This is a continuous account of the life and teaching of Jesus Christ using the four gospels (in a modern translation) interlinked with comments and explanations from the author. Only one instance of each of the parallel passages is presented, but an index is also included which details the other passages. Originally written and published as a school text book, it has been revised for use by any general reader.
Excerpt:
Some Gentle Persuasion
Before we begin to study the life and teaching of Jesus Christ, let us ask a very basic question. Is it possible? Can we, with any reasonable degree of confidence, find some starting point that no one will dispute? Or do we have to make some act of faith even before we begin? There may be many reading this book who do not yet feel ready to commit themselves to an act of faith. They would want to question whether Jesus Christ ever existed even, let alone believe any and every story with which they are presented that claims to describe something He said or did. So we shall begin with two things that cannot be doubted: the existence of the Christian Church and the writings of the New Testament. And we shall see how far back in history we can trace the existence of each.
The Existence of Christianity
If one were to be permitted to assume the accuracy of Christian writings, one could show that the Christian Church came into existence about the year A.D. 29. But it might be argued that these should be disregarded if one is to enquire absolutely impartially into this question. Therefore, for the present, we will ignore them, and see what evidence is left. About A.D. 112 a Roman called Pliny, engaged in the administration of the province of Bithynia (part of the country we now call Turkey), had a problem on his hands. He was not sure how to treat the outlawed Christians and so he wrote to the emperor, Trajan, asking for advice on the matter. Here is part of his letter:
‘Meanwhile, this is the course that I have adopted in the case of those brought before me as Christians. I ask them if they are Christians. If they admit it I repeat the question a second and a third time, threatening capital punishment; if they persist I sentence them to death .... There were others who displayed a like madness and whom I reserved to be sent to Rome, since they were Roman citizens.’
Other parts of the letter give us valuable information about Christian practice and indicate how widespread Christianity then was.
‘Others who recanted declared that the sum of their guilt or error had amounted only to this, that on an appointed day they had been accustomed to meet before daybreak, and recite a hymn antiphonally to Christ, as to a god, and to bind themselves by an oath, not for the commission of any crime but to abstain from theft, robbery, adultery and breach of faith, and not to deny a deposit when it was claimed. After the conclusion of the ceremony it was their custom to depart and meet again to take food .... The contagion of this superstition has spread not only in the cities, but in the villages and rural districts as well; yet it seems capable of being checked and set right. There is no shadow of doubt that the temples, which have been almost deserted, are beginning to be frequented once more, that the sacred rites which have been long neglected are being renewed, and that sacrihcial victims are for sale everywhere, whereas, till recently, a buyer was rarely to be found.’
We are also fortunate enough to possess Trajan’s reply to Pliny’s letter, in which he confirms Pliny’s policy.
However, we can take evidence of Christianity’s existence even closer to the date of A.D. 29 by reference to other Roman writers. About the time that Pliny wrote his letter to Trajan, the Roman historian Tacitus was writing his history of the Roman Empire. He gave an account of the great fire in Rome in A.D. 64. Many suspected that the emperor Nero himself had caused the fire. Tacitus wrote:
‘But all the endeavours of men, all the emperor’s largesse and the propitiations of the gods, did not suffice to allay the scandal or banish the belief that the fire had been ordered. And so, to get rid of the rumour Nero set up as the culprits and punished with the utmost rennements of cruelty a class hated for their abominations, who are commonly called Christians. Christus, from whom their name is derived, was executed at the hands of the procurator Pontius Pilate in the reign of Tiberius. Checked for the moment, this pernicious superstition again broke out, not only in Judea, the source of the evil, but even in Rome, that receptacle for everything that is sordid and degrading from every quarter of the globe which there finds a following’ The abusive way in which Tacitus refers to Christianity shows that he is in no way sympathetic to it, and the language used completely banishes the possibility that some Christian has tampered with the text of Tacitus’ writings to introduce material not originally there. Besides, another Roman historian, Suetonius, writing a few years later than Tacitus (about A.D. 120), confirms the Neronian persecution of Christians: ‘In his reign many abuses were severely punished and repressed, and as many new laws instituted .... Punishment was inflicted on Christians, a set of men adhering to a novel and mischievous superstition.’
