July 5, 2005

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Webcasting around the world from the desert metropolis of Phoenix, Arizona, this is The Dividing Line.
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The Apostle Peter commanded Christians to be ready to give a defense for the hope that is within us, yet to give that answer with gentleness and reverence.
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Our host is Dr. James White, Director of Alpha Omega Ministries and an Elder at the Phoenix Reformed Baptist Church.
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This is a live program and we invite your participation. If you'd like to talk with Dr. White, call now at 602 -973 -4602 or toll free across the
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United States, it's 1 -877 -753 -3341. And now with today's topic, here is
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James White. And welcome to The Dividing Line on this Tuesday morning here in Phoenix, Arizona.
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Beautiful day, going to be a hot one around 111 out here today. Today is
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John Dominick Crossan 101. It has come to my attention, of course, as we have been preparing for the debate and the conference in Seattle, that there are many, even of those who are regular supporters, listeners to this webcast or read the blog, who simply are not aware of the issues regarding John Dominick Crossan, the
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Jesus Seminar, and what the debate is going to be all about. And so today
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I thought we would introduce you to John Dominick Crossan and his perspectives and also hopefully dispel some myths and then also give you some idea of really the tremendous challenge that I am facing in doing this debate.
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It is going to be very difficult and it is going to be very difficult because of the fact that I know, even in arranging this debate, that I had certain false ideas of what
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John Dominick Crossan is all about. And I assumed, wrongly, a connection as far as attitude and even perspective that cannot be assumed amongst the fellows of the
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Jesus Seminar. Almost anyone can join the Jesus Seminar and just because someone like Robert Funk can be very disagreeable and can be rather nasty, you may have listened to him hang up on us and tell us to go to hell in 1989, that does not mean that everyone else in the
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Jesus Seminar holds those same views or comes to their conclusions in the same way. And I think one of the difficult things for most conservative evangelicals to do is to understand really how it is that Crossan comes to the conclusions he does.
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Indeed, for most of us, the problem is we know what the conclusions he comes to are. We know that John Dominick Crossan, we have seen him on the
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ABC special with Peter Jennings, The Search for the Historical Jesus, in essence give his conclusions that he believes that Jesus' body was taken down from the cross and thrown into a garbage dump and eaten by dogs, that this was the probable outcome of what took place, and yet he says he believes in resurrection, it's just an allegorical resurrection, and how does he come to that conclusion?
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Is he like Robert Funk, who has written the 21 Theses of the Coming Reformation, and number six is we need to give
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Jesus a demotion, and really it's very difficult to read Funk's material without going, this man is an atheist.
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Crossan is different. He is a much better speaker than Robert Funk is, and he comes from a very different perspective than Robert Funk does, and so it's going to be a real challenge in light of the very brief amount of time that we have to even clearly express what the issues are, let alone engage them to any major depth.
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Indeed, the more I listen to him and read him and understand where he's coming from, the more
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I'm convinced that in essence this is a debate over presuppositions. It's a debate over starting points.
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It's a debate over assumptions that he is utilizing, and to me it's going to have to be in essence a discussion of those presuppositions and a demonstration of how those presuppositions result in inconsistencies in the utilization of the data that Dominic Crossan uses.
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He, by the way, requests that you call him Dom, and I'm not sure how that's going to work, but anyway, so to give you a sense, you need to listen to him speak.
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He's an Irishman. He is a very clear speaker, and you need to try, if you can, to lay aside the prejudices that naturally would be most of ours who would be listening to this webcast and hear what he's saying for himself in this.
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What I'm going to do here is I have the first clip is his opening statement in the debate he had with William Lane Craig, and that,
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I think, lays out some of the positions very, very well. Listen especially, and I'll probably be starting and stopping it.
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We might go, if we possibly could, a few minutes past our normal time because I've got a lot of stuff to play here.
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Then I have two questions, audience questions, very different audience questions. I've mentioned them on the program before.
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I said I'd play them for you. I have them queued up from the encounter that he had with N .T. Wright in New Orleans back in March that I think would really, you put all this together,
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I think it'll give you a good idea of what this is all about, and hopefully, for some of you, especially in the
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Northwest area, will get you off of the neutral point and get you to be at the debate and at the conference where we'll be discussing these very things.
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So we don't go too long. We need to get started. This is the opening presentation. John Dominic Crossan, William Lane Craig, the debate specifically on the issues of the
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Resurrection, but he lays out his presuppositions very, very well in this opening statement.
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The program we have heard from Dr. Craig, and now we will hear from Dr. Crossan in our exchange on the historicity of Jesus.
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Dr. Crossan. Thank you.
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In my opening statement, I'll try to explain to you the presuppositions that I work from at least as clearly as I can see them.
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I have two major points, and then why I consider those points to be important. First one sort of has to do with history, and it deals with the difference between the real and the historical
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Jesus. The title, the real Jesus is a Jesus of 2000 years of Christian faith.
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That is very easily answered. But I find myself, I have never used the phrase the real
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Jesus in any book. Possibly that may be because I learned English in Ireland rather than America.
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And I don't use real quite so often as it is used here to be on the front page of tomorrow's
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New York Times book review. The real lives of the Brontes. I use instead the historical
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Jesus because that is a technical term in scholarship, whether we like it or not, it's a technical term.
