I. Can You Trust the Gospels?

We are beginning today a new sermon series that is called “The Case for Christ, the Trial of a Lifetime,” and what we’re doing in this series is examining the evidence for Jesus, that is the evidence for our faith, so that we may ask ourselves, “If we are Christians, if we are believers, why do we believe what we believe?” “Is it reasonable?” “Is it a rational thing to believe what we do?” Or if you are an unbeliever, I hope you will examine the evidence and ask yourself, “Is this true?” “Should I believe this?” “Or am I right not to believe it?”

What we’re doing in these weeks, examining the evidence for Jesus, is something that the Christian church has long called apologetics. That doesn’t mean that we are apologizing for something in the sense of being sorry for it, or offering an apology that way. Instead, it is a technical term that means we’re offering a defense or an explanation for something. And I always want to be clear at the outset that apologetics, though it is certainly an “engage your mind” sort of activity, is certainly not only in the mind. As it says in the Scriptures, we love the Lord with all of our heart, soul, mind, and strength. Faith is a whole-person thing, as is un-faith. We either believe this with our whole person, our heart, our mind, our bodies, or we don’t. We follow Jesus with our whole selves or we don’t follow Him with our whole selves. So we will be engaging our brains this morning; we do not have a “check your brain at the door” kind of faith. That is what we’re focusing on this morning, but we will also spend time considering how that implicates our whole lives.

Now, what we’re doing in these first two weeks in particular, is examining that part of the evidence for Christianity that is the Bible, and this week, specifically the Gospels. We’ll be considering whether or not they provide good evidence. And as we get started, I want to tell you that this is a topic about which I am very impassioned, about which I care a good deal. This is something that is both an academic and a personal issue for me, a head and heart issue if you will. I have given many of the hours of my life spending time in sterile university hallways and libraries working on this stuff. It is also something that is important for me in the hot fire of my spirit. This is a personal issue with which I have wrestled, and I want to try and convey to you this morning both sides of how and why this is important.

In order to get us started in the Case for Christ, I want to invite our court official to please come forward to read for us the charge against which we’re going to hear our evidence this morning and each week in this series.

Bailiff: In the case of the People vs. Jesus, the People move that the Bible as a witness to Jesus be dismissed as evidence because it is full of bias and propaganda. It is not so much a witness to Jesus as a hoax that millions of unthinking believers have accepted.

I take that to be a very serious charge, do you? And I remember very well the first time that I ever encountered that charge with any seriousness. It was the Spring semester of 1996 and I was studying at the University of Freiburg. And in my room in my flat I was reading a book called “Who Killed The Messiah?” by a man named John Dominic Crossan, whom I have since met at a convention in Atlanta a few years back. This book really cut me at the time because it made the argument that the Gospels in particular and even more specifically the end of the Gospels, the stories of Jesus’ death and the way that he was prosecuted and killed and raised from the dead, were really just hoaxes. The book suggested that they were made up by people who wanted you to believe what they believed and probably to follow them. Maybe it made people feel better that other people would believe the same thing, so they read up on the Old Testament prophecies and made up a story that would sound like it fulfilled those prophecies. He called it “prophecy historicized.” I read this whole book and it really threatened me at the time. I remember my response to it very well. I got to the end, and I was disturbed. I believe I even said this out loud in my room, “Well, I guess that brings you to the point then, that’s the crossroads. One either believes that the Bible is inspired by the Holy Spirit of God, or one does not. If one does not, one can write critical books like this. If one does, then one cannot do that and one trusts it with their whole heart.” What I was doing without realizing it was creating a “check your brain at the door” theology. I was saying, “I should believe this but not really examine it or think about it.” I was taking a shortcut and I want to tell you that I was both right and wrong in my shortcut. Wrong enough that I shouldn’t have taken it, right enough to have been onto something that we’re going to focus on later today.

Here is what is wrong with it. First, it was a response bred of fear. I think I was afraid that I wouldn’t know how to encounter these arguments, that I wouldn’t know how to examine the evidence, that I lacked the capacity that this scholar had (which is probably true). He had been a Ph.D. level New Testament scholar for 40 years and I was an undergrad student studying German Literature. But I think I was also afraid of what I would find if I did. Maybe I would find out that he was right, that what I had given my life to, even at an early age in my life, was a sham. One does not like to discover that what they’ve given their life to is a sham. I think I was afraid of what I might find. And so, I made this end run around the evidence; I took a shortcut.

