Series Recap and a Look Forward
Welcome back to our mini-series. Last week, we answered, “Is Jesus’ resurrection important?” Through the Bible, we discovered that if Jesus didn’t rise from the dead, it meant that he wasn’t the Christ – the Son of God, and therefore, we are still lost in our sin and are at odds with God. However, if Jesus did rise from the dead, it proves that he is, in fact, the Son of God and that by believing in Him, we have eternal life.
On the flip side, we also discovered that if all the things about Jesus in the Bible are accurate and we don’t repent of our sins and give our lives to Christ, then we will spend eternity separated from God in a horrible place called hell. So, as you can see, much is at stake when we consider Jesus and his resurrection to be factual or legendary.
But how do we know if everything the Bible says about Jesus is true? The Bible is the most valued source for figuring out who Jesus is and what he did in ancient Palestine. According to the New Testament, Jesus is God’s Son; he lived a sinless life, was a good teacher who did miracles, was compassionate toward all, was wrongly arrested, beaten, mocked, crucified on the cross, buried, rose from the dead, appeared to many, and returned to heaven with the promise to return for all those who believe in him so that they can spend eternity with him in heaven. According to the Bible, it is an open and shut case concerning who Jesus is, but can we trust the Bible?
Why Question the New Testament’s Record of Jesus
C.S. Lewis said in his book, Mere Christianity, that Jesus had to be a liar (for claiming things he knew to be false), lunatic (for saying things he believed to be accurate but were not), or Lord (that the things he said about himself were and are true). Bart Ehrman, Professor of New Testament at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, would add “legend” to Lewis’ list.
Now, Dr. Ehrman is not saying that Jesus is a legend as if he never existed; no, he is making the claim that Jesus calling himself God is a legend. According to Ehrman, Jesus’ claim to be divine is that of legend because in Matthew, Mark, and Luke, our earliest gospels, we have no record of Jesus declaring to be God. It is in John’s gospel, written some sixty years after Jesus’ death, that we see Jesus claiming to be one with the Father, existing before Abraham, and using the “I am” statements to describe who he is and how all who listen to his message and believe in the God who sent him could have eternal life. The professor argues that the idea of Jesus being God or claiming to be God arose decades after Jesus left this earth by a segment of his later followers. Thus, his identity and intent have become things of legend. Much like the game of telephone, we played as kids, Jesus’ life and original words had evolved into something of a legend by the time our last gospel was written.
Could Dr. Ehrman and many others who agree with him be correct? If so, billions of people around the globe are living with false hope in a false Savior. If Jesus was crucified in 30 or 33 AD and the gospel of John was written between 85 and 90 AD, could Jesus’ claims to be God recorded in the gospel be words put in Jesus’ mouth by these later followers? This idea of people forming a Jesus of their liking leads me to our bigger question for the series: Can we trust what the Gospels and New Testament tell us about Jesus? Is what we believe and proclaim to others about Jesus based on lies or personal and inaccurate perceptions about him? Is there any evidence to support the biblical authors’ testimonies being true and accurate? Let’s examine the evidence together and see where it takes us!
Examining the Evidence
Is there any evidence that the gospel writers before John believed that Jesus was God?
Matthew’s Gospel Says That Jesus is God.
In Matthew 16, we have Peter confessing that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God of the living God. Peter’s declaration comes as a response to Jesus asking His disciples who they thought Him to be as the Son of Man. How did Jesus respond to Peter’s bold answer? We know Jesus had no problem in correcting His disciples when they were in error (16:21-24) so how did He respond to Peter’s confession about Him as the Christ, the Son of God? Jesus called him blessed for believing rightly and that God had revealed this truth to him and it would be this truth, declared in Peter’s confession that Jesus would build His Church upon!
Does Jesus confirming Peter’s identifying Him as the Messiah, the Son of the Living God the same as Jesus claiming to be God as in the gospel of John? I’d say yes. In John 10:29-39 we see that Jesus has angered the Jews because He has announced that He and the Father are one. These verses are Jesus plainly claiming to be God. We know those around Him heard Him loud and clear for the picked up stones to kill Him because they accused Him of being guilty of blasphemy. The crowd wanted to put Jesus to death because He, a mere man, had claimed to be God. Jesus said that they wanted to stone Him because He said He was the Son of God. They saw this synonymous with Him being equal with and thus God. In Matthew 16, when Peter calls Jesus the Son of God, the fisherman has called Jesus God, an identifying title that Jesus says is correct.
Mark’s Gospel Says That Jesus Is God.
