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Cunningly Devised Fable?
by David King
“For we did not follow cunningly devised fables when we made known
to you the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, but were
eyewitnesses of His majesty” (2 Pet. 1:16).
Skeptics dismiss Christianity as an elaborate hoax. In short, they
claim that our religion is a concoction of “cunningly devised
fables” that have duped millions of people.
In our opening text, of course, the apostle Peter denies that
charge. But upon what basis? How can we be confident that the
religion we follow is legitimate, and its claims valid? How can we
refute the charges of the skeptics who insist that Christianity is
built upon a foundation of fraud and deceit?
Notice the response that Peter himself gives in our text: “(we) were
eyewitnesses of His majesty.” Christianity does not require our
personal experience to validate its credentials. Like any
other artifact of history, Christianity’s claims rest upon the
recorded testimony of those who were there at the beginning. That’s
why we have four gospels to tell us the story.
There are three lines of eyewitness evidence that support the claims
of Christianity. Peter refers to the first in the context of our
opening text (v. 17-18): the transfiguration of Jesus. Peter was one
of three apostles who was with Jesus on the mountain when He was
transfigured. Peter saw Jesus’ appearance turn angelic, and he heard
the booming voice from heaven (Matt. 17:1-9). This incident
must have left a deep and lasting impression upon Peter, because it
is the only specific incident he mentions here.
In addition to the transfiguration, there were many other miracles
witnessed by others during Jesus’ ministry. The four gospels recount
some of these miracles, but indicate that there
were many others, the details of which are not recorded (Jn.
20:30-31; Mk. 6:54-56; Matt. 4:23-24). How else can we explain the
explosion of contemporary interest and controversy surrounding a man
of such humble origins who led no army, wrote no book, and held no
political office? Something extraordinary happened to generate all
this attention in the first century. If not the miracles, then what?
But all the miracles of Jesus pale in comparison to the greatest
miracle of all: His own resurrection from the dead. The writers of
the New Testament repeatedly point to this one event as the
foundation of Christianity (1 Cor. 15:12-19; Rom. 1:4; 1 Pet. 1:3).
When Jesus was executed, every precaution was taken to ensure that
His defeat was complete. Yet something happened to His body. Despite
every attempt to explain it away, the only story that fits all the
evidence is that He arose from the grave and appeared to His
disciples, all of whom devoted the rest of their lives to defending
the integrity of what they had seen.
Many of the eyewitnesses who left behind the story about the origins
of Christianity gave their lives in defense of their testimony. If
Christianity really is a hoax, somebody would have cracked and
exposed the details. But they didn’t, because they couldn’t.
Christianity is not a fable. It is based on real, certifiable facts
that we can build our lives upon. ~
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 On
the Inspiration of the Scriptures, Part 2
by
J.W. McGarvey
(Editor’s Note: This transcript
of a sermon delivered by J.W. McGarvey before the YMCA of University
of Missouri, May 28, 1892 is continued from last issue. The writer
has already offered the amazing impartiality of the New Testament
writers as the first indication of their inspiration, and now
continues his list of evidences…)
In the second place, you can scarcely fail to have observed the
imperturbable calmness with which they describe all events
alike--the most wonderful as the most common-place, the most
touching as the most indifferent. The most astounding miracles are
described by them with no more manifestations of excitement in their
manner than the most trivial everyday events. They betray no more
feeling when they speak of the murder of John the Baptist, than when
they speak of his voice crying in the wilderness. They are as calm
and self-possessed when describing the agony in the garden and the
overwhelming scenes of Calvary, as when they tell of Jesus passing
through the fields on the Sabbath, or taking His seat at Jacob's
well. They use no word of exultation when Jesus arose from the dead,
or when He ascended on high; and their tones betray no trembling or
tearfulness amid His outcries on the cross, no tenderness as His
mangled form is quietly laid in the tomb. Yet these are the very men
of whom it is said, that they were mourning and weeping when the
first announcement of the resurrection broke upon their ears (Mark
16.10). Who can account for this — for this elevation of these
plain men above all the emotions which characterize other men when
writing of scenes in which their tenderest sympathies and dearest
hopes are involved? The experience is superhuman. It is accounted
for only when we know that they were restrained by the Spirit of
Him,
"Who sees with equal eye as God of all, A hero perish or a sparrow
fall; Atoms or systems into ruin hurled, And now a bubble burst, and
now a world."
In the third place we invite attention to the unexampled brevity of
the New Testament narratives; and first, to their brevity as whole
books. Never since time began were a set of writers burdened with a
theme so momentous in their own estimation, or so momentous in
reality. Never were writers so oppressed, when they thought of
brevity, by the multitude of wondrous details before them, and the
difficulty of determining what to insert and what to omit, when the
eternal well-being of a world depended on what they should write.
One of them shows how keenly he felt this sense of oppression, when
he exclaims with startling hyperbole: "If they should be written,
every one, I suppose that even the world itself would not contain
the books that should be written" (John 21:25).
