CHAPTER 4: REDISCOVERING THE BIBLE
THE ACTOR DAVID SUCHET is most recognized for playing the role of Hercule Poirot. His portrayal of the plump Belgian detective became the definitive on-screen incarnation of the character for nearly twenty-five years across seventy TV and film adaptations of Agatha Christie’s novels. Yet in person, Suchet is both slimmer (he wears a fat suit, apparently) and his voice much deeper than the character he portrays.
What many people don’t know about the actor is that he is also a committed Christian. Even fewer know the story of his adult conversion.
When I interviewed Suchet about his stage and screen career, he told me how, while filming in the United States in 1986, a stray thought came to him while soaking in his hotel bathtub that would change the course of his life forever: “I was thinking about my late grandfather. He was for me very much alive, almost my guide. I used to talk to him. And I suddenly started thinking about the afterlife, because I said to myself, ‘I don’t believe in the afterlife. Why am I talking to my grandfather if I don’t believe he’s alive?’”[1]
Eureka moments happen in bathtubs, and it was this thought that led Suchet to get hold of a Bible and begin to investigate its claims.
Although the actor had grown up in a nominally religious household, none of it had stuck. The nearest he had come to religious practice was a fleeting interest in the Eastern spirituality embraced by the Beatles in the sixties and seventies. As far as Christianity was concerned, he wasn’t even sure if Jesus was a strictly historical figure or not. However, from his dimly remembered divinity lessons, he recalled that the apostle Paul had written some letters. So he started with the book of Romans.
Suchet decided to employ the same technique he used when reading classic stage plays for the Royal Shakespeare Company, reading the book not as Scripture but as if it were the first draft that had ever been read —a letter written not just to those first readers but to him personally.
He admits that he struggled to comprehend the first several chapters of Romans. However, after reaching chapter 8, the apostle Paul’s words seemed to speak across the two-thousand-year chasm in a powerful way:
I suddenly found a way of existing, a way of thinking and behaving and caring and looking at the world, in a completely different way. By the end of that letter, I was very moved, very emotional. I believed I had found what I had been looking for. Forget the gurus, forget everything else. I’d found a new way of being, in the way he describes the Christian life.
That encounter in Romans sent Suchet back to the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. There he met the figure of Jesus who had so captured the heart and mind of the zealous Jewish teacher Saul of Tarsus and who had tasked him, as the apostle Paul, to take the Good News to the Gentile world. In reading the Gospels, Suchet discovered the magnetic personality and sublime teachings of Jesus Christ, captured in a historically robust set of documents which, even at two thousand years’ distance, were still capable of bringing another Gentile to the point of conversion. Suchet was baptized soon after.
STILL THE WORLD’S BESTSELLER
Today, the Bible has become such a culturally ubiquitous book that most people assume they know what it is about even if they’ve never actually read it. For that reason, many people dismiss its contents as outdated, irrelevant, and untrue on the basis of the background noise of a largely skeptical culture. Yet the Bible has a tenacious ability to surprise each new generation of readers when they actually open its pages.
Some three hundred years ago, one of the world’s most famous skeptics of Christianity was the French writer and intellectual Voltaire. He is reputed to have said that “one hundred years from my day, there will not be a Bible on earth except one that is looked upon by an antiquarian curiosity-seeker.”[2]
Of course, that is not what happened. In fact, the great irony of Voltaire’s prediction is that, a century after his declaration, Voltaire’s own home in Geneva, Switzerland, had become a storehouse for Bibles and tracts produced by the Evangelical Society of Geneva. Likewise, the same printing presses that had been used to print Voltaire’s anti-religious pamphlets were being used to print their Bibles.
Similar sentiments to Voltaire’s have been expressed by modern-day skeptics. All the horsemen of New Atheism have taken aim at the morality, historicity, and relevance of the Bible to a modern age.
Sam Harris has said, “I can go into any Barnes & Noble blindfolded and pull a book off a shelf which is going to have more relevance, more wisdom for the twenty-first century, than the Bible.”[3] Other New Atheists such as Lawrence Krauss and Richard Dawkins disparage the Bible as the product of “Bronze Age peasants” or “desert tribes.”[4]
Dawkins has famously taken aim at the Old Testament depiction of God as “arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.”[5] It is a description the late Chief Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks condemned as “profoundly antisemitic.”[6]
Dawkins has been similarly critical of the New Testament, dismissing its reliability by writing that “accounts of Jesus’s resurrection and ascension are about as well-documented as Jack and the Beanstalk.”[7]
Nevertheless, despite skeptics past and present predicting the demise of Christianity and its founding Scriptures, the Bible has a stubborn habit of refusing to die. Today the Bible remains the bestselling, most-published book in the world, bar none.
It dwarfs the book sales of the New Atheists themselves. Even J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter books —the bestselling novels of the twenty-first century at over five hundred million copies in print —pale in comparison to the estimated five to seven billion copies of the Bible that have been printed in its lifetime. Ironically, most of the world’s Bibles are today produced in China, an officially atheistic country, where the Amity Printing Company churns out seventy Bibles per minute and celebrated printing its two hundred millionth Bible in 2019.[8]
Why has the Bible survived predictions of its death? Why does it still inform the lives of billions of people today? Like their forebear Voltaire, in their haste to cast aside the superstition of religion, the New Atheists have failed to comprehend that the Bible is not simply a moralistic history or science book to be picked apart and discarded when judged to be out of step with the modern world. It represents something far deeper than that.
In fact, I am convinced that this is another example of the turning tide of faith in our culture. As we shall see, many public intellectuals are no longer disparaging Scripture. Instead, they are recognizing that, regardless of its supernatural claims, the Bible contains a deep well of psychological, practical, and spiritual wisdom that has positively shaped culture in myriad ways.
