Ken Marrocco – 8/9/1999
Most people believe that he or she must stop thinking and asking questions to become a Christian. They believe that you just have to make a leap of faith – a blind leap. Christianity has answers that are not only satisfying for the soul but also satisfying for the mind. Throughout the ages many skeptics have looked at Christianity’s historicity and have ended up coming to faith in Christ. The evidence is there. It just needs to be looked at with an open mind.
Consider the case of Gen. Lew Wallace, the author of Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ. We know General Wallace best for this pro-Christian book, which became the basis for the 1959 film that still holds the record for the most Oscars (eleven) in film history. But did you know that earlier in his life Wallace was a skeptic? Not only was he a skeptic, but he also set out to disprove the Christian faith. After several years of intense research, he became a Christian. It would have been intellectually dishonest for him to do otherwise. He summed it up this way: “After six years given to the impartial investigation of Christianity, as to its truth or falsity, I have come to the deliberate conclusion that Jesus Christ was the Messiah of the Jews, the Saviour of the world, and my personal Saviour.”
One of the best known apologists (defenders) of the
Christian faith today is Josh McDowell, author of the immensely helpful Evidence
That Demands a Verdict. But did you know that, as a college student,
he was very skeptical about Christianity’s historicity? In fact, he spent some time on study leave at
the
Simon Greenleaf is considered by many to be the greatest expert on evidence the world has ever known. Greenleaf, the Royal Professor of Law at Harvard during the latter half of the nineteenth century, has been praised universally for his knowledge. The London Times said that more light on jurisprudence had come from Greenleaf than from all the jurists of Europe. combined. The chief justice of the Supreme Court said that Greenleaf’s testimony is the most basic and compelling that can be accepted in any English-speaking court in the world. In other words, when it comes to the question of what constitutes evidence, Greenleaf’s credentials are impeccable. His one inviolable principle in his classrooms at Harvard was this: Never make up your mind about any significant matter without first considering the evidence. Greenleaf was not a Christian. He was a Jew and did not believe in Christianity, in Christ, or the resurrection.
One day, the subject of religion came up. This was not surprising to Greenleaf because he knew that law was based on ethics, and that ethics and morals are rooted in religion. A discussion of religion in a law classroom was a natural as dissecting a frog in biology. When the subject of Christ’s resurrection came up, Greenleaf said he didn’t believe in it. One bold student raised his hand and said, “Yes, Professor, but have you considered the evidence?” Greenleaf was honest enough to admit to himself that he had not. He decided to undertake such an investigation. He examined every thread of evidence he could find on Jesus Christ and, in particular, His proclaimed resurrection. Finally Greenleaf wrote a book on his findings entitled The Testimony of the Evangelists, in which he considered the evidence presented by the writers of the four Gospels – Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. His conclusion: If the evidence for Christ’s resurrection were presented to any unbiased jury in the world, they would have to conclude that Jesus of Nazareth rose from the dead. Through the examination of such evidence, Greenleaf became a Christian. Greenleaf concludes that Christianity is, in fact, the only evidential, historical religion in the world and that the Christian faith rests on evidence – evidence he found so compelling and so overwhelming that any honest person examine it with an open mind would, like himself, be inescapably drawn to accept it.
Doubters and skeptics are welcome but not those who merely want to play mind games or to engage in a power trip. When Jesus stood before Herod who demanded Jesus do miracles, He did nothing. Because we can’t judge the heart, we don’t know whether a skeptic is interested in honest dialogue or just mind games. This is why we must remember what Paul said: “A servant of the Lord must not quarrel but be gentle to all, able to teach, patient, in humility correcting those who are in opposition, if God perhaps will grant them repentance, so that they may know truth, and that they may come to their senses and escape the snare of the devil, having been taken captive by him to do his will” (2 Timothy 2:24-26). That’s our mandate: to present the truth in love so those who will may come to repentance and faith in Christ.
The Bible, the best selling book of all history is also the least understood and most criticized. No other book is asked to withstand such a heavy weight of proof as the Bible. As believers, we begin and end our understanding of the Christian faith with the Bible. In living, explaining, or defending our faith, we are most likely to say, “The Word of God says…”. As believers, that settles the matter, no matter what the matter may be. What happens, for example, when we are talking to someone who dismisses the Bible? How may times have you been explaining Christianity to someone, explaining God and reality from the Scriptures, when someone says, “Oh, the Bible…I don’t believe in the Bible.” That comment, which is usually brought up at the beginning of the conversation, is meant to put an end to the conversation. What would you do or say at this point?
First of all, is it necessary for a person to believe the Bible to be converted? The apostle Paul went all over the Mediterranean basin – from Jerusalem to Spain, Greece, Turkey, and Italy – preaching the gospel to people who didn’t believe the Bible. The Greek word for gospel is the same root word for our dynamite. When someone speaks or reads the gospel, even in bits and pieces, it has tremendous power to break down barriers, penetrate hearts and minds, and transform lives. In the case of many of the people Paul witnessed to, they came to believe fully in the Bible only after they were converted.
