Very God, very human.

PROLOGUE

The Rylands Fragment.
It is only nine centimetres by six, a torn fragment with writing still clearly visible after nineteen centuries.

The light coloured papyrus on which it is written was made from reeds harvested along the Nile. The words upon it were penned some time between 100 and 120 AD by an unknown copyist whom we shall call Abdul Masih (Servant of Messiah).

Abdul carefully laid a sheet of papyrus on the desk, dipped his stylus in the inkwell and inscribed these Greek characters slowly and carefully one by one, characters which are still legible in the twenty-first century. He may have been copying from another document or possibly he was one of a team, writing to the dictation of its leader who read aloud from the original copy. Either way it was a laborious process, a skilled craft pursued with much tender loving care.

The finished sheets were fastened together into a “codex” which we would recognise as a bound book, unlike the Hebrew scrolls.

Abdul was one of many such copyists and part of a movement which was widespread and growing. His only distinction is being the earliest whose handiwork has survived. Thousands followed him. Today we have, scattered around the museums of the world, some twenty-four thousand manuscripts similar to Abdul’s, some possibly copied from it. For so many to exist, many more must have been produced. The supply and demand for these documents spread hundreds of miles beyond the places where they were originally written.

The Rylands fragment is part of the Gospel of John. When found in AD 1920 it shattered into smaller fragments the fashionable theories of that time and since 1920 more evidence has built up. The dating of the New Testament no longer depends on that one piece of papyrus.

At the time, however, its discovery put an end to what was really the greatest cover-up in the history of the church - not (as asserted by the fictional fanatic Leigh Teabing in The Da Vinci Code) the cover-up of the Gospels’ falsehood, but the cover-up of their truth.

The Cover-up.
The suppression of the four documents we know today as “the four Gospels” - Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, began in the second century, lasted two hundred years then after a gap of less than a century, was renewed and has continued, on and off, ever since.

It took different forms. Emperor Diocletian ordered all the copies to be destroyed, but people hid them. From around the end of the fourth century the most convenient way of suppressing them was to refuse to translate them. A new kind of copyist emerged, monks in their scriptoriums. These copied out the manuscripts with as much loving care as Abdul had done but with one great difference. The early copyists had copied them in the language people could read, with the purpose of spreading them. The monks of the middle ages copied them in Latin and only a few could read them. To the common people they were, literally, closed books.

The invention of printing suddenly multiplied the means of producing books. William Tyndale translated the Bible into the language of the common people; so the organisation which called itself “The Church” had him burned at the stake.

Yet the Gospels survived as they had survived the Emperor Diocletian’s attacks. Translations were produced and the common people who formed the real Church began to read them.

Then followed an entirely different kind of cover-up. The text was no longer suppressed. It was, and it still is, available in bookshops. But from the mid nineteenth century until the discovery of the Rylands Fragment in 1920, it was asserted by scholars and believed by the masses that the Gospels were written too late to be accurate. This is the cover-up I was taught at school, even though it was then thirty years out of date. (When Leigh Teabing said it, he was eighty years out of date).

Evidence builds up.
Around 100 AD a writer named Papias referred to Matthew, Mark, Luke and John as “The Four Gospels” - their title ever since. By this time they were circulated and accepted by the Christians as their authentic account of the life of Jesus Christ.

Hand-written accounts do not multiply and circulate fast. Nor are there many of them made unless someone really wants them. For example, we have ten copies of Julius Caesar’s record of his conquests. Who would have wanted more? The ancient historians on whom we base our knowledge of those times are equally restricted in numbers (Herodotus, 8 - Thucydides, 8 - Tacitus 20 - Livy 20). We have only 7 copies of Plato while the popular fiction of the time was Homer of whose work we have some 650 copies.

Match these figures with the 24,000 copies of New Testament documents and we realise how much more popular Jesus Christ was and how much better documented is our knowledge of Him. We know more about Him than any other character in ancient history. (See also Appendix 4).

Written before AD 70
In AD 70 Jerusalem was reduced to a heap of rubble. The way of life so familiar to readers of the four Gospels became past history, a civilisation gone with the wind.

From that date on, anyone writing about events which took place while Jerusalem was still standing would have referred to it in the past tense. John, for example, could never had written, “Now there is in Jerusalem by the Sheep Gate a pool - -” if he was writing after the Roman legions had destroyed the city. He might have said, “Now there used to be, in Jerusalem, by the Sheep Gate a pool - -” but what would have been the point of even mentioning the sheep gate which no longer existed? If he had to mention it at all he would have needed to explain it as something belonging to the past.

