Can we trust the four canonical Gospels – Matthew, Mark,
Luke and John? More specifically, are the teachings they ascribe to Jesus
authentic? The Jesus Seminar (JS), a collection of skeptical Bible critics active
in the 1980s and 90s, concluded that only 18% of what the Gospels had
attributed to Jesus were actually genuine.
For many, this puts the kibosh on the Bible. If it’s not
authentic, then it can no longer be regarded as the Word of God. However, many gifted
New Testament scholars subsequently addressed the methodological fallacies and
erroneous presuppositions that had given rise to the JS conclusions.
On a positive note, there are many reasons why we should regard the Gospels as God’s Words,
or at least authentic. Besides the fact
that the NT writers regarded their words as God’s Word, there are also many
other objective reasons for arriving at this same conclusion:
On a positive note, there are many reasons to regard the
Gospels as God’s Words. Not merely did
the NT writers regard their own writings as such, there are also many objective
reasons to conclude this way:
- The
Miracles of Jesus
- Fulfilled
Prophecy
- Internal
Consistency
- External
Confirmation
- The
Wisdom of the Writings
- Personal
Transformation
I’d like to focus on one additional way. The Jesus teachings,
as found in the four Gospel accounts, could not represent human embellishments
or inventions. Humans – Christians – would not invent such teachings and
events! Instead, Jesus’ words are offensive, confusing and even seem to
contradict the interests and teachings of the early church. When we examine the
Jesus of the Gospels, we find that virtually everything He did and said cut against the grain of not only His
contemporaries, but also His Apostles and the early church.
THE ASSOCIATES OF JESUS
Christ’s 12 chosen apostles were all simple men. They weren’t highly educated –
not at all the type of people with whom thinking
people today or the early church would want to identify; certainly not the type
of people who would draw new converts.
Even worse, Jesus’ 12 are consistently
portrayed as simpletons who just didn’t get it. Nowhere in the Gospels do we
find Jesus telling them that they had done a good job or that they were
catching on. Yes, Jesus did affirm Peter’s response on one occasion, but then
followed it with a stinging denunciation:
- "Get
behind me, Satan! You are a stumbling block to me; you do not have in mind
the things of God, but the things of men." (Matthew 16:23)
In fact the Apostles misunderstood almost all of Christ’s teachings.
Even at the end, they still failed to get it. The Apostles seemed to be so
filled with themselves that they refused to believe what Jesus told them:
- "You
will all fall away," Jesus told them, "for it is written: 'I will strike the shepherd, and the
sheep will be scattered.'” (Mark 14:27)
However, each of the apostles confidently protested that he
would never abandon Jesus. Later, they had to eat their words. As a matter of
fact, Christ’s absolute inner circle of disciples could not even stay awake to
pray with their Master, as He had requested them to do.
If the early church had invented the four Gospels, the
writers of such a “fiction” would have presented a glowing and winsome portrait
of the apostles. After all, those same
apostles would become the foundation of this movement. A glowing report would lend status and credibility to this new and
embattled religion. However, we find no indication of this kind of
window-dressing. Instead, the apostles are consistently
presented as morally bankrupt, status-conscious and even racist. They looked up
to everyone above them socially and tried to place impediments in front of
those petitioners they regarded as inferior. At times, the apostles physically blocked
the blind, children and gentiles from coming to Jesus. Meanwhile, they held the
rich and powerful in high regard (Mat. 19:25).
Who would want anything to do with such characters, and who would invent such
patriarchs if they wanted their religion to flourish? No one! Why then do we
have such consistently disparaging portrayals of the apostles in the Gospels? The
answer is simple—the accounts are true!
The NT writers were more concerned about the faithfulness and
reliability of what they wrote than how attractive they could make their story
sound.
There is something else we need to remember here. Jesus received the worst sinners into His
presence. Consequently, the ruling class concluded that He couldn’t possibly be
a prophet. How could He be if He allowed such a degraded woman to touch Him? Over and over again, Christ’s actions brought
upon Himself the utter contempt of the Jewish leadership (Luke 7:39).
And it wasn’t only the ruling class which felt this way. The
entire culture partook of this worldview. Jesus not only alienated everyone, He
reserved His strongest denunciations for those who were the most highly
respected. This is certainly not
something you would want to do if you were
starting a religion and wanted to win advocates!
How then could such a Man have a following? He must have been a miracle-worker. Many of the skeptics associated with the
Jesus Seminar have reluctantly admitted as much:
1. “On historical grounds it is virtually indisputable that Jesus was a healer
and exorcist.” (Marcus Borg)
2. “Throughout his life, Jesus performed healings and exorcisms for ordinary
people.” (John Dominic Crossan)
3. “On the eve of the Passover
Yesu was hanged…because he practiced sorcery and led Israel astray.” (Babylonian Talmud; Jewish sources have
an aversion against mentioning Jesus by name and anything positive about Him.)
