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Once more, a very good evening to you. Last night I spent the time of our lecture talki- uh, giving four what I regard as substantial reasons why I believe the Old Testament to be the word of God. Now tonight I wish to turn to the New Testament itself. And I begin by pointing out that it cannot possibly be regarded as an exaggeration to say that if the central message of the New Testament is true, then the New Testament is the most important book in all the world, in all the centuries of human history.
For the central message of the New Testament is this, that about two thousand years ago, not quite, the creator of the universe, of heaven and earth, and all that in them is, he who is called the Word of God, who in the beginning was with God, and what God was, the Word was. That Word, that person that Scripture calls the Word, the one in whom was life, the one through whom all things were made.
The message of the New Testament is that about two thousand years ago, that Word, being God, became human in the person of Jesus Christ of Nazareth. He was, therefore, was our Lord Jesus Christ verily human, and yet being verily human, he was verily God, both man and God, and absolutely both. The message of the New Testament is then that he lived here on earth a sinless life for about thirty three years.
He died crucified on a cross, put there by the malevolence of the world, but put there, according to the New Testament, by God's own design and purpose on God's side. There he might offer an atoning sacrifice for the sins of the world, become, as a later apostle puts it, the propitiation not only for our sins, that is the sins of Christians, but the sins of the world. The New Testament's message is that when he died, he died according to the Old Testament scriptures that had forecast and predicted that God would send a savior into the world, God's perfect servant and anointed Messiah, who should be wounded for our transgressions and bruised for our iniquities, would pour out his soul unto death, and yet in spite of that, and after it, would prolong his days, who would see the travail of his soul and be satisfied.
And therefore, the New Testament records as an historical fact that three days after Jesus died and was buried, he rose again bodily from the grave, and forty days thereafter ascended into heaven. That same Jesus, according to the central message of the New Testament, shall one day come again, and he shall judge both the living and the dead. If that be true, and I believe it is, but if that be true, there can be no exaggeration to say that the New Testament is the most important book that has ever been written in the whole history of mankind.
When we look at it close, more closely, the New Testament, we find, is written by a number of authors. They claim, each one of them, to be contemporaries of this same Lord Jesus Christ. Some of them, like Matthew and John, uh, cra- and Peter, claim to have been his disciples from the very first time of his public ministry, and to have followed him around Palestine faithfully and closely, observing his behavior, listening to his teaching, and witnessed his crucifixion.
They also tell us that not only were they his contemporaries, all of them who write this New Testament, but many of them will say that they saw the Lord Jesus after he was raised from the dead. Two of them, Paul, who came to be a Christian apostle, and Luke, the great historian of the New Testament, will not claim that they saw Jesus Christ, uh, before he was crucified. Paul will tell us that after Jesus Christ rose from the dead and ascended into heaven, he personally appeared to Paul, and Paul stakes his reputation for truth on this claim that he personally saw the Lord Jesus after he rose from the dead.
Luke, the great historian of the early church, tells us that he was a travel companion of Paul and had opportunity closely to investigate the early written records of the life of Christ, and more importantly, to interrogate those who had been eyewitnesses of the Lord Jesus. The historian Luke, likewise, claims that these events on which the New Testament talks can be dated in history. And like a good Hellenistic historian, when he comes to write his gospel, he, in his first three chapters, gives us the synchronisms of the birth and life and death of Christ with the contemporary history of the first century AD.
Luke, in his chapter one tells us that the parents are the parent Mary of our Lord and his reputed father Joseph, were living up in the north of the country at the time when the birth of Christ drew near. But they were obliged, nonetheless, to go to Bethlehem by a census decreed by Augustus, the first emperor in the Roman Empire. He tells us then in chapter two and, and, and three— sorry, in chapter three— that, uh, in the fifteenth year of the reign of the next emperor, Tiberius Caesar, Pontius Pilate being then governor of Judea, and Herod being Tetrarch of Galilee, and his brother Philip, tetrarch of the region of Icaria and Trachonitis, and Lysanias, tetrarch of Abilene.
They are the Gentile rulers and quasi-Gentile. Then at the same time, Annas was a high priest, and Caiaphas also among the Jews. That it was at that time in history that the word of God came to John, the son of Zacharias, in the wilderness, that John whom we call John the Baptist, and was forerunner of Jesus the Messiah. Luke likewise tells us that it was under the governorship of Pilate that our Lord, uh, was crucified. And all through his Acts of the Apostles, he will date the various stories that he relates by contemporary history.
More of that are not. The point is then that, uh, the New Testament is making these prodigious claims for Jesus of Nazareth. And in recording them, these writers of the New Testament are claiming to be contemporary writers and to be writing history, not myth. What then shall we say? We obviously cannot treat these great documents simply as historical documents, because no other historical document makes such a tremendous claim.
There have been many who, faced with the claims of the New Testament in this last one hundred and fifty years, who have said that they frankly cannot believe that the New Testament was written by men who were contemporary with Jesus Christ of Nazareth. And they have claimed that the books of the New Testament were written either late in the first century, and some of them have claimed that they were written in the second century, and some even claimed that one or two of them were written in the third century. In other words, many will claim, particularly nowadays, that the New Testament documents are not authentic.
