INTRODUCTION

Several years ago I received a letter propounding a question of a kind which I am frequently asked to answer. The writer was a Christian, to whom the question had been put by an agnostic friend in the course of a lengthy discussion, and it had caused him, he said, “great concern and some little upset in my spiritual life”.

Here is the question, as framed by my correspondent:

What collateral proof is there in existence of the historical fact of the life of Jesus Christ? If the Bible account of his activities is accurate, he should have caused sufficient interest to gain considerable comment in other histories and records of the time; but in fact (I am told), apart from obscure references in Josephus and the like, no mention is made. The substantiation of the Gospels one from another is hardly acceptable, as it is internal, and such evidence would be inadmissible in any other form of enquiry. It is complicated, too, by the fact that the canon of Scripture was not compiled until many years after it was written, and then the decision of what was included or rejected was man-made. Is such collateral proof available, and if not, are there reasons for the lack of it?

Some parts of this question can be dismissed fairly briefly for our present purpose because they rest on misconceptions which, however widely they may be entertained, can be easily dispelled. This is so, for example, with his reference to the canon of Scripture. Certainly the individual New Testament documents were in existence some time before they were gathered together in a canon (a list of authoritative documents). As for the “man-made” decision about their inclusion in such a canon, or rejection from it, it must be remembered that there was nothing arbitrary about this “decision”, nor was it a sudden, once-for-all matter. The first time that a church council promulgated a statement about which books made up the New Testament canon was ina.d. 393, and that council was merely a provincial synod in North Africa. It perpetrated no innovation, but simply recognized the situation which had been established by Christian use and wont over the preceding two hundred years and more. Inclusion in a canon conferred on no book an authority which it did not already possess. The books were included in the canon because of the authority accorded to them individually throughout the Christian world from the end of the first Christian century onwards. The issue of the canon is irrelevant to the general question put by my correspondent, for it is with the separate documents as originally composed, and not with their subsequent inclusion in a sacred collection, that a historical enquiry is concerned.

A misconception of another kind underlies the statement that “the substantiation of the Gospels one from another is hardly acceptable, as it is internal, and such evidence would be inadmissible in any other form of enquiry”. Just why would “such evidence” be “inadmissible in any other form of enquiry”? If we were dealing with four witnesses who had met together in advance and agreed on the story they were to tell, that might be a reasonable objection. But is it seriously suggested that the evidence of the four Gospel writers is of this sort?

When my correspondent says that their evidence is “internal”, it is not quite clear what he means. He may mean that it is internal to the New Testament; but it is necessary to deal with the documents as they existedbefore there was a New Testament collection. He may mean, on the other hand, that their evidence is internal to the Christian movement, in the sense that it comes from within the church. That is so, but why should that reduce the value of their evidence? It is only natural that men who were closely associ