Can You Trust The Gospels? Reconstructing The Christian Faith [Part 1 of 3]

Today I want to start a reconstruction series. This is going to be 3 videos and it is going to go into the research and the things that I learned as I was building my faith back up at the beginning of the year. Even if you have not deconstructed or you've not walked away from your faith, I feel like these videos are going to be incredibly important in the months and years to come because when we talk to other people about our faith, we need to be able to provide a logical defense for why we believe what we believe. In this climate right now, we live in a society where relativism is sort of the predominant theology, if you will. This idea that, like, you can't really know absolute truth, and what's true for you is not true for me, and all of that. But Christianity and belief in Jesus actually is built on a lot of sound principles and logical thinking. And this is what brought me back to my faith. I hope this is helpful and encouraging to you, whether you are questioning, whether you are deeply rooted in your faith, but you would just like to have some ways to explain it to other people. We're going to do 3 videos, and today's is going to focus on can you trust the gospel accounts? I felt like this was a good place to start because if you're going to talk about Jesus and you're going to talk about his miracles and talk about his resurrection, it's all going to fall apart if you both can't at least agree that the gospel accounts are valid and trustworthy. So I'm going to take you inside a little bit of the research I did, and hopefully it's helpful. Question number 1, or I would say, you know, fact number 1 about the gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. Is that they are the genre of a biography. And in the Greco-Roman times, they called it— I don't even know how to pronounce it— it's B-I-O-I. And this type of writing is focused on the life and character of one central figure. And so you see that with Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. They're focused on Jesus. It's written not just to inform what happened, but also to model behavior and themes, which of course we see in the gospels. The biographies back then didn't require quite the same exhaustive detail like modern biographies are, so selectivity was normal. And so you see that in the gospels where they don't really record everything that ever happened in the 3 years that Jesus was ministering, but they focus on key events. These biographies also typically highlighted death as the climactic event, in this case Jesus' death led to his resurrection. There are many biographies that are in ancient history and specifically ones that are in this time period that historians widely accept as reliable. And they've all— they're all written with a character roughly the same period. But the interesting thing is a lot of these biographies that we hold to be reliable were actually written 800 years or more after the events occurred. One of the remarkable things about Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John is that they were written at a time when people who were eyewitness to Jesus were still alive. So we're talking like AD 50, AD 60 for Mark, and then up to AD 90 for John. And remember, Jesus was 33 when he died. And that was in around AD 33. So we're talking within 50 years of his death and resurrection, we have these biographies, whereas, you know, you look at like the Twelve Caesars or what's it called, Plutarch's Lives. These are considered reliable and yet they were written way, way after that person lived, like 800 years away. When we're thinking about the Gospels, they are not in the genre of legend or mythology. They are designed to be biographies. They are written by eyewitnesses or people that worked right alongside of eyewitnesses, which is remarkable that we have so many. This leads me to the second point about the Gospels. If we answer the question, are they trustworthy? A lot of times historians want to know, like, how many of these original— or not necessarily the original, but how many copies do we actually have? Did you know that the Gospels have more copies than any other ancient document? They absolutely blow any other ancient document out of the water. So I believe it's— there are over 5,000 Greek manuscripts of the Gospels, and there are 20,000+ manuscripts written in other languages. So by comparison, if we look at Homer's Iliad, for example, they have about 1,800 copies, or Caesar's Gallic Wars, that's about 10. So the Gospels are winning as far as the most, like, manuscripts of any ancient document ever, which leads to their reliability. The third question is, when did we find these? Like, do we have the originals, right? And so the earliest manuscripts we've been able to unearth were around 125 AD. Okay, so these are They were found in Egypt, which means the gospel had spread remarkably quickly. And the manuscript that they found, like I said, the ones that they found in AD 125 and then the ones that they continued to find, all were remarkably the same, not just showing reliability between the texts, but also over hundreds of years, things not changing. People, when they say, oh, you know, the resurrection was added later, like they are not operating in logic. Even historians that don't believe in Jesus or the resurrection of Jesus will admit that the Gospels are a historically reliable document. So what's the big— what's the big deal, right? Like, here is the crux of the matter. It's about the miracles. If the miracles were not written in the biographies of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, there would be no controversy. Everyone would accept these as historically reliable about Jesus of Nazareth in first century Palestine. Like, there would be no— there'd be no controversy. The only reason that there's controversy is because they wrote about miracles. And that's a really important topic that I want to circle back to. Another thing that comes up is like the trustworthiness. Like, how can we trust that Matthew Mark, Luke, and John were actually telling the truth, there are a few things that I want to bring your attention to. So first is embarrassing details. There are a lot of embarrassing details like Peter denying Jesus or the disciples misunderstanding that if you were trying to like polish this to start a movement, you would have left