Isn't the Bible just made up by men?

Yes — and no. Men wrote it. God breathed it. Both are true at the same time, and that's the Christian claim. Forty different authors over fifteen hundred years — shepherds, kings, fishermen, doctors, prophets, a tax collector — wrote in their own voices, from their own places, and the thing they produced is somehow one story moving in one direction.

If a committee tried to forge that today, they couldn't. The Bible is too honest about its heroes (David, Peter, Paul all come off badly in places) and too unified across centuries it never planned for. You don't have to swallow that whole right now. Just open it and ask whether it reads like the kind of book a committee would invent.

The 27 New Testament books circulated in the first century and were quoted as Scripture by the second. They weren't chosen by a council to suppress competitors; the lists at Hippo (393) and Carthage (397) recognised what the churches were already reading. The 'lost gospels' (Thomas, Judas, etc.) are second- and third-century writings that look and read nothing like the first-century Gospels.

We have over 5,800 Greek New Testament manuscripts — orders of magnitude more than any other ancient text. By comparison, Caesar's Gallic Wars survives in roughly ten copies, the earliest 900 years after the original. Where there are variants, almost all are spelling and word order; the underlying message is not in serious doubt.