Can the Bible Be Trusted? | FOB Truth Podcast Ep. 1

Transcript

Host Story And Mission

SPEAKER_01 0:00

If written by man disqualifies a claim, then no historical or scientific knowledge survives. That's not skepticism, it's just self-sabotage. This is Fob Truth. I'm Drew, a 12-year Marine Corps veteran, I'm married, and a father of three. After witnessing the worst parts of humanity serving as EOD in Afghanistan, I made the common assumption that the Bible was bogus, and there was no way that these old stories were true or useful. They didn't match up to my real life experience. I was medically retired in 2014, and for a few years I tried to outrun reality the way a lot of us do. I was trying to stay busy or numb myself out, and uh pretend to be self-reliant. Eventually, God put the right people in my path, men who actually live like the Bible was true, and they weren't afraid of my angry and difficult questions. This was the beginning of my current faith journey. The years after were rough. I dealt with identity loss, recovery didn't look like I thought it was going to. I went to some different PTSD programs. Later, working with nonprofits and having honest conversations with other veterans, it taught me something important. Mankind is rejecting God because of shallow answers and fake people, not because the evidence isn't there, but we're not looking at it. During the pandemic, isolation got worse, even among already isolating veterans. And that's when I started an online support group. Um, you know, conversation, it was accountability for me, and uh eventually we started reading some scripture, uh, and that's where we got the name. Here's the deal I created Fob Truth because I saw a gap between the church and the warfighter, between civilians and first responders, between what's preached on Sunday and what's lived on Monday. And in that gap, too many of us are isolated, angry, burnt out, or just spiritually numb. This is not a church podcast. Maybe I should say that again. This isn't a church podcast. This is a Ford operating base for your

Why Fob Truth Exists

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faith. It's a rally point, a safe house. This is where you come because we're not going to puff it up. I'm gonna tell you what I find when I'm researching these topics. I'm gonna be trying to talk to decent people who are gonna shoot us straight. All right. So, what is Fob Truth? In the military, we know Fob as Ford operating base, but in this case, we're talking about fundamentals of biblical truth. Uh that's how I see this mission. We're a place to regroup, refocus, relearn the basics of what is the Bible, who is God, what does it mean to follow Jesus, even when your life looks like a dumpster fire? So this is gonna be no holds barred. Topics like suicide, identity, trauma, death, hope, purpose, grace, forgiveness, and yeah, warfare, because there's plenty of that in the Bible. And we're not gonna sanitize it with church ease or bumper sticker theology. It's not about religion, it's about relationship. I'm not a theologian, I'm not a pastor, I'm not an apologist, and I'm not here to tell you what to think. I'm here to point you to what I can find as truth and let scripture speak louder than the voice in your head, telling you that you're too far gone. We're gonna take some core biblical truths, we're gonna break them down and show you how this this word of God actually holds up under fire and scrutiny. I'm asking you to question everything and bring that same intensity to investigating the Bible itself rather than just clicking over to the next conspiracy theory. Whether you're a soldier, a cop, a firefighter, nurse, a teacher, a husband, mom, or just some human trying to hold it all together. If you've been burned by fake faith, bad theology, and hurt by the church, me too. And this podcast is for you. And that's why this first episode matters. Before we talk about what the Bible says, we need to talk about whether it's even worth listening to in the first place. So where did the

What The Bible Actually Is

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Bible come from? A lot of people talk about it as if it's just one book that dropped out of the sky, but it's not. The Bible is a library, many books written over roughly fifteen hundred years across different regions, cultures, and historical moments. These books include historical narratives, poetry, law codes, wisdom literature, prophecy, letters written to individuals and to churches. These books weren't written by one person in one place with one agenda. They are written by dozens of authors, many of whom never met, often writing under radically different circumstances, and yet all these books tell a coherent story. The Old Testament, the Hebrew Scripture, it's the first part of the Bible. The Old Testament was written primarily in Hebrew, with a small portion in Aramaic. These writings were already recognized as authoritative long before Christianity ever existed. By the time of Jesus, the Hebrew scriptures were already read publicly, copied carefully, taught in the synagogues, and treated as the Word of God. Jesus himself quotes from them constantly, and so do his disciples. So whatever you think about Christianity, it didn't begin by rewriting history. It inherited a body of scripture that already existed from the Jews. The New Testament is where skepticism usually spikes. So let's slow down. The New Testament books were written in Greek, the common language of the Roman world. They weren't written hundreds of years later by anonymous monks from stories that were passed down orally. They are written within the lifetime of eyewitnesses. This isn't a religious claim, it's a historical one. The Gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John are biographical accounts of Jesus' life, teaching, death, and resurrection. The letters are written to real communities dealing with real problems. They weren't written to sound inspirational, they were written to be read aloud to the groups, questioned, challenged, and then circulated to other groups of

