Objection 1: Unreliable source material, the New Testament
One of my chief objections to Christianity was that its claims stem from the pages of the New Testament, and I had reached the conclusion that if the source material was unreliable then believing in Christ was no more than wishful thinking, on a par with believing that the Moon is made of cheese.
Reliability of Source Material – the New Testament
• Written a long time after the events, not by eye-witnesses, therefore unreliable
• Written by Jesus’s followers therefore biased and exaggerated
• Deliberate fiction – the authors invented the imaginary perfect figure of Jesus
When challenged to investigate the evidence for Christianity, however, I was surprised to find significant evidence for the historicity and reliability of the New Testament.
Evidence for the resurrection?
Charge 1: Written a long time after the events, not eye-witness accounts, unreliable
4th Century AD
Earliest complete copy of all the books of the New Testament (Codex Sinaiticus) AD 325 or shortly afterwards
2nd/3rd Centuries - summary
Papyrus P32 Titus Greek 2nd-3rd Century
Papyrus P46 Romans, 1 & 2 Corinthians, Galatians, Ephesians, Philippians, Colossians, 1 Thessalonians, Hebrews Greek 2nd-early 3rd Century
Papyrus P66 Gospel of John Greek 2nd-3rd Century
Papyrus P77 Gospel of Matthew Greek 2nd-3rd Century
Papyrus P103 Gospel of Matthew Greek 2nd-3rd Century
Majuscule GA0189 Acts of the Apostles Greek 2nd-3rd Century
Earliest Fragments – 2nd Century
Matthew’s gospel (P90) and John’s gospel (P104)
Revelation (P98)
John’s gospel (P52) probably ~ AD 135
Conclusion from the New Testament copies
The above fragments or complete books have, of course, been copied from earlier versions. The level of accuracy and agreement between manuscript copies in the Koine Greek commonly used at the time is remarkable and the discrepancies when they occur are minor copying or dictation errors.
I came to the conclusion that the gospels were reliable eyewitness accounts
My conclusion as an agnostic was to acknowledge the historicity and reliability of the documents. That did not mean that I agreed with what was written, but that the various gospels and letters were not only authored by eye-witnesses or those who knew the eye-witnesses, they were alarmingly consistent with each other.
Warner Wallace, a former atheist and cold-case homicide detective, wrote: ‘In the end, I came to the conclusion that the gospels were reliable eyewitness accounts that delivered accurate information about Jesus, including His crucifixion and Resurrection’ Jesus Is Evidence That God Exists | Cold Case Christianity
Charge 2: The New Testament is written by Jesus’s followers therefore biased and exaggerated
Essentially this charge is one of dishonesty and outright hypocrisy as its authors – and Jesus himself – consistently argue that truth is to believed and spoken. If hypocrisy and dishonesty seem to be unnecessarily strong charges, then ‘hyped’ or ‘sexed up’ may be less strident? In other words, deliberately exaggerated maybe, still conveying the ‘truth’, but with some poetic license: Jesus didn’t walk on the water, he knew where a sandbar was and walked on that. It only appeared that he walked on water.
Aware of this easy criticism, the apostle Paul wrote to the church in Corinth anchoring all his claims in unavoidable history. The New Testament is not an attempt to invent a spiritual belief detached from real events. Faith is based on history not myth.
‘Christ died…and…was buried and rose again the third day…and was seen by Peter…then by the twelve. After that he was seen by over 500 at once of whom the majority are still alive…and after that, by me’ 1 Cor 15v3-8
On the third day, according to the scriptures...
Serious historians are not as prone to dismissing the New Testament’s historicity as we might think judging from how Christianity is portrayed in many tv documentaries or in popular literature. Comparison of the literary record with other well-known figures from ancient history, is – was to me – very surprising.
