In the last Unshaken entry, I asked whether the Bible could actually be trusted from a secular perspective. I wanted to know whether the book sitting in front of me had been reliably preserved, whether it was rooted in real history, and whether we could reasonably know that what we are reading today reflects what the biblical authors actually wrote. After looking at manuscripts, archaeology, historical sources, translation, and how the Bible was put together, my answer was yes.

But that left me with an even messier  question– one that truly made me uncomfy! Is this actually REAL? Is God real? Is my faith real? A book can be historically reliable and still not be the Word of God. Archaeology can confirm that a city existed without proving that God performed a miracle there. Ancient manuscripts can tell me what someone wrote without proving God inspired them to write it. So before I could use the Bible to decide what I believed about God, salvation, doctrine, worship, or anything else, I needed to know why I should believe it was actually from God.

Because if it was, that changed everything.

I had already spent enough time trusting religious people and systems simply because they sounded confident. I wasn’t doing that again. I didn’t want to believe the Bible was God’s Word simply because a preacher told me it was, my family believed it was, or even because the Bible itself said it was. One of the ways I came to terms with that question was did the Bible back up from outside what it said inside. Stay with me. 

The way to do that really is to look at prophecies, right? 

If someone says I know that 2+2 is 4 and I’ll show you and they do then you’re more apt to believe them. 

The Bible for me is like that because if it could show me that what it said was true then I could believe it in its entirety as inspired by a creator. 

One of the things that fascinated me most when I started looking at the Bible’s reliability was fulfilled prophecy. And I don’t just mean finding something in the Old Testament and then turning a few hundred pages to find a verse in the New Testament that Christians believe fulfilled it. Those are important, and we’ll get there, but I wanted to know whether there were biblical prophecies that could actually be compared with history outside of the Bible.

That’s where things started getting really interesting.

Take the ancient city of Tyre. In Ezekiel 26, judgment is pronounced against this incredibly powerful coastal city. The passage describes nations coming against Tyre, its walls being destroyed, and its stones, timber, and even its soil being thrown into the water.

Fast forward and it actually happened. 

Tyre was attacked repeatedly by foreign powers. Nebuchadnezzar II of Babylon laid siege to the city, and centuries later Alexander the Great came against Tyre in 332 BC. By Alexander’s time, the great challenge was the island fortress sitting offshore. So Alexander’s army did something extraordinary: they built a causeway out to the island, using material from the mainland as part of its construction. That causeway permanently changed the geography of Tyre, eventually helping turn what had once been an island into the peninsula we see today.

That was the kind of evidence that grabbed my attention because I didn’t have to open another book of the Bible to discover that Alexander conquered Tyre or built a causeway to reach it. Those are events recorded in ancient history, you can learn all about it on the history channel. 

Now, there are legitimate scholarly discussions about exactly how every detail of Ezekiel 26 should be interpreted, and I don’t want to pretend those conversations don’t exist. Nebuchadnezzar’s long siege did not result in the simple destruction of the entire island city, and scholars disagree about how different portions of the prophecy should be understood. But acknowledging that doesn’t mean I have to ignore the historical connections either. If anything, it taught me to investigate these claims instead of simply repeating the polished versions of prophecy arguments I had heard before.

Then there is Cyrus. Isaiah actually names Cyrus and connects him with the return and restoration of God’s people and the rebuilding of Jerusalem. Cyrus wasn’t some character whose existence I had to accept because the Bible told me he existed. Cyrus the Great was a real Persian king whose reign is well established in ancient history. The Cyrus Cylinder, a Persian-period artifact now held by the British Museum, describes Cyrus’s conquest of Babylon and records policies involving the restoration of sanctuaries and the return of displaced peoples.

Now, the dating of Isaiah matters here. Scholars debate the composition and dating of different portions of the book, and some argue that the passages naming Cyrus were written much closer to Cyrus’s lifetime than the traditional view allows. I think that’s worth acknowledging because my faith doesn’t require me to pretend opposing arguments don’t exist.

But it also doesn’t end the conversation.

I was beginning to realize that the Bible wasn’t floating somewhere outside of history. It was talking about real kings, real kingdoms, real cities, and real events that left evidence behind.

And then there are the Dead Sea Scrolls as mentioned in my prior post.

The Great Isaiah Scroll dates to roughly the second century BC and contains all 66 chapters of Isaiah. Think about what that means. We physically possess a copy of Isaiah that existed before Jesus was born and before Christianity existed.

So when I read something like Isaiah 53 and see Christians connecting the suffering servant with Jesus, there is at least one explanation I can immediately take off the table: Christians did not come along after Jesus and write those words into Isaiah to make Him fit the story.

The words were already there.

That doesn’t automatically prove the Christian interpretation of Isaiah 53. Jewish and Christian interpretations of that passage differ, and I think it’s important to say that. But the manuscript itself establishes something significant before we ever begin arguing about interpretation: this text predates Christianity.

And that’s where the two sides of prophecy started coming together for me.

On one side were prophecies involving rulers, kingdoms, cities, destruction, and restoration that could be compared with what we know from history and archaeology. On the other were these threads running throughout the Old Testament about a coming King, suffering, sacrifice, redemption, covenant, judgment, and restoration.