They claim to have been written by contemporaries of Christ. They were not. They claim to have been written in the first century AD, but if they were, it was very late, in the eighties or nineties perhaps, but more likely were written in the second century. And therefore, what we have in these new document, uh, New Testament documents is not history, but legend. Or even worse, missed. Our answer to that may begin at a blind corner. Let us think tonight starting the, about the New Testament documents simply as documents.
And the first thing we have to remind ourselves about these documents is that we do not possess the originals. We do not possess the autographs, as they are technically called, written by Matthew or Mark or Luke or John or Paul. We don't have the originals. What we have from early times onwards are copies of these originals, and they were written out by hand. That is why we refer to them by the Latin term manuscript, which means, as we know, written by hand. So we have copies of these manuscripts.
Our first question will be, are they authentic copies? Do they give us what the originals origin- the original authors originally wrote. That we shall deal with in a subsequent evening. More pressing is the question, do these manuscripts give re- give us reason to think that the originals weren't written in the first century, but were only written later in the second or third century? What about, therefore, the dating of these manuscripts? How soon after the originals were they written?
That is what we shall think about now in the first part of our lecture. But I want to begin by giving you some standard of comparison so that you may judge these things by yourselves. So instead of talking about the manuscripts of the New Testament to start with, I'm going to talk about some of the classical authors and the manuscripts we possess of the work of these classical authors. Let me then say quite honestly that I'm prejudiced. I cannot myself claim to be an expert in the manuscripts of the New Testament and in the textual criticism of the New Testament.
My particular field has been in life, first of all, as a professional classicist. From my youth upwards, from the tender age of ten, I began to study the so-called classics, both Greek, uh, Latin, and at twelve I began the study of Greek. And through my life professionally, it has been my happy pleasure to teach the classical authors. I am not a theologian, as you have already guessed. There's been plenty of evidence for that. I am a classicist by profession, and I used to both read and teach these classical authors. At the same time, my special expertise lay in the manuscripts of the Old Testament, and the questions of the validity of the text and the, what the original text of the Old Testament would have been.
The, uh, within that field, the special interest I had was in the tradition of the ancient Greek translation of the Old Testament. That was made about the year, or began to be made about the year hundred and seventy BC. And that, of course, led me on to think about the manuscripts that were found in the Judean deserts at Qumran and in other places in the Judean hills, the so-called Dead Sea Scrolls. That then was my expertise, uh, first of all in classics, and then in the text of the Old Testament. But of course, the questions of text of Old Testament and the dealing with manuscripts brings one very near to the question of the manuscripts, both of the Bible and of the classical authors.
So let's spend a little time thinking about these classical authors. And take dear old Caesar. Pity schoolboys now and girls who are not taught to read the exciting stories of Master Caesar, you'll see, and his wars, and how he came across the channel and beat up us poor English. Mercifully, he didn't get to the Irish. You'll say, but there we are, many a schoolboy has found his accounts of battles and murderings and slaughterings of Britons and Welsh, and I don't know what have you, very exciting, to say. Nobody ever doubted that there was a Julius Caesar.
No one ever doubted, as he was reading the translation or in Latin, uh, the text of Julius Caesar's records, that he was reading substantially what Julius Caesar originally wrote. No classical scholar that I was ever aware of questioned the fact. But now look at the manuscripts of Master Caesar. Caesar was writing somewhere about fifty eight to fifty BC. And we're going to ask two questions about the manuscripts of Caesar. One, how many have survived? When we try to construct the text of Master Caesar, how many manuscripts have we got to play with, you see, and compare one with another so we can come to what he originally wrote?
And then we shall ask, the manuscripts of Caesar, what is the oldest one of any use that we possess? And we were going to ask that for these other authors, you see. Well, the first question, how many manuscripts of Caesar survive? You may be interested to know there are nine or ten manuscripts of Caesar. And, uh, the oldest copy surviving nine hundred years later than the time of Caesar. That's a big enough gap in anybody's calendar, isn't it? Nine hundred years between the oldest surviving copy of Caesar's Gallic War and the original that Caesar wrote.
In spite of the fewness of the manuscripts that have survived, in spite of that enormous gap between the earliest manuscripts and Caesar's original work, I do not know of any professional classical scholar that would doubt that we now have what Caesar originally wrote. Oh, take the great Roman historian Livy. He wrote from about f- he lived from about fifty nine BC to AD seventeen. He wrote one hundred and forty two books of history. The number of books, uh, surviving in manuscript form, not more than about twenty.
And the oldest copy are fragments of books three to six, written in the fourth century AD, that's in the, uh, th- uh, the hundreds uh, uh, period. So the gap between the originals and our oldest copy, about three hundred years. I repeat, for him too. I don't know of any classical scholar that would doubt the authenticity of the manuscripts, that they truly represent what Livy wrote. Or take, uh, the famous historian Tacitus. He composed both histories and then what are called the Annals.
