Questioning the Bible--continued

Yes, I'm continuing a series of blogs dealing with Questioning the Bible. The author, Jonathan Morrow, moves on to a new topic which is interesting – what can we really know about Jesus? Did he exist? Can we be confident about what he said and did?

One key element the author looks at is something called "criteria of authenticity." This is used by New Testament scholars who are looking at the stories about Jesus. One such criterion is multiple attestation, which says a saying, teaching, or event concerning Jesus is probably authentic if it shows up in multiple sources.

So what is the finding when scholars put this and other criteria to work regarding the New Testament stories of Jesus? An international group of Jesus scholars met from 1998 to 2008 see what they could agree on as being authentic about Jesus. Their conclusion was that there were at least 12 significant events in his life that could be positively established by these criteria.

Here they are – Jesus affirmed the ministry of John the Baptist, Jesus collected 12 key followers, Jesus publicly associated with sinners, Jesus claim to be Lord of the Sabbath, Jesus cast out demons, Jesus accepted Peter's declaration that he was the Christ (Messiah), Jesus rode into Jerusalem on a donkey, Jesus claim to have authority over the sacred space of the Temple, Jesus connected the Passover meal with his disciples to his claim to be the deliverer of God's people, Jesus claimed unique divine authority when examined by Jewish leadership, the Roman ruler Pontius Pilate publicly executed Jesus for sedition, following Jesus's crucifixion and burial his tomb was found empty by a group of women followers.

So even skeptical scholars can agree that a large part of the New Testament Gospels' stories of Jesus are authentic. But what if we did not have the Bible? Morrow notes that these main points about his life are found in secular historians as well (Tacitus, Pliny, Josephus, just to name a few). He quotes Ben Witherington: "There is more historical evidence for the existence of Jesus than there is for the historical existence of Julius Caesar… The only persons who doubt the existence of Jesus of Nazareth are those who either hate Christianity and so want it to disappear, or those who have not bothered to do the proper historical homework."

Okay, that's enough to digest for now.