What Is Truth?

"What is truth?" That is the question Pontius Pilate asked rhetorically as he turned away from the battered and bloody man standing before him, The Man who was, and still is, the Answer to that question.

In today's world--especially Europe, but also the USA to a lesser but still very significant extent--the very concept of truth itself is being dismissed by many who are caught up in "postmodern" thinking. This mindset holds that "truth" is only a construction by the culture or the individual, so that what may be true for one is not true for another. Thus, truth is relative. Necessarily, the meaning of words is not fixed, but a function of interpretation, so that each person can construct his own meanings for them. Adhering to that fallacy leads only to external chaos and internal emptiness.

What is truth? An English dictionary says: "That which is in accordance with fact or reality; that which actually is." In Scripture, the Greek word translated "truth" is aletheia, which means "the revealed reality, or the essence, of something." That is, what you see is what you get.

In Matthew 15:1-9 and Mark 7:1-13, Jesus contrasted truth with "tradition." Replying to the hypocritical Jewish religious leaders who criticized his disciples for failing to adhere to one of the many extraneous requirements they had added to God's Word, he said: "Thus you nullify the word of God for the sake of your tradition."

What is "tradition?" That word is translated from paradosis, which appears 13 times in the Greek text. It simply means "delivering over from one to another." The context determines whether what was delivered was truth or whether it was the ideas of men that oppose the truth. Ten times it is used in the latter sense, and three times it is used in a positive sense, referring to true "teachings," in the NIV, passed on by Paul to others.

All in all, the question: "What is Truth?" does not have an answer, except for the thought that all truth is relative. Truth is different for each person. But, in reality, the very answer to this question, itself, is contradictory. If the answer is posed, "The only truth is that there is no truth." Then it negates itself. The answer is: There is no answer.