How the Bible Came to Be
2 Peter  Part 20
12/31/2025
2 Peter 1:20-21
What is our answer to critics who say the Old Testament only copied other literature? Or that the New Testament was written hundreds of years after the fact so the teachings of the original Apostles is lost?
Introduction
Peter’s Goal: Your Confidence
The Critics
How Inspiration Works
The Human Role in Writing Scripture
Verbal Inspiration
Inerrancy
The Standard for Prophecy
The Dan Brown Internet Myth
Text Criticism
Conclusion
Summary

2 Peter 1:20 Above all, you must understand that no prophecy of Scripture came about by the prophet's own interpretation. 21 For no prophecy ever had its origin in the will of man, but men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit.
Introduction
I asked ChatGPT, “What book is most comparable to the Bible?” Here’s the answer it gave: It depends on what you mean by “comparable.” In different senses, different books come closest—but no single book really compares to the Bible in every category.  It went on to discuss each category one at a time. In the category of religious authority, it named the Quaran. In the category of literary scope and diversity it said there is no comparable work. In the category of historical impact on civilization, it said, “the Bible stands alone.” In the category of manuscript attestation and textual history it said, “Nothing compares. The Bible—especially the New Testament—has far more manuscript evidence than any other ancient text. No other religious or classical work comes close.”
In the category of internal unity across centuries: again, no comparable work. “The Bible tells a single redemptive storyline—from creation to new creation—across dozens of authors, cultures, and centuries. This feature is unique among ancient texts.”
That’s really one of the most amazing features of the Bible, because it addresses all the most difficult and controversial topics there are—the meaning of life, morality, ethics, spirituality, the nature of God, human nature, the trajectory of history, etc. And there’s such incredible consistency and unity—it’s astonishing. You pick out just ten people in our country—just one culture in one place at one time in history, ask them about just a handful of those topics, and you won’t find near that kind of unity.
But the Bible, with all the diversity of authors and contexts, is so integrated, it’s like a living organism.  Take a look at this graphic by Chris Harrison. All he did was draw lines connecting the cross references listed in the King James Bible margins.

Jordan Peterson shows this graphic in his lecture series discussing how the Bible could be considered "the first hyperlinked book". Over 63,000 connections, and that’s not anywhere close to all of them. I saw another graphic with 340,000.

The integration of the material in the Bible is breathtaking.
So I got those answers from ChatGPT, and it made me wonder if ChatGPT was just telling me what I want to hear. So I asked this: “Answer the question from a skeptical academic perspective.” Here’s what it said:  “From a skeptical academic perspective, the short answer is: There is no single book truly comparable to the Bible—but several texts are comparable in specific, limited ways.”
There’s just no question that the Bible is unique. It’s unique, but can we know for sure that it’s God’s Word?
Peter’s Goal: Your Confidence 
Peter’s goal in the end of chapter 1 is for v.19 to become real for you.
2 Peter 1:19 And we have the word of the prophets made more certain
He wants you to pay attention to Scripture as to a light shining in a dark place, and in order for that to happen, you need to have rock solid certainty that it really is God’s Word. So how certain are you? However certain you are, God wants you to be more certain. And for that to happen, Peter decides we need to understand the process of how the Bible came into existence. 
2 Peter 1:19-21 is one of those passages where the Bible teaches about itself. And it’s one of the most important passages for understanding the nature of Scripture and how it came to be. Peter makes two statements about how it didn’t happen, then a statement on how it did happen. God wants us to know how the Bible came into being, what role God had and what role the human authors had—we need to understand all that in order for us to really pay attention to it as to a light shining in a dark place. So I want to take this opportunity to first, take a close look at exactly what Peter teaches here, but also to give you an overview of the whole big picture of how the Bible came together. There is so much disinformation, I’d like to clear up the myths and make sure you understand from both a spiritual point of view and an historical point of view, how it all happened.
