Depending on your age the events of one or all of these dates are seared into your memory. You can see in your mind exactly where you were, what you were doing, and how you responded when you heard or saw what happened. I’m old enough to remember two of the three dates. Even not quite nine, I remember distinctly walking into a neighbor’s house just as the lunar module was going to be landing on the moon. I can see the people in the house sitting on sofa and chairs watching the grainy black and white footage of the lunar surface on a small TV. As an adult, the events of 9/11 are obviously more distinct in my memory. The emotions I felt, still palpable. For those old enough to remember the Kennedy assassination on November 22, 1963, the traumatic events of that day would scar a generation.
What, you may ask, has this to do with apologetics? Quite a lot, actually. Specifically it has to do with how memory works and whether we can trust that the gospels are reliable history, as we’ll see in a moment. Related to memory are two unarguable facts that become increasingly important to me the more I learn and the older I get:
- Critics and critical scholars for 200 years have insisted that the gospels are pretty much made up stories, and not real history. The question we must ask in response is, “Could it all be made up?”
- If Christianity and it’s claims are not true, something else has to be. So the question here must always be, “What’s the alternative?” (A question I’ve asked my kids all their lives.) And whatever it is, is it more credible and plausible than Christianity?
You may already see my point, but what these questions do is level out the burden or proof. What do I mean by that? Since the Enlightenment, from the early to mid-17th century when Descartes started his defense of Christianity with radical doubt and cogito ergo sum, Christians and their God have been in the dock, in C.S. Lewis’ famous phrase. The critics assume they alone get to be the prosecution, that they have nothing to defend, and that Christians must meet their unrealistic demands for unassailable evidence.
The irony is that it is the critics of Christianity who ought to be on the defensive because the evidence for their view of reality (whatever it is) is woefully lacking. Whenever I wonder if what I believe is true, I always consider the alternatives, and I’m always driven back to Jesus. There I’m compelled to ask, could this really be made up as the critics insist? And the answer is a resounding no! Which brings me back to these once in a generation events that we can never forget.
Critical scholars continue to insist that the events recorded in the gospels bear little resemblance to actual history, and that a la the telephone game they morphed over time into the supernatural Jesus we read about in our gospels. This contention is increasingly challenged, most directly with a 600 page tome by British scholar Richard Bauckham, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses: The Gospels as Eyewitness Testimony. Contrary to critical scholars, the reason we know and can trust that the gospels are in fact the testimony of actual eyewitnesses, is because of the nature of the events witnessed. From research about the nature of memory, Bauckham argues that there are three criteria (actually nine, but three make my point) that make memory especially reliable (p. 330, 331):
- Unique or unusual events
- Salient or consequential events
- Events in which a person is emotionally involved.
You likely don’t remember what you had for dinner two weeks ago, but you can’t forget where you were and what you were doing when the twin towers fell on 9/11, and the hours and days surrounding the horror. How exactly does this apply to Jesus and the gospels?
To say that who Jesus was, and that what he said and did, was memorable, is the greatest understatement in all of history. The whole of Israel had been waiting 400(!) years for their Messiah, and the frenzy that surrounded John the Baptist and then Jesus created the memories of a lifetime for his followers, as well as his enemies. If there were rock stars in first century Israel, Jesus was the biggest of the big. You don’t make up myths and fairy tales, as the more ignorant critics put it, out of such raw material. As you read the gospels, very carefully, keep in mind Bauckham’s three criteria. Nothing close to Jesus had ever been experienced by those people before. Nothing more unique or unusual, more salient or consequential, or more emotionally involving. The gospels read nothing like the critics insist, made-up stuff (the alternative), and exactly like eyewitness testimony of actual, historical events. The former is not plausible, and the latter is compelling. I’ll stake my life, and death, on the latter.
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