The following is necessarily an overview. For more detail, please see the works listed at the end, to which I am greatly indebted.
How can we tell if the Bible is true or if it's a bunch of made-up stories? Well, how do you normally tell if someone is being truthful or telling tales? For example, how do the courts decide if someone is telling the truth? They listen to witnesses. They cross-examine those witnesses, looking for material contradictions, either a witness contradicting him/herself, or contradictions between two different witnesses. They examine whether a witness has a motive to lie, and they look into the character of the witnesses that appear before them.
That's what I propose to do with the Bible. Specifically, I will examine the four gospels, which are central to the truth of the whole Bible. The Jesus portrayed in the gospels so closely fits the foreshadowed Messiah of the Old Testament, that if the gospels are true, that would help validate the Old Testament as well.
In the gospels we have four witnesses whose testimony we can examine to see if it bears any marks of being made up or falsified. We can add up the evidence to see how strong or weak their case is. We can decide if they look like fakes, or if their testimony rings true.
What is the standard of evidence to which our case for the truth of the gospels will measure up? Can we give proof beyond a shadow of a doubt that the gospels are true? No. In fact, the evidence does not necessarily prove the truth of the gospels beyond even a reasonable doubt. It may be possible to find some reasonable grounds for doubting the gospels. However, I hope to outline a case for the weight of the evidence being in favor of the gospels being true.
Once it is shown that the gospels are more likely true than not, based on evidence such as I will outline, and such as is found in other published works, then one can go on to decide whether the teachings of Jesus compel our following him or not--whether there is a personal conviction of their high moral and spiritual character.
The first question we need to address is where the gospels came from. They have been handed down to us as being written by first-century chroniclers of the life of Jesus. They can be dated by historical methods to at or near that time. In fact, all the overt evidence--testimony of other ancient writers--tells us that the gospels were indeed written in the time period they claim to be from. There are no ancient writings charging that the gospels are fakes and giving an alternative account for where they came from.
There may be critical evidence against the genuineness of the gospels (we will look at the critical evidence below), but the historical evidence is basically all on the side of their authenticity. This doesn't make them true, but it is necessary that they be what they claim to be in order to be believed as true.
Now let's examine the character of the writings themselves, and ask ourselves: For what purpose would someone have written something like the gospels? Is it likely that someone would have made something like that up?
First, let's examine the possibility that the gospels were completely made up. Let's suppose Jesus never existed, but was merely invented by the gospel writers.
For example, maybe the gospels were written as myth. Is that likely? Well, the problem with that idea is that Jesus' life is set in a very specific, historical time period, not in some mythical world. The gospels are written as history, with real historical rulers named, genealogies including real historical people, etc. They are clearly meant to be taken as history, not myth.
Besides, the gospels are not grandiose enough to be myths. Yes, they contain wondrous events like resurrections from the dead. But they are very restrained in their use of such events. Most of Jesus' miracles are relatively small in scale, while the really big ones occur only at certain strategic moments, not constantly throughout the gospels. Myth-makers like today's George Lucas, on the other hand, are out to wow people as much as possible, not show restraint.
If the gospels were completely made up, they are more like historical fiction, and not myth. We could compare them to a historical novel like Gone with the Wind. But there are problems here, too.
First, if we stop to think about it, no one believes that Gone with the Wind is a true story. Novels are almost always known by everyone to be just fiction. How do people know? Word just gets around. If an author tries to pass off a fictional tale as truth, someone who knows the real facts is liable to come forward to say, "Hey, he's lying!"
But there's another problem with supposing that the gospels were made up by some aspiring novelist: the boring parts. If you wanted to make up a great story that would capture people's imagination, why in the world would you start it with a boring genealogy, like Matthew did with his gospel? Or even include it at all, like Luke did? It doesn't ring true that the gospels were meant to be just entertainment, if they included boring stuff like that. It's not likely that someone would do that.
The gospels don't seem to be myth, and they don't read like historical fiction, but there's one even bigger problem with the idea that they were completely made up: Secular historians tell us that Jesus actually existed. If they had reason to doubt that Jesus ever existed, would these nonbelieving historians have said that he did exist? Not likely. Jesus is not a fabrication out of whole cloth. He must have existed.
But that doesn't mean that the gospels are 100% true. Perhaps they are embellishments on the life of some good, but not superhuman, man. For example, perhaps they are fraud, a hoax that someone pulled on the human race.