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The SPL, the Society of Biblical Literature to which Dr. Craig and myself belong, has a section called the historical
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Jesus section. And that is an attempt to talk about the earthly Jesus as that Jesus can be reconstructed through historical means.
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So that's what I've usually been talking about. The real Jesus is, of course, much bigger than the historical
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Jesus. Now, please notice that the real Jesus is much bigger than the historical
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Jesus. So one of the problems that people have is really we don't speak that way.
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The Jesus of faith, the Jesus of scripture, the Jesus of our worship, the
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Jesus that we understand in the scriptures is the historical
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Jesus. They're one the same. You need to understand that coming from Crossan's perspective, the Jesus of theology is far removed as the result of an extensive process of development over time and evolution.
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And hence, you can speak of the two as being very, very different from one another. The historical
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Jesus is one thing. The real Jesus is something completely different that doesn't necessarily have any connection to the historical
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Jesus. Notice how the language is already causing some difficulties there. And these presuppositions are important for me.
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And by presupposition, I do not mean at all something that cannot be challenged. It simply means something that I started from.
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If it's wrong, then we have to start all over again. Now, it is very, very common for Dr.
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Crossan to, in a what would appear to be very humble way, say, you know, I could be totally wrong about this.
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The problem is the way that he phrases that and the way that it's presented is that's what everyone has to say.
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Everyone in this dialogue is reduced to saying what I believe about Jesus could be completely wrong.
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And we might have to go back to the beginning and start all over again.
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And what that means is what the church has believed for 2 ,000 years just happens to be the perspective that ended up winning out.
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The idea that it's actually true, because certainly from his perspective, he's going to say he thinks it's terrible when he says that when
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Christians say that their religion is true and Buddhism is wrong. He thinks that's terrible. That's horrible.
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It's a bad, bad, bad, bad thing. Jesus would never want us to do that. See, and so people hear that, you know, postmodernists hear someone say, hey,
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I could be wrong about this. They go, oh, that's that's very humble. That's very humble of that individual. And when they say someone's here, someone else say, no, this is the way it must be.
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Oh, he's arrogant. He's mean spirited. And that's what makes this kind of movement proceed in our culture today.
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The presuppositions are supported by a massive consensus of scholarship. Now, that's not an argument.
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That's just a statement of fact. I do not find anywhere in the New Testament that it tells you that numbers makes you right.
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Or anywhere in the Bible, in fact, that it tells you that the majority is usually moral. It seems to be a tendency in the
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Bible to think that the few are more likely to be right than the many. However, as a fact, here is a presupposition that the gospel of Mark was used by the gospel of Matthew and Luke.
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All right, let's start right there. He is right. That is the majority view.
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There are a minority of people who say, no, that comes from German critical theory from well, a full two centuries ago, but from the 19th century.
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And in point of fact, it is just a theory. And yet in most New Testament studies departments and most
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New Testament studies today, even in the most conservative seminaries, with one exception,
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I can think of off the top of my head, it would be, of course, Dr. Thomas at the Master's Seminary. But almost every place else, the assumption from the very start is that Mark is called the theory of Mark and priority.
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Mark is first. Matthew and Luke use Mark, and then they have other sources that they will utilize.
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And hence, what he's going to be saying here, and this is very important to understand, that's why I'm stopping it so I can expand upon it and so you can hear it in his own words and hopefully have a background to understand it, is that the
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Gospels present to us only one stream of tradition, not four.
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John's just off. John isn't even for a large portion of New Testament scholarship. John is almost irrelevant, historically speaking, because it's so different than the
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Synoptic Gospels. And it has such a high Christology. And since everybody knows that developed over time, then that can't really be relevant.
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So Matthew, Mark, and Luke do not present us with three testimonies to the
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Gospel. They present us with one, only one. And in point of fact, what you then have is a
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Gospel, is a retelling of the good news. And that retelling doesn't care about the historicity of the documents it's using.
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He's going to say, look, Luke is going to take Mark, and he's more than happy to change the historical statements.
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This is where the Synoptic problems come from, because he doesn't care. That's not the point. You've missed the boat if you think that's what the
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Gospels are supposed to be doing in the first place. It's a retelling. Then Matthew is a retelling. And so they are changing the story.
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And you see, what we can do today is, since we live in a completely different worldview, completely different society, we can change the story too.
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The historical stuff's irrelevant. Doesn't matter whether Jesus rose from the dead or not. It doesn't matter whether any of these historical things actually took place.
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We can look at all these historical parallels. We can dismiss all that stuff, and still, from John Dominic Cross' perspective, have the
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Gospel. See? Now, that's so foreign to the vast majority of evangelicals' thinking, that it's very difficult to wrap your mind around it and go, ah, there's where he's coming from.
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And now, what's the best way to respond to this? Because this is the type of literature that is informing the secular presentation of what the
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Bible's all about in all of our community colleges, and our universities, and everything else. That's why we need to understand it.
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That it was one of their major sources. Now, that is where I begin.
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If that is wrong, everything will have to be redone. And of course, it could be proved wrong. Could be proved wrong by a peasant digging around in Egypt tomorrow morning in a rubbish dump.
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And finding, say, a Gospel dated to the year 100. But if Mark was used by Matthew and Luke, then you can, if you put them in parallel columns, which is the way scholars study them, cover
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Mark and see what Matthew and Luke do with Mark when they are using him as a source.
