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History and Christianity

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This text was first published in the 1960s and has proven to be a classic work inspiring other Christian apologists like Josh McDowell. The book arose out of a series of lectures delivered in Canada. Montgomery's style is eminently readable. He sets out three essential tests in historiography and applies each test to the gospel records. His purpose is to demonstrate that the gospel accounts are historically sound and reliable sources of data for the life and teachings of Jesus of Nazareth. From the quantity and quality of extant Greek manuscripts of the gospels, the internal eyewitness value of the documents and the external verification of them, Montgomery shows we can depend on them. He then explores the portrait of Jesus as the incarnation of God and delves into the evidence for his bodily resurrection from the dead. This is a superb, succinct treatment of the subject, and its continuing circulation in print is a testament to its worth. A book that non-Christians can grapple with if they doubt the veracity of the Gospels.

In an age of controversy concerning the historicity of Jesus of Nazareth, Dr. Montgomery's book is still a refreshing look at who is Jesus. If you want to read a text devoid of the higher critcism tactics utilized by the "Jesus Seminar" then this is definitely a book that you should buy!

John Warwick Montgomery (b. 1931) is one of the major philosophical apologists of the 20th century. He is also a trained lawyer, which influenced his "historical/legal" approach to Christian apologetics. He is perhaps best known as a writer for his book History and Christianity, as well as for his debates with the infamous atheist Madalyn Murray O'Hair (1967), with the "Death of God" theologian Thomas Altizer (reprinted in Montgomery's book The Suicide of Christian Theology), as well as with Joseph Fletcher, who wrote the book Situation Ethics, The New Morality. (The Montgomery/Fletcher debate is reprinted in Situation ethics; true or false?: A dialogue between Joseph Fletcher and John Warwick Montgomery (Dimension books).)

This brief (110 pages) book began in 1963 as two lectures, which were subsequently expanded into four articles in HIS Magazine in 1964-1965. C.S. Lewis even wrote a letter (one of the very last Lewis wrote) to Montgomery, lauding the book (the letter is printed in the book). Josh McDowell's Evidence That Demands a Verdict gave a lot of attention to Montgomery's book, as well.

Here are some representative quotations from the book:

"This is not to say that New Testament writers did not ever employ sources. We have seen that Luke expressly asserts that he did so. But with the small time interval between Jesus' life and the Gospel records, the Church did not create a 'Christ of faith' out of a simple, moralistic Jesus."

"Would the disciples of Jesus, steeped in the Jewish faith, have deified a mere man, thereby contradicting the central tenet of the Jewish faith, that 'thou shalt have no other gods before me'?"

Montgomery's arguments (remember he is also a lawyer) retain their pungency, even nearly fifty years after they were written. This is an essential work of Christian apologetics.

In this short, highly readable book, Dr. Montgomery defends the New Testament against its critics by going directly to the original documents themselves and subjecting them to the tests of reliability used by historians and literary critics. What the reader comes away with is the undeniable conclusion that the Bible is an accurate presentation of what eye witnesses to the life of Jesus Christ documented. Also,compared to other documents universally regarded as accurate and authentic even though they were written more than one thousand years after the original manuscripts were supposedly written, the earliest known manuscripts of the books of the New Testament were written less than 300 years after the events documented and their accuracy would hold up in any court of law.

This is an excellent resource for those Christians who are witnessing to skeptics who may be more amenable to the Gospel presentation once certain intellectual, legal, and historical/critical hurdles are overcome.

Dr. Montgomery's book is an outstanding treatment of the historicity of the New Testament. It is well written, succint, and it complete guts the arguments of the "scholars" from the ineptly named "Jesus Seminar". What is even better is that it was written many years prior to their "scholarship".

To judge from the comments of many evangelical Christians, _History and Christianity_ by John Warwick Montgomery is a classic of historical apologetics. One might expect, therefore, to find therein a good case for the historical accuracy of the traditional Christian claims about Jesus. But to the contrary, Montgomery's case crumbles under the slightest scrutiny.

