#76 WHY THE GOSPELS SKIP 18 YEARS OF JESUS’ LIFE + Dr. Darrell Bock

So the way that Jesus died was crucifixion, and then there were two guys next to him that were also being crucified.

It seems like a lot of people were dying that way in Rome, but what made Jesus' unique?

Obviously, the whole coming back from the dead thing, but I feel like you don't actually know his childhood. Like, what was he doing before his public ministry?

Why don't we know anything about his teenage years? Because he wasn't doing anything. He wasn't doing anything related to ministry in that period.

When nothing is happening in regard to the plan of God, there's nothing left to tell. When the gospel writers write about Jesus, you're seeing the impact of the gospel services and creating that category of people with naturalities.

Hello, hello. Welcome to Biblically Speaking. My name is Cassian Bellino, and I'm your host.

In this podcast, we talk about the Bible in simple terms with experts, PhDs, and scholarly theologians to make understanding

God easier. These conversations have transformed my relationship with Christ and understanding of religion.

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Thank you so much for listening. Now let's get to the show. Hello, hello. Welcome to Biblically Speaking. I'm your host,

Cassian Valino. Couple questions about Jesus. If you feel like you don't actually know his childhood, like what was he doing before his public ministry?

Why don't we know anything about his teenage years? And why does the Bible give us blueprints for the tabernacle, but not one story about Jesus from the age of 12 to 30?

I wanted to talk about this because it was provoked by a question from my own grandfather saying, what has

Jesus written? Why don't we know anything about his life? And this is what the show does, is help us understand those types of questions to grow in faith.

Today, I have somebody who has spent their life studying the world of Jesus and the New Testament and a repeat guest,

Dr. Daryl Bock. Welcome back to the show. I loved our last conversation. If you haven't heard already, go back.

You explained in detail the thing that, just, it was like painfully easy. Like I struggled with this, and then you explained the gospels, how they were built, why they were built out in that timeline, and how we should look at each gospel differently.

And it was so wonderful to exit that episode with such a thorough understanding. But you're back because you are more than qualified to talk about the formative years of Jesus.

You're a senior research professor at New Testament Studies, an executive director for the cultural engagement at Dallas Theological Seminary.

You've earned your BA from the University of Texas. Go Longhorns. And you have a theological master's from Dallas Theological Seminary and a

PhD from the University of Aberdeen. Oh my gosh, welcome back. Oh, it's good to be with you, and it's a pleasure to be with you as well.

How do you, do you get these questions often about what was Jesus doing before he kind of pops up in the

New Testament? Yeah, I mean, I get all kinds of questions. I get that. The other one is, well, what about all those other gospels that I hear about that aren't in the

New Testament? Those kinds of questions. And so we've done and written and worked in all those areas.

So I can't supply you with a copy of Jesus' diapers.

I'm not that expert in all this, but we can talk about the world that he grew up in and why we have what we have.

And the choices that were made and that kind of thing. Perfect. Looking at the

Bible from the lens of a Sunday school Christian, we hear stories of him, you know, kind of preaching in the synagogues with his parents.

You know, they kind of leave him behind. They find him preaching in that temple, in that tabernacle. And then we see him as a grown man standing in the

Jordan River, ready to be baptized. Why is there such a gap there?

Because he wasn't doing anything. He wasn't doing anything related to ministry in that period. I mean, he was growing and living in his home with his parents, engaged probably in carpentry alongside

Joseph, that kind of thing. But in terms of ministry and message, et cetera, nothing was happening during that period.

So all that we have are a couple of scenes when he's born, around the time when he's born. The one incident that you alluded to when he was probably about the age of 12.

And then we jump immediately to what is probably his early thirties and his baptism by John the

Baptist. So it's selective. In fact, Mark feels so strongly about this.

He doesn't even tell us about the infancy. He just tells us, he just starts writing with John the

Baptist. And John, bless his heart, okay, doesn't talk about the infancy either, but he starts from before the foundation of the world.

In the beginning, the word was with God and the word was God. So there are many places to pick up the story, but when nothing is happening in regard to the plan of God, there's nothing left to tell.

And so as a result, that's what's going on now. Some of the extra biblical gospels claim to fill in these gaps, but that's exactly what they're doing.

They're claiming they're filling in gaps that exist in the record and trying to suggest that there were other things that were going on.

Best we can tell though, we don't know what was going on other than he was living a normal human life. Can you imagine just like going to elementary school with Jesus and you're like, oh yeah,

Jesus, see, I cheated off of him and I was failing class or whatever. Well, if they cheated off of Jesus, they probably got the right answer.

But anyway, you remind me of a service

I was in one Christmas at the church that I was at and a woman who I know got up and said,

I would always like to be parents to Jesus, a baby who had no problems whatsoever.

And I'm sitting here going, I guarantee you the parents didn't have that understanding of Jesus at the time to even think that thought.

I mean, they had an announcement that Jesus was gonna be the Messiah, but they didn't understand everything that they had in this child.

And I imagine that the absence of conflict with Jesus while he was growing up probably was a hint that this is a different kind of child because most parents do encounter a difference of opinion with their children on occasion and have to cope with that.

That wasn't going on probably, but nonetheless, most of these thoughts that we have is that we have projected what we have come to understand about Jesus back onto his life.

And most people looking at it from the outside, they weren't there. The gospels are in the business of creating a category for understanding

Jesus that most people don't have. And so I tell people when

I talk about this, this is actually a key to thinking about evangelism. When you share Jesus with someone and you say he's the son of God, and 30 % of the population in the

United States is religiously none, which means N -O -N -E -S, not N -U -N -S. Okay, so they don't have a religious bone in their body.