4. “Jesus certainly performed exorcisms as they were practiced in the first
century…It would have been natural for an itinerant charismatic healer and teacher
to do so.” (John Rousseau)
THE EVENTS OF JESUS’ LIFE
Jesus was baptized by John the Baptist. It makes it seem that He had a sin to
confess. No one would have invented such an account. The fact that He was
tempted by the Devil for 40 days suggests that He could be tempted. On the
surface, this would seem to be inconsistent with the early church’s agenda to prove that Jesus is God.
We see a Jesus confessing ignorance about His return: “Not even the son of man
knows” (Mark 13:32). The Gospel accounts of Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane
show a fearful and reluctant Jesus. On the Cross, we see a “confused” Jesus,
crying out to His Father, “Why have You forsaken Me?” – hardly the portrait of
Jesus that the early church would want to convey if they wanted to prove that
Jesus is the promised Messiah!
In contrast to the Gospels, every other religion paints their leader departing
in style, as an inspiration and an example for all the followers. However,
Jesus departed in utter disgrace – beaten, stripped naked, murdered as a common
criminal, abandoned by His apostles. This is not a portrait that others would
find inspiring. Why should the Gospels include these embarrassing accounts
unless they actually happened this
way?
Why were the women, whose testimony lacked any credibility
in that culture, acknowledged as the first ones to encounter the risen Lord?
Again, it must have happened that way! No Christian would have invented such an
account!
JESUS’ TEACHINGS
Some of Jesus’ teachings were difficult to understand. Others were impossible
to follow and would, therefore, discourage would-be followers. On one occasion,
Jesus taught:
- "I
tell you the truth, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink
his blood, you have no life in you. (John 6:53)
As a result of this difficult teaching, many departed from
Him. However, just about all of His teachings were difficult to understand. He
taught, “Hate mother and father,” “Let the dead bury the dead,” “Cut off
hands,” “Don’t let your left hand know what your right is doing.”
His parables were no less challenging. None of them had
appeal to the common man or the leadership. Most were highly offensive. None
would warm the heart, except perhaps for the parable of the Prodigal Son. But even this parable ends
by placing a sword into the gut of those who think that they are religious.
Almost all of His parables criticize cherished religious assumptions.
The parable of The Rich Young Man
teaches that humanity is incapable of salvation (Mat. 19:26). The Workers in the Vineyard (Mat.
20:1-16) insultingly teaches that many of those who had worked the longest and
the hardest in the Lord’s vineyard will find themselves out in the cold. The Parable of the Wedding Feast (Mat.
22:1-14) also showed how the most “deserving” lost out entirely. The Parable of the Ten Girls (Mat.
25:1-13) seems to praise an unwillingness to share. Likewise, The Shrewd Manager (Luke 16:1-8) seems
to praise cunning. These are not the type of parables that the early church
would invent if they wanted to win converts.
His other sayings and teachings were, for the most part, impossible to follow
and utterly humbling for anyone who would try to follow them. He taught, “Sell
all you have,” “Give alms of all that you have,” “Turn the other cheek,” and
“Give to anyone who asks.” It seemed as if Jesus didn’t want any followers. Who
would want to be part of a religion that required everything? No one who wanted to promote a new religion would
create such teachings, least of all the early church, which understandably
would want to make its teachings appealing. Evidently, these difficult
teachings had been recorded as such, because these were exactly what Jesus had
taught.
THE CRYPTIC NATURE OF JESUS’ TEACHINGS
Jesus had been very cryptic about many of the central doctrines of the faith –
His messiah-ship, His divinity, the atonement, the new covenant. Had the early
church edited the Gospels, they would have placed these cherished foundational doctrines
more explicitly in the mouth of Jesus. His words would have reflected their
concerns. However, for the most part, He had been embarrassingly silent about
these doctrines until the time of His departure.
For example, Jesus only covertly confessed that He is the
Messiah or that He is God. However, during His trial, in order to enable the
Sanhedrin to convict Him, He confessed His messiah-ship by citing two messianic
texts in reference to Himself (Mat. 26:64).
Capitalizing on Jesus’ relative silence, liberal skeptics
claim that the Gospels were written by the early church (70-100 AD) to prove
that Jesus is actually God. In order to make their case, most will cite the
Gospel of John considered the latest Gospel. It makes more explicit references
to Jesus’ deity than the other three Gospels. Consequently, it reflects the
church’s growing desire to prove that Jesus is God.
