True and Reasonable: In Defense of the Christian Faith by Ronald F. Satta

Author:Ronald F. Satta
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Religion, General
ISBN: 9781498274777
Publisher: Wipf & Stock, an Imprint of Wipf and Stock Publishers
Published: 2016-05-25T23:00:00+00:00

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Jesus the Christ: The Promised Messiah

OF COURSE, JESUS CANNOT be the prophetic fulfillment of anything if he is merely a mythical character. I find it surprising that some people still think of him in those terms, most particularly since we have so much historical verification of his existence. Only the misinformed or the uninformed can possibly contend that Jesus is but a legend. As a matter of fact, if we know anything about the distant past, we know that a man named Jesus lived in the Near East during the first century who claimed to be the Christ, that he gathered a group of disciples together, and that he really was crucified by Pontius Pilate just as the biblical record attests.

But how do we know anything about the distant past? Our knowledge is generally based upon records; documents, histories, diaries, census reports, letters, or sometimes via archeological discoveries as in pottery, weapons, walls, bricks, etc. The past is revealed to us by means of records—written or otherwise. In the case of Jesus, we are fortunate to have abundant documentation from both sympathetic and unsympathetic witnesses. It has been said that the winners write history so it isn’t always considered the unvarnished truth. However, historians typically agree that documentary evidence is particularly compelling if one finds the winners and the losers harmonizing regarding the facts under consideration. This is precisely the sort of unity one discovers when investigating the person of Jesus.

THE HISTORICITY OF THE CRUCIFIXION

Some might suspect that the sole evidence for the existence of Jesus is found in the Bible. That is incorrect. We do have thousands of ancient manuscripts, copies of the Gospels, documents of the New Testament, which were transcribed across time and space throughout the ancient world. These witnesses are typically viewed as sympathetic, the product of scribes who had a vested interest in their faith and sought to transmit the message of Christianity with integrity by copying the ancient records and distributing them and thus preserving the message.

Even though these records are from sympathetic transcribers, there is nothing devious about them. Indeed, textual criticism reveals that these copies are amazingly similar, such that it is abundantly apparent that they find their source in common originals.1 These copies come from the early second century forward and are found all across the region of the ancient world.2 In my Nestle-Aland Greek New Testament, there is a critical apparatus that identifies nearly every textual variant found between and among the manuscripts.3

If we possessed only the preserved Greek manuscripts of the New Testament, we would have an overabundance of documentary support about the historical legitimacy of Jesus. We would know beyond all reasonable doubt that he claimed to be the Christ, recruited disciples, suffered under Pilate, and was believed to have risen from the dead.4 Indeed, one might reasonably argue that the crucifixion of Jesus is the best attested historical fact from antiquity.

However, we have important additional testimony in support of the evidence supplied by the New Testament documents.

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