Who Is The Real Historical Jesus?

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Today's question is, who is the real historical Jesus, and how can we know him?
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Who is the real historical Jesus? So if you've missed out on my first two lessons, my series this summer has been about questions, challenges to the
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Bible. I want to start this morning, and the first one we looked at, the first topic, does anybody remember?
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Science, yes. And we talked about miracles, and we said, is the Bible unscientific? Because it talks about miracles, because it claims that miracles are true, right?
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And if you remember, we looked at the challenger in that one was David Hume, the Scottish philosopher who supposedly anyway attempted to prove that miracles were impossible, but we found that his argument was a logical fallacy in that it was a circular reasoning argument, and we looked, in fact, that it's very plausible and likely that miracles are true and have occurred and are occurring.
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And about the nature of God and his character, and about what the laws of science mean. And just,
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I'll rehash that because it's one of my favorite points, which is that whenever we talk about the quote -unquote laws of science, what we're really referring to is the fact that our
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God is very consistent, that things continue to behave in the way they behave because God is, by his nature and character, is immutable and unchangeable and consistent, and so thus miracles are the exception rather than the rule.
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The rule is that things continue to operate in the way that he himself has deemed and set forth and willed.
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And then number two, the big question was, is the Bible racist? Is the
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Bible racist? And we went through, particularly exploring the history of how false teachers tried to use the
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Bible to justify the slavery system in America. We looked at the quote -unquote curse of Ham, which actually isn't a curse of Ham at all, it's really the curse of Canaan, and attempt, and hopefully anyway for everyone's sake, edified you and built you up to be able to, for the apologetic to understand that the answer to that question is no, that in fact our modern day notions of race and racism are rooted actually in secular and evolutionary theory ideas, and that the
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Bible does not really speak of race in the way that we talk of races in modern terms, and certainly not by skin color.
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So today, a little bit lighter of a topic, but certainly not any less important or meaningful, which is, who is the real historical
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Jesus? Who is the real historical Jesus? How many of you have heard the term before, historical
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Jesus? Okay. Could somebody give me the
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Cliff Notes version of what I mean when I say the historical Jesus? Yeah, that's a pretty good one, yep.
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The idea being that, so if we're going to explore this in terms of quote -unquote written history, are there things in other sources besides the
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Bible that tell us about who Jesus is and what can we know about him from those other sources?
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Bob? Right. Because the presupposition is that the
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Bible is incorrect, or is biased, or is, you know, some other way not reliable, and so we have to go to some other source in order to prove it.
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Alright? Listen to some of these quotes that people have, some quotes that I found of people talking about Jesus.
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Let's start with Ralph Waldo Emerson, okay? The poet, the American poet.
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Emerson once said, Jesus Christ belonged to the true race of prophets. He saw with open eye the mystery of the soul.
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Drawn by its severe harmony, ravished with its beauty. He lived in it and had his being there.
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Alone in all history, he estimated the greatness of man. That's Emerson.
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Very poetic. How about Jack Canfield? Jack Canfield is the man behind Chicken Soup for the
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Soul, if you've ever seen that incredibly popular series of books that there's about a thousand sequels to now.
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Jack Canfield said, I believe in unconditional love and equality, and Jesus Christ exemplified these qualities.
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How about Pope Francis? We all like Pope Francis here, right?
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Truth according to the Christian faith is God's love for us in Jesus Christ. Therefore, truth is a relationship.
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How about Elton John, who has a lot to say about Jesus, actually. Strange, I found a lot of Elton John quotes about Jesus.
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This one was pretty typical. I love the idea of the teachings of Jesus Christ and the beautiful stories about it, which
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I loved in Sunday school, and I collected all the little stickers and put them in my book. But the reality is that organized religion doesn't seem to work.
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Or how about Mikhail Gorbachev? Mikhail Gorbachev, for those of you who are younger than me,
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Mikhail Gorbachev was the last premier of Soviet Russia before it renounced communism and became a pseudo -democracy that it is today.
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So the last premier of Soviet Russia. Mikhail Gorbachev said, what about Jesus Christ?
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I say that he was a precursor of idealists, a precursor of socialists. So the point is, my point here is that all of these people have an understanding, a picture in their mind of who
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Jesus is or was. And who is to say, that's the question today, who is to say who is right and who is wrong?
