Is It Reasonable to Trust the Gospel Narratives?

Faith

Aug 15

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The existence of God was never a grave issue for me. It was taken for granted in our house but he was an unknown God. I knew neither his Word nor his saving ways. I knew him from general, natural revelation. I knew, in my conscience, the natural law. I knew that murder and stealing were wrong. No one had to tell me these things. I knew that I was going to give an account to God but, like most pagans, I hoped that my good deeds, as I thought of them, would outweigh the bad I had done. As I came to faith, as I came to begin to see the greatness of my sin and misery, how I had been redeemed from all my sins and misery, and how I ought to be thankful to God for such redemption (Heidelberg Catechism 2), I came to see not only that I had not reasoned my way to faith (the blindness of sin prevents that) but also that there are reasons for faith.

The textual history of the Scriptures is quite impressive as compared to other ancient texts.

Before my conversion, one of the principal objections, prejudices really, that I assumed against the Christian faith was the reliability of the Scriptures. Like everyone else who assumed the Modern, Enlightenment-fueled narrative, I assumed that pre-modern texts were unenlightened and unreliable. It seemed to me that the entire faith hinged on the gospels and the resurrection. Paul himself said so:

Now if Christ is proclaimed as raised from the dead, how can some of you say that there is no resurrection of the dead? But if there is no resurrection of the dead, then not even Christ has been raised. And if Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is in vain and your faith is in vain. We are even found to be misrepresenting God, because we testified about God that he raised Christ, whom he did not raise if it is true that the dead are not raised. For if the dead are not raised, not even Christ has been raised. And if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins. Then those also who have fallen asleep in Christ have perished. If in Christ we have hope in this life only, we are of all people most to be pitied. (1 Cor. 15:12-19)

Either Christ has been raised or he has not. Either the gospel narratives are true or they are not. Is it reasonable to trust the gospel narratives? Yes. It is true that the Scriptures are quite ancient. Years after my conversion I came to learn that the textual history of the Scriptures is quite impressive as compared to other ancient texts.

The Hebrew (and Aramaic) Scriptures were well preserved in fair copies. There are text-critical issues in the Old Testament, but they do not materially affect the reliability of the historical narratives. The modern criticism of the Old Testament rests mainly on assumptions about how the world must work, i.e., that the supernatural events recorded in the Scriptures could not have happened as recorded. Could is a funny word. Who says? That the world is such (i.e., closed), that God could not have spoken from nothing into nothing to make all that exists, is an a priori. That is essentially a religious conviction, not science. The theory that the Pentateuch (the first five books of the Old Testament) must have had multiple authors also rests on assumptions. That the prophets could not have been written when they were supposed to have been written is another a priori assumption. The traditional Christian explanation for these matters accounts for the particulars more satisfactorily than the critical account, which seems to be more anxious to satisfy the skepticism of Moderns than it does about finding the truth.

Either the gospel narratives are true or they are not.

The question of the Christian faith turns on the gospels. We have four canonical gospels. Until the Modern period, the testimony of the early church had lead the church to think that the gospels were quite early. The Modern consensus has tended, however, to start with Mark and to orbit the gospels, as it were, chronologically, around AD 70. The traditional account, however, leads us to think that Matthew was rather earlier than AD 70 and that Mark was written under Claudius in the early 40s.

We know from the work of Ned Stonehouse and others that each of the gospel writers has a theological agenda and that John is the most overtly theological and least concerned about historical chronology. The synoptics (Matthew, Mark, Luke) may have had a common source (the so-called Q) or perhaps not. Luke presents himself as being particularly concerned about historical accuracy and so I have always found him to be. His Greek is elegant, even elevated (as compared to John’s). Luke was a scholar. Whenever his work has been criticized as inaccurate Luke has always been vindicated. I believe all the gospels, but Luke was a skilled historical-theologian. He gets the details right.

The difference of quality between the Gnostic gospels and the canonical gospels is plain to any sensible person.

Consider the neo-Gnostic argument that the Scriptures. It is alleged that the canonical gospels were arbitrarily selected out of a huge number of competing gospels. This simply is not true, and Charles Hill has documented that it is not true. See the resources below. The earliest evidence we have is that the Gnostic imitations of the canonical gospels, acts, epistles, and apocalypse are later and derivative. The earliest witnesses tell us that the canonical gospels are the earliest and most accurate witnesses to the life of Christ. The difference of quality between the Gnostic gospels and the canonical gospels is plain to any sensible person. The Gnostic Gospel of Thomas, in which the neo-Gnostics put so much store, has Jesus going about in the second century. That is just silly and reveals that the gospel of Thomas is bogus.