THE BOOK THAT SHAPED THE WORLD
Some of the New Atheists themselves have been willing (albeit grudgingly) to grant the massive cultural debt owed to the Bible, especially William Tyndale’s sixteenth-century translation and the King James Bible (also known as the Authorized Version) that followed it.
On the four hundredth anniversary of its publication, Christopher Hitchens wrote, “Though I am sometimes reluctant to admit it, there really is something ‘timeless’ in the Tyndale/King James synthesis. For generations, it provided a common stock of references and allusions, rivaled only by Shakespeare in this respect. It resounded in the minds and memories of literate people, as well as of those who acquired it only by listening.”[9]
Likewise, even Richard Dawkins was prepared to fund a campaign to place a copy of the King James Bible in every school library across the UK, not because of any perceived moral value but because of its undisputed status as a “great work of literature.”[10]
Indeed, no serious cultural critic, even those hostile to organized religion, can deny the cultural influence of the Bible.
First, there is the multitude of modern phrases it has given us: “salt of the earth,” “good Samaritan,” “going the extra mile.” Even the self-styled moniker of Dawkins, Harris, Dennett, and Hitchens —“the four horsemen” —comes from the book of Revelation. Then there’s the sublime poetry of passages such as Psalm 23 and the meditation on love in 1 Corinthians 13. In countless ways, the Bible’s cadence, beauty, and rhythm has informed the poetry and literature of subsequent generations.
Dante, Milton, and Shakespeare are arguably among the greatest influences on Western literature, yet they all stand downstream from the Bible. Shakespeare himself was deeply influenced by Tyndale’s translation of the New Testament. Directly or indirectly, all great works of Western literature have been fed by the great work of literature.
Pulitzer Prize–winning author Marilynne Robinson has described the Bible as “The Book of Books,” writing, “Even when references to Scripture in contemporary fiction and poetry are no more than ornamental or rhetorical —indeed, even when they are unintentional —they are still a natural consequence of the persistence of a powerful literary tradition.”[11]
When I interviewed veteran broadcaster Melvyn Bragg about his love of Tyndale’s translation of the Bible (upon which the Authorized Version drew heavily), he explained why, despite no longer holding to the faith of his youth, he still had “Christianity branded into me somewhere” because of the pervading influence of the King James Version he had grown up with. And it wasn’t only its literary impact. He described the “phenomenal social influence of the Bible” through “all sorts of culture, philanthropy, laws to alleviate poverty, in every way that you can think of.”[12]
Bragg is dismayed that the Bible has been relegated to a subsection of Religious Studies and is no longer seriously read, listened to, or studied by most schoolchildren today (whereas Shakespeare remains a core part of most curricula):
I’m outraged by it. You wouldn’t think of knocking down all the country’s cathedrals because not that many people go. But we have knocked down cathedrals of language that are unique in the world. We should bring it back as a cultural force. They needn’t believe if they don’t want to, but as a cultural force, as something that holds this country together and did so for a lot of years —and could still —this is massively important.[13]
The Scriptures have also had an extraordinary impact beyond the English-speaking world.
Social reformer Vishal Mangalwadi, author of The Book That Made Your World, describes the far-reaching influence of the Bible globally, including in his own country of India. The missionaries who began translating the Bible into the mother tongue of thousands of different people groups were effectively responsible for the first official codification of those languages, leading to education and cultural progress that had never been available before. The biblical worldview that accompanied the missionaries led to the abolition of practices such as widow-burning and infanticide of baby girls. Mangalwadi even makes the case that when India forged an independent path from the British empire, it was largely because of the Christian worldview the empire’s missionaries had brought with them: “We were always told that India’s freedom was a result of Mahatma Gandhi’s struggle; it was a surprise to learn that, in reality, India’s freedom was a fruit of the Bible. Before the Bible, our people did not even have the modern notions of nation or freedom.”[14]
Whether or not it’s recognized or celebrated as it should be, there’s little doubt about the cultural impact of the Bible in the English-speaking world and beyond. But the words which have shaped generations past have not simply done so on the basis of their literary genius. Those words were given their authority by the much older words they were translated from. The ideas they expressed were captured so poetically because they were intrinsically beautiful to begin with.
WHAT IS THE BIBLE, ANYWAY?
The Bible is, of course, not really a single book at all but a collection of books. The word Bible is derived from the Latin and Greek biblia for books or a library (like bibliography or bibliothéque).
The sixty-six books of the Bible (though Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Bibles include some additional books) were written in three different languages: Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek. This collection of books, both Old and New Testament, were brought together over a 1,500-year span, with the origins of the most ancient texts going even further back. There were many different authors, living in different cultures and epochs of history, writing in many different genres of literature. In this library you will find wisdom literature, proverbs and poetry, prophecy and apocalyptic writing, as well as historical accounts, biographies, and letters.
Yet despite its variety of styles and multiplicity of authors over long periods of time, there is an extraordinary harmony and coherence that emerges from the collective whole. The claim of Christianity is that this is not just a happy coincidence but the work of a divine hand which links this story to the grand story of the cosmos itself.
In the public imagination, the Bible is often perceived as some sort of sacred reference book (and a long and complicated one at that) which religious people use to determine the rules for their ethical positions or doctrines. Others may vaguely recall Bible stories from Sunday school that functioned like morality tales in the tradition of Aesop’s fables.
While the Bible contains some of those things, it would be wrong to mistake those parts for the whole. First and foremost, from Genesis to Revelation, the Bible is a story.
The Old Testament is the story of how the one God of the universe saw his good creation turn bad through human rebellion and so chose to call one particular group —the people of Israel —into a special relationship with him. His dealings with them would reveal his grand purpose and promise of redemption and renewal for the whole earth.
The New Testament is the story of how that purpose and promise was fulfilled in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ, the promised Messiah of the Jewish people. It documents the early years of the new Jesus movement as it spread from Jerusalem across the Mediterranean with the help of its most famous convert and evangelist, Paul.
