The Case for Christmas - Can the Biographies of Jesus Be Trusted? (part 1 of 4) - 3 December 2006

scripture focus

Jeremiah 33:14-16

theme

the hope of christmas

summary

the biographies of Jesus can be trusted; thus, they give us hope at christmas

One popular scene from the Christmas story is of some shepherds, watching their flocks by night, who are confronted with a glorious vision of angels (Lk. 2:8-14). These angels declare, in song, that the salvation promised by God (Jer. 33:14-16; cf. Lk. 21:25-28) had, that very night, been realised in the birth of a child in a stable.

Now, you and I, like they, would certainly have been overwhelmed by such an occurrence. But, foreshadowing Postmodernism, these shepherds do not trust their senses, but, instead, went to see this baby for themselves, so as to confirm all that the angels had told them (Lk. 2:15).

Lee Strobel, an editor with the Chicago Tribune newspaper and having a Masters degree in Law, has written a small book titled, “The Case for Christmas”.

Once a skeptic, now a convert to Christianity, his series of “The Case for ...” books remain immensely popular.

During this season of Advent, which prepares our hearts for the coming celebration of Christmas, the festival of Jesus’ birth, I want us to follow the example of the shepherds, to see for ourselves the reason for the season, to gaze upon the child in the manger. We will confirm the identity of this child with the help of Mr Strobel’s investigative journalism.

Some detractors of Christianity argue that belief in the God revealed by Jesus, the child born in a Bethlehem manger, is a crutch designed to make us feel good in a meaningless world, to offer us comfort in the face of our mortality. To such as these, Christmas remains little more than a time to increase debt so as to appease social conventions.

As opposed to this critical pessimism, for others Christmas is essentially and necessarily a festival celebrating the story of Jesus' birth. It is a period of the year that imbues us with glimpses of hope, peace, joy, and love. It does this as we gather with family and friends, and as we reflect upon the identity, the lifestyle, and the teachings of the child in the manger, the one named Jesus, the one whom we identify as the Christ of Almighty God.

We know about Jesus from the biographies written about him. Yet, those biographies make great claims about Jesus. If the biographies of Jesus can be trusted, then there is indeed reason for hope this Christmas.

1. In a court of law, the evidence of an eyewitness is powerful, when it is compelling and convincing. According to Lee Strobel,

When a witness has had ample opportunity to observe a crime, when there’s no bias or ulterior motives, when the witness is truthful and fair, the climactic act of pointing our a defendant in a courtroom can be enough to doom that person to prison or worse.

When such a trustworthy witness is able to describe their eyewitness account, there is often little that can counteract the effects of such testimony. It is one thing to say, “I believe that the accident occurred this way”, and it is another to say, “I saw the accident, and this is exactly the way that it occurred”.

2. In regards to Christianity, the secondhand opinion regarding Jesus (e.g. “I believe this about Jesus”) always only ever lends support to the firsthand accounts recorded in the Bible (e.g. Mt. 9:9-13).

The uniform testimony of the early Christian church, and modern scholars agree, is that the biographies of Jesus, contained in the Bible, were written either by apostles (e.g. Matthew and John) or by companions of the apostles (e.g. Mark, a companion of Peter, and Luke, a companion of Paul).

Consider the following excerpt from the writings of Papias, writing circa 125 AD:

Mark having become the interpreter of Peter, wrote down accurately whatsoever he remembered. It was not, however, in exact order that he related the sayings or deeds of Christ. For he neither heard the Lord nor accompanied Him. But afterwards, as I said, he accompanied Peter, who accommodated his instructions to the necessities [of his hearers], but with no intention of giving a regular narrative of the Lord’s sayings. Wherefore Mark made no mistake in thus writing some things as he remembered them. For of one thing he took especial care, not to omit anything he had heard, and not to put anything fictitious into the statements.

Matthew put together the oracles [of the Lord] in the Hebrew language, and each one interpreted them as best he could.