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Okay, here you have the synoptic problem. Here you have what you see, for example, in what we are doing in studying at Phoenix Foreign Baptist Church.
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Sunday mornings, I've been going through the synoptics. And we are using the very type of document that he says scholars use.
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That's what we're using. The parallel column harmony of the Gospel. We use the all -inversion. And he's saying, see, you can cover over Mark, and here's what
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Matthew and Luke are doing. So we're not, all of this is just one stream of tradition. And since they're willing to play with the history, then why are you people so upset about this stuff when we just observe this?
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When we just recognize this? That, in essence, is what's being said. You can see, in other words, how inspiration operates when somebody is using a source.
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That will become crucial as we continue. A second sort of a presupposition to which there is a massive consensus of scholarship again.
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Stating that simply as a fact, it's not idiosyncratic to start there, in other words. That is that in the data of the
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New Testament Gospels concerning Jesus's words and deeds, there are three successive layers.
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That's called the first one, the original layer that goes back to Jesus. The second layer, which is the tradition taking and adapting, creatively adapting, sayings and words of Jesus.
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And a third layer, which comes from the evangelists themselves. Now that's very important to understand.
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So once again, operational presupposition is that what you have in the Gospels themselves is an edited, changed, three -layer presentation.
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Of course, you've heard the Jesus Seminar and the fact that they are, you know, they examine the words of Jesus and they vote using these little marbles and to find out whether this saying actually goes that first layer or whether it represents the second layer or if it's the third layer where the evangelists, which he would not view as Matthew, Mark, Luke, or John.
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He would not view these as individuals who were eyewitnesses. These are later individuals or groups, committees almost, who have their own particular concerns and hence they're utilizing this material and forming it into their own purposes, their own shapes, so on and so forth.
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But again, he's saying this is the massive consensus. Well, at that point, it doesn't have quite the same massive consensus that the
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Mark and priority idea has, but it's certainly very, very widespread. And when you go to your local
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Christian bookstore and you buy your commentaries that have been written, that's one of the reasons
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I've been mentioning this stuff from Solid Ground. There's a commentary series coming out on Paul from Edy.
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These are older commentaries and the reason I've been recommending them is frequently they're not polluted with this stuff.
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So much of modern commentary writing, you have to spend all your time discussing these things, even if you don't happen to agree with it, since that's the form of scholarly consensus today.
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If you're going to be considered quote unquote scholarly, you almost have to spend more time wasting time discussing this stuff than you do actually dealing with the text.
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And it can become very tedious to work through that stuff, very confusing for the layperson as well. And that there is a degree of creativity that somewhat bothers us in all of those layers.
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That what he means there is creativity means a willingness to alter facts, a willingness to change things, a willingness to insert things, a willingness to change the tradition to meet the alleged needs of the current time of the writer of that particular gospel pericope, that particular story.
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Now without those presuppositions, everything that I say would be as absurd as Dr.
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Craig has made it sound. With those presuppositions, we start down a long 200 year voyage.
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And the trick is not to lose your nerve. Gospels are exactly what they say they are.
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Good news, which means they must be good and they must be news. They're good from somebody's point of view,
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Christian point of view, not the pagan Roman point of view. And they are news. That means by definition, gospels update.
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Now, immediately gospels update. They mean that means they have to be news as if the good news cannot be the same, but have an application for every single generation.
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That obviously is going to be one element of this presupposition that must be challenged right up front and dealt with.
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But because I think that's probably one of the weakest elements of this presentation is the idea that news by definition has to be new.
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It has to be updated in that in that fashion. Mark updates to the 70s.
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Matthew and Luke updates to the 80s. John updates to the 90s. I say update, not upgrade.
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They update the story. Those are presuppositions, not beyond discussion, of course.
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And if they are wrong, everything built on them is built on sand. Secondly, the formulation of this question then brings up the question of the historical
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Jesus. Otherwise, anyone would say you've got four versions. Go read them. Yes, but as soon as you say that Matthew and Luke are based on Mark, and as soon as you say, going a little bit further, that there's almost a split right down the middle of scholarship on whether John knows
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Matthew, Mark and Luke, all of a sudden we begin to see not four accounts of Jesus, but a stream of developing tradition.
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By the way, I see no problem with that. They are gospels. That's what they say they are.
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I think if we had the evangelist here, they would say that is called the freedom of the children of God.
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That's what it means to have the Holy Spirit. Okay, you need to hear that because John Dominic Crossan will use terms like inspiration.
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He'll talk about God. Don't ask him much about God because, you know, he doesn't like to get specific, in essence.
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One thing, by the way, you will never hear this man get upset. He will be just, and I can guarantee you something right now about the debate in Seattle.
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He will be just as calm, cool, collected and likable in the closing statement as he is in the opening statement.
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That's just all there is to it. I've listened to a lot of him speaking now, and I would be shocked if there is any type of change over the course of the discussion that night or even on the ship as well with Marcus Borg on the subject of the resurrection.
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So that's just simply going to be the case. But here you have this idea, inspiration.
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That's the freedom of the children of God. What is he talking about there? The freedom of the children of God is to edit the historical evidence to fit what you want it to be, and that's what inspiration is.
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So obviously, inspiration does not result in a consistency between quote unquote inspired documents.
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In fact, what you're hearing here is inspiration results in inconsistency if you're looking at those documents in the wrong way.
