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Show More on the reliability of the Bible I By REV. ERIC V. KAELBERER Pastor of Cross of Christ Lutheran Church Last week we began an article on the reliability and truthfulness of ! the Old and New Testament Scrip tures. In that first article I said it would be foolish to base one's faith on something that is only probable at best and unreliable. Last week we looked at some of the Jewish sources which verify the Gospel of Jesus Christ and the events of the New Testament. In today's article we will turn to some of the Roman sources. Just before Jesus' death we are told that the sky became dark at mid-day. The day Jesus died noon looked like midnight. The Gospels record this for us (Matthew 27:45, Mark 15:33, and Luke 23:44). A Gentile (non-Jew, but also non-Christian) non-Christian) writer by the name of Thallus also wrote of the strange darkness at noon. This non-Christian non-Christian writer verified that the darkness came. He discounted it as a mere eclipse of the sun. But this could not have been so because a solar eclipse could not have taken place at the time of the full moon, and it was the season of the Pachal full moon (Passover festival) when Jesus died. One of the greatest Roman historians histo-rians of the days of Nero was named Cornelius Tacitus, who was born between 52 and 54 and wrote a history of Rome under the Emperors. Emper-ors. He wrote, later in life, of the great fires in Rome in 64 and described de-scribed how it was widely believed that Nero had started the fire so that he could later rebuild the city and gain honor for himself. Tacitus continues: "Therefore, to scotch the rumor, Nero substituted as culprits, cul-prits, and punished with the utmost refinements of cruelty, a class of men, loathed for their vices, whom the crowd styled Christians. Christus, from whom they got their name, had been executed by sentence sent-ence of the procurator Pontius Pilate Pi-late when Tiberias was emperor; and the pernicious superstition was checked for a short time, only to break out afresh, not only in Judea, the home of the plague, but in Rome itself, where all the horrible and shameful things in the world collect and find a home." (Tacitus, Annals, xv.44) In this report by Tacitus we find some interesting facts. He did not write from a Christian perspective. That is obvious. But he also did not write from a Jewish point of view or from Jewish sources, for the Jews would have referred to the Savior as Jesus and not by the title, "Christ" and would have corrected cor-rected the misspelling of "Christus" "Christ-us" because the word "Christ" stood for the Hebrew word, "Messiah." "Mes-siah." The Jews who did not believe be-lieve Jesus was the "Chrisfwould never have given Him that distinguished disting-uished title. So what, what is the point of this and last week's articles about the truthfulness of the Old and New-Testament New-Testament Scriptures? Simply this: those who attack the witness of Christian writings and the historicity histor-icity of Jesus and His life events, have not one leg to stand on. The earliest proponents of Christianity welcomed the fullest examination and the most careful scrutiny of their message. The events which they proclaimed were not simply to follow believers, believ-ers, and not simply proclaimed in closed rooms or dark shadows, but as St. Paul did in Acts, to King Agi ippa, to those in authority, with the power to check out and verify whether what was said was true. At the bottom line, if the events are true, then we believe the entire message to be equally true. As Lutheran Christians we stand or fall on the printed word of the Old and New Testaments and its truthfulness. truth-fulness. That is why we make such a fuss over verifying every doctrine, doc-trine, every belief, everything we do by the Living Word of God. |