Who is Jesus?
But how can you know who Jesus is? Let’s think about it logically. What are your choices regarding who Jesus is? C.S. Lewis, an Oxford intellectual skeptic, struggled with this question before becoming a well-known Christian author and apologist. Concerning our options about who Jesus is he said:
I am trying to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: "I'm ready to accept Jesus as a great
moral teacher, but I don't accept His claim to be God." That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and
said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic--on the level with the man who
says he is a poached egg--or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son
of God: or else a madman or something worse (C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, pages 55-56).
In other words, Jesus was either a lunatic, a liar or Lord (Josh McDowell, Evidence That Demands a Verdict, p. 107), none of which are comfortable conclusions. Thus we face a dilemma—or rather, tri-lemma, concerning who Jesus is. Before seeking to resolve this trilemma, let us consider whether there is a fourth option.
Some have suggested there is—that Jesus is legend. For the trilemma argument is based on the premise that the four gospels in the New Testament are historically reliable documents that accurately record what Jesus said and did. But is this true?
The Reliability of the Gospels
Few would suggest that Jesus was legend in the sense that he never existed. For his existence as a first century Jewish prophet living in Palestine is attested not only by the New Testament but by the Jewish historian Josephus and the Roman historian Tacitus, among others (McDowell, pp. 84-85). However, many do say that he was legendary in the sense that it is difficult to separate the “historical Jesus” from the legends that grew up about him, such that we cannot be sure that he really made the amazing claims or did the miraculous works that are attributed to him in the gospels. Scholars called form critics have proposed that the New Testament gospels are not authentic, eye-witness accounts of what Jesus said and did but rather are the mythological creations of the Christian community, having been altered freely to meet various life situations and needs (Thomas and Gundry, editors, “Form Criticism,” in A Harmony of the Gospels, pp. 281-282).
However, this proposal faces the difficulty of explaining how a tradition altering church itself came into existence. For it was gospel history that created the church, not vice versa. If early Christian faith created the gospel record, as critics claim, then what created Christian faith (Thomas & Gundry, p. 284)? The Christian communities were groups of people who had received Christian traditions—traditions that had been passed on to them by eyewitnesses, and had believed them to be true. They did not change and alter the traditions to suit their own needs, but they received and believed the traditions, and in doing so found their deepest spiritual needs were in fact met. The eyewitnesses who had passed these traditions on to them—the Apostles, had so sincerely believed these traditions to be true that all but one of them had died as a martyr in defense of these beliefs--the one exception being the Apostle John, who also was persecuted for his faith by being exiled to the Isle of Patmos.
Another problem with the form critical view is that the time was not adequate for the community to develop its own legendary tradition. According to this view, the Christian community altered the traditions about Jesus to suit its needs according to the life situations it found itself in. Thus, over a period of time, the oral tradition was transformed into the mythological creation of the Church. But surely such a process would take time. Studies have shown that the shortest known time for such development of tradition is 100 years, and in other cases it took 200 to 400 years (see note 1 below). Yet form critics, based on their own dates for the writing of the gospels (70 to 100 A.D.) allow only 40 to 70 years for such a tradition to develop. Thus, form criticism overlooks the length of time necessary to create folk lore and legend.
The testimony of the early church fathers in the 2nd and 3rd centuries A.D. is consistent and strong in support of the four New Testament gospels—Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, as authentic, eyewitness accounts of the life and teachings of Jesus (see note 2 below). Matthew and John were themselves among the 12 original disciples and thus eyewitnesses. Mark, according to strong tradition, was informed by Peter, the leader of the disciples and an eyewitness. And Luke, the author of the third gospel, is explicit in speaking of the careful historical research he did to ensure that his gospel was based on eyewitness testimony:
Many have undertaken to draw up an account of the things that have been fulfilled among us, just as they were handed down to us by
those who from the first were eyewitnesses and servants of the word. With this in mind, since I myself have carefully investigated everything
from the beginning, I too decided to write an orderly account for you, most excellent Theophilus, so that you may know the certainty of the
things you have been taught (Luke 1:1-4, emphasis added).
