So, in the past series of posts, we discovered that there almost certainly is a God. However, this raises an series of important questions: what is God like, which religion (if any) is true, and so on. Now, since we know that God possesses certain qualities, such as being loving, personal, etc. it makes sense that God would reveal Himself in some way. Now, obviously, the chief way He does this is via the created order, as we have seen. The very created order speaks to us of the creator and even informs of us partially about some of His attributes.
However, has God revealed Himself to us more directly, such as in the form of organised religion? In these series of posts we shall be exploring the truth claims of Christianity and essentially listing reasons why we can know it is, in fact, true. The reason to start with Christianity, and, say, not another religion, is for a variety of reasons: it's the largest religion in the world (well over 2.2 billion adherents worldwide), it has shaped the course of history and human culture more than any other. But mostly because, unlike most religions, Christianity makes specific claims about history and reality.
What are the main claims of Christianity? Well, the first, and most central, is the claim that Jesus of Nazareth was the Jewish Messiah, rose from the dead roughly 2,000 years ago and is, in fact, the co-eternal Son of God, the second person of the divine Trinity. It thus falls upon the investigator to utilise whatever historical tools are available to subject this claim to a full analysis.
The basis of these claims lies in the New Testament; a collection of documents written not too long after Jesus' death. These documents consist of four biographies of Jesus, a historical account of the events following Jesus' life focused on the lives of the Apostles (Jesus' disciples), numerous letters (mostly by the Apostle Paul), and an account of an apocalyptic vision experienced by the Apostle John.
Now, obviously, we can't show that Jesus rose from the dead simply because these sources tell us so. We need reasons to accept these sources; we need to find indicators of credibility. It should go without saying that we don't need to prove everything in these sources happened beyond all possible doubt. We only need to show that the resurrection happened beyond all reasonable doubt.
To begin with, there are overall, general indicators of reliability that, whilst perhaps not enough to definitively show that the resurrection occurred, nevertheless can be used as evidence to be weighed alongside other evidence to raise the overall probability. The first issue to discuss is the transmission of the content of the documents. After all, this was before the printing press, and documents had to be copied down by hand.
What is more, much of the content of said documents would have been transmitted orally prior to its being written down. This was because writing was expensive and also because the majority of people were illiterate. We can even see indicators of this in the text itself. So, what does this mean when it comes to determining reliability?
It used to be the case that scholars mistakenly believed that orally transmitted texts were the property of the community in which the text was transmitted and thus free to be edited by virtually anyone. This is not the case. Rather, the evidence we have shows that the oral tradition(s) of the NT was carefully preserved.
For starters, there is direct evidence of memorisation techniques being employed in the very text itself. Now, according to the text, Jesus was an itinerant teacher, and, according to tradition, the authors of the texts were the apostles. So, given these facts combined with what we know about the primacy of orality in the ancient world, we should therefore expect to see that in the text, which we do.
We see the use of stunning and memorable words and images, such as hyperbole and overstatements. For instance, where Jesus says to tear out one's eye to avoid sin. We see evidence of wordplay. Now, this one is less evident because, whilst the text was written in Greek, the language Jesus and His disciples would have spoken was Aramaic.
For an example of this, Jesus says that the Pharisees swallow a camel and strain out a gnat is play on words in Aramaic because the Aramaic words for camel and gnat were gamla and galma respectively. We also see the use of short, pithy sayings (i.e. proverbs), such as: "a kingdom that is divided against itself will not stand."
Lastly, we can also see the usage of poetic forms, which account for roughly 80% of Jesus' teachings. Now, the gap between Jesus' life and the accounts of His life being written down is approximately 30-40 years, which, in the Ancient world at least, is an incredibly small gap. For example, the extant biographies we have of Alexander the Great date centuries after his lifetime.
However, even by modern standards, it is not that large a gap either. After all, the Gulf War was 30 years ago and the Vietnam War was 50 years ago. 30-40 years just isn't that long, especially when most of the eyewitnesses are still alive.
Now, consider also the following: Jesus' disciples spent roughly 1-3 years following Jesus around, listening to His teachings and witnessing various events. They then spent 30-40 years telling everybody about Jesus, His teachings, and the events surrounding His life.
So, we can see, then, that there are very good indicators that the oral tradition of the New Testament is reliable, and it would take lots of very good, very convincing evidence to demonstrate otherwise. Next time we shall be looking at the textual tradition of the New Testament.
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