Continued:

Given these issues, it is important to examine the issue of Jesus and blasphemy in ancient Judaism.”Blasphemy in ancient Judaism was regarded as ‘stretching out one’s hand against “God” by impugning God’s honor and holiness (Sipre Deut 221 on Deut 21:22). God was blasphemed when, among other things, one ascribed divine powers to oneself or laid claim to dignity and position. A person might be a fool for claiming to be the Messiah, but not a criminal. This was demonstrated by Bar Kokhba, the leader of the Second Jewish Revolt (A.D. 132-135), who openly proclaimed to be the Messiah and was believed to be the Messiah by Rabbi Akiba (see Shurer: The History of the Jewish People).  Despite Bar Kokhba’s claim to Messiahship, as far as we know, he was never accused of blasphemy for making such a claim.  After Bar Kokhba died another failed Messiah in the history of Judaism, it was clear he did not meet the messianic expectation for the Jewish people.  And when the Messiah dies, you move on to another one.  In relation to a crucified Messiah, Jewish people in the first century were familiar with Deuteronomy 21:22-23: “If a person commits a sin punishable by death and is executed, and you hang the corpse on a tree, his body must not remain all night on the tree; instead you must make certain you bury him that same day,  for the one who is left exposed on a tree is cursed by God. You must not defile your land which the Lord your God is giving you as an inheritance.”

As N.T. Wright says,
“If nothing happened to the body of Jesus, I cannot see why any of his explicit or implicit claims should be regarded as true. What is more, I cannot as a historian, see why anyone would have continued to belong to his movement and to regard him as the Messiah. There were several other Messianic or quasi-Messianic movements within a hundred years either side of Jesus. Routinely, they ended with the leader being killed by authorities, or by a rival group. If your Messiah is killed, you conclude that he was not the Messiah. Some of those movements continued to exist; where they did, they took a new leader from the same family (But note: Nobody ever said that James, the brother of Jesus, was the Messiah.) Such groups did not go around saying that their Messiah had been raised from the dead. What is more, I cannot make sense of the whole picture, historically or theologically, unless they were telling the truth.” (John Dominic Crossan and N.T Wright. The Resurrection of Jesus. Minneapolis, MN, Fortress Press. 2006, 71).

So the Jewish authorities did not find Jesus’s claim to be the Messiah as blasphemy. So something else triggered the accusation of blasphemy in the trial scene of Mark 14. In other words, it was not just Jesus’ affirmation of being  the Messiah. According to Mark 14:62-Jesus affirmed the chief priests question by saying He is the Messiah, the Son Of God, and the Coming Son of Man who would judge the world . This is what is called the “self-understanding of Jesus.” This was considered a claim for deity since the eschatological authority of judgment was for God alone.  Jesus provoked the indignation of his opponents because of His application of Daniel 7:13 and Psalm 110:1 to himself. Jesus’ claim that he would not simply be entering into God’s presence, but that he would actually be sitting at God’s right side was the equivalent to claiming equality with God. And of course, we see the chief priest accuses Jesus of blasphemy  (Mark 14:63-65). (see James R. Edwards, Is Jesus the Only Savior, pgs 90-91).

There is a comment about this issue in the late third century. Rabbi Abbahu says: If someone says to you, ‘I am God,’ he is lying, ‘I am the son of man’ he will regret it: ‘I will ascend to heaven,’ he said it but will not carry it out.” (Jerusalem Talmud, Ta’anith 2.1 65b, quoted in Hengel, Studies in Early Christology, 181).  If this is correct, this rabbinical saying (admittedly dated from over 150 yrs suggests the Jewish leaders also understood Jesus’ words “I am” to be the claim of God. Of course, Jesus is also accused of blasphemy in by asserting his authority to forgive sins (Mark 2:7). Scribes did not forgive sins. Forgiveness was a divine prerogative of the God of Israel.

