Perhaps some readers will be surprised that our defence of Christianity comes directly from the Bible. To some people, the Bible itself is the problem when it comes to taking seriously any of Christianity’s claims to be true. Why bother with Christianity at all when it is indebted to a book that is seriously doubted by intelligent people? Let us face the question directly together.
In our experience there are varied reasons why people think the Bible cannot and should not be believed. One reason many people give is that because the New Testament during the first fifteen centuries of its existence had to be copied out by hand, with all the possibilities of mistakes and changes that that implies, we cannot be sure, so they say, when we now read it, that we are reading what its original authors wrote.
This objection is generally made by people who are not aware how overwhelmingly strong the evidence is for the original text of the New Testament. First, there is the sheer number of the manuscripts containing part [p 7] or whole of the New Testament. There are over 5,000 of them. While, of course, there are copying mistakes in all those manuscripts—for it is virtually impossible to copy out a lengthy document by hand without making some mistakes—no two manuscripts contain exactly the same mistakes. And therefore by comparing all these manuscripts with each other it is possible to reconstruct the original text to a point where less than two per cent is uncertain, with a large part of that two per cent involving small linguistic features that make no difference to the general meaning. Moreover, since no New Testament doctrine depends solely on one verse or one passage, no New Testament doctrine is put in doubt by these minor uncertainties.
And then there is the great age of some of the New Testament manuscripts. A substantial part of the New Testament exists in a manuscript that was written about AD 200, and the earliest surviving manuscript containing the whole of the New Testament was written not much, if at all, later than AD 360. See what that implies. Take the manuscript that was written about AD 200. It is, itself, now nearly 1,800 years old. How old was the manuscript from which it was originally copied? We do not know, of course. But it could easily have been 140 years old; and if it was, it was written out when many of the authors of the New Testament were still alive.
A comparison will help—and here I (David Gooding) speak as a lifelong student of the ancient classical literatures. Some of the works of the very famous ancient Greek and Latin authors have come down to us in only a few, late (i.e. seventh to ninth century) manuscripts. [p 8] Yet no classical scholar would think of questioning their validity as reliable representations of what the original authors wrote. Compared with this, the evidence for the text of the New Testament is overwhelming. We may have every confidence then, that when today we read the New Testament, we have for all practical purposes what its original authors intended us to have.3
But, of course, the greatest difficulty by far which people have in believing the Bible is the claims it makes; particularly its claim that Jesus is the Son of God, that he is the Creator incarnate, who has visited our earth to communicate with us and to reveal God to us. Many people feel that they could not possibly believe a book that made such claims. They do not believe in the existence of a Creator anyway; and so they suppose in advance, without reading or studying the New Testament for themselves, that it cannot be describing a historical reality when it claims that Jesus was both man and God. And they fall back on the idea that the figure of Jesus Christ as described in the New Testament is the invention of the authors of the Gospels.
The character of Jesus not invented
So, for the sake of the argument, let us suppose for a moment that the authors of the Gospels, did not simply describe a Jesus who actually lived, but invented this [p 9] character, taking as their raw material, perhaps, some peasant ‘wise man’, but freely re-constructing, adding to, shaping, exaggerating so that the result was an ideal, more than human, but fictional character who as such never existed. Let us, I say, suppose that this was how it was, and then let us work out the implications of our theory.
The first thing to say about it would be, that if the character of Jesus is a literary fiction, then what we have here is a near-miracle. We know a lot about fictional literary characters and how difficult it is to create a really convincing one. World literature is full of such characters, some well-drawn, some not so well. Now there is no denying that if Jesus is a literary fiction, he is a character that has achieved worldwide fame. To be able to create such a famous fictional character, the authors of the Gospels must have been literary geniuses of the highest order. Now literary geniuses of that rank are quite rare: one does not bump into one round every corner. But here we have four all flowering at once. Who were these men? And what kind of men were they? Well, two were fishermen, one was a low-level tax official, and the other a nondescript young man. Is it credible that all four happened to be literary geniuses of world rank?