Throughout all four Gospels there is an assumption that the events recorded took place in a known culture, in identifiable places, surroundings familiar to the writers and comprehensible by the readers. If Matthew, Mark, Luke and John had written later than AD 70 their whole style and method of presentation must have been entirely different.

The theory that they were written later never had any positive supporting evidence. It was assumed because, at the time, evidence had not been found to prove an earlier dating. The discovery of the Rylands Fragment put an end to the “very late date” theories and the writings of Papias put them clearly in the first century. Then Bishop John Robinson (famous for “Honest to God”) began to question the theories he had been brought up with. His “Redating the New Testament” (SCM 1976) remains the standard work on the subject and clearly places every book of the New Testament before that critical date when Jerusalem was destroyed.

In the case of Luke and its sequel Acts, there is a further insurmountable objection to its being written later than the early sixties. Acts ends with a strong and dramatic build up to St Paul’s trial before Nero, then stops short, leaving Paul under house arrest awaiting trial. No mention is made of the eventual hearing or of his death. The only reasonable conclusion is that Luke wrote it before the case came to trial.

The Time Schedule
We have then, four middle aged writers, some time in the AD 60s or earlier, setting down a record of events which took place in the AD 30s, when they were young adults. They were in the position of second world war historians writing in the 1970s and having available, not only written records but also the memories of many eye witnesses besides their own.

Other documents came later. The first of the “Gnostic Gospels” was not written until around AD 150 - as far removed from the events as a present day writer is from the reign of Queen Victoria. These documents were a mixture of philosophy, mystic theology and legend. There are only a few copies available compared with thousands of the original Gospels.


Who Chose the New Testament Documents?
Not the church leaders. Still less the councils and committees which later became part of the church structure. No, the selection was made by Abdul - and thousands like him who produced the copies. Also by the people who read, preserved and distributed them. Supply and demand. Every copy we have is evidence of the value ordinary people placed on its contents.


Easy Reading.
The four Gospels, in addition to being the world’s all time best sellers, are superbly readable. Modern translations, available in bookshops, are easier reading than most textbooks, many novels and some newspapers.

If any of us were called to jury service we might find ourselves obliged to listen to evidence and possibly to read documents handed in to us. There would be no option. With a fellow citizen’s liberty at stake the Court could order us to read the whole text, no matter how obscure, badly written and boring. A jury would have good reason to be grateful if the documents in the case proved as easy reading as any of the Gospels.

We are not, therefore, dependent on others for our research and weighing of the evidence. We might depend on experts for the dating of a papyrus fragment, but the bulk of the evidence is there for us to read and assess and draw our own conclusions.


Digression - skip this if you like.
This is not history it is philosophy, but it may be worth spending a short time asking what we mean by proof. We are talking about weighing evidence and reaching a conclusion on which a decision may be based.

So what do we need to convince us.

There are three main groups into which proofs fall - and there are subdivisions, variations and combinations. The types of proof, however, are reasonably easy to follow.

1. A Chain of Reasoning.
This is the kind of proof used in mathematics, in solving logic problems and sudokus. It involves reasoning from certainties to certainties. If A = B and B = C then A = C and there can be no uncertainty or argument.

Except that there is frequently a great deal of argument. Is A really equal to B? Is B really equal to C? Are the original statements absolutes or merely probabilities?

A subsection of this kind of proof may apply when the original statements are virtually certain although not perhaps absolutely certain. Such a situation might get a jury to decide an issue “beyond all reasonable doubt” if not beyond all possible doubt.

2. Elimination of all Alternatives.
If Smith was murdered and no one else but Jones could possibly have done it, then Jones must have done it. But once again, we have to ask whether there is any possibility we have not noticed. We also have to ask how certain are the eliminations.

For practical purposes we may treat an alternative as excluded if it appears virtually impossible, incredible even if not absolutely ruled out. Then the question is where do we draw the line between improbable and incredible.

3 Build up of Evidence.
This is by far the most usual kind of proof, the one on which we make nearly all our day-to-day decisions and base our beliefs.

It consists of finding a number of items of evidence, no one conclusive in itself, but pointing in the same direction and creating an overwhelmingly high probability.

If this kind of evidence is presented by a prosecuting counsel, the defence may well take each item and tear it apart as being insufficient in itself. The jury may yet convict, however, if it is convinced by the sheer number of strands of evidence.

When we talk of the message of the Gospels and ask whether they can be proved, we normally look for this third kind of proof; many pointers, all pointing in the same direction, no one conclusive in itself but combining to produce a massive build up of probability.



CHAPTER 1. CHECKING THE EVIDENCE.

