Lord Theory
Option 4: The only remaining option – The Lord Theory
His Claims are TRUE
> Knew & Told the Truth > Verified claims with well-supported events
Positive supports for this theory:
+1 Best explains the data
+2 All alternative theories lack explanatory power & scope, do not fit or explain
the data, have little to no supportive evidence, have extraordinary evidence
against, require unrealistic and unsupported belief, and are far and away inferior
+3 Increasing trend of supportive evidence
+4 Tied to evidence in multiple areas, making a comprehensively verified case
An event studied so intensely for over 2000 years, presents only the options 1 through 3 to choose from. If you think you have another, please contact us so it can be analyzed and added.
How do we evaluate the different models? What are the objective standards used?
- Does it fit with logical consistency
- Explanatory power and scope
- Faithful to the facts
- Avoids unwarranted assumptions
- Avoids poor logic, like ad hoc attempts to save the theory from contrary evidence
- Provides claims that can be tested for truth or inaccuracy, and trends upward in support
- Stands apart in the cumulative case, meaning when considering all applicable fields, the theory is supported better than the competitors
These are primary standards historians, scientists, attorneys, crime scene investigators (CSI), logicians, and everyone associated with evaluating evidence have relied upon. It is extraordinary how far separated the biblical option stands from all other theories – “One of the claims is not like the others.”
In addition, as noted in +3, as time goes on, and more and more evidence comes in, you can see the trend of evidence for the biblical model against all other models. Trends are important because there will always be disagreement about this or that piece of evidence and what it means, but over time, as the evidence grows and becomes better understood with new discoveries, one model trends upward beyond all others. And that is exactly what we see with the Christian model, as not only new understandings (for example, creeds), but also significant discoveries (for example, the Hittites, the Davidic tunnel, writing during Moses’ time) have bolstered the reliability of the Bible’s claims, and turned most of the objections against Christianity into phenomenal supports.
Furthermore, when you consider evidence in every area of study to support atheism, agnosticism, Buddhism, Chirstianity, Islam, etc., the comprehensive case for the Christian model is overwhelming, which makes it that much more likely it is accruate regarding the resurrection also.
Critics have attempted to combine theories, like the Coma + Hallucination, attempting to add explanatory scope, but at the same time, they just multiplied all the associated problems, and still end with lack of supportive evidence, greater unreasonable strain on credability, etc. The Christian model gives one simple, comprehensive explanation of all the facts, without resorting to unsupported and strained alternatives.
An atheist organization president at UC Berkeley provided no evidence to back up her coma + hallucination belief, couldn’t respond to the flaws in her belief, couldn’t detract from the positive evidence I provided for the Christian account, but still said she would not look further into the possibility that the biblical model may be accurate. She seemed to hold to her belief more emotionally than intellectually, but in the end it is her choice and her consequences to be faced if she chooses to stand on an inaccurate belief.
Currently, many opponents to the Christian model do not even attempt to bring up a theory to explain the evidence surrounding Jesus and the resurrection, they either:
- Only turn to negative claims against Christianity, instead of positive support for where they choose to stand – like a bad politician.
- Or, simply admit, “Something happened, but I don’t know what it could have been.”
A couple common negative objections are noted below, and later the “I don’t know” stance is evaluated.
– 1 Objection: Written 1000s years ago, we can’t trust we have what was originally written.
Answer 1: Why do you believe that? The claim above is a statement, not an argument with evidence. Worse, it goes against the evidence.
Answer 2: The actual scholars involved recognize that what we read today is what was originally written. Scholars
accept as certain about 99% of the 138,000 words, and about 1,400 words are debatable. This has always been made clear in the footnotes (see figure at right), and these 1% are inconsequential things, much is grammer or punctuation, and none touch any important issue not redundantly covered elsewhere.
Answer 3: The primary question to answer: Is there a God behind the bible, or not. If God exists, then do you really think God would be incapable of getting us the message he wanted to reach us? Why would you believe that? What evidence do you base that on?
Answer 4: People often bring up the “telephone game” as a comparison, in which a student is briefly shown a silly phrase, which they then whisper to another student, and so on, and finally the last student says out loud what they heard, and it often differs significantly from the original goofy phrase.
Some have claimed the Bible is similar, and we can’t trust the biblical writings because we don’t have the originals, and after two thousand years the copies of the Bible get messed up as in the phone game. It is true we don’t have the original copies, so how are the scholars certain the New Testament writings we read today in the Bible are the same as the originals? Aside from other facts the skeptics ignore, or are unaware of, such as how meticulous biblical manuscripts were copied, the fault-ridden comparison to the telephone game can be exposed with an exercise you can do with any group or class.
