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Seven Reasons the New Testament Is Legit

by James Barringer  
1/11/2011 / Christian Apologetics

One of the annoying things about religion in general is the way a lot of people treat it like it's just personal preference. The conversation is the same one you might have at a Baskin Robbins. "You like Christianity? Oh, that's nice. My friend Fred, he does Islam with a hint of Tao, and he loves it. I think I'll stick with my old favorite, hedonistic humanism. It leaves a pleasant taste in my mouth." This in turn makes it somewhat hard to evangelize. If religion really is just a matter of personal taste, then how can it possibly be right for anyone to foist his own preferences on other people?

Yet Christianity is not a matter of personal taste. It is a historical fact. Our faith is based not merely on a man's moral teachings, not merely on my opinions about religion, but on the fact, written down by multiple sources, that at some well-defined point in history a man named Jesus, who claimed to be from God and claimed to be God, actually lived, did a bunch of really cool things, allowed himself to be crucified, and then was raised by God from the dead. It is fact. It actually happened. A person does not have the intellectual freedom to ignore historical facts in the name of personal taste or preference. If Chrisitanity is true, then everyone in the world ought to accept it, simply because it's true even if for no other reason at all. You accept that the sky is blue, even if you don't like the color blue, just because it's the truth. Religion ought to function the same way.

All of this leads us to the New Testament, which is the written historical record of Jesus' life. If we have good, logical reasons to believe that the New Testament is a reliable historical document, then we can lean heavily on it in defending our own faith and in attempting to convince others that our faith is the only legitimate one. So, do those good and logical reasons exist? I have found seven of them, although I'm sure there are many more, so here's what I've been thinking about lately.

1. The New Testament is geographically accurate. It makes a whole lot of references to various places. It says obvious things, like the fact that the Jewish temple was in Jerusalem. It correctly observes that Bethlehem was the ancestral home of David. In fact, many anecdotes in the gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke, John) begin with a geographical locator. "And he went down to Capernaum, a city of Galilee" (Luke 4:31), "Soon afterward, he went to a town called Nain" (7:11), "And he took them and withdrew to a town called Bethsaida" (9:10). There are many other examples, including most of the book of Acts, much of which is a travelogue making references to over a dozen more cities. All of these places exist, and are located geographically exactly where the Bible says they are located. When it says that two towns are such-and-such distance apart, we can verify that they actually are. Why is this important? Well, the New Testament says a lot of things that we cannot verify, such as Jesus being raised from the dead. Yet if it is accurate in all the ways that we can verify, it is most probably accurate about the things we cannot verify. If we found errors in its verifiable knowledge, we would be right to treat it with skepticism, but we find no such errors of geography.

2. The New Testament is historically accurate. In fact, the New Testament works very hard to tie itself to a specific time and place. Jesus' birth is described as being during the reign of Caesar Augustus (Luke 2:1), while Herod the Great ruled Judea (1:5), during "the first census when Quirinius was governor of Syria" (2:2). That's awfully specific. We have to wonder whether a made-up story would go to such great lengths to insist, not merely that it actually happened, but that it actually happened at one very particular point in history. In Acts, the other book that Luke wrote, we find even more historical figures: Felix the governor, Agrippa the king (a relative of Herod), and Porcius Festus, another Roman official. We can go to secular sources to find that these people actually existed and that they were actually occupying those offices at the point in time that the New Testament says they were. Again, the Bible's history matches what we can verify.

3. The New Testament is theologically accurate. When Jesus lived, he got into feuds with the Jewish religious leaders of the day, the Pharisees and Sadducees. The New Testament describes in pretty extensive detail what these religious leaders believed. Matthew's gospel tells that the Pharisees believed in doing no work on the Sabbath day (12:1-2), which they really believed; that they ritually washed their hands before eating (15:1-2), which they really did; that animals for sacrifices were sold in the temple (21:12), which they really were; that the Sadducees did not believe in resurrection from the dead (22:23), which they really did not; that they had complicated rules regarding when a person was bound to his oath and when he was not (23:16-20), which they really did; and many other claims. In every single one of these instances, the beliefs of the Jewish authorities are represented accurately, matching what the Old Testament Law commanded people to do. Yet the more impressive thing is that Jesus disputed with them about each one of these things, and yet his own teachings also square perfectly with the spirit of the Old Testament Law. That's a pretty impressive feat, if you think about it. We find, as we have before, that the Bible is accurate in these verifiable matters.

4. The gospels are philosophical masterpieces. Consider how amazing it is that Jesus was able to completely shatter the established religious institutions of the day, while still holding perfectly to the spirit of the Old Testament Law. He didn't dispute that it was good not to work on the Sabbath; he just disputed the Pharisees' definition of work: "If your animal fell into a ditch on the Sabbath, wouldn't you pull it out? And isn't it more important to help people than to help animals?" That's sheer brilliance. Consider all the parables he told, all the moral teachings which are still quoted today, and the fact that his moral teachings can be obeyed by everyone from peasant farmers in Tibet to the President of the United States. But unlike other moral teachers, whose teachings are based on their own opinions (such as Muhammad, Buddha, Confucius), Jesus' moral teachings are anchored in a document that was already ancient when he walked the earth. He wasn't inventing new rules; he was merely reminding people of what they had been missing in the rules they already had in front of them, guaranteeing continuity between the first word of Genesis and the last word of the Bible we have today. That's an even more impressive feat than simply inventing a new philosophy from scratch. Also note that there are four different gospel accounts, written in four completely different tones, with differing word choices and emphasis between them. If the gospels were forgeries, they were invented by four different people, telling different stories about different times in Jesus' life, but all collaborating together to make sure their accounts lined up - a feat which is honestly just as hard to believe as the idea that Jesus actually lived. All signs point to the fact that the person who uttered these teachings really lived, and really said and did what the gospels say he said and did.

