Can We Trust The Gospels?

Probably most every one of us has been in on a conversation where one person says something that’s a bit hard to believe. The other person questions it. And the first person raises his hand, as if he is being sworn in to give testimony in court, and says ‘It’s the gospel truth!’ ‘It’s the gospel truth!’

We put the gospels and the truth together to say that if there is anything you can trust in this world, it’s the gospels. That’s as it should be.

But you may have noticed that in the last 15 to 20 years there has been a growing movement that says you can’t trust the gospels. The writers got it wrong. The four gospel writers can’t even agree. They each distorted the message because of the biases of their situations. They got it wrong, so we need to clean up their work a bit and straighten them out.

A few weeks ago PBS ran a special called “From Jesus to Christ,” that explained with great artistic skill and with discussion by quite a few ‘experts’ that the gospel writers were wrong about Jesus. He wasn’t God. He was just a man, Jesus. And he didn’t get the title Christ for hundreds of years. He didn’t intend to die for our sins. The early Christians were blown away when their master was crucified and they invented that story out of a sincere need to understand what went wrong. And the story was distorted again and again for many, many years before it was finally written down.

There is a rapidly growing segment of Bible scholarship that puts together more and more books and TV ‘documentaries’ that tell us that you can’t trust the gospels. You can’t take the gospels at face value. You need to turn to experts who will decode the hidden meanings for you. I don’t know if you even notice, it’s become so common, but the foundations of our faith are being undermined more and more.

So, can we trust the gospels? Were the gospel writers careless when they wrote, or did they intentionally alter the facts to make a point, or gain an advantage in arguments with their enemies?

I’d say the best place to start is to look at just how one of the gospel writers went about his project. Luke tells us clearly how he went about writing his gospel. And after we look at what he said, you tell me if it sounds dependable to you or not.

Would you please stand now for the reading of God’s word, the first 4 verses of the Gospel According to Luke?

1 Since many have undertaken to set down an orderly account of the events that have been fulfilled among us, 2 just as they were handed on to us by those who from the beginning were eyewitnesses and servants of the word. 3 I too decided, after investigating everything carefully from the very first, to write an orderly account for you, most excellent Theophilus, 4 so that you may know the truth concerning the things about which you have been instructed.

Now who was the author of the book we call Luke’s gospel? The author never gives us his name, but there is a very strong tradition in the early church that this book was written by Luke, a Greek speaking early convert to Christianity who was not one of the original 12 disciples, but often traveled with the Apostle Paul. I think that is quite likely. Jesus died in about the year 33. Luke most likely wrote around the year 70, so he wrote about 25 - 30 years after the fact.

And how did he go about it? In verse 1 we read that many people had already started writing down orderly accounts of this story about Jesus. Luke had written resources to work from, not just campfire stories. It’s pretty obvious that one of those resources is what we call the Gospel of Mark because just over 300 of the verses in Mark are in Luke in almost identical form. The early church tells us that Mark traveled with Peter and listened as Peter told the stories over and over again and wrote them down, probably with Peter looking over his shoulder to be sure he had it right. So that tells me that Mark was a good historical source.

We don’t know what other written resources Luke used, but it looks like once Luke collected many of them and wrote them down in one place, the shorter and less polished parts of the story that he used came to be used less and less and disappeared.

The Book of Acts tells us that Luke traveled with Paul, spending 2 years in Palestine while Paul was in jail at Caesarea, about 60 miles from Jerusalem. Don’t you think he would have crossed paths with many of the disciples if they came down to visit Paul, or that Luke would take trips up to Jerusalem to see where it all happened and talk to those who saw it? He may have spent a lot of time with many of the original 12 disciples collecting their stories and making sure he had it right.