2.3 Why Should I Believe the Bible?

Which one of us hasn’t exaggerated a few details? I may not have been completely honest about what I said I was doing at the weekend. In reality I was right here, playing with my kids by the pool but what I told people i was doing was riding the waves on this awesome speedboat! Yeaaaaaaaa! We’re all guilty of exaggerating a few details, like i don’t own this boat but this tendency in all of us is something that people point to when they talk about Jesus and how people remembered it. Some will suggest that maybe the disciples exaggerated parts of the Jesus story. When we exaggerate or make up stories, certainly in my own life, it’s generally to make ourselves look better. So, could the disciples have made up the life of Jesus, or could they have exaggerated bits? Possibly but I doubt it, and I doubt it for a few reasons. Firstly, throughout the Gospels we find these distracting and seemingly irrelevant details that point to them being eyewitness accounts that wouldn’t match up with fiction writing of that era. These details don’t have the air of the spectacular or the fantastical. For example, during a great storm, Jesus is sleeping below deck on a cushion. There is an unusual story about a man wearing a linen cloth and, when the guards tried to arrest him alongside Jesus, they grabbed his cloth and he ran away naked! Jesus calls out to Peter whose boat is about 100 yards from shore and they catch 153 fish. It’s weirdly specific. They sound more like the insignificant tidbits that come from remembering rather than made up story telling. Today, when people are writing fiction they add details like that to make a story sound more believable, but that type of writing didn’t even occur until the 18th century. Besides, if the disciples were doing that, that means they are intentionally lying. And do they have a motive for that? Like if they are intentionally making this up why would they use names of people that are still alive at that time who could easily be asked about the event, to see if it happened or not. We read stories of Jesus in different parts of the Bible like when… ’Jesus testifies before political leaders Herod and Pontius Pilate, he meets privately with a man called Nicodemus, he heals Jairus’ daughter and the father of Alexander and Rufus helped Jesus carry his cross. If you were creating a highly altered or fictional account of a supernatural Jesus you wouldn’t include the names of real people in real places, easily accessible for your listeners to go and ask them about it. Also, if you are writing yourself into a great story that makes you the follower of Jesus...the Son of God! you don’t go out of your way to make yourself and others look like idiots, do you? If the Gospels were fiction, then the disciples (who went on to become the leaders of the early church) would have painted themselves as awesome, if not superhuman! Yet, what we find is stories of their immaturity and even their foolishness. James and John ask permission to call down lightning on an unbelieving village. Peter denies being a follower of Jesus three times on the day Jesus died. On more than one occasion, Jesus has to stop the disciples fighting about which one of them is going to be the greatest. So if you’re going to invent a story that will give you power or make you the leader of a movement, like Peter, you don’t tell the story in a way that makes you look like you can’t be trusted to use a pair of scissors without supervision. And, speaking of the leader of the Early Church, the Gospels record this moment where Jesus calls Peter Satan, you know, God’s arch-enemy - the devil. You can be sure that if Jesus called me Satan to my face, I wouldn’t be tweeting about it. But it’s in there because, presumably, it actually happened. Finally if you are making up a story about Jesus being the Son of God and walking among us, why would you emphasise his humanity? Why would you say that he grew tired and hungry? Why would you invent a story about him weeping and sweating blood as he prays not to be crucified? Why would you invent a story of Jesus being killed in the most gruesome, brutal and humiliating way possible? And, if the disciples did invent such a story, why does history tell us that they died defending it?