What, then, could have induced these four evangelists, thus weighted
down by the abundance of their materials, overwhelmed with a sense
of the importance of their theme, and burning with a desire to
vindicate the fame of their adored Master, to compress their
accounts into thirty-six pages each of this little book which I hold
in my hand? What, but some restraining and irresistible power,
guided by superhuman judgment? As to the book of Acts, the argument
is the same in kind, and perhaps greater in force; for this writer
had to deal with the widespread and ever-varying fortunes of the
church through a period of thirty years, the most eventful and
thrillingly interesting period of its whole history to the present
day; and yet he condenses the story into nearly the same narrow
limits.
When, secondly, we study this brevity with respect to the accounts
given of single incidents, the wonder remains the same. Out of the
many examples we select a few. Few scenes have ever been witnessed
on earth of deeper interest from several points of view than that of
the baptism of our Lord. There was the humble yet lofty mien of him
who came to be baptized; the surprising demeanor of the great
preacher as he confessed his unworthiness to baptize such a person;
the solemn act of the baptism itself; the still deeper solemnity of
the prayer on the river's bank; the startling voice which was heard
from heaven--the voice of Jehovah--which had not thus broken the
silence of the skies since it thundered from the summit of Mount
Sinai; the graceful descent of the Holy Spirit in the form of a
dove; and the oracle, big with the fate of a lost world, in which
God confessed his own beloved Son. What man with a writer's instinct
could have stopped short of many pages in describing the scene so as
to do it justice. But the sublime story is disposed of by the first
Evangelist in twelve short lines, in six each by the second and
third; and in a mere allusion quoted from the lips of another person
by the fourth.
Again, the one event which, above all others, these four writers
felt themselves obliged to set forth with overwhelming proof, was
the resurrection of Jesus from the dead, the event, as they
confessed, on which their own pretensions and their eternal hopes
depended; yet of the twelve appearances of Jesus after his
resurrection, only two are mentioned by the first Evangelist, only
three by the second, only three by the third, and only four by the
fourth. We wonder and wonder why every one did not give all the
evidence and press it home upon the reader by many words of comment.
In the book of Acts the same surprise confronts us. Never did a
writer have a more prolific theme, or one on which he would be more
delighted to dwell than that wild commingling of prayers and
maledictions, lamentations and silent despair, which filled every
street of Jerusalem, when Saul made havoc of the Church, entering
into every house and dragging to prison both men and women, until
the ten thousand saints were driven to the four winds, and the
Church in Jerusalem, the only Church then in existence, was
dispersed and apparently destroyed. A whole volume would scarcely
have sufficed to describe all the harrowing scenes; and the writer
to whom we owe what we know of it was a companion of the principal
actor in it for many years; yet some irresistible constraining power
shriveled his account of it into four short lines!
Next to this event in the history of the young Church, with respect
to those tragic elements in which historians love to revel, stands
the death by martyrdom of James, the son of Zebedee. The death of
Stephen was tragical and heartrending, but that of the Apostle
James, about eight years later, was far more so, both because he was
one of the original twelve on whose labors the future of the whole
Church seemed to depend, and because it was a cold-blooded murder by
a descendant of the tyrant who had butchered all the infants of
Bethlehem in the vain effort to murder the Son of God. How you and I
would love to know the exact motive of this murder! How we should be
strengthened to know something of the brave or of the forgiving
words which James uttered with his last breath--to know, in a word,
how the first apostle who fell a martyr to his faith met the grim
monster! And how it would have delighted any Christian who knew the
facts to tell them to his brethren, and hand them down to posterity!
But this New Testament writer was allowed only a sentence of seven
words in the Greek for the whole story, and they are represented by
only eleven in our English version. Truly, if it were said of Jesus,
"Never man spake like this man," we must say, never man wrote like
these men; and the logical inference is that they wrote as he spoke
under the restraining power of the Spirit of God.
But this argument from the brevity of the narratives is not seen in
its full force until it is considered in connection with the
omissions of remarkable events by which it was chiefly brought
about. What sketch of a great man's career was ever written which
told only of the last three years of his life, if the previous part
were known to the writer? What biographer would consider himself at
liberty to omit from even a brief sketch all that was known of the
boyhood and early manhood of his hero? Yet two of these three Gospel
writers, though they must have known the whole story, have not a
word to say of the first thirty years of the life of Jesus; and the
other two furnish us within that period nothing but a few glimpses
of his unconscious infancy and a single adventure of his boyhood.
Uninspired writers have not been content with this; for the
Protevangelium, an apocryphal work of the second century, devotes
twenty-five chapters to the period between the imaginary
announcement of the birth of Mary and the slaughter of the babes of
Bethlehem, while another, styled the Gospel of the Infancy, has
fifty chapters, drawn from a very feeble imagination, on the first
twelve years of the life of Jesus. This may help us to imagine what
our Gospels would have been had they come from the pens of
uninspired men of the second century, as some rationalists have
affirmed. ~
(to be continued)
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