He wrote about a hun- AD hundred. Tacitus is interesting because he, though a pagan Roman and completely out of sympathy with Christians, bears witness to the fact that Jesus Christ was put to death under Pontius Pilate, a very interesting external witness to the historicity of the story of the crucifixion of Jesus Christ. He, uh, wrote then, uh, fourteen books of histories and sixteen books of annals. Ten survive in f- of only four and a half survive of the fourteen books, and only ten survive in full of the 16 books, though 2 survive in part of those sixteen books.
Now look at the gap. The text of the above survives in only two manuscripts, one of the ninth century AD and one of the eleventh century AD. I repeat, I don't know of any classical historian that on those grounds would doubt the authenticity of the manuscript of Theaetetus. Look at Master Thucydides, with him we're going back i- into, uh, the centuries before Christ, composed about four hundred and sixty to four hundred BC. A very important history by classicists.
Thucydides is reckoned to be perhaps the first scientific historian. Eh, his surviving manuscripts are eight. There are a few first century fragments, little to talk about. The earliest manuscript in full is about AD nine hundred. The gap is one thousand three hundred years. I repeat once more, I don't know of any classical historian that doubts the authenticity of these manuscripts or the fact that Thucydides, the historian, wrote them, uh, wrote the original, eh, thirteen years before.
If you can bear some of those figures in mind, we can now use that as a kind of a yardstick in order to compare the records, the manuscripts of the New Testament, and compare them with the manuscripts of the ancient Greeks and Latins. According to Professor Bruce Metzger and his most helpful volume, Manuscripts of the Greek Bible, I have it here at the front. If afterwards you haven't seen it, you may care to come and look at it. According to him, the total number of manuscripts of the New Testament number four, five thousand three hundred and sixty six.
Notice the number of New Testament manuscripts is vastly bigger than the number of the manuscripts of the classical Roman and Greek writers. Eh, not only do we have, uh, manuscripts direct of the New Testament, five thousand three hundred and sixty six of them, but we have quotations in the early church fathers who lived in the second and third centuries, that's in the two hundreds and the three hundreds eh, of this present era. We have quotations of the New Testament in their writing, and the quotations are so numerous and so widespread from the whole of the New Testament that they are sufficient to reconstruct the whole of the New Testament, except eleven verses.
So if we didn't have these five thousand manuscripts of the New Testament, we should still be able to reconstruct from the writings of the Church Fathers, uh, the whole of the New Testament except eleven verses. And of course, the number of manuscripts of the early Church Fathers are abundant. Then, of course, we have early translations of the New Testament into lang- other languages, Syriac, Latin,lohariic, Tahidic, and so forth and so on. And the number of those manuscripts is very large indeed. Putting all together the, uh, direct manuscripts of New Testament and all these other manuscripts, it is reckoned that the total manuscript evidence of the New Testament will number over twenty thousand manuscripts.
As far as numbers go, the amount of evidence for the New Testament from the manuscripts is overwhelmingly greater than that for the classical authors. And if classical, uh, scholars regard the manuscripts of the classical authors as numerous enough to give us, uh, or, uh, confidence that they are authentic copies of what the original authors wrote, and that they are authentic in this ca- sense that they point to these authors, their reality, their historicity. They were actual men who actually lived at the dates they claimed.
If classical scholars, uh, find no ground for questioning that on the grounds of the fewness and the lateness of the manuscripts of the classical authors, we Christians have no reason to doubt the authenticity of the New Testament manuscripts. But not only the number of them, I ask you now to look at the age of some of them. Perhaps the earliest manuscript that has survived of the New Testament is Papyrus fifty two, so-called. Sorry, I haven't got an overhead, uh, uh, film of it.
They are difficult to do. But there for you to see is Bruce Metzger's photograph of those, uh, pieces of manuscript, they're just a few, uh, small fragments. They exist in Manchester City. Uh, it's not the football team that makes Manchester famous, you know, nor even the IRA bomb. It's the fact that in the John Rylands, uh, library in Manchester, there are these fragments of the New Testament. They are fragments of the Gospel of John. They are the earliest known fragments of the New Testament, and they come, according to Bruce Metzger, s- they were written, these m- m- pieces were written between a hundred and hundred and fifty AD.
Actual manuscripts. Of course, if you went there, you'd have to ask to see them, you wouldn't be allowed to touch them, naturally. These pieces of manuscript, therefore, are, uh, nearly one thousand nine hundred years old. So what do we conclude from that? Well, we conclude this at least, that those scholars, and there were many of them at the end of the last century, who said that the Gospel of John wasn't written by the Apostle John, the disciple of Jesus Christ. It wasn't even written in the first century AD. It was written much, much later in the second century.
Well, they have been proved completely wrong. For here is a, a copy of a Gospel of John. The latest time at which it was written would be about hundred and fifty AD. It could have been written as early as one AD. Now let me put the point to you. Here, this is a print, a facsimile of this manuscript. You could go and actually see it if you wanted to. It exists. Mustn't handle it because it's so delicate, but it's nineteen hundred years old. It has lasted for nineteen hundred years. Now answer me a question.