Well then, if the gospels are a hoax, what was the purpose of such a hoax? Was it something done by the disciples to gain a following for themselves? It's true that the gospels and the book of Acts teach us that the disciples were to be regarded as God's chosen leaders for the new Christian church. And yet, if the gospels were made up for the purpose of persuading people to follow the disciples, why do the gospels contain so much material that reflects so shockingly badly on the disciples?
If you read the gospels, Jesus' disciples were always getting the answers wrong and being rebuked by Jesus. The gospels even tell us how the disciples all deserted Jesus when he was arrested, and how Peter denied Jesus in a cowardly manner-even being intimidated by a young servant girl into denying with curses that he knew his Lord.
Why in the world would anyone who's trying to build a case for following the disciples go to so much trouble to weaken his case with all this damning testimony against the disciples added for no reason? Why would someone making up propaganda say that the first people to see the empty tomb were women-when women were regarded by that society as less trustworthy witnesses than men? Why would someone making up a gospel story go to the trouble of writing four different versions of it?
And if the gospels are a conspiracy by the disciples to perpetrate a hoax, how could all the eleven disciples maintain that hoax with none of them ratting on the others? This is very unlikely, for one thing because the early Christians were severely persecuted for their faith, some even killed. An entire group of eleven conspirators would not be expected to all of them maintain a hoax in the face of such persecution. But if one of them had betrayed their conspiracy, it's likely that his betrayal would have become known. And the secular historians who tell us that Jesus existed would also have told us about how one of his disciples revealed that the gospel stories were a hoax. These are secular historians, after all. If they had heard about evidence against Christianity they would not have hesitated to report it.
In fact, it would have likely been reported in the Bible itself. After all, the Biblical writers don't mind telling us how Peter denied Christ and how Judas, one of Jesus' own hand-picked elite, completely sold him out. So if other of the disciples had later turned against Jesus, we would probably have heard about it too, say in the book of Acts.
No, a hoax perpetrated by the disciples is one of the least likely things that the gospels could be. And the same evidence that makes it unlikely also makes it unlikely that subsequent church leaders perpetrated such a hoax, since those leaders claimed their authority based on inheriting it from the disciple Peter, about whom so much negative is said in the gospels.
But if the gospels were not a fiction made up to legitimize the disciples as leaders of a new cult, what other purpose for their writing can we detect within the gospels themselves? We see no other human purpose for their being written.
However, though they are not a deliberate fraud, it could be that whoever wrote the gospels was sincere, yet deceived. In fact, all the early followers of Christ may have been deceived. For one thing, they could have deceived themselves. Maybe the early followers of Christ just got carried away and started exaggerating things he did until stories of miracles started circulating and eventually got written down as the truth. Sort of a "pious gossip" theory.
But if we look at the gospels, this theory does not fit. The gospels contain accounts of certain events reported by more than one of the gospel writers. And these different accounts differ in emphasis and minor details among the various gospels. This is to be expected of truthful accounts-eyewitnesses generally have somewhat different recollections of the same event, though often they agree on the major points and only disagree on minor ones.
Thus the slightly differing accounts of the gospels fit the mold of an event retold by different witnesses. But if the pious gossip theory is true, people would have been making up embellishments right and left, and events retold by differing witnesses would have changed much more than to differ only in minor points. The differing accounts simply are in too much agreement to think that the miracles reported in the gospels are the result of the multitudes of Jesus' followers engaging in wild exaggerations and gossip. The theory doesn't hold water.
But there's one final possibility. Perhaps the gospel writers were reporting truthfully what they thought they saw and heard. And perhaps Jesus' rank-and-file followers also did not go around making up stories. Perhaps the deception was on the part not of Jesus' followers but of Jesus himself. Maybe Jesus was a charlatan. Since we've ruled out the gospel writers as perpetrators of fraud (they would have written the gospels a lot differently if they were), and we've ruled out the common followers of Jesus (reports would not have agreed so closely), the only remaining possible source of deception that suggest itself is Jesus himself. The gospel writers were truthfully recording what they saw, but they were fooled by Jesus.
This has a certain amount of plausibility when you think of things like feeding the crowds of over five thousand people. A certain amount, but not an overwhelming amount. But how did Jesus fake his own death and resurrection? For one thing, he would have to have been in cahoots with the Roman officials who crucified him. But why would the Romans be part of such a hoax? They had nothing to gain by it. And if Jesus staged his own resurrection to gain a following, why did he disappear from the scene again only forty days afterwards? All that trouble, and he didn't stick around to capitalize on his success? When you think about it, the idea that Jesus was a charlatan makes no sense either.
