How Can We Today be Sure that Christianity’s Claims about Jesus are True?
Q&A • One way to answer this important question is to show that Christianity’s truth hinges on historical events, especially Jesus' resurrection, which is supported by reliable New Testament testimony and corroborated by historical and textual evidence. Read on to see what I mean.
Read time: 5 min
Christianity rises or falls on historical events. It claims that Jesus was a historical man living in Judea in the First Century A.D. (Matt. 1:1; 2:1). His conception was miraculously effected by the Spirit of God in his virgin mother (Luke 1:34-35). He was, in fact, the Eternal God incarnate, both fully human and fully divine, two natures in one person (Gal. 4:4; Heb. 1:3, 8). He was and claimed to be the long-awaited and prophesied Messiah and the Son of God (John 4:25-26; Luke 22:70). As such, Jesus lived a sinless life and died a foreordained, substitutionary death in the place of sinners on a Roman cross (1 Cor. 15:1-3). He was raised back to life three days later and he ascended on high and out of sight in the presence of his disciples (1 Tim. 3:16). If these events did not occur and if Jesus was not whom he said he was, then Christians are bearing false testimony about God (1 Cor. 15:15).
For some, however, two thousand years is too long ago for us today to have much certainty of the truth of such historical claims. In response, I will argue that (1) historical knowledge of the truth of Christianity’s claims is possible and (2) the New Testament Gospels bear rich and reliable testimony to such claims.
First, historical knowledge of the truth of Christianity’s claims is possible.
Given that prophecy predicted it, Jesus predicted it, and its very occurrence consummated his earthly mission by defeating death, Jesus’ resurrection is uniquely the ultimate validation of the historicity of Christianity. Christian apologist, Gary Habermas, has developed a shorthand method of verifying Christianity by verifying the resurrection. Habermas employs “what he calls a ‘minimal facts’ approach to the resurrection which focuses on a few facts for which there is strong evidence and on which most scholars, even atheists, agree.”[1]
The first of the minimal facts is that Jesus actually died by crucifixion. Not only do the four gospels say as much, but First Century historians, Josephus (Jewish) and Tacitus (Roman), said as much, not to mention the Talmud and other contemporary writings.[2]
Second, Jesus’ disciples believed that Jesus had risen and appeared unto them. “They certainly claimed it, and were transformed into bold proclaimers of the gospel who were willing to suffer imprisonment, torture and death.”[3]
Third, the apostle Paul’s life was dramatically changed over a few days. From proud persecutor to humble proclaimer, Paul criss-crossed Asia Minor, suffering and exhausting himself for beliefs he claimed to have received from the risen Christ (Gal. 1:13-16).[4]
Fourth, Jesus’ own brother, James, who originally was skeptical of Jesus’ Messianic identity (John 7:5) suddenly changed and became a central figure in the church in Jerusalem (Gal. 2:9). Paul includes James in the list of those to whom Jesus had personally appeared (1 Cor. 15:7).[5]
Fifth, Jesus’ tomb was empty. Jesus’ body has never been found. Given the motivation for the Jews and the Romans to produce his body and undermine the claim of the resurrection, this fact is remarkable.[6] Though there is not space here to go into detail, no alternate theory denying Jesus’ resurrection can explain these basic, uncontested facts of history, which are best explained by exactly what Scripture claims: “he is risen, as he said” (Matt. 28:6).
Second, the New Testament Gospels are reliable witnesses, and they claim Jesus rose from the dead.
Often, an unbeliever assumes that the Bible has been either fabricated or corrupted or both. How can we even trust that the Bible is the same Bible as was written so long ago? The answer to this question, in large part, involves the discipline of Textual Criticism, the “analysis of various copies, fragments, versions, and translations of a text with the goal of recovering the wording of the original manuscript in its final form.”[7]
Today we have well over five thousand manuscripts available to analyze, “more than any other text from the ancient world!”[8] Since copyists (scribes) were human and thus subject to an occasional error, the thousands of manuscripts contain spelling variations, missing or duplicated words or verses, conflations of two separate accounts of the same story, and smoothing of rougher readings. The truth is, however, as Timothy Paul Jones notes, all the errors in total (known as variants) only affect less than 8% of the New Testament text.
What’s more, “the overwhelming majority of these differences have to do with words that are misspelled or rearranged—differences that have zero impact on the translation or meaning of the text” (emphasis added).[9]
For context, we further realize that the New Testament manuscripts are far better preserved than any other text from the ancient world, even the writings of Homer, Herodotus, and Plato.[10] But we hardly hear historians or philosophers claiming those Greek writings are corrupts and fundamentally different than their originals.
What the writers of the New Testament wrote has been remarkably preserved in the multitude of manuscripts. This is why when the biblical writers narrate and affirm the story of Jesus Christ we may trust what they wrote. And these texts bear witness to Jesus’ resurrection from the dead (Luke 1:1-4; Acts 1:1-4). ❖
References
Brian K. Morley, Mapping Apologetics: Comparing Contemporary Approaches (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2015), Kindle edition, 334.
Ibid., 337.
Ibid., 338.
Ibid.
Ibid., 339.
Ibid.
Timothy Paul Jones, How We Got the Bible (Torrance: Rose Publishing, Inc., 2016), Kindle edition, 1944-1945.
Ibid., 2004.
Ibid., 2015-2019.
Ibid., 2021-2022.
