Synoptics Section 305

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We will be beginning the Passion Narrative, so we'll be in Mark, I'm sorry,
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Matthew 26, Mark 14, and Luke 22, how's that?
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Last week, what we did was sort of did a review of, it's a shame
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I did it a week early given how folks we have here today, but we did a review of some of the key principles that must be kept in mind when looking at the
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Gospels in parallel. I mentioned last week that I think what we've been doing for many years now, for about a year we stepped out of this, well we didn't really step out of it, we did
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John, and John's not a synoptic Gospel, but we did the material that is found in the
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Gospel of John between chapters 13 and 17 basically, or maybe it's all the way back to 12 now that I think about it, but anyway, we worked through that section of John and it took us that long mainly because I'm gone so often
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I suppose, but we're back to the synoptic study and we're entering into the most difficult area of synoptic studies, and I mentioned last week that one of the main reasons we need to do this level of difficult study, it'd be a whole lot easier just to read
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Matthew and not worry about what Mark says or what Luke says and not read them in parallel, but we live in a day where there is a tremendous amount of attack upon the veracity of the text of Scripture, and those who launch those attacks basically say that if you would just read them in parallel, you would see where all the problems are and you wouldn't be so naive and silly as to believe in the accuracy of the
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Scriptures. So you have people like Bart Ehrman and others that are pushing this, and this is very, very, very, very common to hear this kind of presentation, and so the only way to deal with that is to do what
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Christians have done for a long time. I mean, going back to Tatian's Diatessaron in the early centuries of the
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Christian era, Christians have put together books like this. They've put the
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Gospels in parallel. They've created a single Gospel drawing from each
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Gospel. If God had wanted us to do that, I think he would have just given us one, but the issues of comparing
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Matthew, Mark, and Luke in particular are important issues, and they've been known to the
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Church for a very long time. Unfortunately, we have not done a very good job over the past number of generations in educating everyone who is going to be opening their
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Bible about what they're going to be encountering, and so it is heartbreaking to me to see people.
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I've dialogued with many a person who's either joined another religion or become an atheist or something and said, why?
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You know, I believe in Jesus, and I sang in the choir, and you know, all the rest of that stuff, and then one day
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I found out that we don't know who wrote some of the books of the Old Testament. If any of you have seen
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The Age of Reason by Thomas Paine, that's in essence what you have in Paine's writings is very basic fundamental accusations against the
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Bible that have been answered for years and years and years and years, but they were enough to be his form of argumentation.
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I remember meeting with a man once a number of years ago who had come out of Mormonism, and I've often said you come out of a group like that, you should never ever ever be put into a position of Christian leadership for many years.
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There needs to be a period of growth and maturing and grounding. Unfortunately, as is so often the case, this person was put in the position of being an expert on Mormonism and going around to churches and lecturing on Mormonism and blah blah blah blah.
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Well, he ran into Paine's Age of Reason and became an atheist almost overnight, and I met with him and it's like, so you thought we knew every author involved in Second Chronicles?
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Why did you think that? Well, that's just no one had ever said anything about these things, and sadly you probably could go to a lot of churches where no one ever would say anything about the difficulties that we're going to be trying to work through and doing what we did last week and looking at principles.
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One of the things I didn't mention last week, I just want to mention really quickly, it's very interesting.
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I could probably derive all the basic principles I mentioned last week of compression or telescoping and looking at the author's intention, at the author's audience, and all that kind of stuff that we talked about last week and what you need to know to compare
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Matthew, Mark, and Luke especially. I could have derived almost all of that by just looking at some places where you have one author that gives parallel accounts.
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One author tells the same story in multiple places. Now, what's the first thing?
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I mean, unless you're going to assume that the author is stupid, okay, and just doesn't remember what he wrote a few hours earlier, if there are differences in the story told at one place and another place, what would be some of the reasons for that?
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Let me just ask you, where would you think we could look in the
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New Testament for some really good examples of where the same author tells the same story more than once?
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Exactly. Acts 9, Acts 22, you have Paul giving the story of his conversion.
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Now, are they identical? No, they're not. If you've read them, then you know there are some very interesting differences between them.