I was right to think that one needs to engage with the Holy Spirit in this endeavor, that this is not merely a sterile academic exercise. But I was wrong to do so by turning my mind off first.

So here is what we’re going to do today. We are going to turn our minds on and we are going to examine the evidence and engage the Spirit of God and see whether or not this is true and what it means for us. Now, my goal today is to lay a strong foundation for our trust in the Bible as a reliable testimony about Jesus, specifically the Gospel stories. In order to do that, I first want to say something about shaky foundations. I want us to build this case in the right place so that we’re not building a house of straw that someone may come along and blow over when it is most convenient for them and most terrible for us. So first of all, I want to think with you together about the difference between the Gospel and a tape recorder because I think sometimes we think that we should trust the Bible, and the Gospels in particular, because they are like tape recorders. It’s as if we think that somebody 2000 years ago was way ahead of his time, and had a mini-DVD/HD camcorder and walked around behind Jesus and captured everything. And that is what we may think the Gospels are: a transcript of that recording.

We know that is not true, because if it were true the Gospels in the Bible would be three years long. So we already know that there has been some selection going on. You can read any of the Gospels out loud in about two hours, and Mark is shorter than that. So things have been written and selected for us for a purpose. And sometimes we get not only different selections, but we get the same stories told a little differently. The passages on the sermon insert in your bulletin are one example of this from the Gospels of Mark and Matthew. What you have is the story of the encounter that Jesus had with the same Canaanite woman and the conversation they had, the result, and so forth. Matthew and Mark tell the story of the same event differently to communicate a different meaning. I had hoped to go over this comparison with you in detail, but time won’t allow it. You can see even as you glance over it that some details are told differently.

I think all of us already know that you can tell the story of the same event honestly, but differently for different purposes. Imagine with me that I want to tell you something as innocent as the time that I came home a couple of days ago and saw my wife,Amy, and my daughter, Evangeline, sitting on the floor of our house reading a book together. Now, I could get up here and tell you that story in such a way that I communicate to you what joy Amy finds in our daughter. I’d tell you how she was smiling, how much Evangeline loves books and how they’re sitting there on the floor giggling. I could tell you the story so it would make that point. Or, I could tell you the same story, again respecting the facts, but sharing different points. I might leave out some of the things about the smiling and the giggling and instead I would emphasize that Amy had to get down on the ground to do this and how it had been a long day already. I’d tell you about all the other things that she’d done that day because I want to make a point for you that raising children is hard work or something like that. I could tell you the same story, differently, respecting the facts in both cases, to make a different point and I would be honest both times.

I invite you to take time this afternoon to read both of these accounts that we’ve printed out for you and see how they are substantially similar and yet different because they are making different main points. Matthew wants you to know and notice how Jesus is the Israelite Messiah who has been promised and that he’s also the Lord of all nations to all who come to him by faith. So he emphasizes Jewish things and he emphasizes faith. Mark leaves out a bunch of that stuff and words some things differently. He talks about the demon that the woman’s daughter had, while Matthew usually talks about the unclean spirit that she had and says that she was healed. Mark says the demon was “cast out” because of what Mark is trying to emphasize, and it is consistent with his purposes in his whole Gospel story. It is the spiritual authority that Jesus wields. He is trying to tell us that Jesus has authority over these demons to cast them out. Same story, different points, but honest both times. Now, I want to make this point clear very clear: This approach doesn’t apply to making up stories out of whole cloth. That’s a different thing. You can tell parables or fictions or fables to make a point and that’s ok, but if you represent that as what really happened when it really didn’t, that is a different thing. When you’re trying to represent what really happened in time-space, factual reality, you have to respect the facts. And that is what’s going on here, respecting the facts and telling the stories with different points.

Ok, let’s recognize that the Gospels are different from tape recorders. I want to make that point so that we know upon what we should not place our trust in the Scriptures. Let me tell you now, if we should not do it because they’re all just like tape recorders - identical detailed accounts - why should we? I call the Gospels proclamatory retellings of Jesus’ life. But if they’re proclamation, told to help us believe something, how do we distinguish then between proclamation and propaganda? What’s the difference?

There are three main differences:

The first big difference is the difference between public and private testimony. Consider this: When a fisherman comes in from a boat and tells you about the fish he caught, you know first of all that all fishermen are liars. But if you set that aside for a minute, and imagine he comes and tells you about the fish that he’s caught and he’s willing to tell you about it in the presence of the other guys in the boat and in front of his family who knows how he usually tells stories and maybe in front of some of your friends who don’t take any of that kind of lies. Wouldn’t you be more willing to believe him than you otherwise would have been because he’s willing to make a public testimony.

On the other hand, if that same fisherman comes to you and tells you the same story, but wants to tell it to you on the side and says, “don’t talk about this to the other guys in the boat because they might feel bad to hear about it again, and don’t tell anybody else, even though it was a world-record catch. You know, I don’t want to brag…” Maybe I’m just a cynic, but I’m a lot less likely to believe the second way of telling the story than I am in the first because I tend to believe in open books and transparency. It is a mark of the truth.

So let’s apply that to the Bible. Have you heard anything about the Gospel of Judas lately? It’s been big in the news. It was discovered about 30 years ago in the desert in the Middle East, but is just recently becoming more popular and people are starting to read it. It’s on National Geographic’s website if you want to look it up easily. I’ve read through it a couple of times, and the beginning of it goes like this: “The secret account of the revelation that Jesus spoke in conversation with Judas Iscariot during a week three days before he celebrated Passover.” …Now, don’t tell anyone about that fish that I caught, I don’t want to brag about it!

Let me contrast that for you with the opening four verses of the gospel of Luke written in a very “highfalutin” style, which was the style he used. Here is how it goes: “Inasmuch as many have undertaken to compile a narrative of the things that have been accomplished among us, just as those who, from the beginning, were eyewitnesses and ministers of the word have delivered them to us, it seemed good to me also, having followed all things closely for sometime past, to write an orderly account for you, most excellent Theophilus that you may have certainty concerning the things you have been taught.” Night and day! Here is Luke saying not that it was some secret revelation that somebody had whispered to him on the side that nobody else can verify or dispute, but that it was a collaborative project that other people have already talked about, borne witness to, and have told about, that he’s followed all things closely for sometime past, and now he’s putting together a narrative about what has already been heard and he invites everyone to look at his book in open transparency to see that it is a public, reliable, trustworthy testimony that he is willing to lay out for public examination. That is very, very different.

And it is also important as a point related to this, that the four Gospels in the Christian New Testament were all written early enough for some of the eyewitnesses to the events to still be alive to verify what was written. In the case of the Gospel of Judas and some of the other documents that have come about later, they were written, in the case of Gospel of Judas between AD 150 and 180. There were no eyewitnesses left, there were probably not even any people left who had ever known an eyewitness. And so you can write about a secret little revelation that someone had told you and nobody can say it isn’t true; no one who was there can dispute you. So, the dates that the Gospels in the New Testament were written are significant and that they were written as an open testimony testifies to their veracity, i.e. that this is reliable, trustworthy evidence.

The second main reason that we believe that this is proclamation and not propaganda is that there are multiple witnesses. When you read the Gospels, you can compare in excruciating detail all the parallel stories from all the Gospels and what you find is that sometimes it looks like some

Gospel writers are using the accounts of the other Gospel writers and sometimes it doesn’t. It especially looks like Matthew and Luke sometimes use Mark. Also, sometimes you will see that they are drawing from independent sources. So what you have here is a great balance of people who have different sources agreeing with one another and saying, “yeah, that’s true and I’m going to tell that story also. And I also have access to other independent evidence that corroborates that and adds to it.” So we’ve got multiple witnesses bearing witness to the same event.

