JESUS CHRIST: GOD-MAN - Vital Christianity

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contemporary history books. The Bible can and must be subjected to the same type of historical
scrutiny given to other writings of antiquity. When it has undergone such examination it has
stood up to the scrutiny admirably.
The pages of the gospels contain scores of references to geographical locations, all of
them substantiated by what is known of these areas. They contain innumerable references to and
brief descriptions of contemporary characters, such as Ananias, the Herods, Pontius Pilate, and
Tiberius Caesar, not one of which can be shown to contain historical errors.
The gospels were written in an age of careful historical composition. Among
contemporary historians were Tacitus of Rome, Plutarch, the greatest of the Roman biographers,
Strabo of Greece, and by far the greatest of all ancient Jewish philosophers and historians,
Flavius Josephus.
Swedish scholars H. Riesenfeld and B. Gerhardsson insist that the gospel traditions were
transmitted orally with the greatest care in the period between Jesus and the emergence of the
written gospels. In a major study, Memory and Manuscript: Oral Tradition and Written
Transmission in Rabbinic Judaism and Early Christianity (1961), professor Gerhardsson claimed
that the followers of Jesus used the traditional techniques devised within Judaism in order to
ensure the accurate transmission of oral traditions. He concedes that in the course of the
transmission of traditions about Jesus that there was ongoing interpretation in the attempt to
understand the words and deeds of Jesus more fully. However, he insists that this process of
alteration and reinterpretation is entirely consistent with his claim that early Christianity has
handed down the gospel narrative as "memorized text," that is, accurate text. This is so because it
used the same painstaking process observed in the transmission of Jewish oral traditions.
Professor Eduard Meyer (formerly of the University of Berlin), generally recognized as
our century's greatest authority on ancient history, was not at all a believer in Christianity. His
verdict cannot be said to have been given in an attempt to defend the doctrines of the Christian
faith. Yet he said,
"It is evident that for our history of Jesus we have by no means to reckon merely
with representations of the record of the second apostolic generation, but are
taken back far beyond that into the midst of the first generation—people who
personally had known Him intimately and still preserved a lively recollection of
Him; and that these old recollections lie under our eyes in manifold forms . . .
there is not ground at all for refusing to accept these oldest traditions as
historically trustworthy in all essentials and in their chronological ordering of
the history."33
Craig Blomberg in his scholarly book, The Historical Reliability of the Gospels, reasons: