The Case For Christ

going to be returning during their lifetime to consummate
history, so they didn't think it was necessary to preserve any
historical records about his life or teachings. After all, why
bother if he's going to come and end the world at any moment?
"so, " I said, "years later when it became obvious that Jesus
wasn't coming back right away, they found they didn't have any
accurate historical material to draw on in writing the gospels.
Nothing had been captured for historical purposes. Isn't that
what really happened?" "There are certainly sects and groups,
including religious ones throughout history, for which that
argument works, but not with early Christianity," Blomberg
replied.
"Why not?" I challenged him. "What was so different about
Christianity?"
"First, I think the premise is a bit overstated. The truth is
that the majority of Jesus' teachings presuppose a significant
span of time before the end of the world," he said. "But second,
even if some of Jesus' followers did think he might come back
fairly quickly, remember that Christianity was born out of
Judaism.
"For eight centuries the Jews lived with the tension between the
repeated pronouncements of prophets that the Day of the Lord was
at hand and the continuing history of Israel. And still the
followers of these prophets recorded, valued, and preserved the
words of the prophets. Given that Jesus' followers looked upon
him as being even greater than a prophet, it seems very
reasonable that they would have done the same thing."
While that did seem reasonable, some scholars have also raised a
second objection that I wanted to pose to Blomberg. "They say
that early Christians frequently believed that the physically
departed Jesus was speaking through them with messages, or
'prophecies,' for their church," I said. "Since these prophecies
were considered as authoritative as Jesus' own words when he was
alive on earth, the early Christians didn't distinguish between
these newer sayings and the original words of the historical
Jesus. As a result, the gospels blend these two types of
material, so we don't really know what goes back to the
historical Jesus and what doesn't. That's a troubling charge to a
lot of people. How do you respond to that?"
"That argument has less historical support than the previous
one," he said with a smile. "In fact, within the New Testament