From Timothy Keller’s book “The Reason for God:”
Anne Rice was one person who was startled to discover how weak the case for a merely human “historical Jesus” really is. Rice became famous as the author of Interview with the Vampire and other works that could be called “horror erotica.” Raised a Catholic, she lost her faith at a secular college, married an atheist, and became wealthy writing novels about Lestat, who is both a vampire and a rock star. It shocked the literary and media world when Rice announced that she had returned to Christianity.
Why did she do it? In the afterword to her new novel, Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt, she explained that she had begun doing extensive research about the historical Jesus by reading the work of Jesus scholars at the most respected academic institutions. Their main thesis was that the Biblical documents we have aren’t historically reliable. She was amazed at how weak their arguments were.
Some books were no more than assumptions piled on assumptions. . . . Conclusions were reached on little or no data at all. . . . the whole case for the nondivine Jesus who stumbled into Jerusalem and somehow got crucified . . . that whole picture which had flouted around the liberal circles I frequented as an atheist for thirty years—that case was not made. Not only was it not made, I discovered in this field some of the worst and most biased scholarship I’d ever read.1
The Christian faith requires belief in the Bible.2 This is a big stumbling block for many. I meet many New Yorkers for the first time after they have been invited to one of Redeemer’s services. The centerpiece of each service is a sermon on a text of the Bible. The average visitor is surprised or even shocked to find us listening to the Bible so carefully. Most would say that they know that there are many great stories or sayings in the Bible, but today “you can’t take it literally.” What they mean is that he Bible is not entirely trustworthy because some parts—maybe many or most parts—are scientifically impossible, historically unreliable, and culturally regressive. We looked at the first of these issues, of science and the Bible, in the previous chapter. Now we will look at the other two. (p103)
“We Can’t Trust the Bible Historically”
It is widely believed that the Bible is a historically unreliable collection of legends. A highly publicized forum of scholars, “The Jesus Seminar,” has stated that no more than 20 percent of Jesus sayings and actions in the Bible can be historically validated.3 How do we respond to this? It is beyond the range of this book to examine the historic accuracy of each part of the Bible. Instead we will ask whether we can trust the gospels, the New Testament accounts of Jesus’s life, to be historically reliable.4 By this I mean the “canonical” gospels—Matthew, Mark, Luke and John—that the church recognized very early on as authentic and authoritative.
It is often asserted that the New Testament gospels were written so many years after the events happened that the writers’ accounts of Jesus’ life can’t be trusted—that they are highly embellished if not wholly imagined. Many believe that canonical gospels were only four of scores of other texts and that they were written to support the church hierarchy’s power while the rest (including the so-called Gnostic gospels”) were suppressed. This belief has been given new plausibility in the popular imagination by the best selling book The Da Vinci Code. In this novel, the original Jesus is depicted as great but clearly human teacher who many years after his death was made into a resurrected God by church leaders who did so to gain status in the Roman empire.5 However, there are several good reasons why the gospel accounts should be considered historically reliable rather than legends.6
The timing is far too early for the gospels to be legends.
The canonical gospel were written at the very most forty to sixty years after Jesus’s death.7 Paul’s letters, written just fifteen to twenty-five years after the death of Jesus, provide an outline of all the events of Jesus life found in the gospels—his miracles, claims, crucifixion, and resurrection. This means that the Biblical accounts of Jesus’s life were circulating within the lifetime of hundreds who had been present at the events of his ministry. The gospel author Luke claims that he got his account of Jesus’s life from eye witnesses who were still alive (Luke 1:1-4).
In his landmark book Jesus and the Eyewitnesses, Richard Bauckham marshals much historical evidence to demonstrate that at the time the gospels were written there were still numerous well-known living eyewitnesses to Jesus’s teaching and lifetimes, serving as ongoing sources and guarantors of the truth of those accounts. Bauckham uses evidence within the gospels themselves to show that the gospel writers named their eyewitness sources within the text to assure readers of their accounts’ authenticity.
Mark, for example, says that the man who helped Jesus carry his cross to Calvary ” was the father of Alexander and Rufus” (Mark 15:21). There is no reason for the author to include such names unless the readers know or could have access to them.” Paul also appeals to readers to check with living eyewitnesses if they want to establish the truth of what he’s saying about the events of Jesus’s life (1 Corinthians 15:1-6).8 Paul refers to a body of five hundred eyewitnesses who saw the risen Christ a once. You can’t write that in a document designed for public reading unless there were surviving witnesses who’s testimony agreed and who could confirm what the author said. All this decisively refutes the idea that the gospels were anonymous, collective, evolving oral traditions. Instead they were oral histories taken down from the mouths of living eyewitnesses who preserved the words and deeds of Jesus in great detail.
It is not only Christ’s supporters who were still alive. Also still alive were many bystanders, officials, and opponents who had actually seen him teach, seen his actions, and watched him die. They would have been especially ready to challenge any that were fabricated. For a highly altered, fictionalized account of an event to take hold in the public imagination it is necessary the eye witnesses (and their and grandchildren) all be long dead. They must be off the scene so they cannot contradict or debunk the embellishments and falsehoods of the story. The gospels were written far too soon for this to occur.
It would have been impossible, then, for this new faith to spread as it did had Jesus never said or done the things mentioned in the gospel accounts. Paul could confidently assert to government officials that the events of Jesus’s life were public knowledge: “These things were not done in a corner,” he said to King Agrippa (Acts 26:26). The people of Jerusalem had been there—they had been in the crowds that heard and watched Jesus. The New Testament documents could not say Jesus was crucified when thousands of people were still alive who knew whether he was or not. If there had been appearances after his death, if there had not been an empty tomb, if he had not made these claims, and these public documents claimed they happened, Christianity would never have gotten off the ground. The hearers would have simply laughed at the accounts. ~Timothy Keller, The Reason for God (New York, N.Y. 2018) p. 102-06
The above is “a taste” and there is so much more (at least twelve pages more on this theme alone) supporting evidence on the true historicity of Bible accounts that debunk secular propaganda. Should you have further interest in the truth surrounding Bible accounts of Christ’s life, ministry, atoning sacrifice, you will find it in “Belief in and Age of Skepticism The Reason For God” by Timothy Keller. (Thanks Mike Harris for this book, [a Christmas gift] and the others you and Klea have given us over the years.) kdm
Posts with a preamble asterisk * are for a more general audience and not specific to teachings of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