They're not thinking theologically at all. It's just out there. And you say, Jesus is the son of God.

I go, you've just introduced a category to them they don't have. They don't have that category.

You can use the words, but they don't know what it means. They don't know what that category is, what you're suggesting. So I once asked

Google, how many human beings have walked the face of the earth? And Google, because it knows everything, gave me an answer.

They gave me 117 billion people have walked the face of the earth as human beings in the history of humanity.

I say, I'll cut them a break. I'll give a give or take 117 billion. I'll take a number around that.

How many of those 117 billion human beings who've walked the earth are also can credibly claim to be the creator

God incarnate? One. That means it's an exceptional category, 117 billion to one.

And that means that when you tell the core story of Jesus, the person may not even have the category to understand the story that you're telling them.

How do you do that? Of course, the gospels are in the business of trying to show almost a step at a time, at least in the synoptic gospels,

Matthew, Mark, and Luke, who this Jesus is. And you watch it dawn on people who Jesus is because they don't have that category beforehand.

And John does it the other way. John is from heaven down, as I've said. So, you know, from the very first verse what

John thinks of Jesus. In the beginning was the word and the word was with God and the word was God, this is

CNN. I mean, right from the very first verse, you know who

Jesus is as far as John is concerned. But the synoptic gospels don't do it that way.

They start with everyday features out of life. Now, granted a virgin birth is a little bit of a curve ball, but everything else, you're dealing with a normal situation, a child to a set of parents who's growing up, he's a babe wrapped in swaddling clothes.

And then you watch it dawn on people who Jesus is because the gospels are in the business of creating that category that people wouldn't naturally have.

Yeah. Yeah, I think it's odd, you know, just kind of gauging the perceptions of people today that looking back at someone who is the most important person that walks the earth, like we, you know, you don't know who

Elvis is gonna become when he's 16 years old, or maybe you do at that point. I don't know when he got famous, but you know, once he became famous, then it's like, okay, let's go back.

Let's go, you know, where was he from? And so that's when they go back and they dig because of who he became. And so because Jesus is who he is, you would think in today's perception, we would go back and we would pull from the archives.

So just kind of putting this in context, was it a lack of data that we don't have it?

Was it because there was no record or because that's not how they recorded ancient biographies? It's a little bit of all the above.

One of the factors is we actually do have Jesus, but we have the effect of Jesus on people.

That's what we have. So when the gospel writers write about Jesus, you're seeing the impact of what he has.

I once gave a lecture to a PhD seminar at University of Michigan. I was asked to come speak and the topic was historical

Jesus. And it was a Jewish professor who was hosting the class. So he began by saying, we actually don't have anything written by Jesus, just directly himself, which is true.

And so he said, we really don't know who Jesus is. And so when he was done with this introduction, he knew

I was a theological conservative and that's why he introduced me that way because he was trying to cut me off at the pass. And so I saw the room happened to have 12 students.

Okay, God has a sense of humor. And so there were 12 students in the room. And so I said, let's assume for the sake of discussion that you never, as a professor, never wrote anything about what you taught or believe, but these students spent three years with you getting their

PhD. Do you think I could ask them what you taught and what you emphasized and they would be able to tell me?

Yeah, it went silent. The room went totally silent. And I said, that's what we have in the gospels.

What we have in the gospels is the impact of Jesus on us. And I've got impact from four different directions, which actually gives me a kaleidoscope look at Jesus as opposed to, granted, it would be nice to have if he spoke for himself.

And I'm not saying I wouldn't want to hear directly from Jesus. That would have been nice if we had it, but that isn't what we get.

What we get is the impact of Jesus on people who are around him. And that's what you have in the gospels.

Interesting, interesting. Yeah, but we do have that one moment in the temple where he was 12 years old and then he was talking to the teachers.

Mom and dad forgot him on the playground, left without him, came back and he was busy. Why do you think that, do you think that was like a one -off?

Do you think that was like the biggest thing that happened in his childhood and that's why it was worth recording? Or do you think that was - Well, because of what he said, it is necessary for me to be about the,

I've just quoted this very literally because there's a word that's not in the text that you would expect.

I must be about the, there's no noun after that, of my father. So everyone has to interpret what's the blank in that sentence.

And so the things of my father, I must be about the temple of my father because that's where I'm doing this.

What he's saying is that there's a mission that he has, but it's not time yet for it. So he has a self -awareness.

And actually the gospels have a lot of self -disclosure from Jesus embedded within them where we hear

Jesus speak and talk about who he is, but we don't have anything directly written for us by Jesus unless you want to make, take one more step and say, the nature of the

Bible itself as an inspired text coming from the Holy Spirit is hearing from Jesus directly.

You could go that route, but basically when we think about this in the way we normally do, we say, now we don't have anything that comes directly from the quill of Jesus.

If I can use a picture of the inkwell of Jesus, okay, because we aren't in a digital world and we don't have anything like that, but what we certainly have is a very deep impression that Jesus made on four people who were impacted by his life and story.

Okay, okay. Give a little bit of context of the world that Jesus grew up in, like politically, socially, religiously, because that helps us understand how he was shaped as a child.

So if I lived and I was classmates with Jesus, what was the world that I was experiencing?

Well, he lived in a rural area. He is surrounded, as we find out, by people whose primary vocation might be fishing or some form of agriculture.

He lived in a society in which there was a very thin elite who had all the power and all the authority and all the wealth.

