‘Behold, the Lamb
of God’
ide
o amnos tou theou
College Study
74th teaching
5.12.2014
“the Historical
Jesus”
Review:
Moving
on through our structure of the Tetralemma, several weeks ago we answered the
accusation of whether Christ was a Liar or a Lunatic, but what was the
accusation we answered last week? Legend. Specifically, we confronted a
mainstream internet-spread idea that Jesus Christ is fictional and that He is a
myth borrowed from several other myths from other religions throughout history.
What documentary (mockumentary?) did we watch a clip of last week which
proposes that Jesus was legend? Zeitgeist. What Egyptian god did Zeitgeist
claim was a source for the idea of Jesus? I gave two broad reasons to reject
this claim, what were they? We also took a look at some specifics about both
Horus and Jesus, can you remember what some of them were? So are there any
major similarities between the two? How then can you respond to people accusing
Jesus of being a legend because of these supposed parallels? And lastly, we
finished off by talking about the danger of unbelief. But remember, the
proverbial ball is in your court. You have the responsibility of studying God’s
Word and doing your own research. The cure for doubt is in your hands. Believe
something because you’ve found it to
be true! Note: I included and will continue to include my sources at the bottom
of my notes whenever necessary, and notes will be posted on the blog:
nortonliterature.blogspot.com.
End
of Review
Rudolph
Bultmann, the liberal German theologian who died in 1976 and who attempted to
demythologize the New Testament, said this: “By no means are we at the mercy of
those who doubt or deny that Jesus ever lived.”
Trudging on through our structure of
the Tetralemma and discovering who Jesus Christ really is, we’ve confronted the
accusations of Him being a Liar or a Lunatic or a Legend. Last week we
addressed whether Christ was a Fact or a Fairy Tale, specifically if He was a
‘borrowed concept’ from other legends, a kind of hodge-podge of myths and
folktales. Tonight, though, we’re asking a question very much along the same
lines as last week. Last week we asked if Jesus was a Legend but tonight we’re
asking if He even existed at all, legend or not.
Tonight’s study is simply labeled:
“the Historical Jesus”.
Our goal is to discover the real Jesus
of Nazareth as a figure of history, who walked the Galilean countryside, who
delivered the sermon on the Mount and who was ultimately crucified at the
accusation of Jews and at the hands of Romans. But this of course is no
ordinary Man. This is a Man who made the most peculiar claims, who had
followers who made bizarre and unusual claims themselves, such as Him walking
on water, casting out demons, healing the terminally ill and rising from the
grave. These claims alone set Jesus of Nazareth apart from other historical
figures for Abraham Lincoln never made usual claims that he was God, Julius
Caesar never was depicted as walking on water and it was never said of Joan of
Arc that she was killed, buried and rose from the grave three days later. But
all these are said of Jesus. He is therefore a historical figure of whom many extraordinary things have been said.
But there’s a popular phrase among
skeptics which can be attributed to the late astronomer Carl Sagan:
“Extraodinary claims require extraordinary evidence.” Rightfully and rationally
so. We’re not building a case for the historicity of a man who did ordinary
things, but we’re seeing whether the Man who said “No man comes to the Father
except through Me” actually lived
I think that by the end of tonight’s
study we will be able to say with the late Rudolf Bultmann that we aren’t at
the mercy of theories and those who hold such theories that Christ never
existed at all. Guys, even Richard Dawkins, one of the most outspoken atheists
of our time, broke down and admitted that Jesus “probably existed” (The God Delusion, pg 122). He admits it
again in a debate with Prof. John Lennox at the Oxford Museum of Natural
History, saying quote: “When you look at history and let’s leave aside maybe I
alluded to the possibility that some historians think Jesus never existed… I
take that back: Jesus existed. However if you’re going to say that Jesus was
born of a virgin, that Jesus walked on water, that He turned water into wine…
that is palpably anti-scientific.”
So while Dawkins rejects the
supernatural elements of the life of Christ, he has publically admitted to the
historical elements of Jesus of Nazareth, that Jesus existed and was a real
person. And if Richard Dawkins, author of the
God Delusion, can say that, then I hope all his followers on the internet
will find that there is no way out of admitting so themselves. And hopefully
that admission can be made on the basis of a whole mass of evidence.
