The Case for Christ--Eyewitness Evidence

Memorial Day Weekend--what an impressive tribute to our armed forces during the worship service today! Please remember our armed forces who are serving around the world and their families and loved ones in your prayers this week. Also, please keep Kathleen's mom in your prayers as she seeks a new job and is being considered for a position that appears to fit her skills and experience well. Also, would you please pray for Rebecca Edwards, a friend of the Lovingshimers who sustained a serious knee injury while playing soccer this week. She is dealing with pain and a surgical repair and recovery.

During class today, we considered evidence of Jesus and the New Testament based on the direct and indirect eyewitness reports of those who were contemporaries of Jesus. The Gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John are either statements of one who actually witnessed and heard Jesus or they are statements of one who talked to those who saw and heard Jesus. Matthew was one of the original twelve disciples and recorded the words and deeds of Jesus based on his own first-hand account. Likewise, John was in the inner circle of Jesus and wrote about his first-hand observations of Jesus and repeated the actual words of Jesus. Mark was a close confidant of Peter and appears to have recorded the personal experiences of Peter in his relationship with Jesus. While not mentioned in the DVD today, the book does mention an early church historian by the name of Papias who specifically affirmed that Mark had carefully and accurately recorded Peter's eyewitness observations. In fact, he said Mark "made no mistake" and did not include "any false statement." Irenaeus, another early church historian, verified that Luke, who has been called "the historian", was a companion of Paul and "set down in a book the gospel preached by his teacher."

Strobel's research and interviews with the top Bible scholars of our time clearly indicated that the first written records of Jesus acts and words came within a realtively short period of time after His death and resurrection and certainly within a generation of Jesus' life on earth. Until that time, the facts about Jesus were maintained through oral tradition. In the lesson today, we learned that the oral tradition of an ancient culture required those who would share this sacred information to actually memorize the information perfectly in order to ensure that the information was accurately transmitted to the next generation. As a result of the realtively short period of time between the life of Jesus and the recording of these eyewitness accounts, Biblical scholars have suggested that the accuracy of the data was actually enhanced since there would have still been eyewitnesses around who would most assuredly have challenged any false or blatantly inaccurate information that was written in the first manuscripts describing the life and words of Jesus.

We had a brief discussion this morning about the allegations raised by some non-believers that because the details of the Gospels are not perfectly aligned, its credibility is called into question. On the contrary, as we discussed, the fact that there are differences in the eyewitness accounts helps to assure readers that the writers were not acting in collusion. Also, as we mentioned in class, there are no discrepancies about the main themes and critical points of any of these stories.

We looked at a few perceived discrepancies of the Bible and discussed possible resolutions that could be simple explanations.
We looked at 1 Chronicles 21:25 and 2 Samuel 24:24 and the apparent contradiction between the amount of money that King David paid for the property and equipment where he was led to build an altar to make sacrifices to the Lord. We also made reference to Matthew 8:5-13 and Luke 7:1-10 in which there appears to be some contradiction about who asked Jesus to heal the child. Also, in Matthew 1: 1-16 and Luke 3: 23-38, different names are listed in the geneologies of Jesus. These contradictions and about 800 others are addressed in a book called "When Critics Ask" by Norman Geisler. Dr. Geisler says, "...in my experience when critics raise these objections, they invaariably violate one of seventeen principles for interpreting scripture." Now, I am on a quest to find out what those seventeen principles are. Have a great week. Jimmy