It's a copy. It's not the original. It was copied from another manuscript. Can you tell me how old that other manuscript was? Well, it could have been almost brand new, couldn't it? But you couldn't be surprised if that manuscript from which this was copied was thirty years old. That wouldn't be difficult to believe, would it? If this one has survived for nineteen hundred years, wouldn't be difficult to believe that the manuscript from which this was copied could have been thirty years old, could have been forty years old, could have been eighty years old, no difficulty at all.
And if it was, uh, fifty years old or eighty years old, according to what you date it, it could have been that manuscript from which this was copied could have been written when the Apostle John was still alive. That isn't bad going, is it? Get back to the Apostle John in two steps. Then the, uh, next very interesting New Testament manuscript is, uh, what is called Papyrus, uh, Papyrus forty six, better known by its, um, family name, the Chester Beatty Papyrus.
This papyrus is housed in the Chester Beatty Library in Dublin's fair city, and of course is Dublin's chief claim to fame. Nothing to do with horses or Guinness or anything like that. Dublin's chief claim to fame is this, that in the Chester Beatty, uh, library in Dublin, there is this famous manuscript. This is quite a substantial manuscript, eighty six leaves of the epistles of Paul, written about two hundred, uh, AD two hundred. you'll see.
So it's a bit older than those first fragments I showed you. Written about, uh, uh, AD two hundred. There are scholars who believe it could have been written much earlier, but we'll keep to the more conservative view, written about two hundred. There it is. This is a collection of Paul's letters, not all of them. It's a very, very early collection. They're not in the order that you'll find them in your modern Bibles. You can't see from where you sit. Let me put up, uh, a very obscure film so that you perhaps can see something. There's, uh, uh, uh, my film copy of one of the pages of that manuscript, and you can't see, but here at the top is our, is the last verse of the Epistle to the Romans.
And then here comes the title of the next book in the manuscript that says Pros Hebraeus, meaning to the Hebrews. In this collection of manuscripts, Hebrews comes immediately after Romans, and if you were to read on, you would find that Ephesians comes before Galatians, you'll see. Very interesting, incidentally, all the theologians present and biblical scholars will be interested to see that about the year two hundred AD, somebody collected many of Paul's letters together and obviously thought that the Epistle to the Hebrews was written by Paul, you'll see, and put them together.
I'm not quite sure what the theologians will say about that, but the writer has long since gone to heaven, we hope. You'll see. But anyway, uh, there they are. Eh, they are, uh, this is a great bunch, uh, as I say, of eighty-odd odd leaves of the, uh, epistles of Paul. Not all of Paul's epistles, but some of them. They were written, therefore, about two AD. There's two other big batches, uh, belonging to that same collection, and between them they cover most of the New Testament. They were written a little bit later, perhaps by the two hundred and AD, as best they can be judged.
Once more, I want you to think, if you will, with me about the implications of these manuscripts. Let's have a look at those facsimiles. This is a photograph of an actual manuscript. Again, you won't be allowed to put your hand on it, but you can go and see it. And of course, every Christian who goes to Dublin, particularly those who believe in the inspiration of the Holy Writ, don't go to the football matches, do they? Or to the rugby matches or to the horse shows. They all go to the Chester Beatty Library, and you, of course, all of you have been, so, but I'm just reminding you to see here's this manuscript, uh, and uh, written this first watch of manuscript about two AD.
It is now, therefore, about eighteen hundred years old. It's not an original, it's a copy. If this manuscript has survived for eighteen hundred years, how old was the manuscript from which this was copied? Wouldn't be difficult to think, would it, that the manuscript from this cop- with which this was copied could have been one hundred and fifty years old. And if that is so, it would bring us right down to the time of Paul, the apostle. It is not then simply the number of manuscripts, so that is exceedingly impressive. It is also, uh, the age of some of the oldest fragments and considerably large portions of the New Testament.
The first complete New Testament that has survived is the famous Codex Sinaiticus, found in St. Catherine's Monastery by Tischendorf, i- in uh, the St. Catherine's Monastery in the Sinai Peninsula. It is dated not much later than three hundred and sixty AD. That is a complete New Testament plus other material in that manuscript. Eh, and you say, well, look how late that is. That's three hundred and sixty. You see, That's a gap of what, three hundred years between the time of Paul, say, and this manuscript. You say, isn't that a little bit difficult to, to ta- to to to be happy about?
Well, don't you remember what you saw on the first slide? The gap between Thucydides, the Greek historian, and the first surviving copy, uh, apart from a few fragments, thirteen hundred yes. Is absolutely reliable and absolutely. In the consideration of this chapter, if I can just set one or two things before you, it will cause you the gap between Caesar and the first copy, Nine years. That doesn't worry any classical scholar.
There's no need to be worried by this either. And on the subsequent evening, when we turn to talk of these things, we shall see why we have no need to be worried, that the first complete copy of New Testament that has survived is dated about 3 hun- AD three hundred and sixty. So with that, uh, we have made comment on the first line of approach, examining the manuscripts of the New Testament as to their number and their age. To be fair to other scholars, I just remind you before we pass on that a German, uh, scholar by the name of Professor Peter Theda has claimed that three fragments of the Gospel of Matthew that are in Magdalen College, Oxford, were written not later than A D fifty.
