Is the Bible an Accurate Record of Jesus’ Life? (Part 1)

(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: We are taking the time to lay out the evidence for belief in the person of Jesus Christ. If you’re a thinking person, Christianity has always said you do not have to throw your mind away to become a Christian. In fact, if you’ll use that mind of yours, it will bring you to Jesus Christ. This is different than any other religion in the world. You don’t have to come into it, jump in with both feet, before you experience that it’s true or whatever you experience. You can investigate it from the outside and come to a conclusion with your head: this is the truth.

Now, that’s a powerful statement, and we want to back it up with evidence. Dr. Montgomery, in a previous article we were simply asking the question, “Do we have accurate information about this person?” You claim it’s historical. Give us a little summary for all the people that missed that.

Dr. John W. Montgomery: Yes. I had a debate some years ago with Professor Stroll at the University of British Columbia. Professor Stroll said that the documents of the New Testament were simply not adequate to get a picture of Jesus. And I offered evidence to show that these documents are the best-attested documents of the classical world. I said, “If you want to give up Jesus Christ, you first of all have got to dump your knowledge of the classical world.” Professor Stroll said, “Fine. I will throw out the classical world.” At which point the head of the classics department got up and said, “Good Lord, Avrum, not that!” You can’t just toss out Greco-Roman antiquity because you don’t want to face the documents that present Jesus Christ. We have already established that these documents are sound historical materials for understanding who Jesus actually was.

Dr. John Ankerberg: And as William F. Albright said, they can’t be myth; they can’t be legend, because in his opinion every one of the books of the New Testament documents they’ve got on their shelf at home or in the New Testament was written by a baptized Jew between the time of 45 to 75 AD, probably 50 to 80 in his opinion. But you showed us it’s probably more likely under 65, right back to the time of Jesus.

Dr. John W. Montgomery: Yes. In any case, there’s no doubt but what these documents were in circulation while hostile witnesses to the life of Jesus were still alive. And the existence of those hostile witnesses means that the writers could not have fabricated or altered or changed the material about Jesus and gotten away with it.

Dr. John Ankerberg: Yes. Let’s give an illustration. If I were to ask all the people over a certain age, where were you, and do you remember how you felt when you heard President Kennedy had been shot? Most people can remember where they were, and bring back the very emotion that they had. Do you remember how you felt when you saw Jackie Kennedy coming off the airplane with that blood-splattered dress? Or watching the casket go down the streets in Washington, or John-John saluting at the casket? I mean, people can remember that vividly, but the fact is it happened in 1963.

If somebody were to come out and say, “You know, this is how Kennedy really died. There was an Indian standing on the street in Dallas, and he had a bow and arrow. And he took the bow, shot the arrow and got Kennedy right in the head. That’s how he died.” All the people that were eyewitnesses on the streets in Dallas and all the people that have watched it on television, even though it was more than 60 years ago, we would say, “No!” Because we’re still living. It happened that many years ago. Same thing with the Gospel records. Isn’t that what you’re saying?

Dr. John W. Montgomery: Certainly!

Dr. John Ankerberg: So we have accurate information; it couldn’t be myth, couldn’t be legend. But some people say, “But listen, in these texts that have come down, don’t we have errors in the texts?”

Dr. John W. Montgomery: Well, of course, copyists, as they work with materials will introduce what the textual critics call “errors of the pen” or “errors of the eye.” As a manuscript is dictated, they may mis-hear. As they have a copy next to them, they may mis-copy it. But it’s possible to discover these errors as the textual critic compares the texts that come from different copyist traditions. And that’s exactly what goes on in the case of the New Testament documents. And on the basis of that kind of analysis, the conclusion is that we can be surer of the texts of the New Testament than we can of any of the other books of antiquity. We certainly can be sure of the portrait set forth of Jesus. We can tell whether or not He was an Eastern guru, a seller of pastrami sandwiches, or God Almighty on the basis of this primary source evidence.

Dr. John Ankerberg: It’s the same thing you have with every other historical document.

