Are the Gospels Trustworthy?

Are they reliable? Or has something corrupted them or changed over time? And the reason we're doing this is because we're landing our series, I Have a Question. We started this on Good Friday. We asked how could a good God allow suffering, and we looked at how one of the darkest moments in human history, the death of the sinless Son of God, actually points us to some answers about why a good God might allow suffering in our world.

And then on Easter Sunday, we asked, isn't the resurrection a fairy tale? Is it really something that was a historical event? And we looked at some of the historical evidence that points us towards the fact that the resurrection is true, that Jesus rose from the dead in a bodily resurrection. And now this week, we're gonna land the series by asking a bit about the credibility of the scriptures. Are the gospels trustworthy?

Now if you're not a Christian and you're joining us today or you're joining us online, this is a question you need to ask because if the gospels aren't reliable, there's no point looking into Jesus. All the incredible things that have been reported about Him are either not true or they're unverifiable. But if the gospels are trustworthy, then it's worth spending your best time considering them because the claims that Jesus made are too good to ignore. They're too life changing and wonderful to take a shallow look at them. If you're a Christian and the gospels aren't reliable, then you ought to be pitied.

How many years have you wasted praying and serving and giving money if Jesus isn't who you think He is? It's important for us to understand whether the gospels are trustworthy or not. So I'm gonna run through four common objections that we hear today, and we're going to answer them one by one to examine the credibility of the Bible. Now the first objection is what I call the telephone game theory. That's what I mentioned at the beginning.

Some people say, well, how do we know that the book that we have today even represents what the original was? It's been so many years. Surely it's changed over the passage of time. That's the telephone game theory objection. The second objection is the biased author theory. Some people say, well, whether it represents the original or not, the guys that wrote these scriptures, they were Christians.

They want me to believe. Surely they changed some details or embellished them a little bit because they want me to believe the same things they do. That's the biased author theory that we'll deal with second. The third objection is what I call the incomplete bible theory. Maybe you've said, well, I've watched the Da Vinci Code.

Tom Hanks doesn't lie. Alright? There are other gospels out there that haven't been included in the New Testament. Maybe we don't have all the writings. Maybe the church has kept some things secret over the years.

That's the incomplete bible theory. Do we actually have all the books that should belong in the Bible? That's one of the other objections people put against believing the scriptures. And then the fourth objection we'll look at is a more modern one. It's the it doesn't feel right theory.

We're in a day and age where some people don't necessarily value thinking about what is right, but sensing what is right, feeling out what is right. And for some of us, as we read through the scriptures, sometimes we come across something that's like, it doesn't feel quite right. This feels wrong, or that doesn't gel with me. Could this really be divinely inspired? So those are four different theories or objections we're going to look at together today.

Now it's impossible to prove with 100% certainty that the Bible is true, but I do believe I can show that the Bible is more trustworthy than you might think, and ultimately, that Jesus is worth considering. Now just a quick disclaimer, I'm not an expert in archaeology. I'm not a history professor, but I have read and listened to people who know what they're talking about. And so if you've got questions after the service, you're very welcome to ask me. And if I can't answer them on the spot, I'll find you books or the people that know more that can help you answer those questions.

So let's get into it. Let's explore whether the gospels are trustworthy, and we're going to look at the first objection together. This is the telephone game theory. Surely so much time has passed, and as Jesus' teaching was passed on from follower to follower, maybe it changed, maybe it got corrupted, maybe we can't trust what we have in our modern day Bible. Well, to deal with this objection, it's important to know the number of manuscript copies we have of the New Testament.

So when you're looking at historical documents, when you go through archaeological digs and all that sort of stuff, you discover more manuscript copies of those originals, and we need to understand how many we have of the New Testament. We need to understand the time gap between the copies we've got and when they were originally written. And so I wanna give us just a little bit of a timeline of when the New Testament was written so that we're all on the same page. Because you may not be aware of when the New Testament was actually written. So I'm gonna put a picture up on the screen, and this shows roughly the first century and the events that happened around the writing of the New Testament.

So we've got Jesus' birth there. That sounds a little bit weird that he was born four to six years before Christ. But the original guy that calculated Jesus' birth in the fifth or sixth century, he did a really good job. He got really close, but not quite on the cigar. So modern day scholars today have narrowed it down to between four and six BC, and the way they do that is by looking at, for example, there was a census taken in Luke's gospel. I forget the name of the person who took the census.