We lay it down as our first position, that the evangelical Testament has apostles for its authors, to whom was assigned by the Lord Himself this office of publishing the gospel. Since, however, there are apostolic men also, they are yet not alone, but appear with apostles and after apostles [...] Of the apostles, therefore, John and Matthew first instil faith into us; whilst of apostolic men, Luke and Mark renew it afterwards.

Of course, I must concede that there is a legitimate question regarding the authorship of John’s biography —whether or not the author is John the apostle or another John. To ascertain the facts about the biographies of Jesus, which we are exploring today, Lee Strobel interviewed Dr. Craig Blomberg, a professor of New Testament studies at Denver Seminary and a foremost authority on the biographies of Jesus. Dr. Blomberg had this to say regarding the authorship of John’s biography:

“You see, the testimony of a Christian writer named Papias, dated about AD 125, refers to John the apostle and John the elder, and it's not clear from the context whether he's talking about one person from two perspectives or two different people. But granted that exception, the rest of the early testimony is unanimous that it was John the apostle —the son of Zebedee— who wrote the gospel.”

Even if we concede that the biography attributed to John was not necessarily written by the apostle —even though the majority evidence supports that it was John the apostle— the overriding point in this matter is that the early church accepted this biography wholeheartedly, and we can, therefore, trust its account as much as the other three biographies, about whose authorship there is no valid dispute.

Dr. Blomberg highlighted to Lee Strobel that the biographies of Jesus were not necessarily written by noteworthy Christians.

For instance, Matthew was a hated tax collector. No book written by him would run to the top of today’s New York Times best-seller list, unless, of course, he was admitting how foul a person he was. In contrast, the disputed apocryphal gospels all chose names of celebrated persons —such as Philip, Peter, Mary, and James— names that would carry much more weight than Matthew, or even Mark and Luke, who were not even among the twelve disciples of Jesus.

3. The “biographies” of Jesus are not accurately called biographies, at least according to modern standards. Dr. Blomberg told Lee Strobel that

[Ancient biographers] did not have the sense, as we do today, that it was important to give equal proportion to all periods of an individual’s life or that it was necessary to tell the story in strictly chronological order or even to quote people verbatim, as long as the essence of what they said was preserved.

From this perspective, the writers of the biographies of Jesus —which are more properly called “gospels” because of the nature of the message contained within them— wanted to convey the truth revealed by Jesus’ personality and ministry. This, of course, was revealed in each moment that they spent side-by-side with him, in each story of Jesus which was later recounted and retold. Therefore, the facticity of these events is equally important, even if their chronology is not. The biographies of Jesus, which have been included in the Bible, do, in fact, represent eyewitness accounts of Jesus’ life and teaching. Leaving the last word on this point to Dr. Blomberg, he stated that

Christianity [is] based on certain historical claims that God uniquely entered into space and time in the person of Jesus of Nazareth, so the very ideology that Christians were trying to promote required as careful historical work as possible.

4. While these biographies of Jesus record direct and indirect eyewitness testimony to the events they describe, can we accept them as reliable records of that testimony? If their authors wrote these events down too late after their memory was trustworthy, we could reasonably discard them, as many critics try to argue.

Among both conservative and liberal scholars, the accepted date for the writing of these biographies is that Mark was written in the 70's, Matthew and Luke in the 80's, and John in the 90's. This is still certainly within the lifetimes of those who would have witnessed these events, whether the followers of Jesus or his enemies, who would, and did, challenge false claims about Jesus.

But Dr. Blomberg argues for earlier dates by considering the book of Acts

: This book was written by Luke, and ends abruptly with the apostle Paul under house arrest in Rome. We can assume then that the book was written —unfinished in a sense— before Paul’s execution. Thus, it could not have been written any later than 62 AD, which tells us that the first part of Luke’s writings, his biography of Jesus, was written before 62 AD.

We know that Luke incorporated material from the biography of Mark. This means that Mark would have been written in the late 50's, thus reducing the gap between Jesus’ death, in the early 30's, and the first writing about him to less than 30 years.