A substantial part of the population is living from day to day. And there's only about, the elites are said to make up about three or 4 % of the population.

What middle class there is is probably about 10, 15 % of the population.

Everyone else is trying to just survive from day to day. They live in an environment in which

Rome is in control of the world that they're in, and Israel and the

Jews are submissive to being a vassal state in the Roman Empire.

So there's some political stuff going on. And most of his illustrations come out of this agricultural world that we're talking about.

So he talks about seed, and he talks about catching fish, and he talks about harvest and those kinds of things.

And it's a Jewish environment that he's coming out of. So it has this historic faith rooted in Moses and the

Torah, that's a part of the world that he lives in, with different factions coping with the

Roman presence at the same time. And there are really four ways to cope with the Roman presence. One is to totally assimilate, to say they won and we just have to go along.

The second is to live in the midst of it, but resist by living distinctly. That's what the

Pharisees were doing. Another group is to withdraw and go out into the desert and live on your own and just try and get out of it all.

And that's what the Essenes were doing at Qumran in the Dead Sea community. And then the last one is to resist, we're gonna kick them out.

That was the Zealots, we're gonna try and violently remove them, which is a pretty uphill battle against Rome.

So those are your four responses to what happens when the culture around you is felt to be oppressive because it's smothering what you believe.

Those are your four options. And those four options existed in the time of Jesus. So is there like a modern day equivalent of that?

Because I wouldn't say that - Well, we do that all the right way. We do the same, we got the same four choices, right?

Aren't there the same four choices, right? It sounds quite familiar. Okay, yeah, I can assimilate, okay?

I've just got to succumb to the culture, the culture is where the world is. The other is I'm gonna live, but I'm gonna live distinctly, but I'm gonna live with a little bit of skepticism about what's going on around me.

You see that in a lot of the church. The third option is I'm just gonna withdraw, I'm gonna have nothing to do with this culture, what's going on.

I'm basically gonna live in my own bubble and try and create my own world and be completely separate from everything that's going on.

And then the last group said, we got to rebel. So the choices are limited and they've been the same over a long period of time.

That's a good point, yeah. No, I mean, other than living by a fishing village off agriculture, you know, I live in Hawaii, but I'm in the heart of it, in the city.

But yeah, that might be kind of encouraging for somebody that lives in this own political state, but they live in a more agricultural, coastal lifestyle.

You're living very similarly to Jesus's childhood. That's true, yeah, yeah. And it's interesting,

Jesus doesn't go into the bigger city except for Jerusalem. Jesus doesn't go into the big cities when he ministers.

He's always ministering the country and on the edges and the fringes. That's interesting.

I thought he was like going into the heart and getting the prostitutes and the taxpayers and just like pulling it out of the city. Well, they're coming out to him.

They're coming out to him, okay? They've heard and are being drawn by him.

But the two largest cities in the region where he's ministering, Sepphoris and Tiberias, we don't even hear about.

Interesting, wow. I mean, now that you put color to it, that's a big difference. This is a silly question, but it's valid and it was submitted by somebody online, was that Jesus is fully human.

He's fully a kid. We were all kids. We know what it's like. He had to have made mistakes, right?

Well, we don't have a record, so we don't know. But the impression is, the parents certainly thought he made a mistake by hanging back in Jerusalem, okay?

They thought he made a mistake, but his reply says, nope, this wasn't a mistake. You need to understand my services to God first, and I'm calling to this ministry.

It's just not the time yet. So, yeah. So his response to his parents wasn't that he had done anything wrong.

His response to his parents, I tease people that when you preach this passage, the message is not keep a careful eye on your kids, okay?

That's not the point of the passage. So yeah, so you're engaging with someone who has a sense of what their calling is.

Okay, okay. So we could look back on that, and again, there's no data to really affirm it or deny it, but you could probably assume that Jesus in his most formative years was a pretty great kid to have, you know?

Not really - He would have been the only kid to have. Yeah. That's interesting, because it's hard to believe as a believer.

I'm like, you as a kid faced everything I face right now and didn't give in. That's just insane.

So, as God - Well, Hebrews says as much. Hebrews 4 says he was like us in every way except without sin.

That's so hard to imagine him dealing with bullies and dealing with girl crushes.

Yeah, just so calm. But like you said, I mean, in the temple, he knew there was something more and something bigger, so much so that he withheld because it wasn't the right time.

He wasn't like - Exactly right. I am God's gift to this earth, literally, and I'm gonna make sure you know it.

Yeah. Interesting. Okay, I wanna get more into why there is limited information.

Now that we kind of understand his formative years, the gospels themselves are like portraits, vignettes.

They're not like full traditional biographies that we're used to. Why do you think

John the Beloved loves Jesus, probably knows his childhood stories?

Why didn't you, like, why wouldn't he have included everything about the guy that he loves so much? Like a full -

Well, it's a good question. Like a biographical timeline. Yeah, because we don't, our biography which goes into that is not ancient biography.

Ancient biography tells a story for the examples that it represents, and they don't necessarily dive into the background of what took the person there.

So you don't get that kind of material. Ancient biography is interested in what someone's life and example is like, but they aren't interested, like I said, in what took them there, what form, the idea of what formed them to make them into that person, that ancient biographies, generally speaking, don't do that.

They're interested in what the person said. They don't include the background. Oftentimes they don't. They just wanna know, this is what the person said or did that's worth emulating.

That's what they were focused on. So that's why you get what you get. And another feature to think about is, why did it take 40 years to write a gospel?

