We’ve all heard the rant. The Bible is a collection of stories passed around the campfire back in Bronze Age times that somehow got written down centuries after the events by gullible people who didn’t realize how malleable oral histories are. It is almost impossible to know if they depict actual events in any way. Jesus was a charismatic teacher of justice and wisdom who provoked opposition and was executed. After his death, various parties and viewpoints emerged among his followers about who he was. Some claimed he was divine and risen from the dead while others said he was just a teacher who lived on spiritually in the hearts of his disciples. After a power struggle, the “Jesus is divine” faction won and created texts that promoted its views, suppressing and destroying all alternative texts like the “Gnostic” gospels.

Such a view, if true, would radically change our understanding of the content and meaning of Christianity. No one could really know what Jesus said and did; the Bible would lack any sort of authority over our lives and beliefs. It would call into question Jesus’ deity, atonement and resurrection; central doctrines of the Christian faith would be based on mere legend.

Despite Dan Brown’s assertions in The DaVinci Code, the case for the “historic Jesus” is really pretty weak. Anne Rice, famous for Interview with the Vampire and other fiction works, returned to her Catholic faith a few years ago. A hallmark of Rice’s fiction writing is her extensive research into the periods she depicts. She explained in the afterword of her novel Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt that she had begun doing extensive research into the historical Jesus by reading the work of scholars from the most respected academic institutions. She was amazed to discover how weak their arguments concerning the unreliability of the Bible were.  She read assumption piled upon assumption, conclusions reached without any corresponding data, and some of the worst scholarship she’d ever encountered. Given her findings (which are supported by many conservative theologians) the case for the “historical” Jesus as distinct from the New Testament accounts is pretty useless. The Christian faith requires knowledge and belief in the Bible. That is a stumbling block for those who are Biblically ignorant. They insist you can’t take the Bible “literally”. It is full of scientific inaccuracies, historical legends, and culturally repressive ideas. Oh, really?

I’m not going to present exhaustive research here. I’ve presented information along these lines before. By all means, check out books like Reinventing Jesus by Daniel Wallace or Jesus and the Eyewitnesses by Richard Bauckham. If you prefer a less scholarly approach, try The Case for Christ or the Case for the Real Jesus by Lee Strobel. Scholarship has strongly established that the canonical gospels were written not more than 40 to 60 years after Jesus’ death and Paul’s letters were written 15 to 25 years after Jesus’ death.  Paul even challenged his readers to go find the eye witnesses to the events he was describing in order to verify what Paul was claiming. Paul demonstrated clear confidence that the eye witnesses would agree with his record of events. The Gospel writers included details in the stories that were verifiable by their readers. Mark, for example, wrote that the man who helped Jesus carry His cross the Calvary was the “father of Alexander and Rufus” (Mark 15:21). Why include the names unless the readers knew or could access Alexander and Rufus? While the Gospels were clearly based on oral histories, they were written down from the testimony of living witnesses. What was more, enemies of Christianity could vouch for some of these events. Had Jesus’ body truly disappeared from a sealed tomb? Well, it was well-known in Jerusalem that it had. Claims such as that could not have been made if witnesses had existed who could refute the claims. And if such had existed, the new faith of Christianity would have been stillborn. It would have quickly received a reputation as fanciful and full of falsehoods, therefore arguing against some of its own tenets like honesty. The hearers would simply have laughed at the accounts if they’d been refutable.

The four canonical Gospels were written much earlier than the so-called Gnostic gospels. The Gospel of Thomas is a translation from Syriac dated 175 AD at the earliest, more than a hundred years after the time that the canonical Gospels were in widespread use and 15 years after Irenaeus declared in 160 AD that there were four, and only four, Gospels (he named the canonicals). Dan Brown asserted in The DaVinci Code that Emperor Constantine decreed Jesus’ divinity in 325 AD, but Paul’s letter to the Philippians, which historians all agree was written no more than 30 years (c. AD 61) after Jesus’ death, shows Christians were worshipping Jesus as God (Philippians 2) nearly two centuries before the Council of Nicea. Belief in the deity of Christ was part of the dynamic from the beginning of the early Christian church. More likely Constantine affirmed an existing belief because he wanted to back a winner.

When people invent stories about themselves, they tend to leave out the embarrassing parts. Why would Peter depict himself as failing Christ unless he had done so? Why would a church that held Peter in such high esteem depict him as denying Christ unless he had done so?  Why would women, who were considered poor witnesses, be the first witnesses of Jesus’ resurrection unless they were actually the first witnesses to Jesus’ resurrection? Why would the canonical Gospels include so many precise details unless the writers or their sources were privy to such detail? In John 21, we read that Peter and Jesus caught 153 fish. Now that’s precise! The only explanation why an ancient writer would record the precise number of fish caught was if that were the precise number of fish caught. There is a growing body of careful scholarship that shows there were a very large number of eyewitnesses to Jesus’ life who lived for decades, supporting the authenticity of the Biblical account. This was one reason why Christianity grew so rapidly in its early years, because the opposition could not mount an argument against something that kept proving itself to be true.

The Bible was written 2000 years ago in a very different culture from ours. I know a lot of people who have issues with, for example, Ephesians 6:5 “Slaves, obey your masters.”  They jump to incredible conclusions about the Bible based on one sentence without even considering that they might be taking the sentence out of context both within the Bible itself and within history. Slavery in the first century was wholly different from the African slave trade of the 18^th and 19^th centuries. This would be a classic case of ignoring the cultural and historical distance between us and the writer and readers of the original text. I urge people to consider that their problem with some texts might be based upon an unexamined belief in the superiority of their own historical moment over all others. That belief is surely as narrow and exclusive as the views in the Bible many moderns view as so offensive.

It is also important to remember that these are side issues in the greater Biblical context. The shallow end of the Biblical pool is inhabited by controversies over interpretations and culture. The center of the Biblical pool rests with the deity of Jesus, His death and resurrection. These are not disputed among scholars. Even liberal scholars who reject miracles agree that something happened to make the people of Jerusalem, particularly those who became Christians, believe that Jesus had been resurrected. Whether to believe or disbelieve the resurrection themselves, they agree the early church believed in the resurrection of Jesus. It is therefore important to consider the Bible’s core claims about Who Jesus is and whether He rose from the dead before you reject the Bible for its less central and more controversial teachings.

What is at stake is nothing short of your personal salvation! If you don’t trust the Bible enough to let it challenge and correct your thinking, how could you ever have a personal relationship with God? In any truly personal relationship, the other person must be allowed to contradict you. In eliminating what you don’t like from the Bible, you run the risk of creating a “Stepford” religion. Anything that offends your sensibilities or crosses your will is therefore suspect. You may now attempt to create a god of your own design. That is not a God with whom you can have genuine interaction. Only if your God is allowed to outrage you (as a real friend or a marriage partner can) will you know you have gotten hold of a real God and not a figment of your imagination. An authoritative Bible is a precondition to a personal relationship with a real God.