The following is a brief excerpt from a larger book.
For a fuller treatment of this subject as well as a better context, see:
I’d Like To Believe In Jesus, But… (The harder, less frequently discussed questions) By Bob Siegel
Published by CSN Books Copyright © 2007 by Bob Siegel All Rights Reserved
Published by Campus Ambassador Press Copyright © 1999 by Bob Siegel All Rights Reserved
This article is not to be reproduced without written permission from the author.
In my dialogues with university students, objections to the Bible are very common and very similar: “We can’t use the Bible to defend the resurrection,” they tell me. “That’s too internal. You are using one book to verify itself. Besides, the disciples of Jesus were extremely biased. They loved Him. They believed in Him. We can’t trust them to give an objective report.”
Part of our problem with the Bible in discussions like these is the pre-conceived image people have of the Bible. Frankly, Christians contribute much to this image. When people look at this special book, leather bound, with gold plated pages and a personal name engraved on the cover, it seems like something so mystical, so spiritual and so subjective, that it cannot possibly have anything to do with history or any other objective discipline for that matter. Our claim that it is the Word of God doesn’t help much either. It may be a true claim, but the phrase “Word of God” evokes different meanings in different minds. Some take the description to mean that God practically dropped it out of Heaven, wrapped in a white box with a blue ribbon. This, of course, is not what the New Testament writers claimed. Instead, they claimed to have written it themselves while inspired by God’s Spirit (John 14:25-26, 2 Tim 3:16). Whether or not one chooses to believe that the history surrounding Jesus was given with inspiration, the fact remains that it is history and must be studied as history.
We should also keep in mind that the Bible is not one book but actually a collection of 66 different manuscripts, penned by 40 different authors over a period of some 2,000 years. Although several of the books were written in a poetical style, many of the books claim to be actual history and can be corroborated by other ancient documents and archaeology.
The New Testament itself (our primary focus if we are discussing the resurrection), is a collection of 27 different documents. Two of the four Gospels were penned by actual disciples of Jesus, Matthew and John, and both of these men claimed to be eyewitnesses for the resurrection.
Notice John’s words from a letter that he wrote subsequently to his Gospel:
That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked at and our hands have touched–this we proclaim concerning the Word of life. The life appeared, we have seen it and testify to it, and we proclaim to you the eternal life, which was with the Father and has appeared to us. We proclaim to you what we have seen and heard, so that you also may have fellowship with us ( I John 1:1-3).
Nothing in this wording even remotely suggests that John is inviting his readers to take a blind leap of faith. Instead, he talks as though the facts are out there for anyone who wants them verified. And he himself follows Jesus because of what he has personally witnessed, not because he was taught to follow Jesus in Sunday School.
Another Gospel writer, Mark, was a companion of Peter who penned Peter’s version of Christ’s ministry supplying us with a third eyewitness source. This was a common practice in those days: A man, not very literate, would employ the help of an assistant commonly called amanuensis. Nevertheless, when we read Mark, we are really reading the testimony of Peter.1
Were the disciple’s of Jesus biased? Of course they were. But are we to assume from this that their record is unreliable simply because they liked and believed the man they were writing about? I find such logic very questionable: “Show me an eyewitness or a historian who accepts the life and resurrection of Jesus as actual fact, but the men who knew Him, followed Him, lived with Him, listened to Him, studied with Him; none of them count.” Really now. I doubt that such a standard would be placed upon any other figure of history.
The noted New Testament scholar F.F. Bruce, (Professor of Biblical Criticism and Exegesis at the University of Manchester, England), once discussed an interesting analogy to this whole subject of bias:
Nor would any historian ignore Sir Winston Churchill’s The Second World War or Mr. Harold Wilson’s ‘personal record’ of The Labor Government, 1964-1970 on the ground that the author occupied the position of Prime Minister during the periods covered respectively by these works and would therefore present biased accounts ( F.F. Bruce, Jesus and Christian Origins Outside the New Testament William B. Erdmans’s Publishing Company, Grand Rapids Michigan, 1977, p.15).
Think about it. Who honestly believes that Winston Churchill held a view of World War Two free from personal bias? But the follow up question is just as important: Would any historian in his right mind be uninterested in a book about World War Two written by Winston Churchill?
Yes, the disciples were biased, but no more so than anyone else who writes history. In the case of Jesus, we also have records that demonstrate the biases of those who did not follow Him. This is an important point to note for now and return to later.
First, let us wind down our discussion of the New Testament attestation by taking a brief look at the author of the remaining Gospel, Luke. Although he was not an original disciple himself, he wrote as a historian and interviewed many eyewitnesses to the life of Christ. Observe his words:
Many have undertaken to draw up an account of the things that have been fulfilled among us just as they were handed down to us by those who from the first were eyewitnesses and servants of the word. Therefore, since I myself have carefully investigated everything from the beginning, it seemed good also to me to write an orderly account for you, oh most excellent Theophilus, so that you may know the certainty of the things you have been taught (Luke l:1-4).
Theophilus’ identity is uncertain, but he seems to have been a Roman dignitary of some kind who sponsored an investigation into the matters at hand by a man reputed as being a factual historian. It is difficult for people to think of Luke as a historian but only because they are used to thinking of him as a part of the Bible, and the Bible (as mentioned above) is approached with the unfair image of being “just a religious document.”
But Luke did write as an accurate historian. This has been verified by many scholars, including Sir William Ramsey, one of the most famous archaeologists who has ever lived. Educated in the German Tubingen School in the early 1900’s, where the Bible was torn apart according to popular (and extremely subjective) theories, Ramsey originally took it for granted that the Gospel of Luke was untrustworthy. This all changed when his journeys to the Grecian-Roman world and subsequent archaeological digs began to verify fact after fact as reported in the third Gospel and Acts (also penned by Luke).
One alleged Lucan error was his statement that Lystra and Derbe were in the region of Lycaonia and Iconium was not (Acts 14:1-21). This contradicts Roman writers like Cicero, who said that Iconium was in Lycaonia. But in 1919 Ramsey found a monument that proved Iconium was a Phrygian city, not a Lyconian city.2
A more serious controversy involves Luke’s date of the Roman census. This census, conducted under the Syrian Governor, Quirinius, took place in 6 AD, according to the ancient historian Josephus (Antiquities 18, I. I.). But Luke associates the census with the time of Christ’s birth (Luke 2:1) which, according to Matthew, took place during the reign of Herod the Great (Matt. 2). We know Herod was dead after 4 AD. We would seem then to have a fairly major contradiction. But in 1912 Ramsey discovered an inscription in Antioch stating that Quirinius had been governor twice. Although it is not mentioned where, this dual governorship could easily have been in Syria. Since we know he ruled as governor of Syria once, that is the likely location for his earlier term and the location Ramsey argued for.3
These are just two of the many ways Ramsey was continually impressed. He went on to write:
Luke is a historian of the first rank. Not merely are his statements of fact trustworthy, this author should be placed along with the greatest of historians (William, Ramsey, The Bearing of Recent Discoveries On The Trustworthiness of The New Testament p. 222).
Footnotes:
1) See the writings of the church Fathers Iranaeus (end of second century, Adversus Haereses III.I.i in Eusebius H.E. V. 8), and Papias (130), (Expositions of the Oracles of Our Lord, in Eusebius H.E.III. 39).
2) Joseph Free, Archaeology and Bible History, ( Zondervan Publishing House, Grand Rapids, Michigan, 1992) p. 271.
3) William, Ramsey, The Bearing of Recent Discoveries On The Trustworthiness of The New Testament, pp. 275 ff.
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