Scripture: Fact or Myth?

Okay, we are about to get started. Stephen Eliot, good to see you, sir. So, we're going to do a little kind of an apologetics study today. How can we trust the eyewitness accounts of the resurrection of Jesus?

And so, I'm going to give you a quick way in which we can trust them, but also talk about how the opponents of Christianity, oftentimes from within the visible church, that's an odd thing, don't you think?

So-called, I'm a Bible scholar, I teach at a seminary, I'm going to teach you not to trust the Bible. Yeah, those are strange fellows, and I don't understand why the church tolerates such people, but that's a weird thing altogether.

Thankfully, our seminary doesn't do that.

Not yet.

Dwayne says not yet. It'll be a while before they do. All right, we are going to then pray and get into our study. Heavenly Father, almighty and everlasting God, we come before you in humble awe. You are the one true God, and there is none other like you.

Come, we pray, and bless our hearts and minds as we study your word. Send your Holy Spirit into our lives so that we may grow in love and in grace, and that we may go forth into all the world, proclaiming your gospel so that others may learn of your saving grace.

Through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen. All right, I'm going to... Let's pull the chat window up here. Accuser and advocate are always with us. Yeah, that's absolutely true, by the way. Okay, so here's our conundrum.

Eyewitness Testimony in the Gospels

In our gospel text today, we heard from the Apostle John, who was an eyewitness to the events that are recorded in the Gospel of John, that Jesus appeared twice in the upper room. Once on Easter Sunday itself, and the second time in the upper room when Thomas was there, and that Thomas, upon seeing the risen Lord, after the Lord had offered up his body and said, You can touch my wounds if you like.

He confesses him as Lord and God. And you'll note that the eyewitness testimony of all four gospels is clear, that Christ was stone-cold dead on Friday afternoon, and that they saw him alive multiple times during the 40 days before his ascension.

Or is it 50? Yeah, 50. Well, 40. 40 days before his ascension and then 50 days Pentecost. So all of that being said, let me just give you next week's gospel text, and you'll get an idea of the kind of eyewitness testimony we're looking at.

So in the Gospel of Luke, it's important for us to recognize what Luke's gospel is, and we'll kind of talk about it this way. My apologetics mentor, Dr. Rod Rosenblatt, who was an avid student, a star student of Dr. John Warwick Montgomery, they recognize that part of the issue when we talk about Christ rising from the dead is this basic idea that somehow the Bible is a book of legends, that it's a book of stories and things like this.

That's the general idea because it contains stories of the miraculous, and therefore it has to be something other than history. The reality is that it is, in fact, a very specific genre of writing these gospels are, and they fit within the genre of historical eyewitness testimony.

And this is an important fact. So when we take a look at the Gospel of Luke, if you look at the beginning of Luke's gospel, Luke is not an eyewitness. Luke wasn't there. He's a convert to Christianity.

And so here's what we learn about Luke. Inasmuch as many have undertaken to compile a narrative of the things that have been accomplished among us, just as those who were from the beginning were eyewitnesses and ministers of the word, they have delivered them to us, it seemed good to me also, having followed all things closely for some time past, to write an orderly account for you, most excellent Theophilus, that you may have certainty concerning the things that you have been taught.

Now, one of the things I like about this is that there's a particular patron. Putting books together back in the ancient world was an expensive proposition. And so the patron who is the beneficiary of the original copy of the Gospel of Luke is a fellow by the name of Theophilus.

What a wonderful double entendre, okay? Theophilus. Theophilus means lover of God. And you sit there and go, all right, so there's a fellow named Theophilus, but each and every one of us, what are we?

Lovers of God. And so you'll note that where Luke got his information from, he interviewed eyewitnesses. He would sit down with the Virgin Mary. He would sit down with the other apostles and work all of this stuff out.

In fact, you'll note that Luke's Gospel is the only one that we get the full account of the nativity of Christ. Even Matthew's Gospel gives us scant information about Christ's birth. Whereas in Luke's Gospel, it begins with Herod, Zechariah, and his wife Elizabeth.

And we get details that there's only one person on planet Earth who could have given those details to Luke. That's Mary herself. The information that we get in the opening chapters of the Gospel of Luke could have only been given by Mary.