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In our modern culture, there are probably about, almost about as many ideas about Jesus as there are people living.
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And so when we're talking about this so -called search for the historical Jesus, one which is attempting to separate verifiable, provable fact from what they call belief or tradition or myth, okay?
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And what can we really know about him? Is it more reasonable to believe that gullible people from a backwater region of a backwater province in ancient
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Rome invented the idea of Jesus? Or is it more reasonable to believe that there really was a
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Jewish miracle worker from Nazareth who claims to be the long -awaited
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Messiah? Now, last week when we talked about is the
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Bible racist, I quoted Richard Dawkins, right? And Richard Dawkins, the very famous atheist.
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And if you remember in the beginning of that quote, he made a very telling word choice in his opening statement.
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I'm going to read that, just that opening part again. He said, the God of the
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Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction. Right?
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Did you catch that? Yes. Fiction at the end, right? That's the word choice I'm talking about. Because Dawkins considers the
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Bible a fictional book, right? He's actually, at one point, I think a little bit tongue -in -cheek, but campaigned to have
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Bibles moved at Barnes and Noble or the bookstores from, you know, whatever the religious community is.
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The religious studies section where they put them into the fiction section. It will not surprise you to hear then that he only really begrudgingly seems to accept the idea that a person named
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Jesus ever even existed. Okay? And he even mentions in one of his books, he puts it this way, he says, it is even possible to mount a serious, though not widely supported, historical case that Jesus never lived at all.
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He kind of wishes that it was more widely supported. And Raphael Lattaster, if you ever run into him, he's a lecturer in religious studies at the
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University of Sydney. That's his qualifications. He goes further.
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He's one of those folks that Dawkins alludes to about the folks who says that, you know, that it's possible to mount this argument.
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He's the guy who's probably mounted the most detailed argument. He says, there are clearly good reasons to doubt
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Jesus' historical existence, if not to think it outright improbable. Okay?
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But what I want to tell you today is that these guys are truly on the fringe.
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All right? So, you may have heard, particularly on your social media feed, on the internet, that secular historians have proven that the
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Gospels are fake, right? Or that Jesus did not exist, right?
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You might have seen that or heard that. I've also read on the internet that Abraham Lincoln said that the problem with the internet is you can never really be sure if the quotes you're reading are accurate.
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All right. So, and in this case, this is an example of where popular culture, the internet,
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I'm just going to keep referring it to as a monolith, okay? The internet. They rode the bus with the historians for a little ways and then heard what they wanted to hear and got off.
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Okay? Because there was a time, probably in the late 1800s, early 1900s, where it was a pretty popular idea among historians to entertain the notion and try to prove that Jesus was not even a real historical person.
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However, they've long passed that. They've long renounced that and given that up.
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And now, it is a sizable scholarship that says, that has basically abandoned that idea.
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By the mid -20th century, historians, except for a few real fringe guys, accept the idea that Jesus is a historical figure, a real person.
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We're going to get into a long list of things, in fact, that they all generally, near universally accept to be true about Jesus.
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So, let's talk about this. When we're talking about the historical Jesus, and we're going to run into this, or if people challenge you on this,
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I think it's important for you to understand the context of what's really happening, because very likely, those people don't know what's really happening.
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They've heard just the quick little sound bite, or they got a nugget from a professor in their college days, or from their friend, and they're just copying the meme from Facebook over to Twitter, and they think they've got it all figured out, and they think that they're going to nail you,
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Christian, that the historians have proven that Jesus didn't really exist. So, let's talk about what the historians really said, what they're really doing, what they're working on, so that we can understand, from our standpoint, that when we're trying to do apologetics, that we know how to approach these folks, and how to deal with these challenges.
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So, we're going to do a little history lesson about history. So, forgive me,
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I'm going to nerd out here on you a little bit on history stuff. So, there's three eras of the search for historical
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Jesus. Three eras. The first era starts in the Enlightenment. Anybody know when the
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Enlightenment was? Any other history nerds? Yeah.
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Late 1700s, mid -1700s even, through to about the mid -1800s.
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In the Enlightenment era, of course, most famous for the political ideas that came out of that era, which would be the
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American Revolution and the French Revolution. But certainly, you know, it kind of ends around the rise of evolution and modernism.