In Mark chapter two, we have a man lowered down into the house where Jesus was preaching from a hole his friends had made in the roof. Mark says that upon seeing the friends’ faith, He said to the paralytic, “Son, your sins are forgiven.” Upon hearing these words of Jesus, some of the scribes who were present silently questioning why He would say such a thing for only God could forgive sins. If He is claiming to have the power to forgive sins they reasoned, then He is claiming to be God! Knowing what they were thinking, Jesus turned His attention towards the scribes and demonstrated that the Son of Man had the authority and power to forgive sins (and thus be God) by healing the paralyzed man. The same man who had been lowered down through the roof stood up, walked out of the house, with his bed in hand and forgiven! (Mark 2:1-12)
Luke’s Gospel Says That Jesus Is God.
You don’t have to journey far into Luke’s carefully investigative report before finding support for the followers of Jesus believing that He was indeed Lord instead of a thing of legend. Contained in Gabriel’s birth announcement to Mary concerning Jesus we see that He, the child that would be born to this young Jewish girl would be the Son of the Most High, the Son of God (Luke 1:32, 35).
All Four Gospels Say That Jesus Is God, But Did They Originally Make That Claim?
Just a quick survey of the three earliest gospels shows that the belief of Jesus being the Son of God and thus God did not evolve throughout the decades leading up to John’s gospel written in the 80s or 90s AD. Instead, the doctrine of Jesus being the God-man was a belief held and proclaimed not by a small sect of Johannine disciples decades later but by the universal Church as a whole from the start.
Matthew and Mark penned their gospels in the 50’s or 60’s AD, within 20 or 30 years after Jesus’ death, resurrection, and ascension. Luke wrote his account of the good news concerning Jesus in the 60s AD and Acts between 62 and 64 AD. Though these biographies were written earlier than John’s, there is still a significant time gap, especially in our Western mindset. There is always a possibility that even within 2 to 3 decades, people can become legendary depending on what is believed and said about them after they are gone to those closest to them. Yet, we often overlook the fact that while the four gospels begin our New Testament, other New Testament books were written much earlier. Instead of being in chronological order, our New Testament books are grouped by genre (Gospels, History, Letters, Prophecy).
In 1 Corinthians 15:3-4 Paul tells the believers in Corinth that,
I passed on to you what was most important and what had also been passed on to me. Christ died for our sins, just as the Scriptures said. 4 He was buried, and he was raised from the dead on the third day, just as the Scriptures said.
Throughout this post, we have wrestled with Jesus, being a mere man, having become a thing of legend. We have looked at what is written in the Synoptic Gospels themselves and have found that before John wrote the last gospel, Matthew, Mark, and Luke included within their text evidence of Jesus being more than man, but the Christ. As we have seen, they all declared Jesus as God. But, these verses from Paul’s letter are further proof that what John unapologetically claimed about Jesus in his gospel were not things of legend but historical fact, held by the Church at her birth by all. The timeline below shows why.
When visiting Jerusalem and with the Christian leaders there in the city, Paul was taught a creed by them. A creed is a statement of belief. The Christian Church was already using this creed to declare its faith in the resurrection of Jesus. Paul received this statement early on in his walk with Jesus and was now passing it on to the churches in Corinth. This fact is astounding because it means that by the time Paul arrived in Jerusalem, about five years after the death of Christ, the Church was already proclaiming its belief that Jesus had died for sins, was buried, and was raised to life on the third day according to the Scriptures.
This statement of belief shows that the Jesus of the gospels and their record of His life and everything surrounding it isn’t myth or legend. Why? At the latest, this creed was developed and used as a way to learn core teachings about Jesus and the Christian faith 2 to 5 years after Jesus’ death. Experts say that this development happened way too quickly for legend to have developed and erased a core of historical truth.
This post forged its own path. I did not set out with this direction in mind for this post; however, when it comes to rejecting Christ and the reliability of the Gospels’ reporting on Jesus simply on the belief that much of it is legend or myth developed by some which over time rewrote or overwrote the actual, historical accounts of eyewitnesses. Instead, the evidence shows that all four gospels originally taught that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that by believing in Him, will have life by the power of His name (John 20:31).
Are there Other Reasons to Trust the New Testament’s Record of Jesus?
I set out to cover more in the post than just this one common misconception concerning the reliability of the gospels. There are other reasons that we can believe what the Bible says about the Jesus that we worship. I will cover them in the next post or posts. Thanks for allowing me to hopefully help you grow in your faith more than just on Sunday mornings!
Additional Resources
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