And so she was an eyewitness to the nativity, and you get the idea there. And then all the way through, so what he's done is he's compiled all of this and then put it together in one account. And the vital bit then for us in relation to the resurrection is watch the dovetailing here of the information that we read in our Gospel lesson today from John 20.

You can see that this goes perfectly with it, and that Luke gives us a little bit more information. Luke 24, as they were talking about these things, Jesus himself stood among them, and he said to them, Peace to you.

Ah, that's exactly what John said that Jesus said. But they were startled and they were frightened, and they thought they saw a spirit. Now in older translations here, the Greek word pneuma, they're going to translate it as ghost.

And I think that might be a little bit more helpful because when we say spirit, we're not sure what exactly. There's different ways in which we can interpret spirit. But we've all heard the ghost stories, and so what they thought they saw was a ghost.

Ah, it's a ghost! And he said to them, Why are you troubled? Why do doubts arise in your hearts? See my hands and my feet, that it is I myself. Touch me and see. So you'll note that the extension, the offer to touch me and see, really began not when Thomas showed up.

It happened when Jesus first showed up. And when you take the two accounts and put them together, you sit there and go, You know, Thomas isn't so different than the other apostles. After all, they saw the risen Christ.

And did they at first believe? No, it's a ghost! And it always cracks me up. It's like everything went according to plan. Jesus said to his disciples, multiple occasions, We're going to Jerusalem, boys.

They're going to arrest me. They're going to beat me. They're going to hand me over to the Gentiles. They're going to crucify me. I'm going to die, and I'm going to rise again. He laid out the plan to the nano detail, and now when he shows up, they didn't sit there and go,.

You did it!

They went, Ah! It's a ghost! Which I think really tells a little bit about the veracity of these accounts. Because you'll note that the apostles are not unwilling to share embarrassing details. Does this make them look smart?

Does this make them look pious and intelligent? It makes them look like people who have complete thick heads and are incapable of understanding basic Hebrew and basic Greek. And so you'll note, Why are you troubled?

See my hands and my feet. Touch me and see. For a spirit does not have flesh and bones as you see that I have. And when he had said this, he showed them his hands and his feet. While they still disbelieved for joy, they were marveling.

And he said to them, Have you anything to eat? And so you'll note, on a couple of occasions, Christ eats. Ghosts don't have meals. And I know they tried to turn this around using that Ghostbusters thing with that green slimy guy that liked hot dogs.

But still, he was never really able to truly enjoy them, was he?

No.

So ghosts don't have meals. And so they gave him a piece of broiled fish and he took it and he ate it before them. And then you'll note, Jesus said, These are my words that I spoke with you while I was still with you.

Remember I told you guys I was going to rise from the dead? That's the whole point here. And so here in this account, we have a clear eyewitness account. And how did Luke come up with this? He sat down with the eyewitnesses.

Now, what we're dealing with historically then is really a way of understanding what took place. How do we understand what took place? Now, the one thing that is super helpful is that Jesus had enemies.

I know that seems odd, but Jesus had people who didn't like him. And what did his enemies do to prevent Jesus' body from being stolen? Yeah, they posted guards. So they posted soldiers at the tomb and they sealed it.

So this makes it impossible for the disciples to steal the body. But here's the interesting thing. The tomb is empty on Sunday morning, and even the hostile witnesses acknowledge it. That's kind of important.

I want you to think about this. So even the people who were the ones who put Jesus to death, who ensured that Jesus' body couldn't be stolen, what did they do? They acknowledged that the tomb was empty.

What was the story they concocted? The disciples stole the body. Now, here's the funny part about this. Roman soldiers are not allowed to sleep on duty. They're just not. And let's just say that Roman military punishments were extreme.

Good way to put it. Does anyone know what the actual punishment would be for guards in the Roman army to sleep while at their post? Yes, James?

It's death.

Yeah, that's right.

It's death.

So Roman soldiers, the punishment for sleeping on duty at your post is death. And so at this point, we are led to believe by the Pharisees that the Roman centurions, every single one of them, at the tomb decided to take a siesta and that then the disciples did, you know, the Spider-Man thing and kind of swooped in, stayed in the shadows, rolled away the tomb without waking anybody up, took the corpse of Jesus, and here's where it's going to get really weird.

