Hi Phil. I’d forgotten that my blog posts automatically get imported into facebook! You said ‘convince me’, let’s open the discussion! Those were good deep questions and I want to take them seriously so this is not a short answer!
Nigel, you and the whole family have been through a terrible time, there’s no denying that. There has definitely been a whole lot of injustice and lack of compassion from the police and prosecutors.
Surely what this shows is what we know all along – that the world is broken and it doesn’t work as it should or as any of us would like it to. This, believe it or not, is the story of the Bible. Taken as a whole, it tells us how humanity wandered away from God and wanted to do it their own way (Genesis 1-3). This act of wanting to do it our own way resulted in the world becoming broken and was the source of all selfishness, difficulty, hardship and tragedy in the world. The problem is that humanity is separated from God (Gen 3). The rest of the Bible tells us how God desperately wants to bring humanity back to him. The Old Testament is about God fulfilling a promise to the whole world – a promise that would be realised through Adam, Abraham and eventually the OT people of Israel. (All the ‘warlike’ passages in the OT reflect God’s commitment to his people and the promise that he made. I’m not going to pretend that these passages are easy). All this culminated in God breaking into humanity himself in Jesus. Whilst he was on earth he taught with authority, performed miracles, had authority over evil, calmed the power of nature, gave broken and sidelined people hope, and eventually overcame death through his own death and resurrection – This signified that all that separated us from God is defeated, including death, evil and injustice. The resurrection is a foreshadow of what is to come when through faith in Jesus we will experience the defeat of all of those things and the broken world will finally be ‘fixed’. So the whole story of the Bible is about God wanting to get us (humanity) back.
It all rests on the resurrection. Did it happen? If it didn’t then we can safely disregard everything else Jesus said and did. If it did then it is the central event of human history and we have to take Jesus seriously. I’ve written some thoughts on this before (a talk in fact) that I’ve put here.
You are right in saying there were other faith healers around at Jesus’ time. However, none of these had the power over demons, nature or death that Jesus did (and none of them came back to life after they had died – again the resurrection is key).
You asked about the “Son of God” term. In the Gospels, Jesus is continually recognised as the son of God by the demons (Matt 8:29), the disciples (Matt 14:33, 16:16), the Roman centurions (Matt 27:34), and even God himself (Matt 17:5). Jesus himself confirms it when he gives a direct answer to a direct question posed by the Jewish leaders (Matt 26:63-64). He also consistently applies the term ‘Son of Man’ to himself which is an Old Testament way of saying he had come from God’s presence (see Daniel 7:13-14 and compare it to what Jesus says in Matt 26:64). There are similar examples in Mark’s, Luke’s, and John’s gospels.
You also asked how accurate the gospel’s were given that history is written by the winning side. The gospels were all written between about 55 and 90AD. At this point Christianity was not the winning side. It didn’t become the winning side until the Emperor Constantine became the first Christian Roman Emperor in 324AD (he converted in 312 AD). When the gospels were being written Christians were being persecuted first by zealous Jews and then by the pagan Roman Empire (Emperor’s Nero and Domitian whose combined reign was from 54AD to 96AD were well known for persecuting Christians).
So how can we trust these documents? They are the earliest accounts of Jesus’ life. They were written within the lifetimes of people who saw and met Jesus, either by the eyewitnesses themselves (John) or with significant input from eyewitnesses. Although there are no fragments of the original parchments in existence, there are hundreds of fragments of early copies which show a remarkable uniformity (there are minor differences but most of these are simply errors in copying and none of these would result in doctrine needing to change). The evidence for the reliability of the New Testament manuscripts far exceeds that of any other manuscript of a similar age, including those that people take for granted, like Julius Caesar’s writings.
If the resurrection is true then through Jesus there is hope for all that you and the family have been through, because God has not left us alone and he will execute that perfect justice that this broken world cries out for. It may not be in our lifetimes or in this broken world but it will happen.
The final chapters of the Bible describe a vision of life in heaven when God’s love, compassion and justice reigns (Rev 21-22). In that vision, God is described as wiping away every tear from peoples eyes, “where there is no more death or mourning or crying or pain!” (Rev 21:4)