I used to work together in teaching a class called Introduction to the New Testament at Duke University Divinity School and the professor that I taught with had an illustration that he liked to use with the students. It was a copy of an old article from the main London newspaper. It was the story of a man who had been arrested for inciting a riot. He was put in a police van and in that van the police beat him up a little bit. And they took him and put him on trial for participating in the riot, but he was innocent of all the charges. It turned out that he was a photographer taking pictures or something. This case got to the point of a trial and the jury did something that was unusual, if not unprecedented, in the British legal system (and I’m not sure if it has ever happened in the United States ). The jury stopped everything in the middle of the trial and threw out the whole case, kind of laughing about it because they realized that there was no way that this could be true. What happened was that they had gotten a hold of the actual police reports that the officers that had been in the van with the guy had filled out on the day of the arrest. The trial’s main evidence had been those police officers’ testimony against the photographer’s testimony. And what the jury saw was that one officer had written down his account and then three hours later the next guy had written down his own account copying verbatim from the other guys’ account, and in one place he had even scratched out his own handwriting to make it look less suspicious. The jury saw that, realized the whole testimony was cooked, and let the guy go. And he said he’d never trust the police again. Great result, huh?

The reason that this is significant is that it shows what happens when we are reduced to having only one witness to believe. The two police testimonies were only one copied story. But in the Gospels we have multiple attestation, multiple witnesses bearing testimony to the events that happened in Jesus’ life. So, the second reason to believe the Gospels is that we have multiple witnesses bearing witness to the same event.

The third thing that I would like to point out is what I call “unlikely fiction.” If you’re going to write propaganda, if you’re going to make things up to make people believe what you want them to believe even though it’s not true, there are certain things one would expect to happen in stories like that, certain things that would be reasonable to do. For example, if you were a disciple of Jesus who had been involved in Jesus’ life and you also appeared in the story that you were writing, you might occasionally make some effort to make yourself look good in the story, or at least mediocre. But the disciples who wrote the Gospels do not look so good in the Gospels. Matthew and the other disciples come off as a bunch of bumbling morons in the Gospels. It is very unlikely that they would make that stuff up. In that story on the back of the sermon outline, in Matthew especially, the disciples are right there in the middle of the scene when the woman comes up to Jesus, and they are saying, “Jesus, send her away, she’s really bugging us!” instead of saying, “Oh Jesus, we are to love our neighbor as ourselves, would you please have compassion on this poor woman,” which is what they might have said if they were making this up to make themselves look good and make people believe what they wanted them to believe. Or at the end of Matthew, when Jesus is already raised from the dead, the disciples should have their acts together by this point. He’s given them the great commission to go and evangelize the whole world, the work that God Almighty thought was important enough to send his own Son to do. Jesus hands it on to them and the Bible says they worshipped and they doubted. They’re still doubting! They should make that up better if they were making it up.

Another unlikely fiction is one of the most implausible in the Gospels, and that is that in the ancient world, in the time that the New Testament was written, if you were going to call somebody for verification, as an witness to your story, this is who you would not call: a woman. I’m sorry that it was like that, but it was. We’ve come a long way since then. Now, we know that both men and women may be equally untrustworthy in their testimony. But then, they had the strange notion that you could believe a man’s testimony but you couldn’t believe a woman’s testimony. So, if you were going to make up a story about the empty tomb, what you would not do if you wanted anyone at all to believe you was to say, “oh, and we’ll say that the first ones to the empty tomb were all women!” Who’s going to believe that? But all four of the gospels are unanimous in reporting that the first witnesses at the empty tomb were women. That is not a smart thing to make up 2000 years ago. The most likely and historically reasonable explanation for the account of women as the first witnesses to the empty tomb is that it actually happened that way, not that they wanted to make it up so that you’d believe it. Because that is not how you would make it up if you wanted anyone to believe it.

Ok, so we have three good reasons to believe that the gospels are not propaganda, three things that don’t characterize propaganda that do characterize reliable testimony. There is testimony made publicly in the presence of people who could dispute it or verify it; there are multiple witnesses testifying to the same events; and it’s very unlikely that it would have been made up in the way that it was if it had been made up. So the result of all this is that we have multiple stories of Jesus, not tape recordings, mind you, but multiple tellings that tell different sides of the same story. They corroborate one another without being suspicious copies of one another.

Remember the story that I started with about John Dominic Crossan and his book Who Killed the Messiah? I took that shortcut not to do history and not to check evidence. I made that unfortunate mistake of checking my brain at the door. Well, today, we’ve done the history together, ever-so-briefly, and discovered that it’s good. The history and the evidence are good. It’s not propaganda because the things we’ve discussed today don’t characterize it as propaganda, they characterize it as what it is, reliable testimony. I had to get over my fear, my shortcut fear, not to engage the evidence. So do we all. But now, what I took as the easy way out turns out to be where the real work begins.