Then for a period of time, turned Jesus' corpse into a marionette and did the Weekend at Bernie's thing to make it appear like he had risen from the dead. I mean, that's really kind of what we're left believing.

All right?

So, hey, look, it's Jesus. And somebody's up there pulling the string. Jesus is going, hi, I have risen from the dead. Behold, it's me, right? And nobody's going, wait a second, there seems something fishy about Jesus.

He sure does smell bad. None of this makes any sense. But that's the official statement. The disciples stole the body. But here's the issue. Let's say the disciples stole the body. What did they have to gain by stealing the body of Christ?

There was no gain. How did Peter die? He was crucified upside down. How did Thomas die? He was martyred. John, he was boiled in oil and that failed to kill him. And so they ended up exiling him for a bit.

All of the disciples except for one died of martyrdom. How many of them recant and say, I was lying, I was lying. We stole the body. Not a one. Every one of them goes to their death. And you'll note that their lives were not ones of opulence, wealth, fame.

Quite the contrary. To be an apostle is to be hated, to suffer persecution. And for all of the disciples with the exception of one, they were all martyred. And none of them recanted. So when it comes to the veracity of the claim, it doesn't make any sense.

Now, people are willing in human history to die for what they believe is the truth, even if what they believe is the truth is a lie. But we have not yet seen in human history people willing to die for something that they know is a lie.

That doesn't make any sense. And then we have the odd man. And the odd man is none other than the Apostle Paul. Paul started off his career as a Pharisee, Saul of Tarsus. And in 1 Corinthians 15, we get his account.

We get the gospel that he preached, which was given to him directly by Jesus. And so here's what he says. I would remind you, brothers, of the gospel that I preached to you, which you received, in which you stand, and by which you are being saved, if you hold fast to the word that I preached to you, unless you believed in vain.

For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received, that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scripture, that He was buried and that He was raised on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures.

Then He appeared to Cephas and to the twelve. He appeared to more than five hundred brothers at one time, most of whom are still alive, though some have fallen asleep. Now here's the important bit. One appearance, five hundred people saw Jesus alive.

One appearance. And the church kept track of who they were. Who these eyewitnesses were, Paul is mentioning them as a body and notes that some have already died by 50 AD, but most of them are still alive.

Then He appeared to James and to all the apostles. And last of all, to one untimely born, He appeared also to me. The Apostle Paul is an eyewitness of the resurrection. Though I am the least of the apostles, unworthy to be called an apostle because I persecuted the church of God.

And so you'll note that the conversion of Saul of Tarsus to become the Apostle Paul, because he was so vehemently zealous to kill, murder Christians and suppress Christianity, his conversion is so spectacular that the only other parallel that I could think that would have been as spectacular would have been if Hitler had converted to Judaism.

That's what we're talking about here. Both of them working murderously.

Yes, Dave. Yeah.

And this is absolutely true. I love that point. Always and again, the love of Christ is compelling. That He would take somebody that far gone and that He would seek them out, call them by name. In fact, you think about it.

Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me? The words of Christ, the first words of Christ, He called them by name. You know, I think of Isaiah 43 in that regard. Amazing text. Oh yeah, He gave up everything.

He had nothing to gain from becoming a Christian.

Yeah.

Yeah, a little bit of divine justice there to kind of show Him that He wasn't, He was not some. No, and that He really truly was blind until Christ opened His eyes. But you think about God who calls and redeems us.

Isaiah 43 says, But now thus says Yahweh, First words out of Christ's mouth to Saul of Tarsus was Saul.

Saul.

Christ called him by name. And then the text goes on. For I am Yahweh your God, the Holy One of Israel. I am your Savior. And so you'll note that Christ mercifully appears to the Apostle Paul, calls him by name, calls him to be an apostle.

And He Himself notes that He is an eyewitness to the resurrection. And His conversion is shocking in its details and humbling and comforting in the mercy of Christ. If God can forgive Saul of Tarsus, He can forgive me.

He can forgive you. And so you'll note that when you wrap it all up, the people who deny the resurrection have some, well as Ricky Ricardo used to say to Lucy, they have some splainin' to do. And so one of the theories that was running around in the 60s and 70s was a theory called the Swoon Theory.

