Appendices

Appendix A · Recommended Reading by Topic

If you want to go deeper on any chapter, start with the books below. These are the works most frequently cited by working apologists, classical scholars, and biblical historians. They are grouped by the chapter they most directly support.

On Textual Integrity (Part 1)

• Bruce M. Metzger & Bart D. Ehrman, The Text of the New Testament: Its Transmission, Corruption, and Restoration (4th ed., Oxford, 2005).
• Daniel B. Wallace, ed., Revisiting the Corruption of the New Testament (Kregel, 2011).
• F. F. Bruce, The New Testament Documents: Are They Reliable? (6th ed., IVP, 1981).
• Timothy Paul Jones, Misquoting Truth: A Guide to the Fallacies of Bart Ehrman's Misquoting Jesus (IVP, 2007).

On the Canon (Part 2)

• Michael J. Kruger, Canon Revisited: Establishing the Origins and Authority of the New Testament Books (Crossway, 2012).
• Michael J. Kruger, The Question of Canon (IVP Academic, 2013).
• F. F. Bruce, The Canon of Scripture (IVP, 1988).
• Darrell L. Bock, The Missing Gospels: Unearthing the Truth Behind Alternative Christianities (Thomas Nelson, 2006).

On Archaeology (Part 3)

• Kenneth A. Kitchen, On the Reliability of the Old Testament (Eerdmans, 2003).
• James K. Hoffmeier, Israel in Egypt (Oxford, 1996) and Ancient Israel in Sinai (Oxford, 2005).
• Craig A. Evans, Jesus and His World: The Archaeological Evidence (WJK, 2012).
• John McRay, Archaeology and the New Testament (Baker, 1991).

On Extra-Biblical Sources (Part 4)

• Robert E. Van Voorst, Jesus Outside the New Testament: An Introduction to the Ancient Evidence (Eerdmans, 2000).
• Gary R. Habermas, The Historical Jesus: Ancient Evidence for the Life of Christ (College Press, 1996).
• F. F. Bruce, Jesus and Christian Origins Outside the New Testament (Eerdmans, 1974).

On the Resurrection (Part 5)

• N. T. Wright, The Resurrection of the Son of God (Fortress, 2003) — 817 pages, the definitive academic treatment.
• Gary R. Habermas & Michael R. Licona, The Case for the Resurrection of Jesus (Kregel, 2004).
• Michael R. Licona, The Resurrection of Jesus: A New Historiographical Approach (IVP, 2010).
• William Lane Craig, Assessing the New Testament Evidence for the Historicity of the Resurrection of Jesus (Mellen, 1989).

On Prophecy (Part 6)

• Michael Rydelnik, The Messianic Hope: Is the Hebrew Bible Really Messianic? (B&H Academic, 2010).
• Walter C. Kaiser Jr., The Messiah in the Old Testament (Zondervan, 1995).
• Peter W. Stoner, Science Speaks (Moody, 1963) — the classic probability argument.

On Biblical Unity (Part 7)

• Vaughan Roberts, God's Big Picture: Tracing the Storyline of the Bible (IVP, 2002).
• Graeme Goldsworthy, According to Plan (IVP, 1991).
• Sidney Greidanus, Preaching Christ from the Old Testament (Eerdmans, 1999).

On Jesus and Scripture (Part 8)

• John Wenham, Christ and the Bible (3rd ed., Baker, 1994).
• Kevin DeYoung, Taking God at His Word (Crossway, 2014).
• Craig L. Blomberg, The Historical Reliability of the Gospels (2nd ed., IVP Academic, 2007).

On Science (Part 9)

• Francis S. Collins, The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief (Free Press, 2006).
• John C. Lennox, God's Undertaker: Has Science Buried God? (Lion, 2007).
• Alister McGrath, The Big Question: Why We Can't Stop Talking About Science, Faith, and God (St. Martin's, 2015).
• Guillermo Gonzalez & Jay W. Richards, The Privileged Planet (Regnery, 2004).
• Stephen C. Meyer, Return of the God Hypothesis (HarperOne, 2021).

