College Study #73: "The Legend of Christ: Fact or Fairy Tale?"

‘Behold, the Lamb of God’

ide o amnos tou theou

College Study

73^rd teaching

5.5.2014

 

“Christ: Fact or Fairy Tale?”

 

 

          Review:

                   The last time we met, our subject was the Tetralemma. Now what is a tetralemma? What is the Tetralemma in context of Christology? We’ve broken down the tetralemma piece by piece and last time we took a look at the allegations of Christ being either a Liar or a Lunatic. By examining His actions and words and life as recorded in the gospels, the New Testament letters and early non-biblical texts, we concluded that Jesus was neither a fibber nor was He crazy. For the details, check out the notes for the previous study posted online. We finished off that study last time by talking about one of the sins which I believe is specific to modern Christianity: indifference. We quotes Jesus in Luke’s gospel when He told those around Him of their failure to respond appropriately saying: “We played the flute for you, and you did not dance; we mourned to you, and you did not lament.” And we found that in our lives we must avoid the tendency toward an uncaring response to our Savior. The gospel is good news, worthy of rejoicing and celebration, not the cold, callous, coolness that we can meet it with. Therefore, if you asked me to come up with a list of cardinal sins for our modern Christianity, I would include indifference as one of them.

          End of Review

 

         

          Turn to Hebrews 3:1-18.

          Tonight will bring up several concepts of faith, belief and unbelief.

          President Abraham Lincoln and President John F. Kennedy were both amazing leaders and inspiring men. They both deserve to be remembered as great presidents of our national history in America. But did you know that there are some baffling facts about both of these men, facts which you could hardly believe to be true? There are some parallels between their lives that are astounding. Are these merely coincidences between two great American leaders? Or is there something deeper at work: conspiracy, shadow government, illuminati, etc.?

          Here’s a short list by way of example:

Abraham Lincoln was elected to Congress in 1846.
John F. Kennedy was elected to Congress in 1946.

Abraham Lincoln was elected President in 1860.
John F. Kennedy was elected President in 1960.

The names Lincoln and Kennedy each contain seven letters.

Both were particularly concerned with civil rights.

Both wives lost their children while living in the White House.

Both Presidents were shot on a Friday.

Both were shot in the head.

Lincoln's secretary, Kennedy, warned him not to go to the theatre.
Kennedy's secretary, Lincoln, warned him not to go to Dallas.

Both were assassinated by Southerners.

Both were succeeded by Southerners.

Both successors were named Johnson.

Andrew Johnson, who succeeded Lincoln, was born in 1808.
Lyndon Johnson, who succeeded Kennedy, was born in 1908.

John Wilkes Booth was born in 1839.
Lee Harvey Oswald was born in 1939.

Both assassins were known by their three names.

Both names are comprised of fifteen letters

Booth ran from the theater and was caught in a warehouse.
Oswald ran from a warehouse and was caught in a theater.

Booth and Oswald were assassinated before their trials.

 

          Now what can we say about such parallels? Coincidence or conspiracy? Here’s what snopes.com has to say about this: “Despite the seemingly impressive surface appearance, several of these entries are either misleading or factually incorrect, and the rest are mere superficial coincidences that fail to touch upon the substantial differences and dissimilarities that underlie them.”

          For example, while it is true that both Lincoln and Kennedy were elected President 100 years apart exactly, there is no other possible date that they could have been elected. Presidential elections are held only once every four years so Lincoln couldn’t have been elected President in 1857, ’58, ’59 or ’61, ’62 or ’63 because no presidential elections were held in those years. So too, Kennedy could only have been elected President in 1960, not 1957, ’58, ’59 or ’61, ’62 or ’63 because there were no elections in those years.

          As far as dates go, there are many non-matching dates concerning both Lincoln and Kennedy. Don’t be surprised that they were elected 100 years apart. Don’t forget that their birthyears don’t match (1809 and 1917), their death-years don’t match (1865 and 1963) and their ages at death don’t match (age 56 and age 46). Further, Lincoln died in April and Kennedy in November.

