By JOHN YOUNG
Among Scripture scholars there is a great deal of skepticism about the historical reliability of the Gospels. Doubts are raised as to whether Jesus really multiplied the loaves and fish or walked on the water, whether He predicted the coming destruction of Jerusalem, whether He cast out demons.
I heard a homily where the priest seemed determined to cast doubt on the veracity of Scripture, pointing to alleged contradictions where in fact no contradiction existed. I remember one instance in particular: He said that where Luke’s infancy account says Jesus was born in a stable; Matthew says the Magi came to a house.
In fact there’s no contradiction, because the Magi arrived some time (apparently several weeks) after Jesus’ birth, by which time Joseph would surely have found more suitable accommodation.
On another occasion the same priest suggested that the reason some possessed people knew who Jesus was, whereas the people in general did not, was that their mental condition gave them a truer insight. (The implication was clear: These individuals weren’t really possessed by demons; they were suffering from a mental illness.) If we accept, as we should, that evil spirits were speaking through them, it was the spirits, not the possessed people, who knew Jesus’ identity.
Skepticism is also held about accounts in the Gospels which were foretold in the Old Testament — for instance, the birth of the Messiah in Bethlehem. It is suggested instead that He was born in Nazareth, and the early Christians concocted a story about the census so as to place His birth in Bethlehem.
Why the widespread reluctance, among so many Scripture scholars and the many people misled by them, to accept that supernatural events really happened, and were recorded in the Gospels? It is not that the Gospels fail the criteria for their historicity. Leaving aside the supernatural elements, the Gospels can be shown to meet the tests for historicity.
The problem for so many scholars is that the Gospels are full of miracles: instantaneous cures, casting out of demons, foretelling of future events, even raising the dead to life. If the possibility of such things is denied, then logically the whole reliability of the Gospels is called into question.
But in the modern world such things are often totally rejected as relics of superstitious ages that lacked the insights given by modern science. Rudolf Bultmann (1884-1976) expressed this attitude in a famous sentence: “It is impossible to use electric light and the wireless and to avail ourselves of modern medical and surgical discoveries, and at the same time to believe in the New Testament world of spirits and miracles” (New Testament and Mythology, p. 5).
One big problem for those who discard so much of the Gospels as unhistorical is to explain how the truth about Jesus could have become so distorted. Surely early Christians who knew the facts at firsthand would have put the record straight and exposed the myths. His enemies, too, would have seized on contradictions between what the Gospels said and what eyewitnesses, including His enemies, knew to be the facts.
The best the skeptics can do is posit dates as late as possible for the Gospels, when the remaining eyewitnesses were few. We need to remember this when we see the dates estimated by many modern Scripture scholars; dates much later than those estimated by earlier scholars.
Take one reason proposed for a date after AD 70: the fact that the destruction of Jerusalem occurred in that year. The reasoning is that a prophecy of this tragic event was put into our Lord’s mouth by the early Church after the event had happened. But this begs the question: It assumes that He could not have predicted it.
Despite Bultmann and those who think as he did, there is no sound reason to reject the supernatural and conclusive reasons to accept it. But given the prevalence of the materialistic worldview so vividly expressed in his words, it is not surprising that the supernatural is a stumbling block to acceptance of much in Scripture.
It is not just those whose philosophy rejects the supernatural who have a difficulty; there is also a problem for scholars who have no such philosophy but who don’t want to be derided as out of date.
To illustrate. Suppose an alleged expert in the works of Homer were to claim that the Iliad is historically accurate in its depiction of Achilles’ battle against the Trojans, where he slaughters soldier after soldier and they prove helpless against his onslaught. If a scholar were to claim that it all happened as Homer depicts it, and answered the skeptics by saying that Achilles had gods to help him, he would lose any reputation he might have had as a serious scholar.
Now apply this to the claim that the miracles and other supernatural events depicted in the New Testament really occurred, having been caused by God. To a materialist this is like saying that the feats of Achilles in the Iliad happened, having been caused by the Greek gods.
Of course there will not be the same degree of derision directed against the orthodox Scripture scholar as there would be against our hypothetical student of the Iliad. The degree is less, but the derision is there. If a Scripture scholar wants to be accepted by the establishment he would be well advised not to insist on a literal interpretation of supernatural events. If he does he will be branded a fundamentalist.
Here we have part of the explanation of the watering down, even by Catholic scholars, of many incidents in Scripture that were accepted in the past as having actually happened. Not wanting to be derided as fundamentalist, a scholar may succumb to the temptation to explain the supernatural by explaining it away.
Another story about Achilles is that, when he was a baby, his mother Thetis dipped him in the river Styx to make him invulnerable. But his heel remained out of the water, so it was his vulnerable place.
The Achilles Heel of many Scripture scholars is their desire to be accepted by the modernist establishment.
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(John Young is a graduate of the Aquinas Academy in Sydney, Australia, and has taught philosophy in four seminaries. His book The Scope of Philosophy was published by Gracewing Publishers in England in 2010. He has been a frequent contributor to The Wanderer on theological issues since 1977.)
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