It almost shouted out to me. But anyway, there are different Roman governors and figures that are referred to, and you can compare that with the times that they were in power and so on and so forth, and you kinda narrow it down to a historical period. So between four and six BC is when Jesus was born, and then obviously the first century begins at zero AD. And then Jesus' crucifixion, most scholars say it's either 30 or 33 AD. That'll be based on the time when Pilate was governor in Judea and so forth.

And then the New Testament began to be written at the earliest at AD 44. So most people think the first book of the Bible to be written was James' letter. Some people think it was Paul's letter to the Galatians. And the earliest date for the writing of James' letter is probably AD 44. And then the last book of the Bible to be written, funnily enough, is the last one that we have in our New Testament, which is the book of Revelation.

And that was written as late as AD 96. Maybe it was earlier in the nineties, but as late as AD 96. So I've sort of given you the full range of when it possibly could have been written. And it's important to understand that by the end of the first century, it's pretty safe to assume the apostles have died by that point, and that'll become more relevant later on as we discuss these things. But if the apostles were around about Jesus' age when he died, let's say they were around 30, you've got seventy years left in the century. So if you're saying that they lived beyond the first century, you're saying they lived more than 100 years old. It's very unlikely.

So I think it's a pretty safe assumption to make. The first century is when the apostles, most of them, were alive and could actually verify things that were written about Jesus. They were the eyewitnesses, the people that walked with Jesus and saw Him. So there is an academic discipline called textual criticism, which scholars use to check whether the copies they have of ancient documents are reliable.

And I'm going to let Alastair McGrath, he's a world class scholar from Oxford, explain this further for you. This is a clip taken from the Alpha course, which introduces people to Christianity. So I'll let Alastair explain some more in this clip. Textual criticism examines a number of copies of early texts that we have available to us today, and it looks at the time gap between the original document and the earliest copy that we have. And basically, the more manuscripts we have and the earlier they are, the less doubt there's going to be about the original.

So let's compare the Bible to other texts in ancient history, ones that are widely used in schools and universities. Let's look at the Greek historians Herodotus and Thucydides. They both wrote in the fifth century BC, but the earliest copy of their writings that we have dates from AD 900, and that makes a thirteen hundred year time lapse. And even then, we only have eight copies of these manuscripts in the first place. Or look at the Roman historian Tacitus.

There's a thousand year gap between his book being written and our first manuscript, and we only have 20 copies. Or another classic, Caesar's Gallic War, nine hundred and fifty years between the book being written and our first manuscript copy. And even then, we only have nine or 10 copies of these manuscripts. Again, with Livy's famous history of Rome, a nine hundred year gap between the book being written and our first manuscript, and we only have 20 copies of this. But when it comes to the New Testament, well, it's very different. The New Testament was written between about 40 and 100 AD, and we have manuscript evidence going back as early as January and full manuscripts by March.

And we have more than 5,300 Greek manuscripts, 10,000 Latin translations, and 9,300 others. So, you know, we can be pretty confident in the accuracy, the authenticity, and the integrity of the New Testament scriptures that have been passed on to us today. The remarkable thing about the Bible is there's such a short chronological distance between the events being described and our first manuscripts. So in many ways, the Bible scholars are in a very fortunate position of being able to check these things out and finding that they are much more reliable than, for example, some of the alternatives you're looking at. And as a scholar, I am more than happy to say, I trust this.

I take it very, very seriously. I rely on it. So was the Bible changed over time, and have we got something that's unreliable these days? Well, it's actually really encouraging to look at the manuscript evidence that we have that Alastair McGrath just talked about. You can be certain that what you've got in your New Testament today represents what was originally written.

So when we look at the evidence, the telephone game theory objection just doesn't stack up. It doesn't have any basis. But you might say, well, even if the books do reflect the originals, why should we trust the authors? They were Christians. Maybe they, you know, twisted things a bit, wanting me to believe and follow Jesus with them.

Well, we're gonna look at that next, the biased author theory. There are a few things that we can say here. First of all, if you distrust the authors of the gospel simply because they were believers, then it may be helpful to know that several ancient non-Christian authors confirm a lot of the facts that the gospels contain about Jesus. So for example, Doctor William Peter Williams has written a brilliant little book called Can We Trust the Gospels? And in one of the chapters, he examines the writings of non-Christian authors, Cornelius Tacitus, Pliny the Younger, and Flavius Josephus.