          There are literally hundreds of other facts about Lincoln and Kennedy which do not match up at all, where there is no coincidental parallel. Therefore, it is intensely misleading to list just one parallel (about their election dates) and conclude that there is all this matching up of dates when there simply isn’t. Note: the minority facts do not accurately reflect the majority facts.

          Furthermore, some of these parallels can also be explained by simple chance. For example, both Presidents were shot on a Friday. Well the odds are only one in seven that both killings would occur on a Friday. Both were shot in the head. Well, if you’re trying to kill someone with one shot, that’s probably the best place to shoot for, no?

          What’s more, there are some factual errors, things that are flat out wrong, in this list of parallels. Kennedy had a secretary named Lincoln but Abraham Lincoln never had a secretary named Kennedy. Booth wasn’t born 100 years apart from Oswald; Booth was born in 1838, not 1839. Booth ran from a live theater to a tobacco shed, and Oswald ran from a textbook warehouse and was captured alive in a movie theater.

          Even the line that says these two assassins were themselves assassinated is a stretch of the word aimed to create a parallel were there really isn’t one. Booth was shot by a trooper in a burning barn after refusing to surrender and drop his weapon, while Oswald was taken into custody and remained there for two days until he was gunned down by a private citizen. You could really only apply the word assassination to the second case, couldn’t you?

          The article on snopes.com concludes: “The coincidences are easily explained as the simple product of mere chance. It's not difficult to find patterns and similarities between any two marginally-related sets of data, and coincidences similar in number and kind can be (and have been) found between many different pairs of Presidents. Our tendency to seek out patterns wherever we can stems from our desire to make sense of our world…”

          Or as Abraham Lincoln himself said: “Don’t believe everything you read on the Internet just because there’s a picture with a quote next to it.” Brilliant statement, Mr. President. Brilliant.

          But I used this example tonight to illustrate the point that while we’re living in the so-called Information Age, we must recognize that it is also the Misinformation Age, especially when the internet is concerned. And unfortunately our culture’s common beliefs are no longer molded by literature or radio or pulpit, nor even largely by television, but by the uncontrollable, un-censorable, un-moderated internet and the internet’s pseudo-scholars.

          And tonight our goal is not to talk about any alleged parallels between Abraham Lincoln and John F. Kennedy (so if you thought that, take a sigh of relief). But our goal tonight is to discuss what is known as the Christ-myth theory, this common idea (thanks to the internet) that Jesus Christ is an idea borrowed from older pagan religions, that Christianity is just some kind of hodge-podge of heathen concepts sewn together and that it’s all one big deception.

          Now could you imagine if 1000 years from now if some future society discovers this dubious list of supposed parallels between Lincoln and Kennedy, which we’ve just found to be factually incorrect and misleading, but this future society concludes that America was so fascinated with the concept of a great political leader that we invented Kennedy as a kind of hodge-podge of all the great presidents before him, like Lincoln? They would simply be wrong, and hopefully research and scholarship could show that the invention of Kennedy is wrong, but that he was a real living American leader.

          I think the same thing is happening in our day. Common belief holds that Jesus was borrowed from paganism and even that Jesus never existed at all. Guys, this is the battlefield today, this is where the line is drawn.

          So then our study tonight is entitled: “The Legend of Christ: Fact or Fairy Tale?” Was Jesus Christ a real, living, breathing, historical figure who walked the earth in 1^st century Palestine? Or, specifically our question tonight, was He a myth like so many of the myths and legends and folktales found in other religions of the world? Does He stand shoulder to shoulder with the likes of Hercules and Horus, a fictitious figure? Tonight we’re dealing with belief and unbelief. Whether we should believe Jesus was real or not, and the facts involved.

          Really, we’re still moving on through the structure of the Tetralemma. So you don’t get lost, remember that we’re still questioning whether Jesus was Liar, Lunatic, Legend or Lord. We covered Liar and Lunatic last time. Tonight and next week, we’ll address whether Jesus was Legend or not. Tonight we’re discovering whether He was a myth or not, and next week we’ll try to answer a similar question: if He wasn’t a myth, was He still actually real. So tonight: Jesus as fact or fairy tale. Next week: the historical Jesus. There, you got a little preview.

