Sometimes we need a change of view. In most of your cases you need to have your "eyes of your understanding" checked for myopia (my·o·pi·a Nearsightedness. or Lack of imagination, foresight, or intellectual insight).
What I write here is not by any means complete and as I read other sermons I recognize that perhaps I do you a disservice by not spelling everything out for you. But if I do that where is the excitement of discovery? The joy of learning for yourself? Many who think they understand and have all the answers, don't even have the questions right (excuse me if I step on your spiritual toes) but if you truly want to grow in Grace and the knowledge of our Lord and Saviour Christ Jesus then get out of the wadding pool and learn to swim! (OK enough preaching and back to our study).
What Can Be Known About Jesus From History?
We cannot prove everything in the Bible. The New Testament is almost 2,000 years old. The real Jesus lived 2,000 years ago. There are limitations to what one can know through historical inquiry. People are still in sharp disagreement over events which happened within the lifetime of many of us such as the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. How much more so is it going to be difficult to speak conclusively concerning a person who lived 2,000 years ago? But while the limitations of history do not allow us to speak absolutely, they do not prevent our speaking of possibilities and probabilities.
The remarkable thing about this whole controversy is that the skeptical revisionists reject almost in totality what the four Gospels say about Jesus, but they then write a new history of Jesus which is based upon surmise, speculation and theory. Their Jesus is supposedly based on the very same Gospels they have rejected. They are "insisting on discovering history where it cannot be found." If, for example, I cannot prove the virgin birth of Jesus through historical analysis, is it not also true that someone else cannot disprove the virgin birth of Jesus by the same method? Both of us can only speak of possibilities and probabilities. What is even more ridiculous about the Jesus Seminar and several other radical revisionists is that they accept the Gospel of Thomas as an equal or better source for information about Jesus than Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. The Gospel of Thomas is from the mid-second century or later and is possibly Gnostic. It is non-canonical, probably heretical in origin and dated fifty to one hundred years later than the four Gospels. How in the name of common sense can anyone equate it as a historical source to the four Gospels?
Much of the gospel story lies beyond the reach of historical inquiry. For example, it can be established quite firmly as a historical fact that a man named Jesus was crucified in the early first century. What cannot be established as historical fact, because it lies outside the bounds of such analysis, is that Jesus died for our sins and thereby made atonement for mankind to God. While it is important that the Christ of Christian faith be the same as and consistent with the real Jesus of history, the Christ of faith is the living Lord of whom we must say much more than we can say in a strict, limited historical sense about Jesus.
But what arguments from history can be made about Jesus? Only the barest of sketches can be allowed here. I do not have sufficient time to go into the details of literary criticism, form criticism, redaction criticism, and historical methodology. Neither is there time to survey the literature on crucial questions such as the dating of New Testament documents, the authorship of the four Gospels, the canon of the New Testament, the evidence for Jesus outside the New Testament, and other equally important and related issues. But here hopefully one can be pointed in the right direction for further study.
The four Gospels are a combination of history and commentary. They are history written from the post-resurrection perspective of faith which adds interpretation to the events in light of a fuller understanding of them from a later period of time. The Gospels are religious propaganda designed to convert the reader. Let us be honest and admit that the Gospels are biased in favor of Jesus. But the Gospels are not useless in searching for the real Jesus of history just because they are written by insiders. Their favorable attitude toward Jesus and Christianity does require that they be studied carefully in light of what they are and cross-examined for their integrity, but they need not be rejected without a hearing. A good historian knows how to cross-examine evidence, separating what is reliable from what is unreliable.
One key point in cross-examining the story of the four Gospels is their date. Skeptics tend to date the Gospels as late as possible, because this allows more time for their theory that most of the story of Jesus was invented by the early church. Conservatives tend to date the Gospels as early as possible, because this places them within the lifetime of eyewitnesses who would be on hand to verify their contents. Actually we are not able to date any of the four Gospels precisely. It is possible that one of them was written as early as the late 50s and that one of them was written as late as the 90s (not my position). Within that range no one can speak with any certainty, even though many scholars pontificate and pretend to be certain. In my opinion it is likely that the first Gospel, Mark, was written in the 40s. Matthew and Luke were probably sometime within the same relative time period. John was likely last. Even though honesty does not permit us to assign a specific date, the news is good for those who want to believe in the traditional Christ of faith. All of the Gospels are from the first century, as is the rest of the New Testament. All of it is very close in time to the events which they narrate and interpret. And even though the skeptics attempt to dismiss the presence of any eyewitnesses among the writers of the New Testament, that is not so easily done.