Robert Gundry has lent support to the authenticity of the Jesus’ reply to the high priest’s statement. (1) The combination of sitting as God’s right hand and coming in the clouds of heaven appears nowhere in the NT except on Jesus’ lips;(2) the Son of Man in nowhere else associated with the notion of sitting at God’s right hand;(3) the saying exhibits  the same blend of oblique self reference and personally high claims that characterizes other Son of Man sayings (Mark 2:10,28; 8:38:13:26); (4)  even though Psalm 100:1 concerning sitting at the right hand alluded to frequently in the NT, the substitution of “the Power” for “God” though typical for Jewish reverential usage occurs nowhere else in the NT; (5) Mark is unlikely to have created such a prediction to the Sanhedrin which they did not, in fact, see fulfilled- (See Robert Gundry, Mark, A Commentary on His Apology for the Cross, pgs 917-918); cited in William Lane Craig’s Reasonable Faith: 3rd edition, pg 318.

As Richard Bauckham says in his book God Crucified: Monotheism and Christology in the New Testament, that while Greeks focused on philosophical matters of the nature of the divine, Jewish monotheism was more concerned with God’s divine identity. The God of Second Temple Judaism was identifiable by three unique attributes: (1) The God of Israel is the sole Creator of all things (Isa. 40:26, 28; 37:16; 42:5; 45:12; Neh. 9:6; Ps 86:10; Hos. 13:4; (2)The God of Israel is the sovereign Ruler of all things (Dan. 4:34-35); (3) The God of Israel is also the only the only being worthy of being worshiped (Deut. 6:13; Psalm 97:7; Isa. 45:23; Rev. 19:10; 22:8-9). Jesus’ divine identity is affirmed by the fact that He is given the same attributes as God.

Through Jesus’ suffering, death, and resurrection, Jesus comes to participate as God’s sovereign Ruler over all things (Psalm 110:1; Matt. 22:44;26:64; Acts 2:33-35; 5:31; 7:55-56; 1 Cor.15:27-28; Phil. 2:6-11; Eph. 1:21-22; Heb. 1:3; 1 Peter 3:22). Jesus is seen as the object of worship (Matt. 14:33; 28: 9,17; John 5:23; 20:28; Heb. 1:6; Rev. 5:8-12). He is also the recipient of praise (Matt. 21:16-16; Eph. 6:19; 1 Tim. 1:12; Rev. 5:8-14) and  prayer (Acts 1:24; 7:59-60; 9:10-17,21; 22:16,19;1 Cor. 1:2; 16:22; 2 Cor.12:8). Jesus is also the Creator of all things (Heb 1:2; John 1: 1-3; Col. 1:15-16; 1 Cor. 8:6). The divine identity of God is seen in Jesus’ suffering, death, and glory.

The worship of Jesus by Jews in the first century was not the same as “apotheosis,” which can be defined as accepting a human figure as divine-read Paul and Barnabas’ rejection of being worshiped in Acts 14. Thus for non-Jews, “pagans” a proper conversion to the early Messianic faith meant a radical break with their previous religious groups and practices.  As Larry Hurtado says, devotion and worship of Jesus was not prompted by the apotheouis traditions of divine heroes- Jesus was not fit into a pantheon of Gods (see Lord Jesus Christ: Devotion to Jesus in Earliest Christianity by Larry W. Hurtado). And for Jews, in 1 Cor 8:6, Paul  gives a reformulation of the Jewish monotheistic creed-the Shema (see Deut 6).. but he now includes Jesus in context of Jewish monotheism.

Who Do You Say I Am? A Look at Jesus/Part One-Eric Chabot

Now when Jesus came into the district of  Caesarea Philippi, He was asking His disciples, “Who do people say that the Son of Man is?” And they said, “Some say John the Baptist; and others, Elijah; but still others, Jeremiah, or one of the prophets.” He said to them, “But who do you say that I am?” Simon Peter answered, “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God.” And Jesus said to him, “Blessed are you, Simon Barjona, because flesh and blood did not reveal this to you, but My Father who is in heaven.” (Matthew 16:13-17). As of today, people are still trying to answer the same question  that Jesus asked Peter 2,000 years ago.

