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I thank you too for the subject that you have chosen for our deliberations this weekend, namely the defense and confirmation of the gospel. It is indeed invigorating to find a company of Christians who are really concerned and vigorously interested in this important work, the defense and confirmation of the gospel. Your title, of course, is taken from Paul's letter to his friends at Philippi. When himself in prison, he reminded them that he was set for the c- uh, defense and confirmation of the gospel.
It is clear from the historical record that Paul was not content simply to preach the gospel, though he preached it with all might and main and systematically around the Roman Empire while breath blasted in his body. But in addition to preaching it, he gave himself also to the confirmation and defense of the gospel. His many letters show that he was concerned not merely to plant churches, but that the Christians in these churches should retain and increase their true understanding of the Christian doctrines of redemption.
For many of these first generation churches came from either Jewish background or pagan background. And while they had trusted the Savior as their only hope of salvation, many of them did not possess personal copies of what Bibles were a- a- around in those days. And the Bible, the New Testament at least, was only in process of being written. And therefore, from time to time, they got themselves confused with extraneous doctrines that were not true Christian gospel at all. And Paul took time out of his preaching the gospel to write those many letters that, uh, would instruct the Christians themselves on the truth of the gospel, that they might be rooted and grounded in the faith, to use his own word, and not be moved away from the hope of the gospel.
But in addition to confirming the believers in the basic foundation doctrines of the gospel, Paul gave himself to the defense of the gospel vis-a-vis the world. Paul was not content simply to preach the gospel inside the church, but constantly moved outside. You'll see in Ephesus, we are told, that not only did he preach the word in the newfound assembly, but went outside and hired a public hall and expounded the gospel and argued its truth with all comers systematically for three whole years, till all those that were in Asia had heard the gospel.
And in doing so, of course, he came up with many, many objections to the gospel. He was preaching against the background, particularly when he came to Greece, of pagan polytheism. Beliefs in gods galore that had sons and daughters. What on earth use would it have been for him merely to preach that Jesus is the Son of God, when the very term Son of God would, to these polytheistic pagans, conjure up ideas of Zeus and all his many wives, sons, and daughters. Bad lot they were, more immoral than the men who invented them.
Joursay. Things had to be explained, what the Christians meant by saying that Jesus is the Son of God. And then, of course, he had to preach against the background of Roman politics. For in many ci- cities where he went, people soon got the notion, it was false, but they got the notion that Christianity was a form of politics. And he had to be very careful, precisely to point out that the Christian gospel is not a form of politics. Would that the church had, uh, remembered that all down the centuries.
In the sixties of the nineteen hundreds and onwards, particularly in South America, there was quite a movement that interpreted Christianity in terms, if you please, of Marxism, and turned the gospel of Christ into a p- political manifesto and campaign. And then, of course, he had to preach and explain the gospel against the background of Greek philosophy. And we shall be thinking of these things, eh, i- in our time together. Because we in our day and generation need, of course, ourselves to get a good grip and constantly tighten our grip and deepen our understanding of the doctrines of the gospel which we have already believed.
But in our evangelism, in our outreach to this world around us, we shall come across all curious oppositions, hostile ideas, concepts, that we in the end shall have to have a biblical answer to. I shall be mentioning in the course of these talks, uh, uh, difficulties and questions and objections that I have run across in my particular sphere of life and present activity. They may not be the difficulties you come across. So there being question times and meal times and things like that, um, I hope to listen to what difficulties you find, and more particularly what answers you have, so that we might work together in this conference.
And if you should find that I'm talking a lot of irrelevant s- uh, material as far as you're concerned, have a word with Paul Clark or his wife, and they'll doctor my tea and see that I'm properly corrected to say so that I talk what is helpful. But God give us compassion, and particularly for the younger generation that are growing up around us. We've long since been, uh, aware that in many schools, materialistic, virtually atheistic macro evolution has been taught to the children in the name of science.
And the whole philosophy behind it needs to be corrected. But in many, now in many a school, not in the science departments, but in the departments of English literature, quite perverse theories of literary criticism are being taught to the children. They are being taught on the basis of largely French philosophy, that in any one book, any one novel, there is no one true, uh, exposition, interpretation of it. They are taught that you cannot, it's worthless to try and find out what the author intended.