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The first era of the search for the historical Jesus, sorry, starts with a bunch of German scholars in the
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Enlightenment. There's one guy named, I'm going to butcher his name here,
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Gotthold Lessing. Okay? He's the first, at least, that I could find in my research who tried to suggest a gap separating the quote -unquote
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Jesus of history and the Christ of faith. Okay, that's the way that he did this distinction.
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The Jesus of history, and he's using Jesus' name, his earthly name here, as a person, a man, and then the
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Christ, the Messiah of faith. Okay? And he actually describes the separation, the gap between the two, as a broad, ugly ditch.
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All right? That we historians can't cross that ditch. We have no idea how to figure out who is the real
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Jesus of history from this Christ of faith that's been built up. Here's the thing about that first era.
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It's entirely characterized by the presupposition of naturalism. It starts with, as Bob said, the idea of no miracles.
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Right? And if there are no miracles, because Hume, who's also an Enlightenment philosopher, right?
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If Hume's disproven miracles, and the Bible says there are miracles, well then we can't trust the Bible, whatever the
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Bible has to say about Jesus, so we have to find some other sources to talk about in order to learn about Jesus. Okay?
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So they throw out the entire Bible, basically. A perfect example of this is the
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Jefferson Bible, if you're familiar with the Jefferson Bible. So Thomas Jefferson, they actually still sell this down in Washington, D .C.
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or at Monticello, you can go down there and pick it up. What he did was he took the four
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Gospels, and because this is the old days, he didn't have copy -paste, literally cut and paste, right?
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With scissors or knives and glue. That he chopped up a
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Bible and went through the four Gospels and took out everything supernatural.
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Everything. Right? From it. And left behind only just sort of Jesus' teachings and his parables and his sayings and that's it.
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Right? And pasted that all together into one harmonizing sort of thing. And it ends with Jesus being buried in the tomb.
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Done. They roll the stone, they steal the stone. And that's the end of Jefferson's Bible. It's a hopeless
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Bible about a Middle Eastern guru of Thomas Jefferson's own imagination.
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And it's very exemplary of what most of these first era historical
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Jesus folks were thinking. Right? Let's get rid of all the supernatural and boil it down and what can we really know about this mystic, this
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Near Eastern rabbi who just kind of came out of nowhere and captured the imagination of a whole bunch of people, but then got crucified for what he was teaching.
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The first era is the time where we first hear about the idea of legends.
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Okay? That Jesus was really just a legendary figure. That he was perhaps a rabbi, but then very quickly they just built up all these legends around him.
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And that all the miracle stories are legends that were created by his followers. Essentially turning him into Paul Bunyan.
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They also talked a lot about theological propaganda. That the gospels were written not as history, but rather to convince people of a particular theology.
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And so again, they would say that you can't recover the real Jesus because he's buried under all this mythology and legend stuff.
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The final result is a wonderfully liberal Jesus. A Jesus stripped of the more unenlightened entanglements associated with the gospels and Christian orthodoxy.
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A moral reformer, to be sure, a teacher who revealed the simple tenets of a reasonable love -based religion.
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Now I want to remind you that we got here because of the presupposition of naturalism.
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Right? And hopefully, at least for those of you who are here in Lesson 1, you're with me on that we've already disproven that presupposition.
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Right? So you only get to this, this wonderfully liberal
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Jesus, if you take away any possibility of the supernatural.
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If you take away any possibility of the resurrection. But if you accept the idea, or at least even say it is worth investigating whether or not the resurrection occurred or not.
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That it is a plausible explanation for what happened after his death and why his followers suddenly were able to just explode this new religion across the entire ancient known world.
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Alright? That it's a plausible explanation. Maybe it's not the actual one, but it's at least a plausible one. Then the first era starts to fall apart.
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And it did. It started to lose steam. And so by, and so when we get to the second era, there was this, so there was a little while where nothing was happening, and then in the 1950s, okay, the second era happens.
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The 1950s through the 1970s. There's this renewed interest in, let's try to find the historical Jesus. In the 1950s and 60s and 70s, the big deal about this second era was trying to, it was
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Greek Jesus versus Jewish Jesus. Okay? Fight.
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Greek Jesus versus Jewish Jesus. And there was this constant rehashing all the time, arguing over what parts in the
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Gospels or in Paul's writings in the epistles were Greek -influenced elements, and what parts were
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Jewish -influenced elements, right? And there was this whole, they made up this tension that they read into the
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Bible and started to see it when it's not really there, that there's some kind of fight going on between two competing traditions that then sort of blended together into the
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Bible. The second era is also when we started to hear things about, quote -unquote, pagan mythological influences, okay, pagan mythological influences.