For an extreme example, New Testament critic Bart Ehrman
claims:
- The
idea that Jesus was divine was a later Christian invention, one found,
among our Gospels, only in John. (Jesus
Interrupted, 249)
Ehrman believes that the last Gospel, John’s, would have the
most to say about the deity of Christ, because, at this point, the church had
fully evolved into this belief. Meanwhile, Ehrman claims that the earliest
Gospel, Mark’s Gospel, according to him, had nothing to say about Christ’s
deity, because the church had not yet evolved to the point of worshiping Jesus
as God. In this regard, Ehrman makes an extravagantly erroneous claim:
- There
is not one word in this Gospel about Jesus actually being God. (247)
However, this assertion is contradicted by a multitude of
verses in the Gospel of Mark. Even in the first three verses of his Gospel,
Mark applies Isaiah 40:3 (“Yahweh” coming to Israel) to Jesus, equating Jesus
with “Yahweh!”
Nevertheless, Jesus’ relative
silence is embarrassing because it leaves many with the impression that Jesus, at
least superficially, had preached a different Gospel than Peter, Paul and John.
The teachings of Jesus, therefore, couldn’t have been an invention of the early
church, which would have wanted to comfortably harmonize all of these teaching.
APPARENT CONTRADICTIONS
Had the early church exercised editorial oversight over the Gospels, they would
have surely smoothed over the apparent contradictions between Jesus’ teachings
and the Epistles. However, we have no evidence that this ever happened in any
systematic way. Here are a couple of examples. Jesus seemed to teach
unrestrained giving:
- “Give
to the one who asks you, and do not turn away from the one who wants to
borrow from you.” (Matthew 5:42)
However, the Epistles have more qualifications:
- For even when we were with
you, we gave you this rule: "If a man will not work, he shall not
eat." (2 Thes. 3:10)
Of course, Paul does not refer to the man who
cannot work, but the one who will not.
Nevertheless, to the casual reader, this seems like a contradiction, since
Jesus didn’t provide any exceptions. Had the early church written the Gospels
to suit themselves, it is likely that they would have qualified Jesus’ teachings
to line up with the Epistles, but they didn’t.
Jesus even seems to contradict Himself. On
the one hand, it seemed as if He taught complete non-resistance to evil:
- “But I tell you, ‘Do not
resist an evil person. If someone strikes you on the right cheek, turn to
him the other also.’” (Matthew
5:39)
However,
He also proved to be very confrontational. He drove the money-changers out of
the temple (John 2:12-16; Mat. 21:12-13; Mark 11:15-17; Luke 19:45-46) and confronted
the religious leadership with charges of hypocrisy on many occasions.
Of
course, these accounts can be reconciled, but to the casual reader, they seem
like contradictions. It seems unlikely that the early church, had they edited
the Gospels, would not have allowed these apparent
contradictions to stand.
TROUBLING PROPHECIES
In many instances, it seems as if Jesus’ prophecies hadn’t
been fulfilled. Adam Gopnik wrote:
- “The
Jesus faith begins with a failure of faith. His father let him down, and
the promise wasn’t kept: ‘Some who are standing here will not taste death
before they see the kingdom
of God’ [Matthew
16:28; Mark 9:1; Luke 9:27], Jesus announced, but none of them did.”
(“What Did Jesus Do?” The New Yorker,
6/29/2010)
However, each one of these promises is followed by an account
of the Transfiguration on Mt. Tabor, where three of Jesus’ disciples viewed the
glorified Christ – in a sense, the Kingdom
of God.
However, other prophecies present us with more difficulty.
On several occasions, Jesus seemed to prophesy His speedy return. When He sent
His disciples out on their first evangelistic outreach, He promised them:
- “When
you are persecuted in one place, flee to another. I tell you the truth,
you will not finish going through the cities of Israel before the Son of Man
comes.” (Matthew 10:23)
Regarding this perplexing prophecy, Albert Schweitzer
claimed that Jesus had wrongly believed that He would return and set up His
everlasting kingdom prior to the return of His disciples:
- He
tells them in plain words…that He does not expect to see them back in the
present age.
However, was this really what Jesus had communicated? It
seems highly unlikely. The preceding verses reveal that His return would be preceded by many global events:
- "Be
on your guard against men; they will hand you over to the local councils
and flog you in their synagogues. On my account you will be brought before
governors and kings as witnesses to them and to the Gentiles…Brother
will betray brother to death, and a father his child; children will rebel
against their parents and have them put to death. All men will hate
you because of me, but he who stands firm to the end will be saved.” (Matthew 10:17-22)
Instead, it seems
that Jesus was preparing His disciples for both a long wait and possibly
martyrdom. What them did Jesus intend to convey when He stated that “you
will not finish going through the cities of Israel before the Son of Man comes”
(Matthew 10:23)?
