Many people who worry about the Bible’s reliability carry an unspoken rule: before any of it can be trusted, all of it has to be defended. Dr. Chad Thornhill, who chairs theological studies at Liberty University’s School of Divinity, argues that this rule gets the order backward. You do not have to defend every detail first. Begin with a narrower question: does the Bible’s account of Jesus stand on good historical ground? If it does, the larger question about Scripture is still there, but you face it as someone who already has reason to take Jesus seriously.
That is a claim about sequence. The same evidence, taken in a different order, can lead to very different places. One order hangs the whole faith on the hardest unanswered question; the other rests it where the evidence is strongest. Lisa Fields, founder of the Jude 3 Project, notes why this matters for many Black Christians and skeptics. In much of the African American church community, God’s existence is largely assumed, so the apologetic questions now start with Scripture itself.
The Premise Underneath the Demand
Stated out loud, the premise runs like this: before I can trust what the Bible says about Jesus, I must first establish that the Bible as a whole is trustworthy. The general case comes first, and the particular claims ride on it.
Thornhill calls this a top-down approach, and its strongest version deserves a fair hearing. It points to the number of New Testament manuscripts, their early dates and how they compare with other works of ancient history. Thornhill grants that the copies contain many variants, yet they do not split on the central events: “we don’t find, for example, a manuscript that says Jesus rose from the dead, and a manuscript that says Jesus didn’t rise from the dead.” From there the argument concludes that the Bible is generally reliable, therefore inspired, therefore true in what it says about Jesus.
He does not call this a bad argument. His objection is to its order and to what that order forces you to carry. Starting with the whole Bible means “you’re biting off a really big discussion from that approach because you end up potentially dealing with a lot of peripheral issues that can sidetrack the discussion.” A conversation about whether Jesus rose from the dead turns into one about the age of the earth or the archaeology of Jericho. Thornhill says those are good questions that Christians should study. Made into the entrance, though, they stall the conversation before it ever reaches Jesus.
Why the Full Defense Cannot Come First
If you open by arguing for an error-free Bible, Thornhill notes, only two routes are available.
The first is circular: “the Bible says it’s the word of God, therefore it’s the word of God.” A believer may hold this sincerely, but offered to a skeptic as an argument, it assumes its own conclusion. Thornhill is candid about what it amounts to in that setting: “I’m basically just asserting my belief about it.”
The second route avoids circularity but takes on an enormous burden instead. “The other approach, which is to some extent impossible, is to show that there aren’t any errors in scripture.” That is a universal negative. It requires that no error appear anywhere, across every internal tension and every point where the text meets another ancient document or an archaeological site. One unresolved case leaves the conclusion unproven. The whole argument is staked on never meeting a question you cannot answer.
There is a further limit. Statements of inerrancy usually apply to the original manuscripts, not to any modern translation, and according to Thornhill, no one possesses documents known to be those originals. Most surviving New Testament manuscripts date from the fourth century or later, with earlier fragments mostly from the second and third centuries. For the Old Testament, the distance is greater. He raises a pointed case: if Moses wrote the five books of the law, some details describe events after his death, so which version counts as the autograph?
Fields draws the conclusion plainly. To say the original manuscript was without error when no one has seen it means “we’re basically taking a faith position.” Thornhill agrees: “So I think it does become a faith posture.”
This does not make inerrancy false. Fields says she still affirms it, and Thornhill says he holds it too. The point is narrower. Evidence alone cannot carry a person to that conclusion, so it cannot serve as the evidential foundation for everything else.
Starting With Jesus
Thornhill’s alternative shifts the burden. He invites the skeptic to examine specific claims the way historians examine any ancient source: “regardless of what you believe about whether the Bible’s true or not, let’s see what it says about Jesus.”
A careful skeptic will object that the Gospels are part of the Bible, so this looks like the same move in disguise. The difference lies in what the method assumes. It does not treat the Gospels as inspired. It treats them as ancient documents and asks what historians ask of any source: how close it stands to the events, and whether anything outside it agrees. Thornhill indicates that outside evidence is stronger for the crucifixion than for the miracle accounts, though some exists for both. Inspiration enters later, as a conclusion a person may reach, never as a premise the skeptic must grant.
On the crucifixion, Thornhill says “it’s pretty well established, for example, that Jesus died by crucifixion,” and only a handful of New Testament scholars of any faith perspective deny it. He is careful about why that consensus counts: “it’s not that we should believe these things because scholars say them.” Scholars hold the view because there are good reasons to. He points to the Gospels’ early dating, within one or probably two generations of Jesus’s followers, whereas a history of Julius Caesar might be written several hundred years after Caesar lived.
Thornhill also cites Graham Twelftree’s study of the miracle accounts as making a strong case that Jesus was known as a miracle worker. He acknowledges the next debate: some will grant that something unusual happened and explain it as psychosomatic or medical. The historical point he presses is that there was a widespread belief that these things were happening around Jesus.
Each claim is tested on its own, and the portrait builds from them. The case is cumulative, and what it reaches is historical probability. That modesty is its strength: because it promises less at each step, it can deliver what it promises.
Where does it lead? In Thornhill’s words, “if we have good reasons to believe that it’s speaking truly about Jesus, then that opens up some really big questions.” The live question becomes what to do with a man who made the claims Jesus made.
The New Testament itself reasons in this order. Paul rests the whole weight of Christian faith on one event:
“And if Christ be not raised, your faith is vain; ye are yet in your sins.” (1 Corinthians 15:17)
He is writing to Corinthian believers, some of whom doubted the resurrection of the dead. He identifies the load-bearing claim and argues from it.
Doesn’t This Let People Keep Only the Parts They Like?