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Now, part of it is due to the fact that Paul is in two different contexts when he tells a story. The Acts 9 is
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Luke telling Paul's story. Acts 22 is Paul telling Paul's story. And so, you have different contexts, different situation, different purpose for relating the story.
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In one, Luke is explaining why Paul is now going to become the central figure in the rest of his narrative, who has not even been there up until this point in the story.
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So, why is this man all of a sudden so important? But in Acts 22, you already know who
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Paul is, and Paul is now telling his own story to someone else. And so, you have different contexts.
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A number of years have passed between the two, and yet there are differences between the stories.
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In fact, the first serious allegation of biblical contradiction that was ever thrown at me was from that story.
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If any of you have read my book, Letters to a Mormon Elder, or my other book, Scripture Alone, that deals with this, when
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I dealt with topics of alleged biblical contradictions, this is one
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I've included in both books where I've dealt with that particular issue, because it was one of the very first things that Mormon missionaries threw at me.
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In fact, they have a little Mormon missionary handbook. I don't know if any of you have ever seen the
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Mormon missionary handbook. And there's a little section in there on evidences of the corruption of the
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Bible. And missionaries are just taught to throw this kind of thing out at you.
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So, it wasn't that they had discovered these things. It was that, you know, this came from the material that they were given.
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And the primary contradiction, allegedly, had to do with, in one of the stories, it says they heard the voice of the person speaking with Paul, Saul at that point, and the other says they did not hear the voice.
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And so, they said, see, clearly, you know, eighth article of Faith, Mormon Church says, we believe the
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Bible to be the Word of God as far as it is translated correctly, which they basically interpret to mean as far as it has been transmitted correctly, and hasn't been altered by scribes, and so on and so forth.
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And so, they'll throw that out as an alleged contradiction. So, there's an excellent example.
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And if you're wondering, well, how do you resolve that alleged contradiction?
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Well, it doesn't exist in most modern translations of that text, because when you look rather carefully at it, the voice was speaking to him in a language that people traveling with him did not understand.
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And the issue is, they did not understand versus not, they heard something, they just didn't understand what was being said when you look closely at the original language.
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But anyway, there is an example. But you also have a very interesting, another interesting example.
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I wasn't going to look at this, but let me see if I can give you the reference here real quick.
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Well, I'm going to have to get my glasses out, aren't I? Yeah, I probably am. This is terrible. In the
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Ascension stories. In Luke chapter, yeah, here we go.
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Luke chapter 24, I believe. I'm not sure this is going to give me what
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I'm looking for. But in the
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Ascension narrative, where is that found in Luke 24?
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Because I'm straight toward the end.
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It's one of the last portions of the... I guess it is in here someplace.
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Find notes in your thing here. I'm sorry? Okay, that doesn't give any information on the textual variant.
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There's a textual variant in Luke 24, and it would take me too long to pull it up right now.
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But it was just interesting. I was thinking about,
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I forget what I was listening to on the ride yesterday that caused me to think about it, but there's a textual variant in regards to Luke chapter 24 and the
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Ascension of Jesus. And people will present that as evidence that, well, see, yeah, there it is.
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There's some manuscripts, as I recall, that do not have the Ascension in Luke.
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And the thought crossed my mind, and I don't know why I'd never really thought of this before, but there's a rather extensive discussion of this in Acts.
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And who wrote both Luke and Acts? But what is interesting to remember is in the history of the transmission of the text,
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Luke and Acts, while they were clearly written together, were split up. And Luke was put with the other four
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Gospels, and we have a number of manuscripts that have Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John in them. But Acts, we almost need to feel sorry for that poor book, because it sort of got orphaned, and no one really knew what to do with it.
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You didn't put it in with the Pauline epistles, and so it just sort of had its own existence, not nearly as popular, though clearly, as about the only book of history in the
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New Testament, it was important along those lines. But it has a different textual history to it, because it got split up from the book that it was originally written with, and that one was put in with the
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Gospels. And so it's funny that I've actually had conversations with people, and I've talked about the stuff in Luke, and even in my own mind, because we split stuff up into books, and we split stuff up into chapters and verses, and as you all know,
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I hope chapters and verses are a rather modern thing. The verses were first asserted in the
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New Testament in 1551. So, even in my own mind,
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Acts is over there, and I didn't even think about the fact that, well, you know, you've got the same author talking about the same thing, so why wouldn't he just give a small account here, because he's going to be giving a longer account later on.