That is not allowed. And since there is no absolute standard by which to judge, then anybody's interpretation is as good as anybody else's. And when your sixth formers are taught that in their schools, in the English department, and then you in your Bible class have got to face them with scripture and tell them, look, here is God's truth, and it's not a question of what you think or I think, but here it is. This is God's absolute truth. I find your very language strange. Goes quite against what they are being taught in their literary classes in school.
We live in an increasingly godless society. God give us compassion for people. Yes, there is no substitute for preaching the gospel, but many people have vast roadblocks in their way that prevent them from coming even to listen to the gospel, and it is of our Christian charity to try as best we can to remove those stumbling blocks. Tonight I begin then with talking about the authenticity of the New Testament record. And what I mean by that is as follows. The gospels claim to have been written in the second half of the first century AD.
As far as we know, there are no originals still surviving. All we have are copies of what Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, Paul, Peter, uh, John, and James, and Jude wrote. In the second place, all those copies up until the 13th and 14th and fifteenth century had to be copied out by hand. It's a good thing to remind ourselves sometimes, isn't it, that the early Christians, if they wanted the Bible, had to write it out themselves. I wonder how many of us would have a Bible if we had to write it out ourselves.
But of course, when you write out a thing by hand, particularly a long book of some kind, then inevitably, whoever you are, there will occur mistakes. Can we therefore be sure, when we now handle our Bibles translated into English, based, however, on these manuscripts, these copies written out by hand, can we be sure that for all intents and purposes we have what the original authors wrote? Some people find that a great difficulty.
They say, you know, the Bible's been copied out so many times, you can't trust what it says. In Russia, many people were taught that the Bible, the New Testament, was only produced in the fourth century AD and was a collection of fourth century fables. It was news to them when some of us first went to some of their universities and pointed out what the facts are about the manuscripts of the New Testament. So for a few moments, I, I, I beg leave to talk to you about this matter of the manuscripts of the New Testament.
How sure can we ha- be that we have in our modern translations through those manuscripts what the original writers intended us to have. Now, professionally, I was not a theologian. You'll discover that very quickly this weekend. I was a classicist. My interest and my task was to teach the classical authors, particularly their literature and some of their philosophy. And of course, when it comes to the classical authors, Greek and Latin, we are in the same position as the New Testament.
Some of these authors were writing their books around four BC. That's a long while ago. And uh, they, uh, they survive in copies all these long centuries. Can we be sure as classical scholars that we have a fair representation of what the original authors wrote? So first I'm going to ask you to look at a slide summing up some of the, uh, details about the classical authors, and I shall compare the facts there, uh, with the second slide that will show us what our position is with the New Testament authors.
So here on the screen, you will find, uh, a few, uh, authors from the classical world. At the top is Master Caesar. He came to England, you know, and then after him there came eventually a lot of other Romans to England, and they had a look at how the Scotsmen were stealing our cattle from the north of England, and Hadrian ordered a wall to be built across the top, you see, to stop all such things, and the English keep it as best they can in repair to this present day. Mm. Well, Caesar then and his Gallic War report home to the Senate and the people of...
It was composed somewhere about fifty eight in the, in that period from fifty eight to fifty BC. How many copies have we got? Just look at the number of copies we have. We've only got nine or ten manuscript copies. That's all. Um, oh, but what about their date? Of these manuscripts copies. The oldest copy is nine hundred years later than Caesar's day. In spite of that, classical scholars will feel and decide and believe that they have an eminently valid record of, uh, Caesar's Gallic War.
Take the historian Livy, who wrote his great history between fifty BC and AD seventeen. The number of books he wrote were one hundred and forty two. Only thirty five of them survive. How many manuscripts? Not more than twenty. And yet, we regard them as valid representations of what Livy wrote. I myself have lectured on the aforesaid Livy from time to time. He had a very dramatic, uh, exciting style.
Would that modern English books are, history books were written like it. Never mind. The old, uh, the oldest copy, where fragments of books three and five, date to the fourth century AD, you will see. The gap, therefore, between the, uh, composition and the earliest copy is about three hundred years. Look at Master Tacitus. He was writing about AD hundred. He's one of the Roman historians that mentions the Christians, and he thinks they were pestilential nonsense and rightly, uh, persecuted by the emperor. Uh, you'll see he was writing about AD one hundred.
