Episode Details

Given that they’re the best source we have on who Jesus is/was, it would be good to know how reliable they are.

After deconstructing nearly every other aspect of the Christian faith that was handed down to me as a child, I thought it was time to do a mini-series on the question: “who is Jesus to me now?”

One way to answer that question is to see what the people who walked and talked with him had to say: his family, friends, disciples, and others at the time.  There are four books available that have long been regarded as the best source for that kind of eye-witness material: the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. 

Some have blindly embraced those books unquestioned.  They’ve seen the Gospel accounts as inerrant, infallible, and absolutely authoritative; distinct in these respects from all other books not found in the Bible.  And to bolster these high claims, they will invoke a quality … a process … an affirmation … which can’t be defined nor tested nor explained: divine inspiration.

Others, on the other hand, who have spent years or even decades closely studying those books, have found many reasons to question the reliability of these “eye-witness” accounts.

So, this will be the starting point for this mini-series.  We’re going to look at: inspiration, versus revelation on the one hand, and dictation on the other; divine inspiration versus human impulses; “apparent” contradictions versus plain-and-simple contradictions; Bibliolatry (treating the Bible itself as a deity to be worshipped); the role of faulty human memory and differing worldviews in shaping the stories that are written; how copyists produce textual variants (copies with different wording), accidentally or intentionally, and how interpreters try to deal with that.

In the end, we see that human influences have indeed shaped the Gospel accounts that we now hold in our hands in the 21^st century.  Some willfully choose to ignore that fact, while others use that as their reason to reject the Bible entirely.  We suggest a more nuanced and enlightened approach: read the Gospel accounts knowing how they reflect human flaws, human choices, human insights, human hopes …. the humanity of these artefacts!  And for those who also choose to believe in the Divine, they can calibrate the degree to which the Divine worked around and through that.

If you liked this episode, you may also like several of our previous episodes collected thematically under “The Bible<