Now, if that dating is true, of course, it is right to the time of Matthew. It would, of course, upset a good many theological theorists. And as you may expect, uh, most uh theologians of the New Testament are against uh Professor Theda and want to retain the traditional data somewhere about AD eighty. He has a powerful case. Professor Stanton of London has written a whole book to try and prove him wrong, which unfortunately Professor Stanton published for before Tida had the chance to publish the final evidence and the photographic evidence. But the matter is still disputed. I only mention it, therefore, in passing.
If you're interested in these things, pray get hold of a copy and read it. Eh, the same Professor Tida has joined forces with Professor O'Callaghan of Barcelona in Spain. Years ago, when the Dead Sea Scrolls were first discovered, Professor O'Callaghan claimed that there were certain fragments in the caves, one of the caves, that were fragments of the Gospel of Mark. He was about the only scholar who believed they were. They are very tiny fragments, you'll see. He also, uh, claimed that others could have been written, uh, could have been taken as New Testament fragments of New Testament manuscripts.
The implication of that would be that those manuscripts, if they were found in that area of Qumran, wouldn't have been written later than about AD fifty. More recently, Professor Tila, uh, uh, Tida has written this book in which he gives his support full-heartedly to Ocalican and deduces much more forensic evidence for the case. And when just the other year I was talking to Professor Tow from the Hebrew University of in Jerusalem, who nowadays is chairman of the publication committee of the Dead Sea Scrolls. Professor, uh, uh, Tow mentioned the fact to me that there were these manuscripts, and some scholars were claiming that they could be New Testament manuscripts, these very early small fragments.
And Professor Tow, as far as I could understand his drift, was quite prepared to think they might well have been manuscripts of the New Testament. That is an interesting discussion that is going on. We shall doubtless hear more about it in the days to come. But now, of course, these men claim, uh, the New Testament authors then claim to have been writing history. We have examined the document- the, the validity, the authenticity of the manuscript, but that, of course, is only the first thing that we have to consider, is it not? Suppose the New Testament was written then by these men in the first century AD, and I believe it was, and they profess to be writing history.
How can we check up on them? Were they really accurate historians? That's the next thing we want to know. Or did they make a lot of the story up, even though they were writing in the first century AD? Were they reliable historians? Well, uh, there is one way, uh, among many, many other ways that we can check these men, and Luke in particular. For Luke, throughout his history, mentions all kinds of Roman officials, from the emperors, he mentions Augustus and the next emperor Tiberius, he talks about Claudius, uh, you'll see, and uh, he talks also about the Roman officials in various of the provinces, you'll see.
And we can check upon him. Not only did those people exist, that they existed, but certain other minute details about them to know whether Luke has got it right or wrong. And briefly put, it's this, if you will allow me to use an analogy. I want you to imagine the impossible, uh, you'll see, that you were living five thousand years from now in the future. You say, don't be so silly, the laws will have come. Well, very likely so, you'll see. Eh, but just for the sake of argument, suppose you were living five thousand years from now, and a, a book was discovered, you'll see, as written two thousand, uh, said it was written in the year nineteen sixty.
Years and thousands of years ago. And when you own the book, the author said he was writing a history of the Second World War in Europe. And he lived in the time of the Second World War. And what he was writing to you was a genuine historical account of the Second World War. You read it with interest. But suppose when you read it, the historian said, I was living then, so I'm telling you the truth, you'll see. Now, the leader of the German side in the Second World War was Kaiser Bill. Wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute. No, he's got it muddled up. Uh, Kaiser Bill was the the leader on the German side in the First World War, not the Second World War.
The leader of the German side in the Second World War was Master Hitler, yeah? Mm. And you read on, and you'll say, and uh, the Germans nearly won, but there came the concluding victory fought at Waterloo, and the chief general was Napoleon. Half a minute. This man says he was a contemporary. Wait a minute, who did he say he is? He's claiming to be Winston Churchill. So, well, there's obvious fraud. You didn't stop to prove it, did you? He could not possibly have been a contemporary with the things that he was writing. He's got it all mixed up, the f- Second World War with the First World War and with Napoleon, if you please.
Ridiculous man. Of course, he's not writing history, and he wasn't a contemporary. Luke claims to be writing contemporary history, travel companion of the Apostle Paul. And in the course of Paul's travels, Paul came across various Roman officials in the different provinces. One of them was at Corinth. He was a official by the name of Gallio. Now, for many years, historians had no record of Gallio's existence, and they said, there you are, Luke got it wrong. There was no Roman official in Corinth in Paul's time called Gallio. And then archaeological evidence came to light, and there was a Gallio, and uh, Luke had got it right, precisely right.
