Why I trust the bible

Recently, loved ones had passed me references to 'Gospel' of Judas and brought me to watch documentaries on it. I'm grateful that it is given with the intention of giving me food for thought if I'm following man-made doctrines and concern against blind faith when I trust in the original documents in the Protestant Bible as divinely inspired and inerrant.

Sometimes, I have a tendency to regret that I had not been a Christian since young (so much time wasted!) but I praise God that having come to believe in Christ as God as an adult, I'm fully cognisant of the faith-changing and thought process.

Having first believed in Christ as God, I was faced with this dilemma and I remembered agonising in prayer, "God, who is teaching about the real you? The charismatic church that focuses on the teachings of this particular pastor who is getting special, secret revelation from you? The Roman Catholic church? The You that is mentioned in the Protestant bible? God, is the Christian church even teaching about the real You? If not, God, show me who teaches the real You and I will follow, no matter where you take me."

My prayers were answered (Praise God that His revelation is not a secret I need to ferret out!) when I discovered that all the books in the New Testament were written within 60 years after Jesus' death, resurrection and ascension to God's right hand (references here) and written either by the apostles (mostly people who were directly in contact with Jesus' ministry on earth) or people who were directly in contact with the apostles. This proves to me that these are reliable eyewitness records of Jesus' teachings and were within too short a window of time to be fabricated. The matyrdom of the majority of these apostles for refusing to deny the seeing of the living Jesus in the flesh (who is also seen by 500 other people) is further evidence that their accounts are true.

But what of the OT? Is it inspired and which version (Roman Catholic or Protestant) should be accepted? Jesus' words "Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them." (Matthew 5:17), "This is what I told you while I was still with you: Everything must be fulfilled that is written about me in the Law of Moses, the Prophets and the Psalms." (Luke 24:44) made me believe in the OT as inspired and about Christ. The Protestant Canon is accepted as God's word by the knowledge that the additional books (all in the Old Testament) were only recognised as canonical in the Roman Catholic bible in the Council of Trent only in 1546 and that these additional Old Testament books are not part of the Hebrew Tanakh.

It is highly suspicious that the gospel of Judas or gospel of Thomas were written by Judas and Thomas themselves given that they were commonly attributed to be written in 120-170 AD and 200 AD respectively. Thus they may paint Jesus in a good light or even teach good morals but they will still be suspect as a true account of Jesus.

In addition to the bible, I had also exposed myself to the alternative versions of Jesus, the Jesus as fictionalised in the 'Da Vinci Code', the Jesus as seen in the 'Gospel of Judas', the Jesus as "quoted" in the 'Gospel of Thomas'. My prayerful reading of these materials did not give me enough evidence that these theories are reliable accounts by Jesus on how to get into the Kingdom of God.

Besides the alternative theories of Jesus swooning his way to India, Jesus' kingly bloodline preserved through Mary Magdalene, Jesus advocating freeing the spirit from man as necessity to progress, would you be willing to read about the biblical Jesus and decide if He (as shown through the gospel) is the only way to the Kingdom?

In matters of truth and fact (but not differences in personality), there is only right and wrong. After a car accident, a person is either dead or alive (barely or otherwise), he cannot be both dead and alive at the same time. Similarly, Jesus either is resurrected physically or still dead, He cannot be in both states at the same time. If by making an informed decision of this and standing by it defines me as narrow-minded and hopelessly brain-washed, then I am. But can a person be similarly narrow-minded and stubborn if he refuses to admit the possibility that the biblical Jesus is the true Jesus?