(extracted from our series “Was Jesus Christ a Liar, a Lunatic, a Legend, or God?)
The late John Warwick Montgomery was a practicing trial lawyer both in England and America. He held many positions including Distinguished Research Professor of Philosophy at Concordia University in Wisconsin. He is also the author of numerous books, including Evidence for Faith: Deciding the God Question.
Dr. John Ankerberg: You know, I believe that Christianity is absolutely true. It’s not just one good belief among thousands of different beliefs, but the thing about Christianity: it’s unique, it’s true, and there is evidence that a thinking person can investigate that will bring you to the same conclusion—that it’s true, and you can invest your life in it. You can give your life to the Lord Jesus Christ.
Now, Dr. Montgomery, I want to come right to the point, and that is, you have said that Christianity is different from all the other religions in the sense that you say it can be verified. A person can check out the evidence for its claims before they jump into it. Tell us what you mean.
Dr. John W. Montgomery: There are innumerable religious claims in the world. Religions appear on the scene right and left. I come from California, “the land of the fruits and the nuts,” and in California the number of religions probably exceeds the number of people. Now, it’s one thing to make a religious claim, it’s a totally different thing to demonstrate that claim. As in the field of law, anybody can file suit, but winning the case is a very different matter. And in the case of Christianity, we have claims that have to do with history, with historical fact; with certain events which, if they took place, the Christian faith is vindicated. If they didn’t take place, it’s false.
And Christianity has been willing to put itself on the line in that respect across the centuries. At the very beginning, a rabbinic lawyer and convert to Christianity by the name of Paul said if Christ isn’t risen from the dead, we are of all men most miserable (1 Corinthians 15:14-19). In other words, if the resurrection didn’t take place, Christianity is false. If the resurrection did take place, Christianity turns out to be true. So, history is the field in which we can test the claims of Christianity.
Dr. John Ankerberg: Most people right off the bat would say, “Listen, but you’ve got innumerable problems. You’re talking history, you’re talking the Bible as the evidence, you’re talking about disciples that were a part of writing that were all buddy-buddy with Jesus, and then I’ve heard all of this modern textual criticism.” Where would you start in laying out the evidence for a thinking person that says, “Listen, I’ve heard all that. What about that?”
Dr. John W. Montgomery: Well, in the first place, since Christianity came on the scene in history, the first question will have to do with the documents by which we know about it. How good are these documents? If the New Testament documents were written by drunken monks in the tenth century, Christianity is in deep trouble. But they weren’t. They were written by eyewitnesses of the events themselves, or by associates of eyewitnesses. So, this material is what a historian would call “primary source material,” what a lawyer would call “non-hearsay.”
Then, having looked at the documents, we want to see what they have to say about Jesus. Do they present Him as a simple prophet, as a kind of Jewish Boy Scout helping little old ladies across the Sea of Galilee? Or do they present Him as a bit more than that? As a matter of fact, we will discover that they present Jesus as God Almighty, as “very God of very God,” as the Creeds put it. Then, we have to ask ourselves, “Was He really that kind of person?” Because He could claim such and yet not be that. So, we turn to the central evidence presented to show that He was the person He claimed to be, namely, His resurrection from the dead.
So, it seems to me we want to proceed along three lines. First of all, the documents; second, what the documents have to say about Jesus; and then the evidence that what they say about Jesus is correct—specifically, His resurrection.
Dr. John Ankerberg: Alright, now you’re a trial attorney, and the fact is that when you sift evidence, you said there are eyewitnesses. Now, I think this comes as a surprise to many people. Eyewitnesses to Jesus Christ? Come on! Who were they?
Dr. John W. Montgomery: Well, for example, the first Gospel was written by Matthew Levi, a tax collector, who became an apostle, a disciple of Jesus, and who wrote on the basis of his own observation of what Jesus said and did. The fourth Gospel was written by John who was the youngest of the disciples and lived the longest. We have independent evidence that he died in the city of Ephesus around the year 95. We have records of two of his students where they indicate to us that John was in fact the author of that book, and he passed on information to them about the authorship of the other major Gospels. The second Gospel was written by John Mark who was a companion of Peter, one of the apostles. And Luke’s Gospel was written by the physician who accompanied the apostle Paul on his missionary journeys. And Paul was accepted by the original eleven apostles as a legitimate apostle in his own right.
Dr. John Ankerberg: And, of course, you’ve got James and Peter.
Dr. John W. Montgomery: Those as well.