Early Use Of Hebrew Scriptures

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Christians that were struggling to survive at that time. And this circulation is important because Christianity was not a centralized project. One of the biggest misconceptions is that some powerful group sat down and decided what Christians would believe. Dan Brown and popular culture wants you to believe that Constantine and the Council of Nicaea decided what Christianity was about and what books would be in the Bible, but it's not how it went down. When the New Testament was being written, there was no printing press, no centralized authority, at least early on, and no way to control the distribution of these documents. These texts spread because communities across the Roman world independently recognized them as authoritative and wanted to know more about God. It wasn't because these documents were comforting, but because they were consistent early and tied to eyewitness testimony. So the church didn't create the scripture, and that's critical, so let's say it again. The church didn't create scripture. The church just recognized it. The early Christians didn't ask what books do we want. They asked which writings carry apostolic authority and faithfully reflect what was already being taught. And I use words like apostolic, we're just talking about the apostles, the twelve dudes who followed Jesus around during his earthly ministry, they were called the apostles. So they had apostolic authority because they spent three straight years living with the Son of God and learning his teachings. The recognition of these writings by the apostles happened gradually and organically, not politically and not by a ruler or a council. But weren't some of the books not included and others were? So there are different canons of the Bible, and when people hear that different Christian traditions have different numbers of books, uh it raises immediate suspicion, and that reaction makes sense, so let's talk about it. Most Protestants use a sixty-six book canon, canon meaning like the collection of the books. The Roman Catholic

New Testament Origins And Eyewitnesses

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Church includes additional ones, often called the Deutero Canonical books, Deuterro meaning like seconds, like the second canon, and Eastern Orthodox traditions include those and in some cases a few more. That difference didn't happen because one group suddenly decided to add or remove scripture. It comes down to which ancient Jewish collections were being used and how authority was understood over time. So it comes down to an Old Testament disagreement. It has nothing to do with the New Testament. By the time of Jesus there were two major collections of Jewish scripture in circulation. One was preserved in Hebrew and the other in Greek. The Hebrew collection, often called the Hebrew Bible or the Tanakh, corresponds closely to the books found in the Protestant Old Testament today. The Greek collection, called the Septuagint, included additional writings, and these were widely read in the Greek speaking Jewish world and later by early Christians. So the question wasn't are these books Christian? The question was which Jewish scriptures are authoritative. And the Protestant tradition eventually leaned towards the Hebrew language canon as the baseline for the Old Testament. The decision was influenced by desire to align as closely as possible with the scriptures used by ancient Israel. The Catholic Church retained the additional books that had long been used in church readings and theology, formally affirming them at councils much later, during well, at a time of intense debate because people were serious about this. They wanted to know, do we consider this the Word of God? Is this real? The Eastern Orthodox traditions preserved even broader collections, reflecting how scripture was received and used in their regions over time. So what's important is this. These traditions didn't invent books, they preserved the collections that they had received. So why are some books debated? You know, the books in question, like the deuterocanonical or apocryphal, they're not fringe conspiracy texts. They're ancient Jewish writings that were respected and read, but there was debate about their level of authority. Key differences in the books often included like later dates of composition, lack of clear prophetic authorship, limited use in Jewish worship before Christianity, and there was some theological development rather than foundational doctrine, and that's why some communities treated them as helpful but not foundational. Even today, many Protestants will say these books are historically valuable, they're just not scripture in the same sense. And this doesn't mean that the Bible was arbitrarily assembled. It does not mean doctrines were invented later, and it doesn't mean that the core message of Christianity changes depending on the canon.

