Reliable #5

Continuing on about why i think that the historical evidence points to the Bible being historically reliable...

Accusation – The Bible contains mistakes... deliberate or accidental.

Shockingly... it's true. It does. Check out the footnotes in any modern bible. As the Bible has been passed down through history, the translations (despite any of the points I've made previously) have some textual difficulties.

Example?

Mark 5:1… They went across the lake to the region of the Gerasenes.[a]
[a] Some manuscripts Gadarenes; other manuscripts Gergesenes

So what? Jesus travelled across a lake, whose name either contains an "r," "d" or a "g". No significant theological points are reliant on a “typo” of this nature.

Christianity rests on the life, teachings, death and resurrection of Jesus. The 0.3% of the Bible that is uncertain doesn't effect the nature of the message of the gospel.

Actually, the times when Biblical scholars suspect that something suspect has been done to the text (like the final 12 verses of Mark's gospel) the translators don't try to hide the fact. This makes me even more sure about the rest of the text, since they have the transparency to show that they have researched the manuscripts and preserved what was actually originally written!

Also, we need to take into account the archaeological evidence that backs up the Bible.

Nothing dug up from the ground has contradicted anything that has been preserved in the Biblical texts. Instead, many of the claims, events and cities of the Bible have been verified by archaeology. Punch "Biblical archaeology" into a search engine and it will spit out plenty of sites that are dedicated to the very topic.