Are the Gospels Reliable? Examining Bias and Eyewitness Testimony

Video from Cold-Case Christianity - J. Warner & Jimmy Wallace

Are the Gospels Reliable? Examining Bias and Eyewitness Testimony

God’s Peculiar Glory

How We Know the Bible Is True

"For the last two years, I have focused in a greater way than ever before in my life on the question of how we know that the Christian Scriptures are completely true, and then, in view of that, how we should read them. The overflow of that focus and that thinking is now in two books. The first was released two weeks ago. The title is A Peculiar Glory: How the Christian Scriptures Reveal Their Complete Truthfulness. The second I just finished a few weeks ago (it is scheduled to be released next year). I’d like to call it Reading the Bible Supernaturally: Seeing and Savoring the Glory of God in Scripture.

So what I would like to do in our time together is help you see how your confidence in the Scriptures can be unshakable — not because you are stubborn or strong-minded, but because there is a reasonable and warranted ground for this confidence. And, of course, the ultimate goal is that through the Scriptures you would see the glory of God and savor the glory of God and be transformed by this seeing and savoring so that your emotions and attitudes and ideas and words and way of life magnify the glory of God increasingly forever.

The Most Urgent Question

Ever since I first got serious about the question how we know the Bible is true, it has seemed to me that the most urgent question is not how to provide arguments that convince modern atheists (like Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennet, Christopher Hitchens), but rather, how it is that an uneducated Muslim villager in the bush of Nigeria, or a pre-literate tribesman in Papua New Guinea, can know that the message of the Bible is true so that, three weeks after hearing and believing it, he would have a justified, warranted courage to die for his conviction. He could die for the truth of the Scriptures, and not be a fool.

That, to me, is a far more urgent question than how to answer secular skeptics. Is there a way for uneducated, ordinary people around the world to have a well-founded confidence that the Bible is true?

One of the reasons this question began to be so relevant for me when I was about 22 years old, and wrestling with the issues of biblical certainty, is not that uneducated people are more precious than educated people, or more in need than educated people. That’s not true. The reason had to do with my own quest for confidence. When I was exposed to the best arguments for the reliability of the Bible, I was wonderfully encouraged and helped. They seemed right to me. They were compelling.

You don’t need to be a scholar to know the Bible is true. God makes this confidence available to every Christian.

But what I discovered was that a week or two after studying them, I couldn’t remember all the pieces of the argument. I remembered that the argument seemed solid, but I couldn’t reproduce the argument in the present moment. And what made this troubling was not mainly that I couldn’t remember all the steps in the argument for the sake of the debate, but worse, I couldn’t remember them all for the sake of my soul. And on top of that, there was the nagging sense that I would meet some highly educated person who would point to something in my argument that I had overlooked, and I would be stumped. So basing my confidence on a fairly sophisticated sequence of history and logic felt fragile to me.

So you can see that my question about how a pre-literate villager with no formal education can know the Bible is true is very similar to the question, How can I know in a way that doesn’t depend on complicated historical and logical arguments? So for me this issue is not mainly about debates with the new atheists or other educated skeptics. This issue is about my own soul, the task of global missions, and the rearing of our children.

How Jonathan Edwards Helped Me

The person that helped me most in wrestling with these issues is Jonathan Edwards — the New England pastor and theologian who died in 1758. Not because he is brilliant — he is — but because he posed the question exactly the way I did, and he directed me to the Scriptures that answered my questions.

What many people don’t know about Edwards is that from 1751 to 1758, after he had been dismissed from his church in Northampton, Massachusetts, he was the pastor of a tiny church in the frontier town of Stockbridge and was a missionary to the Indians. Here’s where he connected with my concern. He wrestled with how the Indians, with no knowledge of history, or of the wider world, or any ability to read or any formal training in logic — how would they be able to have a well-grounded confidence in the message of Scripture? Here’s what Edwards wrote:

Miserable is the condition of the Houssatunnuck Indians and others, who have lately manifested a desire to be instructed in Christianity, if they can come at no evidence of the truth of Christianity, sufficient to induce them to sell all for Christ, in any other way but this [path of historical reasoning]. (Religious Affections, 304)

Thus a soul may have a kind of intuitive knowledge of the divinity of the things exhibited in the gospel; not that he judges the doctrines of the gospel to be from God, without any argument or deduction at all; but it is without any long chain of arguments; the argument is but one, and the evidence direct; the mind ascends to the truth of the gospel but by one step, and that is its divine glory. (298–299)

Unless men may come to a reasonable solid persuasion and conviction of the truth of the gospel, by the internal evidences of it . . . viz. by a sight of its glory; ’tis impossible that those who are illiterate, and unacquainted with history, should have any thorough and effectual conviction of it at all. (303)

So Edwards is arguing that the path to a reasonable, warranted, well-grounded conviction of the truth of the gospel and the Scriptures is a path that the Nigerian villager and the Papuan tribesman can follow. It is the path of seeing the peculiar glory of God in the word of God.

See Divine Glory for Yourself

I do not doubt that hundreds of you in this room have experienced what Edwards is describing, even if you have never thought of it in these terms. It’s almost always the case that God saves and gives us faith, and only later do we see in the Bible how he did that, and what language the Bible uses to describe our experience. It’s like a baby being born. He’s alive and breathing and crying and eating, before he knows how to describe any of that. Experience often precedes the ability to describe the experience.

So let me try, with three biblical analogies, to help you grasp what Edwards and I mean by gaining a well-founded conviction about divine truth by means of seeing divine glory. If you see these analogies, you may be able to interpret your own experience with biblical categories and language..." from the article: God’s Peculiar Glory

#extraordinarygod