And then there's a very interesting matter with Roman officials. You'll see the Romans governed their empire by two systems. Some parts of the empire were governed by the Senate from Rome. Other parts of the empire were governed by the emperor directly. And when the Senate governed, they appointed various people, generally called consuls, and then proconsuls, and so forth and so on. When the emperor ruled, he had a different set of titles for the men that represented him, so there were different titles. In one province, the man in charge could be called one thing, in the next province he could be called a completely different thing. And if you strayed over the border and didn't realize where the border was, Josie, you could have got things horribly mixed up if you didn't know the facts.
You could be calling one man a proconsul when he wasn't a proconsul. Uh, he wasn't a senatorial official, he was, uh, the emperor's official. He was a legate of the emperor, and so forth and so on. And then in the different provinces, they had different names. And to make things complicated, sometimes a province would be ruled by the Senate, and then, hey, presto, the emperor would decide differently, and the emperor would take over, and therefore the man, the name, the title of the man in charge was now different. What had it been a year ago? Hm. How does Luke fare with all this kind of thing? Does he make the same mistake as our supposed historians thinking that the leader on the German side in the Second World War was Kaiser Bill?
He did it all wrong? No, the fact is, the very interesting fact is, down to tiny details of the descriptions of the Roman officials, he gets it absolutely right every time. Only a contemporary who knew the thing because he lived in it would know exactly what the titles were at that particular time and get it right. There are many other such tests, possible tests of the, uh, historicity then of the New Testament historians. But now we come to the much bigger and much more important thing.
That is, suppose these men were then contemporary with Jesus Christ. Suppose the manuscripts we have are authentic, and they go back, copies of documents that were written in the first century. Suppose the manuscripts are authentic, and they're copies of documents actually written by disciples of the Lord Jesus, Matthew and John and Peter and his apostles like Paul and so forth. Suppose all that. How do we know that the central message of the New Testament is true? You see, those contemporaries could have got all the historical details right, couldn't they?
But then, when they start to talk about Jesus Christ and claim that he did miracles, claim that he rose from the dead. Um, how do we know they weren't making it up? How do we know when they record his parables and his sayings, that because they loved him, they exaggerated and made it all up? It isn't enough, is it, just to say that the New Testament documents are authentic as documents. Not enough to say that many of the writers were, uh, accurate historians. We have to ask, did they invent the story about Jesus and make it appear true by getting all the historical details right, but the character of Jesus they made up.
What should we say to that? There are, aren't there, in world literature, characters that were invented by famous authors that almost live for you. For instance, Dickens' Scrooge. He so lives for us, doesn't he, Scrooge? We can almost hear the chains rattling of Marley's ghost, you see, a- a- a- a- and we call people Scrooges now after Dickens' character Scrooge. But Dickens' character Scrooge wasn't an actual man, was he? He was a description of a type of a man, that's all. But you mustn't say where exactly did Dickens Scrooge live.
Where would I have found him if I'd have been visiting the place? He's a made-up character. Yes? What about Jesus of Nazareth? Is he a made-up character? Did Matthew invent him? Or John? Or Paul? That's the question we have to face, don't we? And the brief answer to that is this. Well, it's not a brief answer. That'll take us all the rest of the week. Just let me sketch in s- s- some of the main features of the answer. First of all, if Peter, Matthew, and Mark, for that matter, and John invented the character of Jesus, well, then these men are world geniuses.
Take it from a literary point of view. The parable of the prodigal son. What a parable that is, isn't it? Whoever invented it was a genius. I'm talking now simply at the ground level of mere literary criticism. I read a moderate amount of literature in my time, both ancient and modern. The man who invented the parable of the prodigal son was a sheer literary genius. Or a genius anyway, even if he never wrote on a piece of paper ever. Did Matthew invent that? An old civil servant? Well, we speak civil servants, but I mean to say, if Matthew invented it, well, he ranks as, uh, one of the leaders of world literature ever.
Peter write it, a fisherman? You know the kind of Greek he wrote from his epistles. Did Paul invent the parable of the prodigal son? No, most unlikely. Um, what about those famous replies, what a personality you find? That famous occasion in the court of the temple when the Sa- Sadducees and the Herodians thought they had him cornered, and they said, is it right to pay tax to Caesar or not? They thought he had him cornered, whichever way he said. If he said pay it to Caesar, all the the right-wing zealots would rise up in protest.
This is no Messiah. And if he said don't pay it to to Caesar, they would have reported him to the governor and got him executed for treason. They thought they'd got him cornered. What a stroke of that of wisdom that was when he said, show me a penny. Or that other occasion when they thought they had him cornered, and they said this woman was taken in adultery. Now Moses commanded she be stoned. What do you say? And they thought if he said, yes, stone her, they'd report him again to the authorities. It was illegal for the Jews to stone anybody at that time. If he said, don't stone her, they would have said, there you are, he's no true prophet, he didn't stand up for Moses' law.
And the genius of his reply, as he stooped down and wrote on the ground, and lifting himself up, he said, he that is without sin, let him cast the first stone. If that's an invented character, then we better take John and put him, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, and Luke and put them on the pedestal, the greatest writers of character, inventors of character that ever lived. Wait a minute, it's not just our, uh, the literary ability of Jesus of Nazareth, all that sparkling personality. But, um, it is easy to show that he wasn't anybody's invention.
