Whether you come as a skeptic, a seeker, a Protestant, or a Catholic, the questions are worth asking honestly. Why trust this book at all? And why does the Church read it the way she does?
It is a fair question, and it deserves more than a circular answer like "because the Bible says so." Set aside faith for a moment and consider the New Testament purely as a collection of ancient documents. By the ordinary standards historians use to judge any text from antiquity, it is the single best-attested work of the ancient world.
Consider the manuscript evidence. For Caesar's Gallic Wars, historians work from fewer than a dozen good copies, the earliest made roughly nine hundred years after Caesar wrote. For the New Testament, there are over 5,800 Greek manuscripts, with fragments dating to within decades of the originals. No other ancient text comes remotely close, in either the number of copies or their nearness to the events. If we doubted the New Testament on textual grounds, we would have to throw out nearly all of ancient history with it.
Consider also the timing. The Gospels and the letters of St. Paul were written within the lifetimes of eyewitnesses, friend and hostile alike, who could have refuted them. St. Paul, writing of the Resurrection around the year 55, appeals to more than five hundred witnesses, most of whom, he says, are still living (1 Corinthians 15:6). That is not the language of legend told safely after everyone has died; it is an open invitation to go and ask them.
Consider, finally, the witnesses themselves. The apostles proclaimed a risen Christ in the very city where he had been executed, where the tomb could have been checked, and they did so at the cost of their lives. People will die for a belief they hold sincerely but mistakenly; few will die for a claim they know to be a lie. The transformation of frightened disciples into fearless martyrs is itself a historical fact in need of an explanation.
None of this forces faith, and it is not meant to. But it does show that trusting the Scriptures is not a leap into the dark. The Bible is reliable history before it is ever read as the inspired Word of God, and the Church holds it to be both.
Indeed they do, and the Church insists upon it. The Second Vatican Council called all the faithful to seek "the surpassing knowledge of Jesus Christ" through frequent reading of the Scriptures, echoing the warning of St. Jerome that ignorance of Scripture is ignorance of Christ.
Far from neglecting the Bible, the Catholic Church is saturated with it. At every Sunday Mass the faithful hear a reading from the Old Testament, a Psalm, a passage from the New Testament letters, and the Gospel. Across a three-year cycle, most of the Bible is proclaimed aloud, and the prayers of the Mass are themselves woven almost entirely from Scripture. The Church "forcefully and specifically exhorts all the Christian faithful to learn the surpassing knowledge of Jesus Christ by frequent reading of the divine Scriptures" (CCC 133).
The Catholic Old Testament includes seven books that most Protestant Bibles omit, known as the Deuterocanonical books:
These books belonged to the Septuagint, the Greek Old Testament that the Apostles themselves used and quoted throughout the New Testament. The early Church received them as Scripture, and the councils of Hippo and Carthage, in the late fourth century, affirmed the full canon of seventy-three books. That canon endured for more than a thousand years, until the Reformation, when these seven were set aside.
Therefore, the Catholic Bible does not contain extra books, but rather preserves the canon the Church has held since the beginning, the very table of contents discerned by the early Christians under the guidance of the Holy Spirit. It was the Church, after all, who recognized and handed on the writings that truly belonged to Scripture (CCC 120).
Catholics do not hold to Scripture alone, and this is itself faithful to the Bible, which never teaches such a thing. St. Paul instructed the Thessalonians to hold fast to the traditions they had been taught, whether by word of mouth or by letter (2 Thessalonians 2:15). The Word of God reaches us through both Sacred Scripture and Sacred Tradition, two streams flowing from one divine source.
The Church does not stand above the Word but serves it, guarding it and faithfully handing it on from one generation to the next. Scripture and Tradition are not rivals but companions, and the teaching office of the Church exists to serve them both (CCC 95).
The Bible did not descend from heaven already bound and assembled. For the first several centuries of Christianity, many writings circulated, some faithful to the apostolic teaching and some not. It was the Church, in her councils and through the authority handed down from the Apostles, who discerned under the guidance of the Holy Spirit which books were truly inspired.
This means that the same Church who gave us the Creed, the sacraments, and the Mass also gave us the Bible itself. To trust the Scriptures is, in a real sense, to trust the Church that recognized and preserved them. God is the author of Sacred Scripture, who inspired its human writers and acts in them and through them (CCC 105 to 106).
It is far more than that. Scripture is living and active (Hebrews 4:12), the very speech of God addressed to you now, and not merely to those who lived long ago. When the Scriptures are read in the Church, it is Christ himself who speaks (CCC 1088).
This is why the reading of Scripture is never a merely academic exercise. It is an encounter. The same Word that spoke creation into being, and took flesh in the womb of the Virgin, speaks to you each time you open the sacred page. To read Scripture prayerfully is to listen to the voice of God.
The Mass is, in a sense, the Bible prayed. The Liturgy of the Word, with its readings from the Old Testament, the Psalms, the Epistles, and the Gospel, places Scripture at the very heart of Catholic worship, and the Eucharistic prayers and responses are themselves drawn almost entirely from the Bible.
As you grow in Scripture, the Mass begins to open before you. You start to recognize the echoes, to hear how the readings answer one another, and to see Christ revealed across the whole sweep of salvation history. The Church has always venerated the Scriptures as she venerates the Body of the Lord, receiving the bread of life from the one table of the Word and of the Eucharist (CCC 103).