Why didn't they write a gospel immediately about Jesus? And the answer to that question is in the ancient world, it was an oral world.

It wasn't primarily a written world. In fact, the argument is about 10 to 15 % of the population's literate.

Everyone else can't read or write. So, and writing something down on papyrus was expensive.

It was an activity for the elite. And so you don't write it down, et cetera.

Everything that gets passed on in an ancient world, in an oral world is passed on orally. And the belief was, it's more important to hear the living voice of someone who experienced this than it is to see it written down on a piece of paper, on a piece of papyri.

So you don't get the gospels until you start to lose the living voices and witnesses to what took place.

Once they start to die off, then you need their testimony and their stories memorialized, okay?

We did the Holocaust the same way. The Holocaust works the same way. For a long time, people could interview

Holocaust people and they didn't make a record of it because the living voices were there. I could always go back and say, hey,

Eli, what happened? But now, today, when we got to the 1990s and the 2000s, all of a sudden, all these people who were interested in the

Holocaust started to record their memory, et cetera, and to memorialize it because they knew, hey, next year,

Eli, man, I'm gonna be able to ask Eli what happened. So that's why, so it took, once you start to lose the living voices, the eyewitnesses who were respected and regarded for telling the story, and they were starting to drop off the scene, someone came to the view of saying, we better record this.

In fact, Justin Martyr in the second century, second century Christian, when he talked about the gospels, it's this question.

Why do you call the gospels if you don't have the name gospel for what it is? And what he called them were the apostolic memoirs.

They were the apostolic memoirs of Jesus. So, which is a nice way to think about it.

It's a good description of what the gospels are. They are the traditional apostolic testimony of who

Jesus was with people who had spent time and day after day and year after year with him.

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Take a breath, slow down, and dwell in the good things. Now, back to the show. Okay. In defense of this, though, for Christians, that's just not how it was written back then.

Today, we want to put our whole trust in Jesus, but again, through the lens of 2025 because that's how we understand it.

How do we, as Christians, grapple with some of the missing information?

The census in Luke or the birth timing. These are reasons to distrust the Gospels because they're inaccurate or they're left out.

How do we, as Christians, defend that? Yeah, well, I'm not sure. For example, let's take the census.

I'm not sure it's inaccurate, although a lot of people say they are. I think you've got to remember that in the ancient world, these kinds of administrative tasks took time.

We got the internet today. We travel at the speed of light. So instead of thinking about traveling at the speed of light, think about traveling at the speed of a snail.

I mean, you had to walk information or ride a horse information from one place to another.

All that took time. So all the administrative elements, governments work slow to begin with, but all those administrative elements may have taken time.

So it's my own view that the association of the census with Quirinius is dating the time from which the census was finally manifesting itself, as opposed to necessarily encompassing the entire time of what it took to have the census.

In other words, you had to gather the information. Once you gather the information, you had to organize the information.

You had to determine what the tax rolls were going to be, because that's why you did a census, et cetera. And that took time.

And then I love to tell a story about a major highway that runs through Dallas, that when I was a college student, they were talking about expanding

Central Expressway. Okay, I was a freshman in college. I didn't drive on that road until I had taught at Dallas for 25 years.

Okay, so it took that much time from the time of expressing the desire to do it and building the plans to do it, to actually doing the work that it took to expand that, to build the new roads, to build the underground that was a part of it, et cetera, 25 years.

So I'm sitting going, sometimes governments, okay, this won't shock people. Sometimes governments move slow.

Yeah, no kidding. Okay, that adds a bit more color, because I don't think people want to distrust the

Bible that gave their soul to it. But you can't argue some logic, but this does. This absolutely refutes it when you put it in context of how truly slow things moved back then.

Let's get a little more surgical here as far as translations go. When it comes to taking the original

Hebrew or Aramaic and translating it into Greek, there's going to be a not 100 % translation literally in the meaning of those words.

So how does that transition of Aramaic or Hebrew into Greek and those translation choices in between those two, how does that, are there instances where it reshapes the way that we see

Jesus' story? Okay, great question. That's a super question. And so we're probably dealing with Aramaic.

That was probably the working language of the time of Jesus. We have targums written at the time that take the

Hebrew and put it into Aramaic because people are able to understand the Aramaic and not necessarily the Hebrew. Anyway, so yeah, so we're probably dealing with Aramaic into Greek and we've got translation, but we have to think about what we have in the

Bible. If you actually put parallel events next to one another, they don't always match word for word.

This is just translation difference. It's also historical choice difference about how I talk about what

I'm presenting to you. So I can quote somebody, I can paraphrase somebody, or I can summarize somebody.

Yeah. All of those moves are historical. Okay, every one of them. So think about the five minute radio broadcast you used to get at the top of the hour.

I don't know if it happens at the top of the hour for everyone anymore, but it used to be when I was growing up, you did get five minutes of news at the top of the radio every hour and throw out the commercial time.

So it's actually probably two and a half minutes because you got to pay for the time. And so, and you get maybe two or three stories in that five minutes about what happens.

So a radio columnist, a news broadcaster comes on and says, the president said today, okay?

And then he has a choice. He can run a tape of what it is, of a particular thing the president said, or he can paraphrase what the president said that was the most important thing, or he can summarize what the president said over the 25 minutes to hour and a half that the press conference was, depending on who the president is and how much they talk.

Okay? So that's, and we don't have, we don't blink at any of those variations as long as the paraphrase of the summary is a reflection of what was actually said.