Consider how different the telephone becomes when the teacher writes down the original message, passes it to the first student, who writes down a copy of the message on their piece of paper, and passes the message on to the next student to copy, and so on. Also, the teacher and first few students get to move around the room and check the students down the line to ensure that a message important to them does not get altered.
The Gospel authors, and many of the eyewitnesses mentioned in the biblcial accounts were still alive when the first copies started, and the original authors’ students, as well as the early copies were circulating to ensure the copies stayed correct.
But what happens if some mistakes or changes do creep in? In the telephone game, only the last students’s message gets made public. What if instead the teracher collects all the copies and places them next to each other, so that all the copies can be compared to determine what the original message was. Even if some alterations had crept in, it would be simple to identify them based on the rest of the copies. This could be done even if the teacher’s original piece of paper with the message was lost. That is exactly what the scholars do with ancient writings, and this task was exceedingly easier for the biblical writings.
Dr. Daniel Wallace has been researching and cataloguing all the manuscript copies of the NT writings, and cannot keep up with all the findings. Dr. Wallace notes that if you look at some specific written work from ancient times, and stack up all the copies we have found of that work, then the average stack would be four feet high of the copies, which is very good as you can compare all the copies together and determine what was originally written. On a whole other level of checkability, if you take just the copies of the New Testament written in Greek, the stack would be one mile high! Now some of those are just parts of a book, or even parts of a page, but this mile high of evidence doesn’t even include the even greater number of manuscripts written in Latin, or in the Coptic language.
Thousands upon thousands of copies, from many different regions, can all be compared together to determine what was originally written. And even if zero copies of the New Testament existed, we could reproduce almost the entire New Testament just from the writings of the early church fathers, who quoted the New Testament in their writings.
We even have multiple “chains of custody,” where the writings were handed from one recognized person to the next (see one chain of custody example, staring with the apostle Peter, above), just as crime scene investigation (CSI) units do today with evidence collected at the scene of the investigation.[1]
– 2 Objection: “I have a problem with miracles?” See article on Miraculous Misunderstandings.
[1] James Warner Wallace, who was on Dateline mutliple times for cold-case crimes he solved, is a detective who applied his expertise to the biblical accounts in an attempt to disprove them. He became a Christian and provided an interesting read covering the facts in Cold-Case Christianity, and allowed me to use the image on this page.
The Bottom-Line:
- The biblical theory entirely fits the evidence
- The evidence is extraordinary: no other religious claim, or even comparable historic event, comes close
- The gap between the support for the biblical theory and all alternate theories is decisively wide
- Only a priori faulty logic or inaccurate assumptions that miracles must never occur would make another option plausible
- The trend of evidence & comprehensive case point directly to the biblical model
What does this mean?
Bad News:
The situation we are in, and our position with God, must be serious – if the cross was what was required to set things right between us and a Holy God.
Good News (or Gospel):
- God has opened the door to a relationship
- We have inherent value and we must be loved preciously – because like anything else, art, for example – value is determined by what one is willing to pay, and Jesus paid the full price
- Jesus’ claims of authority in and beyond life were confirmed with the resurrection, therefore, what you do with your relationship with Jesus is as serious and impactful as it gets.
- You have an opportunity to be loved by One in a position to know and ensure an existence beyond life here, and a hope, protection and joy that lasts, regardless of circumstances in your life.
In this life God reaches out to each of us, and we have the ability to choose to accept his plan, which comes with the sacrifice Jesus made for us, allowing us to be in a Heaven free of sin (things against God’s nature or character), or go a different way we choose, separating us from Jesus’ pardon and placing us in a position to be separated from God and all the good tied to that relationship.
So where do you stand? And why?
While there are many issues about this to discuss, for example, we can talk about whether this is fair, justice, whether God should have done it another way, why just being “a good person” isn’t enough, would God really send one to Hell for not accepting his plan, etc. These are all worth thinking about, and are in the Frequently Asked Questions section of the website, but none of these things change the reality of our situation: there is a personal God, who created the finely-tuned universe and us with a purpose, disclosed himself in an even more personal way through Jesus, and expects us to actively trust him.
Have you accepted what God offers? You are currently standing on one of several choices, which you will see clearly, maybe for the first time, in the next article.