Suetonius also mentioned that in the reign of Claudius (probably about A.D. 50) ‘ ... since the Jews were continually making disturbances at the instigation of Chrestus, he [Claudius] expelled them from Rome.’ Chrestus could be a variant spelling of Christus, and it may well be that in this statement of Suetonius (compare Acts 18.2) we have a reference to quarrels between Jewish and Christian leaders in Rome.
A third non-Christian historian must be mentioned. He is Josephus, a Jew who after a chequered career settled down to sustained literary activity in Rome. Among his writings are a History of the Jewish War (covering from 170 B.C. to A.D. 70) and his twenty-book-long Jewish Antiquities, which he completed in A.D. 93. He refers to many figures who are prominent in the New Testament: Pilate, Annas and Caiaphas, John the Baptist, James the brother of Jesus, and Jesus himself. One passage from the Jewish Antiquities deserves particular attention (it is quoted here in the form put forward by Professor Bruce in his book, The New Testament Documents):
‘And there arose about this time a source of new troubles, one Jesus, a wise man. He was a doer of marvellous deeds, a teacher of men who receive strange things with pleasure. He led away many Jews, and also many of the Greeks. This man was the so-called Christ. And when Pilate had condemned him to the cross on his impeachment by the chief men among us, those who had loved him at first did not cease; for he appeared to them, as they said, on the third day alive again, the divine prophets having spoken these and thousands of other wonderful things about him, and even now the tribe of Christians, so named after him, has not yet died out.’
Let us now try to assess what we know of Christianity by reference only to non-Christian writers whose works were published while personal memories and public records could verify their trustworthiness, remembering that none of these writers showed any sympathy for Christianity. The following facts are established: that under the procuratorship of Pilate over Judea (that is to say sometime between A.D. 26 and 36) a man called Jesus, and given the title Christ (in Latin Christus) by his followers, was crucified; that his followers believed he rose from the dead; that there were followers of his commonly called Christians, in Rome by A.D. 50 probably, and by A.D. 64 certainly; that Christians by A.D. 112 had become so widespread as to be a problem even in a comparatively remote part of the vast Roman Empire. This ‘problem’ was never solved, by the way, for Christianity eventually became the official religion of the Roman Empire.
Now the existence of a Christian Church in the terms just described is more signiflcant than might at first sight appear. For it compels us to ask how it might have come about. How was it that there were men who believed that their leader had risen from the dead? How was it that many Christians were prepared to suffer death, often a very cruel death, rather than recant their beliefs? If we are ever going to find out how these things could be, and they are happening still in the twentieth century as well as in the first, sooner or later we are going to have to examine the documents of Christianity, the writings of those who first held these beliefs. No doubt we shall feel that the obvious starting point is those writings which give an account of the life and teachings of the man whom Pliny tells us the Christians worshipped as god. That is what this book will help us to do, but a few things need to be said about these documents before we can begin.
The New Testament Writings
The most compelling thing about the Christian documents is that they exist. There are billions, literally, of Bibles in the world, translated, in whole or in part, into over one thousand different languages. It has often been the work of a lifetime to provide the Bible (or part of it) in a new language. Men and women today of the highest intellect are devoting their whole lives, often at great sacrifice of comfort and security, to translating, producing, and distributing the Bible; and these are men and women who are aware of, and have studied, the results of two centuries of intense critical scrutiny of the Bible. For the books of the Bible have been subjected to every test that the mind of man can devise, historical, textual, literary, and scientific. And it is still the world’s bestseller.
These facts, I trust, will make us want to know more. How did the New Testament (leaving aside the Old Testament, which is not really within the scope of this book) come to be written? Do we have the original writings, and, if not, how can we be sure that we have accurate copies? In fact, and this is a question that I have actually been asked, how can we be sure that the New Testament is not the work of some monk — or crank — in the Middle Ages ?
The New Testament consists of twenty-seven separate writings. They were all written in Greek, which was the language that nearly every one in the first century knew, at least partially, in addition to his own native language or dialect. Most of them are letters: thirteen of them bearing the name of Paul, one anonymous, one of James, two of Peter, three attributed to John, and one of Jude. Of the remaining six writings one (the Revelation of John) is of rather a special nature, containing seven separate letters within it and the account of a prolonged vision, one is an account of the growth of Christianity up to A.D. 62, and the other four are accounts of the life of Jesus Christ — the gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.
