If you’ve never heard of the The Robe (later made into a movie), I’m delighted you are now. The book played an important role in bringing me to Christ. My grandmother gave me a copy when I was 16, and it captivated me. I just finished reading it again for the fifth or sixth time, and I see again why. What captured my imagination all those years ago was the person of Jesus, and his influence on the people who encountered him. He turned them into better people! When I went to college my dorm room was next to a couple “born-again” Christians, and they asked me a question I had to answer yes to because I’d read The Robe: Would you like to see what the Bible says about who Jesus is? Despite being a bit creeped out by these fanatical Bible-thumpers, I couldn’t say no.
Growing up Catholic we never read the huge family Bible gathering dust in our living room. Protestants read the Bible, while we got our fill of Scripture every week during mass. So I really had no idea what the Bible had to say about Jesus, at least not in any depth. The study was on John, and while the last thing I wanted to do was become a Christian (there goes the fun!), I couldn’t help believing that what we were reading was true. Being a Catholic may not have gotten me to the gospel as I understand it now, but thankfully it gave me a respect for the Bible. If the Bible said it, I believed it! At the time I didn’t realize that The Robe also had apologetic implications for the Bible. All I knew is it made the person of Jesus someone I wanted to know more about.
When you read the book you’ll be gripped by the story; it’s difficult to put down. What impressed me this time through, however, was how skillfully the author, Lloyd C. Douglas, defended the veracity of the Christian message without being didactic or preachy. Who Jesus was, or claimed to be, and what he did, or what others claimed he did, wasn’t any easier for people to believe in that time than it is in ours. But over and over and in various ways, Douglas makes the case through his characters that the message is credible. You can believe it with intellectual integrity, as hard as it may first be to believe. This is a crucial point against the critics who declare that ancient people were gullible, benighted, unenlightened folks who would believe just about anything. Not true at all, as Douglas shows so well.
For me, the most important take-away this time through was a realization that countered every critical claim that the Bible can’t be trusted as true history. If you’re not familiar with the history of biblical criticism, for the last 200 years critics of the Bible, assuming naturalism (miracles can’t happen), have claimed that the stories we read in the gospels (and Acts) are in whole or part made up. How this worked, they tell us from their scholarly perches, is that some event happened that over the decades turned into what we read in the gospels. In other words, the gospels are nothing more than a literary version of the telephone game. Whatever is whispered in the first person’s ear bears little resemblance to it when it gets to the final person. In technical terms, that’s balderdash! And all it’s synonyms put together:
gibberish · claptrap · blarney · guff · blather · blether · rubbish · hogwash · rot · baloney · tripe · drivel · gobbledygook · bilge · bosh · bull · bunk · hot air · eyewash · piffle · poppycock · phooey · hooey · malarkey · twaddle · dribble · cobblers · codswallop · stuff and nonsense · tosh · double Dutch · flannel · waffle · havers · garbage · flapdoodle · blathers · wack · bushwa · applesauce · bunkum · tommyrot · cod · gammon · toffee
Maybe you get my point. As I read and wrote my way through the gospels and Acts over the last couple years, it became very apparent that I was reading credible eyewitness history, not myths and fairy tales as critics contend. I’m convinced that there is absolutely no way this stuff could have been made up. There are many reasons this is true, but one is so well captured in The Robe: the way the stories about Jesus spread in that ancient context. Far from making them less believable, it makes them all the more believable. Given the post is getting long, and this issue so critical for our confidence in the veracity of the gospel narratives, I’ll take this up in more detail in my next post.
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