It’s important to realise that Christianity is not an abstract philosophy or collection of timeless truths. Christianity is built upon a claim verifiable in history.  It’s built on the witness of the first Christians who testified to the physical resurrection of Jesus from the grave.

This fact seems to be overlooked by so much of the literature associated with the ‘New Atheists’ and their movement.  They often equate all religious belief as mere superstition on the level of believing in Santa Claus and the tooth-fairy.  It may serve a usefulness for a time, but we ought to grow out of it as soon as possible.

It’s important therefore for Christians to put some time into these issues because unless they are absolutely convinced of the historicity of those events, then their witness will be blunted.

It’s interesting as we go through Luke’s gospel (here’s the latest talk) the number of times where Luke intersects with the verifiable events of history (we’ve looked recently at 1:1-4, 2:1-2 and shortly we’ll look at in church 3:1-4).

If you’re thinking through these things can I suggest three areas for testing:

1. The events themselves.
2. The documentary record of those events.
3. The transmission of those documents to us today.

James de Costobadie did a slot last night on the reliability of the New Testament documents which is a good start if you’re interested in that area.  You can download a copy of his talk here.  He also recommended a book by Dr Paul Barnett - Is the New Testament History? which you can get from our bookstall.  The revised edition has an interesting chapter on the comparative evidence for the Islamic claims to historicity.