The same is true of the so-called Gospel of Judas, about which the critics also made such a fuss. It too is a second-century Gnostic re-telling of the story, this time with Judas as the hero. Like most of the other Gnostic texts, it focuses on the gaps in the canonical gospels. It seeks to turn the canonical story on its head. It is obviously a late, Gnostic rebuttal to the canonical gospels. There is a reason we are not hearing much about the alleged bombshell anymore: it was a dud. This has been my experience with Scripture generally. The critics come at it, on the basis of unstated assumptions about how the world works and about what is possible and attack its reliability. Yet, Scripture always survives the attacks. This is particularly true of the gospels.

The gospels are more reliable than most other ancient texts.

Over the years the question I have asked myself is this: is it reasonable to stake so much on the gospels? As I keep translating and reading the gospels, the answer is yes. They hold up to scrutiny. They are more reliable than most other ancient texts. They have a better textual witness than comparable ancient texts. We have an amazing wealth of textual witnesses to the canonical gospels. Where other ancient texts might have only a handful of fair copies, the textual witness to the canonical gospels is very rich indeed. The textual variants affect no doctrinal teaching and raise no serious question about the reliability of the canonical gospels.

My day job requires me to read texts critically, even those texts with which I am personally sympathetic. The Gnostic gospels require me to suspend my critical faculties, to accept absurdities. That is not true with the canonical gospels. It is not as though there are no issues with the canonical gospels. The Gospel of John arranges some events differently, with a different attitude toward chronology than do the synoptics. All the gospels are theological, but John is especially theological in his orientation. Even so, each of the gospels is remarkably sober and careful in its handling of the story.

There is no comparison between the Gnostic gospels and the canonical gospels when it comes to the intrinsic qualities of the narrative. Where the Gnostic gospels are bent on making Judas or Satan into the hero, the canonical gospels do not spare the apostles from criticism. They do not speculate. When I read the Martyrdom of Polycarp, I must distinguish the fairly sober elements of the narrative from those aspects that are embellishments added in a sometimes desperate attempt to make Polycarp into a Christ-figure. The redactors did not trust their story. The canonical gospels, however, do not embellish. They trust their subject and story to carry the day and to persuade the reader.

The gospels and Paul appeal boldly to contemporary eye-witness testimony.

There are a few extra-canonical witnesses to the existence of Jesus, but the demand that we find something outside the witness of the canonical Scriptures assumes what it has to prove, that the canonical scriptures are themselves unreliable. We should be very glad to have a similar wealth of carefully written accounts of other ancient figures about whose existence there is little doubt. From the canonical gospels and from the extra-canonical logia (sayings attributed to Jesus outside of the canon) and from the testimony of the early church, we know far more Jesus than we do about other figures. We know something of his interior life, what he did, what he said, where he was, how he died (and why) and that he was raised on the third day. The gospels and Paul appeal boldly to contemporary eye-witness testimony. Were the risen Jesus a fiction or sham, that would be a risky tactic. They did so because it was true. Everything they recorded—and more—happened, and it happened so they said it did.

Read the gospels slowly and carefully for yourself. Do they strike you as fantastic, as straining credulity, as hyperbolic? The gospel writers did not ask us to believe things that they had not described with striking honesty. They did not have to shade the story or to make the disciples heroic because the story was true. The realism is deeply impressive.

We were not present at the resurrection of Jesus so we must rely on someone else’s record.

Is it reasonable to believe that Jesus of Nazareth was, that he went about teaching, healing, and sometimes even raising the dead? Is it credible to think that at the death of Jesus tombs broken open and people who were dead came forth? (Matt 27:52) and that he himself was raised from the dead? Those are extraordinary claims and easily falsified. In the hands of less credible authors, the opening of the tombs would have been front and center. It is the sort of thing that grabs attention and sells books, but Matthew was not about clicks and sales. He includes this extraordinary part of the story almost in passing. It is true that the Enlightenment movements declared that such things were not possible, but that is an a priori. The Enlightenment philosophers thought a great lot of things we know not to be true.

I was not present at the resurrection of Jesus so I must rely on someone else’s record. Of course, we do this all the time. So we look for credible accounts of the present and the past. One of the reasons I am a Christian is because the gospels read like real, careful history because they themselves are credible.

R. Scott Clark, D.Phil., is Professor of Church History and Historical Theology at Westminster Seminary California (Escondido, California), President of the Heidelberg Reformation Association, and the author of Recovering the Reformed Confession (P&R, 2008) among other titles. For more content from Dr. Clark, please visit heidelblog.net.