us the full story about Jesus? I looked at my watch. If traffic was light, I'd make my plane back to Chicago. As I gathered my notes and unplugged my recording equipment, I happened to glance once more at the children's paintings on Blomberg's wall-and suddenly for a moment I thought of him not as a scholar, not as an author, not as a professor, but as a father who sits on the edge of his daughters' beds at night and speaks quietly to them about what's really important in life. What does he tell them, I wondered, about the Bible, about God, about this Jesus who makes such outrageous claims about himself? I couldn't resist one last line of questions. "What about your own faith?" I asked. "How has all your research affected your beliefs?" I barely got the words out of my mouth before he replied. "It has strengthened them, no question. I know from my own research that there's very strong evidence for the trustworthiness of the gospel accounts." He was quiet for a moment, then continued. "You know, it's ironic: The Bible considers it praiseworthy to have a faith that does not require evidence. Remember how Jesus replied to doubting Thomas: 'You believe because you see; blessed are those who have not seen and yet believe.' And I know evidence can never compel or coerce faith. We cannot supplant the role of the Holy Spirit, which is often a concern of Christians when they hear discussions of this kind. I'll tell you this: there are plenty of stories of scholars in the New Testament field who have not been Christians, yet through their studying of these very issues have come to faith in Christ. And there have been countless more scholars, already believers, whose faith has been made stronger, more solid, more grounded, because of the evidence and that's the category I fall into." As for me, I had originally been in the first category-no, not a scholar but a skeptic, an iconoclast, a hard-nosed reporter on a quest for the truth about this Jesus who said he was the Way and the Truth and the Life. I clicked my briefcase closed and stood to thank Blomberg. I would fly back to Chicago satisfied that once again my spiritual quest was off to a good start. Deliberations Questions forReflection or Group Study 1. Overall, how have Blomberg's responses to these eight evidential tests affected your confidence in the reliability of the gospels? Why? 2. Which of these eight tests do you consider the most persuasive and why? 3. When people you trust give slightly different details of the same event, do you automatically doubt their credibility, or do you see if there's a reasonable way to reconcile their accounts? How convincing did you find Blomberg's analysis of the apparent contradictions among the gospels? For Further Evidence More Resources on This Topic Archer, Gleason L. The Encyclopedia of Bible Difficulties. Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1982. Blomberg, Craig. "The Historical Reliability of the New Testament." In Reasonable Faith, by William Lane Craig, 193-231. Westchester, Ill.: Crossway, 1994. "Where Do We Start Studying Jesus?" In Jesus under Fire, edited by Michael J. Wilkins and J. P. Moreland, 17-50. Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1995. Dunn, James. The Living Word. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1988. Marshall, I. Howard. I Believe in the Historical Jesus. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1977.
Were Jesus' Biographies Reliably Preserved for Us? As a reporter at the Chicago Tribune, I was a "document rat"-I spent countless hours rummaging through court files and sniffing for tidbits of news. It was painstaking and time consuming, but the rewards were worth it. I managed to scoop the competition with front page stories on a regular basis. For example, I once stumbled upon some top-secret grand jury transcripts that had inadvertently been put in a public file. My subsequent articles exposed massive bid-rigging behind some of Chicago's biggest public works projects, including the construction of major expressways. But the most eye-popping cache of documents I ever uncovered came in a landmark case in which Ford Motor Company was charged with reckless homicide for the fiery deaths of three teenagers in a subcompact Pinto. It was the first time a U.S. manufacturer had been criminally charged for allegedly marketing a dangerous product. When I checked the court file in tiny Winamac, Indiana, I found scores of confidential Ford memos revealing that the automaker knew in advance that the Pinto could explode when struck from behind at about twenty miles an hour. The documents indicated that the automaker decided against improving the car's safety to save a few dollars per vehicle and to increase its luggage space. A Ford lawyer, who happened to be strolling through the courthouse, spotted me making photocopies of the documents. Frantically he rushed into court to get a judicial order sealing the file from the Public's view.
But it was too late. My story, headlined "Ford Ignored Pinto Fire, Peril, Secret Memos Show," was bannered in the Tribune and then flashed throughout the country.
