Why Do We Trust the Bible about Jesus?
Why do we trust what the Bible says about Jesus? There are other accounts of Jesus’ life that dispute the Bible's supernatural claims about Jesus, and there are many modern people who, frankly, find belief in these types of supernatural claims to be absurd. So why do we trust the Bible?
One of the reasons we trust the Bible is that we think its craziest claim (the resurrection) is verifiable without even using the Bible.
One of the most absurd claims in the Bible about Jesus is the resurrection. The Bible says that after being executed, his dead body was put in a grave on Friday, and then on Sunday morning Jesus wasn’t dead anymore. In fact, beyond not being dead, he had been “resurrected”—his old dead body had been healed and transformed into a new kind of body, a “glorious” body. And we think that this is verifiable without even needing to rely on the Bible. Instead, we think it’s verifiable sociologically.
The best explanation of Christianity’s new, immediate, and universal beliefs about resurrection is that Jesus was actually resurrected.
(This argument is based on the one NT Wright makes in several places. The most accessible version of it can be found as a 25 page appendix to Antony Flew's book There Is a God. The rest of what is said here is almost entirely a summary of his arguments.)
Point #1: In the ancient world, no one but some of the Jews believed in physical resurrection.
They may have believed in some sort of life after death, but none of them believed in resurrection—except some of the Jews. These Jews (because of texts like Daniel 12:2) believed that at the end of time they would all be bodily resurrected at the same time. After death, they would spend some period of time being dead (spiritually disembodied), but then sometime after that they would be re-embodied, resurrected. Some Jews (e.g., Pharisees) believed this, but other Jews (e.g., Sadducees) didn’t believe in a resurrection at all.
Point #2: Beliefs about the afterlife are very conservative and slow to change.
This sounds reasonable (individuals have few reasons to change their beliefs, so it’s even less likely that a whole swath of people change) and is apparently actually the case when one looks at the historical data (see Wright for more of the nitty-gritty details).
Point #3: Christianity immediately and universally believed something entirely new about the afterlife.
The change in Christians’ beliefs about the afterlife was immediate. There was no gradual adoption of new beliefs over a period of decades or centuries.
The change in Christians’ beliefs about the afterlife was universal. There were no pockets of belief, with some Christians believing one way and some believing another (like with the Jews). Instead, practically all Christians believed this.
Christians’ beliefs about the afterlife were entirely new. While some Jews believe in a mass resurrection of people at some future date, the rest of the first century world (other Jews and non-Jews) did not believe in any resurrection. Christianity suddenly believed in a mass resurrection of people at a future date, but their belief was different from that of the Jews. First, the Christians suddenly emphasized that this resurrection was paired with a transformation (new kinds of bodies, no more suffering or death) that not even any of the Jews had believed before. Second, the Christians suddenly believed in the resurrection and transformation of a single person (Jesus) followed at some point in the future by a mass resurrection.
Point #4: Resurrection, a relatively minor doctrine in Judaism, was central to Christians’ whole theology.
American Christians today know that Jesus’ resurrection is central to our theology. More of us forget that the resurrection of us all is central to our theology too.
Point #5: The only plausible historical explanation of all this is the one found in the Bible.
How is it that a whole population of people immediately, uniformly, and drastically changed their idea of life after death? All of the Christian texts we have available would, of course, explain this change by referring to Jesus being raised from the dead. Is there any plausible historical explanation of what could have happened to cause these changes?
There’s no reason for us to think that first century people were any less skeptical about a miraculous resurrection than modern people would be. So there’s little reason to think that Jesus’ followers would have immediately and universally bought some sort of lie that he was “resurrected.”
The only plausible explanation for all this is the one found in the Bible as well as in all of the earliest Christian sources: (A) Jesus’ tomb was found empty, and (B) Jesus was physically seen and touched by his followers.
(A): If the tomb weren’t empty, any sighting of a resurrected Jesus could be explained away like any other ghost story (wishful thinking, hallucination, religious vision, etc.). When they saw Jesus, the only reason his followers knew they weren’t crazy was the empty tomb.
(B): If Jesus weren’t seen and touched, then an empty tomb would have been much more easily explained by a grave robbery than a resurrection. Jesus’ followers only had confidence to proclaim his resurrection because they had actually seen and touched him.
Conclusion: Accepting the resurrection as historically accurate is good reason to accept the rest of what the Bible says about Jesus.
Even from a purely historical point of view, it seems like we ought to believe in Jesus’ resurrection—the theological foundation for the entire New Testament. And once we accept the resurrection as historically accurate, we have reason to believe that Jesus lived and worked with a type of power unknown to the rest of us (how else was he resurrected?). With such power, why wouldn’t we believe that Jesus did the other miracles in the Bible?
