“Don’t trust the Bible but you can trust us.”

 

This morning before church, my wife and I were drinking our coffee in the kitchen and watching CNN as is our habit. The CNN hosts started plugging the second season of “Finding Jesus,” which begins tonight. I definitely won’t be watching. I sat through a single episode of this series last season and it’s basically a group of modernist unbelievers trying to explain away God and the Bible.

Anyway, they said tonight’s opening episode will be focusing on Pontius Pilate among other things. They mentioned the Pilate Stone, which was excavated at Caesarea By The Sea in 1961. My blogosphere friend, Wally, who’s currently touring Israel, and I were discussing this stone just the other day! A fantastic archaeological find, the stone has Pilate’s name inscribed on it. Yes, there was a historical Pontius Pilate and there was and is a Jesus Christ.

The CNN morning hosts then interviewed a Catholic priest (sorry, didn’t catch the name) to get a “religious expert’s” take on Pilate. The priest said the writer of the Gospel of John (I always thought the apostle John was the writer?) purposely portrayed Pilate as weak and indecisive because he was trying to give the impression that the Jews were largely responsible for Christ’s crucifixion, not the Roman Gentiles. The priest went on to say the Gospel of John was written following the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple in 70 AD, afterwhich the Jewish nation was in complete disarray, so the author was catering to a Gentile audience and its prejudices rather than to a Jewish one.

How to respond? This Catholic priest is unabashedly stating that he does not believe the Bible is God’s Word and that the writers of the New Testament were attempting to manipulate their readers. And people trust this priest and his ecclesiastical associates with their souls?