Now what evidence?
Another outspoken atheist, perhaps
even more so, was the author Christopher Hitchens who died in 2011. He was one
of the most eloquent debaters I’ve ever seen and he spoke out against God and
Christianity in very strong language. He said in 2007: “Jesus of Nazareth is
not a figure in history… there is no firm evidence that he existed.”
Shall we agree with Mr. Hitchens? Or
is there evidence, firm evidence for the existence of Jesus Christ? I’m going
to give you several pieces of evidence but let’s start first by opening up the
biblical record. We always start these studies with Scripture and so let’s turn
to I Corinthians 15:1-11
Here, the Apostle Paul writes: “Moreover, brethren, I declare to you the
gospel which I preached to you, which also you received and in which you stand,
by which also you are saved, if you hold fast that word which I preached to you—unless
you believed in vain. For I delivered to you first of all that which I also
received: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, and that
He was buried, and that He rose again the third day according to the
Scriptures, and that He was seen by Cephas [Peter], then by the twelve. After that He was seen by over five hundred
brethren at once, of whom the greater part remain to the present, but some have
fallen asleep [died]. After that He
was seen by James, then by all the apostles. Then last of all He was seen by me
also, as by one born out of due time. For I am the least of all the apostles,
who am not worthy to be called an apostle, because I persecuted the church of
God. But by the grace of God I am what I am, and His grace toward me was not in
vain; but I labored more abundantly than they all, yet not I, but the grace of
God which was with me. Therefore, whether it was I or they, so we preach and so
you believed.”
Now unknown to the casual reader of
Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians is something amazing that resides
beneath the surface of these few verses. What is represented here (specifically
in verses 3-6) is something known as the pre-Pauline creed. Let me explain.
First, what is a creed anyway? It
sounds like very old-fashioned, formal religion. But it isn’t too far removed
from our more casual modern Christianity. For example, our own church bulletin
contains a kind of creed or creedal statement on the back of it. The same
statement is on the church website (calvarychapelav.org). A creed is basically
a “faith formula” or a simple statement of beliefs.
Some tip-offs to the fact that these
verses in 1 Corinthians 15 have a creedal nature come from the language Paul
used, specifically the words ‘received’ and ‘delivered’. In the Greek, these
are equivalent to technical rabbinic terms for the passing on of an oral
tradition. Also, the recurring word “that”
(ex: that Christ died, that He was buried, that He rose again, that He was seen…) in the Greek indicates
a kind of pattern, such as in a formula or creed. The pattern laid out is
death-burial-resurrection-then appearances, each point reinforcing the previous
point.
Thus what Paul is writing here is a
creedal statement, a faith formula, which represents the earliest form of the
gospel message, known as the pre-Pauline creed. Who knew that such a thing lay
right in the midst of Paul’s letter: an oral tradition representing the
earliest form of the gospel message which pre-dates the letter he is writing.
Considering that the New Testament letters, like 1 Corinthians, were written
before the gospel accounts, this is the very earliest written record of the
gospel message. I Corinthians was supposedly written sometime during the AD
50s, the middle of the 1st century, some 20 years after the
crucifixion. But if Paul is quoting a traditional creed, then that creed
necessarily is older than his letter and thus less than 20 years away from the
crucifixion. Let me explain further.
Many scholars (such as Dr. Ben
Witherington III and Dr. Mike Licona) approximate the date of the crucifixion
of Jesus at AD 30. The conversion of Saul of Tarsus into the apostle Paul would
have occurred between AD 32 and 37, depending on the specific crucifixion-date
(Dr. Craig Blomberg and Dr. Gary Habermas place his conversion at AD 32).
However, Paul in Galatians 1 says that
after his conversion he didn’t consult anyone nor go up to Jerusalem, but went
away into Arabia and then to Damascus. Gal
1:18-19 says “Then after three years
I went up to Jerusalem to see Peter, and remained with him fifteen days. But I
saw none of the other apostles except James, the Lord’s brother.” Three
years after his conversion would place this date as early as AD 35, possibly
five years after the crucifixion.