          But we’re going to answer our question of whether Christ was fact or fairy tale tonight with several points, and think that what we’ll find is that there is evidence for your belief in Christ and you needn’t be hung up on unbelief, dubiousness and doubt. There’s no reason for doubt.

          It has been suggested that some of the reasons why young Christians reach adulthood and leave their faith and their church is because they aren’t grounded, their faith isn’t made their own and made real, or because they aren’t supplied with evidence and reason for why they should keep their parents’ faith, especially when the world is supposedly giving them evidence and reason to the contrary, to leave Christianity behind them. Well, I’m giving you reasons to believe tonight. You and your friends don’t need to be cheated by unbelief.

          Here are our points:

1.    The Myth Allegation

2.    Pagan Plagiarism

3.   With Many a Doubt

 

1.   The Myth Allegation

          So just what is the allegation here? What is the argument being brought to bear against Christ? It is known as the Christ-myth Theory or sometimes simply as mythicism. People who hold to this theory believe that Jesus did not exist or if He did that He had virtually nothing to do with the founding of the religion we now know as Christianity.

          There are a few central arguments in the Christ-myth Theory, such as the New Testament having no historical value, but the primary argument that we’re addressing tonight is the statement that Christianity has pagan and mythical roots. According to this theory, there’s no historical basis for Christianity in the gospels’ portrayal of Jesus. It is all based on fiction and fairy tales and folklore, rather than on fact.

          The Christ-myth Theory draws upon studies in comparative mythology. What that simply means is that the Theory compares Jesus to supposed parallels found in other myths and religions in Hinduism, Egyptology and the Greco-Roman mysteries. Myth proponents claim that certain gospel stories are similar to those of dying and rising gods, solar deities, saviors or divine figures in other faiths, such as Horus, Mithras, Prometheus, Dionysus, Buddha or Krishna.

          Note, the claim is pretty much exactly the same as what we saw earlier with Kennedy and Lincoln. And in pretty much exactly the same way, I hope that we can all see just how misleading and inaccurate some of these parallels are.

          But to illustrate the Christ-myth Theory clearly to us, as if from one who believed it himself, let’s turn to an example of a recent documentary. There have been several documentaries and writings in recent years about the Christ-myth Theory, such as the 2005 film The God Who Wasn’t There written and directed by Brian Flemming or such as Dr. of ancient history Richard Carrier who wrote a book called Why I am not a Christian in 2011. But let’s take our overview of the Christ-myth Theory from probably the most famous (or infamous) of all the proponents: the 2007 documentary Zeitgeist: the Movie.

          Who has heard of this? It’s had quite an impact upon general consensus and popular opinion, remarkably considering it was directed by, produced by, written and edited by one guy: Peter Joseph on an apparent budget of a mere $7,000. But note that just because this film has dramatically affected popular beliefs via the internet does not make its claims true.

          The documentary is broken down into three parts. Part one questions Christianity and states that it came from various other religions and astrological myths and traditions. That’s the part we’re going to watch a bit of. The second part has to do with 9/11 conspiracy theories which state that the September 11^th attacks were orchestrated or allowed to happen by the US government. The third part has to do with international bankers creating global calamities and wars to enrich themselves. Paranoid much? It seems like the whole context of the documentary as conspiracy theory sort of undermines its credibility and sets the tone for all these fringe ideas.

          This has led critics of the film, not just Christians, to call Zeitgeist “surreal perversions of genuine issues and debates…” “based solely on anecdotal evidence” “fiction couched in a few facts” “an example of unethical film-making… implicit deception”. Even Tim Callahan, writer for Skeptic magazine—Skeptic magazine!—criticized the part of the film on the origins of Christianity, saying “some of what it asserts is true. Unfortunately, this material is liberally—and sloppily—mixed with material that is only partially true and much that is plainly and simply bogus.”

          When you’ve got a writer from Skeptic magazine, founded by an atheist, claiming your statements about Christianity are simply bogus, then you’ve got a real problem. Not even atheists side with Zeitgeist, which has been labeled as propaganda. And it is laughable as we shall see.

