Defending Christianity in an Age of PluralismPart 2 – A talk by Kaitlyn Nowak

on her studies at the International Academy of Apologetics, Evangelism, and Human Rights

Outline

1. Intro to Strasbourg, quick overview of Academy classes

2. Apologetics – What is it?

3. Why is Apologetics necessary today?

4. Sin as a starting point

5. Grace as the answer

6. Historicity of Christianity

7. Reliability of the Gospels

Apologetics Tabling Sign

Christianity as Contradictory

• Sin and guilt as common ground

• In other religions, it’s all about what you can do for God, to achieve Nirvana, etc.

• Christianity is the only religion that has a concept of grace

• Still, why is Christianity true and not just the “oddball”?

Christianity is Falsifiable

• Analytical philosophy – philosophy must be checked against reality

• Paul, 1 Corinthians 15:12-19

• Remember, most other religions are simply based on personal experience, not history

• You can’t even prove most religions true or false

Christianity is Historical

• “Heaven and earth conjoin” in the Incarnation!

• Born under Caesar Augustus

• Crucified under Pontius Pilate

• 1 Corinthians 15:6 (over 500 witnesses)

Christianity is Historical

• Paul to King Agrippa: “This thing [the historical events of Christianity] has not been done in a corner.”

Why Use the Historical Approach?

• Why not common sense/intuition or authority?

• We use historical investigation in everyday life

• The present is always turning into the past

• We act on less than 100% certainty all the time

• Courts don’t require 100% certainty

• “All that Christianity asks of men on this subject, is, that they would be consistent with themselves; that they would treat its evidences as they treat the evidence of other things…” (The Testimony of the Evangelists, Simon Greenleaf, law professor at Harvard in the early 19th century and foremost authority on common law evidence at the time)

Outline of the Historical Approach

• Point 1: Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John are primary source documents according to the standard of any court of law

• They didn’t come hundreds of years later from inebriated monks

• Point 2: In those primary source records, Jesus claims to be God in human flesh

• Point 3: In all of these primary source records, Christ’s death and resurrection are described in great detail

• Point 4: Christ’s resurrection proves His deity

Point 1: The Primary Sources

• Calling them “primary sources”, not “Gospels”

• Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John are the best historical documents about Jesus’s life

• Esp. Matthew and John are direct eyewitness testimony

• Even non-Christians like Bart Ehrmann know these are the best sources

• Why do we think these documents are “good”?

• Why do we think these documents contain the truth and not just stories made up by the eyewitnesses?

Transmission of the Documents

• Proximity in time of document and events it records

• Not having originals of even works of Shakespeare isn’t considered a problem for literary scholars

• Comparison to works of antiquity

• How many copies do we have?

• No typewriters back then

• More copies, easier detection of errors

• Extra care is used when copying the literal word of God

• We admit there are sections we’re not sure about

• We can actually reconstruct the Gospels from the writings of early Church Fathers

Superior Document Transmission

Author/Work Date Written

Earliest Copy

TimeSpan

Copies

Caesar (Gallic Wars) 58-50 BC 900 AD 1000 yrs 10

Thucydides (Histories)

480-425 BC 900 AD 1300 yrs 8

Catallus (Poetics) 84-54 BC 1400 AD 1500 yrs 3

Plato (Tetralogies) 427-347 BC 900 AD 1300 yrs 7

Tacitus (Annals) 100 AD 1100 AD 1000 yrs 10

Pliny the Younger (Letters)

61-113 AD 850 AD 800 yrs 7

Seutonius (Life of Caesar)

75-160 AD 950 AD 800 yrs 8

Homer (Illiad) 850 BC 400 BC 450 yrs 643

Matthew, Mark, Luke, & John

60-90 AD 200 AD, 325 AD

140-265 yrs

15,000+

Why are the Documents Trustworthy?

Internal External

Witnesses character issues?external

pressures?

Testimonyinconsistencies

or contradictions?

archaeologicalissues?

Internal Evidence

• Are the witnesses honest, or do they paint over their weaknesses?

• They paint themselves as clueless, not even loyal, etc.

• Peter used by Satan, “an idiot” on the Mount of Transfiguration

• Ability of witnesses to get it right

• Matthew was a tax collector & Luke was a medical doctor

• Are there a sufficient number of witnesses and are they consistent?

• Consistency without collusion

• Contradiction or difference in presentation of evidence?

• Example of car accident

• Examples of contradictions in historical documents

Internal Evidence (cont.)

• Is what they write in conformity to our own experience?

• Does the testimony coincide with external contemporaneous facts and circumstances?

• Think Sherlock Holmes or art dealers

• Endless references to customs of the day, circumstances of the times, etc.

• “It would be difficult to select any place or period in the history of nations, for the time and scene of a fictitious history or an imposture, which would combine so many difficulties for the fabricator to surmount…” (The Testimony

of the Evangelists, Simon Greenleaf)

External Evidence

• Hostile witnesses abounded

• Archaeologist and rabbi Nelson Glueck stated clearly that no archaeological discovery has ever contradicted the Bible

• The “Pilate inscription”

• Timeline argument

• 64 AD – death of Peter & Paul under Nero’s persecution

• Acts makes no mention of the death of Paul

• If Acts was written after Paul’s death, it would’ve mentioned it

• Luke came before Acts (most scholars agree on the same author)

• Mark and Matthew came before Luke

• Jesus died 30-33 AD

• So there’s a very small gap between the first Gospels and the events they record

The Process of Telling the Truth

Event

Recollection

Portion selected to be communicated

Symbols

Interpretation by listenerReproduced from The Defense Never Rests, Parton

The Process of Lying

Event

Original Recollection

Distortion to serve purpose of witness

Comparison with prior statements of witnesses

Estimate chance of discovery

Decision to continue with or revise original story

Symbols

Interpretation by listener

Comparison with belief or knowledge

of examiner

Comparison for obvious, provable

discrepancies

Reproduced from The Defense Never Rests, Parton

Point 2: Jesus Claimed to be God

• Many non-Christians are shocked to hear this

• Many Christian denominations now deny it

• Scripture passages

• Luke 5:18-24 (healing of paralytic)

• John 10:25-33 (I told you I’m the Christ, but you don’t believe me, and I give my sheep eternal life, and I and the Father are one)

• John 20:28 (doubting Thomas)

• Normal people don’t say this!

• Still, “claims are cheap”

Point 3: Detail of Death & Resurrection

• Some claim Jesus swooned on the cross

• Physicians have investigated how people die via crucifixion, and it matches with the NT accounts

• Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) article: “On the Physical Death of Jesus Christ” (1986)

• NT accounts also match what we know about Roman society in that time period

• A. N. Sherwan White’s Roman Society and Roman Law in the New Testament

• To reject the Resurrection is to reject the best data we have on the topic – this is the scientific way to approach it

Point 4: Christ Proved His Deity

• Why does the Resurrection in particular prove Christ’s deity, and not some other miracle?

• Death is our fundamental issue

• Jesus claimed that His Resurrection showed His power/victory over death

• Christ also understands evil on a very personal level

• Important to note when talking with people who have been deeply hurt by evil

• The Gospels are focused on the Cross because it was the main point of His ministry

• Jesus knew what His mission was

QUESTIONS?