Now the men who wrote these letters and gospels apparently never for one moment thought they were contributing towards a handbook on Christianity which, when completed, would bear the title ‘The New Testament’. The letters, by and large, were written by the apostles as a means of dealing with a particular situation. Most were intended for a particular community of Christians, though some were intended for a limited or more general circulation. Four of Paul’s letters were written to individual men. None of the letters of the New Testament was a literary work — they were plain letters written for the same reason that any letter is written: because a personal visit is impracticable or impossible; the majority of Paul’s letters, for example, were written when the apostle was in prison.
The background to the gospels and the Acts of the Apostles is somewhat different. Here it will be best to take them one by one. The first gospel to be written, most scholars believe, was that of Mark. It was written probably some time between A.D. 60 and 65, in other words about thirty years after the events it describes. The reason for this long time lag is simple. The early Christians did not need written documents describing the life and teachings of Jesus Christ because of the many eye-witnesses who could personally recount what they knew. They did not feel it necessary, at first, to provide some permanent record because they believed that the end of the world (with the return of Jesus Christ) would come within a few years, certainly within their own lifetime. As time passed these eye-witnesses began to die off and when in A.D. 64 Christianity was declared an illegal religion, for which the penalty was death, the need for written permanent records of the testimony of the remaining eye-witnesses became most urgent. Papias, who was bishop of Hierapolis about A.D. 130, tells us, on the authority of John the Elder, the following about Mark’s Gospel:
‘Mark became the interpreter of Peter and he wrote down accurately, but not in order, as much as he remembered [or, as he (Peter) related] of the sayings and doings of Christ. For he was not a hearer or a follower of the Lord, but afterwards, as I said, of Peter, who adapted his teachings to the needs of the moment and did not make an ordered exposition of the sayings of the Lord. And so Mark made no mistake when he wrote down some things as he remembered [or, as he (Peter) related] them; for he made it his especial care to omit nothing of what he heard, and to make no false statement therein.’
These words of Papias are supported by other second century writers as well as by an examination of the gospel itself, which accords very well with the view that it is the record by another hand of the recollections of Peter.
Two of the other three, Matthew and Luke, have much in common with Mark, so that these three gospels are often called ‘Synoptic’, meaning that they can be viewed together. In fact it seems extremely likely that both the author of Matthew’s Gospel and Luke had Mark’s Gospel in front of them when they wrote their accounts of the life of Jesus Christ. For of the 661 verses of Mark’s Gospel (the last twelve and five others singly are later additions) about 600 are to be found, abridged but more or less unchanged, in Matthew and about 380 in Luke. Matthew and Luke also generally follow Mark’s order — so that occasionally Matthew diverges from Mark and Luke, and Luke from Mark and Matthew, but never do Matthew and Luke together diverge from Mark’s order.
Besides using Mark as a source, Matthew and Luke appear to have another common source, for apart from what we presume they borrowed from Mark there are about 250 verses which are common to both. Nothing certain is known of this source, which scholars refer to as ‘Q.’, from the German word for source, Quelle. It is a theoretical document that is held to exist because this is the easiest way of explaining how Matthew and Luke have these 250 or so verses in common which do not appear in Mark. However, it has been suggested that ‘Q.’ might well be an early composition of Matthew, which was later incorporated by an unknown writer in the gospel traditionally ascribed to Matthew, as well as used by Luke. The evidence for such a document again comes from Papias:
‘So then Matthew recorded the oracles [or sayings, or discourses - the Greek word is Logia] in the Hebrew tongue and each interpreted them to the best of his ability.’
If it is true that this compilation of Matthew is to be identified with ‘Q.’, it would explain how the first gospel came to be ascribed to Matthew, for many scholars find it difficult to believe that the final version, as found in our Bibles, was wholly the work of Matthew, because of the extent of its dependence upon Mark. Indeed it would have been strange for one of the original twelve apostles, and an eye-witness of Jesus, to have used so much of the work of a man who was neither of these.
Luke’s Gospel was the first part of a two-part work, the second part being the Acts of the Apostles. Luke was Paul’s companion in much of his journeyings and obtained a great deal of his material for the Acts from him. As regards his gospel, in addition to what we have already noted, Luke’s own words tell us more of the background of his writing:
Seeing that many have attempted to draw up a narrative of the facts which are received with full assurance among us on the authority of those who were from the beginning eye-witnesses and were devoted to the service of the divine Message, it has seemed right to me also, after careful investigation of the facts from their commencement, to write for you, most noble Theophilus, a connected account, that you may fully know the truth of the things which you have been taught by word of mouth.