He wrote fourteen books of histories, only four and a half survive, annals, sixteen books, ten in full, two in part survive. The text of the above survives in only two manuscripts, one of the ninth century AD and one of the eleventh century AD. To give us a sure, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, of what Tacitus originally wrote. And now thinking about Master Thucydides, he was a Greek historian, the father of modern scientific history.
He was composing his history about four hundred and sixty to four BC. Surviving manuscripts, eight. uh Earliest manuscripts about nine AD, plus a few first century fragments. But for the most part, the gap between the, uh, composition and the first survive- earliest surviving manuscript is about thirteen hundred years. And yet, and yet, and yet. Of course, Thucydides is the great admiration of classical historians. He was the first European that we know of to attempt to write scientific history as distinct from merely telling interesting stories.
You'll say so, they them, and what meager manuscript evidence there is for some of the classical authors. And yet we regard these as sufficient to give us solid understanding of what the original authors wrote. Now let's compare the New Testament on similar grounds. New Testament written largely in the second half of the first century AD. Total number of manuscripts of the New Testament, part or whole, five thousand three hundred and sixty six.
But that is not correct, because since that was done, more manuscripts have been discovered. There's constant stream nowadays of early papyri that constantly somehow turn up and get discovered. Early manuscripts. How early? Well, there's a Papyrus fifty two. it's fragments of the Gospel of John, a date written between AD one hundred and one hundred and fifty. Pause. Stop breathing a minute to take it in. You'll see. That was written fifty years, maybe? seventy years after John the Apostle, who wrote the gospel, died.
If you say that manuscript, what was the age of the manuscript it was copied? The manuscript it was copied from could have existed in the time of John himself. There's Papyrus forty six, eighty six leaves of epistles of Paul, written about AD hundred. That manuscript exists in Dublin, in the Chester Beatty Library, and all Christians who go for their summer holidays to Ireland and see the mountains ought to regard it as their duty to go and look at this manuscript in the Chester Beatty Library.
How could a Christian pass by on the other side, like the Pharisee and a Levite? Yes, but look at the date of it. That manuscript is now, um, um eighteen hundred years old. Uh, what was the date of the manuscript it was copied from? We don't know. It could have been copied every year ever since Paul wrote, who knows? Unlikely. It could again be that the manuscript that it was copied from existed in the time of Paul.
Let's look at it. The complete New Testament in the Codex Sinaiticus, found in St. Catherine's Monastery by Tischendorf. It's dated, it's a complete New Testament, dated not much later than AD three hundred and sixty. You'll see. Now, compared with our classical authors, this is absolutely astonishing. Let's come to the other matter. When we're thinking about the evidence for the text of the New Testament, um, we have another source, not merely the manuscripts that the early Christians wrote, but of course the early church fathers in their writings constantly quote the New Testament.
And you see, from these early church fathers in the second and third centuries AD, you could take their quotations from their writings, quotations of the New Testament, that would be sufficient to reconstruct the whole of the New Testament except eleven verses from their quotations. And then, of course, if we could up this a bit, there are the early translations into other languages. Well, as the early Christians went out as missionaries to Syria, to North Africa, and places like that, and to Egypt, they translated the New Testament into these other languages. We'll see, so we have a total of twenty thousand manuscripts.
I cannot afford to spend more time on it tonight. But of course, you needn't be frightened if somebody tells you the New Testament's been copied out so many times that you can't trust it. That's nonsense. And that's not special pleading. I say that as a classicist myself, used to, um, dealing with the classical authors and their manuscripts. But now you see, um, we come to another question. Yes, suppose we have now reliable copies of what the New Testament authors wrote.
We can test them another way. When they write about Jerusalem or Judea or Greece or Rome or Asia Minor, as it was called, can we check their geography and what they say about all the local conditions and the names of the towns and the governors and the so forth and so on? And yes, of course, we can, a large lot of it, where they are testable. And the version of modern scholarship goes strongly in the direction that where, for instance, Luke in his gospel and in his acts can be tested against contemporary sources, Luke turns out to be a thoroughly reliable historian.
I want, don't want to say anything more about that. To go ahead would involve me in a lot of tiresome detail, but I suspect all of you know, or if you don't, you should get hold of this little book by, uh, Freddie Bruce, F. F. Bruce, The New Testament Documents, Are They Reliable? It's gone through many editions, and the last one that I have was reprinted in nineteen ninety six. An exceedingly valuable tool for those particularly who are younger and want something condensed, giving you the information about manuscripts, giving you the information about the historical accuracy of the details, you'll see. Those who want the tougher reading should consider reading the, a book by C.