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And this is the idea that Christianity is actually just a copycat religion, okay?
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Borrowing from myths, other myths of ancient history, like Osiris from Egypt or Mithras from Greece, Eleusis from Greece, Samothrace from Greece is another one, where they say that they found little elements, right, here, there, and everywhere.
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Or Hercules even, right, because Hercules is half -man, half -god, right?
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And so saying that the Christians sort of just cherry -picked little bits from all these different myths and then synthesized their own religion out of it.
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Osiris is another really good example from Egypt in that Osiris in the myth, the
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Osiris myth, he was resurrected from the dead, and it's one of the most important myths of ancient
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Egyptian religion. And he was resurrected from the dead by his wife and then went on to pass on to the kingdom of the afterlife, and he rules, supposedly, the kingdom of the afterlife, right, the
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Hades, although it wasn't called Hades in ancient Egypt, but that idea, the underworld.
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So let's talk about, I want to talk about that specifically, because we hear a lot about that, that people just want to say that Christianity is either getting these elements from these other, or it's just another one of these ancient religions.
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First off, okay, so a few points on this. First off, Christianity, where did it come from?
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What was, like, if we're just talking in terms of a family tree of religions, right?
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Where did it emerge out of? Judaism, yes. What's Judaism's most defining characteristic compared to all these other ancient religions,
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Brian? There is only one God, right? There is only one God. All these other myths that I just mentioned, there's a ridiculous pantheon of gods in all of these, right?
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Like just tons of them. What in fact was, when
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Jesus was preaching in Judea, what was one of the things that the
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Pharisees had the biggest problem with about Jesus, Brian? Because he claimed to be that one
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God, right? And they could not, in their unbelief and darkened minds, comprehend the possibility that the one, the
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Shema of Deuteronomy, that the one God could be Triune, right?
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And that, in fact, that Jesus was one with the
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Father, right? Judaism, and all the original converts to Christianity were monotheistic
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Jews, okay? They had their antenna up about this stuff, is my point, about polytheism, right?
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They were really, really, really on point about watching out for polytheistic influences.
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They had learned their lesson. They learned their lesson from the
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Babylonian exile, right? That they had been exiled from their homeland specifically because God and the prophets told them that they had done too much of allowing the pagan and the
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Canaanite religions and all of the religions around them to sully their religion, right?
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And they had let all the idol worship in. And so God had allowed the Babylonians to come and capture their land and exile them to Babylon, and they spent decades trapped in Babylon amongst a religion that was very polytheistic, and they had to maintain their culture within that other land, right?
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So when they came out of Babylon, they had really, really refined down the notion of monotheism.
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I read a good quote in saying that, like, something to the effect of, like, if there was one sin that the
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Jews were not going to be accused of again, it was idolatry, right?
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It was idolatry. And that was the one thing that they were really, really on the lookout for in Jesus's time in what we call, quote -unquote,
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Second Temple Judaism. In fact, they were so wary of it that it's what eventually caused their destruction, what, like, if we look at in terms of earthly historical explanations, what resulted in their destruction as a nation in 70
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AD, because they refused to go along with ancient Rome's ideas of religion, and Rome just kept going, like, what is with these people?
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And Rome just tried to get them to just go along a little bit, like, Rome kind of wanted to just leave them alone, but was like, just, could you just compromise a little tiny bit and we'll otherwise leave you alone?
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And they were like, nope, nope, nope, nope, nope, and they eventually revolted and rebelled and Rome had to come in and totally crush them, okay?
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All right. So the idea, then, I say all that to say that the idea that strongly monotheistic
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Jews would be okay with creating a religion that brought in elements from all these other places is really improbable.
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Okay? Really improbable. All right? Yes? The historical
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Jesus thing, or? Oh, Second Temple Judaism? Oh, no.
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Oh, the second era of historical, yeah, 1950s through the 70s. 1950 to 1970, just a 20 -year thing.
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First era was like 100 years, this one's just 20 or 30 years. 1950s to 1970s, 1800s, and then there's nothing.
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There was like a gap. Yep. Sorry, big gap theory, I'm sorry. Yep. Yep.