Now some have asked where Paul
‘received’ this early creedal statement of early Christian beliefs. Well what
do you think he and Peter talked about in Jerusalem in AD 35? The weather? In
fact, the Greek term translated as ‘to see’ when Paul went up to see Peter is
the word historeo, which means to
inquire, examine, investigate, to gain knowledge of by visiting. The idea is
that Paul had his revelation experience on the road to Damascus but three years
later he went to not merely hang out with Peter in Jerusalem, but to inquire
into this whole gospel message. Evidently, this is where many consider Paul to
have picked up this oral tradition that forms the original gospel beliefs which
he eventually included in his first letter to the Corinthians.
That would make the creed he quotes in
I Corinthians 15 older than the
writing of that letter, 20 years after the crucifixion, and older than his visit with Peter where it
was already a tradition which could be given to him, in circulation possibly as
early as 5 years after the crucifixion. Scholar Walter Kasper holds that this
creed was already circulating by the end of AD 30, the same year that Jesus is
estimated to have died! If that’s the case, then that’s far too short a time
for legend to develop, when eyewitnesses both for and against Christ would still be alive who could either testify to or
deny this early Christian creed. Professor Ulrich Wilkins says this creed: “goes
back to the oldest phase of all in the history of primitive Christianity.”
Paul’s gospel is not some later
innovation, some attempt to corrupt the original message. I Corinthians 15
represents the original gospel, possibly the earliest tradition preserved in
writing to show that the early Christians just 5 or so years after the
crucifixion already believed that Jesus died for their sins and rose from the
dead.
Even the atheist New Testament critic Gerd Ludemann stated: “the
elements in the tradition are to be dated to the first two years after the
crucifixion…not later than three years after the death of Jesus.” And liberal
scholar James Dunn also said: “This tradition, we can be entirely confident,
was formulated as a tradition within months of Jesus’ death.”
So what you’re looking at, scholars
say, is the oldest and earliest example of the gospel message, not a later
fabrication or corruption from the 2nd or 3rd centuries,
but a message handed down from a couple of years or perhaps months after the death of Christ.
Now I ask you: could such an early
tradition have developed around a person who never even existed? We’re talking
early as in the eyewitnesses were still alive, both for and against
Christianity. Paul even indicates that at the time of the writing of I
Corinthians that some of those who saw the risen Christ were still alive. Who
knew that something so precious as early, early evidence existed in 1
Corinthians: the pre-Pauline creed, a traditional formula of belief that
pre-dates the writings of the New Testament!
If Jesus never existed, then how could
this early formula have been circulated, especially in light of the strength of
the Jewish religious authorities who were so opposed to early Christianity. All
those Pharisees had to do was demonstrate that no such Jesus was ever crucified
or that no such Jesus was ever tried by Pontius Pilate or even simply that the
body of the man lay still in the tomb. The fact that this early tradition
thrived is evidence that it surrounded the meaningful life and death of Jesus
of Nazareth, the historical figure.
In order to appreciate all of this,
let’s consider something I’d like to call “the Chuck Norris Test”. Now some
pretty extraordinary things have been said about Chuck Norris, such as his
tears being able to cure cancer or him pushing the earth when he does push-ups
or that he has counted to infinity, twice. Obviously (in a moment of clarity if
you please), we regard these Chuck Norris Facts
as jokes. They’re hilarious.
But how long would it take for someone
to actually believe that these recorded ‘facts’ are true? Well, certainly you’d
have to wait for all the eyewitnesses of Chuck Norris to die. They would
immediately call foul on anyone trying to administer Mr. Norris’ actual tears
to a real cancer patient. Then, you’d have to wait for the generation of Mr.
Norris’ lifetime to die, too. You and I never met him, but we know that Chuck
Norris never did these things. You would at least have to wait also for Chuck
himself to pass on. With all of these criteria, eyewitnesses, you and I and
Chuck himself dying, that would put us some… what? 40 or 50 or even 60 years
off? Enough time for the Chuck Facts to develop into actual legend, at least,
considering there’d still be photographic, video and other historical evidence
to show that Chuck Norris cannot, contrary to popular kidding, divide by zero.
Now in the case of Christ, we’ve got a
super-early line of facts that Paul listed, which date not 40 or 50 or even 60 years after Paul’s death, Jesus’ death and
the death of the eyewitnesses, but just a few years, maybe even as short as
months, from the actual events themselves. There is clearly not enough time to
count the pre-Pauline creed as a fake when the original generation of witnesses
was still around.
