Session 5: Corroborating Evidence

Review: How many manuscripts of the NT do we have available? How pure is the NT to its original form? Why is that important?

Opening question: Has there ever been a time in your life when you did not believe someone until they could offer some outside evidence to support or “corroborate” what they said?

Bailiff: Hear Ye! Hear Ye! The 1st Vatra Court of Grass Lake is now called to session.

Prosecution: Your honors, it may be well and fine that the Bible is considered true to the original eyewitness testimonies and teachings of the apostles. But we cannot believe in Jesus just because, as the song goes, “The Bible tells me so.” There is no credible evidence outside the Bible to corroborate the life of Jesus. For example, the defense compared the New Testament to the writings of Josephus and Tacitus, two other ancient authors. Yet we find no mention of Jesus in these important secular historians. The Bible is a book of faith and cannot be scientifically proven. Therefore we must deny its use in these proceedings!

Defense: Your honors, the defense will agree with the prosecution that we should look only to the Bible without checking it for overall reliability. There should be evidence outside the bible that Jesus lived and was considered special by the people of the day, whether or not they believed in Him. In fact, the prosecution is mistaken. There are actually evidence in both Josephus and Tacitus! Therefore we hold that science, archaeology, and objective history will bear the evidence for the Bible, not against it.

Josephus in fact, mentions in his work Antiquities that “James, the brother of Jesus, who is called Christ” was put to death by the high priest Ananias and the Sanhedrin. No scholar has been able to disprove this passage as anything other than original. He also in a later passage went on to describe basic details about the life, and though scholars feel that there have been some pro-Christian additions made to it, it seems clear that he did at least write about Jesus, and that he established a significant following.
Tacitus stated in 115 AD the Roman Emperor Nero persecuted the Christians as scapegoats for the fire that devastated Rome in AD 64. He mentions that the Christians got their origin from Christ who was executed by Pontius Pilate, and that they practiced a most mischievous superstition: the belief in His Resurrection. This confirms from an unsympathetic source some basic info about the earliest Church—that it had spread on the basis of the Resurrection
Pliny the Younger, in 111 AD was a Roman provincial governor. He wrote to Emperor Trajan (Traian—remembered in Romania for having conquered the Dacians) who corroborated the beliefs of the early Christians (“chanting to Christ as if to God”), whom he persecuted and tortured.
Thallus and Phlegon were two ancient authors who made references to the day the world went dark and the sun was hidden at noon and the earth quaked, dated at 33 AD and explained as a cosmic event. Thallus tried to explain it as an eclipse. Significantly, these are completely unrelated to the gospel or any talk of Christianity, so they are good corroboration of the events in themselves.

Compare the historical information about Jesus to other leaders in World Religions:

Zoroaster: some information from 1000 BC but most Zoroastrian scripture was not written until 3rd century AD. The most popular biography of Zoroaster was written around 1278 AD.
Buddha: The Buddha lived in the 6th cent. BC but the Buddhist scriptures and first biography of Buddha were not put into writing until after Christ.
Mohammad: lived from AD 570-632, and his sayings are preserved in the Koran, but his biography was not written until 767.

Corroboration from within the Christian faith:

St. Paul’s Epistles confirm much of what is said and believed about Christ in the Gospels, and were written before them. It shows a well established belief in and worship of Jesus as the Son of God in the early Church.
The Apostolic Fathers: early Christian writers and saints who provide important information about the first beliefs and teachings about Jesus Christ. For example, St. Ignatius of Antioch, martyred before 117 AD; St. Polycarp, bishop of Smyrna, Epistles of Barnabus, the colleague of Paul; Clement of Rome, one of the earliest bishops there.

Pass out the worksheet on Archaeological evidence. Discuss the following questions:

Do you ever watch shows like CSI or Crossing Jordan in which the main characters use scientific methods of gathering evidence that can solve crimes?
Why do you think this type of evidence is so important?
Do you think the Gospels can be subjected to the same kind of evidence gathering?
What kind of evidence might we be able to use in this approach? (inscriptions, coins, ruins, etc.)

The first thing we need to consider is what archaeology can and cannot verify. For instance, it can verify certain details, but it cannot verify what people said or thought. It can verify whether a place that is described actually existed or if certain practices or technologies were in use. It should also be able to verify if certain historical figures really existed, such as Pontius Pilate.

Previously, scholars held that if an author made mistakes about basic historical facts and figures, then their whole story could not be trusted. Some pointed to certain examples in the Gospels as proof that they were unreliable. However, improved and advanced scientific research has shown that in all those cases the gospel writer was correct about his present, and that we, with our limited knowledge of the past, were wrong. For instance, some believed that John was wrong because the Pool of Bethesda with its five porches (John 5:1-115) had not been found. However, it has been uncovered since then, and it matched the description.

Deliberations:

Ancient sources, both pro- and anti- Christian say that early Christians clung to their beliefs rather than disavow them in the face of torture and even death. Why do you think they had such strongly held convictions?
Does the archaeological evidence for the Gospels make you more or less confident in their accuracy? Does archaeology help provide plausible explanations for these puzzles?

Experts Say! But Do They Agree? The Rebuttal Evidence

Opening Question: When was the last time you turned on the news and the top story was something like: “Today, the sun rose, and the planet is still rotating?” Why not? What makes news, news? Do you trust the news without question? (News is by definition, New information. It is not necessarily correct or true.)

Prosecution: We have relied on information that is provided to us by scholars and academics in the field of New Testament studies and Ancient History. But what about scholars who have decidedly contrary opinion about Christ? Shouldn’t they be heard as well?

There is a small group of scholars generally known as “The Jesus Seminar” who have recently received a lot of attention. This is because they have come forward and claimed, contrary to the vast majority of scholars in the field, that the Jesus of history is very different than the Jesus of faith, and that only very little of the information in the Gospels can be trusted, in fact only 2% could be directly attributed to Christ based on their theory. This of course has caused a stir and some controversy, and drawn a lot of attention to them. The danger is that when such media-popular people get such attention, uneducated readers think they represent the mainstream. But are they correct?

What are the criteria that the Jesus Seminar applies to Christ and the Gospels?

If what he says looks like something a later rabbi or Christian father would say, he must not have said it. Whereas normally we would think that if a later person said something Christian the must have learned it from Christ, not the other way around!
If only one Gospel says it must not be Christ’s because we would never just take a single person’s word for it. And since Matthew and Luke drew on Mark they can’t be trusted anyway. Besides what we have already said about corroboration and the variability in oral tradition, this twists a useful principle in the wrong direction. What should normally support the evidence is ruled against it and against common sense.
If there is a parallel example in another tradition or culture, then Christians must have copied it and fit Christ into that mold. Examples: Baptism, the Cross, etc. This is faulty logic. Just because a similarity can be drawn between two ideas, practices, etc., it does not at all follow that the one caused the other. Very often this requires a stretch of logic and a denial of the contexts of those ideas.

We must apply the same standards of evidence:

Are they biased, do they have an agenda? Yes, sometimes very explicitly they wish to recreate Jesus in an image they prefer, and “rescue” him from “fundamentalists” and “evangelicals.” They wish to represent Jesus as anything but the Son of God.
Does their method create its own results? Yes, They determine what evidence they will accept based on conclusions they have already decided. This is assuming what you have yet to prove, and is a logical fallacy.
Does their method reflect reality? No. They say that unless two or more people say it in the gospels, then it can’t be trusted. This precludes any reasonable or realistic variability in accounts. Their method is based on self-established rules that do not reflect common sense reality.