Previous chapter: Chapter 4: The Rest of the Story
Part Two of this book (chapters 5-8) will explain why Jesus Christ is the supreme authority on the duty of a man…and on every other subject as well (including, of course, “The Forgotten Gospel” and “The Rest of the Story”). The proof of His authority is found in history.
History
We don’t need to delve into philosophy or theology. We can evaluate Jesus from a strictly human point of view – the same way we’d assess any other historical person. History is established from sources, and the best historical sources are those closest to the time and place of the subject being studied. Jesus did not leave any writings of his own. However, eight of his contemporaries did. Their writings are the primary historical sources for His life and teaching. Collectively, their 27 texts are called the New Testament.
Objections to the New Testament as History
- “Religious history is not real history” – Is military history not real history? Is art history not real history? History is a record of what happened; the subject of the history doesn’t make the history less historical.
- “These sources are biased” – Do we automatically reject Roman sources when studying Roman history, or American sources when studying American history? Of course, the potential for bias must be taken into account with every historical source, but potential alone does not justify exclusion.
- “The writings have been falsified” – This is one of today’s most common objections to the New Testament, yet there is no evidence for this claim. On the contrary, the only variations we find in ancient manuscripts of the New Testament are minor ones. If all the copies say basically the same thing, how could the originals have said something different?
An Ancient Collection of Even More Ancient Texts
The New Testament as we have today was finalized as a collection in the 4th and 5th centuries, while the 27 texts themselves had been written in the 1st century. Why would it take 300-400 years to produce this collection? Many reasons, including:
- These writings were produced for various reasons at various times and places all over the Roman Empire…and there was no directive from Jesus or his apostles that there should ever be a New Testament.
- With no printing press, all copies had to be handwritten. It would take a long time before a copy of every text would show up in every church.
- There was no central controlling authority of the churches to guide or speed up the process.
- The popularity of these texts spawned forgeries, which created the need for verification of authorship, slowing down the process.
By the 4th century, circumstances dramatically converged to support finalization of the collection. By then, so many Roman citizens were becoming Christians that the Emperor Constantine himself was converted. By the conclusion of the 4th century, Christianity had been made the official religion of the Roman Empire. It was against this backdrop that the 27-text collection by 8 authors was finalized. Even then, the geographically-dispersed and organizationally independent churches weighed in one city or region at a time. There was no single dramatic declaration or vote.
The Key to the Collection
It’s clear from the contents of the collection that what the churches desired above all was authentic apostolic authorship. The apostles and their assistants were contemporaries of Jesus…and, therefore, 1st-century men. Nothing written by any of these eight men was excluded, and nothing written by any of the other apostles or assistants was ever found. Excluded from the collection were forgeries (and there were many); also excluded were writings from men of subsequent generations, no matter how authentic or treasured their writings might otherwise be. Thus authentic apostolic authorship was the sole criterion for inclusion; and no genuine apostolic writing was deemed unworthy of inclusion.
Ancient churches could agree on the identity of the eight authors of the 27 texts because it was a matter of history, not theology…and, therefore, a matter of investigation, not interpretation. We know the authors of the New Testament by the same way we know the authors of all other ancient texts – by accepting the word of those who received and handed down the texts from one generation to the next. There are way more witnesses corroborating the authors of the New Testament than there are corroborating the authors of other ancient texts. Normally, an author – modern or ancient – hands over his text to a publisher and we have to take the publisher’s word for the author’s identity, but each New Testament author was handing over his text to a congregation of people who could verify his identity to the other congregations.
The Durability of the Collection
The 1st-to-5th century Christians who received, verified, and handed down to posterity the 27 apostolic texts did not edit those texts in any way. They merely gave a title to the collection (“The New Testament”) and a title to each individual book. The book titles were not engraved in stone; they were just a way 1) to distinguish each book from the others, and 2) to identify or confirm the author of each book. The point of all this is that ancient Christians have preserved for us undiluted 1st-century eye-witness testimony about Jesus.
As I reported in the third chapter, all three major branches of modern Christianity trace their history back to Jesus and claim the same New Testament as their founding documents. This has not changed even though, since the Enlightenment, there are academics who have questioned the authorship of many of the New Testament’s books. Modern skeptical scholars can’t agree on who did write them – only that it’s generally not the people named from antiquity. But this is preposterous. The ancients had access to chains of custody and evidence, as well as fluency with ancient languages, that modern scholars could never have. It is for good reason that modern sources are – by the definitions of historical research – secondary to primary sources. Furthermore, ancient Christians had no motive, means, or opportunity to lie about the eight New Testament authors.
Next chapter: Chapter 6: The Primary Historical Sources
DM-5
The Duty of a Man 