Now the rest of tonight will also be
concerned with a mass of evidence. The evidence will form our points for
tonight and then will have a conclusive point. I’m going to give you three more
lines of evidence, for a total of four tonight, including the 1 Corinthian
passage.
1. Multiple Attestation
2. Non-biblical Sources
3. Disciples’ Deaths
4. The True Christ
1.
Multiple Attestation
Let’s
say I told you I can fly. Would you believe me? No, in large part because
you’ve never seen a human being fly and secondly because it’s only me telling
you.
But what if someone else told you I
could? And what if someone you really trusted told you I could? What if someone
you were sure had nothing to gain from telling you I could fly told you I
could? What if somebody who had everything to lose from telling you I could fly told you I could? What if you had
several sources telling you the same thing? You might start to worry either
that credible people were going insane, or that maybe they were really seeing
something, at least thinking I could fly.
Simply put, that’s multiple
attestation: multiple independent people attesting to or holding to the same
story.
In studying about the historical
Jesus, multiple attestation becomes important, since the more independent
witnesses that report the same event the better. In this case, we have five
independent witnesses in the New Testament, or five multiple attestations to
the gospel message. We saw one in Paul’s First Corinthians. So we can count
Paul as one, then there’s Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. Some might be tempted
to dismiss these as biased ‘Christian’ accounts, but bear in mind that these
are 1st century documents written during the very time of the events
in question.
Now it may seem weird to call the four
gospels independent because we’ve
always been used to having the four of them grouped together in our English New
Testaments. But that simply was not the original situation.
The four gospels were each written at
different times. They also had different acceptance and circulation in different
areas of the world in the first and second centuries. It is apparent from their
literary style and tone that they had different authors. And please don’t
forget that one of them was actually written by a 1st century
historian, Luke (a bit of foresight on God’s part).
But because we can easily flip between
them, we might assume that they did as well. But tracing the sources of the
four gospels has shown that these are separate independent accounts. That’s
clear even from reading them.
One gospel depicts an event this way
and another gospel apparently sees it from another perspective. One gospel
reports that Jesus said such and such but another gospel says that Jesus’ words
included other words. There are additions and omissions between the four gospels
and that lends credibility to their independence.
I mean, could you imagine if all the
gospels were exactly the same, following the exact same structure and reporting
only the same events in all four? You’d immediately think that the writers all
got together and decided what they
would each include. But it is their diversity which points to their
independence. That’s not to say they don’t reference each other, as scholars
have concluded that Matthew and Luke, though written independently, drew material
from the earlier source in Mark or from a hypothetical document representing
Matthew and Luke’s ‘common’ material, known as the Q source.
So multiple attestation, the more
friends reporting the same event the better off you are, the more reliable the account.
The more witnesses to the situation the more reliably it can be reconstructed.
And the New Testament itself contains at least five independent sources for the
basic elements of the gospel: Paul, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.
This doesn’t absolutely prove that
Jesus lived, died, was buried, rose from the dead and was seen by many, but it
does raise the credibility of the report more so than if there were only one
witness of it all.
If one person says they saw a UFO,
some kind of unknown flying craft, then it is easy to dismiss one person. But
if several people saw something at the same time, doesn’t mean it was an alien
spaceship, but it points to something
happening at that time. Multiple Attestation may not prove that Jesus did all
the things the sources claim, but it raises the credibility that the sources
are reporting something. And what
could there be to report if Jesus of Nazareth never existed?
2.
Non-biblical Sources
We’ve touched on non-biblical sources,
that is, sources outside of the Bible itself, before and so we shan’t dwell to
long on the point.
I like what William Lane Craig says on
this: “People often ask about non-Christian sources for the gospels and I think
that behind this question lies a misconception that laymen have about the New
Testament that needs to be rooted out first… that somehow the New Testament is
a single book which is written by Christians and is therefore unreliable and
not credible, but if there was evidence outside this book ah! that would be
real evidence! …This I think is a complete misconception of what the New
Testament originally was. Laypeople need to understand that originally there
was no such thing as the New Testament… What there were originally were simply
separate independent documents in the Greek language coming down out of the 1st
century… telling this remarkable story of Jesus of Nazareth… and what the
church did was it collected together the earliest of these documents, the most
reliable of them, and put them under one cover and called it the New Testament.
