On various religious/atheists’ newsgroups, an assertion
sometimes appears that goes something like this:

‘If your reason for believing in God or being a Christian
is that you are impressed by Jesus, how can you know whether he
really did or said those things? Haven’t modern scholars debunked
the historicity of the Gospels? The real Jesus lies buried in
there somewhere, probably, but you can’t really separate fact
from fiction/myth/legend…’

Then four writers may be cited: Bishop Spong, Dr
Barbara Thiering, A.N.Wilson, and A.D. Crossan…

Just for fun, let’s begin with excerpts from C.S.
Lewis’ well-known essay, ‘Modern Theology and Biblical Criticism’
(Christian Reflections, Eerdmans, 1967, pp. 152 ff.). He has four
‘bleats’ about modern New Testament scholarship:

1. [If a scholar] tells me that something in a Gospel
is legend or romance, I want to know how many legends and romances
he has read, how well his palate is trained in detecting them
by the flavour…

I have been reading poems, romances, vision-literature,
legends, myths all my life. I know what they are like. I know
that not one [of the stories in the Gospel of John, for example]
is like this… Either this is reportage – though it may no doubt
contain errors – pretty close up to the facts; nearly as close
as Boswell. Or else, some unknown writer in the second century,
without known predecessors or successors, suddenly anticipated
the whole technique of modern, novelistic, realistic narrative…

2. All theology of the liberal type involves at some
point – and often involves throughout – the claim that the real
behaviour and purpose and teaching of Christ came very rapidly
to be misunderstood and misrepresented by his followers, and has
been recovered or exhumed only by modern scholars… The idea
that any… writer should be opaque to those who lived in the
same culture, spoke the same language, shared the same habitual
imagery and unconscious assumptions, and yet be transparent to
those who have none of these advantages, is in my opinion preposterous.
There is an a priori improbability in it which almost no argument
and no evidence could counterbalance.

3. Thirdly, I find in these theologians a constant
use of the principle that the miraculous does not occur… This
is a purely philosophical question. Scholars, as scholars, speak
on it with no more authority than anyone else. The canon ‘if miraculous,
unhistorical’ is one they bring to their study of the texts, not
one they have learned from it. If one is speaking of authority,
the united authority of all the Biblical critics in the world
counts here for nothing.

4. My fourth bleat is my loudest and longest. Reviewers
[of my own books, and of books by friends whose real history I
knew] both friendly and hostile… will tell you what public events
had directed the author’s min to this or that, what other authors
influenced him, what his over-all intention was, what sort of
audience he principally addressed, why – and when – he did everything…
My impression is that in the whole of my experience not one of
these guesses has on any one point been right; the method shows
a record of 100 per cent failure.

The ‘assured results of modern scholarship’, as to
the way in which an old book was written, are ‘assured’, we may
conclude, only because those who knew the facts are dead and can’t
blow the gaff… The Biblical critics, whatever reconstructions
they devise, can never be crudely proved wrong. St. Mark is dead.
When they meet St. Peter there will be more pressing matters to
discuss.

However… we are not fundamentalists… Of course
we agree that passages almost verbally identical cannot be independent.
It is as we glide away from this into reconstructions of a subtler
and more ambitious kind that our faith in the method wavers…
The sort of statement that arouses our deepest scepticism is the
statement that something in a Gospel cannot be historical because
it shows a theology or an ecclesiology too developed for so early
a date…

Such are the reactions of one bleating layman…
Once the layman was anxious to hide the fact that he believed
so much less than the Vicar; he now tends to hide the fact that
he believes so much more…