Legend Makers or Factual Reporters?

 

With Easter on the horizon with its focus on the sacrificial death of Jesus Christ the authenticity of the Gospel accounts will undoubtedly come in for another round of scrutiny – similar to what happened after the release of The Passions of Christ.

Some experts in the past, such as Robert Funk, have gone so far as to claim the accounts about Jesus' life in the Gospels by Mathew, Mark, Luke, and John are nothing more than thinly disguised attempts by early Christians to promote the New Christian religion by making Jesus fit the mould of the promised Messiah.

Funk, the founder of the Jesus Seminar, claimed that the Gospels are really nothing more than a marketing ploy of early Christian propagandists anxious to make the promised Messiah conform to Christian doctrines which evolved after Jesus' death. To him the Gospel writers were nothing more than legend makers.

But are they really nothing more than legend makers? A careful check reveals that such inventiveness alleged by Funk did not appear until well into the Second Century C.E.

At that time fictitious ideas did start to creep into the teachings of some of the Christians communities which had become isolated from the governing body in Jerusalem. Apostasy, featuring unscriptural narratives about Christ did begin to infect the minds of many. But this was long after all of the New Testament was completed and the Gospel writers as well as the original apostles and disciples of Jesus were all dead.

So their ideas did not contaminate the Gospel accounts of Jesus" life, ministry and death on a stake, as shown by the comments of other historians such as C. S. Lewis, H. G. Wells, and E. M. Blaiklock . Lewis, for instance, said, that he found it difficult to believe that the Gospels are legends because of a lack of artistry in the accounts. Moreover he said that "....Most of the life of Jesus is unknown to us and people building up a legend would not allow that to be so."

Wells and Blailock were even more vocal in their defence of the Gospel writers. Wells said: "All four [Gospel writers] agree in giving us a picture of a very definite personality; they carry the conviction of reality." And Blaiklock, a professor of classics at Auckland University in Australia explained: " I claim to be an historian. My approach to the classics is historical. And I tell you that the evidence for the life, the death, and the resurrection of Christ is better authenticated than most of the facts of ancient history."

And yet another historian, Will Durant, the author of Caesar and Christ said: "After two centuries of Higher Criticism the outlines of the life, character, and teaching of Christ, remain reasonably clear, and constitute the most fascinating feature in the history of Western man."