Synoptics Section 349 and 350

We are rushing, slowly, to the end of our study of the Synoptic Gospels. We were in, I believe, 349, and I had mentioned the issue of John 19 a few weeks ago in regards to Rome's building an entire theology on Jesus' words in the cross.

We had talked a little bit about Jesus' words in the cross, one of them, one of those sayings we talked about in regards to Father, forgive them for they know not what they do. We talked about the disputes over how many Marys there were at the cross, and then we looked at the piercing of Jesus' side in John chapter 19.

The fact that, again, in most commentaries that you'll read that are written today, there will be a fundamental distrust in the witness of John as to historical events, and yet we recognize that actually what is said here in regards to the breaking of the legs is fundamentally historically situated.

We know that the reason for breaking the legs is to hasten death by crucifixion because you can't push up any longer to allow your diaphragm to expand and to breathe, and so you'd actually suffocate. You would pass out and suffocate.

And so the use by John of a fulfillment text is interesting. We expect that from Matthew. We get that from Matthew all the time. Matthew is always saying this was so that this might be fulfilled and this might be fulfilled.

That's not so much John's thing, but certainly here this is the case, and we do encounter one thing that I want to mention. When it says that, While the soldiers pierced the side of the spear, this is John 19, 34, and at once there came out blood and water, he who saw it has borne witness, his testimony is true, and he knows that he tells the truth, that you also may believe.

For these things took place, the scripture may be fulfilled, not a bone of him shall be broken. And again, another scripture says, they shall look on him whom they have pierced. So you have two different texts that are brought together.

Really, the bone text is possibly from Exodus numbers, possibly from this Psalm 3420. They shall look at him when they have pierced Zechariah. But what I wanted to focus on especially was the statement, He who saw it has borne witness, his testimony is true, and he knows that he tells the truth.

It's in some places, historically, when the fundamentalist movement began, if you know what the fundamentalist movement was about, if you've ever looked at, for example, the multi-volume set called The Fundamentals, it was a response to a reaction to the rise of liberalism and the pervasiveness of a really an unbelieving starting point in the examination of the text of scripture.

And the original Fundamentals were written by people who read liberal theology, understood it, and were responding against it. So in other words, the writers of The Fundamentals weren't really what we would call fundamentalists today because that term has come to mean, and certainly in experience, very often means someone who has a fear of any other perspective, will not listen to any other perspective, will not study any other perspective, and will condemn every other perspective but their own, and will say that unless you hold to my perspective, you're lost.

But they show no serious knowledge of the other perspectives that they then condemn as being in error or damnable or anything else like that. And so that narrow-mindedness, that fundamentalist mindset where there's no reasoning, there's no arguing, there's no studying beyond your own perspective, that's not what the original fundamentalists, writers of The Fundamentals, were about.

They were simply saying, you know, there are fundamentals, there are non-negotiables that define the Christian faith. The existence of the miraculous, the virgin birth, the cross, the burial, resurrection of Jesus Christ, the inspiration of scripture.

You don't have these things and all you've got is a social club that has some religious aspects but really isn't anything more than that. And so when you consider that background, out of that movement there came a mindset that I think in some ways badly overreacted.

And if you dared even talk about any other perspective, you were considered suspect. Well, in some churches, literally, honestly, I'm not making this up, but when I was a kid, in some churches the color of your Bible, the color of the leather on your Bible could be taken into consideration as to whether you might have some questionable theology.

Like I said, I've told you before, I'll never forget the sermon. The one church my mom took me to, the whole sermon was on the evil of pantsuits. And it was not a prophetic sermon about Hillary Clinton, but it was a very, very serious sermon about the evil of pantsuits and how it was just bobsled straight into the flames of hell if you ever wore something like that.

So literally, there were people who thought, you know, if you have a red leather cover on your Bible, that probably indicates a level of liberal tendency on your part that would probably disqualify you from leadership in certain churches.

And so you can also see why King James-only-ism was pretty big amongst a lot of those folks as well. What does that have to do with this? Well, in the Pentateuch, for example, in the writings of Moses, there are a number of places where you will find a text of Scripture, and we've read through them, where, you know, we just finished the Pentateuch just a few weeks ago in the Sunday evening readings, where you'll have something like, and built the city of da-da-da-da, which is called by that name to this day.

