Hard to Deny the Bible

Even when you want to, it’s hard to deny the Bible. Writing around 150-70 AD, the Greek philosopher:

Celsus declared the first disciples of Jesus to be deceivers of the worst kind; a band of sorcerers, who fabricated and circulated the miraculous stories of the Gospels, particularly that of the resurrection of Jesus…He refers to the Gospels of Matthew, Luke, and John, and makes upon the whole about eighty allusions to, or quotations from the New Testament (Philip Schaff, History of the Christian Church, 92).

Although we lack extant copies of Celsus’ diatribes, according to historians, his words have been faithfully preserved by those who had responded to him. Interestingly, Celsus indirectly acknowledged that our Gospels were long venerated by the Church. That’s why he attacks them rather than the Gnostic Gospels, which clearly, even if they were in circulation, no one venerated.

Celsus pulled no punches. He wanted to denigrate the young faith through whatever argument he could muster. Nevertheless, he also obliquely acknowledged that the Gospels were eyewitness accounts of the “first disciples of Jesus.” This is a weighty admission in light of today’s radical skeptics who claim that the Gospels reflect the editorializing and synthesizing of the early church.

Although Celsus charged that these “disciples…fabricated…the resurrection of Jesus,” no credible historian can take this charge seriously. Why not? The Apostles all died martyrs’ deaths, never veering an inch from their testimony that they had seen and touched the risen Jesus. They were such credible eyewitnesses that even the atheist historian, Gerd Ludemann, had to concede:

It may be taken as historically certain that Peter and the disciples had experiences after Jesus’ death in which Jesus appeared to them as the risen Christ (Quoted by Lee Strobel, Case for the Real Jesus).

This doesn’t mean that Ludemann has come to faith. Far from it! Instead, he claims that the disciples all succumbed to mass hallucination! For forty days? Ludemann can close his eyes, but even he can’t keep the light from penetrating through his eyelids.

Daniel Mann