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There was basically just a time where the historians were like, they just kind of, it wasn't very fun or popular to go searching for the historical
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Jesus, I guess. So nobody did it for like 100 years. Okay. All right. All right, so that's number one about the pagan mythology.
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Number two, all these quote -unquote alleged parallels with ancient myths, they disappear when you really carefully examine them, right?
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So here's one popular one. People will say that Jesus' resurrection happens in springtime, and it's simply just a borrowing of the idea that all these mythology around the idea of spring being when, you know, there's the rebirth of nature, right, and vegetation comes alive and everything gets warm again and crops and everything is really nice.
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The problem with that parallel is autumn, right?
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That everything dies again, and Jesus does not. That all of those myths were very much based on a cycle, and there is nothing in the accounts of Jesus about anything about his life being cyclical in nature.
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It's also really important to understand that Bible accounts do not share literary structure with ancient myths, okay?
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And if you've ever tried to read Beowulf, or if you've tried to read the ancient
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Greek myths, you know what I'm talking about, right? They immediately jump into the fantastical and the crazy, to put it mildly.
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It's also really important to note that all of these myths don't have any real definitive version.
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There is no canon to ancient Greek mythology, right?
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So even when we talk about things like, you know, Hercules, I regret to inform you that the
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Disney movie of Hercules is not the canonical story of Hercules, the
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Hercules myth, right? I know, right? I'm sorry, I just destroyed everyone's childhood. Or middle age, depending.
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But yeah, these things, they don't have a definitive version, okay?
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And so, or even agreement, or anything close to an agreement between the two versions. That Osiris myth that I just told you about, like there's 20 some odd different versions of that Osiris myth.
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And all sorts of different crazy things happen, like in some versions his body gets cut up and then it gets put back together again like Frankenstein, in other versions like the wife doesn't, like he doesn't even come back bodily, he comes back just spiritually, like it's all over the place, right?
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It's all over the place. And so to try to argue that Christianity has some parallel with any of these things is like, well, which one are you talking about, right?
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Another one, number three, Christianity did not, or I'm sorry, Christianity did deal with mystery religion influences, okay?
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It did deal with them. They did try to creep into Christianity, and Christianity excommunicated them very quickly.
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All of those ancient councils, a lot of them that we talk about in church history, were dealing with these pagan outside influences trying to creep in and corrupt biblical truth.
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Gnosticism, Arianism, fake gospels, right? Gospel of Thomas, gospel of Judas, all this other stuff, right?
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Which by the way, are also so much more obviously myth -like in their structure, if you ever read them, where the stories just become like these fantastical legend hero stories, as opposed to what sound like actual history.
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Number four, if any borrowing was actually happening, it was probably actually the other way around, in that the
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Greek cults were borrowing from Christianity. Because of all the ones I just named, even though we call them, we talk about them in terms of ancient
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Greece, it is in fact true that most of at least our earliest source material comes from after the
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Christian era for these Greek myths. And so we're not even really sure if, again, because the elements are so different, we're not even sure if the elements were invented before or after Christianity came on the scene.
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And it's entirely possible that these pagan mystery religions were instead borrowing elements from Christianity, because they were trying to compete for new converts.
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All right, so that's that, with the pagan borrowing copycat stuff.
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Any questions about that? I am racing along, but I still have three more pages, so here we go.
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Okay, good, no questions, excellent. Third era, the third era of the search for historical Jesus starts in the 1980s.
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And the third era is all about context, context, context, context. It's all about studying
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Second Temple Judaism and the culture of the Near East and the culture of Greece in Roman times, et cetera, and asking, how would
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Jesus's actions and teachings be understood in these cultural contexts, okay?
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But notice the presupposition that just happened there that wasn't existent in the first era.
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How would Jesus's actions and teachings be understood? What's the presupposition all of a sudden that's appeared in the third era?
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Jesus existed, that's right. He had teachings and actions to be understood, right?
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That by the third era, we have completely, as I said earlier, we've completely abandoned the idea that he never existed.
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And now we're talking about he did exist, and what can we really know about him?
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He really lived, he was really crucified, and that his followers were worshipping him very soon after the crucifixion, right?
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And so it turns out that that big ugly ditch that Lessing was worried about back in the first era is one that we can actually cross.
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So in today's scholarship of the searching for historical Jesus, they have a set of guidelines that they call the criteria of authenticity, okay, the criteria of authenticity.
