This is maybe the most central reason for faith. But it’s far more: this is the vital challenge at the heart of Christianity. If Jesus really is God, it makes all the difference to everything.
We can’t `prove` this; in the end, each of us must meet with Jesus for ourselves. The aim of this unit is to give us enough material to go away and read the Gospels – on our own or, better, with somebody else; and pray, whether or not we believe; and decide.
First, we need to master the facts. Why should we trust what the Gospels say about Jesus? Let’s be clear what the issue is here: it doesn’t matter at this point whether we share the belief that they are 100% reliable, we can decide where we stand on that once we’ve decided to follow Jesus. (If we become Christ’s disciples ourselves, we should indeed conclude that that involves adopting his attitude to the Scriptures; but this comes later.) What matters now is that they are generally reliable accounts of what Jesus said and was like. That seems clear.
It’s not just that there are no proven errors. It’s not just the vast number of documents – much more than we have for any comparable historian such as Tacitus; nor the absence of radical divergences between them, and the many quotations elsewhere that assure us we have a fairly reliable text. (An excellent survey is Paul Barnett, Is the New Testament History? Barnett includes helpful treatments of issues like the extensive quotation of the Gospels in other very early writers, and the massive quantity of manuscript evidence available, compared with that for the transmission of other standard historical sources such as Josephus or Tacitus.) But it’s also that they were written so close to the events, in a culture marked by retentive memory and when many witnesses of the events would still be alive to challenge falsifications; and written by people, and in a community, whose moral rectitude seems a historically accepted fact, even among their enemies.
It’s also the repeated appeal to eye-witness testimony that we find in, say, John 19:35 and 21:24, 1 John 1:1-3, 2 Peter 1:16 or Acts 1:21-22 or 10:39-41. It’s the careful historical approach displayed by the author of Luke (`Since I myself have carefully investigated everything from the beginning, it seemed good also to me to write an orderly account for you, most excellent Theophilus, so that you may know the certainty of the things you have been taught’. That’s Luke 1:1-4; Luke had ample motive to check the historical facts with care; he travelled with Paul, and saw first-hand the price – and pain – of serious discipleship to Christ.) It’s Papias telling us that this characterised Mark’s gospel-writing too: ‘He paid attention to this one thing, not to omit anything that he had heard, nor to include any false statement among them.’
And other types of evidence converge on the same conclusion. It was J S Mill, no friend of Christianity, who asked the crucial question about the Gospel material: if Jesus was not the source of the teaching attributed to him, who was? The ‘community’, some critics have answered. But Mill had more sense than that and saw in the Gospel sayings a grandeur that was the mark of a most unusual mind: `Who among his disciples or among their proselytes was capable of inventing the sayings of Jesus or imagining the life and character revealed in the Gospels? Certainly not the fishermen of Galilee; as certainly not St Paul, whose character and idiosyncrasies were of a totally different sort; still less the early Christian writers, in whom nothing is more evident than that the good which was in them was all derived, as they always professed that it was derived, from the higher source.` Most of that teaching, Mill is saying, must go right back to Christ himself.
And more modern secular literary criticism provides a further insight: it is incredibly hard to produce a convincing saint-figure in fiction. Consider Dickens, for instance; his evil characters are full of convincing energy, but the good ones are such pale shadows that it is hard to believe in their triumph. To Dostoevski, there was `nothing more difficult’ than `to portray a positively good man’ in a novel: `All writers who have tried it have always failed.’ Yet one generation after another has found the Christ of the Gospels an utterly compelling portrayal of goodness in all its robustness and complexity: striking in his teaching, devastating in debate, while at the same time earthy, gentle, totally at ease with the women he knew; and (for example) so sensitive in his meeting with Peter after the betrayal (John 21). Where in the world’s fiction do we find anything comparable? But then: if our best novelists have proved unable to invent such a figure, must we not conclude that the Gospel writers likewise weren’t inventing, but were copying from a real original? To make matters worse, fictional prose marked by such realistic detail and seriousness of purpose simply didn’t exist at that time (the novel as we know it is a genre that arose largely in the eighteenth century). So either we must say that the Gospels, with their striking realism of style, are basically factual, depictions copied closely from the real events they describe – or else believe that not one but four great novelists arose, and that these four writers (who were not artists but missionaries) somehow came up with a totally new type of prose writing that would then disappear for centuries; and, bizarrely, each of them also succeeded in constructing a fictional saint-figure no later novelist has been able to match! The thing seems absurd. Clearly, as C S Lewis concludes, the picture they present of Jesus must have been copied from reality, and be at least ‘pretty close up to the facts’.