In this review, I can only touch on a tiny fraction of the fallacies and deceptions perpetrated by the author. (I do not accuse him of deliberate dishonesty. By using the word "deceptions", I am referring to the effect, not the motive.)

The first chapter (out of four) consists of a critique of a philosophy professor (Avrum Stroll) who had given a public lecture (at the University of British Columbia, in the early 1960s) that expressed a viewpoint contrary to Christian tradition. Dr Stroll is treated, for convenience, as representative of all those who do not consider the New Testament to be historically reliable.

Montgomery's case against Stroll is a mess. For example, his first accusation - that Stroll simply accepts the judgement of modern authorities rather than facing the evidence directly - is blatantly hypocritical, for the citation of an authority is a legitimate tactic, of which Montgomery himself makes frequent use throughout his booklet. He goes on to complain that Stroll's favourite authorities are all "radical" - which, in the context of biblical scholarship, merely means "non-traditionalist" - when, again, a parallel charge could be directed at Montgomery himself, who is also highly selective with respect to the authorities he cites. He comes perilously close to ruling all radical scholarship out of court from the outset, thus turning his entire case into a huge logical circle.

This selectivity sets the tone for the rest of the book. Montgomery repeatedly exaggerates the significance of any speck of evidence that appears to support his case, and repeatedly fails to acknowledge the existence of evidence to the contrary, even in cases where it is hard to imagine that he might be unaware of it.

For example, when he addresses the bibliographical evidence in order to argue for the stability of the New Testament text (in the second chapter, which aims to establish the historical reliability of the New Testament), he refers to the impressive number of available manuscripts and the great antiquity of some of them. Given nothing more than that, he treats the reliability of the documents as established! He says nothing about the degree of variation that exists in the New Testament manuscripts, though he jumps quickly to conclusions that would require its consideration. (And no wonder he avoids that topic: The New Testament manuscripts show a vast number of textual variations, some of which can only be explained by postulating the willingness of some copyists to insert their own theological preconceptions into the text. See, for example, Bart Ehrman, _Misquoting Jesus_, Oxford University Press, 2005.)

In his examination of internal evidence (regarding the reliability of the content of the Gospels), Montgomery makes much of the claims of the Gospel writers to be relying on eyewitness testimony. But we cannot investigate whether those (anonymous) writers have a track record of reliability. Unlike many ancient Greek and Roman writers, they show no sign of acknowledging the existence of conflicting claims, or acknowledging the possibility of doubt about any of the details, or identifying their sources (let alone discussing the relative merits of their sources). Yet "Matthew" would have us believe that he found out the details of private conversations among Jesus' enemies (27:62-65), without telling us how he found out! Montgomery fails to acknowledge these problems. He also fails to address the matter of contradictions among the different Gospel accounts.

His treatment of the external evidence is hardly better. He fails to acknowledge the nasty ideological disputes (about the nature and teachings of Jesus) that troubled the Church from very early in its history - disputes in which the preferred methods were more political than intellectual. And the only substantial evidence he presents is filtered through the fourth-century work of Eusebius (whose reliability is widely questioned). For example, the opinions of Irenaeus (late second century) are given weight by Eusebius' claim of a third-degree chain of acquaintance from Irenaeus to Jesus.

Montgomery's attempt to dismiss modern "form criticism" consists mostly of irrelevant jabs, along with a few outright falsehoods (such as the claim that form criticism depends on "presuppositions against the supernatural"). He appears not to understand what the method is for. (His disdain for the form critics is the more bewildering in light of his own acceptance of at least one of their conclusions: He accepts the primacy of Mark's Gospel, in spite of the importance he attaches to the witness of Irenaeus, according to whom Matthew's Gospel came first.)

