The Bible:
A Relic or Reliable Revelation?
(This is the seventh part of The Bible: A Relic or Reliable Revelation? I've broken the whole talk up into smaller sections, the rest of which can be found through the links on the Bible Section page. For online reading I recommend reading the shorter sections successively. To view the document with the whole talk in it Click Here. To view the rest of the parts of the talk Click Here. It does not contain numbered endnotes but you can find a list of references used at the end.)
The State of Scholarship regarding the Gospels
Now, if all of what I have said is true then why do many scholars, teachers and other educated people believe the Gospels are not reliable and that they are just full of legends, myths and contradictions? There are two major reasons: First, many scholars and lay people simply are not familiar with the current state of scholarship. They just parrot what they were taught by their teachers who probably parroted what they learned from their teachers and so on. Remember this was the case with Sir William Ramsey whose professor taught him to not trust the Gospel of Luke to be historically accurate. But when he did his own research he concluded that Luke was one of the greatest historians of the ancient world and could be trusted.
The second reason is an across-the-board bias against the supernatural. This anti-supernatural bias has reigned in all academic fields, including biblical and theological studies, for the past 200 years. They assume before they even look at the facts that there is no transcendent personal God who acts in human history. If there is no personal God that is over and above everything else then a man who claims to be God in the flesh is a liar, a lunatic or a legend. Therefore, any document or set of documents that claims there was a man who claimed to be God and did supernatural miracles can't be right. It can't be trusted. But we have to ask these people, "What makes you so sure there is no God and no such thing as a miracle?" Do you know everything about the universe? Were you present in every moment of everyone's history to verify that nothing ever happened outside of normal natural laws? If you were, then you are God yourself and we should be worshipping you!
No person can be intellectually honest, fair and objective when they start with a bias that determines what they can and can not find. But when we start with no bias against what we don't want to find and let the facts speak for themselves we discover abundant evidence that entitles us to believe that there really is a personal, loving God who came into our world to provide salvation from our sin.
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Copyright 2005. Gary C. Burger and New Media Ministries. This article may be reproduced and distributed freely as long as it is done so in its entirety. If quoted it must be properly cited as a reference.
