The Jesus Story - Is it really true?

The Jesus Story - Is it really true?

If we want to investigate Jesus's life, to discern whether Jesus really did live and die and rise again, to know if the Easter story contains even "a grain of history" or perhaps even the key to history, we need to go to the Gospels, the historical documents that tell Jesus's story.

These Gospels are named after their authors: Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.

....Two hundred years ago, some scholars began to propose that the Gospels were oral traditions and embellished with many legendary elements over the generations, and were not written down until more than one hundred years after the events of Jesus's life.

These claims have convinced many people over the years that we cannot know who Jesus really was.

There is now a countermovement going on, however.

One hundred fifty years ago it was confidently asserted that no Gospel existed before the third decade of the second century A.D.

But over the past century the evidence has become overwhelming that the Gospels were written much earlier, within the lifetime of many of the eyewitnesses to Jesus's life and death.

This has led to "faith reversals," as in the well-publicized cases of Anne Rice and A. N. Wilson.

Richard Bauckham's Jesus and the Eyewitnesses
makes, I think, the most conclusive argument that the Gospels are not long-evolving oral traditions, but rather oral histories, written down from the accounts of the eyewitnesses themselves who were still alive and active in the community.

Bauckham cites extensive evidence that for decades after Jesus's death and resurrection the people who were healed by Jesus, like the paralytic who was lowered through the roof; the person who carried the cross for Jesus, Simon of Cyrene; the women who watched Jesus being placed in the tomb, like Mary Magdalene; and the disciples who had followed Jesus for three years, like Peter and John -- all of the participants in the life of Jesus continually and publicly repeated these incidents in great detail.

Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John wrote down these accounts and so we have the Gospels.

Bauckham also observes that the Gospels are too counterproductive in their content to be legends.

For example, it is astonishing that in the very foundational documents of the Christian church we would have a record that one of the greatest leaders of the church, Peter, was an enormous failure who even cursed Jesus in public.

The only reliable source for the account of Peter's denial and betrayal of Jesus would be Peter himself.

No one else could have known the details we are given.

And no one in the early church would have dared to highlight the weaknesses of its most revered and significant leader with such candor -- unless that very weakness was an important part of the story.

And unless, of course, the accounts were true.

--From King's Cross, by Timothy Keller, in Before.