| With heightened controversy swirling about the Gospels
because of Mel Gibson's "The Passion of The Christ," a logical
consideration of the motivations of the Gospel characters, the timeframe
of the Gospels' authorships, and the dissemination of the Gospels is
in order. The accuracy of these New Testament books has been questioned,
and resultantly, the claims of Christ have been doubted, but the Christian
faith is based upon the recorded words of Jesus, therefore, a rigorous
defense of the historical accuracy of the Gospels is self-evidently
necessary.
Skeptics claim that the Gospels were written and distributed long after
the Crucifixion, and thusly, should be considered unreliable. However,
Rome destroyed Jerusalem in 70 A.D., and no mention of that destruction
is made in the Gospels (although around 30 A.D., Jesus did predict said
destruction), therefore, the Gospels must have been written before 70
A.D. (within a few decades of the Crucifixion in 32 A.D.) The spread
of the Gospel message was rapid in the decades after the Crucifixion,
no doubt aided by these written Gospels and letters from the Apostles.
And translations into other languages were early and often, with no
discrepancies of facts showing amongst the various translations, also
demonstrating that the Gospels were consistent and written down shortly
after Christ's crucifixion.
As the written Gospels were being circulated in the decades after Jesus'
incarnation, it is obvious that many people who witnessed the works,
words, and crucifixion of Jesus were then still alive, and indicatively,
none of them objected to the accuracy of the circulating Gospels. And
the Roman historians Suetonius and Tacitus confirm the historicity of
Christ and the faith that He fostered, as does the Hebrew Talmud which
confirms that Jesus did in fact perform miracles.
The Roman historian Thallus recorded that the sun did go dark at mid-day
during the time of the Crucifixion in 32 A.D., as the Bible also describes.
Thallus said that the darkness was due to a solar eclipse, however,
the Passover (when Christ was crucified) always occurred during full
moons (when solar eclipses cannot happen). And the Bible describes three
hours of mid-day darkness, whereas, solar eclipses last merely a few
minutes, therefore, the pagan Thallus accurately recorded the mid-day
darkening, but not the mechanism for the darkening. (The mechanism for
the sky's darkening at the Crucifixion remains a mystery.)
Bible skeptics say that the Apostles may have conspired to somehow fake
the resurrection of Jesus, and thenceforth, deceitfully sought a following
of believers who would gullibly embrace a resurrection charade. This
notion is illogical, however, because the Apostles would never die for
what they knew to be a lie Eleven of the twelve Apostles suffered violent
martyrdoms for their public proclamations about the resurrected Christ,
why then would they send themselves to a life of persecution and eventual
martyrdom for a contrivance that they could easily have disavowed?
The Jewish officials who wanted the death of Jesus hadn't any motivation
to fake Christ's resurrection, for that would have only confirmed the
claims of the One that they wanted to dispatch, and the Roman officials
also hadn't any motivation for essentially the same reasons. Were the
Roman sentries assigned to guard the tomb of Jesus to blame for faked
resurrection? No, the sentries faced execution should they have worked
with the Apostles in a charade of defiance against Roman hegemony.
The Jews were expecting the Messiah at that time, but most were expecting
a military hero who would throw-off the yoke of Rome. Daniel 9 predicted
that the "Anointed One" would be cut-off (killed) four hundred
and eighty-three years after the command to rebuild the Temple in Jerusalem
(which was decreed by Cyrus of Persia around 450 B.C.), therefore obviously,
some Jews saw that Jesus truly is the Messiah. And many Jews also realized
that the circumstances of Christ's incarnation fulfilled the centuries-old
prophecies about the Messiah in minute detail.
The life and physical death of Jesus Christ are historically well-documented,
and there aren't any logical reasons to think that any of the factions
involved in the Crucifixion would have been motivated to fake the resurrection,
so we can safely say that the resurrection is an historical fact because
there were hundreds of eye-witnesses of Jesus' resurrected body recorded
in the Gospels (and remember, these Gospels were not considered to be
inaccurate by the Apostles' contemporaries in the decades after the
Crucifixion).
James I. Nienhuis is the author of "Old Earth? Why Not!"
(www.GenesisVeracity.com)
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