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And so you can find some issues like that, where you've got Luke, and you've got Acts, or you can find some of these things in Paul's writings.
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There are parallel passages in Ephesians and Colossians. The point being that when we look at one author, we can see illustrated the things
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I was talking about last week, as to how we need to be fair in looking at these parallel texts, and allowing the authors to be their authors.
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In fact, I was listening to something this week about something that had gone on. Oh, yeah, the stuff going on in St.
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Louis. Remember a couple days after the Michael Brown shooting, there was another shooting.
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Well, a videotape of the actual shooting has been released, and as I was listening, as you would read the official version, and then watch the videotape, and then listen to eyewitnesses, it was fascinating to compare what they said, and how they perceived things.
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It's often done in various classes, where you'll set up a, you know, you'll have three or four people come in, they'll do something, they'll run out of the room, and then you start, you have everybody get out a piece of paper, write down what you just saw right now, and then you compare these eyewitness accounts.
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It's fascinating to see what certain people see. Ladies tend to see details that men don't see.
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Men see bigger pictures that the women don't see. Some people are focused upon detail stuff.
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Some people are focused upon big story stuff. Some people recognize clothing. Guys never recognize clothing, you know, hair color, hairstyle.
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The lady's like, no it wasn't, it was this long, and it had that much curl in it, and you know, especially if it was a lady involved, and then the ladies go off and have arguments about, she should never have worn those shoes with that dress, and the guy's going, what?
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And so this kind of thing happens, you know, all the time, but it was fascinating to have read the accounts, and then you get to watch the video, and go, okay,
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I now see, you know, this guy saw those details, but didn't see that, and that changes everything, and those people saw that, but didn't see this, and so it's fascinating to see how that works, and all of this to remind us that if we go into this study with the idea that these are
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AP reporters, well, again, when I was a kid, we talked about a reporter, that was someone who was supposedly, you know, just wanting to give the facts, and nobody views a reporter that way anymore.
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I'm not sure the reporters view the reporters that way anymore, but if you go into the study thinking that Matthew, Mark, and Luke were independent journalists that they don't have a purpose, they're not trying to communicate a message, et cetera, et cetera, you're going to be really confused, and really disappointed.
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The other side, that's imbalance over here, but the imbalance on the other side is, well, if they're trying to communicate a message, and we can't trust anything they say, the truth is in between the two, obviously.
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You need to recognize that the author has an intention, and that's going to determine what he does and does not include.
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He has a limitation of space as well. I've noted that before, but it does not follow these lines, and this is certainly illustrated over and over again in our lives.
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I mean, I'll come back from a trip, and I'll get on the dividing line, and I will talk about what happened on the trip, but if I'm having dinner with my family at one of our favorite
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Mexican places, and there's plenty of chips and salsa there, they're going to get a significantly fuller story than I give on the dividing line.
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Now, the scary thing is, people say, well, that means you were lying. I wasn't.
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I didn't have any chips and salsa on the dividing line, so you're not, you really think you could get as much detail out of me if you don't have chips and salsa?
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I mean, ask George, you know. I mean, he's the chips and salsa man, and the music minister. He's amazing, a multi -talented, multi -talented guy.
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You know, you can squat the piano and sing with the piano. It's an amazing thing, but what was
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I saying? I don't know, but just a number of times this past week,
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I was just struck with stuff I was observing that was illustrating if we were just being fair with these texts, then these are things we would do, but unfortunately, in the vast majority of situations we will find ourselves in, the intention is not to be fair with these texts.
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There is an overarching purpose involved in the accusations that are being made. So, let's dive into it, and, you know, we'll be making an application over and over and over again, so I suppose we will have to touch on those things in the future as well.