And the obvious meaning of that is that that particular comment comes at a later period of time. It's sort of obvious. It wouldn't make any difference. To this day is a later period of time. And from the fundamentals perspective, you weren't even allowed to allow for the fact that Moses' writings had to be collected and put into one collection and that there might be these comments about, so for example, you had to believe that Moses prophetically wrote about his own death.

No one else could have done that. Everything in there had to be Moses. And so the same thing here, you get to John, and there are these statements, he who saw it has borne witness.

Well, he, who is he?

Well, he would probably be John. So why is John referring to himself in the third person? Well, he's not. It's the people that put the gospel together after John that are writing that.

And it's like, oh, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.

It has to be every John until it has to be John. Well, where does it say that?

It doesn't say that.

2 Timothy 3 .16 says, all scripture is theanoustos. Not the individuals, the scripture. It's the final result that is theanoustos. And there's nothing in it that says, no, no, no, no, there could not have been any disciples who gathered up John's gospel and put it together and then at the end said, these things are written that you might believe the Jesus Christ.

Oh, that just makes it all untrue.

No, it doesn't.

And so there's been this overreaction. On the one side, you've got, and believe me, I went to a liberal seminary, so I know. On the one side, the liberals, they never, ever, ever, ever, ever even give consideration to even thinking about the idea of harmonizing scripture or that there's an overarching harmony to scripture that goes more than just a surface level type thing.

And it doesn't even get discussed. If you try to bring it up, you sort of look at you like, oh, you're our token fundamentalist. Good, wonderful, thanks, that's good. And that's how I viewed myself. I even called myself Fuller's token fundamentalist when I was there years ago.

But then on the other side,.

There are some people who are like,.

Oh, no, no, no, no, no.

You've got to even think about it like that, and you're jumping off the slide into liberalism. It's fairly obvious that what you have here is a statement. He who saw it has borne witness. His testimony is true.

And he knows he tells the truth. Now, it says he knows, not he knew. So it could very well be that this is written contemporaneously with John himself by the people who have put together his gospel and are possibly putting it in its final form to be distributed to the churches.

Maybe finally somebody said, you know, John, you've been preaching this gospel for so long, you ain't a spring chicken anymore. You know, one fall off of your donkey and you're gone. So, isn't it time that you wrote all this down?

And so he does. And then it's put into its final form. And those disciples close to him say, he who saw it has borne witness. His testimony is true. We heard him preach. We know his testimony is true.

He knows that he tells the truth. And all these things have been written that you may believe. And of course, at the end of John, you get very much the same type of thing in John 21. Let me see where that is hiding here.

Yeah, John 21 -24. This is the disciple who is bearing witness to these things and who has written these things. And we know that his testimony is true. So, yes, this is John's gospel. He has written these things.

No one in their right mind would have said, and if someone puts that, you know, it's like saying, I wrote the King James Only Controversy. Would you write everything in the King James Only Controversy?

Well, actually, Dr. Baird wrote the foreword to it.

Ah, see, so you're a liar.

No, I wrote the book and someone else wrote the foreword.

Well, then, same thing.

He has written these things. We know that his testimony is true. So on and so forth is found there in John chapter 21. So one of the reasons I mention this is recently my attention was drawn to, I don't know much about quote unquote Christian rap, but there was a British Christian rap artist that a few weeks ago announced in social media that he is no longer a Christian.

After 20 years, he's discovered that it's all myth and make-believe, and he's left the faith. And so I actually went through his statement on The Last Dividing Line and answered a lot of what he was saying, even though it was very surface level.

But what it clearly demonstrated was a extremely shallow understanding of the Christian faith, an extremely shallow understanding of the Bible. And it hearkened me back to Thomas Paine's stuff, which if you've ever read any of it, just demonstrate an abysmal ignorance of the history of the Bible and issues such as this.

And so, for example, Paine loved to point out, we don't know who wrote certain books of the Bible. Well, I hope everybody in this room realizes that. See, ignorance becomes the foothold that unbelief can grab hold of and utilize.