Christians today believe they continue to swim in the stream of that grand story (it is sometimes said that the twenty-ninth chapter of Acts is still being written), which will yet have its fulfillment as predicted in both the Old and New Testaments —a renewal of all creation in which “he will wipe every tear from their eyes. Death will be no more; mourning and crying and pain will be no more” (Revelation 21:4) and where Jesus will reign, as the whole earth is “full of the knowledge of the LORD as the waters cover the sea” (Isaiah 11:9).
It is a grand narrative —often exciting and absorbing, sometimes complex and dense, occasionally disturbing and confusing, and frequently beautiful and inspiring. It’s a story that has led to the rise and fall of nations, been used as a tool of oppression or as an instrument of liberation, been banned and burned by some and regarded as an object of veneration by others. To many it is a source of daily comfort, but it is left by many more to gather dust on a bookshelf.
But whether praised, pilloried, or passed over, the way this story has shaped the world and continues to do so cannot be ignored or blithely dismissed.
HOW NEW ATHEISTS READ THE BIBLE
This is why the New Atheist attacks on Scripture, while providing ample fodder for Internet memes about talking snakes and petulant deities, have entirely failed to appreciate the way the Bible continues to exert the influence it does. Why does it manage to rise phoenix-like from the ashes every time it gets literally or metaphorically burned?
Part of the problem is that the Bible’s fiercest contemporary critics have tried to dismiss its credibility by reading it in the same way as the fundamentalist Christians they often find themselves at loggerheads with.
For example, they treat the early chapters of Genesis as though they are to be read as a strictly scientific and historical account of how the earth and all forms of life were created. Such straw men are erected in order to be swiftly knocked down when they point out the obvious differences between these readings and what our best scientific evidence tells us about the age of the earth and its evolutionary history.
But what if such critics (and the Christians who approach the Bible this way) were to stop and read Genesis on its own terms —engaging in the poetry, structure, and concepts it actually conveys?
For instance, there is pattern and purpose in the way the creation story unfolds. In each divine command, order is spoken into chaos and emptiness is filled with life. At its zenith, humans, who have been created in the image of God, are placed at the center of the story to comprehend, name, and cultivate this creation. In a prescientific age, this story communicated truths about our human origins and purpose that made sense of the world to its first hearers and did so across many generations. Remarkably, this story continues to resonate even in today’s scientific age. The reason is not because it is a scientific account. It is because it is much more than that.
When I hosted a debate on whether the science of the universe provides evidence for God with Oxford professor Peter Atkins, an outspoken atheist scientist, he announced that the Bible might be able to authenticate its divine credentials if it contained an unmistakable scientific hypothesis, such as the second law of thermodynamics: “If I were looking in the Bible, heaven forbid, I would expect to see maybe ‘increase in entropy is equal to Q reversible divided by temperature.’ If there was an equation in the Bible rather than all this wishy-washy elastic writing.”[15]
How generations of readers would have made any sense of these unintelligible words before nineteenth-century physicists came along to explain them is left unclear. Yet this idea —that the only way the Bible should be taken seriously by modern people is if its ancient writers had been inspired to include predictions about contemporary scientific theories and modern technology —is surprisingly common. In a similar manner, the inspiration of the texts is also called into question by commentators like Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins because its writers didn’t explicitly advocate for our most recent standards of ethical and social behavior (standards which, as they both know from experience, are often updated and contested by their peers anyway).
The reason these critiques are so shallow is because they are based on a fundamental misunderstanding of the purpose of Scripture itself.
In his Lost World book series, Old Testament scholar John Walton helpfully distinguishes two audiences for ancient Scripture: those to whom the Scriptures were originally written (for example, a seminomadic people in the ancient Near East) and those of later generations for whom it is also written. Understanding what the text would have meant to the first audience will help later readers to properly interpret its significance for their own time and culture, rather than mistakenly reading their own modern assumptions into the text.
The fact that the books of the Bible weren’t written in a way that satisfies the somewhat arbitrary level of contemporary scientific or moral knowledge demanded by New Atheists like Atkins, Harris, and Dawkins is hardly a valid objection to a God who may have a much bigger picture in mind than only the concerns of early-twenty-first-century skeptics. C. S. Lewis coined the phrase “chronological snobbery” in reference to those who regard the thought and philosophy of the era they happen to have been born into as the only one worth listening to.[16]
But, once again, a new set of secular voices is reevaluating the Bible.
HOW THE NEW THINKERS READ THE BIBLE
The Bible hasn’t been handed down, studied, and absorbed by billions of people through sheer luck or in spite of itself. There are reasons why it has survived and thrived. After the flurry of nay-saying and ridicule that the New Atheists heaped on the Bible, a variety of prominent thinkers are giving it a second look.
For instance, evolutionary psychologist Jonathan Haidt says that the Judeo-Christian Scriptures have provided an unequaled source of inspiration for human well-being and moral development, describing the Bible as “among the richest repositories of psychological wisdom ever assembled.”[17]
Haidt is a bestselling secular author but came to appreciate the value of the Bible while researching his book The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom. When I interviewed him about the experience, he said it was spending time alongside religious people and in their texts that changed his mind:
I was a standard American scientific atheist Jew. I was not predisposed to like religion. But in the course of writing that book, I came to see that religion is part of human nature. In America, religions as practiced make people better. They bind them into communities that try to elevate each other morally. When all the New Atheists were writing nasty books about religion and the Bible and saying, “This is false,” I was saying, “Actually, there’s a lot of wisdom there.”[18]
Speaking of our moral decision-making in his book The Righteous Mind, Haidt uses the analogy of an elephant and its rider, in which the rider has less control over the elephant than he would like to believe. Psychological research indicates that, whether we consider ourselves progressive or conservative, our moral beliefs are rarely the result of a purely rational process (the rider). Instead, we tend to use our reason to justify what our emotional commitments are already telling us (the elephant).