J. Hemer, H-E-M-E-R. Now dead alas, on the Acts of the Apostles. The book of Acts in the setting of Hellenistic history, showing in minute detail the accuracy and reliability of Luke as a historian. When it comes to Roman law, relevant, of course, because our Lord was tried by Pilate under Roman law, and Paul, of course, was tried by Roman law, and mentions the magistrates and the consuls and things like that, and knew his stuff, when to call a man a preacher and when to call him a consul and when to call him something else.
Do see, he knew the official terminology. A certain scholar by the name of Sherwin White, W-H-I-T-E, wrote a book some forty years ago called Roman Society and Roman Law in the New Testament. He was a classical scholar and a lawyer, classical lawyer, and came down in that book on the view, uh, uh, and expounded in that view the view, uh, the idea that the New Testament is true when it comes to the matters of Roman law. So now we're thinking about the authenticity of the, uh, the record of the New Testament.
Yes, the fact that it's been copied out so many times, and there are, of course, mistakes in the manuscripts. But then, seeing we have so many thousand manuscripts, we can compare the manuscripts together and come to, uh, decisions as which is to be, likely to be the original reading. And let it be said that there is no doubt about vast acres. You'll see Westcott and Hort, the famous New Testament textual critics, gave it in their estimation that less than two and a half percent of the New Testament text is at all uncertain, and there the things concern largely small matters that do not seriously affect the meaning.
There are some other places where there are bigger questions. If you want to raise them with me, do so by all means in the intervals. But no Christian doctrine is in doubt because of the happy fact that no Christian doctrine in the New Testament depends on just one verse. You'll see, and you can therefore build up your Christian doctrines from the whole of the New Testament. No Christian doctrine, therefore, is in doubt. But now there's a deeper issue, isn't there? We can rely upon the manuscripts. Yes, and when we come to the historical portions, we can check the history in many places to find out that it, uh, is accurate.
There is a very late manuscript called the, the Gospel of Barnabas, and not a New Testament gospel at all, written somewhere, I think, about the fourteenth century. The exact date escapes me. And in that manuscript, you'll read that you could sail to Jerusalem by boat, right into Jerusalem. Well, that's not quite reliable, is it? I don't know if you've been to Jerusalem, you'll say, and a manuscript that can talk about that nonsense is gravely to be suspected. Um, see, uh, talking nonsense elsewhere. It also tells the world that Jesus Christ did not die on the cross. Mm.
But that by the way, granted that the New Testament writers prove historically accurate, but now we come to a deeper question. The figure, the central figure in the New Testament. Is that authentic? You say, why do you ask? Well, for instance, someone is going to write a historical novel, or an ordinary novel for that matter, about some wartime expedition or something. If he's a serious author, he will spend months and months and months researching all the technicalities of warships and submarines and uh tact- uh military tactics and all this kind of thing, so that in his novel, it is true to the life of that period.
Yes? There's no guarantee that the the leading figure, it might be James Bond or something, just says, and no guaranteeing that he's true to history. He wasn't historical at all, anyway. Uh, you'll see. So that if a book just takes, it gets, is accurate as far as the historical details are concerned, no guarantee by itself that the central figure of the novel is true to history. Might simply be a concoction of the novel writer. And what about the central figure of the New Testament? Jesus Christ, of course. Was he in fact, as many liberal scholars claim, largely concocted by the early Christians?
You see, they had valued him, they listened to his teaching, his moral teaching. They saw what they took to be miracles. And then after he died, some thirty or forty years afterwards, they began writing their stories and exaggerated and increased them and whatnot, and and in the end turned him into God. Is that figure a concoction by the early Christians? Um, did he himself really claim to be the Son of God? Or was this some exaggerated idea on the part of his followers?
Now this becomes of exceedingly, uh, uh, great importance, doesn't it, and central to our Christian faith. Did he claim to be God? You will answer site to me, you Christians, a lot of evidences, and therefore, uh, I do not, uh, dwell upon them tonight. I mention simply one. Very often his claim to be deity was not staked out explicitly directly, but implied. For instance, a man was brought to him with the paralysis, and his friends were hoping that Christ would heal him. But when Christ saw him, he said to the man, your sins are forgiven.
