Anne Rice Quote

I never thought I would be quoting Anne Rice (yes, that Anne Rice), but last night I heard this on a Podcast and had to put it somewhere so I could remeber it.

All these skeptics insisted that the Gospels were late documents, that the prophecies in them had been written after the fall of Jerusalem. But the more I read about the fall of Jerusalem, the more…I found it absolutedly impossible that the Gospel writers could not have included the fall of the Temple in their work had they written it as critics insist …Wouldn’t the Christian writers have seen in the fall of Jerusalem some echo of the Babylonian conquest? Of course they would have…I am convinced that the key to understanding the Gospels is that they were written before all this ever happened. That’s why they were preserved without question though they contradicted one another. Of course John A. T. Robinson made the case for an early date for the Gospels far better than I ever could. He made it brilliantly in 1975, and he took to task the liberal scholars for their
assumptions then in Redating the New Testament, but what he said is as true now as it was when he wrote those words.

In sum, the whole case for the non-divine Jesus who stumbled into Jerusalem and somehow got crucified by nobody and had nothing to do with the founding of Christianity and would be horrified by it if he knew about it — that whole picture which had floated in the liberal circles I frequented as an atheist for thirty years — that case was not made. Not only was it not made, I discovered in this field some of the worst and most biased scholarship I’d ever read….And I had also sensed something else. Many of these scholars who apparently devoted their lives to New Testament scholarship, disliked Jesus Christ. Some pitied him as a hopeless failure. Others sneered at him, and some felt an outright contempt…I’d never come across this kind of emotion in any other field of research, at least not to this extent. It was puzzling. The people who go into Elizabethan studies don’t set out to prove that Queen Elizabeth was a fool. They don’t personally dislike her. They don’t make snickering remarks about her, or spend their careers trying to pick apart her historical reputation…But there are NT scholars who detest and despise Jesus Christ…Now somewhere during my journey through all of this, I became disillusioned with the skeptics and with the flimsy evidence for their conclusions…Now the Gospels were becoming ever more coherent to me, the Gospels which appealed to me as elegant first-person witnesses, dictated to scribes no doubt, but definitely early, the Gospels produced before Jerusalem fell.  — Anne Rice from her book Christ the Lord