The Validity Of The Gospels
To purchase the entire Summit Lecture Series, Vol. 2 on DVD, visit summit.org.
Now that tells us something else, though. First chapter of Luke, Luke tells us, “I’m not an eyewitness of this stuff, guys. I’m the detective talking to eyewitnesses. I was there in the Book of Acts, but I wasn’t there for the Gospels.” He tells us that. But I’ve undertaken a drop in account of the things that have been fulfilled amongst us. He’s talking to Theophilus again, since I, myself carefully investigated everything from the beginning, talking to those who are eyewitnesses, I’m going to write for you Theophilus an orderly account.
Why does he call it orderly? You know why he calls it orderly folks because there’s another gospel already out there, that Luke knows about. That’s not orderly. It’s called the gospel of Mark, Capias in the first century describes the gospel of Mark as accurate, but not orderly. Capias says that Mark is listening to Peter’s teaching in Rome, writing down all of Peter’s teaching, but Peter’s teaching in themes.
Not necessarily teaching in like chronology. So Mark’s gospel, according to Capias is accurate, but not orderly. Here comes Luke. I’m going to make, I talked to all these people, including Mark, but now I’m going to give for you Theophilus an orderly account. And who do you think he quotes word for word more than anyone else. He quotes Mark, the disorderly account, which is why I think he’s calling his account orderly. But that means that Mark’s account has to preexist his. And that’s where I get this date. Now look how close we are to the events.
Were within 12 to 15 years of the events now, all your eye witnesses are still alive, including those who could say no, I was there and Jesus was none of that stuff. If you’re riding in the lifetime of those people, you have to be accurate. This is why Paul says in the first Corinthians, there are 500 people who saw Jesus alive at the same time, who are still available.
Only if you have died, you can ask them yourselves. Well, that’s a pretty gutsy thing to say, if it’s not true, or it’s just, hey check it out for yourself, which you could do. If it’s written in this early, by the way, why wouldn’t they write it immediately? Why wouldn’t they write it in the first 10 minutes? I think if you read through scripture, you’re going to see that the disciples, they sound like they believe Jesus is going to come back in their lifetime.
Read the letters of Peter, of Paul, of James, of John. It sounds to me like they believe that Jesus is going to back immediately. And when is the first martyrdom, James the brother of John in 44. When does the first of gospel appear? I think once you know, you’re not getting out alive, you start writing stuff down, right?
I was pretty convinced that they were written early. Now this whole section here on verification, there’s a lot to this section. We can’t cover it today. Tonight. You’re going to have a lecture with Dr. House. Who’s going to talk about archeology. A lot of what I talk about here is archeology. Believe me, my Mormon family cannot substantiate their claims on the basis of archeology. There’s not a single piece of archeology supporting their claims, but we have lots.
We also have the testimony of non-Christians in the first century, which is pretty compelling. There’s a lot more we can talk about in this section. I will send it to you. I’ll send you the video for this talk in an hour and 40 minutes. So you get a lot more, I’ll send that to you in the link, but I want to move to this area. Cause I really had doubts in this area.
Has it been accurate and honest over time? That’s the question I have for the gospels, because an important question for anyone. This is the guy we had on Dateline in March. This was a case from 1981, killed his wife, got rid of her body, said she ran off, left her two kids, eight and a six year old. Yeah. Right? And she ran off. Her family believed it. His problem, by the way, we even believed it for the first six years. We did not work it as a murder. We worked it as a missing. We had no examination of any crime scene. He moved before we even started working as a murder, not a single piece of physical evidence, nothing, no crime scene.
We convicted him in four hours of deliberation. Why? Because he changed his story over time and he couldn’t keep his story straight because it was all a lie to begin with. If you’re changing your story over time is a good chance it’s a lie. So the question I have for you is the same kind of thing happening here. You’ve got four Gospels, do they agree? Think about it. Do your gospels agree on anything? How many women run to the tomb to see if Jesus is alive?
How many? Two, three depends on the gospel. How many angels are waiting at the tomb when they get there? Two, one depends on the gospel. There’s a sign over Jesus’s cross. It’s a simple sign. It’s only got a few words, four gospel authors. They all describe the sign. Do any of those authors describe it in the same way? No, four different descriptions, really!
And you want to trust that as eyewitness accounts? Absolutely, because that’s the way every eyewitness account looks. I’m here to tell you that eyewitnesses never agree. They never agree on anything, on the simplest of details. I used to have this exercise I would do in a class like this, where someone come in, smack me run out of the room. And I would say, okay, I want you to describe the suspect and exactly what happened, but you can’t look at each other’s work.
I give you all an index card, collect the index cards. And I would read to you the descriptions of the suspect you all just saw. And none of you will agree. Is it a guy you can’t even agree on the sex sometimes. So, that kind of stuff is not unusual. You got to learn how to sort through this kind of stuff to get to the truth.
I had a case one time where murder occurred on a rainy night, I was about an hour away. I drive into work. And sure enough, when I got there the first officers who were there, took three or four witnesses who had seen this whole thing. And so they wouldn’t get wet. They put them inside a police car where they sat for an hour talking to each other unmonitored. And I want you to think about that for a second.