To that extent, says Haidt, our society has always depended on a shared stock of moral knowledge that has been handed down to us through means such as the Bible:
The Hebrew Bible and the New Testament are full of insights. That really opened my eyes to the value of attending to our traditions, the words that get passed down to us. It’s not that the ancients were smarter than us, but they wrote a lot down, they had a lot of insights. And what comes down to us is what has been filtered, tested, and found useful.[19]
In his follow-up book The Coddling of the American Mind, Haidt spelled out the psychological perils of raising children who are prevented from ever being hurt, offended, or challenged in their thinking. He questioned the proliferation of safe spaces and trigger warnings for an increasingly mentally fragile generation. In discussing the book, Haidt quoted Romans 5:3-4 —“We also boast in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope” —saying, “That’s antifragility right there.”[20]
Journalist and author Douglas Murray also finds himself to be a secular nonbeliever with a steadily growing appreciation of the significance of the Bible.
In our conversation on the direction of post-Christian culture, Murray described the “most striking failure of our time” as our inability to come up with anything better than the biblical ethic that all people are created equal in the eyes of God:
People are struggling to maintain and hold onto this exceptionally important gift of the Christian inheritance. Without the idea of equality in the eyes of God and the value of every individual, you are left with these attempts to assert that, for instance, “everyone is the same, or can be.” And it’s clear that we can’t be, and aren’t.[21]
Murray went on to recount a story told by the late literary critic George Steiner about the way that a stable repository of knowledge in the “book” of Scriptures has given successive generations and cultures a sense of continuity and tradition. Steiner related a significant conversation he had late one night with Black activists in South Africa during the time of apartheid. One of them told Steiner, “But you don’t understand. We don’t have a book.” Steiner, who as a Jew had the Torah to draw upon, said it was “one of the most distressing things he had ever heard.”[22]
Asked where we can find such a foundational basis in the absence of the Bible, Murray referenced a quote by the philosopher Allan Bloom: “The Bible is not the only means to furnish a mind, but without a book of similar gravity, read with the gravity of the potential believer, it will remain unfurnished.”[23]
“I’ve always thought this is a very important challenge,” said Murray. “Because there are books that people might put forward to try to base it on, but they are never of equivalent seriousness. It’s actually quite hard to think of a book of equivalent seriousness to the Bible. What would you base it all on?”[24]
HOW A PSYCHOLOGIST READS THE BIBLE
Foremost among the secular thinkers reevaluating the place of Scripture is Jordan Peterson, whose wonder and appreciation for the Bible only seems to grow with every passing year.
Peterson’s rise to fame came in the wake of several sell-out theater lectures on the Old Testament, which have also received millions of views online. Talking for two and a half hours for fifteen nights on the book of Genesis isn’t the most obvious way to build a fanbase, but thanks to Peterson’s influence, his massive audience, many of whom are young men, are taking the Bible seriously.
One of them, Daniel James, who described himself as a “hardened anarchist atheist” in his late teens, has since gone on to be baptized in the Catholic church. James says that, as a young man, he thought the Bible was a “silly book,” taking his cues from Lawrence Krauss’s description of the Bible as written by “ignorant Bronze Age peasants.” However, when he started watching Peterson’s lectures, he found himself “blown away”: “I’d never heard the Bible spoken about in that way. . . . Jordan really just opened the door for me to understand that, yes, it was written by people who lived in an era before science, but they were by no means ignorant.”[25]
Peterson himself sees knowledge of the Bible as integral to “a deep understanding of Western culture, which is in turn vital to proper psychological health.”[26] The psychologist frequently frames the stories of Scripture in Jungian terms —speaking of the archetypes and hierarchies that human life is patterned on. The stories that populate the Old and New Testament have immeasurable depths that bespeak their longevity and influence.
For instance, the creation story of Adam and Eve isn’t merely a myth to explain where we come from. It’s a story that tells us who we are and gives us a basis for human sovereignty, value, and equality. “In my estimation, that doctrine is grounded in the very deep and ancient Judeo-Christian proposition that men and women alike are made in the image of God, the very Creator of Being,” writes Peterson. “There is likely no more fundamental presumption grounding our culture.”[27]
Likewise, the story of Cain murdering Abel, which follows soon after in Genesis, is not simply a superstitious story about animal sacrifice and sibling rivalry. To Peterson it is “the manifestation of the archetypal tale of hostile brothers, hero and adversary: the two elements of the individual human psyche, one aimed up, at the Good, and the other, down, at Hell itself.”[28] In fact, as we saw earlier, Peterson says the well of wisdom in this story is so deep that “it has no bottom”[29] (and he’s only got to chapter 4 of the Bible’s first book at this point).
This wonder grows as he explores the New Testament. Here, Christ is the preeminent archetype of the hero figure who must conquer through struggle and death. In 12 Rules for Life Peterson describes Jesus’ encounter with Satan as showing “that Christ is forever He who determines to take personal responsibility for the full depth of human depravity. . . . It’s no merely intellectual matter.”[30]
Of the Passion narratives he says, “You cannot write a more tragic story. It’s impossible.” He describes each element of the injustice and sorrow experienced by Christ as “the aggregation of everything that people are afraid of,” and that each character in the story —Mary, Pilate, Judas, Barabbas, the mob —speaks to an aspect of our own human condition as we face death, destruction, and despair. And yet when we “look harder,” we see “death and resurrection.”[31]
To be sure, Peterson’s account of the significance of Scripture is deeply symbolic and psychological. Questions of the actual historicity of the accounts seem almost irrelevant to him. Nevertheless, the psychologist is constantly amazed at the seemingly miraculous ability of Scripture to describe the human condition.