So by the very nature of the case, our earliest and most reliable sources for
the life of Jesus are found in the New Testament. To ask ‘what evidence is
there outside of the New Testament’ and discount the New Testament itself is to
prefer later, secondary, derivative sources to the earlier, primary sources,
which is simply bad historical methodology. So the question we need to be
asking is not what extra biblical sources are there for the life of Jesus,
although that’s interesting. The real question is: ‘how credible are these
documents when we examine them for what they really were?’ Not inspired or holy
texts but simply independent manuscripts handed down to us out of the 1 century
about this Man, Jesus of Nazareth” (William Lane Craig on the Historical Jesus
– Interview 2001 by John Ankerberg).
I think that’s a fascinating point.
People often dismiss the gospels for those same reasons and in doing so are
paving the way for agnosticism about Jesus, not being able to really know about
Him, since the gospels are the primary sources. However, you should know that
there are non-biblical sources for
the life of Christ. There were people
who weren’t Christians who mentioned Christ in their writings. The times He is
mentioned outside of the Bible is rare simply because these sources are not the
primary sources but the secondary sources. They are not the most important
sources for info on Jesus, but they have some importance nonetheless.
I found a list of some of these
sources, compiled by apologist Norman Geisler. I’ve handed out this list before
but for those of you who may have missed it or lost it, here it is again:
Early non-Christian writers have
confirmed the historicity of many of the main events mentioned in the Gospels
such as: (1) Jesus was from Nazareth; (2) He lived a
virtuous life; (3) He performed unusual feats; (4) He
introduced new teaching contrary to Judaism; (5) He was crucified
under Pontius Pilate; (6) His disciples believed He rose from the
dead; (7) His disciples denied polytheism; (8) His disciples
worshiped Him; (9) His teachings and disciples spread rapidly; (10)
His followers believed they were immortal; (11) His followers had
contempt for death; (12) His followers renounced material goods (see F.F.
Bruce, Jesus and Christian Origins Outside the New Testament).
———————————————————————————————————————
The
following chart summarizes the non-Christian source and the events of Jesus’
life that were confirmed:
Non-Christian Sources within 150
Years of Jesus
|
Source
|
AD
|
Existed
|
Virtuous
|
Worship
|
Disciples
|
Teacher
|
Crucified
|
Empty Tomb
|
Disciples’
Belief in Resurrection
|
Spread
|
Persecution
|
|
Tacitus
|
115
|
X
|
|
|
X
|
|
X
|
X
|
|
X
|
X
|
|
Suetonius
|
117-138
|
X
|
|
X
|
X
|
|
|
X
|
|
X
|
X
|
|
Josephus
|
90-95
|
X
|
X
|
X
|
X
|
X
|
X
|
X
|
X
|
X
|
|
|
Thallus
|
52
|
X
|
|
|
|
|
X*
|
|
|
|
|
|
Pliny
|
112
|
X
|
|
X
|
X
|
X
|
|
X*
|
|
X
|
X
|
|
Trajan
|
112?
|
X*
|
|
X
|
X
|
|
|
|
|
X
|
X
|
|
Hadrian
|
117-138
|
X*
|
|
|
X
|
|
|
|
|
X
|
X
|
|
Talmud
|
70-200
|
X
|
|
|
|
|
X
|
|
|
|
X
|
|
Toledoth Jesu
|
5th Century
|
X
|
|
|
|
|
|
X
|
|
|
|
|
Lucian
|
2nd Century
|
X
|
|
X
|
X
|
X
|
X
|
|
|
|
X
|
|
Mara Bar-Scrapion
|
1st – 3rd
Centuries
|
X
|
X
|
X
|
|
X
|
X
|
X*
|
|
|
|
|
Phlegon
|
80?
|
X
|
|
|
|
|
X
|
X
|
X
|
|
|
*
implied
Now I have read accusations that the
writings of Pliny and Josephus and even Tacitus have been tampered with by the
church, and that later Christians modified the original writings and forged any
quotations about the life of Christ simply to lend historical credence to Jesus
of Nazareth.