What good moral teacher ever claimed he was God? There have been other good moral teachers in the world, but none of them claimed to be uniquely God. Not Buddha, not Confucius, not Gandhi. There have also been people who claimed to be God, but none of them was a good moral teacher. They were power-seekers: Caesars and pharaohs and self-seeking cult leaders. There's no evidence that Jesus was any of these types. He was unique. To think that Jesus was a charlatan makes no sense.
Two paramount facts about the events reported in the gospels make it very unlikely that they could have passed as true if they weren't: the gospels reported events that at the time of writing were recent, and they reported events that were public.
The fact that the events reported were recent meant that if they had been false, there were people living at the time who knew the truth and who could have come forward and expose the falsehoods. And the events were public. Jesus did miracles involving feeding thousands. He healed people in synagogues, and in front of crowds. He called forth Lazarus from the dead in front of a crowd of people. If the gospel claims about crowds of people coming to Jesus and being healed were false, everyone would have thought back and said, "Well, no, it can't be true. I don't remember all the hubbub that the gospels claim went on about Jesus, the people coming to him from all over the place. Nope, it didn't happen."
Now of course if you work at it, you can come up with some hypothesis that covers the facts of the gospels and explains them away as invention. For example, maybe Jesus was a normal human, but a very charismatic teacher. Stories started circulating about wonders he performed. The stories got more exaggerated. Then Jesus was crucified. The numbers of his followers fell off, thus paring down the diversity and contradictory details of wild stories that would be circulating. A select few wild stories were preserved. Stories of a resurrection then became current. Sometime later some serious-minded believer decided to write down what he believed were the actual historical facts of Jesus' life based on the stories that had become established by then. This became the gospel of Mark. Matthew and Luke then did the same, using Mark plus other sources. Then later John recorded his gospel. All the gospel writers believed that the stories that had been passed down to them were true. But of course they were all really just legend.
You can come up with some such plausible-sounding explanation. But of course it's just speculation, and not anything based on evidence. And it glosses over some questionable assumptions, most glaringly regarding the question of how everyone started believing the incredible claim that Jesus, a man of the believers' own time, had actually risen from the dead. And a record of handed-down wild stories would not be expected to contain such serious historical detail as genealogies, records of when Jesus traveled to what city, what was happening with the political rulers of the time, etc. The character of the gospels is not what the legend-turned-to-historical-record speculation would predict.
When we compare the gospel record to various kinds of communication that pass off fiction as truth, we see that the gospel record is unique. It's not like anything else:
It's not a historical novel, like Gone with the Wind. It's not written as just entertainment, but as a report relating ordinary historical facts.
It's not a myth like Homer's Odyssey. It doesn't have that peculiar larger-than-life mythic quality.
It's not a made-up religious book like the Koran. It's not written like something made up just to exalt some human religious leader, as the Koran is. The gospels include a great amount of negative facts as well as the positive facts about the disciples.
It's not a made-up religious book like the Book of Mormon. Joseph Smith got away with his deception because it was made up about events that supposedly happened hundreds of years before the writing of the book. If Smith had written about claimed events within the lifetime of his readers, he would never have gotten away with it so easily.
It's not a hoax like, for example, the TV show Alien Autopsy. This program was played on TV purporting to show an autopsy of an alien body found at the scene of the crash of an alien spacecraft. Problem is, the "autopsy" occurred in secret, with the only evidence being the film itself. By contrast, the gospels relate events that occurred in broad daylight, and if true, must have been known to thousands of people.
The gospels are not even like the other non-Biblical gospels about Jesus that circulated in the second and third centuries A.D. The authenticity of the four Biblical gospels is validated by much better historical evidence, they are generally dated earlier, and they simply do not have the frivolous character that much of the pseudo-gospel writings display.
The Bible bears all the marks of being truth, and not of being false:
The gospels have the marks of being true. Of course, it's always possible that they are an exceedingly cunning deception, done in an exceedingly improbable way, for no discernable motive as far as we can detect. But the evidence points rather to the gospels being true. That they are true is the simplest explanation.
The most reasonable conclusion is that the gospels are true.
For further reading, see:
Why I Am a Christian, edited by Norman Geisler and Paul Hoffman
Faith on Trial, by Pamela Binnings Ewen
The Case for Christ, by Lee Strobel
Evidence that Demands a Verdict, by Josh McDowell
Copyright © 2001, MikeM.
Permission is granted to reproduce for non-commercial purposes.
