Have you ever wondered how much confidence you should put in the four gospel accounts that open the New Testament? Are they just legends? Should we read them as reliable accounts of what Jesus actually did? Could they have preserved Jesus’ teachings after such a long time? These are questions I asked when I first began to investigate Christianity, but a course that I’m taking in the gospels with Wayne Baxter this term has given me greater clarity in understanding them. Let me share what I’ve learned.
It’s hard not to be cynical in our world today. Internet ads make ridiculous claims to unwary consumers. Fake testimonials promote bogus products. Glory-seeking preachers claim miraculous healings. One by one, the frauds are exposed, but they’re replaced by new ones just as quickly. Not surprisingly, objective, rational people are left scratching their heads. Why can’t people be more critical? Why don’t they check the facts? Why won’t they listen to science? Enter the gospel stories. While they contain some good teaching and moral advice, the claims of miracles make them hard for a rational person today to take seriously. Walking on water? Feeding the 5,000? Giving sight to the blind? What do you do with these?
Very few people want to discard the Bible altogether. It’s a holy book after all, and there are passages in the Bible that even the most cynical atheist would admit are beautiful and inspiring. But, sooner or later, everyone finds parts of the Bible that make them feel uncomfortable. There are teachings that disagree with what we believe. There are commands to do things we don’t want to do. And there are warnings against doing things that we want to keep on doing. When we come to one of those uncomfortable places, we’re tempted to conclude, ‘That part must be wrong.’ If the Bible contains errors, then we get to pick and choose the parts we like. So, how true is the Bible? Does it contain mistakes? How can we know? These are important questions to settle in your mind.
I didn’t use to think that I needed to take the Bible too seriously. I assumed that its message had gotten passed down through the centuries a little bit like the telephone game. That’s where everyone lines up and whispers a message from one person to the next down the line and when the last person says what they’ve heard, we all laugh at how garbled the message got along the way. Once I had done some investigation, I realized how wrong my assumptions had been. Over the years, I’ve talked to so many people with the same assumptions that I wanted to address how the transmission of the Bible differs from the telephone game.
