Reading: Video Transcript - Lee Strobel - Basic Apologetics of Truth of the Bible

Basic Apologetics of Truth of the Bible

Is The Bible Bogus

[Pre-show comments]

Lee Strobel: Welcome to Faith Under Fire. When I was an atheist, I thought the bible was a hopelessly outdated book that was contaminated by legends and mythology, especially the Gospels with their stories about turning water into wine, and healing the blind, and casting out demons, and resurrections from the dead. I mean, come on. How can anybody in the 21st century really believe that stuff? Besides, weren't these ancient biographies of Jesus actually written so long after his life that they can't be trusted?

Well, maybe you shared some of these same misgivings about the writings of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. And if so, I think you're really going to enjoy today's discussion. We're going to examine the question of whether the Gospels are merely fanciful stories based on wishful thinking or whether they actually do report accurately about the life, teachings, miracles, death, and resurrection of Jesus. You're going to be hearing a debate about a noted skeptic and a highly regarded New Testament scholar, and I hope you'll be willing to offer your own opinions on the matter as well.

After all, this isn't some irrelevant side issue. I mean, few things are as foundational to Christianity as to whether its core documents can be trusted. So have a great discussion.

[Official Show Starts]

Lee Strobel: Hi. I'm Lee Strobel. Welcome to Faith Under Fire. The Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John purport to tell the story of Jesus, including his miracles, claims of divinity, and resurrection from the dead. Christians have based their faith on these New Testament books for 2,000 years, but are they really reliable or are they fatally flawed documents that only report what people wish were true? Joining me to debate the trustworthiness of the Gospels is Dr. Michael Shermer, founding publisher of Skeptic Magazine, author of several books, including How We Believe: Science, Skepticism, and the Search for God.

And here's Dr. Ben Witherington III, a New Testament scholar at Asbury Seminary. He's authored 22 books and commentaries including the award-winning book, The Jesus Quest.

Michael, let's begin with you. Why do you think the Gospels lack credibility?

Michael Shermer: In my opinion, the Gospels are a type of what we call, typological fiction or what I call myth-history. They're myth stories with a purpose. In the first century AD, Christians invented two types of books, two new books. They invented the New Testament that begins with the canonical Gospels Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. If you're going to have a New Testament, you have to have an Old Testament. So the first century Christians re-invented the Hebrew Bible and called it the Old Testament.

What the New Testament is really, is supposedly the fulfillment of prophecy from the Old Testaments. So the Gospel writers were writing against something. Like any author, editor, commentator, opinion editorial writer, and so on, they're writing in the context of their own culture against something. And when I say against, I mean in the context of something - in this case, the Old Testament.

So the idea of the Messiah coming and dying for your sins, and resurrecting, and so on is a very old story. And it's not just a Hebrew story as in the Old Testament, but it goes back to Babylonians, and Egyptians, and Greeks, and Romans.

Lee Strobel: All right. Ben, what's your response? You've studied this your whole life.

Ben Witherington: Well, I would have to say that I couldn't disagree more with what he just said. What we actually have in the Gospels is we have three ancient biographies, and we have one historical monograph - Luke/Acts.

The truth of the matter is that these documents don't bear any resemblance to ancient Greek mythology or Roman mythology for that matter. And even if we were to look at Greek and Roman mythology, they’d say absolutely nothing about a dying and rising deity. That's a complete myth itself.

Furthermore, these Gospels were all written within the lifetime of either the eyewitnesses or those who had contact with the eyewitnesses. And so the gestation period required to create what he would call myth history simply isn't there. We had the check of the early community. Early Jews were not, in any case, a myth-making people. Occasionally, they would use mythological images, but they were a people who were grounded in events that happened to them, and they believed that God had intervened in their life in the Exodus/Sinai events and various other events. They were not a myth-making people.

All of the writers of the New Testament were Jews with the possible exception of Luke, and they all followed in the historical salvation sort of style of writing history.

Lee Strobel: Okay. Michael, what's your response to that?

Michael Shermer: I think we can start with the extra-biblical sources. You can't just use the bible to prove itself. It would be nice if you want to do something other than making a leap of faith to have extra-biblical sources. And there's only a handful - four. And all of them simply make reference to Christus or the Christians based on Christus, which is just a word for Messiah. It just means the Messiah has come.

Lee Strobel: Ben, how necessary is it to have evidence outside the bible to confirm it? Or do you believe that the documents that make up the New Testament of the Bible themselves are trustworthy?