Dr. John W. Montgomery: Surely. There’s no difference at all. And the method of analyzing that we have engaged in is exactly the method that we would use for any other document, and that’s very important. Because it means that if a person has not committed himself to Jesus Christ, we’re not asking that person to engage in some kind of special spiritual reasoning. We’re asking him simply to use the same kind of reasoning that he employs in every other area of life to determine the reliability of documents and the reliability of testimony, and if he applies those methods to the case for Jesus Christ, he’ll move right along the lines that we’re moving.

Dr. John Ankerberg: Yes. Let me just give one example. I think we mentioned 24,000 manuscripts have come down to us, documents of the New Testament, different shapes and sizes, and so on. But let’s say you’ve got 24,000 different versions of John 3:16, and you’ve got 23,900 of them that say,

“For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believes in him shall not perish but have everlasting life.”

And you have 100 that say,

“God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believes in him shall not perish but have everlasting life.”

And the textual critic says, “Well, you see, you’ve got an error there?” What was the word that was missing? Did you catch it? The word “for;” I left out “for” at the front.

So now, textual criticism, for those of you who aren’t involved in it, but they would say, take a wild guess: if you’ve got 23,900 with the word “for” in there, and you’ve got 100 that don’t have it in there, what conclusion would you come to? Should it be in there or shouldn’t it be in there? That would be number one.

But number two, even if you couldn’t decide that, if you would have to say, “Well, we just don’t know,” would it change the meaning of the rest of the verse? And it wouldn’t. And that’s basically what we’re covering in the New Testament. None of these scribal errors that have come down to us, even if you say, “Well, listen, we have ‘X’ amount of documents over here that disagree with these documents,” when you put those disagreements on the board, none of them change the information, even if you can’t figure that out. Isn’t that correct?

Dr. John W. Montgomery: Almost all of the errors, or “errors” so-called, are of the nature that you were just describing. They have to do with non-substantive matters. A very common example is to have a passage where one text will say, “Jesus and his disciples walked along the shores of Galilee.” And another text will say, “They walked along the shores of the Sea of Galilee” where Jesus and His disciples had been mentioned in the preceding sentence. That sort of thing can easily be explained by copyists not following a text as closely as they might.

But the point is, even in those instances, as we move back through time, getting closer and closer to the original writing, it’s possible to refine this and determine to a high degree of certainty what the original text said. It may be true that at the very tip of the triangle, you don’t have direct evidence, but you simply extrapolate. You would hardly assume that when you got back to that point, suddenly there would be gigantic problems appearing. It’s more reasonable to assume that those problems would totally disappear if you were arriving right at the original manuscript of the author.

Dr. John Ankerberg: This brings up the question, many non-Christians are starting to listen to you and say, “Well, listen, you really are taking this as historical documents by eyewitness writers; doesn’t sound like you’re talking about the fact that they’re inerrant.” We’re going to spend more time on the Bible in later articles, but to start with, define your terms. We are not taking these documents to start with for the non-Christian and saying, “Listen, we’re going to start pushing the inerrancy of the Word of God down your throat to start with.” Explain what we’re doing.

Dr. John W. Montgomery: As we move along, we’re going to discover that these reliable historical documents with which we began turn out to be far more than that. They turn out to be the very Word of God. But, we are beginning with them as ordinary historical documents, the same kind of documents that we have dealing with other historical events. And it’s important that we move in this fashion, because we cannot expect a person who isn’t already committed to Jesus Christ suddenly to look at a Bible and say, “My gosh, every single word is true!” The fact that the Bible is written on India paper isn’t going to impress a person who has not seen what the evidence is. So we’re building up to the total truth of this material through a series of steps. Hang on. We’ll get to that later.

Dr. John Ankerberg: Right. Now we’ve got the fact on the board that we’ve got accurate historical information, but what does that information tell us about Jesus? What do the eyewitnesses say? What did Jesus Himself say? He ought to have known.

(to be continued)