These facts are useful for when you encounter inevitable cultural skepticism.
Have you noticed that some of our most read periodicals always seem to publish something
deeply skeptical about Jesus or Christianity around the holidays that celebrate Jesus? Over
the years we have been served electronic and print skepticism du jour right around Christmas and Easter. A couple of years back we got the revelation on the History channel that an archaeologist named Jacobivici had found Jesus tomb and ostensibly his remains as well right at Easter.
Newsweek asked their readers a few Christmases ago whether Jesus even existed right around Christmas. We hear about alternative “gospels” around Easter every couple of years now. The DaVinci Code movie release? Some years back a reporter named Kurt Eichenwald authored an article published in the January 2015 edition of Newsweek magazine about how Christians constantly misread and then misapply the Bible, this article was a cover page article handed to readers and put on magazine racks all over the world right after Christmas (“The Bible, So Misunderstood it’s a Sin” Newsweek Jan 2015). We can do another engagement in the future analyzing Eichenwald’s woefully pitiful attempt to undermine traditional Biblical interpretation. For a quick two part refutation of Eichenwald’s points see the great Dr. Michael Kruger.

It is instructive to remember that these timed, intentionally subversive articles hardly ever persuade anyone except other odd evangelizing atheists and agnostics.
Another interesting feature of this pattern by secular legacy print and media publishers is that they have admitted in the past that non-skeptical articles and stories about Jesus sell
magazines/newspapers and are viewed more through media than nearly any other subject
about which they could cover. In short, people tend to be still interested in the Bible and Jesus sells magazines. One can see the recent series The Chosen’s meteoric rise to fame as a
current example even in our post-Christian U.S. environment.
I wanted to give you four quick facts that are easy to memorize about Jesus that are based in
the best scholarship available today, any one of which could be used to challenge the
falsehood and half-truths presented in these subversive attempts to undermine our faith.
FOUR QUICK FACTS
1 - THE CANONICAL GOSPELS (Matthew, Mark, Luke and John) ARE THE EARLEST AND MOST RELAIBLE HISTORIES ABOUT JESUS.
There are not many things that majority of scholars, on any subject, agree. Here is one that enjoys a near universal scholarly consensus. There are precious few biographies of any ancient person that number four and, more crucially, are written within the same century of the person they are featuring in their biographies.
2 - THE CANONICAL GOSPELS HAVE A CREDIBLE, STRONG CONNECTION TO THE APOSTLES.
You want a biography, you want it written by someone(s) closest to Jesus because they have the best shot of getting the message of Jesus & who he is right. Yes, there are challenges to gospel authorship that come in the form of “how do we know the apostles or associates of the apostles wrote the gospels?” Let’s start with the last to write, the beloved disciple John’s biography of Jesus. We have confirmation of the early church fathers – Second century early church father named Irenaeus said that John wrote John and Irenaeus was mentored by a church leader named Polycarp who was a personal disciple of John himself! This is a tight historical chain of confirmation that any historian investigating any ancient source would find desirous. None of the apocryphal gospels have this kind of chain of confirmation, though they hijacked some of the apostles’ name to get the attention of the ignorant and uninformed. Not all gospels are created equal, even though our culture and the universities tend to promulgate this lie.
3 - THE CANONICAL GOSPELS LACK THE LEGENDARY EMBELLISHMENTS OF THE LATER “GOSPELS.”
These are qualitatively different kinds of writings – four canonical gospels versus the apocryphal gospels, different genres altogether. The gospels have a constant stream of
verifiable details, designed and undersigned coincidences between the canonical four but not so with the apocryphal gospels. The gospels have restrained miracles accounts and minimal details on Jesus childhood r pre-ministry adulthood.
These details are filled in for the curious person and are given in these later pseudo gospels, falsely attributed to long dead apostles, like the gospel of Thomas or gospel of Peter. One example is how restrained the raising of Lazarus is in the earliest most trusted four canonical gospels. No discussion of what Lazarus did, what he remembered or saw in the afterlife (“was he in heaven without Jesus death occurring?”), where he went or what he said afterwards. The gospels are largely silent on Jesus childhood. However, the infancy gospel of Thomas has little Jesus terrifying Nazareth, getting mad at bullies and killing them, only to later raise them from the dead to avoid punishment by the town authorities,
4 -THE CANONICAL GOSPELS WERE RECOGNIZED AS AUTHORITATIVE FROM A VERY
EARLY DATE.
How do we determine this? Looking at which gospels were copied the most,
revered the most, put on lists by the early church fathers, AKA the disciples of the disciples?
Which gospels were most popular, which were most read? Which gospels were most often
affirmed as most authoritative by the majority of early church fathers? The answer to all of
these questions is resoundingly the canonical four biographies; Matthew, Mark, Luke and
John used by solid churches week after week, decade after decade. It was patently not “a
literary free for all until Emperor Constantine shut down and halted the diversity of early
“Christianities” for nefarious political control or the Roman Empire’s new religious
assimilation.” Though it is common online and in the classroom, this notion of an early,
disparate, contradictory, only locally authoritative Jesus bios all competing for ascendancy
during the first three hundred years of spread and persecution is simply not true.
So, these are not hard to memorize;
1. THE CANONICAL GOSPELS (Matthew, Mark, Luke and John) ARE THE EARLEST AND
MOST RELAIBLE HISTORIES ABOUT JESUS.
2. THE CANONICAL GOSPELS HAVE A CREDIBLE, STRONG CONNECTION TO THE
APOSTLES.
3. THE CANONICAL GOSPELS LACK THE LEGENDARY EMBELLISHMENTS OF THE LATER
“GOSPELS.”
4. THE CANONICAL GOSPELS WERE RECOGNIZED AS AUTHORITATIVE FROM A VERY
EARLY DATE.
Keep these in mind whenever you see our mainline, popular media attempt to undermine your trust in God through your confidence in the Bible, especially around the major holidays. A huge thank you goes to Dr. Michael Kruger whose books Christianity at the Crossroads and Canon Revisited and The Heresy of Orthodoxy all significantly expand on these points and add many others.

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