On Pagan Parallels (Part 10)

• Ronald H. Nash, The Gospel and the Greeks: Did the New Testament Borrow from Pagan Thought? (2nd ed., P&R, 2003).
• T. N. D. Mettinger, The Riddle of Resurrection: Dying and Rising Gods in the Ancient Near East (Almqvist & Wiksell, 2001).
• J. Ed Komoszewski, M. James Sawyer, & Daniel B. Wallace, Reinventing Jesus (Kregel, 2006).

On Moral Objections (Part 11)

• Paul Copan, Is God a Moral Monster? Making Sense of the Old Testament God (Baker, 2011).
• Paul Copan & Matthew Flannagan, Did God Really Command Genocide? (Baker, 2014).
• Richard S. Hess, Israelite Religions: An Archaeological and Biblical Survey (Baker, 2007).
• Timothy Keller, The Reason for God (Dutton, 2008).

On Philosophy (Part 12)

• John Earman, Hume's Abject Failure: The Argument Against Miracles (Oxford, 2000).
• Alvin Plantinga, God, Freedom, and Evil (Eerdmans, 1977).
• William Lane Craig, Reasonable Faith (3rd ed., Crossway, 2008).
• Alvin Plantinga, Warranted Christian Belief (Oxford, 2000).

On Transformed Lives (Part 13)

• Tom Holland, Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World (Basic, 2019).
• Rodney Stark, The Rise of Christianity (HarperSanFrancisco, 1997) and For the Glory of God (Princeton, 2003).
• Alvin J. Schmidt, How Christianity Changed the World (Zondervan, 2004).
• Vishal Mangalwadi, The Book That Made Your World (Thomas Nelson, 2011).

For the Inquirer (Part 14)

• C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (Macmillan, 1952).
• Timothy Keller, The Reason for God (Dutton, 2008).
• Lee Strobel, The Case for Christ (Zondervan, 1998).
• John R. W. Stott, Basic Christianity (IVP, 1958).

Appendix B · Glossary of Key Terms

A short working vocabulary for the concepts used throughout this site.

Apologetics

The rational defense of the Christian faith. From the Greek apologia, meaning "reasoned defense." The discipline has pre-Christian roots (Plato's Apology of Socrates) but takes distinctively Christian form with Justin Martyr in the second century.

Apocalyptic

A genre of Jewish and Christian literature that "unveils" (Greek apokalypsis) God's hidden plan through visions and symbolic imagery. Daniel and Revelation are the canonical examples.

Autograph

The original manuscript of a biblical document, written by the author or his scribe. No biblical autograph survives; we reconstruct the text from copies. The discipline of doing so is textual criticism.

Canon

From the Greek kanōn, "measuring rod." The authoritative list of books received by the church as divinely inspired Scripture. The Protestant Old Testament canon matches the Hebrew Bible; the New Testament canon of 27 books was recognized by the late fourth century and is shared across virtually all Christian traditions.

Codex

A book with pages sewn or bound along one edge — the early Christian alternative to the scroll. Christians preferred the codex from the second century onward, and the major early copies of the New Testament (Sinaiticus, Vaticanus, Alexandrinus) are codices.

Cosmological Argument

A family of arguments that move from the existence or structure of the universe to a First Cause. The Kalām version (popularized by William Lane Craig) argues that whatever begins to exist has a cause, the universe began to exist, therefore the universe has a cause.

Cumulative Case

An argument built not from a single decisive proof but from the convergence of many independent lines of evidence, each moderately supporting the conclusion. Most historical and scientific conclusions are justified this way.

Deism

The belief that a creator made the universe but does not intervene in it. Distinct from Christian theism, which holds that God both created and remains personally active in the world.

Epistemology

The branch of philosophy concerned with how we know what we know — the nature and grounds of knowledge.

Evidentialism

An apologetic approach that treats Christian belief as justified by evidence and argument, as opposed to presuppositionalism (which argues that biblical revelation must be assumed as the foundation for all reasoning) or reformed epistemology (which treats belief in God as properly basic).

