Jesus and the Eyewitnesses: Can We Trust the Gospels?

I’m listening to a wonderful series of lectures by pastor of Christ Reformed Church in Anaheim, California, Kim Riddlebarger called “Apologetics in a Post-Christian Age.” He argues, persuasively, that the central fact of the apologetics enterprise is the resurrection. If that in fact happened, then everything else follows: Christianity is the true understanding of the nature of reality. If it didn’t, eat, drink, and be merry . . . . The question for Christians, and those not yet but who understand the implications of such an event if it in fact happened: Can we trust the historical accounts and information we find in our Bibles? Most people today think whatever happened, it was 2,000 years ago, so of course we can’t know if it actually happened. These people would be wrong. How can I say that with such certainty?

First, let’s agree on an important fact of human existence: we cannot have absolute certainty. Seventeenth century French philosopher injected the bacillus of absolute certainty into the Western intellectual bloodstream, which says the only true knowledge we can have is that which we can be absolutely certain about. The truth is that we have absolute certainty about nothing, zip, zero, nada. I won’t make the case here, but if we can have such certainty, it applies to very little of our existence. So when it comes to the resurrection, like everything else in life, we are looking for beyond-a-reasonable-doubt certainty (BRDC). And the more I know and learn, the more BRDC about the resurrection I have.

The title of this post comes from two books (by Richard Bauckham, and Peter J. Williams respectively) that I’ve yet to read, but from what I’ve heard they are big-time contributors to BRDC when it comes to the trustworthiness of the Bible. Before I got heavily back into apologetics about 10 years ago, and wrote my book, I had some idea about why I could trust that the Bible was telling us true history, but I had no idea how much BRDC I could have. Christians must be familiar with these things because we are basing our lives and eternity on the contents of this book!

I have an ongoing e-mail conversation with an atheist from England (one of the few reasonable atheists I’ve come across on the Internet), and I sent him the following in an e-mail today that gets at why we can have BRDC:

Are you familiar with the textual transmission of the New Testament? Do know that all biblical scholars believe that the earliest writings we find in the NT (Paul’s letters) go back to the 50s AD, maybe 20 years after Jesus death and resurrection? How do you explain Paul? Or do you explain him away? Or, in your mind he requires no explanation?

Skeptics, starting with German critical scholars in the mid-19th century claimed that the NT was the result of a slow process of development over hundreds of year. All scholars today, even Bart Ehrman, reject this. The NT is a first century document, and stories like we read in the gospels could never be made up in such a short time. Are you familiar with how many manuscripts we have of the NT, especially compared to other ancient manuscripts? Are you familiar with how early those manuscripts are, especially compared to other ancient works? Are you familiar with how seriously Jews took the accuracy of textual transmission? Do you know about the Dead Sea Scrolls? Do you know that prior to the DSS (documents from 200 BC to 67 AD), the oldest manuscript of the Old Testament was 10th century? Did you know that the OT manuscripts found at Qumran (DSS) are nearly identical to the manuscripts of a thousand years later (!!!!!)? This is hugely significant because ignorant skeptics like to claim biblical textual transmission is like the telephone game, and inherently distorting the original message. The DSS proved without a shadow of a doubt this is not the case.

One last question. Did you know that the earliest followers of Jesus, ALL of them prior to Paul, were orthodox, pious Jews? I’ll get to why this is so important after we establish your knowledge base on these things. Although we’ll likely never agree that there is a beyond-a-reasonable doubt basis for the resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth, at least we should know, objectively, the facts of the case. Once we do we can have a better, more substantial and helpful discussion. And a BIG thank you to SCIENCE for getting us all this helpful information to establish the plausibility of the NT story!

³ For what I received I passed on to you as of first importance: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, ⁴ that he was buried,that he was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures, ⁵ and that he appeared to Cephas, and then to the Twelve. ⁶ After that, he appeared to more than five hundred of the brothers and sisters at the same time, most of whom are still living, though some have fallen asleep. ⁷ Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles, ⁸ and last of all he appeared to me also, as to one abnormally born.