But more. Even the most brilliant, most lifelike fictional characters remain for their readers simply that: fictional characters. They do not rise up out of the page, so to speak, take on an independent existence and become for their readers a real living person, whom they can know in the way one knows a living person, and with whom they can have a personal relationship. Understandably not! And yet this is what has happened to this supposedly [p 10] fictional character, Jesus Christ. He has become for millions of people throughout more than twenty centuries a real, living, person, with whom they would claim to have a personal relationship; a person whom they love to the point of being prepared to die for, as thousands actually have. Now, you may think them idiots for feeling this way about Jesus. At this stage, I am not asking you to approve. I am simply stating the undeniable fact. And my point is this. If Jesus was in fact a fictional character invented by the authors of the Gospels, then in creating a character who for millions has become a living person worthy of love, devotion and sacrifice, those authors have achieved a literary feat unparalleled in the whole of world literature. Miracle would not be too strong a word for it. Perhaps, indeed, we ought to start worshipping them?
There are, of course, some (though remarkably few) characters in literature that strike us as real persons whom we can know and recognize. One of them is Plato’s Socrates. Plato’s dialogues are not only philosophical works, they are works of world-ranking literature. Yet the Socrates who appears in them has struck generation after generation of readers as a real person, whose character traits they would recognize anywhere; so much so that if they are presented with a depiction of Socrates in some apocryphal, second-rate work, they will say at once, ‘No, that was not how the real Socrates would have reacted, or spoken.’4
But the reason why the Socrates of Plato’s dialogues strikes us like that is because Plato did not invent him. He was a real, historical person, who actually lived. Plato’s [p 11] picture of Socrates may be highly polished: but the person and character of Socrates were no invention of Plato’s. It was the other way round. It was the impact of Socrates’ character that helped to ‘create’ the philosopher and literary artist, Plato.
And so it is with Jesus Christ. And even more so. Though the whole world recognizes that the Socrates of Plato’s dialogues was a real historical person, no one but a lunatic would claim to know him now as a real living person, or to have a personal relationship with him. People nowadays do not die for Socrates. They do for the Jesus of the New Testament! For he is not a literary or religious fiction invented by the authors of the Gospels. The Gospels describe a real historical figure who lived in Palestine in the reign of Tiberius Caesar, who died, and as Christians would say, who rose again from the dead and lives still.
Jesus: nobody’s idea of a hero
But let’s not move on too fast. Let’s stay for a moment with the hypothesis that someone invented the character of Jesus, presented this fiction to the world, where it immediately appealed to people of widely different cultures, and was taken over as their religious ideal.
But this hypothesis falls at the very first hurdle. The more we know about the leading cultures of the time, the more it becomes clear, that if the character of Jesus had not been a historical reality, nobody would have invented it, even if they could. The Jesus of the Gospels fitted nobody’s concept of a hero. Greek, Roman and Jew—all found him the very opposite of their ideal.
[p 12] Take first the Jews, and not merely the Jews who were, and continued to be, hostile to Jesus, but the comparatively few who were at first his friends. They themselves tell us—and they certainly did not invent this bit—that there came a point when they abandoned him, so utterly contrary was he to what they looked for in a hero (Matt 26:47–56). Their concept of a hero was a messianic figure like the Maccabees. A strong, military type, fired with religious ideals, and prepared to fight (with the help of angelic assistance, so popular fervour believed) the imperialists who had subjugated the country and were suppressing the national religion.
But when matters came to a head between Jesus and the authorities and they came to arrest him, Jesus refused to fight, or to let his disciples fight either, and deliberately allowed himself to be arrested. At which point all his followers abandoned him in disgust: he was no hero of theirs! And many Jews, even today, especially those in Israel, feel similarly. A Jewish friend who only just managed to escape Hitler’s gas chambers says frankly, ‘This Jesus of yours is a weakling. He won’t do as a messiah for me. My philosophy is that if someone biffs you on the nose, you biff him back!’ That is how the first disciples of Jesus originally thought; and it was only the resurrection of Jesus that taught them otherwise and radically changed their ideas of what the Messiah should be.