In his book The Case For The Real Jesus, Lee Strobel says if you search for Jesus at Amazon.com, you will find 175, 986 books on the most controversial figure in human history. As of today, biblical scholars have embarked on what is called “The Third Quest” for the historical Jesus, a quest that has been characterized as “the Jewish reclamation of Jesus.”   Rather then saying Jesus broke away from Judaism and started Christianity, Jewish scholars studying the New Testament have sought to re-incorporate Jesus within the fold of Judaism.  In this study, scholars have placed a great deal of emphasis on the social world of first- century Palestine.  Some of the other non-Jewish scholars that are currently active in the Third Quest are Craig A. Evans, I. Howard Marshall, James H. Charlesworth, N.T. Wright, and James D.G. Dunn and Richard Bauckham.  Some of the Jewish scholars include Geza Vermes, and the late David Flusser and Pinchas Lapide. (see W.L. Craig, Reasonable Faith, 3rd edition- pgs 294-95).

In his book Jesus and the Victory of God,Christian Origins and the Question of God, Volume 2, author N.T.Wright says that the historical Jesus is very much the Jesus of the gospels: a first century Palestinian Jew who announced and inaugurated the kingdom of God, performed “mighty works” and believed himself to be Israel’s Messiah who would save his people through his death and resurrection. “He believed himself called,” in other words says Wright, “to do and be what, in the Scriptures, only Israel’s God did and was.” (Sheller, Jeffrey L. Is The Bible True? How Modern Debates and Discoveries Affirm the Essence of the Scriptures, New York. Harper Collins Publishers. 1999, pg 191).

Both E.P. Sanders and James Charlesworth say “the dominate view today seems to be that we can know pretty well what Jesus was out to accomplish, that we can know a lot about what he said, and that those two things make sense within the world of first- century Judaism.”  (E.P. Sanders, Jesus and Judaism, Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1985, pg 2: cited and endorsed by James Charlesworth, Jesus Within Judaism, New York: Doubleday, 1988), pg 205   A Few Things To Consider: Jesus’ Speaking AuthorityOver the years, I have had the opportunity to have several conversations with my Jewish friends about the differences between Christianity and Judaism. If I talk to one of my more Orthodox Jewish friends, they have told me on several occasions that any view that the Messiah is God is viewed in many cases as blasphemous and idolatrous. Of course, the same goes for Islam- to worship a man as divine is blasphemous.

What approach should one take in looking at the identity of Jesus in light of Judaism in the first century?  I think we can learn a lot from a specialist named Oskar Skarsaune- a specialist in church history at Norwegian Lutheran School of Theology in Oslo, Norway. This May, I get the opportunity of sitting under his teaching for a whole weekend. Skarsuane is a specialist in early Christianity and its relationship to Judaism.  I am going to using a lot of his quotes in this link. His two books that I will be using are Light In The Shadow Of The Temple: Jewish Influences On Early Christianity and Incarnation: Myth or Fact?

For starters, in approaching the incarnation, Skarsaune says, “A point of view that seems to be gaining in scholarly research is that the oldest incarnation texts of the New Testament are not Hellenistic but Jewish. It means that if one is going to understand the concept of incarnation historically, one needs to understand it has arisen in a Jewish environment in which one was accustomed to differentiate sharply between the Creator and the created (Romans 1:25).  I have no doubt already implied that obviously (at least for me) the doctrine of the incarnation cannot be explained at all just by referring to a certain milieu. To put it another way, we will not go to some “early primitive congregation” or to a later form of Christianity to discover the origin of the dogma of the incarnation. We must go further back, to the disciples experience with Jesus Himself. In one way or another, through being with Jesus, the conviction that Jesus burst all categories of Judaism must have been impressed upon the disciples.” (Incarnation, Myth or Fact? Pgs 35-36).

Did Jesus speak as any other rabbi, prophet, or teacher? I have a Jewish friend who believes that Jesus is the Messiah. I once asked him how he viewed Jesus before coming to faith in him as the Messiah. He told me he was taught Jesus was a good Jewish teacher, but certainly nothing more than that. Anyway, this leads to an interesting comment by the Swedish rabbi Marcus Eherenpreis. He says,“A difference appears immediately that from the very beginning constituted an unbridgeable wall of separation between Jesus and the Pharisees. Jesus spoke in His own name. Judaism on the other hand, knew the one I, the divine Anochi (the Hebrew word for I) who gave us the eternal commandments at Sinai. No other superhuman has existed in Judaism other than God. Jesus sermons began, “I say to you.” Here is a clash between that goes to the inner core of religion. Jesus’ voice had an alien sound that that Jewish ears had never heard before. For Judaism, the only revealed teaching of God was important, not the teacher’s personal ego. Moses and the prophets were human beings encumbered with shortcomings. Hillel and his successors sat where Moses sat.” (Light in Shadow of Temple, pg 330).

