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.
Category: Apologetics
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?”
There are two types of people who struggle with the big bang cosmology:
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Those who embrace materialism and exclude God from the equation, and
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Those whose religious teachings present the universe as eternal.
The bodily resurrection of Jesus lies at the heart of Christian theology. If the body of Christ did not rise from the dead, the Christian faith means nothing. Since belief in the resurrection relies on the evidence, it’s worth our time as either believers or skeptics to evaluate the quality of the evidence.
“Jesus of Nazareth is easily the dominant figure in history…the historian disregarding the theological significance of his life, writes the name of Jesus of Nazareth at the top of the list of the world’s greatest characters.” ~ H. G. Wells
Few can say that they have never heard of Jesus Christ. In a 2010 TIME Magazine article entitled, “Who’s Biggest? The 100 Most Significant Figures in History,” in which the authors attempted to rank “historical figures just as Google ranks web pages, by integrating a diverse set of measurements about their reputation into a single consensus value,” Jesus came out first1. Loved or hated, the name of Jesus Christ is a “household name,” and has been for centuries. Everybody’s heard of Jesus.
In this third installment, we turn to the question of the gospels’ authenticity and accuracy. Even though the texts of the gospels have come down to us in reliable form, their believability is another question altogether. Is there reason to believe that the gospel accounts were ever true to begin with? Or are they just carefully copied frauds? LOTS could be said on this, and we will have to content ourselves with only scratching the surface.
Last week, I cited multiple ancient authors who referred to Jesus in their respective works. These individuals, who lived in the same and/or following century that Jesus lived, spoke of him as a real historical figure. None of them were Christians, and at least two of them were quite hostile to Christianity, yet they spoke of Jesus as someone who had impacted their world in recent times. There is no reasonable reason to doubt their testimony on this point, and so the overwhelming majority of scholars don’t. But what of those who wrote about Jesus in the first century who were Christians? What about their testimony? In other words, what about the so-called “gospels”—the New Testament books of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John? Can we trust their accounts? Is there evidence one way or the other? These are questions worth answering…for the gospel writers not only affirm that Jesus walked the earth, but that he came from heaven to save us from the consequences of our sins against God. If there’s any chance that might be true, we definitely want to give the gospels a fair hearing.
So let’s see where the evidence leads….
Some doubt that Jesus ever existed. But they’re in the minority. There’s just too much evidence to the contrary: The first century Roman historian Tacitus (born c. AD 55) mentions Jesus in his Annals (15:44). Tacitus’ Jewish contemporary, Josephus (born c. AD 37), references Jesus twice in his Antiquities of the Jews (18.3.3; 20.9.1). Pliny the Younger (born AD 61), the Roman magistrate, mentions Jesus in his letter to the Emperor Trajan (Letters, vol. 2, 10:96). And the second-century satirist, Lucian of Samosata (born AD 125), speaks of Jesus in his work The Death of Peregrine (11-13).
Have you heard of the signal vs noise ratio? It is a science and engineering ratio used to measure the desired signal being received in a transmission versus the amount of noise in the background. Even if you are unfamiliar with the ratio itself you are certainly familiar with the concept. Ever listened to the radio, talked on cell phone or played walkie-talkie as a kid? Then you are familiar with the concept.