Isaiah 53 describes the suffering servant. Micah connects a coming ruler with Bethlehem. Zechariah describes a king arriving humbly on a donkey. Psalm 22 describes terrible suffering and begins with the words Jesus would later speak from the cross: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”

Did all of that give me some airtight mathematical equation that proved God?

No.

There are debates about dating, interpretation, translation, and whether certain passages should even be understood as predictive prophecy. I actually think Christians weaken our argument when we pretend those questions don’t exist. If what we believe is true, we shouldn’t have to be afraid of examining the difficult parts too.

But I couldn’t dismiss what I was seeing either.

I was looking at an ancient collection of writings that continually intersected with real people, rulers, nations, cities, and historical events. I could compare some of its claims with archaeology and ancient history. I could look at manuscripts that physically predated Christianity. And eventually all of those questions kept leading me toward one person.

Jesus.

There are historical reasons for believing Jesus lived and was crucified without first assuming that the New Testament is divinely inspired. Christianity, however, makes a much bigger claim than simply saying Jesus existed.

It says He rose from the dead.

And that belief wasn’t something Christians invented hundreds of years later. It was at the center of Christianity from the beginning. Paul even says in 1 Corinthians 15:14 that if Christ has not been raised, our preaching and our faith are in vain. I actually appreciate that. Christianity puts its central claim right there on the table. If Jesus didn’t rise, we have a pretty major problem.

But if He did?

Then I had to take seriously who Jesus claimed to be, what He taught, and how He treated Scripture. Jesus continually appealed to Scripture as authoritative. He quoted it, taught from it, and used it to correct religious people. Interestingly enough, He also called people out when they elevated their own religious traditions to the level of God’s commands.

That little detail would become very important to me later.

The more I studied, the more I realized I wasn’t looking for one magical piece of evidence that proved God like a math equation. It was the whole picture.

The manuscript evidence gave me confidence that the Bible had been preserved. History and archaeology rooted it in the real world. Prophecy gave me reason to seriously consider something beyond ordinary human authorship. The evidence surrounding Jesus forced me to wrestle with the resurrection, and the resurrection forced me to wrestle with the authority of Jesus Himself.

When I laid all of that out, I reached my answer.

Yes. I believe what I hold in my hands is the Word of God. I believe in a God who loves me, who created me, and who created it all. A God I would still choose to put at the forefront of my life because I love Him, because He is God, and because my life with Him in it is inexplicably just better.

And honestly, that answer was bigger than the question.

Because if I truly believed the Bible was God’s Word, then I had just found the measuring stick for everything else. If this book was really God’s Word and I was going to call it the guide for my life, I couldn’t only use it when I agreed with it. Everything I believed had to be willing to stand next to it. My doctrine, my church, my traditions, things I had been taught since childhood, things I learned in Mormonism, things I learned after Mormonism, things preached from pulpits, things Christians around me had always done, and even my own deeply held convictions.

Everything.

If something I believed went against Scripture, then I had a decision to make. I couldn’t say Scripture was the authority for my life and then move Scripture out of the way when it disagreed with me.

If I truly believed this was God’s Word, Scripture didn’t need to move.

I did.

That became the whole point of deconstruction for me. I wasn’t trying to tear Christianity apart. I wasn’t looking for excuses to do whatever I wanted, and I wasn’t trying to see how many beliefs or rules I could get rid of. I was trying to figure out what was actually true. If Scripture commanded something, I needed to take it seriously whether I liked it or not. If something clearly went against Scripture, I couldn’t knowingly participate in it while also claiming the Bible was the guide for my life.

But there was another side of that measuring stick that I hadn’t thought nearly enough about.

If Scripture didn’t command something, did I have the right to make it a command for everybody else?

Whew. I hate it when I make my ownself uncomfortable, yall! 

That question would end up challenging me almost as much as the first oneBecause when I finally started measuring my beliefs against Scripture instead of measuring them against what I had always been taught, I found a little bit of everything. Some convictions survived. Some actually became stronger. Some things weren’t necessarily wrong at all, but I had to learn that they were personal convictions rather than commands from God.

And then there were things I had been absolutely convinced were biblical that I couldn’t actually find in the Bible. If I was going to be serious about not taking away from God’s Word, I had to become equally serious about not adding to it.

So now I had my measuring stick, and it was time to start measuring.

Doctrine. Salvation. Baptism. Worship. Clothing. Modesty. Traditions. Head coverings. Fellowship halls. All those little places where personal conviction, church culture, and Scripture can get tangled together until we aren’t quite sure where one ends and the other begins. And somewhere in that process, I had to confront a belief I didn’t even realize I held: Stricter does not automatically mean holier.

There is a difference between submitting to God’s Word and creating rules in God’s name. And that’s where we’re going next.

Next in Unshaken: When Conviction Becomes Legalism.

Want the deeper dive? This post is the condensed version of a chapter I originally wrote for Unshaken. There was simply no way to fit all of the evidence I researched into one reasonable blog post. The full chapter goes much deeper into manuscript evidence, archaeology, fulfilled prophecy, historical evidence surrounding Jesus, and why I ultimately came to believe that the Bible can be trusted.

If you’d like to read the full chapter, email me at ashlieverydayamen@gmail.com or leave a comment below, and I’ll be happy to send it your way.