Did God write the Bible?
A small crowd of about 10 students showed up at Lecture Hall seven last Thursday evening to hear Tim Haller, former president of the Fellowship of Christian University Students (FOCUS), lecture on this controversial topic. The lecture was the second in series of presentations on the Bible that were organized by the group.
Throughout the lecture, Haller presented evidence for why he believes the Bible was divinely inspired.
“I want people to see that you don’t have to be an idiot to believe in the Bible,” Haller said. “There’s a lot of evidence out there intellectually speaking to say there’s something to the Bible, there’s something that speaks of God about it.”
Haller first pointed out that there is unity in the Bible despite the fact that it was written in three different languages over 1500 years by 40 independent authors living in 10 different countries.
“Although the Bible has that incredibly diverse background (the authors) all manage to present God and all relationships to Him in the same relative light,” Haller said. “God is the same God throughout the entire Bible.”
Another major argument that Haller presented was Bible math.
He said that in the late 1800s a mathematician discovered recurring patterns involving the number seven in the Bible. This number appears most frequently in the book and symbolizes completion.
“In the first eleven verses of Matthew the number of Greek vocabulary words is exactly 49 or seven sevens,” he said. “The number of letters in these 49 words is exactly 266 or 38 sevens. Of these 266 letters of the vocabulary the number of vowels is exactly a 140 or 20 sevens, which makes the consonants at 126 or 18 sevens.”
Haller held that this kind of pattern occurs thousands of times throughout the Bible, and that the chances of this kind of mathematical pattern occurring randomly is one in billions.
Haller said that it is impossible to recreate this pattern, although many have tried.
“The guy who discovered this submitted an article saying that if anybody that reads this paper can write a passage where they can build in this mathematical code then they broke my theory (and) findings,” Haller said. “Nobody to this day has been able to come up with it.”
Haller took on skeptics of the Bible’s accuracy and further supported his argument by presenting archaeological evidence.
“Scores of archaeological findings have been made which confirm in exact detail historical statements in the Bible,” he said.
One of the examples that Haller gave was the destruction of Jericho city. According to the Bible God made the walls of the city fall down so that Joshua could conquer it.
“They found the archaeological site of Jericho,” Haller said. “After studying that site they showed that the two adjacent walls fell abreast, the outer wall went out and the inner wall went in and whenever you seize the city the walls just really go in.”
Haller closed his presentation by saying that the Bible is filled with very detailed prophecies that have come true. He gave many examples and pointed out that there are hundreds of prophesies concerning the Son of God in the Old Testament that Jesus fulfilled in the New Testament.
Although the turnout for Haller’s lecture was low, the small group of attendees seemed impressed with Haller.
“I think Tim (Haller) did a good job,” said Kevin O’Reilly, FOCUS co-president. “(The lecture) reinforces what I believe in; it tells me that (the Bible) is actually backed up by history.”
Tracey Vence liked the presentation but was not swayed in his beliefs.
“It was interesting,” she said. “But it doesn’t make me believe that (God) is real.”