Is that a good thing? Why is that a bad thing? Because now they’re getting their stories together. I don’t want their stories to come together. I want to get them out. I want to have all the messiness, I expect to see all the apparently contradictory because in the end it won’t be contradictory. It might seem contradictory on its face. But when I sort out why they’re saying what they’re saying, the whole puzzle’s going to come together. So never ever be disturbed by slight variations.
If I told you that, Hey, what’d you do on Friday? I had a great conversation at lunch with this guy. And then I told somebody else, what’d you do on Friday? I said, well, I was I’d teach at summit, which is it, you had a great conversation with this guy you taught at summit. Well, let me tell you the whole story and you’ll see how those two things fit together.
If I identify one angel that I’m having a conversation with, it does not mean there’s not another angel, right? I mean, but no one’s there to ask like a good detective because back up for a second because the other guy’s saying there’s two, but how many were there? There’s nobody to do that in the gospels.
So never ever get all twisted apart by the fact you might see some variations and eyewitness accounts. That is always the case, and that’s a good thing because if they weren’t you’d know they’re lying. Do you think that skeptics would be more comfortable with the gospels? If we had four gospels that were word for word identical. No, they would say that’s got to be a lie. They all got together and made the story up. But then we show the natural variation you expect to see between eyewitnesses and now they want to say it’s not credible.
You can’t have it both ways, but here’s a bigger problem. How do you know whatever was said originally was not changed over time. How do you know whatever gospel we happen to have here? Didn’t get corrupted over all those years. Same thing happens in crime scenes. You get a crime scene. You go to the court. How do I know that this piece of evidence, for example, this casing is exactly in the same condition, years later when I bring it into court.
How do I know that it hasn’t been altered in some way, maybe the very striking mark or the extractor pin mark something I’m going to use to identify it to a gun. Maybe that wasn’t even part of the original evidence. Maybe a detective came along years later wanting to convict this innocent guy. He cleverly puts on the casing. The mark, he knows will later convict him.
Then the guy who follows him, he doesn’t know any better. They work it like it’s legitimate evidence and they give it to the third guy. He brings it in the court 30 years later, and now I’ve got a piece of evidence in my trial, which is not the same piece of evidence I had to begin with. It’s been dramatically altered. That’s a problem. Don’t you think? And that’s the accusation I face a lot of time from defense attorneys. How do I know this evidence? You didn’t mess with it. You didn’t create that. You put those words in her mouth.
I get that all the time about to get it again in about 48 hours when I go on the stand on Monday. But the point is, how do we deal with it? Something similar could have happened to scripture. How do we know that this gospel of John, let’s say is the same gospel that later ends up in our Bible? How do we know there’s not somebody along the way, maybe hundreds of people who either accidentally or intentionally make small changes, hundreds of times until now we have a lie in our Bible. Well, I know how and by the way, anybody who followed this guy wouldn’t know these people who were here wouldn’t know it was changed years earlier. How would they know?
That’s the problem! Let me show you how we solve it. In criminal cases, we have a guy we say, Hey, was there anybody at the crime scene back in 1979 who saw this piece of evidence and described it in a report or took a photograph?
Yeah. Okay. What does he say about it? And then when he gave it to the next guy, did that guy say anything about the evidence? What did he say about it? And then the next guy who got it, the criminalist who did all the in forensic investigations, they took good pictures. They give, we should have reports of all these steps.
This is called the chain of custody, by the way. And the chain of custody will guarantee us, that this thing here hasn’t changed over the years because we have lots of pictures or descriptions of it to show that it wasn’t modified. But do we have a similar chain of custody for the new Testament? Yeah, you do. Let me show it to you. Here’s our crime scene. Here’s our courtroom.
Here’s the first officer on the crime scene. He’s the Apostle John, he’s going to take a Polaroid or he is going to run a report. His report’s called the gospel of John. How do I know what it says? Well, who are the second officers? That he gave that to, he gave that to somebody and when he gave it to somebody, they described it. He had three students. It turns out Capias, Polycarp and Ignatius. These three students, lucky for us, became leaders in the church.
And they wrote their own letters to the local church describing what had been taught to them by John and by all the other early disciples. So we can look at Ignatius as seven letters that still survive. They’re not in your Bible, but they are early Christian documents in which he’s describing what was taught to him by John, Capias, unfortunately we’ve lost his works, but we still have one letter from Polycarp written to the Philippi church, the Philippian church in Philippe.
Sure enough, we can check them and see that they’re going to quote or allude to the gospels and the letters of Paul. We’re going to be able to see what these guys were reading, by reading their writings.
And they’ve got a student named Aronia who became a huge leader in apologist in the church and wrote a ton of stuff, including a list of the 24 books that he was using as scripture with his students. So if anyone tells you that the gospels became part of the can of scripture in the third or fourth century, so you can’t trust it. That’s crap. It just is.
The truth is that these gospels were already being used early in history and quoted early in history in either even early historical lists of these books. The can of scripture was not created at church council folks. It was acknowledged at a church council, but it was being used for hundreds of years prior. So don’t let anyone tell you, these are late creations, is not true.
Follow Christian Podcast Central on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter to see our ongoing discussion with Dr. Jeff Myers regarding worldviews.
(This podcast is by Summit Ministries. Discovered by Christian Podcast Central and our community — copyright is owned by the publisher, not Christian Podcast Central.)