Oh I’m sure that early Christians
found time to collect historical literature and modify the text between being
fed to lions and being persecuted and wrestling down heresy and superstition.
But even if that were the case, that accounts for three historians off of this
list? What about the others?
What could all these various sources
be reporting about if the Man in question never even existed?
3.
Disciples’ Deaths
It has been said that “liars make poor
martyrs”. Could the disciples of Christ, the apostles, and indeed almost the
whole of the early Christian church, have fabricated and cooked up this whole
legend of a Man named Jesus and then went to some horrific deaths all for a
lie?
You and I knew from a young age that
all it takes is a little pain to bring out the truth. When I was a boy, I would
sometimes try to pin my devious crimes off on my younger brother. If my father
thought I was lying, all it would take was one mention of the word ‘spanking’
to allow the truth to come forth. If I didn’t think I could get away with it without
pain then I would freely confess my trickery in order to appeal to parental
sympathy, if only again to be spared the pain of discipline. And that’s human
nature. Or were the early disciples and apostles masochists? Gluttons for
punishment? Did they enjoy being tortured and mutilated and executed so much
that they submitted to it all for a joke, a fiction, a fairy tale they
themselves made up?
Jewish historian Josephus indicates
that in AD 62, James the brother of Jesus was delivered up to be stoned. You
don’t think that when that first stone struck him with pain that James, the
leader of the Jerusalem Church, wouldn’t call time-out and spill the beans that
it was all a lie?
The early church father Eusebius
reported that the apostle Peter was crucified by Romans “head downward” because
he thought himself unworthy to be crucified as his Master was. Would Peter make
such a request and not beg to escape such a death if Jesus had been a mere
hoax?
Andrew is said to have been hanged on
an olive tree. Thomas the doubter is said to have been thrust through with
spears, tormented with red-hot plates and burned alive. Philip is said to have
been tortured and crucified. Matthew, beheaded. Bartholomew, flayed alive and
then crucified. James the lesser, not to be confused with the other James, was
thrown off the temple and beaten to death with a club to the head. Simon the
Zealot, crucified in Syria. Judas Thaddeus, beaten to death. Matthias, stoned
while hanging on a cross. Paul, beheaded in Rome. Only the apostle John made it
to old age, as he was exiled after suffering an unsuccessful execution of being
boiled alive.
And that’s just the first generation
of Christians. But what about those who came after them? What about the other
eyewitnesses and the congregations, some of which marched wholesale to their
deaths without recanting their faith?
Do you know that it was the
willingness of the thousands of martyrs to die for their faith that actually
stopped the persecution? I quote from Bruce Shelley’s Church History in Plain Language: “In 311, on his deathbed, [the
Emperor] Galerius realized that his attempt to do away with the upstart
religion had failed. ‘Thousands upon thousands of terrified Christians had, to
be sure, recanted, but other thousands had stood fast, sealing their faith with
their blood.’ …The effect on public opinion through the empire was tremendous. ‘Even
the throne could no longer take the risk of continuing the torturing, maiming,
and killing. So, in his last official act, Galerius, reluctantly, grudgingly,
issued an edict of toleration,’ and for all practical purposes, the last and
worst persecution of Christians by Rome came to an end.”
How could one such horrific death alone be explained if Jesus was fiction,
not to mention so many more than just one, but thousands? How could thousands
go to their death for a lie, a lie they could easily disprove having been there
and seen the events themselves? If Jesus never existed, then how could the
early church have been drenched with blood?
4.
The True Christ
So we’ve looked at a few things
tonight. We’ve seen the earliest form of the gospel message as preserved in the
writings of the apostle Paul. 1 Corinthians 15 is probably the earliest
evidence in the form of a creed to show that Jesus of Nazareth was already
believed to have died, been buried, resurrection and appeared to many. How
could such an early tradition exist in the face of a hostile environment if
Jesus did not exist also?
We’ve also considered the concept of Multiple
Attestation, that the gospels and Paul’s writings are independent and separate
accounts, separate sources reporting on the life and death of Christ.