I don't know if you're familiar with the Swoon Theory. But there was a, I forget the name of the book now, but there was a book that was a bestseller at the time. And the author of the book claimed that Jesus faked His death.

That Jesus wasn't actually dead on the cross. He said, it's finished, and went like this, and went, is anyone looking? You know, all right. There is not a single account.

Yeah. Right.

And here's the sticking point, is that the Gospel of John gives us the eyewitness account. Remember, John was at the cross when Christ was crucified. The other disciples may have been watching from a distance.

But John himself was at the foot of the cross. And while Christ was suffering, he took care of a very important vital bit of business, and that was Mom has to be taken care of. His father's obviously dead at this point, and if he has any older half-brothers, they're not legally bound to take care of Mary.

Jesus is. He's the firstborn of Mary, and so He's responsible for taking care of her. And so at the foot of the cross, Jesus says to John and says to His mother, He says, Mother, behold your son. Son, behold your mother.

And so He puts the responsibility of caring for Mary on John. And John, at the foot of the cross, also witnessed what happened in the aftermath of the order being given to break the legs of those on the crosses so that their corpses could be taken down before the Sabbath.

And they didn't break Jesus' bones because He was already dead, and a Roman spear was thrust into the side of Christ, into His pericardium, that's the actual sac around the heart, and out came blood and water, which means He'd been dead for a little bit of time.

And some have even postulated, may actually show that He died of a broken heart, which I don't know if medically that's right, but it just sounds right. And so we have an eyewitness account that a Roman spear thrust into Christ's cardial sac.

There's just no way He's coming down alive. The Romans knew what dead is. In fact, other eyewitness accounts in three of the Gospels have it clear that Christ, in giving up His spirit on His own terms and dying at His choosing, saying it is finished, that the soldiers at the foot of the cross were so impressed by this they said surely this man was the Son of God.

So that's what the eyewitness accounts say, but the swoon theory says that Jesus faked His death and that in the cool of the tomb He was able to resuscitate sufficient enough to make resurrection appearances, which you just have to ask the question, how compelling would those have been under those circumstances?

Because Jesus was scourged. Jesus was crucified, and I'm 100 sure that the whip that they used to scourge Him with and that the nails they drove through His hands and feet, those were not pre-sanitized.

They were not up to surgical standards. So Christ, in the tomb, would have been in severe need of antibiotics and medical attention, and all the fluids that He had lost. I mean, He wouldn't have needed an IV and all this kind of stuff.

There was no way that He would resuscitate and recover from this, that even if He hadn't died on the cross, He surely would have died from any number of problems, loss of blood, from a severe infection, things of this nature.

I mean, we're talking gangrene and things like this. So the swoon theory, let's just say, although it was a flash in the pan, and it was, for just a short amount of time, people entertained the thought.

Because the one thing that they cannot allow themselves to do is believe that Christ truly rose from the dead. Because our world has determined by philosophers that miracles are not possible. They're not supposed to be possible, right?

Because it's a breaking of natural law. And apparently, if you break natural law, you can get cited for that. So, you know. Yeah, it's just ridiculous. So the way the skeptics have gone as of late is to attack the historicity of the eyewitness accounts.

That's where they have spent their time. And so as the theory goes today, the Gospels were not written by eyewitnesses. The Gospels were written by, let's just say, people who really like the story of Jesus.

And they're not eyewitness historical accounts. They're more like fan fictions.

Alright?

Really bad fan fictions. And so they always go after the historicity of the accounts. And that's where all the blood is being spilled, and has been for the past few decades. And so in this regard, I would note that there are several good resources.

And I'm going to show you one that's kind of historical, but it still checks out. It's one that I actually find to be very helpful. Do you guys remember the book, Evidence that Demands a Verdict? You guys remember that?

James, I wouldn't expect you to remember it.

Yeah.

It's like, you don't remember the space shuttle blowing up either.

I know that happens.

Okay.

Evidence that Demands a Verdict. And I'll kind of walk you through apologetically how this works out. In Evidence that Demands a Verdict, this was a book by Josh McDowell. It's been updated with his son, Sean McDowell.

And these guys are evangelical apologists, and they do a very decent job at what they're doing. But what they've done is they've collected up a particular argument and fleshed out an argument that was begun by John Warwick Montgomery.