This still seems like a long time. But, historically speaking, it’s more like a “news flash”. Dr. Blomberg compares this dating of Jesus’ biographies to that of Alexander the Great:

The two earliest biographies of Alexander the Great were written by Arrian and Plutarch more than four hundred years after Alexander’s death in 323 BC, yet historians consider them to be generally trustworthy [...]

So whether the gospels were written sixty years of thirty years after the life of Jesus, the amount of time is negligible by comparison. It’s almost a nonissue.

5. I can probably guess that most here implicitly assume that the teachings about Jesus came after the writing of his biographies, that, like us, his followers came to understand his revelation of God after they read the stories about him.

On the contrary, as we read in the book of Acts, immediately after Jesus’ death, the apostles began preaching and teaching about Jesus (see Acts 1:6ff). What did they teach and preach about him? Among other things, Dr. Blomberg states that we can prove that Jesus’ divinity was being taught within two years after his death.

Consider, for example, that almost all of the letters of Paul were written before Jesus’ biographies were written. His writing ministry “probably began in the late 40's”. Within his letters we find evidence of even earlier sources of writings and teachings about Jesus.

Paul referred to creeds, confessions, and hymns of the early Church, the most famous of which is

Philippians 2:6-11, which talks about Jesus being “in very nature God”, and Colossians 1:15-20, which describes him as being “the image of the invisible God”, who created all things and through whom all things are reconciled with God “by making peace through his blood, shed on the cross”.

We can see, then, that the earliest Christians believed that Jesus not only taught interesting things about God, but that he revealed God in a special way by being, somehow, God himself.

More importantly, however, for our purposes, is 1 Corinthians 15:3-7, where Paul directly describes his own instruction into the basic and essential beliefs of Christianity:

³For I handed on to you as of first importance what I in turn had received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures, ⁴and that he was buried, and that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures, ⁵and that he appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve. ⁶Then he appeared to more than five hundred brothers and sisters at one time, most of whom are still alive, though some have died. ⁷Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles.

And here’s the point [...] If the crucifixion was as early as AD 30, Paul’s conversion was about AD 32 [...] His first meeting with the apostles in Jerusalem would have been about AD 35. At some point along there, Paul was given this creed, which had already been formulated and was being used in the early church.

Now, here you have the key facts about Jesus’ death for our sins, plus a detailed list of those to whom he appeared in resurrected form —all dating back to within two to five years of the events themselves!

The pomp and circumstance of Christmas invites us to reflect on the story of Jesus’ birth, a story which comes to us through the testimony of eyewitnesses to the facts of Jesus’ life and the power of his ministry to the poor, the captives, the blind, and the spiritually-hungry (Lk. 4:18-21; cf. Mt. 5:1-12). We can trust the credibility of the biographies of Jesus because they satisfy the most stringent criteria of historical science. We can trust the testimony of their authors because they were there, they were eyewitnesses to these events about which they write. Their testimony is both compelling and convincing.

Because this story of Jesus’ birth is not, therefore, simply made up —but it is, in fact, a story of actual history— this season of Christmas fills us with hope. As the baby Jesus grew up, he gave mercy to the poor, freedom to the captives, sight to the blind, and satisfaction to those that “hunger and thirst for righteousness” (Mt. 5:6). In the eyes of Jesus, people saw God.

At this time of year, each year, we celebrate the birth of a very special baby, who reveals God to us because this baby is God. “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life” (Jn. 3:16). This hope can only be considered a crutch if the story of Christmas were make-believe. The testimony of four eyewitnesses tells us that the story is true.

It has been said before, but it is worth saying again: Jesus is the reason for the season! Let us not forget to prepare our hearts to reflect on the birth of Jesus, even in the midst of the hustle and bustle of Christmas.

Lift up your heart to God; let him fill you with hope as you celebrate Christmas.

sermon delivered by Ian Forest-Jones
at Hurstville Church of Christ
on Sunday, 3 December 2006 at 10am
[email]