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And the wrong way would be to be looking for consistency. You see the rather vicious circle that is created by the presuppositions that have already been brought to the brought to the table.
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I, Matthew, am willing to look at Mark telling me what Jesus said and say, that's all very nice.
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But I think for my people right now, this is a better way to say it. I, too, have the
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Holy Spirit, Mark. In those last 200 years, the formulation, unfortunately, of this question has usually been the historical
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Jesus versus against over against the Christ of faith. That is a formulation which
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I reject completely. It is not against. It is a question of the relationship.
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The way I formulate the question is this. If you were there in Palestine in the first quarter of the first century and you were, let us say, a neutral observer, what would you have seen?
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What would you have seen that explains to you why some people said this man is divine, let us follow him, and other people, maybe equally good people, said this man is criminal, let us execute him?
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Now, catch that because here is an illustration of where one's theology impacts one's reading of history.
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Equally good people. There certainly is nothing in John Dominic Crossan's upbringing and in his current theology that provides a basis for understanding a biblical doctrine of sin.
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Remember, he does not believe there is a biblical doctrine of sin. He does not believe that there is a consistent presentation of anything in Scripture, even a doctrine of God.
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There is nothing there to lay a foundation for coming up with anything consistent.
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But notice, equally good people could come down on both sides of this. There's going to be a whole lot more of this, especially when we hear one of the audience questions later on.
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Now, there's going to be a point here where it's going to sort of stop for a second and sort of repeat itself because there's two MP3 files, but don't worry, you won't miss anything.
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And we know they both were there because they both did it. How do you explain both of those?
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Not just from the Christian point of view, but from the pagan point of view? I am totally on the
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Christian side, but I have to ask myself, what were the pagans seeing that they found criminal?
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The second major area, which is really much more important for me than the former, has to do with language.
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It has to do with the distinction between literal and metaphorical language, or actual and symbolic language, if you prefer.
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Most of us understand it completely on the level of a sentence. Jesus lived at Nazareth is actual, factual, historical, biographical, whatever you would call it.
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Jesus is the Lamb of God, we know immediately, is not the same type of language. It is symbolical, and we have to ask what it means.
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It is figurative, it is metaphorical. Now, are there stories like that?
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Stories which are literal and stories which are symbolical? And of course, either can be true or false. Let me take you out of the
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Bible. I guess since Dr. Craig went to Peter Pan, I can go into Never Never Land too.
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Let's go to Aesop, Aesop's Fables, and imagine a three -way argument.
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One person saying, wow, you know, animals could talk in ancient Greece. A second person saying, no, no, no, no, no, they couldn't.
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But there was a stupid Greek who thought they could. And of course, the third person saying, wait a minute, you're both wrong.
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This is a certain type of story, a genre, called a fable. Animals are allowed to talk there to make basic moral principles evident.
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Now, imagine that argument. How could you prove animals couldn't speak in ancient Greece? I'd hate to have
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Johnny Cochran coming after me in court on that one. Were you there with Dr. Crossland? No, I wasn't. Have you checked out all the animals?
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Well, no, I haven't. Then how dare you say, well, could it could not happen in ancient Greece? Well, they usually don't.
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That's a prejudice, Dr. Crossland. That's a presupposition. Well, yeah, I guess.
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But what we have done now is missed the whole point. Because the point of the story, whatever the story we were reading, had a moral point.
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And we've missed it. We're now arguing whether animals could or could not talk in ancient Greece, or whether ancient
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Greeks were stupid enough to think they could. We have been totally wrong. Now, let's move from fable to parable.
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Jesus tells the story of the Good Samaritan. And notice Jesus likes parables, by the way. Same argument.
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Is the Good Samaritan parable? Did it really happen? Of course it did. It mentions Jerusalem. It mentions
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Jericho. It mentions going down that 1 ,500 foot drop. It mentions the bandits. And everyone knows there were bandits in the hills around there.
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Of course it's historical. No, it isn't historical. Jesus just made it up as a parable, dummy. Now, watch what's happening.
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There's an argument going on which cannot be really proved one way or the other. I can make very good arguments that it was historical.
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You can make very good arguments that Jesus made it up a second ago. In the meanwhile, we are both avoiding the issue which is
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Jesus' challenge to live your life like the Good Samaritan. To live your life not in ethnic cleansing, but if you happen to find your enemy in distress, do everything you possibly can to help him.
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Are you or are you not willing to live your life like that? Now, you need to hear this because it is part of the strength of his argumentation.
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And that is, he is right that very frequently, individuals do utilize argumentation about issues like this to avoid the application that Jesus himself made.
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The problem is, I don't think anyone really has any questions about recognizing that Jesus is telling a story because the texts tell us he's answering the question, who is your neighbor?
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Who is my neighbor? And he's defining who my neighbor is. So, that's not really the issue.
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And then he's the one who makes the application. He's the one who makes the application. Who was the neighbor to this man?
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Well, it was the Samaritan there. And voila, there you have the application.
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The question is, did Jesus one day tell this story? That's the historical issue, not whether there was a specific man who was walking down a specific path and so on and so forth in the subject of a parable.
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The question is, from Dr. Cross's perspective, in essence, Jesus never had to have said this for it to remain, for it still to be true, for it still to have relevance.
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That's where the issue of the nature of the text, I think, gets missed just a little bit by this particular illustration he's giving.