1.1 CROSSCHECKS.
When different people write accounts of the same events it becomes possible to check them by comparing them.

If they are too similar, they have probably collaborated or worked from the same source. That would not invalidate them, but it would mean we have only one piece of evidence instead of several.

If the stories are too different, they may be writing fiction or legend or at least using unreliable data.

If they obviously come from different sources, yet tell essentially the same story, that is strong evidence that they are true.

This is research we may do ourselves. In true records we may expect to find differences on points of detail, different selection of incidents reported, different emphasis and the differing personalities of the writers. On the other hand, the more we compare them the more vivid and convincing the main theme reported will become. This is what happens when we read the four Gospels.

There is, however, one other area of evidence which warrants a brief examination before we go on.

1.2 THE EVIDENCE OF SPIRITUAL EXPERIENCE.
Ask an average Christian for evidence that their faith is true and you will probably be told something about personal experience of a relationship with God. To those who share that experience it is the most convincing evidence of all. To others, it sounds like a cop-out, un-disprovable but equally unprovable.

Related to it and rather more open to discussion, is the claim that this personal relationship with The Holy Spirit changes people’s lives. Here at least there is some observable and arguable evidence. A further point is that Christians who claim this kind of personal life-changing experience, link it both to the person of Jesus Christ and the text of the Bible, especially the Gospels.

Summarising this area of evidence it amounts to the statement by many Christians that; 1/ They have a personal experience of relationship with God;
2/ This experience arises out of faith in Jesus Christ;
3/ Reading the Gospels (and other scriptures) forms part of this relationship. Different Christians will express it differently but are likely to have in common a belief that God is speaking to them through the words of scripture and a claim that this belief is born out by experience. Furthermore, the different Christians who say this are drawn from every culture and background.

We can recognise that these arguments exist, although they are not the kind of evidence we are investigating here. They have to be left “on the back burner” while we concentrate on the job in hand; namely piecing together the jigsaws created by four different Gospel records.

One essential point remains. The Gospels and other main New Testament books are accepted by the Christian Church as scripture - but not because of any edict or dogma laid down by central authority. Their acceptance comes from “the grass roots” the ordinary everyday Christians who read them and recognise their inherent authority.


1.3 THE FOUR WRITERS.
Theologians did poor service to their cause, and to truth, when they coined the word “Synoptic.” It means having the same point of view. The first three Gospels they said are synoptic and John is the odd one out. This is nonsense, read them and see.

The whole strength of the gospel evidence is that Matthew, Mark, Luke and John are different. Each has his own point of view. In about 180 AD, Irenaeus compared them to the four winds or the four points of the compass. A mountain may be viewed from North, from South, from East and from West and four very different pictures seen; yet when they are combined, the understanding of the mountain is clearer and more accurate than from any one of them alone. It is the differences between the four, rather than their similarities, which strengthen their case.

Mark has a racy, no-nonsense, action-packed style, sparing time for descriptive detail but not so much for conversation or teaching.

Matthew cuts the action passages shorter and gives as much space as he can to reporting what Jesus taught.

Luke is the careful historian. He leaves out anything of which he is not sure from his own research.

John, like Mark, selects a few incidents and tells them at length - even fewer than Mark and even greater length, with special emphasis on conversations.

Mark and John are a pair - both being written with the stated purpose of introducing people to Jesus Christ rather than providing a fully detailed record.

Mark and Matthew are a pair in that they both follow roughly the same order of events and cover especially the period in Galilee.

Matthew and Luke are a pair in that they try to pack everything in, producing accounts as full as they are able from the sources they had.

When it comes to literary style, each is an individual and quite distinctive. They do, however, share one literary characteristic. All four write as those who claim to be reporting fact.

None of the books is signed; so it is not essential to know the writer’s identity. In fact however, the traditional authorship is almost certain in the cases of Mark, Luke and John. Matthew is less so, but there is still some internal evidence which will be mentioned when we come to the passage concerned. (Meanwhile we will use the term Matthew to mean the name of the author of the first Gospel.)

1.4 MATTHEW
Peter and his colleagues were competent at their job. They had been commissioned to proclaim the message, found The Church, plant the first local churches, make disciples and pass on all that Jesus had taught them. To do this they needed to write down their message and teachings.

From the very beginning, the church, spreading out from Jerusalem, needed written records of what Jesus had said. These would have been written, mainly in Aramaic, by people who had heard His preaching.

Somewhere along the line - given that the church leaders were reasonable and competent people - they must have appointed a librarian to manage the many individual records. We no longer have those first writings, nor any idea who looked after them - but the assumption is obvious from the nature of the task. They simply could not have done what they did without using notes.