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And we're going to look at these criteria, and I'm going to show you, and we're going to get to, I don't have enough time to show you how each one of these applies, but that we can use these criteria, and then we can get a big list, or not even we, they get a big list of things that they say are more likely true than not about Jesus.
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But let me just tell you about some of these quote -unquote criteria of authenticity, okay? One is called the criterion of multiple attestation, okay, the criterion of multiple attestation.
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And that essentially, I don't know why I can't pronounce it right tonight, this morning, that essentially means that if multiple sources talk about it, then it's more likely true, okay?
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One. Two, the criterion of embarrassment, you've probably heard this one before, the criterion of embarrassment, that's the idea that if you included, if you, the writer, included a detail that was potentially embarrassing to you, or to whatever viewpoint you were trying to espouse, that that's more likely true, because if you were making it up, you'd leave out embarrassing details like that, okay?
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The biggest criterion of, one that matches that criterion of embarrassment around the resurrection is the fact that,
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Pradeep? That the women are the ones who first discover that Jesus is risen. And why is that,
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Pradeep? Right. Because in Second Temple Judaism, women could not testify in a legal context.
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So they would be unable to legally testify to the fact that they had seen
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Jesus resurrected. Right? So it was embarrassing. If you were going to make it up, you'd have Peter and James, or Peter and John being the ones who first saw the risen
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Christ. Not the women. All right, next up, the criterion of historical plausibility.
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Woo! Right? And that one is essentially the idea that, that, that,
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I'm mixing this up with criterion, so okay, let me skip that one for a second, I'll come back to the other one. The other one
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I was about to think of was criterion of, this is a mouthful, Palestinian environmental phenomena.
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Okay? And that one essentially is that if the historical account talks about things that seem strange to us but actually line up with cultural norms of Palestine, then that means it's more likely true.
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Okay? The Palestinian, of that era, of that time period. A good example of this is the parable of the sower, in that Jesus is describing what, according to, looking at the parable, seems like what
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Jewish, his Jewish listeners would assume are standard farming practices, in that the sower throws out seed and then plows.
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Right? And it's sort of like, well, I mean, if you're a farmer now, what normally happens, normally what we do is we first, we plow up the ground, we make it nice, the soil all nice and loose, and then we put the seed in and then we bury the seed, right?
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But in fact, it turns out that in ancient Palestine, that is how they did farming. They threw the seed out first and then they plowed the ground.
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Okay? That was standard farming practice. So that's an example of a criterion of Palestinian environmental phenomenon.
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So the criterion of historical plausibility simply means that in the greater context of other things that we know about history, if it can fit within that framework, then it's more likely true than false.
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Okay? So that's sort of the idea of things like that the dates line up with when we say that rulers existed or when
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Pontius Pilate was governor of Judea and all that type of stuff. Okay? The next one is the criterion of coherence.
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This is similar to multiple attestation where essentially, like, if multiple elements of the story are coherent with each other, then they're more likely true than false.
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Obviously, if you had incoherence, that would sort of prove that at least one or the other was not true. And then there's a handful of others that some historians like and some don't.
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That list that I just gave you is probably the ones that get used the most. I think really important that I want to emphasize is that the criteria in question here, they are not rules, okay?
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They're not rules that guarantee that the material is historical with absolute certainty.
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They're simply more like guidelines that indicate, as this is the quote, usual tendencies and trajectories in developing traditions.
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Okay? And so they're basically statements about what is normally the case, that it's more likely true than not.
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Historians, they just don't like ever saying anything absolute. They just don't want to say, yes, it's 100 % certain that that happened.
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So they just want to say, it's more likely true than not. So we'll give them that, okay? If we zoom in on multiple attestation here for a second.
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So that's the one where I said that multiple sources say the same thing. You might think, hey, we got four
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Gospels. So there's four different things, right? Yeah, no. They don't let us do that.
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That's cheating, they said. So they won't accept that. However, what they do give us is still four things.
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Mark, Q, L, and M. Right? Hey, great. Okay. So I'm just going to tell you, just in case you ever hear these letters, what this means.
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They accept the Gospel of Mark as one possible source, because they say that's the earliest of the four
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Gospels written. Okay? So that's one. Q is this supposed other source, because they note that Luke and Matthew have a lot of content.