Consider this analogy. You are sleeping one night and you hear a noise. You reach over to turn on your lamp and see a man with a mask climbing in your window. He has a knife. What do you do? You pull out your drawer, take out your gun and say, “Stop right where you are!” and he stops. He looks down at what you have in your hand and he says, “Oh, a gun. I don’t believe in guns,” and he starts forward again. I guess at this point there is nothing you can do because he doesn’t believe in guns. You are helpless. Right? Wrong! Squeeze the trigger and he will instantly believe in guns. The point of the analogy is that the Scriptures have incredible power, whether a person believes that or not. In some ways our terminology of defending the faith is wrong. It’s like saying we need to defend an uncaged lion. The lion, in almost any case you think of, will do quite nicely by itself.
The best way to deal with a person that is trying to shut the door on you or showing any kind of aggression, is to throw them off balance. When a person says that he or she doesn’t believe in the Bible, try saying to them, “I believe you have a right not to believe in the Bible. In fact, I would fight for that right.” Now suddenly they are off balance. That is the last thing they expected you to say. Now you have their attention and you follow that up with, “If you don’t believe that Bible, that means you understand it. What do you think the Bible’s main point is?” Usually the answer comes back like this: “Oh, you know, you do the best you can and try to live by the Golden Rule and follow the Ten Commandments and that sort of thing, and…. Maybe you’ll get to heaven.”
You have now just opened a door for further discussion. “Ah,” you say to them, “that is exactly what I was afraid of. You have rejected the Bible, which is the most important book in history in that it has been translated into more languages, published in more editions, printed in more copies, and read by more people than any other book in history. You not only have rejected it, but you also have done so without understanding its main message. Now don’t you think the more intelligent thing to do would be to let me share with you the Bible’s main message – how a person can have eternal life – and then you can make an educated decision about accepting it or rejecting it?” Now the one-time aggressor must decide if he or she wants to remain in ignorance. Their pride may not allow them to that.
Many skeptics believe the Bible cannot be trusted because the original manuscripts – those documents actually written by Matthew, Isaiah, Paul, etc. – do not exist. What we have, these skeptics go on to conclude, are just a few copies of a few copies. Therefore, we have no way of knowing what the original Greek or Hebrew texts actually said. There is a little truth in that statement. The originals penned by the authors crumbled centuries ago. We must understand however that the same is true for other ancient writings such as those by Plato, Aristotle, and Caesar. We have only copies of all the great, ancient writings. The Bible is no exception.
Therefore in judging the accuracy of ancient documents – how close they come to the original autograph – what we need to know is how many copies we have and how close they are to one another. Obviously, if you had two manuscripts and one of them said that Jesus went into a city and the other one said Jesus went out of the city, you would not know whether He went in or out, so that becomes in important issue. With most of the ancient writings relatively few copies are available. For one ancient Roman writer, Cattalos, we have only three copies. With the great historian Herodotus, we have only eight copies of writings. The same can be said of most of the other great ancient writings. We have one, two, three, five, or ten copies.
Another important factor to consider when judging the accuracy of ancient manuscript copies is the time span between the copies and the original. Here are the time spans for some of our greatest ancient writings:
Caesar and his Gaelic Wars: The earliest manuscript is 1,000 years after Caesar lived.
Demoshenes, the great orator of Greece: The earliest manuscript is 1,200 years after he wrote.
Plato, the great philosopher: 1,300 years.
Herodotus: also 1,300 years.
The Greek dramatists: 1,400 years.
Cattalos, the Roman writer: 1,600 years.
Homer and his classic The Odyssey: 2,200 years later. Millions of copies of this book have been printed. People make it into plays, motion pictures, and television programs.
By these standards of antiquity the Bible is an amazingly credible document. We do not have two, three, or five copies, but 5,750 Greek manuscripts of the New Testament. In various other translations we have up to 25,000 more copies. Quotations from the New Testament are found in the writings of virtually every one of the early church fathers – those writers living during the first four centuries after Christ. We also have the earliest fragment of a manuscript, the John Rylands papyri manuscript, which is a small portion of the Gospel of John, and it is dated at A.D. 117-138. John wrote this Gospel sometime in the 90s; so you have a portion of the Gospel of John as few as 30 or 35 years after it was written.
The time separation between the writing of the New Testament and the first complete manuscript copies is only about three hundred years at the most. The gap between when the Old Testament was written and our earliest known manuscripts is much larger than that of the New Testament. With the discoveries of the Dead Sea Scrolls in 1948, however, a complete copy of the Book of Isaiah from the first century was unearthed. When comparing this manuscript with later copies of Isaiah, it was found that it read verbatim with only the slightest variation (and nothing that changed the meaning of the text).