And I'll explain what the argument is. Let me do this. So Evidence that Demands a Verdict is a good read along these lines. But the argument that they're picking up on and then expanding was by John Warwick Montgomery.

John Warwick Montgomery. Here we go. And specifically, there was a book that he wrote decades ago called History and Christianity.

Okay.

Christianity. Let's see here.

I'm not finding it.

Hang on a second here.

All right.

Let's see here. John Warwick Montgomery Library has been working on it here. Why am I not seeing it? Hang on a second here. Montgomery is a prolific author, and he's a little bit of a wingnut when you hang out with him.

Here it is.

History and Christianity. I love Montgomery, but he has these really eccentric mannerisms.

It's hilarious.

So let's see here. I want to go to Purchase Page on this one. This is the book. If you can get a copy of it, it's really thin. And what Josh McDowell did is took Montgomery's argument and he expanded it out.

And the basic gist of it is that when we talk about science, and I'll kind of walk you through this. When we talk about science, many of us think that the only science that exists is the science that relates to things regarding molecules and chemistry and physics and biology, and that in that realm of science, you have a scientific hypothesis, and then you have experimentation, and then you reevaluate your hypothesis based upon the results of your experiments.

That's only one type of science. And so what John Ward Montgomery in History and Christianity rightly points out is that when we talk about science, that there are different fields of science. So there is a field of science that relates to history, and there are legitimate research practices when it comes to determining and rightly telling the story of what took place in human history, and it involves not repeatability of experiments, but actual historical documents and documentation.

And so this is the realm of what's called historiography. And in historiography, you have to take a look at documents and look at the internal evidence as well as the external evidence regarding the veracity of these particular historical documents, but also in the mix, then, you take a look at the total number of documents that you have.

And so what Josh McDowell has been doing for the last few decades in his updating of Evidence that Demands a Verdict is taking the core nugget of John Ward Montgomery's argument regarding how historiography works and apply it with rigor to the New Testament.

So I'll give you an example. So have you all heard that in the ancient world, in the time of the Roman Empire, that Julius Caesar was a general in the Roman army and that he was one of the generals primarily responsible for what was called the Gallic Wars.

He fought up in Gaul against the descendants of the French, and that at some point he returned to Rome and he crossed the Rubicon, brought his army into Italy itself, and thereby, as a result of that, these were part of the events that led to him becoming the actual emperor of Rome.

You're going, yeah, I seem to remember something about this. I mean, there's been history channel documentaries and things like this about it, right? But here's the question. How many documents from antiquity survive that tell that story?

And can they be trusted? When we talk about the number of documents from antiquity that actually tell the story of Julius Caesar, his time fighting in the Gallic Wars, and then his crossing of the Rubicon, we're only talking maybe a dozen or just a little more than a dozen documents that actually tell that story, that have existed, that have lived in our extent over the past couple of millennia.

And of those, the time difference between when the events that they recorded took place and the documents themselves, that time span, we're talking centuries. And in some cases, 800, 900, 1 ,000 years.

And so nobody, I don't know anybody in the field of history who doubts that Caesar crossed the Rubicon. Not a single one. Yet, the only documents that we have, they were written centuries after the events.

Centuries.

But there's no question about that event. So what is the time span then when it comes to the New Testament, from when the New Testament documents were written, and so we'll say the Gospels themselves, when were the Gospels written in relation to the events that they recorded?

Well, the skeptics, they always have to push the Gospels out into the second century. Because if you have the Gospels being written anywhere in the mid part of the first century, then you have a legitimate miracle taking place by Jesus prophesying the destruction of the temple in AD 70.

And so since miracles are not possible, they have to have written the Gospels after the fact. That's how the logic goes. But is that the case? Is that actually something historically that can be validated?

The answer is no. Not even close. So I'm going to ask you guys another question then along these lines. And so I'm not going to get into all the details then of the historical graphical, how that all works.

I want to focus on another aspect. There's been another book, Richard Baucom, and he has written a book, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses. This is an explosive book. And when this thing hit, I mean the ripples that it sent through the biblical scholarship world was immense.