Or take the Greeks of that time. The kind of hero that appealed to them, or at least to the thinking ones among them, was either the ideal Epicurean who carefully avoided, as far as possible, all pains and pleasure that could disturb his tranquillity or the ideal Stoic who, [p 13] following a rigid rationality, subdued his emotions and met suffering and death with undisturbed self-possession. Plato’s Socrates too, we remember, drank the poisoned cup with unflinching cheerfulness and equanimity.
How completely different is the Jesus of the Gospels, tormented with anguish and agony in Gethsemane until his sweat rolled down like heavy drops of blood as he pleaded with God to let him off drinking the cup that was presented to him, and crying out publicly on the cross, ‘My God, why have you forsaken me?’ He certainly was no one that a Greek would have recognized as a hero, no one that a Greek philosopher would have invented as an ideal to look up to.
And as for the Romans, among the philosophically inclined Stoicism was generally the most favoured creed, while the political and military men who came in contact with Jesus found him an impractical nonsense. He talked of himself as a king who had come into the world to bear witness to the truth. ‘Truth? What’s that?’ said Pilate. Pilate’s ultimate god was power (John 18:33–38; 19:1–12). Herod thought the claims of Jesus screamingly funny, and his soldiers considered a ‘king’ like Jesus fair game for the crudest of practical jokes (Luke 23:8-12).
The plain fact is that Jesus in the end ran counter to everybody’s concept of an ideal hero, political, philosophical or religious. Nobody invented him, and nobody, even if they had invented him, would have considered for a moment that here was an ideal that would instantly appeal to the public. The greatest Christian preacher and missionary, Paul, confesses in his writings that the preaching of Jesus who was crucified, constantly struck Jews as [p 14] scandalous and Greeks as sheer folly. If it had not been for the fact that Jesus rose from the dead, the first disciples would have abandoned all faith in him. The Gospels would never have been written.
Of course, as we now look back from the vantage point of two thousand years of history, things appear very different. The Romans who mocked Jesus eventually lost their great empire, and Tiberius Caesar is for the mass of people in the West a forgotten shade of history. But today multi-millions regard Jesus as the greatest king that ever lived, and live their lives in willing obedience to him.
Moreover, the principle of non-retaliation in the face of evil that he exemplified when he yielded to his enemies without fighting, and prayed for those who crucified him, has come to command the world’s respect (even if not its obedience) and still challenges our insane human aggressiveness and violence. It has turned the cross from being a gallows of shame into the noblest attitude a person can adopt.
And as for the contrast between the calmness of Socrates and the dire agony of Jesus, in the face of death, and the confession of Jesus on the cross that God for a while abandoned him: it certainly shows that Jesus was no Greek philosopher. But then it points us to the fact that in the cross of Jesus something was taking place infinitely more significant than the death of a Greek philosopher. In the language of the New Testament, here was the Lamb of God bearing the sin of the world and through his suffering making it possible for our guilt to be removed.
More of that later. Here for the moment is my first major argument: if you suppose that Jesus Christ is an [p 15] invented character, you have an insuperable problem on your hands to explain how the authors of the Gospels could possibly have managed to invent him, and, what is more, why they should have invented such a character anyway.
The greatest difficulty of all?
The greatest difficulty many people find in even contemplating the possibility that the New Testament could be true is its claim that Jesus is more than human, that he is God incarnate. Surely, they say, this must be superstition, which came about because people in the ancient world believed in many gods and imagined that gods quite frequently visited earth in the form of exceptional human beings.
Well, so you may think; but the facts are altogether otherwise. It is true, of course, that all nations in the ancient world believed that there were many gods, and that those gods did visit earth from time to time—that is, all nations except one. And that one exception was the Jewish nation to which the writers of the New Testament, almost to a man, belonged. They were strict monotheists. They despised the other nations for their absurd polytheism and for making gods out of their kings and heroes. To claim divine honours for anybody other than God the Creator was for them a blasphemy so serious that, according to their law, it was punishable by death. In their religious devotions in every home in the land they had for centuries been taught to recite daily as the fundamental tenet of their faith, ‘Hear, O Israel: the LORD our God, [p 16] the LORD is one’ (Deut 6:4). People like this would never have thought for one moment of believing that Jesus of Nazareth was more than human, unless they had been compelled to do so by the sheer weight of the evidence.