If you think that we have the name, address, telephone number, and social security number of every author of the Bible, where did you get that idea? How do you know who wrote Second Chronicles? Where is that set?

And yet, there are places where Jesus will quote from books where we don't know. We don't have a name of a specific person who wrote this. Now, tradition may tell us, well, Ezra was very important in the collection of these records, and Nehemiah did this, and so on and so forth.

But we don't. And nowhere does it say this book, from beginning to end, was written by such and such a person, and here is the date, and in the fourth year of the reign of blah, blah, blah. We don't have that for a large portion of the Old Testament.

And yet, people think we do. My Muslim friends, constantly going,.

Well, you don't even know who wrote Hebrews.

How can that be scripture?

And I'm like, why do I need to know that for it.

To be scripture?

What's your reasoning? What's your thinking? There's an assumption being made there, and those assumptions can be extremely dangerous assumptions. And so the idea that, well, there might be a few phrases from John's disciples as they put the final form of the book together, and they put their stamp on it and say, he testified.

He was consistent. What he said was true. This is written that you might believe Jesus, Son of God. What's wrong with that? I mean, you'd expect that, actually.

And yet, there are people who go, oh, no, no, no.

That just opens the door to everything. Actually, what it ends up doing, if you recognize that, is a lot of people come along. And it's sort of like when Bart Ehrman comes along and says, well, you do know that the story of the woman caught in adultery isn't found in the first 400 years of the manuscript tradition.

And off people go to watch the Zeitgeist movie and become a Buddhist. And what on earth results in that other than, well, especially a Christian rap artist who probably was never in the same church for more than one week at a time?

I mean, that would probably be a good explanation for what ends up happening in situations like that. So I just mention it to you that there you have what seems to be a testimony from the community around John.

He who saw it has borne witness. His testimony is true. And he knows that he tells truth. I'm awful glad that the early church is willing to say, you know what? We know this guy. We know the author. His testimony is true.

And we add our testimony to it.

How does that weaken something?

I don't get it.

Yes, sir.

I don't know.

See, Revelation is a whole other world. Apocalyptic by its nature is going to have a whole different genre. And the author, it's very different than narrating historical events. Now you're narrating visions and making applications that especially the people alive at that time know exactly who you're talking about because of what's going on.

And a little bit of a different situation. I'm not certain of any place in Revelation where you would specifically identify something like that. But the gospel's different situation. It's a different genre than Revelation is.

There really isn't anything else like Revelation in the New Testament. You have to go back to Daniel and sections of Ezekiel to find the same kind of stuff in the Old Testament. So just be aware of that.

People will throw that out. And the assumption being, well, every single word in John has to have been written by John. I suppose that means that every, when it talks about, and there's disagreement on this, but when we talk about who wrote certain of the Psalms, when it says a Psalm of David, does that mean David wrote the Psalm or that David collected the Psalm or that it was placed into the collection of David's Psalms?

And what about the stuff at the beginning which, well, we actually read the Selahs, which is we are the only people on the planet that read the Selahs, which is a musical notation. It's a pause type of a thing.

But what about the stuff at the beginning and the end that's upon Megaloth, which is probably either a particular kind of instrument or a certain range of keys that it was to be done in? And does upon Megaloth, does that mean David indicated all the musical stuff?

Or is there a problem with maybe the person in charge of music in the temple putting that on there?

Or what?

Again, the issue, the, excuse me, the roast is done. Fan on, heat, I've done enough cooking for the past few weeks. Anyways, just some things to keep in mind at that particular point in time. All right.

The Burial of Jesus in Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John

Now, let's get to the burial of Jesus. We should have enough time to get through this. Section 350. Once again, just a couple of things to notice. Matthew gives a very brief accounting here. When it was evening, there came a rich man from Arimathea named Joseph, who also is a disciple of Jesus.

He went to Pilate and asked for the body of Jesus. Then Pilate ordered it to be given to him. And Joseph took the body and wrapped it in a clean linen shroud and laid it in his own new tomb, which he had hewn in the rock.