Obtaining secret corporate memos is one thing; verifying their authenticity is another. Before a journalist can publish their contents or a prosecutor can admit the documents as evidence in a trial, steps must be taken to make sure they're genuine. Concerning the so-called Pinto papers, could the Ford letterheads on which they were written be counterfeits? Could the signatures be forgeries? How could I know for sure? And since the memos had obviously been photocopied numerous times, how could I be confident that their contents hadn't been tampered with? In other words, how could I be certain that each copied document was identical to the original memo, which I didn't possess? What's more, how could I be positive that these memos told the whole story? After all, they represented just a small fraction of the internal correspondence at Ford. What if there were other memos, still hidden from the public's view, that would shed a whole different light on the matter if they were revealed? These are significant questions, and they're equally relevant in examining the New Testament. When I hold a Bible in my hands, essentially I'm holding copies of ancient historical records. The original manuscripts of the biographies of Jesus-Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John-and all the other books of the Old and New Testaments have long ago crumbled into dust. So how can I be sure that these modern-day versions-the end product of countless copying throughout the ages-bear any resemblance to what the authors originally wrote? In addition, how can I tell if these four biographies are telling the whole story? What if there were other biographies of Jesus that have been censored because the early church didn't like the image of Jesus they portrayed? How could I have confidence that church politics haven't squelched biographies of Jesus that were every bit as accurate as the four that were finally included in the New Testament, and that would shed important new light on the words and deeds of this controversial carpenter from Nazareth? These two issues-whether Jesus' biographies were reliably preserved for us and whether equally accurate biographies have been suppressed by the church-merited careful consideration. I knew that there was one scholar universally recognized as a leading authority on these matters. I flew to Newark and drove a rental car to Princeton to visit him on short notice.
I found eighty-four-year-old Bruce Metzger on a Saturday afternoon at his usual hangout, the library at Princeton Theological Seminary, where, he says with a smile, "I like to dust off the books." Actually, he has written some of the best of them, especially when the topic is the text of the New Testament. In all, he has authored or edited fifty books, including The New Testament: Its Background, Growth, and Content; The Text of the New Testament; The Canon of the New Testament, Manuscripts of the Greek Bible; Textual Commentary on the Greek New Testament; Introduction to the Apocrypha; and The Oxford Companion to the Bible. Several have been translated into German, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Malagasy, and other languages. He also is coeditor of The New Oxford Annotated Bible with the Apocrypha and general editor of more than twenty-five volumes in the series New Testament Tools and Studies. Metzger's education includes a master's degree from Princeton Theological Seminary and both a master's degree and a doctorate from Princeton University. He has been awarded honorary doctorates by five colleges and universities, including St. Andrews University in Scotland, the University of Munster in Germany, and Potchefstroom University in South Africa. In 1969 he served as resident scholar at Tyndale House, Cambridge, England. He was a visiting fellow at Clare Hall, University of Cambridge, in 1974 and at Wolfson College, Oxford, in 1979. He is currently professor emeritus at Princeton Theological Seminary after a forty-six-year career teaching the New Testament. Metzger is chairman of the New Revised Standard Version Bible Committee, a corresponding fellow of the British Academy, and serves on the Kuratorium of the Vetus Latina Institute at the Monastery of Beuron, Germany. He is past president of the Society of Biblical Literature, the International Society for New Testament Studies, and the North American Patristic Society. If you scan the footnotes of any authoritative book on the text of the New Testament, the odds are you're going to see Metzger cited time after time. His books are mandatory reading in universities and seminaries around the world. He is held in the highest regard by scholars from across a wide range of theological beliefs. In many ways Metzger, born in 1914, is a throwback to an earlier generation. Alighting from a gray Buick he calls "my gas buggy," he is wearing a dark gray suit and blue paisley tie, which is about as casual as he gets during his visits to the library, even on a weekend. His white hair is neatly combed; his eyes, bright and alert, are framed by rimless glasses. He walks slower than he used to, but he has no difficulty methodically climbing the stairway to the second floor, where he conducts his research in an obscure and austere office. And he hasn't lost his sense of humor. He showed me a tin canister he inherited as chairman of the Revised Standard Version Bible Committee. He opened the lid to reveal the ashes of an RSV Bible that had been torched in a 1952 bonfire during a protest by a fundamentalist preacher. "It seems he didn't like it when the committee changed 'fellows' of the King James Version to 'comrades' in Hebrews 1:9," Metzger explained with a chuckle. "He accused them of being communists!" Though Metzger's speech is hesitant at times and he's prone to