We’ve also seen a decent-sized list of
non-biblical, non-Christian authors and historians who referenced the real
Person, Jesus Christ. This is evidence alongside the Bible that shows that
Jesus really existed. And we’ve finally considered the fact of the persecution
of the early church and the faithfulness of the early Christians even into
martyrdom. And we asked how anyone could die for something they knew was a
hoax, especially the kind of agonizing deaths such as the early Christians
suffered.
And there’s more, guys, we just ran
out of time. Again, I encourage you to do your research and make your own
discoveries. There is not only enough evidence out there… there’s more evidence
than you can handle in one sitting. While researching for this study, I struggled
to find my way and sift through tons of articles, tons of archaeology and
manuscripts and early writings and historians and on and on and on. There’s
more than enough to satisfy any doubt.
But we come then to the conclusion of
the whole thing: we’ve considered and discovered that there’s a mass of
evidence for the existence of Jesus Christ. Simply, if He did not exist, then
how can anyone explain the historical data, the independent sources, the
non-biblical accounts, the historical persecution of the early church members, or
the explosive spread of early Christianity? The best explanation for all of
these pieces of evidence is that there was such a Man named Jesus, a 1st
century Jew who came from Nazareth, who made incredible claims and who died a
terrible and shameful death of crucifixion, who, His disciples claimed in the
face of Jewish hostility, rose from the grave. There is no historical record
proving their claim wrong.
There was such a Man. My question is:
do you know Him?
Did you know that this is one thing
which sets Christianity apart from several systems of faith and all
philosophies? Christianity is based on a historical figure who lived a
historically verifiable life. Christianity is centered around real events that took
place in real time in history. Christianity is a historical faith.
Christianity is no simple philosophy.
Christianity isn’t here merely to direct us along the right path or give us
some good wisdom or help us to live better lives and be the best people we can
be. Get this: Christianity isn’t even a set of religious rules.
Oh sure there are many who sadly live
out their lives as if the only application of Christianity is ‘don’t do this or
that’ or ‘keep this rule or that rule’. To them, Christianity is just a
legalistic shadow always watching, always hanging over you ready to smack the
back of your hand if you’re trying to get too much for yourself. But such a
person who lives that way, as if Christianity were a system of laws, is missing
the point. They’re missing the focus, the center of it all, which is the Person, the Man, the historical
Jesus Christ.
Jesus is at the heart of Christianity
and all the theology, all the church structure, all the liturgy, the worship,
the fellowship, the rules and the laws are built up around Him. But He is the
center.
And if you’re not living out the
Christian walk based upon Jesus as the center and the heart of your life, then
you’re missing the precious privilege of knowing the historical Jesus. You’ve
heard that the Bible compares Christians to the work of a potter, as a pot is
molded in the potter’s hands where it sits spinning on its center. But
certainly if the pot isn’t centered correctly, it’ll shake and spin convulsively
and fall off the pedestal and be ruined.
Some of you might be trying to walk
the Christian walk convulsively, and all the world is spinning around you dizzyingly
because you aren’t centered on the real Person of Jesus. Whatever it is that’s
drawing your attention away from Jesus Christ, realize that you’ve got to get
back to your center, your Lord.
“By no means are we at the mercy of
those who doubt or deny that Jesus ever lived.” On the contrary, we’re only at
the mercy of ourselves. Do you doubt Jesus was real? I’ve given to evidence
showing otherwise. Do you live in denial of Jesus? Ah, that’s the real mistake.
You have to make the decision to live your life as if Jesus matters, or as if
He were as inconsequential and irrelevant as a mere child’s nursery rhyme.
Or are you living with a useless,
inefficient mode of Christianity made up of rules that you can’t seem to keep
and a God you can’t seem to make happy?
There’s no reason to. There’s no
reason to claim that Jesus never existed and
there’s no reason to live as if He never existed.
(Sources: http://www.answering-islam.org/authors/thompson/paul-historical.html;
http://greatcloud.wordpress.com/2010/08/21/gary-habermas-on-the-pre-pauline-creed-of-1-cor-15/;
http://carm.org/analysis-pre-pauline-creed-1-corinthians-151-11#footnote9_yhoi10o;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1_Corinthians_15;
http://normangeisler.net/; https://www.reclaimingthemind.org/content/Parchmentandpen/DeathoftheApostles.pdf)
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