Here is a proposed script for Apologetics Talk, a series of video teachings I hope to produce one of these days.

I started the Apologetics Talk Vlog to answer some of the many comments I’ve been getting on The Real Jesus videos.

In the past, my videos have been seen mainly by Christians. But now with YouTube I am excited that I’ve had tens of thousands of viewers, many of who are skeptics and non-believers. I wanted you to know that your comments have challenged me to go deeper and examine my own beliefs.

This is where I want to give back some reactions to the comments.

First, let’s talk about the Dead Sea Scrolls.

This was the archaeological find of the 20th century, not only did it tell us some important facts about the ancient Judaism, but it also proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that the Hebrew scriptures we have today are exactly the same as the scriptures in the centuries before Jesus Christ and the Apostles.

Now some people still don’t get this. For instance:

sirvega280 wrote: The Dead sea scrolls don’t prove anything that Peter Jennings “failed” to mention. The Jewish authorities that possess the Dead Sea Scrolls will not give the academic world access to the Dead Sea Scrolls so that they can analyze it themselves. The Jewish authorities will only tell us what it supposedly reads, and we are supposed to take their word for it, I guess. Or could it be that the Judeo-Christian community does not want us to find out anything that would undermine this religion?

I don’t know where he got this information, but it is wrong.

Photos of the Dead Sea Scrolls have been available to everyone for study for about ten years on the Internet. These are now public documents.

The Dead Scrolls prove that the Bible hasn’t changed in over 2000 years. The Hebrew scrolls of the Old Testament written before the time Christ are virtually identical to the Bible we have today.

Now for years, I’ve been writing in my articles in The Forerunner that the Dead Sea Scrolls prove the reliability and the unchanging quality and the unchanging quality of the Bible. But after getting Sirvega’s comment, I wanted to know for myself.

So I ordered this book, The Dead Sea Scrolls Bible – Translated from Hebrew for the First Time into Modern English. What I found was amazing. Not only did it conform everything I’ve been writing and teaching about on the Dead Sea Scrolls, but it also boosted my faith in the integrity of scripture. It showed me that today’s biblical text is even more accurate than I thought it was.

Consider this. The last of the Old Testament books – Ezra, Haggai, Zechariah, and Malachi – were written around 400 B.C. so we have copies within about 250 years of the originals. That’s pretty amazing. Besides the Bible, there is no other ancient writing that has surviving manuscript copies within 900 years of the originals.

900 years!

And yet historians accept many of these other ancient accounts of history as accurate. The very existence of the Dead Sea Scrolls is providential – a sign that the scriptures are the Word of God – post dating some of the originals by only 200 years.

So the next time you hear someone say: “The Bible we have today has been changed and altered and we don’t even know what the originals said.”

Tell them to check out this book on The Dead Sea Scrolls and see for themselves what’s true.