Chief among that evidence was the fact that Jesus Christ himself by his actions and their implications and by his explicit statements claimed equality with God. And that leads me to confess to you that one of the strongest reasons I have for believing that Jesus is the Son of God is simply this: that he said he was! I know that sounds hopelessly naive; but before you write me off as a credulous simpleton, give me time to explain what I mean.
Suppose, one day I decided I wanted an opinion about some question to do with music. I should not consult just anybody. I should not even consult my next-door neighbour: he is a good medical doctor, but he is no musician. No, I should consult the highest teachers of music I could get hold of. If I could resurrect Bach or Beethoven, I would consult them. Naturally.
Now suppose I wanted to know not about music, but about morality. Once more I would consult the highest world-ranking experts I could find. And that would lead me of course to Jesus Christ. None ever taught a higher, purer morality. His Sermon on the Mount remains an unsurpassed standard. Check it for yourself. Try living the Sermon on the Mount for a week!
But with this I come to the point I want to make. When through the New Testament I come alongside Jesus of Nazareth, his teaching on morality, his holiness of life, expose me to myself as the sinner I am. I need no external proof that he is true at this level; I know it instinctively [p 17] in my heart. But then comes the striking fact: it was this Jesus Christ whose moral teaching was flawless and whose life matched his teaching, that claimed to be equal with God.
What shall I make of his claim, or rather of the fact that it was he who made it? Shall I say that the author of the Sermon on the Mount was deliberately lying? Well, if he was, then he was the biggest hypocrite, the most despicable fraud, the most evil impostor that ever walked the earth. But it is impossible to read the Gospels carefully, and come away with the conclusion that Jesus was a deliberate fraud. If you doubt that, read the Gospels through once again yourself with this question in mind. You are surely good judges of character; you have to be, to find your way safely through this world. Exercise your judgment on Jesus. Assess his character as you find it in the Gospels. I more than suggest to you that whatever else you conclude about him, you will not conclude that he was a deliberate fraud.
But he could have been genuinely mistaken, you say, without being a deliberate fraud. But if so, think what that means. People who mistakenly think they are God, are megalomaniac lunatics! Was Jesus Christ a lunatic, then? Well, if he was, then very few people have been sane! And as for his being a megalomaniac, it is impossible to study the behaviour and words of Christ as described in the New Testament and come to any such conclusion. The Jesus who could say with conviction, ‘Come unto me all you whose work is hard, whose load is heavy and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble-hearted’ (Matt 11:28–29 own trans.), was no Hitler or Mussolini! Or if he really was a megalomaniac, [p 18] God give us more megalomaniacs! For it is a simple matter of fact that Jesus Christ has been responsible for more mental health and stability than anyone else in the world. Reading his words has brought peace to millions. Faith in him and in his sacrifice has given millions release from the torture of a guilty conscience. Daily fellowship with him has for millions broken the grip of destructive habits, and given them new respect for themselves, a sense of purpose in life and freedom from the fear of death.
It was Jesus Christ, of course, who taught us that God is love. If you believe in God at all, you probably take it for granted that he is love. You might even suppose that just any person in any century could see that God is love. But in all my reading of the ancient Greek and Latin authors I have never found any writer or philosopher who claimed that God was love. All-powerful, yes; good in a detached, absolute sense, approving man’s good behaviour and disapproving his evil acts. But love? Positive, warm-hearted, involved, caring, sacrificing love for mankind? No one ever thought it or taught it like Jesus Christ did nor with such heart-movingly direct statements as, for instance, ‘Are not five sparrows sold for two pennies? And not one of them is forgotten before God. Why, even the hairs of your head are all numbered. Fear not; you are of more value than many sparrows’ (Luke 12:6–7). Are these the words of a lunatic?