I mentioned Josephus on Easter Sunday. He was a Jewish historian that didn't believe. And these three men lived during the first century when Jesus and the apostles lived. And Doctor Williams examines the writings of them and shows us they actually validate important facts about Christianity. They're outside the Bible, but here are some of the facts that they validate.

Doctor Williams writes, we have seen the confirmation of basic facts in the New Testament, such as Christ's death under Pontius Pilate in Judea between AD 26 and AD 36. Like I said last week, no historian argues whether Jesus lived or that he died under Pontius Pilate, it's just a historical fact. That Christ was worshipped as God early on, that Christ's followers often experienced persecution, that Christians spread far and fast, that some early Christian leaders would have known of Christ's family origins. Now if these non-Christian sources are confirming these facts, it just tells us we can't just say Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John are, you know, childish fairy tales, or that they're just making up stuff. They're actually recording events that were in history that other people verify.

The non-Christian authors might not agree with the resurrection. They might not use that as the explanation for the empty tomb, but Jesus certainly did exist, and the gospels aren't just making stuff up out of thin air. The apostle Peter himself said in 2 Peter 1, "We did not follow cleverly devised myths when we made known to you the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, but we were eyewitnesses of His majesty." Another reason why it would be unfair to say the authors of the gospels are biased is because of the embarrassing details in their accounts. I talked a little bit about this on Easter Sunday, but there's plenty more.

So the 12 apostles, they're the leaders of the early church. They're all made out to look like bumbling fools in the gospels. They often don't get things right. They don't understand who Jesus is. Peter denied Jesus three times. He's probably the most prominent of all the apostles, and he denied Jesus to a little servant girl who questioned him.

And most scholars believe that Peter was the main witness for Mark's gospel, and yet Mark's gospel tells us how Peter was scolded by Jesus. This is what it says in Mark 8:33. Jesus rebuked Peter and said, "Get behind me, Satan, for you are not setting your mind on the things of God, but on the things of man." Ouch. That would have been painful for him to include, very humble for him to include, that he got it really wrong at one stage in Jesus' ministry.

If Peter was concocting a story, if he was biased, why would he share these things with Mark? If you were a cult leader or an egomaniac that just wanted to attract a following to yourself, you wouldn't show all these flaws in your accounts, would you? Would you not show yourself to be as respectable as possible? Would you not show that Jesus has the utmost confidence in you as a person that you should be listened to? And yet Peter and the apostles, they have all these flaws in the gospels.

Why would they share these things unless they were true? Unless that's what actually happened? Now the last thing I'll say to the biased author objection is the fact that the testimony of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, their testimonies were high stakes stuff. They weren't just writing books that say we think vanilla ice cream's the best flavour. They were writing about a man being God who should be worshipped.

That was blasphemy and was super dangerous in Jewish circles. Worshipping a man as God was a big deal. It could get you killed. In fact, some of the apostles did get killed. Church history tells us that most of them were tortured, martyred, and killed. But if you're not willing to accept the testimony of the church, then we actually still have rock solid evidence that at least the apostles Peter, Paul, and James the son of Zebedee were martyred, because they're verified through other accounts outside the Bible as well.

So for example, James' death, which is recorded in the Bible, was also confirmed by Josephus, that Jewish historian I've mentioned a few times. We see James' death in Acts 12, where it says, about that time Herod the king laid violent hands on some who belonged to the church. He killed James the brother of John with the sword. Josephus mentions this as well. See, the claims that the gospels and the apostles made were high stakes claims.

Claiming Jesus was God, worshipping Him, going around saying that He rose from the dead was serious business. Why make all this up? They weren't elites who consolidated power through these claims. They didn't make lots of money through these claims. They didn't oppress the weak through these claims.

Most of them were tortured, martyred, and killed for these claims. The authors of the gospels cannot be ruled out as biased without a good explanation about why on earth they'd make these claims. Some of them lost their lives for what they wrote. Yet maybe you're like, but how do we know we've been told the whole truth? I've seen Tom Hanks in Da Vinci Code.

I know there are other gospels out there that aren't in the New Testament. So how do we know the New Testament is everything that was written about Jesus? Well, let's look at that next. That's our third objection, the incomplete bible theory. Now after the books of the apostles and their aids had been written, the church placed them together in what we call the New Testament.