The Critics
I want to do this because there are people who work hard at undermining your confidence in God’s Word. Bart Ehrman is a well-known NT scholar who used to be an evangelical but when he couldn’t figure out a solution to the problem of evil, he turned away from the faith and became an atheist.  But he’s still a Professor of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina, and he’s on a quest to destroy the faith of as many Christians as he can. He always begins the first day of class the same way. He asks his class, “How many of you believe the Bible is the inerrant Word of God?” Then he says, “I don’t believe it, I don’t believe you believe it, and I’m going to spend the rest of the semester showing you that you don’t believe it.” He has devoted his life to being a Bible scholar, and his main goal is to get people to stop believing it’s God’s Word.
Why? Why are atheists so intent on undermining people’s trust in the Bible as God’s Word? What do they care whether you believe the Bible? Even if they’re right—there is no God, no Judgment Day, nothing in the Bible is true—still, how does it hurt them if you and I keep believing in a book that tells us to love our enemies, show kindness to them, to be generous to them, and to lay down our lives for them if need be?
I can’t speak for each one of them, obviously, but I can tell you that Romans 1 teaches that God’s eternal power and divine nature are so obvious to all people that the only way to deny it is to suppress that truth. And if you’re working hard to suppress a truth in your own mind, you really need to get other people to go along. The more other people you can get to go along with you, the easier it is to justify your way of thinking. And so we have a whole lot of people working hard at destroying your faith and convincing you to deny this world we live in, where God has spoken, and join them in their world where God has not spoken.
So they’ll attack both the Old and New Testaments. The way they attack the OT is generally by saying the prophets just copied material from the surrounding cultures, and then editors came in later and penciled in “prophecies” of events that had already taken place to give the appearance that it was predicted ahead of time.
And they’ll have various other arguments, but if you press them, it generally boils down to this: humans wrote it, to err is human, therefore it’s not divine revelation.
How Inspiration Works
But that line of reasoning betrays an ignorance of what the Bible actually claims about how inspiration works. Peter would agree that men wrote the Bible. That’s what he says in v.21—“Men spoke.” So yes, it did come through human beings. But does that mean it originated with human beings? And Peter’s answer to that is an emphatic no.
2 Peter 1:20 Above all, you must understand that no prophecy of Scripture came about by the prophet's own interpretation. 21 For prophecy never had its origin in the will of man
It did not come from man. Where did it come from Peter?
2 Peter 1:21 ... men spoke from God as they were driven along by the Holy Spirit.
The Human Role in Writing Scripture
So what was the prophets’ role, exactly? How did the Holy Spirit drive them along? Did he just take control of their mouth or their pen like automatic writing? Or was it pure dictation where God just said, “Write these exact words ...”?
No. The prophets said what they wanted to say.
1 Corinthians 14:32 The spirits of prophets are subject to the control of prophets.
There are some word-for-word statements from God in the Bible where God speaks in the first person “I am the Lord your God,” “I chose you,” etc. Those parts are kind of like dictation.  We call those oracles, but most of prophecy isn’t like that. Most prophecy passed through the prophet himself and came out of his own heart. That’s why John has a completely different style than Paul. You can easily see the writer’s unique personalities in what they wrote. I showed you last time how many times the prophets resisted God and didn’t want to prophesy.  Even if they resisted at first, there came a point where they stopped resisting and acquiesced and let the Spirit drive them in the direction he wanted. When v.21 says “they were driven along by the Holy Spirit,” that same word is used in sailing contexts in the book of Acts.
Acts 27:15 The ship was caught by the storm and could not head into the wind; so we gave way to it and were driven along.
They stopped fighting it and just let it drive them. That’s what the prophets did with the Holy Spirit.  If they resisted at first, eventually they said, “I can’t buck this wind,” and they gave way to it and allowed themselves to be driven along. Jeremiah resisted, but then he said this:
Jeremiah 20:7 O Lord ... you overpowered me and prevailed. ... So the word of the Lord has brought me insult and reproach all day long. 9 But if I say, "I will not ... speak any more in his name," his word is in my heart like a fire, a fire shut up in my bones. I am weary of holding it in; indeed, I cannot.
Jeremiah resisted, God overcame that resistance, and he did it by putting a fire in Jeremiah’s heart to preach. And when Jeremiah did finally preach, even though it brought terrible persecution, he found the release of that fire satisfying.
