Local News and the Gospels in Action

A few weeks ago, I remember surfing on the internet, and somehow, the following story came to my attention:

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A 72-year-old man has been released from custody on conditions after historical sexual assaults were reported to the Ontario Provincial Police.

The Leeds County OPP Crime Unit launched an investigation after receiving information in October 2015. Sgt. Kristine Rae of the OPP told the Whig-Standard on Wednesday afternoon that four male victims reported being assaulted between the late 1960s and 1990. At the time of the assaults, which occurred in Ontario, the victims were between 12 to 17 years old.

As a result, officers executed a search warrant on a residence in Rockport on Tuesday.

Arrested at the residence was Ronald Howard Huck. He has been charged by the OPP with three counts each of gross indecency and indecent assault on a male as well as one count each of sexual exploitation and sexual assault. He was released on a promise to appear in court and an officer-in-charge undertaking with conditions. He is scheduled to appear in Brockville’s Ontario Court of Justice on June 10.

http://www.thewhig.com/2016/04/13/opp-charge-rockport-man-with-historical-sexual-assaults

http://www.recorder.ca/2016/04/13/police-historical-sex-assault

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Now the reason I bring up this rather sad story is for one simple reason: it helps to analogically show us that the Gospels, at least concerning the issue of when they were written, can still be sufficiently reliable as eyewitness testimony, even if written decades after the fact, to form a reasonable belief that they are true, just like the police in this case formed the reasonable grounds to lay criminal charges against this man on the basis of eye-witness testimony even though some of the crimes he is alleged to have committed occurred approximately 50 years ago, meaning in the late 1960s. 

Now, having worked these types of cases before, I can almost guarantee that the complainants in this matter did not write their story down before they told it to the police. In fact, they might not even have told anyone else about the story until they spoke to the police for the first time. And yet their testimony was still credible enough, even after all those years, to be reasonably believed by seasoned investigators. So even if a skeptic tries to claim that the Gospels were not written for a generation or two after the death of Jesus, that fact, in and of itself, is by no means a clear or certain testament of their lack of reliability, for as we have seen, there are real-life cases today where we take very old testimony seriously enough to charge and arrest people for it.

Is 'Jesus Denial' for the Psychologically Weak

It is interesting to note that from a psychological point-of-view, denial is a well-known and rather primitive psychological defensive mechanism, and it is true that all too often, and in a great many people, it is simply easier and even desirable, from a mental perspective, to deny the truth of an uncomfortable and challenging and disconcerting fact than it is to accept that truth but then struggle against it—this is much like an alcoholic who would rather deny his broken condition instead of accepting his problem and dealing with it, for while the latter option is mentally challenging, the former choice is psychologically easy—and so, in light of this psychological fact about denial, it is thus not irrational to wonder, or even to reasonably suspect, that perhaps one of the main reasons why certain unbelievers wish to deny that the man Jesus Christ ever existed, even though they do so in the teeth of all the historical evidence, is because they know that if they do admit to the actual existence of this most influential historical figure, then, at the same time, they cannot but contend with the various historical evidences that also support the inference that this man Jesus resurrected from the dead, and so the sheer denial of Christ’s existence as a historical person suddenly becomes a quite desirable psychological option if one does not wish to contend with the other historical claims that flow out of his existence, and thus it would not be surprising if some unbelievers of mentally weaker stock actually took this option as the way to ease their psychological burden and mental challenge that his existence poses to them; and while my claim concerning such unbelievers is, of course, little more than speculation at this point—although not necessarily an unreasonable speculation—it is an idea that could ostensibly be tested in some type of empirical manner, and it would indeed be fascinating to see just what the results of such empirical tests would be…one can only hope that at some future date, such tests are indeed carried out, for the results might surprise both theists and atheists alike.