of course, these are things that might make a skeptic raise an eyebrow, but that's not what made it the linchpin of scholarly arguments about the reliability of Scripture. It was something much more mundane. You see, John opens this passage by describing a pool with five colonnades, in other words, a five-sided pool. The problem was that there were no examples of, or references to five-sided pools in the time of Jesus. They existed well after the time of Jesus outside of the region of Judea, but not in his time. And so the details of the story revealed the author's hand. He wasn't actually an eyewitness. He didn't even live in the time of Jesus. He didn't live in

Judea. In fact, he must have lived a century or a century and a half after Jesus, and he created this legend whole cloth. The author included the details to trick readers into thinking that they were reading a real story. But thanks to archaeology and scholarly sleuthing, it was revealed to be an anachronism. Kind of like when you watch a period piece set in past centuries and you spot a wrist watch on someone's wrist. Wrist watches are rather new inventions and that little slip revealed what everybody already knew. This historical fiction is, in fact, fiction. Now, as it turns out, this isn't the only pool mentioned in John. There's another pool. It's called the Pool of Siloam. And similarly, scholars pointed out that there was no evidence

of its existence either. Our authors seemed to have a fixation with imaginary pull. pools. And this was the settled opinion of skeptical Bible scholars for over 100 years. Until something strange happened. First, archaeologist in Jerusalem found a marvel hitherto unimagined. They found, you guessed it, a five-sided pool with five colonnades, mentioned nowhere else in ancient literature outside of John. Remarkably, it was carbon-dated to be time of Jesus. This didn't just disprove the scholars. It lended credence to John's reliability. after all, if it was written a century after Jerusalem's destruction, and no one mentioned it outside of the Bible, then how would that late author have even known about it? How would he even know to refer to it?

Well, the best explanation is that this was written by an eyewitness living during the time of Jesus. Fast forward a few decades, and a group of contractors working on a new subdivision in Jerusalem made a similar discovery. Beneath their site, they found a pool never before discovered. It was the pool of Psyloa. And that's the other supposedly made-up pool in John's Gospel. Yet again, it reaffirmed the veracity, the truthfulness of the gospel's historical claims. So what's the lesson? Well, first and foremost, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Be wary of scholars and so-called experts who say,

We haven't found it so it doesn't exist. Less than 1% of the material ancient world remains with us, and only a fraction of that has even been discovered. But second, it reminds us that there's no, easy way to write off the Gospels. These are eyewitness testimonies. You can question whether or not the authors gave true or false testimonies, but they gave them in a time when they could have been debunked by other eyewitnesses. And the fact that they spread and people believe them is a testament to the fact that they weren't easily debunked. Too many people saw what Jesus did to write Jesus off.

I've walked the site of the five-sided pool, the pool of Bethesda. And like so much else I saw in Jerusalem, it reminded me that what I read in the pages of the Bible is not legendary. It's not a myth. It's not a fairy tale. These are true historical stories. And as I stood at the pool of Bethesda, I couldn't help but think about the paralyzed man. Real history happened here. In a crowded pool with hundreds of people watching, Jesus healed him with a word. If he can do that, what can't he do? What do you need healed in your life, in your heart? Jesus doesn't always heal it in a word or in a moment, but he can heal you. He can transform you. If not in this life, then he will do so in the age to come. Trust him and trust the books written about him. There is nothing else like them.