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He's speaking some element of truth. You do have to deal with the fact that, you know what? The Jews hated the
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Samaritans and that was wrong. But you know what? The Old Testament prophets had already said that, didn't they? And so, he is exposing their hypocrisy.
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And there is a challenge to the story. And if all you ever talk about is whether parables are historical or not, and you use that to miss the thrust of the story, okay, fine.
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But that's not really what's going on when we talk about whether Jesus did or did not actually teach this.
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That's the question. Whether it's historical or not, in a certain sense, I'm almost going to say
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I don't care. It's an interesting debate, but don't let it fake you out on the real issue.
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Now, let me come in to the Bible. And I'm going to talk about two examples of beginnings.
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Because figurative, symbolical, parabolic language. I won't use mythical language because it sounds like a dirty word,
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I'm afraid, at the moment. Parabolic language. Notice the language issues here.
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Parabolic versus mythical. Obviously, he is going to utilize those categories of myth because he believes that, for example, the virgin birth stories are just meant to make a point in regards to the parallels to the birth narratives of Caesar Augustus.
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That's what he's going to do. So, he's going to utilize that type of information. We're going to go ahead and skip our break and come back to crossing.
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Because I'm trying to cram a lot of stuff in here. I'm not exactly sure how long he goes here. It's a brief period of time to make his opening presentation.
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But I'll give you an idea. Then we've got the questions to listen to. So, we're going to skip the break for today and continue on with crossing.
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Try to get done within five or ten minutes of our normal time. The parabolic language is good. It's the chosen form of language of Jesus.
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And he may have picked it up from his father. There's a lot of parabolic language in the Bible. Let's imagine parabolic language is heavy around beginnings and endings.
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Because in beginnings, beginnings have to carry our hopes. And endings have to bury our fears.
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So, endings and beginnings are freighted heavily with symbolic language. I open my Bible in Genesis 1.
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And I find that God created the world in six days of labor. Or six days at least of command.
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And one day of rest. And I immediately then ask myself, is this information about the beginning of the world?
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Certainly reads like it. Two things come together to push me not to read it like that.
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One comes from reason and one comes from revelation. And reason and revelation are for me gifts from God.
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As an aside, I reject absolutely the naturalist position that Dr. Craig attributed to me.
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Reason comes from God to all of us. Revelation comes from God in particulars.
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Reason tells me, from all I know about evolution, and I don't know very much to be honest with you, that it sounds reasonable that that's not the way it happened.
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That could all be wrong. But it sounds reasonable that that's not the way it happened. Now I ask a more important question.
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And this is really the crucial question for me. Not, you've got this dumb story in there, and aren't we so smart since the
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Enlightenment that we know better? But was that story trying to tell us that from the beginning?
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Or are we so dumb since the Enlightenment that we've been misreading it? Was that a metaphorical story?
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That we read literally and we blew it? If it's a metaphorical story, what's it a metaphorical story about?
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Well, read it again. God cannot skip the Sabbath even to create the world.
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He can't begin on Wednesday as it were and work straight through to Tuesday. God has to observe the
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Sabbath. The Sabbath is bigger than creation. It's very close to bigger than God. Now the challenge of the story is then to me.
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Do I or do I not believe that God is Lord of time, Lord of history, and when
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I find out about it, Lord of evolution? Once again, we can argue and we can approve it one way or the other.
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We can argue six days means six days, morning and evening one day, or evening and morning one day in the Jewish reckoning.
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So that's what it means. And in the meanwhile, we are avoiding the major issue that the story gives us as its challenge.
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Is God Lord of history? And if so, what are you doing about it? That you see how attractive that is, especially in our cultural situation today.
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You can't you all been missing the whole point that that provides the newness aspect. You can get away from, you know, all these arguments that have been going on for all this time.
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No one can prove it one way or the other. There's this overarching thing. But in reality, it's up to you to determine what that overarching concept is anyways.
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And you can always make it so vague that you can apply it to all sorts of issues like, you know, general calls for justice and peace and protecting the environment or, you know, however you want to apply it.
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It makes it very, very pliable. And you can you can do all sorts of stuff like that that way.
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See, that's why it's very, very attractive. And also very, very difficult to respond to, especially in a short period of time.
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Let me come then to another beginning, the beginning of Jesus's life. Watch again how figurative language weighs heavily on these beginnings and endings.
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I read Luke and Matthew and very, very clearly, as clearly as those six days,
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I read that there was a virginal conception, a miraculous conception in which God overshadowed
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Mary and God and Mary produced Jesus. Jesus is divine. Jesus is son of God.
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Now, I admit immediately my reason says, wait a minute. Do those things really happen?
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I hear the echoes. How can I tell I wasn't there? Maybe this is the exception. But then I know there's another story as well.
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Another ancient story. I'm just focusing on one. Suetonius, the Roman historian, tells us that the night that Augustus, the emperor at the time of Jesus's birth, was conceived, his mother
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Atsia was in the temple of Apollo and Apollo impregnated her so that Atsia bore a divine child,
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Augustus. Augustus is son of God and divine, says the pagan Roman.
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Jesus is son of God and divine, says the Christian. Now, I look at those two stories.
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I'm sure we could give reasons not to disbelieve Suetonius. He's not a liar, et cetera, et cetera.
