Was the New Testament assembled by a fourth century council? Did that council deliberately exclude other books about Jesus?
Author: Wade Stanley
Defenders of the Christian faith settled on a definition of evil many centuries ago. Evil is a lack, a privation, or a corruption of what is good. It is not the absence of good because evil does not exist in and of itself.
The case in favor of John grows stronger when we add another internal element: the author of this account was familiar with Palestine.
For the sake of argument, I will disregard the previous few blogs concerning the fourth gospel account to consider the additional internal evidence that points to John as the author.
As a general unrest in Palestine fomented outright rebellion in the mid to late 60’s A.D., Eusebius tells us that the disciples and apostles abandoned Jerusalem and Judea.
From the writings of Clement of Rome and Irenaeus, we know that the core elements of the Christian faith were established by the end of the first century, some 60-70 years following the death and reported resurrection of Jesus. I indicated in my previous post that though this is early testimony in terms of ancient history, there are more ancient documents that communicate these truths.
In my last blog post, I briefly discussed how historians are faced with the difficult task of unravelling true historical facts from the embellishments that creep in over time. However, the threat of legend overtaking fact is mitigated by the gap between the actual event and the earliest record.
One of my favorite movies in recent time is The Fellowship of the Ring. This adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien’s classic, The Lord of the Rings, is by far the best of the cinematic series. The filmmakers introduce us to Tokien’s Middle Earth with a brief history of Sauron’s One Ring. When the ring was lost and forgotten, the prologue’s voice-over says, “History became legend. Legend became myth.” Tolkien shows a keen understanding of human nature in this statement.
In his book, The Nature of Historical Explanation, Patrick Gardiner asked a worthwhile question:
“In what sense can I be said to know an event which is in principle unobservable, having vanished behind the mysterious frontier which divides the present from the past? And how can we be sure that anything really happened in the past at all, that the whole story is not an elaborate fabrication, as untrustworthy as a dream or a work of fiction?”