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All right, Matthew 26, 1 through 5, when Jesus had finished all these sayings, he said to his disciples, you know that after two days the
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Passover is coming, and the Son of Man will be delivered up to be crucified. Then the chief priests and the elders of the people gathered in the palace of the high priest, who was called
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Caiaphas, and took counsel together in order to arrest Jesus by stealth and kill him. But they said, not during the feast, lest there be a tumult among the people.
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Mark gives a shorter version of this. It was now two days for the Passover, and the feast of unleavened bread, and the chief priests and scribes were seeking how to arrest him by stealth and kill him.
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They said, not during the feast, lest there be a tumult of the people. And Luke gives about the same story very briefly, and he notes, and they feared the people.
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So, Matthew records for us that Jesus once again announces to the disciples with clarity what is coming.
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The Son of Man will be delivered up to be crucified, and the chief priests and the elders of the people gathered in the palace of the high priest, who was also called
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Caiaphas. So, he gives a fair amount of information. Why might he do that? Well, once again,
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Matthew is primarily focused upon scripture fulfillment, speaking to the
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Jews, demonstrating that Jesus was the Messiah, the
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Christ, and so he gives a fair amount of information, including the chronology.
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Now, it's important for us to keep a couple things in mind. The Passover and the feast of unleavened bread was not just one day.
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There was a particular day upon which the feast began, but it was a week -long celebration.
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And generally, we think of Passover as this one -day thing, but it was not.
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And if we don't keep that in mind, we'll end up with having one of the confusions that we will undoubtedly address again in the future, and that is the timing of the crucifixion.
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Two things to keep in mind, I won't go over these now because we're going to have to go over more later, but just so you sort of have them in your mind.
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A few principles. A, in Jewish reckoning of time, first of all, you have
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Jewish reckoning of time in regards to days. Any portion of a day is considered a full day. So, they didn't talk about two -and -a -half days or one -and -a -quarter days or something along those lines.
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Any portion of a day was considered a full day. Secondly, unlike the
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Romans, the Jews did time from basically based upon the sun.
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So, you didn't start the day at midnight because you wouldn't know where the sun was. You start the day at 6 a .m.
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basically, sunrise for part of the year anyhow. The closer you are to the equator, the easier that is,
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I suppose. So, the timing, especially in the issue of third hour, sixth hour, ninth hour, in Matthew, Mark, and Luke, it would be different than John.
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John uses Roman timing. Matthew, Mark, and Luke use Jewish timing. And so, there's a six -hour difference between them.
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So, people say, oh, there's a third hour, there's a ninth hour. They can't even get their hours straight. They're talking to different audiences.
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John being written at a later point in time, probably, most probably after the destruction of the temple and the nation, utilizes the time that would have been familiar to his readers, and that would be
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Roman time. And hence, there's a difference between them. Once again, based upon the audience they're writing to.
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But, again, people will look at that and go, see, see, contradiction, contradiction. No, see, see, ignorance, ignorance.
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That's really what's going on there. So, portion of a day counted as a full day. The time issue, and I'm going to wake up my
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Greek brother here. He says, uh -oh.
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In Greek, how do you say Thursday? Uh -huh.
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How about Friday? Now, see, you say, you say, the.
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I say, paraskyre. But, do you know what paraskyre means? Yes, I know.
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Yes. Preparation. Preparation. Now, why is this relevant? Well, the reason I ask, brothers, because in modern, even to this point today, in modern
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Greek, the very name for Friday is paraskyre, which means preparation day.
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Preparation for what? Sabbath. Preparation for the Sabbath. It comes from the
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New Testament. And, as a result, one of the big issues that people have, if they just knew the language, if my brother here was reading the chronology of the crucifixion of Jesus, and he encounters paraskyre, it's not even going to be an issue.
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It's just going to be natural, like us reading Friday. But for us, the
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New Testament, the English translations will say preparation day. And we're like, huh?
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But it's actually the day of the week. And so, people will go, well,
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Jesus couldn't have been crucified on Friday, because it has to be three days and three nights.
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And Friday afternoon is only one evening and two nights and one day.
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And so, that doesn't work. And so, it has to have been Wednesday. And they come up with all this complicated stuff, all because they ignore any part of a day as a full day.
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And paraskyre happens to be the name of the day. And so, it's said it happened on Friday.
