The Gospels

The Author's Journey from Doubt to Faith An uneven stack of books on the table in front of me tossed oblong shadows across a tiled floor. The pile included tomes about the myths of dying deities, textual criticism and the canon of Scripture, rabbinic Judaism and the history of atheism. During the past month, while working the lonely five-hour shift before the library closed each evening, I had struggled through nearly all of these books. With each page, I seemed to choke on ever-deepening doubts about my faith. Seven weeks into my first semester of Bible college, I whispered as I stared at the haphazard stack of books, and I don't know if I even believe the Bible anymore. Unable to bear the frustration any longer, I pressed my face against my fists and wept. It wasn't as if my professors were attacking the Bible; they weren't. But, with each lecture and reading, my assumptions about the Scriptures- assumptions that I had held since childhood-had crumbled into hopeless fragments. When I took my seat on the first day of New Testament Survey, I had thought that the Greek and Hebrew texts employed by the translators of the King James Version had been preserved perfectly from the time of the apostles until today. As far as I knew, all the most familiar elements of Christian faith-a dying deity, the resurrection, baptism, the Lord's Supper-were unique to Christianity. Until that moment, I may not always have lived my beliefs, but I had never doubted them. Now, I knew that the ancient world was filled with stories of sacramental meals and ceremonial washings, dying deities and resurrected redeemers. Long before Jesus tumbled into a feed-trough in some obscure corner of the Roman Empire, the Persians seemed to have venerated Mithras, a virgin-born deity whose birth was celebrated by shepherds and wise men. And there were Egyptian divinities, worshiped thousands of years before Jesus, who were believed to have died and risen from the dead-Osiris and Adonis, Attis and Horus. Then, I learned in another class that the original manuscripts of the New Testament had disintegrated into dust more than a thousand years ago and that no two remaining copies of these documents were identical. What's more, the translators commissioned by King James had relied on a Greek New Testament that most scholars now recognized as inadequate-a Greek New Testament that included at least one passage that a Franciscan friar may have forged for political reasons. Nothing had prepared me for these revelations-and I knew that no one in my church or at home was prepared to deal with such doubts either. If I dared to voice these questions, my words would merely confirm their suspicion that academic study leads inevitably to disbelief. Now, seven weeks into my first semester of college, I could no longer blindly embrace the Bible as divine truth. I needed to know why and how. Why did so many elements of Christian faith seem to be borrowed from other religions? Why were there so many differences between manuscripts of the New Testament? How did scholars know that some Greek manuscripts were more reliable than others? And, if no one had possessed a perfect copy of the Greek New Testament for nearly two millennia, how could my New Testament possibly tell me the truth about God? My professors would probably have been glad to help me, but I was too timid to admit my doubts to them. And, so, I began to read-not casually flipping through an occasional interesting text, but obsessively consuming book after book during my late-night shifts as assistant librarian. By the time I found myself sinking into the couch and crying out in the shadows of so many conflicting opinions, I had devoured dozens of volumes from every conceivable perspective-and, still, I didn't know what to believe. So I did the only thing I knew to do. I kept at it. I kept reading everything I could find, searching for some distant glistering of truth. And finally, near the end of my second semester of college, the clouds of doubt began to clear-not all of them and not all at once. But, bit by bit, faith reemerged. It wasn't the same sort of faith that I had possessed when the semester began. In truth, my faith had grown in the darkness. Now, it was far deeper, far richer, and far better equipped to understand what it means to embrace the Bible as God's Word. After seven months of seeking truth, truth finally found me. Through the writings of C.S. Lewis, I saw that the presence of some elements of Christian faith in other religions doesn't mean that Christianity is false. To the contrary, it means that there is, in every system of faith and every human heart, a yearning-however vague-for one true God who enters into death and triumphs over it. F.F. Bruce's The Canon of Scripture and The New Testament Documents: Are They Reliable? convinced me that the authors of the Gospels weren't recording mere myths or legends. They were intentionally writing historical documents. The authors' purposes, to be sure, were theological, but their theology was rooted in real events that had happened in the context of human history. From the works of Bruce Metzger, especially The Canon of the New Testament and The Text of the New Testament, I learned how-despite the hundreds of thousands of variants in the Greek New Testament-it's almost always possible to determine the original reading of the text. What's more, I learned that none of these points of textual uncertainty undermines any crucial element of Christian faith. And, still, I clearly recall the aching emptiness that knotted my stomach during those months of doubt. I remember the frustration I felt when I realized the answers I heard in church simply weren't enough. Most of all, I will never forget the joy that surged in my soul as a pattern of thoughtful trust replaced the blind faith that I had embraced for far too long. That's why I'm passionate about what I've written in this book-because I know that blind faith isn't enough. I remember the joy of moving from blind faith to thoughtful trust, and I want you to experience that joy too.--Timothy Paul Jones "Author" (1/18/2007 12:00:00 AM)
"Recent popular works of fiction along with the widely publicized claims of some of the most skewed scholarship available have misled many into thinking that various ancient "Gospels," many of them Gnostic, are as old or as reliable as the four that appear in the New Testament. This is simply not the case. It is not even remotely the case. Here, in about as succinct a form as possible, Timothy Jones sets the story straight, explaining why the books that are in the New Testament canon were chosen for inclusion, why others were left out, and what is at stake in the discussion. A must read for anyone confused or misled on the topic!"--Craig Blomberg "Denver Seminary" (3/20/2007 12:00:00 AM)