Peterson goes as far as to say that the Bible itself functions as the definitive text out of which all other texts and thoughts in the Western world flow. As he puts it, “It isn’t that the Bible is true. It’s that the Bible is the precondition for the manifestation of truth. Which makes it way more true than just true.”[32] That means a modern Westerner can no more dismiss the Bible than someone standing on the twenty-fifth floor of a high-rise apartment can dismiss the foundation of their building, on the basis that it seems far away.
Peterson, Haidt, and Murray all approach the Bible as secular intellectuals with a growing admiration for its foundational contribution to our shared culture and human experience. That alone might be enough to send many back to the Bible to explore it as a psychologically profound and symbolically rich example of wisdom literature.
Yet once again, in my opinion, the new thinkers are still only halfway there. The Bible may well be the most extraordinary description of psychological and spiritual reality and nevertheless still remain a work of theological invention. Indeed, doubt about the historical reality of the Bible was one of the reasons Douglas Murray gave for losing his faith as a young adult.
However, I believe there need be no false dichotomy between the Bible’s cultural and psychological impact and its claims to describe real, objective history.
A CLASSICIST MEETS JESUS
James Orr and I both attended the same college at Oxford University in the late 1990s. I was already a Christian when I arrived as an undergraduate, but James was not. His public school education had involved attending chapel, but it hadn’t had much effect on him —he was fairly agnostic towards Christianity.
James and I didn’t know each other as students (he was a year above me), but we’ve got to know each other in the years since —although James now has a much more impressive title than I will ever aspire to: Associate Professor of Philosophy of Religion at the Faculty of Divinity at Cambridge University.
How did someone with minimal interest in faith end up becoming a philosopher of religion at one of the world’s most prestigious universities? It turns out that, soon after graduating, James experienced a dramatic conversion which had begun after encountering Jesus in the pages of the Bible while he was still a student.
At school James had studied Greek and Latin. He was almost fluent in reading Greek by the time he arrived at university for a degree in classics. Up to that point, James says he had only read the ancient works of the great playwrights and philosophers that were part of his reading list. But one day, a Christian friend gave James the New Testament in its original language —Koine Greek.
James says he vividly remembers the thrill of being able to read the Gospels in their original language. Of course, he had frequently heard English translations of the Bible being read in public before but had never really thought about it as a historical book.
James describes a “lightning bolt” moment, saying, “I became aware that this text was anchored in history. If you asked, ‘Where did I think it had come from?’ I don’t know. But somehow up to that point it had occupied a part of my imagination that was siloed off from the warp and woof of everyday life and the concrete processes of history.”[33]
As James started to read the Gospels for himself in Greek, he realized these accounts were written to be understood as real historical records just as much as any of the histories and annals he was familiar with from Thucydides, Herodotus, and Plutarch. James was also impressed by how well preserved these texts were compared to most of the ancient literature he was familiar with. Most significantly, the life of Jesus also suddenly came to life in a new way.
This was the beginning of the journey that eventually led to James becoming a Christian. As we shall see, there was more to his conversion than just this encounter with the Bible, but James’s story illuminates an aspect of the Bible that is frequently underappreciated by many people: its historical pedigree, especially concerning the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus.
REASONS FOR RELIABILITY
When people think of the historical Jesus, a skeptical presumption tends to prevail in contemporary culture. Surely modern research shows the Gospels are just legendary accounts . . . right? According to one UK survey, 40 percent of the population either believe Jesus is a mythical character or are uncertain if he was a real person.[34]
Yet in reality, the trajectory of modern historical scholarship is consistently in the opposite direction to this widespread assumption. As research advances into the historicity of the documents and the time and place that Jesus lived, we are given ever more reason to trust that the Gospels are the product of real history.
Briefly, here are five areas where modern scholarship is confirming the reliability of the biblical accounts.
The Manuscript Evidence
New Testament historian N. T. Wright describes the crucifixion of Jesus as “one of the best attested facts in all of ancient history.”[35] If you believe in ancient figures of the past like Julius Caesar or Alexander the Great, you shouldn’t have any problem believing that Jesus existed.
It’s well known that there are a number of extrabiblical sources that reference Jesus and the early Christian movement —written by ancient historians like Josephus, Tacitus, and Pliny the Younger. However, our main sources of information about Jesus are the four Gospels themselves. And those documents are among the most reliable we have from that era.
A rule of thumb when gauging historical authenticity is the closer to the events that the original texts were written down, the more reason we have to believe they are reliable. In addition, the earlier the extant copies of those texts are, and the more copies we have of them, the greater the likelihood we can reconstruct an accurate version of those first accounts. Naturally, most texts from the ancient world, written on papyrus, have crumbled to dust over the millennia. Yet early fragments of documents still turn up, even today.
So how do the New Testament documents compare in these terms to other ancient documents? As it turns out . . . extremely well. In fact, the New Testament outclasses most other ancient records of historical figures and events by a country mile.
When looking at other key historical figures of the ancient world, there are typically only a handful of existing documents that detail their lives. In addition, those accounts were usually written down many years or even centuries following the events.
In contrast, the four Gospel accounts are estimated to have been written within thirty to sixty years of Jesus’ life, and many of the letters of the apostle Paul that witness to the same events were written even sooner.
Moreover, there are thousands of surviving manuscripts, many of which date to within a century or so of the events. Compare this to most other accounts from ancient history, where our surviving documents have gaps of hundreds, if not thousands, of years from the originals.
Critically, whereas the popular imagination assumes that the text we have today must have somehow been metastasized and mythologized in the course of time and transmission, in fact, the opposite is true. Through the science of textual criticism and the advent of digital technology, scholars have increasingly been able to cross examine a wide range of biblical texts and reconstruct what the original documents said with extraordinary accuracy.
