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One of our few advantages as preachers in these postmodern times is that we preach the person of Jesus. Just about everyone respects Jesus, though we might differ as to the nature of his person. Many people find it easier to accept the gospel portrait of Jesus as legend than as historical fact. Influenced by the naturalistic worldview we are so accustomed to, it becomes difficult to accept the idea that Jesus was actually who he said he was. Yet, as C.S. Lewis famously put it, Jesus is either a demon, a madman, a liar, … or God.
Preachers looking to help their listeners to a deepened confidence in the Lordship of Jesus would be well advised to consider Greg Boyd and Paul Eddy’s Lord or Legend? Boyd, senior pastor at Woodland Hills Church in St. Paul, Minnesota, and Eddy, professor of biblical and theological studies at Bethel University, didn’t come to their convictions easily. “Faith has not always come easily for us,” they admit. Yet they have helpfully come to the thesis that “if one remains genuinely open tot he historical possibility that the Gospels’ portrait of Jesus is generally reliable – that is, if one doesn’t assume at the start that the story can’t be reliable – one will find many compelling reasons for concluding that this portrait of Jesus is the most historically probable understanding available.”
Applying proven tests of historical reliability, the authors show why the gospel presentation could not have been historicized fiction. Those tests are…
1. Do we possess copies of the work that are reasonably close to the original?
2. Did the author intend to report reliable history?
3. Were the authors of the gospels in a position to write reliable history?
4. To what degree does the author’s bias compromise the document’s reliability?
5. Does the document include incidental details or casual information?
6. Does the document include self-damaging details?
7. Is the document internally consistent?
8. Does the document contain inherently implausible events?
9. Does literary evidence corroborate the claims made by the document?
10. Does archeological evidence corroborate the document?
The authors offer credible scholarship in a way that is highly accessible and compelling. At 183 pages, the book is not at all difficult to read. I can imagine preachers building a sermon or bible class serious around the contents of this book.
Personally, I found the author’s conclusion entirely convincing and compelling: “The point of this book,” they write, “has been to persuade readers that choosing to have faith in Jesus, and therefore to live one’s life submitted to him as Lord, is the option that is most consistent with the historical evidence and the alternative that makes sense out of, and itself fulfills, the deepest longings of the human heart (154).”