Invitation Part 3: The New Testament

Last week I mentioned that, historically speaking, it's highly unlikely that Jesus' followers fabricated his divinity. More likely, they discovered the Son of God in their midst.

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This week, a simple argument: Palestinian Jews and their close associates were eyewitnesses of the Son of God, and they recorded their observations. They wrote down what they saw and experienced. 

That's our New Testament.

Catholic historian Luke Timothy Johnson notes that the creation of at least 27 distinct letters "which, despite their diversity of literary genre, social setting and theological perspective, have the same Jesus as their point of focus. . . . Such highly specific historical phenomena do not arise out of generalized social conditions, psychological laws or religious types. Their necessary and sufficient cause is the death and . . . exaltation of Jesus." *

What Professor Johnson is getting at is the remarkably unified, coherent portrait of Christ that emerges when one reads the entire New Testament. And here it should be remembered that the New Testament represents a collection of stories and letters composed by several authors, not merely a single book with a single writer. 

Critics often focus on the small percentage of difficult passages in the New Testament (and yes, there are some) but manage to ignore the broad unity therein. A time-honored principle of historical study is that when multiple sources point to the same conclusion, the probability of that conclusion being true increases significantly. 

I remember as a late-teenager when I opened myself to the possibility that Jesus was the Son of God -- that the history of his life was actually true. It was an "aha" moment for me, and when I embraced it, I never turned back.

Perhaps you, too, would consider believing in the Son of God.

* Beilby and Eddy, The Historical Jesus: Five Views, p91.