People say that what the, uh, writers have done is to get an ideal figure and then represent Jesus as fulfilling that ideal figure. That Jesus, you see, was Matthew's ideal, or near enough, you see. And they therefore wrote his history, and they attributed to him all the characteristics that they would have loved in their ideal figure. And that's what Jesus is. Actual Jesus would have been very different from the ideal figure that Matthew and Mark and Luke had depicted in the Gospels. What about that theory then? Well, it's plain silly.
But when you read the Gospels, Jesus is nobody's ideal figure, is he? He claimed to be the Messiah. He came before, uh, Pilate, and he came before Herod, and he was accused of being the king of the Jews. Herod thought it was, he never heard anything so ridiculous and absurd in all his life, and he made a long joke of it, the whole thing. Ridiculous. Jesus of Nazareth, king of the Jews? Absurd. He certainly wasn't the Romans' ideal figure, was he?
What about the Jews? Was he, he their ideal figure? Well, no. They weren't looking for the Messiah that got crucified. To them, uh, it was absolute scandal. They were expecting, even his closest disciples were expecting, that Jesus would raise an army and boot the Romans out and sit himself on the throne of David and lead the nation politically, and every one of them would have a wonderful Rolls-Royce chariot like the Romans did. They weren't thinking of a Messiah that got crucified, of course not. He was no ideal for the Jews and remains not. They didn't invent the character Jesus.
Was he the ideal of the Greeks then? Oh, far from it. Take, by way of contrast, all the philosophy of the Stoics, men that would face suffering without complaint and without flinching. Or take that great hero of Plato, Socrates, who went to his death calmly and drank the hemlock without any blood, sweat, or tears either. And a figure who sweat blood and tears in the Garden of Gethsemane and prayed, oh my God, let this cup pass on me. And before he died was heard to cry, my God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?
Such a figure was no ideal either of Stoics or Epicureans or Platonists among the Greeks. That was not their idea of a hero. Did the apostles invent this then? Well, let the apostles tell you. Let Matthew tell you, uh, uh, uh, honestly, and Mark repeat it, and Luke say the same thing. They're the apostles of Christ as they stood in the garden, and the troops came to arrest the Lord Jesus. They would have defended him with the sword, and Peter tried it, and our Lord told Peter to put up his sword again into his sheath. She said, don't you realize, Peter, I could call to my father and he would give me twelve legions of angels, but then how should the scripture be fulfilled?
And then, says Matthew, when they saw he was not prepared to fight, when they saw he was not prepared to call upon God's angels to come and work a miracle to deliver him, when they saw he was going to give himself over to death. Then all the disciples forsook him and fled. For a Messiah that wouldn't save himself, how could he be the Messiah that could save Israel? Jesus Christ, ladies and gentlemen, was nobody's idea. Let Paul tell you, the great missionary to Europe, as he went around in the civilized cities of the Greek and Roman world, he preached not Jesus, the teacher of the Sermon on the Mount and its wonderfully high moral teaching, glorious as that was.
He preached Christ and him crucified. To the Greeks, uh, to the Jews, a stumbling block, and to the Greeks, absolute folly. Nobody's ideal. We may be utterly sure that the person of Jesus Christ that we encounter in the gospel was not invented by the early Christians, or even by the early church. That's a very important thing to observe, isn't it?
Then how is he the Son of God? For the books tell us that he was not just human, but he was also divine. Can we believe he's the Son of God? Well, the evidence is that the third day he rose again, which proclaimed him and demonstrated him to be the Son of God, and that forty days thereafter he ascended into heaven. Of those things we must talk on another occasion. But it was when he rose from the dead that his apostles saw now clearly that he was indeed the Christ that had been prophesied in the Old Testament, in such famous passages as the prophet Isaiah in chapter fifty three, God's anointed servants- servant who would give his life a ransom for many.
This is he that came by water and blood, says John, not by water only, but by water and blood. He came that way. The only man that entered history, proclaimed as the one come to die for the sins of the world. As John, his forerunner, heralded him, behold the Lamb of God that takes away the sin of the world. The only one that ever claimed it. And I say to you tonight, you'll never be troubled by any other religious leader coming alongside you and saying, I am your creator, and I was born and I came into the world to die for you, that you might be forgiven.
Only Jesus Christ will ever talk to you like that. You'll only have to decide the question once. Why doesn't anybody else talk like it? But if anybody else talked like it, you would dismiss them as a lunatic, wouldn't you? As deranged. Was Jesus Christ deranged, do you suppose? How could you ever begin to think so, when it is through the teaching of Christ that millions have found peace, mental and emotional stability, not to speak about the assurance of acceptance with God and eternal life.
But strangely enough, and yet in the wisdom of God, this Messiah that was born to die for our sins authenticates himself as the Son of God. How is that? Well, forgive me telling the long story, but I was in Kiev about six years ago, just before Yeltsin came to power, and things were getting difficult in Ukraine. I was invited to go to a state school in, uh, Kiev because the headmistress now felt she was free to ask people to come and talk about Christianity and indeed other religions.