It seems Eherenpries is right about this: Jesus spoke in a manner that placed him above the highest category allowed for humans in Judaism, that of the prophet, to say nothing of that of a rabbi. The rabbi may say, “I have received as a tradition from Rabbi A who heard it from Rabbi B,” thus authenticating his halakic ruling by the authority of tradition, ultimately deriving its authority from the oral Torah from Moses. The prophets spoke more directly from God when they say, “Thus says the Lord.” But the prophet also is only a representative of God.  He speaks in God’s name, not in his own. He wants to restore or strengthen the people’s relationship with God, not their relationship with the prophet. His own person is not important. He does not have God’s word in himself, it “comes to him”; sometimes he has to wait for it.  Jesus never authenticated his teaching the way the rabbis did. He never said “I have received as a tradition.” “He taught as one having authority, and not the scribes’ (Mark 1:22).  Nor did he speak like a prophet. He never made himself a representative of God by using the prophetic formula “Thus says the Lord.”  He spoke God’s word, he said God’s Law in his own name: “ You have heard that it was said  [by God] to those [at Sinai] ,..but I say to you.” (Matt 5:21-22; 27, 31, 33, 38). (Light in Shadow of Temple, pgs 330-331).

Furthermore, the rabbis could speak of taking upon oneself the yoke of Torah or the yoke of the kingdom; Jesus said, “Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me.” (Mt 11:29). Also, the rabbis could say that if two or three men sat together, having the words of Torah among them, the shekhina (God’s own presence) would dwell on them (M Avot 3:2) ; Jesus said, “Where two or three are gathered in my name, I will be among them” (Matt 18:20). The rabbis could speak about being persecuted for God’s sake, or in his Name’s sake, or for the Torah’s sake; Jesus spoke about being persecuted for and even loosing one’s life for his sake.

Remember, the prophets could ask people to turn to God, to come to God for rest and help. Jesus spoke with a new prophetic authority by stating, “Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest” (Mt 11:28). In Mark 10:37, a wealthy individual asks Jesus what must I do to have eternal life? For the rabbis people were perfect according to their degree of Torah observance. Jesus instructed the man not to turn to Torah, but instead to sell his possessions and “Come, Follow Me.” (Mark 10: 17-22). So it is no wonder the Jewish people looked at Jesus’ teaching and healing authority in a significant way.  If we look at the Old Testament for role models of this characteristic of Jesus’ behavior –this I beside God, speaking and acting as if this I were God’s own- we find only one: God’s Wisdom (see Prov 1:20—33; 3:13-26; 8:32-36; 9:4-6). (Light in Shadow of Temple- pgs 331-332).

As Skarsuane says, “Jesus appears in roles and functions that burst all previously known categories in Judaism. He was a prophet, but more than a prophet. He was a teacher but taught with a power and authority completely unknown to the rabbis. He could set his authority alongside of, yes, even “over” God’s authority in the Law. He could utter words with creative power. In a Jewish environment zealous for the law, only one category was “large enough” to contain the description of Jesus: the category of Wisdom.” (Incarnation, Myth or Fact? Pg 37)

 

We are all creatures that are made to worship something.  If we don’t worship and venerate God, we tend to worship and venerate our favorite sports team, girl, celebrity, car, career, and/or bank account.  Believing the object of your worship exists is a great first step but has very little to do with the actual worship and veneration itself.

When it comes to worshiping the God revealed to us in the Bible, we are (1) called to tell others of God’s greatness as well as (2) tell Him directly.  Telling others about the object of your veneration or worship has got to be the most natural thing for beings like ourselves.