And he rolled a great stone in the door of the tomb and departed. Mary Magdalene and the other Mary were there sitting opposite the sepulchre. So that's sort of the shortest version. And again, remember, in years past, especially many years ago, we talked about synoptic issues, the synoptic Gospels, Matthew, Mark, and Luke.

And we've seen many, many times where clearly they're drawing from the same tradition and are emphasizing different aspects of it and things like that. One of the challenges of the next few sections, well, the rest of the sections, because there's only a few sections left, is why isn't there the same type of relationship between Matthew, Mark, and Luke now as there was up to this point?

Because Matthew, Mark, and Luke go their own ways. Resurrection narratives, very, very different from one another. And here in the burial narratives, they're still pretty much on track. I mean, Luke has another.

There was a man named Joseph from the Jewish town of Arimathea. Notice how he had to explain what Arimathea was. And notice that Matthew just assumes it. Might say something about when being written, audience to whom being written.

Matthew can assume his audience knows. Luke assumes that they don't know. So he doesn't use just a formal patronym. He uses, he says, from the Jewish town of Arimathea. He was a member of the council, a good and righteous man who had not consented their purpose and deed.

And he was looking for the kingdom of God. So there's much more discussion of, all Matthew says is he was a rich man and was a disciple of Jesus. Luke expands upon that, interestingly enough. This man went to Pilate and asked for the body of Jesus.

And he took it down and wrapped it in a linen shroud and laid him in a rock-hewn tomb where no one had ever yet been laid. And Matthew tells us why. It was his. And he wasn't dead yet. So that's why nobody had been laid there.

But there's also something else that we've only learned over the past number of decades. Do you know that?

Remember, what was it?

I didn't look. But remember a few years ago, in like 16 days, I wrote an entire book. Remember what prompted me to do so? Was the tomb story, the ossuary story, with James Cameron and Simcha Jakubowicz came out with this book.

And they're on the Today Show basically saying they had found Jesus's bone box. And we've always said the only thing that could ever destroy Christianity would be to find Jesus. Well, that's what they're trying to do.

Well, they actually hadn't found Jesus. And it was a joke. But he's, man, Jakubowicz is still going at it. I think he's almost to the level of space aliens now, however. I mean, anyone remember when Fonzie jumped the shark?

Well, Jakubowicz jumped the shark a long time ago and is about to, I think, call on space aliens to explain where Jesus's bones went. But anyway, they had come out. And when you've got James Cameron behind you, I think he had just done what was the big avatar at that time.

And so he has more money than the United States government, which isn't difficult to do. But anyway, and so like 16 days, I wrote a book debunking this thing. But one of the things that was fascinating is it threw light upon the fact that we have learned a lot more about Jewish burial practice thanks to things like that.

We just assume you stick somebody in a coffin, you stick them in the ground. Or they used above ground tombs for some reason. Maybe they couldn't dig as well as we can. Well, no. What the practice was was to place the body in the tomb for a year, during which time the body would decay.

The soft tissue would be eaten away by time and by the natural processes. And after a year, you go back into the tomb. And you collect the bones. And you place them in an ossuary. And these stone boxes would have the names of the people's bones who were placed inside it.

And sometimes you had multiple people in the same ossuary. If you've ever seen, like, ever driven through, right as you get on to Long Island, there's that massive graveyard there in New York. Anybody know what I'm talking about?

Well, of course, Kelly, we've driven through New York. I mean, you just drive, and drive, and drive, and just everywhere. It's not the best use of land in the long run, in the sense of there's just only so much of it.

And this was a, obviously, more efficient way of doing things. And we found a lot of tombs where you'd have various alcoves. And you'd have a couple of bone boxes in each alcove. Maybe for a particular family, or branch of a family, and relations around, and so on and so forth.

So you had the initial tomb where the decaying process would take place. And then a more permanent site. For example, we found some of the big names. We found people named in the New Testament. We found their bones.

Governors and people like that, which would have a really much more ornate box, more permanent, clear inscriptions, things like that. That's also, if you've ever seen the picture of the heel bone with the spike driven through it.

Have you seen that, like, in Biblical Archeology Review,.

Or something like that?

