The Gospels vs. Claims of Contradiction

Welcome! Today we have our final installment in our series on the reliability of the gospels. Two weeks ago we focused on atheists’ and others’ claims that the gospels are fabrications. We looked at when the gospels were written, using as evidence early copies, letters by Christians, and writings by those who were neutral or even opposed to the Christian faith. We saw strong evidence for a very small gap in time between the events in Christ’s life and the writing of the gospels as well as overwhelming evidence that the gospel accounts were not “doctored” in the following centuries.

Last week we focused on claims that the gospels must be in error based on what the gospels say. We focused in on the miracles of Jesus because that is one of the things people have a hard time with. As the atheist Christopher Hitchens has said, “Exceptional claims demand exceptional evidence.” I think we showed evidence that was pretty exceptional. Our main approach was to show that alternative explanations for how the gospels accounts were written and came to be strongly believed as fact were all severely flawed. For example, we talked about how if you start with the presumption that the miracles were “added in” you find the problem that the miracles are completely integrated into the entire story and, beyond this, essential! 

The Gospels vs. Claims of Error

Welcome! Today we continue our series on the reliability of the Gospels. Last week we began by explaining that we were focusing in on the Gospels because they are the most central documents of the Christian faith; they are “ground zero” for the fundamental claims of Christianity. If one accepts the Gospels as true accounts, the fact that Jesus and the Gospel writers clearly believed the Old Testament makes it natural to trust in the Old Testament as well. Similarly, the other material in the New Testament can also be believed because the fundamental teachings are clearly based on the historicity of the Gospels.

Last week we also focused in on atheists’ claims that the Gospels are fabrications. We addressed this by looking in some detail at when the Gospels were likely written, as evidenced by early copies of the Gospels, as evidenced by Gospel fragments, as evidenced by other early letters by Christians referring to the Gospels, and as evidenced by early letters by those who were not Christian but who acknowledged some Christian claims along with some historical events in the life of Christ. 

This week I want to discuss claims that the Gospels must be wrong, must be in error, because of what they say. There are two common types of arguments along these lines. First, people try to find and point out specific errors in the details between one gospel and another or between a gospel and a non-gospel piece of evidence such as an item from archaeology, another document, geographical data, etc. This category I will refer to as contradictions, and we will look at this next week.

The Gospels vs. Claims of Fabrication

Welcome! Today we begin a three-week series that is something significantly different from our usual Sunday morning. Normally we have a message that is either based on a particular passage of Scripture (sometimes our series take us through a book of the Bible), or a topical message that looks at a variety of passages from the Bible to see what it has to say about a given topic. Although these two types of messages have differences, they are the same in that the Bible is what we go to in order to learn.  

Personally, I trust the Bible. I love the Bible. I have been a Christian for close to 25 years, and over that time, my respect for the Bible as a source of wisdom, as being a trustworthy account of history, as being a tool God uses to personally speak to my life, has only grown year after year after year. In contrast, my respect for the world as a source of these things has fallen continually. In addition, my respect for myself, apart from the wisdom I have gained from the Bible, has also only become less and less over time. This has not happened because I have become increasingly brainwashed, or because I am losing my mind; it has happened because the Bible has proven itself again and again to me. Things I thought might have been wrong in the Bible have turned out be because I misunderstood what the Bible was saying or because I was led astray by other sources, Christian and otherwise.