We have numerous papyri manuscripts from the second and third century, some larger manuscripts from the fourth century, and so on. No other ancient writing of any kind anywhere rests on as solid a foundation as does the Bible. In fact, if we were to throw out the Bible as being textually uncertain, we would have to do away with all ancient history. We would have to say we know absolutely nothing about anything that happened in this world before A.D. 1000.
Another objection to the Bible’s credibility is the matter of translations. The criticism usually goes something like this: “Well, you really don’t even know what the Bible originally said because the New Testament was written in Greek and then it was translated into Aramaic, and from that to Syriac, and from that to Latin, and from there to German, then to French, then to Anglo-Saxon, and now into English. So you really don’t have a clue to what it originally said.” Dr. Kennedy sums up this argument as follows: “I am so ignorant of the facts, I really shouldn’t be opening my mouth.” The issue of the number of translations is not an issue. The New Testament was originally written in Greek and we have more than five thousand Greek manuscript copies and we have several million people in the world today who can read Greek. We do not have to rely on translations at all; we can read the New Testament in the language in which it was originally written. The same is true for the Old Testament.
This section highlights the research and findings of two different scientists, neither of whom is a professing Christian. Both of these scientists have come to the conclusion based on the laws of probability that evolution cannot account for even the simplest of living organisms.
The first scientist, Dr. Francis Crick, along with Dr. James Watson, is credited with the discovery of DNA, that double helix building block of life that forms like two twisted circular stairways in each of the several trillion cells of a person’s body. The DNA contains all of the information for the various parts of our bodies, as well as for every cell. This is the most complex molecule that has ever been discovered. Though it is tiny, it exists inside the nucleus of each microscopic cell. If you could stretch it out, it would be about six and one-half feet long. All of the DNA in just one human body, linked together and stretched out, would reach to the moon and back. That makes it a phenomenally complex substance. Crick, who won the Noble Prize for his discovery of DNA, decided to ascertain the probabilities of such a complex molecule’s coming into existence by the law of chance, which governs evolutionary theory. We need to keep in mind that Charles Darwin, who gave birth to the idea of evolution one hundred years ago, was operating under the assumption that the simple cell really was simple.
His first question to investigate was: What are the probabilities of a single molecule of DNA coming into existence by chance? His conclusion: 0.0 percent chance, even considering the supposed four-and-a-half-billion-year history of the Earth. Crick wrote, “An honest man, armed with all the knowledge available to us now, could only state that in some sense, the origin of life appears at the moment to be almost a miracle.” Despite more than seventy-five years of teaching that life came into being through evolution, Crick said that it could never have happened. The idea that various amino acids in the ocean got together in primordial slime and somehow formed a single cell was preposterous. Even after Dr. Crick disproved the theory of evolution, he still could not admit to the existence of God. Therefore, he developed an alternative theory to evolution called “Directed Panspermia.” Pan means “all” and spermia means “sperm”. Crick’s theory states that some sperm of an advanced living race somewhere in the galaxy seeded the human race on earth. This is a currently popular theory which is being taught in many colleges today. There is an immediate flaw to this theory called the law of infinite regression. The obvious question that any person would ask would be: Where did this advanced race that seeded life on earth come from? The answer from Crick would be some other more advanced race in some other part of the galaxy. That race, in turn, was seeded by an even more advanced race, and so on and so on. This goes on and on and never answers the question of where did the original seeders come from? Dr. Crick would rather believe in a theory with at least one noticeable flaw than to believe in God.
The second scientist is Sir Fred Hoyle who is a professor at Cambridge and one of the leading astronomers and scientists of our time. He set out to test the law of probability of just one cell – not just one strand of DNA – coming into existence by chance. To be fair he even started his calculation with the supposed age of the universe to be 15 to 20 billion years rather than the supposed age of the Earth at 4.5 billion years. Hoyle worked with another world-famous mathematician and astrophysicist, Chandra Wickramasinghe, to calculate the probabilities. These two great mathematical minds came up with this number of years for just one simple cell to come into existence by chance: 1040,000 (10 to the 40,000th power) years. To give you a better idea of what this means, one noted Swiss mathematician, Lecomte duNouy, said that any number in which the probabilities were greater than 1050 would simply never happen. He came to that particular figure to compare to because if you count all the electrons in this universe, the thing we have the most of, the number of electrons would come to 1052. That would be counting every electron in every planet, in every sun, in every galaxy. So duNouy assumed that, once something hit 1050, it simply was not going to happen. Wickramasinghe states, “Living systems could not have been generated by random processes, within a finite time-scale, in a finite universe.” Hoyle and Wickramasinghe rejected evolution as the source of life. Instead they said that for any kind of life to exist anywhere in the universe, it must be there by the hand of an eternally existent being of infinite power, which, if you desire to, you may call God. Hoyle, once an atheist, became a believer of God.