Fine-Tuning

The observation that the physical constants of the universe (the strength of gravity, the mass of the electron, the cosmological constant, etc.) fall within an extraordinarily narrow range that permits the existence of complex life. The improbability of this range is the basis of the fine-tuning argument for design.

Harmonization

The attempt to reconcile apparent contradictions in parallel biblical accounts by showing that both can be simultaneously true given additional information — the same event viewed from different angles.

Hermeneutics

The theory and practice of interpretation. Biblical hermeneutics covers questions of genre, literary context, historical background, and the relationship between the two testaments.

Inerrancy

The doctrine that Scripture, properly interpreted according to its intended meaning, is without error in all that it affirms. The Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy (1978) is its most widely cited formulation.

Inspiration

The doctrine that Scripture is "God-breathed" (2 Tim 3:16, Greek theopneustos) — a genuinely human document that is at the same time the word of God.

Messianic Prophecy

A passage in the Hebrew Bible that, by Christian reading, predicts or prefigures the coming Messiah. Types range from direct prediction (Micah 5:2, Bethlehem) to typological fulfillment (the Passover lamb).

Minimal Facts Approach

An argument for the resurrection developed by Gary Habermas that relies only on historical facts accepted by the overwhelming majority of critical scholars (believer and skeptic alike), then argues that those facts are best explained by the resurrection.

Monotheism

The belief that there is one God. Distinctive of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. The Hebrew Shema (Deut 6:4) is the classic statement.

Naturalism

The philosophical view that only the natural (physical, material) world exists — there is no God, no soul, no miracle. Methodological naturalism is the narrower stance that science should proceed as if naturalism were true, bracketing metaphysical questions.

Ontological Argument

Anselm's argument that the very concept of God as "that than which nothing greater can be conceived" entails God's existence. Alvin Plantinga has given a modern modal-logic version.

Pentateuch

The first five books of the Bible — Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy — traditionally attributed to Moses. Jewish tradition calls them the Torah ("instruction").

Presuppositionalism

An apologetic tradition (Cornelius Van Til, Greg Bahnsen) that argues Christianity is the necessary precondition for any intelligible thought at all, and attempts to show that competing worldviews cannot account for logic, morality, or science without borrowing from the Christian framework.

Problem of Evil

The objection that the existence of evil or suffering is incompatible with, or strongly evidence against, the existence of an all-good, all-powerful God. Answers include the free-will defense, the soul-making theodicy, and the cross as God's own entrance into suffering.

Septuagint (LXX)

The Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible, produced in Alexandria from the third to the first centuries BC. The New Testament writers often quote it directly. Named for the traditional number of translators (seventy).

Synoptic Gospels

Matthew, Mark, and Luke — "synoptic" (Greek, "seen together") because of their substantial overlap in content, order, and wording. John is the fourth gospel and stands apart in material and style.

Textual Criticism

The scholarly discipline of comparing manuscript copies to reconstruct, as closely as possible, the original text of a document. Applied to the Bible it has yielded remarkable confidence in the text we possess.

Theism

Belief in a personal creator God who is distinct from the world he made, who remains active in it, and who can reveal himself to it.

Theodicy

A proposed justification of God's goodness in the face of evil — literally "God-justification" (Greek theos + dikē).

Typology

A method of reading the Old Testament in which persons, events, or institutions prefigure Christ and his work — the Passover lamb, the bronze serpent, Melchizedek, the tabernacle. Distinct from allegory in that the Old Testament events are treated as genuinely historical, and the connection to Christ is built into the pattern of redemption itself.

Variant

A difference between two manuscripts of the same text. Of the roughly 400,000 variants in the New Testament manuscript tradition, nearly all are spelling or word-order differences; only a tiny fraction affect the meaning, and none affects any major doctrine.

Appendix C · Manuscript Evidence Quick Reference

Comparative manuscript data for the New Testament against other works of classical antiquity. Figures follow standard handbook sources (Metzger, Bruce, Wallace, Kostenberger et al.).

