The Cradle, the Cross, and the Crown (34 page)

Some scholars have argued that John's Gospel does not portray the Last Supper as a Passover meal but instead presents Jesus' crucifixion as occurring at the time of the Passover in order to portray Jesus' death as the sacrifice of the Passover lamb. However, the most natural reading of the reference to the “preparation day for the Passover” refers to the day of preparation for the Sabbath during Passover week, the Friday of the Passover celebration.
¹⁵⁵
The word translated “day of preparation”
(paraskeuē)
was the normal word for Friday. This interpretation is confirmed by John 19:31: “Since it was the preparation day, the Jews did not want the bodies to remain on the cross on the Sabbath (for that Sabbath was a special day).” Both the Synoptics and John present the Last Supper as a
Passover meal and show that Jesus was executed on the Friday of Passover week. Thus no real conflict between the accounts exists at all.

The Passover meal was eaten by the Jews on Nissan 14. Thus the year of Jesus' execution must be a year in which Nissan 14 fell on a Thursday. This possibly occurred in AD 30 and definitely occurred in the year 33.
¹⁵⁶
Since AD 30 would not allow for sufficient time between Jesus' baptism and death for his extensive public ministry unless one posits that Josephus or Luke used unusual methods of reckoning time or that Jesus' ministry lasted only one or two years, the most likely year of Jesus' death is AD 33.

Table 3.3: Chronology of Jesus' Life

Conclusion

Jesus was probably born between 6 and 4 BC (5 BC being the most likely date) and began his public ministry around AD 29. His ministry apparently lasted about three and a half years and included three or four Passover celebrations. His Crucifixion probably occurred in AD 33.

THE HISTORICAL RELIABILITY OF THE GOSPELS

As mentioned, contemporary portrayals of Jesus vary considerably. This is largely a function of which sources scholars privilege in their reconstruction of the identity of Jesus. Some scholars prefer sources such as the Gospel of Thomas or the Gospel of Peter to Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John because they are convinced that the four NT Gospels are unreliable accounts of Jesus' life and teachings. The Jesus Seminar, which categorized the Gospel of Thomas as a “fifth Gospel,” shocked many Christians with their confident claim that only 18 percent of the sayings attributed to Jesus in the Gospels were actually uttered by him.
¹⁵⁷
Such sweeping dismissals of the Gospels by certain critics can easily make Christians wonder if the historical value of the four Gospels is at all salvageable. The purpose of this section is to help readers understand the presuppositions and processes that lead some scholars to these conclusions. It also demonstrates that compelling evidence can be offered for the reliability of the Gospels.

The Philosophical Foundations of Modern Gospels Study

Many readers may assume that most scholars reject the reliability of the Gospels because careful analysis uncovered irreconcilable conflicts within the Gospels or with other historical accounts. In fact, many scholars reject the reliability of the Gospels for very different reasons. They do so because the Gospel accounts describe events that they consider impossible. Jesus could not have controlled the weather, cleansed lepers, given sight to the blind, or raised the dead because these scholars have a modernist worldview that denies the possibility of such occurrences. For such scholars the only events that are possible are those that can be explained as the effects of natural causes. In other words, many scholars approach history through their philosophical commitment to naturalism.

Denial of even the possibility of miraculous or supernatural occurrences is ultimately driven by atheism, deism, or monism. Atheism denies the existence of God. Deism acknowledges the existence of God but views him as one who governs the universe only through natural laws and apart from any direct intervention. Monism equates nature and its laws with deity. In these three worldviews, miracles in the sense of acts by a personal God simply do not occur either because a personal God does not exist or because God does not act in a manner that is inconsistent with natural law.

Skepticism regarding the possibility of miracles has a long history. A century before the time of Christ, Cicero (106–43 BC) argued, “For nothing can happen without cause; nothing happens that cannot happen, and when what was capable of happening has happened, it may not be interpreted as a miracle. Consequently, there are no miracles.”
¹⁵⁸
About 300 years later, Lucian of Samosata expressed his skepticism about demon possession and exorcism.
¹⁵⁹
Although ancient people are often assumed to be gullible, superstitious, and easily deceived by claims of miracles, some of the ancients were as skeptical as some modern thinkers. Rejection of supernatural occurrences is not a new phenomenon.

The widespread rejection of miracles in the modern era can be traced to the writings of the Jewish philosopher B. de Spinoza. His
Tractatus Theologico-Politicus
, which was published in 1670, provided a naturalistic critique of miracles in which Spinoza claimed that the idea of miracles was self-contradictory, since to say that God performed some action contrary to the laws of nature was to imply that God acts contrary to his own nature.
¹⁶⁰
Spinoza identified the laws of nature with God's nature because he was a monist who viewed nature itself as God. Although Spinoza's work prompted some of the angriest and most vitriolic critiques of any published work in the seventeenth century, it would in many ways set the tone for the views of the supernatural in the Enlightenment period.

Spinoza's work paved the way for the critical deists who initiated what is now known as the “quest of the historical Jesus.” The deists felt that the real Jesus had been obscured in the Gospels. The accounts of his miraculous activity in the Gospels were ruled to be impossible in their philosophical system. In their view, pious notions of the inspiration of the Gospels could no longer be entertained by rational thinkers. The legends of Jesus' miracles and his claim to be divine had to be stripped from the Gospels in order to recover reliable traditions about Jesus.

