Sublime

Galatians.

They read it not as a story that carried a universal human meaning but, in Nietzsche’s words, as a ‘historical reality’.

“The risen Lord is not the historical Jesus behind the Gospels, but the Christ of the apostolic preaching, of the whole New Testament” (65).

I am merely attempting to explain why and how I continue to find traditional Christian doctrines and confessions “true,” why I’m willing to confess the creeds, even though I am a critical scholar who knows much of the Bible is not “true” when taken as history or science. This is not an apology but an attempt at explanation and illustration.

Mark’s gospel is an exposition of the deity of Jesus. The first biography of Jesus ever written is designed to teach that Jesus is Yahweh.

The Bible is an unreliable witness when it comes to ancient history, having been written by so many authors and revised so much over time. Many scholars believe the stories in the Old Testament to have been written down in the late Iron Age – drawing on earlier oral histories, of course, but with a healthy dose of legend mixed in.

We need not regret that the books of many fathers and councils have, by God’s grace, disappeared. If they had all remained in existence, no room would be left for anything but books; and yet all of them together would not have improved on what one finds in the Holy Scriptures.

Many of the modern controversies surrounding the Bible—for example,