Who Chose The Books And Why

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No major Christian doctrine about God, Jesus, sin, or salvation rests solely on a disputed book. And that's an important point that often gets lost in online arguments. So I was talking to somebody the other day about Fob Truth, and he got excited and he was like, yeah, like those guys that dug up parts of the Bible in Egypt in the forties, truth like that. That's not what we're talking about. People often hear about the lost gospels or books that were left out and assume that something shady happened. But here's the reality. Books were recognized as scripture if they met a few consistent criteria. One was the apostolic connection. Was it written by an apostle or someone closely connected to one? Two, did it have early origin? Was it written close to the events they describe? Not generations later. Three, consistency with the existing scripture that we already had. The writings couldn't contradict what was already widely accepted as the Word of God, and four widespread use. They weren't fringe documents used by one small group, where they read broadly across many different churches, because all of those documents were getting hand copied and spread as the actual Word of God. So the excluded books of the lost gospels fail these tests. One of the cleanest examples is the Gospel of Thomas, because it's one of the most often marketed as suppressed or earliest or too dangerous for the church. When you actually run it through the same criteria we just talked about, it fails pretty badly. So if we're testing apostolic origin, it fails. The Gospel of Thomas claims to be written by Didymus Judas Thomas. No, that's doubting Thomas the Apostle. Um this but this is an ancient trick. It was attached a famous name to something you've written to gain authority for the writing. But the problem was that no early church writers actually attributed this book to Thomas. And we don't have a copy of the manuscript that appears before mid to late second century. And the theology that's reflected in the book developed way later. It wasn't the types of ideas that they were talking about during the Apostolic Era. If we're testing doctrinal consistency, Thomas fails again. It's not like Matthew, Mark,

Canon Differences Explained

SPEAKER_01 13:05

Luke, or John. The Gospel of Thomas is more like Plato and Eastern mysticism with some Christian vocabulary layered on top. For example, the Gospel of Thomas saying 114, Simon Peter said to them, Let Mary leave us, for women are not worthy of life. Jesus said, I myself shall lead her in order to make her male, so that she too may become a living spirit resembling you males, for every woman who makes herself male will enter the kingdom of heaven. Okay, this reflects a Gnostic anthropology where male symbolizes spiritual perfection and female symbolizes deficiency. It directly contradicts Genesis 127 and what Jesus was teaching on creation and embodiment. So Genesis 127 says, So God created human beings in his own image. In the image of God he created them, male and female he created them. Early Christians rejected the gospel of Thomas because it contradicted what they already believed, not because it threatened power. So if we're testing widespread use, Thomas fails again. Thomas wasn't read in public worship. He wasn't quoted as scripture by early church leaders, and it was not used across a geographically diverse set of churches. It shows up primarily isolated in Gnostic communities, especially in Egypt, where they dug up these documents. By contrast, the four gospels are cited across Rome, Asia Minor, Gaul, North Africa. Thomas had local interest, but not Catholic or universal use. All right. So the suppressed truth myth falls apart here. If the truth were power-hungry editors, Thomas would have been very useful because the language was very mystical, vague, and elitist, and Gnosticism would actually have helped consolidate control and power. But instead the church rejected the idea of secret knowledge and elitism and disembodied salvation, and they doubled down with their public teaching. They wanted people to know exactly what they believed. It wasn't about control, it was about enlightening people with the truth of Jesus. And there was a physical resurrection, there was moral accountability. Gnosticism says that, you know, there's secret knowledge that you hold within you. Bottom line, the lost gospels were not excluded because they were too true. They were excluded because they were late, anonymous or falsely attributed, theologically incompatible with the rest of scripture, narrowly used, and historically disconnected from the apostles. The real irony is calling them lost, because that only works if you ignore the fact that the early church read them, debated them, and then rejected them openly. That's not suppression, it's called discernment. Why is this still worth trusting? Canon differences don't undermine the Bible's reliability. They show that ancient communities took scripture seriously enough to debate it carefully rather than just accepting everything. If anything, that process argues against careless inclusion of bad documents. And for the purpose of this

Criteria That Excluded “Lost Gospels”

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podcast, here's the key takeaway. You don't have to settle every canon question on day one to take the Bible seriously as a historical and theological document. So let's talk about conspiracies. If you believe the Bible's a fabrication, you're not just claiming error, you're claiming a conspiracy spanning centuries, languages, and persecuted communities. This would be a conspiracy with no centralized power early on, no financial incentive, no political protection, and no way to enforce uniformity of the actual conspiracy. And yet the manuscripts that we have are remarkably consistent. That doesn't make belief mandatory, but it does make a dismissal of the scripture careless. So if the Bible's just folklore, then it deserves to be ignored. But if it is what it claims to be, a historically grounded collection of texts rooted in eyewitness testimony, then it would be intellectually lazy to ignore something of this existential magnitude. And yes, I hear you, eyewitness testimony's unreliable. Modern studies show that individuals can misremember details, memory is reconstructive, and it's not a video. And stress can really distort your perception. All of that is true, but none of that implies eyewitness testimony is useless. Courts still rely on it every day with cooperation. Historians already assume memory is imperfect. That's why they don't treat any single witness as decisive. The implied claim here is if memory isn't perfect, it can't transmit truth. That standard would erase all ancient history, not just the gospels. Ancient history never asks, is this eyewitness flawless? It asks questions like are there multiple independent witnesses? Are accounts early relative to the event? Are they embarrassing or counterproductive to the authors? And are they consistent on core claims, even if details vary? Are they anchored to real people, places, and dates? And if you take those standards, the gospels are unusually strong. Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John don't fail the eyewitness tests. They are actually early by ancient standards. So Jesus' death was approximately AD thirty. Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John were all written between sixty and ninety AD, and that's within living memory. The development of legends normally takes centuries, not decades. Now I know most of you have witnessed some incredible events or endured some deep traumas, things that created indelible memories that you can recall decades later as if they just happened. So if you were with the Son of God and witnessed all of his miracles and his resurrection, you can guarantee that those details would have staying power. Has the Bible

