Christianity Considered 1

Christianity Considered 1 (Part 4)

What about the Bible?

In the last blog we suggested the biographies of the life of Jesus of Nazareth were reliable because they were written either by eye-witnesses or by those who received their information first hand from eye-witnesses. But that still leaves us with another question. Were the followers of Jesus themselves deceived ?

Were the disciples of Jesus subject to a deception?

This question has to be faced. If the biographies were, in fact, eye-witness accounts, were the writers themselves, subject to a deception? Were they gullible? Had they been deluded into believing Jesus was someone special? After all, it was 2,000 years ago, and isn’t commonly believed that people of that era were illiterate and uneducated? History presents a somewhat different picture.

Some 300 years before the birth of Christ, an order was given for the building of a great library in Alexandria. This world renowned library became a driving force for learning. Other libraries followed and education was highly valued. In the wake of this fresh impetus for learning, philosophical schools were set up by Plato and Aristotle, and their philosophies spread throughout the empire. It is no surprise that education was highly prized in Jesus’ day, especially among the Jews. Paul who wrote a substantial part of the New Testament was highly educated in three cultures, Roman, Greek and Jewish. The scholar F. F. Bruce, wrote of Paul: “I have learnt to regard Paul as the greatest man who ever wrote in Greek. If anyone should call him the greatest writer of all time, I would not dispute that claim.”

Luke, whom we have already met, was an educated Greek. Professor E. M. Blaiklock, who was a lecturer in the classics of Greece and Rome, and who had studied in that field for forty years, said: “Luke is a consummate historian, to be ranked in his own right with the great writers of the Greeks.” Matthew, writer of the first gospel, was a civil servant, an employee in the custom and excise department of the government of Rome. He kept records, calculated taxes and collected money. Even a cursory reading of the New Testament will demonstrate that the people who testified to the facts of the life of Jesus were neither fools nor gullible. This leads us to ask a further question.

Were the followers of Jesus deceivers ?

If the followers of Jesus were not deceived, could it be that they themselves were deceivers? Did they engage in a conspiracy to raise Jesus to a figure of legend? The answer must be an emphatic ‘No!’ Everything we know about them marks them out as honest men. And besides, all were persecuted for their faith, and most were martyred. It is highly unlikely that they would die for a lie. And considering the numbers involved, at least one would have broken ranks and recanted. But none did!

The absence of fictitious material

In support of the belief that the writers of the life of Christ were neither deceivers nor deceived, it could be asserted that there is a distinct lack of fanciful material in the New Testament record. What is commonly called "myth", i.e. fable or legend, is conspicuous by its absence. Many who work in the field of ancient literature have commented on this. Archibald Rutledge wrote: “For more than 30 years it was my chief business in life to study and try to teach literature. To anyone earnestly so engaged there naturally comes a certain ability to distinguish the genuine from the spurious, the authentic from the invented. Every time I read the Gospels I am pressed more deeply with the conviction that the narratives concerning Christ do not belong to the realms of fancy, tradition or folklore…The incidents are such that they could never have been invented; and their effect on the world for 2,000 years has been such as no inventions could have produced. These stories possess that patent transparent validity that belongs only to truth.”

C. S. Lewis, who was professor of Medieval and Renaissance Literature at the University of Cambridge, wrote of his conversion to Christianity in his autobiography, ‘Surprised by Joy’: “I was by now too experienced in literary criticism to regard the Gospels as myths. They had not the mythical taste...nothing else in all literature was just like this … And no person was like the Person it depicted; as real, as recognisable, through all the depths of time, as Plato's Socrates or Boswell's Johnson, yet also numinous, lit by a light from beyond the world, a god. But if a god—we are no longer polytheists—then not a god, but God. Here and here only in all time the myth must have become fact; the Word, flesh; God, Man.”