Altogether, Montgomery's case for the historical reliability of the New Testament falls flat. So the arguments of his third chapter, being concerned with the consequences of recognising those documents as reliable, hardly matter. Yet the relentless pace of the author's sleight-of-hand tricks shows no sign of flagging. He starts by declaring inadmissible all observations of differences among the portrayals of Jesus by different New Testament writers, he goes on to commit repeated violence against New Testament passages in order to force them to say what he wants them to say, and he fails to notice numerous New Testament passages that point in a direction contrary to his conclusions.

Most of the fourth chapter is dedicated to (an extension of) the popular Liar/Lunatic/Lord trilemma. Here, Montgomery resorts to astounding lengths of hyperbole in order to dismiss the possibility that Jesus could have been a charlatan or a madman.

His efforts to dismiss the possibility that Jesus could have been misrepresented are more interesting. The substance of his argument is twofold: First, Jesus' life was contrary to what was expected of a Messiah, so he could not have been elevated falsely to the status of Messiah. Second, making a man out to be God is so contrary to the teachings and instincts of Judaism that Jesus could not have been elevated falsely to the status of deity. But a similar prior improbability applies to a _correct_ attribution of divine status to Jesus. If you can explain how the earliest Christians became convinced that Jesus was not only the Messiah but was (in a sense) God incarnate, under the assumption that this conviction represents the truth, then you have already accomplished the most difficult part of constructing a plausible conjecture for how they may have reached the same conclusion erroneously. Montgomery's observations here do as much damage (collaterally) to his own position as they do to the radical positions that he opposes.

He presents Jesus' resurrection as the mechanism by which the disciples innate aversion to deifying a man was overcome. (Incidentally, where in the New Testament are the signs that the disciples were afflicted by such an aversion? Where are the signs of struggle to overcome it?) Naturally, he spends some time discussing the evidence regarding the resurrection. In keeping with his usual modus operandi, he attaches a great deal of weight to any canonical writer's protest of accuracy, and he fails to acknowledge that the Gospel accounts do not even agree with each other. (For example, did the disciples first see the risen Jesus in Galilee, as Matthew claims, or was it in Jerusalem?)

Montgomery attacks Venturini's "swoon theory" (that Jesus passed out on the cross and recovered later), and similar (unspecified) theories, as being "infinitely more improbable than the resurrection itself." He does not explain how he calculates this probability. (It is worth mentioning, in passing, that Josephus witnessed at least one crucifixion where the victim was taken down and then found to be alive.)

And here we come to a central problem. Whose idea of probability should we follow? If we can ignore our own experience, according to which dead people do not (in general) come back to life if they have been dead for more than a day, then why can we not also ignore whatever analysis leads Montgomery to assert that the "swoon theory" is "infinitely" improbable? Indeed, why can we not ignore all his arguments against the ideas that Jesus may have been a liar, or a lunatic, or misrepresented? Even if we grant, for the sake of argument, that these arguments are very good (though I contend otherwise), how could they be better than the arguments from repeated human experience about what does or does not happen to dead bodies? For that is the nature of any defence of miracles: One is asked to disregard all humanly-accessible knowledge about what is probable or possible. It is simply not consistent to embed such an argument in a series of arguments against the plausibility of alternative explanations.

Imagining himself (erroneously) to have supported his claim that "the weight of historical probability lies on the side of the validity of Jesus' claim to be God incarnate, the Savior of man, and the coming Judge of the world," Montgomery goes on to urge the reader to respond by taking a _willful_ step toward belief. This is nothing more than a way of dissuading us from taking a closer look at the arguments presented thus far, or from seeking other evidence, whether for or against his position. These are the tactics of a salesman, not a scholar. He asks us to rush to a judgement - and a _committed_ one at that, as if any human opinion about any historical evidence could possibly deserve such commitment or such haste.

_History and Christianity_ fails miserably to present a cogent case for the veracity of the traditional account of Jesus. Yet this booklet possesses, superficially, the "look and feel" of a solid argument. So those who are convinced that they already know the truth, but who desire reassurance in order to quell their own barely-perceived doubts, will find what they are looking for.