Are the written records of the Gospel historically accurate? Part 1

First of all let me define my terms here. When I speak of the Gospel, I mean that story which is relayed in the four writings of the Christian Bible which are called Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. There are two ways in which the historicity and therefore the accuracy of the Gospel are attacked. The first is through attacking the content of the Gospel. This method goes something like this, the historical records were actually the memoirs of the experiences of the immediate followers of Christ, but they either lied about what really happened or grossly misunderstood what Christ really said and/or meant. The second is through attacking the authorship and/or the chain of evidence of the gospels. This method goes something like this, the four written records are not written by the people who are accredited as authors, but were written well after the fact to justify the beliefs of a weird emerging Jewish sect, or that during the mists of time the nefarious church in order to retain the mind control over its people changed the historical record to cover up the truth and to more accurately fit the church’s message, al la Dan Brown.

[Before I do so I want to make one caveat. Once again I am merely treating these documents as historical for now. I am not attempting to claim that they are the very Word of God. They may contain the story of God’s revelation to man, but I am treating them as if they themselves are not that very revelation. For now I can dismiss the claim against them, that the four stories seemingly contradict one another on minor points (I do believe that one can reconcile the Gospel stories, but that this is beyond the scope of what I am attempting to do at this point in time), as they need not agree 100% in every detail to be generally historically accurate. For example one does not need to reconcile the fact that Christ is recorded to have said “X” in one Gospel account and “X + Y” in another Gospel account; if we treat the written records like we treat all other historical records, there is abundant historical evidence in the Gospels that Christ for example in fact existed. In other words the differences (if there are any at all) are petty differences in the overall arch of the historical story line. Ironing out these minor differences is important only if one is claiming that the Gospels themselves are inspired and infallible, which I am not doing at the moment. Ok I will stop beating that dead horse.]

Let’s see if these arguments stand up to scrutiny. Let’s work our way backwards chronologically. Argument - Sometime during the middle ages the Church changed what was written in the Gospels to a message more in line with its teaching. Response – We have literally thousands of written historical manuscripts (copies of the original) that date back before the Middle Ages that were located all across Europe and the Middle East. Argument – Those manuscripts must have all been tampered with in some grand conspiracy. It is helpful to know a little history for this. From about 800 AD until 1500AD (of course after 1500 the church has split even more) the nefarious Church was effectively split between two factions, which did not particularly care for one another. So in order for this to happen the two halves of the Church had to agree on the exact changes to be made across thousands of miles and inform each monastery, university and local church, some of which were at the very outpost of human civilization, in fact anywhere there was a manuscript of the Bible, to change hundreds and thousands of hand written manuscripts, of a book which these people held to be the unchangeable Word of God. Not missing a one tucked in a library somewhere forgotten. All of this must have been done without one shred of evidence of the change or of the conspiracy to the modern observer. Not only that but it doesn’t explain the existence of the church itself. If they didn’t believe that Christ was who He claimed to be what was the whole point of the Church to begin with. This is a little hard to believe to say the least. Argument – Ok so maybe there wasn’t a grand conspiracy. Maybe the monks just made small little mistakes here and there and it started to add up over the course of time. Response – We have over ten thousand manuscripts from various time periods and regions of the world all of which are 98 % accurate with each other. None of the scribal errors deal with any point of Christian doctrine. In other words the errors that did occur are on minor points, like misspellings etc. Argument – Well we must go back further before the Middle Ages to see where the manuscripts were changed. Response – The earliest complete manuscript of the Gospel of John is around the early third century that is around 200 AD, and we have portions of manuscripts that date back another 75 years to around 125AD. So if there really was a change in the message of the church it had to have happened prior to this. Argument – Ah Ha! Your complete manuscripts only go back to around 200AD, and you don’t have the originals. So they can’t be proven to be historically accurate. Response – While we do not have the originals the manuscripts we do have are closer to the date of the originals than any other book of antiquity. For example, most for books of antiquity from around the same period the closest manuscript we have to the original is around 900 years. So if we claim the Bible is not historical due to this relatively small gap in the line, then we would have to throw out virtually every book written before 500AD as unhistorical. So we have now pushed the time line of when the church could have changed the Gospel message back through the Middle Ages, back through Christianity being named as the official religion of the Roman Empire, back through even Constantine and the Edict of Milan, which prohibited the persecution of Christians, all the way back to 200AD, which is important because during this time Christians were being killed for their beliefs by Rome.

To be continued . . .

Thomas