It is impossible to state with any confidence exactly the date of Matthew and Luke, but a date for both somewhere near A.D. 70 would probably be not far wrong.
When one comes to John’s Gospel one enters upon a topic of a complexity beyond the scope of this introduction. There has been much discussion concerning its authorship and date, but in spite of this there do not, to the present writer at any rate, seem to be any really compelling reasons for rejecting the traditional view: that it was written, or caused to be written, by the apostle John some time after the other three, say around A.D. 90, at Ephesus. It seems probable that John knew the other gospels and did not want to go over ground already covered, for only one story outside the narrative of the crucifixion and resurrection appears in John which also appears in the others. John’s Gospel is a very personal account of specially chosen events, and often it is difficult to know whether the words used are meant to be taken as those of Jesus or those of the author himself. While the other gospels seem, in many ways, intended for those already Christians — Matthew has a very Jewish outlook, Mark less so, and Luke a distinctly Gentile orientation — John’s Gospel seems directed at the non-Christian and was written, the author states, that the reader ‘might believe’.
This, very briefly, is how the gospels particularly, and the New Testament as a whole, came to be written. Of course these conclusions are based on internal as well as external evidence. But they are the sort of considerations, which, if applied by historians to any other book of comparable antiquity, would be accepted as having an undeniable validity.
With this information we can now go on to the question of how sure we can be that what we find today written in our Bibles does in fact correspond accurately to what was originally set down by the authors of the New Testament. In spite of what has been said in describing the content of the New Testament, there may still be the suspicion in some minds that it is all a clever hoax.
The Manuscripts of the New Testament
As we have said, there are billions of Bibles in existence today. There are probably very few readers of this book who do not possess one, or have access to one. It is also probable that the copy you possess is a translation of the original Greek and Hebrew, in which the writers of the Biblical books wrote, called the Authorized Version. This translation was completed in 1611 and used the works of previous translators, mainly Tyndale, and, to a much lesser degree, Coverdale. These men were the first to translate the Bible into English directly from the original languages. The very few previous translations, for example that of Wycliffe, had been from a Latin version of the Bible called the Vulgate.
Now the history of Biblical manuscripts is a large subject, so it will help if we leave aside the Old Testament and concentrate on the New. Before printing came to Europe in the fifteenth century all books were written by hand; the word ‘manuscript’ means, strictly speaking, something written by hand. The making of books before printing was used was an extremely laborious business, and books were very scarce and very expensive, and normally were only to be found in places like monasteries, universities, and palaces. The first printed version of the New Testament in its original Greek was produced by Erasmus in 1516. His work was based on those manuscripts which he had been able to collect, and it was this that Tyndale used. Since 1516 there have been many publications of the Greek New Testament, as the discovery of more ancient manuscripts made some small changes seem desirable. An up-to-date copy today would include all the most recent findings, and would represent the result of meticulous comparisons made by thousands of scholars since Erasmus’ day. But what do we know of the New Testament prior to 1516? How many of the manuscripts written before that date survive to this day, and just how old are they?