And of course, the knowledgeable folks in the room were startled. Who does he think he is? Who is this that forgives sins? Only God could conven- con- can forgive sins. And the logic is good, isn't it? Hm. Yes, if somebody offended you, your next door neighbor, and trod on your delphiniums or something, or his rabbit ate your roses, ah, you know, whatever, you might at first be angry, then you'd forgive him. Ah, good Christian you are. But if you were deeply injured and cheated by somebody else, and I came along and heard that this somebody else had done a crime against you, and I said, well, I forgive him.
What would you say? You'd say, what on earth have you got to do with it anyway? Keep your nose out of our things. Right, have you got to forgive this man? Your objection would be very sensible, wouldn't it? That's what the ancient people, the ones who thought, saw at once. Who is this that forgives sins? Only God can do that. They weren't prepared to draw the conclusion from it. The conclusion was true, of course. This was God incarnate.
And he did claim that, uh, the Father has given all judgment to the Son. He shall be the final judge. And it is the thing that stirs the hearts of Christians every time they read it or remember it. It is the judge, the one that shall be judged, that said, verily, verily, I say to you, he that hears my word and believes on him that sent me has everlasting life and shall not come into condemnation, but is passed from death to life. The judge speaks, able to pronounce forgiveness because he was and is God incarnate.
But if we want evidence that the gospel is not a concoction, not an invention of the early Christians, the apostles, we can see it if we come to the very center of the Christian doctrine of salvation. For the gospel is this, that Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures, that he was buried, that he rose again the third day according to the scriptures. Central to Christianity, the doctrine of the atoning death of Jesus Christ at Calvary.
It goes back to him, of course. But as we shall notice in a moment, when our Lord first taught the apostles that he must go to Jerusalem, be rejected and crucified, killed, and then rise again, they openly rebuked him. That wasn't in their line of thinking. They thought it quite perverse and did their best to discourage him. And even after he was dead, buried, and rose again from the grave. So they went out now to preach the gospel that Christ died for our sins, died on a cross.
The best of all, that evangelist tells us in words of one syllable that he realized this gospel of the cross of Christ that he preached to the world was to the world nonsense. To the Jew, it was a scandal. And to the Greeks, sheer folly. You try to preach Jesus is the Messiah, Jesus that hung upon the cross at Calvary, the Messiah. You try to preach that to unconverted Saul of Tarsus. It would sound to him such a blasphemous scandal.
You don't have to be careful he didn't torture you and and stand over you and kill you for blasphemy. Why? Because his Old Testament said, cursed is everyone that hangs on a tree, cursed of God. And if Jesus Christ hung upon a tree under the curse of God, how dare you say that he was God's Messiah and the world's savior. That's how Solotarsus reasoned. It was nothing short of a scandal. And tell the Greeks, try and tell Aristotle, if you get hold of him one of these days, uh, that the answer to all his questions, the secret for the putting right and redemption of the whole world, is a man hang- hanging upon a cross.
They would think it's sheer twaddle of nonsense. I tell you what, the early Christians didn't invent the story. They realized it was folly. Before the resurrection, they themselves had disagreed over the matter. And when after the resurrection, they went out and preached it, they were aware at every turn. That message was a scandal to the Jew and folly to the Greek. My point, now here is a something that the early Christians didn't invent.
Obviously so. And when you face the cross of Jesus Christ our Lord, you are looking straight at the very heart of Christ, and through him to the very heart of God. You see, the Bible's answer to the Christian is this. The cross of Christ is the power of God to salvation, because it diagnoses correctly what man's need is.
Man's need, on the whole, is not that his intellect is defective. Mine is, and gets increasingly so with advancing age, but that's another story. But man's real trouble is not defective intellect. It's defect of heart. The Bible is true here, but there's an inbuilt enmity against God. Not necessarily bitter hostility, but a determination to be independent of him. The notion that to believe God would involve you in subjection to some tyrant and take away your freedom is widespread in the human race.
It was to meet that kind of heart, that rebellion, that hostility, that God devised the central message of Christianity. God was in Christ, reconciling the world to himself. This is what God is like. And we know it because, before Christ lived, he ordered that his disciples should come together and keep a simple ceremony in memory of him. And what then should this ceremony be then?