Gospel Of Thomas Put To The Test

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been changed? We talked about the writing of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. So once people hear where all of these books came from, the next question's pretty much automatic. Has the Bible been changed? It's a reasonable question, and any ancient document deserves scrutiny. Christianity isn't asking for a pass here. When someone says the Bible's been changed, they're usually imagining one of two things. Either someone deliberately altered it to control people, or it slowly morphed over time, like a long game of telephone. And those are very different claims, but neither one fits the historical evidence. The Bible was copied by hand for centuries, that's true. And yes, when humans copy text, variants happen. That's not a secret, and scholars do talk about it openly. But here's the key distinction variants are not the same thing as corruption. Most differences between manuscripts are just spelling variations, word order differences. Or minor grammatical changes, things that don't affect the meaning. And importantly, no core Christian doctrine depends on a disputed text. No variant changes the fundamentals of biblical truth. This is not a game of telephone.

SPEAKER_00 20:16

You know, when the when the Bible was uh written and then rewritten and then edited and then re-edited. I guess what I'm saying is the Bible is literally the world's oldest game of telephone.

SPEAKER_01 20:27

I know that analogy sounds clever, and comics use it, and people repeat it, but it breaks down immediately. In the game of telephone, there's one line of transmission, no written record, and you don't really compare the versions. And that's not at all how the Bible was transmitted. We don't have one manuscript. We have thousands. Manuscripts copied in different regions and different centuries and into different languages, which means we can cross-check them all. When variations appear, scholars don't panic, they compare. The more manuscripts you have, the easier it is to identify copying errors, not harder. People assume more manuscripts mean more problems, but it's the opposite. If you only had one or two copies, you'd have no way of knowing if they were altered. But with thousands of manuscripts, patterns clearly emerge. The few errors that exist stand out. Original readings can be identified with high confidence, guys. And that's why the New Testament is one of the best attested documents in ancient history by a wide margin. Another concern is translation. You probably heard this one. Modern Bibles are translations of translations of translations. No, that's not true. The Bibles are translated directly from ancient Hebrew manuscripts, ancient Greek manuscripts, and they're done by teams of people, not individuals, and they're done across denominations with transparency and peer review. That doesn't mean that every translation choice is perfect, but it does mean that no single person controls the text. But what about intentional changes? Well, unfortunately for the haters,

Conspiracy Claims Don’t Add Up

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there's no evidence of a successful widespread effort to rewrite scripture. For that to happen, you'd need centralized authority early on, control over every single manuscript, and the ability to erase the older copies. But none of that existed. Early Christians were persecuted, scattered, and decentralized. They didn't have the power to rewrite history. Now, there's something called textual criticism, and it's the field of study that looks at the manuscript variations, but that doesn't undermine the Bible. In fact, it strengthens our confidence in it, because it shows where differences exist across the different manuscripts, why they exist, and how minimal their impact actually is. Scholars can say with confidence that the text we have today faithfully reflects the originals. It's not perfectly copied letter for letter in every manuscript, but is reliably preserved in substance and meaning. And that matters for trust. Like if the Bible had been heavily altered, we'd expect to see major doctrinal changes, wildly divergent versions and unsolved contradictions. But instead we see remarkable consistency across the centuries, continents, and communities where people disagreed on everything else. No, that's not proof of the existence of God, but it does mean that the Bible isn't fragile. If you're spiritually hungry, guys, this book is legit. Look into it. It means the Bible that you're holding, or hopefully the one that you'll hold in the future, isn't a distorted echo, but a historically reliable document. In the words of the late Vodibacum, I choose to believe the Bible because it's a reliable collection of historical documents written down by eyewitnesses during the lifetime of other eyewitnesses, and they report of supernatural events that took place in the fulfillment of specific prophecies and claim that their writings are divine rather than human in origin. Oh no. Here comes another problem, right? The Bible shouldn't be believed because it was written by man. If taken seriously, that rule would force you to discard nearly everything you claim to know. The claim assumes that human involvement automatically corrupts truth. But every source of knowledge you trust comes through humans. History