And then, of course, no one has ever personally expressed the love of God towards mankind as Jesus did by his self-sacrifice at Calvary. Thousands of noble and courageous men and women have endured torture and suffering and have eventually laid down their lives for their friends or their country, or in protest against some evil regime. [p 19] We rightly acclaim them as heroes. But we have missed the point if we suppose the New Testament is claiming no more than that Jesus Christ was a hero. What it claims for him, indeed what he claimed for himself, is unique in the history of both literature and religion. At the very beginning of his public ministry (not after his crucifixion) his official introducer, John the Baptist, announced that Jesus had come as the Lamb of God to take away the sin of the world (John 1:29); and the term he used, ‘the Lamb of God’, indicated that Jesus had come in order to die as a sacrifice to take away sin. Or, as the Apostle Peter later put it:
You were ransomed . . . with the precious blood of Christ, like that of a lamb without blemish or spot. . . . He himself bore our sins in his body on the tree, that we might die to sin and live to righteousness. . . . For Christ also suffered once for sins, the righteous for the unrighteous that he might bring us to God. (1 Pet 1:18–19; 2:24; 3:18)
And that this was what Jesus Christ himself regarded as the chief purpose of his coming into the world is shown by the following fact. The night before his crucifixion he instituted a ceremony by which his followers should thereafter remember him; and it is very instructive to notice the nature of that ceremony. He did not ask that when his followers met together they should recite the story of one of his spectacular miracles. That would [p 20] have suggested that the main thing about his ministry was that he was a miracle worker. Nor did he ask that they should select a portion of his moral teaching and recite it. That would have suggested that the main purpose of his life was to be a philosopher–teacher. He asked that they should take bread and wine to represent his body and blood, and eat and drink them in memory of the fact that on the cross he gave his body and shed his blood to secure for them forgiveness of sins (Matt 26:26–28).
And that the early Christians understood the chief purpose of Christ’s coming into the world was to give himself for them as a sacrifice for their sins, is shown by the fact that right from the very beginning, as the records show, they were found meeting together to perform this ceremony. It lies at the very centre and heart of all that Christ claimed and stood for. And it is this self-sacrificing love of Christ that has broken down people’s resistance to him, and won him the gratitude and personal devotion of his millions of followers. They all say with Paul, the Christian apostle, ‘The life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me’ (Gal 2:20).
All this, however, brings us to the crux of the matter. There is a very good and obvious reason why no one else has ever claimed that he, or she, came into the world in order to die as a sacrifice for the sin of the world. To claim that, is to claim not to be a hero, or even a martyr, but to be more than human, to be God incarnate. Only one who was himself the infinite God could offer an adequate sacrifice for the sin of the whole world.
You will see this from the simple fact that if one of your friends were seriously to claim that the whole purpose for his being born into this world was to die for the sins of the world, you would probably seek out a [p 21] psychiatrist for him. You would regard his claim as a sign of lunacy. And yet when Jesus Christ makes the claim—and he did make it: we have seen that it was not invented by the writers of the New Testament—it does not carry the faintest suggestion that he was a megalomaniac lunatic.
Indeed this claim of his is one of the things that convinces me that he is indeed the Son of God, for it both diagnoses what my fundamental problem as a human being is, and offers me the only acceptable solution to that problem. Let me explain.
All other religions and philosophies constantly inform me, each in its own way, that I ought to be good. That is helpful, I suppose; but it does not touch my real problem. I know already that I ought to be good. I don’t need the help of religion or philosophy to tell me that! My problem is not that I don’t know I ought to be good, but that times without number I have not been good. (And my neighbours, I notice, are in the same position.) And that is an enormous problem. What am I to say about my past sins? I have broken even my own standards, let alone God’s. I have compromised and befouled my own values. How then can I find forgiveness? If I decide that my past sins do not after all matter, then I am saying that my values do not matter either. And if what I do does not matter, then I who am responsible for it do not ultimately matter. But suppose my values matter. And suppose God’s standards matter and he will not lower them for me or anybody else. Then my sins matter. How can I find a forgiveness for my past, that does not by implication destroy my own values, my own significance, let alone everybody else’s? And the same goes for you as well as me.
[p 22] It is just here that Christ meets us. He claims authority to grant us forgiveness, but to do so without condoning our sin, or undercutting God’s standards. He does not say that what we have done does not matter. He insists that the penalty for it be paid. But then, he explains, this is the central reason why he came to our earth: he is the God who set and insists on the penalty for sin, the God whose law we have broken and so have deserved that penalty. Yet he is the Creator who made us, and in love and loyalty to us took the burden of our sin upon himself, paid its penalty by his suffering at Calvary, thus upholding his law and our values, and yet making it possible for us to be granted forgiveness, if we will have it.