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First off, that Luke and Matthew have a lot of stuff that's in Mark, and also that they have a lot of stuff that the two of them share, but is not in Mark.
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And so that stuff that Matthew and Luke have in common, but Mark doesn't, they call that Q. Okay?
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Just go with it. Then L and M stand for Luke and Matthew, and these are the things that Luke has unique to his
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Gospel, and Matthew has unique to his Gospel. You will note that John isn't even in the list, and that's because historians don't like to use
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John, because there's just too much unique about John, and so they don't want to use it.
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But Paul is okay as a fifth, so we can look at the Pauline Epistles, and we can use that as a fifth source in the list of multiple attestation, okay?
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I don't know. I'm just going with what the historians are giving me here. And so they also answer the challenge that Jesus was fictional, because we have both biblical, and we also have non -biblical sources for that, right?
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So besides those four or five that I just listed with Paul, we can also talk about Josephus, and Tacitus, and a few other ancient historians that at least mention
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Christians, or Jesus himself, and mention, and their writings are very soon in the late first or early second century.
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So all that said, 45 minutes in, here we go. If we follow these guidelines and these criteria, just what kind of picture of Jesus do we get?
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All right? We don't have a lot of time, but I want to do this, so let's open it up. I need a bunch of volunteers.
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Mark chapter 2. Thank you, Mark. Mark 2, 21 to 22.
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Luke 11, 20. Linton, thank you. Matthew 5, 17.
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Nathan, thank you. Luke 17, 21. I'm sorry, Luke 17, 20 to 21.
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Other Mark. And Colossians 1, 13. What do all those verses have in common?
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What topic are they all talking about? Anybody notice? We read them fast.
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The kingdom of God. Yes, the kingdom of God. They're all about Christ preaching not just about the kingdom of God, but that the kingdom of God has come.
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That when Christ came and he is preaching the arrival of the kingdom of God.
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Those verses that we just read, that is Mark, Q, M, L, and Paul, by the historian's reckoning.
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All attesting to Christ preaching that the kingdom of God has come. And so there's one that we can say that the historical
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Jesus did, that he was a preacher about the kingdom of God, and that he preached that the kingdom of God had come.
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In 2008, a group of Jesus scholars produced a 900 -page book that they had been working on.
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Real light reading. Knock it off in a night. Key events in the life of the historical
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Jesus. And they used all these criteria, and they said that this is the list of things that are more likely true than false.
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Are you ready? One, Jesus affirmed the ministry of John the Baptist. Two, Jesus collected 12 key followers.
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Three, Jesus publicly associated with societal outcasts. Sinners, is what we would say.
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Four, Jesus claimed to be the Lord of the Sabbath. Five, Jesus was believed by his contemporaries to be capable of casting out demons.
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Six, Jesus accepted Peter's declaration that he was
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Messiah. Seven, Jesus rode into Jerusalem on a donkey.
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Eight, Jesus claims to have authority over the temple and the temple area. Nine, Jesus connected the
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Passover meal with his own ministry. Ten, Jesus claims to be the
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Son of Man, as prophesied by Daniel in the Old Testament. Eleven, Jesus was crucified for sedition against the empire under the orders of Pontius Pilate.
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Twelve, several followers of Jesus claims to find his tomb empty three days after the crucifixion.
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And thirteen, Jesus was an apocalyptic preacher that the kingdom of God has come. Okay? Now, consider the implications of all of these in sum, right?
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Because this is the thing. The scholars, they're like, all right, fine, we'll give you these, this list of stuff.
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But as I was telling Pradeep when he and I were talking about this earlier in the week, I think that they failed to think about the implications of all the things that they just said were more likely true than not.
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And it really is an example of how sad it is. Because I'll tell you, in preparing this lesson and reading through all of these scholars and reading all their quotes and everything, and I'm thinking to myself that so many of these men and women are neck deep in New Testament, reading all the time about Jesus, and yet still blind to the truth.
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Right? And just how sad that is, but just goes to show how powerful unbelief can be.
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That you can read and read and read the Bible and still not believe. And study it, and it literally is your career, and still not believe.
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This is a bit of an aside, but it was my own personal experience. That growing up in a house that was a
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Christmas and Easter Christian kind of house, where we just went to church on Christmas and Easter, and that was it.