Right. Okay? So what I'm saying to you is, I think we get that mix in the gospels when we get

Jesus said. Oh. Sometimes I might be getting his words, exact words. Sometimes I may be getting a paraphrase of what he said.

Sometimes I may be getting a summary of what he said. And let me illustrate it with particular passage.

So at the last supper, when Jesus is going through the elements, you know, everyone who worships in a church goes through this regularly.

They know what is said at the Lord's table. In Matthew and Mark, when we get to the blood, it says, this is the blood of the covenant.

When we get to Luke, it says, this is the blood of the new covenant. So what did Jesus say and what's going on?

Actually, it's not just in Luke. Luke also in first Corinthians in the Pauline verse. So Matthew and Mark line up with blood of the covenant.

Luke and first Corinthians line up with the blood of the new covenant. And this shows you what can happen. I, my own view is that Matthew and Mark give us the words of what

Jesus said at the supper, but Luke is giving you what they meant, what that, what those words meant. In other words, things that were implied in what

Jesus said are now made to be explicit. What was implicit in what Jesus said is now made to be implicit because there's only one covenant that needed to be triggered.

Up to this point, there were three covenants, the Abrahamic covenant, seed of Abraham. When Jesus was born, he was seed of Abraham. The second covenant, the

Davidic covenant, there's gonna be a Messiah in the line of David who's gonna be a king. When Jesus was born, that was also in place.

But the new covenant said, I've got to forgive your sins and I'm gonna put the law in your heart. Okay, Ezekiel's version of this says,

I'm gonna wash you clean and put my spirit within you. Okay, that's the new covenant hope. Well, he's got to die for that to happen.

And that hasn't happened yet. So the only covenant of blood that he could be referring to would be the new covenant.

And so when Luke says, I'm gonna tell you, I'm gonna name this covenant, even though it's implied in what Jesus said, I'm gonna make explicit what's implicit.

That's a paraphrase or a summary. And the summary is designed to bring to the surface what's embedded in what was said, but wasn't explicitly named.

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Thank you so much. Now back to the show. Okay. And it's all true. Yeah. Is there errors?

You know, like, oh, just errors just because of our interpretation 2035. Like there's a word that translated as best it could.

But now today we kind of read into it a very eisegetical understanding of it.

Well, I think you have the potential to read it that way, but I don't think that takes place in the translation work.

I think the translation work, what I'm saying to you is the translation work, whether it's citing Jesus, giving a paraphrase or giving a summary is an accurate reflection of what was taking place and what's being described.

Because what you're dealing with aren't just words. In some cases, you're dealing with concepts. Okay. You're dealing with concepts.

And there is someone listens to this broadcast and say, so what was Cassian doing with Dr.

Bach? Well, they were having a discussion about Jesus. Well, what did Dr. Bach say? Okay. Now pretend I'm not going to say this next sentence.

Okay. Dr. Bach talked about the accuracy of the gospels.

Okay. Now actually up to this point, I have not said that sentence anywhere. Okay.

But that would be reflection of what I was communicating in the concepts that we've been talking about over the last, whatever, half hour or so we've been chatting.

And so I'm summarizing, and no one who then comes back and listen, well,

I'm gonna see if Dr. Bach actually said that sentence and let's cut out this explanation that I'm giving. And that sentence nowhere appears.

And yet someone doesn't pull out their hair, get my hairline and say, oh, Dr. Bach didn't say that. No, I'm summarizing.

I'm summarizing a 30 minute conversation in one sentence. Yeah, that's a solid point.

It's a solid point, especially when you humanize it like that, because I'm not looking for gaps in the Bible, but I think that some people who are confused have very valid questions about this as far as, you know,

Aramaic to Hebrew to Greek, that's a lot of jumps. And what I'm saying to you is, is that those questions are totally legitimate, but if you understand the nature of the

Bible itself and how it's working, you realize that the question has a premise in it that may not be right, which is

I'm always getting Jesus quoted. And I think you can put the gospels next to one another and show that's not the case.

When a doctoral student takes a PhD exam here, I'll sometimes ask him, talk to me about the red letter

Bible. What's it doing? And of course the red letter Bible is supposedly puts all the words of Jesus in red.

And so the second question is, so are we always quoting Jesus? To which the student is supposed to say, no, we aren't always quoting

Jesus. Sometimes we're getting a representation of what he said over a longer period of time, a paraphrase or a summary.

I said, but is that necessarily unhistorical? To which the answer to that question is no, it's not necessarily unhistorical, has to do with the accuracy of what's being summarized.

So all those go together. So we have a predisposition to what we think the Bible is doing. If it's too narrow, we might accuse the

Bible of doing something it's not trying to do. Right. Okay, yeah, that's fair.

I'm gonna pivot a bit into archeological and historical evidence. Do we have any findings from Jesus's childhood or Jesus's world in general that really helps the accuracy of the gospels?

We have yet to find a Frisbee that Jesus played with. No, we don't have anything that's that specific.

What we do have, interestingly enough, if you go to Capernaum today, which is where Jesus's headquarters was for his ministry, you will encounter a

Roman Catholic church built over the remains of a house in Capernaum that's said to be where Peter lived.

And actually have a glass floor on the bottom so you can look down into the house that the church is built over.

Because obviously they've regarded it as a sacred site because this is where Peter and the Lord lived. It's just down the street from the synagogue where Jesus conceivably would have taught and preached, that kind of thing.

So we have general stuff. We found a boat in 1986, a fishing boat from the first century dug up out of the

Sea of Galilee at a place called Gennesaret, not Gennesaret, Gennesar.