This then is exactly what I need, and you too. Christ has read our need, and met it as no one could. In this he is unique. As you face his claims, you may be sure of this: you will only have to decide this question once in your life. Nobody else has ever, or will ever, come alongside you and tell you that he is the Creator who made you and loves you, who came as God incarnate to die for you, so that you might be forgiven. Jesus Christ is the only one who ever claimed it. And his claim is so direct and so personal: he says he died for you; which means that you personally must make your individual response to him and to his claim.
The final validation of Christ’s claims
The validation of Christ’s claim lies ultimately in two things: the objective evidence of his resurrection, and our own subjective experience of the Holy Spirit’s witness in our own hearts when, having been convinced by [p 23] the objective evidence, we open our hearts to Christ and receive him personally as Saviour.
First then his resurrection: the New Testament writers all claim that the third day after he died and was buried, Jesus Christ literally, bodily, physically rose from the dead.
Perhaps, at this point, you will be saying to yourself that anyone who believes in the resurrection of Christ must already have committed intellectual suicide; for we know nowadays that miracles like the resurrection do not take place: science has shown them to be impossible.
But in actual fact we do not know any such thing, nor has science proved any such thing. And if you think it has, you are not quite as good a scientist as you might claim.
But, you protest, the laws of science show that it is impossible for a dead body to come to life again.
No they do not; in fact they could not. The laws of science are not some absolute laws which we find written up in the sky somewhere. The laws of science are descriptions, worked out by the scientists—and all honour to them: I for one applaud their efforts—of the way that the universe normally works; or rather, that little part of the universe that they have so far been able to study and understand.
But there are two things that we must consider in this connection. First, as you will know, perhaps better than I, there are cosmologists nowadays who seriously argue that there are so-called black holes in the universe, and that in those black holes the laws of physics break down; so that following the laws of physics backwards you come to a point where you can no longer work out what happened before that point, because the laws of [p 24] physics no longer hold. You have reached what is called a singularity in the universe.
Now I know that not all cosmologists accept this theory; but my point is that those scientists who have suggested that there are such singularities in the universe are not accused of having committed intellectual suicide. Nor do genuine scientists take the view that the laws of physics prove in advance, before the evidence is investigated, that by definition there could not be any singularity in the universe. To be able to predict a priori that there could never be a singularity in the universe, science would first have to understand the working of every part of the whole universe in its entirety. Science has scarcely done that yet!
And secondly, we must always remember that the laws of science can only tell us what normally happens as long as there is no interference in our world from outside. But science, as science, cannot tell us whether in fact there has been such interference in the past or whether there will be in the future. We must go to history, not to science, to discover whether there have been such interferences in the past. Of course we all agree, Christian and non-Christian, that such interferences will have been exceedingly rare: miracles are by definition rare. To come to history, however, with your mind already made up that no miracle can ever have happened, and to refuse to investigate the evidence that sometimes miracles have happened, is not a truly scientific attitude. It is obscurantism.
In a later chapter we will consider more of the evidence for the resurrection. But consider this one point for now: if you refuse to believe in the resurrection you will [p 25] have a host of historical problems on your hands, and one very large one in particular. No one can deny the existence of the Christian church. Nor can anyone deny that it did not always exist: it had a beginning. The question is: what brought it into being? What was its purpose? If you consult the New Testament, you will find all the early Christians saying with one voice, that the thing that brought the church into existence was the resurrection of Christ; and that the whole purpose for which it was brought into existence was to bear witness to the resurrection of Christ. Their early sermons are full of little else (see the Acts of the Apostles).
The first Christians were all Jews, born and bred. Their weekly holy day was the Sabbath, that is the last, the seventh day of the week. Then suddenly, as the records show, in addition to the Sabbath, they began meeting on the first day of the week in order to eat bread and drink wine in memory of Jesus. Why this change, and why the first day of the week? Because, the early Christians tell us, Jesus Christ rose from the dead on the first day of the week.