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That I had a Bible in my house, and I had read the Bible, and I had heard Bible stories, and even went quite frequently with my grandmother to her church when
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I was a teenager, and went to that church and heard a lot about the Bible. And even when
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I was an unbelieving teenager, got up and preached a message about Joseph in his rainbow coat in church on a kid's
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Sunday, but then I got saved when
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I was 19 years old. And when I went back to read John and Romans and Acts and Matthew and Mark and Luke, and suddenly,
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I could actually read them. And suddenly, things that had been there in the words all along, the
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Holy Spirit could reveal to me, right?
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And that's what it really takes. So while we can look at these folks and we can sort of scoff and say, how can you be neck deep in New Testament and not see it?
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The answer is they don't see it because they don't believe, because they don't have faith, they don't have grace.
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But here's the implications of that list of stuff. One, the Baptist, John the Baptist, and Jesus both preached that a new era had arrived because Messiah had arrived.
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Forgiveness of sins was offered. Christ demonstrated his authority to offer that forgiveness by performing those exorcisms and other miracles.
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At least some of his followers agree that this meant that he was really Messiah. And at least some of his opponents were very upset by this claim, so upset that they crucified him over it, right?
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That the triumphal entry on the donkey and the Last Supper, the Passover meal that the historians are talking about, they both corrected the misunderstanding that Messiah was coming as some kind of military conqueror.
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That in fact, he was to be a suffering sacrifice. That was Jesus's message.
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And that he fulfilled his promise by suffering a martyr's death. But that strangely, in terms of from a secular viewpoint, his followers double down on their loyalty after his crucifixion.
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Rather than scattering to the wind like so many other false Messiah claimants over all of history.
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What caused that? Why would this group of people, after their leader had been killed, instead of abandoning it and chasing after some other new thing, become even more loyal to him?
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The most plausible explanation is the resurrection. Darrell Bock said, what
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Jesus offered was new and challenged the way things were being done. Jesus was more than a prophet or a religious teacher.
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His claims went beyond simply pointing the way to God. His claims involved a personal level of authority through which
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God was revealing himself. And William Lane Craig says, the
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Gospels were written in such a temporal and geographical proximity to the events they record that it would have been almost impossible to fabricate.
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The facts that the disciples were able to proclaim the resurrection in Jerusalem in the face of their enemies a few weeks after the crucifixion shows that what they had proclaimed was true, for they could never have proclaimed the resurrection and been believed under such circumstances had it not occurred.
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So when you're engaging unbelievers about the historical Jesus, I think the main thing I want you to think about is to ask questions and to ask lots of questions of them.
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And through those questions, help them to see if they, like the people that I quoted at the beginning, have just invented an imaginary Jesus, right?
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One of their own making, one that they're comfortable with. So the questions you can ask, a really great opening question is, who do you think
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Jesus claimed to be? Or how did you arrive at that position?
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What do you think of the gospel stories about Jesus? Why do you think so many people started worshipping
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Jesus so soon after his death, right? Help them think through this.
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And then, what if Jesus really was divine? What are you going to do about that, right?
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Let's pray. Heavenly Father, we thank you for this time, as short as it was, to be able to look through this and consider this challenge to your word.
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We are thankful that we know far more than just the so -called, quote -unquote, historical
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Jesus, that your word through your spirit reveals such great truth to us, that like I think of Romans 1 and we think of how there's the world and creation testify to the existence of you,
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Lord, but that without your special revelation in the Bible, we wouldn't really be able to know you personally. And in the same way,
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I suppose we can look and say that we can look at these historical things and say that we certainly can see plenty a picture of Jesus as a preacher, but without your word, we could not really know that he is your son and our savior.
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We are so thankful that you stooped down to reveal that to us. We are so thankful that Christ and his coming is the perfect image of you and that through his death and resurrection, we may come to know you personally, that you have adopted us into your family as sons and daughters and joint heirs with Christ.
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We pray, Lord, for those who steep themselves in study of the
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Bible and yet miss its true message and do not see you and do not come to know your son as their savior.
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I pray, Lord, that you would give them the grace to be saved, that you would grant them faith, that their conversion would be a powerful testimony,
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Lord, to your power to change hearts. And I pray,
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Lord, that you would help us as believers to be ready to answer challenges like this with sweetness, with understanding, with compassion, and with graciousness in our speech,
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Lord, and stand strong and firm in what we know we have believed.