And you go into the museum and there's this remains of this eight foot by 13 foot boat made of wood.

It's kind of pretty, it's half the boat, it's half the deck basically.

And it's leak, if you put water in it, if you try to put it in the water today, it would leak and it would sink because there are breaks in the wood and that kind of thing.

But it's a first century fishing boat. So it's a remains of the type of fishing boat that Peter would have fished off of, that kind of thing.

Found in the very location where he would have been fishing. I don't know if it's his boat. I don't know if it's his boat.

I don't think it would say that. It's one boat that sank during the first century, but it shows the kind of fishing vessel that would have been common on the lake in the first century.

So we have remains like that, but we don't have anything that's so specific to be the specific place where Jesus was.

Interesting. Interesting. I need to go to Crown. Oh, you need to, anyone, everyone, let me create a bucket list for people.

Go to Israel. Go to Israel when there's peace, okay? But go to Israel. I would love to go to Israel.

Oh my gosh. Okay, we're gonna get into a section that I'm really excited about. It's gonna be like common misconceptions about Jesus.

And I think that if you go to church and you read the Old Testament and you read the New Testament, you might've asked these questions already.

So this is why we're here for you, Dr. Bach, but there's a misconception here that God of the

Old Testament, and I think that had like episodes on the violence of the Old Testament. It's harsh, it's brutal, and it's different than when

Jesus comes on the scene, he's like, turn the other cheek. How do you help people connect those two?

Because you see the world as it is in its fallenness and how God out of a frame of justice would deal with it.

And then you see what grace does with justice. So, for example, the hardest part of the

Old Testament, I think, is the command that Israel go into the land and slay every man, woman, and child in the

Holy Land. And it's the hardest part of the Old Testament. And anyone who reads the

Old Testament wrestles with this. Yeah. When I was going through these books at Dallas, when you're a student, you go through every book of the

Bible and you read it from front to back in the four years while you're here. And you sit in a class where you talk about what it is that you read.

And I remember distinctly being in the class where we were going from Genesis to Judges. So we're going through Joshua and through Judges and where this comes up.

And what you read in the Pentateuch is the kind of society that Canaanite society was.

There were things done without blinking, like child sacrifice and that kind of thing.

So what God was doing as he was clearing the land for Israel to come into it was actually issuing a judgment against sin and against the society that's in.

It's a one -of -a -kind request in the Bible that takes place.

But what it shows is, if God applied a strict standard of justice, okay, we'd all be in bad shape, okay?

Yes, yes. So when you put contrast against that, okay, then you see what it is that grace has done and how it's delivered all of us.

And that's part of what the total story is gonna be. And here's the unfortunate part of this, is the judgment that comes in the end is gonna be like that.

You're either gonna be accountable to God for what you've done, or you're gonna appeal to him for the forgiveness of sins that he offers and you will be forgiven.

Oh, okay. Okay, I like that. I like the contrast of showing grace.

I've never thought about it that way. Yep, that's what it's doing. So that's why

Jesus says, you've heard it said, an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. And then in the Sermon on the Mount, he changes that image to loving your enemy.

And actually we just had this illustrated powerfully in the, I'm gonna try and stay out of politics, but for this, it's an important illustration.

At the memorial service for Charlie Kirk, where you had Erica Kirk get up and offer forgiveness to the person who shot her husband.

Okay, and there's been all kinds of reaction to that offer. And as they're saying, this woman understands the gospel.

Okay, because what she's saying is, I'm not choosing the way of hate, I'm choosing the way out.

And there's an offer forgiveness to the person who shot her husband, which is what she was doing.

She can't actually forgive sins. I mean, Erica Kirk is a powerful personality, but she doesn't have that authority.

And so she doesn't. In contrast to other people at the same event who said,

I have the right to hate. Okay, so that was a contrast within that service.

And I'm sitting here going, she gets what the gospel is about. Because if, unless and until we offer the way out of the polarization cul -de -sac that we're in, through what it is that Jesus Christ is about, okay, we will stay in the cul -de -sac, both sides.

Yeah, yeah, okay. So the way that Jesus died was crucifixion.

And then there were two guys next to him that were also being crucified. It seems like a lot of people were dying that way in Rome.

But what made Jesus' unique? Obviously the whole coming back from the dead thing, but in that moment.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But like on his way into it, much bigger deal.

Why? What was, was it just like the conversation? Well, Jesus, you need to understand that what

Jesus was executed for by Rome was not why the

Pharisees brought Jesus to Pilate. The Pharisees brought Jesus to Pilate because they thought he was guilty of the religious charge of blasphemy, which means he was claiming to be more than he was.

He wasn't who he claimed to be. That's why, that was a religious charge. If the Pharisees had brought

Jesus to Pilate and said, we want you to crucify him because he's guilty of blasphemy of our

God, Pilate would have said, well, gee, that's not my business. Right. Okay. I'm not,

I'm not, I'm not going to do that. So what they did is they took a religious charge, blasphemy, and they translated it into a political charge.

The political charge was, the political charge was Jesus claims to be a

King that Rome didn't appoint. Okay. So they bring him before Pilate and they say, Pilate, do your job.

Your job is to protect Caesar's interests. And the only Kings that Rome recognizes are the

Kings Rome appoints. He's claiming to be a King that Rome didn't appoint. So he's guilty of sedition and you need to do your job and put him to death because you're supposed to look after Caesar's interests.

I didn't know that. And that's what he did. So I tease people, Rome believed in law and order. You follow our law, we'll put you in order.