These aren’t merely half-remembered accounts, adapted, changed, and written down centuries later. The source material has a good historical pedigree.
Names in the Gospels
Turning to the content of the Gospels reveals a range of reasons to trust that they are reporting eyewitness testimony rather than second- or third-hand information. Research shows that the details of the Gospels confirm their accuracy and reliability in terms of their knowledge of geography, historical events and characters, and local customs and culture.
New Testament historian Richard Bauckham’s book Jesus and the Eyewitnesses is a groundbreaking piece of scholarship in this regard.
His research communicates how the Gospels are filled with evidence that the authors were reporting eyewitness accounts of the very first followers of Christ. For instance, a strong case can be made that the Gospel of Mark is based on the firsthand accounts of the apostle Peter. Even the Gospel of John, often assumed to be a later, more theological account of Jesus’ life, contains multiple clues to being the work of a direct disciple of Jesus.
Perhaps most fascinating is Bauckham’s research on how the names used in the New Testament (think of Mary, Martha, Simon, Andrew, Bartholomew, and so on) are perfectly synchronized with the time and place of Jesus. The frequency of names in the Gospels was cross-checked with Israeli scholar Tal Ilan’s comprehensive research from burial sites into the names being used during the time. A striking correlation showed that the Gospels are full of the same names that were common in the time and places where Jesus lived.
Any prospective parent who has looked up the most popular baby names that are published each year will know that the most common names change frequently. But the Gospel writers got it right for their time and place. It’s a strong confirmation that these accounts were not made up in some other location at a later time. You can only get that sort of detail right if you were there and you knew the people you are talking about.
Geography and Customs
Likewise, further research by Cambridge biblical scholar Dr. Peter J. Williams, author of Can We Trust the Gospels?, has revealed a plethora of ways in which the Gospel writers show that they are clearly familiar with the times, places, and customs of Jesus’ day, including the local geography.
Williams explains how remarkably reliable the Gospels are as a guide to the landscape of Judea and Jerusalem in the first century: “I’d say either the person has lived in the land, or they spent detailed conversations talking to people who lived in the land. And I’d say that about all four Gospels —that they know where the land goes up and down; between them they mention twenty-six town names; they know traveling times and so on.”[36]
In the absence of Google or any sort of reference book, this is the sort of information you had to be a local to get right. Time and again the Gospel writers place their events in the right geographical and historical context. They also get the details right. They know the coinage, customs, and conventions of the day. Williams says the phraseology is distinctly local too:
I can think of four verses in a row in Luke 16, where you get a dry measure and a wet measure, and then we get “the sons of light” as a phrase —which is a Palestinian religious phrase, and then “unrighteous mammon” in the next verse. Those are four bits of language which I would expect really reflects the land of Palestine. If we’ve got them in a row, it’s because we actually have the wording somehow preserved.[37]
When you compare these sorts of details in Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John to later accounts of Jesus (sometimes called “apocryphal Gospels,” like the Gospels of Thomas or Judas) from the second and third century, you immediately see the difference. Later accounts include very little detail of local custom, geography, or names. They are far vaguer, much less connected to real history, time, and place.
Undesigned Coincidences
Another line of evidence to show that the Gospels are the result of reliable eyewitness testimony has been explored recently by scholars including Dr. Lydia McGrew in her book Hidden in Plain View: Undesigned Coincidences in the Gospels and Acts.
Undesigned coincidences are details within stories across the different Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John that seem to dovetail with each other, suggesting that the authors knew the truth of the events they describe. These “coincidences” are examples of natural corroborations between the separate accounts that could not have been manufactured.
To give just one example, when the story of the feeding of the five thousand is related in John 6, Jesus turns to the disciple Philip and asks him where they may go to buy bread for the vast crowd that has followed them into the countryside. In the story, Jesus is setting a test for his disciples and receives the answer he was expecting from a bewildered Philip: “Two hundred denarii [six months’ wages] would not buy enough bread for each of them to get a little” (John 6:7). This brief dialogue sets the stage for one of Jesus’ most memorable miracles, involving a young boy and his packed lunch of loaves and fishes.
However, if this story were being invented rather than recounted, why would the author have Jesus ask the question of Philip rather than one of the more senior disciples, such as Peter or John?
The answer may lie in other parts of the Gospels. We learn earlier in John that Philip is from the town of Bethsaida. As it happens, when the story is recorded in Luke 9, we are also told where the miracle happens: near the town of Bethsaida.
Furnished with this additional information, we can make sense of why Jesus asks Philip in particular. He’s a local. Out of all the disciples, he would be most likely to know the answer to the question (however rhetorical it was). Luke’s account of the story makes sense of John’s account. In the process, we see that both accounts share the same underlying reality.
By itself, this single example is unlikely to convince a skeptic of the general trustworthiness of the Gospels. But the cumulative weight of the many additional examples that could be given should give a skeptic pause for thought. Like the pieces of a puzzle falling into place, the interlocking connections between multiple details in the Gospels can’t be explained away by scribal ingenuity or later invention. As McGrew writes, all these undesigned coincidences are “marks of the truth of the Gospels hidden in plain view.”[38]
Archaeology
Perhaps most impressive of all is to see the very places the Bible mentions being unearthed in Israel today, which continue to prove the authenticity of the Gospels.
For instance, in John 9 Jesus heals a blind man and tells him to wash at the Pool of Siloam. Until recently, the location of this pool had never been discovered, and skeptics assumed it probably did not exist. However, during construction work in 2004, the steps of the pool were unearthed, and eventually the site was excavated, revealing a grand pool that makes exact sense of Jesus’ words and the story.