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What about those two stories? Here is how I read them. You can say the
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Jesus story is historical. But of course, the pagan Roman historian is that's just mythical. And since there are no pagan
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Romans around to defend you and it's not politically incorrect and not the pagan Romans, you probably get away with it.
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But in all honesty, the question then presses. Did Matthew and Luke intend that literally?
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Or did they intend it metaphorically? Are we misreading them? Are we misinterpreting them?
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And are our debates about the biology of Mary totally off the point, which is this.
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Where do you find your God? Is it in Augustus over there in the
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Palatine Palace backed by the legions with power from the top down? Or is it in the peasant stable in a child born to a family that didn't even have a place to live when it happened?
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Where do you find your God? With power, with domination, with Augustus or with Jesus and empowerment from the bottom up.
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Now, you hear the cultural aspect here, the cultural perspective, all this stuff about, you know, power from the bottom up instead of the top down and Roman domination.
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And what you got to realize, allegedly, that's what all these gospel writers are all about is they seem to think like John Dominic Crossan does in modern context of cultural power struggles and all the rest of this type of stuff.
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And the virgin birth stories, despite the massive differences between the concept of a
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Jewish person in a monotheistic context talking about the incarnation and Apollo and Axia and Suetonius, the differences there are so huge.
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I would argue that they're minimized in Crossan's discussion in his books and realize, of course, his books.
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Well, this one here. How many pages? Five hundred and six pages long. Harper, San Francisco, the historical
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Jesus, the life of Mediterranean Jewish peasant. Notice the subtitle here, which he may not be accountable for.
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The first comprehensive determination of who Jesus was, what he did and what he said. We had to wait until the end of the 20th century, beginning of the 21st for somebody to do that.
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Just gives you an idea of where these folks coming from and what their presuppositions are. That's the challenge.
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And that's what we're avoiding by asking the other question. When we say when Christians said in the first century,
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Jesus is Lord, they were committing high treason. That's hard for us ever to do.
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They meant Jesus is Lord and Caesar ain't. Now, it took the
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Romans about 100 years to figure out that they were serious on that. And it wasn't just some kind of a bad joke.
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By then it was too late. It was as if in the 30s of this century, a group in Germany began to say,
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Jesus is Führer, meaning he ain't.
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That is the challenge of these stories. Now, I repeat my problem. It's not, aren't these dumb stories and aren't we so smart that we don't take them literally?
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My question is, did people in ancient times and in medieval times and in many places of the world today know how to hear a story, not really be sure whether it was literal or metaphorical, but get the point and then ask, do you or do you not believe in that point?
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Is Jesus for you, Lord and Savior or not? Two final points.
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Why is this important for me? For two reasons, internal and external.
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The Gospels are normative, I think, for us as Christians, not just in their production, but to create, but in the way they are written.
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Every time a gospel goes back as if it was in the 20s and writes Jesus from the 20s into the 70s, the 80s, the 90s.
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Gospel always takes the historical Jesus and laminates it together with the
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Christ we believe in. Do you hear that presupposition? It was at the beginning.
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He's consistent with it. I would argue that once you accept it, you can't be overly consistent in the sense that it's now his viewpoint versus every other viewpoint anybody wants to come up with.
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There's no means of determining truth or error. Now, there's no truth or error left from an epistemological standpoint, but the presupposition ends up clearly determining what the conclusion is going to be.
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Two of them together. John rewrites the 20s as Mark had done before him. The historical
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Jesus is crucial for Christianity because we must, in each generation in the church, redo our historical work and redo our theological work.
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We can't skip it. And the second and final reason is this, that when I look a
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Buddhist friend in the face, I cannot say because I think it is wrong. Our story about Jesus's virginal birth, that is true and factual.
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Your story that the Buddha came out of his mother's womb, walking, talking, teaching and preaching, which
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I must admit is even better than our story, that's a myth. We have the truth.
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You have the lie. I don't think that can be said any longer, and I think it is a cancer that eats at the heart of Christianity.
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Our insistence that our stories, our faith is fact.
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You hear that? That's what I was talking about earlier. There's there's where the rubber meets the road.
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Is really the conclusions for John Dominic Crossan have to be the utter denial of the reality of the
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Christ of faith, the real Jesus, because of the reconstruction of the historical
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Jesus. That's that's where the conclusion comes out. And hopefully, just in this brief period, you've been able to determine, been able to understand what brings about that kind of conclusion.
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That your faith is lie. OK, so there's there's that.
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And now there were two questions. Well, there are a number of audience questions, and it was funny to listen to both
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N .T. Wright and John Dominic Crossan respond to audience questions from a an audience in New Orleans.
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The number of accents which didn't sound a whole lot alike to one another was was sort of funny.
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It was like a very foreign type thing. Anyway, the first one. Somehow they let a
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Catholic in and he got to a microphone and I don't know, I was this this question, as it was asked, bothered me a good bit.
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I wanted to respond to some elements of it. But the response from John Dominic Crossan, who is a what is his relationship?
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Well, he's he's not a good Roman Catholic, obviously. I don't think he's been excommunicated.
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I could be wrong. I haven't gotten to that point yet. He he talks about the fact that when he first debated with a this subject with a with a bishop, it was a cardinal, actually.
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And he said, by the time we got done with the debate, I was an ex -priest, an ex -monk. So whatever that means, however, however we interpret that, but make a long story short, his background, of course, is a
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Roman Catholic background. And he views the church as abusing its power, being top down instead of bottom up and so on and so forth.