And so Jesus is up on the cross because they're putting, they are publicly displaying what happens to someone who claims to be a

King Rome didn't appoint. Whoa. I have never heard of it that way, but that makes a lot of sense.

Okay. Okay, moving along. This is like the issue with this podcast is like,

I can't even react to that right now. That like adds so much more context to that. Okay, let me give you one more that'll, if your jaw was dropping now, well, let's make your jaw even bigger.

Okay. Okay. And that is who supplied the testimony that sent Jesus to the cross?

The answer to that question is Jesus did. When he was asked, if you're the

Christ, the son of the blessed one, he said, I am. And you will see the son of man seated at the right hand of God coming on the clouds of heaven.

And as soon as he said that Caiaphas, because he understood theologically what Jesus was saying, tore his clothes and said, that's blasphemy.

We don't need any more witnesses. Okay. So Jesus supplies the testimony that sends

Jesus to the cross because they don't believe what he's claiming about himself. And so when he's in front of them, he doubles down.

He doubles down. And he's so committed to the cross that when they can't get testimony to send him on to Pilate, Jesus supplies it so that he ends up going to the cross.

Knowing it'll send him to the cross. Knowing it'll send him to the cross, exactly. This wasn't like an ignorant statement. No, no, no, no, no, no.

He knows exactly what he's doing. He also is saying this, by the way, we'll have a little fun with this.

He's also saying this, you can do with me whatever you want and you may think I'm the defendant on trial here, but actually

I'm gonna be your judge. You can write me at www .righthandofgod

.com and I will reply. Okay. And one day I will be your judge. That must have been hard to swallow for them.

Like I can understand that. That was very hard to swallow for them. This guy is crazy. Yeah, yeah. They swallowed it with a cross.

But then they were asking questions and they followed up with his witnesses. So they were like, oh.

So here's the resurrection on the other end. When Jesus is crucified in the public square, there are two views of who

Jesus is. Okay. He either is a blasphemer who claims to be something he isn't, or he is who he claims to be.

The resurrection is God's vote in that dispute. You can imagine the political divide that would have taken on us today.

How insane that would have been. Exactly. But the whole point here is I got two options.

Okay, we're not doing calculus. We're doing basic math. I've got two options. I take one away.

There's only one left. Yeah. Yeah, okay. So was it like, ah, dang, the guy that made our table is hung up on the cross.

This was like a well -known debate as far as is he God or is he not? Exactly.

And the resurrection is supposed to be God is vindicated. I tell people we undersell Easter. On Easter, we walk out and people say, he is risen.

And of course, what does the crowd do? He's risen indeed. Risen indeed. All right. So we make it about there's life after death.

There's only life after death that matters if Jesus is who he claims to be. So the real point of Easter is who is

Jesus and is he the one that he claims to be? Wow. Okay.

So on that note, why didn't everybody jump right on board after that? Because like, why didn't more

Jewish people specifically say, we've been waiting for a Messiah. This one seems like the one, you know, why?

Like Isaiah 53 is so clear that he is the Messiah. How is there any room for doubt here?

Because they didn't read Isaiah 53 as being about an individual. That's one part of it.

They thought it was about the nation as a whole, in all likelihood. So they didn't connect

Isaiah 53 with the Jesus story. Even today in Judaism, Isaiah 53 in some circles is not allowed to be read because it will be read as Christian when for a

Jewish person, you know, you're not supposed to go there, at least for some Jewish people. So there's that.

But the other reason why it didn't happen is there's a parable that's told earlier that Jesus tells in which it's the rich man and Lazarus.

And when the rich man is in hell separated from Lazarus as a result of the judgment that he's undertaken, he says, well, send someone to tell, you know, to tell my brothers, he said.

And the response is they have Moses and the prophets. If they really understand the story of Moses and the prophets, then they will understand what

God is doing. Okay? No, no, no, go raise someone from the dead. Okay, that's how this parable ends.

They said, even if you raise someone from the dead, they won't believe. Okay, because they have created a theological narrative that inoculates themselves from the story.

Oh, interesting. So that's part of the challenge.

When Jesus performs miracles, this is how it works. When Jesus performs miracles, okay, there's a wonderful passage of Luke 11 that does this.

The miracles one verse, everything else is the reaction. The reverse of a normal miracle story where you go through all the detail in the miracle and then the last verse is the reaction.

So there's a reverse of the normal pattern tells you it's an important passage on miracles. Anyway, when he does it, the judgment is, there are two judgments to come.

Well, we need to see more. Okay? We're holding out for more evidence. Okay? To which

I might whisper and suggest the resurrection might be that. And then secondly, the second option is, oh, we aren't disagreeing that he's doing marvelous supernatural things, but it's the power of Beelzebul.

It's not the power of God. Okay? All right. So they have an explanation that says this is coming from somewhere else.

It's not coming from God. Okay? And then Jesus goes on to talk about blasphemy of the spirit after this text, because to misjudge what

God is doing and attribute it to Satan is a slight problem. Well, obviously, but wow.

I didn't, they thought it was a different, like, pegadistic God. That was Jesus' power. So I tease people, the modern critic today who says miracles don't happen.

I said, that's not what Jesus' opponents were saying. Jesus' opponents were saying, oh yeah, there's something happening here, but it's coming from below, not above.

Whoa. Oh my gosh. Oh my gosh. But they worshiped those gods at that time.

So how is it considered below? Well, because for a Jewish person, if it's untrue and it's deceptive, it's coming from below.

And they're claiming it's deceptive. Okay, okay. That makes sense. Okay. Well, we kind of covered a few.

