So why do I put my belief in a man who claimed to be God and died an untimely gruesome death at the age of 33. And how can I believe so strongly in something which relies on some eyewitnesses and early church writers who wrote their accounts almost 2000 years ago. Why believe in something which is so "narrow minded" or some would say is "so last century dude". Eastern religions are more cool to believe these days or what right do you have to say that Christianity is the only way to God, why can't there be many. There are so many layers to strip away when talking about the Christian faith because our western world has encased Christianity in a thick cocoon of materialism and denomanationalism.
The only way to understand what it means to be a follower of Christ is to understand the person we are following, Jesus Christ. To go back to the source of Christianity and remove all preconceived blind spots which have been formed by history like the Spanish inquisition, slavery, Apartheid and the use of issues like Abortion and gay marriage as a political wedge.
Looking at Jesus, we see a man that hung out with the sick, the outcasts, identified with the poor, with children, he rubbed mud in the eyes of the blind to heal them, he saved a prostitutes life, he let a woman pour her expensive perfume all over him and wipe it with her hair and he patched a guards ear back that his disciple had cut off. He confounds the wisest Jewish teachers of the day and says that we need become like children to enter the Kingdom of Heaven. He says "I am the way the truth and the life" and he gets crucified for calling himself God. As C.S. Lewis says, we have 3 options. "Either this man was, and is, the Son of God: or else a madman or something worse. You can shut Him up for a fool, you can spit at Him and kill Him as a demon; or you can fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to."
Of course all of this assumes that their was a man called Jesus that walked on the earth around 2000 years ago and I will talk later about how to test the accuracy of ancient literature.
I grew up in a Christian home and went to church regularly and was constantly surrounded by bible stories. But that's what they remained, stories and I felt I was doing OK, hanging out with the right crowd, going to Sunday school, taking sermon notes and singing Christian songs. I didn't yet fully grasp that I was a wayward human in need of salvation. This happened when I was 17 and I was suddenly struck by the fact that I needed to surrender my whole life to Jesus and accept his forgiveness for my sins. The whole process was very child-like in the sense that I didn't question the validity of the Bible, I just blindly accepted Jesus as my Saviour knowing that the world offered me nothing better. If people had seen me after that day, they wouldn't have noticed anything different, I behaved pretty much the same but yet inside I felt like God was with me. I began to challenge people around me more openly about knowing where they would stand before God.
I finished school and went to University away from home and then I suddenly discovered that the world is far bigger than the Christian enclave I had grown up in. I was exposed to other religions and new ways of thinking. The most interesting people weren't the Christians, they seemed old fashioned and one dimensional. I wanted to hang out with musicians and artists, many of whom were "new age" thinkers who believed there are many ways to reach God or didn't believe in God. I started questioning whether Christianity was the only way and had periods of real doubt. Behind this doubt was also the sad reality of Christianity in South Africa. Apartheid, a system of institutionalist racial discrimination was justified by a government run on "Christian" principles as did many other right wing organisations. It seemed their was this mismatch between the source of Christianity and what it produced or perhaps these were just the sort of people that were created. Fortunately I had met some Christian leaders while I was at school in the 1980's that were saying the church should challenge the government. But these were a handful of men and woman against a mostly complacent silent church.
In the 1990's I began to read more about supporting evidence for Christianity. I also started reading a lot of books by C.S. Lewis, an apologist and Oxford professor of English and Josh McDowell, somebody who had set out to disprove Christianity but was overwhelmed by the evidence supporting it. Lewis' approach to apologetics is more ontological, aguing from a point of view of intuition and reason. McDowell argues from the point of view of tangible evidence and describes three basic steps in understanding the evidence. Establishing the reliability of the biblical records, establishing evidence for these events actually taking place, especially Jesus death and resurrection. Then based on this evidence, coming to a final verdict. Think of it as Christianity on trial in a court case and these same principles can be applied to any other religion.
The reliability of the biblical records should use the basic principles of historiography which you would use on any historic records. These are the bibliographical test, the internal evidence test and the external evidence test.
In terms of the bibliographical test, most people accept a lot of ancient history based on a few supporting texts. for example Caesar's history of the Galic Wars between 58 and 50 B.C relies on 9 manuscript copies dating to 1000 years after his death. This history of Thucydides (460-600 B.C.) is available to us from just eight manuscripts dated around A.D 900 almost 1300 years after it was written but no one questions the authenticity of these men or events. In contrast over 20000 copies of new testament manuscripts are in existence and most historians agree that every book of the new testament was written by a baptised Jew sometime between A.D. 50 and A.D. 70. Second to this in manuscript authority, is the Illiad, which has 643 manuscripts.
The internal evidence test is basically a test of whether the accounts seem contradictory or there are factual inaccuracies. At the time, the accounts of the gospels were written, there were eye witnesses and the gospel accounts were upheld by the church as reliable witnesses to the life, death and resurrection of Jesus. When you read the gospel accounts you get a sense that these aren't contrived. A carefully contrived work wouldn't portray Peter fleeing and denying Jesus after Jesus arrest, disciples arguing over who would be ranked highest in the Kingdom of Heaven or Jesus wrestling with God over the crucifixion. It seems simply impossible that a few simple men could have created such a powerful, appealing personality in one generation which would have such a massive impact on the middle eastern world at that time.
The external evidence test checks if there is any non-biblical literature which confirms or denies the internal testimony of the documents. The historian Eusebius preserved writings of Papias, bishop of Hierapolis (A.D. 130) who spoke about Mark being Peter's interpreter and accurately writing down all he said being careful not to make any false statement. Iranaeus, Bishop of Lyons (A.D. 180) was a student pf Polycarp, Bishop of Smyrna who had been a Christian for 86 yeas and was a disciple of Apostle John. He recounts how John produced a gospel while he was living in Ephesus in Asia. Most of the the historical places mentioned in the Bible are still places you can visit today and archaeology provides powerful external evidence. The bible also agrees fully with what Roman historians have gleaned from other Roman historical texts. Scepticism around the historical accuracy of Christianity is usually based on an anti-supernatural bias and not on detailed factual analysis.
As I have time I will talk more about evidence supporting Jesus death and resurrection but jumping to the conclusion for now. When I think about the supporting evidence for my faith I always create an image in my mind of someone who is dropped blindfolded with a parachute out of an aeroplane and lands in an unknown country. They take the blind fold off and begin walking around. They notice that they are walking in snow and at night they see strange lights on the horizon. Then they see a polar bear and decide that they must be in the Arctic circle, using their compass, they now decide to walk south to get to warmer habitable land because walking north will take them to the pole. But they are relying on a limited set of evidence which includes things that they experience with their senses as well as information they learnt from a book namely that polar bears only exist in the north pole and not the south pole. But this evidence is enough to convince them and only by making a firm decision to now walk South will they begin to experience confirmation of their decision when the temperature starts to rise and they begin to see more vegetation instead of only ice (well this is before global warming while there is still sea ice connecting to Greenland). This is how it is with the Christian faith; you begin with a set of evidence, its not a full scientific proof buts its enough for you to take a step of Faith, accept it as true and in the process of living out the Christian life, it becomes more real as God works out his purpose in your life.
A good resource for modern apologetics is:
The C.S. Lewis society
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