So she invited me along, and I went to the school, and she assembled the whole school, you'll see, and, uh, I was asked to talk to them about Christianity. Anything you like, she said, history of it if you like, or anything at all. So I talked to the school. I fancy they were shocked beyond anything to hear somebody talk about religion in a communist state school, you see. Never mind. After the lecture, the deputy headmistress came up to me, a very gracious senior lady she was, and she said, um, tell me something, she said, if I may ask a question. What do you think about UFOs? Uh, I said, well, you know, unidentified flying objects.
I said, madam, I don't think very much about them because we haven't had any our way, do you see? Uh, well, I said, there's some, some reported sightings, but the government said they were not the real thing, so I don't know what to think about them. I said, but I believe you've had a lot down here, haven't you? Yes, she said, we've had a tremendous lot. And she said, you know, the story is that the last one that came, the men got out of this spacecraft and they told the local people that Buddhism was the true religion, not Christianity. What do you say to that, she said. I said it was absolutely remarkable. Oh, say, ha. I, I said, uh, I was in, uh, Malaysia, uh, some years ago, and more recently in Japan, I said.
And, uh, when I inquired of Buddhists there what they really believe, they said that, um, when according to them, men have disciplined themselves well enough so that they, when they die, don't have to be reincarnated, they go off into the world beyond, but they come back again. They're available to help us, um, human beings, I said. So you're talking about spirits, I suppose. I said, you think there could have been spirits, perhaps demons, maybe, i- i- in your UFO. I didn't press the point. I said, you know, I- I- but I was in Japan recently, and a good lady there, she said, well, I do like your Jesus Christ, but why can't you Christians, uh, allow us to have both the Buddha and Jesus?
Why can't we have both, you see? I said to the headmistress, I said, I'll tell you what I answered. I said, well, for me, ma'am, the thing is very simple, really, and I'll tell you why. Uh, I don't much need religious leaders to tell me to be good. I mean, they are can be helpful in defining what is good and what is bad, that's very good, but on the whole, I don't need a lot of telling that I ought to be good, because I know that already. Uh, I I know I ought to be good. My trouble is not that I don't know I ought to be good. My trouble is that I haven't been. And the basic problem of all is this: I have sinned against my own standards, let alone God's standards.
How can I find forgiveness in such a way as maintains my own standards and maintains God's standards? How can I find forgiveness like that? And I said to this Buddhist lady, I said, my dear, you'll see, in Buddhism there is no such thing as forgiveness, is there? Neither in the Theravada Buddhism nor the Mahayana, in most of it anyway, there's no such thing as forgiveness. Everybody has to bear their karma and its results. You must go on bearing your karma, and if you don't get suffer enough in this life, you'll have to be reincarnated and suffer again in the next life, until you've suffered enough to save yourself from being reincarnated again.
I said there's no forgiveness in Buddha. So for me, I said, you know, that doesn't enter into the the equation. I said, and this is why I believe Jesus Christ, because he meets my needs. I am a sinner. How can I find forgiveness? And here is the wonder about this figure we find in the New Testament. He claims to be God incarnate, our creator, become man primarily that he might die for us, that we might be forgiven. There was none other good enough to pay the price of sin. He only could unlock the gate of heaven and let us in.
How do we know it's true? The great Bishop Henry Moll once said, and the disciples will be delighted to know. Andy Moll once said, let me read you his words. The gospel can never be proved except to a bad conscience. If bad means awakened, the saying is profoundly true.
With the conscience sound asleep, we may discuss Christianity, whether to condemn it or to applaud it. We may see in it an elevating program for the race. We may affirm a thousand times that from the creed that God became flesh, there result a boundless possibilities for humanity. And the gospel, the power of God unto salvation, will hardly be seen in its own prevailing evidence till the student is first and with all else a penitent. The man must know for himself something of sin as a condemnable guilt, and something of self as a thing in, in, uh, something of self as a thing in helpless yet responsible bondage, before he can so see Christ given for us and risen for us and seated at the right hand of God for us, as to be able to say, there is now no condemnation to them that are in Christ Jesus.
How do you know a loaf of bread is authentic? When you get hungry and the bread offers itself, you take it and you eat it, and you find out it is all it claims to be. Ladies and gentlemen, that in the end is how you find Jesus Christ to be true. Shall we pray? Our Father, we thank thee for thy written word, and for every evidence of its authenticity and its credibility. We thank thee that it leads us to him who is thy spoken word to men, supremely so.
And as we survey all the evidence for his truth, we bless thee for this above all, that the Father sent the Son to be the Savior of the world. That God is love, and thou hast shown thy love, not that we loved thee, but thou didst love us and send thy Son to be the propitiation for our sins. So inform our minds by the facts that we have considered tonight, we beseech thee. But in these closing hours of this day, draw near to our hearts and to our consciences and make real to us Jesus Christ, man and God and our savior, that we may embrace him and rejoice in his salvation for his name's sake.
Amen.