But most of all there is a final issue, which is often ignored to a quite astounding degree: people died for the reliability of these documents. The early Christians were not spiritual tourists; and they would most certainly have wanted as accurate as possible a record of what their Master did and taught. Hence there is in the new testament a strong emphasis on the careful passing-on of the gospel tradition (eg 1 Corinthians 15:3-8, Galatians 2:1-21, Colossians 2:7, 1 Thessalonians 2:13). Many of these early believers knew they might come to very unpleasant ends for their beliefs, and so had every reason to want to be certain of their authenticity. They and their families could be beheaded, crucified upside down, whipped, tortured. One of the early Roman emperors took to using burning Christians as human torches for his garden. If we imagine ourselves in the position of someone who remains a Christian knowing this is how it might end, we can see that those early believers would want to be very sure of the historical basis for their horrendous gamble. People who were dying for the gospel story would surely want to be as certain as they could be that their Gospels were telling the truth. For all these reasons, then, we can be confident that these colourful, earthy accounts are at least very close to what Jesus actually said and did.
And as we read them, they are enormously impressive. What touches us most says a lot about who we are. Some of us may well be captivated most by the shrewdness and sublimity of Christ’s words and stories. For others it is the glory of what he does: his identifying with the poor and broken and untouchable; the way he loves joyous celebrations, yet stands unflinchingly in the way of entrenched evil; his generosity in caring, healing, and forgiving; the astonishingly moving events when he washes the disciples’ feet, including Judas, or the restoration of Peter after his betrayal. And so very much more. If ever there was ever someone who lived life as it should be lived, we so often feel, this is it.
We can’t “prove” this in these notes, and we shouldn’t try. What is vital is for us to expose ourselves again, before God, to the experience of encountering Jesus in the gospels. And if we do that with an open mind – we know this, don’t we – what we see is enormously impressive and enormously attractive. Gandhi, not a Christian, said, `He expressed, as no other could, the spirit and will of God.` Napoleon said, `I know men; and I tell you that Jesus Christ is not a man… Everything in Christ astonishes me. His spirit overawes me, and his will confounds me. Between him and whoever else in the world, there is no possible term of comparison… The nearer I approach, the more carefully I examine, everything is above me…` His experience is almost universal…
But then comes a very serious problem. This Jesus is enormously impressive – yet he also makes astonishing claims. He gives us enormously perceptive guidance on one moral issue after another, and yet he takes an extraordinary line on his own goodness; he cannot see that he himself has any moral flaw, he has no awareness at all of any wrong in his own heart. (His followers Peter and Paul are very different in this respect; Luke 5:8, 1 Timothy 1:15.) And when he makes these claims of sinlessness, it’s interesting that John the Gospel writer, who knew Christ so well, reports it without flinching (he apparently has no debate to record in which Jesus fends off accusations of sin); indeed, he says (John 8:29-30, 46) that that is when other people started to follow him.
This is disturbing enough, but it gets worse. He makes massive claims about himself, and consequently massive demands of his disciples (to the point of their self-destruction, if he were not who he claimed to be). No other major religious teacher – Buddha, Mohammed, Lao Tzu, Confucius, Socrates, Paul – ever made such claims. And the more we read the Gospels, the more we see Jesus’ teaching centres absolutely, over and over again, on his hearers’ response to himself, and his demand for absolute discipleship. I must take absolute priority over your parents, your wife and children and everything else in your life, he insists in Luke (14:26); you must renounce everything for me (14:33); you must deny yourself, you must give up your life for me (note, not for the truths in my teaching, but for me; 9:23-24). I am in an utterly different class from all God’s preceding messengers (20:9-14); greater than the greatest of Israel’s kings (20:41-44); wiser than the wisest of the ancients (11:31); greater than God’s own law (6:1-5; imagine someone saying that!). Everything has been given to me by God, and only I know what God is like (10:22); your public response to me (again, not to the truths I teach, but to me) will decide your eternal fate (12:8). And there is more; we can try to imagine our reaction to a contemporary making such claims. It is fascinating – considering the uniqueness of these claims among the world religions – that the Gospel writers can cope. Indeed, Luke centres his book’s entire structure on Peter’s confession of Jesus as the Christ of God (9:20).
John’s Gospel takes matters still further. Jesus states that he embodies the life of the resurrection, and anyone who believes in him will never die (11:25-26); he alone gives life to the dead, depending on whether or not they believed on him (5:25-26, 6:40). He, personally, is (not shows) the way, and the truth, and no one comes to God except through him (14:6); he always does what pleases God (8:29,46). Staggeringly, `Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father’ (God) (again, we should try to visualize a contemporary saying that; 14:9); `I and the Father are one’ (for that the Jews tried to stone him, 10:30-31, 38-39). He, not the Father, will judge the world (5:22), `that all may honour the Son’ (himself) `just as they honour the Father’. He is God’s equal (5:18), the eternal `I AM’, the very Creator who hung the stars in space (8:58-59). Perhaps most striking is 5:23: anyone who does not honour him, Jesus, does not honour God; worship of God only has meaning if it is worship of Jesus. More could be cited. For Christ, the whole universe centres on a Person, and he is that Person. We find such claims in every part of the Gospel traditions, and indeed in those texts accepted even by the most sceptical school of biblical scholars (see on this J P Moreland’s excellent Scaling the Secular City p.155); and in sections too (e.g. throughout John 13‑17) where the unbiased reader is compelled to sense teaching of a depth and stature that must surely come from Jesus himself. There are so many of these remarkable passages that, even if a couple had been invented by his disciples, the overall shape of Christ’s self-understanding would be unmistakable.