Selected Key New Testament Manuscripts

• P52 (Rylands Papyrus 457) — fragment of John 18; c. AD 125; earliest NT manuscript.
• P46 (Chester Beatty II) — c. AD 200; most of Paul's letters.
• P66 (Bodmer II) — c. AD 200; most of John.
• P75 (Bodmer XIV–XV) — c. AD 175–225; most of Luke and John.
• Codex Sinaiticus (ℵ) — c. AD 330–360; earliest complete NT.
• Codex Vaticanus (B) — c. AD 325–350; nearly complete NT.
• Codex Alexandrinus (A) — c. AD 400–440; nearly complete Bible.

Appendix D · Messianic Prophecy Quick Index

A cross-reference of significant Old Testament prophecies and their New Testament fulfillment. Not exhaustive — these are the ones most often cited in apologetic discussion.

Appendix E · Objection Index

Every skeptical objection given its own "Skeptic's Corner" treatment on this site, with a link to the chapter where it is addressed. If you came here with a specific objection in mind, start with the relevant chapter.

On Textual Integrity

• "There are over 400,000 variants in the New Testament manuscripts." → Part 1
• "The Bible has been translated and retranslated so many times it's like a game of telephone." → Part 1
• "Bart Ehrman has shown the New Testament text is unreliable." → Part 1

On the Canon

• "Constantine imposed the canon at the Council of Nicaea." → Part 2
• "The Gospel of Thomas and other 'lost gospels' should have been in the Bible." → Part 2

On Archaeology

• "There's no archaeological evidence for the Exodus." → Part 3
• "Nazareth didn't exist in Jesus' time." → Part 3

On Extra-Biblical Sources

• "The Testimonium Flavianum (Josephus on Jesus) is a Christian forgery." → Part 4
• "Tacitus just reported what Christians themselves said." → Part 4

On the Resurrection

• "The disciples hallucinated." → Part 5
• "The resurrection is a legend that developed over time." → Part 5
• "The Gospels contradict each other on the resurrection details." → Part 5

On Prophecy

• "The Gospel writers invented the prophecies after the fact." → Part 6
• "Daniel was written during the Maccabean period, not predicting anything." → Part 6

On Biblical Unity

• "The Old and New Testaments describe two different gods." → Part 7
• "Christians just cherry-pick which Old Testament commands to keep." → Part 7

On Jesus's View of Scripture

• "Jesus was accommodating the beliefs of his audience." → Part 8
• "We don't really have Jesus's words — only what the Gospel writers put in his mouth." → Part 8

On Science

• "The multiverse explains fine-tuning without God." → Part 9
• "Science and religion are fundamentally in conflict." → Part 9

On Pagan Parallels

• "The similarities between Jesus and pagan saviors are too many to be coincidence." → Part 10
• "Paul's language of 'mystery' proves he borrowed from mystery religions." → Part 10

On Moral Objections

• "The Bible endorses slavery." → Part 11
• "God commanded genocide against the Canaanites." → Part 11
• "The doctrine of hell is a cruelty invented by the church." → Part 11

On Philosophy

• "Hume showed that miracles are inherently incredible." → Part 12
• "The existence of evil disproves a good God." → Part 12
• "If God existed he would make himself more obvious." → Part 12

On Transformed Lives

• "Religion has caused more harm than good in history." → Part 13
• "People's personal stories aren't evidence of anything objective." → Part 13

Appendix F · About This Project

"Why You Can Believe the Bible" is an evidence-based case written for the honest questioner — the skeptic willing to weigh the arguments, and the believer who wants to know why the convictions they hold are defensible. It is the work of Appointed Church in central Florida, built from the historical, archaeological, textual, philosophical, and experiential evidence that, taken together, makes the Christian claim intellectually credible and existentially compelling.

The case is cumulative. No single chapter is the whole argument; each one narrows the space of reasonable conclusions further. Taken together, they point — we believe — to a single verdict: the Bible is what it claims to be, and the Jesus of its pages is who he claimed to be.

If you have worked through these chapters and found the case persuasive — or if you have simply found enough here to take the next honest step — please read the Gospel of John, pray honestly, and find a serious, Bible-teaching church near you. If you are local to central Florida, we would love to welcome you at Appointed Church.

Come, let us reason together, says the LORD. — Isaiah 1:18