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Testament is a reliable historical document, then the New Testament can be quoted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historical document.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testing that a skeptic would place on any other secular historical document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.