We believe the books in our New Testament are inspired by God. Popular authors like Dan Brown, though, will tell you, and let's just be fair to him, he was writing fiction, but he'd tell you that there are other gospels floating around that have been deceptively excluded. Now is that right? There are a number of other ancient gospels called the Gnostic Gospels.

Their names, for example, some of them are called the Gospel of Thomas, the Gospel of Mary, the Gospel of Philip. And those were all disciples of Jesus, weren't they? So why aren't they in the New Testament, you might ask? Well, let's just talk about how you would recognise a book that belongs in the New Testament. Here are some of the things that the early church considered. The early church didn't go, oh, let's just put those books in the New Testament.

They weren't choosing what goes in the New Testament. They were recognising what was written by the apostles, what was inspired by God. And here's how they would recognise legitimate books. They would look at the author of the book. Was it written by an apostle, an eyewitness, or based on the evidence of an apostle?

Was it written during the first century when the apostles lived? And the teachings of the book, does it square with what we know Jesus taught, or is it way out there and wacky? So let's apply those three tests to the most famous of the Gnostic Gospels, the Gospel of Thomas. Well, was the early church hiding this text from us so that we wouldn't know alternative accounts about Jesus? The Gospel of Thomas was written no earlier than the second century, which obviously was outside the time the apostles lived in the first century, so they couldn't have verified it.

So there's no way it could have been written by an eyewitness because all the eyewitnesses were dead by this point. And that means the author of the Gospel of Thomas was not Thomas the apostle at all. We actually don't know who wrote it. Whoever did write it just used Thomas' name. Same with those other Gnostic Gospels I mentioned before.

They weren't written by Mary, for example. The person that wrote it just used the name of a disciple for their book. And then if you read some of these Gnostic Gospels, you do discover some wacky teachings that don't gel with what Jesus taught. So for example, the Gospel of Thomas ends like this. Simon Peter said to them, make Mary leave us, for females don't deserve life.

Jesus said, look, I will guide her to make her male so that she too may become a living spirit resembling you males. For every female who makes herself male will enter the domain of heaven. Yikes. Right? That simply doesn't square with Jesus' view of women.

From all the other sources we have about Jesus, women had an honoured place in His life and ministry. Women helped to finance His ministry. Women were some of the only disciples left at the cross when Jesus died. Women were the first witnesses of Jesus' resurrection. The Gospel of Thomas obviously doesn't deserve a place in the New Testament.

The idea that the church intentionally left out books that should be part of our Bible doesn't have any grounds. It's a baseless claim that belongs with other conspiracy theories. So we can safely reject the incomplete bible theory as baseless as well. So we've done a bit of work today. We've looked at the telephone game theory.

We've looked at the manuscript evidence, and we know that what we have today, we've got good reason to trust that what we have today in our Bibles is what was originally written. We've looked at the biased author theory. We know that what the apostles wrote down didn't make them rich and famous. They got killed for it. They put embarrassing details about themselves.

You can't just write them off as biased without some really good reasoning for that. And then thirdly, the incomplete bible theory. Do we have all the right books in the New Testament? And I think the answer is yes. It seems clear when you look at some of the other alternatives that weren't included.

It seems obvious why they weren't included. So now we're gonna deal with the final objection. It's the it doesn't feel right theory. Have you ever come across something in the Bible and felt like it doesn't have the ring of truth to it? I remember when I first became a Christian, I was reading through the New Testament.

I just started reading it through, reading it through, and I came up to some teachings, some passages, and I felt like, oh, this is hard. Like, I'm not sure I really believe this is good. I just remember talking to God about it and saying, I don't understand this, Lord, but I know that Jesus died for me and I trust that, so I'm gonna keep reading. And over time, the Lord slowly changed me, and I understood how to read the Bible better and so on. But maybe you've had that experience as well.

Maybe you've had a similar experience where you've read something and it just doesn't feel right. Well, if that's you, let me ask you this question. Do you think that if God existed, He would think exactly like you do? If everything the Bible says fits the taste of a twenty first century Australian, then it's probably written by a twenty first century Australian. But if God is God, above us, before us, surely we cannot think He must think like us in every way.

Surely He will challenge us at some points. The much loved and well known pastor Timothy Keller has some words of advice here. He says, I have one more bit of advice to people struggling with some of the Bible's teaching. We should make sure we distinguish between the major themes and message of the Bible and its less primary teachings. The Bible talks about the person and work of Christ and also about how widows should be regarded in the church.