5. The written gospels match what was already known about Jesus. How did stories of Jesus' life circulate before the gospels were written? By word of mouth. In Acts 13:23-25, we see Paul explaining the life of John the Baptist, several years before the first gospel was written. Likewise, in Romans 13:8, he mentions that everyone who loves another has fulfilled the Old Testament law, which is exactly what Jesus said - but again, the gospels had not yet been written at the time of Paul's letter. Yet he already knew about John the Baptist and about Jesus' life because there were lots of people who had seen what Jesus did and had spread the news through word-of-mouth. Why does this matter? Because, when the gospels appeared, they matched what people already knew about Jesus. Otherwise, nobody would have accepted them. If you saw a baseball game, and then twenty years later read a book about that game which gave a completely different version of events, you would reject the book. In the same way, people would have rejected the gospels, had they not matched the eyewitness accounts and widespread knowledge of Jesus' life that already existed. Additionally, the four gospels appeared within a very short time (for antiquity), which is twenty to thirty years after Jesus lived. Two of them (Matthew and John) were written by eyewitnesses, one was written by the secretary of an eyewitness (Mark), and a third was a research volume put together by a man who interviewed eyewitnesses (Luke). When the gospels appeared, there were still plenty of other people around who could have disputed them if they had told a different story about Jesus, but there's no record of any such disputation. No first-century person, Christian or otherwise, disagreed with the idea that the gospels were accurate. Which brings us to the next point...

6. Jesus' enemies accepted his life and even his miracles. You would think that, of all people, the Pharisees and Sadducees might have some motivation for covering up, denying, or otherwise slandering the life and deeds of Jesus, yet that didn't happen. Jewish historians, called Talmudists, agree that Jesus was crucified on the eve of Passover, just like the Bible says, and they agree that he had no apparent father, calling him "Ben Pandera," punning the phrase for "son of a virgin." Another Jewish document called the Baraila mentions that the charges against Jesus included sorcery: they accepted that he had done miracles and signs, but thought they were dark magic instead of God-power. So we see that even Jesus' enemies accept that he lived, that he did impressive feats, and that he was put to death on the eve of passover - just like the New Testament says. When even the testimony of his enemies supports the gospel accounts, you have to think that the gospel accounts are most probably accurate.

7. There was no reason for the disciples to lie about Jesus. This is really one of the most powerful things to think about. Jesus told his disciples very plainly that he was going to die and that they should not expect any better. This prophecy ended up coming true: Jesus was indeed put to death, as were eleven of his twelve disciples (the exception being Judas, who betrayed him, and committed suicide). So it makes you wonder: if the events of the New Testament didn't really happen, why were Jesus' disciples so insistent that they did? There was no incentive to them, financial or otherwise, and in fact there was a great disincentive, in the form of preserving their own lives. If Jesus didn't really do miracles or rise from the dead, as some skeptics believe, why say he did? Why not rather make a fortune as teachers of the "Jesus philosophy," and live in opulence and comfort for the rest of your long and happy life? Why add false details to the story which make people hostile, and continue to defend those details up to the point of death? There is literally no reason to believe that any sane and rational human being would do such a thing, and the gospel accounts do not tell stories of disciples who are insane or irrational. (The truly dedicated skeptic will say that belief in the supernatural is itself proof of insanity or irrationality, at which point you can tell that such a person will not be convinced by any proof no matter how airtight. We should not wonder at this; Jesus said that even if someone came back from the dead to warn others about eternal truths, many still wouldn't listen [Luke 16:31].) If you examine the gospels and then Paul's letters, what you will find are human minds which are very capable of explaining dates, places, and events in understandable ways. Paul's letters show a very calculating mind, familiar with Greek philosophy and literature and skilled at logical arguments. The sanity of Jesus' followers is not up for debate, so the question remains: what is the most likely explanation for a sane person insisting that something did happen, and continuing in that insistence through torture and execution? The most cogent explanation, and I would say the only one that makes any sense at all, is that they really saw what they thought they saw. There's no reason to believe that they had any desire or motive for faking any part of the New Testament.

What we see when we add all this together is that there are a lot of really great reasons to believe that the New Testament, as written, tells the truth about Jesus' life. And if, as I said earlier, the New Testament is truth, then it must be believed simply because truth must be believed. We do not have the intellectual freedom as humans to believe whatever we want, especially when our preferred belief disagrees with what can be proven, or reasonably proven, to be true. That's the assurance that we have: our faith is not "blind faith," not "a leap of faith," as critics of religion often call it, but it is based in actual historical truth. You may have not known all of this when you became a Christian, may have come to Christ simply because it felt right or it met a need, but you can rest easy at night knowing that there is substance behind the feelings, and that truth is truth - and that truth is Jesus. "I am the way, the truth, and the life." John 14:6

Jim Barringer is a 38-year-old writer, musician, and teacher. More of his work can be found at facebook.com/jmbarringer. This work may be reprinted for any purpose so long as this bio and statement of copyright is included.

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