(1) For an example, let’s just look at a young man who has a souped-up hot-rod of a car that he works on constantly.  This young man has purchased every after-market accessory he can afford, from an aluminum radiator, nitrous tank, and twin tailpipes to a supercharger and an ear-splitting stereo system.  I can guarantee that this car will be a big part of this young man’s conversations to all of his friends, acquaintances, and any stranger who will listen to him.  He doesn’t tell others of his object of worship and veneration because he is obligated to do so, but because it is the natural outpouring of his affections.  I’d argue that no happiness is complete until we express it to others.   Let’s say you saw a great ballgame on TV one evening that comes down to the last 5 seconds and your local team wins.  You’d almost feel a compulsion to talk to your friends about the nail-biting final points around the coffee pot the next morning.  This wouldn’t come from some sort of coercion, but it’d be the most natural overflow.

Now, I’m not drawing a direct parallel between a tricked-out car or a ballgame with God, but rather I’m offering a lesser to greater argument.  If a people are pleased with cars and sports they spend their time, money and attention on, how much more would Followers of Jesus be pleased with the author, and king of all the universe especially if they understand that this monarch takes personal interest them?  How much more would such a worshiper and venerator of God want to tell others about Him?

(2) Not only is it natural and necessary to tell everyone you know about the object of your veneration, it is also natural and necessary to tell the object itself, so long as it’s a personal being that can understand.  I have known people who actually talk to their beloved cars, but usually this is the kind of thing they do in front of other people for a laugh.  Such attention is not proper to give to impersonal things like cars, or bank accounts, but when the object of your worship and veneration is a celebrity, or your loved one, things are different.

For a man who worships or venerates a celebrity, he’ll try to get close to the star to get an autograph, for instance.  It’s not that he really cares about a signature on a piece of paper, but it’s more of an excuse to talk to this person he thinks so much of.

Now think of a young couple who are very much in love and plan to be married in a month after a long engagement.  Further, let’s assume they’ve been separated for a long period and see each other again for the first time in two months.  On their meeting, would you expect the young woman to do anything less than tell her fiancé how much she loves him and how much she has missed him?  Wouldn’t be strange and unnatural to do otherwise?  Such expression of adoration and affection are once again the natural outpouring of what is in the heart.  Now again, I’m using the lesser to greater argument.  If a fan can’t help but want to tell a celebrity how much he likes him, and an engaged couple can’t help but express their love to one another, how much more should a Christ follower want to tell his beloved Heavenly Father (or “Abba,” which means “daddy” in Aramaic) how much he loves Him?

We all worship something in this life.  We may not participate in formal worship services or light candles, but we all inevitably worship and venerate the thing that pleases us most in life.  With this desire for worship being a basic part of human nature, the question is: “Are you worshiping the right thing?”  If we were created for a purpose and if the God of the Bible exists, then it turns out that He is the only proper object of worship and veneration.  It would turn out that if we really were designed this way, our worshiping of Him would be the most natural, not to mention pleasurable experience of all.  I am told the famous atheist, Ayn Rand once said, “Admiration is the rarest and best of pleasures.”  On this note I agree with her wholeheartedly.

We are now doing live call-in radio every Saturday morning at 11 a.m. ET.  You can listen live on the web at www.afr.net or on one of 126 stations across the country.  The show is also podcasted here.

The show on March 7 was with Dr. Mike Licona, co-author of one of the best books examining the evidence for resurrection of Jesus:  The Case for the Resurrection of Jesus.

This column by Frank Turek appeared on www.Townhall.com Today: 

My friend David has a knack for cutting through the smokescreens people throw up when they’re trying to avoid making commitments, be they commitments to God or to other people.  Last week, with one comment, he blew away all the smoke that a young agnostic was hiding behind.  It was a demonstration of tremendous insight, and it required some courage to say.

For several weeks David was teaching through a series on Christian apologetics, which involves providing evidence for the truth of Christianity.   In addition to the biblical mandate to provide such evidence, David thought it would be wise to do so because 75 percent of Christian youth stop attending church after age 18.  Many of them abandon the church because they’re bombarded by secularism in college and they’ve never been taught any of the sound evidence that supports Christianity.

