Please Call the First Witness

Walk with me. We are headed to my research advisor’s office at Western Carolina University. We are in the graduate program, about to meet with my advisor to get an introduction to the project that we are starting this week. (Don’t worry, there won’t be a test) He says, “Come in. Have a seat! How are you?” and general small talk about the semester and how graduate school is treating me goes on for a minute or two. He then begins to talk about the project *insert cool science-y conversation about stem cells and protein biomarkers*. On the outside I’m like, “Yea, that sounds great! Really interesting.” The meeting draws to a close and he assigns some related papers that I can search to familiarize myself with the project, terminology, lab procedures, etc. In science that translates into looking up what they call “scholarly articles” that report about other projects that are similar to yours. So I start the search. Looking up evidence for how well the laboratory process works. Can we can use this old procedure but update it and apply it to a different research goal to make “new” science that is worthy of publication? Different papers say different things. All the procedures are a little different. I’m confused. But I make notes and return a few days later to see my advisor. He has his own past research and papers to draw from, we go through the process we will actually be using and he explains everything. Then we go to the lab and actually walk through the process together. It makes sense! Hey, this could work, this actually makes sense!

What does this have to do with Jesus? Well, Lee Strobel’s first chapter* talks about eyewitness evidence. My first thought was, what do you mean, there isn’t eyewitness evidence for Jesus. You can’t go talk to someone about what they saw Jesus do. Then I realized, um, what about the Bible! Duhh. The gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John) are (at least claim to be) eyewitness accounts about Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection. We can read and glean information, but sometimes they leave us confused, sometimes they seem to say different things. So do they line up? Are they trustworthy (as they call it in science, peer-reviewed)? Like with my research, Strobel went to an advisor (Craig Blomberg) so that he could ask questions and get help understanding the facts. He wanted to find out, what are the practical use for the gospels? Is it just a confusing mess, or is there an underlying truth and message found within the four books? I didn’t see it in my research without the help of my advisor. I was even doubting that the method and the project as a whole was possible. Then I found out that there was truth, accuracy, honesty in how things did or didn’t work for the other scientists who wrote papers. I realized that even with what seemed like inconsistencies, the papers all stood behind the method and survived scrutiny of other scientists. The gospels are like that.

Without going into too much detail, here’s what is said about the Gospels in Strobel’s first chapter. The authors are believed to be who they say they are. The writing lines up with what a biography genre in the ancient world would have required. There is underlying uniformity concerning the kind of person Jesus was, who He claimed to be, and of what He was capable. One can be confident that the history is not skewed but emphasized by the theological agenda the authors had because the truth of Jesus’ saving power relies on His life, death, and resurrection being real, confirmable, events (In the book an analogy is cited about how the Jewish people most accurately report and preserve the memory of the Holocaust because they know that prevention of future horrors requires a truthful memory of the event.). It can be asserted confidently that the gospels were written sixty or thirty years after Jesus – Alexander the Great’s biography, for example, was recorded no earlier than 400 years after his death and still historians trust their accuracy.

*Strobel, Lee. The Case for Christ. Grand Rapids, Michigan: Zondervan, 1998.
        See also, My Beautiful Inheritance previous blog entry Taking Jesus to Court

Want to know more?(Works Cited by Strobel)

Barnett, Paul. Is the New Testament History? Ann Arbor, Mich.: Vine, 1986.

__________. Jesus and the Logic of History. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1997.

Blomberg, Craig.  The Historical Reliability of the Gospels. Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity Press, 1987.

Bruce, F. F.  The New Testament Documents. Are they Reliable? Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1960.
France, R. T. The Evidence for Jesus. Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity Press, 1986.