So here is the question. Other reasons for faith are very significant indeed. But for me at least the biggest issue is this: what on earth shall I believe about Jesus? Shall I hide from the question? No, that’s pathetic. But then there are only three alternatives. When he talks like that and says he’s God, did he know it was false?- was he a liar, a deliberate, conscious deceiver, lying knowing his closest friends were successfully enough deceived that they would die in agony for this? Or was he unaware, did he not know it was false? Was he the kind of lunatic who walks around a mental hospital thinking he is the Creator? Or – were they true, and he was, and is, God?
At the end of the day we do have to look Jesus in the face, consciously, and put our whole being as the stake of what we’re saying behind one of these alternatives: Jesus you were a trickster – misleading and deceiving and leading your closest friends to torture and death for your lies. Or Jesus, you were a lunatic and should have been given drugs and sorted out.
But then we think of the facts. Jesus the conscious trickster, setting up his own bogus personality cult? Can I stake my life on that? Can we fit that with our experience of the profundity of the Gospels, the glory of the sermon on the mount for example? For three years he travelled around an often-hostile Palestine with a handful of his closest friends; and they did not notice his deceptive nature? If it was all a lie, what was he doing in agony in Gethsemane? Why didn’t he just run away? And what on earth was he doing ending up on the cross? Reread the horror of that event. The idea that he was a trickster just doesn’t work.
OK, we may feel, that’s impossible; so I will look Jesus in the eye and stake my life that he was a lunatic. But that’s even worse. As I encounter the shrewdness, the simplicity, the calmness, the sanity of what he does, the calm relational skills he demonstrates in so many varied situations. A lunatic who thinks they are the creator of the universe is seriously crazy, yet this man is so evidently, calmly, wise. Claiming to be the very Creator (how could one imagine that?): how could he be so sublimely sensible, yet so enormously out of touch with his own nature? (And above all in Judaea, a culture shaped through and through by a sense of the utter uniqueness of God?) How could he be so totally out of touch with who he actually was? Can I stake my life on that?
In the presence of the Gospels, the choice seems stark. I could not – can you? – look Jesus in the face and say, You were totally lunatic when it came to any perceptions about yourself; deliberately or not, Jesus was an utter megalomaniac. But nor could I say, You were an egoistic liar, a trickster, consciously misleading (and so destroying) your closest friends. But then if neither of these options makes any sense, the only other way is to commit ourselves to him as the Lord; God in a human body, coming as prophesied for centuries beforehand, as he always claimed to be. For Christians throughout the ages, that has seemed the only reasonable alternative.
Chinese-American writer Ada Lum says, `His penetrating humour, his iconoclastic challenge to the establishment, his devastating calmness in the midst of personal danger, his compassion and respect for prostitutes as sisters, his warm magnetism for children, his redemptive view of crooked politicians, his unorthodox social habits, his deep integrity in the face of full-blown dilemmas – all these characteristics should inspire us to ask, “Who then is this?” The deity of Jesus Christ awes me.’ That’s how I feel too.
We can’t `prove` it here. We can only decide these things as we read the data for ourselves. (In our Foundations 2-3 post, Jill Spink gave some great suggestions about doing this with some friends.) But if Christian faith is true at all, then we can only decide these things through placing ourselves in a position of humble (which does not mean believing) openness for encounter with God; by taking our Gospels and saying to God – even if we’re praying to a God we’re not sure is there, God is pleased when we do that – ‘If you are there, if in your mercy you show me from these pages the truth about my life and about who Christ was, I will give myself to you and follow you wherever you lead.’ To Christian belief, each of us stands in the presence of God, with the possibility of choice; to take the whole issue off the periphery and expose ourselves to it realistically; to draw, and then live by, our conclusions. And if I were talking to a friend, then in love and fairness I might also want to say, This is unimaginably important; heaven and hell and our future for millions of years can depend on what we do with this.
And finally for those of us who are Christians: there are probably lots of other reasons why we individually are believers. But just from what you yourself have seen of Jesus, could you now be willing to stake your life that he was a liar after all? Or, that he was a maniac? And if neither, then you know that he’s God. You don’t just hope. You don’t just believe. You know.
And then you know that there is a Jesus present in our world. He loves you enormously; he’s going to be there for you this month; he’s going to see you safe from hell and safe to heaven. And as Studd wrote, if that Jesus be God and died for me, then no sacrifice is too great for me to make for him.
ABSORB TIME: Will you stake your life (and possible eternity) on the belief that Jesus was a liar and a deceiver? Or, that he was insane? Or, that he is God, God who came here to live and die for us? If so, everything else in life must be recentred around that reality…
(For further reading try Josh McDowell, More than A Carpenter; Professor Norman Anderson, Jesus Christ: the Witness of History; or Lee Strobel, The Case for Christ.)