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And yet, despite all that. His response and N .T.
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Wright's response to this question. Well, you've just got to listen to it for yourself.
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Thank you. Thank you both very much. My name is Brant Petrie. I have a question for Professor Crossan.
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You issued something of a challenge to those who take the resurrection literally.
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And I'm quoting you here. You said, if it is literal, then how do we participate in the new creation?
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Could you give me a reading which comes from a literal reading of it? That's what you said in your talk earlier. And I'd just like to know to ask you to comment on this.
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The answer to that I would give as someone who takes the resurrection of both Jesus and saints in the end, literally, is that the way we participate in the new creation, there are several ways, baptism, following the life of Christ.
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But principally, the way we participate in the new creation is through partaking of Christ's risen body and blood in the
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Eucharist. I'm thinking here of John 6. Unless you eat the flesh of the son of man and drink his blood, you have no life in you.
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He who eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life. And I will raise him up on the last day.
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That's interesting. That's the resurrection body of Christ. We always ask
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Roman Catholics. So exactly before the cross,
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Jesus' words here are meant to communicate that all this is future.
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And in fact, to these poor people in the synagogue at Capernaum, when they said, who can understand his words?
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They're too difficult to hear. They were right, because Jesus wasn't talking to them. And in fact, he was talking about stuff that there's no way they could possibly understand it.
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And of course, all of this collapses if you actually insert into John 6, verses 35 through 45, which has this whole theological thing that then determines what comes afterwards and so on and so forth.
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But I guess that's what the guy's saying. So the connection there between Eucharist and the risen body of Christ is made very explicit in John chapter 6.
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Several times he speaks of the raising on the last day. And also, I think it's evident in Luke 24.
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Now notice in John 6, he doesn't talk about his raising on the last day. He talks about raising us up on the last day.
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And who is it that he raised up on the last day? Those who go through a Eucharistic ceremony, a sacrament?
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No. Who is it that he raises up on the last day? He raises up on the last day those who come to him in faith, who are looking to him, believing upon him, who see him as the source of their spiritual food and their spiritual drink.
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And they are the elect. They are those that the Father gives to the
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Son. They are the ones coming to the Son. They're the ones the Son raises up on the last day, not those who partake in a sacrament that did not have the meaning a modern
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Roman Catholic would have until, you know, like a thousand years down the road. And yet that's what's being presented here.
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You're not going to hear any of what I'm saying from N .T. Wright or from John Dominic Crossan in response to the question.
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However, that's probably even more disappointing. Why does Christ disappear at the breaking of the bread?
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Well, he points them to the fact that he is now present with them in the breaking of the bread.
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That is in the way in which the risen Christ remains. As if the two disciples were engaging in some eucharistic sacrifice at that point.
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Talk about amazing leaps here. So that would be my answer to your challenge.
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The way you participate in the new creation is through the first fruits of the new creation, namely the Eucharist. No disagreement at all in what you've just said, except what you're going to do about it.
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I'm not talking to you personally. This is where we get our dynamism. This is where we plug in to Christ.
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This is where we get empowerment. But it doesn't tell me what to do. For example, I think you were referring to the
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Emmaus story. The key thing there is if they had not invited the stranger into their house, that's the verse that gets left out all the time.
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They had a warm glow when they had the seminar on the road. And I take that seriously.
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But there came a point when the stranger was going on. That's the key verse in there.
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They had to invite him in. Then when they invite him in, I think you have to say they found the stranger was
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Christ. And when he was gone, they didn't say anything by looking around him. Where is he?
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He looked under the chairs or anything. They knew exactly. The person who wrote that, I think, I think, the person who wrote that was writing a metaphor, a parable,
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I prefer to say, since it's a story, saying, how is Christ present in the church today? In the reading of the scriptures that lead up to him and in the breaking of bread which brings the stranger in from the cold, as it were.
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You can't leave out that verse. So I agree with everything you've said. But I want to know, what do you do in between?
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Of course, the Eucharist. Absolutely. And I would even insist one thing in the Eucharist. It's not just about bread and wine.
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It's about the body and blood. Body and blood. How would I put this? If a person dies, we usually say body and soul separates.
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That's fascinating. When the body and blood is separated, somebody got killed. And if you share, how would
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I put this? If you insist that the stuff of God in this world be shared justly, you're liable to get yourself killed.
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Or at least extremely removed from common concerns, one way or the other.
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We have many other ways of doing it. Can I just again piggyback on that? Because I agree with what's been said.
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Paul says in 1 Corinthians 11 .26, as often as you eat the bread and drink the cup, you announce the death of the
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Lord. Catangelity. The death of the Lord until he comes. Now, we know from elsewhere in 1
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Corinthians that for Paul, the death of the Lord is the thing that actually conquered the principalities and powers.
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Because if they'd known who he was, they wouldn't have gone ahead and done it. Because they were signing their own death warrant, according to 1
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Corinthians 2. That's how that works. And it's the death of the Lord, and for Paul again and again, Lord Jesus, not
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Lord Caesar. And until he comes, and Paul's whole language about coming is derived from and shows up as a parody,
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Caesar's parousia, Caesar's arrival. You know, that's how the language of parousia works. So that the social, cultural, political meaning of the
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Eucharist cannot be divorced from all that you said, which I am totally happy with.
