Thanksgiving and New Testament Documents

And then a month of silence passed on Wendell’s blog. For those 3 or 4 of you who have been on the edge of your seat: sorry about that. Life at the Trinity Forum Academy suddenly got busy. Each time I post, I think to myself, “well, I’ll just do that again in a week.” And then a month of silence passes. Good intentions…

I spent much of last week in Washington D.C. for two conferences: the first was the Evangelical Theological Society proceedings, and the second was an apologetics conference at McLean Bible Church. At the McLean conference, I heard a talk titled “The Historical Reliability of the Gospels.” This lecture coincided with our most recent classroom readings and discussions at the TFA. We have been addressing questions like “Was Jesus really divine? Did he even claim to be? Is Jesus the only way to God? Was Jesus really resurrected from the dead?” On several of these questions we read two authors giving opposing answers, and then we discussed the arguments at length in class, trying to reach some consensus. The combination of classroom discussions at the TFA and lectures at the apologetics conference has left me thinking hard about the above questions.

Furthermore, last week I read the first half of Sam Harris’s Letter to a Christian Nation, in which he argues that Christian faith is foolish and dangerous. I hope to discuss the book in greater detail at some point in the future (including a discussion of some things Harris and I may agree on), but for now I want to compare the information I received at McLean with one of the general claims that Sam Harris makes. Harris thinks that Christian faith is groundless and irrational, not suitable for a civilized and enlightened people. In making this argument, he seems to assume that there is no legitimate evidence or reason why anyone could possibly believe the Bible to be true.

Craig Blomberg, in his talk on the historical reliability of the gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John) spoke to this very challenge, although without naming Harris. In his argument, Blomberg presented the case against the books and then commenced a discussion of the historical evidence available to us and the several reasons why he believes it testifies to the gospels’ trustworthiness. Some of what he said I had heard before, but much of it was new. Here is a brief summary of some of the points I found most significant.

1. We (the royal academic “we”) have vastly more manuscripts of the gospels than we do for any text from close to the same time period. That means that if someone in the first or second century wanted to alter the book of Mark, for example, he or she would have needed to change a whole lot of documents, because there were so many floating around. (Of course, this doesn’t make any of what the gospels report actually true, it just means we have vastly greater reason to believe these are the original texts than we do for any other documents from the period).

2. The authors of the gospels were in good positions to report accurate information. Mark was a traveling companion to Peter and Paul. Matthew and John were among the 12 disciples, and Luke was Paul’s physician. So these were people close to the events they reported.

3. The gospels, even by the most skeptical estimations, are dated in the mid to late 1st century, a time when many eyewitnesses of the events in the gospels would have been alive. Had the gospels been fabrications, given their offensiveness to the predominate Pharisaic Judaism, we might expect to find documents protesting their claims. But we don’t.

4. Instead of documents protesting the record of the gospels, we find 12 separate historians outside the Christian faith who corroborate the general contours of the gospel accounts (although some of the sources account for Jesus’ miracles by calling him a “sorcerer.”) The most prominent of these accounts is by Flavius Josephus, who published his History of the Jews in AD 90.

5. This was news to me: One of the traditions of first century Judaism was compulsory elementary education for young Jewish boys. It started around age 3 and consisted almost entirely of rote memorization of massive passages of Hebrew Scriptures. We live today in a culture where memorization is a lost skill; but in a culture without a printing press and a premium placed on the preservation of Holy Scriptures, the capacity of the human brain to memorize spoken and written material was stretched to its limits. (My Greek professor at Furman explained this to me as an account of how books like the Iliad were eventually written: oral tradition and massive amounts of memorized material.) Why is this significant? It is significant because it gives us great reason to believe that the gospel writers had capabilities, far above and beyond what we do today, that would allow them to memorize and record the words of Jesus. If there was ever a culture from which trustworthy accounts of a leader’s spoken words could be recorded, it was 1st century Judaism.

6. The gospels contain numerous “hard sayings” of Jesus that presented interpretive difficulties to the 1st century church (and the 21st century church, for that matter). If the gospels had been merely fabricated by the 1st century Christians, why would they have attributed such controversial sayings to Jesus (example: John 6:53)? These passages would not have been conducive to the growth and political power of the Christian movement.

7. Conversely, the gospels do not contain pronouncements from Jesus on issues like circumcision, which would have been very helpful to the 1st century church. Had the gospels writers felt the liberty to put words in Jesus mouth, why would they not have taken the opportunity to resolve the great controversies of the 1st century church by simply having their master give a decisive word? The presence of “hard sayings” and lack of pronouncement on 1st century controversies both speak against theories that claim the gospels were inventions of the early church.

This is only a brief summary of Blomberg’s presentation, but it makes a general point. There are many scholars, Christian and non-Christian, who look at the historical evidence and conclude that the gospels are reliable accounts of a real first century religious figure: Jesus. It is certainly possible to doubt them, to say Jesus was not real or that his followers grossly embellished accounts of his deeds, but that is not where the evidence seems to point.

After Blomberg’s talk, I was reflecting on what has been, to my mind, the best argument against the gospels: that Jesus’ followers hid his body and then propagated myths about his life, making up all the claims we now associate with Jesus—deity, miracles, resurrection, etc. We’ll call this the “fabrication hypothesis.” There may not really be any evidence that such a thing happened, but it has always seemed a formidable doubt in the back of mind. But after Blomberg’s talk, I reconsidered this explanation and found it to be more lacking than I had ever before realized.

Jesus’ disciples, during his earthly ministry, thought he was going to be a political leader. Their devotion was to the hope that he would lead a political revolution in which the Jews would throw off Roman hegemony and establish an autonomous Jewish state in the name of Yahweh. These were the politics of the day and the hopes of the Jews following Jesus. That they had this view is made apparent in the gospels.

Given these hopes, we have to ask ourselves, how would the disciples have viewed Jesus’ seizure and conviction to death by the Roman governor Pilate? It certainly was not a confirmation of their faith in Jesus. In fact, Jesus’ crucifixion would have marked the total failure of Jesus to do what they had hoped he would; it was like a signpost informing them that they had made a mistake to follow this guy.

Now, according to the fabrication hypothesis, at the point when the disciples’ hopes in Jesus were utterly shattered, instead of scattering and growing disillusioned about him, they decided to pretend he had been raised from the dead and exalt him as a God. Then they established a new religion in Jesus’ name, for which they and their followers were beaten and imprisoned and often martyred over the next century. When I put myself in their shoes, I cannot imagine having this response. I cannot imagine dying for a religion I knew I had fabricated in the name of someone who had utterly failed to do what I expected him to do.

To my mind, Jesus’ actual resurrection seems a more likely explanation for the transformation of the disciples from Jewish patriots into spokesmen for a new religion of God’s love and grace for all nations. I do not see how or why they would have overcome their own disappointment and motivated in themselves such zeal if there were not a real event that inspired their change.

In conclusion, I'll say this: I think there is sufficient evidence to legitimately protest the claims by many that Christianity is all wishful thinking and irrationality. Christian belief is, no doubt, a long leap for a naturalist, and it unequivocally does require a leap of faith—but it is not a leap into the dark, unenlightened and absurd. It is a leap in the direction of much evidence.

What do you think of these arguments? I think they are perhaps useful, informative and helpful, but limited. If you’re a Christian reading this, do you buy it? If you’re an unbeliever reading this, what do you think? Is it all smoke and mirrors?

Thank you for reading so far. Sorry my posts are ridiculously long. It takes me a while to get my thoughts out. I’ll hopefully take up some more philosophical concerns with the notion of “evidence” and “rationality” in the next post.