Foundational Apologetics

Creating A Valid Source
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CREATING A VALID SOURCE

The ultimate goal is actually to communicate the most practical display of thought, philosophy and evidence showing the non-Christian that the claims of Jesus Christ’s divinity and the evidence of His resurrection from the dead are genuine and authentic facts. This can only come from one source. That source is the New Testament gospel accounts. If a non-Christian has no reason to believe the New Testament is a reliable historical document, then the New Testament  can be quoted verse after verse, proclaiming the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, and ultimately the response from the non-Christian will be “So what?”

The New Testament documents must first become a valid source for these claims to come from. Secular historical accounts from the writings of the first and second century are able to prove sufficiently that Jesus Christ was indeed a historical figure who lived and was killed by the Romans. They also adequately demonstrate that His closest followers spawned a new religious movement that had a notable impact on the communities they lived in. But these secular accounts yield no affirmation to the reality of the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead. In fact, they never mention it.   

So, if Jesus Christ is really God incarnate (came in human flesh), and that is evidenced by His resurrection from the dead as recorded in the Gospel accounts of the New Testament, Christians must prove beyond a reasonable doubt that indeed these documents can be reliable enough to proclaim an event such as the resurrection actually did take place. This is where Christians must have the knowledge to present the evidence of such reliability of the Gospel’s text.  

There are three tests by which these Gospel documents can be evaluated are very helpful in this process. These are tests you can apply to any secular historical document. So, by testing the gospel accounts by these standards, we are not making the non-Christian (or the skeptic) meet our standards of evaluation, but rather, we are taking the Gospel accounts into the realm of testing that a skeptic would place on any other secular historical document from any other era.   

The first test is the bibliographical test. This simply asks the question of how these documents have been relayed to us. Is what we have an accurate portrayal of what was originally written? New Testament documents have less than a 30 year gap between their original writings and their verifiable manuscript copies. Some of these earliest manuscript “bits and pieces” can easily be dated to the early second century, which would yield a very narrow gap that could possibly be less than a century. Other secular historical authors such as Homer and Plato have gaps of anywhere from 900-1300 years between their life and writings and the first manuscript copies that are available.

Even the translations of these original manuscript copies of New Testament texts are extremely similar. This is because the various copies of the same text have been copied with a high amount of integrity down through the centuries. So the New Testament stands up very well to this form of bibliographical test.

Secular scholars often attempt to diminish the nature, quality and content of the Holy Bible. One way they attempt to do so is to refute the accuracy of its transmission down through the last two thousand years. The popular illustration is that of the childhood game “Telephone”. This is where someone whispers a sentence in to the ear of the person next to them. That person tells the person next to them and by the time it passes through the mind of a dozen people and gets back to the original person who started the chain, it sounds very little like what was originally said.

People who have little or no use for Scriptures use this comparison in the continual copying of Scriptural manuscripts down through the last two thousand years. The earliest extant Scriptural manuscripts we have date to the early second century. If you are willing to go to the various locations throughout Europe and the Mediterranean region where these manuscripts are still located, you can actually see that that the generational copies of our Scriptural text have been copied with over a 95% accuracy rate.

The parts that vary are almost all punctuation, spelling or missing secondary words that have absolutely no influence or effect on the theological message of the entire Bible text. There is one story in the Gospels that has been moved around three different times in two different Gospels. However this process has had no bearing on the message or theological truth of the story or its position in the particular text it has shown up in.

The internal test deals with the fact of who wrote these accounts and if they can be considered to be primary source material. In the case of the New Testament, the authors of the texts claim to be eyewitnesses of the actual accounts. They clearly state that in many of the texts. When they are not direct eyewitnesses, they state that they have received first-hand accounts from those who actually did experience the events of the New Testament. 

The Gospel writer John says that they saw Jesus with their own eyes and handled Him with their own hands (I John 1:1). The Apostle Peter in his second letter proclaims to be an eyewitness of Gospel events (II Peter 1:16). The historian and Gospel writer named Luke says that he investigated everything carefully, by speaking to the eyewitnesses (Luke 1:1-3). So, the authors claim to be primary sources for the materials. They never hint or indicate that this was a story passed down to them through anymore than one primary source.

The third test is the external test. This test simply yields data that confirms from sources outside the text that these things happened and were recorded by the identified authors. These external affirmations can be easily acquired in the writings of the patristic fathers of the Christian faith during the first three centuries. These men form not only a connected line of friendship through personal acquaintance, but also through theological presentation of the gospel during these early years of church history.

Central Institute for Theological Studies
P.O. Box 750491
Dayton, Ohio    45475