To many people, Christianity seems strange, unrealistic, fantastical and just plain weird. This blog is my grand experiment to show why it makes perfect sense without making it too complicated. I’m nobody special – just someone who happens to take this stuff seriously.
Should we really believe a book that was written thousands of years ago which talks about a man dying and then being raised from the dead? On the “debates page” of our website you will find where I have been challenged to give an answer more than once to this question. There is much that needs to be said in defense of the Bible that you can learn by exploring that part of our site. Here, however, I want to focus on what the New Testament is. After all, what it claims about Christ was written by Christians. In short, is it understandable for us to trust that they would be non-biased and give us the actual story? It seems like more people would be willing to take this stuff seriously if the details of the death, buriel and crucifixion were written down by non-Christians.
First of all, to understand what the New Testament is, you can’t look at it as simply a religious book. Instead, you need to understand what scholars know; the New Testament is a group of the primary sources of the Christian faith. The Gospels, Pauline epistles and everything else, are the earliest (and eyewitness) documents of the life of Christ and rise of His church. It is reasonable to look to the Bible first because it is the oldest and most comprehensive library of documents about Christianity.
But why do only Christians affirm the resurrection? I mean, if Jesus really rose again, then why didn’t non-Christians at that time, write about it so we could get an outside perspective? The reason for this is that when people see that Christianity is true – they usually become Christians! Asking for an unbeliever’s testimony about the resurrection is like asking someone who doesn’t believe a car wreck just happened on Mulberry st. to describe the details of it. If they saw the wreck, they are going to believe that it happened.
So, of course the New Testament is written only by Christians, and we don’t believe in it for no reason, but because it contains the primary sources of our Faith.
For this reason, among many others, I am still understandably Christian!