Probably most every one of us has been in on a conversation where one person says something that’s a bit hard to believe. The other person questions it. And the first person raises his hand, as if he is being sworn in to give testimony in court, and says ‘It’s the gospel truth!’ ‘It’s the gospel truth!’
We put the gospels and the truth together to say that if there is anything you can trust in this world, it’s the gospels. That’s as it should be.
But you may have noticed that in the last 15 to 20 years there has been a growing movement that says you can’t trust the gospels. The writers got it wrong. The four gospel writers can’t even agree. They each distorted the message because of the biases of their situations. They got it wrong, so we need to clean up their work a bit and straighten them out.
A few weeks ago PBS ran a special called “From Jesus to Christ,” that explained with great artistic skill and with discussion by quite a few ‘experts’ that the gospel writers were wrong about Jesus. He wasn’t God. He was just a man, Jesus. And he didn’t get the title Christ for hundreds of years. He didn’t intend to die for our sins. The early Christians were blown away when their master was crucified and they invented that story out of a sincere need to understand what went wrong. And the story was distorted again and again for many, many years before it was finally written down.
There is a rapidly growing segment of Bible scholarship that puts together more and more books and TV ‘documentaries’ that tell us that you can’t trust the gospels. You can’t take the gospels at face value. You need to turn to experts who will decode the hidden meanings for you. I don’t know if you even notice, it’s become so common, but the foundations of our faith are being undermined more and more.
So, can we trust the gospels? Were the gospel writers careless when they wrote, or did they intentionally alter the facts to make a point, or gain an advantage in arguments with their enemies?
I’d say the best place to start is to look at just how one of the gospel writers went about his project. Luke tells us clearly how he went about writing his gospel. And after we look at what he said, you tell me if it sounds dependable to you or not.
Would you please stand now for the reading of God’s word, the first 4 verses of the Gospel According to Luke?
1 Since many have undertaken to set down an orderly account of the events that have been fulfilled among us, 2 just as they were handed on to us by those who from the beginning were eyewitnesses and servants of the word. 3 I too decided, after investigating everything carefully from the very first, to write an orderly account for you, most excellent Theophilus, 4 so that you may know the truth concerning the things about which you have been instructed.
Now who was the author of the book we call Luke’s gospel? The author never gives us his name, but there is a very strong tradition in the early church that this book was written by Luke, a Greek speaking early convert to Christianity who was not one of the original 12 disciples, but often traveled with the Apostle Paul. I think that is quite likely. Jesus died in about the year 33. Luke most likely wrote around the year 70, so he wrote about 25 - 30 years after the fact.
And how did he go about it? In verse 1 we read that many people had already started writing down orderly accounts of this story about Jesus. Luke had written resources to work from, not just campfire stories. It’s pretty obvious that one of those resources is what we call the Gospel of Mark because just over 300 of the verses in Mark are in Luke in almost identical form. The early church tells us that Mark traveled with Peter and listened as Peter told the stories over and over again and wrote them down, probably with Peter looking over his shoulder to be sure he had it right. So that tells me that Mark was a good historical source.
We don’t know what other written resources Luke used, but it looks like once Luke collected many of them and wrote them down in one place, the shorter and less polished parts of the story that he used came to be used less and less and disappeared.
The Book of Acts tells us that Luke traveled with Paul, spending 2 years in Palestine while Paul was in jail at Caesarea, about 60 miles from Jerusalem. Don’t you think he would have crossed paths with many of the disciples if they came down to visit Paul, or that Luke would take trips up to Jerusalem to see where it all happened and talk to those who saw it? He may have spent a lot of time with many of the original 12 disciples collecting their stories and making sure he had it right.
In verse 1 he referred to these events that he was recorded as “events that have been fulfilled among us.” Luke had come to see the life of Jesus as a fulfillment of things that God had been preparing for centuries, the fulfillment of prophecies and promises throughout the Old Testament. Luke watched for sources that would understand the story of Jesus in its proper context.
Luke tells us in verse one that he and the sources that he used put the things they learned in an orderly fashion. The gospels are generally organized in chronological order, running from start to finish. But often the writers collected Jesus’ teachings on a certain topic together into collections of teachings, so they are sometimes ordered in chronological order and sometimes ordered by topic. That just makes sense. The story about Jesus started out in oral form, probably with the order sometimes confused. A wise writer would work hard to get it organized.
And today we don’t put much stock in our memories. I don’t like to go to Wal-Mart with even three items in my mind. I write them down because I don’t trust my memory.
But remember this is a culture where few people were able to write things down. And if they were able, paper was very expensive. They were used to memorizing everything. Many of them had memorized large portions of the Old Testament.
I remember hearing a missionary tell of serving her first term in a very remote jungle area in Papua New Guinea. She was on a river boat to go home for a year’s furlough and they stopped at a town where no missionary had ever stopped before. She got out. A crowd gathered. She told them the gospel story for about one hour. A year later she was on another boat heading back up the river and she stopped at the same village. They repeated the story for her almost word for word. They had memory skills that we have lost.
And the things they saw and heard with Jesus were the kinds of things that stick in your memory well. How many of us can remember where you were on September 11 when you first heard about the attack on the Twin Towers in New York? Can you remember who told you first? Those things stick in your mind.
For those who are older, can you remember where you were when you when you heard that President Kennedy was shot? I remember part of it. I was at school in eighth grade. I was in the hallway outside the main bathrooms and the announcement came over the loud speakers.
That was 1963, over 40 years ago. Shocking events like that stick in your mind. And Jesus shocked people all the time. He was someone you just didn’t forget.