I forget when that was found. Sometime in the 80s, I think. And they're finding stuff all the time, because every time you try to build an apartment complex somewhere, anywhere in Israel, it all comes to a screeching halt when you break into some ancient burial site, and they've got teams.

Just, you call them up, and all the people stop working. They go, oh, we got a week off. And in come the archeology teams, and they know how to map everything out, and get everything out, and get a catalog, and get out of the way, so they can go ahead and build the apartment complex.

But they've pictured it, and they graph it out computer-wise, and all the rest of that kind of stuff. And that's how we know, for example, about the names. Remember, I mentioned to you how many Mary's there were.

And we have a running database, because we've got all these bone boxes, and they've got names on them. And so you can go, oh, OK. Wow, look at that. Another Mary.

Shocking.

And it's a Joseph.

Who could have guessed?

You find something like Shaq. OK, that's going to be a big thing. OK, that makes the news. But all the rest of it is pretty much the same range of names. But that's how they get the database put together, and all the rest of that kind of stuff.

So evidently, what you've got here, then, is this was supposed to be that first burial spot, where the body would be allowed to undergo the natural process of decay. And then the assumption would be, a year later, that stone is then rolled away.

And the family members come in and collect those bones and place them in an ossuary, sometimes in the same place, or often another place, where they would be stored permanently. And so what you have here is an assertion that this is a rock-hewn tomb.

And so it is set into a rock. I suppose it could be down some steps or something like that. I mean, we have our normal way of seeing the big, huge stone, and it's in a rock face. And that's just because that's what we've seen over and over and over again.

But we're not given a whole lot of descriptions, other than the opening to it could be sealed by a rock, similar to Lazarus's situation. But that that rock had to be able to be moved, because it wasn't meant to be permanent forever.

It had to be open for the collection of the bones at a later time. Neither Matthew nor Luke mention what Mark mentions. And that is, Pilate wondered if he were already dead. And summoned the centurion.

He asked him whether he was already dead. And when he learned from the centurion he was dead, he granted the body to Joseph. Now, why wouldn't Matthew and Luke mention that? And that's one of the questions that comes up is it seems it's pretty much right here where Matthew, Mark, and Luke are going their separate directions.

Now, it could just simply be they want to finish their book in a particular way. It could honestly be that both of them have decided this book needs to be only so many folds of papyri.

Long.

And I'm getting toward the end. So I've got to pick and choose what I'm going to put in here. It could be that the assumption, this is always something, again, I mentioned nine years ago now. So I'm mentioning it again.

It could also be that the assumption is that they're looking at these books to be read primarily within the context of the witness of the living church. And so witnesses who had seen these things would be the ones that would be utilizing this more as an outline that they would then add their own elements to rather than a freestanding, complete narrative in of itself.

It's important to remember that these books are being written within the context of the lifetimes of the eyewitnesses who are still preaching and teaching. There is a living, oral proclamation of the gospel that is going on here.

And we are rather self-centered in a sense when we demand to place an interpretive grid on top of these books that demands that the authors be thinking only of us or of our context and our situation rather than thinking, well, what would they have found to be the most useful way of recording.

The gospel?

And can it be that the relative brevity of each one was due to the fact that they wrote it to be used within the context where the community still had living eyewitnesses that would be giving their testimonies as well?

So a lot of the apologetic arguments that I hear that I have to defend against from Muslims and agnostics and liberals and so on and so forth doesn't take into consideration what the author's intentions in the writing of these things would be and assumes that each one of these was meant to exist in isolation.

But it makes absolutely no sense that any one of these writers would have thought in that way. We think of the Gospel of John as something we can hand out to people. Do you know how long it would take.

You to write the Gospel of John?

Having a couple extra copies with you to distribute was not a possibility. It took time to create these things. And so they were written to exist within the community and the community was the primary location of where the full message was to be found.

This is an outline. This is something that emphasizes a particular aspect of things. And a lot of our problems come when we ignore that, when we forget what the original context was and we take it out of that context and start it.

And whether we know it or not, whether we admit it or not, applying standards to it that just simply wouldn't be fair to the original authors because that wasn't a part of what they were thinking of. And so again, something to keep in mind as we look at that.