This is the strongest objection. If you do not defend every verse up front, you seem to invite people to keep the verses they like and drop the rest. Fields raised exactly this, describing a friend who argues that any looser view of inerrancy puts everything in the Bible up for debate.
Thornhill’s first answer is logical: “when I hear slippery slope, it is one of our logical fallacies.” The argument assumes that because X happens, Y and Z must follow. That is a prediction, and predictions need evidence. He offers counterexamples: writers he respects who would not call themselves inerrantists yet hold Scripture as authoritative over their lives. Karl Barth is his clearest case. In Thornhill’s account, Barth put little stock in the term but would still have been horrified by anyone who drew up a list of the Bible’s errors. Doubts about a word did not lead Barth to treat the text as optional, which is exactly the link the slippery-slope argument says is inevitable.
His second answer turns the objection around: “there’s actually more danger in having that sort of all or nothing approach.” If a person is taught that every detail must stand or the whole faith falls, one unresolved question becomes a reason to abandon everything. As Thornhill puts it, “what we’re basically telling them to do is that they either need to reconcile it or jettison everything.”
He gives a concrete case. A student taught that faith depends on one reading of creation goes to college, becomes persuaded by the evidence for evolution and walks away from Christianity. Thornhill says that is not where he lands on the question, and the Jude 3 Project leaves the how and when of creation open while holding that God is Creator. His concern is the false either-or the student was handed. His counsel is direct: “don’t give up on Jesus” because of problems with Genesis.
Logically, the all-or-nothing premise ties the strength of the entire faith to its single weakest point, by stipulation. The Jesus-first order declines that stipulation and lets the weight rest where the evidence is heaviest.
Thornhill still grants a real danger, but he locates it in deciding what to believe by personal preference. Questions themselves do not alarm him. What concerns him is a person’s posture toward Scripture, which he calls “the posture towards scripture that becomes the thing that would be alarming to me.”
Two Conversations, One Posture
Thornhill separates two settings: “one is sort of an in-house discussion, and one is an outside of the house discussion.” With a skeptic, the question is whether the central message stands on good historical ground. Among believers, the question is what Christians should hold about the nature of Scripture. Confusing the two is how a skeptic ends up being asked to accept a theological conclusion before seeing any evidence.
Inside the house, Scripture makes its own claim:
“All scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness.” (2 Timothy 3:16)
Thornhill renders the key Greek term as God-breathed. Peter adds:
“For the prophecy came not in old time by the will of man: but holy men of God spake as they were moved by the Holy Ghost.” (2 Peter 1:21)
Thornhill notes that these texts affirm that God directed the writing, while Scripture never spells out the mechanism. That is where faithful Christians debate terms like infallible and inerrant.
The conviction the Jude 3 Project holds belongs to this in-house conversation: Scripture is the inspired, authoritative Word of God, fully trustworthy in all it intends to teach, and the final standard for faith and practice. Thornhill’s order shows how someone can come to that conviction honestly. It is where a disciple arrives, and a skeptic need not grant it at the door.
Thornhill describes the right posture with a play on words: Scripture calls for “understanding rather than overstanding.” The reader stands under the text rather than sitting above it as a judge. “So we place ourselves under the authority of scripture because we believe that it is God speaking,” he says, and because it bears witness to Jesus, the fullest revelation of God.
He also asks what has counted as the center of the faith. In Galatians 2, Paul rebukes Peter for withdrawing from Gentile believers, saying “they walked not uprightly according to the truth of the gospel” (Galatians 2:14). Thornhill’s point is that Paul treated table fellowship as a gospel issue in that moment, though few would list it as a core doctrine today. So what counts as central has to be examined, not assumed. The early church centered its confessions on the nature of God, the Trinity and the person and work of Christ, and by Thornhill’s reading, inerrancy as a defined term was absent from that discussion. Denying Christ’s divinity, the resurrection or the Trinity would alarm him. Breaking fellowship over the word inerrancy would mean treating a minor issue as a major one.
Why This Order Asks More
Starting with Jesus can sound like the softer position. Thornhill argues it is harder, because then Jesus sets the terms. The Jesus of the Gospels told his followers to turn the other cheek, but he also called them to take up a cross and said his message would divide households. Refusing Scripture’s authority, Thornhill warns, usually goes hand in hand with deciding which parts of Jesus to keep, until “I’m basically just following the parts of Jesus that I like” and avoiding the call to repentance. His short version of the alternative: “Jesus calls us as we are, but he doesn’t expect us to stay there.”
He adds that in Paul’s letters, statements about what is true are always followed by what to do about it. Belief and behavior are meant to shape each other, and much of First and Second Corinthians addresses people whose claims and conduct did not match.
That is where the order of trust ends up. The skeptic first looks honestly at what the Gospels say about Jesus. A person who comes to trust him then hears the rest of Scripture as his follower, under its voice, and stops auditing each line before signing off. The questions about manuscripts, archaeology and the age of the earth stay open and worth studying, but they are no longer the price of entry. The demand that remains is a willingness to be changed by what you find.
Quick Answers
What if I hit a passage I cannot resolve? Thornhill’s counsel is to keep studying it without letting it decide everything. One unresolved question does not overturn the historical case for Jesus.
Can someone who doubts the term inerrancy be a real Christian? Fields says she believes such people can still be authentic believers, and Thornhill agrees. His test is whether they submit to Scripture’s authority, not whether they use the word.
Can I follow Jesus’s words and set Paul aside? Thornhill rejects that move. He argues that Paul has been misunderstood, pointing to how Paul welcomed Gentiles without requiring circumcision across the deepest ethnic divide of his day. Fields says all of Scripture stands on the same playing field.
Should Christians avoid hard questions like Jericho or the age of the earth? No. Thornhill calls them good questions to examine. He simply does not make them the first step in a conversation with a skeptic.