For their preaching of the resurrection of Jesus, the early Christians were severely persecuted, and some were tortured, fed to the lions and otherwise executed. If only they had been content simply to preach the Christian ethic, that people ought to love one another, no one would have persecuted them. But no, they would insist on witnessing to the fact that Jesus, executed by the authorities, was risen from the dead. And many of them died for it. Do you suppose that they died for a story which they, the early Christians, made up themselves and knew to be false? [p 26]
Whatever you think of the Christian church, it exists; and unless we are going to shut our eyes to history, we must find some cause big enough to account for its birth. Things like the Christian church do not appear out of nowhere without any cause. Cut out the resurrection, and you are left with a gaping hole in history: the Christian church, and no adequate cause to account for its origin and existence.5
What’s all this got to do with me?
Perhaps by now some of you are beginning to protest under your breath, ‘What’s all this got to do with me? I’m a biochemist, an engineer, a builder, a mother. I can’t be expected, can I, to go poking around in ancient history like this? I’ve got enough to do with my own studies or work.’
Well, all I’ve been trying to do is to answer the question: ‘Is it necessary to commit intellectual suicide to believe the Bible?’ If you genuinely haven’t the time to consider the evidence necessary for answering the question, that’s too bad. Even so, I hope I have said enough to dissuade you from yielding to the temptation to go around saying that the claims of the New Testament are obvious nonsense. If you were to do that without having studied the evidence, it might be you who was committing the intellectual suicide!
But, of course, there’s more to it than that. If the New Testament is right, Jesus Christ is the Son of God, our [p 27] Creator—and that has everything to do with you and me and everybody else. If he is the Son of God, to neglect him, for whatever reason, is ten thousand times worse than intellectual suicide: it is culpable indifference towards our Maker. That is why the New Testament summons us to study the evidence with all the seriousness we can muster. We could hardly hope to understand the physics of the universe, without seriously studying the evidence supplied us by the universe itself. Then how could we get to know and to understand the universe’s Creator without studying the evidence he has given us about himself with equal seriousness?
I find it not uncommon that otherwise highly intelligent academics, physicists, chemists, biologists, and so forth, are inclined to dismiss the Bible as nonsense. When in response I gently press them to say whether they’ve read the Bible, they retort, ‘Of course we have.’ When I then ask them what they think of the evidence the Bible submits for the deity of Christ, they generally reply, ‘What evidence?’
I say, ‘Take for instance the Gospel of John. Its author explains his purpose in writing: “These [signs] are written”, he says as evidence to convince you “that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name” (John 20:31). This is the evidence I’m referring to,’ I say; ‘what do you think of it?’
And time and again I’ve had them reply to me, ‘Ah, the Gospel of John. Well, no, I’ve not read that one. We only studied Mark at school.’
So here they are, learned professors in the university some of them, now in middle life, and never since they [p 28] were children in school have they studied the Bible, and never have they read the Gospel of John through with an adult mind and with the seriousness with which they study their academic subjects. How they know its evidence is worthless, if they’ve never read it, I don’t know. (How they can regard themselves as educated men and women if they’ve never read the Gospel of John seriously—I do not know either.) But the far more important thing at issue is this: the Gospel of John comes to us with the authority of Jesus Christ. If what it says is true, here is God our Creator trying to communicate with us, trying to talk to us personally, trying to reveal himself to us, so that through Jesus Christ we may enter into a personal relationship of faith and love with him. Not to be interested in discovering whether it is true or not; not to be interested in the possibility of hearing our Creator speak to us, might seem to indicate a strange, irrational predisposition on our part.
‘But look,’ my colleagues say to me, ‘it’s no good telling us to read the Bible, because we don’t believe it. If we believed it, of course we would read it. You are asking us to begin by believing it, and so read it. Of course, if we believe it is true before we start, we shall believe everything it says. But we don’t believe it, and there’s no good our reading it.’
