(This is the second in a weekly series called “Apologetics 101,” where we examine some of the key questions skeptics ask about the Christian faith.)
Do you remember playing the game “Telephone,” when you were a kid in school? In that game, one person whispers a word or phrase into the ear of another, who repeats the phrase to the next person, until it goes all the way around the room. By the time it gets to the last person, the word or phrase is almost always completely different than what the first person said. That’s because the more people who heard and passed it on, the more opportunities there were to misunderstand it. By the time it goes through more than four or five sets of mouths and ears, miscommunication happens. This game is often used as an object lesson on the importance of good communication, or the dangers of gossip.
But some skeptics of Christianity have used it as proof that we cannot trust the Bible – specifically the accounts of Jesus’ life. They say that by the time the stories were passed down from one person to the next and then finally written down – they’d been exaggerated and misconstrued to the point that they were unrecognizable from who the real Jesus was and what he said. One skeptical group of New Testament scholars concluded that they could only be certain that Jesus actually said fifteen of the sayings found in the Gospels – and they discounted all the miracles, including the resurrection, as legend and myth.
So what are believers to make of these claims? What are skeptics to make of them? Maybe you’re somewhere in between – you’d like to believe, but you’re not sure you can. I want to make a case today that the evidence we find in the Gospels about Jesus is very compelling, and that there was not nearly enough time between Jesus’ life and their writing for legend to develop.
First of all, let me agree with one basic premise made by skeptics. The longer the time between something happening and it being written down, the more likely it is for legend to develop. But we still generally trust biographies written long after a person’s life. For example, the first biography written about Alexander the Great came about four hundred years after his death, and we still use it for historical purposes. The biographies of Jesus came much, much sooner.
It is generally agreed upon that the Gospels were written in this order – Mark, Matthew, Luke, and John. John was probably written in the late 90’s AD, but we find Luke was most likely written much sooner. Here’s why we believe that. Luke also wrote the book of Acts, as a second volume to his gospel. Acts ends before the death of Paul, generally believed to have been in 64 AD. That means that Acts was written before then, and it pushes the writing of Luke back even further – perhaps to between 60 and 62. It’s likely Matthew was written before Luke, using Mark as one source. That would push Matthew back to the late 50’s. If Mark was the first of the Gospels written, it would have been done so even earlier – perhaps the mid-50’s. That means that the earliest known gospel was written roughly twenty years after the life of Jesus. Think about the difference here between biographies of Jesus and Alexander the Great! Twenty years versus four hundred years! Twenty years is not nearly enough time for legend to build up, especially when there are people still alive who could dispute those legendary accounts.
Look at this from one other perspective – what motivation did the gospel writers have to make these stories of Jesus up? Fame? Fortune? The good life? All of them suffered greatly for this truth – but none of them recanted it. We are left to imagine that for no good reason whatsoever, they made up the greatest hoax in the history of the world. That would make them evil. But this character who they made up – this Jesus – is by all accounts the most moral human being in the history of the world. So, if we are to believe the gospels are made-up, we must also believe that evil people who made up the biggest lie in human history did so while creating the most moral human being in history. This seems unlikely, to be sure.
We are left with one real possibility – these accounts are true. Jesus said what he said. He is who he claimed to be. And if that is true, then we must reckon with it. C.S. Lewis famously said, “A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic — on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg — or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse.” I’ve made my choice on this. Jesus is Lord. What do you say?