The Gospels are True

The first four books of the New Testament (the Gospels) tell of the events of Jesus’ birth, ministry, death by execution, and resurrection. These are historical events, witnessed by many people. As time passed, it became necessary to write down what happened, so that the eye-witness accounts would not be forgotten or distorted. This is the reason the Gospels were written, so that the truth of what happened, what the many eye-witnesses had seen and heard, would be preserved.

Luke’s Gospel begins with exactly such an explanation:

Since many have undertaken to set down an orderly account of the events that have been fulfilled among us, just as they were handed on to us by those who from the beginning were eyewitnesses and servants of the word, I too decided, after investigating everything carefully from the very first, to write an orderly account… so that you may know the truth concerning the things about which you have been instructed. [Luke 1:1-4]

The importance of this cannot be minimized: Christianity is based not on a philosophy or a theory, but concrete historical events: the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, who is the Christ, the Messiah. As St. Paul writes in his first letter to the Corinthians, “… if Christ has not been raised, then our proclamation has been in vain and your faith has been in vain”. [1 Corinthians 15:14]

“OK, that’s great”, one might say, “the Gospels document historical events, so we accept them as fact and move on”. But that’s not quite how it goes for everyone. The Gospels can be a bit challenging to accept. Here are two reasons.

The first is that the Gospels report events that seem almost fantastical: a man walking on water [Matthew 14:26], raising the dead [John 11:43-44, Luke 7:14-15], healing leprosy with a touch [Mark 1:41-42], curing the blind [Mark 10:52], feeding thousands of people with small amounts of food and having far more leftovers at the end than the original amount [Luke 9:14-17]. They tell of a man brutally executed in public in a way impossible to survive [John 19:33-34], and yet rising from the dead a few days later fully alive and more capable than ever before [Acts 1:3]. Are these events made up?

Well, no, they’re not made up. That is exactly the point. These events happened in front of significant numbers of eye-witnesses, who were as amazed by them as any of us would be. Even those who opposed Jesus acknowledged the amazing and unprecedented things that he did [John 9:26]. And the Gospels are not merely a heroic legend. Despite the wondrous nature of Jesus’ miracles, the Gospels show characteristics of real accounts, such as an occasion where a miracle does not work properly on the first attempt [Mark 8:23-25] or where miracles cannot even be performed at all [Mark 6:5]. Moreover, rather than Jesus triumphing over adversity and prevailing over his enemies in a classic heroic tale, it is the enemies who prevail: Jesus is ultimately rejected by the people in power and brutally executed on trumped-up charges [John 19:4,16]. To say that the extraordinary things in the Gospels are made up because they are extraordinary is to beg the question. It is to argue that Jesus can’t be who he shows he is, because the things he shows can’t be shown. This argument is circular. But if you go with it anyway, you are faced with the conclusion that the Christian claim must be either a mistake or a deception, and Christians, from the Gospel-writers to the believers of the present day, must essentially be either fools or frauds.

But the “fool or fraud” hypothesis is even more implausible than the amazing events of the Gospel itself. Many people saw Jesus’ miracles over an extended period [Luke 7:21]; many of them weren’t particularly credulous, and even people who opposed him acknowledged what he did [Mark 15:31]. As for a carefully contrived fraud, a deception at this scale involving so many people over such a long period of time seems highly improbable. Moreover, fraud for what purpose? All that Christians are gaining through their claims is a challenging and difficult life, full of persecution and often martyrdom. Christianity has endured over two millennia, and while perhaps there have been some times and places when there have been material advantages to being Christian, that is not true of the times and places recorded in the Gospels [e.g. Matthew 24:9].

The second and perhaps greater challenge in accepting the Gospels is what it means if true. If the Gospels are true, then Jesus is more than an ordinary man, he is the son of God. This means that what Jesus said, taught and did is important, worth remembering and imitating. But what Jesus said, taught and did is no pleasant philosophy, it is a call to a life of self-sacrifice, a call to take up your cross and follow him [Luke 9:23]. The cross is no pleasant metaphor: Jesus literally was tortured, crucified to death by being nailed to a wooden cross and hung up on that cross in public until he expired. Yet he called people to follow him to this sort of dire end [Matthew 16:24], knowing exactly what would happen to him [Luke 9:44], and telling them so up front [Mark 8:31]. When the consequences of accepting the Gospels as true are so challenging, it is no wonder that some people demur.

But either the Gospels are true or they aren’t. To say they aren’t true doesn’t fly: if not true, there’s no plausible explanation for what they say. They simply don’t work as a mass delusion, or as some sort of elaborate fraud. But to say that they are true leads to some challenging conclusions, consequences that are hard to live out. Yet the Gospels offer more than just toil and trouble, they offer hope. In them we read that God loves the world so much that he sends his son, Jesus, to save it, so that whoever believes in him will not perish, but have eternal life [John 3:16]. Following Jesus may be difficult, but we will have his help [Matthew 28:20]. And our ultimate destination is not abject failure and death, but eternal life, because Jesus, who seemed for a little while to be a complete failure when he was executed on trumped-up charges and tortured to death by crucifixion, rose to new life on the third day afterwards, not as a battered survivor in need of rest and recovery, but as a vibrant resurrected person, witnessed by many [Acts 13:31], renewed in power and full of life and hope. This new life is promised to those of us who follow Jesus. This is why the Gospels have been written, so that we who were not eye-witnesses can know what happened; that we, too, might believe in Jesus, and instead of perishing, inherit eternal life from him.