I have been an admirer of Peter Williams scholarship and communication ability for some time. (There is at least one video of his up on the ChosenRebel Blog that gives testimony to both.) Recently, I started reading his 2018 book on the reliability of the gospels. It does not disappoint. Here’s a brief quote from chapter 1 to wet your appetite for some forgotten facts of history.
What Do Non-Christian Sources Tell Us?
Tacitus tells us that at the time of the Great Fire in AD 64, there were many Christians in Rome. He uses the Latin phrase multitudo ingens, “vast multitude.” Christianity had clearly spread a long way, since the distance, as the crow flies, between Jerusalem and Rome is around 2,300 kilometers (1,430 miles), greater than the distance between Edinburgh and the north of Morocco, or between New York City and Havana.
The rapid spread of Christianity may have relevance for investigating the reliability of the Gospels. Surely, the more widespread Christianity became, the harder it would have been for anyone to change its message and beliefs. This would have been particularly so if the Christians were paying a high price for their faith.
Can We Trust the Gospels
by Peter J. Williams, (Crossway, 2018), 23.
Think about what you just read. Just 31 years after the events of passion week, 31 years after the crucifixion, just 31 years after the resurrection, Tacitus, a Roman historian, who has no love for Christians—at one point he calls us “a disease”—says that there was a “vast multitude” of Christians already Rome. That is one of the reasons the second paragraph above is so important. Despite the high price that Christians were paying for their belief in Christ, they began to grow so rapidly that Nero could use them as a scapegoat for the fire he (Nero) started to burn down Rome so he could rebuild it on his own grand design!
Praise God for scholarship that looks long and hard at texts in foreign languages and manuscripts from deserts!
Praise God for leaving evidence for scholars to trace down and present to the world on the reliability of gospels and the New Testament.
Praise God for a faith with facts.
ChosenRebel's Blog 