So after Mark had produced his short easy-to-read account of Christ’s life - mainly as an aid for travelling missioners - Matthew realised the need for a fuller more detailed account to ensure that Jesus’ teachings were not lost.

Matthew used these earliest written notes, which no doubt needed a good deal of sorting and editing. As Eusebius wrote of him, “Matthew compiled the oracles in the Hebrew language.”

He had another important source. Writing in or near Jerusalem Matthew had access to the leaders of that first church. Peter’s leadership had lasted only a short time at the beginning, after which he began to travel, leaving the Jerusalem church under the direction of James and Jude, Christ’s earthly brothers. This explains why Matthew’s first two chapters are told from the point of view of Joseph rather than Mary (see 2.20).

Matthew’s Gospel is the most Jewish of the four, being written in a Jewish setting. (Luke was a Gentile, Mark and John were used to living among gentiles and spreading the Gospel to them.) Yet it is Matthew which contains the fullest account of the command to go into all the world and reach all nations. He also records two occasions when Jesus promised that the Gospel would indeed reach all nations, (Matthew 24:14 and 26:13).

1.5 MARK.
Mark’s mother was the sister of the apostle Barnabas and had her home in Jerusalem. Mark probably met Jesus and became His follower, but little else is known of his early life. His uncle Barnabas took him to Antioch in Syria - to the lively and dynamic church which was to become the springboard for Christianity and where the term “Christian” was coined.

From Antioch, Barnabas took Mark out on tour with Paul, preaching to gentiles. Mark, however, left them halfway and Paul saw him as a quitter. So Paul took Silas as his helper while Barnabas gave Mark another chance.

Barnabas was known as a great encourager. Probably he recognised that his young nephew had been brought up too soft for the rigourous life of a travelling church-planter. But he also recognised that Mark had been educated to write good Greek.

Whether or not at his uncle’s suggestion, Mark rejoined Peter and according to history became a travelling companion and interpreter for him. (Peter came from a bilingual area; so spoke trade Greek, but needed Mark to write the Greek of educated Gentile readers.) Mark worked alongside Peter to produce his Gospel. Writing under Peter’s influence, Mark tends to play down Peter’s leading role, while fully recording his human weaknesses and failings.

Mark had seen each of the early phases of Christianity - Christ’s own teaching, the Jerusalem church, the Antioch church, and early mission to Gentiles. All these experiences equipped him to write what was needed. His Gospel was, and still it, the spearhead for mission, the first scripture to be translated into new languages, the first introduction to the faith for a new Christian - or for an interested non-Christian. It is, however, more than a starter-kit and mature Christians need to go back to it constantly for the extra details which the others miss.

But for Mark we would never know that Jesus was in the wilderness “with fierce animals” or that He slept in Peter’s fishing boat “on a pillow.” It was Mark who reported that the five thousand were fed, sitting on the “green grass” - little knowing that his love of descriptive detail would later confirm John’s statement that the incident was just before Passover - the one season when grass in Galilee is green.


1.6 LUKE
Luke was a Greek physician who joined Paul’s team of travelling apostles planting churches mainly in Europe.

When Paul travelled to Jerusalem (about AD 57) Luke went with him. When Paul was taken back to Rome under guard by sea, Luke again accompanied him. Between those two journeys, Paul had spent two years in prison (on remand) under governor Felix.

So Luke had time available and was in or near Jerusalem in contact with the Apostles. This was a golden opportunity for research. In that period he could interview people who had known Jesus or heard Him preach.

He was a careful, painstaking researcher and has two unusual qualities in a writer. One was that he never filled a gap with uncertain material. What he did not know he did not write. His account is of events and teaching as reported to him by eye witnesses. If he did not have a witness for any part of the account he left it blank.

Another quality was his sensitivity and good manners. He avoided embarrassing people or writing ill of them. He tried to put people in a good light if he could and he held back from pressing questions which might be distressing to the person answering them.

And it was to Luke, the physician, that Mary the mother of Jesus was able to unburden her soul. She was a quiet personality who used to “keep things and ponder them in her heart” rather than gossip them abroad. (If she had told her neighbours that her son was the Messiah, Jesus could never have had a normal childhood).

Luke has Mary’s story - of Christ’s birth and of several other incidents.

There is no reason to believe that Luke delayed publication of his account once it was written. It was, however, dedicated and presumably sent to someone named Theophilus who may or may not have held on to it for a while. But it was soon in full circulation along with the other Gospels.