The contrary opinions of higher-critical scholars are far from being objective, scientific findings, although they would like you to believe that they are. External testimony of the early Church fathers is minimized or dismissed, even though these men had the advantage of being close in time to the writing of the Gospels. Internal evidences which don’t fit their conclusions are dismissed as later additions, even though there is no textual evidence of such (see note 3 below). It is assumed that the Gospel writers were more interested in altering the traditions to meet the needs of the Community than they were in preserving an accurate history, even though Luke, one of the authors, explicitly claimed the opposite. In short, their reasons for rejecting traditional authorship are based more on their own unproven assumptions and anti-faith biases than they are on any objective facts. At best, what they have done is to create a viable alternative to accepting the gospels as authentic, eyewitness accounts, viable enough that those who are looking for an escape from the uncomfortable trilemma posed above are quick to latch onto it, but not convincing enough to dissuade true believers who, through the confirmation of their own experience, have come to believe in Christ as Son of God and resurrected Lord.
Even many who had not yet experienced Christ but were able to set aside their anti-faith bias long enough to objectively look at the evidence have become convinced that the gospels are authentic, reliable accounts of the life and teachings of Jesus. For example, the reliability of Luke is attested to by Sir William Ramsey, who was regarded as one of the greatest geographers who ever lived. He was trained in the German historical school and originally accepted the higher critical theories against the traditional authorship of the New Testament. But his own archaeological discoveries compelled him to conclude that: “Luke is a historian of the first rank . . .” Ramsey rejected his former view that Acts (the sequel to the Gospel of Luke also written by Luke) was a second century document and accepted it as a mid-first century historically reliable account (McDowell and Gilcrest, The Islam Debate, pp. 55-56). Another scholar who became convinced of the reliability of the New Testament gospels even though he originally held to the higher critical view is Dr. John A. T. Robinson, lecturer at Trinity College in Cambridge. As “little more than a theological joke” he decided to investigate the issue of the authorship of the New Testament. He concluded, to his own surprise, that the New Testament is the work of the apostles themselves or of contemporaries who worked closely with them (McDowell and Gilcrest, p.56). Among those who have turned from skeptic to believer after examining the evidence are Josh McDowell, author of Evidence that Demands a Verdict, and Lee Strobel, an unbelieving journalist who through his own research became a convinced Christian and the author of such apologetic works as The Case for Christ and The Case for the Bible.
We have been speaking of the four New Testament gospels, but what if the “real” story of Jesus is not contained in these, but in other gospels about Jesus which have been suppressed by the Church? These kind of questions and doubts arise because of the existence of a number of non-canonical gospels and have been spurred on by conspiracy theories promoted in popular writings (see note 4 below). But the reality is that the four authorized gospels are included in the New Testament because they are clearly more authentic than the excluded gospels. They were written closer to the time of Jesus’ life by eyewitnesses (Matthew and John) or those who had access to eyewitnesses (Mark and Luke). The other gospels were written 100 to 200 years after the time of Christ. The manuscript evidence for the authorized gospels is far superior—5,500 Greek manuscripts compared to only one or a few manuscripts for the other gospels. The authorized gospels had apostolic backing. The others claim it, but fraudulently so. It is recognized by all scholars that they weren’t written until 100 to 200 years later. The New Testament gospels were used widely by the churches from an early date, whereas the fake gospels can be traced to spurious groups in the 2nd century or later that taught gnostic or other heresies. Even some secular historians acknowledge that the four New Testament gospels are the most reliable accounts of Jesus’ life (See Bart Ehrman, Truth and Fiction in The DaVinci Code).
- McGinlay’s study in Form Criticism of the Synoptic Healing Narratives, cited in “Syllabus for the Beginnings of the Gospel,” Denver Seminary, 1984, p. 24.
- Donald Guthrie, New Testament Introduction, Downers Grove, IL: Intervarsity Press, 1970, pp. 33-41 (Matthew), pp. 69-72 (Mark), pp.98-99 (Luke), pp. 258-263 (John).
- For example, see their treatment of John 21 as discussed in Guthrie, NTI, p. 244.
- Such as The DaVinci Code by Dan Brown
Next page: Evidence for Jesus
For further Study: (click and read)
(1) C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (especially, Part II, chapter 3 (The Shocking Alternative)
(2) Josh McDowell, Evidence That Demands a Verdict pdf
(3) David Larson. section on The Authenticity of the Gospels
Book Resources (order from amazon or CBD)
(1) Josh McDowell, Evidence That Demands a Verdict, and The New Evidence that Demands a Verdict
(2) Lee Stroebel, The Case for the Bible