I think that Jesus,
so thoroughly imbued with the prophecies of the Hebrew Scriptures, mimicked
them. Often, these prophecies would begin with the immediate in view but would
then jump years into the future in the same breath. Here’s a familiar example –
the prophecy to Abraham:
- "Leave
your country, your people and your father's household and go to the land I
will show you. I will make you into a great nation and I will bless you; I
will make your name great, and you will be a blessing. I will bless those
who bless you, and whoever curses you I will curse; and all peoples on
earth will be blessed through you." (Genesis 12:1-3)
Although this prophecy had some immediate applications, the
blessing to “all the peoples of the earth” would come much later.
Similarly, it seems that Jesus’ prophecy to His disciple
would also be realized by later
generations.
He delivered a similar prophecy to the high priest:
- But
Jesus remained silent. The high priest said to him, "I charge you
under oath by the living God: Tell us if you are the Christ, the Son of
God." "Yes, it is as you say," Jesus replied. "But I
say to all of you: In the future you will see the Son of Man
sitting at the right hand of the Mighty One and coming on the clouds of
heaven." (Matthew 26:63-64)
This shouldn’t be
interpreted to mean that the high priest himself
would see this take place. However, in harmony with the character of Hebrew
prophecy, He was probably suggesting that the Jewish people would observe His return.
Perhaps the most fought-over prophecy about Jesus’ return
comes from Matthew 24:34, after Jesus had described the signs preceding His
return:
- “I
tell you the truth, this generation will certainly not pass away until all
these things have happened.” (Matthew
24:34; also Mark 13:30-31 and Luke 21:32-33)
“This generation” seems to take away any ambiguity about His
return. Specifically, it would be during “this generation!” However, there is
some controversy about what “this generation” really refers to. As we found in
Matthew 10, here too we find that Jesus clearly doesn’t believe that the end is
near:
- You
will hear of wars and rumors of wars, but see to it that you are not
alarmed. Such things must happen, but the end is still to come.
Nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom. There will
be famines and earthquakes in various places. All these are the beginning
of birth pains. Then you will be handed over to be persecuted and put to death
[Evidently, the Apostles will not be living at the time of His return!],
and you will be hated by all nations because of me. At that time many will
turn away from the faith and will betray and hate each other, and many
false prophets will appear and deceive many people. Because of the
increase of wickedness, the love of most will grow cold…And this gospel of
the kingdom will be preached in the whole world as a testimony to
all nations, and then the end will come. (Matthew 24:6-14)
Many things must
first take place – martyrdom, apostasy, and worldwide evangelism - prior to
Jesus’ return. Therefore, “this generation” shouldn’t be interpreted in
its usual sense.
It is therefore more likely that “this generation” should be
understood as “this Jewish people.” In other words, Jesus seems to be saying
that the Jewish people will still exist when He returns.
However, while the Greek word for “generation” (“genea”) can
be understood in certain verses in this sense (Luke 11:50-51; Mat. 12:39), only
in the Hebrew Scriptures can we find the corresponding term (“dor”), usually
rendered at “generation,” used unequivocally
in this manner:
- There
they are, overwhelmed with dread, for God is present in the company
[“dor”] of the righteous. (Psalm
14:5)
- By
oppression and judgment he was taken away. And who can speak of his
descendants [“dor”]? For he was cut off from the land of the living; for
the transgression of my people he was stricken. (Isaiah 53:8)
In both of these cases, “dor” cannot be understood as
“generation” – a typical human lifespan. In Isaiah, “dor” can only be
understood as the many generations,
“descendents,” or people who didn’t come forth from the Messiah, because He
died for the sins of the people.
Was Jesus mistaken about the time of His return? Well, if we
choose to understand His words as indicating an early return, then it does seem
that He was mistaken. However, if we don’t dismiss entire context of His
remarks, then it is not possible to construe His words as prophesying an early
return.
Nevertheless, these prophecies are troubling and have
understandably invited the charge that Jesus had been mistaken. Why then would
the Gospels have retained such troubling prophecies? The writers must have
regarded them as genuine!
New Testament scholar, Craig Blomberg, consequently
concluded,
- Whether
by giving the Gospels the benefit of the doubt which all narratives of
purportedly historical events merit or by approaching them with initial
suspicion in which every detail must satisfy the criteria of authenticity,
the verdict should remain the same. The Gospels may be accepted as
trustworthy accounts of what Jesus did and said. (The Historical Reliability of the Gospels)
If the Gospels are reliable, then we can accept their
accounts of the miraculous, especially the Resurrection. If Jesus rose from the
dead, this authenticates His testimony about Himself and His words as the Words
of God Himself. Hallelujah!