Jeremiah 15:16 When your words came, I ate them; they were my joy and my heart's delight
God put a fire in them to say something, they couldn’t hold it back, so they said it. But when they did, they said it in their words in their way shaped by their personality and style communicating what really was in their heart. William McKane speaks of "a mysterious dialectic, a strange tension of suffering and joy, of pain and satisfaction. There is a joy which even a prophet of doom finds when he stands in the path of deity and says what he must." So we enjoy David's love for nature shining through in the psalms, Paul's love of sports, Luke's medical knowledge, Mark's abruptness and literary skill, Paul's logical manner and John's almost mystical eloquence, and all the time each wrote exactly what God willed. 
Verbal Inspiration 
And not just the general concepts, but every word, every verb tense, every jot and tittle (the little marks that distinguish one letter from another)—every bit of it is inspired. We know that because Jesus made an argument for the resurrection based on the fact that God said “I am the God of Abraham” not “I was the God of Abraham.” That’s a major theological point drawn from a very tense. Paul points out that God’s promise to Abraham was to his seed (singular) not to his seeds (plural).
Matthew 5:18 I tell you the truth, until heaven and earth disappear, not the smallest letter, not the least stroke of a pen, will by any means disappear from the Law until everything is accomplished.
The seminary word for that is “verbal inspiration”—inspired right down to the individual words. Every word, very letter, every detail is God-breathed.
The writers wrote what was in their heart to write, put it in their own words, expressed it their way, and yet God’s Spirit blew on them just right so that every marking of the pen was exactly what God wanted to communicate. That’s the miracle of divine inspiration.
Inerrancy 
And this is why I believe in the inerrancy of Scripture—no errors.  Many Christians teach that the Bible writers made some mistakes here and there, but they mostly got it right. But if every letter and verb tense and every dot of an i or cross of a t came from God, how could there be errors?
Some say, “Maybe the big, spiritual points are infallible, but minor points may have mistakes.”  But if that’s the case, where do you draw the line? How important does a statement have to be before I can start trusting it? Jesus relied on a verb tense, but what if Moses made a mistake on that verb? I don’t see the point in saying every word and every letter is inspired if some of the words are mistakes.
2 Timothy 3:16 All Scripture is God-breathed 
I don’t believe God breathes out errors of any kind.
The Standard for Prophecy
Okay, so that’s the claim Scripture makes for itself—inspired by God right down to the letter when it’s coming from a true prophet. But how did the people know for sure if someone was a true prophet? There had to be supernatural proof. If someone says he’s speaking for God, you can’t just take his word for it. He has to prove it by doing something only God can do. What kind of miracles? For one thing, they had to be able to foretell the future with 100% accuracy.  Deuteronomy 18:21 You may say to yourselves, "How can we know when a message has not been spoken by the Lord?" 22 If what a prophet proclaims in the name of the Lord does not take place or come true, that is a message the Lord has not spoken. That prophet has spoken presumptuously. 
So God verified who his true prophets were, drove them along by the Spirit, and worked through them so that when those men communicated what was in their heart to say, it ended up being exactly what God wanted said to the letter.
Now, there were some complexities in the process. The prophetic community did add to and refine earlier writings. We know that because of passages like the final chapter of Deuteronomy. That book was written by Moses, but the last chapter describes the death of Moses and then says this:
Deuteronomy 34:6 The LORD buried Moses in Moab ... but to this day no one knows where his grave is.
That “to this day” tells us that whoever added this was writing at a later period. So did those later editors tamper with the meaning or add in fake prophecies after the fact? No. Jesus regarded the OT Scriptures as the Word of God. That means you can trust it.
“Okay, I can trust that it was the Word of God in Jesus’ time, but how do we know it hasn’t been altered in a game of telephone since then?” Up until 1946, the earliest copies of the OT were from 1000 AD—1400 plus years after the last book was written. How could we know what changes might have been made in those 1400 years? So there was a high level of confidence in the integrity of the manuscripts because of how careful the scribes were, but still, how could we know for sure?