In verse 2 Luke tells us what kind of people he looked to as sources. He was careful to collect information that came from eyewitnesses. And I think the wording here is that not all the people he learned from were eyewitnesses, but at least they had been taught by eyewitnesses.
In Verse 2 Luke tells us that it was important to him that the teaching he saved for us came through people who were servants of the word, people who had committed their lives to this message. And at that point Luke was much wiser than the authors of the documentary I saw, “From Jesus to Christ.”
I jotted down the names and credentials of the various experts who gave their opinions. Of the 8 I recorded, 7 taught in secular universities. That’s one of the problems we have today. The rules and tools used in today’s secular universities don’t work for understanding the gospel.
The secular scholar sets out to ‘deconstruct’ the ancient texts, to cut out things that we can’t confirm in order to find ‘the real meaning.’ Over a decade ago a group of so-called Bible scholars came together and called themselves the Jesus Seminar. They went over all of the gospels and voted on which verses they thought were authentic to Jesus and which weren’t. They were all given colored beads to use in voting over each verse. If they were sure a verse was authentic, they voted with a red bead. If they were sure that the gospel writers had gotten it wrong or somebody changed it, then they voted a black bead. And if they weren’t sure, they gave a pink for a probably authentic and a gray for probably not authentic.
And how did they decide? They set out to be as scientific as they could. Can you prove scientifically whether Jesus did miracles or not? You can’t, so the miracles got red beads. Out they went. And, of course, that included the biggest miracle of all, the resurrection and Jesus’ divinity. You can’t prove those using the scientific method today. Take out all the miracles and Jesus starts to look more common right away.
If, in their studies of the first couple of hundred years of the history of the church they found that the church wrestled with issues that show up in our gospels today, it could be that somebody changed the gospels in order to use them to fight a battle that happened long after Jesus died. So whatever verses in the gospels touched on an issue that faced the early church, out they went.
By their voting, Jesus’ sayings, “Blessed are the meek,” and “Blessed are the peacemakers” have been voted out, with many, many others. “Blessed are you when men hate you” got a split decision, so it’s still accepted, but on probation. The entire Gospel of John is out because none of it fits their criteria for what is acceptable.
The earliest Christian writings we have are the letters of the Apostle Paul. But Paul believed in Jesus, so they are very suspicious of Paul, charging him with bias.
But in verse 2, Luke intentionally tells us he used as his sources people who were ‘servants of the word,’ who had tasted the gospel for themselves and found its truth and glory alive in their hearts. He used as his sources many people who were so sure of what they had seen that they died for their faith. And liars don’t make good martyrs.
Let me tell you about the worst call I ever received from a basketball referee. I was playing defense at the south end of the Wheaton College gym, on the east side of the court, down near the baseline. My man had the ball. He faked a jump shot and I fell for his fake completely and jumped to dry to block it. But as I went up in the air, he put the ball on the floor and started dribbling around me. As he went by I came back down and lunged at him, but I never got within 8 inches of touching him in any way. And the referee blew his whistle on me and called me for a foul. I was guilty of bad defense and looking like an idiot, but not a foul. That was almost 25 years ago, but I remember where we were, where the two refs were and I remember my response, of just shaking my head and having a good laugh at the call.
And do you know why he made such a bad call? I was down within 5 feet of the baseline at one end of the court. And for some reason the referee was way down at the other end. He was out of position. He hadn’t come down to follow the play. That’s why he made the bad call. The other referee was right there and I’m sure he knew there had been no contact. But he kept quiet.
I think we are very wise when we look at the Gospels to honor the excellent work of Luke and the other writers, those who were close on the scene and able to see much better than we can.
Albert Schweitzer, the Nobel Peace Prize winner, once wrote a book on the early wave of scholarly attempts to rewrite the story of Jesus. He called it “The Quest for the Historical Jesus” and it came out way back in 1906.
Schweitzer said that this modern scholarship is like people digging a well. They figure that the treasure of the real Jesus is buried down there somewhere, but the truth has had layers and layers of interpretations and distortions piled over it for many years. So the challenge is to just dig down through all of those layers, throwing them all aside until you get down to the real Jesus. But as he surveyed the attempts that had been made up to his time, he said that without fail, after the scholars had done their best to dig their wells right down to the very bottom, when they leaned over and looked down every one of them saw nothing left at the bottom but their own reflections. They all ended up recreating Jesus in their own image, what seemed right to them by their own judgment.
Luke, the gospel writer told his patron, Theophilus, that he wanted Theophilus to be able to know the truth concerning the things he had been instructed about Jesus. I think he did a very good job. Theophilus needed to know the stories. But he also needed to know that they were really true.
He might have missed a few details. Luke tells us that on Jesus’ last trip from Galilee to Jerusalem, Jesus healed a blind man who was sitting beside the roadside, begging just as he went into Jericho. Mark tells the same story, but in Mark it happened on the way out of Jericho rather than on the way in. From here it looks like one of them messed up, I don’t know. But praise God, Jesus healed the blind man who was begging by one of the gates outside Jericho. And you can never confirm that using any scientific methods, going back through history from today. But Luke can give us enough confidence to call out to that Jesus who walked the roads of Israel and who was crucified and rose again on our behalf. And millions of Christians have called out to him and met him for themselves in their hearts.
This is a place where we need to use the tools of faith, not the tools of doubt. If you need to turn a screw into a piece of wood, use a screw driver, not a hammer. And there are many Bible scholars who have both good heads for scholarship and good hearts with faith in God.
I want you to know, along with Theophilus, that you can trust the gospels. I want you to dig in them and seek after the Jesus they describe until you have met him for yourselves and you will know him, too. AMEN