Eyewitness Memory And Ancient History

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books, science papers, court transcripts, journalism, mathematics, textbooks, and recorded speeches. They're all written by people, all filtered through language, memory, culture, and bias. If written by man disqualifies a claim, then no historical or scientific knowledge survives. That's not skepticism, it's just self-sabotage. Christians have never claimed that the Bible dropped from heaven leather bound. The claim's always been God used human authors to communicate real truth through real language, history, and culture. That's not unique to Christianity. It's how all meaningful communication works. Human authorship of the Bible would be a problem only if the text showed signs of rampant internal contradiction on core claims, legendary drift over time, theological incoherence or historical fantasy disconnected from reality. Instead, what we see is coherent themes across centuries of writing, talking about prophecies, hundreds of prophecies that have been fulfilled, stable transmission with thousands of manuscripts, embarrassing material that was preserved, not edited out. Authors don't like to just embarrass themselves, but the early authors of the Bible did. They wrote the truth. There was precise anchoring to real places, rulers and events which have been historically verified. The double standard that people don't notice is when skeptics say it was written by men, so it can't be trusted, they almost never apply that standard to Tacitus, Josephus, Plato, Aristotle, Caesar, or Thucydides. Okay, these were all written by men with far less manuscript support and often centuries after the events that they describe. So the objection to the Bible isn't principled, it's just selective. Written by man is not a disqualifier. It's the only way any truth enters into human history. So dismissing the Bible for being human author doesn't make someone

Has The Bible Been Changed?

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rational or enlightened. It just means they rejected the only communication channel reality actually allows. Up to this point, we've talked about the Bible as a document, where it came from, how it was preserved, why common objections don't hold the weight that people think they do. And that's necessary, but not the whole picture. Because people don't wrestle with the Bible just because it's old, they wrestle with it because it doesn't stay theoretical. One of the reasons the Bible keeps resurfacing, even in a modern world, is because it doesn't flatter us. It doesn't start by telling you that you're basically fine and you just need a few better habits. It starts by saying something's wrong, not just out there, but in your heart, in you. And that makes everyone squirm to some degree. Feeling a bit empty is normal. That hunger isn't ignorance, it's awareness. And most people aren't spiritually hungry because they're uninformed, they're hungry because everything they've tried still left them empty. They're chasing meaning through work and relationships, they're looking for that success, and if it doesn't work out, then they just start numbing and seeking distraction. The Bible describes that condition long before modern psychology gave it a name. It talks about guilt and shame that don't go away, desire that doesn't satisfy, justice that never fully arrives, and death that you just can't ignore. Those are timeless, universal human issues. And the reliability matters before meaning, and that's why we started this first podcast with trust in the document, because if the Bible was just folklore, none of this would matter. Who cares what the fundamentals of fairy tales are? But if the Bible's a historically grounded collection of texts written by people wrestling honestly with God, suffering evil and hope, then it deserves more than your dismissal or disdain. Don't believe blindly. God doesn't ask you to, and if a preacher does, walk away from that guy. The Bible can stand up to your questions and doubt. That's the invitation. Read it for yourself. Okay, the Bible is not trying to win arguments. Something that surprises people when they actually read it is that it doesn't feel like propaganda. It records failure and doubt and cowardice and hypocrisy, especially among its heroes. That's not how myths are written, because the truth tends to show up uncomfortable and unsanitized. So this podcast exists for people who are tired of shallow answers, people who've been burned by fake faith, people who were told

Manuscripts, Variants, And Translation

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to stop asking questions, people who sense something's missing but can't quite name it. This isn't about winning debates. It's about fundamentals, what the Bible says, why it says it, and how it applies to your life. That's where we'll stop for today. Okay, take some time with this, check into all the things that I've told you. Look it up for yourself. Nobody's asking you to believe this list of facts. Uh, we'll have some links in the show notes of where you can find some of this information. Check it out. See what holds up. All right. We'll talk again soon. If you want to join us live, Fob Truth meets every single Wednesday at 8 p.m. Eastern on Zoom. The link is at Fobtruth.org. You can find it there along with all the information about our nonprofit who's just trying to bring you the fundamentals of biblical truth. I'm Drew. See ya.