So in 1946, God said, “You want to know for sure? Here you go.” A shepherd boy found some jars in a cave by the Dead Sea full of ancient scrolls. Some of them were scrolls of the OT that dated back to 250 BC, some say 350.  And since then they have found amulets with portions of the OT from 600 BC. So now we can see exactly how the so-called game of telephone turned out. Compare the text from 1000 AD to the ones 1200 to 1600 years earlier. And they were astonished to find that they matched. The only differences were very minor spelling or stylistic variations. 
The Dan Brown Internet Myth
Okay, so that’s the OT Scriptures.  But I told you the main way I know for sure those are the Word of God is the testimony of Jesus. And he’s reliable because he rose from the dead. How do we know he rose from the dead? We know that from the NT. So how do we know for sure the NT is reliable?
A lot of the critics sound really smart, like they’re up to their elbows in the ancient manuscripts and archeological research, but most of them are really just parroting talking points from a Dan Brown novel called The Da Vinci Code. So most of their arguments against the historical reliability of the NT documents come from a work of fiction, which is a bit ironic.
So the basic Internet myth you’ll hear most often is that some guy named Jesus lived and died, and that’s all we really know about him. But hundreds of years later, people started writing legends and myths about him, turning him into a god. They say all kinds of books and letters were swirling around claiming to be authoritative.  Then, toward the end of the 300s, a bunch of big shots in the church held a council to pick the books that supported their agenda, and dubbed those official Scripture.  Everything else, perfectly good historical accounts of Jesus’ life, even better than the gospels we have, were thrown out. And that was the day the New Testament was born.
And I’m not talking about liberal scholars here. The scholars know this is garbage. This is just the Internet myth—this idea that the NT didn’t exist until hundreds of years after Jesus’ time.
When did the NT come into existence? Even among Evangelical Christians, it’s very common to hear that the first century only had the Old Testament. I hear that all the time from preachers. “The people Matthew and Paul and Peter and the gang were writing to only had the OT. They didn’t have the NT until much later.”
Not only is that completely false, but it comes close to being self-refuting. If the churches in the first century didn’t have the New Testament, how do you explain their existence?  How can you have a New Testament church without the New Testament?
Think about it. Even secular scholars agree that Paul was writing his epistles around 50 AD—less than 20 years after Jesus died. And it’s obvious from Paul’s letters that there were already lots of churches spread all over the Roman Empire that were already established and up and running and had been for many years. How did those churches start, and what were they preaching in those churches? The answer is in Acts 2:42.
Acts 2:42 They devoted themselves to the apostles' teaching 
That was just 10 days after Jesus ascended into heaven. From day 1 of the existence of the church, they devoted themselves to the NT—the same body of teaching we have.
“But it wasn’t written down yet!” So what? Tell me—the traditions your family has at Christmas time—where are those written down? Nowhere. Does that mean you don’t know them? Of course you know them. You know them a lot better than you know a lot of things that are written down.
When did the early church get the New Testament? In the 4th Century? No. In the 50’s and 60’s of the first Century when the New Testament books were being written? No. The NT is the teaching of the Apostles. It didn’t become the NT when it was written down. It was the NT from the first day they started teaching it.   Here’s the timeline:  Jesus’ ministry took place early in the first century—in the 30s. He trained 12 Apostles and told them this:
Matthew 10:27 What I tell you in the dark, speak in the daylight; what is whispered in your ear, proclaim from the roofs.
What did Jesus whisper in their ears? The New Testament.  And Jesus promised them supernatural ability to get it right.
John 14:25 All this I have spoken while still with you. 26 But the Counselor, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, will teach you all things and will remind you of everything I have said to you.
John 16:13 But when he, the Spirit of truth, comes, he will guide you into all truth. ... he will tell you what is yet to come.
Those aren’t promises for us—those are promises to the Apostles that their proclamation of Jesus’ teachings would be controlled by divine inspiration.