those things out. Even the fact that it was women that found Jesus. On the road to Emmaus after his resurrection? You wouldn't do that if you really wanted to establish credibility because a woman's point of view wouldn't matter in a court of law. Why would they include these things unless they were true? Right? So that's one thing. The second thing is external corroboration. So we have people like Josephus referenced Jesus, James, and the crucifixion. Pliny the Younger also talks about Jesus and the early Christian worship about Jesus as God. So we have like external people who are not Christian whatsoever corroborating what Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John said. The third, which is the one I found the most compelling, is something called undesigned coincidences. This is refuting the argument, okay, well, maybe one of them wrote the gospel and then the other three just like copied. So undesigned coincidences are like these little details in one gospel that don't quite make full sense, but then if you read another gospel, they do. It's too subtle for it to be intentional, but it's also too coherent to be a coincidence. So it basically leans towards the most likely explanation is this just, is just a natural byproduct of multiple eyewitnesses remembering the same event from different angles. Let me give you an example. So in the feeding of the 5,000, it's written down in John 6 and Mark 6. In John 6, Jesus says to Philip, "Where shall we buy bread for these people to eat?" Why Philip? Why did he ask Philip? That seems kind of random. If we go over to Mark 6 and we read the story there, the miracle happens near Bethsaida, and it says so in the text. Now Philip was from Bethsaida. So the pieces click. John drops Philip's name, Mark gives the location, Luke confirms Philip's hometown. So together it makes perfect sense why Jesus asked Philip, because he was from that area and he was saying, where should we buy food for them to eat? But you needed something from John and Mark and Luke in order to make that make sense. And that was too subtle for it to be like, planned, but also too coherent for it to be a coincidence. And there are a lot of these. If the Gospels were fabricated centuries later, you'd expect things to be very polished. You'd expect things to be very consistent. You wouldn't see these little inconsistencies that actually leads it to be more likely that it was true eyewitnesses that were not copying each other. There's a great book. It's called Cold Case Christianity. And he talks about this a lot. I read this book and he was a detective and talking about how they put together an investigation and prove that something is true. So I highly recommend that book if you're interested in that particular topic. Let's go back to the miracles. This is why people call the Gospels into question, not because of when they were found, not because of how many manuscripts, not because of grammatical inconsistencies. They are clearly reliable documents. But this is the issue. If you ask 10 people on the street if they believe in miracles, you'll get something like this. Yes, I believe in them. Or you'll get, mm, maybe they're possible, but extraordinary claims need extraordinary evidence. You could get the response of like, well, yeah, I believe in them, but why don't we see them today? Or you might hear, no, I do not believe anything that claims to happen outside of the laws of the natural world. So, curious, how would you answer that question? If you follow Jesus, I'm sure you would answer it, you believe in miracles. If you have friends or family or maybe you're questioning, maybe you would answer maybe 2, 3, or 4. I wanna go deep into the idea of miracles and the biblical worldview that accepts miracles as a possibility versus a worldview that does not. And so that's what we're gonna do in the second episode, because I feel like this is absolutely critical to reconstructing a faith or constructing a faith for the first time. I hope that this episode has shown you the reliability of the Gospels, that we can look at the Gospels and say, "Okay, for all intents and purposes, these are historically reliable documents." We just have to deal with the miracles. One last thing I wanna point out. If you feel tension right now when I say you either have to believe in miracles or not, you'll find that a lot of other worldviews don't like this tension either. And so they do this sort of hunt-and-peck method of the Gospels. They'll accept some pieces of the Gospel, but not all. Let's take Islam as an example, right? Claims the Gospels were distorted. So they throw away the death and resurrection of Jesus, they throw away the claim that he was God, Now, this does not match the evidence I just presented to you about the historical reliability of these documents. And we have tons of examples of the preservation of the text. Now, non-religious historians acknowledge that Jesus did in fact die on a cross. So this entire religion is based on something that is logically— it falls apart as soon as you start to dig. You'll find similar inconsistencies in other worldviews as well. They'll, they'll accept Jesus's wisdom, but not his miracles. Or maybe they'll accept his miracles, but they'll strip away the exclusivity that he's the only way to God, right? They'll pick and choose. In fact, the only religion that doesn't do this, that takes the evidence seriously and still doesn't believe it, is Orthodox Judaism. They actually, they don't deny the miracles. They do not dismiss the reliability of the text. Instead, they argue that Jesus was a false prophet whose power came from the wrong source. Now, you may or may not agree with that. Obviously, I do not agree with that, but at least it's a logically consistent position. They're not ignoring the mountain of evidence for the manuscripts and reliability. They're just simply saying, okay, I believe it happened, but it wasn't God, it was evil. We come back to that fork in the road. The gospels are either reliable eyewitness accounts of a man who claimed to be God and performed miracles. Or they are an early, widespread, carefully preserved account of something that got all wrong, that is completely false. That's what we're gonna look at next in the next episode. We're gonna focus in on the miracles because they are the stumbling block to whether or not we believe the gospels are true. Thanks. Talk to you soon.