          (Play clip from Zeitgeist: the Movie—00:00 to 17:00)

          Now there is waaay too much in there to respond to and indeed if we took the time to refute every statement, it would take this college group several Mondays. Debunking documentaries against Zeitgeist actually end up being longer than the film they’re debunking. So we can only take a few examples out of this video and attempt to refute them.

          What I want to show you is simply that these statements can be refuted and that you have no excuse for unbelief if you’re simply not going to do your research. Don’t believe everything you read on the internet until you do the studies yourself.

2.   Pagan Plagiarism

          Since we don’t have time now to defend against all of the accusations, we want to zoom in on the allegation of Christ being Legend specifically in terms of Christianity plagiarizing, ‘borrowing from’, paganism in the same way that a poor college student might ‘borrow’ some statements from authors and scholars, treat them as their own and not give any credit where credit is due.

          So is this true? Is Jesus merely a fiction borrowed from previous Egyptian, Greek, Roman or other fictions? I’m going to give you two broad reasons to reject the Christ-myth claims and a specific example of how these parallels are false.

          Dr. William Lane Craig writes on the subject of the Christ-myth Theory and its proponents: “The Free Thought movement, which fuels the popular objection that Christian beliefs about Jesus are derived from pagan mythology, is stuck in the scholarship of the late nineteenth century. In one sense this is flabbergasting, since there are plenty of contemporary sceptical scholars, like those in the Jesus Seminar, whose work Free Thinkers could avail themselves of in order to justify their scepticism about the traditional understanding of Jesus. But it just goes to show how out of touch with scholarly work on Jesus these popularizers are. They are a hundred years out of date.

          “Back in the hey-day of the so-called History of Religions school, scholars in comparative religion collected parallels to Christian beliefs in other religious movements, and some thought to explain those beliefs (including belief in Jesus' resurrection) as the result of the influence of such myths. Today, however, scarcely any scholar thinks of myth as an important interpretive category for the Gospels. Scholars came to realize that pagan mythology is simply the wrong interpretive context for understanding Jesus of Nazareth.”

          I said I’m going to give you two broad reasons to reject the Christ-myth Theory. The first is the idea of interpretive context. Simply, the first believers were Jewish. They lived in Judea. They practiced Judaism. They lived in a Jewish culture that had been strict to preserve its scriptures, its beliefs, its traditions and its cultural identity. The tenacity with which the Jews preserved their culture becomes incredible when you consider how prior to the 1^st century they lived in exile for 70 years in another culture, Babylonian, while preserving their culture, and that at the time of the 1^st century they lived under Roman rule in a Roman empire while strictly holding on to their fundamentally Jewish beliefs. Therefore, Jesus as Jew and his disciples as Jews are to be interpreted in a Jewish context. Makes sense, right?

          Imagine if you forgot to apply this in other areas of history? Imagine, for example if you considered American history as a kind of allegorical retelling of Greek myth. Imagine if someone reinterpreted Washington as Hercules or the signing of the Declaration as the words of Zeus. They’d be an idiot, because they’d for one be denying historical fact and secondly they be using the wrong interpretive context. The correct interpretive context for American history is America and the correct interpretive context for 1^st century Christianity is not paganism or myth, it was Judaism and Jewish culture. Christianity stemmed from that, not from pagan myth, something which the Jews strictly guarded against and something which it would be highly unlikely that simple fishermen and tax-collectors, the first disciples, knew anything about.

          Do you seriously think that simple-minded Peter or Jewish-educated Paul would know enough about ancient Egyptian texts and hieroglyphics to use that as inspiration for inventing the figure of Christ? There is simply no causal connection here. The Theory is ignoring the Jewishness of Jesus.

          So first reason to reject the Christ-myth Theory, it is the wrong interpretive context.

          Second reason to reject this Theory that Christ was fabricated legend is this: the Theory is out-of-date, as Dr. Craig mentioned. The Theory relies on scholarship that is already old in our time and takes no recent scholarship or studies from the last hundred years into consideration.

          Earlier we imagined what it would be like to forget interpretive context in terms of American history, now imagine what it would be like to forget the scholarship of the past hundred years, say, in terms of science. We would still believe for example that the Earth’s continents and plates were stable and did not move or we would still believe that the universe was static and not expanding. Or imagine if we ignored scholarly development even further into the past: we might still think the Earth was flat, or that it was the center of the universe.