Biblical scholar Mark D. Roberts reports, “In the plaster of this pool were found coins that establish the date of the pool to the years before and after Jesus. There is little question that this is in fact the pool of Siloam, to which Jesus sent the blind man in John 9.”[39]
The Pool of Siloam is just one example of many other archaeological finds that corroborate the New Testament accounts. These include recently excavated houses, settlements, and synagogues that have overturned previous skepticism about the cultural and religious significance of the towns where Jesus carried out his ministry, such as Nazareth and Capernaum. The remains of crucifixion victims also confirm the nature of Jesus’ execution as related in the Gospels.
Many similarly exciting finds are confirming various aspects of Old Testament history and chronology too.
For example, there was the discovery of “Hezekiah’s tunnel” under Jerusalem in the 1800s and an ancient inscription linking it to the biblical account of Hezekiah commanding the construction of such a tunnel to bring fresh water into the city because of an impending Assyrian invasion. Or the 1993 discovery of the Tel Dan stele —a stone slab which contains an ancient Canaanite inscription that provides evidence of the reign of King David outside the biblical accounts. And the finds keep coming. In 2022 archaeologist Dr. Scott Stripling announced the discovery of a “curse tablet” dated to between 1400 and 1200 BC, which appears to contain the earliest example of Hebrew writing and use of the name Yahweh. If verified (the find is still being peer-reviewed at the time of writing), it provides strong evidence that the historical accounts of Israel in the Old Testament may have been written down much earlier than critics have assumed.
Inevitably, most of the archaeological history of the Old and New Testament has been lost to the sands of time. Yet despite the skepticism that often exists towards the reliability of the biblical accounts, whenever new discoveries are made, they rarely contradict the Bible. On the contrary, every passing year seems to turn up further archaeological findings that confirm the biblical record.
These are just some of the reasons why new evidence and recent scholarship mean the Bible needs to be taken seriously, not only as a work of literature that has had a dramatic impact on the world, but also as a work of history. That means taking its central character —Jesus Christ —seriously too.
SOME IMPORTANT OBJECTIONS
Even though the New Atheists have undervalued the influence of the Bible and underestimated the historical nature of the Gospels, some of the general objections they have brought to the table are still worth responding to.
You Can’t Trust the Gospels Because They Are Biased
This objection raises the question of whether the Gospels have a theological agenda at play. Aren’t they simply pious fiction for the Jesus movement that began in the first century?
The first point to note in response is that the works of scholars such as Richard Burridge have established that the Gospels fall firmly into a category of Greco-Roman writing called “historical biography.” It’s the same kind of writing that Plutarch, Josephus, and other contemporary historians were doing in that era for other notable figures.
Whether or not you think they are accurate, these accounts were at least written to be understood as conveying real historical events, not simply pious fiction, as some critics have maintained.
So was there an agenda? My answer would be that, yes, of course the Gospels have an agenda. In fact, they are very explicit about it. John 20:30-31 reads, “Now Jesus did many other signs in the presence of his disciples, which are not written in this book. But these are written so that you may come to believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that through believing you may have life in his name.”
These stories of Jesus weren’t recorded by detached, neutral observers. The Gospel writers believed Jesus was the Son of God and were writing down their accounts to persuade others to believe the same. But that doesn’t mean the accounts are merely propaganda.
Having “an agenda” is completely normal for almost every piece of writing. Whether it be a newspaper that leans in a certain political direction, a brochure that wants to sell you something, or a work of history that wants to make a specific point about the world, you will hardly read anything in your life that does not have a purpose or agenda behind it, including the book you are holding in your hands.
So let’s not get hung up on “agendas.” Every writer has an agenda of some sort. The question is: Do they make a persuasive case? Does their evidence stack up? And, in the case of the Gospels, can we trust that we are getting a reliable account that supports their claim that Jesus really was the Son of God?
I believe we can trust that these documents are not only historically reliable accounts but that the Gospel writers had good reasons for conveying their belief that Jesus Christ really was the Son of God.
The story of a Messiah who was crucified as a criminal by the Jews’ imperial oppressors and then discovered alive again three days later by a group of his female followers would have gone against all their prevailing Jewish cultural and theological norms. This would be a very odd story to invent. And yet this was the account they gave. It was a story they were willing to suffer persecution and death for, and which went on to change the course of history altogether.
What about All the Differences and Contradictions?
Many skeptics seem to believe that merely pointing out the fact that the Gospels contain differences between them is enough to dismiss the Bible’s claim to be divinely inspired. But that’s only true if we assume its divine pedigree is based upon how closely it mirrors modern literary conventions. What if, again, we are guilty of “chronological snobbery” in making such a judgment?
It’s true there are differences between the accounts, but none of them are irreconcilable. Frankly, we should be suspicious if the accounts all lined up perfectly —that would suggest someone had rigged things. Any police detective will tell you that you never hear exactly the same account from two different witnesses at a crime scene. It doesn’t mean they aren’t telling the truth —just that they had different perspectives on it.
However, many of the supposed contradictions tend to evaporate once we understand that the Gospels’ literary genre of historical biography adhered to different conventions than modern biography.
Certainly, if you line up the Gospels side by side, you’ll frequently find a different timeline of events, mentions of different people in the same events, words and speeches recorded differently, and more besides. But that was just a standard way that biographers worked in that day and age.
In his book Why Are There Differences in the Gospels?, Michael Licona compares the Gospel accounts with the lives that the Roman biographer Plutarch recorded and finds a striking overlap in literary devices. Writers were simply more at liberty to reorganize and reorder their material or to spotlight certain characters to make their points. None of this diminishes Plutarch’s contribution to history, and we should take the same approach with the Gospels.
The lesson for us today is that comparing the Gospels to a modern biography is going to be problematic —styles and literary conventions change a lot in two thousand years. It is a modern error, often committed equally by both Christians and skeptics, that weighs Scripture down with unreasonable expectations. However, understood on their own terms, these accounts do not contradict each other. If anything, they are noteworthy for the remarkable amount of correlation between them.