Last week, after David finished a presentation refuting the “new atheists”—Dawkins, Hitchens and the like—a young man approached him and said, “I once was a Christian, but now I’m an agnostic, and I don’t think you should be doing what you’re doing.”

“What do you mean?” David asked.

“I don’t think you should be giving arguments against atheists,” the young man said. “Jesus told us to love, and it’s not loving what you’re doing.”

David said, “No, that’s not right.  Jesus came with both love and tuth.  Love without truth is a swampy, borderless mess.  Truth is necessary.  In fact, it’s unloving to keep truth from people, especially if that truth has eternal consequences.”

David was absolutely right.  In fact, if you look at Matthew chapter 23, Jesus was more like a drill sergeant than he was like Mister Rogers.

But the young man would have none of it. Without acknowledging David’s point, he immediately brought up another objection to Christianity.  David succinctly answered that one too, but again the kid seemed uninterested.  He fired a couple of more objections at David, who began to suspect something else was up—something I’ve noticed as well.

I’ve found that the machine-gun-objection approach is common among many skeptics and liberals. They throw objection after objection at believers and conservatives but never pause long enough to listen to the answers.  It doesn’t matter that you’ve just answered their question with an undeniable fact—they’ve already left that topic and are rattling off another objection on another topic as if you hadn’t said a word.  They don’t really seem interested in finding answers but in finding reasons to make themselves feel better about what they want to believe.  After all, a skeptic of one set of beliefs is actually a true believer in another set of beliefs.

David recognized that’s exactly what was happening in his conversation. So after the kid fired off another objection, David decided to end the charade and cut right to the heart.  He said, “You’re raising all of these objections because you’re sleeping with your girlfriend.  Am I right?”

All the blood drained from the kid’s face. He was caught. He just stood there speechless. He was rejecting God because he didn’t like God’s morality, and he was disguising it with alleged intellectual objections.
This young man wasn’t the first atheist or agnostic to admit that his desire to follow his own agenda was keeping him out of the Kingdom.  In the first chapter of his letter to the Romans, the apostle Paul revealed this tendency we humans have to “suppress the truth” about God in order to follow our own desires.  In other words, unbelief is more motivated by the heart than the head. Some prominent atheists have admitted this.

Atheist Julian Huxley, grandson of “Darwin’s Bulldog” Thomas Huxley, famously said many years ago that the reason he and many of his contemporaries “accepted Darwinism even without proof, is because we didn‘t want God to interfere with our sexual mores.”

Professor Thomas Nagel of NYU more recently wrote, “It isn’t just that I don’t believe in God and, naturally, hope that I’m right in my belief.  It’s that I hope there is no God!  I don’t want there to be a God; I don’t want the universe to be like that.  My guess is that this cosmic authority problem is not a rare condition and that it is responsible for much of the scientism and reductionism of our time.”

Certainly the new atheists such as Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins have problems with cosmic authority.  Hitchens refuses to live under the “tyranny of a divine dictatorship.”  Dawkins calls the God of the Bible a “malevolent bully” (among other things) and admits that he is “hostile to religion.”

It’s not that Hitchens and Dawkins offer any serious examination and rebuttal of the evidence for God.  They misunderstand and dismiss hundreds of pages of metaphysical argumentation from Aristotle, Aquinas and others and fail to answer the modern arguments from the beginning and design of the universe.  (Dawkins explanation for the extreme design of the universe is “luck.”)

Instead, as any honest reader of their books will see, Hitchens and Dawkins are outraged at the very thought of God.  Even their titles scream out contempt (god is not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything and The God Delusion). They don’t seem to realize that their moral outrage presupposes an objective moral standard that exists only if God exists.  Objective morality—as well as the immaterial laws of reason and science—cannot exist in the materialist universe they attempt to defend.  In effect, they have to borrow from a theistic worldview in order to argue against it.  They have to sit in God’s lap to slap his face.

While both men are very good writers, Hitchens and Dawkins are short on evidence and long on attitude.  As I mentioned in our debate, you can sum up Christopher’s attitude in one sentence:  “There is no God, and I hate him.”

Despite this, God’s attitude as evidenced by the sacrifice of Christ is: There are atheists, and I love them.