Apparently Luke went on to write Acts immediately after the Gospel, finishing it while Paul was still under house arrest in Rome.

Time and again Luke’s narrative has been confirmed by history after being challenged. He is now accepted as a reliable and trustworthy historian.


1.7 JOHN.
John makes no attempt to write a detailed account of Christ’s life. He selects a few incidents and tells them at length, concentrating on those not mentioned in the other Gospels. Except for a few council or court proceedings he keeps to events of which he was an eye witness. The vividness of his account confirms this. John more than any, writes with a personal touch. He also writes with a declared intention; “that you might believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God and that believing you may have life in His Name.”

John also writes mainly about incidents in Jerusalem, while Matthew and Mark tell more of the earlier days in Galilee and Luke seems to specialise in the transitional period during which Jesus assailed Herod’s home ground.


1.8 THE EVIDENCE OF CHRIST’S OWN DISTINCTIVE STYLE.
Each of the Gospel writers has his own distinctive style of writing, but Jesus had another. He had his own personal style of communication. He made parables into an art form. Even when not using full-length stories as parables He persistently used word pictures, metaphors and simple symbolism. His pictures were drawn from everyday life. In this they differed from the mystic or dramatic symbols used by others of His day, including the Hebrew prophets; the obscure symbolism of Zechariah, Ezekiel or Daniel.

Jesus drew His illustrations from sowing, reaping, fishing, cooking, shepherding, children’s games, housekeeping, family life, crime, politics, hospitality and weddings.

He also had a sense of humour which is, perhaps, difficult to perceive from another culture and language. It consisted of using illustrations which were appropriate in the sense that they made their point, but were decidedly inappropriate to moralists. He likened God to an unjust judge or an unhelpful friend, Himself to a harsh despot or to a robber, plundering the Devil’s household. He used the astuteness of an embezzler to illustrate the wisdom of living for Heaven not earth. He likened the kingdom of heaven to yeast (which in Jewish religious symbolism meant corruption.)

Even when not telling parables, His distinctive style came through. A few examples are as follows.

“Don’t try to take a speck from your brother’s eye when there is a plank in your own.”

“The cup my Father has given me, shall I not drink it.”

“You strain out a gnat and swallow a whole camel.”

“If they do this when the trees are green, what will they do when they are dry.”

“You shall move mountains - - handle poisonous snakes - - tread on scorpions.”

“If you drink the water I give, you will never be thirsty again.”

“A city set on a hill cannot be hidden.” (Most of the towns were on hilltops, still are.)

“Anyone who corrupts a child would be better off in the deepest sea with a large-sized millstone tied round his neck.” (Capernaum had an industry making large sized millstones.)


This distinctive style by which Jesus was known comes through in Matthew, in Mark, in Luke and in John - yet they each had styles of their own. The only reasonable explanation is that they were reporting Him accurately. Their consistency in reporting His style could not have been faked.


1.9 THE CLAIM.
All four Gospels make the claim - that Jesus is “the Christ” or promised Messiah; that He is God revealed in human form and that knowing Him is a life-changing experience.

It is not part of this book to argue the truth of that claim. Each person can confirm it for themselves. But one essential point must be made.

As we look into the narratives, we shall find, among the events and the teaching, a great many supernatural events: angel appearances, the virgin birth, healings, water turned to wine; finally and supremely, the resurrection.

If one begins with the assumption that miracles do not happen, then one will inevitably reach the conclusion that miracles do not happen. If the claims af Christ are rejected before they are read, they will still be rejected after they are read.

If, however, we begin by recognising that we are investigating a claim (albeit a remarkable one) we shall see that the whole claim hangs together. If God did become a man, then miracles are to be expected; and not just “ordinary” miracles of healing which might have other explanations.

If God became a man there is nothing surprising about His doing miracles. More significantly, the miracles done must fit His character and purpose. So for example, He might walk on water to reach and encourage his distressed companions, but He might also refuse to jump down from the top of the temple to impress the crowds.

In short it is the claim rather than the miracles which we need to investigate. If the claim is false, so are the miracles, but if the claim is true the miracles present no rational problem.

There is, for many, an emotional problem. People like to imagine supernatural beings of whatever kind as super-human whereas Jesus in the four Gospels is presented as supremely human. That is one point on which the four accounts are in full agreement. They were writing about a man who could be tired and hungry; who had a sense of humour, a manual skill which he had had to learn; a man who valued human friendship and enjoyed the company of His colleagues; a man who needed to grieve when His friend the Baptist was killed and who reacted to that killing with defiance; a man who took calculated risks.

In short, He was very human; and the writers also declared Him, “Very God”.

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