One can answer these questions fairly exactly. There are about five thousand manuscripts containing either the whole or part of the New Testament, and they date from the first half of the second century onwards. The earliest fragment, containing a few verses from John’s Gospel, has been dated at around A.D. 130. Manuscripts containing parts of Luke, John, and the letters of Peter and Jude, are dated around A.D. 200. There are third-century manuscripts with more or less the rest of the New Testament. The material on which these writings were copied is called papyrus. It was made from a reed which grew largely in Egypt; strips of the pith were glued over strips placed at right angles to them, to make separate sheets which were then glued together into rolls which varied in length according to the needs of the writer, up to a maximum of about thirty feet. Papyrus will only survive under certain conditions of dry climate, such as those found in Egypt or Palestine. That some papyri have survived so long is a remarkable thing. However, in the fourth century another writing material, which had not been used a great deal previously, came into popular use. This was vellum, what we would call parchment, made from the skins of suitable animals. Vellum was arranged in leaves placed on top of each other and bound like a modern book. Such a book is called a codex. Another most important event of the fourth century was the recognition by the Roman Emperor Constantine of Christianity as a permissible religion in 313, which was soon followed by its adoption as the Roman Empire’s official religion. This naturally caused a great demand for the Christian writings to be made widely available, and many codices of the New Testament were produced. Vellum survives much more readily than papyrus, and from the fourth century onwards we have ample manuscript evidence of the text of the New Testament. There is a complete vellum copy of the New Testament dated as fourth century in the British Museum, for example, (it is called the Codex Sinaiticus) and another almost complete New Testament codex in the Vatican Library (the Codex Vaticanus). We possess four codices dated as fifth century, one of which is in the Cambridge University Library. And so on ... to detail the evidence after these dates is clearly unnecessary. Besides pieces of paper on which the New Testament has been copied out, and which by modern methods can be dated with considerable accuracy, there is another form of evidence which is very valuable. This is where we possess writings which can be dated by the lifetime of their authors, and usually much more precisely than that, and which actually quote parts of the New Testament. Thus a letter written by Clement, bishop of Rome, around a.D. 96, has quotations from ten books of the New Testament, possibly more. About the same number of books (but not all the same ones) have quotations from them appearing in a letter written by Ignatius, bishop of Antioch, in A.D. 115. In a letter written by Polycarp to the Philippians around A.D. 120 sixteen books of the New Testament appear in quotation. From then on throughout the second century there are writings which quote from all the books of the New Testament. Clearly, from all this is is impossible to believe that the New Testament was written later than the second half of the first century, with the majority of the books written within forty years of the events they describe, in other words within the lifetime of many thousands of eye-witnesses.
Conclusion
The point of this introduction has been to show that there are certain things that we just cannot dismiss. There can be no doubt that Jesus really lived, that certain people were willing to die for the belief that he had risen from the dead and was the Son of God, and that the stories of Jesus’ deeds and words were spread, both orally and in writing, while it was easily possible to verify their truth. It is of course still possible for us to hold that these beliefs were mistaken, but we would be very narrow-minded if we decided in advance of studying the records that this was the case. The scientific method of study is first observation, then the forming of a theory to explain the observed facts, and finally the testing of the theory. Our first task must be to find out what the gospels actually say.
How can we then find out what really happened, as it all happened so long ago? The job of a historian is very difiicult. When all the documents relating to a particular event have been studied, and obvious inconsistencies ruled out, he must in the end work on probabilities. Given my knowledge of human behaviour, he asks himself, what is the most likely thing to have happened in this situation? And even then he knows he is not always going to be right. This leads us to one crucial question — that of miracles. Many assume that a miracle is, by dehnition, something that cannot happen, and they therefore refuse ever to believe in one. The word ‘miracle’ actually means simply ‘something wonderful’, and we often use it in everyday language in this way, talking of, for example, ‘the miracles of modern science’. When Christians talk about miracles in the gospels, they do not mean that the scientifically observable laws of nature were suspended; they believe rather that there was another factor operating which must be taken into account, namely the direct activity of God. If this really was so, if it is true that in the person of Jesus Christ the God of creation was literally present on earth, what would we expect to happen? It seems to me that it would be more surprising that nothing wonderful should happen.
If Jesus was nothing more than an ordinary human being, I agree, miracles would be a real problem. The important question is — was he ? How can we decide on that? In two ways, I think. First we can study the gospels with a view to judging for ourselves, weighing the probabilities as a historian would, whether it is more consistent to look on Jesus as merely human or a great deal more than human. Some one has pointed out that if Jesus was not what he said he was, then either he was insane or else the cruellest man in history, knowingly to lead so many astray — to put it more simply, either mad or bad.
The second way of answering the question is based on one’s own experience. Christians are usually not convinced that Jesus is the Son of God merely on the grounds of their historical judgment. They find that in responding to the claims of Christ and opening their hearts to him, they do grasp a reality. They are aware within them of a friend, and a transformation of themselves, gradually, painfully sometimes, and never magically, with fear giving place to trust and selfishness to love. It is this transforming friendship that confirms their first tentative hopes of a transforming friend.
In this book no one is preaching at you, or trying to bend your mind to think in a particular way. The hope simply is to give you the opportunity of making your own mind up about the one who, by any reckoning, is the most important figure in history.