Ben Witherington: Well, first of all, let's talk about those sources that he's referring to. He's talking about Tacitus, Suetonius, Josephus I'm assuming. And those sources make perfectly clear that this Christus, they're using it as a name, not as a title. It's not being used as a title. It's not [foreign 00:05:29] Christoph. It's not Christus in Latin. It's a name. It's a synonym for the name Jesus. And only one person who was called that in the first century AD was said to have been crucified under Pontius Pilate, and that's the fact that all of them report about this. So we know it's a particular person in mind.

It's also not true that ancient Greeks and Romans had Messiah figures in the same way that Jews did. They were not looking for crucified and risen Messiah figures. Indeed, even early Jews are surprised by this idea. It's something new in the Gospel.

Lee Strobel: Michael, let me ask you this. The writing of the Gospels, the date in which they were written, Ben made the assertion that they were written within the lifetimes of eyewitnesses who were [crosstalk 00:06:24]. What do you believe?

Michael Shermer: Well, Mark is 65 to 70, and Matthew and Luke come after Mark and are clearly based on the writings in Mark.

Lee Strobel: And Jesus would've been put to death in 30 or 33 to give a time period.

Michael Shermer: Right. So they're three to four decades after the fact. There's got to be some leakage of error. It's not that oral traditions are completely wrong when they're passed along, but errors do creep in. So I think it's a mistake to take them as historical fact. We have to understand that the bible is a work of mythic fiction, not in a negative sense but as a story.

Lee Strobel: Let me just jump in here and get Ben's opinion on your assertion that these Gospels were written that much later. Do you agree with that Ben or do you think they're earlier to the scene.

Ben Witherington: Actually, I do agree with that. I think his dating is probably correct. I think the Gospel of John was probably the last of the four to be written. But what you're not really conjuring with is that fact that we're dealing with documents written within the Jewish tradition. And they took sacred tradition very, very seriously indeed.

I mean, we have sayings, for example, on the mission that says, "To what shall we liken a disciple? He's like a cistern that loses not a single drop." That is rote memorization of traditions was the basis of Jewish traditions, and that's how these traditions were passed on.

Michael Shermer: I think it's interesting, for example, that Old Testament prophesy says that Jesus-- the Messiah-- was supposed to come from Bethlehem. And so right off the bat, you see in the Gospels this kind of conflicting tension between where Jesus was born. Was it Bethlehem or was it, Nazareth? He's called Jesus of Nazareth, but one of the Gospels says he was from Bethlehem.

Ben Witherington:            Well, none of the Gospels say Jesus was born in Nazareth. Not a single one. Matthew and Luke both are perfectly clear that he was born in Bethlehem. John says nothing about where Jesus was born. That only leaves Mark. And Mark doesn't have a birth story either. So the truth of the matter is that the only two Gospels that pontificate on where Jesus was born. Both say he was born in Bethlehem.

Now, yes, of course, Jesus was raised in Nazareth. No Gospel disagrees with that fact either. It's simply a myth to say that some Gospel is claiming that Jesus was born in Nazareth. No Gospel claims that.

[Post-show comments] 

Lee Strobel: For years, I was a skeptic about the bible. Not because I'd thoroughly studied it and concluded it was unreliable, but because I'd heard enough snippets of criticism through the years to poison my view of the book. It wasn't until I analyzed the bible thoroughly that I concluded it must have a divine origin.

Not only is its wisdom breathtaking in its beauty and its depth, especially in the Proverbs, and the Psalms, and Jesus teachings, but the bible is based on key eyewitness accounts. It has repeatedly been corroborated by archeological discoveries. It has specific predictions that were made hundreds of years in advance that were literally fulfilled against all mathematical odds. And it contains credible and well-documented miracles that confirm its message.

The Gospels, which describe the life, teachings, miracles, death, and resurrection of Jesus reflect eyewitness testimony and bear the unmistakable earmarks of accuracy. As I describe in my book, The Case for Christ, there's persuasive evidence that the Gospel writers intended to preserve reliable history, were able to do so, were honest and willing to include difficult-to-explain material, and didn't allow bias to unduly color the reporting.

The harmony among the Gospels on essential facts coupled with different perspectives on some of the details lends historical credibility to the accounts. What's more, the early church couldn't have taken root and flourished right there in Jerusalem if had been teaching facts about Jesus that its own contemporaries knew were exaggerated or false.

So let me ask this. Do you know of any other religious book that matches the credentials of the bible? Think about that for a moment as you chart where you stand on this issue.