The principle of embarrassment applies here. If you were making up a story, why would you include things that make you look bad? The gospels include embarrassing or problematic details.
As an example of a problematic detail, remember that the New Testament(NT) argues that Jesus is sinless & therefore the perfect sacrificial lamb to die for the sins of mankind. All 4 gospels record the baptism of Jesus by John the Baptist. In Mt 3:13-17 John even asks Jesus if Jesus should baptize John instead. John’s thinking he’s the sinner not Jesus, but Jesus says it is proper for John to baptize Jesus. Does that imply Jesus is admitting he isn’t sinless?
There is also the story of Jesus chasing the money changers out of the temple which is also in all 4 gospels. You end up having to explain Jesus’ anger as righteous anger to get around the implication that his anger & violence are sinful. Wouldn’t it be better to leave out these stories, if one of your main points is that Jesus is the sinless Messiah, the unblemished perfect lamb who dies for mankind’s sins?
In Mt 24:3 Jesus is asked about his return & the end times. In Mt 24:36 he says only the Father knows. Acts 1:7 quotes him saying the same thing. How can he be the divine Messiah, the Son of God, God With Us & not know when these things will happen? If you want him to look like the divine Son of God, wouldn’t you skip that part of the story?
Here’s another embarrassing detail that’s in the story of the Last Supper. It’s Jesus predicting that Peter will deny him 3 times before the cock crows (Mt 26:34, Mk 14:30, Lk 22:34, Jn 13:38). Peter has just said that he is willing to lay down his life for Jesus (Jn 13:37). When it turns out his life could be forfeit in the next 24 hours, though, Peter has a change of heart & does exactly as Jesus predicted. Makes Jesus look smart, but Peter not so much.
If the gospels are just stories made up by the disciples to make themselves look good, Peter must have missed the brain storming session where the other disciples decided to make him out to be a weak namby-pamby coward. Peter gone fishin’ again? Let’s make him the one that almost didn’t get away! Now compare that with what I already told you in my last post about Peter’s death in Rome for the crime of being a christian. That was the time to deny Jesus too, but Peter didn’t, even though, it cost him his life. That’s the kind of story a bunch of liars would include. The kind that would make them look like noble heroes, but that one is not in the Bible.
My last example of an embarrassing detail that I’ll mention is probably my favorite one. You know it, but don’t recognize it as such. On Easter morning, women find the tomb empty (Mt 28:1, Mk 16:1, Lk 24:10 & Jn 20:1). Why is this embarrassing? Actually this one would get you laughed out of court. At that time if you wanted to sue your neighbor, according to jewish law you needed witnesses to testify on your behalf. 2 is good, but 3 is better. The witnesses couldn’t be just anybody. Whoa, Mary, not your kind. You aren’t good enough around here. That’s right women were not allowed as legal witnesses in jewish courts at that point in time. Putting this detail in is just asking all the men in the Sanhedrin, the jewish ruling council, to suspect the story is a big lie from the start. If they were smart, though, and didn’t want to sleep on the couch, they didn’t bring this up for discussion around their wives.
All the skeptics at this point say I told you so. The disciples made it all up. The hitch is they could have just left out those details, if the story is made up. The disciples knew women weren’t legal witnesses. They could make themselves look good & Jesus look perfect by just leaving stuff out, but they didn’t. It’s not a made up story & those details are in there, because they were trying to tell the absolute truth about how the events unfolded no matter how it made them look.
As a skeptic, my next thought was maybe they were honestly reporting most of what they saw, but lies work better when mixed with some of the truth. How do we know the disciples weren’t just lying about seeing the resurrected Christ? I’m surprised I’d never heard the answer to this one in a church & it’s a pretty important question. More in Post (#6).
2020 Update – It occurs to me that I should bring up 2 other points here. First is there is a fair amount of archaeological evidence supporting the New Testament. I didn’t include it originally, because while it’s general support of the historical accuracy about places & dates, it’s not proof of all of the events. Many modern stories are fictionalized versions of historical events, but we all know that Forrest Gump did not actually meet Presidents Kennedy & Johnson. I personally I find the argument of embarrassing details more convincing. Here’s a link to a summary of archaeological evidence on Cold Case Christianity that summarizes it, if you want to know more.
Second point is one I’ve made in other places about how we can rule out the gospels substantially changing over time. There are too many early copies. It’s mentioned in “Could the Resurrection be a legend added later to the New Testament?” both the long & short answer. I also discussed it in the long answer to “How do we know that Jesus wasn’t just a good teacher?“. Here’s a slightly enhanced discussion.
Modern bibles all go back & translate the earliest Greek & Hebrew text including the Dead Sea Scrolls, not the umpteenth previous translation. There are currently 5800 early surviving copies or partial copies of the Greek NT. If we include early copies in other languages, the number climbs to 25,000 copies total. Comparisons can be made across Greek copies & other languages. Most variations are minor changes in word order (The Sabbath is tomorrow vs. Tomorrow is the Sabbath) or word choice (Jesus vs. he/him) & grammatical mistakes like incorrect use of a & an (an herb or a Herb). There are very few real variations across 5000+ copies & many bibles like the New International Version include variations in the footnotes to the text. There aren’t any variations that affect essential facts or major beliefs.
Given some 25,000 surviving copies of the early texts, changing what they said is impossible. It’s like saying Time magazine modified the 1938 Man of Year article decades later to feature someone other than Hitler & then replaced all the originals. It would just not be possible to find them all to do it.
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