What does it mean to say that we believe and trust Scripture. Does it mean we pay lip service to it? Or does it mean we are willing to put our money where our mouth is? If we believe it, it means we will walk what we talk. If it is something as big and deep as the Bible and we say that we believe it and its true, then that is going to implicate us in our response to that truth. It means that we will become followers of the Jesus to whom the Scriptures bear testimony. It means that we will worship the God whose story the Scriptures are, it means that we will repent of the sin in our lives of which the Bible convicts us and which shows us a much better way to live our lives. It means that we will turn the charge that was read to us earlier on its head. I would like to read to you a second charge. It’s a charge that I heard a number of years ago. It still haunts me and I hope it haunts you after you’ve heard it. Here is the second charge:

Sometimes the people who talk the most about how true the Bible is are the people who read it and obey it the least.

Ouch! Here I am talking a lot about how true the Bible is. Will I be the kind of person who reads it and obeys it the least? Let’s make an agreement together here this morning. You and I and all of us together, let’s drive our stake in the ground. And here is our agreement: Not so among us! Let it not be so among us that we will be the people who talk about it and not do it. We will not do the Bible the disservice of disbelieving it, because it is true. Furthermore and more importantly, we will not do the Bible the disservice of ignoring it, because there is too much at stake. Let that not be so among us!

If the Bible is true, it means that Jesus is Lord of the universe, of the world, of our lives. It means that we have a Savior, that the story of Salvation that the Bible tells is true! It means that God cares about the world like the story in the Bible said. It means that God forgives sinners like you and me. Good news, people, good news. It means that there is hope. Hope for you and me. Hope for all of the fallen human messes that we make all of the time in our own lives and our own communities. It means there is hope when I can’t see any other hope, because God saves.

And if the Bible is true, it means we ought to read it and hear about these things and trust them. We ought to read it together, if we’re Christians, to strengthen one another in faith. And for those who are not Christians, you ought to read it with other people to examine the evidence fairly. We ought to be so bold as to read it together.

In that regard, I have to tell you that I am proud of this church. We have something that many churches do not have, hundreds of people of all ages in small groups reading the Bible together. Which means that we are in some way putting one foot in front of the other and walking what we talk. But it also means that we are still hundreds short. It means that there are still lots of opportunities for us to read it as if we believed it. Let me encourage you, if you are a person in this church who’s not a part of a small group, to take steps to be part of one. First of all, I know there are lots of good reasons. We don’t have many groups that meet outside of Wednesday nights right now. People work on Wednesday nights, they travel, you probably have a really good reason. I know. But let’s find a way. Let’s start making room for reading the Bible together as Christians in all of our lives if we say that we believe this stuff. There is a tear-off form on the bottom of your sermon outline. Sign up and tell me how to get a hold of you and I will make sure to find a time that will work for you to get into a small group to be able to read the Scriptures with others and come to have your life changed by them, because we believe that its true. And if you’re out there doubting that it’s true, again I dare you to come and read along with everybody else and examine the evidence. And I’ll examine it with you and we’ll take a look at it. We’ll start these Bible study groups as soon as I get your information.

And if the Bible is true, most importantly, give your life to the Lord of it. If what he says is true, there is no place else to be. You don’t want to be anywhere else but following behind this guy in whom there is hope, in whom there is love and mercy and truth. The Lord who is Jesus, who died and was raised again, is alive and well and knocking on the door and waiting for an answer. And I’m telling you, you will never find anyone more gracious or more true.

As you read the Bible and follow Jesus, you may start asking questions about this Bible that you’re reading. You may say things like, “well maybe they are good evidence, those gospel stories, maybe these are good stories about Jesus, but how did ancient things written about Jesus get translated and bound up and find their way onto the shelf of a bookstore near me, for sale? Has it been mishandled or tampered with? How did we get the Bible that we have right now?” Maybe you’ll have some of those questions, and I hope that you do. Because those are exactly the questions that we will engage next week as we examine the Bible as reliable evidence to Jesus. Until next week, may the God of all truth lead you into His Truth.

Stephan K. Turnbull
First Lutheran Church
White Bear Lake, Minnesota
sturnbull@firstlutheranwbl.org