The Reason for God: Belief in an Age of Skepticism

by Timothy J. Keller

Also, why constantly depict the apostles—the eventual leaders of the early Church—as petty and jealous, almost impossibly slow-witted, and in the end as cowards who either actively or passively failed their master? Richard Bauckham makes similar arguments about the depiction of Peter’s denial of Jesus, even to the point of his calling down a curse on his master (Mark 14:71). Why would anyone in the early church want to play up the terrible failures of their most prominent leader? No one would have made such a story up, and even though it is true, Bauckham reasons that no one but Peter himself would have dared to recount it unless Peter himself was the source and had authorized its preservation and propagation.14