Dr. John Ankerberg: That’s right. So you have seven eyewitnesses that said they were either there or checked out other witnesses and gave us information, which is what we have in the New Testament. But then I can hear many of the folks that are listening in right now, they would be saying, “But Dr. Montgomery, you know those were all the disciples of Jesus. Those were His friends. Didn’t they pad the case? I mean, didn’t they really kind of make it up and lift Jesus up? And we really don’t have any skeptics in the group there; we just have good friends of Jesus. How do we know that they actually are telling us the truth about what Jesus actually did?”
Dr. John W. Montgomery: That’s one of the central questions, and it seems to me we need to face that directly. And there are two things we need to see about it. First of all, these people did not start out as believers. In fact, after Jesus’ crucifixion, they were back at the old fishing nets. They quite obviously had not arrived at the belief reflected in the writings that they produced later. What changed their minds was the resurrection itself. We see this in the case of Thomas, who wouldn’t believe unless he could touch the nail prints in Jesus’ hands and thrust his hand into his side after the resurrection. That’s the first thing.
Second thing is, it doesn’t really make any difference whether a writer about Jesus or a writer about anything else is a friend of the person that he writes about if he produces his writings in an environment where there are hostile witnesses. The fact is that the early apostles went out and presented what we have in the New Testament in a primarily Jewish audience, particularly in the synagogues. And the Jewish religious leaders had been the primary opponents of Jesus’ message.
Now, it is inconceivable that the disciples, friends of Jesus or not, could have gotten away with incorrect information about Jesus in the presence of hostile witnesses who had themselves had contact with Jesus’ life and who had what we lawyers call “means, motive, and opportunity” to destroy that picture.
Dr. John Ankerberg: Now, we’ve had folks that would say, “Well, yes, that sounds pretty good, but how do you know that what the disciples saw has come down to us accurately?” In other words, two things: some will say, “You know, alright, you’ve got seven eyewitnesses; you’ve got people that said they saw things and heard Jesus say things; they wrote it down. But don’t we have a lot of errors in the text and weren’t these things written down hundreds of years later?”
I mean, I’ve had Jewish rabbis on the program that said, you know, two or three hundred years after the time that Jesus lived we have the documents. And the fact is it would be like talking to the man in the front row, whispering something into his ear, and he whispers something into the next guy’s ear and it goes all the way around, and by the time it gets to the back, the message has changed. And what they’re saying is, “Listen, that’s where Jesus and the disciples, they were talking up there, and then those guys passed it on word of mouth, word of mouth, word of mouth, and by the time it got down here we’ve got legend. We’ve got myth.” What do you say to that?
Dr. John W. Montgomery: Well, in the case of the New Testament documents we have writings of antiquity which were copied and recopied across the centuries up to the time of the invention of printing in the West in the fifteenth century. There is a science known as textual criticism which examines the documents to see whether they have been altered through the copying and recopying, and which corrects the documents on the basis of better texts.
This is a highly technical field, and the results of it are what interest us, not the means by which those results were obtained. We couldn’t go into that. But the results of textual criticism applied to the New Testament documents is very simple: The New Testament documents are the best-attested documents of the Ancient World. That is to say, there has been the least difficulty in getting back to the original content of those documents as compared with any of the documents of classical antiquity.
I’ll give you a few examples here. I majored in classics as an undergraduate at Cornell University, and I spent an entire semester on the Roman poet Catullus. He wrote love poems. It was a delightful semester. And no one mentioned in the course of that series of sessions on Catullus that all of the poems of Catullus that we have come from one manuscript which was discovered during the Italian Renaissance and has since been lost. In other words, the earliest manuscript of the complete poems of Catullus was a thousand years after the writing of those poems themselves. This is in general the situation as to the documents of classical antiquity.
In contrast with this we have the New Testament documents. We have complete texts of the Gospels going back within 300 years of the original writings—300 years! And the 300 years is bridged by quotations, fragments, lectionary readings that take us right back on top of the original writings. We even have a fragment of the Gospel of John that is dated at 100; in other words, within five years of the writing of the Gospel itself. Classical textual critics would sell their grandmothers for that kind of evidence in regard to writers such as Catullus.
Now, the conclusion that we have to arrive at in this is that if you want to throw out the New Testament documents on the basis of some textual argument, you must first dump your entire knowledge of Greco-Roman history; because our knowledge of Greece and Rome depend upon documentary evidence less adequate than the documentary evidence for Jesus Christ.
(to be continued)