He didn't ask them that when they came together, they should recite his Sermon on the Mount. Good and marvelous as that is, of course. His ethical teaching. Or had he prescribed that, uh, when they met, they should read the Sermon on the Mount regularly and repeatedly. We should have remembered him chiefly as a moral teacher. He didn't ask that at this occasion people should continually recite his miracles. Marvelously significant though they were. But had he told us to remember him by constantly repeating his miracles, we should have remembered him as a miracle worker, above all.
He told his apostles and and followers and disciples to take bread and to eat it, and to take wine and to drink it. This is my body, he said, which is given for you. This is my blood shed for the forgiveness of. It's not only true, this is the heart, this is not some human invention, this goes right back to Christ himself. But you see, it is unique. Tell me another religion that has anything like it.
Scratch your head if you have to, to think of one. In most forms of Buddhism, there is no such thing as forgiveness. In Hinduism, of the philosophical sort at any rate, Shankara and his followers. There is no such thing as forgiveness. The ill that you do, you must suffer yourself for. If by the end of this life you haven't suffered enough to work off what they call your karma, then after death you'll have to be reincarnated and come back again to suffer some more.
Only by your own suffering can you be released from the guilt and the consequence of your sinning. How magnificently our Lord shines out, not only in Judaism, but in the world at large. Did I tell you? I probably have done because I'm getting old, and like all old men, they tell you one or two stories constantly. But I was in the Ukraine at one stage, years ago now, ten years and more.
Uh, talk to the school about Christianity. She explained to the pupils that up till now it had been forbidden by the state, but the state, she said, had had deeper insights. So now they could teach religion, and she was going to teach religion, not just Christianity, you said, she said, but all religions. So I was invited to speak. I must say the students looked astounded. Uh, talked to the school about Christianity. She explained to the pupils that up till now it had been forbidden by the state, but the state, she said, had had deeper insights, so now they could teach religion.
And she was going to teach religion, not just Christianity, you said, she said, but all religions. Mm. So I was invited to speak. I must say the students looked astounded. Never heard anything like it, of course. I expect they didn't understand it, it was so strange. Afterwards, the deputy headmistress came up to me. She says, could I ask you a question? I said, yes, madam, certainly. She said, what do you think of U- UFOs? I said, ma'am, I don't know what to think. And I said, we haven't had any our way. And those we have had, the government said weren't the real thing.
I said, I believe you've had a lot. Yes, she said, we've had a lot. And she said, it's remarkable. The last lot that came, when the beings got out of this thing, they told the locals that Buddhism was the true religion and not Christianity. What would you think about that, she said. I said that was astounding. And then gradually, and respectfully as I could, I said, Madam, I have to confess to you, I have a little difficulty about Buddhism. In Buddhism, mostly there is no such thing as forgiveness.
You have to endure your kamma and be reincarnated as many times as was possible in order to get rid of it. I said, you see, I have a special difficulty, madam. I don't, in the end, need anybody to tell me to be good. I know I should be. There's a help sometimes to have some- somebody point out, uh, precisions here and precisions there on what being good means, but I know I ought to be good. I said, madam, my problem is I haven't been. And I have to ask myself, how can I find forgiveness and release from the chain of guilt and acceptance with God?
On what basis can I find it? It's no good saying sin doesn't matter. That's nonsense. If I get drunk and run over your sixteen-year-old daughter and kill her, you'll be angry, won't you? Rightly so. And you won't take the view that it didn't matter. You'll never take that view. God will never take the view. And he'll never, he'll never cease holding against the person that has done it.
Not to all eternity, unless they repent. Why? Because he loves your daughter, that's why. How can I find forgiveness? In a way that will satisfy God's standards of values. And my own standard of values. You tell me my sin doesn't matter. You tell you are diminishing me as a human being, and you are devaluing human life. How can I find forgiveness that upholds my standards, let alone God's?
And this is what the Christian gospel preaches. God has done it. While we were yet sinners, God commends his love to us in that Christ died for us. Here then, and my case is finished for tonight, is for me the supreme evidence that the Christian gospel is not some concoction concocted by the early Christians. It is self-evidently going back to Christ himself, and to God, who so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son, that whoever believes on him should not perish, but have everlasting life.
You needn't worry about other religions in this respect. There's no other on the market that offers what Christ offers you. So may God himself bless our attempt to think seriously about the authenticity of the New Testament record.