Sometime in the 30’s Jesus died, rose, and ascended into heaven.  Then the Apostles and their associates went out and did what Jesus told them to do—shouted the NT message from the housetops. They went all over the place preaching the gospel message. Did the people know the Apostles were speaking God’s Word? Yes—that’s the whole purpose of the miracles. Jesus gave them the power to do miracles to prove they were speaking for God, just like the OT prophets.
And they knew it was God’s Word.
2 Peter 3:15 … our dear brother Paul also wrote you with the wisdom that God gave him. 16 He writes the same way in all his letters, speaking in them of these matters. His letters contain some things that are hard to understand, which ignorant and unstable people distort, as they do the other Scriptures, to their own destruction.
Peter considered Paul’s writings Scripture.
1 Timothy 5:18 For the Scripture says, "Do not muzzle the ox while it is treading out the grain," and "The worker deserves his wages."
Two quotations from Scripture.  The first one is from Dt.25:4 and the second is from Lk.10:7. So Peter called Paul’s writings Scripture, and Paul called the Gospel of Luke Scripture. The church had the NT in verbal form right from the start and they considered the written form Scripture even while the books were being written.
The Apostles preached that message over and over, and they taught it to other church leaders who taught it to others, and it spread like wildfire.
2 Timothy 2:2 And the things you have heard me say in the presence of many witnesses entrust to reliable men who will also be qualified to teach others.
Jesus gave it to Paul, Paul gave it to Timothy, Timothy was to give it to reliable men who were to give it to the next generation—5 generations in one verse.
And then finally, after 20 to 30 years of that, the Apostles said, “You know what? We’re getting kind of old, we won’t be around forever, and we have false teachers popping up already, and we can’t be everywhere in every church to refute them—we need to start putting this stuff down on paper.” When the Apostles got word that someone was teaching corrupted form of the gospel, they would set the record straight. And they did that through writing letters to those churches. And the letters basically said, “This message we’ve been preaching the past 20 or 30 years that you heard when you became a Christian, just to be clear, here it is in writing …” Now we’re into the 50s and 60s. And during that time while the Apostles were writing it all down, the churches cared a lot about making sure to preserve the actual message of the original Apostles.
Revelation 2:2 ... you have tested those who claim to be apostles but are not, and have found them false.
So all the way back when the Apostles were still alive, and there were people in the churches who were old enough to remember Jesus, there were people popping up claiming to be Apostles and the old timers in the churches, or the true Apostles, and the people who had been listening to their preaching for 20 years all said, “No, you’re not a true Apostle.”
So they knew what was legit and what wasn’t. And the churches kept the writings of the original Apostles and read them publicly and made copies and disseminated them all over the empire. 
The critics will say, “But what about all the other material that was rejected—the Gospel of Thomas or the Gospel of Phillip?” Those were all written much later and came from another religion called Gnosticism. 150-200 years after the time of Christ, the gnostics came along and wrote their own books, using the names of the original Apostles and said, “This is what Jesus really taught.” Those writings were rejected by the churches because the teachings were so different from what the real Apostles taught and had written down.
We have the writings of Clement of Rome who was born around the time Jesus died and probably knew the Apostles personally. We have the writings of Irenaeus, who knew Polycarp, and Polycarp was a direct disciple of the Apostle John.
The point is, during that time, the churches knew who was who.  And we’re thankful to God for the early church wrestling through that because if we had to do it today, we’d have no way of really knowing who spoke for Jesus and who didn’t. When they had discussions in those early centuries of which books belonged in the Bible and which didn’t, it wasn’t a bunch of power brokers in a smoke filled room deciding which books they liked or didn’t like. It was a discussion of “Which books are all the churches accepting and which ones are they rejecting?” The ones the churches all over the world were affirming—those are the only ones that were considered Scripture.
There are “experts” today who think they know better who was legit and who wasn’t than the people who were actually alive at the time. But my money is on the people who were there and who had a high vested interest in getting it right. Especially when you realize that so many of the critics today who cast doubts on everything have a strong anti-Christian bias. 