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It's right there. And yet, people will develop this whole big, huge, complicated thing.
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And the cults will use this as well. They'll come to your door, and they love to have these little things that are their hooks.
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You know, they need to get something to hook you with. And basically, what they want to do is they want to ask you a question they figure you're not really going to have an answer to, because you never even thought about it before.
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And once they've got you, then it's like, well, you know, if the church you're going to right now never told you about that,
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I wonder what else they didn't tell you about. See? And so, they'll do that.
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They'll utilize that kind of argumentation. So, at some point, we're probably going to have to spend just an entire thing.
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We did it before. Some of you, maybe four of you, maybe. Great keeper of the notes,
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I'm sure, could tell me the exact day. That was a few notebooks ago.
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Wow. That was that long ago, huh? In the archives. Okay. And you don't carry the archives?
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I mean, you could carry the archives. I mean, you could just...
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Yeah, but... By the way, digital archives are much easier to carry than the...
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I'm sorry? You're old school? Okay. All right. Yes, ma 'am? I'm sorry?
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Oh, sure. Yeah, they only knock once. There's a big old
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X on my house, especially the Jehovah's Witnesses and the Mormons. They don't come back.
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Not because they were mistreated. It's just like... Well, I remember one of my favorite recollections was when
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Rich lived next door. I lived next... Well, I lived next door to Rich. And my office was in the front room of Rich's house.
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This was before he got married. And so, my office was his front room. And we did not plan this out.
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We weren't thinking this through correctly. But my library was in there on these, you know, those super cheap metal shelves, you know, that you...
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Yeah, it was ugly. But anyways, that's all we could afford. And so, I had my entire
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Jehovah's Witness library on this big old shelf. And unfortunately, if you stood just outside the front door and looked in, it would be the main shelf you could see from the front door.
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And we're talking all their books, their bound volumes of the Watchtower and Wake magazines back in the 1950s.
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I mean, a pretty decent Watchtower library. And so, one day,
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I'm sitting there and someone knocks on the door. And lo and behold, it's the Witness. It's like, all right. You know, so I opened the door and I'm standing there talking with them and all, you know.
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And we're talking about, I don't know, probably Armageddon at some point. That seems to be their favorite topic.
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And, you know, eventually trying to get it over to the subject of the Trinity or something like that.
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And all of a sudden, I see that there's two of them. And the one that's talking to me is sort of looking at me.
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But the other one, you know, and recognizes what's in there.
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And of course, they freak out because Witnesses are not allowed to talk to apostates.
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So, if you're a former Witness, which I'm not, but if you're a former Witness, then they're not supposed to be talking to you.
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And so, this person's like, what, what, what? You know, so I start explaining. Man, they were out of there so fast.
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It's like, no way. I remember talking to two Jehovah's Witness ladies who were absolutely convinced that I was a former
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Witness by the name of, oh, what was that guy's name? Oh, Chuck Love.
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What a name. Straight out of the 1960s, I think. But Chuck Love, they were convinced.
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And I knew who Chuck Love was. I never met him. But I knew that he was a former Witness in the valley somewhere. I'd never met him.
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But they were absolutely convinced. I got out my driver's license and showed it to them.
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And they were, that can be fake. That can be fake. They marched out the door. They were absolutely convinced. So, there are those who, yeah, they're interesting.
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But how do you get on all that? I don't know. Oh, yes. The background issues.
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They will utilize those things. Secondly, please note as well from this text, people will say, how could the disciples have reacted the way they did to the arrest and crucifixion of Jesus?
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If Jesus had been so clear in speaking to them.
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I mean, right here, he says, the Son of Man will be delivered up to be crucified. Matthew chapter 16.
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Peter, get behind me. Why? Because Peter's saying, may it be far from you, Lord, that you ever go, you know, it's necessary to go to Jerusalem and the
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Son of Man will be betrayed in the hands of men and he'll be beaten and he'll be crucified and rise again the third day.
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And Peter's like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. And that was 10 chapters before this. I mean,
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Matthew has made it very, very, very, very plain that the crucifixion was not something that Jesus kept hidden from the notice of the disciples.