THE MIRACLE OF SCRIPTURE
In that sense, the Bible is not a magic book that floated down from heaven to earth fully formed, bound in a leather cover with index included. It doesn’t exist independently of the historical circumstances and influences of the many hands that wrote it.
If God has chosen to convey something divine through this written word, then he has chosen to transmit it over many ages, through ordinary human authors and imperfect processes. That means serious work has been left for later generations to recover the most reliable manuscripts, piece together the original texts, and try to understand the historical and religious context into which they were originally written.
Nevertheless, once that work has been done (and it has been done meticulously), we find something quite astonishing.
What really marks out the Bible as unusual is that, despite being the end product of many different authors writing in times and places very different to each other and our own, it still tells a historically coherent and thematically unified story.
Perhaps even more remarkably, it has been able to unfailingly communicate the meaning and wisdom of that story to multiple generations in diverse parts of the world. Whole swaths of people whose lives have been soaked in the words of the Bible have consequently been able to locate themselves and their purpose within a grand narrative of what it means to be human.
This is the miracle of Scripture. Not some parlor trick of finding a scientific equation predicted in its pages (as a New Atheist like Peter Atkins might require). Nor some magical ability to exist hermetically sealed off from the normal processes of time and history (as some Christians might like to believe). The miracle of Scripture is that it has spoken, and continues to speak, to every generation, place, and time it encounters. In doing so, its message has transformed individuals, nations, and empires.
It is the reason why James Orr, having become intrigued as an undergraduate by the discovery of a real, historical Jesus of Nazareth, went on to test whether the Christ of history may also be the Christ of today.
Having graduated and embarked upon a promising career in law, James was nevertheless asking himself existential questions about the purpose of his life. On New Year’s Eve 2002 he prayed a skeptical (and, he admits, fairly drunken) prayer, asking God, if he was there, to reveal himself. Remarkably, from the very next morning and over the following two months, James says he experienced a number of very specific and unusual answers to his prayers. “It got to the point where it was becoming irrational of me to deny the cumulative weight of these coincidences.”[40]
These signs stopped almost as suddenly as they had begun but led to James investigating the evidence for Christianity with renewed vigor, devouring scholarly books alongside Bible reading. At this point he was not connected to a church community and knew no committed Christians, yet his lifestyle began to change dramatically. Any desire for smoking and drinking evaporated. People around him noticed the difference. His sudden change in behavior was “unsettling” to his family and friends.
Yet something had ignited inside James. The Jesus of history who had consumed his intellectual interest now began to come into focus as the same God who was leading him inexorably towards the Christian faith. James eventually became part of a church community, where he found others who had made similar journeys. They seemed to him to be “the real deal.” “There was something self-authenticatingly true about this community,” he says.
Through a further series of providential circumstances, James eventually felt called to leave his law career and begin a postgraduate degree in philosophy of religion at Cambridge. Ironically, the rise of New Atheism at that time also fueled his change in career. “I was amazed at the weakness of their arguments,” he recalls.
Today James continues in his role as a member of the Divinity Faculty at the University of Cambridge. Incidentally, he is among a group of Cambridge academics who reissued the invitation of a visiting fellowship to Jordan Peterson (an original invitation had been controversially rescinded), allowing the psychologist to pursue his studies there in biblical literature.
MYTH BECAME FACT
Despite the Bible being widely available today in all manner of digital and physical formats, ours is the most biblically illiterate generation in several centuries. For that reason, it’s encouraging to see that the shallow critiques of the New Atheists are now being replaced by a renewed appreciation of the Bible from secular quarters, through thinkers such as Peterson, Murray, and Haidt. Even if they don’t believe in its divine inspiration (though Peterson comes pretty close to describing the Bible in miraculous terms), these figures are at least reminding their sizable audiences about the way Scripture has shaped culture and the debt we owe it.
But I want to push these thinkers a little further still.
The Bible is certainly a great source of ancient wisdom. It is also undoubtedly the distillation of thousands of years of myth[41] and meaning into one captivating narrative. And, as they point out, in its pages we find supreme psychological examples of sacrifice, heroism, and love that have been a source of inspiration to millions.
But what if, in the words of C. S. Lewis, in its central character, “the great myth became Fact”?[42] For it is only when we combine the psychological depth of Scripture with the historical bedrock of the person of Jesus Christ that we can truly explain the extraordinary impact this library of books has had on the world.
Think of those unforgettable stories about prodigal sons and good Samaritans; Jesus’ unmatched teachings on forgiveness, grace, and love; the radical command to love enemies; his unique willingness to touch the untouchable and love the unlovable. It is the words and actions of Jesus in Scripture that have most shaped history.
But this amounts to more than just good moral teaching. The reason the Bible has changed the world is because its written word provides evidence of a personal “living Word” who can be encountered today.
During one of my conversations with Douglas Murray, I challenged him to give a reason why he remained an agnostic atheist, despite his appreciation for the cultural value of Christianity and the Bible. What would it take for him to believe? Murray replied, “I’d need to hear a voice.”[43]
Many Christians would also appreciate a booming voice from the heavens to confirm their faltering faith from time to time. However, I would argue that all of us, Murray included, do have access to the voice of God in a very powerful way. I hope that Murray will look again at the Bible, not just for its psychological and literary value, but at its historical pedigree. For there is ever-increasing historical evidence that the Gospels really do relay the real words and history of Jesus of Nazareth —words which, as Murray himself admits, have miraculously and irrevocably shaped everything in the world that he holds dear. What clearer voice could we ask for?
The stories of David Suchet, James Orr, and countless others demonstrate that this book cannot be picked up, admired, and then merely set aside. History itself hinges on the reality of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Somehow, in him, all the hopes, dreams, and fears of humankind once found their meeting place and continue to do so today. That, after all, is the radical claim at the center of the whole story.