120 Things ABC CBS CNN FOX and NBC Won't Tell You" Cont..
28. Archaeology has helped confirm the historicity of the New Testament.
Ankerberg: How does archaeology help us in learning about the historical Jesus?
Witherington: Well, a text without a context is a pretext for whatever you want that text to mean. I mean, it becomes a sound bite without a setting. And so, the truth of the matter is that without archaeology or the study of social history or that sort of stuff we don’t have a proper context, we only have a literary context in which this or that saying of Jesus is set. We need the historical and social setting as a sort of check and balance against misrepresentation of what the parameters of possible meaning could by about a saying of Jesus, or a particular thing that he did could possible have signified in that kind of a culture and time.
Ankerberg: What archaeological finds of, say the last 100 years have confirmed the historical text of the New Testament?
Witherington: Well, most of the kinds of materials that we would call direct confirmation, there’s not an abundant amount of material like that. I mean, we have found a Pontius Pilate inscription, we have an ossuary with a name of the family of Caiaphas written on it. That kind of very direct evidence of correspondence with some person or thing mentioned in the New Testament is reasonably rare, but what we do have is we have an abundance of archaeological evidence that comports with the evidence we have in the New Testament. It doesn’t disconfirm it, and that’s very important in a general way.
Ankerberg: What kind of evidence should we expect to find about the historical Jesus?
Witherington: Well, I think, when we’re talking about the historical Jesus himself, that the kind of evidence that we would expect to find would be testimonies, personal witnesses about Jesus, reflections on him, by those who were his followers, whether the first or second or third generation of his followers. Those are the kind of things that we would expect to find, and do find in the New Testament.
29. The Gospel accounts are not hopelessly contradictory and different.
Ankerberg: Peter Jennings said that everybody starts with the four Gospels. But then he made the statement that scholars do not read everything in the New Testament literally because the New Testament has four different and sometimes contradictory versions of Jesus life. The Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. Are they contradictory and different so that they can’t be trusted?
Witherington: Well, certainly we’ve got four different Gospels. Three of them are more similar to each other. They’re called the synoptic Gospels, Matthew, Mark and Luke. And one is certainly dramatically different, and that’s the gospel of John. Now, I would liken this to four portraits of the same person. The gospels are not photographs of Jesus, where you could compare, well, was this photograph identical to this photograph? They are portraits, and portraits are, by their very nature, interpretive presentations of a particular historical figure. The truth of the matter is about Jesus that he’s such a large and compelling historical figure that no one portrait of Jesus could do him justice. He needs to be seen from different angles, with different takes and different foci. And that’s what we have in the Gospels, I would say. But if you’re dealing with the differences between the Gospels, most of these differences can be explained in terms of the particular angle of perspective that the different gospel writers want to take about Jesus. It’s not a matter of this gospel contradicting this gospel on this particular piece of evidence for the most part. It’s more a matter of them having a different desire to give a fresh perspective on Jesus, and that’s really what’s happening with the reports.
30. The four Gospels were each written for a different audience and for a different purpose.
Ankerberg: Who were the writers, how did they put them together, and what the purpose of the four?
Witherington: Well, each gospel writer has a different purpose. I mean, in a general way you could say all of them want people to know more about the historical Jesus, what he was like, and what his significance was. But when you get beyond that, each gospel writer has written for a different audience, at a different time, with different purposes in mind. The earliest gospel, the vast majority of scholars would say, is the gospel of Mark, written somewhere between 68 and 70 A.D., right after or right during the disaster of what happened in Jerusalem when the temple fell, and Judaism was forever changed. After that we have the gospel of Matthew and Luke, both of whom probably used the gospel of Mark as one of their primary sources to write their gospel. And finally, we have this independent testimony in the gospel of John. Written, in my mind, probably by a Judean disciple, and that’s one of the reasons it’s such a different portrait that what we have in the synoptic gospels. So the gospels were all written at different times, for different audiences. For example, Mark I think was written for Roman Christians. Most would say the gospel of John was written for an audience in Asia Minor, the western part of Turkey. We could go on like that and say that explains some of the differences that we have in those gospels. But in each case, the gospels were written as ancient documents, either ancient biographies, or an ancient historical monograph to convey the same message about Jesus as the one who has come as the savior of the world and Messiah of Israel. |