Homer – The Iliad – written 900BC – earliest copy 400BC - time delay 500years
Julius Caesar - 100-44 BC – earliest copy 900 - time delay 1000 years
New Testament – AD50 - AD100 – earliest copy AD 135 - time delay less than 100 years
The number of ancient copies of the New Testament still in existence is 5800 Greek, 10,000 Latin, and 9,300 in other languages. This is considerably more than for any other ancient document:
Homer Iliad – 643
Julius Caesar - 10 copies
My conclusion: having read the New Testament I was not only surprised by the level of internal agreement between its various authors concerning historical events and doctrinal beliefs, I was genuinely surprised to find that all of is heroes (except Jesus) were deeply flawed and permitted the authors to expose their imperfections, fears, lack of faith, unloving attitudes, and cowardice to public view in the writings in the gospels and elsewhere.
I could still maintain my agnosticism. I could accept that the contents of the New Testament were genuine and accurately copied from the originals and that they represented the point of view of the various authors whether eye-witnesses or based on eye-witness reports. Accepting that the New Testament is genuine does not mean that, had you been a eye-witness to the events and teaching of Jesus that you would have been convinced by His claims.
Agnostic, I remained, if somewhat surprised by the strength of evidence for the historicity of the New Testament.
Charge 3: Deliberate fake?
J.B. Philips, a bible translator, and author of The Ring of Truth, began translating the New Testament with a fairly jaundiced point of view:
‘I confess…I had viewed the Greek of the New Testament with a rather snobbish disdain’
As he read and translated the Koine Greek – everyday rather than classical ‘posh’ Greek with which he was more accustomed, he reported:
‘As I pressed on with the task of translation I became convinced of the truth of the resurrection…I was reading the actual words of people who had seen Christ after his resurrection an had seen men an women changed by his living power’
‘There is no hysteria, no careful working for effect and no attempt at collusion. These are not embroidered tales: the material is cut to the bone…no man could have invented a character as Jesus’
The greatest problem with the suspicion and assertion that Jesus did not exist and that the New Testament is a fiction, is that, rather than being dismissed at the time as demonstrably false, the message – principally of the resurrection - took hold. Within a few decades of the events witnessed by the apostles and other early followers of Christ, the testimony of eye-witnesses was believed from Jerusalem to Rome and was on the way to Spain. Having crossed the Jewish-Gentile barrier there was no stopping of he growth and spread of Christianity or ‘The Way’ as it was nicknamed early on.
Apart from statistical evidence of the rapid growth of the faith that Jesus was the Messiah, the Christ, it is the character of the apostles and other eye-witnesses, all of whose lived lives of impeccable honesty with an emphasis on truth and love that cannot be dismissed. Had they been proven charlatans, unreliable characters, using their fantastical claims in order to extort the faithful, then the case against the New Testament would have been strengthened.
‘As I pressed on with the task of translation I became convinced of the truth of the resurrection…I was reading the actual words of people who had seen Christ after his resurrection an had seen men an women changed by his living power’
Further to this is the record of the sufferings of Jesus and his followers all of whom could have avoided their sufferings had they abandoned their false claims about the resurrection and the miracles. John the Baptist was beheaded, Jesus was crucified, Stephen was stoned to death, James killed, and Paul was arrested and imprisoned, whipped, suffered shipwreck.
My conclusion: the New Testament is not a fake; it is a genuine attempt of the writers to record the actual events and words of Jesus and his followers before and after the resurrection. Whilst I accepted all of this, my agnosticism remained intact. Had I been there, I may not have been as convinced as the eyewitnesses who then passed on material to be enshrined in the pages of the New Testament.
But, like JB Philips, not in translation but in reading the source material, the New Testament, I had to abandon my own ‘snobbish disdain’. I could, no longer maintain any sense of chronological snobbery. Either the claims of Jesus in the gospels and the apostles that followed the resurrection are true or not true. That is the issue, not whether the New Testament is historically reliable, or reporting genuine eye-witness accounts.
This agnostic has been made to think.