          The point is, when it comes to scholarship, you cannot hold to outdated material in the face of more recent studies, and what was said in the 18^th and 19^th centuries about the historical data and the manuscript evidence surrounding Christ has in fact changed since that time. We have more evidence in manuscript form today than they did then, simply put.

          The collapse of this Theory in modern scholarship took place because scholars came to realize that the alleged parallels are baloney (as we shall see). To ignore the development of mainstream modern scholarship in terms of refuting this Christ-myth Theory would be like forgetting the past 100 years of development in fields of science.

          Bart Ehrman, Professor at the University of North Carolina and agnostic… agnostic!... writes: “I don't think there's any serious historian who doubts the existence of Jesus... We have more evidence for Jesus than we have for almost anybody from his time period.” Guys, an agnostic said that.

          *We’re barely scratching the surface here of everything written on the subject of the Christ-myth Theory, but I’ve given you two broad reasons to reject it: it forgets interpretive context and it ignores recent scholarship.

          Next, let’s consider an alleged parallel. There are several listed in the video we saw and in other literature, but let’s home in on Horus. The Egyptian legends of Horus are considered the oldest foundation for the Christ-myth Theory so he is a unique example to consider.

          Horus is one of the oldest deities in ancient Egyptian religion and is depicted as having a falcon’s head and being the god of vengeance, sky, protection and war. (Insert sarcasm here) Already the parallels abound! Didn’t Jesus have a falcon’s head? Oh, no, that’s right. And wasn’t Jesus Egyptian? Oh no…

          But we were told several facts about Horus in the Zeitgeist video: He was born on December 25^th, born of a virgin, his birth was hailed by a star in the east, he was adored by 3 kings at his birth, he was a teacher at age 12, he was baptized at age 30, he had 12 disciples whom he traveled about with and performed miracles, he was known as “the Lamb of God” and “the Light”, he was betrayed, crucified, dead for 3 days and then resurrected.

          We’ve been given thirteen facts.

          First, we’re told that Horus was born on December 25^th. What a parallel to Jesus! Until we remember that the Bible says nothing about the actual birth-date of Jesus Christ. Look hard for it in the gospels, you won’t find it! The December 25^th date was later added years and years after Christ’s death. So already, the claim is attempting to prove a parallel that isn’t even there. Christ and Horus were not both born on December 25^th because Christ at least was not born on December 25^th. Already we’re off to a factually incorrect start, so far as the information we’re given about Christ.

          Secondly, we were told that Horus had a virgin birth. This is bad information about Horus this time. Zeitgeist’s own source book says this: “The virginity of Horus‘s mother, Isis, has been disputed, because in one myth she is portrayed as impregnating herself with Osiris‘s severed phallus. In depictions of Isis‘s impregnation, the goddess conceives Horus ―while she fluttered in the form of a hawk over the corpse of her dead husband.‖50 We have also seen that in an image from the tomb of Ramesses VI, Horus is born out of Osiris‘s corpse without Isis even being in the picture. In another tradition, Horus is conceived when the water of the Nile—identified as Osiris—overflows the river‘s banks, which are equated with Isis.”

          So we have several conflicting birth-myths for Horus. The first one isn’t a virgin birth since Horus’ mum uses his father’s dead members to impregnate herself. The second one still isn’t a virgin birth since Isis in hawk form mystically or magically becomes pregnant while hover over the father’s corpse, so he’s still involved. The third doesn’t even include the mother, so I guess that’d be a virgin birth from the male perspective? Ew. And in the fourth, it is all metaphor and allegory for the rising of the Nile river. In none of these cases, expect for the second, is there anything remotely close to the virgin birth of Christ.

          An Egyptian artifact known as Plate XIV, now preserved in Paris, depicts the procreation of Horus, son of Isis. In it you can see Isis fanning the body with her feathers, and producing air that caused the inert members of Osiris to move, and she supposedly drew from him his essence, from which she produced her child Horus. Here’s a translation of the legend: “She made to rise up the helpless members of him whose heart was at rest, she drew from him his essence, and she made therefrom an heir.”