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Very, very plain. So, were they just that dull? Were their memories that short?
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How can we explain this? Because it causes some people a problem. Again, I'm thinking primarily of my
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Muslim friends. You know, I'm getting ready to go on another trip. And, you know, you go down to South Africa and you debate in mosques in South Africa.
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And the conversations after the debate in the mosque in South Africa are rather interesting because you're dealing with folks who've only heard portions of the story.
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And one of the things that very frequently comes up is, how can we trust the
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Bible when it's so obvious? I mean, the disciples did not expect
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Jesus to be crucified. They ran away, etc., etc. And yet Jesus had told them.
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I mean, how do you explain all this kind of stuff? And so, obviously, as I look at these things, you know,
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I think about, well, how do you respond to something like that? And what we learn from it, what's fairly obvious,
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I think, to me, we learn from it. What were these men expecting even after the crucifixion and resurrection?
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Even after Jesus has ministered to them and he's opened up the scriptures and he's opened up their minds in Luke 24 to understand the scriptures.
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And even after all of that, what's going on in the last few minutes as well as time for us to sort of take over, you know, time to establish the kingdom.
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And they've got such a strong tradition of what the
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Messiah is to be that they keep interpreting everything that Jesus says in light of that tradition.
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And it takes so long and it takes the indwelling presence of the Holy Spirit. And even when the
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Spirit comes and you've got Pentecost and you've got preaching and everything else and Peter's been preaching, it's still quite some time until he's on the roof at Simon's house.
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And we're sort of wondering why he's on the roof. Well, it's probably cooler up there. First of all, we don't have air conditioning. But secondly,
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Simon was a tanner. And I bet you Peter was going, I'm doing pretty good staying as a tanner because tanners are touching dead bodies all the time.
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And therefore, from the Jewish perspective, it'd be very unclean. And so Peter was probably thinking he was actually being very liberal.
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But he's up on the roof probably because it doesn't smell real good in Simon the Tanner's house. Simon the
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Tanner probably doesn't smell that good. And what does God have to do? Three times he has to give him a vision and command him,
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Peter, rise me. Oh, no, no, no, no, no, no. It takes that amount of effort to break through.
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And still Peter relapses. Where does he relapse? Galatians chapter 2.
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The men come from James. Looked like Peter had gotten the idea. He was having table fellowship with the
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Gentiles. It's cool. But no. People come from James. What happens?
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He withdraws table fellowship. Starts trying to, you know, do the Jewish thing again. Tradition is a powerful, powerful, powerful thing.
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And given what they expected the Messiah to be and how they did not have a fully biblical understanding of who the
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Messiah was to be, we can see why even in light of the clarity of what
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Jesus says, they just can't believe that that's a possibility. The Messiah is going to be a conqueror.
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The Messiah is going to bring peace to Israel. The Messiah is going to overthrow the Romans. The Messiah is going to give us a preeminent role amongst the nations of the earth, etc.,
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etc., etc., etc. And when Jesus says this is what the
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Messiah will do, it is amazing how people, you can speak with the greatest clarity you can muster.
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And then you talk to somebody after they've listened to you speak and you have no idea how they heard you say what you said. Believe me,
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I speak enough in enough places that I'll meet with somebody after, you know, somebody will come up to me and ask me a question.
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They'll shake my hand. Love what you had to say. And then in the conversation afterwards, I'm like, who were you listening to?
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Did you have an iPod on or listen to somebody other than me? Because I have no earthly idea how you came up with that conclusion.
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But unfortunately, that happens a lot. And it happens with the disciples as well.
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So it is as the section 305 says, Jesus' death is premeditated. That is,
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Jesus knows that it's coming and it is purposeful. He knows. He says it is necessary for the
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Son of Man to go to Jerusalem. This is not something that sneaks up on him. This is something that he knows is coming.
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Unfortunately, we have run completely out of time. We'll try to pick things up a little bit faster in the future, but don't hold your breath.
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Let's close. Father, we do thank you for this time, the freedom you've given to us to open your word and to study it, help us to be good students of your word, to remember that we might proclaim it to others, that others might know the truth of the gospel of Jesus Christ.