Miracles and matters of fact

All historians do write with an agenda, as Adam Mueller pointed out last week ("Historians cannot take Bible as true history," March 4). In fact all writers have an agenda when they write. It would be rather odd to sit down to pound out random letters on one's keyboard.

The real question is always what the agenda is, particularly in matters of proposed fact -- is it to tell truth, or to tell lies? "Agenda" is itself a neutral word, but with a (sometimes sinister) connotation of withholding or distorting the real truth. This is often the sense of "agenda" attributed to the authors of the Bible.

Last week my intention was not to present a full defense for the Bible as a true depiction of history. All I intended was to think through a particular objection -- that the New Testament (NT) was really just cobbled together in the Middle Ages by some European power cabal. Adam Mueller was right to respond that I had not gone far enough. Even if I did show that one book of the NT, the Gospel of John, was written at least a decade before 100 A.D., I have not shown a few crucial things: Did John, the friend of Jesus, write it? Did he intend to tell the truth? Did he succeed?

As for the first, the book itself claims to be written by an eyewitness, a disciple of Jesus, and while never giving his name, uses the (modest) "pseudonym", "the beloved disciple."

The context in which the name is used in the events depicted, compared to the other Gospels, suggests the "beloved disciple" was indeed John, son of Zebedee. But we don't have to have the Bible tell us that.

One of the first Christian pastors, Irenaeus of Lyons, France, around 180 A.D. writes simply, "John, the disciple of the Lord, who also had leaned upon his breast, had himself published a Gospel during his residence in Ephesus in Asia." Dozens of these early pastors, from the first hundred or so years after Jesus, are some of our best witnesses that the NT we have now is authentic. If you put all their quotations of the NT together, you would get a copy missing only a handful of verses.

Was Jesus the Messiah? Was he the Son of God? How would we know unless we had evidence? John is simply saying, "yes, and here's the evidence," as any witness would try to report what he had seen. How do you someone was or wasn't in the Air National Guard, for instance, unless someone produces evidence for you to believe?

Some would say that John is not trying to tell the truth, but only a story, like a fable or a fairy tale. While it is true that someone who tells a fable is not a liar, someone who tells a fable as if it were really true fact would be a liar.

But John writes these stories as if they were real events. And so does Luke, and Matthew, and Mark in their Gospels. If they were liars then they were very good ones, for thousands of people believed them. But they were also very foolish liars, for their lies only got them hunted down and killed. While we can imagine someone dying for something they believe to be true, who would ever die for something they knew to be false?

It is easier to believe that these men wanted to write the truth with no distortions or cover-ups, especially when they themselves come across in their own works as cowardly, bumbling, and arrogant. They faithfully record their embarrassing squabbles, slow-wits, and abandonment of Jesus at the very end.

Some cannot believe that the Gospel writers intended to tell the truth because the Gospels contain miracles. Miracles, they say, cannot be true, so the Gospels must be a story or a lie. But this is odd reasoning. Imagine a president who, upon receiving a report on climate change, dismissed it on the spot. Imagine if his reason for dismissing it was that it had evidence of global warming in it, and he didn't believe that global warming existed. Wouldn't that be rather foolish?

Mr. President, we would say, you cannot dismiss evidence because it doesn't match your conclusion, you have to make your conclusion based on the evidence. And the same is true here, isn't it? The Gospels claim to be historical documents. We cannot dismiss them as such because they contain historical events that we, sight unseen, don't believe can exist.

Did John succeed in telling the truth? Historians don't have to say, "we don't know". The events John records are easily corroborated by Luke (c. 70 A.D.), whose work is so packed with historical references (Tiberius, Qurinius, Pontius Pilate, etc) it is a one of those most reliable ancient documents around.

Many of us have no doubt taken a political science class and read Thucydides' History, written c. 400 B.C.. We have no problem treating it as reliable history, even though our earliest actual manuscript is from 900 A.D. -- a gap of 1,300 years. The earliest actual copy of Luke we have is c. 200 AD, a gap of barely over a hundred years. We can take it as reliable history before making any judgment on the truth of the theological claims within it.

We don't need to "just unconditionally trust" here, especially if we are Christians. Faith does not mean believing in something you know is false. Hinduism doesn't need a founder. Buddhism doesn't need the Buddha. But without a historical Christ there is no Christianity. "Christianity" means "God entered human history as a man, lived among us, died and rose again". If it happened in history, then there can be good evidence for it, just like any other event. And there is good evidence for it. Those who seek it will find it. You don't need to check your brain at the door.