Not Made Up Stories: That we may know the certainty of the things we have been taught

In addition to writing here at The Persuasive Christian Parent, several years ago I started writing my way through the Bible. I gave that blog the uninspiring title of, My Walk Through the Bible. Recently I finished the gospel of Mark and moved on to Luke. As I was writing my first post on Luke, I realized my thoughts would be good for readers of PCP given the apologetic nature of the end of the second gospel and the beginning of the third. Here are those thoughts.

I’ve never noticed before now the apologetics connection between the last verse of Mark and the first verses of Luke. I love the way that works! Mark ends his book (or whoever wrote the disputed last section of Mark) saying that the Lord confirmed the disciples spreading his word “by the signs that accompanied it.” Those signs would be miracles. God provides evidence for the veracity of the message, never expecting us to believe just because someone says so. Christianity is different than every other religion on earth because it is based on facts that require evidence.

So Luke starts his gospel in a way consistent with the evidentiary nature of Christianity: The facts, ma’am, just the facts:

Many have undertaken to draw up an account of the things that have been fulfilled^[among us, ² just as they were handed down to us by those who from the first were eyewitnesses and servants of the word.³ With this in mind, since I myself have carefully investigated everything from the beginning, I too decided to write an orderly account for you, most excellent Theophilus, ⁴ so that you may know the certainty of the things you have been taught.

This is not a fairy tale of some larger than life story, as skeptics never tire of claiming. Quite the contrary. As with the Dragnet reference about “the facts,” Christianity’s first adherents were concerned with exactly that. Notice how he starts: “Many have undertaken” to write these things down. We don’t know how many more accounts there were outside of our four gospels, but “many” is not one or two.

The ancient world was primarily an oral culture because books were very expensive, and few people knew how to read. But ancient Jews were a “people of the Book.” They were a text people. So it doesn’t surprise us that the earliest Jewish followers of Jesus immediately sought to write down the events of his life, teaching, death, and resurrection. Something so momentous as the fulfillment of the entire Old Testament had to be written down and propagated. They were taking seriously Matthew’s version of Jesus’ Great Commission charge to go into all the world and teach his disciples “to obey everything I have commanded you.”

Also notice Luke is going to write what comes to us from the first “eyewitnesses.” This is no handed down story a la the telephone game that easily gets distorted in the process. Not at all! It comes directly from those who heard and saw what Jesus said and did, and there were a lot of them. To prove this, look what the disciples who encounter Jesus on the road to Emmaus say to him later in Luke’s account:

“Are you the only one visiting Jerusalem who does not know the things that have happened there in these days?”

The reference to “visiting Jerusalem” is to the Passover holiday when the population of the city exploded. It is estimated that the population of Jerusalem during Jesus’ lifetime was around 30,000, but it swelled to almost three times that during Passover and other Jewish festivals. That is a lot of visitors who “know the things that have happened.” That means anything that is written down is falsifiable, and the writers would have known that. This es mucho importante! And it’s hard to convey just how important if we want to have confidence that this Christianity thing we believe in is true.

Starting with the so called Enlightenment in the 17th century, and finding its fulfillment in the German “higher critics” of the 19th, the Bible’s veracity was questioned. We were told with an increasing assurance that exploded in the 20th century that the Bible cannot be trusted to tell us “true truth,” as Francis Schaeffer called it. The dominant presupposition (i.e., it can’t be and never was proved) became that the Bible is primarily myth with a little bit of history thrown in.  But not only does the Bible not read like myth and made up stuff, it was never transmitted that way. The German high critics decided that that Bible was pretty much like their German myths and fairy tales that developed over the dark and middle ages. The problem with this contention and it’s comparison to the Bible is that myths and fairy tales do take generations and hundreds of years to form. But with Christianity the stories were fully formed right out of the gate!

This is why Luke, knowing this (“with this in mind”), decided he was going to carefully investigate“everything from the beginning” and write it down. Only in absolute ignorance of the text and ancient history in general could someone say these are just “made up stories.” God gave us Scripture, and Luke, so that we “may know the certainty of the things” we have been taught. Our confidence that Christianity is the ultimate truth about the nature of reality is well founded, and well grounded. The alternatives? Not at all.