There is more good news, though, which shrinks this time frame considerably. The Gospels are based, in part, on earlier information, either oral or written. Luke tells us at the beginning of his Gospel that others had "undertaken to set down an orderly account of the events that have been fulfilled among us, just as they were handed on to us by those who from the beginning were eyewitnesses and servants of the word" (Lk. 1:1-2). So while the skeptical critics carry on long and loud about sources they think they have detected within the Gospels or other New Testament documents, that is not bad news for the historical Jesus. Most source criticism is theory. It is speculation built on top of speculation. Much of it might be right, or almost all of it might be wrong. But if we are concerned about the accuracy of the information regarding Jesus in the Gospels, the presence of sources behind the Gospels is good news. If Mark wrote his Gospel in the 40s and Matthew and Luke sometime in the same time period , they are removed by a mere few years from the death and resurrection of Jesus. If they used sources of information which go back another ten, twenty or more years, that is even closer to the time of the event. There is less time available for any potential corruption and distortion of the message to occur, and certainly not enough time for a complete myth to evolve.
It is almost unanimously believed among New Testament scholars today that Mark's Gospel was written first and that the Gospel of Matthew and the Gospel of Luke used Mark as a source. There is a significant portion of material which Matthew and Luke share in common which is not found in Mark. This material is labeled "Q" from the German word for "source." No one knows whether this information was written down or whether it was merely passed along by word of mouth in oral tradition. The similar wording suggests to some that it was in written form, or possibly in several written forms. Let us for the sake of argument date Matthew and Luke in the 70s. They both may have been written a decade before or after, but let us put them in the 70s which is not an extreme date in either direction. When did the so-called "Q" traditions originate? In the 60s? In the 50s? In the 40s? Or possibly as early as the 30s? Once again this puts us extremely close to the time of the actual events. It is also a matter of scholarly discussion as to whether or not Matthew and Luke had other sources. Most conclude that they did. Once again this pushes the origin of these traditions back closer to the time of their occurrence.
The writings of Paul, which are almost all dated in the 50s and 60s, show evidence of earlier sources. While Paul's apostleship and his encounter with the living Christ were the result of a direct revelation from God, Paul conferred with eyewitnesses and received information about Jesus from them. In about 55 A.D. in 1 Corinthians Paul writes about the last supper, quoting the very words of Jesus (1 Cor. 11:23-26). This was done possibly ten years or more before any of the Gospels were written and a mere twenty-five years after the event. Furthermore, Paul reminded the Corinthian church: "For I handed on to you as of first importance what I in turn had received" (1 Cor. 15:3). This takes us back to the 30s to the time of Paul's conversion, only a few years after the resurrection of Jesus. Paul was in contact with eyewitnesses and first generation Christians everywhere he went. Thus it is apparent, except to the person who begins with a skeptical attitude, that the stories and traditions about Jesus were known and recorded a very short time after they occurred.
Let us draw an analogy. The distance of time from today in the year 2,000 to World War II is as great or greater than the distance in time from the ministry of Jesus to the writing of most of the books of the New Testament. And we have already noted, many of them are much earlier and they are built on information which predates them, sometimes by decades. But working with a fifty-five to sixty year time span, how many of you were involved in the war effort, either as a soldier or a civilian? How many of you were old enough to listen to the radio during the war or read the newspaper? How many of you have a parent who fits into one of these first two categories? How many of you have a grandparent who fits into one of the first two categories? Imagine how difficult it would be to fictionalize a whole life story, a series of events and a body of teaching, as if it all happened in the heart of Europe in the 1940s. If I attempted to do that and pass it off as fact, people all around could expose my deceit.
How much more so would that be true if I tried to do something similar for events from the Vietnam war era. That takes us back thirty years. Thirty years after Jesus died, a significant portion of the New Testament was already written and sources for later use were already developed, either in writing or in oral tradition. Let us push it back even further. The initial telling and retelling of the story of Jesus and the development of the oral tradition about him began immediately after his resurrection. The gospel story had already taken definite form by the time of Paul's conversion in the 33 A.D. So imagine me trying to create some grand fiction about the Gulf War and passing it off as history today. When the apostle Paul noted that there were over five hundred witnesses of the resurrected Jesus, he added: "most of whom are still alive" (1 Cor. 15:6). His point was obvious. If the story of the resurrection were not true, there were close to five hundred people who could have exposed it as a fraud.
Thus a very strong hypothetical case can be built for the accuracy with which the early Christians handed down the story of Jesus, but this is hypothetical. Bias on the part of the person investigating the historicity of Jesus is very evident if we keep the discussion at this level. Liberal skeptics tend to distrust the accuracy of the transmission of the story of Jesus. The believer assumes that the story has been accurately transmitted. Is there any way that we can get beyond pure speculation about how well the story was transmitted between 30 A.D. and the writing of the Gospels? Yes, there is. Again, it is almost certain that Mark was the first Gospel and that Matthew and Luke used Mark to produce their Gospels. If we compare parallel passages between the three synoptic Gospels, we can see whether or not the message was preserved accurately. Examine the following narrative which is found in all four Gospels.
TO BE CONTINUED...