I mean, how is the Old Testament and the New Testament so different in its harshness?

And people were crucified all the time, what made him special? And why are Messiah not recognized? Jesus is the

Messiah, but you've been in this a lot longer than I have. So are there other misconceptions that you feel like you always have to re -clarify?

I tell people that when you listen to someone who's skeptical about Jesus and they want to make

Jesus a prophet, you don't want to go, no, he's not a prophet. You want to go, yes, he's a prophet, but he's something more.

Or they go, he claims to be the Messiah, but he's not the son of God. I go, yes, he's the

Messiah, but he's something more. So it isn't that the claim of what they want to attach

Jesus to is wrong. It's just that it's incomplete. And you don't get to who

Jesus really is without him being the son of man who rides the clouds, Daniel 7.

Only God rides the clouds in the Old Testament. Or without him being the Lord seated at the right hand of God, who shares the rule and authority of God in heaven.

Without him being not just son of God in the sense of a regal sense, which you could describe the king as being a son of God in that sense, but he is son of God in all the sense that that communicates in terms of his authority and his unique relationship to the father as part of the

Trinity. So the problem is when people cherry pick about who Jesus is and select these certain things, but we can't be sure he's these other things, it's the other things that matter.

And it's the other things that really show totally who Jesus is. Okay, okay.

That is really, really interesting. Kind of just going back to the gospels, like back where we began.

And we both agreed that there was a lot left out, but out of necessity, we can't be bored with like, and then he went to school and then he came back.

How should, like as a Christian, how do we not get frustrated with that? What is your advice to that Christian that wants to have faith grow but not be frustrated?

We've been given everything that we need to understand and appreciate who Jesus is. End of story.

Okay. You think people are just like, not reading it well enough?

No, I mean, you're naturally, whenever you hear a narrative, you're curious about the things you're not told about.

That's a natural response. But the flip side of it is we've been given what we need in order to understand and appreciate who

Jesus is. Okay, okay. Yeah, I mean, I'm definitely one of those people that doesn't fully understand who

Jesus is. Like, and that's a struggle because you want to know him fully so you can love him wholly.

Well, you'll be at that until we get to heaven. So that, so you've got, you've given yourself a long -term job.

Yeah, we will always be able to discover more of who Jesus is. He's that deep. So I've been doing this for almost a half century.

Okay, there's stuff I learn all the time. So, so yeah, so dig deep and bring a shovel.

My gosh. My gosh. What is something that you've been in your life? What was the, like, what was the biggest dig?

Like, tell me something that are you like, your shovel went into the dirt and it picked up something really big in the face already.

I spent one year just on the passage of Jesus being examined by the Jewish leadership.

One year on just that passage alone. I'd spent an entire sabbatical studying that one text. What was the text?

It was the text where Jesus is asked, are you the Christ, the son of the blessed one? In Mark 14.

And so I actually traced two concepts in Judaism through all the ancient writing that exists about it.

And one of those concepts was exaltation. Who gets to sit with God in heaven? And the other was the concept of blasphemy.

What constitutes blasphemy in Judaism? Because at that scene, those two ideas are colliding.

The Jewish leadership thinks Jesus committed blasphemy and Jesus proclaiming an exaltation coming from the hand of God.

They're trains on the same track headed in a different direction and they collide at that scene. And so the question was, how do

I make sense out of what this conversation actually is? And so I looked at every use of exaltation and blasphemy in Judaism running from the

Old Testament through Second Temple Judaism into Mishnaic and Talmudic Judaism, and then wrote about what all that background means for the scene.

And so, yeah. So that was, I took, I not only took a shovel,

I probably took a whole host of them and we just kept digging. Wow.

And like simply stated, what did you come to the conclusion of? I've already told you what it was, which is, this was the public confrontation and there were two options.

Okay. Got it, got it. And God's vote was the resurrection. Got it. Okay. Yeah. You did it again.

You took this very complicated, like very surface level questions and you took us 10 levels deeper and you made it really easy to understand.

So thank you for that wisdom, that knowledge. Sharing your years of experience, Dr. Bock, it's such a pleasure to have you on the show.

If people want to connect with you, buy your books, see you in a seminar, how can they learn more, do more, get to know you?

Well, the books can be found at amazon .com, probably the easiest way to do it. If they want to connect to the podcast that I host, where I'm sitting in your chair, okay, along with other people from my team here at the

Hendricks Center, they can go to voice .dts .edu

slash table podcast. Call it the table. Welcome to the table. We discuss issues of God and culture, which is a nice way of saying we discuss anything and everything.

And so that's the podcast and we cover all kinds of topics in that space.

So it isn't just a biblical studies. It has to do with the application of Christian life to living in a pluralistic world, which is a challenge these days.

Yeah, and it's filled with people who are really, really smart. So it's not just me, the curious and confusing you, the smart and scholarly.

Everybody on that team is very, very well read. Yeah, exactly. And we bring in experts on the various topics that we discuss and we're trying to help people understand whatever the topic is.

That's amazing. I'll host everything in the show notes below if you guys just want to easily click on the books or the table podcast, just to make it easy for you, you know, so it doesn't push people your way.

Thank you so much for coming on the show. Let's find another excuse to bring you back. Okay, well, I've never been to Hawaii.

So this is the closest I've ever been to Hawaii. We'll do the first in -person together.

Yeah, that would be fun. No, seriously, I appreciate what you do and how you're going about it and your commitment to have people kind of understand what's going on and asking questions that people have that oftentimes don't get discussed.