Now, I told you even the secular scholars agree that Paul’s undisputed letters were written very early—around 50 AD. But very often you’ll hear critics say the four gospels were written hundreds of years after the fact. Not true. Most scholars all agree that the gospel of John was the last one written. And archeologists dug up a fragment John’s gospel in Egypt dated between 100 and 125 AD. So at the end of the first century, John’s gospel was already being copied and distributed internationally—in Africa. This fragment is written on both sides of the papyrus, so it was in a book form, not a scroll, and it was pocket-sized. People were copying and distributing pocket-sized gospels of John internationally by the early 100’s AD.
Text Criticism
Now, again, the Internet trolls will try to tell you we can’t know what the Apostles originally wrote because it’s been a giant game of telephone for the past 2000 years with translations of translations and copies of copies—who knows how much the message has been corrupted? And the answer to that is simple. If you have a copy today that you think is corrupted, just compare it to copies from 2000 years ago and you’ll see if there has been any change.
It’s true we don’t have the originals, but we have so many copies that are so close in time to the originals, it’s easy to piece together what the originals said. This is the science of text criticism, and it’s how historians analyze ancient history. But for most ancient history, all we have is a handful of copies, if that, and usually from hundreds of years later. And even with that, they are generally able to figure out what the original said with a fair degree of certainty. If I wrote a letter, each of you copied it, and the original was lost, you could look at those 10 copies and figure out what the original said. If nine of the copies start out, “Dear friends,” but one copy starts out, “Dear friend,” then it’s obvious the original was plural and one guy made a mistake. If you only have two copies and one says friend and the other says friends, you don’t know which is right. But the more copies you have, and the wider the geographical areas where you found those copies, the greater the accuracy.
The most well-attested ancient document outside of the Bible is Homer’s Iliad. We have about 1500 surviving copies of that, so historians know exactly what the original said when they compare all those. With the NT, we have over 5000 surviving Greek manuscripts. Over 24,000 if you include versions.  Nothing in antiquity compares to that. The renowned NT scholar A. T. Robertson personally studied those manuscripts and he said that due to the vast array of manuscripts, we know that the New Testament we have today is 99% certain. And that remaining 1% that’s in question doesn’t affect any major Christian doctrine—it’s mainly just variant word spellings.
So in our previous session, we established that the Apostles were honest, reliable eyewitnesses. They were extraordinarily truthful men, they had no motivation to make the story up, their claims were falsifiable (they could have easily been proved wrong if they weren’t true), there were multiple corroborating witnesses, they were convinced even though they were extremely skeptical, still didn’t believe even after the tomb was empty on the third day, but then something happened that made them willing to suffer and die for the message. And they said that something was personal encounters with the risen Christ. That’s what the historical records show, and those records have been preserved in an incredible way until our time so we know none of that was the product of tampering or copy mistakes. We know what they originally wrote down.
Conclusion
The context is about how the Bible came to be. So let’s come back to where Peter started. “We have the prophetic word made more certain, to which you do well to pay attention as to a lamp shining in a dark place.” God never calls us to blind faith. God spoke, he spoke through real people, in real history, in real languages. They weren’t stenographers.  They weren’t passive instruments. They spoke from their own hearts, in their own words—but as they did, the Holy Spirit exerted force on the writers of Scripture like a strong wind, they gave way to him, and under that influence, they wrote what they received from God, and the Spirit saw to it that what they wrote was what he wanted written down to the letter. That has been challenged, tested, and confirmed in both history and in millions of people’s personal lives. , and preserved through the centuries. It was copied, scrutinized, preserved, and passed down through centuries of persecution, skepticism, and attack. And along the way, it changed the world. And here we are—still reading the same message, still encountering the same Christ through the same words.
No other book or collection of books has had a fraction of the impact on the world the Bible has. No other source has had a fraction of the impact on my life that the Bible has had. And no other book can bring you to God like the Bible can. And God saw to it that you can take all that to the bank.

Summary
To protect you from falling away, Peter wants to make your confidence in Scripture strong. He explains that the Old Testament (the prophets) came from God. The New Testament solidifies and strengthens our confidence in the Old. God moved the writers to communicate what they wanted to say and saw to it that what they said was his Word—down to the letter. So there are no errors. And the New Testament was carefully guarded in the first Century and preserved to our day.