So Mark gives us this vitally important information and yet Mark's the shortest Gospel. Mark's the one always going, and immediately this, and immediately that. But he doesn't and immediately get to giving the body to Joseph.

And so he says, when evening had come, since it was a day of preparation, that is the day before the Sabbath. And we all remember what that term means. Preparation means Friday. Joseph of Arimathea, again he uses the patronym there, the location name actually.

Not patronym, the father's name. But Joseph of Arimathea, doesn't have to explain what Arimathea was. A respected member of the council, who was also himself looking for the kingdom of God, took courage and went to Pilate and asked the body of Jesus.

Then we have Pilate's inquiry. And he brought a linen shroud and taking him down, wrapped him in the linen shroud and laid him in a tomb which had been hewn out of the rock. And he rolled a stone against the door of the tomb.

Mary Magdalene and Mary, the mother of Joseph, saw where he was laid. It's important to note that there are three times the Synoptic Gospels all say the same thing. There is more than one tomb around Jerusalem.

And one of the theories that has been propounded over the years, of course, is that there weren't any eyewitnesses. This was a rushed job. One of the theories that has been put forward is that this whole Joseph story is made up and that the Romans just would have, well, John Dominic Crossan, you all remember, those of you who were here back in 2005, I think it was, yeah, 2005 I think it was, learned far more about John Dominic Crossan than you ever wanted to learn because I was preparing to debate him.

And so we covered a bunch of stuff in Sunday school about John Dominic Crossan. And Crossan's a brilliant man, but he's one of the co-founders of the Jesus Seminar and stuff like that. And his conclusion is that Jesus was hurriedly taken down from the cross, buried in a shallow grave, dug up by dogs, and his body was eaten.

That's where the story of the resurrection came from. And so that idea basically is, well, Joseph, that's just a made-up story. The Romans wouldn't have allowed the Jews to do this. And they just did it themselves.

They didn't care about the bodies, their victims. And that's where all that came from. But in three of the Gospels, you have this testimony that, and it's an unusual testimony because who are the testifiers?

They're women.

Sorry, ladies, but in the ancient world, your testimony was not considered pretty much across the world, but especially in Middle Eastern context, was not considered to have the weight that a man's testimony would have.

And yet, the New Testament has no problem in having the very first witnesses to the resurrection are women. The witnesses to the location, the disciples, nowhere to be found. They'd be gone. The only male disciple is a secret male disciple, Joseph of Arimathea.

And yet Mary Magdalene and Mary, the mother of Joseph, saw where he was laid. So the theory was they just went to the wrong tomb. And lo and behold, it was empty, and therefore there's resurrection. Now, of course, the Jews knew where it was.

And so it would have been pretty easy to demonstrate,.

No, no, no, no, no.

Resurrection thing is all wrong. Here's Jesus now, and drag his body through the streets. That would have been enough to deal with that. But you had multiple witnesses as to the actual location of the tomb, which of the tombs it would be, because obviously there was more than one.

John says that there was a garden. In the garden, a new tomb where no one had ever been laid. So because the Jewish day of preparation, as the tomb was close at hand, they laid Jesus there. John's story, after this, Joseph of Arimathea, who was a disciple of Jesus, but secretly for fear of the Jews, asked Pilate that he might take away the body of Jesus.

It's the exact same story. And Pilate gave him leave. But what John adds is, so he came and took away his body. Nicodemus also, who had at first come to him by night. Now, Nicodemus is only found in John.

Now, is that because only John knew him? Is it because John was from that area and therefore had a relationship to Nicodemus? That's how he knows the details of the conversation between Jesus and Nicodemus?

Good question. Good question.

Unfortunately, we are out of time. We'll have to take up that question at the next point where we get to the guard of the tomb and resurrection. We are getting close. We actually made like half a page today.

That's pretty good for me. Anyways, let's close with a word of prayer. Father, we do thank you for your word. We thank you for our opportunity to study it. We ask that, indeed, as we go in now, please let us not be apathetic.

May we lift up our hearts and our minds in worship to you. May you be honored and glorified in all that takes place. We pray in Christ's name. Amen.