Perhaps I’m odd in this way, but I find that one of the main things that bolsters my faith is the flimsiness of objections to Christian belief.  Sometimes these objections catch us off guard if we haven’t thought them through, but on more investigation, we find that they just seem ignorant.  I remember one of the very first Sunday school groups I was in after becoming a Christian, that a couple of the college students in the group, who had grown up in the church, said the Gospels aren’t reliable because John’s is so much different than the other 3.  In their view, the 4 writers couldn’t have been writing about the same person, and perhaps as a result Jesus was not real.  First, I had to deal with my shock that these people were in a Bible study even though they had serious doubts about Scripture’s reliability and authority, as well as about Jesus’ identity.  Second, I realized I didn’t have a good answer to this “problem.”  So, in this post I’m sharing what I discovered since this early experience.

Most Bible students and scholars agree that Jesus spent about 3 years of His life in public ministry., from His first miracle of turning water to wine in Cana, on through His resurrection and ascension to heaven.  Yet, we only have 4 short books, the Gospels, telling us what He did during his entire life of about 33 years, with a focus on the last 3.  To me, it’s surprising we have so little documentation of Jesus’ life especially since the Gospels make it clear that Jesus was a very busy person, often having to hide from the crowds that followed Him everywhere.  Why is this?  Why isn’t there more to read about Jesus’ life?

Somewhere I read that each Gospel is really a passion narrative (a story of His suffering, death and resurrection) preceded by a brief introduction.  Compare this with a modern biography of an important figure that might be hundreds of pages.  The 4 writers weren’t writing a biography of Jesus in the way we might expect them to but were trying to give us enough information about who He was and what He’s done for us so that we have a basis for believing in Him.  Writing for different audiences and at different times, the writers selected what they knew about Jesus to fit what they wanted to communicate.  They weren’t trying to answer every question we might have.  That would have taken much longer, and wasn’t really necessary.

In John’s Gospel, the very last verse (21:25) says:

“Now there are also many other things that Jesus did. Were every one of them to be written, I suppose that the world itself could not contain the books that would be written.”

As I noted, John’s gospel is sometimes criticized as inauthentic because it is so different than the other ones.  But how John closes his Gospel shows that there was so much from Jesus’ ministry that he could have chosen to write, and that he didn’t include everything.  John just made different choices than the others.  For example, John records only 7 miracles that Jesus performed, when in reality there must have been hundreds or thousands.  The Gospels say Jesus was sometimes up all night healing people.

John also wrote about 7 “I am” statements that aren’t in the other Gospels.  To John, the number 7 seemed to be important and maybe useful tool for organizing his thoughts among all he had to choose from.  Considering Jesus spent hundreds or thousands of hours teaching His disciples and others, it’s not naïve to think that John alone would find this group of similar statements and decide to structure His Gospel around them.  They likely were spoken months and even years apart from each other, so the pattern might not have been as obvious as it is to us, who are reading a brief, curated summary.

So, sometimes when objections to our faith catch us off guard, it sometimes means that the person making the objection (and us) haven’t thought it through.  We may not figure out the answers to everything, because God wants us to trust, not necessarily understand, but knowing that He is reliable doesn’t require our knowledge to be complete or perfect.

As one of my favorite Bible commentators, Warren Wiersbe, often wrote: “We do not live on explanations; we live on promises.”  We can’t know everything, but we can know as Psalm 40:5 proclaims, that:

“You have multiplied, O LORD my God,
            your wondrous deeds and your thoughts toward us;
            none can compare with you!
I will proclaim and tell of them,
            yet they are more than can be told.”

Amen.