The first of these subjects is much more foundational. Without it, the secondary teachings don't make sense. We should therefore consider the Bible's teachings in their proper order. Let's take a hot issue today as a good example. If you say, I can't accept what the Bible says about gender roles, you must keep in mind that Christians themselves differ over what some texts mean, as they do about many, many other things.

However, they all confess in the words of the Apostles' Creed that Jesus rose from the dead on the third day. Don't worry about gender roles until you figure out what you think about the central teachings of the faith. You may say, but I can't accept the Bible if what it says about gender is outmoded. I would respond to that with this question. Are you saying that because you don't like what the Bible says about sex that Jesus couldn't have been raised from the dead?

I'm sure you wouldn't insist on such a false conclusion. If Jesus is the Son of God, then we have to take His teaching seriously, including His confidence in the authority of the whole Bible. If He is not who He says He is, why should we care what the Bible says about anything else? That's some helpful words from Timothy Keller, who passed away a few years ago. The gospels are more trustworthy than you may have realised, especially if you're new to the Bible and new to faith.

The Bible hasn't been corrupted over the years. We've got lots of evidence for its accuracy today. The Bible doesn't seem to be written by people who are biased and trying to exclude the truth. They include embarrassing details about themselves. They died for the claims that they put in the scriptures.

The Bible isn't excluding some books that should have been in there. When you think about who those other books were written by and when they were written, it becomes obvious why they weren't included. And the Bible sometimes may not feel right to us at points, but that's what we should expect if it's inspired by God, because God does not think like you or me. He's above us. He is before us, and sometimes He will challenge us in the way we think.

See, the authors of the Bible, they want us to know about Jesus. He's not a man they've made up. He was real. They knew Him. They saw Him.

They heard Him speak, and people like John believed that Jesus was more than merely a man. John writes this at the beginning of his first letter. He says, that which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we looked upon and have touched with our hands concerning the word of life. The life was made manifest and we have seen it and testify to it and proclaim to you the eternal life, which was with the Father and made manifest to us. That which we have seen and heard, we proclaim also to you, so that you too may have fellowship with us.

You see, John makes all these incredible claims about Jesus. He says He was that which was from the beginning, that Jesus was there in the beginning when the world was created. The world was created through Him and for Him. He calls Jesus the word of life. Jesus is God's word to the world, God's message to the world.

God wants you to listen to Him and believe in Him because He is the word of life. He calls Jesus the eternal life. Jesus offers you eternal life, and when you trust in Him, it begins now in knowing the eternal one and continues on past the grave. Jesus is offering you never ending life, and John is telling you these things, he says, so that you may have fellowship with us. John wants us to know these things because he wants us to know God.

He wants us to join in on the party, to enjoy fellowship with God, to enjoy fellowship with one another. This is why the apostles wrote these things down and died for their claims, so that we might believe and know that Jesus is God and that He has died for our sins on our behalf, that He is the eternal word, that He is the eternal life. This is what John, an eyewitness, wants you and I to know. The gospels have too much credibility to just flat out ignore what John is saying. I can't prove the Bible's claims are true, but we certainly can't write them off as childish fairy tales.

We have to grapple with what the Bible says about Jesus. If you're here or if you're online and you're seeking the truth, we would love to be part of that journey with you. If you wanna talk to us or discuss questions with us, we would love to chat with you. If you let me know after the service who you are, I'd love to buy you a Bible as a gift, just to help you look at the scriptures and to find out more about who Jesus is. The claims that Jesus made are too good to ignore.

They are too life changing and wonderful to take a shallow look at them. The message of the gospels is not just wonderful, incredibly good news, they're trustworthy news. They're a message that's worth considering. Let's pray together. Father, we thank you that you are a speaking God.

We thank you that you didn't leave us to just feel and sense our way towards you, but that you've spoken to us in the scriptures. You've given us your precious word. You've spoken to us in these latter days through your Son, Jesus, the word of God. We thank you for speaking to us, and we pray that you'd open our ears to listen. Give us the gift of faith to trust and believe your word, to stake our lives on its promises.

Thank you that it is trustworthy and sure and perfect and right. We praise you for your word, and we ask that you help us to live our lives according to it. In Jesus' name we pray. Amen.