Gunning for God (30 page)

First, a voice from the USA. Ed Sanders of Duke University, one of the leading figures in the historical study of Jesus over the last three decades, and a self-confessed agnostic, writes:

There are no substantial doubts about the general course of Jesus’ life: when and where he lived, approximately when and where he died, and the sort of thing that he did during his public activity… I shall first offer a list of statements about Jesus that meet two standards: they are almost beyond dispute; and they belong to the framework of his life, and especially of his public career: Jesus was born c. 4
BCE
, near the time of the death of Herod the Great; he spent his childhood and early adult years in Nazareth, a Galilean village; he was baptized by John the Baptist; he called disciples; he taught in the towns, villages and countryside of Galilee (apparently not the cities); he preached ‘the kingdom of God’; about the year 30 he went to Jerusalem for Passover; he created a disturbance in the Temple area; he had a final meal with the disciples; he was arrested and interrogated by Jewish authorities, specifically the High Priest; he was executed on the orders of the Roman prefect, Pontius Pilate. We may add here a short list of equally secure facts about the aftermath of Jesus’ life: his disciples fled; they saw him (in what sense is not certain) after his death; as a consequence, they believed that he would return to found the kingdom; they formed a community to await his return and sought to win others to faith in him as God’s Messiah.
⁵

Next, a voice from England. Christopher Tuckett, University of Oxford, author of the Cambridge University textbook on the historical Jesus:

All this does at least render highly implausible any far-fetched theories that even Jesus’ very existence was a Christian invention. The fact that Jesus existed, that he was crucified under Pontius Pilate (for whatever reason) and that he had a band of followers who continued to support his cause, seems to be part of the bedrock of historical tradition. If nothing else, the non-Christian evidence can provide us with certainty on that score.
⁶

Finally, a voice from Germany. Gerd Thiessen, a leading German New Testament historian at the liberal/sceptical end of the theological spectrum, says:

The mentions of Jesus in ancient historians allay doubt about his historicity. The notices about Jesus in Jewish and pagan writers… — especially those in Josephus, the letter of Sarapion and Tacitus — indicate that in antiquity the historicity of Jesus was taken for granted, and rightly so, as two observations on the above-mentioned sources show:

The notices about Jesus are independent of one another. Three authors from different backgrounds utilize information about Jesus independently: a Jewish aristocrat and historian, a Syrian philosopher, and a Roman statesman and historian.

All three know of the execution of Jesus, but in different ways: Tacitus puts the responsibility on Pontius Pilate, Mara bar Sarapion on the Jewish people, and the Testimonium Flavianum (probably) on a co operation between the Jewish aristocracy and the Roman governor. The execution was offensive for any worship of Jesus. As a “scandal” it cannot have been invented.
⁷

All this shows that Bertrand Russell was talking in sheer ignorance of the facts, when he wrote in his book
Why I am not a Christian
, “Historically it is quite doubtful whether Christ ever existed at all, and if he did we know nothing about him.”
⁸
I can well recall when I first read Russell’s book as a student in Cambridge. It had been recommended to me as one of the most powerful and important intellectual rebuttals of Christianity ever written; and I took it up wondering what effect it would have on my thinking. I was totally unprepared for what I found. I had expected a careful, incisive examination of the evidence that was readily available, a lot of which I had already been exposed to; yet I came away with the impression that Russell simply had not engaged at any depth with the substantial body of evidence that supports Christianity. The net effect of the book was to leave me very disappointed with Russell (after all, he was a mathematician), and to confirm my Christian faith, not undermine it. Much more recently I have had many similar experiences reading the New Atheists.

It is very difficult to know how to proceed with people who, on the one hand, insist that we examine the evidence they claim in support for their views and who then, on the other hand, clamour loudly for our evidence, and peremptorily dismiss what we offer to them. I am aware that I cannot hope to persuade the minority, who have already decided their answer without looking at the evidence; so I must now write for those who, in the spirit of Socrates, are not content with remaining in the intellectual fog generated by the New Atheism, but are genuinely interested in following historical evidence where it leads.

I remind the reader that I use the term “evidence” and not the term “proof”, since, as we pointed out in Chapter 2, proof in the rigorous mathematical sense is not available in any other discipline or area of experience, not even in the so-called “hard” sciences. In all other disciplines we speak of evidence; and it is up to each person to make up their mind whether the evidence is convincing for them or not. That is the approach I shall take here. I shall present the evidence as I understand it, and leave it to my readers to decide whether or not I have made my case.

The resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead lies at the heart of Christianity. Indeed, it is to be noted that, whatever they may have in common at the level of ethical teaching (and it is considerable), the death and resurrection of Jesus are watershed issues that separate the three major monotheistic religions — Judaism, Islam, and Christianity — from each other. Judaism holds that Jesus died, but did not rise; Islam holds that Jesus never died; and Christianity holds that Jesus both died and rose again. It is clear that these three understandings of history are mutually exclusive — at most only one of them can be true.

For centuries Christians have greeted each other at Easter time with the confident, indeed triumphant, words “Christ is risen! He is risen indeed.” It is, therefore, time to examine the basis for that confidence.

