Are the written records of the Gospel historically accurate? Part 2

So we have now pushed back the timeline of when the Gospel message could have been written or tampered with to the earliest existing complete manuscript around 200AD. Let’s move on to the next arguments. Argument – The four Gospels were written or tampered with during the period between 200AD (the date of the last known manuscript) and 100AD (the death of the last man to actually be an eye witness of the events recorded in the Gospels). Response – If the Gospels obscured the real story of the teaching of merely a Galilean rabbi named Jesus and changed it into the religion of the Son of God during this time, it doesn’t solve the problem of the existence of the church prior to this change. If the subsequent generations of Christians believed that he was nothing more than a Jewish philosopher, what was the whole point of having a following in the first place, a following that lasted not only after His death but also the death of the His immediate followers. Logically there should have been no grand and great following to even concoct such a scheme. Secondly there would have been no motive present to the leadership of the early church to disregard the original message of Jesus and the Apostles and create something new out of thin air, other than to potentially control the laity. Typically in a cult the leadership in power seeks to control others for some kind of personal gain. What possible personal gain did the leadership get here in changing the message? They would have known that the only logical outcome of the creation of this new pseudo-religion would be to be subsequently killed by Rome. Why make up a story that is just going to get you killed, and why stick to that story even in the face of certain death? The people being put to death were not just the laity, but reached all the way up to the highest leadership. Some people are stupid, but that would really be a colossal case of stupidity on a grand scale. Additionally, they had no way of exercising any physical control over their members as they all lived in the much broader context of the Rome world. In other words they couldn’t quarantine their followers off from the rest of society and brainwash them like modern cults, as most of them where little more than slaves themselves, they quite simply had no means to do so. No, they acted as if they really and truly believed the story that they were telling others, and back that belief up with their very lives. Another problem with this theory is that the Christian following even at the end of the first century (around 100AD) was extremely broad, reaching throughout the Roman empire and into the Middle East. Again the conspiracy had to be well coordinated, leaving virtually no evidence of Jesus’ true original message, and being very very through in getting everyone to agree with the new message, with no hint of dissent among the ranks. A hundred years is not a long period of time for a wide spread, technologically inferior (where it might have taken many years to even get one message across the breadth of the known Christian world), oppressed people to create a new story, wipe out all evidence of the original story all without anyone standing up and saying “This is a bunch of bunk. That’s not the story that was originally told to me.” For this type of conspiracy to work it would have had to had taken place almost at the very beginning when there were very few followers who knew what was going on and all of those followers were in the same general geographical location. Argument – What about the other gospels and writings which the church attempted to destroy and in some cases did in fact destroy? They clearly show a different message other than the one which became the official version of the story. Response – While I don’t want to spend time debunking each and every Gnostic gospel produced during this time period (although others have), I will say that the existence of these writings do not help the skeptics’ case at all, as each one of these alternative gospels all claim even more extraordinary things about Jesus than the “official story”. The fact that these gospels were discredited shows that the early church was concerned about the purity of the real story, and not on subsequent embellishments of that story. And even the writings that were destroyed there exists evidence that they in fact at one time existed, in that we have the written record of the early church’s arguments against them. There is simply no evidence, none, that anyone believed that Jesus was just merely a man who merely had a few witty things to say.
So we have now established that for the “change the Gospel” conspiracy theory to work it must have happened very early as Christianity spread rapidly both in numbers and geographically. I believe that we can safely push the timeline back to the original Apostles. Argument – Paul and/or the other first generation Jesus followers (the Apostles) made up the story found in the four gospels to create a new religion. Response – To respond to this, one must understand the Jews and the Jewish history up to this point in time. The Jewish people were fiercely monotheistic, more so than any other culture in existence at the time. Monotheism had been hammered into to them for several hundred years prior to the events of the first century. There was a messianic expectation, but it was viewed as more of a political salvation from whoever was ruling over them at the time. It was never thought to be a spiritual messiah who would come, nor one who would claim to be the very Son of God. The Apostles as well as Jesus were steeped in this Monotheistic culture. They knew very well that if they proclaimed Jesus raised from the dead and as the Son of God, they would at the very least be completely ostracized, and more than likely they would be dead men. Why would they say these things unless they actually believed it? Why would they have changed the story at all? What motivation would they possibly have? To quote Mark Shea “[People who raise these types of arguments ask] us to believe that the Misunderstood Sage of Nazareth was a figure so riveting, charismatic, and mesmerizing that he galvanized a movement of deeply devoted disciples into ignoring everything he said and did, utterly forgetting his unforgettable oratory and replacing it with reams of quotations and stories about him having the historical value of a fever dream. It proposes that, though he never walked on water or calmed a storm, the Jesus of modernism is nonetheless a miracle worker of sorts. Simply by uttering a few sketchy epigrams about being nice, this itinerate preacher (who did not, we are assured, make claims of deity, multiply loaves, raise the dead, or even compose the “Lord’s Prayer”) managed to transform pious Jewish monotheists into men who willingly blasphemed the God he preached by deifying this Nazarene cipher. So deeply inspired by the awesome figure of Jesus were they that, out of profound reverence for Him, they obliterated virtually every trace of his memory and substituted in its place the ingenious fabrication called the gospel.”
On top of all of this, we are asked to believe that all of the Apostles spent the rest of their lives working feverishly and endlessly to promote this lie and eventually, every single one of them died for this lie that they had made up. Not only were they stupid enough to die for something that was an out and out lie, but they didn’t even have the smarts to make themselves look good in the story that they made up. I mean if one is going to change a story to one so preposterous as claiming that a mere human was in fact the Son of God to a fiercely monotheistic culture, the least they could do was make themselves out to be some sort of sub-gods or at least competent individuals. However, in the Gospel story, almost all the Apostles come across as bumbling idiots. You have Peter the leader of the Apostles, sticking his foot in his mouth time and time again. Not only that, but they created a story were he denies that he even knew Jesus on three separate occasions. In this false story, Peter is also called Satan by Jesus, Thomas doubts that Jesus actually raised from the dead, you have women (an unreliable source from the first century perspective) as the first eye witnesses to the resurrection, James and John start an ego induced grab for power, and Jesus has to repeatedly call them all out on their abject stupidity. Does this sound like a story that men would just make up about themselves to sell a new religion of which they are the leaders, unless they believed it to be true? It appears from all honest evaluations that the Gospel story is a brutally honest record of what the Apostles believed actually happened, even at the expense of portraying themselves poorly. They didn’t sugar coat anything.

So in the end we have a historical record to which all logic and evidence points is an accurate description of what the Apostles believed they saw and heard 2000 years ago. There is no other reasonable theory which can be presented, which covers all the evidence or lack thereof.