          So Horus was born from a dead body and his mother was in hawk-form. Virgin birth? Not hardly. In fact, there’s not much that resembles the birth of Christ here at all. It is a huge stretch to call Horus’ a virgin birth.

          How about another example? We were told that Horus birth was accompanied by three kings who worshipped him. And doesn’t that match up with the three kings from the Orient, the three magi, who came to worship the baby Jesus? Nope.

          The gospels never say there were three magi. In fact, only one of the gospels mentions them at all. Matthew 2 calls them “wise men from the East”. The concept of three magi was an invention of Middle Age Western Christianity, which named them, Melchior, Gaspar and Balthazar. Note that in Eastern Christian Syriac churches, the magi numbered twelve, not three.

          And whereas literal wise men came to adore the baby Christ, in Zeitgeist’s source book they use the term “three kings” to describe the three stars in Orion’s belt, claiming that Osiris (the name for Horus’ father and sometimes Horus’ own name) is identified with Orion and thus with these three stars. What?

          Look at the kind of hoops you have to jump through to get a parallel. Zeitgeist claims it is a parallel that Jesus was adored by an unnumbered group of wise men and that Horus aka Osiris is identified with Orion which has three stars as “three kings” in his belt? Where exactly is the parallel?

          One more, and this one is a real joke. The Zeitgeist documentary had the audacity to claim that Horus was crucified. That would be pretty incredible… considering the date affixed to Horus’ legends is 3000 BC. Generations before crucifixion appeared in history when it was used by the Persians (who some claim were the first to use it) and of course the Romans (who others claim were the ones to perfect it). A Greek writer named Herodotus writes that King Darius (the same mentioned in the Bible) had 3000 Babylonians crucified in about 519BC. The Encyclopedia Britannica agrees with this earliest date for crucifixion saying that it was a method of punishment employed from the 6^th century BC on.

          If that’s the case, then somehow Horus was crucified before crucifixion was invented, some 2500 years before it was invented. To get around this, they claim that Horus is depicted not as being literally killed by crucifixion but merely in cruciform, that is with arms spread out. So from the mere fact that Horus is shown in pictures and hieroglyphs as having his arms spread out they make the claim that he was crucified just like Jesus?

          Here’s their actual claim straight from their source book:  “The ‘crucifixion’ of Horus is misunderstood because many erroneously assume that the term denotes a direct resemblance to the crucifixion narrative of Jesus Christ. Hence, it is critical to point out that we are dealing with metaphors here, not ‘history,’ as the ‘crucifixions’ of both Horus and Jesus are improvable events historically.

          “The issue at hand is not a man being thrown to the ground and nailed to a cross, as Jesus is depicted to have been, but the portrayal of gods and goddesses in ‘cruciform,’ whereby the divine figure appears with arms outstretched in a symbolic context.”

          They even include a handy, low-res image of Horus with arms outstretched in the vault of heaven, though admittedly the image in their source book is shown “upside-down for purposes of more readily illustrating the point”.

          So what have we seen with just a short survey of a few of these claims? We’ve seen that they’re factually false, misleading in their wording and wrong.

          Dr. Ben Witherington, New Testament scholar writes this: Unfortunately [Zeitgeist] gets most of the story of Horus wrong. He claims the Horus myth says he was born on Dec. 25th, born of a virgin, star in the east, worshipped by kings, and was a teacher by 12. This he claims was the original form of the myth in 3000 B.C. It would be nice to know how Mr. Joseph learned this, since we don’t have any ancient Egyptian texts that go back that far on this matter. Furthermore this disinformation he gives in the film is refuted by numerous analysis of the proper sources.…again not only is Mr. Joseph guilty of falsely blending together various different religions which developed largely regionally and independently of each other, he is actually guilty of falsifying some of the claims made in the Egyptian myths…Ironically he does a disservice to all the religions he discusses….I could go on about the egregious errors in his presentation of Horus, who was not called the lamb of God, and was not crucified and resurrected, even in the myth. The story of Horus is of course the story of the rebirth of the sun in east, and it is based on the cycles of nature, not on any sort of historical claims at all, unlike the story of Jesus. But more to the point the story of Horus does not include many of the elements that Joseph claims it does—shame on him for not doing his homework properly even on Egyptology.”