THE SOURCES OF THE EVIDENCE

That brings us at once to another difficulty. Most of our evidence comes from the New Testament, and there is a widespread notion that the New Testament is not historically reliable. The New Atheists have done their part in communicating this highly erroneous impression to the public. Richard Dawkins, for instance, writes: “Although Jesus probably existed, reputable biblical scholars do not in general regard the New Testament (and obviously not the Old Testament) as a reliable record of what actually happened in history, and I shall not consider the Bible further as evidence… The only difference between
The Da Vinci Code
and the gospels is that the gospels are ancient fiction while
The Da Vinci Code
is modern fiction.”
⁹
Hitchens thinks that the New Testament is “a work of crude carpentry, hammered together long after its purported events, and full of improvised attempts to make things come out right”.
¹⁰

Once again this cavalier dismissal of the Gospels as ancient fiction tells us much more about Dawkins’ and Hitchens’ attitudes to history than it does about the authenticity of the Gospels. Like many others, they seem to be unaware of the evidence for the authenticity and reliability of the New Testament text. They do not appear to have consulted the literature — indeed Hitchens cites as his authority H. L. Mencken, an American journalist who apparently never even went to college. Here is just a little of what they might have found out, if they had done a bit of serious research.

THE NUMBER OF MANUSCRIPTS

No original manuscripts of the New Testament survive today. If what we possess, therefore, is the result of a centuries-long copying process, many people wonder how it bears any resemblance to the original text.

This difficulty is generally felt by people who are not aware of how overwhelmingly strong the evidence actually is for the original text of the New Testament. Firstly, there is the sheer number of the manuscripts that we now have. There are 5,664 partial or complete manuscripts of the New Testament in the original Greek language that have been catalogued; and over 9,000 in early translations into Latin, Syriac, Coptic, Arabic, and others. Added to this, there are 38,289 quotations from the New Testament by the early church fathers, who wrote between the second and the fourth centuries
AD
. If, then, we lost all the New Testament manuscripts, we could still reconstruct the entire New Testament from these quotations (except for eleven verses).

In order to get some idea of the weight of this manuscript support, it is helpful to compare it with the documentary evidence available for other ancient works of literature. For instance, the Roman historian Tacitus wrote
The Annals of Imperial Rome
around
AD
116. The first six books of the
Annals
survive in only one manuscript, which was copied in about
AD
850. Books 11 to 16 are in another single manuscript, dated to the eleventh century. The manuscript evidence is very sparse therefore; and the time gap between the original compilation and the earliest surviving manuscripts is over 700 years.

The documentary evidence for
The Jewish War
, written in Greek by the first-century historian Josephus, consists of nine manuscripts that were copied in the tenth to twelfth centuries
AD
; a Latin translation from the fourth century; and some Russian versions dating back to the eleventh and twelfth centuries. The ancient secular work with the most documentary support is Homer’s
Iliad
(c. 800 BC), of which there are 643 manuscript copies, dating from the second and later centuries
AD
. Thus, in this case, the time gap between the original and the earliest surviving manuscripts is a thousand years.

The main point to be made here is that scholars treat these documents as authentic representations of the originals, in spite of the fewness of the manuscripts and their late dates. In comparison with these, the New Testament is by far the best-attested document from the ancient world.

THE AGE OF THE MANUSCRIPTS

The time-lapse between the date of certain ancient manuscripts, and the originals of which they are copies, is considerable. How does the New Testament fare in this respect? Here again, the evidence for the authenticity of the text is extremely impressive by comparison.

Some of the New Testament manuscripts are of a very great age.
The Bodmer Papyri
(in the Bodmer Collection, Culagny, Switzerland) contain about two-thirds of the Gospel of John in one papyrus, dated to around
AD
200. Another third-century papyrus has parts of Luke and John. Perhaps the most important manuscripts are the
Chester Beatty Papyri
, which were discovered in 1930 and are now housed in the Chester Beatty Museum in Dublin, Ireland. Papyrus 1 comes from the third century, and contains parts of the four Gospels and Acts. Papyrus 2, dated to around
AD
200, contains substantial portions of eight of Paul’s letters, plus parts of the letter to the Hebrews. Papyrus 3 has a large part of the book of Revelation, and is dated to the third century.

Some fragments are even earlier. The famous
John Rylands Fragment
(in the John Rylands Library, Manchester, England), which consists of five verses from the Gospel of John, is dated by some to the time of the Emperor Hadrian,
AD
117—138; and by others even to the reign of Trajan,
AD
98—117. This refutes the influential view of sceptical nineteenth-century German scholars that John’s Gospel could not have been written before
AD
160.

The earliest surviving manuscripts containing all the books of the New Testament were written around
AD
325—350. (Incidentally, it was in
AD
325 that the Council of Nicea decreed that the Bible could be freely copied.) The most important of these manuscripts are the
Codex Vaticanus
and the
Codex Sinaiticus
, which are called uncial manuscripts because they are written in Greek capital letters. The
Codex Vaticanus
was catalogued by the Vatican Library (hence its name) in 1475; but, for 400 years after that, scholars were forbidden to study it — rather odd, in light of the original decision by the Council of Nicea!

The
Codex Sinaiticus
was found by Tischendorf (1815—44) in the Monastery of St Catherine, on Mount Sinai in Arabia, and is now in the British Museum in London. It is regarded as one of the most important witnesses to the text of the New Testament, because of its antiquity, accuracy, and lack of omissions.

MISTAKES IN THE COPYING PROCESS

We can now readily see that the objection — the New Testament cannot be reliable because it has been copied out so many times — is completely unfounded. Take, for example, a manuscript that was written around
AD
200, and is therefore now some 1,800 years old. How old was the manuscript from which it was originally copied? We do not know, of course; but it could very easily have been 140 years old at the time it was copied. If so, that manuscript was written out when many of the authors of the New Testament were still alive. Thus, we get from New Testament times to the modern day in just
two
steps!