Whatever we may think of these assertions, it must at least be agreed that
they are extremely important.
As we have said more than once, if they are correct assertions, they have
vital implications for all of us.
But how are we to judge whether or not they are
correct?
They are mostly about matters of which we have and can have no direct experience.
Even if we are ready to approach the subject with an open mind, can we have
any hope of coming to a reasonable conclusion?
Those who are willing to stand or fall by these
assertions have their reasons for taking up this attitude.
What are these reasons?
The first reason is called
THE AUTHORITY OF THE CHURCH.
This does not mean that the Creed is imposed upon people from above by a
lot of popes and bishops, though Christians do, of course, believe that the
teaching of the Church comes to us with authority, as from God.
The point to be emphasized here, however, is that hundreds of millions of
people, over hundreds of years, have accepted and proclaimed these assertions
as true, have put their trust in that truth, and have found that it works.
Not all these people were fools or ignorant or easily duped.
They include many of the greatest thinkers of all time.
They include persons of all kinds of men and women, kings and commoners,
artists and scientists, poets and men of business.
As we are looking at this matter without prejudice, we must admit that numbers
in themselves are not a guarantee of correctness.
But we must also admit that a positive statement supported by such a mass
of testimony is entitled to respect, and that the burden of proof lies more
with those who oppose it than with those who support it.
The second reason is the witness of history.
Some of the assertions deal with philosophical questions such as the nature
of God and his relations with the universe.
But a number of the assertions are concerned with quite definite historical
facts.
It is claimed that particular things happened at particular places and at
particular times.
For this claim there is evidence.
It may be good evidence or bad evidence, but it is the same kind of evidence
as we have to rely upon for our knowledge of other historical events, such
as the assassination of Julius Caesar or the battle of Hastings.
What, after all, is proof?
Given certain things which you take for granted (axioms and postulates) you
can prove that the three angles of a triangle are together equal to two
right angles.
But you cannot prove, in that sense, that Julius Caesar was murdered, or
that Harold was shot in the eye by an arrow at the battle of Hastings.
We accept these as facts (if we do) on two grounds:
first, that documents, which we (or people we trust) regard as trustworthy,
record these events;
and secondly, that these events had consequences which set up a chain of
cause and effect reaching right up to the present day.
In exactly the same way we know the alleged events in the
life of Jesus Christ partly from documentary evidence and partly through
their consequences.
The difficulty that people find in believing in those events does not really
arise from the unsatisfactory nature of the evidence, but from the fact that
the events, as described by the Church, are not the kind of events of which
we have experience.
We find no difficulty, on the basis of our experience, in believing in the
murder of a dictator; though many of us may regret that such events do not
occur more frequently.
We may have, it is true, little or no direct experience of gentlemen being
shot in the eye with arrows;
but our experience tells us that it is quite
a likely thing to happen when arrows are flying around.
But of God becoming man we quite certainly have no experience at all.
That is why - quite apart from the evidence - so many people
are willing to accept much of the Church's creed, but cannot bring themselves
to believe in the 'miracles', and more particularly in the Virgin Birth and
the Resurrection.
Yet surely, if we accept at all the stupendous fact of God becoming man,
we ought not really to be surprised if not only he showed himself, as man,
to have special qualities and powers, but also if his entry into and departure
from human life were attended by special circumstances.
It would be much more surprising if it were otherwise.
But we must return to this later.
For the moment we are speaking of evidence.
What is the evidence for the assertions in the Creed about
the birth, life, and death of Christ?
Most people would probably answer, the Gospels.
Yes; but the Gospels are not the first evidence.
The first evidence is to be found in the letters of Saint Paul, usually called
the EPISTLES.
No one has any reasonable doubt that most of the Epistles
are genuine letters written by Saint Paul, more
or less between AD45 and AD60.
These letters are, then, first-hand evidence, not of the truth of Saint Paul's
beliefs, but at any rate of what those beliefs were.
Now it can be stated without fear of contradiction that if
any reasonable person will take the trouble to read Saint
Paul's First Epistle to the Corinthians,
which scholars have concluded
was written somewhere between AD50 and AD 55,
he will be forced to admit (whatever else he may think about Saint Paul)
that Saint Paul did claim to know about certain historical facts and did
publicly proclaim those facts as genuine;
and that amongst those facts were the following:
Indeed, Saint Paul is so dead certain of his facts that he says in so many
words
(though the Authorized Version puts it more politely) that,
if the Resurrection did not take place,
Christianity is bunk and you need not waste time over it.
This does not, of course, prove Saint Paul to have been right.
He may have been bluffing,
or he may have been mistaken.
We, living nearly 2,000 years after Saint Paul, and perhaps 3,000 years
after Homer, are rather apt, with some excuse, to lump them together as almost
legendary figures of the distant past.
But the difference between Saint Paul and Homer is that Homer, whoever he
was, made no pretence to be writing about things which happened at a particular
date and of which persons still living were witnesses.
His stories do not pretend to be more than fairy tales of the 'once upon
a time' variety.
But Saint Paul was openly preaching and writing
about things that had either actually happened within the past twenty-five
years or so,
or had not happened at all.
It is quite impossible to explain his attitude,
and the atmosphere in which such a letter as the First Epistle to the Corinthians
could be not only written but,
what is more important,
taken seriously by those who read it,
except on the basis that those who claimed to have been witnesses of the
Resurrection
had been able to carry conviction?
and to keep it up for several years?
to an extent which,
taking into account the inherent improbability of the story,
is incredible on the assumption that they were either liars or nincompoops.
We can now turn to THE GOSPELS.
Saint Paul's letters were written down for the simple reason that they were
letters;
and they were preserved because those who received them thought
a lot of Saint Paul and of them.
The Gospels (so far as the researches of scholars show) were not written
down until later.
So long as the original witnesses were alive, they could tell their own story,
and it could be passed on by word of mouth.
Those were not the days of cheap printing and popular journalism.
But as time went on, it was found necessary to make permanent records of
the original teaching,
and so we have
THE GOSPELS 'according to' MATTHEW, MARK, LUKE, and JOHN.
Any amount has been written about the authorship and exact date of
the Gospels,
but all this need not worry us here.
The important thing is that they show what was believed and taught by the
Church in very early times.
If we read the four Gospels and put together the which they purport to give, we can summarize it very baldly something like this:
That, in barest outline, is the story as accepted at the
time when the Gospels were written down.
What can we say of its value as evidence?
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