But to talk like that is silly. Of course I am not asking them, or you either, to believe the Bible before you start reading it. But I am asking them—and you—to read it, and then make up your mind whether it’s true or not. After all, that’s how you treat the newspapers, isn’t it? You know before you start that some of the things they [p 29] contain will be true, and some not. You certainly do not decide, before you read them, to believe whatever they say. But that doesn’t stop you reading them. You have confidence enough in your own judgment to read what they say, to reflect on it and to make up your own mind whether it’s true or not. I’m asking you to do the same with the New Testament.
And if you will, Jesus Christ himself guarantees that provided you are prepared to fulfil one condition, God will show you personally whether his claims are true or not. And the condition is this: ‘If anyone is willing to do God’s will’—that is, when he discovers what it is—‘he will find out whether my teaching comes from God or whether I speak on my own’ (John 7:17 own trans.). He will find out, because as he reads and studies and thinks about what Jesus taught, God will speak to his heart, and show him beyond shadow of doubt, that what Jesus says is true.
The trouble lies, I suspect, with the condition: ‘if anyone is willing to do God’s will’. We sense before we start, that if God did show us, it would carry profound implications for our way of life that we might not wish to face. So we would prefer to approach the whole thing impersonally, like we approach experiments in physics, without committing ourselves in advance to any practical implications. But we cannot treat God like that. We cannot come to the Almighty and say: ‘Yes, I would like to know whether you are there or not, and whether Jesus Christ is your Son or not. Please show me. But I would like you to understand that if you reveal yourself to me, I still am not necessarily prepared to do anything you might tell me to do.’ God has no time for spiritual dilettantes.
[p 30] But if you are serious, and willing to do God’s will when you know it, then make the experiment: read the Gospel of John seriously with an open mind; and Jesus Christ guarantees that God will show you what the truth is.
Someone will be saying, perhaps, ‘My trouble is this: I don’t even know whether God exists. If I made the experiment you suggest, should I not be in danger of imagining I heard God speak to me, when it was only auto-suggestion? How would I recognize God, even if he did speak to me?’
Well, let me finish by telling you a story about a miracle Jesus is said to have done (John 9). You may probably dismiss all stories of miracles as nonsense. Never mind for the moment. I appeal to it solely as an illustration.
Jesus, so the story goes, once came across a man who had been born blind, and asked him if he would like to be given sight.
Now I don’t know if you have ever tried to explain to someone born blind what sight is, or what colour is like, or even to convince them that there are such things as light and colour. But it is mighty difficult! We could have well understood it, therefore, if the blind man had replied to Jesus, that he didn’t know what sight was, and considered that all claims that there was such a thing as sight, to be nonsense. That, at least, is how many people react nowadays when they hear Jesus Christ say that he can give them spiritual sight; that he can give them eternal life, which is the faculty of knowing God personally (John 17:3).
Fortunately, however, the blind man said that if there was such a thing as sight he would like to have it. So Jesus Christ suggested to the man that there was an experiment [p 31] he could perform, if he was willing to; and he guaranteed that if he performed it, he would receive sight.
Now the experiment Christ laid down seemed a strange experiment, as you will discover if you read the story. But the blind man was no obscurantist. He reasoned that Jesus Christ was no charlatan, nor lunatic either. If he said there was a thing called sight and that he could give it to anyone who wanted it, then it was worth making the experiment. There was nothing to lose. There was everything to gain. So he made the experiment, found by personal experience that it worked, and returned from the experiment, seeing.
I recommend a similar experiment to you. Read John’s Gospel. As you read, say: ‘God, I’m not sure if you exist. But if you do, and if Jesus is your Son and he can give me, as he claims, eternal life, whatever that is, speak to me, reveal yourself to me, show me that Jesus is your Son. And if you show me, I am prepared to do your will, whatever it turns out to be.’
And Christ guarantees that God will show you.
Notes
3 To examine the evidence further, see the book by F. F. Bruce, The New Testament Documents: Are They Reliable? For an equally helpful book on the Old Testament, see K. A. Kitchen’s book, On the Reliability of the Old Testament.
4 Cf. C. S. Lewis, Fern-Seed and Elephants, 110.
5 For further reading see William Lane Craig’s Reasonable Faith, Gary Habermas’s The Case for the Resurrection of Jesus, and Phenomenon of the New Testament by C. F. D. Moule.
English (US) · 