          Guys, realize this: you’ve got all the proof for your claims in a text that’s readily available: the Bible. That’s your source material. You don’t need to suffer under the burden of proof, rather you put the burden of proof on someone who makes the crazy claims such as the ones we’ve examined tonight.

          I like Dr. Craig’s hardcore response “When they say that Christian beliefs about Jesus are derived from pagan mythology, I think you should laugh. Then look at them wide-eyed and with a big grin, and exclaim, "Do you really believe that?" Act as though you've just met a flat earther or Roswell conspirator. You could say something like, "Man, those old theories have been dead for over a hundred years! Where are you getting this stuff?" Tell them this is just sensationalist junk, not serious scholarship. If they persist, then ask them to show you the actual passages narrating the supposed parallel. They're the ones who are swimming against the scholarly consensus, so make them work hard to save their religion. I think you'll find that they've never even read the primary sources.”

3.   With Many a Doubt

          As I mentioned earlier, you have no reason for doubt. Jesus Christ isn’t borrowed from pagan religion. He’s no fairy tale. He’s a real Savior. And Christianity is the most well attested, best evidenced, best documented, logically coherent, credible system of faith on the planet. At the start of tonight we read about the children of Israel failing to enter into God’s rest because of their unbelief.

          Like indifference, I think another cardinal sin for our modern Christianity must be unbelief. It wasn’t disobedience. It wasn’t rebellion. It was something deeper, a hard heart of unbelief, that kept the children of Israel from finding rest in God’s land. And if we do not become honest and open with ourselves, we may miss this same rest in God ourselves.

          Remember in II Kings 7 when Syria surrounded Samaria and the people in the city were starving to death? The prophet Elisha said “Thus says the LORD: ‘Tomorrow about this time a seah of fine flour shall be sold for a shekel, and two seahs of barley for a shekel, at the gate of Samaria’ So an officer on whose hand the king leaned answered the man of God and said, ‘Look, if the LORD would make windows in heaven, could this thing be?’ And [Elisha] said, ‘In fact, you shall see it with your eyes, but you shall not eat of it.”

          And so when the famine broke, the people rushed for the food and that officer who doubted was trampled by the crowd and died (II Kings 7:20). He died? Yes. Because of unbelief? Yes. (Erica is awesome)

          Unbelief is dangerous, do you realize that? Not believing God is just as dangerous as disbelieving our parents when they told us not to talk to strangers, not to cross the street alone or not to touch the stove because it is hot. Israel couldn’t taste the Lord’s rest because of unbelief.

          You might be restless yourself. You might be wandering through life, cynical of other Christians when you hear them claim about God guiding them or whatnot. You might have a relationship with Christ that it anything but rest, that might even be stress, or a sense of distance, trying to appease and please an angry God without realize that He died because He loves you, not because He’s angry at you. But in essence, you’re Christianity is shallow and restless probably because of some unbelief.

          So when you read the Bible, do you believe what it is saying? Ask yourself that. Do you really believe the claim of Christ who said “Come to Me all you who are weary and heavy laden and I will give you rest”?

          As we’ve seen tonight, you have no cause for unbelief. And I hope that you only help yourself, that if you wrestle with doubts that you do the research. I’m encouraging you to get studying for yourself. Read your Bible. Read some books and articles. Watch some documentaries. Talk with as many people as you can and ask questions. Christians are often stereotyped as being narrow-minded and stupid. There’s no reason for that at all. Christian faith has evidence, but you’ve got to take the time to find it.

          Go and find out for yourself what is true and what are the lies that prevail all over the internet. As Lincoln said: don’t believe everything you read on the internet… including that quote by Lincoln. Believe something because you’ve found it to be true.

 

 

          (Sources: http://www.stellarhousepublishing.com/zeitgeistsourcebook.pdf; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oZgT1SRcrKE; http://www.reasonablefaith.org/jesus-and-pagan-mythology; http://thedevineevidence.com/jesus_similarities.html; http://www.sacred-texts.com/egy/leg/leg22.htm; http://alwaysbeready.com/zeitgeist-the-movie)