Ben Witherington: Will the Real Jesus Please Stand Up? A Vertical Jesus in a World of Horizontal Analysis

If you have ever wondered if the Gospel accounts of Jesus are true, this is a must read for you.

We are all products of our education, and in case of myself and indeed all of us, we were all trained to analyze the Gospels in detail using source, and form, and redaction criticism.   Now these methods have their pluses and minuses.  They can be useful in getting at certain aspects of things about the historical Jesus, but unfortunately these methods cannot help us very much to deal with the canonical Gospels  if we seek to treat them  as they were intended to be treated by their original inspired authors. More on that in a minute.

These Gospel authors were not operating with the canons of modern secular historiography which tends to have an anti-supernatural bias with its practitioners regularly muttering astoundingly dogmatic things like “that didn’t happen because those kind of things don’t happen.  People don’t rise from the dead.”   I have to say that that sort of dogmatic statement puts the dog back in dogmatic just as much as the dogmatic statements of some fundamentalist TV preachers.     It is especially proper to ask persons who are dogmatic in modern secular anti-supernaturalist ways, just as it is proper to ask persons who are dogmatic in others ways—  ‘How do you know things like that don’t happen?’    And if the answer is ‘I have never seen such a thing happen’  then we realize we are dealing with persons who needs to get out more,  see more of the world of human experience,  but have the arrogance to assume that his or her private, individual experience exhausts what is possible when it comes to the limits of historical reality.    This person is in fact saying “talk to the hand with your miracle reports, the face is not listening.”  What is even worse is when such scholars then take the next step of suggesting that if you don’t have these sorts of presuppositions you are not a critical scholar, and are not doing proper historical analysis of the Gospels.

Take your time and read this post.