I’ve done it again!

This post took more space then I had originally intended, so I have split it into two parts.

Part two will be posted next week.

Proofs for Christ – part one

It is common today to hear people make the claim that Jesus never really existed, or that he wasn’t divine or that he faked his resurrection from the dead.

Let’s examine some of these claims and see what the evidence tells us:

Claim: Jesus never existed; he was just a made up character

This claim is pure nonsense.

Not only do we have the four Gospel accounts, plus other accounts in the New Testament that Jesus was a real man who walked the earth 2000 years ago, we also have non-Christian sources who record his life.

Pliny, Tacitus, the Talmud and Josephus are all secular or non-Christian sources from that era which make reference to the existence of Jesus Christ.

We also have the early Church fathers who wrote about Jesus, and we even have the Gnostics who wrote about Jesus and tried to claim Him for their heretical religious sect in the early days of Christianity.

We have much more written evidence for the existence of Jesus then we do for the fact that Caesar crossed the Rubicon River, yet no one doubts that that event really happened.

Saying that Jesus never existed is like saying that Steve Irwin or Sir Peter Blake were fictional characters who were made up by their supporters.

Claim: The Gospels are fictitious writings made up by the disciples, or some other group

This is another farcical claim.

If the Gospels are made up stories then they are the worst examples of fake documents in the history of literature

Think about it – if the Gospels are fictitious writings made up by the disciples then why did the disciples include so many stories that portray them in such a bad light?

We have accounts of the disciples sleeping when they should be praying, often being told off by Jesus for not intellectually grasping His words, we have Peter being called “Satan” by Christ, we have them being told off for their lack of faith and we even have them running away in fear, or betraying Christ during His crucifixion.

Someone forgot to tell the disciples that if they were going to write fake stories in order to start a new religion they really should have portrayed themselves in a better light – after all; they were meant to inspire people to follow them as the leaders of this new religion!

The Gospels are unique pieces of literature.

They contain principals for living that were completely countercultural and likely to see them rejected rather than embraced by the Jewish culture of the day.

For example; they portray Jesus telling Jews to live in peace with the Romans, and turn the other cheek, etc, in a culture that believed in an eye for an eye, hated the Romans and was looking for a messiah who would lead them to military victory over the Romans.

The Gospels have women acting as witnesses to the Resurrection in a culture where women were not allowed to testify in legal courts because they were considered to be unreliable witnesses.

The Gospels also contain such wise principals for everyday living that they would revolutionise our world if everyone started living them, even in a secular or non-Christian setting.

The Gospels also accurately record real and verifiable historical events from the period in which they were written.

The Gospels don’t read like traditional mythology.

Sure, you have a messiah, but he gets killed, and even when he performs miraculous demonstrations of power he keeps telling people not to talk about it – in fact his whole message is based on service and humility; hardly the traditional characteristics of a mythological messiah!

What a lot of people also don’t seem to realise is that during the time of Christ it was quite common for people to claim to be the messiah, and then gather a band of followers around them.

The acid test of your messiah-ship however was usually death – if you died then it was taken as a sure sign that you weren’t actually the messiah after all, and once you died, so did your following.

With this in mind two questions need to be asked…

a) Why would the disciples write a fake document proclaiming that Jesus was the promised Messiah and then kill Him off in that document, when, in the culture of the day, the death of your messiah signalled the failure of your religion?!

b) How come Jesus’ little movement survived for more than 2000 years when the other sects with dead false messiahs did not?

Claim: the Gospels were written hundreds of years after the time of Jesus

Pure fiction based on bad scholarship.

General scholarly consensus tells us that the earliest Gospel was written between 50 A.D. to the early 70’s A.D. – that’s just twenty to forty years after the death of Christ, and before many of the 12 Disciples had died.

John did not die until 101 A.D., so the Gospels were circulating thirty to fifty years before his death – and He would have spoken out if they contained error.

This false claim is just a feeble attempt to try and discredit the reliability of the Gospels, and the weight of scholarly evidence clearly refutes this hollow claim.

Next week we will continue looking at the proofs for Jesus’ divinity and His resurrection