As many of you know, I grew up in a non-religious society. When I was young, we studied Greek mythology in school and I read a lot of it. In fact, I probably read the entire collection because I was fascinated with the cool stories. Somebody had quite an imagination to come up with the wild and out-of-this-world tales of Zeus and Athena and the Cyclops and the myriad of gods and demi-gods that populated Olympus. Then there were the “dark” forces of Hades, the river Styx with its ferryman and the big bad three-headed monster Cerberus. I put the word ‘dark’ in quotes because it wasn’t always obvious that the gods of Olympus were any better than the gods of the underworld. They stole, murdered, cheated and lied to one another just as they did to people on Earth. But still, the stories were awesome. They fueled my imagination with vivid pictures of battles where man stood against man and god stood against god, with heroes and villains reigning over the world in succession and with all the amazing powers each god wielded. And through it all I never had the slightest doubt that these stories were products of wild imagination of men who attempted to understand their extremely complicated world. Where they failed to use reason they filled the gaping holes with mysticism and invented new powers, new gods and new incredible adventures.
And in this highly vivid and imaginative world Jesus fit right in. He was a bit confusing, since his message was different from the gods of Greece, but hey, he had more powers than the Greek gods since he claimed to be the only god, unlimited by anybody or anything. If people wanted to believe in him, that was just fine with me. Personally, I did not see the point of going to a largely dark and gloomy church (you know what I mean if you’ve ever visited the Russian orthodox variety) filled with old people lighting some candles to icons. Aha, I said to myself, those icons are like the demi-gods in Greek mythology. All these guys have powers but they are weaker than the ultimate guy at the top.
Fast-forward to about 5 years ago. By that time I was going to college, working pretty hard toward my degrees and enjoying the experience. Also by that time, I had a few good Christian friends. Most of the time religion didn’t come up in our conversations, but now and again we would talk and battle over how it was just another form of control and how the tithes were used to cheat people out of their income to promote church’s goals. Jesus was still a great myth in my head and all this stuff about prophets and miracles fit right along the lines of all the other lustrous but dead religions that came before Christianity.
And then came one day which I remember quite vividly. I was riding in a car, debating a friend of mine on the merits of religion and at some point he turned his head, looked at me and said: “You know that Jesus is a true historical figure, not a figment of imagination, right?”
Huh? Someone has the audacity to claim that? that’s ridiculous! I mean, that’s a good story and all, but it would be absurd to claim that he is anything but a story made up by a few people.
“No, no,” my friend protested, “even the non-religious historians agree that Jesus truly lived. They might say that he was just a prophet, not a god, but it’s a historically accurate fact.”
Weird. That conversation kind of stuck to me. So Jesus is real? I don’t think so! Hmm…and yet this new claim bothered me. There were some uneasy repercussions to that statement if, indeed, it was true. Well, apparently, I was not the only one bothered by this thought. Some of the most prominent historians, archaeologists, lawyers and scholars have set out to check for themselves the validity of the stories in the New Testament.
So what have they found? Well, I could not put it better than it has already been put before me so I will refer to a couple of books that contain their analysis. Keep in mind that most of the people I quote here were atheists or agnostics who took an extremely careful and skeptical look at the evidence before deriving the answer. Many of them are the top scholars of their respective disciplines.
Josh McDowell writes: “After personally trying to shatter the historicity and validity of the Scriptures, I have come to the conclusion that they are historically trustworthy. If a person discards the Bible as unreliable in this sense, then he or she must discard almost all the literature of antiquity. “ What does he mean by that? Geisler and Turek shed more insight in their detailed study of the historicity of the New Testament: “To see if the New Testament is a record of actual history, we need to answer two questions concerning the documents that comprise the New Testament:
- Do we have accurate copies of the original documents that were written down in the first century?
- Do those documents speak the truth.”
The authors then spend 75 pages of their book meticulously documenting and presenting every fact that has been established about the historicity of the New Testament. Their conclusion is supported by a wealth of secular and religious archaeological, historical and legal studies. I do not have the right nor the desire to copy their work so instead I will present just a few excerpts from their writing as well as from McDowell’s book.
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