Lets talk Apologetics

Apologetics, first of all, is a term that in greek means 'In Defense Of.' and naturally, thats what Christian Apologetics is, defending the Christian faith from non-believers, and opponents of Christianity.

So I'm taking a class on New Testament Theology, and I'm going to share some prominent New Testament apologetics with ya, because they're important. The New Testament is probably the most widely opposed bit of Christianity, what with miracles, and the various contradictions amongst the 4 gospels.

Some people go as far as to say that the 4 gospels themselves are proof that the events surrounding Jesus' life are greatly exaggerated. But an apologetic response to this point is quite fun, because it can be taken in three stages.

1. Back before the church officially adapted the 4 gospels as canon, the church really needed to maintain it's legitimacy, because Christianity was in essence, based off of the life of Jesus, and the accounts of Matthew, John, Mark and Luke were the oldest historical records of Jesus, especially the events surrounding his death, so the church clung to them, accepting the apparent risk of the differences amongst the documents.

2. SECONDLY, the apocryphal writings such as the Gospel of Peter, and Timothy, they are heretical, in that they take bits and pieces of the 4 Gospels, and harmonize them into one singular gospel. But the important thing here, is that they pull from the Gospels (Mostly Luke, for some odd reason) - and then they go about butchering stuff after that, but the point is, even the heretical works pull their proof of credibility from the four gospels.

3. Third, and most important of the apologetic responses is this. John claims that if everything that Jesus had done were to be recorded, the world couldn't hold all of the books. I think this is a powerful metaphor implying that the 4 Gospels are in fact 4 interpretations of the One Gospel of Jesus Christ. The story is so vast, and complex, that no one man's account can correctly relay all of the information effectively, so we've ended up with 4, and even yet, we still can't grasp it completely, as Jesus is much larger than life, but we believe the Gospels as true, because he's intimately close to each of us.