You probably have heard someone say, “Well, after all, we don’t know anything about Jesus except what we get in the Bible, and that’s obviously unreliable.” He or she may go on to claim that little or no evidence for Jesus comes from outside the Bible. That simply is not true. There are at least nineteen early pagan writers who refer to Jesus Christ as an actual, real-life, historical figure: Tacitus, a great historian of Rome; Suetonius, also a historian; Pliny the Younger, one of the leaders of the Roman Empire; Epictetus; Lucian; Aristides; Galenus; Lampridius; Dio Cassius; Emeritus; Annianus; Marcellinus; Eunapius; and Zosimus. Some wrote entire works about Jesus, such as Lucian, Celsus (the first great antagonist, who wrote a whole book attacking Christianity), Porphyry, Hieracles, and Julian the Apostate.
Tacitus was the most famous of the Roman historians. Born in A.D. 55 – in the middle of the New Testament period – he gives a thorough account of Christianity, which includes these facts:
Christ, the founder of the Christian sect, was put to death as a malefactor by Pontius Pilate.
Christianity began in Judea and spread in spite of Christ’s ignominious death.
Christianity encountered hatred and contempt throughout the Roman Empire, and vast multitudes of Christians were cruelly put to death in Rome ant the hands of Nero as late as A.D. 64.
The Jerusalem temple was destroyed, and the Jewish people were subjugated, which was a fulfillment of Christ’s prophecy.
Pliny the Younger, a contemporary of Tacitus, wrote a letter to the emperor, Trajan, in A.D. 112. In his letter, Pliny expressed near panic. The spread of Christianity in Asia Minor, he reported, was happening at an astonishingly rapid rate among all ranks of society. He made mention of both the moral purity and the cruel persecution of these Christians. He also observed several of their beliefs, including their worship on the first day of the week and their adoration of Jesus Christ as God.
Celsus, the first great anti-Christian writer, penned the second-century book A True Discourse, dismissing Christianity. A Greek philosopher, Celsus ruthlessly ridiculed the Christian faith. Using his considerable gifts of learning, philosophy, common sense, wit, and sarcasm, he sought to disprove Christianity. Even with this goal in mind, Celsus wrote the following about the Christian belief in Jesus Christ:
He was born of a virgin in a small village of Judea;
He was adored by wise men;
His birth was followed by the slaughter of infants by order of Herod;
He took flight to Egypt, where Celsus supposes Christ learned the charms of the magicians;
After returning, He resided in Nazareth;
He was baptized and the Holy Spirit descended on Him as a voice was heard from heaven;
He elected disciples;
He was a friend with publicans and other low people;
He cured the lame and blind;
He raised people from the dead;
He was betrayed by Judas;
He was denied by Peter.
In addition, Celsus refers to several details of Christ’s passion, crucifixion, and resurrection. Although he perverts and bends these historical realities, he does regard them all as history. If Celsus were trying to disparage the Christian faith, wouldn’t it have been easy for him to write, “Ha, the whole thing is a myth. Jesus never lived.” Celsus, anti-Christian as he was, knew he couldn’t be intellectually credible and get away with such a statement. Although he rejected the Christian faith, he regarded Jesus Christ as a historical person.
Flavius Josephus was the most highly reputed Jewish historian. Born in A.D. 37, shortly after Christ’s death, he wrote about the Jews’ history and wars. In The Antiquities of the Jews, book 18, chapter 3, section 3, he writes: “About this time lived Jesus, a wise man, if it be proper to call him a man, for he was a doer of wonderful works, a teacher of such men as received the truth with pleasure. He drew over to him both many of Jews and many of the Greeks. He was the Christ. And when Pilate, at the instigation of the principled men among us, had condemned him to the cross, those who had loved him at first, did not forsake him, for he appeared to them alive again on the third day, the divine prophets having foretold these and many other wonderful things concerning him. The sect of Christians so named after him are not extinct to this day.”
The evidence is all on Christianity’s side. Let’s take a tally: twenty-seven books of the New Testament, nineteen pagan writers, and three Jewish writers testify to Jesus Christ’s historical reality. There were, as the Bible proclaims, eyewitnesses to His majesty and in short, no scholar worthy of the name doubts whether Jesus of Nazareth did indeed exist.
Jesus’ claims to deity are overwhelming. Therefore, we must decide if He was crazy, or a deceiver, or telling the truth. Was He a lunatic? A Liar? Or, as He claimed, Lord? C.S. Lewis, the great scholar and Christian writer, put it so well: “A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic – on a level with the man who says he is a poached egg – or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God: or else a madman or something worse. You can shut Him up for a fool, you can spit at Him and kill Him as a demon; or you can fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God. But let us not come up with any patronizing nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.”