The mystery of Christian origins

Mark’s gospel was not a cold biography but a living text, the written version of preachings in the years between Jesus and the moment Mark dipped his pen in ink and opened his scroll and began to write.

A fourth reason in support of historical truth is that our sources for Jesus are numerous. We have the four Gospels, the Synoptic Gospel sources “Q”, “L” and “M”, we have the Letters of Paul, James, Peter, Jude and John, and the Revelation. About a dozen in all, mostly primary, underived sources, each pointing to Jesus, called Christ of the royal line of David, Son of God crucified for sins, raised alive from the dead.

For Jesus, a crucified nobody from a despised race, we have vibrant documents written within a lifetime of his lifetime. We have earlier and better sources of evidence than for Augustus, the greatest Roman in history.

How did this man Jesus, a sociological “nobody”, generate this plethora of early documentation? In my opinion, two things alone account for this. His identity as the Son of God and he was raised alive from the dead.

A fifth reason is that there is an unbroken transmission of information between Jesus and us. The very nature of the Christian movement created the situation whereby today we may be confident of the integrity of the texts we read.

By an objective science called Textual Criticism we are confident that the New Testament we read is 99 per cent certain to be the New Testament as it was when it left the hands of Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, Paul, Peter, James, Jude and the writer to the Hebrews.

Several things guarantee this. One guarantee is that Christianity is historically a missionary movement. Another is that converts were gathered into churches. Another is that churches were adapted synagogues and, like synagogues, their core activity was reading texts. They read the writings of the apostles to one another. The Qu’ran calls Christians “people of the book” and that is correct. 

Another guarantee is that these churches needed more and more copies of texts. The Corinthians copied Paul’s letters to them and exchanged their copies with the Ephesians. The seven churches of Revelation each had their copy. It is no wonder Tacitus and Pliny both called Christianity a spreading disease. And this in itself is another guarantee of authenticity. The movement grew from a few thousand in AD 30 to perhaps 10 million by AD 313. Look at maps of churches in AD 40 - Jerusalem, Lydda, Joppa, Caesarea (in Palestine), Antioch (in Syria), Shechem (in Samaria), Ptolemais, Tyre, Sidon (in Phoenicia), Rome (in Italy). Keep looking at these maps every decade for the next 200 years and what do you see? It is like measles with dots on maps representing churches in every country ringing the Mediterranean.

Another guarantee is that thousands of those copies in various languages have survived the ravages of time, including a few lines from John from early in the second century that is likely a copy of the autograph that John wrote. Also from the second century, P46 (in Dublin) Paul’s letters, P45 (in Dublin) the Gospels and the Acts; from the 300s the whole New Testament, found in the late 1800s and now in the British Museum.

From the early centuries there are 5,000 texts of the New Testament, in part or whole, in Greek, Latin, Coptic, Syriac, Armenian. And how many manuscripts of Tacitus’ Annals have survived? One. Discovered in the 1500s.

A sixth reason, then, to believe in the historical truth of Jesus’ story is that it is difficult to account for the rise of Christianity and the writing of the New Testament unless Jesus was indeed the Son of God, raised from the dead. The sources were either right or they were wrong. If wrong, then logically we would have to say they were either sincerely wrong (misguided) or insincerely wrong (mischievous).

The nature of the evidence, its earliness and its independence, drives me to reach another conclusion - that they portray Jesus as he was. My sense is that they know what they are talking about. The New Testament “rings true”. That is a subjective judgement. It is a judgement each of us must make for ourselves.

Many years ago I asked the question, “Is it true?” You have my answers here. I called this paper, “The Mystery of Christian Origins”. But what is the “mystery”? Just this: Why don’t more people believe it?