In 1730, the English deist M. Tindal denied that the Bible was special revelation and called others to return to the original religion that was founded on the rational interpretation of natural revelation. Tindal's claims seriously undermined the authority of the Bible and weakened the assumption that one could trust the Gospels' accounts of Jesus' life and ministry simply because they were inspired Scripture.
¹⁶¹

During the years 1727–30, T. Woolston published his
Six Discourses on the Miracles of Our Saviour and Defences of His Discourses
in which he claimed that Jesus' miracles were “Improbabilities, and Incredibilities, and grossest Absurdities.” Woolston argued that a commonsense reading of the accounts of Jesus' miracles led to the conclusion that these acts were immoral or insane, actions that were never equaled by any “Quack-doctor.” Woolston saved his most blistering critique of Jesus' miracles for the resurrection. He argued that the resurrection of Jesus was a fraud. Jesus' disciples had stolen his body, and then superstitious people who were given to seeing apparitions interpreted the empty tomb as a proof of resurrection. Woolston argued that the miracles of the Gospels were sensible and helpful only when interpreted allegorically. W. Baird commented: “This denial of the historicity of the miracles struck a responsive chord in an era when belief in the supernatural was evaporating, when the universe was believed to be ordered by Newton's law, and when physical phenomena were attributed to natural causes.”
¹⁶²
Although most of the deists were not biblical scholars and their work “could have been accomplished by any bright skeptic with the aid of the King James Bible,” they did exert an influence on scholars of later generations.
¹⁶³

D. Hume dismissed miracles in his
Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding
. He argued that no alleged miracle had been witnessed by a large enough group of observers to ensure that the witnesses either had not been deceived or were not misleading others themselves. He added that people generally wish for a display of the supernatural and believe miraculous accounts more readily than they should. He argued that miracles only occur among primitive and superstitious peoples. Finally, he claimed that since all major
religions appeal to miracles to support their competing claims, appeals to miracles to support the truthfulness of Christianity are not convincing.
¹⁶⁴

Spinoza's early critique of miracles greatly influenced F. Schleiermacher, the philosopher and theologian who is generally recognized as the father of liberal theology. Schleiermacher expressed Spinoza's critique with a new degree of sophistication, but the argument was essentially the same as that of Spinoza, whose influence is obvious in the following quotation:

Now some have represented miracle in this [absolute] sense as essential to the perfect manifestation of the divine omnipotence. But it is difficult to conceive, on the one side, how omnipotence is shown to be greater in the suspension of the interdependence of nature than in its original immutable course which was no less divinely ordered. For, indeed, the capacity to make a change in what has been ordained is only a merit in the ordainer, if a change is necessary, which again can only be the result of some imperfection in him or in his work.
¹⁶⁵

Like Spinoza, Schleiermacher viewed history as a closed system of causes and necessary effects, a “divinely ordered” and “original immutable course” into which even God himself cannot intrude. W. Dembski offered a helpful summary of the view of Spinoza and Schleiermacher:

Essentially Spinoza and Schleiermacher have God lock the door and throw away the key, and then they ask whether God can get back into the room. Since God presumably makes the best locks in the business, even God is not capable of getting back into the room without a key. By ordaining a system of nature, God builds a closed system of natural causes which has no way of accommodating miracles.
¹⁶⁶

Similar ideas appear in the writings of the influential NT scholar R. Bultmann. Bultmann's famous dictum was “man's knowledge and mastery of the world have advanced to such an extent through science and technology that it is no longer possible for anyone
seriously to hold the New Testament view of the world.”
¹⁶⁷
Bultmann led a sweeping movement in NT scholarship that rejected the notion of a three-storied universe as well as the virgin birth, resurrection, and miracles of Jesus. Like Spinoza and Schleiermacher, Bultmann presupposed that God could not intervene in natural processes.
¹⁶⁸
Bultmann's worldview led him to dismiss the reliability of most of the material in the Gospels. Bultmann insisted, “It is impossible to use electric light and the wireless and to avail ourselves of modern medical discoveries, and at the same time to believe in the New Testament world of daemons
[sic]
and spirits.”
¹⁶⁹
He also maintained, “An historical event which involves a resurrection from the dead is utterly inconceivable.”
¹⁷⁰
Bultmann ultimately despaired of finding any reliable information about Jesus in the Gospels. He wrote, “I do indeed think that we can now know almost nothing concerning the life and personality of Jesus.”
¹⁷¹
Bultmann's rejection of the testimony of the Gospels was grounded in his views of science and philosophy.

It is not the purpose of this introduction to prove the existence of a personal God or his intervention in the world today. Other excellent resources in Christian apologetics are available for guiding readers in exploring the evidence for these Christian claims.
¹⁷²
However, readers should be alert to the philosophical presuppositions that underlie various approaches to Gospels study. The conclusions of the approach are no better than the presuppositions that guide them. Many Christians embrace particular approaches to Gospels study and affirm conclusions drawn from the application of these approaches without realizing that the philosophy that dictated the approach is antithetical to their most cherished convictions.

It is becoming increasingly clear at the beginning of the twenty-first century that the philosophy that has guided the skeptical study of the Gospels has failed. Despite the reign of modernist philosophy in Western education for over a century, most Americans believe that the existence and intervention of God is self-evident. According to a survey conducted in 2006 by the Barna Research group, 71 percent of adult Americans believe in “the all
powerful, all-knowing, perfect creator of the universe who rules the world today.”
¹⁷³
The 2003 Harris poll discovered that 84 percent of American adults believe in miracles and that 72 percent of those who have postgraduate degrees believe in miracles.
¹⁷⁴
This pervasive belief is likely a result of personal experiences that participants deemed to be miraculous or the result of personal testimonies about miracles experienced by people who were regarded as credible. Personal experiences have overridden the reigning philosophy and led to a widespread rejection of naturalistic claims. This rejection is legitimate since an acceptable philosophy should account for actual experiences.
¹⁷⁵