And I'm going to talk a little bit about some of his arguments here. So the way it goes then is that when you take a look at Montgomery's argument that the time span between when the accounts took place in the New Testament and when they were recorded, all of the evidence that we have shows that the New Testament was written, we're talking shortly after Christ.

For instance, 1 Corinthians, the book that we were reading, 1 Corinthians 15, 1 Corinthians was written in 50 AD. It was written in 50 AD. The Apostle Paul, on his missionary journeys, the author of the Gospel of Luke, Luke was a companion of the Apostle Paul.

And we know that from how he cites Scripture that Paul quoted from the Gospel of Luke in his missionary endeavors. So we know that the Gospel of Luke couldn't have been started any later than 50 AD. And it relies on bits and pieces of the Gospel of Mark.

It's clear that Luke was riffing off of stuff that Mark had written, which was the preaching notes of the Apostle Peter. And so all of the evidence that we have and the sheer number of copies that we have of the New Testament make it clear that out of all of the books of ancient antiquity, the Gospels, the New Testament itself, is the most attested.

To doubt it, you would have to doubt everything else in the history of humanity in antiquity. That's how solid its pedigree is and how many copies of the New Testament we have. And our earliest copies of the New Testament, even our earliest fragments, are first century documents.

We have a fragment from the Gospel of John dated to no later than 90 AD. Ninety. It's called the John Ryland's Papyrus. So there's no reason to doubt this. But where Bauckham spends his time then is talking about the detail that we find in the Gospels themselves that cannot be explained other than by the fact that the people who recorded them were actual eyewitnesses to the event.

So let me guys ask you, do any of you know where Southern California is?

Yes.

Can you name to me, name a major city in Southern California. San Diego, okay. Coronado, okay. Name another one. Southern California, name another big city.

Tijuana.

No, that's across the border. Point Loma, okay. So you know, okay, that's the famous college there.

All right.

You guys know where Pasadena is, right?

All right.

You know where Los Angeles is, right?

All right.

Now, if I were to tell you that when I was a kid, I liked to hang out in La Cunada.

All right.

And then I would travel from La Cunada down into Rosemead. And then, you know, and in fact, Barb and I worked, we worked many hours in Rosemead at some of the supermarkets there overnight. And that, you know, from time to time after that, we would head over, we'd actually drive back south and come up through El Monte, back into Arcadia.

Do you guys know what I'm talking about? You have no idea what I'm talking about, right?

Okay.

What does that tell you that I have about Southern California that you don't have? Local knowledge. I'm an eyewitness of those places.

All right. If I told you,.

I loved eating at Tacolita.

Okay.

You guys wouldn't know what I'm talking about, right?

Okay.

All right.

That shows local knowledge. So what we find in the gospels themselves is that same exact level of detail that you cannot find otherwise. If you were writing it after the fact, a century later, details you could not have gotten right unless you were an eyewitness.

That's the stuff that's embedded in there. And so I'll walk you through some of the ideas here. So the major claim, if you would, that people make, and this is a good one that C .S. Lewis put together.

And by the way, I want to make sure that I give credit here. Dr. Peter Williams of Cambridge University, he and I had a couple of really great conversations. And it was his work that inspired me to kind of put these slides together.

And I'm building off of an apologetic lecture that he gave almost a decade ago. But I've since spoken with him, and we've had just great conversations. But all of that being said, C .S. Lewis, Christian apologist, he noted that when it comes to Jesus Christ, there's really few options as to who he is because he claimed to be God in human flesh.

That's what he claimed. He claimed to be the IM of the Old Testament, claimed to be the Son of God. And so he's either the Lord that he claims to be, he's either a liar or he's a lunatic. But where the skeptics have been focusing on now is they're saying that he's just a legend, all right?

That the accounts that we have in the gospel are not written by eyewitnesses. Instead, this is just some kind of weird Jesus legend stuff, right? So I'll give you another example. Have any of you guys watched any episodes of The Chosen?

Anyone seen this? The Chosen. All right, it's a pretty decent show. It's a television depiction, if you would, of the life of Christ. But the thing is that they take liberties in writing backstories that are not in the Bible.

And so if you've ever watched any episodes of The Chosen, like episode one, they give the redemption story of Mary Magdalene. But the thing is that none of the details there are actually in the Bible, all right?