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The one flows into the other and back again. I mean, it's the Mother Teresa principle. It's recognizing
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Christ in the Eucharist, and then recognizing him again in the homeless person on the street. I think you would agree with that.
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And that's N .T. Wright's take on the same question. We'll just let that speak for itself.
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This next question, I'm just going to let you hear the whole thing, and it should take us right around to our time. Listen to the rejoinder from the audience questioner and Crossan's response.
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If you want to get a real idea, I think, of really the epistemological collapse.
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I didn't see this one coming when this guy first started talking, and now you'll see why. Thank you, Paul. My question is for Dr.
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Prasad. I hope my accent is not as far removed, being from North Alabama, from the
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British accents. And I hope my question is not far removed from the topic tonight.
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First off, I would like to say that I'm in agreement with both of you that whether the resurrection be literal, metaphorical, or whatever, that I'm in agreement that whatever that event was, that it certainly should and ought to change the world, to transform the world.
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My question is in regard to why should it? What is the basis for that?
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My understanding of your argument is that it rests on two issues.
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One is that the kingdom of God at hand with Jesus, the kingdom of God that Jesus brought pre -resurrection, serves as one of the pillars of your argument that subsequently resulted in this understanding that the apostles had, which ultimately birthed the
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Christian faith. Yet it appears to me that the understanding of the kingdom of God that the apostles preached and the understanding of the kingdom of God that occurred after the resurrection was drastically different than the kingdom of God that the apostles might have understood pre -resurrection.
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The second pillar that your argument appears to rest on is that of apparitions.
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In other words, we all concede that there are stories or there are events in the gospels and you interpret those as apparitions, yet the very documents that we appeal to appear to go out of their way to indicate these were not apparitions.
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The Emmaus walk, eating of the fish, etc. And so with that,
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I'm faced with the two pillars of your argument and sharing a common goal to want to transform the world as these documents compel us to do.
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But it appears the foundation of your arguments is not as firm as I would like for it to be as I appeal to that same document to motivate me to be a part of bringing the kingdom of God to the earth.
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So I'm wondering, what is your basis beyond that to motivate, to explain the birth of Christianity and to motivate us to go forward?
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Why should we do that? It's called faith. Let me be very clear.
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Faith, pistis, fides is a perfectly good common discourse word in the first century.
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You believed in the Roman Empire. That meant you got with the program. Now, Pilate, let's imagine
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Pilate looking at the end of Good Friday. His faith is in the
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Roman Empire, in Roman law and order. And as far as he is concerned, he's got rid of one more troublemaker. That's not an act of non -faith.
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That's an act of Roman faith. Alternatively, a Christian looking, say, at the salvific death of the
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Son of God, let's put it that way, is making a counteract of faith. They're both acts of faith. And I think the
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Christian one took much more faith, to be honest with you, because you could see at least the Roman Empire all around you looked like it was booming.
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They're both acts of faith. If you say, why would I choose one over the other? Because I think this is the will of God.
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This is what makes sense of the world. All of that. I cannot prove why it should be one or the other.
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If the Roman Empire had managed, say, in the year 50 to declare Christianity a forbidden religion,
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I'm not talking about martyrdom. I'm talking about genocide. Any Christian can be put to death just for the name of Christian.
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I do not know what would have happened. But if Christianity continued, it probably would have been Gnostic Christianity, because the world would have been as evil as they thought it was.
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So I do not presume, ever, that the future is guaranteed. If they had decided to stay in Galilee and not go into the cities, if they had not decided to bring in Gentiles into the people of God, if they had not decided to rebel against Rome and the
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Temple had been burned to the ground. We really don't know what would have happened. And we really know what would have happened.
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Nothing could stop this. Granted, everything we've talked about. Granted that...
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Now, just stop it just for a second, because we're getting close on time. But did you hear that? No one knows the future.
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No one knows the future. Talk about a theological, completely theological disconnect here.
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From the biblical perspective. No one knows the future. Gnostic Christianity might have won. Maybe the
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Romans would have won. Who knows? This just happens to be the way it turned out. Resurrection, that's the most literal.
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Certain things had to happen for what happened to continue. How is that not arbitrary?
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In other words, why pick the faith? What motivates a first century individual from picking the
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Roman faith over and against the Christian faith? Excellent question.
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And listen to the response. What makes it arbitrary for me not to pick a non -humane philosophy in this day and age or a
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Nazi philosophy over and against the unselfish benevolent philosophy of Christianity?
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I wish there was some way I could prove it to you. And say, this proves it here beyond a shadow of a doubt.
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An act of faith presumes a future. And only when you see what happens in that future is that act of faith validated.
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It really is. Because there's things being done in the name of faith in many religions at the moment that are horrible.
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There are sins against divinity. You can say the future validates it. But that's all you've got.
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You're making an act of faith because you don't know what will happen. Thank you very much.
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Now, there you go. His faith is a faith not in the promises of God who controls the future.
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He does not have a God who can control the future. And you can see the massive difference that results therefrom.
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I hope this has been educational for you. I hope you understand sort of what I'm up against coming up at the end of August.
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And I hope that if you were sort of on the fence about being there in Seattle, we could certainly use your presence there.
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I think you'll be blessed by the entirety of the conference and by the debate as well. Thanks for listening to The Dividing Line.
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We'll be back again Thursday evening, 7 o 'clock Eastern Daylight Time. See you then.
01:00:00
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